Fun On The Finca

Mamaduck has been working as a volunteer on a little farm (finca, in Spanish) in Aranjuez for the last week, and will be doing the same for the coming week too. Today was her day off, so I got the train to Aranjuez this morning - it's only a 40-minute trip from Madrid. We mooched around the town for a bit - it has several palaces and places of interest, and we took the 50-minute Chiquitren tour of the town.



The Chiquitren is the kind of thing you see in lots of tourist places - the 'engine' is built to look like an old steam locomotive, but it's actually a deisel-driven truck pulling three 'carriages'. The carriages are open-sided and extremely cramped: if you were not well-acquainted with the person opposite you at the start of the trip, you certainly would be by the end after you'd had each other's knees in your groin for the duration. We could barely walk by the time we got off.

We had a long slow lunch, and then at 4 p.m. it was cool enough to set off walking to the finca. It took about an hour, and we were more than ready for a brief siesta. Then I had a tour of the place, which is actually on two sites. The volunteers - last week there were five of them, next week it's down to four - stay on the 'huerta', or vegetable garden. The owners of the finca stay on the other site, down the lane, with two slobbery dogs, two donkeys, a horse, two pigs and a bunch of chickens.





And at about about 7.30 we set off back to the railway station and I caught the train back to Madrid: totally chilled and completely exhausted by long walks and that special air you get in the country.

Tonight in Madrid is 'La Noche En Blanco' - The White Night. This is the third year they've been doing this, and basically there's loads of events going on all through the night, and lots of major galleries are open and free. Being a boring old knackered fart, I won't be partaking. Sorry. But at least I gave you a picture of a pig.

Orange Juice

If you've ever seen the British film 'Brassed Off', you'll have seen and heard a Yorkshire brass band performing 't'Concerto d'Orange Juice'. It's actually the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo, and it's one of my absolute favourite pieces of music. As it happens, Aranjuez is a pretty little town about 50 km south of Madrid. It is home to a Royal Palace with associated formal gardens and several other places of interest. The area is known for its production of strawberries and asparagus. Each Saturday and Sunday during the summer, a restored steam train makes the trip from Madrid Atocha to Aranjuez with volunteers in period dress handing out strawberries. It's called El Tren de las Freses (it used to be how the farmers of Aranjuez got their goods to market in Madrid), and we tried quite hard to get on it. Sadly, it was full, so I think you may need to book more than a day in advance.

Aranjuez has always been on our hit-list of places to visit, but we were given a bit of impetus by a friend of MamaDuck's who was going there today specifically to watch a concert. We took the Cercanias (suburban train), which leaves Atocha every half-hour, and takes forty minutes. We eventually met up with our friend, had a nice lunch, wandered around the Palace Gardens, had a drink in the sunshine, got to the Palace too late to do the tour, had another drink, and then tootled off to the station to get the train home at about 7pm.















I can't believe the last picture!