The garden is a bit daffodil-crazy at the moment, with daffies on all sides!
Many of these are miniature ones that I collected here and there. I remember getting one pot of bulbs out of the trash in the cemetery while walking Olga, and another came in a big floral arrangement that had been purchased for a special occasion at school.
I like the miniature ones because they seem to clump together and bloom really well, though maybe that's just because of the way we planted them.
While walking around the garden taking these pictures yesterday morning, I discovered this big, sleepy bumblebee tucked into the trumpet of one of our regular-sized daffodils. It didn't seem to want to move. It was pretty chilly yesterday morning so hibernating may have been the sensible thing to do until the sun warmed things up.
It's encouraging to have both flowers and bees coming out. I have a bamboo pole wired to the trunk of the avocado to support whatever winter covering may be needed to protect it, and I'm thinking I might be able to remove that sometime soon -- but I'm still wary because in past years we've had pretty heavy snow in late February and early March. I probably need to leave it in place for another month or so in case the avocado needs to be covered again.
But we're almost done with this winter, I can feel it!
The pink magnolias are starting to come out -- this tree is going to be a cloud of blossoms in a week or two. Look at all those buds!
Professional Development yesterday wasn't as tedious as one might expect. It was about structural racism and how it affects children's performance in schools. For example, if children feel picked on or singled out or somehow threatened, their brains are paying more attention to survival than to learning -- their brain stem goes into fight-or-flight mode, which short-circuits any activity in the "learning zone" of the pre-frontal cortex. Obviously I know that children who are happier and more comfortable are better students, but I'd never heard about the brain chemistry involved.
There's an online training session we're supposed to complete as well, and I only finished 66 percent of it, so I need to go back and do that today.
I absolutely do believe that structural racism exists. A lot of people are uncomfortable with this idea but it makes perfect sense to me -- people who come from advantaged backgrounds, and in the USA and most of the West that has typically meant white people, tend to do better themselves for a variety of reasons. And people who are part of groups that are perceived to be "less successful" have higher hurdles to jump. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors involved in success, like class and wealth, but race is often heavily correlated with those.
There are a lot of poor white people too, but even they have an immediate advantage because they are unburdened by assumptions and expectations based on race. They may have other barriers based on class or accent or region -- that has certainly been historically true here in England, and that's a problem as well. But racial assumptions seem a heavier burden to me.
Anyway, I'm not saying anything new here, but I found it all interesting.
In notes from the Department of Public Works, remember that sidewalk that was so slanted someone put God-awful planters on it to keep people from walking there? Well, there's been a massive project to level it out. Crews came in, dug up the pavement, moved around utilities, and made a huge mess in general so that now there's a flatter sidewalk in front of this new building.
And no more planters. Of course, I wonder where the plants went.
It looks pretty good, doesn't it?
And closer to home...
...this is happening across the street. Don't ask me what it is, but a jackhammer was out there at 9 p.m. on Sunday night plowing up the pavement. Kind of an interesting time to start that project, but maybe the pavement had to be gone so crews could do their work on Monday. As I always say, never a dull moment!
After watching the noisy, invasive parakeets in the Plaza de la Merced in Málaga, it's nice to be home watching our own noisy, invasive parakeets in our garden! Noisy, invasive parakeets really are a worldwide phenomenon. They sure do love our suet balls. That one on top is trying to lift the lid to get into the feeder!
Seriously, it's great to be home. I love putting down the bags, unpacking everything, doing the laundry and getting organized. That's what I did yesterday, in addition to finally catching up on most blogs and responding to some comments.
I made lunch with some ingredients in the fridge that survived our weeklong absence, but only barely. We had some broccoli in there that was looking a bit pale, and a head of baby gem lettuce that "expired" on Jan. 14! (I say "expired" in quotes because why does lettuce need an expiration date?) The outer leaves were looking pretty sad, so I threw those away, but the inner ones looked fine and I washed them up and ate them. Waste not, want not!
(Every time I hear that phrase, I think of a scene in the TV miniseries "Backstairs at the White House," which I watched as a kid. One of the presidents -- Wilson or Coolidge, I can't remember -- arrives at the White House and begins turning off lights. "Waste not, want not," he says. Something tells me that is not a lesson Donald Trump will have learned.)
Here's some of the promised footage from the garden cam, showing our bird feeders. As I said yesterday, I wanted to see whether rodents were getting to the seed, and they're not -- at least not in the feeders. But the birds are messy eaters, particularly the great tits, which fling seeds hither and yon with wild abandon. In addition to great tits, which have black heads, white faces and yellowish bodies, you'll see smaller blue tits, which have blue heads and bright yellow bodies. You can also hear the roofers talking as they work on the house next door.
Today we have a professional development day at work. I think there's some kind of meeting to get us all on the same page and then some planned tutorials or other activities. This may be my last professional development day, come to think of it!
Here's one more picture from Spain, showing a tray of Easter cookies at the bakery down the street from our hotel in Málaga. I went there yesterday morning for a coffee and a pastry before we left for the airport, and snapped this picture. The guys with the hoods look a little scary to our American eyes, but in Spain those pointy hoods are known as capirotes and are traditionally worn in processions during Lent.
We got off to the airport with no problem yesterday morning, simply wandering out to the Plaza de la Merced to pick up one of the dozen or so taxis waiting. Our check-in was smooth and the flight was fine -- there were a few periodically screaming kiddies but nothing like our journey a week ago. Apparently taking small children on vacation to Spain is something that people in the UK commonly do. When I was a little kid we never went anywhere that required an airplane, unless it was to see grandparents -- and even then, we usually drove.
I did have one scary moment in the airport. We were sitting at the gate, waiting to board our plane, when I went to a vending machine to buy a bottle of water. I punched in the number for the water and inserted my bank card in the ATM-like slot, only to realize that the slot was for cash and not for cards -- and the card was pushed so far in that I couldn't grip it to pull it out. Holy crap, I thought, I'm either going to have to leave my card here or miss my flight! I had visions of frantically calling the bank to cancel it before we took off.
Fortunately, I have a very thin leather wallet, and I was able to insert the edge of the wallet into the slot and push the card askew, so that its corner stuck out. I then gingerly grabbed that corner with my fingertips and worked the card out of the machine. Whew!
Back home again, the house and garden were just as we left them. The hyacinths are up and one of them is blooming -- these are the sparkly bulbs we got years ago for Christmas. They just keep coming.
Remember how I trained the garden cam on the bird feeder, to see if any rodents climbed the pole during our week away? Well, I skimmed through the footage last night. I didn't see rodents at all, which is good -- apparently to whatever extent they're around, they're staying on the ground where they belong. But I did get some good footage of birds, including some showing them throwing seed out of the feeder -- which in turn, of course, attracts the rodents.
Maybe I'll post a bird video at some point, but first...
...on our train journey from Gatwick back to West Hampstead, we passed over the Thames bridge at Blackfriars station, which offers a spectacular view of the river and the city beyond. I made a very quick video to show you what that view was like from the Thameslink train.
Oh, and at the airport, we ran into a group of about ten senior students from our school, coming back from a ski week in Austria. They seemed unaccompanied by any adult, though they must be 18 themselves, or close to it. I guess by that age they are capable of traveling on their own, and indeed they all seemed alive and in one piece. Dave and I run into students all the time when we travel, but usually they're with their families.
Today will be all about settling back in, doing laundry, that kind of thing. Gotta get ready for work tomorrow!
Well, we got back to Málaga without incident yesterday. Car travel is really pretty awesome, if you don't mind the expense -- which I do, at least enough not to do it regularly. But it's hard to beat in terms of convenience.
Before we left Granada, I took a walk up into the hilly neighborhood just below the Alhambra to photograph the street art there. Dave and I saw some amazing murals when we rode up by taxi the day before, and walking gave me a chance to stretch my legs and get some fresh air before getting in the car for the hour-and-a-half drive to Málaga. I stopped in a park and saw this guy:
That's a lot of dog! He was brushing their coats and as he'd work on one, the other two watched me intently, as if I were a gigantic dog treat.
The car ride was smooth and back in Málaga we checked in to the same hotel where we'd stayed earlier in the week, coincidentally on Calle Granada. Then we headed out to the Plaza Carbón for lunch.
The adjacent Plaza del Siglo
We found a table in the shade and I ordered an excellent sangria and some salmorejo, a cold blended tomato soup similar to gazpacho. It was all excellent until I got to the bottom of the salmorejo bowl and found these:
They looked like tiny ball bearings, the size of BBs. I've been warned in the past while eating birds like grouse or pheasant that they could contain birdshot, but there was no poultry in my gazpacho! We could only theorize that an immersion blender used to mix the soup had somehow self-destructed and thrown off these ball bearings. The servers were very apologetic and gave me the soup for free. Fortunately it was smooth enough that no chewing was required, and they were very easy to detect so I'm reasonably sure I didn't swallow any. (Will I set off the airport metal detectors?)
After lunch Dave went back to the room for a nap (you can see this is our pattern) and I wandered around Málaga. I wanted to get out of the tourist zone, so I headed west and north, winding my way through the streets roughly between the hotel, the river and the Plaza de Capuchinos. I walked past graffiti saying (in Spanish) things like, "there is no Covid-19," "the virus is the television," and "chemtrails: they are spraying us." So there are crazy people in every country.
I passed this fun mural by Sara Fratini on the Calle Padre Mondejar. I couldn't get the whole thing in a photo so I had to make a video, made more awkward by several streetlamps on the sidewalk that I had to step around!
Finally, last night Dave and I decided to head down to the beach. Málaga is known as a beach resort but I'd only barely seen the Mediterranean, and Dave hadn't seen it at all. So we walked to the Playa de la Malagueta, where we found a restaurant that seated us just at sunset. We had some good seafood tapas, followed (for me) by some fish stew and a strawberry dessert made with Inés Rosales cake ice cream. I knew about Inés Rosales cakes from Mitchell's blog, so I was glad to try it, albeit in ice cream form.
As we ate dinner, a group of about 20 teenagers on some kind of school trip -- we think they were American -- gathered on the walkway just outside the restaurant windows and ate pizza, which proved distracting. And then some little kids eating with a family in the restaurant ran out onto the beach to play on the Malagueta sign (above). It's hard to tell, but there are six of them in that picture. I don't think I would be an overprotective parent, but I'm not sure I'd have felt comfortable having my under-10 kids running around on a dark beach with no parent nearby! (The adults stayed seated indoors.)
Soon, we'll be off to the airport. Thank you, by the way, for slogging through my overly long Spain posts. I know I've been cramming a lot in here each day and I appreciate your indulgence. They will help me remember this trip in the future. Coming to you tomorrow from London!
As it turned out, not having tickets to the palaces at the Alhambra worked out fine for us! We still got access to the hilltop fortress known as the Alcazaba, which The Clash would have called the "casbah" (before rocking it). And we got to walk the landscaped and forested grounds, which are beautiful in their own right, and to visit the Generalife, a 13th-century palace on an adjacent slope, which offered great views of the Alhambra (above).
The place was positively teeming with Spanish schoolchildren in big, loud mobs -- and when I looked back in my journals to read about my visit in 1994, I complained about mobs of people then, too. So this is not a new phenomenon.
The cat above sought refuge in the sun beneath a cannon perched on the hillside overlooking the city. Lots of people were taking its picture, and I told Dave, "I bet there will be 600,000 pictures of that cat on Instagram today."
I took plenty of photos, but it's easiest to show you our experience via a short video.
First we visit the Alcazaba, or fortress, and go up in the highest tower, from which we get the best views of Granada and the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Then we walk a path with artfully trimmed juniper and box hedges to get to the Generalife, where we see its fountains and ornately carved interior.
This is a picture of me, in March 1994, when I was 27 years old and visiting the Albambra for the first time. I'm atop the Torre de la Vela, or bell tower, having come over from Morocco, where I was working in the Peace Corps. I met a friend from Florida and we toured around Spain for a week or two.
Dave and I decided to recreate the picture yesterday:
It's almost the same time of year, so the trees look similar, though some of them are much bigger! No surprise there, after 32 years. I look like I have a pom-pom atop my hat but that's just a tree behind me.
Anyway, after descending from the Alhambra, Dave and I got a coffee and a type of sweet custardy treat called piononos in the Plaza Nueva. Again, back in 1994, I took a photo of a bar facing the plaza, and I wanted to see what it looks like now:
Left, my photo from 1994; right, the same place today
I blogged about this photo years ago, and I knew the bar was no longer there. I'd say the building has lost some character, don't you think?
From there, we headed to the cathedral.
In my journal from my 1994 visit, I described the cathedral like this: "It had a pretty window of orange stained glass in a sunburst shape at the end of the nave, and the walls were white-gray marble. I told (my friend) I wished I could fly when I walk in those huge cathedrals -- with those soaring arches and spaces, you really yearn to touch the ceiling. He said, imagine building such a thing today -- the time and the cost. It really puts into perspective what an indescribable treasure those places are."
I couldn't describe it better now.
After that, Dave went back to the room for a nap and I continued wandering the city on a slight nostalgia binge, visiting the Hotel Reina Cristina, where I stayed back then. I remember watching MTV in the room there -- it was the first time I saw "Beavis and Butthead," and I also remember Bjork's "Violently Happy" and the Cranberries' "Linger" videos being on heavy rotation.
I stopped in the shady Plaza de la Trinidad for a beer and a bocadillo, or small sandwich, and soaked up the atmosphere.
Finally, last night, Dave and I went to a tapas place called Avila around the corner from our hotel. We lined up with a mob of Spaniards for the 8 p.m. opening and got a table right away, and dined on lemon-fried boquerones, or anchovies, as well as chicken fingers with honey-mustard dip and of course a plate of sliced pork. Oh, and sliced tomatoes, just to get a vegetable in.
Today we're headed back to Málaga, and guess what! The trains are out again! At least this time we knew what to do -- we went straight out and hired a car and driver. I did not try to faff around with buses. I'm not thrilled with the added expense but we gotta do what we gotta do.
Here we are in Granada, in the foothills of the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains, where the first thing we noticed is that the temperature is a good ten degrees cooler than it was in Córdoba. Dave looked up our altitude and we're above 2,000 feet, so that's quite a difference. I've had to break out my trusty green jacket again.
The good news is, we got here. The bad news? Remember those tickets to the Alhambra I was proud of resourcefully ordering through a tour company? Well, they sent us a message after 9 p.m. last night saying they were unable to procure them and our tour was cancelled and our money would be refunded. (I expect so!) So it looks like we won't be getting into the Nasrid palaces, but as I wrote before, I've seen them, so I'm not heartbroken. Dave has never been there, but he's not that attached to the idea.
I was able to get last-minute tickets to the Alcazaba and the Generalife, two parts of the Alhambra complex that are less in demand. So we'll at least see those.
Cable box cover in Córdoba
Before we left Córdoba yesterday morning, we sat for a while in one of the parks and then went to meet Mitchell and San Geraldo (aka Jerry) for coffee.
And this time we managed to take a picture!
Then Dave and I were off to the train station for our nearly two-hour journey to Granada. Before we climbed on the train Dave popped into the Ale-Hop, a chain of gift shops that Mitchell has written about before. A cow is their mascot:
(I love that it's on casters. I wanted to roll it around the train station.)
Dave bought his very own Speed-Poo, which Mitchell has also written about, but as far as I'm concerned the less said about that the better.
After checking into the Barcelo Hotel Carmen here in Granada, we went out for a glass of something and wound up in a square dominated by the Fuente de los Gigantones, a fountain topped by a figure of Neptune and supported by four grotesque giants.
Here are some interesting street sights:
How desperate would a person have to be to dial a phone number with not even a picture or gender to go on?
Where to go when you're feeling hungry and somewhat sacrilegious.
This is where we had dinner last night. The menu included some story about a Robin Hood-like figure known as "Big Ears" who roamed Granada in antiquity, and who knows whether that's true, but supposedly he inspired the name of the restaurant. ("El Orejas" translates to "The Ears.")
We had a good meal, though quite leisurely because our single waiter was consumed by serving a family of 12 (!), including at least half a dozen small children, at an adjacent table. (Plus three other tables besides ours.) Fortunately we didn't have to be anywhere fast!
