Spanish life is going well for me, the Spanish diet is not
going so well or should I say it’s going down a little too easy. Paella, churros,
crepes, baguettes, jamón (delicious ham), chorizo and salami are the staples of
my diet; perhaps this is contributing to why my clothes are starting to feel a
little tighter and my stomach seems to regularly have more of a bloated look!
On my weekends after enjoying some sun on the beach or a
walk around town accompanied by some delicious food I then get to enjoying my
siesta, finally I have an excuse to nap, this country definitely understands my
needs.
Having a base for a while is fantastic, having a wardrobe to
hang my clothes in instead of living out of my backpack is a small luxury and
it’s been great to be able to cook at home. Dana and I learnt our lesson about
not doing food shopping on a Sunday however as everything is closed, it appears
Sundays are a day of rest for all.
Keeping to Spanish time is harder than we thought. Everyone
eats so late here, about 10:00pm and no-one really heads out for a night out
before 12pm so learning to have a late afternoon or early evening snack is a
priority. During the week however as we are getting up at a normal time to go
to work we are going to bed at our normal time so we are trying really hard to
at least adapt to the later Spanish schedule on weekends.
The office for the
Olive Press newspaper where I’m doing my internship is in the beautiful
countryside of Casares. The drive itself to get to the office is picturesque
with the rolling hills as a backdrop to a landscape dotted with big beautiful
country homes, animals and meadows.
To get to the office itself you have to drive down a winding
gravel track where eventually you get to big wrought iron gates which open up
to a huge property which holds both my editors family home and the large
separate office to one side. The house looks straight out of the pages of a
designer magazine, it’s absolutely stunning and the views from our office
windows of the hills and fields can be quite distracting.
The second day at the office was a bit of an adventure….I
drove the company car around Spain. Driving on the opposite side of the road
took a bit of getting used to especially in a manual car when I’m used to my
gear stick being on the left of me. It was quite stressful and definitely nerve
racking, the tension headache was definitely in full swing, but all was going
well until….we filled up the car with petrol instead of diesel. Needless to say
we didn’t make it much further until it packed up on us. Stranded in a town
still a good 40 minutes away from where we needed to be to do our stories we
had to call insurance and wait for a tow truck to come and take away the one
remaining office car that was in use, the other two taken off the road just
last week. Fortunately Dana is fluent in Spanish so was able to deal with
insurance etc. The rest of the day involved taking numerous buses to get to
Mijas, a small Spanish village which we were doing a feature story on, and
several buses back home. To complete the day nicely I also managed to fall down
some stairs, slightly grazing and bruising my arm, apparently my sandals don’t
agree with Spain’s tiled pavements as I’m finding out. It was 9pm when we
finally dragged our tired, sunburnt selves back home, totally exhausted and
wondering what the rest of the week will be like!
