Today, this evening, our first trip outside
Castelldefels proper for months – to Terrassa (still in the province area of
Barcelona and therefore legal) for the Name Day of one of Toni’s nephews.
We have
been on one of the motorways to the local superstores but they are within a
couple of minutes of where we live. This
will be well outside our usual routes.
Not, of course, that the journey is not something that we haven’t done
many, many times – but the experience will be different this time.
Just a
quick note before we go, perhaps I’ll add to it later.
We don't actually know where, specifically, we are going as the restaurants in Terrassa are not taking bookings and so I am not entirely sure how our final location is going to be worked out. Adds to the excitement of the journey.
And the weather looks threatening. After an indifferent start to the day, it gradually brightened up and, apart from a fairly still breeze, the day was one during which you could have gone to the beach and expected to tan - the sort of day, in short that inexperienced visitors from duller shores such as Britain would assume would be an ideal 'starter day' to work on the tan. And they would have been flayed by the time of their evening shower. Though, there again, as one of my friends used to say, "If your first shower after sunbathing doesn't hurt, you haven't been sunbathing properly." [N.B. This advice and comment does not meet the requirements for safe sunning and should not be taken as a recommendation.]
I suppose that it is often true that, depending on the direction in which you are looking, you could make radically different predictions about the weather. I have often noted in Castelldefels that observing the climactic conditions from the cardinal points of the compass gives one views which are often diametrically opposed - whereas, in Britain one was often surrounded by a unity of weather in which ever direction you cared to glance!
The trip to Terrassa had an odd feel to it as this was, for us, a major jaunt - the furthest that we have travelled from our house in months. We thought that there was less traffic than usual, but we were driving after 8 pm so the usual rush hour traffic (whatever that term means nowadays) had died down.
There was a sense of freedom, or at least of some sort of normality about our trip that was satisfying . as though another part of Old Normality was adding to whatever New Normality is going to be.
The Name Day celebrations were held in a restaurant chain called Viena (sic) which is a take on a fast food burger place, but with a slightly higher quality of food. The design and uniform of the staff has an odd dirdle vibe with some odd Austrian Tyrol embroidery thrown in for what appears to be no good reason!
My 'meal' was chicken fillets with some strange and messy sauce whose selling point was that it was supposedly picant - perhaps for the Catalans, not really for me, but the end result was messily delicious - as opposed to the '0% alcohol' beer which was disgusting, do not drink Heineken alcohol-free beer in cans!
Because of faulty crossed-lines of communication, we ended up walking far too far to the eventual restaurant and I tripled my steps target for the day. Even linking that to swimming 1,500m and going on two bike rides of over 20k, my smart watch still rated my 'exercise capacity' as 'Low' for the day! What else do I have to do!
The excesses and corruption of the Bourbon de Bourbon family i.e. the so-called royal family of Spain, are being splashed across the newspapers in the European press - not so much in the Spanish press. The debased political parties of PSOE and PP have joined together to kill-off any attempt by the authorities in this country to investigate the mounting evidence of theft and corruption of the family.
In spite of the fact that the thief-in-chief (aka the so-called king emerito, the one who was forced to abdicate to try and control the mounting rumours and overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing; the one who went on television to vaunt the 'fact' in Spain that, "Justice is the same for everyone" but obviously did not include himself or his family in the category of "everyone" and has, so far, escaped judicial punishment while the powers-that-be here have ignored the evidence of his skimming-off contracts to boost his finances.
One of the latest exposés is in the Times, in one of their supplements entitled, "Sex, lies and Swiss bank accounts"! You can read that here:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-lies-and-swiss-bank-accounts-the-allegations-against-spains-ex-king-that-are-rocking-his-sons-reign-0sgw99c2b
because you can't read it in Spain!
My next swim is at 12 mid day tomorrow. My slots get worse and worse!
We don't actually know where, specifically, we are going as the restaurants in Terrassa are not taking bookings and so I am not entirely sure how our final location is going to be worked out. Adds to the excitement of the journey.
And the weather looks threatening. After an indifferent start to the day, it gradually brightened up and, apart from a fairly still breeze, the day was one during which you could have gone to the beach and expected to tan - the sort of day, in short that inexperienced visitors from duller shores such as Britain would assume would be an ideal 'starter day' to work on the tan. And they would have been flayed by the time of their evening shower. Though, there again, as one of my friends used to say, "If your first shower after sunbathing doesn't hurt, you haven't been sunbathing properly." [N.B. This advice and comment does not meet the requirements for safe sunning and should not be taken as a recommendation.]
I suppose that it is often true that, depending on the direction in which you are looking, you could make radically different predictions about the weather. I have often noted in Castelldefels that observing the climactic conditions from the cardinal points of the compass gives one views which are often diametrically opposed - whereas, in Britain one was often surrounded by a unity of weather in which ever direction you cared to glance!
The trip to Terrassa had an odd feel to it as this was, for us, a major jaunt - the furthest that we have travelled from our house in months. We thought that there was less traffic than usual, but we were driving after 8 pm so the usual rush hour traffic (whatever that term means nowadays) had died down.
There was a sense of freedom, or at least of some sort of normality about our trip that was satisfying . as though another part of Old Normality was adding to whatever New Normality is going to be.
The Name Day celebrations were held in a restaurant chain called Viena (sic) which is a take on a fast food burger place, but with a slightly higher quality of food. The design and uniform of the staff has an odd dirdle vibe with some odd Austrian Tyrol embroidery thrown in for what appears to be no good reason!
My 'meal' was chicken fillets with some strange and messy sauce whose selling point was that it was supposedly picant - perhaps for the Catalans, not really for me, but the end result was messily delicious - as opposed to the '0% alcohol' beer which was disgusting, do not drink Heineken alcohol-free beer in cans!
Because of faulty crossed-lines of communication, we ended up walking far too far to the eventual restaurant and I tripled my steps target for the day. Even linking that to swimming 1,500m and going on two bike rides of over 20k, my smart watch still rated my 'exercise capacity' as 'Low' for the day! What else do I have to do!
The excesses and corruption of the Bourbon de Bourbon family i.e. the so-called royal family of Spain, are being splashed across the newspapers in the European press - not so much in the Spanish press. The debased political parties of PSOE and PP have joined together to kill-off any attempt by the authorities in this country to investigate the mounting evidence of theft and corruption of the family.
In spite of the fact that the thief-in-chief (aka the so-called king emerito, the one who was forced to abdicate to try and control the mounting rumours and overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing; the one who went on television to vaunt the 'fact' in Spain that, "Justice is the same for everyone" but obviously did not include himself or his family in the category of "everyone" and has, so far, escaped judicial punishment while the powers-that-be here have ignored the evidence of his skimming-off contracts to boost his finances.
One of the latest exposés is in the Times, in one of their supplements entitled, "Sex, lies and Swiss bank accounts"! You can read that here:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-lies-and-swiss-bank-accounts-the-allegations-against-spains-ex-king-that-are-rocking-his-sons-reign-0sgw99c2b
because you can't read it in Spain!
My next swim is at 12 mid day tomorrow. My slots get worse and worse!
