Departing Steve

We´ve been here at Steve´s, the mad Brit´s, for about two weeks now and we´re definitely ready to go. Just a few days ago, he apologized for his odd behaviour and confessed that he and his girlfriend had just split up on the day we had arrived. Bad timing. After this confession, he has been a lot better, but he´s still a manic, arrogant, lecturing pain in the ass sometimes. Not to say he doesn´t have his charms, he´s been very kind opening up his house, showing us some great cooking, we just hit him at a bad week, we´ll miss him in a way, but it´s definitely time to go. He very kindly gave each of us a hat. Me, a nice Panama hat and Teagan, a sort of Spanish cowboy hat, they look very flash. (Note: the photo shoot in the slide show is of Simon´s hats, our fancy new hats have not been recorded to the digital world yet.)

Teagan and I have just finished today putting charging bulls on the wall above his barbecue, and it´s turned out looking beautiful. We also laid stones to make a walkway to his pool.

The other day we went to Steve´s friend, Simon´s, house to help him make wine. He has many vines on each side of his property. And his property was something else indeed. It´s like a James Bond villain´s headquarters complete with winding corridors to get lost in and a helipad. I guess it´s not so much like a Bond villain´s headquarters, perhaps I just say that because apparently he was in some old Bond film that neither Teagan nor I can remember the name of. His full name is Simon Munro Kerr, and he is the epitome of posh. Literally, his parents owned one of the shipping freight lines that went from Britain to India. Posh, incidentally, means acronymically (we learned this from Bob Dylan´s Theme Time Radio Hour) port out starboard home, that is, on the shady side of the ship when going from England to India and back- P.O.S.H. would be stamped on your ticket. Simon is trying to start up a business at his place, a retreat of sorts, the website just got up and running at www.lajarilla.net, go to the gallery to behold its splendor. The real posh shit is in Simon´s living room, which isn´t in the gallery and I, unfortunately, didn´t get any pictures of, but lets just say he likes his dead animal heads. He also had loads of fancy hats, so we had a little photo shoot.

The making of the wine was great fun. We picked them, then put them through a machine that cleverly de-stems them, then pressed them and pumped them into the vats where they will distill. Teagan and I wanted to smash them with our feet, but sadly the old ways are dying out.

I have decided to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, my favorite novel, in Spanish, or Cien Anos de Soledad, if you will. This is partly for to help my spanish and partly just to soak up the beauty of the language. Yes, I know it seems like a back-asswards approach to learning a new language: with very rusty old rudimentary basics of Spanish (about three years in middle school and high school... that´s over ten years ago...) and jumping into a highly advanced verbose and labyrinthine novel, not the best way of going about things. I read about a page in half an hour and don´t understand most of it, but I´m enjoying it and pick up little tidbits along the way. It helps, though, that I´ve read the book twice, the second time a mere three or so weeks ago, so it´s pretty fresh in my memory. I´m expanding my vocabulary loads, but I don´t know if I´ll get a chance to use alchemical laboratory in a sentence any time soon. Just you wait, I´ll be a master soon.

A short entry, but we´re on to our next adventure tomorrow, where I´m sure we´ll be working hard as there´s olive harvesting, fence building, donkey tending, and a myriad other jobs to do.