Ware's Jewellsy?: The Spanish experience, so far…………

Helene catching a bit of sun under a convenient palm tree

Oranges shining in the blue sky

Okay, so just to remind everyone that we are hard at work in Spain, and yes it is February! The weather has been truly amazing – one day of rain, but otherwise bright sunshine, and we even had breakfast outside this morning. It is not quite tee-shirt weather but it is warm and bright, just the kind of weather that makes you feel all happy and cheerful.

We arrived last Sunday via Girona where we stayed the night in a cheap hotel (fast becoming experts in cheap hotels as some of our trips are a bit long for one day with Tegan). Although we didn’t spend long there it felt like a place with a good vibe and we had a little amble around the streets, ate some lovely tapas (accompanied by “dos cervezas”!) and got enough of a feel for it to put it on the “must explore further” list.

We arrived in Alcover in the afternoon at Mas Rosich – a run down restaurant being converted into some gites. Alas host was nowhere to be seen and unresponsive to text messages, but fortunately Simone the Italian WWOOFER showed us round. I think we both got a slightly unsettled feeling when we arrived as the place did look a real dump and we still weren’t exactly sure what we were going to be doing. Added to which there were three dogs, two of which were huge and crazy (although not fierce in any way). I watched Simone taking them out a few days later – the dogs were walking him for sure and Andy has had the pleasure of feeding them once, lets just say that boisterous doesn’t really cover it………

We moved into our compact double room, complete with a bed that regularly lost slats from the base during the night and a cast iron bedstead sort of carefully propped up behind the bed. In general not a very good idea to move too much during the night! The place has three rooms and a kitchen where we have been able largely to cook our own food bought by the host, although she has also sent meals to the gite for us from her flat nearby. We eventually met her (Elaine) the evening we arrived, accompanied by plates of roast dinner and a whirlwind welcome of one way conversation, fortunately in broad Mancunian rather than Spanish! She left without telling us exactly what we would be doing, but the next day it all became a bit clearer.

We sort of knew there are two projects, one of which is a farm near Alcover, where Simone has been doing a bit of work, the other is at Mas Rosich itself. As it seemed that Simone was not all that keen to go back to the farm which he had done the previous week, we volunteered and he stayed to lay some roof tiles with Graham, the hired help (also English) at Mas Rosich.

So we went to the farm and spent the week helping to prune almond trees while Simone stayed and laid roof tiles and carried out other cement focused activities. Ron (the Scottish host at the farm) has 2500 almond trees apparently, and I think we pruned about 100, so he still has a fair way to go. It was quite methodical work and in the beautiful sunshine on the terraces overlooking some gorgeous views we picked up the pieces that Ron chopped off the trees and sorted them into thicker sticks for firewood to be loaded into the tractor (Andy dubbed this the “Glorious Goodwood”) and the smaller ones for leaving in piles on the ground. We were given pneumatic cutters (powered by the tractor) to help with the task – I have to say I did quite like these as they made a good noise when you chopped (a sort of “pssssst”!) and got through the sticks really easily. Tegan meanwhile played with the mud in the field, also collected sticks and left over almonds or sat in the backpack while we worked. It was actually probably the easiest job that I have done with Tegan as there seemed to be so much open space to amuse her.

In the mud

On Daddy’s back

Yes, I did say almond trees – these oranges were brought round by a neighbour! This doesn’t seem to happen much in Bristol……

What a view!

We also got coffee breaks and long lunch breaks (with beer), where Tegan got to play, so generally this was a lovely week.

She hasn’t quite worked out the peddles yet

A post lunch rest

However………..while we quite liked prancing around the almond trees and were given the choice to work back at the gite/restaurant site, we kind of began to feel like this wasn’t the place for us. We actually came to this host via a website called Helpx which is similar to WWOOFING but where things don’t have to be organic and we felt like we had come to people on the other end of the hippy spectrum (ie not anywhere close!). When Ron wasn’t on his farm, which he ran for a hobby, he managed an oil rig and while his almonds were actually organic he only did it for the subsidies. Interesting fact by the way – if you use enough of the right chemicals on your crops the EU give you subsidies, but take them away if there are not enough used. If on the other hand you don’t want to use any chemicals/fertilisers etc at all you get money for being organic – weird paradox. He also got so little for his crop that the only way he could afford to harvest it was by using volunteers. Anyway, while we never actually got to any discussions over the environment, we did feel like we viewed the world in quite different ways and although Andy had some engineering type discussions with Ron, we didn’t really click. There was a bit of a slave labour feel about the job – there is definitely a fine line when doing this WWOOFING type of thing and a danger that you are doing some kind of unskilled work because someone else (the host) doesn’t want to pay someone to do the work. The idea is for an exchange, of ideas, skills etc as well as the accommodation and food. We also didn’t think that mixing concrete back at Mas Rosich for a gite business was for us.

So, we made our excuses and having spent a lovely weekend visiting some of the local towns and beaches we have decided to spend a few days in Barcelona whilst looking for somewhere new to rest our feet. We would like to stay until the end of the month in Spain as there seems a lot to investigate. Even my GCSE Spanish is slowly coming back (although trying to string a sentence together does make my French feel rather fluent!). The weather is a definite bonus and while I have never been over excited by Spain in the past, the Catalan people that we have met so far seem lovely and Tegan seems to be a big hit everywhere – I think we are going to have to impose some EC type regulations on the lollypop quota regularly donated by her fan club of shop and bar owners though! Tegan is actually very full of beans at the moment and has taken to lying in her cot every morning holding little conversations with herself. This morning we woke up to hear “Tegan’s got hair, Mummy’s got hair, Daddy’s got….…….Daddy’s got little hair” – clearly an early morning philosopher!