Roadtrip to Southern Spain, Part 2: Toledo

To say that Toledo is convoluted and difficult to get around in, is like saying that Quantum Physics is a bit difficult to understand; I mean, it is a gross understatement.

We left Aranda de Duero happy that the start of our Road Trip had gone so well. If you have read what I wrote about it (a couple of postings back) you'd know that we were lucky to have arrived in that charming town when it was celebrating its patron saint. (Lots of music, dancing, roast lamb, and bodegas, the traditional caves where wine was stored.)

So, after having celebrated my birthday and spent a few days there, off we went down south toward our next stop: Toledo.

Aranda is an old town with the typically narrow streets and the crowded urbanization to be expected of towns like it. But, we found it was surprisingly well organized, so we had no trouble getting around or finding a place to park our car.

Hence we expected Toledo, a much bigger and much visited town to be even better: we were wrong.

Getting there was no problem. Spanish highways are a so very different from the paved cowpaths I first encountered back in the late seventies and early eighties. Today, driving in them is not only safe and fast, it is a pleasure.

Via the A1 and A2 highways, it's about 250 kilometers from Aranda de Duero to Toledo, about two and a half hours at my accustomed speed. We were there by noon.

Right! So, next order of business? Find the Air BandB lodging we had booked for our stay in Toledo.

As we drove into the city, I knew that finding the place we were going to stay would not to be easy. Even from afar, the city looked complicated:

 the streets that led us into the center of the city were winding, narrow, and filled with traffic. The street we were on kept going up and up, until we came to something that looked as if it were the center of the city. There was a large building to my left and a series of shops and restaurants to my right. The large building had limited-time parking in front of it and I drove into the only free space available.

"Let's try the GPS again," I said to my wife. The GPS had sort of given up trying to find the address I had entered. It gave an impossible route through streets that seemed not to exist. I decided I would put the car in a nearby parking garage and we decided that after we had eaten I would do what I usually do when stumped to find a street or address: I would ask a taxi to go there and I would follow it with my car.

We went into a hotel restaurant that was a half block away and in front of the large building that we found out was the famous Alcazar: that's the large building that dominates the view up above.

Anyway, the food in the restaurant was awful. It was mostly fast food, and bad fast food at that.

"Toledo is nothing like I remember it," said my wife.

"Nothing is forty years later," I said.

She had fond memories of the place because her parents had brought her to Toledo when she was a teenager.

I finished the "tostada" I had ordered and I can say that I would never order another like it unless it was under duress, threat of severe punishment, or ravishing hunger. It was a piece of dry, tasteless bread, with drier even more tasteless cheese melted on it, and a sprinkling of "chorizo" which is what the menu said was the pink things that were on the cheese.

"OK," I said once I had paid the exorbitant twenty euros for the "tostada" a beer and a soft drink for Claudette, "let's go find the street."

I thought that the best place to ask would be the garage. We had to get the car anyway so that would be killing the proverbial two birds with one stone. Again I was wrong.

I went up to the booth where the parking attendant was and I showed him the paper I had printed with the name of the street and address. I asked (and I will write the conversation in English; if you would like the funnier version in Spanish, go to my other blog http://mecaseconunafrancesa.blogspot.fr ):

"Excuse me, can you tell me how I can get to this street?"

He looked at the paper, scratched his head, rubbed his chin, and took his cap of and put it back on.

"Well, look" he said, "if you want to get to that street, you have to go back to the entrence of the town and then take the road that goes to the back of the town, and then go into this neighborhood, that I don't remember the name just now, but it is well-known and then you have to go in there, like if you were trying to get to the center of the city and..."

"Thank you very much," I said, "I think I can find it now."

I motioned to Claudette to follow me and we left the garage.

"Aren't we taking the car?" she asked.

"In Mexico," I said, "we have an adjetive, "cantinflesco", that is in honor of a famous comedian, Cantinflas, who was famous for talking for fifteen minutes without really saying anything. The directions that fellow gave me were "cantinflescas." We'd better ask someone else.

In the street, I looked for a taxi but after several minutes, none came by. So, I stopped a fellow that was pushing one of those two wheeled things used to carry heavy objects. In Mexico, we call them "diablitos", little devils. Don't ask me why.

"Excuse me," I said, "can you tell me where this street is?" I showed him the paper.

"Ah, yes," he said. "It is not far. In fact, I am going to a street that is not far from it. You can follow me."

"OK," I said turning to Claudette, "we'll go with this fellow and..." Claudette was not there. She was taking pictures across the street.

"Claudette," I yelled, "what are you doing over there? Come on! We have to go with this fellow."

Off we went. The fellow chattering all the time as we walked up narrow streets and down narrow streets. The cobbled pavement was rough. The fellow, a Rumanian, said that he liked Toledo because it resembled the old Roman towns of his country. It reminded me more of other tourist traps in France, like Carcassonne and Cordes sur Ciel, but I said nothing.

After about fifteen minutes of walking, he said, "I have to go this way to pick up something but you go up this street and at the end, you will find the street you are looking for."

It was another then minutes of walking and asking people but we finally found the street.

The building where our reservation said our room would be looked like a school dormitory. The reason for that was that it WAS a school dormitory! Located in the old Jewish barrio, it was lodging for the students that came to the nearby University of Castilla-La Mancha.

On the way there, we had passed the Cathedral, Synagogs, and lots and lots of stores selling trinkets for tourists. But the area was nice. There was a park across the street and Santa Maria la Blanca, an old Roman church, was not more than fifty meters away; also, just around the corner there was a street full of bars, cafés, and restaurants.

Getting to our room took some time. We rang the bell, knocked on the door, yelled and so on. No one answered. Finally, a young man, a student, came out and he let us in but warned that the lady who was in charge of the building was not there. We had to wait for her a half hour.

When we did get our room, although a bit spartan and definitely something for students, the view made all the trouble worth while. Here is what we could see from our large window:

That's Santa Maria la Blanca, and the other light is the street where the Museo del Greco is located.

"There seems to be no place to park the car around here," I said, "so let's leave it in the garage; the daily rent is not expensive."

"What about our luggage?" my wife asked.

"Well, we'll just walk down to the Alcazar, have something to eat in a nice place, and then walk back with our luggage."

Easier said than done: the waking DOWN toward the Alcazar was no problem; walking back UP with the bags trundling along the cobble-stone streets was a real treat.

We decided that we had better buy something to take back to the room with us and eat it there. We saw a modern looking shop that advertised those staples of new-cuisine fast food: wraps, falafel, and Subway type sandwiches. The person in attendance was a MEXICAN! I heard his accent and asked him where he was from. He said he was a native of the northern city of Torreón.

"I went to work as an illegal immigrant in the fields of California," he explained, "and I met a Spanish girl at a dance. We got married and here I am."

He told us a lot of things about the city, among them that most of the shops selling trinkets and souvenirs to tourist are not owned by locals, but rather by foreigners who employ locals to run them and to act as fronts for ownership by non-Spaniards. It now made sense to me why there were so many foreign looking shops in the town. Here is a sample:

That's Claudette coming out of the very Spanish Bijou Brigitte store.

Back in our room, we looked for a place to eat our sandwiches in peace. As I said, the building was like a student dormitory and the "dining room" was also in that style with long tables and stools, microwave ovens and coffee machines, vending machines and a common refrigerator with parcels of food that had name tags on them.

Night was falling as we finished our dinner so we went upstairs to freshen up and then go out to explore the town a bit more.

The fact is that we were very disappointed with the city. Yes, it has its bevy of old churches, a wonderful cathedral, its historic monuments, and so on, but wherever you go you are hindered by groups of tourist (lots of Chinese and Japanese) following a guide and crowding around whatever is to be seen to take photos and listen to the guides drone on about the "must see" sight.

But, that was not the worst of it. What I found deplorable was the hundreds of shops selling junk, the dozens of chain restaurants, the many, many bars and cafés that produce tons of trash (lots of dirty paper napkins and cigarette buts for the most part) that is strewn about the streets.

It was quite a change from Aranda de Duero where we didn't feel like tourists because the streets were filled with the locals celebrating their patron saint in their very peculiar way. There we were just part of the celebrating crowd. In Toledo, we felt like part of the herd, the tourist mob.

After wandering around for a while, we trudged up the winding streets to our room. The only bit of real local color we saw were the families enjoying the night air in the park across the street.

We had a well-deserved rest and then next day we made another game try at discovering the city; but, it was all the same wherever we went: shops selling souvenir junk and groups of tourists jamming the streets. In despair and glad we had only booked two days in Toledo, we went back to our room; we were resting from the mornings excursion and from walking up and down those streets, when there was a knock on the door: it was the owner of the building, the man who had rented us the room.

He is a nice and friendly fellow who confirmed that most of the tenants of the building were indeed students who were in Toledo for language studies at the University. He told us about his plans to convert the building into a "real hotel". We let him know, gently, that we were disappointed with the city and he told us that what we should see before we left the next day were the "cobertizos y callejones." (See this link for a good look at what these are and how they are being restored:

http://www.toledo-turismo.com/es/cobertizos-y-callejones_106 )

He told us that these dark, very old alleys were being restored as a tourist attraction. He said that they are especially interesting at night when their sombre mood is more romantic. They are covered because the overlapping roofs of the adjoining houses create a complete roof. Some have a canal on either side for the axels of carriages to pass through. The houses were mostly inhabited by jewish families in the old days.

We decided to have a go at them that night. Off we went half understanding the directions that the owner of the building had given us. Therefore, we promptly got lost.

Fortunately, we wound up in front of a police station. They say that God protects the innocent and the dumb, and He did so this time because when we asked for directions, a policeman that was just coming off duty told us he lived in that barrio and that he would show us the way.

The young policeman was a wonderful guide. He told us stories about the places and streets we were passing and explained how we could get back to the center of town if we got lost.

"Just look for stairs that go down, and go down every stair you see. Eventually," he said, "you will wind up in the center of town."

Here is a picture of the "callejón" where we started out trek.

We wandered around in the maze of callejones for an hour until we came to an open space where there was a sort of plaza. There was a bar-restaurant there and people were sitting outside in the tables that filled the plaza. It was a cheery spot with bright lights and live music playing.

"Ah, so this where the locals hang out, hiding from the madding crowds of tourist," I said.

It was a beautiful place, with trees and grand, old houses surrounding the plaza, creating the mood of a protected space.

We decided we had had enough for the night and we wanted to go back home. The problem was, we had no idea how to go back. We took the policeman's advice and we started to look for stairways.

After wandering around some more and going down every stairway we found, we did end up in the center of town. But, now we had to walk UP to our room. Oh, the misery. We were dead tired when we retired for the night well past midnight.

The next morning we decided to have breakfast in one of the cafes around the corner and then go to the El Greco museum. The breakfast was grand with large croissants and good coffee. Then we went to the "museum." It turned out to be another disappointment: for EIGHT euros one can stand in front of a wall where there is a reproduction of "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz." A "guide" drones on about the characters and the meaning of the painting to the assembled tourists. That is ALL there is in the so-called museum.

We gave up on Toledo and walked DOWN the streets to our car, with our luggage in tow. We paid the garage and sighed in relief as we were left the town. Next stop: Córdoba.

Road trip series postponed: want to know why?

To all of you who were waiting with bated breath for the next installment of our road trip to Spain "On to Toledo", I apologize for not posting it yet; the reason is that a more important and interesting subject has come up: money!

Yes, the root of all evil, that which makes the dog dance, the thing that "makes the World go 'round" according to the song from the musical "Cabaret",

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8P80A8vy9I

has come to usurp the fun part of life. As some of you already know, I have started a "crowd funding" campaign in order to gather the necessary funds to professionally edit and publish or self-publish a novel, "Mrinalika, a Third World romance". Hence, I thought I should use my blog to give my loyal half-dozen readers a "behind the scenes" look at the campaign.

Firstly, I'd like to explain how all of this started: as we all know, the Internet, and its evil/good children, social media, have come to change many things. One of the most important is the Publishing World.

Publishing has been around practically as long as Humanity has been around. Paintings on the wall and scratches on rock surfaces were Humanity's first editions. It took us thousands of years to go from cave walls and rock to clay tablets, parchment, and eventually paper. And it took just a few hundred years to go from paper to electronic bits displayed on screens.

After the printing press was invented, publishing was pretty straight forward: an author wrote something, took it to a printer, got it printed, and then took the copies of his work to a book seller. An author paid the printer either a fee from his own pocket or, more frequently, from the pocket of a patron or sponsor, or he shared the profits from selling his stuff with the printer and book seller. Even Shakespeare and Proust did this.

In the early Twentieth Century, another actor appeared on the scene: the agent. Since there were now hundreds, if not thousands, of magazines and book publishers in the world, it was hard for an author to manage, negotiate, or even approach the right magazine and/or publisher for his work. So, a specialized entity, an agent, offered to do that for a fee: usually 10-15% of the author's profits.

That situation went on for decades: authors wrote, agents found and negotiated with the proper magazine or publisher, editors of the magazine or publisher cleaned up the manuscript and argued with the author about changes, and finally the publisher published and distributed the work.

But then came the disruptive element: the Internet.

In the old author-agent-publisher system, the publisher took care of most everything: editing, creating a book cover, distribution, promotion, getting the book reviewed, etc. With the event of the Internet, all of those pieces flew apart and became independent. The motivation for this was, and is, MONEY! Or better put, PROFIT and COSTS.

As the old system of author-agent-publisher found that the profits of the publisher were diminishing and the cost increasing, it became harder and harder for first time, or unknown authors to get their manuscripts printed or even looked at. Agents found they could interest publishers only in sure-fire best sellers, and publishers only wanted that kind of stuff. It was easier to sell of piece of trash like "Fifty Shades of Gray" (pornography always sells) than to publish a serious novel, such as Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore."

In an interesting experiment, an author took a book that had sold millions in the fifties and sixties "Old Yeller" and which had been a very popular Walt Disney movie, put it into typed manuscript form, changed the title and sent it to agents and publishers. NO ONE WOULD TOUCH IT.

Agents complained that there was no market for "dog stories" and publishers asked why there were no "sex scenes" in it.

Which brings us to the present problems an author faces when trying to publish a book. Firstly is convincing an agent to "take on" your manuscript. Time after time you are told NOT to send out your manuscript unless it is PERFECT. By that they mean that is it professionally proofread and edited. "Any typos," they will tell you, "misuse of grammar, or badly structured sentences will guarantee that a publisher will not even bother to send you a rejection slip." Professional independent editors charge between $1,500-$2,500 dollars to line edit a 100,000 word novel. Ebook publishers and electronic magazines will ask you to do your own cover or graphic designs. They tell you that a book cover that will "work" in both electronic and paper publishing has to have certain graphic elements and that a graphic designer asks for $400-$600 US dollars for a cover design. Advertising, distribution, and promotional campaigns cost between $1,000 and $2,000 US Dollars. Internet publishing does not call for thousands of copies that are distributed to bookstores; it is done "on demand", that is, the book is printed only when a person orders it online. The printing costs goes against the profits of the author. And so on, and so on.

Yes, you can use something like Amazon's Kindle Publishing to self-publish a book. That is, you can write your manuscript in Word, create a book cover in your favorite paint program, and upload it to Amazon's CreateSpace or Kindle Directo Publishing but you are on your own to write, design, promote, distribute, etc. etc. Of course, you can then buy all those services, but it that case, you are back to square one: see the costs mentioned above.

You can say, "To Hell with that: I'll just put it up on Amazon and wait to see what happens." Well, so do thousands of people and what happens is that an ebook without promotion rarely sells more than a couple of hundred copies. Amazon doesn't care because if a million authors give them 2 dollars profit for selling just one book each, that's two million dollars for them and 1 dollar for each author, if the selling price is $2.99. Many times, it is even less. However, it is zero cost for Amazon, it is just pure profit.

This now brings us neatly to my efforts at crowd funding. Please go look at the campaign web page:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mrinalika-a-third-world-romance-novel/x/8737005

Notice the target? $3,500 dollars. Well, if you add up the costs above mentioned, you will see where that figure comes from. BUT, consider that even if the TARGET IS NOT REACHED, any and all funding is useful. I do believe in PROFESSIONAL EDITING AND CONTENT REVIEW. It is very important whether I can get an agent to manage the novel or if I decide to SELF-PUBLISH the novel.

Another thing to mention: it is important to know that NOT ONLY THE AMOUNT CONTRIBUTED IS IMPORTANT, SO IS THE AMOUT OF CONTRIBUTORS! The INDIEGOGO web sites promotes and features a campaign according to the AMOUNT OF CONTRIBUTORS NOT THE AMOUNT OF MONEY. That is why even contributions of one dollar make a difference.

OK, now you know why I started this thing. The campaign will last two months. I will keep all six of you posted on any further and interesting developments.

Please post your comments on both this blog and on the campaign website:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mrinalika-a-third-world-romance-novel/x/8737005

Regards,
Rodolfo

Three things the French love

There are three things that the French hold dear to their hearts: the first and foremost is Market Day.

I've talked about this before but now that I have often joined the fray, as it were, I can say without qualms that the French truly enjoy going, once a week, at least, to a designated place where you can be jostled by the rushing crowd, charged twice the normal price for any commodity, sold cheap good from China as if they were made by laborious French craftsmen, and generally made to spend on a Sunday meal what you usually spend for the rest of the week.

No matter where you go in this country, no matter how small the village or how far from the nearest paved road a huddled dozen homes may be, there is a Market Day, which is as inevitable as death and taxes.

The little old lady across the street may lay prostrate with age and infirmities six days a week but on Market Day she will hustle out of bed, put on her support hose, grab her cane and shopping bag and rush like a rugby fullback through the throng in search of dirt encrusted mushrooms and smelly cheese.

It used to be that Market Day was the day when farmers and stock breeders near a town would bring their products--usually bread, cheese, fowls and their byproducts, vegetables, meat from slaughtered animals (rabbits, lambs, and so on)--to sell to town folks. There is still some of that but for the most part you have professional salesmen in special trucks that fold out to become well-lit and well-stocked stores, hustlers with mounds of cheap shoes or shirts or whatever the season calls for; specialists who sell soaps made from fruits and vegetables, or bunches of vanilla roots, or oils extracted from exotic seeds; food from Morocco, China, India, made by immigrants from those countries or Spanish paella, Danish pastry, or Japanese sushi all made by French cooks.

Which brings me to the second thing the French love most: eating at the market.

Now, I know about eating at a "mercado": Mexicans have been eating in the town market for hundreds of years, if not thousands. If you, dear reader, are ever in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, you will see the beautiful representation of Market Day in Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. Among the hundreds of little figures you will see some sitting down to a meal after having done their shopping for leather sandals and snakeskin belts.

But for the French--at least the modern French--eating in the market on Market Day, is a novelty. And it is such fun for them that they are willing to pay exorbitant prices for six oysters and a cup of bad white wine (a cup is an exaggeration because what they give you resembles the little containers you get from the nurse when they need a urine sample.)

The crowd in the market prefers sitting on rickety plastic chairs and eating with disposable plastic forks over unstable picnic type tables rather than take the damn oysters home to enjoy them with a decent and much less expensive entire bottle of white wine.

Today, after a couple of weeks of the nicest, warmest indian summer days, the curtain finally came down on summer and the rain and cold told us the party was over and that winter would soon be here. But, you could't tell it from the crowd at the market: they hustled and bustled and shoved each other around in order to eat the six oysters and buy dirt encrusted mushrooms.

Which brings me nicely to my third point: a third thing that the French hold dear is freshness! Only surpassed by the Japanese who seem to like eating fish while the poor things are still squirming around on the plate, no other country makes such a big deal of "freshness" as do the French.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that sometime in the past the things brought to market were indeed freshly picked vegetables and fruits, and freshly slaughtered animals. But, the only "fresh" thing I saw in the market today was the mud on the cèpes, those huge, brown mushrooms that bloom in the autumn midst the shady, humid woods. Although, according to my wife, that's a good sign. (Go figure.)

A lot of the prepared food looked pretty warmed over and the fish and meat on the counters looked like they had been in the fridge for a while. The tangerines were so fresh they were still green and the green peppers had been around so long they were turning red.

There are many things I like about France; there are many of its traditions which I like and admire. But, Market Day is not one of them. Not because of what it is but because of what modern life has made of it: the commercialization of a great tradition to the detriment of small producers and the gain of greedy merchants.

There are places, to be sure, where Market Day is still what it was meant to be. In smaller towns and villages that are not "profitable" for the roving bands of greedy merchants and hustlers of bad goods, local farmers do bring their products to the market. I remember a market day in Vic en Bigorre with farmers bringing in their live rabbits and chickens, a fellow that made and bottled fruit liqueurs; and in Gimont on a Sunday buying from a local lady a "barquette" of cherry tomatoes for one euro which are the best cherry tomatoes I have ever had.

I should start a petition on Change.org to get cities to change the name "Market Day" to "Cheap Crap at Expensive Prices Day." Market Day should be an "appellation contrôlée"and should be reserved for markets that welcome local producers of authentic and good fare.

Roadtrip to Spain -- Part 1: Aranda de Duero

We were supposed to have left on the 13th of September because I did not want to spend my birthday, the 15th, on the road, driving. But, because of circumstances which I will not discuss again for the sake of my health, we did not. We left--you might have guessed--on the 15th.

So, on that date, we put everything but the cats--literally--into the car and off we went south toward the border with Spain.

* * * * * * Conversation as we headed out of the city * * * * * *

Claudette

Did you check the tire pressure?

Me

No.

Claudette 

Did you check the oil?

Me 

No, 

Claudette

Did you check the water level of...

Me

Look, these cars don't need checking of anything. You can go 100,000 kilometers without once opening the hood. If something is needed the computer will tell you. So, stop with the asking if I checked. I did not check. There is no checking involved in my trips. I just go.

(Sepulchral, icy silence ensues. Then a few minutes later:)

Claudette

Well, when I went to Spain with my parents, they did not leave the town without...

Me

For God's sake that was 50 years ago and those cars hardly ran 50 kilometers without a breakdown, they used up more oil than gasoline. Things have changed a bit since then. We don't need to hand crank them to start. There's paved roads and we won't be attacked by bandits that look like something out of a painting by Goya. 

(More silence, rain starts to fall. I start the windshield wipers and it is obvious they are falling apart.)

Claudette

You should have checked the windshield wipers. They need changing.

Me

Arrrgh!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It's about 350 kilometers from Biarritz to Aranda de Duero but we managed to get there just a few minutes after 15:00 hours. The house we had booked for our stay was in a zone for pedestrians; we had to leave the car a few blocks away. (Later, the owner of the house showed us a parking spot that was just a block away; very convenient.)

It was 16.00 hours by the time we met the landlady and she gave us the key. Here's Claudette going into the house.

We had the whole house to ourselves.

They say that God protects the innocent and the stupid. We didn't know that we had arrived the day that the "Fiestas" of the town started. Aranda de Duero is in wine country so the patron saint is "La Virgen de las Viñas", the Virgin of the Vineyards. (Unlimited supply of wine? Spaniards having fiestas? What could this lead to???) 

The town has dozens of "Peñas"; these are social clubs who each has as a home base a "Bodega", an underground cellar, cut from the stone bed on which the town was built. These Bodegas were used to store wine so they are cool, somewhat humid and each has an exhaust passage to allow the gasses produced from fermentation to escape and not pose a danger to the workers--not to mention the ruckus and brouhaha that dozens of drunken Spaniards can produce in an enclosed space.

 Nowadays, the Bodegas are mainly used for dinners and drinking parties of the Peñas. On the days of the Fiestas, anyone can go into any Bodega and when you do, there is always a club member there to offer you wine and some tapas to eat. Admittedly, more wine than tapas, but there you are.

But, that was for us to experience later. We were starving upon arrival, so as soon as we were settled in, we headed for the part of town where the bars and restaurants are. Every one of them was crowded with singing, drinking, laughing, loudly talking locals. We wanted to eat the town's specialty: roasted lamb. So we found a good restaurant in a  side street.

After a San Miguel to quench the thirst acquired from four hours of driving, we had a half bottle of good Duero wine Señorío de Nava, crianza, 2008. The meat was a quarter of a lamb brought to us in a hot, earthen plate.


It was accompanied by a bowl of salad, and that wonderful oven baked bread typical of León y Castilla. Here is a better picture of it.

So, hunger satisfied, thirst quenched, off we went to explore the town. The place was jumpin'! The bars were full, restaurants with every table occupied, the streets crowded with townspeople dressed in funny costumes, and bands, bands, bands.

It seems that every Peña has a band and on occasions such as these, they gather to play in the streets. First they play in front of their Bodega, and after having had a good many cups of wine and other spirits offered by their own Bodega keeper or the people in near-by bars, they march off playing, followed by their supporters who were dressed in funny, strange, or weird clothes, with painted faces, and cups of wine in hand.

The bands play popular and traditional songs. But, from time to time, they stopped marching and played a "jota", the traditional dance music of this region of Spain. And people in the crowd would dance. Here's a smidgen of a jota:

I think that even I would dance better than the guy in the red shirt on the right.

We thought: "Well, isn't this wonderful and colorful. What good luck that we arrived when the locals are in such a festive mood. What we didm't know was that this was scheduled to go on until four in the morning of the next day---and for the next seven days! And, we were right in the middle of it. Thank Goodness for double windows.

Supposedly, all of this was in honor of the Virgin, so one would imagine that the center of activity would be the church. But we walked by the place, and no one was there!

RIEN Á VOIR! CIRCULEZ! CIRCULEZ!

Since there was no action at the church, on we went to a street from where a lot of music and revelry seemed to be emanating. That street was lined on one side with bars and "asaderos", restaurants whose specialty is roasted lamb. In front of one of the most celebrated ones, there was (what else?) a band playing and a guy dancing.

Late in the afternoon quiet descended on the town. We thought that the "Fiestas" were over; but that was not the case. It was just a break in the fandango, a sort of catching of their collective breath in order to go at it until the very end of the night's "Verbena", a sort of concert, dance, drinking party that was to last until four in the morning. It did not last until four in the morning--it lasted until SIX in the morning!

Here is the town resting before the all-night party that was to come. Notice the painting of the house (on the right) that was demolished. When an old house is torn down, they put up these tromp l'oeil until the new house can be built or they leave the old facade (house on the left) for the same purpose.

We, of course, went to sleep early--around midnight. Thankfully, the double glazed windows on the street side kept most of the noise out. The next day, we got up around nine in the morning and wanting a cup of coffee and some breakfast, we went out and into the quiet of the streets. We went by a store that was both a pharmacy and a ham and sandwich shop. Rather appropriate, I thought.

The sandwiches this place sells are great. They are made with that local, round bread and the very good Iberico or Serrano hams. You can also buy a whole leg of ham which can cost from 90 to 250 euros, depending on the weight and quality.

Our final night in town was like a grand finale: all the bands of all the Peñas paraded through the streets playing and drinking, followed by huge crowds. As each band reached its home Bodega, they would file in and a crowd of their families and friends would follow them into the place to drink and dance till into the wee hours.

Not content with the racket of the bands, while all the marching, and playing, and drinking, and dancing was going on, there was a loud and long fireworks display.

The day after, after some more coffee and rest, we were off to the next stop: Toledo! I'll post the pictures and text about that city in the next blog entry.

A Tail Of Two Cats

The title to this blog entry might seem facetious to you, or you might think it a rather bad pun, but it does make a point about our two cats.

People who have not had pets do not understand or do not believe that animals have personalities just as different and distinct as humans do.

Take our cats, please. (No, that's an old Henny Youngman joke: "Take my wife, please.") But, I digress.

Our two cats, or maybe I should say our cat and the other one that comes to eat and sleep here during the day, are as different in behavior and habits as any two humans can be.

Lea,  the cat on the right of this photo,

has the personality, habits, and finicky character of an old spinster (she is old BTW; we guess she is 12 years old which would make her a 70 year old person). If you are a film buff like I am, I would describe her like Millicent Wetherby, the spinsterish woman played by Joan Crawford in the movie Autumn Leaves. Or perhaps an older Jane Hudson as played by Katherine Hepburn in Summertime, the movie about a spinster who goes to Venice and falls in love with Rossano Brazzi. 

Well, Prince, the cat on the left of the picture would make a convincing Renato de Rossi, the character played by Brazzi in the same movie. He is dashing, handsome, amorous, and quite the man (uh, cat) about town.

In this photo,

 you can see that he is not one of perfunctory sleeping habits, much to the dismay of Lea. Yet, much like in the movie Summertime (and if you are too young to remember it or have seen it, here is a link to a clip in Youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67MxIl795w) Lea is just as reluctant to give in to Prince's shenanigans as was Miss Hepburn when Rossano Brazzi tried to charm her out of her wits and to stay in Venice. In the movie, Jane's common sense and old maid morality prevails and she leaves Venice. In our house, Lea's spinsterish spirit prevails and she has no truck with Prince.

Joan Crawford's behavior toward Cliff Robertson in "The Autumn Leaves" it is not too far fetched to describe what happens to Lea when Prince comes around after being out all night doing who knows what all over the neighborhood. (See the 1956 trailer for the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiDz3vcEBnQ).

When he comes in, like the rake that he is, he goes up to Lea and kisses her (actually rubs noses). She accepts his gesture but then strikes at him, as if saying, "You smell of another cat, you cad!" Prince nimbly jumps out of harm's way, like the young, street-wise cat that he is, then jauntily goes to have his milk and food, after which he sleeps all morning. Nevertheless, when he leaves to do his rounds, she stares out the window, longingly.

But, back to why I named this entry "The Tail Of Two Cats."

There are many things that give insight into an animal's personality and its state of mind. But, in a cat, the most telling (apart from the meowing, purring, and growling) is the way they move or manage their tail.

Lea is constantly at war with her tail. She chases it, bites it, paws at it with her claws to such an extent that we find tufts of her hair on the rug and her tail looks like those Christmas tree branches after they have gone dry and have lost all of their pine needles.

To me this "tail chasing" denotes Lea's character and anxieties. Like all old maids, she is highly strung, mildly psychotic, and always chasing herself instead of chasing a male cat.

While Prince, on the other hand, never chases his tail. He does chase other cats, especially his nemesis the black cat that lives in a street near-by and dares invade Prince's territory.

When he is not fighting, Prince's main occupation is sunning himself in front of the house or on top of our garden table. His tail, a thick, furry thing that serves him well as as rudder when he is jumping from roof to roof, keeps a sort of time when he is at rest. Like a metronome, it flips from side to side, at regular intervals, as if he were humming to himself and thus marking the beats to a song.

When he is about to get into a fight or he is on the alert, his tail stands straight up, like a battle flag.

It reminds me of the Japanese soldiers in movies like Kagemucha.

Lea, in contrast, uses her tail mostly to display anger or displeasure. She shoots it straight back as if streamlining herself for a run.

Prince being an expressive cat, uses his tail in a lot of ways which (being a cat psychiatrist I am in a position to know) I think allows him to be a more settled, well-adjusted feline; while Lea, which is always at odds with her tail (and it seem with Life itself) is so nervous her hair falls out.

Prince seems to have learned his cat ways from Tom, a cat that lives across the road in a neighbor's house and whom we suspect is in fact Prince's father.

That's Tom sitting on a post of our front fence. As one can see, Price looks a lot like Tom. Prince has taken over the street from Tom and occasionally he lets him know who is boss now so Tom is always on the lookout for Prince. He is, in fact, afraid of him -- as one can see from the way he looks when Prince is approaching.

Tom has a funny way of expressing himself with his tail. He never meows or purrs or utters any sound at all. But, he twirls his tail when we feed him. Its his way of saying, "Thanks for the chow."

Strangely enough, there are no female cats in our neighborhood (except Lea and she has been "fixed", as they say). So, I wonder how this cat saga is going to develop when a she-cat appears on the block.

I bet there'll be a lot of tail wagging.

Dummies defeat designers: not really news!

So, I imagine some guy in the design department of an automotive manufacturer pitching the first idea ever for a wireless device that would lock/unlock a car's doors with just the push of a button on the key itself:

"You know what happens," the guy said to management, "to a lot of people (he did not want to say women because he would have been accused of being a misogynist by the one woman on the management team) they leave the car and forget to lock the doors, or think that they will be back in five minutes so they are too lazy to lock them, and ¡bam! a car thief makes off with the car in a New York Minute. So, here is the perfect answer to that problem: a wireless device to lock the doors of a car with just the push of a button."

The guy was given a substantial raise and he was promoted to head of design at the car company.



OK,  now flash forward twenty years. How do you defeat such great design? Easily. A few days ago, a person I know (no names, please) got out of the car, dutifully clicked on the device to lock the doors and walked away from the car. Why do I say that this wonderful design was defeated? BECAUSE THE PERSON LEFT A WINDOW OPEN! And, not only that, when the car alarm complained by bipping, this person, ignored the beeps and was even annoyed by them!

I wish they would make talking alarms that would shout insults,

"Hey, dummy, you forgot to close the door!

TV clickers, those long black things with lots of buttons that allow you to change channels, adjust the volume, and so on were designed so that one didn't have to get up from the couch to go twist a dial or push a button on the TV set itself when you wanted to change channels or adjust the volumen. How can a person defeat this design? Easily: you leave the clicker in another room!

Some smart designer made a brush with a handle that fits neatly onto the handle of the matching dust pan. Thus you keep both items together neatly without having to look for one or the other when you want to, say, pick up the cat litter that your cat pushes out of the litter box.

Why is it, then, that every time I want to use said items I can find the brush but not the dust pan or the dust pan but not the brush? Foiled again, Mr. Designer.

Pens are a favorite subject around our house. It seems you can never find one when one wants to write down a message or take down a telephone number. My wife buys boxes of them and they all quietly, mysteriously disappear. So, she decided to get a pen designed to avoid those pesky pens that run away. She got one of those pens that are attached to a base by a chain!

Oh, yeah? Well try to find both pen and base. They seem to have run away like those prisoners that escape chained together in those prison movies.

When I worked in the systems support department of a large corporation, we systems engineers dreaded the time we had to answer calls for support from users. No matter how "fool proof" we or the designers of computer software made things, users would find a way to defeat the design. Idiots and fools can prove incredibly ingenious when it comes to making stupid mistakes or defeating the purpose of a design.

Take floppy disks, for example. Most people nowadays do not remember why floppy disks were called that. It was because they were indeed floppy, made of very thin material. So, they came protected by a harder plastic cover. Well, there was always some enterprising moron who would look at the thing, figure that if the floppy was going to be read by the machine it should be taken out of its cover! One guy cut the cover with a large pair of scissors, put the floppy part into the floppy disk reader, and after the reader crunched it up into a ball of plastic, he brought it to us at the systems department to complain that his machine did not work properly.

There is a web site http://www.darwinawards.com that records the fatal disregard of the obvious, the warning sings, the defeat of designs that are meant to keep you safe. The results are tragic...although they do make me laugh. I especially like the story of the man who turned off the lights of his car to "save electricity." A 40 ton truck showed him it was a bad idea.

There has been a lot of reports lately that car makers are working on production of "driverless" cars. That is, cars that drive themselves. Well, if that doesn't scare you into becoming a Jehovah Witness I don't know what does.  Can you imagine some guy defeating that little piece of design? "Oh, let's see what happens if ..."

Nothing, absolutely nothing is "idiot proof". Only an idiot would believe things can be idiot proof.

I have conceded to the constant nagging

Well, there is just so much nagging one can stand. I won't reveal the source of said nagging but, there you are. Or rather, here I am...writing another long entry, back in the saddle again, as it were.

So, here is the catch-up, not ketchup, c-a-t-c-h-u-p, as in getting you up to date.

We came back from Mexico (Oh, it seems so long ago, as if it had happened in another century) in May of last year. And the first order of business was to retrieve our cat, which had been parked with a relative (I won't name names) for the duration of our five month trip--or so we thought.

We went to fetch her and, (to quote the girl in Gone With The Wind), " Oh, Lordy, Lordy" we were told that said feline had (to quote a character from the film Brief Encounter) "Offted it", taken a powder, scrammed it, jumped the hoop, taken it on the lam, in other words, gone!

W. C. Fields said that absence does not make the heart grow fonder; if anything, it gives a fella a chance to get a drink. In the case of our cat, it gave her the chance to see the town because not wanting to wear out her welcome, she disappeared into the wilds of Biarritz.

We had given up hope of finding her when one day she appeared on the roof of our wash house. But, resentful as only a female of the species can be, she would not come into the house. Skinny as an anorexic fashion model, she would only come, hesitantly, to have food we left by the garden door.

Finally, after a few days of that, growling as if resentful that we had abandoned her for so long, she consented to come into the house.

Soon after our wayward cat came back, another cat (almost a kitten) started showing up in our window. We had been feeding Tom the Cat, the cat that belongs to the neighborhood, for a while and we thought that this new arrival might be one of Tom's descendants because it had the same striping but very blue-green eyes, not like Tom's dark green ones.

Prince as a kitten.

We called it Princess, because it was so dainty and beautifully colored,; but as it grew and became a muscled, well-formed male, we had to change the name to Prince the Cat. Not only has it grown in size, it has grown in strength and muscle power. Prince has taken over from Tom (in fact he has beat up poor old Tom a few times). He fights off any stray cat that comes into out street and has even jumped a sissy dog that strayed away from its home a few houses down the road.

As you can see, he is not much on the well-mannered pussy-cat form. He is a laid-back cat who has rough nights and needs a rest after having his breakfast.
 
On the home front, there was summer to contend with. My wife started posting our spare bedrooms on a B&B site and had quite a nice response. We had myriad guests from a nice Indian guy from Singapore to a Russian family.

After that, the family that usually rents our house for two weeks during August came to stay and WE offed it to Paris. That was a great trip. As usual, we went by the national roads rather than the superhighways. The nationals are more colorful, there are a lot of nice towns to see on the way, and places to eat and stay. This time we made a stopover in Lectoure, a town famous for its beautiful high tower.

The evening we stayed there was balmy so we looked for an outdoor place to have dinner. We came upon a vary nice terrace, with tables and candle light, which was the restaurant of a hotel. We waited to be seated and when the waitress came, she asked if we were staying in the hotel. We said that we were not and that we just wanted dinner. But, she said, I can't give you a table if you are not staying in the hotel. Trust the French to figure out a way to turn away business.

Rebuffed, we went on our way and found a very nice restaurant with a very busy and nicely appointed terrace, with huge umbrellas that protected the tables from the few raindrops that fell. After a very good dinner in that terrace restaurant we walked along the village, which was quiet and peaceful--everyone being home and in bed.

Paris was, well, Paris: full of summer tourists and the hustle and bustle of a large city. We stayed away from the usual stomping grounds of the crowds. I only visited the Louvre a couple of times and when we went I usually steered clear of the gathering places for the herd: the Mona Lisa, the winged victory, etc. There are so many other things to see, many of them never visited by the crowd.

We like to take city buses into and from the city. It is like being on a bus tour. Number 52 goes by most of the "sights" of Paris and leaves you just on  the Hotel de Ville or the Madeleine.

This is one of our favorite café-restaurants in Paris, Le Livre.

The shopping area of the Louvre.

One of my favorite areas of Paris: the Pantheon is to the right of that fence but that beautiful church and tower flank a street that goes down to the Rue Mouffetard, the oldest part of the city on the left bank. Hardly any crowds come to this part of town.

And, of course, the carrousel at the Hotel de Ville. This is where number 52 drops us off.

OK, so back to Biarritz we came at the middle of August. Fortunately by then the highways were not so crowded as at the start of vacation time. Now it was time to get ready for all the late summer activities: the visit from the kids, doing some gardening and taking some local trips with the AFLACOBA crowd.

September was taken up by the Biarritz Film Festival. Since we are members of AFLACOBA, the Latin Americans in the Basque Country association, we get a special price. There were a lot of good films and documentaries this year and the "Latin American Village", a sort of market place for people selling food, wares, and goods from Latin American countries was as usual noisy and fun.

The Biarritz Casino where the Latin American Village is housed.

One of the many musical events of the Biarritz Film Festival

The AFLACOBA also organized a trip to a very beautiful, historic and colorful Spanish town just south of us: Pasajes.

In the small boat you can see on the bottom right corner, one goes from one part of the town to the other, the older part, which is on the other side of the bay.

Pasajes other claim to fame, other than its colorful beauty and anchovy canning business, was the fact that Victor Hugo came here and rented a house for the summer. It is also the place where he received the terrible news that one of his beloved daughters had drowned in a boating accident.

October and November are sort of the doldrums around here. The town is resting from all of the tourists that have crowded it for two months and everyone is doing house chores and getting ready for the big vacation and celebration: Christmas.

I took the time to start a new novel: "Diego Rivera and Don Porfirio Díaz" about the fictional meeting in Paris of these two seminal personages of Mexican history. But, I also finished another novel, "The Story of a Doctor, his Town, and his Country", which I printed two copies of and sent to a Novel contest by the great editorial house Planeta in Barcelona. I also finished a book of short stories and sent that to another contest in Cadiz, Spain.

So, then came Christmas: it was, as usual, a great dinner with friends and family. On the 24th we had the traditional oysters, foie gras with champagne, and a splendid dinner that was topped with Christmas pudding. On the 25th we had a great lunch of salmon and lamb chops; the fish course featured a great Sancerre white wine.

We were a bit disappointed we could not get away again to go back to Mexico. And, having been spoiled by the temperate and constantly nice climate of Dolores, the town where we stayed for five months, we were not prepared for the constant rain and cold of this year's winter.

 Ship wrecked by the storm; torn apart against the rocks.

 Yet another storm coming from the south, from Spain, courtesy of the North Atlantic.

We are prisoners of the climate here: few days are nice enough to go out and about. We stay indoors and I we write or work, as the time permits. The garden is a mess and we will have a lot of work to do in the Spring and Summer.

Right, so that is our catch-up. I will now post my weekly blog with the usual sarcasm and wit. Please leave some comments on the blog.

APT
Rodolfo