This weekend we are planning to rest! By rest, I mean that we are planning to do nothing much except potter around, check up from time to time on any signings by Sven Goran Eriksson (SGE), stroll on the beach in the morning and eat three sensible meals a day. Because we have been busy.
For example, twice a week we have started attending our pilates classes again ( form of excercise based on working core muscles, usually through quite small and controlled movements with associated breathing). On another two days we go to our Spanish class with Marga and wrestle, not always successfully but always with great enthusiasm, with Spanish Level C1 Nivel Consolida. And then we just do stuff. This morning after our class, for example, we went with Marga and various other students, to the new-ish Museo de las Salinas here in Chiclana. The salinas are the salt farms that were constructed out of the marshes that surround the Bay of Cadiz. Very few remain that continue to produce salt manually, using a system of driving water through a series of channels until the amount of salt relative to that of water is great and the water evaporates, leaving pure salt. However, for centuries it has been one of the traditional industries of the Cadiz Bay area-hence the delicious dish of fish cooked in salt, which tastes wonderfully moist and not at all salty- and must have meant a very hard life since most of the hardest work had to be undertaken in the heat of summer, by hand. Anyway, the museum is a restored salt farm. There is a small exhibition, explaining the process, the history and giving information about the plants and birds of the area (fascinating in themselves). Then you can walk, either on your own or, as we did, with a guide, through the salt farm with your binoculars. Worth a detour, as the Michelin guide would say!
After our class and this trip-about 5 hours in total-all of which was in Spanish, we were more or less "Spanished out". That's to say that our brains were gradually grinding to a halt. Imagine then, two days of Spanish speaking..........
We did this!
The weekend before last we went with Marga, her family and friends (22 of us in total!) to a casa rural, a converted water mill, just outside the little town of La Jimera de Libar, near Ronda. It was incredibly beautiful, incredibly tranquil and reminded us again of how rural, relative to the UK, for example, Spain is. Not only is it possible to walk for miles without meeting anyone, you can also drive through beautiful countryside with virtually no traffic. Everyone cooked, talked a lot, the Spanish played guitars and stayed up till 4 in the morning-and even Mike and I didn't stumble to our beds until after one in the morning. To be honest, we cheated slightly on the talking spanish front by offering to walk into Jimera on Saturday morning to buy bread (we ended up buying all the bread in Jimera!) so that we could mutter to each other in English and also be quiet for a bit, but we felt quite triumphant, nevertheless!
This photo should be called "mad-dogs and english men" perhaps. It shows Mike repacking his rucksack full of all the bread we had been able to buy. Then we went for a cup of coffee, of course!
And, on the way back to the house, Mike took a fancy to a new job as station master-presumably some gardening is also involved!
Here are some of us sitting around after breakfast on sunday. Others were in the pool, fishing or playing miniature golf!
Mike takes a turn in the baby corner whilst some of us visit the pony!
