We have decided we are not quite yet ready for a relaxing quiet life out of the city – we have had too much time in Milton Keynes – now we need to have life!! :-D
So we will move into the city apartment and have to cycle to see the views (about the width of Walnut Tree) and be on the beach – hardly a hardship!
The plan is still on for the first week of May – this evening we go to sign and pay the deposit.
So we have spent the entire day looking at properties around Valencia with Mairead who has done a fantastic job of searching for properties for us.
We are now at the end of the day and faced with our decision between two properties.
One in centre of Valencia:
And one on the outskirts by but the beach – infact 8 floors up with a great view of the sea in one direction and the plains of Valencia and the mountains in the other:
What’s the problem – why not just go for the great views? well it feels like it could be quite remote and we will have to work there everyday in addition to living there. What is the problem with the city centre apartment then? It is quite small – and also it is hard to imagine living and working there.
After a sleep hopefully all will be clear to us……..
Tomorrow we fly to Valencia to start a long weekend and on Thursday we have lots of flats in and around Valencia to see.
It is quite exciting – but it will also be very rushed – it will be hard to make a decision in one day – but for this reason we hope to only sign a 6 month contract.
Will post more details once we are back next week.
We recently spent 3 hours at a Sauna complex which was a great experience as it was on-off snowing at the time. We could swim in the heated pool that went outside and be warm but with snow landing on our heads.
For the swimming pool you must wear a swimming costume – but for the Sauna you must wear nothing (this is the same for all sauna in Germany). This was not my first time in a German sauna but it reminded me of how quickly you stop noticing that you and everyone else is nude.
It is strange though to balance this with a scene I saw in the shop window of a department store recently where they were in between dressing the models – so rather than leave the people of Trier with the site of plastic lumps and bumps of the models they had decided to cover them with modesty sheets! Somehow the two just don’t reconcile.
I was amused at a meal out recently with 10 people when 5 of us ordered Red wine.
How did the wine come – as 5 glasses of wine that had already been poured? As one large carafe for us all to share? Nope! We each got our own individual carafe of wine – that way we all got an equal measure! :-D
Here are two pictures of Serrig that have been taken at different times that give an idea of the setting of the village in addition to my previous text that tried to set the scene here in Serrig.
The first was taken on a cold foggy day as we return to the village on a road through the forest, you can see the cliffs on the other side of the valley rising out of the fog and also the castle/house that is near Nicole can also be clearly seen.
The second was taken a few days later and you can make out the same castle/house on the right of the photo and more hills in the background.
Neither really capture the river which is further down the hill at the bottom of the valley – I have found this video on youTube though from a skyglider flying about 2 miles south of the village which shows a nice bend in the river but he never flies over the hill to his right which is where the village is! :-(
So lots of little things to say about Easter, in general not that different to the UK. The Friday and Monday are both holidays, and Easter Sunday is viewed with less significance to Christmas day. Now the interesting stuff – the little changes.
Firstly Serrig is a very catholic village and many things revolve around the church – at Easter the bells of the Church are not used for reasons that I must confess I don’t understand (something to do with hearing the bells from Rome). To help the residents of Serrig know when to come to the church various children are sent out with what I can only describe as ‘Clackers’ that make a loud noise to replace the bells. These children then must wander up and down every road in the village at significant times during the day – see video below:
They love to decorate here – in my various visits I have seen decorations outside and inside people’s houses for Easter, Christmas and Autumn – there are probably other periods that I have also missed. The nice thing about decorations here is they are generally subtle and not in your face. So in Nicole’s parents house there suddenly appeared eggs hanging around the place with sprigs of leaves – but if you didn’t look you would not see them – and if you didn’t know the house you might think they were always there. This is similar in Autumn when suddenly Pumpkins and other vegatables will appear outside people’s front doors and in their gardens.Quite a few trees in the area have been decorated with coloured eggs – something that should confuse any young child for a while as clearly there is no connection between trees, eggs and the various colours that they have been painted. I wanted to get some nice pictures of the trees with eggs but I have failed on that so far! :-(
I do have a picture of a basket of painted eggs that Nicole helped create on Saturday and you will just have to imagine these hanging in a tree.
A friend of mine (Jon) works as a Highway officer and because of this he spends a lot of time driving up and down motorways with not much to do but think.
As some point in his boredom induced thinking he noticed that many cows in the fields were quite dirty and started to ponder the economics of a mobile cow wash that he could drive up and offer to farmers as a service. I have no doubt that the idea was just a whimsy to pass the time in the car and to entertain people with as a stupid idea.
How surprised was I to find out that those clever Germans have obviously been driving down far more roads than Jon and have a much lower tolerance of the dirty cow (or coo as it is pronounced here) and invented the Cow wash years ago!
If I had all the time that I would like to have then I would photograph all the food I am eating here, so far I have only managed one other sausage photo.
Although not all of it is sausage based a lot is.
We have bread with cold meat, cheese and things twice a day (Breakfast and tea) and the cold meat is all different types of sausage cut up.
My tactic to cope with the two similar bread meals each day is that I try to eat more sweet things on bread in the morning and meat based bread in the evening.
So anyway the purpose of the post is to explain Currywurst to those unlucky enough not to know it. You can find this on the street in many places and when we recently when to a football match I found a Bovril and pie is replaced here with a bier and Currywust. A Currywurst is a long sausage cut up in to many small pieces covered in a sweet thick ketchup which is then sprinkled with Curry powder.
Last weekend I wanted to cook for Nicole’s parents (Hanne and Rudi) who are currently providing our hotel like accommodation for the two months that we are in Germany.
I decided to do a nice Sunday roast and choose chicken as I really like my mum’s bread sauce in addition to the roast potatoes etc.
Well knowing that it was going to be hard to find any mixes to help me make the stuffing I was already resigned to having to make everything from scratch – thinking this would be the biggest problem with the meal.
This was not to be the case though – the Chicken was the biggest problem!! When I mentioned cooking a roast to Nicole she said yes sounds good but I don’t know where we will get a chicken from. I just did not think that a chicken would not be easy to get. Supermarkets and butchers here do not sell whole chickens (if they do they are frozen – but I wanted a fresh chicken).
Luckily in the village there is a farm / sheltered accommodation for mentally disabled people called Hofgut and this has s large farm shop – then sell their chickens for three weekends a month – you have to book in your request for a chicken. For the first weekend they sell 1Kg chickens, those that survive that weekend make it to the next one where 1.5 Kg chickens are done in, and the lucky few who get to weekend 3 are in a healthy 2.0 Kg state before they go to the great chicken coop in the sky.
We were in the 1Kg chicken weekend though so had to settle for what turned out to be quite a small bird, which I worried about feeding 4 people. As the chicken was so small I wanted to also cook some sausages wrapped in bacon and cover the top of the chicken in bacon – again the challenge was in the simplest of things.
Sausages – not a problem in Germany! Bacon – apparently they don’t have the technology to cut slices of raw pig here (that is what we were told at the supermarket) so I was going to try replacing bacon with cured parma ham. When we got home though it turned out Hanne had something that resembled bacon which worked a charm.
The meal was lovely though – the great thing about a 1Kg chicken is cooks in an hour – the whole experience has only reinforced how I assume that things in the UK will be simple in another country and then find they are not. This gives me nerves about life in Spain but I still am looking forward to the challenge.
