Feeling at home

We went to see our pal Pepa this weekend. She has a Casa Rural up in Teruel in a place called Fuentes de Rubielos.

I never quite know how to translate casa rural - rural house isn't right and although I always tell my students to use country cottage that doesn't really convey the same idea. It's somewhere people rent for a holiday and it's usually in the middle of the countryside. Anyway Pepa owns one. There are tens of them in Fuentes de Rubielos and hundreds in this part of Teruel province, part of the ancient Kingdom of Aragon. I've always thought staying in a casa rural would be the perfect recipe for getting bored in 24 hours - reading is great but it can also become a chore and how many times can you walk up a hill for entertainment? Pepa surprised me by saying that there are all sorts of activities on offer for people who stay in the houses - bird watching, astronomy, furniture making, canyon running and a recent addition - first you hunt out your truffles and then you cook with them. Teruel is famous for ham - I wonder if it's pig and tourist in perfect harmony sniffing out subterranean mushrooms?

Fuentes is called Fuentes because on every corner there is a drinking fountain, horse trough or open air wash house - something powered by water flowing down the hill and all described as fuentes in Spanish. There is also a rather more sophisticated stretch of water which is the municipal swimming pool. Every year the local town hall auctions the right to run the pool for the summer months. For the second year in a row three young woman won the contract. They do a splendid job running a bar alongside the pool. They're a bit alternative - baggy harem pants and tied back hair. They produce snack food which is pretty unusual for Spain - couscous, Greek salad, hummus - light, tasty stuff with enough Spanishness not to put the Spanish off but different enough to be interesting.

I've just been looking for more information about the pool. I expected it to feature on websites because Fuentes is full of people who are a bit "hippy" - felt hats, non standard hairstyles and clothes that don't come from chain stores. My guess is that they are all computer wizards, have an allotment outside the back door of a house powered by a mix of small hydro-electric plants, chicken droppings and photovoltaic panels. They hang around the bar so I presumed they would have done a webpage for their chums at the pool by now. If they have I can't find it. Nice to know that when you don't want to read or walk or hunt for truffles there is still alcohol and food to be had.

We went for a walk of course. We went to see one of the now abandoned masías which is nothing more than a family farm at some distance from the main village. We passed one of the ermitas, hermitage in English, but really a sort of rural chapel that gets occasional use for local religious processions or feast days and maybe the odd wedding. We passed several of the multiservicios - a multi-use community space. There is a multiservicio in Fuentes so that means there are two bars to choose from. We strolled through villages where nothing stirred and the only sounds were of things creaking in the sun. There were people in the bars though and it was noticeable that there were bars. Food smells wafted from open windows.

Sitting in Pepa's house we had several reminders that we weren't in our own home. We couldn't get a decent cup of tea. She had thousands of varieties of fruit teas and infusions but nothing like council house tea. Anyway she had no milk - she had soya milk and an even stranger milk substitute made from oats. It's not the first Spanish house I've been in without milk or tea. Coffee was awkward too. Hot drinks at home are a bit unusual. Different traditions. She did have a frying pan though that she keeps specifically for when she cooks tortilla - the Spanish potato omelette - she says it's a necessary expense to stop the tortilla from sticking. She offered us a burger - I think they may have been bought in specially for us. It was easy to see what a strange food it was for her. She served it without any garnish, with the bread on a side plate and with a side dish of fried spring garlic and broad beans. Very McDonalds

Variation on a theme

One certain way to bring the rain is to hang out some washing or maybe to wash the car. To bring on a heat wave wear a nice thick coat.

Well we've just spent hours cleaning the house and, coming in from the South there are some very dark clouds. I don't think it's rain; it could be smoke from the forest fire that's burning out of control in Valencia at the moment or, more likely, it's a dust cloud blowing in from North Africa ready to coat all our newly cleaned surfaces with a layer of orange dust.

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.