Summer exodus

There's an advert on the telly at the moment. The premise of the ad is that, during the summer, everyone abandons the cities and heads for their village. The village that their family hails from. Some poor souls have no village to go to. They are left alone, orphaned, in the deserted cities. So the advert directs you to a website where inhabitants of the idyllic rural villages can nominate their villages as reception centres for the poor lost souls and where city orphans can seek refuge in an adoptive village.

The idea that cities are deserted for the summer isn't quite as far fetched as you may imagine. There is even a phrase in Spanish for the plight of the men left behind to work whilst the family heads for the cooler mountain or beach air- estar de Rodriguez.

Down in Cartagena I needed to park in a part of the city where parking space is normally at a premium but not on Thursday it wasn't. Oh no, it's after San Juan, the children have broken up from school, the exodus to the beach has begun.  It's the beach in Cartagena but as an awful lot of Spain is a long way from the nearest beach people have to make do with anything rural.

Over the past few weeks nearly all of my students have been preparing their summer homes ready for the 10 or 11 weeks they will spend there until the children are back at school. Sometimes the house is theirs but often it's just someone's in the family. Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents all muck in and somehow manage to find enough sleeping space for everyone.

We're back in Culebrón. Our next door neighbours who usually live in Elda are here too. I noticed a light in one of the houses down by the farm - the last time they were here was the summer of 2011. Culebrón is filling up.

P.S.

Across the top of the page there are some tabs for the three Life ins but there is also one called The TIM articles. Nobody ever looks at it. I understand.

Breaking Radio Silence

It's not that nothing is happening. The footie is a huge media and bar event. I sit, drinking coffee, and watch the world go by in bars and log away little incidents and forms of behaviour. At work I get lots of stories from my students that give me an insight into life here. I listen to stories from friends and acquaintances of redundancy, closures, cutbacks. I feel the collective holding of breath as we await the collapse of the old continent, overseen by a group of uncomprehending and powerless politicians, whilst everything continues with its usual banality.

Not much to report in Culebrón though. The big events of our weekends here are collecting the post or having a coffee with some British pals. I would be happy to write about the delights of our visit to Consum yesterday if the most exciting thing hadn't been that we bought boquerones but decided against the red peppers as they were a little soft. I could tell you about Carlos's book, of which I read the first draft pages yesterday, except that I am sworn to secrecy about it's content. The weather is always a good topic but I've told you before about the weather here and, at the moment it's uneventful. The weather log would read  - sunny and warm: high 31ºC, low 18ºC. The farmers are up early - collecting apricots and maybe cherries - and they finish when the light goes at around 9.30 - just like they did last year. The goats and goat-herder seem to be in fine form but I've written about their belching and farting before. The swallows in our garden are noisy but the cuckoos are less noticeable than a couple of weeks ago. That's the thing - Life in Culebrón is calm and cyclical.

I could, of course, write about anything I like but I'm a pretty disciplined sort of chap and the tag line of things that happen to us and around us sort of rules that out. So I have nothing much to say.

But I thought I'd prove we were still breathing.

Nul points

Culebrón doesn't offer a wide range of Saturday night entertainment. We drank brandy, well at least half of us did, and watched the Eurovision song contest.

We were flipping between the BBC and RTVE channels. The Spanish was deadpan, the British, or should that be Irish, was tongue in cheek. The Spanish commentator was sympathetic to Englebert and the British song. The Portuguese didn't let us down. And the Irish? Where were the traditional 12 points for the neighbouring country? The Turks did it for Greece. Everyone else did it for everyone else. Graham wondered if we expats would do our stuff in Spain but we must have all been out having a beer. The large Romanian population in Spain obviously had nothing better to do with their Saturday nights.

Well at least the Swedes can afford to host next years competition.

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.