asturias

Pepe wonders about mud and sun

As the weather improves, the chaps (and chapesses) in Grupo Naranco get more cheerful. The amounts of clothing, gaiters and umbrellas gets less and less, people stop scanning the sky as we head out on the bus, confident that it won’t be as grey as in the winter. Pepe works as a security guard up at the hospital and I bump into him most weeks on my way to or from the classes there. We say hello and wonder aloud if the next walk will be sunny or not, or if there’s finally going to be a walk without mud (it is an unwritten, and unspoken rule that all walks must contain a section on either a very muddy path or up or down a stream). It hasn’t happened so far.

Coming down

Sunday was forecast to be glorious, until Friday when the forecast changed to hazy, then cloudy. So far so normal for Asturias. Friday and Saturday had been balmy in the city so we had high hopes. We were heading to San Isidro, the ski station (I’d say resort but it’s not big enough… what do you use when it’s a place to ski but not really big enough for a holiday? Resort seems too grand) in León. We’d walk from there North into Asturias. As ever the landscape is stunning, patches of snow amongst the limestone and grass, with hundreds of tiny daffodils… a host? a hostess? We walked up to Peña de viento, and as we got to the top, as ever, the clouds covered everything north of us (ie everything in Asturias). We stopped for a snack and to watch the clouds coming up and over the peaks, enjoying the sunshine when it appeared.

Hulooooo

We descended on snow slopes rather than ankle snapping scree, enjoying the softness of the spring snow, where you can put your heel down hard and be sure of not slipping. All too soon we were below the snow, and the cloud, filling up water bottles with icy meltwater. We stopped in a meadow formed from moraine dam and ate empanada (basically a foccacia baked with chorizo and pork fat (Liz took the pork fat out of hers, I didn’t)). Then down a track for a couple of hours along the side of a big valley, passing high altitude bee hives and heather covered hills… and a couple of muddy sections. Just enough time for a shandy at the bottom before a snooze on the coach home.

waiting for tortilla

First of all we had to get back to where we had left off which meant a four-hour bus ride deep into Asturias. As we got near to Grandas, a group we assumed were pilgrims got on the bus… blatant cheating, but it had been snowing on the high pass and they claimed incipient hypothermia. What that meant though, was Julio became a little paranoid that there wouldn’t be any spare places in the albergue (the pilgrim’s refuge) so as soon as the bus stopped he was away, grabbing his rucksack and marching smartly towards the town hall. As it happened the three pilgrims were looking for a hotel, they wanted the extra heat and the chance to warm up. We found the albergue almost empty, a couple of guys from Galicia and a Frenchman, and a cyclist and his suspiciously clean bike. As ever, a place to eat was next on the list. We tried one bar in town where they said it was too early (8pm) and we’d have to wait. So we went to another where the guy said he’d ask his wife and gave us pinchos de chosco (a pressed ham that they do here which is rather good) while we waited. She brought us out a tortilla which was brilliant yellow with waxy soft potatoes, that we ate while the bar filled up ready for Barcelona v Arsenal on the telly. The only other entertainment in town seemed to be the ubiquitous protests about the head of the ethnographic museum being fired. We headed back to the albergue to sleep in the almost suffocating heat (the heating was turned up to ‘dry everything’).

not raining yet, but look at the lush green, it's just a matter of time

Next morning we walked away from Grandas and out of Asturias. There were a couple of villages left to pass before we made it to Galicia, but the buildings were already showing signs of Galician influence. There’s a lot of slate around there, and roofs are normally made of it, but with interlocking tops so that the stones can’t blow off in the wind. The weather forecast was not the most optimal for walking, predicting showers and snow down to 900m (our route over Holly Pass, el puerto del acebo was at 11oo or so. It hadn’t started raining at that point so we enjoyed the verdant rolling hills as we headed up the steep-ish climb.

Moss and slate giving a clue to the sunny climate...

We stopped for a rest in Penafonte, where there’s a quite impressive slate and granite church. Julio is keen on getting his pilgrim credentials (the piece of paper you need to demonstrate your journey and to let you use the albergues) stamped everywhere he can. At the moment there is a preponderance of bar stamps. This may be because of the local priest shortage. Although there are a lot of churches and chapels, it’s hard to find a priest when you want one. The

churches in these remote parts have services every few weeks if they’re lucky. As we left the shelter of the church porch it started raining.

The high point of the day found us walking under windmills which loomed suddenly from the mist. For the top kilometre we were in snow and sleet. Then we passed a small slate with the words Asturias | Galicia and that was that. We’d walked out of Asturias. The rest was downhill to the coast.

Liz thinks it's going to burn off

We walked on, descending though extensive pine plantations until we reached a hamlet. There was a bar but it was shut, looked like it never really opened. A few houses later on we asked someone and they said there was a restaurant just a bit further on. The restaurant was called the catro ventos (Galician for the four winds – quatro vientos). They say you eat well in Galicia, they’re not kidding. We had caldo gallego to start (Galician soup, which is basically stock with potatoes, beans and turnip leaves) and then I had a steak which filled a big plate (rather more than I expected seeing as the price was not much more that €6).

Some very fine tentacular action

As we got nearer to A Fonsagrada (a note on Galician names, A means La in Castillian Spanish, O is El, basically the Galicians couldn’t be bothered with the first consonants in the so A Fonsagrada means The sacred spring) Julio asked an old guy where the albergue was. He said there wasn’t one. The albergue is actually in a little village further on called Padrón. Sigh. We arrived, a little damp, and signed in. This albergue is run by the Protección  civíl and is a bit more than just one room. We had a room to ourselves and a lift back up to Fonsagrada to have a look at the town and to eat octopus. Many people have told us that the best octopus in Galicia can be found here (a long way from the coast). So even though we had eaten a reasonable lunch we tucked into a plate of pulpo which was at least as good as any I’ve had elsewhere in Spain.

There will be none left in short order

This week Spring has most definitely sprung. One of the signs here (as opposed to the UK, where Spring seems to be marked by the same shot of someone having a butty in a London park without a jacket) is the sudden appearance of strawberries in vast quantities. Liz cannot pass up the opportunity of fruit, so she bought a crate (no punnets here, just little crates, holding 2Kg) at the frutería just around the corner. We have some requesón (cream cheese) ready and waiting.

Pretty near the hospital

“How’s are you?” I asked, sitting down and getting my books out of my bag as the doctors put their white coats on and stuffed their pockets with scraps of paper, reference books and stethoscopes.

“It’s not a good day.” They said, “How do you say despedida in English?”

“Depends what you mean, can you explain a little more?”

“Yesterday some doctors were despedida’d and sent home.”

“Fired or made redundant?”

So it turns out that yesterday, with no warning fifty-some doctors were made redundant. This was a bit of a shock. Many had more than ten years service in the hospital. So now they face having to move to another part of Spain to find work, because all over Asturias the lack of tax revenue due to the economic downturn, la crisis means that public sector workers are facing a difficult future.

One of the problems is that to get a job in the public sector you have to do exams called oposiciones or opos. That’s for pretty much any public sector job. You want to be a rheumatologist, there’s an exam; a teacher, exam;  a council worker, exam; police, prison guard, you name it, there’s an exam.

Except when there isn’t.

In the hospital, in that department, there haven’t been any opos for fifteen years because there are no available places. If you get the top marks in an opo, you get the job you want and it’s for life. Which is why so many Spanish folk are preparing for them (I know half a dozen people who are in the process of doing opo preparation, there’s a whole industry of academies and tutors out there). If there are no opos you may still have a job but it’s an interina, a temporary job and you can be tossed out like these doctors were (with no more than one month’s pay).

Oposiciones were instituted, I’ve been told, in response to the old way of doing things, which was to know the right people, and to have the right politics (and it was right being the Franco era) in order to get a job. The exams were supposed to bring about a certain egalitarianism in candidate selection. Which it did. But then it went a bit far according to some Spanish friends, and the whole job-for-life at the end of it seems to encourage a certain lethargy  in those who have achieved that holy grail.

So to be a doctor, first you need to get the degree, then do an exam called the MIR in order to get onto a speciality (if you do well you can pick your speciality, if you don’t then you’re headed for wherever they tell you, you didn’t want to be  a GP? Tough.). then you have to complete the residency requirements and then to progress from temporary contracts to permanent, the oposición. Up until that point you have no more job security than anyone else, and, in these times of crisis, it seems, less.

oh, there you are, taking photos again...

The forecast said sun. But it also said that there was a cloudbank heading in from the east, snowing heavily over the Basque country. We were hoping for some stunning views of the Picos de Europa, that planned walk was to take us up the hills just to the north east of the Picos and if all went well we’d have the snowy peaks on one side and the sea on the other.

As it turned out, the tops were in cloud and we all felt a little disappointed. So we made up for it with snowball fights when we decided we were high enough (ie, just below the mist) for the team photo.

So yet another peak we have to go back to, what a damn shame.

Pompeyo's nose

Liz was off running with her new running chums so I took advantage of Pompeyo’s offer to go skiing.

I’d already been to San Isidro and Fuentes de Invierno so we decided on Pajares (Valgrande-Pajares, to give it its full name). Pajares is the original Asturian ski resort (seems funny to call it a resort, in Spanish they’re called estaciones de ski, ski stations: resort seems a little grand). It’s bigger than Fuentes de Invierno, even has a brace of hotels/hostels. As we drove up there Pompeyo told me that the first time he went there was in 1986, when there was only one charlift (wooden slatted chairs) and a ton of button lifts.

It’s popular, on a good weekend it’ll be packed full of folk. Being Spanish, of course, they mainly arrive a little late so as we got there at 8:45am we had the pick of parking spaces. The lifts opened at 9 and there was a gaggle of kids in matching ski-club outfits ready to go up that we had to negotiate. Unfortunately the ski-club yoot had a competition going on so one of the pistes (the best one according to Pompeyo) was shut.

As we started, the weather wasn’t too bad, a bit windy up top because it’s much more exposed than the other ski resorts I’ve been to here. We enjoyed powdery hard pistes (refreshing after a couple of trips with spring wet snow).

Is this a red or a blue?

After a couple of hours the clouds came down and we skied on in very poor visibilty. At times the tiny snowflakes were driven hard into our faces by the wind, and the combination of that, and the ice forming on our goggles meant that on a couple of occasions we really had to work hard to figure out where the hell the piste went.

Another entertaining difficulty was that the ice on the piste markers made them all the same colour (I don’t think it was my colour blindness). So I have no idea what colours the pistes were. The majority are either red or blue, but they’re wide and smooth so they’re easy reds (even the last one which we did with zero visibilty).

All in all a good morning. We bailed as the weather closed in, three and a half hours of skiing (€16 for the half day pass) and were home by 1:45. According to the web site there’s a bus we can get up to Pajares so I’ll have to go up there with Liz at some point.

It was a learning experience for everyone. Pompeyo had raised the issue at the AGM (and a few times before, sounding people out). What about those members of the group who had never in their lives put a pair of skis on? Why not use the knowledge of the group to give them a taster of skiing so they could decide whether or not they liked it.

They don't know what they've let themselves in for

It seemed like a reasonable idea, a few people agreed. So that’s what we did.

The ‘knowledgeable’ folk were: Pompeyo, Carmen, Me and Liz.

So we were teaching (coaching, pulling up from the floor, encouraging, trying not to wince) some absolute novices. Let’s be clear, we were not trying to teach them to ski, only teach them enough to stop (turn if at all possible) and to use the lift, and of course, let them have a go at putting on boots, getting up after a fall, that kind of thing. It didn’t  hurt that the plan included a discount on gear hire (€10) and the option of a big lunch (€12).

We went to Fuentes de Invierno (I took my camera but the visibility was so bad that it never left my pocket). Spring snow (i.e. wet). We had a quick recap of necessary vocab (ski tips: espatulas, the back of the ski: talon, edges: los cantos, bindings: sujetadores, brake!: frena, snowplough: cuña) in the car and off we went.

Chaos, absolute chaos... like herding cats

We marched up the bottom of a long flat green piste and set to work.

There’s nothing like watching absolute novices to show you how much you have learned (and to demonstrate some appropriate cursing, meca is the Asturian equivalent of “bugger”, because it is basically the short form of me cago en el mar (poo in the sea!) although you can soften it even more by using “me caches el el mar“). As expected there was much falling, flailing, yelping and laughing. What seemed to us painfully slow was for them frighteningly speedy, but they all seemed to enjoy it. I’ll be interested to hear from Noel what he thinks about teaching real beginners. Fuentes de Invierno has a ski school, but there seemed to be a huge number autodidacts today (that would be, all over the place).

After a few goes down this little slope, Sabi, one of my charges told me to say los giros not las giras (ie masculine not femenine) for the turns, as the femenine means a tour. This was a long way from being my only mistake in Spainsh today (I paid special attention to the ski instructors I passed later in the day for good phrases: no te tiras! (don’t lean back) was one of the most used).

After lunch Liz and I went up to tootle around (in the zero visibility) and the others (those still standing/willing) paid for a single go on a lift. There were only a couple of injuries, despite the ma

ny falls, nothing too serious (fingers crossed). I think it was a success, half of them will be back, I’m sure.

The papers were full of it, the news on TV said that fifty provinces in Spain were on High Alert.

“Xynthia will hit Asturias today” according to El Comercio, yesterday.

“The principality ask citizens to take measures to protect themselves before the arrival of the cyclone”

What measures are these, we asked? Well, close your windows, move your pot plants and pull your shutters down. Oh and we’re not going to do any rubbish collection so that we don’t have empty bins flying round. Oh and don’t go out in your car… and look at the red and yellow alerts… look! They’re Red! And Yellow!

They forecast 160km/h winds. We cancelled our plan to go to Gijón with Cova and Julio and try out a certain Mexican restaurant, which we had been looking forward to…

Instead we met at La Más Barata for some rice (which wasn’t bad (for which read bloomin’ gorgeous), chipirones (baby squid) and smoked cheese… which both Julio and I plumped for and devoured). Mexican food will have to wait.

All day on the news they were tracking the storm, which actually was causing severe damage almost everywhere else in the North of Spain. In Oviedo, it was a bit breezy. Fresh, you might say, a blowy evening in Greetland…

The storm blew over and upset the forecast for today too, which had been sunshine and showers, lots of showers. We woke up early to go out with the walking group and it was blue sky and a light breeze. That seemed to be it as far as the weather went. We were walking in Teverga, up to 1760m, so in snow for most of the walk (mud for the rest). Beautiful.

Stunning views, snowy ridge walk, sunshine, cup o’ tea at the top. You could not ask for more.

We finished in San Martín, taking over a hotel bar as we all had our sarnies. Once again I was struck by how ‘Irish’ the Asturians can be as Julio (not the same one) and Andrés argued over who was going to pay for what. I’d messed things up by paying for the wine, Julio had snuck in and paid for his coffee and some spirits which left Andrés complaining that there was nothing left for him to pay for ‘except the champagne’ until we kindly offered to let him buy us another round of spirits… a selfless act which led to Liz sleeping all the way home on the bus.

Chocolate con churros
Originally uploaded by correoscar.

After skiing on Saturday (along with the rest of the entire world, it seemed, thanks to the closure of the two other ski resorts in this neck of the woods… far too many people, low visibility and a ton of snowboarders made for an entertaining morning) and finally getting the internet sorted in the house) we had a fairly lazy day on Sunday. At six we decided to go for a stroll, taking cameras, and seeing what we could see.

Eventually we wound up on la losa (the slab), where there are some modern looking cubist flats built on a big slab over the railway lines. Large numbers of older folk were strolling, showing some fine suits, polished canes and enough fur keep the whole of Leeds warm.

At the bottom of one of these cubes (they actually look pretty good all lined up) there is a chocolate shop called Valor. Valor do some of the best chocolate there is, hot chocolate, which I never used to like because it was milk and cocoa powder (an abomination). This is more like chocolate, but melted. Ahhh.

Valor is decorated in a very traditional style, in contrast to its surroundings. Inside it’s marble and cane backed chairs and every table full of chatting folk all tucking in to chocolate and churros.

Rather bad for you if you eat them too often, but every now and again, rather fine.

Día soleado en San Isidro
Originally uploaded by Marcos Dopico.

“Fancy going skiing some time?” Asked Pompeyo on last week’s walk.

“Why not” We answered, fresh from the week in the Alps.

The phone rang on Thursday:

“The forecast is okay for Saturday, how about it?”

So we went. And it didn’t rain, and it only snowed a little bit. The snow was a bit heavy (alright, on the lower slopes it was papa (as they say here, mashed potato consistency) but higher up it was fine).

We set off at 8, sure in the knowledge that the majority of Spaniards would not be rising early to ski. Well some of them did but not too many.

A half day pass for San Isidro (in León) is €16, boot and pole hire for Liz another €11. Pompeyo lent me his carving skis, he skied on his ancient long thin skis. Liz used Carmen’s short skis, which she enjoyed, and we just tootled up and down the reds (which were easier than many blues in Courchevel).

We ate on the way home in Felechosa, pote then trout and now we’re home, digesting and getting ready to head out to the opera. It’s a hard life…