Wednesday was the day we returned to Sanlu. As teachers, both of us had the whole of Easter off and as such were able to travel in the first half of the week when prices were lower. Still, it was with a heavy heart that we packed and left La Antigua Vaquería.
Our first stop, as already advanced in my previous post, was the Restaurante Isis
for brekky. It was rather disappointing - perhaps due to a lack of communication, as different terms have different meanings in different parts of Spain. In (at least) Andalusia a café cortado is an expresso with a mere dribble of milk. It would appear that in the Restaurante Isis café cortado seems to mean an expresso with a whole udderful of warm, caramelised milk. The toast, however, was excellent and the owner's wife's pyjamas and fluffy slippers up to snuff. At least standards hadn't slipped there, then!
We breakfasted outside on the deserted terrace. In my first post on Cuenca, I mused whether plants were sentient beings. I sincerely hope not. We subjected the nearby potted plants to unbearably exquisite torture by pouring the undrinkable coffee into their pots, à la Mr Bean. I doubt if El Ocejón would have survived a millenium on such a nauseating diet. The sufferings of sentient vegetables were, however, soon forgotten as we were treated to yet another display of eccentricity.
As we sat, minding our own business and quietly killing the plants with the Isis' own particular interpretation of Agent Orange, my Dark Lady decided to have a cigarette. Our table did not have an ashtray, so she went to the next one along and got the (used) ashtray from there. Among the detritus of the burnt offerings to the goddess Nicotiniana was a rumpled 1.5-inch stub of a slim cigar. We had been at our table for about 20 minutes, drinking black coffee and in the Dark Lady's case, smoking, when a couple of families emerged from the hostal and sat around the pyramid. The father of one of them took a seemingly nonchcalant stroll around the terrace and then took his place back at the pyramid.
After a while, he started to steal shifty glances towards us and after a bit of scratching, fidgeting and leg-crossing and re-crossing, he stood up and sidled past us again, muttering to himself. I began to get worried. Was he an axe murderer? Did he think that one of us was someone famous and was coming over to ask for an autograph? Was he a jealous husband who thought I, or indeed my Dark Lady, had been rootling around with his wife? Or, quite simply, did he have The Fear? He had The Fear. His mind was made up. Purposefully, he approached and, towering over our table, he muttered "Good day", snatched up the cigar stub, retreated a couple of metres, straightened it out and started to smoke enthusiastically, if somewhat defiantly.
WTF???
Unanswered questions still pullulate in my mind:
1) He didn't exactly look like a tramp, so why pick up a second-mouth cigar?
2) If it was his own cigar, why had he left it in the first place? It had the concertina shape of having been put out dliberately.
3) How long had it been there?
4) Why didn't he just light up a new cigar and save himself the embarrassment?
5) If he had The Fear and was so in need of a nicotine hit, and had no more cigars, why didn't he just buy a packet of ciggies from the machine, or ask for one from my Dark Lady?
6) Did he realise that he was making a spectacle of himself in front of his family and an appreciative public?
Before he came back to eat what was left on our breakfast plates and lick the Agent Orange from the potted plants' fast wilting leaves, we paid and departed.
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| The restaurant. Image from the Hostal Isis website |
We breakfasted outside on the deserted terrace. In my first post on Cuenca, I mused whether plants were sentient beings. I sincerely hope not. We subjected the nearby potted plants to unbearably exquisite torture by pouring the undrinkable coffee into their pots, à la Mr Bean. I doubt if El Ocejón would have survived a millenium on such a nauseating diet. The sufferings of sentient vegetables were, however, soon forgotten as we were treated to yet another display of eccentricity.
 |
The terrace. Image from the Hostal Isis website. unfortunately for the
owner, the pyramid's ratios are not those of Gizeh.
|
As we sat, minding our own business and quietly killing the plants with the Isis' own particular interpretation of Agent Orange, my Dark Lady decided to have a cigarette. Our table did not have an ashtray, so she went to the next one along and got the (used) ashtray from there. Among the detritus of the burnt offerings to the goddess Nicotiniana was a rumpled 1.5-inch stub of a slim cigar. We had been at our table for about 20 minutes, drinking black coffee and in the Dark Lady's case, smoking, when a couple of families emerged from the hostal and sat around the pyramid. The father of one of them took a seemingly nonchcalant stroll around the terrace and then took his place back at the pyramid.
After a while, he started to steal shifty glances towards us and after a bit of scratching, fidgeting and leg-crossing and re-crossing, he stood up and sidled past us again, muttering to himself. I began to get worried. Was he an axe murderer? Did he think that one of us was someone famous and was coming over to ask for an autograph? Was he a jealous husband who thought I, or indeed my Dark Lady, had been rootling around with his wife? Or, quite simply, did he have The Fear? He had The Fear. His mind was made up. Purposefully, he approached and, towering over our table, he muttered "Good day", snatched up the cigar stub, retreated a couple of metres, straightened it out and started to smoke enthusiastically, if somewhat defiantly.
WTF???
Unanswered questions still pullulate in my mind:
1) He didn't exactly look like a tramp, so why pick up a second-mouth cigar?
2) If it was his own cigar, why had he left it in the first place? It had the concertina shape of having been put out dliberately.
3) How long had it been there?
4) Why didn't he just light up a new cigar and save himself the embarrassment?
5) If he had The Fear and was so in need of a nicotine hit, and had no more cigars, why didn't he just buy a packet of ciggies from the machine, or ask for one from my Dark Lady?
6) Did he realise that he was making a spectacle of himself in front of his family and an appreciative public?
Before he came back to eat what was left on our breakfast plates and lick the Agent Orange from the potted plants' fast wilting leaves, we paid and departed.
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| A nice church, Almodóvar del Pinar. |
First stop on the way back was a little town called Almodóvar del Pinar where we bought a packet of fine pork scratchings and a loaf of disappointing bread. Curiously, it must be the only town in the whole of Spain that doesn't sell lottery tickets. We found this out because it's a tradition in my Dark Lady's family to buy such a ticket in one of the places visited when on a journey. We gleaned this information from the ciggy shop lady, who was unable to give us an explanation as to why no-one sells lottery tickets there. It's not even as if the locals don't play the lottery - they go to the next town along to get the tickets.
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| A typical street, Úbeda |
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| Façade, Hospital de Santiago, Úbeda. |
Úbeda. Hooray! We arrived at about 15.00 and the city's shops - including all of the chains - were closed for lunch, as were the churches and historic buildings. Unfortunately we had very little time to see anything. Anyway as the Easter processions were also about to recommence, we got back into Mr. Bubbles and drove off to Baeza for an ice cream in the main square before the final couple of hundred km back to Sanlu.
Thus ended our trip. We had, as the Spanish saying goes, been left with with honey on our lips. In other words what we had seen and experienced in Cuenca and Jaén had less than scratched the surface of what was to be enjoyed there. As the great thespian and politician Arnie has so expressively declaimed on several occasions, "We will be back".
You once asked me whether they served cortado in the UK and at the time I replied that I had not seen any such in our coffee bars. Since then, there has been a change and a drink called cortado has put in an appearance, first in the chain Costa Coffee, and increasingly in other coffee shops as well. It is now one of Tigger's preferred tipples. Unhappily for you, however, it is made by putting an espresso in the bottom of a glass and then topping this up with hot frothed milk. The ratio of milk to coffee is at least 10 to 1 and probably higher.
ReplyDeleteThe episode of the cigar butt is slightly odd but it is not difficult to think up a number of plausible scenarios. A brother-in-law of mine had the lamentable habit of collecting up cigarette butts and incorporating their contents into roll-ups. Said butts had not necessarily been originally smoked by him... Tobacco smokers are, after all, addicts and as such are often not too fussy as to the source of the wherewithal to satisfy their craving.
As I was writing the coffee episode, I remembered our cortado conversation. What you have described as a Costa cortado is here called a manchada - literally stained milk. even the name is off-putting!
ReplyDeleteAs for your brother-in-law, that reminds me of a passage in my copy of Mayhew's 'London Characters and Crooks' where he describes the second-mouth tobacco industry in Victorian London. Apparently, it was statistically possible for the same tobacco to make its way into seven different products before being finally combusted completely. And we think that today we are masters of recycling!