A slightly Random podcast from the wonderful north of Spain… photos and more video coming soon!
Here is the info promised in the podcast on where we stayed and ate:
Hotel La Torre: http://www.desdeasturias.com/latorre Tel: 676 06 33 44 – 985 41 11 33
Casa Poli. Address: Opposite the above hotel in Puertas de Vidiago! Tel: 985 411 217 / 985 411 142
Recently we were discussing why Spanish needs two verbs for ‘to be’, Ser and Estar. OK, so there were valid arguments for that, but please, someone tell me why they need two prepositions, Por and Para, for ‘for’?!
Thoughts welcome below, and for keen Spanish learners, we’ve been dissecting Por y Para in our latest Notes in Spanish episodes:
Click here to nail por y para once and for all!
Gracias por tu atención 🙂
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=55430
And here is something for Jose (aka Valenciason). As requested, Chorizo a la Sidra, delivered here in a fantastic Sidrería we’ll be mentioning in an upcoming podcast, with a side of fried egg and chips/fries. Heaven!
I wrote the article below 5 years ago, long before this blog was born, on another trip to Asturias. We are here again right now, and happy to report that nothing has changed. So, while we gather audio and photos to show you when we get back next week, I hope you enjoy this earlier “Letter from Asturias” as a taste of things to come:
If you take a walk along the beach at Gandia, a small Mediterranean resort town an hour to the south of Valencia, at nine o clock in the morning in July, a surprising sight awaits you. The entire front line, the ‘Primera Linea’, that long stretch of beach at the water’s edge, is already completely occupied by parasols and beach mats, yet there isn’t a soul to be seen. The canny Spanish holiday-maker stole down at dawn, marked out his territory, and went back to bed. The effect is rather eerie, and certainly frustrating for the despondent family that arrives half an hour too late: ‘Look Mama’, sighs a small boy, ‘the sea has all been reserved.’
And so it is for all the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The ‘Primera Linea’ has long since been reserved, marked out, built on and altogether gobbled up. The resort chain from Catalonia to Gibraltar is all but complete, with barely a missing link. In places it is mercifully low-rise and low-key, backed by orange groves and as distinctly Spanish as it was before the builders arrived. But in general the beaches are as packed and no less hectic than the Metro in Madrid, the sun is merciless and the humidity at night will make an insomniac of even the deepest of sleepers.
Apologies for the light posting here recently, we’ve been working hard on our new Notes in Spanish Inspired Beginners podcasts. Full details here for those that want to learn more about music, por y para, shopping, and Spanish customs!
In other news… Marina and I are off to the green, and hopefully substantially cooler, north of Spain for a week (Asturias way). I’ll even be happy if it rains for a week! Bring on the need for a jacket! ¡Adios Calor!
http://www.viddler.com/player/1cbe6a19/
Totally happy to have made my first Salmorejo, you can join in the fun with our full salmorejo recipe, let me know how it goes!
And I’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole ‘what is the Spanish version of a Francophile’ debate in the comments!
As far as I remember, most house buyers in the UK crave a south-facing garden. When we bought our current flat here in Madrid, Marina was quick to point out how lucky we were that if faced North. This didn’t make much sense to me until we spent our first summer here, but now it is something I’m constantly grateful for. It means we can open our shutters and let a bit of natural light in after about 11 am. Before that, as we actually face slightly north-east, we have to keep the shutters in the living room firmly down to make sure no sunlight gets in.
At night we sleep in the living room as well, on the sofabed, as the bedroom is far too hot to use during July and August. We keep the windows overlooking our roof terrace wide open, and enough air comes in to cool the room to about 25ºC by 7 a.m. (on a cool day). That’s the time I wake up, see the first rays of sun creeping in at an acute angle (it’s that north-east angle again), and quickly bring all the shutters down, in the hope that we can maintain something close to that temperature all day long. I then go back to bed for half an hour, before running round to the small spare bedroom/study (also too hot to use) to shut the window and blind there too, before the sun starts pouring in on that side of the building as well.
So in the mornings we work in the living room, in near darkness, ceiling fans spinning above our heads, and in the afternoon we sleep a little and work drowsily (no one can argue with a siesta when you’re only getting 6 hours hot sleep at night). All things being well the inside temperature maxs out around the 30º mark, and we sit it out until 8pm, when it’s cool enough to go out to the park.
Thank goodness this is a cool summer, with outside temperatures in the shade rarely topping 33º in the last couple of weeks. On a wine tasting course I went on recently, the girl in charge was explaining how alcohol content in wine is increasing as a result. I don’t remember the exact reasoning (something to do with the changing way the grapes ripen), but she basically said, “You just don’t get those crazy hot summers in Madrid any more, where you would see 40 degrees or more on a regular basis.”
It’s true, and such a relief. Otherwise we’d be moving the sofa bed onto the terrace every night. Or ourselves to somewhere a lot cooler… like the Basque Country or Asturias. Now there’s a thought…
Cory Hughes recently interviewed me about my book, Errant in Iberia, using questions sent in by Notes in Spanish listeners. You can check out the interview here: http://bencurtisbooktour.com/ – I think there is some good stuff in there about the experience of moving to another country, focusing of course on Spain.
Another book?
I think about writing a follow up to Errant in Iberia about once a week, but haven’t started yet for a few reasons:
1. The first book covers a period when everything was asonishingly and wonderfully new to me, when I was making a huge change to my life. That meant there was a huge amount of material to write about.
2. The story of ‘what happened next’ (i.e. what could be in book 2, continuing the story after our marriage) is very different to the ‘inspiring move abroad’ narrative that I wrote about in the first book.
What did happen next was that I struggled for a long time with finding happy employment here before we started our own business, and, once we did start the business, had a lot of hard stuff to deal with, like constant trips to the UK for a year leading up to the death of my mother. I also travelled less than in the first 3 or 4 years. This makes it a much more complicated book to write in the ‘inspiring life in Spain’ mould, though I think the rise of Notes in Spanish as a business can be an inspiring stroy (I like the thought of being inspiring, as you can tell!)
So basically, I’m not sure what the story would be for book 2. If the story of the first book, Errant in Iberia, was ‘escaping to Spain, discovering Spain and myself, meeting Marina,’ then a book 2 might be ‘finding it’s hard to really settle in, but building a cool business which solved lots of problems’, and again, I’m not sure how great a book that makes.
3. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to write a book, you have to want to do it more than anything else on the planet, and we’ve got a business to run at the moment!
4. Rather than ‘Errant 2’, I also get distracted by the idea of doing a different sort of book, based around the blog, like ‘Notes from Spain – the book’, full of the best posts on Spain from here, and new stuff with lots of fun lists, Spain-isms etc. Then I think, ‘why don’t I just blog that here instead?’
Thanks for listening! Thoughts welcome.
Yesterday was pretty damn good. I saw the living legend Bob Dylan live at Rock en Rio just outside Madrid, and Rafa Nadal won Wimbledon. For me Nadal is the greatest sportsman Spain has produced in the last ten years, and possibly the greatest sportsman in Europe at the moment. He’s thrilling to watch, incredibly strong both physically and mentally, and just ridiculously humble and nice. If only all sportsman were like that.
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch as Rafa wins the final point and sets off on a climb to see his family, the Prince, and La Leti. Well done Rafa!!!!
And the very best photo from the Notes from Spain Flickr Group for June, was, in my humble opinion, Celebración, by Mirall, showing revellers in Madrid’s Fuente de Quevedo, celebrating Sunday’s European Cup win:
Do check out the rest of Mirall’s photo’s on Flickr.
Meanwhile, as the Independent claims that Spain are actually the Champions of nearly everything (thanks Parubin and Margot for the link), I wonder, how much does a major win like this actually do to boost a country’s moral, and image in the eyes of the rest of the world?
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 