Pictures of Our New Home

by Tim

We have landed in a tiny town in Andalucia called Carboneras. It is on the lower right corner of the country, about an hour's drive east of Almeria and two or three hours south of Alicante. We'll be here until the end of January.

From here, we can make day trips to Granada, Cartegena, Almeria, Malaga, and other places of interest including Mini Hollywood where Sergio Leone filmed him Spagetti Westerns: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly et al.

Here are some shots of our new digs taken by Terre with her Christmas present, a new Canon digital camera that she can drop in her pocket. She loves to take pictures.

Above and below are two of the views from our deck.

The view out our bedroom window.

The closer selling point on the apartment was this little girl and her buddy, a great big black and white guy, our first visitors.

This is the street looking up from the sea.

The kitchen area.

We do not plan to be trying out the bike on this particular road anytime soon. We came across it on our way into town.

Another view of our approach to Carboneras.

We hope everyone has had a great Christmas and Santa has been good to you all. We miss everyone... but not enough to come home yet.

Tim

Barcelona Calling

Text by Tim; photos by Terre

I can sum up Barcelona simply: it is my favorite city in Europe. So far.

I like it better than Paris. I like it better than Rome. I like it better than, dare I say it, Dublin.

This is my second visit. We stayed two nights in 2000, just enough time to get a taste of this beautiful town. Now, on this trip, Terre and I would get up and say, “Want to stay another day?” Sure! So we did. Five times. Every time we started to move, we changed our mind. Our cheapie little Formule 1 hotel was about 800 metres from the train station. It was 5 € return for the two of us into town. What more could you want?

So, we walked and walked and walked around Barcelona.

The first day, we took the train to Sants station. I chose it because, on my transit map, all of the train lines went there, so I figured it must be central. And there was a big street heading northeast from there that just had to be Las Ramblas, the city’s hip, happening street. So, we popped up from underground, found the street and walked as far as Diagonal. Nope. This definitely was not Las Ramblas. A nice street, but no tourist junk. No flower stands. No one selling birds. Nope.


So, I got out the map. Ah, this one must be it. We walked another mile or so down Diagonal to another street and walked the other way down it. Again, I was mistaken. So, we gave into the winds and just wandered.


Getting on towards sunset, we ended up in the university district watching some skateboarders try to break their necks. We were both tired and ready to pack it in when we saw a sign: “La Rambla.” Well, signs I can follow. Five minutes later, we were on one of Europe’s most famous streets—even if it had taken us four-and-a-half hours to get there. Instead of packing it in, we stayed up another couple of hours.

A “rambla” is not a ramble, it is a dry stream bed and this street was built over one. Today it is called Las Ramblas—the plural—because various sections of the street have distinct personalities.

First let me describe it a bit. At one point in its history, this was a very wide avenue, probably six or eight lanes plus parking on either side. But a long time ago—judging by the age of some of the trees—the city decided it really was a place to ramble. So they turned it into a pedestrian area. There is a one lane service road on either side, no parking, and the middle is a raised, concrete island. It runs more than a kilometre from Place Catalunya (Plaza Catalonia) to the Cristopher Columbus monument down at the waterfront, the one where Columbus is pointing to the east, away from the New World. (He gets a monument in Barcelona because this is where he made his “official” landing and was met by Fred and Izzie.)




There is one section where they sell birds. How any town can support the sale of so many parrots, finches, canaries, and budgies is beyond me. I mean, are they really that popular? And most of these stalls also sell cute little bunnies. However, I suspect that these creatures are not destined to be family pets but for family pots.

We ended our five days in town by going to see King Kong, this time in English with Spanish sub-titles, but surely it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been in Swahili. Lots of fun.

We are heading south for the sun!

More Basque Country

text by Tim; photos by Terre

We left the Basque Country on Sunday morning, December 11, after a week there: three days in Bilbao, three in Vittoria-Gasteiz, and two in Luyando.

Bilbao was basically a washout—literally. It rained—hard—practically the entire time we were there. We were cooped up in our hotel room almost all the time. We finally ventured downtown as we were leaving the city. We caught a glimpse of the Gugenheim art museum. Well, more than a glimpse as we parked across the river and ate our lunch. It is quite a striking building, a work of art on its own. But then we hit the road for Vittoria-Gasteiz.

On the way there we had to cross a 700 metre pass where it was threatening to snow. Our rather worn front tires made us nervous. The back ones were fairly new, but the front ones were definitely ready for replacement. We moved that way up our priority list and despite two intervening national holidays where everything was closed, we managed to get new tires before we left Vittoria-Gasteiz. Of course, we’ve not seen any snow, but we are ready!

Vittoria itself was a delightful surprise. It is a charming city, the provincial capital. It lies in a valley at about 500 metres elevation. Our host, José Luiz, works for a shipping company. He had a few days off as Tuesday, Dec 6, was Constitution Day, and Thursday, Dec 8, was the feast of the Immaculate Conception, both holidays. Like many Spaniards, he was also taking off the day in between - a bridge day - so he had lots of time to spend with us. If a person takes the rest of the days of the week off, it's called a viaduct.

Every evening, on the car-free mall area downtown, hundreds of people are out walking with their families, even on weeknights. The stores may be closed, but the place is jumpin’!The restaurants were crowded. A trio of two hot accordions and a base were just jammin’ it up. And everywhere people were in a holiday mood.

The local wine producers were putting on a wine tasting for the residents of the area and had put up large tents around the mall for folks to come to sample the vintages. We saw many people with their wine glasses in felt bags strung around their necks. This used to be potato-growing country, apparently, but Jose Luiz says that EU bureaucrats in Brussels decided there were other areas better suited to growing spuds and this area has converted largely to other crops, including a now thriving wine business.

On Friday, December 9, after we got our tires, we moved to Amaia’s place in Luyanda, a village in a mountain valley. She is a woman about Terre’s age who works in accounting. Amaia has lived her entire life in this village. She and three of her four siblings were born in a house just a few blocks from where she now lives.

But where she now lives is a sign of what is happening to her little village. She lives in one of eight twelve-unit apartment blocks put up at the edge of town. And there are others throughout the valley. The commuter trains to Bilbao make it a 20-minute trip to downtown and with house and apartment prices in the city outrageous—we’re talking half-a-million euros for a 120 sq. m. apartment (1300 sq. ft., $600,000 US)—folks are looking to places like Luyando if they hope to ever own their own homes. Amaia’s rural valley is quickly becoming a suburb.

On Saturday, she took us to see “el nacio del Nervión,” the birth of the Nervión river. This is a spectacular waterfall that plunges 600 metres, almost 2000 feet, from a hanging valley. Most of the year, she told us, it is dry. We were lucky and caught it on a wet day. It was truly breathtaking. I don’t think our photos can begin to capture it.

On Sunday, we were supposed to head west to Gallicia, the upper left-hand corner of Spain, but one of the neat things about this trip is we can do what we want, and we found we didn’t really want to go that way. So we turned the other way and pointed Yoda east, for Barcelona. It was a long day, almost 600 km., but the change in the landscape was quite marked. We went from damp, dark forested mountains, something like the coast of northern California, to land that looked more like what I had expected of Spain—dry, semi-arid, scrub.

And on some of the ridgelines are these massive black silhouettes of bulls. Now what is that about? Darned if I know, but they seem to be all over the country. I’ll let you know what they’re about when I find out.

One last thing. Before we left Vittoria-Gasteiz, we had decided to enjoy one of Europe’s truly cross-cultural experiences, something you can only do over here: go to a dubbed American movie! We chose Jodie Foster’s latest, Desparecido! (Disappeared assuming the name is the same in English) about a woman whose little girl goes missing on a trans-Atlantic flight. We figured “How difficult can it be to translate this one?”

We were right. The movie was so predictable that you could have watched it in any language. Woman’s husband dies in Berlin. She and daughter flying back to America with the body. Child goes missing; how and why is never explained. We checked that with some Spaniards, by the way, at the end. They didn’t know either. Anyway, nobody can find her. “How can a seven-year-old girl just disappear on an airplane?” She freaks. Nice looking guy in the row behind her turns out to be air marshall, who, in my opinion, should have handcuffed her long before he did. Anyway, she manages to cause havoc all over the plane. She shorts out a bunch of circuits, could have easily crashed the damn thing, and she’s still not cuffed to her seat! They tell her that her daughter is not on the manifest. “Your daughter was killed with your husband.” “No! She came on board with me.” But no one has seen the little girl. The woman is obviously crazy. Yada, yada, yada.

Could you have written this in your sleep? Could the seven-year-old girl in the script have written it in her sleep? No translator needed.

We had a blast!

Maybe we’ll get our courage up to go to a purely Spanish movie in Spanish soon. But not yet. In Belgium, we watched a movie in Italian and English with Dutch subtitles. Luc was translating for us the parts that weren’t in English, and I got pieces of the Italian. But it was exhausting for all of us. So, no pure Spanish for now.

By the way, the quality of the dubbing was incredibly good. Generally, you could not tell. The dubbing actors and the translators had worked hard to match the new dialogue to the old so that the consonants—which are the sounds we make with our lips and that you can see—remained the same or similar. If you can pretty much match the consonants, it won’t look dubbed. Ninety-five percent of the time, this did not.

Next stop: Barcelona.

That Old Bilbao Moon

by Tim Perrin
Photos by Terre Perrin

That old Bilbao moon,
I won’t forget it soon.
That old Bilbao moon,
Just like a big balloon.

Andy Williams used to croon that tune from one of my mother’s LPs when I was a kid. I didn’t know where Bilbao was at the time, much less imagine that I would ever be there. But, tonight I am in Bilbao, Spain.

It’s not at all what I imagined—when I imagined it at all.

From Andy’s song, I saw a quaint little town on the Bay of Biscay: romantic, small. Instead, I was greeted with a sprawling city of 350,000, one criss-crossed by freeways. Our hotel is near one of the biggest Ikea outlets I’ve ever seen which is attached to a shopping centre the size of lower Manhattan that is across the freeway from another mall the size of south Jersey. And it’s Christmas shopping time. Gee, is the traffic fun or what?

Now, perhaps there is a small, romantic, quaint core to Bilbao. We’ll try to find it if there is. I expect there will be. This is an old city.

But what is most noteworthy tonight is our trip here.

Today is Saturday. We left Bordeaux in heavy fog on Wednesday, intending to drive to Spain in one day. But, by the time we had driven from Bordeaux to the coast—about 60 km—it had turned beautifully sunny, so we took the scenic route through little seaside village, some of which go back to pre-Roman times.

There has been a definite shift in the architecture. We are seeing more sprawling houses and more tile roofs.

We eventually arrived in Bayonne after dark. Now, by the most direct route, this is a two-hour drive. By the Tim and Terre route, it took six hours—including a stop for perhaps the worst Tex-Mex food in my life. We ordered nachos. We wondered what wonderful exotic French cheese they were going to use on the chips. Would it be emmenthal? Something with peppers or olives in it? A goat cheese? What we got was a pitiful pile of “zesty” flavoured chips with a dribble of orange processed-cheese stuff that may have once been heated. It was disgusting.

But the weather had certainly turned; it was amazingly warm, at least into the low- to mid-teens, which for what we’ve been used to, is warm. There was a breeze blowing. It was a nice evening.

We both woke up on Friday hoping to take a ride on the lovely bike trails we had spotted around Bayonne the night before. We were to be disappointed. It was pissing down rain and hail—big hail. Overnight, it had started blowing so we should have known it was coming. In fact, I had commented that it sounded like a frontal passage. We walked over to the nearby Intermarché to do a bit of shopping and just missed getting caught in a deluge of rain and hail.

We went to Carrefour—a big superstore—and did a little bit of shopping and then headed down to see the beach at Biarritz. When we got there, the surf was magnificent. The same storm that had blown the night before was creative huge waves that were smashing against the rocky shore and throwing up huge clouds of spray.

We had, of course, left the camera behind—again! So, we went back to Carrefour and I bought Terre her Christmas present, a Canon 750 pocket camera. But it was too late to go back to the beach for any decent pictures.

Which brings us to today. We got a decently early start—for us, that is any time before noon. We went back to the beach and got some passable shots of crashing surf, but nothing like yesterday when the surf was higher, the sky was darker, the light more oblique, children obeyed their parents, policemen never took bribes, and Canada Post delivered a letter across the country in two days.

So we started lolligagging down the coast. By the fastest route, Bayonne to Bilbao is 1:34. We took all day, but what a day!

A few miles before the French border, we stopped at one 19th century mansion on a bluff overlooking the coast. It had been the home of Antoine d’Abbadie, described as a “explorer, geographer, linguist, and astronomer” by the French Academy of Sciences of which he was a member and to whom he left his little shack above the sea. He had built an observatory and invited astronomers to map all the stars in the heavens. The house is decorated with sculptures of crocodiles, boa constrictors, monkeys, and elephants. And he wasn’t afraid of a little dirt under the nails himself; he personally drew the first reliable maps of Ethiopia.

Ten kilometres later, our poor little van was struggling up a twisty road from Hendaye at the mouth of the Rio Bidasoa. The bay there marks the border, both geographic and political, between France and Spain. To the east, it is relatively flat. To the west, it is up, up, and up. We drove all the way to the top in second gear, rarely topping 30 km/h. But once up there, it was truly spectacular. My God, what scenery! At one point, we were driving along the ridge of a mountain crest. On our right, the land tumbled half a kilometre down to the crashing Atlantic. On our left, it fell precipitously into a river valley almost as deep. Across the valley, the 1400 metre peaks of the Sierra de Aralar were sporting winter’s first snows.

When we finally came down from the ridge, we passed through little towns situated on tiny bays with tiny harbors, tiny beaches, tiny streets, and names like Zarautz, Getaria, Zumaia, Deba and Lekeitio.

Every time I look at a sign, I feel like I am in Turkey. The Basque language is not even in the Indo-European family of languages and has nothing in common with Spanish or English. The Basque are one of the oldest peoples in Europe, possibly the oldest, probably direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who first lived in the Pyrenees 40,000 years ago. They were here before the Celts, before the Phonecians and Cartheginians, before the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Moors. Many of them still live in stone houses—called caseríos by the Spanish—that were built by the forbears. Their ancient legal system or fueros were suppressed under Franco, but they have had their own regional parliament since 1975. Nevertheless, there is still a strong movement for independence for Euskadi, the Basque region of Spain.

The countryside reminds me of the northern California coast: rugged, and gorgeous, a total surprise. We have been four months in flatland: Holland, Belgium and western France. A “mountain” there hardly qualifies as a “rise” in BC. But here, we are definitely back into the hill country, the land that Terre and I both love, and even better it is right by the sea.

After our few days in Bilbao, we start into another stretch with SERVAS hosts. We will be two days 35 km south of here in Vitoria-Gastiez, then two days in a tiny village of 750 people. Then we expect to spend next Saturday night on the road before arriving at A Coruña on the northwest tip of Spain for a few nights. We will be spending Sunday and Monday with a nice couple with whom I have been corresponding in Spanish. In fact, I’ve been doing virtually all my SERVAS correspondence in Spanish—painfully slow and with much reference to both my dictionary and grammar book, but it is helping me get back into the language. And then we are meeting my clone. He is a young man in his 20s who, when I started to read his list of interests in the SERVAS directory, I would have sworn I was reading my own: computers, electronics, listening to shortwave radio, biking. But the kicker, the one Terre refused to believe, was that this young man plays the harmonica. Oh, it’s gonna be a hot time in Gallicia next Tuesday night!

Spanish Lessons

by Tim Perrin

Something wonderful happened today. I said, “Después.”

Después is Spanish for “later.” The maid had knocked on the door of our hotel room. We weren’t ready to go, and I said, “Después.” Come back later. No big deal, you say.

What makes it wonderful is that I did it without thinking, without going through a mental lookup table to find the right word. I just said it. I knew I wanted her to come back and the word that came out of my mouth was “después.”

Now, when I was sixteen and had been actively studying Spanish for seven years, I had reached the point where I was modestly fluent and would occasionally catch myself thinking in Spanish. Of course, as soon as I caught myself doing it, I stopped. But it was a neat sensation. And here I was, 40 years later, doing it again, if only for a moment.

Of course, I was still in France. We were in Bayonne, about 20 miles from the Spanish border, but my poor brain has been trying to speak Spanish form the moment we landed in France, two months ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “sí” instead of “oui” or how often I’ve been able to quickly come up with the Spanish word for something only to have to struggle to find the French word. My formal study of French consists of two semesters in a university extension conversational French class in my 20s. Spanish I started when I was nine and did every year but one until I was sixteen, including summer schools. It was often a repeat of Spanish One, but I got the basics drilled into me pretty good. And, living in southern California, I had Hispanic friends and Hispanic culture all around me. Spanish was a natural. And, besides, from the beginning, I have loved the language (and the food). It is melodious and beautiful. None of the other languages I’ve studied is more pleasing to the ear. Italian—as much as I love it—tends to be a bit singsong. French sounds like you have marbles in your mouth and half the letters could be thrown away. Latin forever makes me think I am an altar boy again; I can almost smell the incense. And Russian is fun, but it is all guttaral and full of coughing sounds.

Since my move to Canada 31 years ago, my opportunities to use my Spanish have been limited to the occasional vacation in Mexico. So to say it has become rusty is like saying the Pacific is a bit of a pond. Even then, I’m always amazed at how quickly it comes back south of the border.

Tonight, when we got to our hotel, traffic was jammed right up and I had to take the car around the block while Terre got out to go get us a room. But by the time I got there, she was nowhere to be seen. I walked into the Formule 1 Lobby and slipped into a conversation with the young man as easily as if I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t translating. I was just listening and speaking. Man, I love it when it works like that. I didn’t get every word, but I don’t need to. I got enough to know what is going on and I was able to say enough to put through what I wanted to say.

The Formule 1, as it turned out, was full for tonight (Saturday, December 3) so she had left.

“¿A donde va?” Where did she go?

“No sé.” I don’t know, he shrugged. “Salida.” She left.

By the way, I finally found Terre at the Ibis Hotel next door where she’d found us a room. “Did you have any trouble with the Spanish?” I asked her.

“None at all,” she said. “The woman at the desk spoke English.”

We had a good chuckle. Then we walked back to the Formule 1 to make a reservation for the next two nights. Terre walked in and started to speak to the young man in English. He replied in impeccable English. Often, in Europe, when they detect an accent and a bit of a struggle with their language, they’ll kick over to English. The fact that this young man had spoken to me in Spanish was the greatest compliment he could have paid me.

I know I know very little Spanish, really. But if you believe in the 80/20 rule—you need to know 20 percent of Spanish to do 80 percent of the communication—then I think I’m way past 20 percent.

It’s our first night in Spain. I may—will—get my comeuppance soon. But, tonight, I am enjoying the feeling of being somewhat competent in another language.

Adios. Hasta luego.

Tim

P.S. I got my comeuppance within 24 hours (of course) when I tried to ask the cashier in the box office at the theatre how much a ticket was. A young woman standing next to me had to restate what I said, but pronounce it properly so the poor cashier in the box office could understand me. I had the right words, but I butchered them so badly I was incomprehensible after several tries.

And I’ve always prided myself on my accent. To quote some of my long neglected Latin: sic transit gloria mundi.

Ouch!