From Murcia to Wigan

Suddenly life started to go by at an alarming rate.

One weekend, I was up in the mountains with a few colleagues. We were exploring an old fortress from the Spanish Civil War which had been left derelict since the early 90s. It was a strange place, almost spooky. Although there were a few tourists, it felt like a ghost town. It would never have survived in the UK - it would either have been torn down or done up - here it was just left exactly as it had been. Health and safety clearly wasn't on the minds of the Spanish authorities. A happy result of this was that we ended up trespassing in through a locked but broken door and into the belly of a huge Vickers cannon:


Climbing in the pitch dark up metal ladders, brushing against oily walls, it felt more as if we were in a submarine than a gun. In its functioning days, this monster could fire a hefty missile over a distance of 20 miles. Once outside again, we explored the part of the gun that peeked out of the ground. I held on tight:


A few days later, an unexpected interlude presented itself in the shape of a trip home. Whilst Spain went on national strike to protest against changes to the labour laws, predicted budget cuts, and general unhappiness, I went to Wigan for an interview for my next placement. It was a successful interview. The company, like the one I am currently working for, specialises in salad. Lettuce, it seems, is my calling! Only this time I think I will have much more chance of becoming a real lettuce geek, rather than a lorry nerd. May the flat-hunting begin....

Back in Spain, it was time for my holiday, and my family came out to experience Semana Santa (Easter week) with me. Spain at Easter is impressive. In most towns and cities there are huge processions every night in the streets. We travelled down to Granada. By day we wandered the streets, sampled the tapas, learned the truth of the Spanish saying that it always rains in Easter week, met up with friends, and visited the Alhambra, marvelling at the moorish architecture.



By evening we watched flamenco dancing and processions:






Back in Murcia, more processions were in store, this time by day. And back in my little town, we were in for a surprise: the locals seemed to have renounced Christianity's claims on the week and chosen instead to celebrate with a huge medieval market, selling local arts and crafts, food and drink, and in the evening an enormous procession telling the story of the arab invasion of the area. The procession included dancers and gymnasts, duelling on horseback, marching bands, and a troupe of performing geese. On Easter Sunday things only got more bizarre, as I went out to buy a frozen yoghurt and got caught up in a parade to celebrate "the burial of the sardine". Apparently the sardine is significant to the area, as back in the day when people were self sufficient, when the land couldn't give them the food that they needed, they turned to the sea. The burial of the sardine hence symbolized the fertility of the land. Tins of sardines got thrown off floats into the crowd, children begged paraders for sweets and toys, and women danced in little more than underwear. It was odd, to say the least!

And now I only have five days left. And yes, perhaps I never thought I'd say it, but I'm going to miss it here in Spain, strange customs and all!

Hasta Luego!

Lots of shit!

It has to be said, I haven’t experienced much Spanish culture recently! One weekend was spent indulging in some good old-fashioned sunbathing, and this one was spent watching the Six Nations matches and enjoying the festive St Patrick’s Day atmosphere of The Celt – my local Irish bar – complete with Guinness to drink, steak and Guinness stew to eat, and a furry Guinness hat on my head. It was good fun! I was also made to eat humble pie: I had said a few days before the England-Ireland match that I thought that Ireland would win. This claim had seen me (playfully) locked out of the house by the more patriotic of my housemates, and then well and truly proved wrong as England walked all over their opponents.

I have, however, learned a lot of Spanish, so I thought I’d share the best bit with you:

In English, we say “break a leg!” to actors to wish them luck. In Spanish it’s customary to wish somebody “lots of shit!”, or “mucha mierda!”. A strange saying, I think you’ll agree. Apparently it comes from the time when audiences drew up outside theatres on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages. If there was a good show on, word would get out and soon there would be lots of horses stamping their hooves outside the theatre. And where there were horses, there was sure to be horse poo. And so the quantity of shit outside a theatre came to be directly related to the quality of a performance.

This got me on to wondering if the Spanish crossed their fingers for good luck. In Germany they press their thumbs. As it turns out, the Spanish do cross their fingers. But they also have a custom which involves pressing their thumbs into their fists in the manner of the Germans. Amongst the superstitious it is common to press one’s thumb behind one’s back at the birth of a baby to protect it against curses, or, as the Spanish put it, the evil eye.

And I have news, at last. So long as nothing goes drastically wrong over the next four weeks, by the end of April I will have left Spain for the sunny climes of… wait for it… Wigan! I have a telephone interview lined up for this week, and a visit booked for the end of next week. Quite what my role will be I’m not yet sure, but I do know that it will be much more people-based and active than my current placement, which makes me happy. And I’m excited at the prospect of living between Manchester and Liverpool and being able to explore those two cities, and the Cumbrian countryside to the north, too.

So, not long left to go here. For the first time, I can think of things and people that I will miss when I leave. It’s taken long enough, but for now I’m happy!

Hasta Luego!

When Jesus met a badger

Well, it’s been quite a fortnight! My main bit of exploration took me and a colleague into the Sierra Espuña, which is the closest National Park to where I live in Spain. We drove up into the mountains and explored, driving past vineyards, cherry orchards in full blossom, forests of pine trees, dessert scrubland and cacti, all within five minutes of each other.

We went into little old villages with tiny streets that were never built for cars to drive around, like these:

We took a pilgrimage up a hill above a monastry to see Jesus, and got distracted by the fact that the sculptor appeared to have sculpted a bird onto his head:

We spent time standing at the top of the mountains and looking out over the plains and into the distance, marvelling at how far we could see:

We tried to go to several churches and castles and were foiled at each attempt, either by mass, or by renovation works, or by the fact that there were just no roads to get up to them by, so we ended up admiring them from afar:

We also ate wonderfully: game paté, cured hams and chorizos and manchego cheese and salad to start with, and then an enormous paella that could have fed four of us, cooked in the traditional way in a vast, flat pan over a wood-burning stove with saffron and red peppers, rabbit and mountain snails. Mountain snails!!! And a carafe of light but potent red wine, and then complementary shots of lemon liquor afterwards, all served up by the most charmingly sweet and attentive man; we were his only customers that afternoon.

I’ve been getting into the swing of things with speaking Spanish, and at the end of last week it came out that I’d never eaten a doner kebab before, so the next day I was dragged out to the local kebab shop for lunch, and spent an hour eating kebab and discussing communism with a Spaniard, a Brazillian, a German, a Czech and a Pole.

Whether it was the kebab (which at the time of eating I quite enjoyed) or not, I’ll never know, but last weekend my stomach was struck down, and I ended up taking two days of this week off work, so this week has seemed strangely short. During my two days off I discovered a minor ant problem in the kitchen. After dispatching these ants off to their ant-y graves, I was then told off for killing the ants by one of my flatmates, who told me that the ants had more right to be in the kitchen than we did, because they were just hungry, and besides they hadn’t sinned. That was a decidedly odd moment.

Not as odd, however, as Friday in the office must have seemed to everybody else, as my other flatmate and I had hatched a plan. One of our colleagues has developed the nickname “Badger”, and there is plenty of badger banter being thrown around. We decided that it would be quite funny if we wore badger masks. So, in a quiet moment, I created a set of masks. The colleague in question went off into the kitchen to make a coffee, leaving three humans at the desks next to him. He came back to find three badgers:

For us behind the masks it was hilarious. For everyone else it must have been vaguely surreal.

On that note, my parting trivia for you this week is that badgers are related to weasels. Hasta luego!

Love is in the air...

… although it isn’t in the air for me! On Tuesday – Valentine’s Day – I played Cupid. One of my flatmates fancied one of my work colleagues, and asked me for my help. So while she wasn’t there at lunchtime I surreptitiously transferred a sizeable box of chocolates from a hidden place on his desk to hers, trying to look as nonchalant as possible so as not to attract suspicion from other colleagues. Soon the chocolates were the talk of the office, despite the recipient’s attempt to keep them a secret. Everybody suspected my flatmate, who spent the rest of the week denying it. But he got a date with his girl at the end of it all… so we shall see!

On the work front, all is not well in Spain with salads. We’ve been having really low temperatures, particularly at night. It’s very unusual, and the plants can’t handle it. So the iceberg lettuces are literally freezing is their beds – they contain a high percentage of water – and are disintegrating in the fields. Not good news for the farmers… and it won’t be good news for salad stocks on the UK shelves, either.

I might not have met with love this week, but I did meet with a large flock of sheep! It was quite a shock. There I was, driving along at 80km/h… around a corner… cue an emergency break! A veritable sea of sheep was trotting towards me. Hazard lights on, hoping that nobody came whizzing too fast around the corner behind me, all I could do was sit there and wait. And take a photograph, of course:

On the subject of photograpghs, it’s finally that time of year again: sunrises on my morning walks. I have little to write about this week, so I’ll leave you with a selection of this week’s best shots. Next week, there’ll be news on a trip to a nearby national park… so keep tuned. Hasta Luego!

Factoids from a foreigner in Spain

Did you know that…

… if you pass a lorry on the motorway and it happens to be full of salad, it might contain up to:

- 21450 iceberg lettuces

- 40560 packets of celery

- 83200 little gem lettuces

… organic mushrooms take around six weeks to grow. Regular mushrooms can be grown in just under four weeks. They are watered more than the organic varieties and so grow faster (because mushrooms have a high water content) but are more susceptible to disease, and do not last as long once harvested as organic ones.

… “estar constipado” in Spanish doesn’t mean “to be constipated”. It means to have a bad cold. Some amusing conversations at cross purposes to be had in this chilly weather…. To be constipated, on the other hand, is “estar estreñido” – literally “to be strained”.

I didn’t know any of those things. You learn a new thing (or three!) every week.

I also learned this week that banana works well on pizza. This wasn’t one of my mad experimental cookery moments, although you would be forgiven for thinking so. No, I was actually served a banana curry pizza in a restaurant. I saw it on the menu and – to the amused disgust of my fellow diners – couldn’t help but order it out of fascination. The just-underripe banana had been cut into rounds and tossed in curry powder before being added to a regular ham pizza. To be honest, I could have done without the curry powder – it was just a bit too bizarre on the cheese and tomato base! But the banana was just like the pineapple on a Hawaiian pizza. Yummy! Another strange culinary experience of the week, admittedly on a much more luxurious scale, was eating thinly cut ox steak that I cooked myself at the table on a piping hot slab of stone. The concept of going to a restaurant to cook for myself took a little getting used to… but I couldn’t fault it for novelty factor and experience!

My spoken Spanish is coming along nicely. I had a mid-term review this week, and as a result of that I had been set a challenge – to start answering my (Spanish) colleauge’s phone when she wasn’t in the office. It was a prospect that I didn’t relish. But not to be defeated, I started picking up the calls. And to my surprise, I could understand what was being said, and after a few conversations I began to get the hang of what I needed to say back to the callers. My phone manner still leaves something to be desired, but it was a definite victory, and a cause for a little well earned celebration.

Hasta luego!

Back again!

Finally, my flatmate and I took a trip to Cartagena. It was only 20 minutes down the motorway, and I wasn´t entirely sure why we hadn´t explored that way before, but we hadn´t. I hadn´t heard brilliant things about it from the locals... but then I don´t tend to hear anything brilliant about the area from them, even though they are quick enough to defend their homeland if anybody says anything against it. And I was pleasantly surprised! There was a well-kept harbour, bustling despite the fact that it was early on a Sunday afternoon. Some of the boats were impressive - I loved the old wooden "pirate" boats, but there were also plenty of shiny new white ones which must have cost their owners a pretty penny.


It was very pleasant to walk along the pavements in the sun, listening to the music playing in the bars and restaurants and admiring the architecture of the buildings growing up the hill behind us.

Walking into the town centre felt like entering a different world from that of the rest of the Spain that I´d experienced so far. It didn´t feel run down and depressed. The buildings, whose architecture was mostly beautiful if you looked up, were well cared for, and the streets were tidy. The people walking around were well dressed, the shops - although closed for the Sabbath - were plentiful, and none of them were empty or boarded up like they are in most of the towns, and the cafes and bars were full of happy people chattering and drinking. It felt like a town with a life! I was particularly delighted by a series of bronze statues who sat around on the benches in the streets. They were quirky and added to the character of the place.

The week before I went home was a good week. At work I really felt useful for once. My boss was in the UK, so there was more for me to do (even though I couldn´t do a lot of what he does), and on top of that I had been asked to write two reports and prepare powerpoint presentations on them... to be delivered in Spanish! The prospect was mildly terrifying, but in a really good way. Plus, once I´d written one, I earned a rare "well done" from my manager. On top of this, I was beginning to be able to talk. Over lunch there were conversations about the capsized cruise liner, about the merits of christenings and baptisms, and about how a first date should never involve food. And I managed to keep up, and occasionally take part. I even tried to explain Quakerism... which is hard enough in English! I almost felt sad to be going home just when I was getting into the swing of things. Maybe I wouldn´t want to go home at the end of the 6 months here after all.

10 days in the UK went by all too fast. I laughed with friends and enjoyed the winter and relaxed with family, went to the cinema (Ralph Fiennes´ Corialanus - not one for the faint-hearted), the theatre (RSC´s The Taming of the Shrew - not one for the prudish) and a recital of ´cello music in Cambridge (courtesy of my sister).

10 days, it seems, however fast they go by, is long enough to forget every word of Spanish that I knew! I´ve felt a bit like I´m back to square one this week, but it´s getting slowly easier again now. Work has been hectic around me, thanks to the weather. Snow in France and northen Spain has been wreaking havoc with international logistics, with lorries getting stuck all over the shop, and struggling to cross the channel. The snow forecast for the UK is only going to make things worse. And although it´s warmer here than in the rest of the continent, it´s still unseasonably cold. We´re dropping below freezing at night, and struggling to reach double figures in the middle of the day. I predict problems in the harvests over here in the next few weeks - the plants just aren´t used to these temperatures.

A brief haitus

This is a quick message for any loyal followers that I might have - I'm taking a brief haitus from blogging while I enjoy being at home, but I will be back on the first weekend in February with more scintillating insights into my life....

Hasta luego!

I love trees

One of the biggest differences between Spain and the UK is the trees. The UK is fundamentally green. Spain is fundamentally beige. Especially at this time of year. It is winter, after all. We didn’t ever have autumn. The leaves never turned those beautiful shades of golden brown. Mostly the leaves didn’t fall off at all – not like in the UK…

…or in Germany, where this picture was taken. Palm trees don’t seem to be deciduous. But like sheep are shorn in the spring time, so palm trees are here. They go from looking like large umbrellas of shade to resembling improbable pineapples stuck on hairy lampposts. They make me laugh when I see them now.

That’s the palm trees that are left. Southern Spain has been struck by a mystery palm tree disease, and ever since I arrived here I’ve come across intermittent culls of sickly plants, great pyres of trunk and broad leaf, smouldering at the roadside. Like the countryside scenes during the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK a decade or so ago, but smelling less of barbeque and more of bonfire.

Another kind of tree, the one that lines most of the suburban roads, is shorter and gnarled and has large oval leaves in the summer. By the time I started working here the branches were spewing their crispy dead leaves onto the pavements. Recently the trees underwent a mysterious overnight haircut, ridding them of their original twiggy growths and any stubborn remaining leaves. They look strange now, but they fascinate me.

They are planted in rows, and they look like rows of bony hands reaching skywards. Their bark is whorled and dented, and begging to be drawn. I think that sometime soon they will start to re-grow. I hope that they’ll have blossom, although Spain doesn’t strike me as a blossom kind of country.

No news from work or life this week, but no news is good news. Into my letterbox fell a slice of Christmas cake, a few CDs of new music for my delectation, a bar of very dark chocolate, and a small bag of well-travelled walnuts in their shell (they’ve been from the tree in a garden in Holland to a student flat in Edinburgh to a newspaper bag in a Spanish apartment. Lucky old walnuts). I have no nutcracker though. I’m working on the best way to crack them!!

5 days now until I’m home for a holiday. A good length of holiday this time – a full 9 days. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and relaxing properly, going on a training course with all the other management trainees in other companies, and just being in Blighty. And I’m looking forward to seeing familiar, impressive trees in their naked winter glory!

Hasta Luego!

Food, glorious food!

I have a bit of a gastronomic offering for you this week, because I’ve been trying all sorts of typical Spanish fare to share with you.

My journey started on New Year’s Day. A five minute walk away from my house sits a small white trailer, which looks like a burger van from a fair. It’s always there, and is usually open on Friday and Saturday nights, and Saturday and Sunday mornings. You wouldn’t be able to buy a burger there though, and as if to prove this, a drunken predecessor of mine is famed for having tried to. It is a churreria, which sells churros.

Churros are common all over Spain. They are either eaten as a treat for children, for breakfast, or in the place of a greasy kebab on the way home from a night out to soak up any excess alcohol. They are essentially long thin strips of doughnut dough either in a long coil to be cut up later or in smaller rods, piped directly from a star-shaped nozzle into a vat of bubbling oil, where they’re left to fry until they’re crispy on the outside and soft and piping hot in the centre. They’re then given a liberal sprinkling of sugar –often cinnamon sugar – and are typically served in portions of six with a hot chocolate sauce to dip them in. Very VERY piggy.

Anyway, it sounded like it was the done thing to eat churros con chocolate after having seen the New Year in at about 4am. As I was happily dead to the world at about 1am, this wasn’t really an option for me. So when I woke up again on the right side of 2012’s first sunrise, I decided that today was the day. I was going to have churros for breakfast.

At the time, it felt decadent. But really I could have done with someone to share them with. My eyes bigger than my stomach, I felt it was my duty to eat all that I had been given… and they were naughtily delicious… but it was also effectively like eating six chocolate covered doughnuts in one sitting. I felt pretty rubbish for the rest of the day, and vowed only to eat vegetables for the foreseeable future, which of course was a futile vow!

Mostly it was futile because the following day I was offered a polvoron, which dashed all of my plans for healthy eating. Remember my post about the mantecados (lardos) a month or so ago? Another variety of Spanish Christmas biscuit, polvorones are essentially the same as mantecados, but possibly even better. Mantecados have the same reassuring solidity to them as all-butter shortbread. Polvorones, although made from the same ingredients, are finer in texture. In fact, polver means "powder", so I was effectively eating a powderoni. As soon as I bit into my first one, it dissolved into a delicious sweet and nutty smush in my mouth. The problem was, because it didn’t seem very substantial in my mouth, I might have had to have two…

And then the day afterwards at lunch time with my colleagues, I tried something very bizarre. One of the women was sprinkling what I thought was really finely grated red Leicester cheese down the middle of slices of ham, rolling them up and eating them. Except then I read the cheese packet, and it said HUEVO (egg) in big letters. I was so surprised to see grated egg yolk in a packet that I had to ask if it was normal. I was assured that it was. My surprise went even further when the woman went on to explain “it’s sweet. Have you really never tried it? Go on, have some”. Before I knew it I was sharing a roll of egg and ham with a Polish colleague who had never tried it before either. It was SO STRANGE. It didn’t taste of egg – I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was eating if I hadn’t known. The closest taste sensation that I could link it to was a pancake with ham and maple syrup – it was that kind of sickly sweet. Honestly I found it a bit of a pointless addition to my encyclopaedia of gastronomic experiences, but an interesting one nonetheless. After all, whoever first thought “I know what’ll work really well. Let’s process a load of egg yolks, mix them with sugar, squeeze them through a mini spaghetti machine, pack it in plastic and charge lots of money for it – I bet the shoppers’ll flock around it!”? He’s probably a rich man now.

My final introduction to Spanish cuisine came on Thursday lunchtime. Friday was 6^th January – a national holiday in Spain – so we “celebrated” it on Thursday at work with a traditional cake. The 6^th of January is the day when the three wise men / kings were supposed to have reached Bethlehem and given their gifts to Jesus. Traditionally in Spain this is the day when children receive Christmas gifts, not 25^th December. Father Christmas doesn’t come to them, instead it’s Los Reyes – the kings. Because of globalisation and America’s influence across the world this is in a state of change, with more and more Spaniards exchanging gifts on 24^th or 25^th December each year, but the 6^th is still an important day. And on this day they eat a special cake. It’s in the shape of a ring, and the hole in the middle holds a cardboard crown.

The cake itself, called the Roscon de Reyes, is like a sweet bread – in the style of brioche or pannetone - rather than a sponge cake, and is decorated with candied fruits and sugar crystals. It is split in half and sandwiched together with fresh cream, or custard, or chocolate icing, or any other filling. Baked into the cake is a little figurine (traditionally it was a dried fava bean, but commercialisation favours toys), and whoever finds the figurine is crowned king or queen for the day. I was spared the embarrassment of the crown – my first slice was figurine-free

So was my second slice. And my third one….

Hasta Luego!!