De Perros y Limones

Madrid, Cordoba and Lebanon

Okay, not an obvious title but one that sums up the travelling done since Sonalee returned, via Malaga Airport, a few weeks ago.  Ah, Malaga Airport.  The place where you hear more cockney accents than any other European city and where Russian is spoken by many many people who are definitely honest, not dodgy at all and are just on holiday.  No, really.   The Costa Del Sol will never really lose its tag of the Costa Del Crime, I fear

Anyroadup, Cordoba.  A beautiful city centre, well designed, well-kept and great for walking around.  And so much history!  I know Granada and Barcelona get a lot of publicity, as do Valencia and Seville but Cordoba has it all, including the obligatory slightly naff outskirts that blight pretty much every Spanish town we have seen since we’ve been here.  If you visit us at any point in the next few decades, you have to visit Cordoba.

One of the reasons for me to go there was to get the train to Madrid in order to then get a flight to Lebanon to join my BFF, Kev, on our 50th birthday trip.  Why Lebanon?  Its somewhere not on the tourist radar, its famous for being  the ‘Paris of the Middle East’, it has some incredible historical ruins as well as vineyards.  What’s not to like?  That it also had a million refugees from the Syrian Civil War camped out on the cold fields of its border valley was a reminder of just how fortunate we are.

  • Baalbek ruins
  • Scars of war in Beirut
  • Historical records back to the days of Ancient Egypt

It was grim.  Looking at the endless plastic-covered huts along the road to one of the most incredible set of historical ruins I have ever seen was discomforting to say the least.  What to do?  Do you close your ears and eyes?  Do you resolve to get more involved in helping?  Do you donate money?  Do you, at the very least, discuss with your friend of 40 years how human nature leads to these kinds of situations?  I don’t know.

Overall, I think Kev and I agreed that Lebanon was not what you would expect, not what you imagine it to be and certainly not the basket-case it is presented to be. 

The trip to Lebanon was interesting for several other reasons.  I had to go via Madrid, which is a revelation in itself, given that we live in the middle of nowhere in Olive country.   One reason is that you get free rail-transfer to the airport from any station – imagine that in the UK!  Two is that, the effect that is described by Giles Tremlett in his book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ was very much evident.  On the flight to Beirut my fellow passengers found themselves surrounded by about 50 academics from Madrid who were on their way to some sort of conference/fact finding thing (my language skills aren’t that good yet).

Anyway, after the meals were served, they took it upon themselves to talk to each other.  A lot.  They stood up in the aisle and talked.  A lot.  They smiled at people who wished to pass them and continued to talk to each other.  A lot.  They agreed with the flight attendants that they would sit down, but only after they had chatted to their friends.  A lot.  In fact, by my reckoning, they talked, interchanging who stood up and who sat down, for about four hours. 

Dora, now 3 years old

It was astonishing.  It was slightly annoying at times as I was, very ironically, trying to read another book about the Spanish called ‘Driving Over Lemons’  (Highly recommended btw) .  They were indefatigable in their efforts to talk.  The stamina involved was awesome!  I have never seen such a group of people make so much effort to merely talk.  And they talked and they talked and they talked!  They weren’t rude or obnoxious.  They didn’t shout or get drunk so much they turned into idiots – as us Brits are wont to do.  They just talked.  And they talked and they talked and they talked.

Looking back, even now, I just have to admire them.  Such fortitude!  Such endurance!  Such devotion to the art of conversation!  It is as Tremlett described, “This country is famous for noise… Spaniards seem to need noise.  Televisions can stay on in people’s homes all day long…Bars, where much of life takes place, have musical fruit machines, talking cigarette machines, coffee machines, microwaves and television sets all pinging, chattering, streaming, shouting and clattering all at once.  Raised voices, competing to be heard above the machines, add an extra layer to the noise”

Tremlett nailed it.  He was so right.  Sonalee and I have seen it everywhere we go.  The two of us are ‘anglosajon’ (Anglo-Saxon) in our outlook and so we find the Spanish need to talk somewhat strange and frightening.  This is confirmed by the thoughts of our Spanish teacher, Lara, who explains a huge problem in her apartment block.  One of the tenants has complained about the noise from the garage doors opening and closing as well as the noise from children playing in their apartments.  The rest of residents are shocked, why is this a problem now, why do we have to pay for new, quieter, doors?  Why do our children need to be quiet?   Lara shrugs with incomprehension as she states, “We are Spanish, we need to live around each other, we need the constant toing and froing.  What is their problem?”

Do you know the first question we ask upon hearing this?  

“Are they British?”

Apparently they aren’t actually Brits, but Spanish who are considered very strange by all of the other tenants in the block.

Que hace?

And upon my return to Spain, I had the good fortune to spend a few hours at the main train station in Madrid, Puerta de Atocha, the scene of the worst bombing  atrocity committed on European soil in 2004, killing 193 people.  That awful event will be etched into Spanish history for what it was and for what followed it – read Tremlett’s fine book to understand what it did for Spanish politics.

Today the station stands as an absolutely incredible statement of modern Spain.  The place is enormous.  It dwarfs anything the UK has, with its four levels of train departures to all places near and far in Spain, links to every single Madrid underground line and bevvy of smiling multi-lingual staff ready to help us idiot travellers.   It has its own indoor arboretum and stunning architecture.  Its own arboretum!  It’s a train station!  Waterloo, St Pancras and Victoria stations all have their merits – Puerta de Atocha beats them all hands down.

The journey home to Cordoba on a train that left on time, had functioning toilets, a bar that had prices equivalent to the high street, free  headphones to listen to the radio, specialised playlists or latest films on the overhead televisions, a seat for all and, again, smiling multi-lingual staff ready to help.  I did ponder the differences between the UK attempt to squeeze every last drop out of any customer in an aggressively capitalist society and the one that I currently  live in  that, well, doesn’t do what the UK does. 

On the way home I read Marca, a daily national newspaper devoted to football.  One of three daily national newspapers devoted to football plus a few other sports.  No current affairs, celebrity gossip – just sports.  Normally it has headlines devoted to Real Madrid but this day it had a photo of 60,000 people attending a game at Atletico Madrid.  It was a great picture.  The headline proclaimed that it was a world record.  This was because it was the attendance for a woman’s match.  60,000 people had gone to support their teams at a woman’s game.  And the paper was really proud of it.   It mirrored the coverage that the tv  stations give to the women’s game here – people actually watch it and treat it as an entity worth seeing for its own sake.

Anything that gets a Real Madrid headline off the front page must be special

Upon the return from travelling, Sonalee and I had the chance to your our local olive oil factory, courtesy of a man called Emilio who runs it.  It is a co-operative with about 400 members, some large landowners and other small stake farmers.  It is about 20 years old and it is big. This year it will be close to capacity with the bountiful harvest from this season.  Hopefully Norway, one of the big buyers of oil from here, will enjoy the oil from the olives that Dante has helped to ‘water’.

It was a fascinating short tour full of noise, smell of olive oil, machines whirring and doing their job of separating, sorting, squeezing, pouring and leaking ever so slightly.  The storage tanks were a real surprise – they’re huge – as was the realisation that very little is wasted in the whole process with waste materials being turned into fuel or compost.

  • Where the mix of olives and leaves and stuff gets delivered
  • Initial cleaning
  • First separating + Emilio
  • The huge storage vats
  • Like something from a film
  • The end product
  • Sonalee reading the Health and Safety sign that says you need earmuffs

Out in the fields, with the harvest over, the farmers are taking the opportunity to prune their trees, take in the wood for fireplaces, mulch the leaves and twigs and do what farmers around here have been doing for centuries – get the harvest in and start to party a bit.  And it’s all done  so efficiently given how labour-intensive it all is.   The farmers use machinery, of course, but they haven’t yet taken to intensive farming methods, huge agriculture companies buying up all the land and exploiting it for all they’re worth.  I’m not sure that the Spanish government would let them.

When we ‘anglosajon’ think of Spain we think of that macho culture that we have been groomed to think of as normal here.  The bullfights, the hunting, the church demanding that wives obey their husbands.  These are the things we are brought up to think are what Spanish people believe are intrinsic to their nature.  And perhaps, in certain places, these things hold to be true.

Except that we don’t see it.  We see a very different Spain than what was expected.  Tremlett said that he thought Spain was trying to catch up with the rest of modern Europe.  Economically, that is probably true.  I would argue that, culturally, it has taken on that difficult question of what to retain and what to jettison and is busy just getting on with it. 

I find that I cannot disagree with what Tremlett and Chris Stewart (the author of Driving over Lemons) conclude – that Spain and its people are remarkably adaptable, can point the way forward in the traditions that they keep and make you want to stay to find out more.  Those two authors are self-confessed Spain lovers.  I think I may have to join them in their infatuation. 

Hasta Luego

Paul

This tune from Melodia.  You know it makes sense. 

Paul

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