Friends call

Our friend, Claire Morrison, owns a rather splendid looking Mercedes soft top. Claire allows her husband, John, to drive the car from time to time.

As a bit of a trip they decided to use the car to travel from their home in Cambridgeshire to their holiday home in Altea just up the coast from us.

First they travelled from Huntingdon to Portsmouth then they caught the ferry to Bilbao. On the way to Altea they stopped off in Pamplona, Zaragoza, Teruel and Requena.

After a couple of weeks in Altea they packed the car and set off for Cuenca, Toledo, Madrid, Burgos and Madrid.

We saw them a couple of times during their visit but as they set out for the homeward leg of their journey their first stop was here, in Culebrón. They said they wanted to say goodbye. I did notice though that John had left a little space in the tightly packed car and he was very quick to get across to our local bodega and buy 18 bottles of wine.

Two birds, one stone - I wonder?

Beyond belief

Back in May I got myself a Certificado de Registro de Ciudadano de la Unión, the piece of paper to prove you are resident in Spain; Maggie tried to do the same thing a few days later but was thwarted at every turn. Today, finally, we got around to having another go.

The usual drill for getting paperwork at the Police Station in Elda is to turn up around 7.30am, get yourself a ticket, just like Sainsbury's deli counter, and then hang about till your number is called. Today we were late but we thought we might as well give it a go, it is August after all and everything is dead quiet. There was a huge queue. We stood there looking lost but I pushed in front of everyone to ask if it were worth waiting. As I dithered a woman at a desk said "Any foreigners waiting?", I said we were, I went and got Maggie, she handed over her paperwork and within 3 minutes we had the certificate.

Believe me this is a remarkable thing.

Frolicking in the shower

As we drove away from Jumilla last night we were amused by groups of young people using the car washes to hose each other down.

We'd been to see the festival of the grape harvest. I'd presumed that this fiesta stretched back in time to hardy Spanish peasants celebrating the start of the harvest. But none of it. As I've been searching for photos it turns out that the local bodegas set up the fiesta in 1972 as a tourist attraction and attract tourists it does.

The streets heave with young people. Older people generally cower away from the passing floats. White is a good colour to wear. It colours up a treat with red wine. Nothing wrong with wearing a traditional swirly skirt and a white blouse (better if you're a woman) or black trousers, white shirt and blue cummerbund (apparently suitable for both sexes though probably traditionally male). Both sexes can wear the alpargatas with high ankle laces (they're the correct footwear for trading grapes). Old clothes are good too, shorts, anything you can rip and cover in wine. Young men seem to be quite keen on ripping the shirts the young women wear as well as their own T shirts. The torn clothes, drenched in wine are hurled into the air. People swim in the wine. People pour wine over their heads. People on the floats pour wine on the crowd from plastic metre cubes brimming with nasty, cheap, early harvest wine.

So everyone is pushing and shoving and drinking and jumping and singing and bawling. Amazingly no vomiting or fighting though. At least we didn't see any. We did see a lot of staggering.

And afterwards they go back to their cars and pour cold water over themselves, or go to the municipally provided showers or pop down the car wash at the local garage. It doesn't matter so long as they can change their clothes and get on with the fiesta

Late nights

We went to see a chap called Antonio Orozco in concert in Jumilla last night. Good show, interesting venue in a school playground and well worth a lot more than the 8€ we paid to get in.

Antonio's support act started a bit after the advertised time of midnight so by the time the calls for an encore (¡otra,otra!) had died away it was around 3am.

We've been out and about a fair bit recently; the Pinoso festival had most of its acts on around midnight, the Flamenco in La Unión started at 11pm, the Elche fireworks at 11.15pm, the Elche barraca at 2am etc. Throw in a bit of travelling time and we've not been to bed much before 3am even after the early evening events like the Moors and Christians.

Now everyone knows that Spaniards eat late - lunch is usually 2pm but 3.30pm isn't unusual, the evening meal varies an hour or so on either side of 10pm. It's also quite warm in much of Spain at the moment so starting the entertainment after people have had their tea and as the temperatures moderate make sense.

But why was it that as we came through Mahoya, a village too small to show on the map, there were still plenty of people sitting in the bar having a beer just after 3am? I think they just like to stay up late.

Nit de l'Alba

I did a piece on the fireworks in Elche last August so I won't repeat the details but this year I did take a video of the finale.

The lights of the whole city are turned off, Christian music blasts out of huge speakers in the square outside the Basilica and then this happens.

Barracas

We went to see the fireworks of the Nit de l'Alba in Elche. Afterwards we went to the Europa FM Barraca, the sort of open air temporary disco typical of most festivals in Alicante province.

We didn't stay long, bit too young for us, but the friends we were with were impressed that the youngsters who were there didn't make a dash for the bar and get legless as fast as they could. In fact they seemed to be there to chat with their mates, pose and dance. We suspect the same would not be true in the UK.

Spanish youngsters do, of course, get drunk and the botellon, a sort of open air drinking party arranged via SMS messages, is a phenomenon that older Spaniards find both sad and incomprehensible.

La Unión, El Cante de las Minas

La Unión is an unremarkable town in Murcia. They used to mine lead, silver and pyrites there and as the miners worked they sang a sort of Flamenco - the song of the mines.

Nowadays the town hosts a Flamenco festival each summer that is famous enough to merit TV and radio mentions every day that it's on. The professional Flamenco dancers, singers and guitarists run for a week but for the last four days there is a competition in each of the three disciplines for newcomers. The overall winner picks up 12,000€, a trophy in the shape of a miner's lamp and almost certainly a professional career.

We went to one of the semi-final days. The event is held in an old "Victorian" cast iron and glass market hall with plastic chairs arranged in rows for the audience. It starts at 10.45pm (Spanish time) and goes on for about 3 hours. Not bad value for 8.50€ and even though I don't like Flamenco much it was impressive stuff.

This man, Juan Pinilla, won the lamp

Takeover bid

On the A7 motorway close to Murcia the big electronic sign warned us about the number of road deaths in Spain since January this year. Amazingly the message was in English.

SantaPolaChris

When we first moved to Spain, almost three years ago, we rented a flat in Santa Pola.

We liked Santa Pola; the Med at the bottom of the street, plenty to do, plenty of shops and close to where Maggie worked. The problem was that houses were too expensive for us to consider which is why, eventually we ended up in Culebrón.

Santa Pola is invaded by tourists, mainly Spanish tourists, during July and August. Various people have told me that the population, normally about 25,000 increases from anywhere between 125,000 to 200,000.

But the soft spot for Santa Pola remains so, when we had to pick up a pal from the airport yesterday, we popped in to revisit some of our old haunts. Maggie was concerned that we would never find a parking space (some English chums visited last year and abandoned the idea when they couldn't find a parking space) and that the town would be so crowded that we would be shouldered off the the pavements by the milling tourists. In fact we parked in ten minutes and the town was relatively quiet. Plenty of life on the beach and along the front but the town centre was lively though not at all uncomfortable. We were able, for example, to wander around the book fair in the main glorieta by the fortress without any shoulder charging and we had no trouble getting a table in the restaurant we'd set out for.

And only fifteen minutes from the airport.

Pinoso en fiestas

The annual Pinoso fiesta got under way officially last night.

From the balcony of the Town hall, just after 10.30, the pregonera did the local equivalent of Cilla Black turning on the Blackpool Illuminations and our Fiestas Patronales were under way.

As well as all the stalls, extra bars and funfair last night we had dancers from Galicia - the male dancers were dressed like Captain Pugwash - and fireworks. The rockets should have gone up at midnight but, just to confuse us, they let them off five minutes early. Early is not a Spanish option.

They've moved the fun fair to a different side of town this year and there are stalls running from there back to the main street. The Peruvian bobble hat and jumper sellers seem to have been moved off the roundabout and into a little side street and all the burger and chip vans that used to be down by the barracas (a sort of temporary disco/club/rave) seem to have moved to the top end of town up by the Sports Centre.

We didn't actually get to see the whole lot; we didn't see the barracas for instance, we didn't have any of the street food nor did we ride on the dodgems because we bumped into Clive and had a couple of drinks with him.

We'll be checking out the vermouth sessions by the town hall, the bull running (more like big dog sort of size running), the free paella, a couple of big pop acts etc. over the next 8 days of Fiesta and I'll let you know if there is anything exciting.

This is one of the barracas that has a website

Taking the Waters

Romans and Arabs used to go for a scrub up in the naturally hot spring water that bubbles out of the ground at Los Baños de Fortuna about 30km from where we live. Maggie and her chum Ros decided to do the same yesterday.

In what we would call Victorian times a husband and wife team recognised the potential for building a small tourist resort around the hot spring. They put in the pool, treatment rooms, hotels, cafeterias and a park. They even threw in a religious shrine for good measure.

Ros and Maggie bathed. They hired sunbeds. They sipped on long drinks and they didn't gossip. Just after 2pm, tired from her exertions, Maggie suggested lunch. She's really got the hang of this Spanish thing that no event is an event unless it involves food.

The intrepid duo eschewed the charms of the Hotel Victoria and the Hotel España and, purely by chance, of the three elegant, but faded, hotels on the site they chose the Hotel Balneario, the oldest hotel in the whole of Murcia. The hotel was built in 1860, luckily for Maggie she wasn't there then or she'd have gone hungry because the restaurant wasn't added till 1910. They were greeted enthusiastically by the waitress who kissed them, announced to the whole restaurant that they were honorary Pinoseros and even introduced them to the cook as well as serving them food and drink.

I think they had a good time.