Adios Espana.

On Wednesday 27th July 2011 I flew back from Spain for the final time. I have been abroad for exactly 14 months and 13 days, and for the first time in that whole period I don’t have a flight or onward travel plan coming up. I feel lost!

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On my final weekend abroad, a Spanish friend of mine, Luisa, had invited me to go on a trip with her and 2 other amigas to her village and on to the Portuguese border. As arranged, I turned up at 6:30 p.m. last Saturday, and waited, as instructed, outside the Avenida pharmacy and as expected, they didn’t arrive until 7:15 – Spanish timing.

As I bundled my bag into the boot, crushing the piles of food they had bought for dinner, I was introduced to Marta, a gorgeous, curly haired 30-year old who didn’t look a day over 25 nor very Spanish, with a pale complexion and light brunette hair. She was our designated driver and also one of the bubbliest and nicest Spaniards I have ever met. She spoke in rapid, clear Spanish and made a special effort to involve me in the conversation even though my replies were laboured and staccato. Her boyfriend worked in Madrid, but was currently in Poland, she asked me if I liked Madrid, she loved it, I lied and said I loved it too. Luisa gave me a funny look.

We drove over the river to the south of Salamanca, not somewhere I have spent much time, it being an ugly area of high rise flats, bins and crime in stark contrast to the beautiful old town. There we picked up Ana, a rather more reserved girl who didn’t seemed nearly as enthused to meet me as Marta had. As we pulled off, Luisa explained to me unabashedly in front of Ana that the area we were in was the part no-one wanted to live in because it was full of “gitanos” gypsies. I laughed to myself, saying such a thing in England would be taken as an insult by someone like Ana, but she just nodded in ascent as she gazed out of the window with a wan smile. How I am going to miss the easy-going ways of the Spanish.

We drove west along a very long, straight and dusty road for about 45 minutes. Energetic Marta was talking constantly the whole way. She made a joke about how in Spanish, good-looking girls are colloquially called monuments, and how the men kept staring as we passed as there were four “monumentos” in the car.

During my winter months here, I had taken the trip to and from Madrid and Portugal many times and marvelled at just how ugly the scenery of Castile y León was. For the whole journey, all you would see was miles of flat, barren, browny-beige land stretching off into the distance with the odd derelict barn or bare tree. Looming too, one after the other were the skeletal, metal arms of the industrial crop watering systems. Placed exactly in the middle of the fields they stretched the whole diameter of the field, and trundling on their wheels they could circle around and water the whole area. I had never seen such a contraption before as unlike England, Spain has the luxury of lots of open space.

I had always thought it strange that the countryside should be SO barren and unattractive, it seemed dead, dull and depressing. So it came as a shock when as soon as spring came around these seemingly lifeless and infertile fields leapt into life. Suddenly my surroundings were lush, fecund and full of colour.

As we drove that day I watched the monsterous sprinklers in action, bringing life to the vast swathes of crops. We passed fields filled with thousands of bright sunflower faces staring back at us as they followed the sun’s path across the sky. The odd confused plant was facing away from us like when a dancer on stage takes the wrong steps and ends up with their back to the crowd.

Every single column of what I assume to be a collapsing aqueduct, the duct part on top long gone, was now covered in a mountainous eerie of twigs and guano. Atop many stood a huge and proud looking white stork, the baby bringing kind, which are very numerous in that area of Spain. Two nesting pairs have even made their home in Salamanca’s Plaza Major.

We weren’t far from Ciudad Rodrigo a pueblo which, although not internationally famous like Pamplona’s San Fermin, is at least locally famed for its annual running of the bull, in which I participated in back in March. As such, some fields were designated grazing ground for the verahermosa bulls, a breed which is specifically bred just for bull fighting. One of Spain’s arguments backing the blood sport is that this breed of bull wouldn’t even exist were it not for the tradition. Until I lived in Spain, I had never noticed just how different these animals look from the regular old fresians you see dotted around British farmlands. For one they are huge. Stocky, broad and muscular, they hold their large heads high. The first thing you notice when you see a field full of them are their brilliant horns. They are so white and dagger shaped they look fake, as if someone had crept in during the night and stuck on them the horns off a plastic Viking helmet. Years of fine tuning and perfecting has created a very impressive animal which looks out of place grazing peacefully in a field.

This is a MACHINE not a herbivore!

I never did quite catch the name of the tiny village of some 200 inhabitants in where Luisa’s family owned a 100-year old farmhouse. Marta and Ana, seeing themselves as Salamantinas and therefore big city women (I’ll point out now that Salamanca has little over 150,000 people), hadn’t heard of the place either and laughed at its quaintness and how “backward” it seemed. Indeed I did feel like I had stepped back in time to scenes from Bienvenido Mister Marshall and into that part of the country’s history people like to pretend never happened. What was that? Franco? Isn’t that what the French used to spend?

“Village people always stare like that,” Luisa said, rolling her eyes at three ancient, wizened old women sat in the fading evening sun outside the doorway of their crumbling stone house. All three had stopped talking as we passed by, watching our every step, and only resumed their husky voiced chat once we were far down the cobbled path. It felt like a different world there, I felt like I was back in somewhere like Guatemala or Mexico. The children behaved like those in the rural parts of Latin America too, stopping their games in the streets in order to follow us shyly a few paces behind, giggling and hiding whenever I turned and waved.

At one point the four of us had to step aside as a tractor passed, which looked to be on its last legs and carrying two flat cap and plaid wearing young men. All that was missing from that scene was a wheat sheaf dangling from the men’s teeth. Luisa waved jovially to the cross eyed gentleman who was hanging off the back and staring at me (or was he?) and addressed him on first name terms.

We had a quick drink at one of the village’s 3 local bars (the number drops to 2 in the winter, when the pool bar closes). It was be-patroned by your stereotypical village drunk, a bleary eyed man shouting obscenities alongside his political views from a wheelchair.

Back in Luisa’s house we set out an impressive spread of the typical stodgy Castile y León fare. During our last intercambio meeting, I had mentioned casually to Luisa that I had never got to try the Salamancan special “hornazo” and probably never would as I was leaving very soon. Hornazo is basically an empañada, both being baking tray sized slabs of filled pastry. Like a giant pasty, except the pastry isn’t flaky, but very bready and thick. Hornazos aren’t just any old empañada either, as they are stuffed with every edible part of the pig your mind can conjure (apart from jeta, thankfully. And yes, those are pig snouts…) Following our conversation, Luisa’s mum had very kindly made one just for me to try, and I was ecstatic not to be trying a substandard shop-bought version, this was the real deal, an authentic hornazo homemade by a Spanish mum. Perfect. It contained diced chunks of bacon, pork lion and chorizo, in that order, layered one on top of the other. People often put eggs in them too, but this one didn’t have any, I was pretty grateful for that as it was very heavy without. Decadent and delicious, I somehow managed three slices, wanting to show my gratitude to her mother more than to sate my hunger. This was accompanied with an equally large and heavy empañada of salmon and prawns in bechamel sauce, which Ana and Marta thought unusual and Luisa defended as her mother’s speciality, crispy tostadas of bread, cheese and nut spread, Doritos, and a smidgen of salad leafs slathered in oil and more cheese chunks. Luisa apologised profusely for forgetting the bread stick and asked us anxiously if we were still hungry….

After getting merry on a couple of glasses of red wine over dinner, which I point out we started at 11:20 and finished around 1a.m., we headed out to another bar. Rather amusingly it was named “The Cuban” (well, El Cubano) even though my being there was probably the closest that place had come to becoming multinational, having brought its foreign visitor count up to one. It was set up, rather confusingly, as a bamboo beach hut, with dirt floors inside, and wooden tables and benches outside. One wall was filled with a number of newspaper clippings and photographs, some black and white but all of the same theme: a donkey. Yes, you needn’t reread that. This was no ordinary donkey either, it was stood on its hind legs, with its front ones resting on the shoulders of a man, who was dressed in the typical farm labourer white shirt, dungarees and braces. It looked as though they were dancing a waltz. The same pose of man and donkey in this strange embrace was repeated over and over in each picture. It is a shame as I have only remembered this details whilst writing and therefore promptly forgot once we ordered our drinks. So we will never know what exactly that was all about.

Our old friend the wheelchair drunk had moved on too, and was there, bottle of beer in hand looking even more dishevelled than 3 hours prior.

We sat outside and laughed together as the girls attempted to remember as many slang words for the male and female genitalia as they could. Turns out they have a LOT. Far more than we do and is necessary. When asked to name as many words for ‘penis’ in English, I came up with a paltry 3 words, thus proving the Spanish have an excess of non dictionary classified and un-learnable words. I will never be a nativa.

For two hours we played cards, and it was my first time (apart from a random night with a Spaniard on an island in the San Blas) playing with Spanish decks. Their cards have only 42 in a pack, and are decorated in a similar fashion to tarot cards. They are divided into the 4 suits: oros (golds), bastas (clubs, the beating kind), copas (cups) and espaldas (swords). I was introduced to some very salubrious games including, “Culo Sucio” dirty bottom, and “Burro” donkey (hey a theme?!).

Back in the house Luisa turned her computer on and insisted in embarrassing us all by making us sing kareoke. It didn’t really work as I could only sing English songs, and the girls vice versa – Luisa on the other hand had a tone perfect voice and was able to sing in both languages perfectly.

We went to be at just gone 4 with alarms set for 10…

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