Harold

There's an earlier post on Life in Ciudad Rodrigo about the disappearance of Harold the cat.

Harold looks a lot like Eduardo our other cat. Well he's ginger and cat shaped. I was outside the house in Culebrón one evening, having a smoke when he popped his head around the corner. I presumed he was Eddie and I couldn't understand why he was so nervous. Only when I found Eddie fast asleep on the couch inside the house did I realise that we had a different cat checking us out. It took a long time before Harold abandoned his home near the bins to come inside where it was warmer, drier and with three squares a day. He became part of the household and he travelled with me when I moved to Ciudad Rodrigo but he didn't settle in the flat. Like the Norwegian Blue (beautiful plumage) he pined for the fjiords. He got away pretty quickly.

In the earlier post he's declared missing in action rather than lost and I'm still prowling the streets around midnight and at 6.30am in the hope that he'll show up. But it's now five days since the last sighting and I'm beginning to lose hope; I think he's back around a bin somewhere.

I may well have given up and stuck to my bed in the morning but for the fact that Eduardo has now taken to coming out on the search with me. We stroll the streets together looking for our lost charge/pal.

I just hope that Eduardo continues to trot around and keep close. I'd hate to lose him too. Mind you he's spending most of the night charging around the flat, scratching at doors and generally making as much noise as possible. Cats and flats may rhyme but I don't think they go well together.

Living Away

I am now in my new home in Ciudad Rodrigo, a town on the opposite side of Spain to Culebrón which means that I intend to put the majority of the new post in my Life in Ciudad Rodrigo blog. Please have a look there to catch up on the trivia of our lives in Spain.

The reason for moving was that my partner, Maggie, has been working on a bilingual project in a state school in Ciudad Rodrigo for just over a year. I hadn't been able to find work near her so I stayed behind in Culebrón, with the cats.

Over the summer I was offered a job teaching English to youngsters and adults in the Dublin School of English in Ciudad Rodrigo beginning in the new academic year. I still hung on in Alicante hoping that our roof repairs and general ackling up of the house would be done before I had to start work but no such luck. I had to abandon the house to the builders and cross Spain with the house still, very much, a shell.

The cats and I moved into Maggie's flat just before the start of October. The cats did not travel well and are much less happy here than they were in the countryside but they are not unhappy either and we are hoping that they will get used to the change.

As for me I like the town and it's great to be back with Maggie but we are in dire straits financially what with the roof repairs and with me not earning any money through August or September.  Add to that the strain of any new job and it's all been a little unsettling. But the work isn't bad and even though it's pretty obvious that I'm not a natural born teacher I hope to get better. Fortunately for me, and for the students, the school is extremely well organised so that the process of beginning to teach has been quite straightforward.

Anyway, the main point of this entry was to redirect you to the blog I will be using whilst I'm here in Ciudad Rodrigo

Railway talk

Find out about Ciudad Rodrigo's international standing at Life in Ciudad Rodrigo

First "week" report

I have no idea what's happening in Culebrón. No word from our builders though the neighbour tells me that the chaps have been there a couple of days at least.

Here in Ciudad Rodrigo the cats are still very unsettled and I haven't managed to work out any sort of routine though both the cats and I have disturbed Maggie's.

The people I now work for, Gusa and Adel, have been very welcoming and they have tried hard to make sure that things have been arranged properly for me down to having a contract in place from the get go which is far from usual in Spain. The working environment is really pleasant - clean and light, nice office chairs, working computers, hot water - standard stuff really but slightly different to the work and working conditions of the last three years or so. Now I shower before going to work rather than when I get home.

As to the teaching - well the jury is still out on my abilities as a teacher. I have 19 hours of teaching arranged in different time slots between 4 and 9 in the afternoon (or evening as you Brits would say). There is everything from 7 year old children, through young teenagers and sixth formers and on to a geologist looking for technical language. Nice spread and nice people but also quite a mix of books, styles and abilities to get organised in my mind.

The Move

Fine 60s band as I remember and wasn't theirs the first song ever played on Radio 1?

But, yesterday, the cats and I abandoned the house in Culebrón and headed for Maggie, my new job and my new home in the town of Ciudad Rodrigo in the province of Salamanca.

The Mini performed well doing the 740kms in about seven and a quarter hours on less than a tankful of diesel. The cats didn`t do so well. They weren't happy in the big cat carrier together. They howled and screeched. Eduardo had thrown up by the time we left Yecla just 30kms from home. An even stronger odour produced by a different bodily evacuation had been added by the time we reached Almansa with some 50 minutes of journey time gone.

I couldn´t do anything about it. Opening the carrier before we got to our destination was out of the question and the cats and I had to put up with it for the whole journey. When we got into Ciudad Rodrigo the poor beasts had to endure being showered down too. Cats aren't that keen on water.

Relief

I have been packing, ready to go and join Maggie. One of my jobs was to speak to the neighbour. The one with a hole in his wall of our making, the one who went to the Town Hall to try to get the work stopped, the one threatening legal action, the one we've been avoiding for weeks.

"I need to speak to you about this hole in your wall"
"Oh, that's sorted, I had some blokes come and fix it a couple of weeks ago, I had them repair another small hole at the same time, I hope you don't mind"
"You mean it's all done, there's nothing else to be said and we're pals again?"
"We never stopped being pals and yes, everything's back as it should be - the bill's about 170€"

So after all that worry it just went away in about three minutes.

One instinctively knows

The house still isn't finished. The workmen have only been here sporadically over the past week - nobody on Monday, one man on Tuesday though we did have a full team today. If they had been here it may have been done and I could have made a stab at tidying up and finishing off the inevitable Spanish paperwork before having to leave for my new job which begins next Wednesday in Ciudad Rodrigo.

I had, originally, planned to meet my new employers to talk detail and to sign my contract today but, ever hopeful, I put that off in the vain hope that the house would be completed by now. No such luck. Fortunately the owner of the language school where I will be working was understanding, if not exactly overjoyed, by rescheduling that meeting for just 23 hours before I give my first class

Very unsatisfactory having to leave the house in such a state and it will be hard work even finding the things I need to take amongst the piled up furniture. But it will be good to be with Maggie again, good to be back at work with a bit of structure to my life and an income, albeit small. It will be nice to be able to stay relatively clean and live in a place where things like lights just work.

We are completely skint too. As poor as when we first arrived here.

Indulgence

The story of our roof replacement goes on. I'm still living in filthy squalor. We've run out of money completely. But today, when I came home, there had been five men working on the place and, suddenly, it's going back together. It is really scary looking at the damage - smashed tiles, smashed windows, smashed doors, no power in most rooms etc. but there is a faint glimmer that the place might recover with time.

There are pictures in the side bar, "Some of my snaps" or just click the link The Story of Our Roof

Cold and dark

17ºC last night and only 27ºC during the day. Nice and sunny though.

Dark till about 7.20 in the morning and fading light by 8.15 in the evening.

Autumn is definitely on it's way

Was it Lucille Ball and the grapes?

When I lived in Cambridgeshire September was the month for sitting patiently behind the beet lorries as they trundled through the country lanes on their way to the sugar refineries. In Pinoso it's tractors loaded with grapes headed for the bodegas

Geoff, a pal, told me that he'd seen one of this group of pickers wearing buckets on his feet to push the grapes down into the trailer.

To me the Legion!

In a bar I use one of the regular drinkers is a bloke called Angel. You may have met his type in bars in Glasgow or Newcastle. They tell you stories of their past in an inpenetrable accent.

Angel told me today that he was a Sergeant in the Legion, the Spanish Legion originally known as the Spanish Foreign Legion, an army unit first formed in the 1920s. Unlike its French counterpart the foreign bit in its title was not because it was formed of foreigners but because it was put together to fight in foreign lands.  They are in Afghanistan and Lebanon at the moment. Foreigners can currently join the unit though so long as they are Spanish speaking and entitled to residence in Spain.

The Legion is considered to be a crack regiment. Along with colonial troops from Morocco they formed an effective spearhead of the Nationalist armies that took on the legitimate Spanish Government in the Spanish Civil War until they came up against the equally well trained International Brigades. On the other hand they also got their backsides well and truly kicked by irregular untrained troops in Morocco in the late 1950s. Oh, and they shot down a bunch of unarmed demonstators in the 1970s again in Morocco.

The Legion has some funny ways. They can wear beards, leave their shirts open more or less to the waist, their uniforms are plain and they wear tassled kepis. Its members are called Knight (or Dame) Legionnaires, and they call themselves "The bridegrooms of death". When they march in the big military parades they seem to shoot past, swinging their arms high in the air across their bodies at a march step of some 190 steps per minute as against the more usual 90 spm. Their mascot is a fast moving uniformed goat. And when they find themselves in a spot of bother on the battlefield and shout ¡A mi la Legión! (To me the Legion!) anyone within earshot has no option but to lend a hand however great the peril.