The F-Word Part 6: Wetsuits or nudity?

  Ever since I learned to swim I have loved it - I'm not an expert and my strokes couldn't be called Phelpsian, but I did swim the equivalent of the English channel - 26 miles - a few years back for ASPIRE (the spinal charity). I should add I did this over the period of 10 weeks in the local swimming pool and not all at once. Still being a hardy and confident swimmer, used to the all year round uninviting cold of the Welsh side of the Atlantic and equally determined to confront the frothy waves in March as September, I've often wondered why people wear wet suits for surfing.

   Here in Fuerteventura the water is comparatively warm: sometimes it feels warmer than the air temperature and frequently like a bath that is filled with epsom salts and has been left standing for an hour. Yet surfing is popular here and I want to learn, but don't like the idea of suiting up or see why I should, if I am happy to spend hours in the ocean swimming. As long as you move you don't get cold, right?

   A trip to the popular Flagbeach (below) a week or two ago taught me a lesson I will never forget.

   Sometimes here I lie awake before dawn because I can't wait to get up and start my day, but don't want to wake my sleep passenger. In London that only happened at weekends - weekdays, I clung to my duvet, like a feathery shield, postponing the day on the train and in the office. I woke up that morning as the sun rose, with clear blue skies spreading like giant kingfisher wings engulfing the islands. The sound of dead leaves rattling in the breeze against the door promised wind and waves. It was cool, fresh and windy when I stepped outside, the perfect morning for practising some body-boarding and a swim. We drove to our usual beach, a white sandy expanse of about 300 metres, edged by volcanic rocks and usually only a handful of people. However, the tide was high and the waves breaking too close to shore for riding, so Dominick suggested we try a different beach with a more conducive facing to catch the waves. We headed north and found parking near Flagbeach which is popular for surfing, kite surfing and wind surfing.

   The waves definitely looked bigger and stronger, breaking further out and already people were speeding across them with kites, bouncing 20 feet into the air and landing back in the water. No one was swimming and everyone in the water was wearing wetsuits. Wusses I thought as I gamely headed into the sea. It was colder than I expected but not unbearable. Dominick stayed on the dunes watching the kite surfers, as he intends to take lessons. I ran back for the virgin body board and dived back in the water.

  I ended up in way over my head quite literally. The waves, whilst no more than 6-8 feet were faster and more frequent and powerful than I have ever experienced. The other major difference here is that in the UK the ground does not drop out beneath your feet, you can paddle and wade in and it takes a long while to get in waist deep. Here you can be up to your ankles and then waist deep with the next step - it's really steep and the sand so soft there is no grip. I suddenly got pulled under and over and didn't know which way was up. My bikini bottoms were ripped down to my knees. At first I just laughed, tried to regain my modesty and waved at Dominick that I was fine, as I found footing. As I was  righting myself another wave broke over me, blinding me and the next completely barrelled me over.
   I couldn't get to my feet as one wave threw me over like a piece of flotsam and the next pulled me back out. I caught a glimpse of where I was being dragged and realised that I was perilously close to the kite surfers. One clip with a board and I would be gone. I saw Dominick get to his feet looking concerned. At the same moment I lost my grip of the body board and the leash tangled itself around my neck and under I went. It was my first time not feeling in control when in the ocean. I couldn't even get the right way round to swim and the incessant crash of the waves was so powerful I couldn't disentangle myself from the leash - the more I tried, the more it tightened with the pull of the waves. Next thing I knew I was face down on the bottom sucking up lungfuls of sand trying to breathe. There were a few seconds between waves when I managed to get to the surface, choking and snorting up sand - a new experience as I don't think I ever ate sand, even as an adventurous toddler. I pulled the cord off my neck and the board took to the air as easily as if it were a balloon or a kite. The next wave dragged me across the sand into the shallower water for about 15 feet skinning my knee and shin raw. Modesty forgotten, I crawled out like some prehistoric creature that had just learnt to walk on land. Every orifice, including my ass, was caked full of sand and I spent the next few minutes coughing sand up as Dominick looked rather worried and decided not to go in the sea this time.

   I gained a whole new respect both for the ocean and the surfers who wear wet suits. They aren't simply for the cold - they protect you against the burn of sand and rocks which can rip the skin of you in a few short seconds.
  It was a rather subdued Nina that walked across the dunes to the car, coughing up bits of sand. Still when we got home Dominick got the pleasure of hosing me down as I couldn't go into the apartment as a human sand bag!
  From now on I will stick to the beaches I know and that have other people swimming in them, enjoy the nudity and when it's time, I will definitely suit up!

 

Well some of the nudity at least...

 

The F-Word Part 5: Spanish & Skyrim

Lots of you have asked me - how is my Spanish coming along? The truth is, besides being busy with the move, I’ve been putting off learning Spanish in any kind of constructive way since we got here over 5 weeks ago, only learning the odd new word here and there to add to my Spanish vocabulario.

For the record, it's not my first encounter with the language. My long-lost parents began their marriage as JW missionaries in Northern Spain and only left after my mum got pregnant with me (perhaps they should have paid as much attention to contraception as travel and language!) Nevertheless I brought an early termination to their adventure, but they never lost their love of the Spanish culture and language. Around the age of 10 they decided that regular school was too much of a bad influence on their religious ambitions for a nice, spiritual girl and withdrew from public education and decided to teach me themselves at home. As a language was part of the school curiculum they opted to teach me Spanish, which largely consisted of giving me a large black book full of pictures of elephants and the word 'grande' beneath or a mouse, with 'pequeno' underneath. From this and some conversational Spanish with my parents during lessons, I learned most of the Spanish I have now, which is surprisingly well remembered and has been really helpful as a framework and having at least a limited understanding of what people are trying to communicate to me.

Even with this background Spanish I have been a little fearful of trying again 25 years on, thinking perhaps I am too old to retain it or even learn a new language and have procrastinated even though I know to make a success of this move, I cannot leave Dominick to be my mouthpiece in public forevermore. Whilst nursing my latest crop of mosquito/gnat bites I thought about what am I really good at and enjoy doing? Anyone who knows me well would know that I love video games. From the very earliest console tennis on atari to complicated, absorbing RPG's for xbox like Skyrim ( from where our house name, Breezehome originated). This led me to thinking if I can remember obscure potion ingredients for several dozen potions - that charred skeever tail, blisterwort, blue dartwing and daedra heart are the four components for a restore health potion in Skyrim which will potentially save my character’s life in mortal combat against a Serpentine Dragon, then surely, I reasoned, I can remember the four key components to concoct a simple sentence. The noun, the verb, the conjugation and the adjective. This thought spurred me on - after all I can remember and use endless combinations of minerals to smith virtual weapons because I use them. I learn what they do and therefore I remember them - they are part of my knowledge.

Hence today after making mushroom omlette and beans for breakfast I knuckled down to a morning of Spanish lessons, using Michel Thomas cds recommended to me by a lady I met at a restaurant we visited in January, who like us fell in love with the island and moved here permanently from the UK.

   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas.) Michel Thomas was a Pole who survived a number of internments in Nazi concentration camps and went on to arrest the Hangman of Dachau at the end of the second world war in 1945. He had become an expert on languages and worked with the French Resistance and also US Army Counter Intelligence. In a way his assimilation of language skills ensured his survival and became his future career as a language teacher, with his own school in Beverley Hills. His students included many famous Hollywood actors of the time such as Grace Kelly whose marriage to the Prince of Monaco necessitated the learning of French.

  His calm reassuring voice begins by telling the listener that "any form of anxiety or tension inhibits true and effective learning" and goes on to say there is no homework and no need to memorise, just listen and repeat as the lessons proceed. "Let it be absorbed as knowledge and what you know, you will not forgot". Fears of inadequacy and ineptitude put aside I spent the morning developing my language skills. I haven’t really gotten onto adjectives just yet, but I have learned how to formulate a few basic sentences and phrases and learned that the stress always goes on the penultimate vowel-syllable in a word. Most importantly I learned that inflection alone changes a statement to a question  without the need for the word ‘do’, which does not exist and has been hindering me from conversation as I couldn’t think how to phrases things like 'Do you have...?'.

My question of the day is: Lo siento, pero por que no lo tiene para mi ahora, porque lo necessito ahora?

Rougly translated as 'I'm sorry, but why don't you have it for me now, because I need it now'.

This could have been very helpful when trying to discover why we still hadn't got cable, phones and internet a couple of weeks ago.

Ahora tengo corazon - now I have heart! So here is to Fus-Ro-Dah and my new Spanish Dragon Shouts!

PS If anyone knows how to get the inverted question mark symbol on an English keyboard in Word - please let me know.

The F-Word Part 4: The Stackable Garden

One of the great delights of living here is the ease with which we can recycle. We both wanted to be a bit more environmentally conscious in our new lives. Our UK lives involved in an inordinate amount of waste - we got through a giant bag of rubbish every day and without transport to the nearest recycling unit, I am ashamed to say we recycled very little.

   Nearly every street corner here has recycling and waste bins, which are entirely necessary to keeping the house as cockroach and fly-free as possible and smelling sweet! Partly this is because the sewage pipes here are too narrow to take anything except human waste - so no toilet paper or sanitary products can be flushed unless you want to really piss off your neighbours and/or have a flooded toilet. Every bar, restaurant and public restroom has little bins beside the toilet facilities for the disposal of toilet paper, but obviously in the mostly warm weather you need to empty these regularly. Hence here the large wastebins in every residential area are emptied daily. This system of sanitary waste disposal would never work in the UK, where in some areas the council only collect household waste once a fortnight, which inevitably attracts foxes, mice, rats and insects in hordes over the summer - not to mention the rancid smell!

   In addition to the main waste bins there are paper, plastic, tin, glass and oil bins, so every morning this is my first destination. However, apart from a few wine bottles, water bottles and jars, we have very little to throw away now, thanks largely to our compost and stackable garden project. We also try to be imaginative and find an alternative, practical use for as much packaging and waste as possible. Hence our first seedlings were planted in used egg cartons in shallow soil ready to be transferred to the larger planter and then to the stackable garden. After the seedlings are ready to move to a planter, the egg cartons are then shredded and put in the compost, ready to decompose and provide the rich earth for the next planting stages.

   Following much research on the internet we discovered almost everything in terms of food and paper waste can be composted. Hair from your hair brush (although probably not if you use lots of hairproducts), the contents of the vaccuum cleaner, dead leaves, crushed egg shells, vegetable and grain scraps, used kitchen towels and napkins, bbq ash, rice, stale bread, toilet rolls, shredded junk mail ( not the glossy kind),pizza boxes, milk cartons, wine corks, nail clippings, tea bags, coffee grounds, old wine, beer (not that I tend to waste much of this!) and even urine (although we haven't tried that - yet!) So I keep a sealed compost bin in the kitchen and most of the vegetable ends and egg shells go in here ready to be moved. The important thing is to keep the dry matter (paper, dead leaves, dried garden waste and grass equal to the wet matter - the fruit and veg scraps. We've re-purposed some of the storage containers from moving here and now they are compost bins, soil bins and sand bins kept outside in a dark utility room. Pretty much the only thing I can't recycle are meat, chicken and fish bones and left-overs, but these can all go to make stock for soups, sauces, gravies and stews.

   Creating the stackable garden itself was the most fun and a feat of constructive ingenuity; although as it involved use of power tools, I mostly watched as Dominick did all the hard work. This is where I learned one of my first new words of the language - FERRETERIA, absolutely nothing to do with small furry animals, which was my first guess. This means literally ironmonger, or hardware store, the kind of shop that is almost extinct in the UK and US, overtaken by the larger monopolies who have enormous warehouses on the outskirts of most towns. In Fuerteventura, these mainly family-run smaller enterprises are almost as common as supermarkets, selling everything from pegs to lightbulbs and power tools and an invaluable resource for us.

 We used a new plastic household dustbin, which I used to pack items to ship over and then turned out to be far too big to use as a bin here, given you can't keep waste in the house more than a day. He used a stanley knife, hairdryer and a scrubbing brush with the bristles ripped out to cut 3-5 inch slits in the sides of the bin (depending on what veg or herb you plan to grow in that area), then drive pockets into the plastic using the heat from the hair dryer and the wooden brush handle as a wedge (but any piece of wedge shaped wood would work). Unfortunately the first few didn't come out so neatly, as the hairdryer couldn't get the plastic hot enough to bend easily, so we bought a heat gun (See power tools picture above) and this made the plastic much more malleable. After a couple of nights work we had the stackable garden shell.

   Next, another visit to the ferreteria to get the items to craft the irrigation system.  For this we needed a length of hard plastic pipe (like the kind you use for guttering and drainage), a small saw to cut it to size and an electric drill to make holes at regular intervals around the pipe, for water to seep through to the plants. Once the irrigation funnel was ready it was placed in the  centre of the bin (not forgetting a few holes in the base of the bin for air and water circulation and drainage). We placed soil around the pipe to pack it in tightly and then last of all a midnight jaunt to the sand dunes to collect a storage box of sand. The pipe in the middle is filled with sand and this prevents rainfall and water from deluging the multiple plants, slowly filtering it through to the roots from the holes along the cylinder.

   And this is the end result, or should I say the beginning, as we haven't gotten to the final planting, growing and harvesting stages yet. The compost will take about a month to be ready and we will slowly start adding it to the stackable garden to enrich the soil. In the meantime Dominick planted some seeds in egg cartons and chatted to them regularly in the hope they would grow. Much of this is trial and error, learning what works and what doesn't according to the climate and resources available. One thing we did not take into account is that the tapwater here is desalinated sea water and still very salty and so tap water can't be used on the seeds, and therefore disappointingly nothing sprouted in the first week, despite the glorious late autumn weather. The second week we had tremendous rainfall and the agg carton got swamped and most of the seedlings washed away. However, I rescued a couple of sprouting seeds and put them in a larger planter, we kept them out of the heavy rain and only used bottled water for additional watering. There are never frosts here or any snow so there is no danger of them freezing and dying, but the wind is a hazard and can over-turn them, which has happened once, so you do need to keep an eye on the weather, which can change from sunny to stormy in seconds.

   So now we have our first tiny emerging crop of organic salad onions, spinach and various herbs - all of which are quite difficult to get hold of here or don't exist at all. It will take time, but we hope to be able to grow enough to supplement our salads and veggies without resorting to imported frozen stuff from the mainland or farther afield. It's great if you are short of space and can be done indoors on a smaller scale using water bottles and containers as long as you get some natural sunlight through your windows.

  If you have a similar project and any ideas please share!

  Apparently it is a public holiday here today - so Happy Spanish Constitution day to you all!

The F-Word: Snapshorts: Treasures

When we were in the process of moving we had to give so much away as we couldn't bring a lot, but I had to bring some personal 'treasures' - mementos from loved ones. It's nice to have reminders of folks around our little home.






This was painted my lovely friend Tracey Bainbridge in 2003 and is of me. (It should be the other way round - link won't let me rotate the image!)

This was also painted by Tracey and is now serving as a curtain in my kitchen to protect the passing kids on their way to school from seeing my naked breakfast making! I love the stained glass effect I get in the morning when the sun shines through it.

  This lovely cross-stitch bag holder is also proving very useful in the kitchen and was made for me one Christmas by Sylvia Willmot in Scotland, who remembered my life-long love of birds. 

 

 

   Another cross-stitch, that makes me smile everytime I see it and reminds me of Lannie Waggy, who gave it to me for my birthday a few years ago.

 

And of course my severely whittled-down book collection keeping just my favourites that I plan to

 re-read when I am too old to do anything else and without which I would never feel at home.

As with all treasure collections - you have to add to them. This beautiful and erotic Gustav Klimt print is the first picture Dominick and I bought together, and I we're both a bit in love with her. http://www.klimt.com/en/gallery/early-works/klimt-wasserschlangen2-1904.ihtml

 

The F-Word: Snap-shorts

Dominick catapulted us both out of bed just after 4 a.m. this morning having heard a mosquito in his ear. After ten minutes searching for the invisible wretch, it met its timely sizzling demise courtesy of the electrocution tennis racket.
  However if we'd not woken up as the cocks were crowing we'd have missed this beautiful moon, the photo doesn't do it justice but it was set against the clouds, casting them all in silver.

The F-Word Part 3: Food

So shopping is of itself an experience - especially for food. Unless I take my Spanish dictionary - it's not always clear what a product is, so cooking can be a bit random.

I made a chilli the first week here and was about to add a tin of tomatoes to the fresh tomatoes when I discovered the three cans I'd bought believing them to be tomatoes were some kind of tomato soup. For the record Fritos does not mean tinned tomatoes even if the picture on the can looks like that!


The one on the right is the proper stuff!

Mojo Sauce

Canarian Potatoes are a local speciality served with most meals rather than chips. They are minature baked potatoes with a salty, slightly crispy jacket and usually come with Mojo sauce which is a spicey bell pepper sauce, sweet and sharp at the same time and goes with almost everything I am finding. I'm so glad I have something to stand in for Nandos piri-piri sauces and this goes really well on chicken kebabs for the bbq.

Here's a monster kebab Dominick made the other night about to hit the flames!
 

 Almost everyone has a bbq of some kind - it's generally too hot for my special roast dinners - both to eat and to cook indoors. Sadly the rain of the last week has meant switching to the hob indoors and I am missing the smell of charcoal.

Another oddity we discovered is that the tea and coffee we made at home tasted foul - all salty and bitter and really undrinkable. This is due to the high salt content in the water which you can taste if you drink straight from the tap. So for hot beverages we've switched to bottled water. A side effect of so much salt in the water is that everything rusts really quickly - pans, cutlery, cars. Within two washes a brand knife will be showing signs of rust so as far as possible its best to use plastic - pity they haven't invented plastic cars yet though!

  It's quite easy to get old favourites though and I was relieved to find marmite on the supermarket shelves...so I neededn't have smuggled this one in after all!

 

Some of the packaging is weird as I posted on www.facebook.com/crumpetcapers about "slutty bread". 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeQNPJtMWY

Does anyone remember the yellow Yorkie chocolate bar with the almond nuts in? Well I have been missing that for years since they discontinued it, but I think I might have found a replacement with dark chocolate!

I will have to wait until Saturday (cheat day - to be explained in a further blog) to trial it!

The F-Word Part 2: Of Flies and Fish

Perhaps it will come as some consolation if you’re stuck at work reading this, it’s not all fun and frolics on this island off the coast of Africa. Pests do abound as I discovered on our first morning here a few weeks ago.

I remember from our January visit that tiny cockroaches got everywhere in the self-catering apartment we stayed in, but they were small and I put it down to our choice of budget accommodation. It never occurred to me that these wee beasties were just babies and that they grow to the size of the mouth of a pint glass and even longer if you count their feelers. This is about two-thirds of the actual size.

   These prehistoric-looking creatures scuttle more rapidly than I could ever have imagined and you can get an excellent work-out chasing them with a shoe, but they are pretty hardy and usually survive the first few whacks, should you be quick enough to catch them. I’ve never actually encountered such large insects outside of a zoo. We discovered that every household needs a can of Raid and quickly obtained some. Dirty plates, used cups and every crumb must be cleaned up fastidiously and immediately to detract them. All food including in cupboards must be sealed tightly at all times. Otherwise you will find them having left-over parties in the kitchen, leaving piles of black poop up the walls and wherever they move. And definitely no toast and tea in bed! However, comparing this unanticipated challenge to the alternative of commuting on a train squashed against strangers for three hours every day to spend 8 hours in an office with mice running around, I’d definitely take las cucarachas.

  Mosquitos also abound, but it’s definitely worse if you are near water. In the holiday villa we rented a few weeks ago there was a pool and this seemed to invite mosquitos in droves. Unfortunately we didn’t see them, just the bites they left. These take forever to heal and are itchy for about a week. I have had several on me including two on my face, whilst they seem to prefer Dominick’s feet. You can’t really avoid them, but you can stay covered up (I am seriously considering adopting the hijab if I get anymore on my face!) although that’s not really ideal when it gets up to 80F in the day and doesn’t drop below 72F at night and there is no air conditioning apart from in some of the supermarkets. You can also buy wristbands which emit citrus odours to deter them, but they are only really efficient if you wear them on each wrist and ankle. Or you can spray every four hours with insect repellent and hope for the best. It doesn’t seem like the locals get bitten as much as us, so we’re hoping that we get some kind of immunity after so many weeks/bites.

  The biggest bane are the flies – you can’t eat outside anywhere without having swarms of them landing on you and your food and they do not take a siesta either so it makes sunbathing impossible. I am so glad we brought our electronic fly swatters! Mysteriously as the sun sets at 6 they all vanish and so eating out in the evening is the best time.

  Not all the creatures cause a nuisance though – the butterflies and dragon flies are enormous and beautiful. Lizards are common to spot around the apartment and help with the flies. The birds and chipmunks are relatively unafraid of people and will even eat from your hand in some places.

There are no sheep or cows or really much in the way of agricultural farming because the island is mostly desert and there is nowhere for them to graze. The most common sight are the goats. We took an off road journey and found a dog herding them (see below), which was rather odd, but not another human in sight for miles. The goats provide milk, cheese and meat and for the island and roam freely throughout the mountains.

  Best of all though F is for Fish and this is in glorious tasty abundance. I’ve never enjoyed such delicious prawns, shellfish, sea bass, dorado, snapper and tuna mostly caught fresh on the shores that morning. Fish has quickly replaced my life-time favourite of fillet steak. It is the staple, and really only other available, protein that is not imported from Spain or further afield. Luckily we’re both fans of fish and goats cheese!

Overall flies and fish win out over “mice and men” for me. I realise that there is no complete freedom from challenges and stresses, but what I can do is choose which ones I prefer to be fettered by and adapt to them.

 

The F-Word Part 1

Tuesday 13 November 2012

F is for Fuerteventura and a strange new life for me and Dominick, escaping the ever-tightening noose of London which, with the commuting, over-crowding and grey skies, meant we were only enjoying a fraction of our lives and not living in any sense fully. Life was all about surviving the journey to work, surviving the daily stresses, surviving the combat of getting home and then trying to raise a smile for one another when we got there.

In January of this year we came to Fuerteventura, knowing nothing about it, except it was a cheap package holiday that promised a little space and sunshine, a reprieve from an exhausting 2011 work-wise. We loved it and we decided there and then that we would move here and learn to live, instead of just survive.

From the moment I came home I fantasised constantly about going back - permanently. In the meantime I wasted no time constructing my survival strategy for the rest of the year, namely booking another week in November. It's what we all do - come back from a fantastic holiday and immediately look to the planning the next one I guess, and the planning and dreaming is half the fun.

To both of us the desire to move full-time was not just a fantasy, but a firm goal. I started to live as if it would happen, not knowing how we would make it possible, but determined as I always am when I set my mind to something seemingly impossible ( a bit like marrying Dominick, which I decided pretty much in a couple of days of meeting him). I started packing up belongings and for every weekend of the last few months took a bag of clothes, shoes, ornaments, books, games and dvds to charity shops, gradually shedding everything I knew I couldn't take with me. I told everyone I met I was moving, I just didn't know when. I got used to the raised eyebrows and doubtful expressions, as no one really believed me...and sometimes I wasn't sure if I totally believed me either.

We thought we'd have to wait another year so Dominick could get British citizenship in 2013, having resided in the UK for the statutory three years since he arrived in 2010 and then we'd be able to live in another part of the EU. One frustrating afternoon at work, as the Olympic euphoria in London had finally given way to damp weather and spirits, I felt desperate for a quicker escape route so I did some more research into the legalities, impulsively employed an immigration lawyer and discovered that, as the spouse of an EU citizen, Dominick could move anytime. We'd still have to apply for residency and depending on whether we had jobs and a place to live and no criminal records, we'd be able to get it. Dominick engineered a way to work from home as his company began to outsource to Eastern Europe. I had just gotten my honours degree in late August (after 6 years of studying whilst working), so I hoped that might help with obtaining a teaching position, but with the cost of living being so low, we figured if we were prepared to live frugally we could manage on one income for a while.

Finally we had a way to be here forever or as long as we want to be (pending successful residency applications) and so I tore up our return flight tickets, handed in my notice at work (HURRAY!), found an apartment and we flew to Fuerteventura for our holiday in November with no plans to return.

It's exciting, a bit scary and so very much to learn, but we're loving it and am so thankful to be here with Dominick. Sometimes it seems if you wish for something very hard, plan as if there is no way it won't happen and live as if it is about to, then it will.