Life in Culebrón

I went to a little bilingual talk last night about the history of the nearby village of La Romana. It wasn't at all bad. The local expert, Francesc Gallardo, did his stuff and answered, knowledgeably, the questions he was asked. He was ably assisted by a woman, Anabel, who handled the translation. She was the same woman who did the talk back in December . I had no real trouble understanding nearly all of the Spanish part of the talk and my English was up to the English part though that didn't seem to be everyone's case. I'm not talking about the Spanish; I'm talking about the English. I thought we had some most amusing culture and translation problems. In the Q&A session someone asked in English about a building that had a "big flat stone" inside, "probably" for processing grapes. The translator turned the English into Spanish and talked about grapes and wine to the Francesc, the speaker. He said he didn't know of any bodegas (winer...

When I was at university, a lifetime ago, I was asked how much say I thought students should have in the learning programme. My answer, then, was almost none. Nobody had yet persuaded me that participation was the way to go. Nobody had then persuaded me that it was the learning that was important. It used to be that language teaching, English language teaching, in Spain was pretty straightforward. The teacher started with page one, went on to page two and so on. There was a lot of writing and copying and not much talking or listening. I'm sure it's no longer like that. Having been brought up in another country it never struck me to teach in that traditional Spanish way. Even when we have a course book I tend to drift off the straight and narrow. I try to talk them through grammar. I don't think that a grammatical rule with one line of explanation followed by a page of exceptions is going to be very helpful to someone who has to juggle with vocabulary, structures, id...

A while ago we got something from the Catastro, or Land Registry, saying that we needed to stump up 60€ to have our entry in the land registry updated. I did a fair bit of research at the time to find out what was happening and why. I came to the conclusion that the Catastro was doing two things at once - updating the rateable value of houses and checking that their details for each house were correct. If there was any discrepancy between their records and the actual state of the property they were systematically fining people a standard 60€ for regularising their records throughout Spain. I read somewhere that, in Pinoso, about 1,000 households had been charged the 60€. Considering that there are fewer than 8,000 people in Pinoso and presuming that more than one person lives in most houses it sounded as though a good percentage of the records were skew whiff in some way. The system here is a lot like the old British Rates system. Each property has an assigned value calculated on...

When driving in Spain crossing solid white lines, in their many manifestations, is a bit of a no-no. I did it innocently in Cartagena in front of a passing police car once and got that crooked finger "come hither" symbol along with a sound telling off. On the telly the traffic cameras in the helicopters metaphorically click their tongues as lorries, cars and motorbikes, on completely deserted roads, take the direct line through the curves. Culebrón, our village, is split in half by the CV83 road - or more accurately split into something like a big bit and a little bit - and it's our part, the little bit, that is the cast aside orphan of the village. Our access road is made from dirt and it is criss crossed with rivulets carved by the occasional storms. Some of the gullies are suspension torturing deep. Our street lighting is vestigial and intermittent and about half the houses are just beyond the reach of the mains drainage. But, more than that, we are marooned be...

I do a Spanish class each Monday. I do it to make sure that I speak at least a little Spanish each week. Otherwise I probably wouldn't. One doesn't need much Spanish in a supermarket or a bar. In my job the expectation is that I speak English. At home Maggie's English is as good as mine and she makes sure that we watch English speaking TV. Last week the young woman who teaches me Spanish had written a short piece about a local festival. I noticed that it was tagged as level B1. This is one of the levels of the Common European Framework for language learning. The description of level B1 says that someone at this level can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in everyday situations and can deal with most situations likely to arise in an area where the language is spoken. People who do level B1 English courses with me can, in reality, hardly string two words together. Yesterday we went to see a film called Tarde par...

We've just been to the presentation of something called la Mostra de la Cuina which is a sort of gastronomic showcase  for the food local to Pinoso in a selection of local restaurants. The title is in Valencià and Google translate says it means Cooking Show which doesn't quite have the same ring as the original. Pinoso, like all of Spain, is proud of its traditional food particularly the dishes based around local produce. The star of the show around here is a rice dish with rabbit and snails cooked over sheaves of twigs. Unlike the paella from a bit further North in Valencia, the local rice dish is much thinner, usually only a grain or two of thick, it's a lot drier, often verging on burned, and it's a muddy browny green colour instead of that saffron yellow and, of course, it doesn't have chicken or seafood or whatever it is that Valencia paella has in it. Locals often make the difference in the name, ours is just arroz, rice, and the Valencia dish is paella ...

Writing the blog entry the other day about the two weather stations and the variations in a very short distance sent me looking for those weather reports I mentioned. I found both the January 2017 report and the full roundup for 2016. Apparently in Pinoso in the whole of 2016 we had 54 rainy days, 12 days with sub zero temperatures, 165 days with dew, 23 foggy days, no snow, no hail, 4 days with electrical storms, 163 sunny days, 133 days with sun and clouds, 45 cloudy days and 25 days with complete cloud cover. Some of those I'm not so sure about. First of all I don't quite know what it means. If the day starts with full cloud cover and then the clouds part and the sun shines through is that both complete cloud cover and sunny or is there some sort of generalisation made? If it's a combination then why were there 624 days in the year? There are other things I doubt too - OK we may not have had torrential rain and what not from more than four thunderstorms but I'm...

Cars have thermometers nowadays. Cieza is lower than Culebrón so, as I drive to work, the temperature increases but it's interesting that there are lots of local variations all along the route. The temperature differences between the villages that surround Pinoso can be quite marked. It's usually one or two degrees colder in Culebrón than in Pinoso for instance. In fact the weather in general can be very different over short distances. Back in 2013 to give an extreme example a hailstorm caused havoc in Paredón. In Culebrón, at the same time, it rained a bit. The distance between the two places is just over 5km. Pinoso has an official weather station, it's official in the sense that it contributes to the AEMET network with AEMET being the State Meterological Agency. As I understand it this is because a local teacher, always referred to as Capito, started a weather station as a school project which, slowly but surely, became more professional. From time to time I have ...

It's been a bit miserable for days, nay weeks, now. Tumble dryer rather than washing line, slightly moist bath towels. Dirty boot prints across the kitchen floor. I've been looking for something to do. What about popping up north for the weekend? I don't know why but I thought about Huesca or maybe Sigúenza. Some travel website says I'm talking about five or six hours. Well, if we set off after I finish work on Friday evening we could still be there for a nightcap around midnight. Paradors, Paradores, choose your plural, the upmarket hotel chain, constantly promote their offers. I had a bit of a look. None of it quite fits. Maybe it would work. Why not? Well, the truth is, it looks a bit dear actually. Madrid maybe, Madrid is always good. It always makes me feel less like a yokel when I'm in an art gallery and I'm not the only person there. That's not exactly free either and the deals on the super fast trains don't seem to be quite as stupendous and ub...

My guess is that you know that it snowed here yesterday. A good thick layer of snow in Culebrón. I missed most of it. In fact I must be the only person in Culebrón who doesn't have a photo of somewhere looking very Christmas card. I took a few snaps today but by then the thaw was well under way. There was 33mm of precipitation in Pinoso which, Google tells me, normally bulks up to about 33cm of snow. I'd have said it was less than that, maybe 15cm, but I wasn't here to see the snow at its height so I am not a reliable source. I drove to work through reasonably heavy falling snow but, by the time I got to work, the snow was nasty wet rain instead. Cieza is nearly 400 metres lower than Culebrón. By the time I came home the ploughs had done their stuff and I followed the car width wet tarmac ribbon, hemmed in by snow, occasionally hitting big compacted lumps, all the way home. It wasn't easy getting up the slope to the house though and I had to dig the snow away to a...