So there has been a hiatus of a few months and much toing and froing about a home for this blog and whether it was something that I still wanted to do, in part thanks to the toing and froing that was doing my head in.
Anyway, it is back. It will be here for the foreseeable future. It is nice to write these things for the most part but it is also nice to go back and read them again and remember stuff that we have done together that we would otherwise probably forget. So. I will carry on.
And, yes, there have been some photos that I am actually quite proud of. And some that are a bit rubbish, of course, but that’s life. Hopefully there will be more goodish ones.
Anyway, there is a lot to catch up with since the last one from Portugal which was a bit lacking in the prose department, again partly due to the toing and froing that was doing my head in.
So, the big news. My mum is coming over for Christmas! Yay! She is now well enough to travel and to visit a forrin country which is, frankly, quite something given what she went through at the start of the year.
Sonalee and I are well chuffed, in part because we get another visitor to experience the new and improved house that we want to show off to lots of people – and why shouldn’t we considering all the hassle and money we went through to get it into the state it is today?
The other news is that we are now both in Cordoba during the week and have been spending most weekends back in the village enjoying being in our new and improved house and taking the dogs out into the campo.
Luna needs the campo. She needs to run and run and run. It is just a part of her and denying her that opportunity would just be cruel. There are opportunities here for her but they’re a bit crap in comparison. The railway sidings and abandoned warehouses on the other side of the railway line is okay for her. She loves it for the most part but it’s a lot of concrete and stones and fencing and it isn’t the campo.
Plus getting there means going over a road bridge with steps that seem to attract people who sit there, drink awful alcohol and smoke dodgy stuff as if it were some kind of beauty spot when the reality is that it overlooks a busy railway line, a busyish road and the headquarters of the Spanish army in the area. And it’s littered with, well, tons of litter.
We live in a place called El Higueron, on the outskirts of Cordoba.
El Higueron is not a cool place. It is Chav Central. Gitanotastic. Pikeyville. An out of town place that offers us cheap rent for a small bungalow with a pool and a huge garden with landlords that don’t care that we have four dogs and two cats.
We could rent a place in town that would be much more salubrious but it would cost double what we are paying and the animals would be cooped up and bored on a daily basis. El Higueron it is then. And it really isn’t that bad.
It suits us both at the moment for the both of us are now working at the school that Sonalee so fortuitously found her dream job at last year. We are working together again, which is nice. They gave me a job!
The school officially say it is part-time but it doesn’t really feel like it given that it’s still five days per week and lots of teaching hours teaching English Literature in the secondary school.
The school were desperate, let’s not muck about. Something happened which led to a gap in their teaching staff and they needed someone who could fill that gap and not cost too much – hence the part-time contract. The kids are nice, the school has nice people, the school lunches are okay and are free, my department are nice, I’ve started coaching girls football once a week and I get to work with my wife.
What’s not to like? It’s great, let’s be honest here. It is the best outcome we could have wished for.
The dogs get a morning walk a few times per week and an evening walk with the two of us twice a week and we all get to go home and walk in the campo most weekends.
We both think we need to spend more time in Cordoba on the weekends just to experience the cultural aspects of what the city offers but we also just love going home. It’s nice that we have a choice.
Cordoba isn’t the most dynamic city in Spain but it does have some attractions beyond the ones we have seen as tourists before. It has a football team that I would be happy to see play on any given Sunday and it has people that we would like to see more of, people that we work with and who seem interesting.
It also has a lot of roundabouts and traffic systems that defy all logic. Naturally, these roundabouts induce utter chaos constantly given that the typical Spanish driver has no clue as to how roundabouts should work.
It is not their fault. When learning to drive, all Spanish learners are told to use the outside of two or three lanes on a roundabout TO GET TO WHICHEVER EXIT THEY WANT EVEN IF IT MEANS GOING ALL THE WAY AROUND THE BLOODY ROUNDABOUT IN THE OUTSIDE LANE TO DO SO. It’s literally part of their driving test so if a learner uses the inside lane, as you should do and is normal in most civilised countries in the world, and then changes lane to exit the fourth or fifth exit then they will fail their test.
It is the same with the things that we call indicators.
Indicators are compulsory in most countries. In Spain, it’s optional. And just because a car is indicating right from a roundabout it doesn’t mean that they won’t just keep going left because, well, because that isn’t the way that it is done here.
After a while you get used to the sheer idiocy of it all and you end up checking all angles and all mirrors each and every time you use a roundabout. It’s normal. But there are times when you ponder if a learner has ever asked an instructor what the inside lane on a roundabout is actually for given that you’re not supposed to use it. I mean, why build an inside lane at all if all you ever do is use the outside one? Or what the indicator lever is for given that they’re told not to use it.
Do not get me started on the belief that if you see a red light you don’t have to stop if you can’t see any traffic coming at you. That will take all night to explain.
But I digress from how fortunate we all are at the moment. Sparky and Sambol continue to be absolute wusses when it comes to the local cats coming over to eat their food and wee on their territory. We have decided that Sparky is an embarrassment to all Moroccan street cats who are meant to be as hard as nails.
The weather has turned somewhat here so that the endless 35 degree heat of the past months is now abating, thank God. We have actually had rain, which has been a blessing for all around this part of Andalusia.
I apologise for the dearth of decent photos for this blog but it has been an uncertain few months since the sheer exuberance of photography of our time in Portugal – and what a month that was, wow.
Now we are gearing up for the Autumn and Winter times after our summer in Iberia and, for Sonalee, an amazing ten days back in Sri Lanka that she loved so much. She needed to go. We all need to go home sometimes. This was her time. It has brought her a degree of contentment that I think we all crave from time to time.
And so, Ciao
Hasta Luego, inshallah
Ayubowan
Paul
PS. We saw these guys in Madrid in August with our friend Ken who is an ex roadie of theirs. It was a brilliant weekend and it’s really difficult to pick out a couple of tracks from all of those that we loved hearing. Here is one. This one is pretty good. And I loved this one.