Friday, February 24, 2012

A Weekend Adventure

A few weekends ago I went to Asturias, the next province to the west of Cantabria, with some friends on a little day trip. We went to see a cave called el Pindal, which full of paleolithic paintings. These included depictions of a fish and a mammoth, which are very rare in cave paintings in this area, if you were wondering. But I suppose I should talk about this day chronologically, so you will have to wait a minute til I get to the cave part (or scroll down, if you are that excited about paleolithic cave art. That's you, mom.)

First we stopped for lunch in Cerrazo, a tiny, typical Cantabrian village near Torrelavega, the city where I work. The restaurant is really popular because it's a) cheap, and b) has great food, and they don't take reservations, so we got there a little early...so early, in fact, that the kitchen wasn't open. That's ok, we'll just go for a nice stroll through the village. Now I should mention that EVERY. TIME we leave the city I make a huge annoying point of going to find ponies, because there are inevitably some pastured nearby. My friends are very good about humoring this particular quirk of mine. I even have a "pony kit" ready to go, which I have never once remembered to bring along. It includes two brushes, one hard, one soft (I bought them at the supermarket and I'm pretty sure they were meant for shoe cleaning), a sugar cube stealthily stolen from a bar, and a carrot. Well, actually, the carrot is in there on kind of a rotating basis, because they were getting all shriveled up and smelly between pony excursions.

So we walked down the hill from the restaurant, and sure enough! We found two horsies in a beautiful field. The seemed pretty uninterested in us, though, and my friends were ready to continue along the country lane. "Oh pish posh," I said. "Let me show you a little pony trick I know." I pulled out a packet of kleenex from my bag and wrinkled the plastic wrapper. This method is not very honest, because it makes the pony think he is going to get a peppermint or other similarly cellophane-wrapped treat. But it is a tried-and-true way of luring ponies closer to fences to be petted. And this proves its effectiveness is international. Sure enough, this nice, dirty, stocky grey pony lumbered over, ears perked up and looking for a candy. I apologized for tricking him but soon learned he felt pretty OK about it, and was happy to be scratched and patted. My friends were very shocked at this: what can I say, my horse powers are finely tuned. They even called me the horse whisperer! We spent a little while with this nice fellow, and my friends found it hilarious that he was pretty lippy, meaning he let me play with his nose and he made funny faces and yawned big great yawns, and let me kiss the soft, velvet spot between his nostrils. My friends eventually got a little bored (I would happily have stayed there all afternoon), so we continued up the road. This is our parting glimpse of my pony friend:

As we walked along we passed a few farms, and one had a big, muddy pen in the back yard. We found some sheep huddled in a shed, looking stranded in a sea of muck. And in another such refuge:


He/she is destined, I'm sure, to be chorizo, jamón, lomo, or salchichón one day. Such is the life cycle of a Spanish pig. 


We went back up the hill and had a lovely lunch -- I'll do an entry on food later on, so you can get familiar with all the jargon -- including raciones of morcilla (blood sausage, don't you turn your nose up, it is delicious), piping hot clams with olive oil, garlic, parsley, and hot peppers, and a cheese plate. For our main course we split a whole white fish cooked in the oven with potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and peppers, and a steak with french fries and roasted red peppers. I didn't eat much steak, not being a big red meat person, and especially not being a very, very rare red meat person. But I can appreciate the quality and preparation of the meat here, especially this steak. It was cooked on a super hot grill with nothing but salt and maybe a little oil. Everything was spectacular. Spanish food really is great. To drink I had a glass of red wine, one friend had a beer, and we all had water and mosto, a very sweet grape juice made as a bi-product of (? or maybe just in the same facility as) wine.

Then we drove just over the border into Asturias, where we drove up a hill to a tiny resort village at the top of a ridge overlooking the sea. Since we had time to kill before our cave appointment, we went to a lookout and took a brief walk down a very steep hill leading down to cliffs, and eventually to the ocean. The sun was coming out from behind the clouds, and even though the water here is far from tropical, it always has that turquoise tinge to it that I associate with much warmer climes. I snapped a few pictures of my friend Leah venturing down in front of us, and got this one of the sun shining full on her. I love the way her little red hat makes her stand out in the vast landscape she's a part of. I am no photographer, and my camera is a piece of crap, but sometimes by sheer luck a nice picture gets produced.



The cave was down the hill towards the sea. We walked through a forest of stunted trees with gnarled roots coming up out of the ground, and down a narrow staircase carved into the cliff on the other side. 




It opens up to a view of the ocean, a very Pirates-of-the-Caribbean scene with a huge rock that looks like it grew right up out of the ocean.



The cave tour was just the four of us with the guide, and we walked deep into the cave, along wet, dripping paths that wound between thick stalagmites. It was mostly dark and muddy in the cave, but the guide turned on low lights and carried a flashlight so we could see the drawings and carvings he pointed out on the walls. I've been to a number of caves in this part of Spain, some with drawings, some with incredible rock and crystal formations. I never get tired of seeing the drawings on the walls, and imagining the people who made them. Twelve thousand years ago. Twelve thousand. You know Christ? How he lived two thousand years ago? Yeah, go back another ten thousand from then. These people lived in caves, but not this one, because it opens directly onto the ocean and is very cold and wet. But they went deep into el Pindal to paint on the walls with an iron oxide compound they mixed with animal fat; that made the lines absorb into the porous rock, so that they haven't faded over time and are just as vibrant (the experts think) as they were back then. The people -- probably the shaman or holy men, but no one knows for sure -- painted bison and horses and, as I mentioned above, a fish and a mammoth. They used the rock itself as part of the drawings, so that the heads of some of the drawn bison protrude like the real animal, or the curve of a horse's haunch is clear in a crack in the stone. 


There are also abstract marks that can be found in caves all over the north of Spain and into the south of France; scientists think they could have been some kind of mutually understood communication system between the many tribes that used the network of caves along the coast of the Bay of Biscay, or that the tribes shared a religion and the marks represent some spiritual meaning. It's incredible that modern man can know so much about these ancient people, but there is still so much we'll never know, and it's so thrilling for me to imagine what it could have been like. What the people were like, what they wore, what they looked like, how it felt to live so very long ago. That's one of the things about Spain that make it so mysterious and awe-inspiring -- the ancient, ancient history that surrounds us every day here, that can be seen just about anywhere, and the influence it's had on the way we live now.

As we left the cave not too much happened: one friend and I went into the woods in lieu of a bathroom; I almost lost one of the beautiful green mittens my Granny gave me years ago; and a woman with a siamese cat on a leash came to ask for information about the cave:




The cat was really unhappy about being on a leash and didn't really seem to understand that he was supposed to walk along with the woman -- so mostly she alternated between holding him like a limp ragdoll or heaving on the leash while he dug in his claws and wailed.

We stopped for a drink in Llanes, a pretty little beach town just before the border of Cantabria, and took a walk along the sea wall as the sun set behind the mountains opposite the ocean. 




  

We wanted to get a snack in Llanes, but nothing was open, so we moved along from town to town looking for a bar whose kitchen was preparing food. All we found was a rest stop off the highway, where we ate potato chips. Then we drove home. Just a normal end to a normal weekend day trip. You can see more pictures here.


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