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!!

Old Night, New Year

I was perplexed by the lack of signs of Christmas so close to the day itself. There were still no songs playing in the shops, still hardly any decorations of any kind. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know any Spanish carols either – between university and my colleagues, I had been introduced to a few. So why weren’t they playing? The first time I was really aware of Christmas was in the airport on the way home, which, in a way, was quite fitting.

The evening that I left was 22^nd December. This was an important day in Spain. It was the National Lottery. But not the National Lottery as we know it over here. These tickets were 20€ apiece, sold all year around by street vendors and cafes and supermarkets… They weren’t bought individually either. Each number had eight tickets attached to it, so somebody paid 160€ for the number, and then either kept the lot or sold the other tickets on to friends. And, unlike in the UK, it really is a national obsession here. Everybody does it, and everybody really does seem to dream about winning the lottery – it was all I heard about that week. Many people took the day off work just to watch it on TV – it was broadcast from 9am to around 2:30pm. As for me, I was subjected to it on the radio. I say subjected, because it got intensely irritating. The numbers weren’t read out, they were sung, always in the same tuneless tune, by a child (well, probably several different children) in a high-pitched voice. It was probably supposed to be cute, but all it served to do for me was give me a headache! The first large prize to be drawn was in the Cartagena region of Murcia (where we live and work), so at about 10:30 there was a mad scramble to check ticket numbers, but predictably none of my colleagues had won. Apart from that, it was fairly boring.

To say that I enjoyed being at home would be an understatement. To feel that I belonged, to be surrounded by familiarity of both family and friends and environment. To go through the comforting traditions of a family Christmas (watching “The Snowman”, playing spronkers by the lake, not opening presents until after The Queen’s Speech, being a present-bearing fairy and spending the lazy evening time reading Enid Blyton), to eat wonderful festive food (sprouts! Parsnips! Stuffing! BREAD SAUCE!!!!!) and to have breakfast at a proper time.

(playing spronkers.... sprouts are surprisingly resiliant!)

Not even getting a flat tyre in the cold British rain the one time I took my trusty car out could dampen my spirits. Four days wasn’t nearly long enough. I didn’t have any problem about going back to my job, but I just didn’t want to tear myself away from the UK. Knowing that I was only returning for less than a month before my next trip home made the parting bearable.

Back in Spain, it had finally happened – Christmas had arrived, and music was blaring from shops, decorations appeared on houses (albeit often religious rather than garish lights) and an enormous nativity scene had appeared in the town centre.

If these exist at all in the UK, they show just the scene of the birth of Jesus. This showed everything from the Magi in Eygypt to Mary receiving the news from Gabriel, to the arrival in Bethlehem to the birth of Christ to Herod to the murder of the Innocents, to the arrival of the kings. It was vast – perhaps 5 meteres by 20. I introduced my lunchtime colleagues to a traditional British Christmas cake – it’s not like anything here, which is all much lighter and usually almond-based – to great success and demands for the recipe.

Yesterday was New Year’s Eve, or as the Spanish put it, “Old Night”. It’s supposedly a huge celebration here – for me it began at midday on 30^th (when most of my colleagues called it a day for the festive weekend) with sweet Spanish cider for lunch, and a toast to the New Year in Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Lithuanian, German and English – the languages of the colleagues who still happened to be there. Many people go out into the country and rent houses there for a night with friends and family if they can afford to. Others cook a big meal at home, and others go out to eat, usually at ridiculously elevated prices. Those who are so inclined pay through the nose to get into packed out bars and nightclubs, where many places serve a “free” buffet and bar. At the countdown to midnight, as the clock chimes, there is a tradition that for every chime you have to eat a grape – this is known as “tomar las uvas” – “taking the grapes”. I had rather anticipated an evening alone savouring Mr Cadbury and a dose of Mr Johnny Depp. As it was, I spent the day sunbathing thanks to a freakishly warm day, and in the evening my boss (who, although not being remotely Depp-ish, would also have been alone otherwise) and I went out for a curry, and then sat in the Irish bar with about 20 other ex-pats, and experienced the street celebrations as they unfolded. Typically, wherever “the place to be” on New Year’s Eve was, Los Alcazares wasn’t it. It was fairly dead, and most of those around were Brits. At midnight, the three bars still open near me spilled out onto the street and people began setting off fireworks and firecrackers. Health and safety out the window, rockets were set off from glass bottles and fired accidently into apartment balconies. A huge rope was produced – maybe 30 metres long – and snaked down the street. One end of it was set light to and a hundred firecrackers went off in succession, filling the street with the smell of cordite. The whole display was quite a spectacle, in a bizarre, unsafe way. Give me a Chinese lantern over a Chinese firecracker any day though!

New Year’s Resolutions? I happen to like them, though I know many who don’t. I think they can work, if you want them to. For the first time in about eight years, I’m happy to say that “Lose weight” has finally been struck off the list. I don’t want to lose any more. Instead…

I resolve to be healthy and strong.

I resolve to continue exercising my writing skills.

I resolve to be able to leave Spain satisfied.

I resolve to continue pushing myself to speak Spanish.

I resolve to keep in touch with good friends, and not to lose contact with any more of them.

I resolve to cease scratching my head (seriously, this is a really irritating one!!)

2011 was an interesting year for me. I worked hard and played hard at uni, ensuring that my final year was my favourite one. A wonderful set of flatmates, a healthy obsession with yoga, and the distraction of theatrical projects got me through my final exams. I started the year thinking that I would be a primary school teacher, and then became convinced that I would be a plumber. I enrolled on a plumbing course that then fell through thanks to government cuts. That was when I began to explore jobs in food – somewhat half-heartedly given as I assumed that doing a languages degree was a bullet in the foot – and by chance happened upon the training company who now employs me, who happened to be keeping an eye out for linguists with experience with fresh food. Because of my time farming in France, I was in with a chance after all. I graduated, not with the first class degree that I had hoped and worked for, but with the highest 2:1 I could possibly have achieved. Soon after, I had the offer of a job. A summer – probably my last living at home with my family - of unemployment followed as I waited to be told where I would be going for my first placement. I bought my first car – a shiny red Honda Jazz – and felt like a grown up. I was told I would be going to Spain, and two weeks later I went. I found it difficult at first. The job got easier but the social situation didn’t, and I struggled. And here I am now.

I wonder what 2012 will bring.

Hasta luego.