San Juan 09

Before the weekend I attended San Juan. It was quite a strange San Juan to say the least.

Things all started off quite well. Unlike last year were me and the missus spent the whole evening sat on our own, this year we knew people and got to have a bit more fun.
After some time on the beach I went for a little walk, spotted some other friends and doubled the size of our party.
Things were going quite well. The main problem at the beginning of the night was the DJ failed to show up and we didn’t have any music. In fact I didn’t hear much music this year on the beach. More of a fact is that that the beach seemed less busy then last year.
Also I discovered that this years effigy that was to be burnt was of a flame. A flame!? Who burns a flame effigy?
Things took a slight change for the worse at midnight. Just as the fireworks were set to go off and the time when everyone jumps in the sea to wash away evil spirits, two friends of mine and Sams, who are also a couple decide to split. This meant that most of the girls in our original group, being more then slightly drunk disappeared angry/teary/sick for some time.
This meant that my big moment of diving in the sea at midnight and getting more then 6 foot wetter* then last year went unnoticed and unphotographed. Sorry.

Anyways, here are some early photos from a very quiet, sociable, beach party.

Just arrived

Have a nice day

Being prepared is the key

When two become one

Killing time

Parties carry on until dark

Like I mentioned, unfortunately there are no photos of everyone in the sea as I splashing about and the missus was with an upset friend, but imagine me in this photo but a litter wetter and you get the idea.

How I looked before getting wet

Next year I think I’m going to head to one of the other beaches as I hear they have some music and DJ's there.

Here is the slidey show. [source]

*Also I felt quite ill with a cold and sore throat for the next few days.

Pre-Noche de San Juan 2009

Another day, another fiesta

Today is Noche de San Juan.

For those that were reading last year, you can skip much of this but you shouldn’t as you their might be a quiz afterwards.

The bases of this fiesta is it is the shortest night of the year. [source]
I don’t see how the longest day of the year was celebrated two days ago and the shortest night is celebrated today. I thought the two would come hand in hand? And originally thought that it was to do with John Baptist’s birth but that only applies to Venezuela apparently?

Tradition suggests that people have to jump over a fire three times and jump in the sea to cleanse my body.
Which is fun.

Tradition also suggests that you celebrate the night with friends, getting drunk and having BBQ’s, bonfires and parties on the beach until the sun comes up, which isn’t long seeing as it is the shortest night.

And it’s because of these many traditions that Noche de San Juan is by far my favourite fiesta in the whole of the year.

Last year me and the missus, having not been here long and knowing no one had a semi-ok night.

This year we actually know people and I am much looking forward to this years noche a lot more.
Although I doubt I’ll take a tent down this year. But at least my house/fridge stocked with beer is only a few minutes away so I will always have some cold beers near by.

Should be good.

PS it’s good to see some people getting an early start. Personally I’ve got a bit of work to do, perhaps take a quick siesta and have something to eat before I start.

The early bird catches the good spot. 

Happy noche de San Juan.

Aprendiendo Espaňol es muy dificil

My Spanish is not going as well as it should be. The classes I was taking last year have stopped. Christmas kind of broke things up, the class took a break anyway and I was in England for a while. When I returned my work picked up quite a bit which meant it left me with little free time. And work will always have to come before anything else at the moment.

I’ve tried various ways of being able to study from home. I subscribe to a podcast that I was listening to regularly, until my headphones broke and I had to wait to get new ones. Now I’m just waiting for this period of visitors to die down so I have some free time.

I’ve found twitter handy for learning. I follow a few Spanish people and have tweetdeck set up to show their tweets. That way I can learn and read actually Spanish like how they would speak it.
Another little way I’ve been learning Spanish is by having a module on my igoogle home page. One that displays a Word of the Day.
Not only does this module give you the word, its pronunciation and obviously it’s meaning, it also puts it in to a sentence.
I find these help me with my word structure a lot.

There is one problem though with Spanish. Any word you learn and think you know off by heart can change so much within a sentence. A lot of Spanish is about how the sentences are implied rather then literal said.
The one I can never get is siento. It can mean either saying you’re sorry or sit down. What if you wanted to say just sorry and not sit? Or sit and not sorry? What if you wanted to tell someone to sit down so you can say sorry? And if you said it would they think you were telling them you were sorry they were sitting?

Another example was from my igoogle module yesterday. Here it is.

Es claro, verdad?

Claro here can mean light, pale or fair. (Claro can also mean about 25 other things according to google and used to me “understood” as in “that’s clear” in sentences in the same sense you or I might say “that’s clear” when given instructions)

But anyway, the sentence given says “she has black hair and CLARO eyes.” But as you can see they’ve changed the meaning of claro, which they only just explained mean light/pale/fair they now say means blue/gray/green eyes. They didn’t say that before.

GAH!

The one thing that annoys me more then all of this word sex-change type of business is the fact that I can’t use my Spanish here.
Every time I go to a bar, restaurant or shop and try to speak in Spanish the person will always reply in English.
I understand that this town is a town built on tourism and such and it’s good that businesses employ bilingual employees for times when people might not speak Spanish but I just wish that if someone was putting in effort trying to speak your language that you would help them out and first try speaking back to them in your that language.

Score

Last weekend I was doing something that Cristiano Ronaldo was wanting to do. Playing football in Spain.

It’s well known that Ronaldo wants to move to Real Madrid to play football in the Spanish Sun. But I have a few words of warning for him.

Nice tan

I now support, not only a t-shirt tan line from the same day but also I have sun burn around my knees. Slightly embarrassing.

Time to start topping up that tan me thinks.

So Cristiano Ronaldo, if you’re reading, wear sunscreen
(link to video as I knew you were thinking of that.)

Feeling lucky

These last few days I’ve been feeling very very lucky.

First I had popped down the shops to get some tomatoes for sandwiches. As I was lightly jogging up the stairs, as you do, I came centimetres away from stepping on a SNAKE! A monkey-fried snake.

A monkey-fried snake on a Monday to Friday step. [bonus second photo]

This guy is by far better then any of the lizard spots I’ve seen over the last 13 months here.
Pretty lucky that I just happened to go get tomatoes at that time.

Then, later on me and the missus were out attending some evening for a local pub football and pool team. The seasons have finished and they' were having a trophy giveaway.
They were offering out raffle tickets and I picked up two. The tickets were for a game of “Play Your Cards Right,” you know, that game were you have to say whether the next card is higher or lower.
So my number got called out first and I stepped up to the cards. About 14 cards later (all in one go with only one change your card move) I had won.
A grand total of 89€. Sweet!
(There is a photo on someone’s camera of me, with trilby, €89 all gangsta style. A bit like this. Double sweet. If it comes back to me I’ll make sure to post it for sheer badass-ness.)
What makes this win a little bit better is that I was told Play Your Cards Right is a popular game in this bar and normally last 30 minutes to an hour with any number of people getting up to play after other fail. So me to get up and go from start to end in one go that’s pretty lucky.

And finally. After going down to one of the beach restaurants yesterday to spend my weekends winnings I topped up my phone on the way back. Since moving on to pay as you go I’m pretty crap when it comes to staying on top of keeping credit on my phone. So I grabbed a 15€ top up voucher from a shop, put in the pin and got a message saying I had 25€ credit!

My tired old phone.

Now I’m sure that Orange were having some special offer for those people that keep forgetting to top up there phone and telling them “do it now for free €10” as I got a message from Orange earlier that day but like normal deleted it immediately.
So it’s pretty lucky that I can’t read Spanish very well otherwise I wouldn’t of been so surprised about this.

Since I’ve been gone

A few days ago my 1 year since moving here anniversary passed. Me and the missus didn’t do anything to celebrate, I had family visiting so we were probably out anyway. But some thing’s haven’t really change here that I wished had.

The biggest thing has been the let down that Spanish culture has yet, well at least here, to embrace the fantastic idea of sandwich deli’s. I love a good deli. I love a good sandwich. But I don’t have the patience for all that preparation to make the type of selection they have in deli’s. Or the knowledge. If anyone can teach me to make that chicken mayo fusion filling that you get in deli’s I’d be more then thankful.

There was some interest in one starting up but that never materialised.
One restaurant that does serve tasty, but slightly expensive, sandwiches had stopped. Although I have seen they stuck their sandwich board outside again.

But it’s not quite a deli.

I’ve resorted to having to find different, simple, fillings that I can stick between my two slices of Bimbo bread myself. I’ve starred at the meat counter for far too long then is allowed for a health sane person to.
And the best I could come up with is having corned beef filling. But I never really know what to have with corned beef, apart from salady stuff but at least it’s a change from having ham and salady stuff.
So I was doing at little investigating to see what I could have with my new meat and found some simple sandwich ideas that all ended with toasting the sandwich.
Which made me remember, I saw an advert for a genius idea on the TV the other day. You guys back in the UK now have the fantastic invention of Tostabag.

What a great idea. Any sandwich filling can now be doubled thanks to the easy idea of toasting your sandwich in a little sleeve and using a toaster, which I assume is in every home in the World. Ever. By law.

Amazing stuff.

But not only have the UK made advancements in dinner time snacks since I’ve been gone. No. You’ve also improved breakfast.
Watching some more English TV the other day, I promise, English TV is something that I see very close to nothing off. These are the only two things I remember watching. I don’t even remember what shows I was watching at the time, just the adverts.
Anyway, I now learnt that you have Weetabix Bitesize.

Now this is more of an “about time” invention then a “bloody marvellous” like the first one but I could so do with Bitesize Weetabix over here due to the fact that we have tiny tiny little bowls. My Weetabix look more like Weetastax then Weetabix in these tiny bowls.
Plus it means the bottom one gets very soggy and not very sugared and the top one is dry and over sugared.
I just want my Weetabix side by side.
Or in BiteSize.

It feels nice, when it happens to you.

So I have my dad and his family visiting from Saturday. It should be good. Their visit coincides with Semana Santa (Easter Week). There will be a lot of parades with men in cloaks and pointy hats (yes, like they look like those kind of pointy hats) carrying creepy statues of Jesus and other various things happening all week. This is also the only fiesta/parade that I have yet to experience since being in Spain. So now I can mark off the last one.
And expect quite a few photos.

Another favourite habit of mine when people come to visit, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, is I turn in to “Vacation Mode.”
I’ll do a lot of things I don’t normally do, like eat out (although me and the missus have been doing tapas nights out again quite recently), go to the beach in average weather (average to me maybe, but there are a lot of holiday makers walking around in shorts and vests) and just generally walking around the main part of town really slowly (damn it tourists, pick up the pace).

I’m also looking forward to showing off my new favourite place El Molino.
Unlike other touristy flamenco bars which do big shows with all the dresses and proper dancers, El Molino is 90%+ filled with the Spanish. It has a solo guitarist/singer who performs on a very small stage and then anyone in the bar can join him on stage and dance to his music. And after a few drinks no one is shy.
I learned about El Molino when we first arrived but never went to it. Not sure why. I was taken to El Molino last week and had a fantastic time in there and wondered why I never went to it sooner? Although I plan to make up missed opportunities.

But I do need to work on my rhythmic hand clapping a bit more.

And if I'm ballsy enough I might start watching some youtube teach yourself Flamenco dance lessons....

or perhaps not.

Clapclap-CLAP. Clapclap-CLAP. Clapclap-CLAP.

The Sun has just about got it’s hat on.

The last few days it’s starting to get a bit warmer here. Even the evenings haven’t been too bad.

Some noticeable signs of this are the heater hasn’t been on for a few weeks now. The butter is no longer frozen and destroys my bread every time I make a sandwich. And I don’t have to wear my slippers as often.

But I’m feeling myself slipping in to some British ways. No not wearing socks with sandals, but having a growing concern that the summer isn’t going to be all that hot.
With the UK’s inconsistent summers I find it hard to believe that this summer will be the same as last.

Last summer was baking hot here. For most of the summer it was 30+, even after 6/7pm. I didn’t attempt to take a walk past the farmacia to check on temperatures during the hottest parts of the day so wouldn’t guess on what they were.
There were times when we were staying up in Frigiliana and while waiting for a bus at the unsheltered bus stop, it was a killer waiting under all that heat. Especially as we were trying not to sweat too much in our dining out clothes. (Would of made for a stinky meal)

But these last few weeks I’ve found it hard to think that this summer will be as hot as it has just been so cold. When I came to Spain I expected it to be hot in the Summer and warm in the winter. But it can be nearly as cold as the UK in the winter (or at least it feels like).
Even when we spent time up in Frigiliana a few weeks ago, walking past the same bus stop I had a jumper on (but no coat as I had left it in home) and was shivering at about 6pm.

I’m sure that in a few months (weeks?) I’ll be complaining about the heat and this talk will just be impatient nonsense, but I blame a life time of poor British summers for my ‘Precognition Summer Dissatisfaction’.

Cold feet

One of the most notable things you would spot in any given Spanish casa is lack of carpet. Anywhere.

The Spanish, at least here on the South coast, have done away with carpets. I'm not completely sure if this is a decoration thing or it is to keep mi casa y frio casa in the scorching summer months.

A desgin flaw in these tiles is that they become freezing cold in winter months. Like ridiculously cold.
Cold enough to hurt your feet.
Cold enough to make me wear these when wandering around the house and sunbathing on the balcony...(And as I work from home I do A LOT of wandering around the apartment.)

Somewhere back in the UK and old man looks for his slippers

Although they ain't all too bad...

Proud owner of a new pair of slippers. No more cold feet for me. Plus I feel about 5 inches taller in these.
3:40 PM Feb 12th from Me

But it's strange that over the past few decades that the Spanish have had this same recurring problem once a year that nothing has been done about it. I mean the Spanish like to keep their houses cool, including not having ANY central heating all this time (and they've only just discovered ovens-don't get me started on that). And it's not like this is a colder then normal winter here.

So I have only one question, how are they getting away with the cold floor problem?

Personally I suspect the Spanish have evolved these....

Penguin feet. For the coldest of cold casa floors

Now I just need to hatch a plan to get a Spanish person to remove their shoes...

After a morning of packing

After a morning of packing, this is what we have.

Things packed


Various bags


DVDs and a tent


Clothes and WiiFit

We have accumulated many more things then when we originally arrived. Although I think perhaps about 25%~33% of the clothes in these bags are clothes that we haven't worn in a while/since we arrived.

But there are a few things that we haven't packed, mainly Red

Red out catching a few droplets

So after spending most of the morning packing we now have very little to do during the week........except move.

Oh and all this without a cup of tea. :(

Sunday, bloomin Sunday

I still find it hard to adjust to Sundays here. It's can be pretty quiet at times. A bit like a few years back in England when shops were not allowed to open.

Most shops here are closed of a Sunday still. The only ones open are tourist-y ones and that's during the tourist season.

But the small grocery stores and supermercados they stay closed. So for the essential important items, like PG Tips, you can't get them on a Sunday if you were to run out.
Days, for example, like today.

After making a cup of tea for me and the missus this morning I realised that we have run out of such an essential item.

Back in England, if this was to occur, I know I could of just gone down the local Co-Op and been back making a cup of tea within 5 minutes.

What's made this particular situation harder today is that we are packing for our move. And all this hard work will seem so much harder without the medicinal strength giving properties of leaves and cow juice.

Tapping red shoes and singing

There is no place like a new home.

After days waiting around for a response from our letting agent we have now been confirmed a moving in date in to our new home.
Originally planned for the 1st of February we were able to get the date moved forwards a few days to this coming Thursday.
Which is a good date really as we get chance to move in and then the weekend is straight upon us.

Another good reasons for this date is we get kicked out next Friday.

The NYE Post

Yeah it has been a while but it's time to get this guy out in the open.

The missus had her parents visiting for Christmas and New Years so we all decided to go down to the Balcon de Europa (main square) to celebrate the Spanish way, which consists of eating a grape with every chime of the bell at midnight.
But just lots of people gather and do this at the same time.

In Britain I'd expect them to advise on wearing safety specs just in case there are "shooting pips."

So as you'd expect an un-experienced Brit attending a Foreign event we turned up too early. Much too early in fact. Like at 10pm! You'd think that wouldn't be too early but no one else was there. We were a but lucky the bars were open. But for celebrating The New Year the Spanish leave it pretty late and not starting until gone 11ish.


The Crowd

When we arrived I went for a walk to see what was on show and if I could spot where the fireworks would be coming from.
I certainly did spot the fireworks. Unattended and open to anyone to stand in the middle.

Health and Safety first


We past away the time by playing dress up


Tuck in
And finally twelve oclock came. I was given the task of photographing the moment. Moments before my mum phoned to go through the Spanish New Years moment. So I had a phone under my chin, eating grapes out of small cup while trying to take photo's.
I'd like to see THAT on Krypton Factor.


Swoosh BANG


Pop
And then a few of us went over to a "British" bar where we celebrated a "British" New Year at 1am with traditional Auld Lang Syne.

Not to long after that everyone went home at a nice sensible time.

The next day I took a walk down to the beach and it was packed. It was strange walking along the beach and seeing families out playing in the sand and sunbathing. Mind you it was in the 20's.

So all in all it was a very strange New Years Eve.

It fells a lot like Christmas

As I've bene out of the apartment for the last 2 weeks I'm playing cath up with some blog entries.
This one is from my Spanish Christmas. The most significant thing about this is that it is actually Spanish Christmas TODAY.
Feliz dia de los Tres Reyes.

But here is how things went down with me this Christmas Eve

The local Council have a great set up where they have a Santa parade around streets where Santa and his helpers give out sweets*.




Packing up


Little Helpers




Handing out sweets

Then on Christmas Eve everyone went out for a small drink

Yes, that kind of small drink


And wore silly hats


Various silly hats


Had a little dance


Copied the DJ

Then it all got a little fuzzy, including the photos.

And a few hours later we got to open up all are many presents under the huge Christmas Tree**


And here is the slideyshow


There where a few downsides to Christmas though.
I have to admit this is the one Christmas ever when I was half hoping to get some socks and underwear as in teh last few days/weeks I've noticed mine are getting thin on the material side. But to my surprise I didn't get one single present of socks. Not one.
On the plus side though I will hopefully stop unconsciously singing Christmas songs now that it's all over.

Hopefully....

*Giving out sweets is polite, they actually launch the sweet at anyone within range. The young, elderly and injured are most open to attack.
**You may think that is a small Christmas Tree but you would be wrong. I was just standing really far away when I took that photo.

Snow

A little weather news.

This weekend it has been freezing cold here.

So cold I even felt chilly with just my jumper on in the evening!

So cold that it actually snowed on the hills right behind where we live.


The big hill right behind where we live with it's snowy top.


I was actually on my way to play football when I took these shots with my phone.
And yes, it was chilly playing football.


Some of the more mountain-y hills a little further away where covered even more in snow.

I was told by someone that this was the closest there had been snow fall to Nerja (probably less then 5km away) in a very long time.

I did get a few other better shots today as I made my way to the market with my camera, I'll upload/post them a little later.


This is a shot from the bus.


And this (slightly) snowy hill panorama.



It's very unfortunate that I didn't have the missus BRAND SPANKING NEW camera.
I've just ordered for her (it's ok she knows already) some Fujifilm long zoom range Finepix that has 18x zoom on it. I could of taken photographs of the frozen, snow covered plants on top of them mountains from where I was stood with that camera!

Estoy aprendiendo espanol...not so much

A few weeks ago I started taking Spanish lessons.

Before I moved to Spain I was teaching myself and it was going really well. I had some podcasts that I listened to while commuting to and from work, which would take on average 40 minutes. That meant each day I could do almost an hour and a half a day of "lessons."

But here in Spain, of the two jobs I've had, the longest commuting I've had to do is a 10 minute walk. Almost the same time it to to walk to the bus stop back home. And now I work from home which means I get even less time to listen to lessons.

Obviously you'd think that working from home would give me more time. But I get up later, work more (in this job I can't spend hours online and still get paid for it) and tend to do a bit more around the house. Which means that 6oclock comes round quicker and then I'm in "relax" mode.
I guess I have bad time keeping.

But my Spanish lessons are a good idea. It makes me get out of the house. Forces me to take part in lessons. Not only that, I actually use the Spanish I learn (you tend to find there aren't many people wanting to speak Spanish at 630am on a packed train).
And it's nice being surrounded by a Spanish environment. Across the road from the class is an old persons home. They do a lot of painting and dancing. So some times when learning Spanish you'll have flamenco music coming through the windows and the occasional sound of dozens of feet stamping on the floor. It's nice.
And afterwards on the way home when walking through the main town there are always a lot of people eating out in bars and restaurants. It's certainly an alien feeling in November compared to what I was used to this time last year in England.

There is a slight problem though. It's not that the whole class is in Spanish. But what was suppose to start as a beginners class has turned quite difficult.
Whats happened is a Experienced Spanish Course has started on a Friday. One of the people from that class started taking the Tuesday/Thursday--free--beginners class. Probably to brush up. I think it's trickled through the class that there is this other class to brush up on.
So now more experienced Spanish speakers are taking the beginners class and the average level of the class has increased A LOT.
So I'm slowly starting to think I'm falling behind. Already some of the beginners have dropped out of class and I'm feeling a bit of the same.
I'm thinking that if I took the same time that I put aside for lessons now but went back to teaching myself I'd be able to work at my own pace and from text books I understand.

The problem with this is outside my Spanish lessons there aren't many Spanish people I speak with. So anything I learn I'll forget again unless I use it.

I'm going to keep going for now. I'll have to start putting a bit of an effort in to home studying. Combining the two sounds like the best option really. I just hope that in the mean time I don't get left too far behind in class.

Charades in Nerja

(posted here due to missus using the unhelpful wordpress platform)

this is how good i am at charades

not only am i good
im so good i can get a 5 or 6 year old to do a charade and get it guessed in one go

see


can you guess what the answer is?

actual answer will be posted later

Spanish TV confuses me

this isnt my first post about crazy spanish tv
(this is)
the one thing i hate most about not being fluent in spanish is i cant understand the tv
stuff like telenovelas and lalola (which is my newest favourite tv show)

but there is also times on the news and topical chat shows that i wish i knew what the eff was going on

like for instance the other day when i spotted this guy on the tv





what the eff is this presenter doing with a gunshot wound to the head?
as an example

Let's go!

just a few days after spotting a friendly grasshopper watching some ants it now appears he may have to be careful

whether it was him alerting the ants, the cooler weather we have be having or the thunderstorm we had the other day something stirred the ants

oh and be warned, these are not like pesky little ants, these are gi-ants


the hippest ant hang out, The Rock


from this height all the ants look like the size of ants

but often i've spotted lonely ants searching for food, a house, something? and just wondering the streets
and they weren't sticking to the mud, they were all over the roads and paths

but a little bit like this guy

if you look closer you can see hit claws on his gi-ant shiney head

also i'd just like to point out that trying to photograph these guys was hard work, especially in flipflops
if i stood still for longer then a second i had ants crawling up my legs and biting me
for some time after i still thought i had ants in my hair, pants, just about anywhere

ps if you havent noticed i have a bit of poll on the side there>>>>>>
all names were suggested by daisy (thanks daisy)
you can vote--well you should be able to--as often as you like
and you dont get redirected from this site
so go trigger happy

Back to school

Tomorrow I go back to school. I'm a little nervous about it all but it is FREE Spanish language lessons so I thought it could really help me out.

Or at least I think I've joined a Spanish course.

They are one hour weekly--or bi-weekly--courses and when I went to sign up last week no one at the school spoke English. So in my very broken Spanish I was able to sign up to some course. Although I cannot confirm 100% that the course is for Spanish lessons. Although my first one is tomorrow so I will find out pretty soon.

I've not been to the stationery shop for pens and notebooks and I've not got my school uniform-although it would be good for me not to be wearing too many different fancy dress outfits in such a short time.

But it will be good for me to get back in to my Spanish lessons by taking actual Spanish classes and using the Spanish I have learnt-mostly I just learn phrases and never use them-plus it will get me out of the house which is nice.

Anyway I am a little nervous, I hope everyone likes me and that no one tries to take me lunch money.