November in Spain

Don’t you just LOVE Spain! 1st-5th Nov 2007

Yes! Back to a country where people smile, and say ‘Hola’-even the toll man smiled last night and spoke! The people are really nice and happy. The driving is safe and it’s visibly calmer and sane. No horns blaring!

The site we’re on is massive, but fairly quiet, with great security. It’s like a little village. It was a holiday here on the 1st, ‘All Souls Day’, where people visit their dead relatives-bit spooky just after Halloween. There are loads of Spanish on the site for the coming weekend, but then it should quieten off again. Loads of Brits too. Met a family from Wigan at the pool on Thursday. Their girls are similar ages to ours so they’re paling around. Toni spent a few years in Barrowford, so still comes to Burnley to meet up with friends…small world! We met for drinks in the evening in the bar, and were the last out at midnight (chucked out actually), and then had drinks at Toni and Rob’s van until 1.30am. Their German neighbour got out of bed and came over to complain about the noise. Bit embarrassing!

On Friday we were up late, and drove into Vilanova to find a cash point and supermarket. After lunch we swam in the indoor pool on the site. We all had to buy swimming caps in order to go in the pool. Not a pretty sight….there will be no photographic evidence! Met up with Toni, Rob, Isla and Freya for drinks in the evening. Bit more of a sober affair tonight! The girls are hoping to meet up again when we’re home, so we may be calling in on Wigan sometime!

The weather is really lovely-around 18-20ºC, with clear blue skies. On Saturday we had (another) lazy day, meeting the Wigan folk at the pool in the afternoon. They left for home in the evening, so we were back to our own company again. Started watching the 5th series of ‘24’. We’ve had it for ages, but have held off watching it until we’re desperate. True to form, we’re all hooked on it now and watched the first 4 episodes back-to-back…well, it’s not like we have a lot else to do!

Sunday we finally ventured off site and headed to the town of Sitges, which is about 10km away. It has a reputation as a gay resort, and we did see many examples as we wandered up and down the prom, ‘gay-spotting’! There’s even a large pink triangle-shaped monument on one of the jetties which states ‘Sitges Contra L’Homofobia’, which we interpret as meaning that the town’s OK with homosexuals. It was certainly a posh place, with the locals strolling around in very snazzy clothes. We were probably the scruffiest people there, still in our shorts….all the locals were well wrapped up in smart jeans and jumpers, whilst we Brits are still trying to catch the last of the sun’s rays! We’re so easy to spot!

We wandered to the end of the beachfront, past the sand sculptures, to the town’s landmark, the 17th century church of Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla, which was really pretty. As the sun started to set, the walls of the sandstone church began to turn pink…very nice!! The girls bought a headband each, with their names on, made as we waited. They are both sporting beautiful, tasteful false nails so fit in quite well with the well dressed crowd of Sitges.

Darryl and Kelly turned up at the site today (the Landrover campers from Nettuno), on their way down to Valencia, so more friendly faces! All the Spanish de-camped today after their weekend break, and it’s very quiet on site, especially in the bit we’re on. Our campervan neighbours are from Lincoln. They can’t get a satellite signal either, so we lent them our DVD’s. In return we got a nosey around their camper…Andrew is still fancying one!

No bonfires for us on the 5th though. We did manage to get back into doing school work, although our morning lessons didn’t start until 11am! We also managed to book the car into a local Nissan garage for a service, fix the door lock, and fix the front two lights on the caravan ( I say ‘we’- it’s the royal ‘we’ of course). Still have other jobs to do though- find a Spanish SIM card for our phone being the most important.

And….me and Madi are having sausage and mash for tea…with real English pork sausages! It’s amazing the things you really crave for. Madi just needs to find a chippy and then she’s sorted! Andrew and Elena are having vegetarian stuffed tortellini with sweetcorn in a tomato and basil sauce. They are both still going strong with the veggie thing, but it’s driving me mad! My diet doesn’t exactly fit in with veggies, so it usually ends up with cooking two separate meals. Not easy with a kitchen area as small as ours.

Karaoke, Bingo and Cuban Roger shakes his balls 6-9th Nov 2007

We’ve been mooching around the area during these last few days. Been into Vilanova a couple of times for a wander around the shops, cycled on the roads near by, and donned our gorgeous swimming caps again for a dip in the pool.

Our neighbours, Sue and Stuart (Stuart was an extra on ‘The DaVinci Code’, so we’re going to look out for him when we watch it!: see photo), have with them their electric guitars and have been playing loads of songs during the afternoon. Good practice for the karaoke in the evening with Cuban Roger! We went up with S&S and Darryl and Kelly for the evening. The girls were desperate to sing, but were too shy. Eventually, Elena went up (although I had to go as well) to sing ‘Don’t go breaking my heart’, and Elena and Madi sang ‘Hey, Baby’ together. They were really good, and D&K have video evidence!

As the message board says, we missed D&K leaving Wednesday morning (sorry guys)….we just don’t do early mornings anymore!! They missed a treat in the evening though, with Cuban Roger shaking his balls….bingo balls, that is! He did say that he can do make all the numbers with his body…with the inevitable jokes about ‘69’ thrown in several times…

Port Aventura 10th Nov 2007

As if Disney wasn’t torture enough for Andrew, we went to Port Aventura for the a day of Halloween rollercoasters…or so we thought. It wasn’t quite a day of rides…more a day of queuing for rides! We couldn’t believe it was so busy! Even though the park is only open at weekends, we didn’t think it would be heaving. It took 45mins just to queue up for the pleasure of entering the park. We managed a full 6 rides in the 9 hours we were there, with a mega 1.5hr queue for ‘Dragon Khan’ (see video for the action). Even the kids weren’t prepared to queue up for the new ride so we gave that a miss. We did have a good day though, all things considered, with the ‘Monster Parade’ as the finale…lots of scary clowns and blood and gore!

A spiritual experience with Buddha 11th Nov 2007

We headed up into the Parc Garraf this afternoon to the Palau Novella, a Buddhist Temple (counts towards PHSE!). The directions in our guide book said we needed to look for a stony bumpy road, and it was! It’s officially Andrew’s favourite road, as he got a go at a bit of ‘off-roading’, although technically it was still a road! The kids weren’t overly impressed by our destination, but we’ve never been to a Buddhist temple before.

In order to look around the temple, which is actually an old palace built in 1890, we had to go on a guided tour, with headphones and recording in English, with a monk. He took us around the palace, where several of the rooms have Tibetan art, clothing, music and other artefacts of Buddhist culture. It all seemed a bit weird to us (as do all other religious stuff, no matter what the denomination), with the chanting and strange music (which was supposed to help you get into a meditation mood, but just got on your nerves). Don’t quite get it really. 

After the tour we were invited into the chapel for warm cinnamon milk tea, which was disgusting…Madi drank all ours though. We then did our walk around the Estupa, a monument which is supposed to be a representation of Buddha. As you walk around clockwise (don’t know why it has to be this way), getting stimulated by its energy (hmmm), you’re supposed to think good thoughts about sentient and non-sentient beings on earth. I asked the girls what they had been thinking about. 

Elena said: world peace, kindness to others, saving the animals etc. 

Madi said: sausage and mash!! The girl is always thinking about food!

 A Gaudi day in Barcelona 12th Nov 2007
We were up at 7am this morning (what a shock to the system…it was still dark!) because the car was due down at the Nissan garage for a service at 9am. At least we hope its going to get a service…hopefully our very basic-Spanish combined with hand gestures etc got over what we wanted doing! We didn’t need to pick the car back up again until 6pm, so decided to spend the day in Barcelona. It’s a bit of a torturous journey in to the city at the moment because the train line was damaged when they dropped a huge concrete slab on it. Now the train stops at Gava, and they have loads of coaches to ferry everyone in. It takes about 90mins to do this…but it’s all FREE (train and coach). It’d be rude not to take advantage of free stuff!

Since we knew we were limited with time (and we’ve tramped the kids around so many cities so far that they all look the same to them), we chose the days itinerary very carefully and opted for a Gaudi day, as it is this architecture that gives Barcelona its uniqueness. We caught the Metro to Lesseps, ate paella in a little café, and walked to Parc Güell, a park designed by Gaudi as a residential English-style garden city, and now a UNESCO site. Gaudi was commissioned by Güell in the 1890s to design this 50 acre estate, which was supposed to include 60 houses alongside public buildings…a housing estate basically! The guide book says ‘the initiative was unsuccessful’ (not sure why, probably cash flow), and only a 2 houses were built, one of which was the show house. Noboby wanted to buy it so Gaudi bought it and lived in it until he died. Güell ended up donating the land to the city in 1923 as a public park and it’s been raking in visitors ever since.

The buildings were a real surprise to us: gingerbread/fairytale in style, childlike in design, colourful, and extremely eccentric (although officially one should say that the buildings were built ‘within a framework the modernist period’ with a twist reflecting Gaudi’s unique, introverted and mystical personality!). Apparently when he was awarded the title of architect in 1878 his tutor said ‘Who knows if we have given this diploma to a nut or to a genius’….his work is certainly a far-cry from the rest of the architecture in the city (or any other city for that matter)…so I’m leaning towards the ‘nut’ end of the spectrum!

We walked around the park (finding the swings along the way), crossing the viaducts and listening to the various buskers playing in the arcades underneath them. If you read the architectural blurb the viaducts were masterfully designed (technically, that is), but they look very strange as the columns are sloped (to take the diagonal thrust) and they look like they’ve been thrown together. We ended up on the terrace on top of the Room of a Hundred Columns (which doesn’t have 100 columns at all…only 84 (we didn’t count them, so relying on DK for this morsel of info!)). The edge of the terrace is called the serpentine bench, and is a wavy edged, mosaic bench inspired by the shape of buttocks left by a naked workman sitting in wet clay. Loads of questions here: why was a workman naked at work, why was Gaudi looking at him so closely, why sit in wet clay if you’re naked???....Like I said…Nuts! Speaking of which…wouldn’t they leave a mould as well? 

We posed for photos near the famous mosaic dragon fountain (which had only just been restored after vandalism earlier this year) and headed off to the Sagrada Família, apparently Europe’s most unconventional church (there goes Gaudi again!). Gaudi designed it to have 18 towers, 12 for the apostles, 4 for the evangelists, one for Mary and one for Jesus, and Gaudi lived like a recluse for 16 years on the site. He unfortunately got run over by a tram in 1926, didn’t get immediate treatment because he was so dishevelled and scruffy, and died three days later. He is buried in the Sagrada crypt. Only 1 tower was completed by this time, and because Gaudi kept changing his mind about the design he kept recreating his blueprints. The last set of blueprints was destroyed in 1938 by anarchists on the night of Franco’s invasion of Barcelona, so the rest of the Sagrada is being built without really knowing how Gaudi would have built it. So far there have been 8 towers completed, along with the main entrance, the Passion Façade, which is so far removed from Gaudi’s work it looks really odd: angular figures, spooky soldiers in sci-fi masks, emaciated naked Christ on the cross. Its just as bizarre as Gaudi would have built it no doubt, but in a completely different way! The whole thing should be finished by 2026, although the underground TGV-style line which will run under the foundations might destroy it all, just like in 2005 when a metro tunnel caused the collapse of a whole block of buildings! Hope they sort that little problem out! We got back for the car which got its service as planned. It only cost 116 Euro, much cheaper than in the UK….

 Karaoke again…with Cuban Roger gyrating his balls this time! 13th Nov 2007

 It’s karaoke night again tonight with Sue and Stuart. Cuban Roger greeted us, saying ‘Hello rock and roll family’, thinking Sue and Stuart are the Gramps! The girls had worked their nerve up, so were on for singing. Cuban Roger started the night with his own, unique rendition of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, which was a treat to say the least. Elena had a good go at Robbie’s ‘Angels’, Madi got up with Elena to sing ‘Hey Baby’, Andrew and I debuted as a duet singing ‘I got U Babe’, and the girls chose ‘Johnny B Good’ for Stuart to sing. The night ended with Cuban Roger gyrating to ‘Boomba’, in his tight white Cuban jeans. There is video evidence of these activities…
 

On the move again- 14-18th Nov 2007

Back to traveling again as we head further south to Guardamar, just south of Alicante. It was a long days drive, 7 hours, but we wanted to just get there without doing an overnighter. The campsite we’ve picked for the next 3 weeks or so is the Marjal, right on the coast. We’ve met quite a few people who’ve stayed there and said it was really nice: TV, fresh water, and drains on each pitch (no more lugging water around), free indoor pool, clean loos (yes! toilet seats and paper inside the loos) and showers, restaurant and loads of activities. It’s laid out very formally in little avenues, with the pitches defined by low hedges and covered in crushed marble. There are loads of English here, average age +55, many of which look like they’re here for the entire winter. They have covered the ground completely with a ground sheet (to keep the dust down), put up awnings and have fridges, kitchens and furniture in them…proper home from home! There also some enormous RVs too, complete with pop-out sides.

We had a surprise on our first full day on site. At 5pm the tanoy suddenly sprang to life with Angie, our own hidey-hi camper, letting everyone know what was on offer during the evening. Was a bit naff really…it just needed a xylophone for the total Hidey-Hi effect! Anyway, we have loads to look forward to: a singer on Saturday, BBQ on Sunday, cribbage on Monday, line dancing Tue/Fri, and, top of the bill, the Abba tribute night on Thurs. Not sure we’ll be going too much of it, being financially challenged, but we might make the cribbage as that’s free!

We’ve finally got some English TV, only BBC1 and ITV1, but it’s great. We’d completely lost track of time and hadn’t realized how near to Xmas it is, only being reminded by the adverts. There are no decorations up here anywhere, whereas I’ll bet back home they’ve been up for weeks! It reminded us we’d better get onto Amazon and get ordering in time for Andrew’s visit home.

We did a bit of clothes shopping at Torrevieja on Friday. Managed to get Andrew kitted out for his interview next week, down to the shoes and tie! Not exactly Armani man…more like C&A man, but he’ll look smart enough. The girls were desperate for new stuff too, so got up to date with an outfit each. We also bought a little electric heater- it’s getting quite cold overnight as the temperature drops from the daytime 18ºC to only 2-3 ºC. Bit chilly without central heating!

We met up with Nic, Jack and Taylor that night at their house (lord, did it feel spacious) and went out for a Chinese at their local. Really cheap: starter, main with rice/noodles for less than 5 euros. Even we can afford that! It was lovely to see them all again and catch up with their lives in Spain. Nic is still crazily rushing around all day…nothing changes! The boys are still enjoying their Spanish life and are into football in a big way. Mike is working in England at the moment, but we’ll catch up with him before we move on.

We were on the beach on Saturday, the kids were in the sea…it was absolutely freezing (not that I know first hand of course). Just guessing after looking at the girls’ blue lips.

We’re going to get into the Xmas spirit next Sunday, as we’re planning to go and watch Jack in his panto. It’s in English obviously, so should be fun….Oh, yes it will!

The Rain in Spain falls mainly….on Guardamar!! 19th-21st Nov 2007

Yes, it’s raining and chilly….not as bad as back home, but a shock to the system nonetheless! 

Andrew has packed his bags and gone home 22nd Nov 2007

Well, after nearly 9 months on the road with three girls, the pressure has got to Andrew and he’s had enough. He packed his bags, got on a plane and went back to Burnley. Fortunately for us (well, we do need someone to empty our toilet and get the water), he’s coming back next week, hopefully with a job in the bag. Bit of a reality check for us, but got to think about coming home and what we’ll do. Watch this space…! 

While the cat’s away, the mice will….go shopping! 23rd-26th Nov 2007

The girls and I have spent a nice day shopping today (26th) in Murcia’s equivalent of the Trafford Centre. We went to take advantage of bargains at Primark and H&M, as the girls are growing far too fast. Never been to Primark before…and never will again…what a pile of rubbish, naff clothes. Everyone usually raves over the clothes there, but we all thought it was rubbish. H&M was much better and we all got new gear.

Last night we got in the mood for Xmas with the Torrevieja Show Group’s pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack Routledge was in the chorus, so we went along to watch with Mike, Nic and Taylor. It’s a thoroughly British performance (as all panto should be!), with a fab guy playing the dame, and a not-so-fab cast doing the rest. The jokes were as corny as they should have been for panto, with the inevitable lines leading into the songs….’If only I had a hero’ ….queue…a bit of Bonnie Tyler. You get the drift. Average age of audience and cast +50 (except for the chorus kids). However, they were raising money for charity, €3000 this year, so fair play to them all. Madi got up at the end to go the Christmas Alphabet song. She was the ‘M’, funnily enough, and kept getting a kiss from the policewoman for ‘mistletoe’. We had a good night.

The Guardamar area is a strange one really (for Spain, that is)…as it’s very British. I was reading in Wikipedia that the Torrevieja area is only 47% Spanish, with the rest being made up of 13% British, and then 2-3% each of many of the other European countries. We did a survey of the campsite for our school, and the British and Germans are by far the largest groups. As you’d expect from the UK influence, the shops cater for us. The camp shop even sells Asda’s Smart Price tins of Spag Bol. Not sure how they got hold of these but they charge €1 each for them…must only cost about 10p back home! There are loads of signs in English advertising homes and cars for sale on the sides of the roads, so it’s easy to forget you’re in Spain really.

One other thing that’s made me laugh recently, and I must include this or I’ll forget it. You know you always worry about what kind of an area you’re bringing you kids up in. Well, I don’t think any of you can top this one. We’ve been driving home in the dark a few times this week, either from the airport, Nics or the shops. The main road doesn’t have any street lights, so our land mark for the campsite turnoff is quite important to us, otherwise we drive right past it. As we were driving home the other night, and getting close to home, Madi spotted we were nearly there and said ‘Look Mum, we’re nearly home… there’s the strip club’. Hmmm, we didn’t have one of THOSE places near Printers Fold.

The girls are busy getting ready for X-factor 2017, writing and choreographing their own songs. You might see a sample on our blogg if they get up the nerve to be videoed!!

Job Interview  27th Nov 2007

Just a quick update on the job progress. Well, I got it! Surprising but true, somebody does want to employ me.

A strange experience when sorting out all the HR paperwork just before I went in to see the panel, I was asked for all my relevant qualifications; I had to reply, erm, I have no relevant qualifications to submit!

Anyhow, a 15 minute presentation on "the significant threats to further education over the next three years and how would I prepare a business development team to meet them"......... and et voila...SO as from the end of March 2008, (yes they will wait for me) I will be in position as "Senior Account Manager" within the Business Development Department of Carlisle College  with my new boss who was my old boss at the Ambulance Service, and mate Phil Woodford,so pretty exciting really.

Thanks to Mum and Dad for putting up with me at home and Anne and Alan for doing the taxi and car hire service. Sorry I couldn't catch up with everyone when I was home but I was really Short of time before and after the interview.

Andrew