Sunday, June 21, 2009

Granada

Granada

Many of the parents and children of Sunnyview School, and the instructional staff as well, took their 1974 Christmas holiday to ski in the mountain resorts south of Granada. At that time we had only been in Torremolinos for a few months and really didn’t know anybody. So, why not go to Granada with the rest of the lemmings?

We packed up all our cares and clothes in our car, El Flojo, and headed north and east of Málaga, over the mountains To Granada. We made it in one piece without a breakdown, contrary to our expectations, and checked in to a no-star hotel in an older part of town recommended to us by our neighbor, David McConnell.

We had one room to be shared by all four of us, 7th-grade Eric, 9th-grade Pat, and we two parents who were beginning to have second thoughts. The room was clean enough, but dark, illuminated by lamps with 39-watt bulbs. Clearly, we were not meant to spend a lot of time in our rooms reading.

We left our hotel to procure a late lunch and soon came upon a tapa bar open to the street and an adjoining alley. We bellied up to the bar, for we found no little cast iron chairs and tables. Pretentious it was not. It was a stand up-eat up-drink up-pay up-go away bar.

We ordered chicken wings in a rich tomato sauce. By exercising great care we consumed the meat and left the bones sitting on the plate and did not decorate our clothes or persons with the sauce. Very much. We pushed the plate to the bartender’s side of the bar. He disgustedly picked up the plate and turned it upside down on our side of the bar, dumping bones and sauce on the floor. Soon a couple of dogs who had been lurking in the alley sidled up to crunch and lick the site clean.

And I thought I knew all about garbage disposal units.

The Toast

It was after dark, but early evening on my first night in Granada. David McConnell and I were drinking mediocre red wine in one of Granada’s no-name bars and listening to an elderly man play the hell out of his flamenco guitar. Cigarette smoke and the smell of wine provided a proper ambiance for the musician’s brilliance. I played a little guitar myself in those days and his technique dazzled me. His fingers were all over that neck like pigment on a Jackson Pollack canvas. The thing is, I didn’t recognize anything his fingers were doing. I couldn’t even figure out what key he was in. So I asked him. He didn’t know either. He had no clue. He just knew how to play his instrument like a champ.

It was at just this magic moment that one of the bar’s patrons approached us. Convivial. Jovial. Happy. Drunker than a whole herd of skunks. He wanted to tell us how much he liked the English. McConnell was from North Ireland and I from the States. Between my slow and his slurred Spanish, we had us quite a conversation.

At last he wanted to propose a toast to our eternal friendship. I agreed because he was drinking his own wine and I didn’t think it would cost me anything. We grabbed our wines and linked right arms at the elbow. But I was several inches taller than he and when we drank, finally, after a long and flowery toast, my new friend missed his mouth completely and poured his red wine all over his white shirt front. The mishap didn’t seem to bother him much. He brushed off the excess wine with his hand as best he could and returned to the bar for a refill. He then suggested we all meet together on the following night at the same time and bar so we could drink more toasts. I said it sounded like a fine idea.

As we left McConnell asked me why I had agreed to such an obviously dumb plan. I told him I wanted to know where our friend was going to be at that time tomorrow night so I could be somewhere else.

More next week.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Eric and Chile

We have always risen reasonably early by most peoples’ standards. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we might sleep in, but usually we rise and shine by seven. And we almost always managed to get up before our son, Eric.

With some surprise, then, I woke up around 5:30 one Sunday morning to find Eric dressed and leaving the house. He said he was going to church. And that was probably true, I thought, because there’s not much a teenage boy can do at 5:30 Sunday morning besides go to church. At the same time, since we never participated ourselves, I couldn’t help but wonder what motivated the boy.

Later investigation revealed it all had to do with Chile, a bartender at Tres Barriles (Three Barrels). There was absolutely nothing for young foreigners to do in Spain except study or hang out with each other. No youth clubs, no soccer leagues, nada. And, being foreigners, they couldn’t get jobs.

Eric and several friends got to know Chile as he was setting out tables for the evening trade. They called him “Chile” because that’s where he came from, Chile.

Chile let the boys help him set out tables and bought them a soft drink in exchange. But he had a proviso. They couldn’t help unless they went to church with him. “He even gave me a hundred pesetas for the collection box, Dad,” Eric said as he ran out the door.

“My God,” I thought as I rolled over and went back to sleep. “My son’s bartender is a better influence on him than I am.”

Eric’s newly discovered piety didn’t last very long, though. Six o’clock mass is early for anybody, let alone a teenager.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Dining Out in Torremolinos

As we walked into Torremolinos from our home on a more or less daily basis, we passed by a Danish restaurant. I noticed they offered a five-course meal free to anyone who could eat the whole thing. “The whole thing” was the key. If you passed out halfway through the meal, you still had to pay for the whole dinner, even though you had only eaten half. No doggie bags. Joanne and I let this temptation go for a year, but eventually succumbed.

We ordered the meal with some wine and prepared ourselves for the inevitable food fest. Salad first, right? Wrong. Salad did not appear on the menu. A little bread, but no salad.

The first course was a fish course. Pickled herring in sour cream, fish fillets served with rich sauces, bacalao, lobster, salmon, shrimp, eat, you fools, eat.

` The second course was a hot meat course. Hot roast beef, hot roast pork, ham, meat loaves, enjoy, enjoy.

The third course was a cold meat course, more beef, more ham, meat rolls stuffed with pimientos. Having a little difficulty? There are two more courses to come.

I wonder what Circle of Hell we’re in?

The fourth course was the cheese course. If there is one thing the Danes do well, it is cheese. And the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the British. And all the countries had representatives in the cheese course. It was a regular cheesy United Nations.

There was no way we could make any serious indentures into the cheese course. To this day, we have no idea what the fifth course might have been. Nuts? Peanuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, cocoanuts? As it was, we walked home and didn’t have to eat again for a long time.

If the Danish dinner was an experiment in applied misery, my favorite fish restaurant was a joy forever. Torremolinos extends to the beach as does it’s neighboring area, the Calvario. The two places are separated by a finger of land jutting into the sea that happens to be devoid of vegetation. Hence the name “Calvario”, which means something like “finger of land devoid of vegetation” or “bald place.” The Calvario had no beach to speak of, but hundreds of little stores and restaurants stacked on top of each other.

I don’t even know if my favorite fish restaurant had a name. Certainly it did not blazon into the night with the aid of neon. Nor did I ever see a menu, for there were none. They didn’t know what was going to be caught that day, and therefore didn’t know what they would have to sell that night. You had to learn the names of the fish.

We could take our friends there and each order a fish dish in which we could all share. They served deep fat fried elver eels by the basket. Their little eyeballs looked like flakes of black pepper. Most of our guests ate them without asking. They may have suspected, but they didn’t ask. They served deep fat fried herrings that we ate bones and all. Don’t ask, don’t tell dining. Instead of onion rings we had squid tentacles fried a la Romana.

We also had individual salads, bread and wine. Usually people ate and enjoyed. They especially enjoyed when it was time to pay up because the cost was around $2.00 per head.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Claud's finca


Claud deBretteville, our neighbor in Urbanización Colombia, owned a small finca in rural Málaga province. What sort of pet or applicance is a finca you are probably asking yourself. It’s a small farm. At least, it was in 1975.

Now, thanks to Google, I learn that they are villas with indoor plumbing and everything. You can pay everything from 250,000 euros to over two million. The current exchange rate today (January 24, 2008) is $1.27 to the euro. Indoor plumbing costs a lot.

But in Claud’s day, a finca was a farm house. We had to drive through a tiny village to reach Claud’s finca. As we chugged up the main street leading through the village, we met what must have been the entire population walking the other way. They were on their way to the fútbol field to support their local team’s efforts against a neighboring village. Our progress was slowed. Impeded. Stopped. Everyone was good-natured about it. We couldn’t run over all of them, so why run over any?

Eventually traffic cleared and we drove a short distance out of town, probably a half mile, and parked under an olive tree by the side of the road. We could easily see the village sitting uphill of us. Her finca itself laid downhill of us, perhaps two hundred feet down a ridge, a small, whitewashed house with a thatched roof. Claud invited us in.

The first thing I noticed about Claud’s house was the floor to ceiling bookcase just inside the front door. I don’t remember any windows, but there must have been. I don’t remember any indoor plumbing, either. In the States, Claud’s finca would have been a “cabin.”

Her stone floor was unsealed so that she could use “Spanish air conditioning.” This involves wetting the floor with buckets of water and opening the doors and windows so the wind can blow through. The house is cooled by evaporation. It works great and doesn’t use any electricity.

The house had two doors, a front and back door which gave out onto a walled enclosure with walls four feet high. There was no way in or out of the enclosure save through the house. Smaller harder stones than those that paved the rest of the house led from front to back doors providing a path for the finca burro to take because it lived in the enclosure behind the house. The small stones had to be harder than the others so the burro’s hooves wouldn’t wear them out too soon.

Burros were very valuable and had to be registered in town. You even needed a pink slip for your burro. When he was in his enclosure, there was no way a thief was going to get him out unless he lifted him over the wall. If the thief was strong enough to lift a full grown burro over a wall, you probably didn’t want to interfere anyway. “Si, señor. Go ahead and take my burro. Bon apetít.”

Joanne has always had the gift to “witch” water, at least ever since I’ve known her. Don’t ask me how it works or why. I have no idea. But Claud persuaded Joanne to try to find her a well. If water could have been found, that finca would have increased in value tenfold.

It didn’t happen. Así es la vida. But even without water, it was a nice little finca.