Dumb luck

I haven't posted anything in a while. I've been all of a tizz-wozz, as my sainted mother would say, about leaving Pamplona. We had a lovely last couple of weeks, with visits to Vitoria and Olite, and lots of food and booze, all of which I'll get to a bit later.

Right now we're at my grandparents' house in Wokingham, and we're damn lucky to be here. Our original plan had been to drive through France and get the ferry across to England, but we thought it might be a bit iffy given the expected snow so we booked tickets to fly out of Bilbao on the 20th. In the days leading up to our departure there were two things worrying us; one, the strikes in Spanish airports, and two, the snow in England. But we crossed our fingers and figured the only thing we could do would be to turn up at the airport and hope. 

First thing we saw when we got to Bilbao airport...huge lines at the check-in desks, this at an airport with a few dozen flights each day. The staff were indeed on strike. We lined up anyway, and after about half an hour or so they started checking people in. Damn work-shy Spaniards can't even maintain the necessary energy for a proper strike. 

Then we played the waiting game. Long, tedious story short, our flight to Heathrow was cancelled. Luckily, due to a bit of a misunderstanding, we had ended up also having tickets for a later flight to Stansted which managed not only to take off, but which ended up only running about twenty minutes later than scheduled. Sitting in the airport at Bilbao we started talking to an English girl who lives just up the road from Wokingham, and we arranged to get a cab home together, rather than trying our luck on the equally unpredictable train systerm. We ended up getting home a bit after 1am, having been in the airport at Bilbao since 1pm. But we got lucky. Stansted airport was full of people waiting for flights that were, in all likelihood never going to leave. The statistic I read was that of 20,000 scheduled European flights yesterday, only 6,500 took off.

The chances were very, very good that Jo and I would still be sitting in the airport at Bilbao today, waiting for our rescheduled flight. But instead, I'm sitting, warm and full of tea in my beloved granparents' house. We had Vegemite toast for breakfast (oh, Vegemite, how I missed your salty goodness!), then I decorated the Christmas tree (by myself, because no one else was interested, but I think it came out OK)

Then we had lunch (cheddar cheese! pork pie! anyone who doubts the quality of English food is a  damn fool), and now everyone's having a post-lunch-and-gin-and-tonic snooze. So, so, happy to be here, especially considering what could have been.

I'll leave you for now with some pictures of my grandparents' garden in the snow;

Brush with the law

When Jo's sister was here the other weekend we went for a little stroll down by the river, and then up to the next town. It was a lovely day, the birds were singing, the sky was blue, all of that sort of thing. We stopped by one of the many old bridges that are scattered up and down the length of the river that runs through Pamplona (called the River Ars - really, could I love this place any more?) to take some pictures, when a couple of policemen stopped and said something to us. To begin with I thought they were telling us that we weren't allowed to take pictures of of bridge for some reason, but then I realised that they were actually offering some information about the age and origin of it. Which was nice. Then one of them offered to take our picture, and as he did so the other one said with a cheeky grin 'I really don't think we're supposed to do this when we're on duty'. What wonderful representatives of their profession.

Graffiti V

We have a theme this week, one probably not suitable for the easily offended, though at least one of these pieces falls under the heading of Public Service Announcement;

Translation: Amanita mushrooms give you diarrhea

Translation: Your life is shit, and you know it

Churros and hot chocolate (or, why I can no longer button my jeans)

I get on my high horse

Ready for another instalment of my series ‘Things Are Different in Spain’? Good. 

The attitude toward children is totally different here. Maybe it was just due to the nature of the demographic of the Northern Beaches* where I’m from, and where I spent... many, many years working in retail, but parents at home seemed so often to treat their children as chores. Not all of them, obviously, and I can think of many exceptions, but  the attitudes of lots of parents seemed to be one of eye-rolling frustration, and their main interactions with their offspring seemed to be screeching at them to be quiet, sit still, and be more like a little doll that can be put away when it isn’t needed. I’d see people shopping with their children at the mall for the first time at about nine in the morning, and then I’d see them again and again over the course of the day, for hours and hours, until two or three in the afternoon. Usually by this stage the kid was reduced to delirious whinging due to sheer mind melting boredom and the total inattention of the parent. 

I know I’m being a bit unfair, and I fully accept that the people I was seeing represented a certain type of parent, and not all parents. And I also know that until you’ve actually had kids, it’s unfair to judge other people’s approach to parenting. And I further acknowledge that part of the problem is that people who don’t have children sometimes resent the intrusion of kids into what they think should be a grown-ups only milieu. But I still feel that there is a tendency in Australia to treat children as tiny, annoying idiots, and it is pretty unusual to see small children out at dinner, let alone at a pub or bar. 

But kids here are part of the social landscape. Everyone smiles indulgently at them, no one shouts at them, or minds when they run about. As a result, their behaviour is amazing. They tend to play together unobtrusively, they talk to adults politely and are in general pleasant to have around. And I think it’s due to this treatment that the kids here seem paradoxically both older and younger. Older because they have the freedom to run around with other kids while their parents sit in a cafe or bar, safe in the knowledge that all the adults in the area are keeping half an eye on them. And younger because they’re kids, and are treated as such, not as tiny, annoying idiots. 

Apologies if this has ended up sounding like a second-rate anthropological study, but the difference in attitude has really struck me in a big way. This just seems like such a great place to raise kids, not that we’re making any plans in that direction. But I do think that Australia has a lot to learn from the Spanish example of how to treat kids, and that we’d be much happier if we could incorporate this way of doing things to some degree. I say this as someone who has been guilty of rolling my eyes at people who take kids out to expensive restaurants and then let them run wild. But I hope I’ll go home with a new attitude to children in restaurants and cafes, now that I’ve seen that it can be done, and done well.

*Rich and bored

Living like nutty superkings

Jo’s student allowance has finally arrived, a mere two weeks before the end of semester. The fact that we got it at all is due mainly to the efforts of Jo’s courageous mum, who valiantly took the fight to Centrelink, who would otherwise still be squatting, Smaug-like, on the glittering heap of benefits to which Jo is entitled. So hooray. Seeing as we’ve been paying our own way so far, and living on a relatively tight budget, we decided to go out for a nice dinner, at the Australian tax-payer’s expense. You know how a while ago I was complaining about the state of the steaks here? Well, as with every time I make a grand, sweeping statement about the nature of life in Spain, it turns out I am wrong. Good steak can indeed be had here. Good steak? Amaaazing steak. Aged to within an inch of its life, seared and served perfectly rare, and with a rind of fat on it that gives you chest pains just to look at it. 

Well, that’s what Jo had, anyway. I, at his suggestion I might add, passed up the lamb in favour of grilled prawns. Which were fine, but they looked pretty measly next to Jo’s steak, which was so big it hung over the sides of his plate. So obviously we had to go back so that I could also eat a chunk of something’s flesh. And we did, and I had chops and they were fabulous, and Jo had a steak that was even more hyperbolic than the first one. Just to round out the carnivore celebration, we had some jamon as a starter. This is how good it was;

 Good jamon is like nothing else I’ve ever tasted. It is an incredibly complex flavour, salty, nutty, creamy and soft, and barely porky at all. It melts in your mouth, and leaves a wonderful film of fat on your tongue. It is a completely blissful experience. We had some excellent jamon at the wine bar up the road which came served with salmorejo, oil, and bread, which makes the plate look nice, but it really is totally extraneous. If you need side dishes, it is because the jamon is no good. Good jamon needs no accompaniment. Just reverent silence.  OK, enough food poncery. 

We had an extremely good dinner, which was then spoiled by the old guy at the table next to us lighting up a cigar the size of a baguette.And all thanks to fact that those useless bureaucrats at Centrelink couldn't find their arses with two hands and a map. Thankyou, Centrelink, the food was delicious.  

World's greatest hangover cure

Ah, the cafe bonbon. This is the best hangover cure I have ever tried; a demitasse of condensed milk topped with a layer of lethally strong espresso, it's kill or cure stuff.

Moping

Less than two weeks left. How did that happen? I mostly don’t want to leave. I love it here, and I’ve been enjoying myself far too much to have felt homesick. But I have been thinking a lot about going home over the last couple of days, mainly because of the practical things we’ll need to sort out like packing, distributing or disposing of things we can’t take home, you know the sort of thing. But also because I’m really looking forward to seeing my family. I had initially written that I am also looking forward to being back where things are more familiar, but I looking back on it I realised that that isn’t strictly true. I feel utterly comfortable here and the slight strangeness of it all is part of the appeal. But I am looking forward to seeing familiar people. 

I was looking back over Everything but the Squeal, and came across this passage;

... it doesn’t matter what kind of life you’ve made for yourself away from home, how integrated you have become, how content you are in your foreign land. You’ll never entirely escape those subtle, inexpressible feelings of loss that assail you when you least expect them, fleeting memories of a place that formed and nurtured you, but which you can no longer see or touch.

and it reminded me of a bit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where, in an unusually gag-free and earnest paragraph, Douglas Adams talks about the idea that we’re all attached to the place of our birth by a long, invisible string. The further we go from home, and the faster we move, the more the string gets stretched, but it can only stretch so far before it snaps. I suppose we need contact with the familiar on a regular basis or we’ll snap, so to speak. We’ve been lucky in that sense. For one, we have each other for support, which has made it all much less scary. But we’ve also had my mum and Jo’s sister come to visit, and those visits helped to remind me that the familiar world is carrying on without us, and that it will all be there for us to go back to when we decide we want to.

Words are different in Spanish

The new Mark Haddon book, as seen in the centre of the window display of the bookshop down the street. In English it is called 'Boom' and I am so happy that it is different in Spanish. Because I have the sense of humour of a child. Actually, that isn't fair to children. Anyway, I laughed, but Jo just rolled his eyes in despair.

Graffiti IV

I'm so excited about the SNOW that it requires ALL CAPS! MORE SNOW!

I am out of my head with excitement because of the snow. I've never really spent that much time around it, and certainly never seen it falling before, or at least not this much. We were out of bed at 8:30 this morning to go and look at the snow, and had Pamplona almost to ourselves.

Rose tinted Spain

I feel that so far I have been painting an overly rosy picture of our lives in Spain. And it is generally pretty great. But maybe it’s time to have a good old whinge about some of the stuff that really gives me the shits about this place.

The Meat

Yes, meat is abundant. As the song says, everything has meat in it. Vegetarians would have a hard time of it and would pretty much be restricted to cheese sandwiches and patatas bravas, and vegans would probably starve to death. But abundant as it is, the meat tends to come in strip or chunk form, rarely in the form of a hulking great slab of steak. Man, I want a good steak so much right now. I mean, it is possible to get steak, but it tends to be quite expensive and not always the best quality. But if you like your steaks wafer thin, with a generous helping of gristle, garnished with salt and then served with a side of salt, Spain is the place to be. If you feel the need for a chunk of meat, why not try cabeza de jabali? Scrapings of boar's head topped with a layer of gelatine. Tastes as good as it sounds.

The Post Office

The post office is utterly baffling. There are four counters, each with a different function. One is for sending things, one is for picking things up, one is for buying mobile phones, and the final desk seems to just sell pens and is for some reason the busiest. Each desk has a little electronic number display next to it that corresponds to a ticket number, but to begin with I wasn’t sure where to obtain a ticket. Given Spain’s notoriously pedantic bureaucratic system, I thought maybe you had to fill out a form somewhere and they’d mail you a ticket and an assigned time to go to the post office, but then I realised that you would then have to go to the post office to pick up your ticket number, which you wouldn’t be able to do without a ticket, so I dismissed this theory as merely the hysterical reaction of my brain to administrative centres of all kinds. Eventually I located the ticket machine tucked just inside the vestibule. It is a 1970s era dispenser with cardboard taped over most of the panel, so that your only options are to take a ticket for the ‘sending’ or ‘picking up’ desk. If I needed to buy a pen I don’t know that I would be able to figure out how to do it, let alone face the hazards of the mobile phone counter. Once you actually get to the desk the process is quite straightforward, except that no one who works in the post office seems to be aware of the existence of either Australia or England, and they treat with distrust anyone who seems to want to send things to these obviously made up places. Picking up stuff is even more fraught with suspicion; the lady behind the desk assumed that I was Russian because of my name, and tried to ask me where in Russia I was from. When I told her that I was in fact not Russian, she gave me a look like she was about to set the security guards on me to arrest me for mail fraud. Luckily, the guards aren’t the nimblest looking guys and I was able to make my escape before anything too complicated went down.



Smoking Indoors

S

I actually don’t mind sitting next to a smoker at an outside table, and I don’t even especially mind being in a room with a smoker. But as it gets colder here, people tend to sit inside cafes and bars more, and there are no laws to stop them from smoking indoors here. A law banning smoking in restaurants is on the books, but it is massively unpopular. Jo pointed out that rather than having ‘no smoking’ signs up in bars and cafes, they tend to have ones that say ‘it is permitted to smoke here’, and they are displayed almost as a point of pride. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any ‘no smoking’ signs anywhere other than in shops. Everywhere else is open season, and it’s getting to the point that not only coats and shirts smell like cigarette smoke when you get home after a night in a bar, you can smell it on every layer of your clothes, right down to the delicates. My pillowcase smells of smoke. My handbag smells of smoke. My socks smell of smoke.

Opening Times

We worked out the whole siesta thing pretty quickly (shops open at about ten in the morning, then close from about two to five, and then stay open until about nine or ten at night), but then they keep changing the rules on us. Some weekends things seem to shut down at midday on Saturday. But then sometimes they stay open all weekend. Public holidays are even more confusing. And you’ve got to admire the balls of a country whose economy is shot, and yet where it is perfectly acceptable to close your business for two weeks, leaving a sign in the window saying ‘cerrado por vacaciones’ (closed for holidays). And the worst thing is that everyone is in on it except us. It sometimes feels like a conspiracy to drive foreigners crazy, or at the very least to keep them in a state of bewildered submission. I’m not saying for a minute that I think that shops should be open all the time – I actually really like the idea of having one day a week on which all the shops are closed, I think it’s good for people to have to delay their shopping gratification occasionally. But, to quote the great Tom Stoppard, ‘consistency is all I ask’. 

Ah. I feel much better. Now I’m off to eat pinchos and look at the Christmas decorations in the Plaza. Will this torment never end?

What I think expressed in more good English

A great article about the importance of learning a second language from The Independent.

Gigantes

Jo’s sister was here over the weekend, which was lovely. We drank too much wine and coffee, debated the merits of Russel Brand and Jane Austen, and Jo and I had an opportunity to show off a bit. I think we’ve fallen in love with this city so much that we’re like people in the irritating early stages of a relationship. All I want to do is talk about how much I love Pamplona, and how wonderful it is, and oh, it did the funniest thing the other day. Sigh. 

The Monday was a public holiday, something to do with San Saturnino, and the Gigantes were broken out for the occasion;

These are representations of saints and kings and queens, and the kids love them. There are also these guys

who wander through the crowds, hitting people with rubber balls on strings. They’re hilarious to watch, partly because they quite often manage to sneak up behind people and smack them around the face (don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt – I’m one of those who was sneaked up on), but also because the reaction of kids to them is fear mingled with hilarity. As they approach the kids, you can see the reaction swinging wildly between gibbering terror and hysterical glee, and there are those great moments of tears turning to laughter and back to tears in the space of a few seconds. 

We hung around for a while but nothing seemed to be happening and we had planned to go to San Sebastian that day, so we left. Then, as we were pulling out of the bus station the parade of Gigantes appeared

(there were more people, these were just the participants who had managed to get separated from the main flow)

Then we were off to San Sebastian. If there’s anywhere that could compete with my love for Pamplona it’s San Sebastian. It is just the prettiest city I’ve ever seen, and it is just as charming in the winter as it was in summer. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago part of the seawall collapsed due to the huge waves, killing some people (the day after we were there with my mum, which was a bit spooky), so a lot of it was closed off. Obviously it was a tragedy and I really don’t mean to sound callous, but it was a pity that we couldn’t walk all the way around as it was such a beautiful day. The first time we went there was sunny and warm and sparkly, and it was almost as sparkly the other day, though this time it was the sparkliness of frost and bitter winds. There was even some frost on the rock platform;

We had a bit of a wander around, and looked at the marina;

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit the cement museum or the aquarium, which I love Instead, we ate some pinchos, and then I fell over. Not because of the pinchos though. I wasn’t looking where I walking and my feet got tangled in one of those plastic straps bundles of newspaper get wrapped in, and I went straight down, face first. Because I am extremely shallow, my first thought was ‘oh no, I’ve broken my iPod’, and it wasn’t til a few seconds later that I thought ‘ow, that really hurt’. Happily, I had not in fact broken my beloved iPod, and I also discovered that chivalry is not dead in San Sebastian. I was immediately scooped up by some nice men who looked very concerned, especially as the shock had forced all my Spanish words out of my head and all I could think to do was sob pathetically and say ‘gracias’ in reply to their questions, so I think they probably thought I’d given myself a concussion. I don’t think I had, though, because a fish on a bike will never find me, blurbledurblewurble. So yeah, no concussion, and no lasting damage except for a gratifyingly large bruise on my knee that has got me out of playing volleyball yet again with the exchange students, all of whom are much lither and fitter than me, and who are young enough that the sight of me crying hysterically in confusion as sport takes place around me has the potential to cause them psychological damage. I’m doing them a favour, really.

Sorry, I got a bit side tracked there. Where are we after all that? Oh yes. In summary, the fiesta of San Saturnino has big heads and grievous bodily harm against small children and unwary tourists, San Sebastian has boats and frost, and I probably don’t have concussion.

For legal reasons, definitely not called 'spanksgiving'

More drinking. Oh, God. For any potential employers reading this, I just want to assure you that my alcoholism is for the most part well within the realms of ‘functional’, and I rarely abuse my liver to this extent.

The night after the beer pong and zombies was Espansgiving (which my spell checker seems to think is a real word, which worries me slightly – damn you, Microsoft Word, what other spelling mistakes have you been letting through?). Espansgiving is a clever combination of ‘Espana’ and ‘Thanksgiving’ (gettit?). It was pretty dull, just the usual Friday night; dinner with Icelandic girls who plied us with hip flasks of topas, a trip to a salsa club, a failed kidnap attempt, you know, the usual. 

We met the other exchange students over on the other side of the city and walked to the restaurant, which turned out to be an RSL style sports/social club. The top floors were buzzing with people, and there was a basketball game in the stadium. Then we were led down increasingly quiet and non-descript corridors into what seemed to be a basement, and I was not feeling optimistic about the way the evening was going to go. But the restaurant turned out to be quite nice, in a RSL kind of way, and not in a basement at all – it was built into the side of the hill, so that we had a nice view across the valley. The food was acceptable, and we had some nice fat steaks which were probably the best we’ve had here, though to the dismay of a number of people on our table the steaks were served rare. One guy cut eagerly into his steak, then wailed in horror ‘it’s not cooked!’ We assured him that people do in fact eat steak in that condition, but he still looked doubtful and slightly appalled.  

Towards the end of the meal it was announced that we were to go to a salsa club, and before we could protest we were bundled into the car of some guy who took off without saying anything to us. We weren’t entirely sure what was going on, and we seemed to be stopping and starting a lot, and making sudden turns, and I did start to think that maybe we were being kidnapped by anti-exchange student radicals, but we eventually got to the salsa club, where it turned out our driver was one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen and not a crazed kidnapper at all. In fact, all the dancers there were intimidatingly good. I have previously mentioned that I dance like someone recovering from brain surgery, and I was even more demoralised than usual after seeing these people whirling all over the dance floor. The club did have a stage to one side with some men demonstrating the basic dance steps for beginners to follow, but I’m beyond the help of mere demonstration. I need years of training at the hands of an aloof Eastern European dancing master to get me up to the level of normal people, but despite the exorbitant price of the drinks, this was not a service the club seemed willing to provide. Amazingly for men in tight white pants and tight white shirts with the name of the club written across the shoulders in silver rhinestones, the dance teachers looked not at all ridiculous. In fact, they looked quite masculine. That’s the magic of salsa. 

Jo and I shuffled around the dance floor for a bit, then Miss Sutherland Shire, shamefaced, admitted that she was too tired to stay and was heading off. We pointed and laughed, and pretended that we were having a great time and were going to stay all night. We may even have done a dance of triumph. Then, five minutes after she left we gratefully went home too.

A good time was had by all, especially when the zombies arrived

I'm going to let you in on a little secret about me; I judge people based on how prepared they are for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It isn't quite as crazy as it sounds. OK, it is as crazy as it sounds. But we all have our quirks. And anyway, have you thought about your escape plan? Do you have a scheme for gathering food or for finding protection? No? Then don't come crying to me when you find yourself at the mercy of the undead hoards. I will not stand here and be insulted when there is so much at stake.

I bring this up because on Thursday night we had a zombie scare, and I was woefully, shamefully, underprepared. 

Our friend, the always lovely and vivacious Miss Sutherland Shire, had been nagging us for weeks to go out with the young folks. We’ve tried to explain that we’re old and tired, and that in our distant youth we had been known to dance on bars (true) and rarely feel the urge these days to stay out all night drinking. Or we feel the urge, then realise that a night of pasta, wine and movies is much more appealing. But eventually we agreed to go to out, first to a bar where a jazz band was playing, and then to one of those dark rooms where they sell expensive drinks and try to deafen you with Lady Gaga. 

So we went, and we had a very nice time. We drank too much (mainly because of the insistence in Spain of serving gin and tonics made to the following recipe; take one bucket. Add a bottle of gin. Garnish with tonic and a slice of lemon), and I even had a little dance, much to the horror of our younger, ineffably cooler friends, as I tend to dance like someone whose only awareness of the concept of dancing is from having at some point read a badly translated pamphlet on the subject. 

Oh, and as I subtly hinted above, we saw some zombies.

There were three guys in costume, and they shuffled into the bar in approved zombie fashion,and wandered around in a sinister sort of way. The effect was spoiled slightly by the fact that the jazz band was playing something particularly tinkly and elevator-musicy at the time. And also that we were all slightly too pissed to take them seriously anyway. I tried to get one of them to dance with me, much to his chagrin, though I don’t know if he was annoyed at me for ruining the effect he was trying to create, or if it was simply due to the fact that I was dancing, for which I do not blame him. Either way he was somewhat deflated. It’s hard to loom convincingly when the person you’re attempting to menace is trying to jolly you into doing the mashed potato like some kind of demented children’s TV presenter. Then the girls decided to find out what the zombies looked like under the masks, and started pulling them off the guys’ heads. One in particular was pronounced cute by Miss Sutherland Shire, and he was quick enough on the uptake to realise that there was a lot more mileage in going maskless, which his fellow zombies were also annoyed about.

We moved on to another bar, zombies in tow (it turns out they were all classical musicians, and very nice chaps too), where I was thrilled to learn that one of the other exchange students also has a plan for dealing with the zombie apocalypse. I was with him right up until he said that part of his plan entailed getting everyone on a bus, and I was like ‘Amateur. Haven’t you seen the end of Dawn of the Dead? Good luck with that.’ Honestly, young people today have no idea. 

We played some beer pong, less successfully than the photographic record of the evening suggests;

As with any drinking game, the problem is that once you start to lose it is pretty much impossible to make up the lost ground. I later found out that the Spanish rules for beer pong don’t require you to scull your beers, you are only meant to take a sip of your beer each time you lose a point. But that’s not how Australians play it, and we showed these effete Europeans a thing or two about binge drinking. In the end we only lost by one cup, so we did quite well all things considered. It was about this stage that Miss Southerland Shire admitted that she had thought that we’d be ‘soft’, and that she hadn’t expected us to stay out so long. The subtext was that she hadn’t thought we’d be any fun, but given the fact that we tend to act as if we’re in our dotage already, I suppose I can’t be offended by this assumption. 

 In short, we had a lovely time, though I was sick as a dog the next day and it wasn’t until about five in the afternoon that I could manage solid foods again, though luckily it was just a hangover, and not the onset of advanced zombiism.