Menorca

We've just been to Menorca an island about the same size as the Isle of Man and the most easterly point of Spain. Ryanair had an offer on cheapish flights and, as we've only ever done Mallorca in the Balearics, it seemed like a good opportunity. We went for a long weekend.

I have this marking system for films that I go to see. The scale is from one to five. I work on the assumption that if someone manages to finance and release a film in ordinary cinemas it will be perfectly OK. So the natural score for any film is three out of five. If it's better than expected it gets four or very rarely a five and if it's not so good a two or even a one. The problem with this system is that some perfectly well made Hollywood romcom will get the same score as a well made art house film. To solve the problem I added a couple of grades, three plus and three minus, to allow for a bit of personal comment on a film. Basically three plus is for a well produced film that I enjoyed and three minus for a well made film that wasn't my cup of tea.

Menorca gets a three. Everyone told me that it was beautiful. There were certainly plenty of us tourists there from all over Europe and farther afield. A lovely coastline they said and it's true but I wasn't that impressed to find it littered with retirement developments and overly twee housing. We were told that the two main towns, Mahón and Ciutadella, had a real historic feel to them with lots of architecture left behind after the 18th Century occupation by the British. True again; quite a lot of nice buildings and I noticed some sash windows as billed but I've seen places on the mainland that are much more impressive.

Menorca is dotted with things described as talayots - pre Christian stone mounds often with the remains of stone circles, altar pieces and houses close by. I'm a big fan of sites like Avebury, Carnac or Castlerigg but somehow the Menorcan sites we saw failed to light my imagination in the same way.

Acting on the advice of at least three "Top ten things to do in Menorca" that I found on the internet I dragged Maggie along to eat caldereta de langosta which turned out, as the name suggests, to be a lobster soup. It was fine but not so different from the seafood soups you get as part of cheap set meals. Maybe we only got sub standard examples of Menorcan cheese too but despite it being touted as a rare pleasure it all tasted a bit bland to me. Prices were generally relatively high for drinks and snacks wherever we went and despite being used to Spanish prices we constantly found that the banknote we had ready wasn't big enough, Service was remarkably friendly (for the most part) but it was also often notably slow.

I don't want to go on and sound negative. Maggie has already decided that I had a horrible time and I didn't. I thought it was jolly nice, I'm glad we've been there, I had a perfectly pleasant time but I'd hoped and expected to be impressed and I found it all a bit ordinary.

Maybe we just didn't have enough time there to get the real feel of it but much more likely is that I'm just a grumpy old man nowadays.

A spot of rain

As I drove the first few of the 35kms from work to home there were big black clouds on the horizon. Sooty black clouds. There were flashes of lightning criss crossing the clouds. The rain that has been threatening to fall for the last few days was about to arrive. True there had been a fine mist of rain this morning but generally it was still fair to say that we hadn't had any rain since May.

As the car ploughed through rivers of water, as the temperature dropped from the high twenties to around 15ºC I thought that at least it was something for this blog. I stopped thinking about the blog as I put the wipers onto their highest speed, turned on all of the fog lights and moved the heater controls from air con to heat to clear the misted up screen. I stopped thinking about the blog and worried more about the driving. I couldn't see anything out of the windscreen and the torrents of brown water pouring off the fields had spread sheets of large sump breaking rocks across the road. I fretted that the noise pounding through the car wasn't just rain but included hail as well. The hail is often so big and so powerful around here that it pounds dents into car bodywork. We had one hail storm not so long ago that dsetroyed sheds, smashed windscreens, cracked roof tiles and pulverized outdoor furniture to matchwood or shards of plastic.

Extreme weather I thought. That can be the theme for the piece but the truth is it hasn't been that extreme recently. Well I suppose no rain for four months is pretty extreme but we've had none of the winds that sound powerful enough to rip bits off buildings and bring down trees. And whilst it's been hot for months and people have complained and complained about the heat we haven't recorded a temperture over 40ºC in our back yard all summer. Normally we do.

So the entry on extreme weather can wait until it gets properly cold and we're freezing every moment that we're inside the house, until the rain digs huge ruts into our track, until the wind brings down the televion aerial and rips branches off the trees.

One good thing about the weather was that it made me forget all about trying to stop a revolt amongst five year olds ostensibly in my class to learn English. Torrential rain is a lot more fun.

Trains, culture and city life

I had a lot of trouble getting a job when I was a young man. One day in the 70s after another disastrous interview I was on the milk train back from London to Halifax. It was early morning when the train made an unscheduled stop in my home town of Elland presumably waiting for the signals or somesuch. Beeching had done for Elland as an official stop. I jumped out of the train (no conductor controlled doors in those days) and despite the protestations of the British Rail staff legged it over the semi derelict platforms and pushed through a hole in the wire that I knew from my boyhood adventures. It saved me the four mile hike back from the official stop in Halifax.

Yesterday we decided to travel to Valencia for one last outing before I go back to work on Monday. We agreed to use  the train. Quite by chance we'd been in the station at Villena a couple of days before. That's where I got the idea. It was interesting looking at the routes of the slower trains that run on the wider traditional gauge of Spanish railways. The train we got from Elda for instance had come from Cartagena and had passed through Murcia, Elche and Alicante. From Elda/Petrer it went on to Villena, Xátiva, Valencia and then up through Teruel and on to Zaragoza. Plenty of interesting stops there, Plenty of places that I had never thought of as train destinations. As well as our route there was another that went up to Barcelona and a third went through Castilla La Mancha taking in Campo de Criptana (one of the places with lots of white windmills) on its way to Ciudad Real - a town I haven't visited for years.

One of the reasons that the very fast Spanish AVE trains cover the ground so quickly is not just because they can travel at over 300 kph but because they don't stop. Between Alicante and Madrid for instance, a distance of just over 420kms, they stop just twice to keep the time to around two hours and ten minutes. It adds fifteen minutes to put in another couple of stops. I think I've got used to thinking of trains as long distance services rather than considering their routes through lots of interesting towns.

Spanish trains are usually clean and prompt and generally it's allocated seats too. So even if there are suitcases all over the place on the crowded routes you still get a seat. Prices seem reasonable to me. The 290km round trip cost 31€ for full price tickets or a tad under 25 quid. Covering the 450 kms from Madrid to Cartagena in January of this year on a special ticket (no passes or cards - just an offer) cost me 15€.

So we got off the train into the modernist Estación del Norte built in 1917 and we were plunged into Valencia city. There were back packer type tourists everywhere, a variation on the tourist families of the Costa Blanca, and lots of lots of ordinary people just going about their lives. Valencia is the third largest city in Spain and even on a Saturday it was obvious that we were a long way from Culebrón.

I always like to take in an exhibition when I'm in a town. To be honest I'm not a good gallery goer. I soon get bored of looking at pictures or sculptures or installations or whatever but I just love going to galleries. Places full of ideas, the effervescence of human endeavour. Maggie suggested the Cathedral. That sounded good to me too as it's years since I've been inside. The entrance price (wasn't there a story about Jesus and people doing business in a temple?) included a surprisingly interesting audio guide despite lots of references to polychrome figures and retables. And, unlike the Monty Python crowd we didn't have any trouble finding the Holy Grail. It's stop 20 on the audio guide.

We got to a gallery too, though they are always termed museums in Spanish, with the IVAM, the Valencia Institute of Modern Art. To get there we wandered through the bohemian Barrio Carmen which is full of bars, eateries, antique clothes shops and bike hire places. We even found time to down a jug of Agua de Valencia, a sparkling wine, orange juice, gin and vodka combo before heading back to a Talgo train to whip us back to Petrer and the waiting Mini.

Tortilla de patatas

What's tortilla to you? Is it that Mexican pancake or is it a thick and unfolded potato (and onion) omelette?

Tortilla Española or tortilla de patatas is a Spanish classic. Basically you fry some spuds cut into slices and maybe some onions too. With or without onion is a debate - cubed or sliced potatoes too. Whilst the potatoes are softening you beat some eggs into a bowl - usually adding a pinch of salt. Then, when the frying is done, you drain off the oil and add the potatoes (and onions) to the beaten eggs. You return the mix to the frying pan, cook on one side till the "pancake" starts to firm up and then you either flip it over, a la Shrove Tuesday, or you use a plate or lid over the frying pan to help  you get the sticky side back into the pan to fry. When it has set to your preference you slide it out of the pan and set about eating it.

Of course you could set it aside to cool, Tortilla is nice cold too. It goes well in bread rolls. I'm not absolutely sure whether it gets wrapped in silver paper when it's going to be eaten later as part of a mid morning snack, on the beach or even as you sit at your lunchtime desk but if not silver paper then it is cut into wedges and popped into plastic containers, always called tupper here, for the snack to come.

It was one of my little language exercises to get students to tell me the ingredients and method for making a tortilla. Everyone had some subtle variation. The students were convinced that we Brits, out of Spain at least, call the dish Spanish Omelette. I'm not sure, it's a long time since I lived in the UK, but I'm pretty sure that a Spanish Omelette was something from the 1960s or 70s that was a normal omelette loaded with veg - things like peas and peppers.

We're trying to lose weight at the moment and I picked up one of the ready made tortillas in Mercadona to check the calories. I put it back quickly. The surprise though was not the calories. The shock was that there were two new recipes to add to the standard with and without onion varieties. One with peppers and one with chorizo. Had Jamie Oliver had a word with Mercadona about how to "improve" a classic? 

Good Lord I thought. What is the world coming to! Is nothing sacred?

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INGREDIENTS:

4 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

6 eggs

1 onion, chopped

¼ litre olive oil

salt

RECIPE:

First, heat the oil in a large frying pan and then gently fry the sliced potatoes until almost soft, stirring from time to time so that they don't burn on the bottom of the pan. Add the onion and continue frying until all the pieces are soft. Drain the vegetables in a colander to get rid of the excess oil.

Beat the eggs in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add the potatoes, etc. and mix well and check seasoning.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan on a moderate heat. Pour in the potatoes and eggs and shake the frying pan from time to time so that the omelette doesn't stick to the bottom. Once the bottom of the omelette has set, turn the heat down low and cover the pan. After about ten minutes, turn the omelette by placing either a flat plate or saucepan lid on the frying pan and quickly turning over. Gently slide the omelette back into the frying pan and continue frying, once again shaking the pan from time to time so that it doesn't stick to the bottom, until it has set all the way through.

At the flicks - again

I go to the flicks as often as I can. As with everything else I write in this blog I've mentioned it before. My life just isn't exciting enough to sustain a flow of new adventures.

All films at the cinema are dubbed into Spanish. I've discussed this several times with Spanish chums and students. They try to argue that the Spanish versions are as good - better for them. They're wrong. Changing the language just mashes up the film. Nonetheless I still love going to the pictures.

How much of the film I understand is down to chance. I never catch all the nuances or get all the puns and subtleties but it's rare for me to be completely lost. It does happen from time to time and when it does I come out of the film disappointed and angry in equal measure. The easiest films to understand are British ones followed by other European fare. Hollywood films are usually relatively straightforward but action films are an exception. I miss the vital links amongst the explosions and CGI. Spanish language films are the hardest because they are loaded with idioms. I saw one called El Niño yesterday and I was well lost.

In Pinoso there is a group called something like the Platform Against Gender Violence. Amongst their activities they often show films in the local cultural centre. There was one tonight  - a 2005 French Canadian film called Crazy.

Now around these parts as well as the language we Brits call Spanish there is a regional language called Valencian. To differentiate we use the term Castilian for the standard Spanish and Valenciano for the local one though I think it's actually Valencià in Valencian - if you see what I mean. The posters for the film were in Valenciano.

Being an event the local press were there to take some snaps. The photographer is a chum from our village, someone who recently helped me to arrange a language exchange with one of her friends. She came over to ask me how it was going. I stuttered and spluttered in barely comprehensible Castilian. It just compounded the trouble I'd had when we went on a bodega tour earlier today. It did not bode well for another adventure with the language. 

Being an arty sort of film there was an intro from one of the group members. It was in Valenciano. I crossed my fingers that the dubbing would be Castilian. It was. It would have been very difficult to get up and walk out as we were a very select group. It didn't help though. I understood next to nothing. 

Not knowing what was going on the film seemed to drag on and on. I was very relieved when the gay son reconciled with his dad and the credits started to roll. But nobody moved. We had to critique the film. Blow me if that wasn't in Valenciano too.

It won't stop me though. If there's another one, and I can go, I'll be there.

One thing leads to another

Maggie thinks we should be greener. She fancied solar panels to provide at least some of our power. Good idea. After all it's pretty sunny where we live. Just by chance a cold caller got in touch and it was Maggie who took the call. So, this morning, a man came to talk to us about solar panels and other green solutions. He told us it didn't make economic sense. Plan scotched.

If solar power was Maggie's concern mine was a the palm tree. The palm tree that I've been spraying religiously to protect it against the dreaded boring beetle thing.

The palm tree is fit and healthy - so fit and healthy that it's growing into the power lines. Just a bit of bad luck and either the tree gets fried or it blacks out our house and the two next door. For various reasons I don't want to talk to the power company but our neighbours came up with the bright idea of moving the tree rather than the power lines.

I checked with the environmental people at the town hall to make sure the tree wasn't protected and via those strange networks that the exist in rural Spain the return call came not from the town hall but from the palm tree man who did such a good job of shaving and pruning the tree back in November. He suggested that he could supervise the work. He knew a bloke with a crane but could I find a mini excavator? A bit of asking around and I did though that became a little complicated when a pal put a lot of effort into trying to help me find someone and I ended up with an over supply of digger drivers looking for work.

The palm tree man agreed to phone the digger owner and to coordinate the move. We've just got off the phone. He'd talked to the bloke with the crane and he, in turn, knew another bloke with a digger but a full sized one. I asked whether he thought it would be able to get up our tree lined drive. Well if it can't then neither can the crane he said. So now I'm very confused.

These are not easy conversations in my Spanish. The palm tree man is going to come and have a look. It's not impossible I know. There are cranes with long extendable arms, I'm certain of that because one popped a couple of five tonne steel beams over the fence and onto our roof. However, I suspect they don't come cheap and nice straight beams may be easier to handle than floppy palm trees.

Something that seemed so simple is just getting more and more complicated. If I end up phoning the power company we may well have to get back onto the solar power man to maintain a useable supply that doesn't pop the circuit breakers when we turn on the kettle for a nice cup of tea. Or I could just take an axe to the tree!

Mediterráneamente

Summer is just about to end. Very properly this year it finishes on a Sunday evening so we can all get back to work on Monday morning. Calendar controlled, on the first of the month. The TV is full of the great return as people finish their holidays. Of course there are lots of people in Spain who don't have a job to go back to and I presume those tour guides, restaurant workers and ice cream vendors who get seasonal work in July and August will be up bright and early on Monday morning to get down to the dole office.

I just saw an advert on the telly for a beer that has been running all summer. It shows lots of people having a really good time. It's sunny, the people are young, happy and tanned. The beach has a starring role and the tag line is Mediterráneamente, a word that is probably about as real as its English equivalent, Mediterraneanly.

The strange thing is that I have to agree. There is something very special about being near the Med in summer. I know I've mentioned it before but indulge me. For instance, the other day we went down to the coast at Altea to go on a tourist boat that follows a working fishing boat going about its business in coastal waters. I worried about which camera lenses to take but not about my clothes. Shorts and T shirt were the order of the day without bothering to check the weather forecast or even look out of the window. On the boat we were offered sunscreen and water. It was around 35ºC and sunny.

Shorts, flip flops, fans, aircon in the car, water, sunscreen, sunglasses and the bar table in the shade are the norm. It's not like that in all of Spain. In the North you're just as likely to need a brolly or a pullover as you are in Ilfracombe but I can't remember the last time it rained here.

Luckily for me I'm not back to work for a couple of weeks yet.

Not looping the loop

Maggie was most definite in the manner in which she declined to go on the roller coaster that flipped people over and did barrel rolls. She kept reminding me about the Icelander who had died on a similar ride in the same park just a couple of months ago. Later though, by herself - I was too macho to join her - she went on the teen size roller coaster. Emboldened by her experience she agreed to go on the old style big dipper. All Billy Butlin at Skegness. Apparently built of criss crossing wood like the rail bridges in classic cowboy films and with sit up and beg cars. It rattled and shook, it rocked and rolled. Maggie didn't seem to enjoy it much.

She did enjoy the boat ride type roller coasters though and she let me go on one of those bungee jump type rides and the one that spins around a central pivot.

In fact we had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Terra Mitica theme park. The place is based on the motifs of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The park has an unhappy financial past. It was haemorrhaging money when I last heard. It certainly wasn't exactly bursting at the seams today and, in the afternoon, we hardly had to queue for rides. It's just outside Benidorm so it has a pretty international clientele but all day long we were generally treated in Spanish and served by Spaniards. The themes are pretty loose to be honest - the Lair of the Minotaur was a sort of ghost train and the Nile Falls or some such was the name of one of those boat rides. Maybe the big, old roller coaster was a Titan something or other. Food was expensive but acceptably so and the atmosphere was everything to everyone whoever you were. I'm sure that to the teenagers it seemed designed for them, the same for the families and at least one old codger felt perfectly at home.

It's the first time that I've actually been there when it has been open. I went to a Van Morrison concert (deadly dull) maybe eight or nine years ago but somehow I'd never eaten one of their burgers or drunk their coke since. 

Nice day out.

With Nevil Shute and Chris Rea

On the beach that is.

Maggie's Mitsu is nine years old but Miitsubishi Spain phoned us about getting a software update. I suspect that they have come across some sort of fault but when I asked they said it was nothing more than customer support. Anyway we agreed to get it done at a dealer in San Juan which is the next coastal town along from Alicante city.

So we were at the beach. Now I don't care much for the beach. I'm obese so taking off most of my clothes and displaying myself for all and sundry to see in a public place is not something I do willingly. Add to that the fact that beaches are often made of sand. Sand is a powdery substance but the individual grains are usually hard quartz. This sand not only gets into your sandwiches and your hair it sneaks into every nook and crevice of your body no matter how intimate. I was eating sand all the way home. I generally keep out of the water too. I quite like water but as I wear contact lenses I always fear that they will be swept away to sea. Anyway what do you do about the bag with your wallet and mobile phone? Like shrouds there are no pockets in swimwear - well no waterproof ones at least.

Going to the beach though is a Spanish passion. I don't think that Spaniards behave particularly differently on the beach to us or the Germans or anyone else. There are the young ones who turn up with the minimum of equipment - towels, suncream, a book and the mobile phone and the three generational family groups who arrive with a veritable encampment - chairs, sunshades, windbreaks, beach games and an epicurean feast packed into coolboxes. Fat, old men and women queue up early in the morning on the busy beaches waiting for the beach cleaners to finish their work. At the off they head for the waterline and set up chairs and sunshades to bag their spot, which the families will later occupy, before heading back to their summer digs for a leisurely breakfast. Towels and Germans spring to mind.

If we are away from home and we tell Spaniards that we live in Alicante they always presume we live on the coast. They will congratulate us on the quality of the Costa Blanca beaches. Ask my students where they went over the weekend and the answer is to the beach. Question the families of Alicante or Murcia as to whether they have a summer house at the beach and the answer will almost certainly be that someone in their family does. Turn on the TV and go channel hopping and you will find a programme where people are being interviewed about their beach experiences.

The tourist figures are up for Spain. Once again it's tourism that's the motor for the economy. Where are those tourists heading - the landscapes of Galicia and Aragon, the marvellous Andalucian or Salmantino cities? No, they're headed for the beaches of Catalunya, Andalucia and the Islands. The Sunday supplements may be full of the voguish delights of rural tourism but it's on the beaches where it's standing room only.

As traditional as...

We were in Jumilla today for a while. Jumilla is a town just over the border into Murcia. They have "always" produced wine in Jumilla but it just keeps getting better and better. Today we were there for a very small part of their Fiestas de la Vendimia -the wine harvest festival.

So wine is a traditional crop in Jumilla just as pelotas and gazpacho are traditional food. We Pinoseros also claim wine and gazpacho as our own but as we are only 35km away I suppose that's fair enough. After all it's Yorkshire Pudding not Barnsley, Ripon or Cleckheaton Pudding though thinking about it we do have Bakewell Tart and Caerphilly Cheese. Anyway.

So when do things become traditional? Family names, surnames, generally pass from generation to generation. Surnames like Thompson, son of Tom, are equivalent to the Arabic ibn or bin names whilst the Spanish tend to use -ez endings, as in Dominguez. But why did it stop? My Dad was John so why am I not a Johnson? And if it's Fletcher and Barber and Smith why not Mr. Web Designer?

Although they are quite different outfits Spanish bullfighters, the ones who fight on foot, wear costumes based on 18th Century dress as do their horse mounted counterparts. Why did it stick at the 18th Century - why not the 16th or why aren't they dressed, like cyclists or swimmers, in the latest technologies?

So. Just 35kms between Jumilla and Pinoso but in Pinoso the traditional dress for women, in the Fiestas at least, is an incredibly ornate affair The local women folk dancers wear a much simpler skirt that seems to be of circle of cloth made to work as a skirt by multiple pleats. In the Villazgo festival in Pinoso traditional dress for women is more practical, less ornate and the men wear a black smock and neckerchief. Over in Jumilla the costume is much simpler again. It actually looks like something that people may have worn everyday at some time in the past. Cloth and woven grass shoes, simple skirts or trousers, white shirts for both sexes with shawls for the women and waistcoats and cummerbund like sashes for the men

This traditional clothing is only trotted out for traditional events. Women heading for the supermarket wear everyday skirts and jeans and shirts and tops. If anythinng were traditional summer dress for women at the moment it would be shorts and vests. For men shorts and T-shirts. Flip flops or sandals and not the traditional rope soled alpargatas.

I'm pleased to say that this divide between what's trotted out as traditional and what people actually do is not true of the wine or food. Just as Lancashire Hotpot is alive and well so are local traditional foods. In fact maybe it's time for a nice longaniza sandwich with a drop of monastrell to wash it down?

Tabarca

I couldn't help it. My gaze kept wandering to the man sitting to my right. He was shirtless and his belly was so huge that it was squidged onto the table even though his chair was pushed well back. I also noticed the young women in bikinis in the restaurant but Maggie must never know.

We were in Tabarca. It's an island just off the coast from Santa Pola though we'd travelled over on the boat from Alicante. Considering that the Med. is nothing more than a big lake and given that we were hugging the coast it was remarkably choppy.  The crew were handing out sick bags willy nilly. I expected to succumb but despite the sweat dribbling from my forehead I reached terra firma with breakfast still somewhere in my digestive tract.

The island, it's actually an archipelago, is a place that locals and tourists go to get a bronzy and to eat. In the summer heat the main things you smell in the air are hot cooking oil and sun protection cream. Lots of the home team take everything bar the kitchen sink and set up bedou style, on the beach. They carry army feeding amounts of food. Most people who go there though eat in one of the several restaurants. Menus are principally fish and seafood based. Rice dishes, paellas, are de rigeur.

The island  was used as a base by pirates to raid the coast so, in 1760, Carlos III used a group of shipwrecked Genoese as a garrison on the island. They came from the islet of Tabarka and so the Spanish island, our island, got a new name. The remains of the fortifications, like the church are somewhere to stroll in your flip flops and swimwear before or after eating.

I think I was the only visitor on the island with full length trousers.