spain – Page 72 – don't confuse the narrator

use your loaf

Bread is important in Spain. Not what I’d call good, but important, all the same.

The two loaves in the picture look tempting, but they are both basically cotton-wool-style white bread. The one on the left, bought as un pan, will be easier to cut in a couple of days, and will make quite decent toast. At first sight, a foreigner may think the one on the right – una barra – will be like a French baguette. They’d be wrong. It’s pretty much the standard tasteless Spanish loaf, though the supermarket version tends to be rather cheaper and even more like cardboard than the ones I buy in the panadería.
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april

While others bundle and bunch
 under umbrellas, shrug
 into pak-a-macs and hunch deep 
into their collars, their faces
 scrunched, gurning
 against the elements, she 
pokes tongues 
at raindrops and laughs 
glitter from her hair. 

In the UK we are used to hearing that “April showers bring May flowers”, an expression that apparently can be traced to its earliest known form – Continue reading “april”

hunter of dreams

My neighbours may think I should be concerned about meeting wild boar(s) in the vecinity, but not all such meetings are to be feared.

The picture is a close up (full image below) of one such beast that I came across at the Feria de Arte in Arenas de San Pedro a couple of weeks ago and that I really wish I could have taken home with me.
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wild boars and motorbikes

During a break in the rain this afternoon, I went for a brief walk. The whole thing only took me about 40 minutes, and I met and spoke to three guys. The first, walking a small dog along the road down by the river, simply wished me good afternoon. Then I turned off the road onto a trail up between the olive groves and towards the pine woods.

There I met a neighbour whose first reaction was, “¿No tienes miedo de caminar por aquí?” I said no, I wasn’t afraid, and he hastened to assure me there were lots of jabalíes in the area; he definitely seemed concerned when I didn’t pale at the thought of bumping in to a wild boar in the middle of the afternoon half a mile from my own back yard.
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carry on shopping

Living in Spain, there are times when I feel as if I am looking at life through linguistic bi-focals: one lens is my mother tongue, English, the other is the local language, Spanish (Castellano).

So, when I see signs like the one in the picture (taken in a small town in the province of Cáceres), I understand perfectly that it’s a village grocery store – indicated by “alimentación” – but I also notice that it appears to be selling “carrion”. Such vignettes add a touch of the surreal to life.