Semana Santa in Ocentejo

We're just coming to the end of Semana Santa - Holy Week in Spain. The week leading up to Easter is as important as Easter itself, and MamaDuck had a week off work. We were invited to spend the week with some friends of ours at their place in Ocentejo, a tiny village (permanent population 25, but weekend and holiday population somewhat larger) about 150 kms north of Madrid. We've been there several times, but usually only for an overnighter, and usually as passengers in someone else's car. This time, our friends were already there, so we took the twice-daily coach as far as Cifuentes, about half-an-hour from Ocentejo, and they picked us up from there.



With spring teetering on the verge of sprunging, there is a lot of work to be done in the garden, and MamaDuck was eager to do some of it. I had been enlisted to make pork pies for general nibbling through the week, and a big steak and kidney pie to share with the family of José-Luis (the chef/owner of the only bar/restaurant in the village), and Espe, who just happened to be around. I spent a very happy morning in the kitchen constructing these pies, and they were a great success.

The pattern of our days at the house goes something like this: get up some time between 9 and 10, sort yourself out with breakfast, then get down to thinking about writing a new novel / actual work / dig the garden / make pies / go for a walk / paint the walls of the living room / try to draw a picture or do whatever it is you want to do. Sometimes there's a mid-morning coffee at the bar. At about 2.30, we knock off and go for an aperitivo at the bar. José-Luis is very canny, and will appear with a superb bit of food just as we look to be on the point of going back to the house for lunch. As we're eating this, we will of course order another round of drinks, and on more than one occasion we would be too full of J-L's creations to actually have or need any lunch. Some of the things he made for us: codornices (quails); migas (a southern Spanish dish of breadcrumbs and meat with a chopped-up fried egg stirred in - it sounds weird, but José-Luis makes the best migas I've ever had); beans (not Heinz); red peppers stuffed with a cheesy cod sauce; lomo (pork loin); patatas bravas (sauteed chunks of potato with a hot sauce); and many other goodies.

Then, back to the house for lunch (or not), usually followed by a snooze, and then whatever was planned for the evening. One night this involved trooping down to the Mayor's* house to watch Atléti vs Real Madrid (el Derbi, and a truly crap match it was), and a few days later a drive to the next village, Sacecorbo, to watch Atléti vs Valencia. The reason for all this mooching around to watch footie is that Castilla La Mancha switched off their analogue TV broadcasts last weekend. Now, this has been planned for years, and everyone now has a TDT (Terrestrial Digital Television) adapter. But Ocentejo (actually, the beloved Mayor of Ocentejo, who is the only person in the village who has satellite TV), forgot / didn't bother to tell the authorities they would like to have whatever doohickey is required to transmit digital signals. So, blank screens in Ocentejo.

And then back to the house for a nightcap, and sometimes staying up talking till stupid o'clock.

Sigüenza Cathedral

Some days we'd have a trip out of the village - MamaDuck and lady friend went to a garden centre in Guadalajara one day. We all went to Siguenza a few days later - it's quite a pretty place with an astounding cathedral and a castle that has been restored and is now a Parador.

Castle / Parador

And finally, the culmination of Semana Santa - el viernes Santo (Good Friday). There were lots of events organised by the village, starting with a competition to see who could make the best torrijas (a bit like a cross between French toast and bread-and-butter pudding). MamaDuck and I had been co-opted onto the judging panel, along with one of our friends and the mayor's wife. After that there was a concert of classical music given by a violinist and a guitarist, followed by the church-goers parading their little statue of Christ on the cross around the village. And then a bonfire in the square, which was supposed to be accompanied by roast potatoes. But they didn't put the spuds in until about 11pm, and by midnight they were still not ready, it had turned seriously cold, and us poor little Brits buggered off to bed.

Yesterday our pals gave as a lift into Guadalajara and we caught the train back to Madrid, where it promptly started to rain. But it was such a pleasure to be out of Madrid and plunged into a proper little Spanish pueblo where, of course, almost nobody speaks English and so you absolutely have to inflict your appalling Spanish on them.

*It's always amazed me that such a tiny village as Ocentejo has a Mayor and a town hall, but it turns out that the municipality is actually the largest in Castilla La Mancha in terms of land area. 

San Antón Market, Chueca

This is gonna be a rant about architecture and fake bricks. Sorry.

When we moved into Plaza de Chueca, Madrid a couple of years ago, there was a fenced-off hole in the ground directly opposite the entrance to the Plaza, on Calle Augusto Figueroa. A sign announced it to be the site of the new Mercado de San Antón (I have no idea if there had previously been a market on the site, and if there had been, what happened to it). While the Barceló market was only a few blocks away, we awaited developments with interest. The site appeared to be dormant for about eighteen months, when suddenly it sprang to life, in November 2008. The grotty graffiti- and fly-poster-covered fence was removed and replaced with a tall and shiny corrugated aluminium barrier (and a week later it too was bespattered by graffiti and fly-posters). Site huts were installed, followed a few days later by a tower crane that moved so much in the wind we were convinced it would not survive the construction process.

And a few days later, up went the sign with an 'artists impression' of what it would look like.

Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt.

What the fuck is that? It looks like the very worst of British municipal 'architecture' from the seventies - and I should know, I grew up in the town that invented it. I stared at the sign in disbelief, trying to analyse what this picture is telling me. Okay, Keefie, take a deep breath. Right. It looks like a two-storey monolithic podium. At the ground level, it's clad in black stuff: can't tell what it is. There don't seem to be any openings like doors or windows in it on the main street elevation. Above that, the first storey seems to be clad in pinky-red tiles or brick slips*, arranged vertically. Looks like the top floor splits into two chunks with a gap in the middle suggesting a light-well or atrium. And this level is clad in golden tile or brick.

I rush home to get my camera: I have to document this. It must be a mistake. The Municipality has held a design competition, and this was the losing entry but a junior clerk was given the job of ordering the sign and supplied the wrong image. Hohoho, how they will laugh when they realise the mistake.

After a lengthy delay while the contractors built two levels of underground parking, the concrete superstructure began to emerge. Oh. My. God. It wasn't a mistake, they were actually building the shite in the picture. At this point we felt obliged to move a long way away.

A few weeks ago, I was showing our visitors around central Madrid, and we went into Chueca. The building is very well advanced: only a few weeks from completion, I guess. It's far, far worse than the 'artists impression'.

Oh, man, this is just awful. My pictures probably don't do it justice, but you have vast expanses of one batch of brick slips, interspersed with a different batch that should be the same colour, but is different enough to make it look like the cock-up it is. And because the 'architect' has designed this abomination with no surface relief whatsoever, your eyes are drawn to the errors. The corners are awful: there's no pretence that this is real brickwork (because it very obviously isn't) - maybe the 'architect' thought he was making some kind of ironic post-modern joke, because if you were actually building this thing in brick it would fall down: the brick slips cladding the first floor are stuck onto the concrete as if they were tiles (which they are, of course): around the corner they are stuck on in a stretcher bond pattern. It's just too awful for words.

And look, look! Down that little street, how this blank, ugly facade says 'fuck you, hombre' to the delicately detailed buildings around it.

Well, you know, 'fuck you' can sometimes work extremely well in historic urban contexts. But the building doing the fucking had better be good enough (go to St Mary Axe in London and see how Number 30 just completely ignores its context, but you don't actually care because that is one helluva gorgeous building).

So, early next year this hideous affront to the fine-grained architecture of Chueca will open. Graffiti artists will abseil from the roof and decorate it. I might be one of them.

*Brick slips - just like normal bricks - same material, same texture - but only a centimetre thick: used when you want to convey the impression of bricks in an unsuitably bricky context.

A Little Adventure

Today is a public holiday in Madrid for the patron saint, San Isidro. So we decided to head out to the country. Actually we decided to go to the mountains. We found a slight glitch when we got to the main station at Chamartín: due to engineering works, we would have to get off the train at Los Molinos (the stop before Cercedilla) and take a special bus to Cotos. It seemed fairly straightforward, so we did it, along with several other people who were obviously kitted out for some serious walking.

However, when we got to Los Molinos, the train doors declined to open. We ran down the carriage to another set of doors, and they failed too. The train continued on to Cercedilla. We hammered on the windows to attract the attention of some security guys who pressed the button from outside, obviously thinking 'who are these morons who can't open a train door?'

We pointed out the problem to the ticket inspector and the driver, who were both massively uninterested in doing anything about it. 'Get back on,' they said, 'we're leaving in ten minutes.'

So we did get back on, choosing a different carriage, and when we got back to Los Molinos, the ticket inspector pressed the button and off we got. Of course we had missed the bus up the mountain, and the next one was an hour and a quarter away.

So we strolled into Los Molinos, and found a very pleasant little town with some excellent bars and restaurants. We abandoned the mountain plan, and spent the day there.



The main street with snow-capped mountains in the background.



The restaurant where we had lunch is a converted ice factory.



Fields and mountains.



The Guadarrama River runs through it.



There are plenty of trees and green stuff in and around the town. But despite the brilliant sunshine, if you weren't actually in it, it was pretty cold (apparently the temperature here is always 5 degrees less than Madrid: I guess it's at least 1km above sea level). They always get snow in winter.

A totally unexpected day out. Thank you, San Isidro.

Around And About

I promised you some picture of our new neighbourhood, so here goes. Actually, where we live is nothing like this. These picturesque / falling down / ramshackle houses are further down the road, overlooking a small park in a valley.


See the mountains in the background - still a bit of snow on them.

It's Raining Sheds

One of the things I used to love about living in England in the winter was the possibility that you would wake up one morning to find the landscape covered in snow. We've had a similar experience over the last couple of weeks here in Madrid. First, the surprising appearance of half of this year's Christmas lights in Plaza de Chueca, and the other half the following morning. A week later, a dozen metal sheds appeared overnight, and the next morning, another dozen.

The sheds, apparently, will be populated by people selling aromatherapy stuff, organic foodstuffs and all the other crap that the dedicated new-ager cannot live without. This will go on until Jan 11.

Wakey Wakey!

I was up unusually early this morning, so I got to see this:

Moonrise

I am a bit of a luney when it comes to taking pictures of the moon. I like trying to do it, but it's a bit tricky when your camera doesn't have Hubble Space Telescope mode. I'd just started eating my dinner on the terrace this evening when my eye was caught by an orange blob in the sky behind an illuminated church spire. I grabbed my camera and took a load of photos as the moon rose. Two of them were more or less in focus:

The church in the foreground is in Calle de Goya, and it has a quite unusual cast-iron spire.

Waiting For The Bus

Los Campeones returned to Madrid last night, and of course we had to go to see it. We had no idea what was going to happen, all we knew was that it would be a good idea to be at Plaza de Colón by about 8pm. As it happened, we were there at 7.30, along with a sizeable crowd, a big stage, big video screens and a perfectly adequate sound system.



We were entertained by several bands that we'd never heard of, and an enterprising dude was doing good business painting Spanish flags on peoples' faces - although it did look like he was using acrylic paint, which is a bugger to get off.





The team's plane touched down at 8pm, and after about fifteen minutes they set off on the slowest-ever bus trip from the airport - it took over an hour for them to reach Colón, but everyone was quite pleased when they did. The National Library of Spain sits on a corner of the Plaza, and these security guys on the roof got a pretty good view.



A few minutes before the actual arrival, the Spanish Air Force Aerobatics Team flew over our heads trailing yellow and red smoke.



Then finally, the bus arrived. In the photo below, do you see the yellow blob to the left of the kid in the blue t-shirt? That's the Cup! (Actually it might be Luis Aragones, but it's hard to tell from this distance).



Once again, a bloody fantastic experience: thank you Madrid, thank you Spain!

And I promise you, a complete change of topic tomorrow.

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!

Meet Terry

Warning: bad puns ahead.

Many moons ago, I had a ball of fairly dense foam with a map of the world embossed and printed upon it. It was a 'stress-ball' and the idea was that you could squeeze it as hard as you liked, but it would always return to its normal shape. So if you were upset or angry about something, you could just squeeze hell out of this thing, and it stopped you getting into trouble for hitting other people (that happens, you know).

A few weeks ago, MamaDuck got me a present. Being the tease she is, she made me close my eyes, feel the object, and try to guess what it was.

'¡Es un toro!' I say. And I was right. It's made of exactly the same material that my stress-ball was, so I reckon it's a stress-bull.



A thing like this has to have a name. I named him Terry. In my head, I was thinking 'Terry the Toro.' MamaDuck didn't know this, of course. She thought it was 'Terry-Bull'.

Groan.

Dos de Mayo [Second of May]

UPDATE: Lots of videos now on YouTube - search for 'MOREworldVIEW La Fura'.

Two hundred years ago yesterday, the people of Madrid rose up against the French occupiers. Yesterday saw many celebratory events throughout Madrid, all but one of which we managed to miss. The one we didn't miss was a spectacular sound, light, music, theatre, acrobatic, firework wossname in front of the Ayuntamiento in Plaza Cibeles. Graeme at South of Watford has some useful historical stuff about Dos de Mayo, if you're interested.

The organisers were tight-lipped about the show, but I heard or read somewhere that there was no need for a big stage because the sky would be the stage. Two huge cranes were positioned at opposite ends of the Plaza, and they were used to lift various pieces of equipment that housed the performers. There were things like a giant treadmill, two gantries with a wall of people hanging from them, a steel cage containing the Bonaparte brothers and a wooden horse, and a gigantic golden puppet.







There was also lots of action on the ground - armies of rebels bearing torches ran through the crowd. The treadmill was rolled around the plaza. Two stretch limos with police escort forced their way to the stage. And in the air, a tightrope walker in Napoleonic costume crossed Calle Alcala from Casa de las Americas to the top of Ayuntamiento - real heart-in-mouth stuff.







It was absolutely sensational.

This looks like a useful site for hotels in Madrid or the rest of the world: Madrid Hotels

Easy Ads

Having forsaken Dubai for Madrid last summer, I was quite hopeful that I would never see another tower crane or live next to a building site ever again. Well, I was wrong. Just out of sight of Plaza de Chueca, but not out of earshot, we have three major building sites. The noisiest is the reconstruction of Mercado San Martín (St Martin's Market), where for the last two months they have been pile-driving. They seem to have finished that (very noisy operation) recently, and are now quietly throwing up steel columns and beams. In the Plaza itself, there's a couple of buildings having their facades fixed.

In the last few days, scaffolding has been erected around the building that has the wonderful Taverna de Angel Sierra pub on its ground floor. I was a bit surprised yesterday morning to see floodlights being mounted at the top of the scaffolding - were they planning to work in the dark? But returning from a night out at the writer's group, we saw the reason for the floodlights.



Yes, to illuminate a chuffing enormous advert for EasyJet. I think that building sites involving scaffolding have to be surrounded by netting to stop stray bits of debris from falling to the ground and injuring people. And the EasyNet certainly looks more capable of doing the job than the ancient green stuff on the building next door but one. But it's intrusive and not pretty, and I hope it doesn't stay up too long.



I can't translate the words exactly, but I think means something like: stop imagining everyone neckid - go see.

Our square is a trendy little place, by the way, and frequently gets used as a backdrop for filming ads and music videos. The fruit and veg shop has been used for something - an advert or a feature film - that required a film crew the size of a Premier League football squad, using proper movie cameras rather than vidjo. On Valentine's Day this year, Ryanair staged a stunt involving hundreds of people having a group snog.



All very interesting.

Fire! [¡Fuego!]

Something's ablaze in the east of Madrid. Anybody know? Please leave a comment.