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!