Thank you, Frank Gehry

Yesterday in San Sebastian, as I enjoyed my final Spanish beachside picnic, I remembered that I the idea to come to Spain was born sometime back in 1997, when I saw photos of the Guggenheim Bilbao in the Globe. Shortly thereafter, I actually dreamt about the museum (I don´t really know what that says about my subconscious, but moving on) and decided that I definitely had to go there.

I had forgotten almost all about this until yesterday. It´s a nice way to end my Spanish adventures. The museum is unbelievable, so much so that I was moved to make like a spy and take surreptitious, illicit photos while I was there.

In a bizarre way that I hadn´t expected, the museum is actually this weird connection between the beginning of the trip and now. Turns out Gehry is inspired a lot by fish in his architecture because of childhood trips to the market with his grandmother, where she´d buy a live carp and keep it in the bathtub before they killed and ate it. This is a Czech Christmas tradition, and I only just missed those very same carp stalls when I was in Prague back in late December.

Bilbao brings it all together.

Penultimate details

In my last few days in Barcelona, I ate the most incredible meal of my life. Five hours, countless tiny haute cuisine tapas, a glass of wine (or sherry or pear cider) paired with each course, and it was the most un-poncey fancy food ever. There is no way to capture the degree of playful inventiveness that was so alive in every bite. And the game of determining which flavours were doing what when was equally entertaining. Carles Abellan, the chef of the restaurant ComerÇ 24, is a genius.

Also in those last few days, I stumbled upon an incredible cemetery that stretches up from sea level to the heights of Montjuïc and learned about Catalan history at a museum. September 11 has been an important day for the Catalans since 1714, when some sort of massacre occured.

Yesterday, in San Sebastian, I hiked up one of the two "mountains" that jut out from gorgeous beach into the Cantabrian Sea, discovering the myriad moss-covered parts of an old castle, including a cemetery for English naval officers from way back when. San Sebastian was just stunning, and I now understand what people have meant when they´ve told me about the incredible beauty of the Basque country.

My hiking boots broke, irreparably this time, and I replaced them with a rather impractical pair of Spanish cowboy boots.

I met the ex-Spanish surfing champion, whose English was impeccable.

And today in Bilbao, it´s 10 degrees and I´m feeling the chill. Toronto on Friday will likely cause me some sort of immediate frostbite, or shock, or something.

Back in Barcelona, baby

Okay, okay, so here I am, in Barcelona again. My decision to return to the city of the theft was largely based on the fact that, while talking to some Catalans at the hostel in Seville last week, they started talking about Barcelona and all the incredible things here that I missed when I was here last. Also, there´s a mountain nearby (Montserrat, apparently it´s some sort of religious pilgrimage site, but I plan to go for the view and the height) and I´m now drawn to mountains. And spending several hours in one of Madrid´s other incredible museums (the Reina Sofia museum of modern art) I realized just how many of the famous Spanish artists of the 20th century (Picasso, Dali) were Catalan.

In any case, I´ve only been here for a few hours, and already am glad that I came back. For one thing, this is a city that, to me, feels more like home than Madrid did. Don´t get me wrong; Madrid was incredible. On art galleries alone, it wins hands down. Also, there´s this amazing park right in the centre that makes Central Park whimper in unfavourable comparison. But still, there´s something too colonial about Madrid. Too big, too worldly, too polished, despite the aforementioned nocturnal habits of its inhabitants. The parallel is probably really flawed, since neither Toronto nor Ottawa are at all as vibrant and alive as Spanish cities, but if Madrid is Ottawa, then Barcelona is Toronto (or maybe Montreal, but as an anglophone, I have not always been received all that well there).

Barcelona is just cooler, as ridiculous and juvenile as that may sound. Also, there is the fact that it´s nestled between ocean and mountains. (And we all know how I feel about mountains.) I went to this small contemporary art gallery called the Centre d´Art de Santa Monica, and although it´s in an old convent, it had all sorts of off the wall crazy modern art on display. Also, it was free to enter, and there was a pile of posters (free for the taking) that constituted an exhibit. I think it was from an artist who´d shown there recently, but my Catalan is even worse than my Spanish, so I´m not quite sure of the details.

I was talking to this Icelandic guy at the hostel earlier who´s lived in Barcelona for a year (and is only in the hostel because his girlfriend dumped him and took the house) and he called Barcelona the Sodom and Gomorrah of Europe. The most drugs and the most prostitutes, he says. Still, I like it, warts and all. It´s nice to be here and not be on edge ALL THE TIME. Which was my mindset at the time of my last visit as the result of the wallet loss and my traditionally uptight nature, which has now been subdued a fair bit by the Spanish "mañana, mañana" attitude which I´ve acquired. I hope that´s one of the things that remains, after my tan has faded and my Canadian tolerance for winter has returned.

Toledo, I hardly knew you. (And I think I´m happier that way...)

I took a daytrip to Toledo yesterday, a city that Cervantes called the light of Spain, among other things. It was pretty. It was actually very pretty, and arriving at the bus station just outside the city walls and having to walk the five minutes uphill to the city gates was pretty awesome. However, (and there´s always going to be a however when I call something "pretty") it was a little too touristy for my liking. Yes, the narrow windy streets were UNESCO world heritage site worthy, and yes, I enjoyed ambling about and buying a marzipan dessert (the city is apparently famed for its marzipan, and the thing I bought was literally called a marzipan dessert and pretty outrageously decadent) but there were too many touristy shops selling Don Quixote armour (I kid you not) for it to feel like an actual place where people live. That´s all. It reminded me a lot of the old part of Prague, north (?) of the river where the castle is. It´s all windy streets and cobblestone alleys, but again, the same excessive amount of tourist shops all hawking the same kitschy collectables.

A morning with Madrileños

This morning, I woke up bright and early and headed to the nearest cafe for breakfast -- a coffee and some churros. At the next table were three madrileños (dudes from Madrid) who were having a different kind of breakfast altogether (beer and tapas). They had been out all night; I had slept for 9 hours, a fact which they found really hysterical. In any case, they started talking to me, and decided to be my guides (albeit rather hungover and direction-challenged ones) for the morning.

The whole thing was rather hilarious, as my Spanish is piss-poor and their English wasn´t fluent. Luckily though, one of them had studied in Italy for a year, so we were able to communicate all morning long in a mix of the three languages. I learned that the sister of the Spanish king (or prince, I´m not quite sure) committed suicide mere days ago, an overdose of some sort of pills. We saw the huge buildings of the Austrian part of Madrid, and they told me that the Austrian kings are more admired in Spain than the Bourbon ones, who did nothing but drink. Eventually, we broke for lunch (beer and bocadillos, or sandwiches, of calamari) and then they headed home to sleep while I went to the Prado museum.

I have a meager knowledge of art history from a few years of high school art classes, and was completely blown away by the sheer quantity of masterpieces. Entire rooms devoted to Rubens, Velasquez, Goya, Bosch, etc, etc, etc. Also, a really cool exhibit by a contemporary German artist, Thomas Struth, called Making Time. Interspersed with the museum´s permanent collection, they were large prints of photographs he´d taken in various museums and art galleries around the world of people looking at art, or restoring art, or simply sitting in the back rooms of art galleries. In a room of Goya paintings, there was a huge photo of people looking at another Goya painting altogether at a museum in Tokyo. Quite the juxtaposition.

¡Vale!

This is my new favourite Spanish word. (The old one was "chica.") I´m not quite sure exactly what it means, but it´s something along the lines of, "that´s alright, that´s cool, no problem," but in the arena of flamenco dancing (and guitar playing, singing, clapping, and foot-stomping) is also used very frequently in the way I had assumed "ole" would be.

I´m in Seville, waiting for replacement credit and debit cards, and have spent my five days here wandering the streets and soaking up all the flamenco I can get my hands on. I haven´t paid to see any of the spectacle shows marketed for tourists, but I´ve seen several laid back, casual affairs in tiny bars, where the audience is just as likely to participate in the flamenco jam as the performers. The dancing, though, is incredible. There´s this imposing power and assertive aggression to the way the woman stomp their feet and assuredly raise and move their arms. It´s a lot more aggressive and serious than I thought it would be, and that makes me like it even more.

Also, I visited the bullring, on a guided tour, and am very sad that I´m not here in April with my battered copy of The Sun Also Rises in hand. As gruesome as the details of a corrida are, I found myself curiously compelled regardless. Each bullfight lasts two hours. There are three matadors and six bulls, and each matador has to kill two. It only takes 20 minutes to kill a bull, and the bulls are shipped to the ring from various bull farms in Andalucia only 24 hours before the fight.

Matadors die too, and there was a very famous matador in the mid-twentieth century who started fighting when he was 9, and died in the ring at 20. The bullring in Seville had a tiny museum in which a matador outfit he wore at 14 was hanging in a glass case. Wild.

A day on The Rock

I arrived in La Linea, the Spanish border town to Gibraltar, in what can only be described as torrential downpour. In this rain, I met two Polish girls, and together we found a cheap and nearby hostal (no, not a typo) and commiserated about our wet belongings.

Later that afternoon, we crossed the Spain-Gibraltar border on foot, amazed by the rock rising up from the otherwise flat coast, partially obscured by rainclouds. A wander through Gibraltar led us to many unmanicured sights not pointed out on tourist maps: sunken concrete piers, abandoned war bunkers, the town dump, a slum of sorts, but exactly the kind of stuff I like to stumble upon because it makes places seem less phony and more real -- the grit, the quotidian, etc.

The next day, we walked up to the top of the rock of Gibraltar, interacting with some exceedingly tame roadside Barbary apes on our way, and stopped for lunch with a view of the rising continent of Africa directly south of us. I really can´t explain how incredible this was. I saw Africa! Africa! In the distance!

Anyway, the walk down was also pretty incredible, following the worn Mediterranean steps as they zigzagged down the eastern face of the rock.

I am now in Seville, having parted ways with my temporary companions (who are worth a line or two of their own: in Poland, one was a chemist, the other a teacher. Now they live in Plymouth and work as shop assistants. On their two-week jaunt through Spain and Portugal, they brought a hairdryer, packs as big as mine, no guidebook or phrase book, and followed me from the bus station because I looked like I knew where I was going. I thought I was living on the edge by not booking rooms in advance, but they take spontaneous travel to a whole new level.)

city mouse, back in a city

Granada! I´m in Granada currently, with a friend from the farm. Today we visited the Alhambra, which was the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, falling to the Catholics in 1492, that important Spanish year. The Alhambra was unbelievable. So many intricately decorated buildings, calm reflective pools, and traditional Arabic layouts, architecture, baths, and gardens combined with various other additions made by Renaissance and other monarchs over the years. In a way, it´s like a microcosm of Spain: there were just so many different cultures and flavours at work, all in the same place, engaged in this weird sort of coexistence.

It´s almost time for tapas, but one quick note first: tapas in Toronto misses the point entirely. Medium prices for small plates of food that require you to spend a small fortune (in my budgetary terms, anyhow) for a full meal? Nonsense. Here in Granada, and elsewhere in Spain I am led to believe, going for tapas means spending one euro and change on a glass of beer and getting a plate of assorted snacks with each beer you order to help offset the drinks. Yes, that´s right: free olives, free bread topped with things, free mini sandwiches, free slices of tortilla espagnola, a delightful spanish omelette with potato and onion. Yum.

"plus douce"

Last week I had a conversation in French with a wizened Catalonian hippie (he squats in an abandoned military base on Mallorca in the summer, and cortijo surfs, helping his friends with their olive harvests, in the winter). We talked about romance languages, and he told me how the Spanish spoken in South America is sweeter than that spoken in Spain. He was pushing sixty, I´d say, and had what I´m discovering is the typically Spanish mullet: short on top, long on bottom, but buzzed on the sides. It may sound strange and even laughable to some, but it looks quite fetching on those of the younger generations.

Notes on weather

When I first got to the farm, I was a little appalled by the frequency with which weaterh was discussed. "Christ," I thought to myself, "this topic of conversation is dull as dishwater. Shouldn´t we be spending more time discussing the cool, exciting things, like living off the grid and organic farming?"

Well, it turns out that weather is actually of supreme importance if you´re a farmer, and precipitation is even more important if you live up a mountain and rely on snow melt as your source of irrigation water in the summers. Andalucia is a typically dry region of Spain, as I think I´ve already mentioned. Lots of sun, which is great for tourists, but shit for farmers, because dry winters mean dry summers which lead to bummer harvests. So, when it began to rain last week, even though all of his wwoofers were a little grouchy, my farmer host was pretty ecstatic. Just a few days of rain is the difference between a stressful dry summer and a well-irrigated one. It also snowed one day, which led to me and two of the other girls to leave the relative warmth of the farmhouse and marvel at the pyramid-shaped snowflakes "like African children," as one of the others put it.

One final weather-related note: a number of years ago, I stumbled upon a used copy of a book by Cancon darling Jann Arden. Not only was it a diary of the songstress, but it also included some "poems" she´d written. I just leafed quickly through it out of a curious disgust, but picked up on a poem she´d written about how she was so upset and heartbroken that the rain was falling down upon her like manzanilla olives, splatting down on her, pathetic fallacy and all. As someone who has literally had manzanilla olives rain down on her back as they were violently beaten out of a tree above her, I can say that the sensation is actually quite pleasant. Sort of like a gentle massage.

City mouse goes to the mountains

So here I am in Orgiva, a small town in the Alpujarra region of Andalucia in southern Spain. The town itself is in a bit of a valley, and I can see the white cluster of its buildings from the mountain side I´m currently living and working on. Yes, that´s right, I´m now some sort of farmhand. For the past three days I´ve been scrabbling about on dry terraced plots of land below old olive trees, picking manzanilla olives from wherever they´ve been hiding.

Although this is probably one of the more insane things I´ve done in my day, it´s working out quite well, although at first I had a pretty insistent interior refrain of ¨what the hell have I gotten myself into???¨ The farmer who I´m working for picked me up at the bus stop in Orgiva on Monday night at about 7, by which time it was fairly dark. There was an older British couple also headed up to his farm for a weird sort of holiday thing, and he came and picked the three of us up in a battered old citroen. He was fairly gruff, and headed up this winding dirt track up the mountain, barrelling along as though the road was paved and lit, stopping every once in a while to fix the fan so the engine wouldn´t overheat. Slightly terrifying, but we managed to make it to the top of the mountain alive and intact.

In truth, we´re not at the top of the mountain, only about 2000 m up, but the view is spectacular. It´s funny, because when picking olives I focus on my immediate surroundings: the olive tree, the crumbling terrace wall, the dry dry red earth. But every time I look up and out across the valley, I´m blown away by this landscape that consistently takes my breath away, and leaves me thinking of nothing but really cliched adjectives and adjectival phrases. Seriously though, the outdoor wc has the best view of all.

The farming life is simple, and there´s a calm to life on La Jimena (the name of the farm) that is ever so refreshing after the stress of Barcelona. I wake up at eight, about the same time that the sun begins to rise over the mountains, eat a light breakfast and head out to the terraces for three hours of work with the others. At around noon we break for a light snack, then head back out for another three or so hours of work. The main meal of the day is eaten at around 3ish, and I´m in bed by 8 usually (the sun sets sometime between 7 and 8), and asleep not long after my head hits the pillow. I´ve never slept so soundly or so long before. It´s funny how, without electricity, a body will just adjust to the more natural rhythms of the sun. If it´s dark, I´m sleeping, and if it´s light, I´m awake.

Olive harvesting itself is rather varied work, although I think today (my day off) is the last day of the season. So tomorrow on to other farm tasks, maybe work in the garden or clearing out another set of ruins on the property. My favourite bit of harvesting the olives is climbing the trees, short stick in hand, and beating the fruit down from the branches onto nets below. Scrabbling in the dirt for the fruits (or are they vegetables?) is also rewarding work, and I feel something like a gold digger up in the Yukon back in the day.

The other wwoofers on the farm are really cool, laid back people, all around my age, from England, Holland, and Belgium. The family whose farm it is are pretty great, so generous with their home and food. It´s funny, all my romantic city girl notions of the bucolic country life, though not faded exactly, have been imbued with a good healthy dose of reality. Yes, there´s a romance to living halfway up a mountain, making a living with your hands and working with the land and whatnot, but it´s a tough life. There´s not a lot of money in organic farming, and living without the modern comforts of electricity and such makes life a little more rustic and grubby.

I myself am already developing the hardened, weathered hands of a labourer, and live in a state of perpetual grit. My work pants are dusty and grass-stained, with the occasional olive oil stain no less, and my hair is taking some rather unusual twists. However, I rarely look in a mirror, so I suppose it doesn´t really matter all that much.

The weather is wild. Chilly in the mornings and at night, but by midday, the sun is so hot that I´m overheating in a t-shirt. This area of Spain is always sunny and dry - 314 days of sun a year, the farmer tells me. And the sky at sunset and sunrise is always pink and bright and lovely, the sun leaves a halo over the mountain tops as it sets. Oh, of course, stars too. Lots of stars, very bright and all.