Callosa de Segura

Friday morning was a glorious day. When we looked outside the bathroom window, we could see bright-colored oranges in the grove that starts near our house and stretches out towards an unusual craggy mountain in the distance. The mountain was crystal clear. In a half hour we had loaded and started the washing machine and the dishwasher, so that some productive work could get done while we were out, and off we went to the town of Callosa de Segura.

Callosa de Segura lies inland and is a town with history, and well kept. We walked up and down several streets (Callosa is built right next to a mountain) enjoying the varied architecture of the houses, some old, some new, some ornate and elaborate, but all, it seemed, well-maintained. There is a beautiful central plaza, with plantings, walkways, and a fountain, and since the sun had disappeared by the time we reached there, we looked for a café where we could sit inside and have a café con leche and tostada. We found Cafetería Las Rocas. In a little nook there was a tiny booth with an old square wooden table and two wooden benches facing each other, just enough for two people, or three if you pulled a chair up to the third side of the table. Which you would do, because on the fourth side of the table was an artistic cut glass window, with several layers of glass framing, a treasure in itself, but it also opened onto one of the most charming views I have ever seen.

We had left hurriedly, without camera or iPad. I have two pictures of that view, but they are locked inside my cell phone. I do not have a smartphone, or rather, I guess I do, but in addition to being smart, it is secretive, and it has not divulged to me, within the limits of my patience, the technique of siphoning images from its tiny window to a computer screen. So I will have to compose a word picture of the window and the view.

The window itself is rectangular, with the shorter sides at top and bottom. It measures, perhaps, 18 inches by 36. The surface is a mixture of clear and frosted glass, the frosted portions gracefully arranged in a large floral pattern, so that light refracts through the various irregular panes in interesting ways. By the time we got our coffee, the sun had reappeared and we were treated to lovely sunlight coming through the window, and a clear view outside of the plaza, a very tall palm tree, and another mature and tall tree the name of which I always forget, but we call it the upside-down Christmas tree, because the needles grow upwards on wide-spread branches, ideal as a base for Christmas tree decorations. Perfectly in the center of the horizontal pane of the window, but high up in the vertical, we could see the craggy rock of Callosa mountain, rivaling the rock of Gibraltar in its majesty, but in a sandy color rather than dark.

There was life in the plaza. Las Rocas had a large tent with many tables and chairs outside for the benefit of smokers and hardy souls who had not looked for the warmth of indoors. A few people were seated at the tables, and I watched the server take drinks and snacks out to them. A feeble older woman walked slowly by, escorted by a younger woman, her daughter, perhaps, or a neighbor. Several women walked by with child strollers, and in the distance on the other side of the plaza you could hear and just barely see some elementary school students engaged in a game of football. Occasionally a man or two would walk past, dressed in business attire, on the way to or from an appointment. It was still early, around noon, and there were all the signs of life in a busy village in late morning.

We paid our bill and walked out, and I turned to look into the window that I had spent such a pleasurable time looking out. I could not see in. The outer surface was a mirror, and I found myself looking at myself, with the green trees, the café tent, and the tall rocky mountain peak reflected in the background in a blue sky.

Extra Rinse Cycle

This morning I read in one of the free newspapers that this has been the driest winter in the Torrevieja area in years. In fact, it is said that we only got one-third of the rainfall that we normally get in February.

What rain we did get all seemed to fall on my clean laundry.

Three times in the past two weeks I hung laundry outside to dry in good weather: clear, dry, no sign of rain to come. Three times it received an unscheduled extra rinse cycle from nature before it got dry the first time.

Wet laundry with rainwater collected on the laundry machines container cover

My "laundry room" is the upstairs terrace of our house, which lies between the master bedroom (convenient for collecting the laundry) and my office (convenient for taking quick breaks from desk work to load the machine, hang things on the line, and bring them in again). The washing machine and tumble dryer are housed on the roofless terrace in a large green and tan plastic storage box with two doors: dryer on the left, washer on the right. It was designed and sold to conceal garden equipment, but it works fine for the two electric appliances. My transformation from a died-in-the-wool electric dryer dependent to a steadfast clothesline addict happened five years ago when we moved to a place where it was easy to hang things out and get a little sun at the same time. I almost always run a load of wash in the morning, planning it to make sure that the lengthy 1 1/2 to 2 hour cycle finishes before the changeover from discounted to expensive "regular rate" electricity: noontime in the winter, 1:00 PM in the summer. I rarely use the tumble dryer. For one thing, I would have to start earlier to make sure I was done before cheap electric time finished; for another, the technique of no-wrinkle drying does not seem to have made it to Spain. Then, too, I have grown to enjoy the mild exercise of hanging the laundry and the convenience of getting into the sun and fresh air for a short period of time.

It has happened before that rain has come down on my hanging laundry during an afternoon, but it is rare, since rain showers in Spain usually come during nighttime hours. What I generally do when I leave my desk at the end of the afternoon to collect the laundry before going downstairs to start dinner, and discover that it has rained, is just wait. Let it stay up all night, and by the time that I am out of bed the next morning (which can be quite late, depending on my in-bed reading and iPadding) the sun has returned to the sky and the laundry is dry.

This past Thursday, though, when I glanced at the laundry at 5:30, I was shocked and dismayed. I hadn't heard any sign of rain, and I had been "right next door" the entire time. What's more, I had sheets and comforter covers on the line, and two nightgowns recovering from coffee stains (that happens when you lie in bed of a morning, reading and iPadding) and I had planned to put the linens right back on the same bed for that night.

Looking out at dry laundry the next morning

I briefly thought about firing up the tumble dryer, but I resisted and simply dug out the reserve bed linens instead. And considered myself lucky, as I always do when the extra rinse cycle surprises me, that the rain that day was not one of the ones that comes carrying Sahara sand, which drops dusty particles over everything, usually just after a car has been washed.

But that's another story.

Tons of Salt

The Torrevieja Salt Lakes

We live not far outside the city of Torrevieja, which is located at the bottom left of the map above, but stretches out into the surrounding areas. Our town, Algorfa, is located  off the map at the top right, and the yellow line going diagonally across the screen, the CV-905, is a two-lane highway connecting our urbanization, Montebello, to the city of Torrevieja. It extends for about nine kilometers. Also known as the Crevillente Road, it runs between two sizable lakes, shown on the map. The "pink lake" to the left often has a pink shade due to the crustaceans living in it. The "green lake" to the right doesn't change color. We see both these lakes often, almost daily, as we drive to our petanca, Spanish lessons, shopping, and other social events in the area. Quite often, we see huge piles of salt surrounding the pink lake, because it is still a working salt factory (the green lake no longer produces salt, for some reason that I do not know).

Ever since we have lived here, we have heard that the lake provides salt to melt the snow on the streets of New York City in the winter time. I thought this was probably an apocryphal story, possibly with as much truth as that at one time, salt had been sold from this area to New York. It certainly seems like a long way to ship salt; doesn't northern Europe offer enough of a market?

This week, the Round Town News weekly paper featured a story that confirms the rumor. It reported that, "With the USA experiencing one of their worst winters for decades, and no sign of any major improvements in sight, this week the 'Sakura Kobe' left Torrevieja heading for the U.S. East Coast carrying 30,000 tons of salt." It is the largest shipment of salt that has left Torrevieja for a number of years, and more large container ships are expected to follow.

We were there early in the season. We know you need it. We are thinking of you.

Going Back Home to Roquetas

How many homes can one person have in a lifetime? Lots, I guess. I have just recently returned to my current home in Spain from my, what? original home in the United States. This past Thursday morning when I woke up, I realized that we had no definite arrangement on the calendar for that day. And when I checked, we had nothing definite for Friday, either. And it was a beautifully sunny day outside, so I wanted to go for a ride. Only a couple hours later, we had thrown a few pieces of clothing, our toiletries, and our electronic gadgets (cachivaches) into the car, and we were off to Roquetas de Mar, the Andalusian town we called home when we first came to Spain to live, in 2003.

Roquetas lies right on the Mediterranean about a three hour drive from our current home in Algorfa. It is in the province of Almería, which is the easternmost province of the comunidad of Andalusia, which stretches over almost the southern third of Spain, from the Mediterranean Sea on the east to the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal on the west. For several months in 2008 and 2009 we drove the route in between often, as we commuted back and forth on occasion between the Roquetas condo and the tiny apartment we rented in Torrevieja, in Alicante province, to help us decide whether we really did want to pull up stakes and move to a new home in Spain. We determined that we did, and eventually sold the condo in Roquetas during the first year of the financial crisis that hit in 2008 and is still making its effects evident. Although we have talked about returning to Roquetas for a visit several times in the past five years, we had not. So this spontaneous trip was anticipated, but not planned.

Ironically we drove north to get onto the E-15. But as soon as we joined that major highway running through Europe, we went south, toward Murcia. The car knew the way, because this is how we go to Ikea, which has furnished much of our Algorfa home, and also to the Apple store, where we have gone for help and some of those cachivaches in the past two years. This time, though, we drove straight through Murcia, ignoring the two exits that we usually take. An hour after we had started, the road turned west, and we did, too, and then we really felt like we were on our way.

As it neared noontime we began looking for a restaurant that we had often stopped at during the time we were making frequent trips. The only problem was that we couldn't remember the name of it, nor the town in which it was located, nor the proper exit to take. Actually we knew that we wouldn't recognize the exit anyway, because we were not traveling on the same road that we used to use when we traveled between the two places. Then we traveled on a new toll highway,  the AP-7 (the P stands for Peaje, which means "pay, " and pay we did, to the tune of more than 11 euros, about $15 then, for a one-hour ride). We knew that the tolls had climbed even higher over the past five years, and we decided that we didn't want to support that highway robbery. So we were traveling the E-15, which in some places goes parallel with the AP-7, and we were on the lookout for an exit to the remembered restaurant in a not remembered town.

We gave up before we even got close, we discovered later, but instead we found a nice roadside restaurant on the side of an "easy off, easy on"service road. It was Mi Cortijo, which is a word I had to look up when I had a chance. My Cambridge-Klett dictionary says it means "country estate" or "country house," but an online reference I found first made it sound more like working farm and its various buildings. This establishment just looked like a large roadside restaurant. We sat at a table in front of the house and shared three tapas, some bread, a glass of wine and a gaseosa. It only took 25 minutes, start to finish. I think that perhaps the definition of tapas is changing in Spain, or at least in my  mind, to mean "fast food," because the various tapas offered by a restaurant are ready (and usually displayed in counter top trays) when you are. Most provide very good fast food. So in less than a half hour we were back on the road to Roquetas, which we reached just a little over an hour and a half latter, after an interesting stop.

Coffee to Go--in Spain!

Coffee culture in Spain is, well, cultured. You may be served your cup of coffee in a clear glass or in a ceramic cup or mug, but whichever one it is, it will rest on a ceramic saucer or plate, and you will get a small stainless steel spoon to stir your sugar in, if you take sugar. But before you add sugar, if you are having café con leche, half the cup will be filled with steaming hot milk, rapidly so that a froth develops on the top. If you are in a sit-down cafetería, the combination will probably be made at the table, with the server bringing two pitchers to pour from, one coffee, the other, milk. But even if you are at a stand-up coffee bar, like at a gas station or restaurant along the highway, the barman will likely pour the coffee and the hot milk before your eyes. It's a little ceremony, and it is lovely to drink coffee from a real cup rather than from Styrofoam or cardboard or plastic. And you will drink it where your bought it--coffee to go is just not done in Spain.

On the road to Roquetas, we had driven a half hour after our lunch of tapas and were now ready for coffee, so we pulled off the highway at the sign promising food and drink. The restaurant that we came to was filled--at least the parking lot was overflowing with fifty or more cars. It was, of course, now Spanish lunch time, and we figured that it would take a half hour or more to get served, and then no one would be very happy to give us just a cup of coffee rather than the typical full-course mediodía meal. So we left the restaurant parking lot and drove down the road to the lone gas station, because most gas stations have a coffee bar.

We were out of luck, we saw after walking in: no cafetería, no bar, not even a coffee machine was in view. When we asked the clerk about coffee, however, he apologized for no cafetería and handed us an aluminum can instead. I thought he was going to tell us to pour the contents into a plastic or Styrofoam cup and microwave it, but there wasn't any microwave. He then explained that if we pushed a pop-top on this can and shook it, we would get hot coffee.

Cafe con leche in a self-heating can

This was my first experience with self-heating cans, and I was skeptical. But it was only two euros and we really wanted coffee. It worked almost as well as he said, but fortunately explicit instructions were on the can in Spanish and in English.

1. Remove the bottom lid and press the plastic tab firmly.
2. Wait until the liquid (inside) disappears and steam becomes visible.
3. Turn, shake, and open the can.

We took the can cautiously to the car and followed directions. When we opened it, it was so hot that you could burn your mouth. It would have been nice to have even a Styrofoam a cup to pour it into, but we didn't. The café con leche tasted good, however,. The can stayed hot for almost an hour. I said it was magic, or at least ingenious. Johannes said he knew how it worked and started talking about childhood chemistry experiments. I wondered what chemicals I was drinking. Still , just the thing for camping trips, we said, or just to have on hand in the car for emergencies.

Of course the print on the can was too small for me to read anything, but now I am home and I have read the can and found the website. I am no longer worried about the chemicals and I even know that I can dispose of the can conscientiously in the envases recycle bin. Though drinking coffee "on the street" is counter to the Spanish culture, the Fast Drinks 2GO company says, apparently there is a need, because sales have been good. 2GO gives credit for the idea to an American company, WP Beverage Partners, which it says distributed it through Wolfgang Puck back in 2004. I never saw it there, but I'll check next time I find a Wolfgang Puck at the airport, because this is just the thing to take on board for one of those flights without frills, which they all seem to be these days. You can also purchase in advance from an online store, but I wonder about getting it through security.

Seeing Roquetas: The Same and Not the Same

View from our room at the Sabinal Hotel, Roquetas de Mar

The time we spent in Roquetas was delightful. It had been almost five years since we had been there, and we were prepared for some things to be the same, some to be different. That morning I had quickly reserved a room at a hotel whose name we knew, and whose main-floor public bathroom I had used before, as the hotel was between one of the Spanish language schools I had attended and the bus stop. But it was the first time we had stayed there, and it was in a different part of town--the "urba," or urbanization, or tourist area--than where we had lived before. So we really had the experience of being tourists in a town that we knew well enough that we didn't need a map but that we had some idea of where services, like the local Mercadona grocery store, were. We took advantage of the Mercadona the first night, buying cold drinks and then picking up comida para llevar, a takeaway pizza, on the way back to the hotel.

We also met up with some friends and acquaintances from the past. Mari Carmen, who cleaned for us then and was always a good friend and connection to Spanish life; now she is just a wonderful connection to Spanish life in general and a good barometer of what has changed and what has not. We were surprised at how clean and well-maintained almost everything we saw in Roquetas was. We did not see empty, half-finished buildings as relics of the financial crisis the way we do in the Torrevieja area. We did notice that many businesses had changed names, and Mari Carmen said that often a new place opened up and then closed two months later, but at least here it seems as though someone is able to invest in a new dream right away. We drifted around town to the bookstore and former art workshop, past the language school, to a new secondary school, by our old condo, down to the kiosk where we always bought the newspaper. We rekindled a lot of old memories, mostly pleasant.

And we took the local bus to Almería city the way we used to, because we didn't have a car when we lived in Roquetas, and walked up and down the Rambla, looking for the statue of John Lennon, who composed "Strawberry Fields Forever" in Almería. We ambled around the old city, where many of the old narrow streets have been converted into pedestrian areas. Almería, being a big city and the capital of the province, and not focused on tourism as Roquetas is, was not as spic-and-span clean and well maintained as Roquetas, but it still is a nice, comfortable city. Our favorite cafetería, Santa Rita's, on the Rambla, had disappeared from view, but its venue had metamorphosed into the Chester Café, a tapas bar "with an American theme." We each had a nice tapa ("shrimp in gabardine" (breaded) for me, and a mini-hamburguesa for Johannes. I spent more time than I normally would in the bathroom, reading the wallpaper that consisted of enlarged front pages of U.S. newspapers from the 1920s and '30s that all seemed to feature sea disasters of some kind. At one end of the restaurant proper were portraits of famous American musicians, all apparently black, and a facsimile placard from some unidentified music hall in some unidentified year, but you could get admission to a concert of Ray Charles for five dollars.

We returned to Roquetas and picked up our car, that we had parked at the big shopping center, the Gran Plaza, but not before we took a quick stroll through the Plaza, which had been new when we lived there. Here was where we saw the stark signs of the recession. Almost a third of the stores were boarded up, some announcing impending new tenants, many not. I guess the high rent at the fancy shopping center is enough to deter many dreams of starting a new business.

I did my part in improving the mall economy, however, when I saw the Desigual store, my newest favorite brand. "Desigual" means, literally, "unequal" or "uneven," even "changeable."  By extension, for this Barcelona designer, it has come to mean "unique."  I had bought a unique handbag for a colleague at a different Desigual outlet several months ago, and on my last trip back to the U.S. I had been unable to resist buying a blouse at the Desigual shop in the Alicante airport. Now here was a Desigual in Roquetas, once my home, and it had not been there before. Nor had I ever seen a Desigual with a 50% discount sale going on, so I got an early birthday present and now have a desigual dress.

Sunday Morning at the Mall

We usually spend Sunday morning at the outdoor mercadillo near our house, buying the week's supply of fruits and vegetables, picking up the free weekly newspapers, enjoying a café con leche in the sun, and browsing music, clothing, book, and sundry stalls. This morning dawned sunny and warm, but for various reasons we did not need any produce or frutos secos, and I had successfully said "no" to a 3 euro sweater at the market last week that I liked but didn't need, and was not sure that I could withstand temptation again this week. So we decided to give the market a miss, as our British friends say, and headed out instead to the Torrevieja shopping mall, Habaneras. This was a treat in itself, because it is only recently that Torrevieja has been declared a tourist area of sufficient importance that it has the right to allow larger commercial establishments to be open on Sundays--all for the convenience of tourists, mind you.

We parked in the large--and very busy--parking lot at Carrefour, the French superstore that has all sorts of wares in addition to food, but decided against the garden shop there. Instead we walked across the street to the Habaneras mall, where Johannes went in to AKI, the hardware store, and I took a quick trip to C&A, a popular clothing store for men and women. Ten minutes later I walked out, again having successfully said "no" to a couple items I don't need, but my "looking" genes satisfied. We met at AKI, where Johannes had found a garden hose to replace the one that came with the  house when we purchased it five years ago, but which he was sick of patching up. I reminded him that we needed a holder to hang up the hose that has rested, tangled, on the floor of the upstairs terrace since we purchased the house five years ago, and which I was sick of taking pains to avoid tripping over when moving around in my "laundry room" tending to clothing on the line. We bought two holders, upstairs/downstairs, or his and hers.

Sunday morning at 100 Montaditos. © 2014 Johannes Bjorner

Armed with our major purchase, we took the elevator upstairs to 100 Montaditos, the little sandwich place (that is little sandwiches, not necessarily a little place that serves sandwiches) and ordered two mini-sandwiches each and a small glass of wine. There is no roof on the top level of the mall, which can be a problem when it rains, as it does occasionally, but today there was no problem with water. We felt a few rays of warm sun and since we had not picked up the usual free papers, we went over to the newsstand and invested in the Sunday edition of El Mundo. Johannes kept the news of the world and gave me the magazine section. I don't usually read style magazines, but this time I did and found a beautiful leather case for your iPhone, with three-dimensional flowered cut-outs, in several spring colors, all for just 235 euros. Then I browsed through an article about the founder of Spotify, who has an interesting quote from George Bernard Shaw* in his Stockholm office, and I peaked into a story claiming that croquet is on a worldwide comeback and has become a very popular sport in Spain. I played lot of croquet as a child during summers in New Hampshire, though I am not sure that now I can remember the rules. No matter, there is a description in the paper, and reading that would be a very good lesson for my Spanish improvement project.

The sun had moved and it started to get a little chilly just sitting, so when we were finished with our sandwiches and wine but before I was finished learning how to play croquet in Spanish, we packed up the paper and the garden hose equipment, walked back over to Carrefour, bought a chicken for dinner, and made our way home by early afternoon. A pleasant way to do something a little different on Sunday.


* The quote from George Bernard Shaw is this:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I found it in a November 2013 article in The Guardian, which apparently carried the original version of the interview.