The papers were full of it, the news on TV said that fifty provinces in Spain were on High Alert.
"Xynthia will hit Asturias today" according to El Comercio, yesterday.

"The principality ask citizens to take measures to protect themselves before the arrival of the cyclone"

What measures are these, we asked? Well, close your windows, move your pot plants and pull your shutters down. Oh and we're not going to do any rubbish collection so that we don't have empty bins flying round. Oh and don't go out in your car... and look at the red and yellow alerts... look! They're Red! And Yellow!

They forecast 160km/h winds. We cancelled our plan to go to Gijón with Cova and Julio and try out a certain Mexican restaurant, which we had been looking forward to...

Instead we met at La Más Barata for some rice (which wasn't bad (for which read bloomin' gorgeous), chipirones (baby squid) and smoked cheese... which both Julio and I plumped for and devoured). Mexican food will have to wait.

All day on the news they were tracking the storm, which actually was causing severe damage almost everywhere else in the North of Spain. In Oviedo, it was a bit breezy. Fresh, you might say, a blowy evening in Greetland...

The storm blew over and upset the forecast for today too, which had been sunshine and showers, lots of showers. We woke up early to go out with the walking group and it was blue sky and a light breeze. That seemed to be it as far as the weather went. We were walking in Teverga, up to 1760m, so in snow for most of the walk (mud for the rest). Beautiful.


Stunning views, snowy ridge walk, sunshine, cup o' tea at the top. You could not ask for more.

We finished in San Martín, taking over a hotel bar as we all had our sarnies. Once again I was struck by how 'Irish' the Asturians can be as Julio (not the same one) and Andrés argued over who was going to pay for what. I'd messed things up by paying for the wine, Julio had snuck in and paid for his coffee and some spirits which left Andrés complaining that there was nothing left for him to pay for 'except the champagne' until we kindly offered to let him buy us another round of spirits... a selfless act which led to Liz sleeping all the way home on the bus.

Labels: asturias, walking, weather

  ¶ 7:06 PM 0 comments

  After skiing on Saturday (along with the rest of the entire world, it seemed, thanks to the closure of the two other ski resorts in this neck of the woods... far too many people, low visibility and a ton of snowboarders made for an entertaining morning) and finally getting the internet sorted in the house) we had a fairly lazy day on Sunday. At six we decided to go for a stroll, taking cameras, and seeing what we could see.

Eventually we wound up on la losa (the slab), where there are some modern looking cubist flats built on a big slab over the railway lines. Large numbers of older folk were strolling, showing some fine suits, polished canes and enough fur keep the whole of Leeds warm.

At the bottom of one of these cubes (they actually look pretty good all lined up) there is a chocolate shop called Valor. Valor do some of the best chocolate there is, hot chocolate, which I never used to like because it was milk and cocoa powder (an abomination). This is more like chocolate, but melted. Ahhh.

Valor is decorated in a very traditional style, in contrast to its surroundings. Inside it's marble and cane backed chairs and every table full of chatting folk all tucking in to chocolate and churros.

Rather bad for you if you eat them too often, but every now and again, rather fine.

Labels: asturias, food

  ¶ 10:58 PM 1 comments

  "Fancy going skiing some time?" Asked Pompeyo on last week's walk.

"Why not" We answered, fresh from the week in the Alps.

The phone rang on Thursday:

"The forecast is okay for Saturday, how about it?"

So we went. And it didn't rain, and it only snowed a little bit. The snow was a bit heavy (alright, on the lower slopes it was papa (as they say here, mashed potato consistency) but higher up it was fine).

We set off at 8, sure in the knowledge that the majority of Spaniards would not be rising early to ski. Well some of them did but not too many.

A half day pass for San Isidro (in León) is €16, boot and pole hire for Liz another €11. Pompeyo lent me his carving skis, he skied on his ancient long thin skis. Liz used Carmen's short skis, which she enjoyed, and we just tootled up and down the reds (which were easier than many blues in Courchevel).

We ate on the way home in Felechosa, pote then trout and now we're home, digesting and getting ready to head out to the opera. It's a hard life...

Labels: asturias, food, leon, skiing, winter

  ¶ 4:29 PM 0 comments

  It's gone now, but when we arrived back here on Monday morning we found that the city had been rather snowier than normal. Last year we had snow laying on the ground for half a day. This time for three days.

Things have returned to normal, it's raining.

Labels: asturias, weather

  ¶ 8:18 PM 3 comments

  Although it hadn't felt particularly christmassy (maybe we're just used to the three month build up you can get in the UK when the shops fill with decorations in October and certain parts of the brainstem are directly targetted by Slade or, worse, Shakey) Liz had expressed a desire to have a few folk round for some nibbles and a glass of wine.

MJ (aka Maria Jesús) had previously suggested going out dancing so we decided to combine the two and show off the new flat too.

Liz also bought me a Spanish scrabble set (which includes tiles for "ch" "rr" "ll" and "ñ") so we thought we might play that too.

We did a fairly standard table full of cold meats, cheese and dips... we even managed to find some humous. What we didn't know is that dipping is not spanish, and there were a couple of comments along the lines of "what's this raw carrot for?" In fact, on the humous pack it said "para dipear" which is a hispanicization of 'to dip' leading to a discussion about what dip is in Spanish (meter, we decided).

So we dipped, we snacked, we drank wine and toasted a merry christmas. Then at midnight we all trooped out into the chill (-6C, nothing compared to a frosty Yorkshire I know) and off to Rock Circus.

Rock Circus is basically the hard rock cafe, without the eating. As we went in they were playing AC/DC or some such. Saul excitedly recognised Led Zep, I didn't... and as such, suffered a dent in my muso reputation. Liz demonstrated a fine solo mosh to the new UK crimble number one (which I didn't recognise either) and drew a few admiring comments from the chaps next to us.

And therein lies the problem with Rock Circus (or lay, because I don't know if it's always like that). The average age of the clientele went down when we went in...

After a drink in there we toddled off to Morgana Le Fey, where they played much less recognisable music (made no difference to me), more europoppy, a younger crowd, more noise...

We made our excuses at around 3 and headed home becuase the following day we were up at 7:30 to go walking...

Never got round to the scrabble.

Labels: asturias, food, oviedo

  ¶ 1:46 PM 1 comments

 
Julio had been trying to convince us to take it easy on the third day and get to Grandas a bit later. This would have meant missing the only bus back and having to wait until 3pm the following day for a bus. So we were reluctant. As it was, the weather had eased a little, and we decided to get going earlyish to take advantage of the lack of rain. This meant we left Berducedo before the bar had opened. Never mind, we thought, there's going to be somewhere to get a coffee between here and there.

There wasn't.


We passed La Mesa, a hamlet with 13 people, all asleep, stopping in the albergue there to see if there was a jar of nescafe or something similar.

No.

Then we climbed steeply up, into real north of England territory, smoother hills, heather and a fierce cold wind. The houses here have slate roofs and are a dark grey that wouldn't look out of place in Kendal. At the top we could see our destination, Grandas de Salime. Doesn't look too far, we thought, maybe 5km in a straight line. Then we saw a sign that said 14km. There was a long descent punctuated by plaintive cries for coffee...

It was stunning scenery, the hills are big, 1200m and steep sided, plunging to a man made lake before rising on the other side the same way. The path wandered through pine forest then oak and chestnut, so we had all of the colours of autumn. We descended as far as the dam that forms the lake, it's a big piece of engineering and when you get up close you're knackered from the descent, and it seems even more impressive.

We'd spotted a building as we were descending and Julio had said it was a bar (well he actually said to Enrique that we'd be there in 15 minutes, an hour and a half out... not too bad). So we were hoping to finally have our first coffee of the day at about 1pm. It wasn't just closed, it was abandoned.


Enrique and Encarna decided to stop there for some butties and we said our farewells. We were hoping to make it to the town in time to have lunch before the bus back. Which we did after a strength-sapping 6km up the hill.

Grandas de Salime has 500 inhabitants, it's the capital of the middle of the back of beyond nowhere. Still, it has a couple of rather nice restaurants, we blagged a table and in contrast to the majority of diners, who were in their Sunday best (although it was Monday), we piled rucksacks and sticks at the side of the table and set to eating. A chickpea stew followed by (merluza for Liz) slices of hand (I think that's the name for the cut in English butchers, in Spanish codillo, which is little-elbow, basically the forearm). We ate heartily, there is no other word for it, and even had time for coffee before getting on the bus for a 3.5 hour drive back.

On which we were able to actually see some of the hills we'd walked over, unlike the day before.

Labels: asturias, camino primitivo, food, walking

  ¶ 1:39 PM 1 comments

  Liz was awake at 6, she said, listening to the wind. The rest of us got up around 8 and got everything ready. The wind had died down a little bit but Enrique (one half of the Valencian couple, the other being Encarna) said it was still raining. I dithered between umbrella and waterproofs, eventually opting for waterproof trousers and umbrella combo which would avoid overheating. I had a new umbrella for walking, a huge aluminium thing, light but sturdy enough to cope with the wind.

It bucketed down.

We walked to a village called La Mortera, where there was, surprisingly, a bar (you may be getting an idea of what kind of pilgrimage this is by now... it's a pub crawl... a very loooong pub crawl). It was another bar-tienda (the combination of bar and village shop with all the stock on shelves, they sold everything from soap to slippers, blankets to tins of peaches. The bar owner seemed happy to have so many customers and busied herself making coffee. Enrique suggested a chupito, so we had an orujo that the landlady said was made by one of the local chaps, yes, moonshine. She stamped our credentials and we waited to see if the rain would let up.

No.

So it was off again, this time to Pola de Allande, another bigish town (for very small, Asturian values of big). We arrived at lunchtime and had a big blowout meal. The rain let up a little bit and the sun came out for all of five minutes. While we were inside.



Full, we decided to do the next part. A climb up to Puerto del Palo (puerto means pass in the mountains), which had a reputation of being a bit tough for pilgrims. Julio suggested that we stop at an albergue after a couple of km, but we were thinking of how we were getting home, one bus a day, and we thought we should press on. We stopped in a bar after a few more kilometres. Here in the deeps of Asturias the bars are full of pictures of hunters on the walls, proudly posing above boar corpses. The bar was full of hunters complaining about the weather and worryingly combining drinking with walking around with shotguns. There were a few raised eyebrows when we said where we were going.

We trudged through the rain up the road for a couple of hours, and then took the path as it left the road to head straight up while the road did a few hairpins which would have added another 4km to the route. The path was basically a stream, which made it easy to follow at least.


We got to the top in the murk, fog, twilight, wind... it was very Yorkshire. The light was going and there was another 8km to the albergue. We passed a tiny slate chapel and a hamlet of three housed, pointed in the right direction by an umbrella wielding farmer (if you take a wrong turn doing the camino, local people notice and soon set you straight, although on this day, a couple of people I asked were in the middle of slaughtering pigs, elbow deep in offal, which made pointing a challenge).We couldn't see very much, so we just walked on. 8km, two hours, a village with a bar in 4km, but would it be open... I put my mp3 player on and listened to Melvyn Bragg on Sparta and the discovery of radiation while we walked, it was hard to chat with the drumming of the rain on the umbrella, yes, it was still raining.


We got to the tiny village of Lago and had a coffee at the bar, 4km left to the albergue. Pitch black now, so head torches out and single file to present a smaller target to the traffic. When we reached the albergue, it was occupied by a solitary walker from Mallorca who had put the heating up to maximum on all the radiators. Handy because we were all pretty damp. There were wet sleeping bags, boots, socks, clothes... Enrique, Julio and I went down to the bar (the voluntary donation was, well, not very voluntary here) to pay and Julio rang his wife (it was their 40th wedding anniversary). Then back up to the sauna that the albergue had become and an attempt to sleep.

Labels: asturias, camino primitivo, walking

  ¶ 3:21 PM 0 comments