And on it goes

It turns out that the chap we finally asked to finish the work on the house has been doing it without telling us. We knew he'd started but we understood that he had gone on to do another job. In fact I emailed him last night to check that he would still be able to get the work finished with sufficient margin to give a painter friend time to re-do the exterior before we arrived back. 

Today we got a phone call from our neighbour to say that the work appeared to be finished but that, in her opinion, it left a lot to be desired. When I opened my email this evening the builder had come back, happy to give us the good news and probably even happier to ask for payment.

Getting work done, at a distance, continues to have nightmarish qualities!

Back in Castilla y León

Maggie, Eduardo and I made the trip back to Ciudad Rodrigo today so the saga continues on the other blog

El Culebrón

As we were strolling into the village to have a meal at Casa Pepe the other day we passed Eduardo's restaurant we had a look around the corner to see how the post box in the village square was. We peered over towards the village hall. Later we went to the bodega to get a couple of bottles of the local wine. Everything appeared to be in order in El Culebrón

Despite putting quite a few entries into Life in Culebrón I have never featured the village as a place so there is now a series of snaps taken on the walk from our house into the centre of the village and back again. Actually I'm typing this just before I go and take the photos. Would you like to make a little wager as to whether any of the pictures will feature people - there aren't usually a lot of folk on the streets of Culebrón!

Written Sunday 12 April 2009

Bars and Community

We went back to Casa Pepe, the restaurant in Culebrón on Saturday to get some of the traditional food for this area - arroz con conejo y caracoles, the local paella made with rice, rabbit and snails. Rather than drink our coffee at our table in the restaurant we repaired to the bar where we were offered a couple of small spirit drinks, orujo, on the house and where we fell into conversation with people on either side of the bar.

When we first looked at the house in Culebrón one of the selling points of the location was that the bar, the bar that is now Pepe's but was then something else. We always reckoned that going into the bar a few times would have us chatting with the locals and make it easier to assimilate into the community. The bar closed before we got to actually living in the house. It re-opened briefly as an Uruguayan restaurant but with no bar and the enterprise collapsed within six months. We're off back to Ciudad Rodrigo tomorrow. Maybe we are fated to never mix it with the Culebrón locals.

Written on Sunday 12 April 2009

The Fonts d'Algar

Whilst we've been at home we took the opportunity to see our old friends John and Claire. They have a holiday home here in Alicante, on the coast, and they were over for the Easter holiday. We stayed with them a couple of days and, like all good hosts, as well as feeding us and taking care of our every need they took us on a little excursion. We went to the Fonts d'Algar.

The Fonts are a short series of waterfalls up in the hills behind the coast at Altea and although Maggie had been there with a party of children from her old school and John and Claire had been before too it was new to me - I was a Fonts virgin. I didn't have high expectations in the cataract sense, I wasn't expecting The Angel Falls or Niagra -more Aysgarth - and that's what I got; a lovely little waterfall in a splendid wooded setting. But the place itself was quite horrid. This poor little stream had been completely enclosed by tasteful wooden walkways, sympathetic stone flag steps, concrete paths and channels and being Good Friday the place was teeming with other visitors. I felt much happier as we wandered around the museum of aromatic plants and amongst the souveneir shops as they seemed a bit more honest.

Written on Friday 10 April 2009

Off road

I was driving over to Sax to pick Maggie up from the haircutter. I was listening to the 24 hour news station on the radio and there was an item on about what to do, in a first aid sense, if you were early on the scene of a road traffic accident. It's the start of the Easter holiday weekend exodus today, hence the preoccupation with traffic accidents. As I listened there was a puff of smoke from the offside rear tyre of the lorry in front of me and the vehicle slid off the road and stopped against the Armco. I pulled up and went to check that the lorry driver was OK. He was quite dismissive but I might have been too if I'd just stuffed my lorry into a ditch and got it stuck in the dirt with the cab mangled against the barrier. I'm sure he felt a bit stupid. I was happy that I didn't have to remember any First Aid.

Written on Wednesday 8 April 2009

On the beam

It's a long time since I last had a TV aerial fitted. I have this feeling that time it was 25 quid and it was a pretty straightforward process. Well, today, we got a TV aerial fitted in Culebrón. The bloke took something like six hours to get it all up and running but the amusing (or frustrating) thing was that, in the middle of it, he disappeared for a couple of hours. As he said, "It's time to eat", and eat he did. So we now have Spanish analogue TV as well as UK satellite stuff and, as soon as we hook up the TDT box (broadcast digital TV), then we'll have high image quality Spanish TV too. Just over 230€.

Written on Wednesday 8 April 2009

Still open

Well the house doesn't look too bad and last night, for the first time in eight months, we slept in our own bed in our own bedroom. The cat is enjoying the freedom of the countryside too.

We saw a man about a new TV aerial and he's due on Wednesday to fit it, I wonder if he'll turn up.

We had a meal yesterday in the local restaurant in the village which, we are pleased to say, was not only still open but booming. And at 8€ for the three courses, wine and coffee the price was very reasonable. We'll have to go and check out the local bodega today and buy a few bottles.

Pinoso doesn't seem to have changed much though a couple of the businesses seem to have come and gone. There is a new Brit sweetie shop in the High Street. Odd sort of shop for Spain. We've been in a couple of bars but nothing exciting.

And the weather is pretty poor. Cloudy with sunny spells and a nasty cool breeze. It was much nicer in Salamanca.

Havin a laff

The roof job in Culebrón still isn't finished. Well actually the roof is done but there's a bit of rendering, some guttering and quite a few other bits and bats to finish off.

We got a price from a builder we'd used before but it was beyond our means. Our next door neighbour recommended someone she'd used and his price was about half the amount. We told him to go ahead. He couldn't do it straight away as he had to make a series of journeys between the UK and Spain but there was no real hurry - at first - though as we closed in on Easter we became a little more concerned.

The next door neighbour phoned me today. The cheap builder had, allegedly, been running van loads of cheap fags between Spain and the UK and he is now supposed to be languishing in a French jail for 10 weeks. We are back with the original builder.

Passing through

Just 3 or 4kms from Pinoso we left the Valencian Community and Alicante province and crossed into Murcia. Just outside Almansa, near the wind turbines, we started our trek across Castilla la Mancha though it doesn't become the wide open Don Quijote landscape till close to the provincial capital of Albacete. Into the province of Cuenca and about four hours into the journey into Madrid, the province and community, rather than the city. Swing South, to avoid the traffic in town, onto the M50 ring road and out, via the A6, heading for A Coruña after tunnelling under the Guadarrama mountains. On the other side of the mountain we were in Castilla y Leon, at the edge of Segovia province, right at the edge so we were quickly onto Avila province on the toll motorway. The new A50 motorway, that will eventually join Avila to Salamanca has been opened for a good part of its length whilst we were in Culebrón so we were soon into our home province of Salamanca and into Ciudad Rodrigo. The adventure continues there.

Rice, Paella and Valencia

My earliest brush with a paella would have been as part of the Vesta meals range in my student days - Hmm which shall I cook tonight, Beef Chow Mein or Paella?

Paella goes with Spain like rock goes with Blackpool.

Paella is available all over Spain, in fact all over the World, but it originated in the area around Valencia. Once I got here I soon realised that my idea that paella was a yellow rice, seafood and chicken dish was only partially true. There are tens, maybe hundereds, of recipes generally dependant on what produce is abundant locally. So, on the coast the traditional dish is indeed seafood and chicken whilst near us in Pinoso they cook the rice with rabbit and snails. That's why Valencianos usually call the food rice rather than paella. Apparently the paella is the name of the wide, flat, handled pans that the rice is cooked in though, to be honest, the words for the food and the utensil are now more or less interchangeable even for Spaniards.

We were in Valencia with our Spanish pal Pepa the other day. She realised we were hard up but still looking for something a bit different so she took us to this open air paella stall. There was a typical seafood paella but they also had one with bacalao and cauliflower - "Just like the rice my Gran used to cook", said Pepa.