Go West

Another location that topped the lists of Spaniards´ suggestions for our continued search for the "perfect place" was the area around Cadiz. Cadiz lies on the windy Atlantic coast of Spain and was recommended to us for its combination of warm sun and cooling wind. Furthermore, the people of Cadiz, the Gaditanos, are known for their irreverent humor and fun-loving nature (could Gaditanos be even MORE fun-loving than the less-than-serious Spaniards we had met almost everywhere else???)

We couldn´t find any hosts in Cadiz and we´re not looking to live in a big city anyway, so we contacted the owner of a boutique hotel (read: candles, incense and strong blocks of color) in a small, white village (please note that when I say "white village" I am referring to the color of the uniformly white-washed buildings). The guide books in English didn´t have much to say about the village, so we were quite surprised when we got off the bus to find a really charming and lovely place perched atop a small hill.

We spent the two weeks here painting (and I became a steam-iron professional). The hotel is for sale and the owner, whose attention was mostly spent on preparing for her new phase of life as a yoga instructor, wanted to spruce it up without spending too much money. She gave us a list of painting and cleaning tasks and left us to do our thing. It was enjoyable to be in charge of our own planning and to spend hours on the wonderful roof terrace but it was a challenge to rely on her to provide us with food provisions as it wasn´t high on her list of priorities.

It was fun to be in a little town and I must admit that I really enjoyed the freedom of walking down the street for supplies or just taking a stroll to the grocery store. For me, this was the most viable location in Spain so far. The town was close to beautiful, unspoiled beaches; there were lots of interesting activities on offer (I attended a day-long meditation seminar and an Astanga yoga class); there were incredible views of the mountains of Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar from the rooftop terraces and I made a couple of really nice expat friends.

The highlight of our time there was spending time with Annie B, a Scottish expat who runs Annie B´s Spanish Kitchen cooking school from her home. Check out her website HERE. Her enthusiasm for all things was absolutely contagious and it was a delight to be with her. She even took us out for a day of driving around the mountains to see if there were interesting towns there.

So...why didn´t we stop looking and park ourselves there? Most importantly, Michiel wasn´t as enthusiastic about it as I was. What we are really looking for is a small home with a bit of land. In Spain, if you live in the town, you don´t have any land at all. Buildings are right next to one another and chances are very good that you won´t be able to escape the noise that Spaniards are so fond of. Additionally, the countryside around our town wasn´t very enticing - especially after we learned more about what how the famous Levanter and the lesser known Poniente winds make farming and fruit trees impossible to grow without some kind of serious protection.

We ended up having a great experience in this part of Spain and are very grateful that our Spanish friends recommended it to us, but the search for our perfect place had to continue. Next stop....Catalonia.

Granada and the Alhambra

As I mentioned, we left our "saviour hostess" for a bit and then returned. Upon returning to the area, we finally had an opportunity to spend a weekend in Granada. Many Spaniards had recommended this city to us and I had studied the Alhambra palace and fortress in Architecture School, so we had high expectations. Indeed, the city is incredibly vibrant - most notably because it is FULL of university students and tourists. It is also quite lovely, especially the old Arab Quarter.

The logistics of visiting this amazing Moorish wonder and the surrounding gardens (Generalife) are a bit tricky and guests are only allowed to visit the palace areas at a specified time but this ensures that the rooms are only crowded instead of incredibly crowded.  I´m sure that it would be a terrific experience to have the place to yourself on a warm evening.

One of the great draws of Granada are the free tapas. Every single bar that serves drinks offers a free snack with each glass of alcoholic beverage. The tradition comes from the desire to keep insects out of your drink so a little nibble on a plate would serve as a lid or "tapa" for your glass. These days, they don't serve the tapa on top of the glass, but they are still free in some parts of Spain. If this is the case, as in Granada and the Alpujarras, you can make a meal out of a pub crawl. Each round of drinks at a bar comes with a different tapa, so even if you stay in the same bar all night, you could have a variety of hams, cheeses, potatoes, olives or other items.

The other wonderful thing about Granada is that it is large and diverse enough to have some ethnic restaurants (other than Italian or Chinese - the extent of foreign cuisine in most of Spain). We took full advantage of this and after many months of Spanish cuisine, dove with gusto into a (disappointingly mediocre) Thai restaurant and a really good Moroccan place.

Our Saviour

Our saviour came in the form of a 60 year old British woman (thus the British spelling of savior), with whom we had already made contact through HelpX. We had planned on volunteering with her after 2 weeks with the previous hosts, but the circumstances required a frantic phone call to move our arrival date forward.

She quickly agreed and we took the bus just 20 minutes down the road to a much nicer little spa town, known for its bottled water. We were greeted by a whirlwind of energy, warm kisses on both cheeks and lots of chatter. As she drove us up the winding track to her lodging establishment perched high above the white-washed town, we began to breathe a sigh of relief.

The view

Her compound was an oasis of flowers and green in the desert (we soon learned that this oasis required 1.5 hours per day of watering!!!!) complete with 5 little, stand-alone houses (casitas). Each casita had a small kitchen, a bed and bathroom and a terrace or patio. The real gem of the place was the swimming pool and pool bar, stocked with soft drinks, beer and wine that were completely free for our consumption. Almost every night we ate dinner beneath the grape vines alongside the pool.

She often cooked dinner for her guests, who were mainly clients of local companies offering biking, horse riding or hiking tours and we were always invited to join. We were expected to assist with the prep and cleaning after these meals, but we were always treated like family and were free to enjoy our adult beverages while "working". Our hostess was very fair about the hours so that if we worked with clients at night (for example, Michiel and I cooked a Moroccan meal for her guests one night) then we could have a "lie in" the next morning.

We did a variety of tasks here and learned quite a bit about making and canning jams and chutneys, harvesting almonds and walnuts, and cleaning pools amongst other things. The hours were a bit longer than at other hosts, but the accommodation was great (once we moved out of her back bedroom and into a casita) and our hostess was incredibly generous with food and drink. We had coffee breaks and snack time and she was a big proponent of cooling off with a "tinto de verano" before dinner (chilled red wine mixed with lemon soda and lots of lemon slices).

Not only was our hostess generous with drink, she was also generous with her time. She knew that we were looking for places to live so she took us to look at various properties and land for sale. To top it all off, she took both of us out on our respective birthdays to enjoy the local tradition of free tapas with drink orders. (Do you get the sense that there was a lot of wine drinking here?)

On our two days off per week, we took the bus to the famous white villages in the mountains, did some hiking, explored the the little town, swam in the pool and did a lot of reading. There were other volunteers working here, as well as family and friends of our hostess and guests, so there was no lack of socializing opportunity.

Photos from the White Villages

We had originally planned to stay for 2 weeks, but we ended up returning here after Pueblo Ingles (the English Immersion program for Spaniards that we volunteered for). All together, we ended up staying for nearly 5 weeks and had a hard time leaving. In fact, we were even tempted to lodge-sit over the holidays while our hostess returned to the UK.

What made it possible to leave was the fact that we determined that the area was just too dry and extreme for us. The heat of summer lasted well into October and daytime temperatures could still easily reach into the 90s (35 plus degrees C). When we left, nighttime temperatures were falling below freezing and we could feel the bitter cold air flowing off the mountains.

We also had a hard time seeing ourselves thriving in this very traditional Spanish village. We didn´t see that we had much in common with the other expats (mostly older Brits who were into drinking and socializing and had lots of money) and we didn´t find the locals to be particularly intriguing, so we set off to the western region of Andalucia.

We´re BACK!

Happy Belated New Year!

After a long hiatus, it´s time to get back to telling the rest of the Spain story. For those who´ve lost the thread, here´s a recap:

We spent six months travelling around Spain in 2009 with the hope of finding our "perfect place". We volunteered for two weeks at a time in the homes and lodging establishments of a wide variety of characters, using the HelpX website as our means of making contact.

In our last posting, we were in the south of Spain in the heart of the Alpujarras Mountains (Andalucia) and had just been asked by our host to leave. Please use the Previous Post links to the left to read past postings.

Over the next several weeks, I hope to finish telling that story and will get you back up to date on what´s next for us. Thanks for reading and we love to get comments.

Kicked out

After our first Pueblo Ingles week we headed south to an area that we thought would hold great promise for us called the Alpujarras. In fact, several Pueblo Ingles participants had even suggested that we check out this region as one which might meet many of our criteria. The Alpujarras region is a series of valleys on the south side of the Sierra Nevada range, which is home to the highest mountain peak in Spain, the Mulhacen. The valleys in this region are dotted with small, white villages (pueblos blancos) which are huddled together to protect from the cold winters and painted white to reflect the extreme heat of the summer sun. One village in particular was well-known as being a bit of a haven for alternative expats and our HelpX resource listed dozens of hosts looking for assistance.

We chose a host who offered good food and comfortable, separate accommodation(at least that's what the reviewers said) in this "hippy" white village surrounded by mountains. Upon arrival, our Indian (by way of England) host served us a lovely Indian food lunch and we discussed the importance of "open and honest" communication in order for our host/helper arrangement to work out. She also asked whether we had liability insurance as we would be responsible for paying for any damage we incurred. This was a bit of a surprise as we had not encountered this sort of attitude or comment from any prior hosts. Furthermore, that evening she asked to have our passports so that she would have some "collateral" in the event that any tools go "walkies" (which apparently happened with a new weed-wacker). Aside from the fact that it is apparently illegal for a foreigner to walk around without a passport while in Spain, we were flabbergasted by the total lack of trust.

The next day, we started work on a difficult job doing traditional mud plastering over stone walls. Her generally crotchety husband did all of the training, but he barely spoke any English, so she did the translating and when they disagreed we had to wait for them to work things out. It was extremely hot in this part of Spain in late September but we were working inside a shed so we had some shade. We stopped work to have lunch, which was one and a half white bread sandwiches with a thin layer of tomato, a thick layer of mayo and one slice of meat and some potato chips. At one point during the work day, Michiel asked if we could have a snack of some fruit. She hesitated and said, "well, I guess you haven't had any time to go to town to buy and snacks so I suppose I could give you something" before bringing us some sugary biscuits.

Traditional mud plastering involves flinging trowel-fulls of sand and cement at a wall.


On the third day, the hard work, white bread sandwiches, grumpy interactions with the husband, no-snack policy and the total lack of trust ("you did lock the gate, didn't you?"..."why didn't you put the tools away during lunch. I told you to do that, didn't I?") forced us to test out her desire to have "open and honest communications". We told her that we were very uncomfortable with having our passports taken from us and that every other host had provided us with sufficient food to get through the day. She was pretty taken aback and claimed that none of her other volunteers ever complained about these things. In fact, there was another volunteer (a young British guy) who had no complaints about anything (not surprising, really, as most Brits are not comfortable with confrontation or complaining in person).

We finished our conversation, went to our room and 15 minutes later were visited by her with the message that "we just don't have enough time to sit around and talk about these issues, so we think it would be best if you leave." We were relieved that they had forced our hand and made the decision for us. We had spent both evenings discussing whether we should move on but hadn't made the decision to do so, now we had to get on the phone and make some calls to other hosts.

Luckily, we had already contacted a lady in the next town over and she was able to take us a week and a half early. Even more fortunately, we had decided in our 3 days in this alternative town, that we didn't like the feel of it at all.

The town - it looks nice enough, but we didn't take any photos of the dumpster-divers or the raggedy, skeletal and unwashed people.