Turrón and mincemeat

In Spain the traditional Christmas sweet is turrón. It is made of almonds and honey among other things. There are two basic traditional varieties: hard and soft. I prefer hard turrón, but soft can be good too. You can buy it in the supermarket in packets ranging in price from two to eight euros. There's a make called "1880" which prides itself on being "the most expensive turrón in the world". Actually, I think the handmade turrones made in small local confectioners probably cost more.
In Jaca there are a number of very reputed confectioners, which produce turrones at Christmas, exquisitely decorated chocolate eggs at Easter, "Huesos de Santo" (saints' bones) for All Saints', not forgetting St Joseph's woodshavings and Epiphany rings. Although we see Father Christmas portrayed in many places here, traditionally children don't receive their presents from him but from the three kings, who visit on Epiphany, so on the evening of 5th January children line the streets to watch them arrive; on horseback, or possibly camels depending whereabouts in this big country, which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Cantabrian to the Atlantic and the African coast of the Canary Islands. I think they even ski by torchlight down the slopes in Formigal, a big ski resort in the neighbouring Tena valley.
When they go to bed, children leave glasses of wine and food for the kings, water for the camels, and I think, cleaned shoes. In the morning they will find their gifts, or if they've been bad, a lump of coal. (Shops sell lumps of coal made out of sugar.)
There's a family meal that day, and the dessert will be a special Kings' cake or Epiphany ring. Not, in my opinion the most exciting cake, but one which has a hidden token. In my English family, we had Christmas pudding in which my mother had hidden a silver sixpence.

Spanish confectioneries apart, I've found very few people who don't enjoy English mincepies when I make them. They take quite a bit of preparation, because out of necessity, I make the mincemeat- from ingredients bought here. It's very satisfying, but you have to make it at least two weeks befor you need it, so you have to get the timing right. However, there's always so much turrón around at Christmas that it's really not necessary to offer mincepies then, and since people don't associate them with Christmas, you can make them any other time and they're greatly appreciated.

Snowfall

On Monday, the last day of November, it started snowing around midday. It carried on snowing. My goodness, how it snowed! Tuesday morning, we woke up to find the biggest snowfall in many years. Cars were buried in 40 cm of fluffy white snow. The roads and pavements were thickly covered. Lots of branches broke under the weight. Everything was very pretty and extremely complicated.It took us half an hour to dig the wheels of the car out enough to be able to move it! There was a policeman stopping traffic going up to the hospital; he said the car park was a metre-deep in snow.If driving was difficult, walking wasn't easy either-the pavements were thigh-deep and we had to go on the road, keeping a lookout for skating cars and lorries.
By the evening things were getting better, and by the next day the pavements were cleared. Now there are only dirty piles of cleared snow and broken branches everywhere. The lovely snowmen which had appeared even in the city streets have all gone.
The place is crammed with tourists for the first weekend of the ski season; this year there'll be skiing right from the beginning of December.

 This is one of the nicest snowmen I've seen. His buttons are green leaves and he carries a broken twig as a trident. He is guarding the Ciudadela.

Autumn

Today it started to feel a bit cold and we needed coats when we went out into the windy morning. You couldn't see the mountains for the clouds on them. Looks like the autumn weather has come at last. There are fallen leaves all over the pavements just to prove it really is the beginning of November.

Yesterday we went to Gavín, a village just past Biescas in the Tena valley-first to visit the Mozarabic chapel of San Bartolomé and walk in the country, and then then a wander round part of Gavín. It was completely destroyed in the civil war; only one building remained standing, and now there are quite a lot of newly-built houses. Very pretty and well-kept. Was there one balcony or windowsill without pots of geraniums decorating it?

It was warm and sunny - for November, and the trees on the hillsides were in their autumn colours.

Mountain flowers

You can see this is an old photo; it's from when my camera was new. We went to Cerler, the highest Pyrenean ski resort in Aragon. I found this patch of spectacular flowers which turned out be aconite; monk's hood (of course it's terribly poisonous) but aren't they pretty?

Tomatoes, figs

One of the nice things about being home; just one of them, is eating Jaca tomatoes. What are they like? Big, dark red, soft and sweet. Some are quite ugly and misshapen, but that doesn't matter, they are delicious. I don't know if they are only grown on allotments; they couldn't possibly be sold in big places because they are almost as squashy as the figs I bought from a woman selling garden produce outside the cathedral this morning, and would disintegrate if roughly handled.
In the spring I bought a tomato plant, tended and watered it, and missed all the fruit while I was in England in the summer. No matter, the ones you can buy now are better than anything else!

Punting on the Cam

The cliche for Cambridge is punting. I had to look after a class for a teacher who was ill, and the lesson was a trip in punts. We took them into the city and to the boatyard, where a "touter", or should that be "punter"? gave us a price for our 28 students, reduced it and handed us a written quote which was higher than what we had told the students: £6 each for three punts full instead of the £4.50 we'd previously understood. The kids had started handing over the cash to us when the manager said he couldn't do it for that, only two punts and four of the students would have to punt themselves instead of being punted. There were protests; I think all the boys wanted to do it!
I sat in the front (stern) of a big punt and handed out the slices of stale bread for the students to feed to the ducks.
My goodness there were a lot of punts on the river! In some places there were real traffic jams where amateurs were drifting across and bumping into others. The professionals just glided peacefully through the chaos making it look very easy.
It's a nice guided tour, past the pretty sides of the colleges and their gardens. We were told little snippets of history and tradition, and we threw bread for the ducks who came rushing towards us as if they were starving! On our return we saw the boys who were punting themselves struggling along with all the mess of punts near the boatyard; they'd had a great time, but not got very far.

English summer

There have been some hot days this summer in Cambridge, but the overall impression is wet. Not really cold, but every time I open a door and see the rain, I think: "Not again!" Being used to Pyrenean summers in which it can be wet and stormy but on the whole bright and sunny and not too hot, this English summer is a bit depressing. That thing of not knowing what to wear; what to put on your feet, or if you need an umbrella grinds you down a bit. A lot of the drama of swine flu is just summer colds as far as I can see.
On Saturday I went to the theatre. It was in one of the University college gardens, where, with a small wooden platform and a ladder hidden by a screen, a small company performed Romeo and Juliet under an ancient spreading fir tree. There was a circle of three rows of plastic chairs on the grass. The audience sat down and it started to rain. People got out umbrellas and spread plastic sheets over their laps, some took glasses and bottles of wine out and sipped throughout.
During the performance it rained more, or less heavily nearly all the time. In the interval mulled wine was served from a thing like a tea urn and I warmed my cold hands as I drank.
The cast pretty well ignored the rain. Juliet, in a white cotton nightie got muddier and muddier as the evening progressed. I felt cold for her and for Romeo, who stripped to the waist at one point.
At the close we applauded as much for their fine performance and hardiness in getting so wet for so long.

A taste of England

Rather unexpectedly, I'm not spending the summer in Jaca; I'll miss the folk festival which takes place every two years there, as well as the mild climate and the floods of tourists. I'm working in Cambridge, as a director of studies for a Young Learners course. Cambridge is even more full of tourists than Jaca! I'd forgotten how pretty and gracious it is. Not having brought my camera with me, I've bought a disposable one with which I should be able to make a disc and digitalise to put one or two photos on this blog. (On the left there's a photo of a Victorian postbox outside King's college)
Oh yes, a taste of England: Yorkshire Tea, Indian restaurants, cheese scones are some of the indulgences of being here!
Walking on the lawn. there's another luxury. Grass here is so well-tended. And the garden flowers as well. The English really are good at that. In and around Jaca the wild flowers are spectacular. I can think of orchids of various kinds, wild irises on the mountain slopes, gentians of different shapes and sizes to mention a few. In England it's really the parks where I've seen good displays of flowers, like the lovely areas full of daffodils you get in the early spring. I miss that at home in Jaca; my daffs don't come up very abundantly in the garden.

Candanchú, spring flowers

Late spring in the mountains is pretty. One Sunday we went for a short walk in the ski resort of Candanchú. The snow had all gone from the lower slopes, leaving the detritus of the season: ends of ski poles, straps, gloves, and even a mobile phone - needless to say it didn't work!
There wasn't so much rubbish that you couldn't see the flowers on the ski slopes. There were lots of little (blue) gentians and pink and yellow orchids. I've looked in my flower books, but accurate identification is difficult, so I won't try. There are so many sub-types I wouldn't like to say for sure.
We know our way perfectly well in the winter, but it looks so different when there's no snow. You see the slopes in a different way if you haven't got skis on. Sometimes we've seen marmots and wild goats. Where do they go in the winter, when the snowy slopes are so full of people? Where do they find food?

Cesaraugusta

It's beginning to get hot - if it's hot here in Jaca, Zaragoza is really hot: they said 35 degrees yesterday. I'm not sorry I didn't go. The Orfeón had to sing at a wedding in the cathedral yesterday, so the others went without me and got very hot!
A couple of weeks ago, however, we spent a weekend in Zaragoza and had the pleasure of revisiting the archaeological museum. It had been closed for reform since the the boys were tiny; they loved it then and would still love it.






I'm sure there was a lot more variety before; as well as the Roman exhibits we saw bits and pieces from all historical periods. These are now in storage awaiting an extension to the museum.
There are two sections, Roman and Goya.
The former displays some good bits of Roman statuary, a lot of wonderful mosaic floors rescued from Roman Zaragoza, and a triclinium. They excavated the remains of a plastered, painted room, along with a mosaic floor, and created a reconstruction with the fragments. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing and the gaps painted in. Reproduction Roman furniture, plates and food to add to the effect. It's really impressive!
Some of the mosaics are very good, sophisticated ones, others are those slightly amateur - looking ones; the kind where an artist who's never seen an elephant, but produces an image based (sort of) on what he's heard.
The Goya wing was also impressive. For me, the best thing was that I could get up really close to the paintings - close enough to see the cracks and brushstrokes in the half-dozen major works on display.

It's a good way to spend a cool, peaceful couple of hours in Zaragoza.

Gabardito

Sunday afternoon, a pleasant walk up to a glacial cirque (that's what the online dictionary says). We drove to Canfranc, known as "Quemao" meaning burnt, because of a fire in the last century which burnt the entire village. It's being rebuilt now, but the main nucleus of population is still where it moved after the fire, in the part known as Canfranc Estación, where the "international" railway station is. They are restoring the great station building, which fell into ruin after the rail route into France was cut off in the 1970s.
Well, back to the walk. It's well signposted, just off the main road. Going is a steep uphill walk through trees and past what we think are the remains of an abandoned village. A stream which runs into the Aragón is running very powerfully at the moment with melting snow. Spring flowers everywhere. Not a great variety: violets, hepatica both blue and white and at the top a thing which looked like a little aquilegia, but I don't know. When we got up high enough there was a fantastic view of the cirque at one end of the plane, and beyond, the snow-capped mountains. There'll still be snow on them for a while yet. It was an hour up and one to come down, more or less.

Teruel exists!

Teruel is a long way from Jaca. Over 300 kms makes it more than a day-trip. We stayed overnight in Zaragoza and left quite early in the morning. The journey was just two hours on the lovely new motorway; what a difference it makes!

When we first went there, about ten years ago, the citizens of Teruel had started the "Teruel Exists" campaign to give their city a well-needed boost. It was rather disappointing because all the monuments were closed and most of the inhabitants were in the country celebrating the feast of the "sermon of the omelette". A few years later things had improved and the cathedral was opened to the public once more.

There are two glories in the cathedral, a great carved altarpiece and a wonderful medieval panelled ceiling, painted with people, animals, flowers, anything and everything.

On this trip we were able to see the ceiling from quite close in the galleries. The paintings are wonderful. I've put a detail in the text, but it doesn't show just how much there is.

Teruel is really open for business these days. There are plenty of parts of the city just as decrepit as they were before, but it gives a great impression of growth and youth and pride in the history of the place . Good for them! They also have four Mudejar towers, all of which have arches at the bottom, and one of which, San Salvador, is open to visitors.

We were lucky with the weather; this April it has varied between snow and 30 degree sunshine. In Teruel it was warm and sunny without being unbearable.

Zaragoza

The big city: Zaragoza.
It's about 2 hours' drive from Jaca including parking time. While Jaca has about 14,000 inhabitants, 700,000 live in the Aragonese capital of Zaragoza, so it's a real contrast to go there. Busy streets, innumerable shops, cars, buses, noise almost all the time.
We had to go this week to sort out our flat there; we'd had tenants there since we bought it- now it's free and we can spend the occasional weekend in the big city. After the summer the boys will be staying there when they are at the university.
Apart from time spent getting the flat sorted out, waiting for furniture to be delivered, we went to an exhibition about the sieges which took place in Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809. Napoleon's troops beseiged the city, and the people resisted. Thousands were killed. It was heroic and terrible-very famous at the time. The exhibition was held in two wonderful buildings in the city centre; the Lonja with its Mudejar exterior and Gothic arches inside, and the enormous Sástago Palace. In these we saw paintings-some by Goya, others less well-known artists, texts, artefacts such as the long rifles and bayonets they used. There were maps of the city and explanations of the progress of the sieges. Really well done, but very sobering.
In the streets of the city you can find plenty of evidence still: the Carmen gate, now dwarfed by the modern buildings which surround it, some of the many convents and monasteries, now just parish churches, stretches of city wall, even bullet-scarred houses.
This was on Maundy Thursday, while the streets were coloured with processions of hooded penitents playing their drums, not to mention the elegant women dressed in black with their high combs and mantillas. All very traditional.

Snow picture

This is a photo taken in Jaca

after one of the first snowfalls this winter.

Today really looks like spring; not long till it's official, but you never know. There have been snowy days at Easter before now!

Jaca weather

It's nearly spring, only a week to go, and it's beginning to look like it too. This has been an exceptionally snowy winter. There hasn't been snow on the ground all the time, but since the end of October there have been about ten occasions of heavy snowfalls. Several times I've had to shovel snow to clear the way to our front door. One day the thick layer of snow from the roof fell onto the front garden and flattened the middle of the box hedges of the whole row of houses.
Jaca is 820 metres above sea level, and has a pleasant climate on the whole. Just sometimes we have this inconvenience of snow on the roads.
The last time we went up to the cross-country ski resort of Somport, just across the French border, we found it really changed, because the snow-cover was 1.5 metres instead of 10 or 20 centimetres. The trees looked shorter because we were higher up!
It's been a brilliant season for winter sports; snow from November onwards.

Birds in Jaca

I am constantly amazed by the size and variety of birds we see here; even in the city centre. Red kites fly over the rooftops, and there are a great number of griffon vultures which must live near us; twenty, thirty, I don't know how many. They say they have been causing problems in Aragón because there isn't enough carrion for them to eat, and there were reports a while ago that they attacked livestock. whatever. They are very spectacular.
Then there are the cranes. Every year in February we hear a sound like a lot of doors creaking in the distance, and see people start to look up at the sky. Skein after skein of cranes making their journey north.
I've seen Egyptian vultures not far from Jaca, and that rarest of birds, the bearded vulture.
This week I saw a bird which is dead common in Spain, but there are never any here; it's too cold. A stork! It must have lost its way.