Life in Culebrón

There's a shoe museum in Elda. It's not surprising; shoes were big business along the valley of the Vinalopó. They still are but, as you might imagine the industry has taken a battering from the Chinese. There are often pieces in the local papers about Chinese firms based here importing shoes from China and then bunging them in boxes marked "Made in Spain" before shipping them all over Europe with names that sound Spanish or International. Stories about counterfeiting of branded shoes abound. Spanish workers regularly march around with banners or go in coachloads to Madrid and dump shoes in front of Government buildings. Anyway, ther's a shoe museum in Elda. It's a big building, a modern and quite impressive building with interesting displays as I remembered and I hadn't been there for a while. So when I went to Elda to sign on yesterday I thought I'd have another look around. I've been here in Spain a while now and lots of things that used t...

One of the few poems I know is Auden's Night Mail - the one that has the clackety clack rhythm. For we Brits mail and trains go together. Maybe it's no longer a reality (doesn't all the mail go by road or air nowadays?) but we old folk still talk about Mail Trains. I certainly expect a post box at a railway station. So just now, when I went to collect Maggie from the train as she arrived in Petrer from Cartagena I took a couple of letters to post. A waste of time. Not a letter box in sight, not on the platform nor near the station nor even on the nearest main road. A whole culture to unlearn and relearn still.

I got back to Culebrón today and this bird was in our living room.

Really I have nothing to report. Well nothing in the way of an insight into Spain unless you want to read my stupendously insightful 500 words on street names in Spain as published in this month's TIM magazine . I think the article is on page 8, it's called 1066 and all that . Third article I've had printed in the magazine. But I did want to make sure that you knew that Life in Culebrón was still alive. We were here for the weekend. It's been rather nice actually. Away from the hustle and bustle of Cartagena. Paradise for Edi the cat who has been able to get out of the house and slaughter all sorts of small lifeforms. Last night we went, with some English pals, to take in one of the Moors and Christians parades in the nearby town of Crevillente. I wasn't looking forward to it all that much (seen one M&C seen 'em all) but we actually had quite a good evening. We even stopped for a beer on the way home in the town of Aspe. Sitting out at 11 in the evening ...

Get to Know Spain is a companion book for GCSE exams written by Rosemary Hunt and first published in 1980. In the section on climate it says - In most parts of Spain the climate is extremely harsh. As I've said in another post we haven't seen much rain over the last two or three months but for the past couple of days the temperatures have dropped (27ºC daytime 15ºC overnight) and the sky has been threatening rain. And today it came. Buckets and buckets of the stuff. As usual our interior patio started to fill with water and I had to wade out to unblock the drain, our next door neighbour is apparently, as I type, trying to stop the water flowing down our joint track from carving out a mini version of the Grand Cañon, our aljibe, the thing that collects run off water, is overflowing, we keep losing the electric for a few seconds after every lightning flash and we've unplugged all the computers from the mains just in case. The hail was bouncing off the cars and patio furn...

I was with a British pal yesterday as we went to the fruit and veg stalls in the town market. He had been charged, by his wife, to buy potatoes and tomatoes. At the stall he pointed to the potatoes, showed five fingers and said kilos, he repeated the mime for the tomatoes (though with a different number of digits) and then held out a handful of small change from which the stall holder took the appropriate amount. His wife mentioned that they have been living in Spain for six years.

Back in Culebrón for the weekend and I noticed that there were a lot of small moths hanging on to the kitchen ceiling. Something similar happened a couple of years ago we had tens, if not hundreds, of moths inside the kitchen cupboard where we keep the dried goods. Being murderous and ecologically unsound I set about them with the fly spray which worked to a degree in that the moths had soon gone. I forgot all about them but later Maggie noticed that there were grub like caterpillars undulating their way across our ceiling. Horrid. Manual harvesting along with a thorough clean out of the flour and cereal cupboard seems to have done the trick for the moment.

We Brits have been running auctions at two spots around Pinoso for a while now - one at the Country Hotel, La Pinada and the other at Bonnie's Bar and Campsite. We went along to Bonnie's as we were looking for things for the flat in Cartagena. My guess is that we will not be regular attenders. Don't forget: with our weeks now split between Culebrón and Cartagena new posts will be on both sites.

Because I used to own an anorak I keep records of maximum and minimum temperatures. I thought it would be reasonably interesting to log the summer temperatures bearing in mind that it was much cooler in Ciudad Rodrigo (where we were living in June) than it has been in Alicante for July and August. Despite what our friends and neighbours say the temperature only reached 40ºC on one day, the 24 July, and our lowest overnight temperature here in Culebrón was 16ºC on 18 July. Looking at the spread of temperatures I would say that a sunny and warm day with a minimum of 19ºC and a high of 32ºC would be the most typical whilst we've been here in Culebrón. Turned out nice again then.

We went out for lunch with our old pals John and Trish today and we went to a reasonably decent restaurant in town. We had, probably, the most traditional meal in Pinoso and I was a bit surprised when it seemed to be something a bit out of the ordinary for them. Then I checked the blog and found that I've only once made reference to it here on this blog. A wrong to be righted. Rice, cooked in a paella pan is a standard meal all over Spain, all over the World come to that, but the famous paella, the one from Valencia usually has prawns, other seafood and chicken. The one in these here parts comes with rabbit and snails. The meal in and around Pinoso goes something like this. First you choose an assortment of bits and bats to start that are put on the table for everyone to share. Toasted and oiled bread served with some alli olli and grated tomato, salad, olives and nuts come more or less as standard. The rest will be to your choice, whatever they have on today plus some stapl...