2012-12-14
Woke up very early after going to bed very late having imbibed three xmas parties in one evening. Got to Luton with plenty of time to spare to catch our flight to Gran Canaria. The flight was quite long but bareable seeming as it was on Ryanair.
Got the car, a nice little red 2 door Citroen. As usual I was petrified to drive it. Before getting it we had to stock up on caffeine and sugar in the form of mentos as we were feeling pretty dead after the flight which was about 5 hours long Stalled quite a few times as it was my first time in a manual car on the wrong side for me…
Got to the rented villa after some drama on the Canarian motorways. It was amazing. There’s a pool. I jumped in but it was far too cold so got out straight away. The weather here fluctuates between pleasantly warm and tolerably cool. Tepid, in a word.
2012-12-15
Had a look around the place we’re staying at. The neighbour is a vet and has 3 donkeys. A grandma, a mother and a daughter. The vet has organised that tomorrow a donkey stud should come round and impregnate them. Kind of weird. Wonder if any of them will get jealous and cause a rift in the family. There are also goats, and two dogs which roam the grounds. We met Rosa, the owner who was an old granny, the “matriarch” who showed us her home and her son’s half-rebuilt Porsche 911 in the garage.
We went to a market in a place called San mateo. There was some amazing produce. We found miniature leeks, and bergamots , which is what earl grey tea tastes like. They’re little things that look like miniature lemons.
We bought loads of groceries then went for lunch in a cafe and ordered some stuff we couldn’t translate and ended up with onion rings chips, chicken wings and other fatty things. Not great.
After that we headed back to the house, via Santa brigida, another town which was much prettier. We dropped off the food and set off for las palmas, the capital town/city of the island.
We got there and walked along a part of the coast where you could see the sunset. It was a bit touristic there though. There was an old punk band playing along there, a bit too cheesy to be enjoyable though.
We went and had dinner at a place the vet recommended to us. Had this local dish that translates as “old clothes” which is chickpeas and shredded beef. The chickpeas were like none I’d had before. Tough on the outside and squishy on the inside.
The rest::
One day we found a caldera called “Bandama”, and walked down into it on a sunny day. We found a big rock at the bottom of it and lounged on it for a while. One thing that struck me was that instead of grass there was giant clover, and there were cacti and palms everywhere. Quite surreal. We picked some prickly pears and got prickled a lot more than we bargained for.
On another day we went on a drive with Javi and Eugenia, our airbnb hosts. They drove our car because they didn’t feel safe with me driving (although they didn’t put it that way). We went to a farm to pick up a dead sheep (for eating), and a cheese. This woman made the cheese on the farm, which was on top of a hill looking over the sea in the middle of nowhere.
The rest of the holiday we spent lounging, eating and daring eachother to jump into the freezing pool.
On the last day, we decided to go to the south of the island to see the sand dunes. As we got nearer to our destination the architecture turned from pastelled rickety houses, no two the same, to huge time-share blocks and shops selling various mutations of inflatable floatation devices. It was all very depressing. We decided to try to make the most of it and go for a walk along the beach. It turned out to be a nudist beach with lots of saggy german flesh to avert our eyes from. Then we went back to London