At the beginning of August, Gus and I decided to do just over a week's worth of holiday travel, and to both economize and add to my Spain experience, we chose to have a two-parter. We first headed south to Andalucía, to his mother's home province of Huelva, so we could visit her Tio Ignacio in his home in a beach town called Punta Umbria. Gus´ mom was already there, so we caught a ride with Gus´ father, who was driving down to spend the month of August. Following this we capped it off with a few days in Sevilla, on the way back to Madrid.
1. PUNTA UMBRIA: KISS MY PENINSULAR WETLANDS
What a town, and maybe not so easy to describe. Here's the layout - it's a peninsula framed by an ocean side, and a "ria" side. Not exactly a river, a "ria" is more like an inlet, or an outlet. It's also dotted with wetlands and is very full of marinas. See that back there? That's New Jersey. No, no, but it is an oil refinery. Seemed a little close for comfort when I first looked out Uncle Iggy's window - from which this pic was taken. In fact, the fire-shooting smokestack on the right of this image was the general location of a fatal fire the day after we arrived, sad to say.
But here it is, the Ria side. The ocean side was a bit more tony and new-money, day-tripper. The Ria side has all these gracious, waterside apartment buildings, with wide windows looking out on the waterfront promenade and the marinas. Here's Gus and Uncle Iggy, in front of his building. In fact, above their heads, count three lit up windows in from the left and that´s the start of his apartment. Nice spot!
Uncle Iggy is the very soul of sweetness, a widower who has kept his home in the exact manner his late wife had left it. She was a woman clearly possessed by the need to create joyful visual arrangements, and their home is a wonderful funhouse of mementos, tchotchkes and photos, all carefully composed into tableaux and shrines to Family. With no children of their own, it seems the home became a kind of family museum, and while it's more than too much, it was so enjoyable to see. No kidding, it's one of the warmest and most fun homes I've ever been in, and it reminded me of my own late mother's tendency to decorative excess. But I'd never before seen it handled with this kind of scale and confidence. Oh, let the pictures do the talking.
But wait, there's more!
I think you get the idea, I'll let Jesus and the Eternal Flames here have the last word.
Right-o. OK, we spent 5 or 6 days there, lazily waltzing to the Ria beach or, taking the longer walk to the ocean side. The ria side was dead calm but for the jetski rich kid wankers zooming by, and bathtub hot. The ocean side was more action-packed with waves but, the warmth of the water in both spots really was remarkable. I just about never get into water without whining about the coldness and this was ideal for me.
I didn't take any beach pix though, sand and cameras didn't seem a good fit, so much of the trip is not documented in terms of hours of beach time. But I got some good pix of the town itself, to share.
It's full of very old people and the very young, too, out on parade on Calle Ancha, the Broadway of Punta Umbria. But this one old woman half summed things up for me. Here she is, outside the gambling parlor, in her TV chair, check her out (blurry, yeah, but we were trying to be stealthy about it).
And the other half lives in painful shoes. Perhaps most painful to look at (see right). Ouch.
Close to the end of the trip in Huelva, we were treated to a drive in the country with Gus' dad Manolo, seen here sporting his best "Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar" costume.
We saw an ancient mine, a spectacular underground ice cave,
fields of sunflowers and olive groves (I came to think of these as the Oil Fields), and some lovely, sunny, bright white buildinged towns with some very dimly lit people. Having gotten well twisted into the maze of narrow, seemingly one way corridor-like streets of one town, and in danger of not being able to safely back out of any upcoming dead-ends, Manolo asked a local how to get back to the center of town. "You've just driven by it!" she replied. Hard to argue with her.
Finally extricated from the tinytown trap, we ended our journey in...Jabugo. Yes, the land of the acorn fed pigs, cured and sliced into glassy shards of pure porcine heaven. And, rather than subject us to the, it must be said, roadside tourist-trap looking restaurants, Gus and Manolo tried to find a small locals-only kind of place in Jabugo proper. That's not as easy as it sounds, and in the end we ate at the first place we'd seen, right at the entrance to town. It was no disappointment at all, though, the barman was gracious and the food was...
Let's move on, but first I'll sum up my report by saying that we only committed one mother-offending faux pas in that entire 6 day stretch, a minor miracle in itself and one we still feel is defensible but, we'll call it a draw. It was a lovely time.
2. SEVILLA: DISORIENTINGLY HOT
OK, now I know why a hotel room with a rack rate of 600€ goes for something like 60€ a night in August. It´s hot, I mean, 45C or 113F, whatever floats your mirage. Wow. I really loved it, we´re rather more intrepid than most and truth is, there were still some people around, but the difficulty in staying upright at midday is not to be understated. I took a lot of pics at night because... I don´t know, really, I don´t remember the daytimes so much. Wow.
Yes, this needs some explaining. Gus is paying tribute to ¨Bollilón¨. OK ... Gus has some distant cousins from Sevilla, who are part of a band called ¨No Me Pises, Que Llevo Chanclas¨. Which means, ¨Don´t Step On Me, I´m Wearing Sandals¨. Really. They have a funny and popular song video, ¨Bolillón¨, which is filmed right here in this square in the old section of Sevilla, called Santa Cruz. The video is about zombies who are high on hash because a Moroccan guy dropped a lump in the priest´s incense censer, and the yuppie hero spends the video desperately trying to escape the smoke filled neighborhood via... oh, just watch it. Dig the ocarina solo.
Though all of Sevilla is lovely, my pictures didn´t really take it in very well, until our final morning. The Alcazar is a splendid, ornate Moorish monument that is probably best not described, but shown.
The Sevilla fan club
As always, thanks for reading and please, if you´d like to comment, please do it here right on the blog! It makes me happy and encourages me to know someone´s interested.
Hasta luego!
