A couple of exhibitions

A couple of weeks ago Maggie and I went to see a travelling exhibition about Spanish portrtait painting. The show had been organised by the Prado Museum in Madrid, but was on at MUBAG, the Fine Arts Museum just down the road in Alicante. I thought it was really good. 62 pictures, 32 artists including el Greco, Velázquez, Murillo and Goya with a well organised theme and good labelling of the various periods and paintings. It was sponsored by a local bank called the CAM.

The CAM also runs a small museum dedicated to the writer Azorín. I mentioned it in a blog from October of last year. I went to see a show there this weekend called Azorín; Journeys Lived and Told. I thought from the blurb that it was about Azorín going to Paris, Albacete, Castilla la Mancha and New York. In fact, and I think this only because I've gone through the website and catalogue about the show with a dictionary, that it is actually a bunch of photos taken by a photographer called Eva Guillamón in those places. I couldn't work that out whilst I was at he exhibition. I also think that Azorín never actually made it to New York! The photos were generally out of focus and poorly framed, the example here is much better than most. I thought the link was tenuous and the exhibition was amongst the worst that I have ever seen.

Vías Pecuarias

The track that goes past the bottom of our house has a little sign on it that says Vía Pecuaria. It means Drover's Path.

Last week I saw an article in our local rag about conserving these Drover's Paths. It seems to me that they are a bit like the public footpaths or the green lanes in the UK. Just like in the UK some people want to see them remain as open access, public spaces and others want to fence them off, build on them etc.

Their original purpose was to link the summer pastures in the mountains with winter pastures in the valleys for the movement of animals. In order to ensure that there weren't conflicts between the nomadic herders and more settled farmers these paths have been governed by a whole range of rules and regs from the Middle Ages onwards. The rules defined the characteristics of overnight resting places, widths of the tracks etc. It's these ancient rights that still protect these paths as public spaces. Apparently, at their height, there were over 125,000kms of tracks in Spain, nearly 1% of the total landspace. That compares with just 15,000km of railway lines.

The track past our house is only a couple of metres wide but some are much wider. In fact there is a classification system defined by width. The Royal Droves have to be at least 75 metres wide to qualify for the title. You could build quite a few houses on a track 75 metres wide!

Port Saplaya

We went to see our pals who live in Bétera near Valencia again this weekend. Apart from a trip to the mountains and into Valencia city we went to a seaside town called Port Saplaya. There's a big housing development there where each block of flats and each house is designed to be different to the rest. The idea was to build something unique and with the same watery feel as Venice.

It looks quite good. Unfortunately the designers forgot that there's not much of a tide on the Med; certainly not enough to swill the water around inside the development. Like Venice it got a tad smelly in summer. There are now huge pumps to slosh the water around a bit when necessary.

Plumbers

The water pressure in our house was down a bit. The hot water was taking even longer than usual to get to the taps in the kitchen so when the next door neighbours said they were going to get a plumber in we suggested a job share.

They phoned for him yesterday, to come today. He turned up on time. He was called Lucretio. He tinkered around cleaning things out for a couple of hours (nothing too complicated), serviced the water heater and then went on his merry way. He charged 50€ for about 2, maybe 2½hrs, work and the situation seems to be improved.

I recall it wasn't easy getting a plumber in the UK and that they were very expensive.

Kings

Traditionally Spanish children receive their Christmas gifts on 6 January, Epiphany, the day associated with the arrival of the Three Kings in Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus. The Kings are called Melchor, Gaspar and Balthazar, representing Europe, Arabia, and Africa and bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Nearly every Spanish town of any size has a parade of the Three Kings on the evening of 5 January. This year we went to the one in the small town of Sax mainly because the daughter of one of Maggie's friends was taking part. It was quite a good parade. The Kings were on floats pulled by tractors, Balthazar was a blacked up white person (Very Black and White Minstrels), there were Roman soldiers, fire eaters, people on stilts, a dancing horse, children on donkeys, a small flock of geese, lots of dancers and plenty of the local variation on brass bands - there weren't many sweets being thrown about though.

Aftr the parade the normal thing to do would be to go home for a big meal and then the children would go to bed in anticipation of their gifts to come on the morning of the 6th. Of course the power of Coca Cola, Corte Inglés (a huge department store here) and global and local advertising means that Spanish children now often get their gifts from Santa on 25 December and the richer or luckier ones get gifts from both Santa and the Kings.

Belén

As part of their Christmas routine most Spanish houses set up a nativity scene, called a Belén after the Castilian word for Bethlehem. There are lots of nativity scenes too in shop windows, outside in the streets as part of municipal celebrations etc.

For some reason or another an individual in Pinoso rents a shop which she calls a Belén museum. Unsurprisingly it is only open around the Christmas. We went to have a nose around the other day.

As usual the baby Jesus was the centre of the show. The Three Kings were just around the corner, there was the traditional figure having a crap in the fields (c.f. Clarence Carter and Patches) and the donkeys and oxen were doing their stuff despite the Angel Gabriel shining all around. But there were other really great bits; the polar bears were pretty cool, especially as they seemed to be mixing it with penguins and the crocodile eating the zebra was noteworthy. Maggie seemed to think there were fewer dinosaurs in Bethlehem than the model maker was suggesting and the volcano spewing forth lava had me vainly trying to remember whether there was a subduction zone running through Palestine/Israel at the time.

We've got a Belén at home but it lacks volcanoes, dinosaurs and all sorts of essential items that I will obviously need to purchase before next year!

¡Feliz Año!

For the first time in years Maggie and I decided to do something a bit different for New Year. We joined our pal Pepa in Valencia where one of the national TV stations (Channel 5) was hosting a 10 minute slot up to the midnight countdown from Valencia, Spain's third largest city. They used three of the stars from a soap opera called "I am Bea" famous for featuring an "ugly" woman in the lead role. The Spanish word for ugly is fea so fea and Bea rhyme. The TV celebs were on a little stage in front of a countdown clock projected against a wall of one of the buildings in the Arts and Science Park.

There were a lot of us there. The organisers played Dance Music before and after the event, we all ate our twelve lucky grapes, one per chime, at midnight, we splashed our fizzy cava wine around, we watched the fireworks as they banged and crashed along with a couple of pieces by Beethoven and Falla and then the three of us had a stroll around an old part of the town amongst the partying crowds.

ETA

I don't usually comment on "hard" news stories but the bomb blast at Madrid airport seems such a shame. Not just for the, currently reported, two missing, four injuries and material damage but because it has put paid to talks to stop more killing.

The Socialist Government here has been treading the difficult path followed by recent UK Governments with the IRA. Over the last nine months, since ETA announced a truce, there has been a lot of toing and froing about how and whether the Government should open talks with a terrorist group that has not formally renounced either violence or its armed struggle. The conservative opposition are very firm in saying "no", public feeling seems to be a bit anti any talking too but, in my opinion, the Government has been doing the right thing; they've used regional political parties, affiliated to them, to talk to the terrorists to try and establish some ground rules. Political dancing if you will but dancing is better than shooting, bombing and dying.

ETA, or presumably radical elements within it, had pushed the boundaries by stealing guns in France and fomenting some street violence a couple of weeks ago. The politicians footwork had to become even fancier.

But a car bomb at Barajas airport can't be danced around. Today has been a bad day for the good guys.

Going up the Hill

We took a couple of friends to the airport in Alicante this evening. When we left our house in el Culebrón, it was 5ºC. When we got to our pals in Crevillente, which is close to the coast, it was 10ºC and it was 11ºC at the airport in El Altet. By the time we got home it was 0ºC in Culebrón.

Culebron is 600m above sea level (1968ft), Crevillente at 131m (429ft) and El Altet at 30m (98ft). It just shows what a gentle gradient can do!

The snow on our palm tree is from last January. No settled snow yet this year.

Boxing Day

We popped down to Benidorm yesterday. We thought that the people who had come out from the UK for a Christmas break would be well pleased with the sunshine.

Well, at least we didn't lose

It was "el Gordo" today, the National State Christmas lottery. There were 180 series of 85,000 tickets on sale. Each ticket costs 200€ but they are sold in tenths of a ticket at 20€ per pop. The biggest prize is only 3 million euros (so you'd only win a tenth of that if you bought, as is usual, one of the 20 euro vouchers) but there are thousands and thousands of smaller prizes.

Along with the 80% of the Spanish population I bought a lottery ticket nd this year, for the first time the lottery "touched" us and we got our stake money back!