One thing about studying Spanish in a typical language school here in Spain is the rapid turnover of students. Although most people sign up for more than one week at a time, at the end of each week there are a fair few that have finished their studies, and are off maybe to return home, travel, or study further elsewhere.

So, there´s a continual turnover of fresh faces, but at the same time it´s easy to meet these people, as everyone is typically interested and keen to get to know the others in the school.
Both in the language school in Santiago, and now here in Santander I´ve met a number of very nice people, maybe only for a few days at a time, but it´s always been worthwhile meeting and talking to these people, and finding the occasion to go out for a drink or a meal somewhere. Most people have a story or two to tell, and it can be very interesting if you keep your eyes and ears open. I feel that I´ve been enlightened a number of times talking to some of my fellow students.

Next week will be my last here at Santander, after which I´m off for a week to catch up with friends in France and do some hiking in the mountains before beginning the Camino.

When I was in Galicia, in the far north west of Spain, a few weeks ago, the issue of the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker and the subsequent oil spill was such a big issue. As I´ve mentioned previously, there were still slogans, posters, demonstrations etc demanding that this sort of thing never be allowed to happen again ("Nunca Mais" is the popular slogan - "Never Again").

Well, last week I went to one of the beaches near Santander with the family that I´m currently staying with, and we took a walk along the rocky coastline.
At one point I found myself scrabbling along some rocks, and getting black tar on my hands. Talking to Olga, it turns out that this is the remnants of the Prestiage oil spill. It is amazing that it managed to reach so far along the northern Spanish coast, as it is quite a long way from the Galicia (probably more than 500 kilometers), and it gives one an idea of the magnitude of the disaster.

When I was in Santiago I bought a book of photographs of the clean-up operation, with hundreds of volunteers sifting the sand and scrubbing down the rocks on the beaches. It all looked like such amazingly back-breaking and tedious work, and the sad thing is that there is still much oil contained inside the wreck of the Prestige which is slowly leaching out into the sea, and will possibly find its way onto these Spanish beaches for a long time to come.

Some funny little things concerning the Spanish language:

1. The way people say "adios" (goodbye) instead of "hola" (hello) when they pass in the street.

2. The fact that the word for "to hope" and "to wait" is the same (esperar).

3. The fact that the word for lunch is simply "food" (comida).

4. I think I´ve mentioned this before, but it´s the small words that you have to watch out for; the big words are often very similar to their English counterparts, although the endings differ depending on the context (e.g. probalamente = probably).

5. The fact that the word for body is a little macabre ("cuerpo", similar to "corpse" in English).

6. The fact that the words for "weather" and "time" are exactly the same (tiempo).

One very pleasant surprise with Santander is the Cantabrian coastline. It turns out that the beaches around here are pretty much everything you´d want and, along with parts of the Portuguese coastline, the Cantabrian coast is the only part of Europe that I´ve seen that makes me think of New Zealand.

A great beach should have the following: plenty of good, clean sand; nice rolling dunes in the background, with clumps of toitoi growing amongst them; wide expanses populated with not too many people; a fair bit of surf, with the water clean and temperate; and plenty of sunshine (goes without saying).

Well, the beaches around Santander, particularly on the other side of the harbour have all this. I took a walk along the clifftops last week, and had some great views down the coastline and out to sea.

Sometimes homesickness can be such a nice feeling.

P.S. You may have to refresh the page if you visit the link above for the picture of toitoi (hit the "F5" key on a PC) in order to see the picture.

I´ve just spent the weekend walking in the Picos de Europa, a national park in northern Spain which, although not huge (maybe 40 kilometers square), contains a very impressive amount of alpine scenery.

Although it´s Spain, it could be Heidi country, as the valleys are green and lush, rising up into high vertical peaks, and the hillsides resonate with the sound of the bells tinkling around the necks of the livestock.
Indeed, walking back from Sotres on Sunday along the road following the valley floor, I thought I heard church bells, only to turn a corner and find a herd of cows making music as they chomped away.

Walking into the valley on Saturday, I found myself being followed by a tormenta (the Spanish word for "storm", or, as one of the teachers here at the language school says, "thunder-lights"). It was a little scary, as the approaching weather was obviously very foul, with huge peels of thunder echoing across the valley and bright shafts of bolt lightening every few seconds. However, my wet weather gear managed to hold up, and I think I missed the worst of the storm.

I´d brought a tent along, but because of the rain was quite happy to stay at the albergue (hostal with dormitary accomodation) in Sotres, which was more modern and well run than you can normally expect.

In contrast to Saturday, Sunday was a fantastic blue-sky day, and the views of the mountains and pastures were almost surreal. In contrast to the pastureland that I know from England and New Zealand, it´s amazing that people can eke out an existence with livestock on what is often very limited patches of green grass; in the afternoon I took a route which led along a hillside, with occasional bedroom-sized meadows branching off the path.

At one point I looked up and noticed some cows and two human figures very high up on a scree slope on the opposite side of the valley. I could have been mistaken, but it seems that they were milking the herd, and it looked like a lot of hard work to chase the cows around the slopes.
The area is known for its cheeses, including a type of blue cheese, although unfortunately I didn´t get the chance to try it (possibly next weekend though).

Sunday afternoon ended with a trip down the Fuente De teleferico, a cable car connecting 900 meters of vertical drop down a mountain face.

Today´s post is the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice (in Wonderland), which is featured on a poster above where I´m sitting, and seems curiously apt at the moment.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don´t much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn´t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you´re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if only you walk long enough."

Something I didn´t expect to find in sunny Spain is the presence of a number of solariums, or tanning centres. Why, given the abundance of sunshine hours in this country, would there be a demand for these? You´d think that possibly they´d be justified in the winter months, but the ones that I´ve noticed in Santander are open at the moment, and seem to be doing a busy trade, even though Santander is home to some fantastic beaches with great sand and sea.

Speaking of the beaches, one of the local playas is called "Bikini Beach", and the locals claim that it is where a certain foreign female student first introduced the Bikini, and that the swimsuit was named after the beach itself. This all seems pretty improbable, and it´s more likely that the beach was named after the swimsuit, given that the history of the Bikini points to a French automotive engineer developing a radical new swimsuit for his mother´s lingerie business, and this swimsuit was named after the US atom bomb explosion at Bikini atoll four days prior to its introduction.

Interestingly, the Bikini has actually been with us for at least 1800 years, as there are mosaics in Italy dating back to 200 A.D. showing women clad in fur Bikinis!

Another point about the Spanish language that I noticed, which is that often the translation of certain words and phrases into English can end up sounding very funny. For example, if you want to order fish, and you prefer it grilled, the word is "plancha". However this word is also the same for the iron used to remove wrinkles from clothes. So a literal conversation could go something like:

"How would sir like the fish?"

"I´d prefer it ironed, thank you".

I´ve been reading a very interesting book over the last couple of weeks, called "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which purports to be the "history of everybody for the last 13,000 years".

It tries to explain how certain civilisations got to be the ones that did the conquoring, while others became the conquored, and it arrives at some pretty surprising conclusions. In the largest part, the factors that made the difference are the ability to produce food surpluses through agriculture, often because of the luck of certain societies having domesticable crops, animals, and a good climate. I.E. Not much credit can be given for differences between races or cultures.

However, this book also carries out some of its investigation by looking at the similarities between langauges, and for me it´s been fascinating to find how history can be traced by the development of langauge.
For example, many languages in the world belong to certain groups and can be traced back to certain root languages. In the case of English, this language belongs to the Indo-European group and includes many similarities with other languages in the group, including Latin, Spanish, Russian and Sanskrit.

One way to date historical developments is to look at the languages in a particular group, and to see whether they share similar words for certain objects/concepts, or whether they each have unique words for these objects and concepts.
If the languages in the group share similar words, then it is highly likely that they already had these particular words before they branched from the root language.

For instance, the word for "sheep" in the languages of the Indo-European family are quite similar: "avis", "avis", "ovis", "oveja", "ovtsa", "owis" and "oi" in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Irish respectively, which strongly suggests that sheep had been domesticated by the people using the original root language of the Indo-European family before the other languages branched off.

You might think that the above list doesn´t include English "sheep", which is very different, but the interesting thing is that English has the word "ewe", which is related to the above list.

Apparently, by looking at the sound shifts of the Indo-European languages over time, it looks like the original word for "sheep" was "owis" in the root form of the language that was spoken 6000 years ago.

One European language that shares very few similar words with other languages is the Basque language, which somehow has managed to survive as an island of uniqueness in the sea of European languages which share much of their vocabulary. There´s a lot of speculation about the origin and history of the Basques and their language, and they certainly have a strong local identity here in the north of Spain.

Well, my whistle-stop tour of the north of Spain continues.
Tomorrow I´m off to Santander on the north coast, as the language school here in Vitoria can´t offer any classes next week, whereas the one in Santander can.

Santander is given a bit of a rough time by the guide book (uh, the Rough Guide), but according to the locals here in Vitoria it´s quite a nice spot with some good beaches. Tomorrow I´ll be able to judge for myself. Whatever, it´ll be a good base for doing some training in the Picos de Europas for the Camino de Santiago, which I´ll be aiming to start in a month´s time.

Spent today completing a 20km walk through the beech forests near Vitoria, and it was so quiet. Very beautiful territory to walk through, and after leaving the information centre I didn´t see another person along the entire walk (and, thinking of yesterday, no snakes either, although plenty of small scurrying lizards).

It´s funny the unexpected things that I´ve been discovering since I´ve been in Spain.

When I was young, maybe up to the age of 9 or 10, I used to be a natural in the water. I remember a swimathon at my primary school where, dressed in pyjamas (I´ve no idea why), we swam as many lengths of the school pool as we could to raise money for the school. I was the last one remaining in the pool and had passed 100 lengths when the teacher got tired of waiting and ordered me out. I remember feeling as if I could have swam up and down that pool all day.

Since then though, my swimming experiences have been all too infrequent, and I´ve found myself in a swimming pool less than once a year for the last so many years.
However, over the last few days I´ve been rediscovering the joy of swimming. I spent an afternoon at the pool in Barcelona with Kate last week, and did a few tentative lengths, and yesterday I discovered the fantastic olympic-sized public pool here at Vitoria. I found myself getting more comfortable and relaxed in the water the more I swam. By the end of the afternoon I was swimming continuous lengths easily, and feeling that I could go on without stopping.

I think it´s something to do with feeling comfortable in the water, and finding the right pace at which to swim (it also helps that the swimming pools here in Spain have beautiful water, and are not hyper-clorinated like those in the UK). The pool here at Vitoria is very large, and well populated with sun loungers and the local populace, but it´s been a weird summer in Spain so far, and in the water I found myself feeling like Dustin Hoffman in the pool scenes from The Graduate, removed from the rest of the world around me.

Today however, the activity has all been land-based (apart from a short dip in the lake at the end of the afternoon). I´ve been breaking in my new trekking boots, and completed a 12 kilometer walk around a local lake. As well as being the inaugural journey in my new boots (which carried me around the lake perfectly), I also saw my first snake since I´ve been in Spain.
I stopped while crossing a bridge and looked down to watch the schools of small fish swimming in the water, and the dozens of blue-bodied dragonflies skimming across the water´s surface. Then I noticed something weaving it´s way sideways through the water, and sure enough it was a snake, lazily swimming in the warm water.

This memory of this scene came to me again 3 hours later when, upon completing my walk round the lake, I took a dip to cool off. However, I figured it was a big lake and a little snake, so I felt happy that the law of probability was on my side (although I didn´t give any thoughts to the snake´s possible extended family until later).

I´ve enjoyed much of Barcelona over the last week, and have been reaquainted with some of the sights I saw on a previous visit as well as making new discoveries.
However, I´m happy to have left Barcelona for the mid-northern town of Vitoria, which I´ll be using over the next few days as a base from which to do some walking/trekking.

Some of the sights in Barcelona that were quite amazing include the Font Magica de Montjuic, a large fountain which provides amazingly colourful chorographed displays on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday evenings. It´s comparable to a display of fireworks, except that it is all acheived by a mixture of many different jets of water and sequences of coloured lights. A very wonderful experience, especially as viewed from above on the steps leading up to Montjuic, with the Barcelona skyline acting as a backdrop.

Also, Barcelona is the place to see Antoni Gaudi´s constructions, and although they are all amazing in their own way, one of the loveliest to visit on a warm summer evening is the rooftop of Casa Mila ("La Pedrera"), a plaza on top of the building crowned with bizzare representations in the forms of the chimnies and air ducts.

Other Barcelona landmarks, not found on the tourist map, are the Horchaterias. They exist mainly to serve the delicious horchata ("orxata" in Catalan), a drink made from tiger nuts (which, confusingly, have nothing to do with nuts, but are instead nodules from the root of the chufa plant). Horchata is only slightly sweet (in comparision with your average softdrink), and incredibly refreshing after a hot day wandering around the Barcelona streets. Although available in supermercados and occasional bars, the best stuff by far is that that one finds at the Horchaterias.
Another beverage served at the horchaterias, almost as good as horchata itself, is granizado, a slushy drink made from ground ice with coffee or lemon (or, if you get really confused when ordering it as I did, both).

Another note on the Spanish language: because the Spanish pronounce "ll" as "lye", this can lead to complications when the Spanish co-opt words featuring "ll" from other languages, such as "parallel". The solution, as seen in various street signs around Barcelona, is to use a hyphen to break up the "ll". For example, one of the main avenues in Barcelona is called "Paral-lel" which means it will be pronounced as "Para-lel" rather than "Para-lye".

Just spent much of the day shopping for a pair of trekking boots, and visiting MACBA, the Barcelona museum of contemporary art.

There´s only three halfway suitable shops in town in which to buy boots, so you think it´d be a relatively simple process; in fact I´ve been into each of these three shops probably 4 times, and am still trying to work out what sort of boots I need.

I did find a suitable pair yesterday, but I listened to the little voice of moderation, and put them back on the shelf thinking that I´d return today and make certain they were what I wanted. Well, I returned, but the boots had been snaffled by some other happy shopper, and they were the last in that size.

Why is it, with what I consider average-size feet - UK 9, Europe 44 - that there never seems to be much in this size in the shops? Probably because there are many other people with similar sized feet, but you´d think those in charge would account for this and get a few more pairs of this size into the shops (to be even more difficult, I´m actually a half size - UK 9.5 - but I´ve only ever found one pair of shoes in this size that suited me, so have given up looking).

As for MACBA, I wasn´t realy in the mood to concentrate and study the works properly, but I did notice the thing that caught my attention the one other time I´ve visited the museum two years ago.

Just as you enter, having bought your ticket, there is a hall with three tables, each with three or four boxed jigsaw puzzles, the photograph of the completed jigsaw on the top.
The scenes are quite ordinary, such as a view of a living room, a person working at a desk, but the photos are well-lit, and they catch everyone´s attention.
Both times I´ve visited, the tables have had a number of people gathered round, putting different puzzles together. It´s a simple thing, but it really seems to catch people´s attention.

Following the first visit to MACBA, I took a photo of my sister-in-law´s apartment living room in the Bario Gotico, and got it produced by a lab as a jigsaw in imitation of what I´d seen at the museum. Made quite a nice christmas gift.

The pensions and hostals in the Barrio Gotico (the old town) in Barcelona have been designed to ensure that the inhabitants get the least sleep possible per night.

They are typically located on top of or across from noisy bars, and all the street noise seems to drift directly into the windows. Because of the heat the floors are typically lined with marble or somesuch instead of stone, ideal for creating the maximum amount of noise as someone in flip-flops visits the toilet in the middle of the night.

Also, if the window in a room doesn´t look out onto the noisy street, it will instead face inwards into a well in the middle of the building, which is ideal for hearing all the strange human (and non-human) noises emanating from the other rooms also facing into the well.

The plumbing systems are suitably ancient that any activity in the bathroom will result in the pipes groaning for the next quarter of an hour, and all doors have been designed to create the maximum noise when they slam shut (as they must do in order to close properly).

On top of this, just when one starts getting to sleep around 5am, the delivery vans and mechanical street sweepers arrive in the streets below, invariably parking beneath your window for minutes at a time so that you get to hear the ruminations of a diesel engine in close detail.

It´s now come time for me to leave Santiago De Compostela, and I´m sad to go in a way.

I was thinking about the cathedral this morning, and the funny thing is that in the time that I´ve been here I´ve had almost no interest at all in the inside of the building, and I´ve not felt any desire to see the botafumiero in action (a gigantic censor that is suspended from ropes and swung the length of the church by seven men, releasing clouds of incense - there´s a story that the ropes broke when Catherine of Aragon was attending mass here, and the botafumiero flew out a window).

The exterior of the cathedral has been much more interesting and important, and I´ve spent quite a bit of time sitting under its gaze, drinking, talking or writing in cafes, and just sitting in the sunshine watching people living their lives in public.
The cathedral is surrounded on different sides by three separate large plazas where people meet, stroll, sit in the sun, and watch the performance artists and musicians play, and somehow the exterior of the cathedral seems to offer back a reflection of all the life that is going on around it, and because of this it seems like a living being.

Santiago has been a city which has shown me things when I´ve needed to see them, and which has introduced me to people when I needed to meet them.

And all this against a backdrop of some of the most beautiful medieval architecture I´ve ever seen, experienced during wonderful long hot summer days.
The old town is such a charming and beautiful place, with many narrow twisting streets and with the cathedral rising up to dominate the north of town.
It´s a town that´s big enough to be a place for people to live, not just a place to entertain the endless tourists.

So, with all this, what more could you ask for from a place?

One little trap in the Spanish language, which so far I´ve thankfully managed to avoid, involves two essential words which anyone learning Spanish in Spain comes across in their first few days.

The word for beers is cervezas (pronounced "thervethas"), while the gentile word for the toilets is servicios (pronounced "servithios").
Mix these two up, and you´ll either find yourself presented with a cold beer when in desparate need of a leak, or being directed to the back of the restaurant after asking for a drink.

There´s many similarities between English and Spanish, but there´s also a number of weird differences.

One of many that I´ve picked up on recently is that there are no words in Spanish that begin with "sh", and that´s because it´s not possible in Spanish to make the "sh" sound, as the "h" is pronounced silently.

If this was also true in English, you wouldn´t be able to shop, sail a ship to the shore, shiver, shout, and many other things.

The funny thing is, here is Spain, Spanish is not the only language, and other languages that one finds in Spain do have a way around this.

Both the Basque language and Gallego make use of the "x" to stand in for the missing "sh", and indeed the Basques have given the English language the word "caix" (or "cash" in English).

Weird, huh?