1. That you can buy a bottle of decent* wine for 80 cents
2. That you can buy wine in 5L plastic bottles direct from
the winery
3. Climbing on Margalef pocketed limestone, such novelty value!
4. That no body gets up before 9am, and few before 10am
5. The old Spaniards who congregate at some known social
meeting point, usually the town square or in front of the church, to
“socialise” (which actually looks like they just sit near each other and watch
the colourful climbers pass by with a disgruntled expression of confusion and amusement)
6. The communal water fonts, often referred to as the Lion’s Heads, (which are another common
meeting location of the oldies)
The Lion and his beard (of slime)
7. The terraces that you stumble across in the most unlikely
places, like when you think you’ve bush bashed and scrambled far away for a
morning poo, only to arrive at a well constructed stone wall holding up a
levelled field in the side of a mountain, that is likely to be a few thousand
years old.
Terraces at Margalef, if you look closely you can see the stone walls at every level
8. The fact that no matter how tight our monthly budget
becomes, we always manage to have a vast selection of olives, a type for every
occasion. The little bitter ones as beer snacks, the big green ones for dinner,
those of the “Receta Abuela” (Gransma’s Recipe) which have a curious flavour of
cumin and citrus, and Mick’s favourite – the “Bombas”, which the Olive man
assured us would blow his head off, and was slightly disappointed when Mick
didn’t collapse to the ground wheezing but casually bought a tub full.
9. The ancient stone towns full of epic history, like Siurana, where they say the Moorish Queen road her horse out through the castle window and over the cliff to commit suicide when the town was falling to the Christians.
Siurana
Siurana after the storm
*It is possible that
my judgement of decent wine has degraded somewhat over the last few months
