122 – Of Acorns, Olives, and Old-Andaluz

The pigs definitely won.  Out of everything in this amazing multi-cultural language immersion week, the pigs definitely won.  And the horses, the dogs, and the miles of rolling countryside and beautiful holm-oaks.  Or maybe the food?   Or perhaps achieving the challenge of a week without a single word in our own languages?   Or possibly …. no, never mind.   It was the pigs.

121 – Walking Under The Moon

“Un Sendero Nocturno”.   A night-time walk.  It had sounded beautiful.   A relaxed stroll in the moonlight, chatting with 30 friends and neighbours.  Starting from the next village, Casabermeja, and wandering gently up to Torre Zambra, an old Moorish lookout point and beacon, under the bright light of the October full moon, to be followed by a meal in a bar.  Lovely.

120 – Reddest, Greenest, Tastiest …

I’d heard it a million times.  Gardeners, exaggerating how marvellous their fruit and veg were.  Fisherman’s tales of everything being greener, bigger, rounder, smoother, and above all, so much BETTER than everything we poor mortals were buying.  Yawn.  Until my awakening.  Until that Damascene moment.  Until I ate the first tomato from my own plant.

119 – Noisy, Noisier, Noisiest

It’s over two years now since the sounds outside my bedroom window that very first night, made me think about how we react to noise, especially at night  “First Night in My Casita”.  Back then, in July 2012, I took a firm decision that NOISE, however noisy, was not going to bother me.  The combination of dogs barking, children shrieking, adults arguing, and church bells ringing, was clearly going to be a regular occurrence, and even as an inexperienced newbie it seemed to me to be something that I either needed to get used to and push to the back of my mind, or it would grow to become something unbearable.