how i almost became a greengrocer in spayyyn. actual gap yah real life.

it's been a rato since i wrote - i've been rather ocupada (would you believe it?! i didn't at first either). however i feel inspired to bash out a few thoughts on this chilly october night. this morning's trip to the 'office of foreignness' (direct translation) in sevilla gave me some material i suppose and got the ball rolling as it were...

today i got up at 6am to make the 120 mile round trip to the 'office of foreignness' in sevilla to get my NIE (not sure what it is either, appaz a 'foreigner essential'). bearing in mind that not even pensioners surface before 10am this was achingly early. to make matters worse this was not the first time i've been to the 'office of foreignness' - oh no, i stood in the 100 person long queue for 3 hours last week too, but guess what - chronic fuck up in the 'foreigness office' meant that instead of sending me my 'foreigner identity card' in the post i received a form regarding the import/export of fruit & veg. quite how i will never know, is my spanish so bad that i can't distinguish a banana from an identity card? let's hope not. things got pretty messy at the 'foreigness office' this morning, a brawl broke up between some marroquis and the security guards who shouted i quote 'we'll call the police if you don't start speaking spanish, you fuckers'. sure enough the marroquis were escorted from the building yelling and screaming (and not in spanish either, though i doubt that would've helped by that point). if that's not abject rascism then i don't know what is. anyway correct form successfully submitted, i am to be a recognised resident of spain (albeit foreign) and not a greengrocer, yippee.

a little moan about spanish food... principle ingredients: olive oil, tomatoes and salt. even the shitting hobnobs (hobi-nobis or somethinkg) are salty, i'm not talking about a mild savoury tang either. oh no... i'm talking montruous chunks of rock salt heavily distributed at random within the biscuits themselves.
so andalucian breakfast - big blob like white bread, drenched in olive oil, then you get a tomato, halve it, rub it up and down your bread then if you're feeling exotic crack open a couple of garlic cloves and go nuts with the rubbing up and down. THEN if you're feeling flush whack out the iberian ham (salty salty stuff) and chomp to your heart's delight. i can handle this kind of thing at lunchtime, not 8am, i'm sticking to the special k for now.
pretty sure someone fed me fried cake the other night. like doughnut but with a cakey interior, not good for the food baby/heart/teeth.
tapas...well everyone just BUMS tapas and yup once a month tapas is beautiful but ahh my gahhhd fried salty food every time you go out?! there's a reason why la tasca always makes it on to studentbeans.com every week.

i've started teaching in the nun school this week, the nuns make me nervous. however there's only 4 nuns that work there, the rest are just ermmm normal - especially headman alvaro - he's such a LAD! the first time i met him i walked into his office (adorned with pics of mary, baby j etc) and goes 'heyyyy', i hear you like to party (word spread like wildfire after my performance at the policeman party)...not quite what i was expecting, i'd put on my smart clothes (teachers at school told me 'baps out' was inappropriate) and had my diary out all ready to talk education and the merits of cathechism and here we were discussing 'lash'. anyway so the kiddies enrolled on my little english course and trotted along to colegio this week... monday was the 3/4/5 year olds: i was slightly put off by the fact that most of them were crying before i'd even got there, however they met paddington bear and calmed down and looked after him because he doesn't speak spanish so sometimes he feels very lonely, they made him a bed out of crayons and loo roll and spoke to him in english. winner. the older children were actually really good fun and sang me all the songs they knew in english, this went on a while, endearing though. then wednesday & thursday were 1st and 2nd years...aka little shits. entertaining though - 'do you sleep in constantina or do you sleep in english?'(sic). we learnt red, yellow, green, blue, stand up, sit down - still working on 'shut the hell up' though. no but seriously the spanish just LOVE to yell and it seems perfectly acceptable for their children to yell too, pretty sure i can yell louder though...if the 'yellow card/red card/go & sit outside and think about what you've done' technique doesn't work this can be plan b.

winter is on its way in constantina, it's pissing it down so they've all put metal barriers up outside their doors so their houses don't flood. the streets are like rivers when it rains but then again i suppose it probably hasn't rained for 6 months so it's doing it properly. just about to order some hunters, don't know that constantina will ever have seen wellies as a fashion item, the townsfolk reacted pretty badly to the geek glasses - pretty sure they thought i had a serious sight problem and that my glasses were corrective, if anything they evoked sympathy and more people talk to me now. i snapped the arm off though so won't be wearing them again, at least i made a couple of friends out of them even if they do pity me.

i've got un monton de cosas to say but am going to call it a day here. and will endeavour to write more frequently and hope to keep you entertained. thanks for reading.

muchos love xxxx

when i got lashed with the local policemen

very grateful to those of you who have followed me so far... truth is i'm not actually going anywhere. there's not an awful lot going on here especially now it's winter (the mercury hit 23C today, apparently that's chilly). however last saturday night things got pretty spicy down at the local church in celebration of 'national policeman's day'. i will try and recreate the soiree for you and tell you just how i came to attend the festivities...

last friday i found myself in the local library just at the bottom of my street, this is the only place in Constantina (population 5.000/6.000 ish) that has public internet access and as you can probably imagine a pretty long queue for the two pc's that it houses. and its opening hours are minimal, especially now it's on 'winter timetable', apparently there's less call for literature in the winter here. anyway there i was at the desk asking for the wifi code and the bloke next to me introduces himself as one of my pupils (whom for these purposes we'll call Bob) - how he knew i was his teacher i'm not sure (probably because i am one of two foreigners in the town). his next sentence 'i like you car, i walk your street in the morning and i see you car'(sic) - their grammar/pronunciation is at times rusty but to be fair they do make the effort. ok so he knows where i live, what car i drive and where i work and i haven't even had a chance to say 'hola'. anyway the library closes, we step outside and along hobbles a little old man, don enrique (for real). don enrique is an artist, i imagine he was a bit of a player in his day, turns out he lives just across the plaza and wants to show me his house (read palace), paintings and sculptures. incidentally he would quite like me to marry his son but that's by the bye. anyway turns out he lives in a beaut moorish riyad style house and is quite the talented artist. i'm not entirely sure what my little tour of his abode was in aid of (besides me being a potential marriage prospect and the subject of his perverted and naahht funny jokes) but it was a kind gesture. by the way the pupil is still in tow at this point but he makes his excuses and leaves (yes that's right - he leaves me with pimp daddy don enrique banging on about russian orphans. however enrique babes valiantly walks me home, up a big hill, he hyperventilates despite taking regular breaks up with 100 metre stretch, i insist i can go the rest of the way alone but he soldiers on regardless. he was pretty sure his wife had locked him out of the house anyway. again. it's no surprise, he was pretty pesky). creepy pupil kindly invites me to Mass and a policeman party in the church the next evening where he will be waiting on tables and will make sure i get to sample the meaty delights of constantina. Mass starts at 8pm and the festivites swiftly follow on at 9pm, he tells me to come along and just ask for Bob...

i rope the french assistant into coming with me so that i don't look like a guillermo sin amigos (yahs that's 'billy no mates' when it's at home). i regret this when he turns up at my flat smelling of ape and exuding grubbiness. apparently he's been hiking. he's quite a character, i feel i will have to dedicate an entire blog entry to his bizarre behaviour. anyway we head out into 'town', i convince him to skip Mass as i am feeling particularly heathen that day and that we should just go to the 'afterparty' for the free meat treats then leave because it won't go on for long...

...i stumble home at 4am (almost fluent in spanish by this point, apparently the combo of vino tinto, cerveza, gin and voddy surpasses any spanish lessons i've ever had).

so i turn up with the aforementioned malodorous french assistant to the church around 9:15pm, Mass has surprise surprise over run. the church is packed full of people, all dressed up to the nines in particular the women, not sure Jesus would approve thigh high boots, i imagine he preferred something a little more demure - who knows. we peer our befuddled foreign faces through the entrance to try and figure out what's going on...some sort of ceremony with lots of clapping and policemen (note only one policewoman) in welly green outfits. this ends and the partaaay begins. there's about 500 people in the church and long tables running down the length of the church (oddly not a pew in sight). the tables are swiftly filled up with food and the hungry locals move on in, chomping at the bit and ready to fill up on free nosh...head policeman rings a bell, declares it's tea time and they go nuts. 


admittedly it was pretty awkward at first, one because i knew no-one and two because the only person i did know was pretty gaddamn embarassing to be standing with. it was do or die... i chose do and struck up a convo with the rather sweaty man next to me who was getting rather stuck in with the chorizo being passed around. at first it was hard to distract him from his meat but then he realised i was foreign... one word was all it took...chorizo abandonned and his attention fully engaged. he introduced me to his amigo, who introduced me to his wife, who introduced me to her uncle and cousin who introduced me to their neighbours blah blah... you get the idea.


the chorizo kept coming, two chunks and i'm done normally but on this occasion i was force-fed until i'd tried the lot. the vino was flowing and my plastic cup was topped up constantly. it got to about 11, i'd conversed with countless individuals and don't remember one single name. i'm hopeless with spanish names, if it's not jesus, pedro or maria i'm screwed. so by now i thought it'd be dying down (not that i wanted it too, i was having a blast) but no no, out of the church kitchen over the next couple of hours come five vats of stew. and this wasn't just any old stew, no no, it was made from the tender bovine victim of last week's bullfight and a wild deer who had been hunted locally - both beasts presented as gifts to the local police for all their toil and labour. my sweaty friend insisted on sharing my fork and making me little stew sandwiches despite me telling him that actually i'd already eaten an entire hog tonight and i'm pretty full, muchas gracias. 


my memories are pretty fuzzy. my french counterpart attracted much attention with his wild gesturing and wobbly command of the spanish language and rapidly hit on the town's chicas, lucky girls. he was also asked to leave at about 2am because his behaviour was becoming pretty distasteful and his balance problematic. shortly after he'd been escorted from the church by the police it was announced that it was 'la hora de gambas' - yep that's right 'prawn o'clock'. so i was trying to think what this could mean in metaphorical terms...but before i knew it boatloads of prawns were plonked down and from the kitchen emerged litres of salomorejo (like gazpacho but thicker and with hard boiled egg shavings sprinkled on top). there was no getting out of this one, it was just what i fancied at 2:30am...cold tomato soup and fishes...to wash down my gin and fanta, tasty stuff. 


the party continued in a similar vein, i met tonnes of locals and they really couldn't have been friendlier. i also got on the good side of the local police and appaz they aren't too arsed that i don't have a set of spare bulbs in my boot (a legal requirement for driving spain, naturally). they also averted disaster today when i was parked on a 'double yellow' and the bastard neighbours rang 999 to have me deported. when i say double yellow i mean there was a inch or two or the kerb painted at the turn of the 20th century in a sandy beige shade and apparently i'm meant to realise it's highly illegal to park there, they let me off, i gave them percy pigs, they were chuffed. 

back to the party - i received plenty of invites for dinner and lunch from fellow attendees (note the recurrent food theme), they'd explain to me where they lived and that i should drop by, i'd give it the 'si si si' and really not have a fecking clue where they're talking about, their invites were appreciated nonetheless. i exchanged numbers with plenty of people and woke up the next afternoon with only a vague idea of who the new contacts in my phone rafael, miguelangel and yolanda amongst others were. turns out i went for lunch with them the next day so i wasn't baffled for long. i also bumped into some of my new amigos on monday at the vet, yes that's right i went to the vet, i bumped into santi the exceedingly camp local tv presenter whom i had met at the policeman party and was on the way to the vet with his pup 'chico' who had the shits, big time it turns out, he relieved himself in the reception, pretty nasty for everyone involved.

so that was the night that was. apparently there's another similar event coming up soon though this time it will be celebrating the 'day of the civil guard' (yep i don't get it either)and i hope i'm reinvited because i truly had a fantastic time... it was a great introduction into small-town spain.

more to follow of course. with a 5 day weekend coming up i should find time.


xxxx

hola from constantina

hola,

i realise i don't have any followers (yet) but this is just a test run/little intro to my new and intensely spanish existence.

so i arrived just over a week ago in constantina in a rather dusty mini laden with m&s curry paste, ribena and marmite. first on the list was flat-hunting, this reduced me to tears within about 4 minutes (which given i cry roughly biennially was pretty rapido). my living arrangement options were limited to say the least (this town has no erasmus party scene, no students, no tempting flatshares) so i decided to live alone. before arriving in constantina (for the second time, i visited at the end of my stint at the gypsy farm in august) i had a vague criteria of what my flat should and shouldn't have. however after my first and harrowing phone call to a phone number i found on a noticeboard this list rapidly went to shit and the only stipulation remaining was whether or not the owner of the flat was a mentalist screaming granny and if so would this hamper our communication? after a testing 5 minutes of said granny straining her little spanish voicebox trying to explain where her flat was (i still don't have the foggiest) and when asked to repeat a little slower for the sake of a bewildered (not deaf) foreigner she cackled then carried on screeching about the brand new fridge she had recently installed...i gave up, goodbye senora but you're nuts and NO i don't want to live in your flat. no way never.

i have however found a delightful little flat in el barrio de la moreria which is an area of town about as spanish as a bullfight and a chorizo. windy little streets, white houses, complete with the odd herd of goats and old people no longer in possession of teeth.

that is all for now, i am about to discover the delights of skype, today i had internet installed in my flat, the first in the street by all accounts. technotechno.


i have copious time on my hands, will blog again before long.


muchos love xx