Posts Tagged ‘drink’

Tombs for one, or granaries

En castellano

It dawned fresh on the crossroads and we headed to the bar for the breakfast of champions. Unfortunately this is Spain so we settled for Madeleines (well Julio and Liz did, I opted for pre-packed sugary doughnuts). A lady from the hotel drove us back to our spot in a big old wobbly estate car that juddered from side to side independently of the camber on the road.

The plan for the day was to walk to Merlán. We had stopped planning in detail thanks to the loss of the guide book so we were relying on a leaflet we had picked up the previous day in the parish of San Lazaro. We didn’t actually know if there was an albergue in Merlán but the second part of the plan was to walk until we came to somewhere to eat or to stay.

So we walked, passing through tiny villages and one-house hamlets and hórreos. In Galicia the hórreos are stone built, with either air bricks or wooden slats in the side, they look like individual sized tombs (I guess you could stack four in if you tried). We stopped facing one as a couple of old ladies paced slowly past. We asked if there had been many pilgrims along today. ¡Ay muchos! Muchos, they replied.

From Lugo to A Coruña en llanto

While we were sitting there another woman came past with a big tub of milk which she proceeded to feed to a calf in a building we had thought deserted. We exchanged pleasantries –Life in the countryside is hard, she said, lots of work, up early, hard work. We made sympathetic noises.

We kept going, hoping for a bar to top up in. Nothing. We talked to one woman who pointed us towards the casa de remedios (basically a private house in which they will sell stuff to pilgrims) but when we got there no one answered Julio’s increasingly despairing cries of !Oiga¡ ¡Hay alguien! and ¡Remedios! (Hellooooo! Anybody there! Foooooood!) One old boy said that we’d find a bar in Seixas. At that point we realised we were in Merlán and we would be walking much further than we thought. In Seixas there was an albergue rather than a bar. Julio and Liz had pulled ahead of me (I was dawdling) and as I approached I could see that the albergue was new. So new in fact, that they were taking delivery of the beds. Great, I thought, we can stop here and have an easy day of it.

Summer rose

As I arrived Julio was enraged. He and Liz had poked their heads in the door to see what was what and the warden had rushed out screeching for them to get out and that the albergue wasn’t open until one and they mustn’t come in. It takes a lot for Liz to say anything bad about anyone, but she said the woman had been really rude. So we filled our water bottles and decided to keep going. Melide became our next stop, and judging from our found map, there were still 6km to go before we had a chance of finding anything to eat.

I practice my stiff-armed penguin waddle

The path rose towards the Hospital of Seixias (basically the old word for a pilgrim’s rest stop) which was just below a col on a hillside filled with heather and windmills. No bar though. We crossed the border between Lugo and A Coruña at the col and started down. The day was heating up, Julio was complaining about being en yanto, which he explained as equivalent to running on empty but literally means to be on the rims of your wheels (after say, a puncture). He pinched a couple of apples and plums from a tree overhanging the road. The plums were inedibly tart, the apples bitter. I was glad of my doughnut choice in the morning.

We passed another village, asking anyone we met where the nearest bar was. We got differing answers but they all pointed downhill. A chap in a car said we’d find a bar in Vilamor which was 3km ahead. We reached it and gratefully cooled ourselves under a fountain. No bar. We continued and an old boy came out of his house and said another coulple of kilometres, at the end of the village. The vilage was about 3km long. Most annoying. Well eventually (at about 4:30) we got to the bar Carburo and asked what they had. The owner said something about a plato combinado with steak and salad and chips and we said yes. Plus wine and soda. Most welcome, although we sat outside so we were accompanied by significant numbers of flies.

So do they measure the 2cm from the end or the middle?

The steak was big and tender, the chips abundant, the wine homemade, but good, the post prandial snifter of orujo possibly unwise.

The sign on the wall said 55km to Santiago (5km to Melide) but the stone markers we’d been following said 60. Well actually the marker (el mojón) twenty metres up the street said 60.020. They seemed to go in for some serious precision, centimetre level precision. But lacking accuracy. Despite the discrepancy there were still 5km to Melide so we had to get moving, it was 5:45 when we left, there were unlikely to be places in the albergue but we’d just have to see what happened. We sweated past polytunnels filled with flowers until we entered a built up area.

Melide reminded Liz and me of the small towns in rural Argentina, the low rise buildings and the styles of frontage. Not surprising really given that, as the Irish to the US, the Galicians were to Argentina. So much so that pretty much any Spaniard is called a gallego in Argentina. The sounds of the Argentine accent seems to come from Galician too, the x in so many Galician words has lent itself to the sh pronunciation of  ‘ll’ and ‘y’.

Liz has had a little bit to drink at this point, and is happy that there's only 55km to go

Sure enough the albergue was full, so we were directed to the sports centre where we were lucky enough to get three of the last four beds (the people who came after us had to sleep on the floor). This was our first contact with the camino frances (the route that most people think of when they think Camino de Santiago). About 1% of pilgrims do the camino primitivo, that’s 2000 so far this year. 75% or more do the camino frances.

In addition to the normal August crowds, this week also included 12,000 young people doing a pilgrimage ending in Santiago on the following Sunday. They, fortunately, were staying in specially reserved sports halls. Our beds were in a walled off area within the sports hall. It was like a temporary military hospital, showers, toilets, dorms of 40 beds walled off. So we showered and marveled at our good fortune and then went out to eat cheese and pimientos de padron (fried green peppers) and drink galician white wine from much bigger porcelain cups than they use in Oviedo.

We strolled happily back to the bunks for the 10 o’clock closing time. I lay on the bed, put my earplugs in and fell asleep in seconds.

Si alguien pudiera hacer unas correcciones si he cometido errores grandes estaría agradecido

Hacía fresco el amanecer al cruce aquel y nos dirigimos al bar para tomar un desayuno de los campeones. Por desgracia este es España así que comimos magdalenas, así comieron Julio y Liz, tomé yo un dónut empaquetado y azucarado. Nos llevó al inicio de la ruta una mujer del hotel en un gran coche familiar que se bamboleaba independientemente de la inclinación de la carretera.

Ademas de la muchedumbre normal para agosto, esta semana hacían el camino 12.000 jóvenes terminando en Santiago el domingo siguiente. Afortunadamente quedaban en pabellones especiales. Las camas nuestras estaban en una área con paredes adentro del polideportivo. Era como un hospital militar con duchas, dormitorios para 40 personas detrás de las paredes. Duchamos y nos maravillamos con la suerte que tuvimos. Salimos para comer queso, pimientos de padrón y beber vino blanco de Galicia de tazas mucho mas grandes que las que utilicen en Oviedo.

Paseamos feliz a las literas antes de la hora de cerrar (las 22h). Me eché en la cama, puse los tapones y me dormí enseguida.

Queimada Flames 5 Originally uploaded by hegarty_david.

So there we were, in the Atapuerca hotel (described accurately as ‘for truck drivers’) an isolated place with a couple of villages close by, but too far to walk to after a long day outside.

After dinner Ignacio said we’d be having the Queimada. Then, seeing the blank looks on our faces they proceeded to explain.

You take a litre or two of orujo (preferably home made, with a high alcohol content), chop orange peel, apples, lemon peel and add them and coffee beans, and a ton of sugar. All this goes into a ceramic cauldron.

Then you light the thing and stir it with a ladle (hopefully not made of wood). When the flames go completely blue, you put them out and serve it.

It’s warm, sweet and quite strong (even after the burning off process).

While it’s being burned you’re meant to recite a conjuro (a spell) which is a call to the earth, wind, sea and fire to purify the drink and share it with souls of absent family and friends. So of course we did this, fifty or so people, much to the amusement of the few additional guests in the bar.

Yes, all this was done in the hotel bar. A health and safety nightmare!

I usually take a little hip flask of whisky on the walks, just for a drop at the summit and to share it around, for most of the group have only tried Johhny Walker or (shudder) Hundred Pipers (or even DYC: Spain’s very own whisky, only to be drunk when drunk, and even then, only with coke or something to cover the taste). Andrés brings Orujo or other home made spirits, or home flavoured. These are usually sweet, but pleasant enough. He also bakes and cooks and brings along tortillas and tarts and cakes. You can’t refuse either, well, we can’t anyway.

A couple of others carry wine skins. Bernardo (the chap in his eighties) was scoffing at the amount the youngsters (Paco, in his mid fifties) carry. He pointed to his very small knapsack (the kind of cloth and leather, buckled job that was probably all the rage in the forties) and said he had his jacket, his hat, his umbrella and in his bag just a half litre of wine and some cheese, meat and bread and his knife and that was it. No water…

So we’ve had to try the skins, they keep the wine cool, but there’s a knack to it. We were told, you have to hold it like a woman, soft around the neck and squeeze the bottom hard (followed by quick ‘it’s a joke, it’s a joke’ comments, in case we hadn’t got that they weren’t being serious).

Of course we had faces full of wine in no time.

So the last week has been all about storms here. Lots of wind, waves and rain. The UK press even reported a bit of it (thanks to the tragic collapse of a sports centre which killed 4 children near Barcelona). Despite all that, and despite a forecast which said rain, almost a full coachload of walkers assembled on Sunday with resigned smiles and shrugs and ‘we must be mad’ comments. The walk was close to Oviedo, and amazingly, as we left the city on the coach, the rain stopped, the clouds fled and the sun came out.

The walk was a horseshoe, so once we were up we had fantastic views of the snow covered cordillera cantabrica. The clouds built to the west but kept slipping past us to the South. It was a bit breezy (Lakeland breezy, like a cool spring day on the fells) and we walked and chatted (one guy told me all about buying LPs from England in the Franco years… his first album was Bob Dylan, which I didn’t understand because he pronounced it Vov-dye-lan). In a hamlet we stopped for a coffee de pote (brewed in a pot, old style) fortified with orujo and the owner of the bar opened up his ‘museum’ for us. It was his old bar, unchanged from the fifties (except for the addition of dust, pigeon droppings and mould). It was very rustic, both bar and grocers, with broken old radios, dusty empty bottles and stacks of folded old newspapers. On the wall was the then-obligatory photo of Franco.

Two kilometres from the end the route went past a restaurant. The group had booked places for those who wanted to eat. I had been told about this restaurant before, it’s got a limited menu but it’s famous for what it does cook. We arrived at 4:30 and the place was packed. We slotted into the limited space and set to eating the bread and sipping the cold red wine. What they do in this place is Pote or Fabada to start… but really good pote and really good fabada. Then chicken (pitu in Asturian) or lamb, then flan or rice pudding (the cold stuff they do here which is rather good). I should say and rather than or because they just bring everything and you eat what you want… if you run out, you ask for more. Ignacio, the president of the group said afterwards that he’d just had two plates of pote and two of fabada and a tiny amount of rice pudding. He’s very fond of his Asturian food and always asks us if we’ve tried something and whether we enjoyed it. The noise level was pretty high too… a roomful of Spaniards eating is like a pub full of English folk drinking…

Sometime while we were eating, the rain caught up with us and we did the last 2k in a torrent of rain. That’s okay though, we all had umbrellas, it wasn’t too windy, and the coach ride back was 15 minutes.

Wave at the camera Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Liz got a text message just before the weekend. ‘Do you want to go to Gijon for dinner on Saturday?’ It was from Maria Jesus, one of the walking group members who’s about our age. Of course we said yes, so at 8:30 we were standing outside the Calatrava (the Ovetense name for the spaceship style building that doubles as a shopping centre and the Palacio del Congresso). Covadonga (Maria Jesus’ friend who we’ve met a few times) met us there and we walked along to where MJ picked us up.

Maria Jesus is not the world’s most confident driver but we managed to reach Gijon unscathed and then drove around a bit looking for a big enough parking space so that my parking skills wouldn’t be needed. That done it was time to stroll along the seafront (there’s something like 5kM of seafront) chatting away until we reached the restaurant. Both Liz and I like the relaxed approach to evening eating we’ve seen, we decided to pick a small plate each and share, rather than choose a main dish. So we troughed down on mini squid, ham, octopus, grilled fish and sea urchins (which Maria Jesus hadn’t had before).

After coffee we wandered. According to Covadonga it was a difficult hour, because it was a bit late for cafes and too early for the late night bars (it was 1am). We had a drink in a quiet wine bar and then the girls suggested we go to another place (where a friend of there’s had texted from). After asking directions a few times we got there and in we went. It was not really our cup of tea, I haven’t been in an English nightclub in quite a few years and even then Europop wouldn’t have been high on my list of destinations. Still, it was interesting watching the people (and there was no entrance fee). There was no dance floor, it seemed you just found a space and, well, danced… at the bar there were a couple of youngish blokes waiting for their whisky and red bulls and they were grinning and excitedly bouncing along to the music (part of me wanted to ask them if they really enjoyed it or if they had taken some recreational pharmaceuticals). It may be that in the UK it’s the same these days but I’m not sure, I felt like there was no air of self conciousness, no studied cool on display, people were just out, just having a good time. It felt foreign.

We were in a cafe (what’s new) the other day and Liz saw in the paper that this weekend was the sardine festival at Cándas. So of course we had to go. Cándas is a small seaside town that used to be a fishing village and now is a tourist town with a smattering of hotels and a good few bars. Every year (for the last 40 or so) they’ve had a festival to celebrate sardines.

We wandered up to the fiesta and had a good look round, there were five stalls, each run by a different local restaurant or bar. According to the paper they would each be grilling 5000 sardines each day of the festival. We could smell it from some way off. We picked our stall based on two things… one we knew the restaurant and two there were the shortest queues. So we went for the dozen sardines and a bottle of cider, for the tradition is to accompany the sardines with cider. A very friendly chap behind the bar gave us some pointers on more advanced cider drinking, apparently you have to pour it down your throat, rather than gulp it down, you have to be smooth (mas suave he said). After that he sold us on the corn bread rather than the white bread, and he was right, the slightly sweet corn bread went really well with the sardines. Liz asked for cutlery only to be told to use her hands and to be given a small demo on how to eat grilled sardines with your fingers. Oh my they were delicious, absolutely fantastic, and as we dug in, a couple of the folks behind the bar, including the grill chief, came over to see how we found them (muy ricas, we said). Friendly guy behind the bar kept pouring the culetes of cider, he was trying to get us smashed I’m sure. In the middle of all this a few dozen vespa riders came past in formation and we ended up chatting with a few of them, they got free sardines for being part if the parade but they were from Madrid so they didn’t know sidra, and we all ended up drinking a fair amount as we polished off the fish (and I cannot stress enough… they were absolutely gorgeous, there was much finger licking (a mix of lemon, cider and sardines mmmm). Then the friendly chap forced us to pour our own… Liz’s expression is a mixture of frustration and cider fuelled giggles.

The upshot was, we were both a little tipsy and full of oily fish as we got on the bus back to Oviedo.

Love Wine Originally uploaded by Firenzesca.

I was behind an old chap in the supermarket checkout queue in my local supermarket (El Arbol). I noticed he just had three identical bottles of wine. This in itself is not unusual, it was 2pm and folk were heading home for lunch. Then I noticed the till said €3.60. At first I thought that the checkout person had made a mistake but she hadn’t. Three bottles of wine for pennies (almost). It was young wine (joven), as opposed to the aged stuff (crianza) and probably tasted like ribena but it reminded me of how different the wine market is here.

In the UK I was used to a wine section in the supermarket being a mini world tour (with the exception of Asia) but here I haven’t seen a single bottle of non-Spanish wine for sale. Oh wait, yes I have, a half bottle of Moet Chandon in a bar. When I asked a couple of my students about this they looked at me as though they didn’t understand the question. Why would we want to drink wine from anywhere else? They said, Spanish wine’s the best in the world. I kept my counsel, and didn’t ask how they knew, if they never drank anything but Spanish wine. My Dad said, on his recent visit, that he hadn’t had a bad wine while he was here, and this was with a slight note of surprise (not that surprising really, the difference between a Rioja on sale in the UK and what they drink here is marked). Even the first glass (white, in the Airport cafe, costing less than €1.50) was more than acceptable.

The other thing is the price. Wine here is cheap. Not that the wine tastes cheap, no. You struggle to pay more than €5 a bottle in the supermarket and the bars where they do wine rather than beer, even the expensive wines are €2 a glass, and that’s often with nibbles. It’s a fine sight to see in a bar, lunchtime or evening, blokes who, in England, would be on pints, sitting at the bar sipping a glass of something red and picking at a tiny dish of octopus.