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!