The Doldrums

This blog would not be the searingly honest account of one man's struggle to find a decent cup of tea that it most certainly isn't, if I were not to share with you some of the more challenging moments of my escapology act. That is to say the shit bits.

Having successfully navigated the tempest of festivals, fiestas and fun that was my first 6 weeks 'in country', I have, of late, found myself becalmed. I have drifted into the social doldrums and my ship of state bobs listlessly as the party streamers on the pool deck of August fade in the cool autumnal sun.

Such is the lot of the solo traveler and indeed one would hope that having gone to the quite elaborate and not inexpensive effort of having left family, job, and friends to move to a place where I know absolutely no one and have only a tenuous grasp of the language that there would be moments of quietude such as this.

Nonetheless, steps have to be taken, there can be no excuses for sulking. But what steps are these?

The main enemy of any would-be social sailor is Shyness who, with his cunning accomplice Pride, conspires to limit the plucky adventure's opportunities to meet new people to invitations received and parties already know. The enemy of your enemies Shyness and Pride, and so your friend is of course Booze, or alternatively 'Just bloody growing up and sorting it out', but in the absence of such psychological gumption booze will do just fine.

So I have embarked on a series of nocturnal sorties with, for the lack of a better label, 'acquaintances' on the hunt for a social scene that can fill the sail and stir the lank waters of my lassitude. This has led me to drinks with English teachers, birthday parties with strangers, Spanish pop/folk gigs and American pub rock bands. So far the fruits of these efforts have not been bountiful but one cannot expect success overnight, “Life,” as Malcolm Fraser once remarked from the luxury of his Melbourne town house, “was not meant to be easy!”

So you find me on a Sunday afternoon sizing up the prospects of another evening of slightly drunken semi-awkward social maneuvering otherwise known as night life. Tonight its the American pub band venue again with a mustachioed man called Eneko (a friend of a friend of a friend) and colleagues unknown.

Step two is to move house. Its important to know when something has failed – a point lost on most Republicans – and my short stay with Morgan my Togoan flat mate has not been a success. Problems with a dank room lack of writing desk, and high rent gave weight to the decision but like most failed partnerships ours floundered on the rocks of mis-communication. The separation has been set (Oct 29th) and it should be a clean break, I don't expect to see my corkscrew again and Morgan will retain custody of the cleaning products he loves so dearly.

I will leave the description of my new abode to when I have moved in, suffice it to say that it has central heating, WiFi Internet and two Spanish flat mates.

Step three – get a job. Tick! Clearly the most successful means devised by humans to find someone to share a beer with has been the office. Offices have been ruthlessly efficient booze buddy factories since the invention of all day drinking and so its a shame that I won't be working in one. But I will be working in a school which owing to the proximity of annoying teenagers does just as well.

Meanwhile, slack waters slap at the sides and its time for another cup of tea....

A festivus for the rest of us

Who cares if one successful professional at an industry event tells another successful professional that they think that they're great and then that successful professional returns the compliment (very likely adding that they think they love them) and that, like everyone else who has spoken that night, they are thrilled even honoured to be there? Not many you'd think, certainly not the stuff of TV spectaculars right? Wrong! Such was the content of the oh so self congratulatory opening 'gala' of the San Sebastian International Film Festival (which I watched the other night – on TV, no cocktails and chit chat with botox brigade for me.).

Now I love cinema, I like a movie – some of them make a difference some of them make a profit I can like both -but a 1.5 hour TV show dedicated to watching rich, famous and successful people congratulating similarly rich, famous and successful people was a big ask. I sat through this rectum twisting tedium in the hope of learning something about the films to be shown at the Festival which runs for ten days attracting some pretty good talent, however the most I learnt was that Woody Allen thinks that Javier Bardem is an excellent actor (no shit Woody is that why you cast him as the lead in your latest movie?) and that his co-star can't speak a word of Spanish and isn't about to learn any.

Despite this entertainment crime of an opening night there are some excellent films being shown at the festival and I am looking forward to seeing a couple this week. On Wednesday night I'm off to see 'Tiro en la Cabeza' about a seemingly ordinary guy who kills two cops, then to round off the hilarity I'm hoping to get a ticket for 'The boy in the striped pajamas' about the holocaust. Ben Stiller is here but I don't think he's in either of them. I'll let you know the winner of the Juanathan prize at the end of the week and of course I'm simply thrilled and actually quite honoured to be here – I love all thank you, thank you, thank you...

MADrid

It wasn't really MAD although it was rad.

With Andrew visiting San Sebastian wasn't big enough for the both of us, so the both of us went somewhere bigger – Madrid.

I would be lying if I said Madrid wasn't awash with beautiful women, so I won't. Also Madrid in summer is well supplied with alfresco dining and drinking options all the better for the beautiful women of Madrid to catch a glimpse of me as I sip stylishly at my espresso – or so I imagine. If that wasn't enough entertainment for one lifetime there is also more high quality art than you can possibly eat and food that should be hung in the Louvre (or Prado in this case). There are also palaces, and fine shops, and more bars, then some restaurants, odd lifts and some more bars – suffice it to say that we had a good time.

The stand out however had to be the Sherry bar that one late night we stumbled into demanding Armenac.

It is an odd bar that wont allow you to take photos but they would not. The till was a hand cranker from the 30s, the sherry was served from the barrel into anonymous brown bottles then chilled in an ice bucket at the bar. The ancient staff marked your tab in chalk on the bar in front of you as you drank and whole place had the sepia tint from the exhalations of a hundred years of smokers.

Andrew and I became connoisseurs of differently aged sherry whilst admiring the faded posters advertising the world sherry festivals of the fifties and sixties. The din of a busy Madrid evening was inaudible replaced by the murmurings of the gaggle of local sherry lovers clustered around the end of the bar. A quite magical experience but on leaving you were left with the nagging suspicion that if you ever attempted to return you would not be able to find that bar again, and no one in the street would ever have heard of it....

A revolution in hiking comfort

I think its safe to say that more people would have conquered Everest had they thought to bring an umbrella. If, like me, you have taken time out from your drug infused orgy-fest of a lifestyle to nose around the odd camping/outdoor fun shop you'd know that the umbrella (or para-agua as they delightfully call it in Spanish) is not a common sight. Things are about to change. Thanks to the willingness of one Andrew Portors to shrug off convention and innovate the umbrella will soon be seen proudly deployed by the many Gortex fetishists that festoon our crags and dales – who, to a man, will be smiling with quiet astonishment at the comfort that the umbrella can bring to an otherwise soggy hike, wondering no doubt 'why the f**k didn't i think of that?'

The site of the umbrella revelation was “The Picos de Europa” a quite breathtaking mountain range that leaps from sea level to 2500m in just 15 kilometers making for plenty of vertical landscape with precipitous drops and soaring skylines. For the day walker as were Andrew, myself and our provider of tents Mairi, there is a great walk through the Picos along the Cares gorge. This walk has been made possible by the construction early in the last century of a small aqueduct that, for reasons I haven't been able to grasp' was cut into the side of the gorge half way up massive cliffs along with an access path in an engineering feat of mind-boggling awkwardness for benefits of dubious quality – that was our route.

The Spanish have a very adult approach to heath and safety issues in the mountains which boils down to one sign waring that stick figures can fall off ledges. They then invite you to walk 12kms on a sometimes very narrow path cut into the mountainside with drops of dizzying depth beckoning just centimeters away – no rails, no fenced off areas, if you go up to the tall places and fall off 'em that's your problem – all very refreshing.

I can't remember a more staggering walk – more Lord of the Rings than Lord of the Rings – if you are ever in Northern Spain with a pair of sturdy shoes you could find no better place to put them through their paces. Oh and there were goats too. Ok not in itself an amazing highlight after all they were not bears (and there are bears in those mountains) but nonetheless an unexpected encounter with a frisky mountain goat two foot from a swallowing chasm can be invigorating.

When is a man on holiday but not on holiday?

When is a man on holiday but not on holiday?


Who cares! Pass me another vino tinto! Such is life here in the holiday town at the holiday school with the holiday people. Life is condensed into disposable packages of two or three weeks. Once opened it must be consumed quickly and it is. Relationships form blossom and decay to be replaced by others. Perspectives transform from innocence to experience as the wine bottle is drained giving weeks the feeling of years and fortnights lifetimes. Already I have experienced the passing of old friends and the birth of new ones. I am as an immortal amongst the mayflies – but can immortals keep pace with the doomed?

The first chapter of my Spanish experience is about to come to a close – not such a bad thing for my liver at least. I have spent the last month being fiesta'd (its something that happens to you rather than by you) in a shared flat with other students, socialising with other students and their tourist friends, amongst a sea of tourists from all over the world. By Monday I will be in a new flat, living with locals, two weeks after that all the friends I have so far made (and one I made earlier) will have left and all that now is will no longer be. It's anything but boring.

Before the end of the beginning begins the start of the now. No I haven't been smoking weed (although you can here in the street and in the bars – and yet its not endemic and the sky hasn't fallen in....) but I am looking forward to three weeks off school and to do some exploring with Andrew (who is visiting from Oz). We will see wild places and places that are wild. No doubt there will be picture and so I will share them with you all, also tales, and some of those too will find their way to these pages. But just now I am contemplating tonight's coming adventures and wondering who I will be tomorrow, and with whom....

Running of the cows

I saw the running of the cows last week. Some of you may be familiar with the more famous and, some would say more impressive but what do they know, Running of the Bulls during the San Fermin festival in Pamplona. Well i was not in Pamplona but in Laguardia a tiny pueblo in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I was not there to see the running of the cows but rather to taste some wine because Lagaurdia is wine country (actually most of Spain is wine country which is why its cheaper than water here). Nevertheless, it happened and I saw it.

It may not have been the highlight of my first two weeks indeed I doubt it was anyones highlight of anything but it was a first for me. Let me paint the picture for you. I emerge into the sunlight, along with a bus load of other spanish language students, from the cellar tour of a local winery. The tour had left 90% of the students none the wiser about the niceties of the wine making process of the Basque Country as most of them are beginners and our guide was incapable or simply unwilling to dumb his lifes work down to one clause sentences in the present tense, but it had left them with a raging thirst and so we headed to the local bars.

The first sign that something was UP was the installation of crash barriers along the narrow streets and the local crowd eagerly peering at an empty street. Wine in hand we decided to wait and see what was to happen and before long, much to my bemusement, some of the least impressive heffers i've ever seen scurried up the street to screams of excitement (that the heffers met with streams of excrement). No sign of drunken youths running from their dubious threat nor matadors waiting to dispatch them, in tight pants - just cows and poo. You couldn't help but be enchanted.

I now sit on my balcony waiting to go out and see off the first of my fellow students to leave. Within three weeks almost everyone I have befriended here will have gone home, holidays over leaving me with some happy memories of the first hectic three weeks and a mission to make friends with the none-too-friendly locals...I like a challenge. Ad

Pillow talk

I was going a bit stir crazy last night waiting for my flatmates to arrive (actually one just arrived now as I type this - she seems sane, phew) and so I made this crap video to show you my flat - hmm gotta work on those camera skills..

I blame the pillow too for my inability to get a good nights rest yet and maybe that too has added to the weirdness of the last few days...

I am in a three bedroom flat that is totally occupied by students at the Spanish school I am enrolled at. That means there is a lot of turn over in people and I have already (in six days) met eight students who either were leaving or have just arrived.

Oh dear - my last flatemates have arrived and would you know it - young enough to be my daughters! Oh well they are only two weeks then maybe I'll get someone who can talk about something other than their A-Levels (they're English). The guys who just left were surfers from Holland (shurfers froom de Nederlandsch) they were Schooper cool ya..

Right - anyway San Sebastian. It's right nice. You should all come here - actually you can't cos its full. Its August and the entirety of southern Europe thinks its a great idea to have holidays at the same time, and that time is now. Today being a weekend day by the afternoon it was hard to see the beach for flesh and these Europeans like to show as much flesh are humanly possible (was that a leathery speedo clad man with his mouth open trying to get a tongue tan?).

Full though it may be it still contrives to be lovely - like Goldilocks preferred sleeping arrangements (or was it breakfasting options?) its not too big, not to small, and not too hot and not too cold - I wonder when the bears are coming home?

Here are some photos for your edification... And then I must go and talk to the children....

Left - Old town

Right - not so old big building which I haven't been brave enough to enter lest i be transported to the mother ship and assimilated....