Another festival in Terreros

This weekend see the 9th 'Experiencia Espantapitas' taking place in Terreros. My understanding of this is a music, arts and discussion festival for indie music. On the south end of the town (out past the Calypso) an area has been made for all the campers and there are hundreds of tents there with more dreadlocks on show than I've ever seen before. I think this is a festival that moves around Spain, I don't think it's here every year.

The arena has been built at the other end of the beach next door to Pepa's and the festival is running tonight and tomorrow, yesterday being a rehearsal day. We can hear the music up at the villa so anyone living on Calas del Pinar (where we are buying) will be getting a rousing free rendition as they are very close to the action, and it's currently 1.30am and still going on.

Throughout August there have been several events taking place, a few weeks ago there was to be a free concert by Malu, a female best selling singer in Spain. The stage was set up next to Pepa's bar but for some reason Malu cancelled on the day she was supposed to appear due to ill health.

During the 1st two weeks of August, which seems to be the main Spanish holiday weeks there were activities on the beach and the square every day with a large board erected in the main square detailing what was happening and when, from School Band competitions to Basket Ball games and much much more. It has really been good to see so much activity in the town and on the beach and although the population has increased 10 fold during August, we haven't found it to be as much of a problem as many of the local residents had told us it would be when we first arrived. OK, so there are more cars parked in the car parks at the bars at night and there are definitely more people in the local hyper-market but overall it has been now where near as bad as we were expecting.

With so many people and so many events, we have been really impressed with how smoothly the organisation of them is, how quickly they build the stages, seating tiers etc and then how quickly they take them down again and how, after every event, the whole place is cleaned ready for the next day.

It will be interesting to see whether this weekend really does so a mass evacuation of the beaches and streams of cars heading away from the coastline back inland - not to be seen until next summer.

After this weekend we should all be able to return to our normal peaceful lives living in a quiet sleepy little Spanish town.

My Kumquats are turning yellow!

Now that's a phrase I never thought I'd be typing.

Back in June the Terreros Ladies Group bought me a Kumquat tree for my birthday. Now, they weren't to know that me and horticulture don't exactly go hand in hand, that when I buy cut flowers and put them in a vase the only time they get water is when I first put them in or that growing plants in the garden involves coming into close contact with soil which may hide any one of a multitude of insects not to mention the number of livestock that will move in amongst the leaves, fruit and flowers of any plant left in my possession.

This tree is in a pot so that it can be moved and planted when we move into our own home later on, so I now have a serious watering issue. We live in the hottest climate I've ever lived in where things dry out in an hour and I am now responsible for ensuring this tree has adequate water at all times to nurture and grow flowers and fruit which, when ripened (always assuming we'll get that far) will be ideal for making marmalade (and cooking ranks about level with my skills in horticulture - still, you should learn new tasks once you have retired and have the time - shouldn't you?).

So, several weeks on and the tree is surviving well, the little bees have pollenated the flowers so that we have a couple of dozen fruits growing and so far the birds haven't realised the fruit is there for the taking.

Today I noticed a couple of the fruits, having grown to be slightly larger than a pound coin, are starting to turn yellow rather than green. I felt so proud of them, like a mother duck watching her ducklings take to water the first time! I know the ultimate aim is for them to turn orange, but just seeing them start to change colour to anything is an achievement for me. I feel like a true gardener

Now......

anyone got a recipe for Kumquat Jam?

For my Dad.

The hardest thing about moving to Spain was leaving my Dad but he wanted us to go, he knew it would be good for my health and with todays technology, keeping in touch is so much easier. I rang Dad every couple of days from Spain to chat to him about our new adventure, what had happened, what we had achieved and what had gone wrong and he always seemed to enjoy hearing of our experiences so much.

When I came back to visit him in hospital he always wanted to know everything and he was always telling me when he thought it was time for me to go back home.

One of our reasons for choosing Spain for our new home, among many, is that it would only take a few hours to fly back if we needed to, and that was the case last week. I spoke with Dad on Thursday morning and flew back to be with him the same day. I could have a cup of coffee and a chat with Dad as we had done so many times over the last few years before Dad went to sleep for the last time.

When I started this blog I promised myself it would be a 'warts and all' record - well, this has to be the biggest 'wart' that I'll ever include.

Dad, I'll miss ringing you up to tell you of our new lives, but as I continue this blog over the months and years, it will be over a cup of coffee and it'll be my chats with you.

I'm so glad you got to see how happy we are in Spain, I know that was important to you.

The coffee cup is empty now so it's time to end this chat, but from now on this blog will always be written

For my Dad.

Where did all these boats spring from?

We've noticed that this week the bay has suddenly sprouted a number of small boats - we don't have a harbour and they just sit out in the bay dotted all around Terreros. Where they have come from is a mystery, we never saw them arrive. We haven't seen them being sailed and we don't know how people get from the beach out to them - presumably, they swim.

But it does make the bay look picturesque - and we know that on the 1st September - they'll all have gone.

A thank you

I want to say 'Thank You' to everyone who reads this blog, and to those that leave me comments. I started writing this as a record for me, for my family and my friends to keep up to date with our new lives, so they could see how we are getting on. What has amazed me is the number of people who regularly read this blog and where they are. I have a link that tells me which country and area people are in, nothing specific, but enough for me to know that, as well as the UK and Spain I have regular readers from the USA and from Istanbul, Bangkok and Bermuda.

To those that are reading this to keep up to date with our new lives, I hope you are enjoying reading it as much as we are enjoying living it.

To those that find this as a result of searching for info on the internet, I hope you find it useful.

And to everyone - please feel free to send me a comment, I love to hear from you all

Today, we played in our 1st golf tournament

We have been playing at our golf course for about 3 months now and so we decided it was time we started to take part in some competitions - so, today was our 1st.

Normally I would tell you how we had got on but the truth is as yet, we don't know how we got on...........but we may do tomorrow.

It was a pairs competition and we were told it was the best score on each hole - so that's how we marked it.. I normally play off 28, my UK handicap, but with the difficulty of this course (Mundo del Aguilon) I have been given a handicap of 32. However, there was a cap of 26 - so it was going to be a challenge for me to score better than my other half.

As it happens, I had a stonking round and the other half didn't and having scored better on 11 holes out of the 18 - we came in with a net 68.

And that is where the fun (or confusion) started, some had scored stableford, some had scored stroke play and no-one seemed to know what we were really playing. The manager of the club apparently only wanted gross scores and they would apply the handicap and score the cards. Not the normal way of scoring but hey ho, it seems that's the way they want it because so many people don't score correctly (meaning in essence the spanish)

We have noticed the spaniards we play with have a different scoring system along with the need to pick up stray items - such as wayward golf balls (that may still be in play) ball markers on a green (that are definitely still in play - I say this from personal experience as recently I was looking for my marker to place my ball on the 8th green - and couldn't find it anywhere only to find that one of the spaniards we were playing with had picked it up as he crossed the green - just because it was there! Doh!) and not scorung air shots and shots that don't really go anywhere.

So, we'll go up to the club house tomorrow to see how we did - I don't think it will be our name on the trophy but we had a good game, played with 2 new guys who were good company and we enjoyed our 4 hours on the golf course, followed by a beer and tapas - which is what it is all about.

Next tournament - Friday!

Introducing the Cicada.....

In the afternoon, between the hours of 2 and 4pm it's siesta time, a time to relax, a time to snooze, a time to keep out of the sun.

It's a pity that someone didn't tell the cicado, a relatively small member of the flying insect family, no bigger than the watch face of an average sized mans watch.

It looks like a very large fly and I've heard them as we've walked through the campo (countryside) and they make a rather odd clicky buzzy sound, the name cicada is a direct translation from the latin word meaning buzzer (That's the high brow intellectual bit over - promise). They are harmless to us, they don't bite or sting, and don't destroy plants BUT....

..... the male cicada makes the loudest sound in the insect world; and yesterday the one in the photo gave us a front row rendition, right in the middle of siesta! Some cicada's can reach 120 decibells at close range, according to Wikipedia - and I think we can vouch for it.

Being siesta time, it obviously decided to have a rest on the column outside the lounge door to the villa - about 6 feet from the door. Having settled for siesta it decided to call to it's friends. Now whether it was the close proximity to the villa, or whether it was the amount of surrounding concrete I don't know - what I do know is that it sounded like a high pitched hammer drill going off inside my head. It was a noise that got right inside your skull and reverberated around your head.

At first I thought that we had workmen???(siesta time, Spain, workmen - doesn't really compute) digging up the road outside but everytime we went outside it stopped and we couldn't see any vans or machinery but within minutes of going back inside, it started again. Infact, it happened so frequently, I thought we were on candid camera!

Eventually, we tracked it down on the inside of the column and chased it off - peace was restored to siesta time!

These are not creatures to have in a confined space.

A towel on a sunbed or an umbrella on the beach - what do you do?

3 times a week we pass the beach on the way to the golf course early in the morning and very often there are a number of beach umbrella's stuck in the sand with no loungers underneath, no chairs and no people - just umbrella's so I asked where they came from. Apparently, this is how our spanish holiday makers reserve their spot on the beach. They then go for breakfast, go shopping, infact go where ever knowing that when they return, their place will be safe.

I also noticed that despite the beach being quite wide from the promenade to the sea ALL the beach umbrellas and sunbathers seem to be in a concentration of 3 or 4 meters close to the sea. There may be 20 meters of empty beach but no-one sets their umbrella there, they go very close to someone already in place. Whether this is because the sand is so hot they prefer to be on top of each other rather than having to walk across hot sand to get to the sea, or whether they feel there is safety in numbers, who knows

but it does seem odd to see them all clustered together when there is so much empty beach.

Our first Spanish party

Whilst we have been in Spain we have been fortunate to make friends with some spanish families and Amelia and Jose Luis invited us to their party last night to celebrate Amelia's birthday, and the invitation had said we were to dress up as either cowboys, indians or can-can girls (or boys!)

Now, it's so hot that it's hard enough getting ready to go out in the evening, but to be getting dressed in denims and cowboy hats really does take some doing, but I knew that most people (and there were about 70 going) would be making the effort so it seemed only fair that we did as well.

Our local hypermarket must have been warned that this themed party was happening as they had definitely stocked up on cowboy hats and toy guns and sherrif's badges, and judging by the number of similar 'props and hats' last night, they had done a roaring trade in the last few days.

As we walked down to the party we joined dozens of others all dressed up, some more than others, and we got lots of stares from passing cars.

The party was fantastic, there were 2 massive paella's and enough food to feed 170. As is the tradition, most people had brought some food and drink with them and no-one needed to go hungry.

At approx 10pm, a group of ladies who had been practising put on a display of line dancing

which was followed by a group of the men who had been rehearsing 'a 4-legged friend' and others.

We then all had a sing-a-long led by one man and his guitar.

The party went on into the early hours and it was a really enjoyable night. There was a real mix of nationalities there but language never seemed a problem and the more you have to drink the less of a problem it becomes.

All that was left for us to do was to stagger back up the hill and home to bed.

So, I now know I live in 'una aldea a orillas del mar!'

Well, spanish lesson numero uno went much better than I expected. Having studied (and passed) 'O' level spanish in 1974 and not using the language since, I had been brushing up on words by using the Spanish training program on my Nintendo DS, bashing gophers on the head that happened to hold the plaque with the correct word and doing word searches in spanish. But, since living here it has been apparent how little I could put together to form a sentence and I anticipated serious problems getting back into reading and constructing full sentences. Having sat down with my book - Present Day Spanish - Volume 1, the chosen book of my tutor, well - I was pleasantly surprised.

Having explained my (limited and somewhat aging) level of spanish language knowledge, we decided to get straight into reading a short paragraph to see how much I could understand.......and success. In the main I could understand the general gist of most of it. While I have a long way to go, at least what I did in school all those years back was actually worth it.

So, in one lesson we got through 2 chapters and I now know that the family in the book live in a village by the sea, have a son and daughter and a beer drinking friend.

Sounds pretty close to our life here (if you replace the 2 children with our 2 pups).

I have done my homework for the week, ( I was always a goody goody at school), will do a quick refresher before my lesson next week and look forward to not feeling quite so scared (or stupid) as I reach for the doorbell at my tutors house.

I don't envy anyone starting from scratch, having to get their head round why tables are feminine and boats are masculine, (just because they are, ok?).

All I have to do is work out how to decided whether something is a definite or indefinite article! Doh!

Oh, and 'una aldea a orillas del mar? - a village by the sea!