Happy Festivus!

Distance Traveled:   34,895 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB-PP-HCMC-NC-TH-HA-H-L-MR-AG-SV-TF-AC-LL-ML-CZ-TF)

Time Difference: -10 hours (from Brisbane)

Soundtrack: Into cheery pop music right now.  Gotye's new one, Jessie J, Beyonce

Currently Inspired by:  Ahh, my Mr Adams.  I thought of him, and this particular passage below, whilst on the Tenerife ferry.  It is my all time favourite piece of writing of his, and I have a tendency to spout it off as a party trick.  (OK, just realised I'm a gigantic geek).  Cried with laughter the first time I read it, and depending on my mood it can still bring a tear to my eye and a resounding strike to my funny bone.  Pure brilliance.

There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.

Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

``Make 'em dry,'' is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ``make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.''

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.

If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef's hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific. 

Stacks: Had one trip over a small lip in the floor in my room, causing me to basically throw my digital camera onto the tiles with great force.  It is fine, which is quite impressive.  Good to know it can survive a thorough dunking (Morocco) and also being hurled onto ceramic tiles!  Also I still have sea legs :(  See below.

Words written: 53,112.  Slow week, am being a tourist

Cadiz was my next stop, and I was really only there for one night and half a day before boarding my ferry to Tenerife, so I didn’t see that much.  It was a few degrees colder than Malaga and you definitely feel it at these temperatures!  I went for a long stroll on the second day and stopped at a couple of the lovely little cafes I encountered on the way and enjoyed some leisurely hot drinks and tasty tapas while people watching.  It’s nice to be able to eat out again, I must say.  The tapas experience in Spain is very different to Australia, no doubt due to the availability of ingredients and also the availability of tapas restaurants.  Here it is very seafood and cured meat based, and the idea is that you have one or two dishes at one place, and then move onto the next venue.  I like it, and although I frequently have little to no idea what I’m actually ordering, I haven’t had a bad dish yet.

Ship in Cadiz port (not my ship! I wish!)

I really need to learn not to have expectations about things.  Most of the time I’m a seasoned and well behaved enough traveller on these issues, but with the ferry I was so excited at the prospect of more than two days at sea I did a huge amount of online stalking of the operator and its fleet.  They didn’t say which ship we were getting but even the most basic ones they had sounded lovely.  Upon boarding I realised that they mustn’t have their entire fleet available for online inspection.  It had a “restaurant” which was really just a room full of plastic chairs and tables reminiscent of a high school cafeteria, bay maries included.  The food was of the overcooked beef, frozen fish, chips & peas variety, slopped haphazardly onto our plates by insouciant servers who couldn’t stop their conversations long enough to pay attention to what they were doing.  I half expected to see them standing there wearing torn hair nets and with fags hanging out the side of their mouths.  Still, mealtimes were a welcome relief from the monotony, with a large TV screen playing blockbuster movie after blockbuster movie, many of which I wanted to see, all of which had been overdubbed in Spanish.  On occasion the person putting them on would give us the English subtitles for which I was most grateful, and it was quite surreal watching an American film, overdubbed in Spanish, with English subtitles.  Sometimes I could tell from the actor’s mouths that the subtitles weren’t actually saying what they were saying.  Why do you think that is?

Coming up to Tenerife

These were the kinds of fascinating questions that absorbed me during my 50 hours on the rolling Mediterranean with no books (I haven’t been able to buy any books in English for ages).  I had booked a seat only as the cabins were outrageously expensive (much more than a flight) and only discovered once on there that the seats didn’t recline.  All of the online fleet had reclining seats.  Cheeky buggers!  Fortunately there were less than thirty people in the seated section so we all had pretty much at least a row of three seats to ourselves, and this is where I would stretch out for the night’s “sleep”.  They would leave the lights on all night, and the seating area was in the same room as the bar and restaurant so people would stay up talking until the wee hours and it wasn’t exactly comfortable as the seats were leather bucket seats, so it wasn’t an even surface.  Also it was a narrow space, and with the rolling of the ship, was difficult to stay on.  It was too cold and windy to spend any amount of time on deck so basically I sat alternating between two spots for two days, first in my chair, and when that became unbearable, I sat in the restaurant and looked out at the window.  You know, people say sea views are fabulous, and they can be, but they really require some perspective don’t they?  When it’s nothing but sea, and a grey sea under an overcast sky at that, it isn’t terribly exciting.  The first night I was so bored I bought some whiskey and got very drunk while watching episodes of the West Wing on my iPad.  The benefit of doing so is that I was so ill the next day, I couldn’t really feel that bored because I had a hangover to nurse.  Needless to say the remainder of the whiskey is sitting in my bag, glaring at me and serving as a solemn reminder of the evils of the devil’s nectar.  I feel funny when I look at it.  “Why didn’t you spend your time writing?” I hear you ask, and it’s a valid question.  I was in a fairly regular phase of hating my book and everyone in it, and wanting them all to die.  If I killed all my characters before I finished the book I wouldn’t have much else to write about!

Note:  It has been three nights since I got off the boat, and I am still experiencing “sea legs” where it feels like the ground is moving the same way the boat did.  It is causing me to stumble on occasion (like I needed help in the department!), I can’t really walk in a straight line, and at the parade I kept swaying into the people either side of me.  It’s embarrassing, and has now officially gone longer than the boat trip was.  Should I be worried?

One of the many fountains

Tenerife is funky, and much larger than I expected.  There are nearly a million people on this island, and about 300,000 of them live in the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where I am staying.  I was planning to just pop over to another area called Playa de las Americas, a famous beach / resort town with lots of nightclubs in the hope of meeting some English speaking tourists, and it’s 70 kilometres away!  I don’t even know how to get there.  There are about 30 gazillion tourists here at the moment, however they all appear to me to be Spanish, and Spanish speaking.  I’ve encountered a couple of people who I believe were some other type of Europeans, after eavesdropping on their conversations.  What does a girl have to do to meet some English speakers around here?  Talk about language barriers.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I have learned SOME Spanish while I’ve been here, enough to be able to ask a variety of pertinent questions and understand the responses, but I certainly can’t converse on any meaningful level.  

Lots of people have no idea about where I am at the moment.  Click here to read about the Canary Islands.

The Shouty Men

Fortunately, music and dancing are universal, and there is muchos musica y bailar to be had.  The first night I was here saw a huge parade to kick off the festivities properly, so my timing was perfect.  I have never seen costumes as elaborate and detailed as there were in this parade, and it went forever.  Unfortunately I left my brain in the hotel room, along with my wallet and my camera, so I couldn’t get any photos of the parade!  Tut.  My favourite part about this whole festival is that just about half the town wears fancy dress around the streets, whether they are performing or part of a group or just coming along to watch.  There are so many costume shops in this place.  I have seen at least half a dozen, and only three supermarkets, if that gives you any indication.  I have a feeling it is a fun place, year round.  The funniest part is getting up and going for a walk in the morning and seeing people still in their costumes from the night before, makeup smeared, wigs askew, shoes covered in beer, looking and smelling absolutely worse for wear.  You know you’re getting old when instead of thinking “looks like a top night” you think “Gee I’m grateful for my good sleep last night, and the fact that I am clean and smelling good right now.”  The costumes are so great though.  I have encountered lady bugs and cows and kitties and birds.  Flamenco dancers tango with nuns, and monks walk arm in arm with criminals.  Batman fights Superman fights Wonderwoman fights Darth Vader.  Big shiny smiley faces hop around putting smiles on our faces, clowns of every shape, size, colour and demeanour cavort and sing at the drop of a hat.  Nasty hockey and Ghostface masks keep us on our toes and the sexy police keep everything above board... from the waist up.  There are an inordinate number of men in dresses, wigs and makeup, just the way a gigantic fancy dress party should be.  My favourite characters so far were Bender, Fry , Leila and the Professor from Futurama.  Classic.  I really wish I had brought my camera to the parade!

It's sad that he looks better in that than I would

I have basically just been wandering around every afternoon and evening until I locate a pocket of chaos, colour and noise.  It doesn’t take long.  There have been nearly constant musical groups on a variety of stages, from traditional Spanish (terrific) to modern acapella and percussion groups, who I find too shouty and aggressive, and not terribly musical at all.  It’s basically a whole stack of men yelling in three part harmonies into too many microphones, with a percussion group playing behind them.  Today I stumbled across what can only be described as a large outdoor rave, with a main stage, DJs, tons of dancers, singers, performers, guys shooting beer cans out of big gun things and lots of jumping and screaming people.  Helicopters kept going overhead and the ground was literally shaking from the bass in the speakers.  It was insane!  Especially in the middle of the day, outdoors and with children everywhere.  I have never been to something like that sober and it was quite a hot and heady experience.  I was enjoying the dancing and cheering, I couldn’t understand anything the MC was saying of course but I just screamed when everyone else was.  Caught up in the moment, you know.  I can only hope he wasn’t saying “Give it up for a privatised healthcare system!” or “Shout if you love Jesus!”  I think I was pretty safe.  I danced and smiled and gambolled around with the best of them and only decided I’d had enough when a small boy threw up at my feet.  Thus far I have managed to ignore all of the naughty food stalls except for one very small (and expensive) hot dog the other night when I was starving.  Just the smell of all the fried dough and sugar gets me high, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold out, and I worry that the longer I hold out, the worse the binge is going to be when I finally cave.  They have toffee apples.  TOFFEE APPLES.

Click here to see the photos of Tenerife I haven't taken that many of the actual town, because honestly apart from the festival activities there isn't that much that sets it apart from mainland Spain.  The same architecture, cute streets, lovely gardens, lots of monuments and fountains.  When I get out of the city and onto the beaches and up the volcano, that will change, no doubt.

This afternoon's madness

Tomorrow there is not much happening here during the day, festival wise, so I am getting a bus to another region called Puerta de la Cruz which has a large attraction called Loro Parque.  Basically it sounds like SeaWorld with the addition of the world’s largest “collection” of parrots.  (Is it called a collection?  That doesn’t seem right).  Then more festivities at night.  Every night until I leave there is something happening, so I will no doubt have many more colourful photos for next week’s blog.  I am also going to attempt to go up to the highest point on the island (and in Spain) Mount Teide, which is the third largest volcano in the world.  Exciting times ahead!

Til Next We Speak

*LOVE*

N