… home’s best.
After nearly a month of travelling and living out of a suitcase, I am back in the pueblo in Spain. It’s gloriously sunny, there are huge drifts of leaves, snow on the mountains, cats on the verandah…
Thanks to Randall Munroe at xkcd for his thoughts on the relativity of east and west.
In the summer, the untended land here is mostly too dry for weeds and no lawn can survive without almost daily watering. The neighbour moves his grand-daughter’s shetland pony around between the various empty gardens and fields, and she may not be in one place for more than a couple of days, depending on the grazing.
We’ve had rain now – torrential thunderstorms and strong winds – but not enough sun to bring the weeds on again, though no doubt they’ll be knee high again in a week or so.
Continue reading “a for apple”
It’s not just the bread and cake shops that confuse me in Spain. There’s a-whole-nother area of shop difficulties associated with chemist shops and drug stores.
In the UK we have chemists. Inside a chemist shop you’ll find the pharmacy counter where you can buy your medicines – or, hopefully, in the near future get your prescription made up free of charge. You’ll also usually find a photographic department, perhaps an optician, even, maybe, a wine-making area. Continue reading “de tiendas II”
On the subject of shops, I talked about the bombonería – the chocolate shop – and the fact that our local bar is called the Bombonera although it’s neither chocolate box pretty, nor does it sell anything sweet, focusing rather, as do most normal Spanish bars, on fried food such as calamares and pieces of pig.
The whole bomb… lexical area is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one which deserves due respect. Our butane gas is delivered in big orange bottles called bombonas. (Remember that bombón is a chocolate or similar sweet.) Continue reading “language bombs”
One thing that remains confusing about living abroad, even after so many years, is the the shopping.
Not the opening hours, this time – though that’s a subject that can always get me ranting happily, and which I’ll no doubt come back to – but the shops themselves and where you need to go to buy different things.
You’d think that mostly there’d be a one-to-one equivalence between shops in different countries, wouldn’t you? But back in French class, in the 70s, I remember seeing that this isn’t the case. Continue reading “de tiendas I”
don't confuse the narrator 