Names and seasonal stuff

Today and tomorrow are the days to eat roscón, roscón de Reyes. I've written about it several times before, check this link for earlier blog posts. So no real detail this time. It's a bit like a big doughnut, a cake to be eaten around epiphany, when the Three Kings, The Three Wise Men, allegedly arrived with their odd gifts for the baby Jesus - not a Scalextric American Police Chase nor a Linkimals Smooth Moves Sloth in sight but a couple of tree resin extracts and, always useful, gold.

I've bought roscones lots of times. Buy them from a cake shop, made to order, and they cost an arm and a leg, well around 25€ which is pretty expensive for a cake. In supermarkets the price varies a lot. You can get some for five or six euros but the one I'd seen judged as the best for this year was from one of the low price supermarket chains, Día. I was expecting to pay around 10€ but I couldn't find one. I went back and forth to our local branch five times over three days and I tried another branch in another town. They said they had sold out and were waiting for deliveries. No success cakewise.

From my experience of a couple of countries I am going to extrapolate. Once upon a time, in the UK, to talk about a vacuum cleaner you would say Hoover, to describe a vacuum flask it was a Thermos, sticking plasters were Elastoplasts, Armco for the crash barriers, Jacuzzi for the hot tub baths etc. In the same way similar things and their brands may be well known in different countries whilst others are world brands. I know very little about guns but I think that British soldiers of my dad's generation used Lee Enfield rifles, and that British soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland used something called an SLR. I suspect that is peculiarly British knowledge whilst the "Soviet" AK-47 Kalashnikov and the US Americans, M14 rifle are so well known as to be almost cliches. For some strange reason I know that the famous Spanish rifle is called a CETME.

Now a little while ago I heard someone say they were going to buy some Chirucas. I thought it was a word I didn't know but it turns out to be a trade name for a brand of Spanish boot - the sort that hunters or mountaineers might use. I decided that I could be Spanish minded and link this idea of doing the Camino with buying something intrinsically Spanish. It turned out that Chirucas and I are not a match made in heaven. The 44 is too tight, the 45 is floppy. Also, very unsatisfactorily, the label inside the model I liked said, in English, Made in Vietnam. No success bootswise.

For some reason Madrid doesn't load a bunch of fireworks skyward on New Year's Eve. There are plenty of New Year traditions though. One of the main ones is eating grapes. Again I've written about this so check it out here if you're interested. Anyway we were at a party on New year's Eve. The house we were in usually watches platform based telly - Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. - rather than broadcast stuff. For a live event though it needed to be broadcast telly. The two main choices were the state broadcaster who broadcast from in front of the most famous clock in the Puerta del Sol Spain in Madrid and a private station which now has a tradition of being hosted by a team which includes a woman in a revealing "dress". As the most technically adept person in the house struggled to fight past the adverts and cookie warnings to connect his laptop to the telly in time for the midnight chimes we missed the critical moment. We had no chance to eat our grapes. New Year was declared at about 00:02 hrs. by someone in the room. No success grapewise.

Looking forward to a torchlight procession as part of the Kings parade tonight though.