Washing up

I don't like washing up. I don't like chopping and dicing either. It always seems to me that the time necessary to prepare a meal and clean up after it is disproportionate to the five to ten minutes required to eat it. On the other hand I resent paying proper restaurant prices. I hum and hah about spending 100€ on a pair of jeans or a bit for the camera and then happily spend half that amount on food that will be costing me money in sewage charges only hours later.

Maggie likes restaurants though and I enjoy the experience of abandoning our English speaking existence for a couple of hours. I'm a big fan of the cheap set meals - the menú del día - available all over Spain. Between 8€ and 12€ for three or four courses with the booze and coffee thrown in. Set meals, though tend to be formulaic. Similar starters, mains and puddings the length and breadth of the land. There are a growing number of slightly better but more expensive set meals but when the quality of the food is an unknown quantity they can simply be standard fare at inflated prices.

Now Spaniards enjoy eating and they are convinced that Spanish cuisine is the best in the world. For evidence they can point to the list of the top 50 restaurants of the world. Three Spanish in the top ten this year for instance as against one in the UK; five Spanish in the top 50 against three British.

In general though Spain isn't foody like the UK. There are cookery programmes on the telly but they are pure demonstration rather than the plethora of food based UK TV programmes. And there are no celebrity chefs go ice dancing programmes either because, with the possible exception of Ferran Adrià, there are no celebrity chefs.

If we do decide to spend a bit more money on a meal the emphasis is usually on traditional dishes prepared with good quality ingredients. So it's paella in a greasy spoon with the telly on and paella in the place with Porsches parked outside and the waiters in grey and black. Recently though, maybe because of the financial crisis, we've noticed a trend towards "25€" degustación menus in the upscale restaurants - a tasting menu. More courses than the traditional set meal but absolutely no choice. You get what you're given. Probably by UK standards the meals are not very adventurous (bear in mind that I haven't eaten in a UK restaurant in eight years now) but putting grapefruit and strawberries in the salad, serving deep fried aubergine crisps or adding a sweet drizzle to a savoury food is pretty adventurous in these here parts.

There are a couple of these degustación type of restaurants near our flat in Cartagena, one of them is probably the place I have most enjoyed a meal anywhere in Spain. Today, just outside Pinoso, we went to a similar sort of place. Brilliant setting, good service and a different menu. A traditional sort of crisp pancake spread with a sweet onion paste, small mushroom stuffed peppers covered in a corn sauce, pork cheek in a fig sauce then grilled chicken with home made all-i-oli followed by a cheesecake.With coffee, water and a bottle of decent local wine the whole lot came in at 62€ for the two of us.

Who knows, one day when I ask one of my students what their favourite food is they will mention something with a beetroot drizzle rather than paella, lentils, tortilla, steak, spaghetti or pizza.

Invisible customers

It may be unfair but the UK comparison is Kwik Save. If Tesco's has clean aisles and lots of open tills then Kwik Save has shelf stackers who bump into you and only one, rather reluctant, assistant on the single open till. Most supermarkets in Spain are Kwik Save. Día, Aldi, Lidl, Consum, Árbol, HiperBer, Upper - all the same. A bit messy, a bit small. Not invariably but generally. Mercadona is a bit smarter but even there the shelf stackers and floor sweepers expect you to give way to them. The big stores are Carrefour and Eroski - at least around here.

Only Eroski and Carrefour, to my knowledge, have the 10 items or fewer cash desks. Even they only have a couple of cash desks open in the 2pm-5pm afternoon lull in which case the same problem arises as with smaller stores.

Queues are slow. Time saving strategies like having your cash or card ready, preparing your shopping bags or not having a chat about something of great import are not the Spanish way. So, if you just pop into the local supermarket to get a few items it can take a frustrating while. The seasoned Spanish shopper out for only a few things has a strategy. They buy the main items and park their basket in the queue. They anticipate the slowness of the queue and leave it to inch forward whilst they abandon the basket and finish shopping. Of course those last things always take longer than they expect or the queue moves with unusual swiftness and it is soon the basket's turn with no owner present.

I am always the person who arrives at a cash desk to find the queueing basket. Or maybe competing queueing baskets. The way is symbolically blocked. I could step over and ignore the presumption. I usually though stand dutifully behind fretting over the virtual race between the checkout process and the absent shoppers.

It happened today. The absent owner returned just in time. In reality she was two customers as she divided the contents of her basket into two piles. Now where is that coupon? Oh, I probably need some bags. Money? Oh, yes I probably have my purse here somewhere - now where did I leave it? Terrible about that little girl isn't it? Let me see I may have the coppers somewhere.

The Black Cap is too good for 'em I say.

Combining the blogs

I have never quite understood why this blog - Life in Culebrón - is much more popular than my Life in Cartagena blog.

Not many people look at either to be honest but there is a marked difference in the number of visitors to each. I have just discovered a tool on the Blogger design page that allows me to combine the various blogs I still write - Cartagena and Culebrón - with the now moribund Ciudad Rodrigo.

I have also added a tab for some articles I have written in a local magazine.

So, by just clicking on the tabs at the top of this page, you can quickly navigate between all three Life Ins and the magazine articles.

The cars out in Pinoso

I used to own a 1977 MGB GT. It came to Spain and it was beautiful. But poor insurance and a shortage of money turned it into a battered jalopy. I sold it on four years ago.

When we first arrived I had a five year plan. To be a local councillor. I expected my Spanish to improve and being a councillor would indulge an interest in politics and an idea of becoming a part of my new community. Part of the plan was to join a classic car club following Richard Vaughan's advice to join a group where a shared interest would make it easier to practice my Spanish. I joined the Orihuela SEAT 600 Club but somehow it never worked out. There were other Brits in the group and the Spanish, keen to make us feel at home, always coralled us into a little group together. I never had the courage to break away.

Even though I've been without a classic car for four years the secretary of the club continues to send me information about their activities so I knew that today they were out in Pinoso. I drove in to town to say hello. I didn't though; the ever present diffidence. I sat in the café where the group was having breakfast and didn't say anything though Jesús, the secretary, spotted me and came over. He also invited me to lunch. I won't go of course. I might have to speak.

Boom boom

I began to laugh out loud. My head was ringing. It was about 2am and all around me people dressed in a motley uniform of black robes and red scarves plus any number of personal touches from cigars and sunglasses to multicoloured wigs were walking up and down banging the hell out of drums.

Big drums, little drums, every size of drum. Children, adults, teenagers. bang, bang, bang.

I was in Hellín where they celebrate the Resurrection by banging on drums. They call it a tamborada from tambor the Spanish for a drum. As far as I could see there was no organisation to the event. People turned up with any number of friends or family and banged drums.

I laughed because I suddenly thought how mad it all was.

Not a decent snap all night. The flash ones look horrid and the ambient light ones are all blurred. But you should get the idea.

Drains

We have to pay for drains that we don't have in Culebrón. Fair enough really. We don't have children either but we're happy to pay tax towards the schools. So we have a pit. I've never known whether it's a pure cess pit or a septic tank. I don't really know what the difference is, apart from having the vague notion that a septic tank produces clean water to drain away. It would be easy to find out. Google knows everything but I have different things to do with my time.

The bathroom off our bedroom smells a bit. As we used to say in the 60s it pongs. Then again the two flats in Santa Pola and the one in Ciudad Rodrigo whiffed a bit at times too. I've been told that it's something to do with Spanish toilets having a different, and less efficient, trap design than their UK equivalents. So sligtly more aromatic toilets are a fact of life in Spain.

Maggie had some sort of concern about our tank because the shower she uses isn't draining as well as it did and she wondered if there was a damp patch on the garage floor. So we opened up the pit and had a nosey the other day. It looked like the mud you get in a river estuary - oozy and shiny.

Anyway, so Maggie did a bit of Googling. The search engine told us what a couple of locals have said before. If things begin to smell a bit hurling a supermarket chicken or some roadkill into the pit can help. We've always stuck to the more genteel and commercially available yeast and sugar mixes which do the same thing by helping the beasts that do the digesting to multiply. They also told us what we already knew that the kinder you are to the beasts - less bleach, no oils, less paper etc. - the longer the tanks can go without needing pumping out. The big surprise though was that, apparently you are supposed to have the pits sucked dry every year. We haven't done anything to ours for seven years.

Whoops - fun to come then.

Whilst we're nearby

We hadn't been to La Rioja, a small wine producing region in the North of Spain, for a while so we decided to put that right. We stayed in a Parador, visited the capital Logroño and toured an upmarket bodega. And, as we were nearby we extended the trip to Bilbao and finally to Canfranc.

I'd mentioned a place in Bilbao that I had read was worth seeing. Maggie looked on the map and thought as we were in La Rioja why not wander over the border into Euskadi (nobody seems to call it the Basque Country anymore) and have a look? The place I'd read about is called the Alhóndiga and it turned out to be a sort of arts, culture and fitness centre rolled into one. It took us a couple of hours to drive to Bilbao from Logroño.

I also noticed that a sensible route home passed through the Huesca province of Aragon. This time I'd heard a programme on the radio about the Canfranc International Railway Station. The place was built as part of a railway project to unite France and Spain via an 8km tunnel dug through the Pyrenees. The station was opened in 1928, worked well for a while but the line went into decline after the 1940s. The railway was finally closed in 1970 when a bridge on the French side became unusable and repairing it just didn't make economic sense. By all reports, in its heyday, the station was like a mini embassy in that part of the station was considered to be French territory on Spanish soil.

So our route was set and hotels booked accordingly. It was only when we typed the destinations into the TomTom that the horrible truth hit us. From Bilbao to Canfranc for instance is just short of 300kms and three and a half hours of driving. Spain is a big country but the mean map makers fit it onto the same sized bit of paper as we use for the England and Wales side of the map of the UK. It catches us out every time.

The round trip was 1993 kilometres.

Toast for breakfast

In Pinoso, in Cartagena and in Culebrón, if there were a bar, a typical breakfast food would be toast. In Alicante and Murcia that usually means a portion of a bread stick (they always ask if you want half or whole when you order) toasted and with something on top. By far and away the most popular are either oil and salt or grated tomato. Adding a slice of ham is optional and not standard but very common.


In Madrid on the other hand if you ask for toast in the morning it's usually a thick Mother's Pride type slice served with butter and jam. Down in Seville the breadstick type toast usually comes along with a three sectioned dish containing grated tomato and various fats (sobrasada and lard are common.) In Catalonia they seem to rub the tomato directly onto the toast rather than grate it first and rubbing the bread with garlic as well as tomato is very common.


So, this morning we were in la Rioja, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada to be precise. "How do you do the toast around here," I asked, "Do you have it with tomato?" The girl leaning on the bar didn't look too sure. Shell shocked by my appalling pronunciation I presumed. Then she asked her mum who was in the kitchen - "Butter and jam," she said,  "Did we want sliced bread or normal bread?"

Interesting little regional variation I thought.

La Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós

I could lie. Except for those of you who live in and around Pinoso you would never know. It would be easy to lie about the 12th edition of the La Mostra de la Cuina de Pinós.

Now if my Castillian Spanish is shaky my Valencian is non existent. My guess is that the title means something like "Pinoso's culinary showcase" - the showing of the cooking/cuisine from Pinoso. And this is where I chose not to lie; it took place from the 21st to 26th of February. Long before I got around to writing this blog entry.

The idea is elegant. Five local restaurants chose to get involved this year. Each cooks local dishes using local produce accompanied by local wine. The price is a set 25€ per person. The organisation is tight. The side dishes are the same in each and every restaurant for all six days and the main course is also stipulated by the organisers for each day. So if you chose to go to La Torre or Alfonso on the same day you would get the same main course. The only significant variation is that each restaurant prepares a different daily special to be served after the regulated starter and before the regulated main course. Even there the organisers stipulate that the special should include a particular and different ingredient per day.

The menus featured a lot of snails, a lot of rabbit, several varieties of sausage and the local meatballs. We were in Pinoso for the Saturday and Maggie, always up for a nice feed, forced me to go too. The restaurant we went to, el Timón, was packed to the rafters, the atmosphere was excellent, the noise was that quiet Spanish bellow and the food was plentiful, tasty and as traditional as could be.

Splendid little event.

I could only find the menus as a pdf but this is the link in case you want to have a look.

The photo, which has us in the background, was taken by a local online newspaper El Eco de Pinoso

The day we went to Beni

Benidorm has to be one of the oddest towns in Spain. For a start it looks odd. Far too many tall buildings for your average Spanish town. It also seems to lack any sort of cultural life in the theatre and museum sense of the word. I'm sure that isn't true but as an average visitor all I saw were bars, restaurants, poundstretcher type shops and sex clubs. All of them had that sort of seedy, run down look reserved for brash seaside towns.

Benidorm feels oddly foreign too. Obviously the majority of businesses in a Spanish town dedicated to tourism are Spanish but there are so many British, German, Dutch and even Chinese businesses that it would be easy for any of the nationals of those countries to forget that they had left their homelands.

Benidorm was odd in another, much less quirky, way. At one point on Saturday night we were strolling along a pedestrianised street. There were bars on both sides and planted firmly in the middle of the street were muscly, shaven headed men. I presumed that they were under-employed bouncers being used as early evening leafleteers until the bars got going and their bouncerial skills were required. Every bar had some sort of offer - free shots with every beer, bargain pints of vodka and Red Bull, two for one deals etc. We'd been given a couple of leaflets as we strolled though I suppose for most of these places I was too old. They'd have me down as a customer for one of the bars with the other white haired men where María Jesús would be playing her accordion. But there was something wrong with the way the bouncers were standing; with their lack of movement. Maggie noticed it too. There was menace in the air and I'm still not sure whether it was from the bouncers themselves or because of what they were waiting for.

I can't remember the last time I felt threatened walking the streets of a Spanish town. Last night, in Benidorm, surrounded by signs for British Breakfasts, Scottish bars and roast beef dinners I did. A Spanish couple we talked to later commented on the same unease.

We were there, in Benidorm, with the people of Culebrón, with people from the Neighbourhood Association. Elena, who heads up the Association, had found a deal at a Benidorm hotel. For the princely sum of 27€ per person we got the coach ride from Culebrón to Benidorm and full board in one of the big Benidorm chain hotels for twenty four hours. It was the sort of hotel that has a featured dance band in one lounge and a music quizz in another. There was a two for one deal on most drinks too.

To be truthful we didn't do much except eat, drink and stroll for twenty four hours but that would be a majority pastime here. The weather was excellent, the room was good, the food was plentiful and we were made to feel very welcome. I had predicted disaster but I was wrong. It couldn't have gone much better.

Just one last observation. We left Culebrón at 4pm in the afternoon. It seemed odd to our British sensibility. Obviously, if we British are going somewhere we get up at the crack of dawn and try to get there before the shops open. Probably the timings were linked to whatever package the hotel was offering but none of our Spanish travelling companions thought that a late afternoon start was in the least odd. We'll be there in nice time for dinner they said.

Dashed hopes

My dad never passed a driving test. When he began to drive it was enough to stay alive on the road with provisional licences long enough to claim the full driving licence. He was very angry when, in one of the periodic updates of the licencing system, his right to ride motorbikes and drive steam rollers was taken away from him. He sent a letter to, what was then, the Ministry of Transport. His argument was simple.  He wrote: I never passed a test to drive anything so, if I'm allowed to drive anything I should be allowed to drive everything. The Ministry took no notice of his flawless logic.

Eight months ago I began the process of swapping my UK driving licence for a Spanish one. I used a local driving school as the intermediary. Three weeks ago the school phoned to say they needed my UK driving licence in a hurry. Yesterday they telephoned me again. "Is my licence ready?" I asked. "Pop by the office to pick it up" was the answer.

As I drove to their office today I became wistful. I've had a UK driving licence since I was 16*, well over 40 years. From red covered booklets to the current plastic cards. Not having a UK licence would be odd. I also knew the Spanish would have taken away my right to drive minibuses. We old Brits got to drive minibuses as a Brussels concession. It's not that I'm keen to drive minibuses but losing rights is never a good thing.

In the end I was mightily disappointed. All I got was a piece of card. A temporary substitute for my UK licence. The real one, the new Spanish one, should be available by mid April.

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*When I was 16 it was possible to get a licence to drive a three wheeler. My father was keen that I didn't die on a motorbike so I became the proud owner of a Reliant Regal similar to the one in the photo.