I suppose if you learn anything from foreign travel, it’s that knowing the language is beneficial. I don’t know Spanish, but I thought I could cope with ordering coffee and a croissant – variations of the word “coffee” are easy to mash up in continental Europe and croissant needs no translation – but this morning mine came sliced like a loaf of bread and served with butter and jam, which left me dumbfounded. I mean, how is it even possible to slice flaky pastry? And why would you do so? Actually, I haven’t really needed Spanish, on the whole, because most of our time here has been spent in the company of a community of finca owners hailing from anywhere but Spain. They all speak English when together.
Still, despite ignorance of the language, there is much general knowledge you can pick up in the course of foreign travel. For example, in the town of Reus, there is a museum devoted to the work of its most famous son, Anton Gaudi, son of a boiler maker but better known as the architect of Barcelona’s La Sagrada Familia – (which was not, by the way, his only claim to fame). If you want to know more, you could try Google, but I would recommend visiting the museum, especially as it close by the museum of vermouth, the world-famous aperitif that was invented in no other place than Reus. And in the city of Tarragona, we took a guided tour by way of a talking app activated by GPS and narrated in English by an Australian who was big on the Roman history but made the fundamental error of describing the Mediterranean sea as an “ocean”. Still, I forgave him. Australia is surrounded by oceans and, besides, everyone loves the Aussies, right?
Something that required no language at all was a piece of performance art we encountered at the Jaime Botín arts centre in Santander. In a vast gallery lit only at one end by a glass wall overlooking the sea, two young women lay as if asleep on the floor. They awoke slowly, moving like creatures weighted down by fathoms of water and began to emit whale-like musical tones, harmonising intermittently. When they were ‘awake’, they were joined by a mother carrying her baby, with whom all three interacted as it crawled about and attempted to walk. All the while, the performers ‘sang’ and made rhythmic clicking sounds – so unlike the usual high-pitched cooing that babies are usually subjected to – and the baby, who had no language, appeared to join in as if he had been selected by audition for the part. I thought they were exploring human development as a natural and universal process before language skills and cultural norms become part of our learning and serve to differentiate us from others.
Preconceptions about the serving of croissants are not the only fixed ideas challenged in the course of this trip. Another is that Spain is one country, with one language and one cultural tradition. I now know better than to say as much in the hearing of a Basque or Catalan. But we’re heading back now to the Hermit Kingdom on a ferry with a fair quota of second-home-owning Brits bemoaning the fact that Brexit has meant their overseas sojourns are limited to ninety days per year. If there is a benefit to Brexit, the ferry operators are probably the ones counting it.
As for the gas-fitting, one of the tasks requested of me by our host at the finca was to fix her gas hob, which had only two of its four burners working when we arrived. Fortunately, she has another hob in the guest quarters because, as of the day we left, the hob I attempted to fix lay partly re-assembled in the expectation of parts arriving. Mañana, as I believe they say in Spain.
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