Christmas

The girls have made it – surviving their first term in a Spanish school and Simon and I are feeling very proud of them. The finale was the Nativity play where we watched Madeleine perform her part as a servant to one of the Three Kings, (click below to watch the directors cut). Unfortunately Yve didn’t have a chance to show off her singing as her teacher decided the day before that her class hadn’t been good enough and wouldn’t be able to participate! Thank goodness none of them seemed that bothered.

While snow is causing havoc in the UK and the rest of Northern Europe, we are having the most torrential rain which is causing flooding and damage to the local roads and bridges. Our house doesn’t seem to be very watertight either with water dripping through the skylight and windows.

 We had a lovely Christmas Day with Granny, Jeremy and Pits, the rain briefly letting up for a fabulous walk and a successful meal.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our Blog watchers and thanks for all your support over the past couple of months.

Oranges, Oranges, Oranges

The valley looks like a child’s drawing with all the trees dripping with oranges – very beautiful to look at and extremely cheap! In fact the price of oranges is so low that many farmers can’t be bothered to harvest them, and they’re left to fall on the ground.


We had our first night out, (just the two of us), for three months on Thursday. Marie Angeles babysat while we headed off to Granada to see a new friend play in a 'Spanish' bluegrass band. No banjo but she sang brilliantly and played the Dulcimer (have a look).


Christmas is around the corner but the girls don’t break up until the 22^nd December when on the last day they are in the nativity play. Yve is singing and Madeleine has a speaking part, which she has learnt by heart.  We’re not entirely sure what it means or who she’s meant to be and whether there’s a costume involved but …. watch this space!

Big Weekend

A countdown to Madeleine’s birthday and a visit from Pits (Hannah) made for a bumper weekend.

The birthday treat for Madeleine on Saturday was a horse trek through the hills with Daddy and Pits.

Yve and I opted out, (as the sight of horses at 40 paces makes us sniff and sneeze), so we had a very enjoyable afternoon at a party in a nearby village. (Yes, I think I can see a glimmer of a social life).

The trekking was a great success but it was probably a good thing I wasn’t there. Hearing about it and seeing the pictures afterwards made me feel a little nervous. Madeleine, who has only ridden a handful of times, was hoisted onto an enormous adult saddle on a 16 hand horse, her feet barely connecting with the stirrups.

She was then left to her own devices as they made their way along a narrow trail up the canyon, their guide Juan chain smoking his roll-ups as he lead the way.



I don’t think there is a direct translation for Health & Safety in Spanish, but it made for a terrific adventure.

A further breakthrough this weekend … we were given our first piece of locally grown produce, a truly gigantic lettuce. The locals apparently feel sorry for you if you don’t have a piece of land!

Something to Say

The great excitement for the girls this week was to have a 10 year old girl called Molly to play for the day. Not just any girl however, but an English speaking one! It’s the first time in 3 months that Yve and Madeleine have spent time with another child from the UK.

Usually there is a great debate about the age difference between the girls and their friends. Not so today, the girls couldn’t have cared less about the age, just very pleased to play in their own language.  Molly has Irish/American parents and has been living in Spain for 6 years and has never been to an English school – totally bilingual. It came in handy when they were out exploring the neighbourhood and someone offered to buy Madeleine. (They didn’t get a price).

Oh yes, 15th November and still 22°C ... hot!

Granny's Workout

The girls were very excited to have Granny and Jeremy visiting us this week. They arrived laden with goodies including a newspaper and a copy of ‘Hello’  - a treat, as our village doesn’t even sell Spanish newspapers, in fact no one seems to read them and Spain has the lowest circulation of papers in Europe.

Another successful trip to the Alhambra, this time to the Nasrid Palace – booked tickets on line including the pensioner discount (in Spanish) drove the tour bus there and back – I am getting the hang of this, possibly a job opportunity?

After lunch at a restaurant in the next village, we walked around the corner to the new local park, for children we assumed, but no a Council initiative for locals of all ages and granny participated fully! (The pictures speak for themselves)

Guadix

Last week we visited a town about an hour north of us called Guadix.  The drive was quite spectacular through a dusty red lunar landscape backed by snow capped mountains. The town is on the edge of the area where they filmed the ‘Paella Westerns’ in the seventies, (so think Sergeo Leone, Clint Eastwood & A Fist Full of Dollars).

Guadix is famous for it’s cave houses with about 10,000 people still living in modernised caves buried into the hillside with only windows and doors at the front. Apparently very comfortable with a stable 21°C summer and winter.  All very strange and more like a home for smurfs or teletubbies!  From my perspective, a visit to an authentic cave museum with its claustrophobic rooms was only bearable because of 21st century lighting. I think the whole experience nearly passed Madeleine by until our ‘television starved’ daughter found the “Presentation Suite” with a 40” flat screen monitor showing a very dramatic publicity film for Guadix, which could have rivalled a pitch for the Olympic games. As Clint might have said... it 'made her day'!

Snow

Until now, we have been enjoying lovely warm sunny days (~24 C), swimming in the pool and wearing shorts, although the locals are now dressed for winter.

Last night we went to bed with most of the doors and windows open, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the sound of a howling cat trapped in the house, doors banging and pouring with rain. This morning I set off to walk Plum in shorts and a jumper and looked up to find the first sprinkling of snow on the Sierra Nevada! (see below).

I am now in demand at the girl’s school as two teachers have asked whether we can come to a mutual language arrangement. They “make English with me” and I get to practice my Spanish. So for the foreseeable future, on Monday & Wednesday mornings I meet with Maria de la Trinidad (Trini) the IT teacher who uses every opportunity to speak English and causes the girls to giggle as she tells them to sit on their arses in class! Whilst on Monday evenings, I have an hour with Maria Carmen, who is responsible for teaching English at the school, but currently has great difficulty speaking it!

Learning Spanish

One of the main reasons for coming to Spain was to learn the language and the first question everyone asks is “How’s the Spanish going?” Luckily for us we have found fabulous Ana. She is from Madrid, but lives in a nearby village and comes to our house to teach the girls and us several times a week. 

The girls understand much more than they realise and can respond with phrases and key words, though the main incentive seems to be to be able to talk to friends about their favourite musicians and trade stickers.  Some days I manage to have quite good conversations with Paquita in the shop, chatting about the weather and how the girls are doing at school.  Other days like last Friday in the bank, I waited 20 minutes watching the man in front count out every bit of small change he could possibly own and when it was my turn feeling hot and impatient I couldn’t remember a word!

We have just had Bank holiday here and we set off to get our first glimpse of the Alhambra, couldn’t get tickets for the palace only the gardens but just as well as the gardens took up all afternoon.

Our belongings have finally arrived from the UK.  Three weeks late and one broken computer! but at least we have a few more clothes to wear.

 

Fiesta

Spain isn’t Spain without a fiesta. The girls excitedly came home from school last week and told us that the next village was having a fiesta on Saturday, and lucky we were forewarned. It all started with a series of explosions echoing across the valley at 6:30. The sky rockets proceeded to give way to the brass band who eventually gave way to the local cockerels.

We set off mid-morning across the ‘campo’ to check out the action, (including mass!), but just before we reached the main square, we were sidetracked by Dolores, who saw me taking photos of a building. She insisted on inviting us in to her house, where she proudly proceeded to show us around her kitchen, sitting room and garden. We couldn’t leave without taking lots of photos and promising her a visit to our house!

The mass didn’t disappoint – the band, the dresses, the guitars and castanets. The party continued on with entertainment throughout the night, fireworks more gunshots and eventually the final parade for the “Virgen del Rosario” passing through our village and under our window, at 7.45am Sunday morning.

 

Essential Trip to Granada

We’re back in our house – relief. Still waiting however, for our boxes to arrive from England. They’re 2 weeks late and still no definite delivery date in sight. Hopefully they’ll arrive soon as I’m not sure our life in shorts and t-shirts can go on indefinitely!

It was Madeleine’s turn for the emotional roller coaster at school this week. Having survived till Thursday, the treat was a little shopping trip in Granada, (Simon declined this invitation). After feeling extremely proud of myself for navigating into Granada and tackling the underground carpark with the van, we headed to Zara (when in Spain!). Two hours, one skirt and a pair of jeans later, we moved on to the Carrefour (where you can purchase just about anything, including puppies – eek!). Here, along with the groceries we found a sticker book and stickers which Madeleine insisted was essential at school.

Friday at school turned out to be the most successful day so far with Madeleine swapping High School Musical stickers and admiring everyone else’s.

If only I had known earlier what the real local currency was!

A Change of Scene

Ok, so this week wasn’t quite as smooth sailing as we had hoped. We had to move out of the house for a week and move into another further up the valley. We always knew it was going to happen but had put it out of our minds. We hadn’t quite anticipated the upheaval and the inconvenience of actually having to drive the girls to school (very easy to slip into zero commuting!)

The positive of being in a different village for a week is discovering the area and finding the most fantastic walk (part of the walk crosses the GR7 footpath which goes from Istanbul to Portugal) from the top of the valley downhill through lemon, almond and olive trees. Madeleine has never been a keen walker but the excitement of collecting pomegranates, figs and almonds was a good incentive.

Southern Spain has had a few storms this week so the weather has been a bit showery. Decided to head off to the beach one cool day, with the temperature being about 17 – 19C where we live but 23C at the coast (half an hours drive), had a swim in the sea and came home – not quite St Lucia but better than Bognor Regis!

Simon and I are about to start our intensive Spanish – hooray. (It would be interesting to know if the locals really are that friendly or just being incredibly patronising).

First Week at School

The day before school started, Carmen (the school secretary), called to ask me to collect the girls books from the chairman of the parents committee. Simon and the girls set off and I watched them return laden with all the text books, exercise books, pens and paper they need for the whole year.
Yve and Madeleine were surprisingly calm on their first morning before school, in fact I think Simon and I were more apprehensive. We watched all the children walk past our house on the way to school with their parents and grandparents carrying the vast amounts of school equipment. The girls were swept away with various teachers at 9.00am and we left to go to a local hippy market with Simon’s sister Gigi and brother in law Chris to while away the time until 2.00pm.
I returned to pick up the girls and was met by a very happy Madeleine and a very grumpy Yve. Firstly she was cross that I had come to pick her up as none of the other parents did, secondly she hated it and thirdly everyone had Serrano ham sandwiches for their snack and I had given them pain au chocolat!
Lunch at Jose’s restaurant seemed to brighten things up a bit, particularly when the ice cream came out. It evidently wasn’t that bad in hindsight and both of them happily went off to school today.

Walking home from school

South of Granada

After handing over the keys of our house to the new tenants in Sussex we loaded up the van, left the UK and spent 10 days traveling through France and Spain to arrive at our NEW house on Saturday 29^th August. The house is as lovely as I remembered it. We can’t quite believe we’ve made it here and keep having to pinch ourselves.

We had a crossover with the owners of the house who very kindly introduced us to the essential players in the village – the shop owner and Jose in the bar.

No one is sure when school starts but someone had seen the caretaker! We visited the school and enrolled a slightly nervous Yve and Madeleine and were encouraged by how friendly they are and happy to give extra Spanish tuition when the rest of the class is studying English.

The girls are having Spanish lessons in the mornings with a local tutor coming to our house which seems to work out well.  They are making friends already, the locals are making an effort and inviting the girls to their houses and causing great hilarity with “Whenever you are boring at home come for swim” and vice versa with me telling a blank looking girl she was “guapa” (hindquarters) instead of “guapo” (pretty). We are all slipping into Spanish time very quickly which seems to be winding your clocks forward 2-3 hours.  The girls have friends knocking on the door at 9.30pm to come out and play!

Village life is pretty noisy with the early sound of Cockerels and Donkeys all sounding too close for comfort, followed by hooting bread, fish and meat vans, until lunchtime then silence until 5 – 6pm, when it starts all over again!

Weather 30 C and everyone enjoying the pool.

We now have the start date for school - 10th Septembe