American in Spain

A notable change in the weather has taken place this past week. The days of sleeping with the windows open and wearing sandals about town is coming to a close. It’s time to break out the sweaters and long trousers. There’s something about the beginning of autumn that makes me want to go outside and throw an American football around. It surprises me every year, since it’s not one of my top five favorite sports, I’ve never worn a football helmet, and I don’t have a favorite team, but there’s some deep bit of Americanism in me that I can neither control nor explain. Curious, that.
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Last weekend we went to the annual festival in Ampuero, a neighboring town of 4,000 residents. Every year, they hold a miniature version of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, complete with all night partying in white clothes and red scarfs, a running of the bulls, and bullfighting. Of the six years we’ve lived here, we’ve gone several times. We knew from past experience that it’s nearly impossible to park in a small town that’s hosting three times its inhabitants in a festival, so we parked on the outskirts of town to save the time and stress of finding a closer spot.
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This morning when I was walking Nora back from the town’s Friday market, a man was wandering around asking people if they knew when the race was coming through. What race? The human race? As I went about my daily errands, I gradually learned, through eavesdropping on people, that the Vuelta a España would be passing through town. This is huge!! It’s one of the biggest international cycling races, sort of Spain’s version of the Tour de France (vuelta = tour or lap). Then I remembered that I had heard that they were finishing one stage in the nearby town of Noja. Apparently the parties thrown at the end of each stage are absolutely amazing, and worth going to even if you don’t care about the sport at all, so if you’re a heavy partier looking for cheap holidays abroad… I learned that they were leaving Noja at 1:45 PM and that they were expected to go through Laredo at 2:10 PM, which would put them smack in Colindres at around 2:05 PM.
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When we go on summer vacations in Extremadura, as we do most Augusts, the weather is usually too hot to do much besides drink and sleep during the day, but at dusk, it’s just the right temperature for a nice stroll through the countryside. Just after sunset, the stars come out with a light-pollution-free brilliance that I almost never get to enjoy. In the past, I have been a bit more serious about photographing the serene beauty of an Extremadura sunset, but this year, in a marriage of convenience and laziness, I decided to only take my iPhone with me.
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The word Sevillana, pronounced “seh-vee-YA-na”, can refer to several things. It can be an adjective to describe a woman or any feminine noun from Seville, Spain. It can refer to a particular kind of folk music from Andalusia, or a particular four-part dance that originated in Seville. Like for other Spanish dances like the pasodoble, it doesn’t require much imagination to see that the movements in a sevillana dance are meant to mimic bullfighting, with the dancers gracefully passing buy each other without touching. The whole closeness without touching aspect of it makes it quite sexy.
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Every kid has done it and loved it. What could be better than walking on top of a wall, holding your parent’s hand, up at grownup eye level, carefully placing each step, enjoying the illusion of danger. Last Sunday, we took a stroll up to Colindres de Arriba, the picturesque village within a town just up a hill past the town hall. We spent about thirty minutes picking blackberries and then continued on to the medieval church. If I had been planning on it before we left, I’d have taken a better camera, but it occurred to me while we were up there that I could take a series of photographs and photoshop them together into a motion composite. I’m fairly pleased with the result.
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This past June, I traveled to Ireland to play golf with some friends. I briefly mentioned, in a post about playing Ballybunion Old, that my good friends, Jacob and Jeff, took a walk one evening (while I was in bed shivering with a fever) on the Cashen Course at Ballybunion. I said that I’d post the photos Jacob took, but I never got around to it. Yesterday was Jacob’s birthday, so I thought today would be a good day to post these gorgeous photos he took. For photogenic terrain, you really can’t beat golden hour on an Irish links course.
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About a year ago, I became a fan of a Facebook page about Colindres, the town where I live. With the exception of one brief spat in which I suggested that perhaps the town hall shouldn’t be sponsoring a bunch of crackpot UFOlogists to come to town and vend their wares, where a few people got offended by my suggestion that extraterrestrials have probably not travelled light years to come visit the Earth and not leave any evidence that psychology cannot explain, the experience has been very interesting. No new meatspace friendships have come out of it, but I can stay up to date with festival schedules and things.

One of the things I enjoy most about following this particular Facebook page are the photos that are posted fairly regularly, taken by a gentleman named Raúl Gonzalez. He has an eye for capturing his town’s beauty. Earlier this week, I was looking up some census data for Colindres on Wikipedia and discovered this gorgeous photograph of the two bridges with a rainbow, taken by none other than Raúl.
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When discussing what sort of mischief and/or tourism we could get up to last Sunday, my wife mentioned that a friend had recommended visiting “the oldest town in Cantabria”. With only this tidbit to go on, I turned to Google and discovered a Cantabrian tourism site with the sentence, “It is said that [Bárceno Mayor] is the oldest town in Cantabria, and possibly even all of Spain.” Yet nowhere on the great big internet could I find out how old the town was thought to be. It was also unclear how one would even determine how old a small town is when it’s nestled in the mountains near a cave with 15,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings.
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If the dozen or so hours of “travel in Spain” television shows I’ve watched are any indication, one of the tapas capitals of Spain is San Sebastián. There’s one particular district where every bar you glance into has fifteen or twenty different tapas to choose from, all laid out on the bar. The quality is really high, just like the prices. Just the previous week, I had been at a tapas festival in Santander, and I’d noted that 2.50€ for a tapa and drink was a little expensive. Well, in San Sebastián, all three tapas we tried were at least 4€ each (with drink). Pricy!
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