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Every time I go to Spain I like it more and more.
I like the fact that you can sleep the entire day away and still be able to go shopping when you drag yourself out of bed at 19:00. I like the fact that you get a tasty little schnack with your beer. I like the fact that no one bats an eyelid when it's midnight and the woman sitting next to you in the bar is bouncing a tiny baby on her knee. And I especially like the fact that the further south you go, the less likely it is to rain.
This is how I happen to be back in Spain, only a few weeks after spending a soggy couple of weeks in the north of the country. As we watched yet another dark cloud roll in over the Catabrian mountains and the fat drops hit the windscreen, we realised that no matter where we go in the world, or when, it rains.
Yes, my friends, we are the people who made it rain in the Sahara desert, one of the world's driest and most hostile regions. The UN should seriously employ us as drought relievers. Other examples include having our Cuban beach idyll marred by hurricane-like weather, a weekend in Budapest almost resulting in trench foot and a visit to Venice almost causing a humanitarian disaster. Venice is not a place that needs any more water than it already has.
My personal favourite, however, is when we arrived on the Croatian island of Dugi Otok one a hot July day. Twenty minutes after we landed, in rolled the clouds and down rolled the rain, torrentially, for a good five hours. "The locals are overjoyed," exclaimed an old man, who'd moved to the US when he was a teenager and recently moved back to the island. He'd taken pity on us as we sat shivering under the parasol at the island's only open restaurant watching the panicked yacht owners leaping onto the dock from their expensive, lolling, flimsy boats as the water got more and more violent. He invited us to his house for cheese and homemade raki and continued,"it's not rained for 52 days and people were really starting to get worried."
Almería
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So, with the obligatory cheap flight booked, we trundled off to the "driest place in Europe" and dared it to rain.
In my opinion, the tapas are definitely better in the north. But what makes them almost as good in Adalucía is that they come free with every drink. This is great if you like to eat octopus, which seems to be what you get a giant scoop of, sometimes slathered with mayonnaise, sometimes pickled in vinegar, whenever you order a drink. It's not so great if, like me, you think that octopus tastes like murky sea water and has the texture of old car tyre or like Portugeezer who practically vomits at the mere whiff of the stuff.
Spain is full of old people and Almería city is no exception. I don't know whether they live longer, or whether all the young people move to London as soon as they finish school to work in a bar giving the impression of a greying nation, or whether they are just dragged out more by over-zealous daughters-in-law. Every evening, without fail, in every town, little old men with their pants up to their nipples shuffle up and down and little old ladies totter along in their sensible heels.
Away from the zimmer frames and blue rinses of the main square, we found ourselves a bustling bar off one of the tiny medina-esque alleyways, where I hastily ordered 'cheese fondue' sin jamón for my tapa to accompany my new found most favourite drink - Tinto de Verano. I was very disappointed when cheese fodue turned out to be a finger sized slice of bread with melted cheese on it. I think the cook decided to teach me about the importance of being a carnivore in Spain by hiding a lump of ham a centemetre below the cheese. Grrrr.
The next day, we made it out of bed just before the shops shut at 14:00 for siesta. Within about five minutes of leaving our hostal, I had to duck into a shoe shop to cool down in its frosty air-conditioned lovelines because it was 31 degrees in the shade and I was panting like an over-exercised donkey. While I was in there cooling down, I happened to peruse the shelves and realised that almost everything was on sale. The prices were so cheap, I actually wondered whether the price was per shoe and Portugeezer went to ask the girl behind the counter who stared at him like he was on the run from a mental hospital.
When we were in the north, we'd seen several shoe shops that had signs in the window saying 'we sell single shoes' and we had assumed that it was quite normal for the Spanish to buy one shoe at a time, although we couldn't quite work out why. Lots of one legged-people in remote villages because of too much inbreeding perhaps? Buy one this week, buy the other next week when you get paid? Some sort of strange fashion fad?
Once we'd established that the price was per pair, all hell broke loose and I am surprised I only left with two pairs...
Baza
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I'm quite obsessed with sleeping in unusual places and had found us a troglodyte cave house in the middle of nowhere to go and be troggy in. We drove a couple of hours north across the mountains, past the place where they filmed the spaghetti westerns (and I learned that they are not called spaghetti westerns because they were filmed in Italy as I had thought for my entire life) and numerous other crap films like Zorro and arrived at our trog cave in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing but dust and a huge orange rock-mountain that made me feel like I was in Arizona.
The owner of the cave house was a perpetually happy, rubber-faced Belgian called Sam, with a barrel-shaped labrador called Red Bull. Sam looked at the gathering clouds in the sky and said, in the weird mix of Dutch, French and English we were conversing in, "It's been sunny since April, not a cloud in the sky until today. What have you done?"
The cave house was amazing - painted bright white and full of lumps and bumps and curves. There was a huge double bed, built into the far wall with two separate pillows. I was happy to see two pillows because one night with the ubiquitous 'divorce pillows' that they are very fond of in Spain was already enough. I named them that because expecting two people to share one long, thin pillow is a recipe for trouble, especially when my penchant for sheet and pillow stealing and general bed-hogging is thrown into the equation. I wonder how many times 'pillow issues' have been cited in divorce cases.
Because there are no windows and only one door and they are buried under tons of rock, cave houses have a constant temperature and are cool in the summer and toasty in the winter. They are dark and cosy and once the door is shut, there's no natural light whatsoever; even the most hardened of insomniacs would find it difficult not to get some shut eye in there. Being in the middle of nowhere and having walls several meters thick meant absolute silence. I had fantasies about moving there for winter to hibernate and suggested it to Portugeezer but he was already half-hibernated and only grunted his approval.
Our little cave house had a little swimming pool too and we swung about in the hammocks drinking my homemade and improvised Tinto de Verano (red wine, ice cubes and sprite) and chomping on lumps of manchego and wolfing down olives, while Red Bull sat patently underneath our hammocks ready to hoover up any stray crumbs that might come his way. By early evening, it was starting to get cold and I feared that I might be about to catch pneumonia, so we gave up on the pool and warmed up in our cave.
Later that night, we drove to the nearest town, Baza, which wasn't very near at all. Baza was supposed to be having its fiesta, but the only thing we could find were the remnants of a children's puppet show on the town's main square complete with hyperactive children buzzing about while grumpy looking men dismantled the stage and adoring abuelas sat in huge gangs on white plastic chairs keeping an eye on the beloved niños.
Around the town square, I noticed about eight photography shops, which I thought must make for very healthy competition. In every window, alongside the usual cheesy, forced, soft-focus wedding pictures, each shop had very bizarre pictures of babies dressed like adults and performing tasks like policeman, secretary, fireman. Very freaky.
We walked around for ages trying to find somewhere to eat and ended up in a small bar at the top end of the town. I ordered a half ración of deep fried shrimps. I like a shrimp or two, but more than about five is way too much. My eyes almost popped out of my head when they delivered me a gigantic heap of shrimps. Let's just say that the scruffy stray kittens cowering in a doorway nearby probably thought they'd died and gone to kitty heaven when I started chucking the shrimps, one by one, in their direction.
>> Next: drugged up Flamenco in Granada and hippies, nakedness and the worst wine ever in Las Negras. Stay tuned to find out whether it rained or not >>
