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Posts Tagged ‘Spain’

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Mierda, y otros detalles.

In Plenary, Production on February 29, 2012 at 1:11 pm

I’m staring at poo.

It’s a shapely stool – well formed and regularly shaped, but the colour is just wrong; a dreadful pale hue. Truly awful.

It’s one of a number of turds I’ve had a good long look at recently. I’m not sure why I stare though.

Perhaps I enjoy savoring the rage.

No doubt there will be more to look at tomorrow. One of the motifs, the little details of daily life, currently: pieces of poo.

Winter is reductive – the head goes down and the eyes are drawn away from the far-flung horizon. They focus on the minutae at our feet. The world is scanned, bit by little bit – unconnected dots; attention hopping from one to the next without time for drawing the lines as one scurries from one warm spot to another.

Life is grainy; a composite of discrete things.

It’s 9.35 in the evening as I step off the bus at the first of Tarifa’s two stops, on my return from work. I’m just inside the town which spreads out downhill in front of me, and I take a right into a neighborhood of uniform, almost Soviet-style apartment blocks, away from the casco where we used to live. More

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Frio

In Uncategorized on February 19, 2012 at 4:11 pm

January and February. The eleventh and twelfth most popular months of the year, in no particular order.

It’s been a schlepp. The year has begun with some important changes for us, but what a schlepp. Up to our necks in boxes, budgeting and assorted banalities. Also, bunny replacements. We’re just getting over it now – lifting our heads and looking towards the horizon again, the year ahead.

Mentalities opening out like spring blossoms.

The cold hasn’t helped. Siberians – why can’t they keep their weather to themselves? We’ve been cold down here at the southernmost point of mainland Europe for weeks. Process that for a minute. Southernmost point. Cold.

Of course when I explain to our cousins in the north that we’re getting daytime highs of 13, 14 and 15 degrees the sympathy is limited. Those are just the highs though – our lows have been low and the houses down here are built to refridgerate, so when it’s 6 degrees outside, it’s 5 degrees in the living room.

For fahrenheit people, simply take the celsius figure and dip it in hot water, leave to dry naturally at room temperature for two hours and then soak again overnight, More

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Real Estate

In Plenary, Production on January 28, 2012 at 6:08 pm

There is still a week to go and it isn’t as if we’re moving far (four or five streets away) but life has already changed. It starts the moment the first picture is removed from the wall, the first box filled with books; we are unsettled, not sleeping well and thinking differently.

Taking a new place makes a person think about time and, more specifically, time scales. Nebulous wish thinking finds itself slotted involuntarily into the concrete schedules of feasibility. It’s a healthy process I suppose, but it feels like a bad case of malaria.

For example we wouldn’t undertake this – packing, redecorating, heavy lifting – for the sake of a mere twelve months of relocation, so that pretty much means we will be in Tarifa for a minimum of a further two years. Puts a shape on things.

We are dealing with two different orders of time scale on two different…eh, scales. Firstly, micro; for the next week we will be pottering around an increasingly chaotic apartment busily surrounding ourselves with boxes and bags where once there were books and personal bric-a-brac. I have called our internet provider and been informed with some confidence by their English speaking department that we cannot have adsl More

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Gran Bretaña

In Plenary, Presentation on December 21, 2011 at 6:18 pm

Less than an hour’s drive from Tarifa, over the mountain, through Algeciras and around the bay, is Britain – probably the most distinctive physical feature in the whole of southern Spain. Many of you will know, of course, that Britain is a small, over-crowded and heavily urbanised island but you may not have been aware of some of its lesser known attributes; the commanding views of Africa’s northern coast, the small but stubborn population of Barbary Apes (unique amongst all apes in that they are in fact monkeys) and of course the tell-tale British surnames; Tewkesbury, Finlayson, Parody, Netto, Buttigieg, Benady, Santos, Spiteri, Zammit, Xerri and Crisp.

The main bulwark of the British economy is money itself. Investments, insurance, pensions and numerous other products I have a very poor grasp of are sold from here. Poker, a possibly related activity, is also popular. After that it’s booze. After that it’s cigarettes. And after that it’s you; the tourist. You come to get in the cable car and go see the monkeys. Then you buy some booze and cigarettes. Then you leave. It’s almost as if you came here for gambling, booze, cigarettes and monkeys! You certainly don’t come, I would hope, for the food.

Britain is peppered with traditional pubs – recognisable by their grim exteriors and sticky carpets. More

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Los Invitados

In Practice, Production on December 8, 2011 at 9:50 am

Two bottles of St Georgen’s Bräu to start the season. A gift from friends who are visiting from Germany and who know my tastes. The beer was a discovery for me on a previous visit to Bavaria – Franconia to be more precise – and as well as evoking memories of Gasthof Schiller and juicy schäufele is probably, despite another brewery’s having nabbed the slogan, the best lager in the world.

Visitors, guests. We have them, we are them. The Schiller guesthouse in Wernsdorf where I first tasted St Georgen’s Bräu has been there in one form or another since 1348, but apparently only run as the guesthouse it is now since 1715. Still, they seem to be settling in. The biergarten there on a summer evening, a stein of beer on the wooden table, its surface dappled by spear tips of golden sunlight that pierce the leafed shade. A bone of slow roast pork next to it. The best hospitality makes you feel at home even when you know you aren’t, even when everything is new.

I don’t know how Georg Modscheidler did it, but sometime around 1624 he discovered how to brew my favourite beer. You always wonder, don’t you, about the sequence of events and decisions that lead to a great discovery. Read the rest of this entry »

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El Acceso

In Plenary on November 16, 2011 at 11:21 am

We love Seville; it seems to us just about the perfect city. Leafy, shaded parks that provide contrast and refuge from the warren of narrow streets in the old town. Majestic plazas and hidden plazuelas. The Giralda, a twelfth century Almohad minaret, emblem of Spain, and the cathedral to which it later became attached, the world’s third largest church. The cradle of flamenco across the river in Triana. The Alcazar with its insanely ornate mudejar palaces. The old juderia of Santa Cruz, its boulevards and squares lined with orange trees. The bull ring. The Torre de Oro. Everything, basically.

K is in her element with the big city shopping and I am in mine with…well, anything – as long as it isn’t shopping. What we share is the opinion that this is the best place to eat in Andalucia; were El Tapeo a country, this would certainly be its capital. If it has one minor flaw, and this is in fact the only criticism we can ever think of, it’s that it isn’t Granada. But let’s not quibble.

We part for the afternoon – K for the shops, me for this other thing I want to do. When we meet up again she hasn’t finished and suggests I go down to the cathedral for a look. For all it’s glory there has always been something inaccessible about the cathedral for me. More

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El Idioma

In Practice on October 12, 2011 at 10:36 am

Lessons have begun again. We’ve been joined by Stefan, a German who has been here for eleven years, and someone else is due next week. In a fortnight or so there’ll be five of us we’re told by Luis, the teacher. Two hours is a pretty punishing length of time to sit still and attempt to acquire language, but none of us can make it on any other day but Friday. We feel fairly smug studying alongside someone who’s been here so long, so we must guard against that I suppose.

We like Luis – he likes food and wine, the Arab history of Spain and getting out into the open country, so we feel compatible. Also, he’s from Madrid, so when he speaks we understand it, as opposed to the consonant-free andaluz of the average Tarifeño. Well, K understands him. I do my best. Picking up between forty and sixty percent and guessing at the rest seems to be working for me so far. Given my distractable nature it’s more or less what I’ve been doing with English all my life, so no big change.

He’s invited us along the next time he and his “little group” go walking in the mountains. I will pester him about it too, until he honours the invitation. We need to find ourselves more frequently in the company of Spaniards. Especially K; unlike her I spend my days in Spain and not in glorious British isolation on the Rock but, to be honest, when it comes to reaching my goal of good conversational Spanish “Teacher! Alejandro stuck his pen in my arm!” doesn’t really help. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Castle, the Eagle and the Lake.

In Presentation on September 28, 2011 at 9:39 am

We both go into the weekend exhausted. K because she is working very hard at the moment, and I because I’ve been busy winding myself up again about time, now that I’m in front of the kids and out of the house for eight hours a day. I spend a self-defeating proportion of my time worrying about how little time I have. As a result of course I have less. When I’m not worrying about how little time there is I’m worrying about how little I’m doing with the time that I have. As a result of course I do less. It’s exhausting.

Still, I don’t want to vegetate so I pitch K on a day trip to nearby Castillo de Castellar, a place we’ve heard about from several sources but have never been to; we usually head west and north west when we travel these days, to the likes of Jerez, Sevilla and Cadiz – so it makes a change to go north east to Algeciras and then briefly north to Castellar de la Frontera. As we near it we take the tiny road that winds up to the old Moorish fortification– the castillo – that sits on a height overlooking the town on one side and a lake on the other.

The road is of the kind that K would refuse to drive if forewarned – steep and winding and precipitous – so I don’t warn her, despite having been advised by a colleague. I’m just not up for the walk today. More

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La Granja

In Practice, Production on September 21, 2011 at 10:16 am

I suppose I may have given the impression that life in Spain, if one sets aside the gut-wrenching bunny grief, is all romance and fried fish. Gaseosa rivers, cotton candy clouds and so forth.

But there are hardships.

We don’t always get our favourite table at our favourite bar. The water down at Playa Chica can be a little on the chilly side, from time to time. Not every weekend involves wallowing up to our greedy chins in the unrivalled, intoxicating locations that Andalucia has to offer (just most of them), and parking can be a problem.

And so much to learn! What a schlepp! How to distinguish between varieties of olive, for example, or which kinds of fish are best for the grill and which for a stew. What on earth is the difference between a langostino and a gamba, anyway? And what’s for the best; tortilla de patatas con cebolla, or sin cebolla? I don’t know. It’s all so tiresome!

We look to the future with optimism. We refuse to contemplate failure! But… not every endeavour is destined for success. There will be difficulties, setbacks, and none of our projects to date have illustrated as much so vividly, with such melancholic eloquence, as the farm. More

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Año

In Plenary, Production on August 31, 2011 at 1:43 pm

A year. Twelve months. Fifty two weeks. Three hundred and sixty five days. The first of them in August, just; sweaty, sweltering disorientation. Teeth clenched, eyes wide, ready.

September was a month of early mornings and confounding application forms. Religious processions and kind hearted bureaucrats. And baptism of fire in that most frightening of places. A classroom of children.

October brought reunion and a new beginning. Departures, grave-digging and grief. A weekend in oft-criticised Tangier. We loved it, especially the cake.

I was surprised to make it through the month of November, what with all the bloodsuckers. Back to our beloved Granada to clink glasses.

December was a lesson; when it rains in Spain it doesn’t mess around. Oh, and try not to be up a mountain when it happens. More blood loss and a snowy Christmas.

After all the mosquitoes, I got my first look at the Mezquita in January. Settling in to the apartment, the noise and the confusion. More

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