Life in Culebrón

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero.  Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too. The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal. Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Mill...

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death. Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries. It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this custo...

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest. Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle , a Civil War machine gun emplacemen t and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys . On Sunday I popped in to see the  Fallas  "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three. I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even kn...

Last week it rained a lot. Even here in sunny Alicante it rains from time to time. Fortunately it didn't do what it did to lots of Southern Spain, it didn't come down in tremendous sheets, causing floods that destroyed everything in their path. It rained in a very English way. Heavy, persistent rain rarher than a tremendous downpour. The weather has improved since then. Blue skies from time to time but generally it's been quite grey with the occasional shower. It's stayed relatively warm though - in the high 20s - but I'd be mightily disappointed if I were here on holiday especially with the cool evenings. We've closed  the workroom windows which have been open since we we wedged them that way back in June. We've also taken to closing the front and back doors to stop the cool draught passing through the house. When I changed the duvet cover yeterday morning I considered substituting a slightly thicker and warmer quilt. The towels in the bathroom a...

Pinoso doesn't have traffic lights and parking is free. In Culebrón we don't have much tarmac let alone street names. Yesterday I went for a job interview in Murcia. I hadn't been looking for a new job it's just that a job website I'm signed up to sends me offers matched against keywords. From time to time I apply for something that looks interesting. Like being a tourist guide. But jobs are in short supply in Spain at the moment and I never get any sort of response. There's no effort to applying though, just push a button and my CV wings its way to wherever. I never bother with a covering letter. I'm not expecting to get an interview so I don't put any effort into the process. There was effort in writing the original CV of course and every now and then I update it but it's low maintenance. So the surprise was that the firm came straight back to me after one of these occasional button pushes. It was for English teaching of course. The on...

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose. We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too. Nonetheless, when I'd finished a...

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain. I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog. Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem...