VISIT THE PLAYMOBIL & LEGO FAIR IN EL POBLE ESPANYOL

The Grandma visits Montjuïc

After a 25-hours flight from Auckland with a scale in Dubai, The Grandma is exhausted. The jet lag is killing her and because of this she has decided to leave their English studies during two days, to give enough time to her brain to put it in order and to give enough time to her body to get fit again.

Eli Jones explained her that today was going to there be a great Playmobil and Lego fair in El Poble Espanyol and The Grandma has thought that this visit could be a good way to start to recover herself.

Early, this morning, The Grandma has taken the bus and has arrived to El Poble Espanyol in Montjuïc, one of the most popular Jewish mountains in Barcelona. The Grandma has taken profit of this fair to visit the installations and enjoy with some examples of the Spanish culture in a beautiful place after buying some appreciated figures that she had been searching for a long time.

After remembering Herod lots of times, a cold and necessary beer has been the best Grandma's friend to help her to suffer the unfinished quantity of children who were disturbing, crying, shouting and running, in every one of the activities.

Finally, The Grandma has arrived at home saved, healthy and without any kind of psychological trauma produced by the pack of children.

More information: Barcelona Turisme

The Poble Espanyol, literally Spanish town, is an open-air architectural museum in Barcelona, Catalonia, approximately 400 metres away from the Fountains of Montjuïc.

Built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, the museum consists of 117 full-scale buildings, which recreate Spanish villages. It also contains a theater, restaurants, artisan workshops and a museum of contemporary art.

The Grandma visits El Poble Espanyol

The idea was promoted by the Catalan architect Josep Puig Cadafalch and the project was realized by architects Francesc Folguera and Ramon Reventós, art critic Miquel Utrillo and painter Xavier Nogués. The four professionals visited over 600,000 sites in Spain to collect the architecture to bring together the main characteristics of the peoples of Spain.

The Poble Espanyol has replications of 117 buildings representing Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Baleric Islands, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Galicia, Murcia, Navarre, Valencian Country, and the Basque Country.  

La Rioja is not present because it was not a region when the museum was designed and built. The Canary Islands are not represented because the four designers could not travel to them for economic reasons.

More information: Poble Espanyol

Playmobil is a line of toys produced by the Brandstätter Group, headquartered in Zirndorf, Germany.

The signature Playmobil toy is a 7.5 cm tall (1:24 scale) human figure with a particular cherub-like smiling face, known as a klicky. A wide range of accessories, buildings and vehicles, as well as many sorts of animals, are also part of the Playmobil line.

Playmobil toys are produced in themed series of sets as well as individual special figures and playsets. New products and product lines developed by a 50-strong development team are introduced frequently, and older sets are discontinued. Promotional and one-off products are sometimes produced in very limited quantities. These practices have helped give rise to a sizeable community of collectors. Collector activities extend beyond collecting and free-form play and include customization, miniature wargaming, and the creation of photo stories and stop motion films, or simply as decoration.

Playmobil was invented by German inventor Hans Beck (1929–2009), who is often called the Father of Playmobil. Beck received training as a cabinetmaker and was also an avid hobbyist of model airplanes, a product he pitched to the company geobra Brandstätter. The owner of the company, Horst Brandstätter, asked him to develop toy figures for children instead.

Murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, WWI begins

Beck spent three years from 1971 to 1974 developing what became Playmobil. Beck conducted research that allowed him to develop a toy that would not be too complex but would nevertheless be flexible. He felt that too much flexibility would get in the way of children's imaginations, and too much rigidity would cause frustration.

The toy he came up with, at 7.5 cm tall, fit in a child's hand and its facial design was based on children's drawings, a large head, a big smile, and no nose. I would put the little figures in their hands without saying anything about what they were, Beck remarked. They accepted them right away... They invented little scenarios for them. They never grew tired of playing with them.

The 1973 oil crisis made it possible for Playmobil to be considered a viable product. The rising oil prices imposed on geobra Brandstätter, for whom Beck worked as head of development, demanded that the company turn to products that required less solid plastic material than the hula hoops and other large plastic items the company had been producing.

In 1974, the company put the first sets of knights, Native Americans, and construction workers on show in its display rooms. Initially, visitors were reluctant to accept the toy. Nevertheless, the toy was shown at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, which took place that same year. A Dutch firm agreed to buy a whole year's production. By the end of the year, geobra Brandstätter had achieved sales of 3 million Deutschmarks with Playmobil, one-sixth of the company's total sales. Playmobil began to be sold worldwide in 1975, and has remained a popular toy ever since.

Playmobil has been a successful toy line for more than 40 years and they have been a major competitor to Lego toys. Examples of directly competing toys in both their product line are not hard to find. Within the limitations of the Playmobil toy world, the Playmobil toys are usually realistic, and present accurate representations of arms, armor, costumes, and tools from a recognizable time period. Especially notable for their fine attention to detail are the modern construction and city life toys: cars, cranes, fire-engines, trains or boats.

More information: Playmobil

Lego is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects.

The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Supporting movies, games, competitions, and six Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. 

Romans, Egyptians, Greeks and the Far West

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called Lego, derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means play well. In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys.

In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, calling them Automatic Binding Bricks. These bricks were based on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which had been patented in the United Kingdom in 1939 and released in 1947. Lego had received a sample of the Kiddicraft bricks from the supplier of an injection-molding machine that it purchased. The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate, were a development of the traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.

The Lego Group's motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means roughly only the best is the best. This motto, which is still used today, was created by Christiansen to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the Lego company's output, even though the Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende, visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early 1950s, felt that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys. Although a common sentiment, Lego toys seem to have become a significant exception to the dislike of plastic in children's toys, due in part to the high standards set by Ole Kirk.

By 1954, Christiansen's son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with an overseas buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the immense potential in Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some problems from a technical standpoint: their locking ability was limited and they were not versatile.

In 1958, the modern brick design was developed; it took five years to find the right material for it, ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) polymer. The modern Lego brick design was patented on 28 January 1958.

The Lego Group's Duplo product line was introduced in 1969 and is a range of simple blocks whose lengths measure twice the width, height and depth of standard Lego blocks and are aimed towards younger children.

In 1978, Lego produced the first minifigures, which have since become a staple in most sets.

More information: Lego

We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, 

to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space 

so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as

ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion.

Max de Pree