Liz bought me this fine Spanish hardback edition of Watchmen for my birthday. I know it pretty much by heart in English and this will be great for learning some idiomatic Spanish... it should also help when the film comes out here on March 6th. I am looking forward to it just a little (with fingers crossed, please don't screw it up).  ¶ 6:53 PM 1 comments

  This made me chuckle... checito...
  ¶ 10:46 AM 0 comments

  It just slipped out. I wasn't even thinking about it. We were in the photography school and I was calibrating my camera (well attempting to calibrate it). I had bought a weston III light meter (which is forty years old) but during the calibration I kept having trouble with it. After half an hour's use it stopped responding. "Hostia!" I said. Then I realised I'd sworn in Spanish rather than English (hostia is literally 'host' and could be translated as 'bloody hell'). There was a new student there as well, Monica, and she was pretty impressed, seeing as my normal Spanish conversational level usually makes it pretty clear that I'm a foreigner.

Ricardo, the photographer said that the selenium in the light meter was probably exhausted. Damn, I mean, hostia!
  ¶ 10:16 AM 2 comments

 
Cova had recommended a restaurant, they do four things there, she had said, and it's not very posh. Our sort of place, it seemed.

It was called La Taberna Gallega (The Galician Tavern) and they did more than four things (but not by much). We went with Maria Jesus and Covadonga, who pointed out that the place was so basic that they didn't even put tablecloths out (not even the paper ones).

The four things they do are Pulpo (octopus), Calamares (Squid), Vino de ribeira (Galician white wine) and bread. Cova suggested that we ordered pulpo without potatoes, because you get more pulpo. It came on the wooden platters we've seen before, sprinkled with paprika. A slice of bread (the size and shape of a quarter of a panetone) came along with it. The wine was served in a white ceramic jar and we had ceramic cups for the wine that reminded me of delicate japanese tea cups (so no handles).

The combination was excellent, the wine's not premier quality but it's slight sourness goes very well with the pulpo. The calamares were the best I've ever had, soft and sweet.

We ummed and ahhed over what else to have, before settling on rabo (pigs tail) rather than oreja (pigs ear). Pigs tails are tasty, if a little fatty too.

As we ate the place filled up, and by the time we left they were two deep at the bar, waiting for tables.  ¶ 7:32 PM 5 comments

 
One of the things that I thought I might miss was the easy access to new music. Given that we don't have internet in the house (in Spanish, it's just internet, not the internet, which is the opposite of most cases). Well, I needn't have worried on that score. I've been listening to Where's the Skill in That on Resonance fm (it's the current home of the presenters of Mixing it from radio 3) and there are old shows available for download. I listen to the shows as I walk up to the hospital (to teach the doctors) and later on go to eMusic to download albums from groups I like the sound of (which I pay for). At the moment I'm listening to an album by AU, and it's dreamy Portland collectivist fun. The Spanish radio stations are a little too top forty for me, with the exception of radio 3 (who'd have guessed?) which often demonstrates a satisfyingly ecclectic taste.

As well as the music, the BBC's current podcast range is very welcome, including the world service documentaries. It seems that with all that, and the guardian weekly, we manage to get all the news and music that we want without having to wade through and filter out all the celebrity dross.

Which is nice.  ¶ 11:18 AM 1 comments

  Despite the snow in the rest of Spain, Asturias seems to have a Cornwall-like ocean influenced climate. So here it just rains (although tomorrow the forecast is for snow down to 200m so we may get a dusting.

It rains a lot. But it's not windy (usually).

So umbrellas are ubiquitous. That means that every shop, bar, flat and indoor space has an umbrella stand or two near the door (it's bad form to trail a dripping brolly through somewhere).

Posh places, and those where you can't leave your umbrella, like the hospital and the big department store El Corte Ingles, have an automatic umbrella bagging machine. You insert your umbrella in the top and it slides into a bag. Very sensible.
  ¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments

  While Oscar season is proceeding apace, last night saw the Spanish equivalent, the Goyas. I only heard the results this morning on the radio and it seems that the only one of the contenders that I saw won all the main prizes. It was called 'Camino' which can mean way or path (with an additional sense of pilgrimage, like in the Camino de Santiago). It was a well made film, and a bit controversial here.

It opens with a deathbed scene, a young girl is dying and her hospital room is filled with and surrounded by priests, nuns and praying medical staff. Then we're off into flashback mode for most of the rest of the film where we see how the priests have come to believe that this girl is on the path to sainthood. She talks about Jesus with longing, she sees angels, she's dying of cancer... The film shows us that one Jesus she talks about is a boy in her school, but the priests and nurses and nuns don't know that... We see her visions but they are also explained as a symptom of cancer. At the end, her death becomes a big church affair and her family are pushed to the side as the priests strain to hear her last words. It's apparently based on a true story. As I said, well made, but a little too polemical. Definitely worth seeing if it comes out in the UK.

In a lighter vein, we went to the cinema to see 'Welcome to the North' last night, which was a charming French comedy that has probably already been on in the UK. It was a good film to see dubbed, because a lot of the humour was related to the accent and peculiarities of the place. I'm not sure what Spanish accent they used to show the difference but it was probably something along the lines of Southerners doing Geordie....
  ¶ 11:15 AM 0 comments