Yellow

Flock of Turkeys & Dinner Table

seems to have been the theme color this Thanksgiving, both on the wall and on the table. The dinner party was held on Saturday this time. It took 8 pairs of hands of varying sizes, one kitchen, and 5 and a half hours to prep and cook the dinner. The results looked and tasted great. We made the traditional hand turkeys and played a board game while waiting for the turkey to roast. The bird, by the way, came from France and was described as part chicken, part pig to those of younger ages in attendance. The after-dinner-exercise consisted of not a walk in the colorful woods but instead a sled dash in the snow.

2 weekends, 4 campsites

6 new recipes.

So it snowed

We had been out running errands and were coming back in a tram. We stepped out and walked 500 feet by the end of which there were caps of snow on our heads. We couldn't actually tell if it was snow or hail but based on others' stories about white blankets covering the ground I'll call it snow. Older people claimed they did not remember having seen snow in summer before but they did recall one summer 35, 36, or 37 years ago when it never warmed up enough so that they could have removed their outer layers of clothing.

Estonians are the worst

to work in customer service positions. This was what I thought and how I remembered things. Now I'm beginning to believe that there is hope for us.

Within the last fortnight we've eaten out several times. No doubt, there have been some prototypical Estonian servers that barely say hello, don't come to the table to check on their guests, or even take offense if they get the order wrong. But it seems that over the winter more eateries have instructed their employees to ask their customers if they would like to start out with drinks and later, to finish with desserts or coffee. Also, there are now more than one place in town where the servers have learned that being friendly and helpful is what works not only for the guests but for them as well.

I've written a word or two about postal service before. I guess their systems are outdated or perhaps hard to uncomplicate. But their people are nice. I talked to a customer service rep at a desk yesterday and she took her time to try to help me out. I talked to the mail lady in our current abode today and she was generous with advice. They didn't just ignore me and use an excuse of having work to do. I talked to another person on the phone about some special request. He didn't just say "no, we don't have it" but instead came up with an original solution on the spot and made me happy.

Perhaps one group of people in business that haven't contributed to my changing opinion on the service level here (with one exception, though) is real estate agents. I thought they were like car dealers - no offense - out for a kill but I suppose I was mistaken. The brokers we've dealt with have not been pushy at all. They tend to ignore queries or be curt when responding, and laid back when waiting for a response. Let's blame it on this bullish market and not the agents.

If I was a tourist

coming to Tallinn in spring I would try to hold on with my visit until the second half of May. If I remember it correctly, during the last 3-4 (or 6) years there have been at least a few days of 25° C/ 77° F and sunny weather in every May. So, when planning your trip months in advance, you just might get lucky with the weather. And the cost of getting over here should be lower as well. However, as this week proved you might also luck out and end up having to make your first order of business a visit to the ladies selling woolly mitts and hats. So it's a gamble.

I like spring in Estonia. There are blooms everywhere: tulips in gardens, lilacs and chestnuts outside of them, and globe-flowers and lilies-of-the-valley in forests. I suppose May then would be a good time to visit the Botanical Gardens.

There will be names

I think when we want to record some restaurants that we like more than others. Perhaps there will be names of events and of more towns. I also hope there will be more photos. Having been a tourist for 90 days I would want to keep on being one.

Ronda

has an old bull ring and a deep gorge.

White Towns. Jimena de la Frontera

Just like so many other hill villages, Jimena has ruins of an ancient castle up above it.

View of Jimena de la Frontera

Tower without Church

There is a cemetery on the other side of the plateau and water reservoirs between them. There is room also for a couple of horses to feed themselves on lush greens and possibly for construction vehicles to unload their supplies or crew. Visitors would have to walk up the hill: at least a few hundred yards if they were lucky finding a parking spot among the cars of the locals, or more likely all the way from the other end of the town as we did. Neither the magenta colored signs on street corners nor the town's web site hinted that the buildings would be closed off due to the ongoing renovation work. It seemed there were some tourists that, in a case like this, considered it their hard earned right to ignore the temporary barriers and stepped out onto scaffolding to snap their higher vantage point photos of the town below. We settled for the other side: for the unobstructed views of the hills of cork and vultures, and for the sound of a cattle.

Street in Town

Jimena de la Frontera has a population of nine or ten thousand. The town boosts several churches and retirement homes, a library with wireless internet connection, a selection of restaurants and bars, and a number of access spots to natural springs. For some reason the springs and public drinking fountains all run dry. Luckily, we found an unmarked stream at the outskirts of the town near the river and the canal built for a 18th century artillery factory. We did not have time to go check out their cave paintings from around 1000 B.C. but were convinced that the folks are proud of their history as an image of a ship from one of those drawings was turned into sculptures and weather vanes, probably souvenirs, too.

For fellow travelers and as a note for my future self I would recommend taking the riverside path back to the train station only when the weather is summery and the water level is normal or below that and secondly, trying to get some maps or coordinates for going to the Laja Alta cave as the maps provided by local businesses weren't too exact.

White Villages. Grazalema

Grazalema and Clouds

is probably the most frequently used gateway to the natural park with the same name - Sierra de Grazalema. The village is in the mountains that are one of the best in not only Andalusia but the whole of Spain in having the clouds drop their loads of precipitation they carry. One of the perks of all this moisture is a unique microclimate it creates, drawing nature lovers and walkers to the area. All this rain, they say, is good to make plants like Spanish fir (otherwise known as pinsapo pine) thrive.

A House in Village

The Thursday I visited was probably a regular spring day in the area. I was welcomed by misty gray clouds that within a few hours moved out from above the village. The rain was no obstacle in sightseeing. So I checked off my list several churches, couple of village squares, and local produce and souvenir stores. But on the hilly slope right outside a village wall I also noticed a flock of sheep announcing their movement with bells and being herded by a real shepherd with a hat and cane. I happened on a group of teenagers practicing the art of carrying an Easter or festival float by using one amongst them as the float. I found the rocky track leading out of the village to old worship sites slightly above it that turned out to provide great views of the village and the surrounding hills. I also took along a jar of honey collected from the aforementioned pinsapo trees but could not locate any products made from cork that could be seen covering the nearby hills. Perhaps they take the cork bark to some other village that has a factory.

Semana Santa

Mary on Float

or Holy Week is the week of Easter. In Spain it is not about cute bunnies or colorful eggs but rather about faith and Jesus and Mary. It is said that many people take the week off from work to be able to participate in the festivities. And the festivities, which consist mainly of parades of floats of Jesus and Mary, take place from Sunday to Sunday. Somehow they divide up the days or nights among the churches and religious brotherhoods of the town and then take turns parading the streets.

Costaleros

The two most important groups of participants in the parades are the nazarenos or penitents who can be either adults or children dressed in long robes and pointy head gear, wearing candles and costaleros who are the solemn members of brotherhoods and carry the floats. There are also participants that hoist silver scepters or crosses or distribute flower petals or incense. Sometimes there are women dressed in mournful black. And most always there is a brass band and drummers setting the pace.

Nazarenos

People come from far away to witness even one of these penance processions; hotels are fully booked and parking is near impossible. The cities that put on major processions are Seville and Malaga. That is why we escaped the heavily crowded streets of Malaga for much less doable Ronda. Perhaps those pointy hoods had something to do with it, too.

White villages. Benalmádena Pueblo

is fancier than some others.

Not only Spanish

can be heard and seen in Andalusia. Sometimes, when going about your touristy business, you may encounter any one of the following situations, with varying probabilities, though:

• you turn around to take a better look at a kid hopping along the white tile path hemming a street, telling his mom to do the same in a language you register as your native
• you have to dig up as much Spanish as you can to explain to a stranger that no, you are not a friend of a girl from Vilnius; however, you come from a place quite close to that
• you feel a little ashamed having forgotten most of the Russian you used to know when an ATM selects a transactional language for you (I suppose on its estimate of your preferences based on the location of the issuer of the card)
• you shake your head "no" to two ladies having approached you with a question and a booklet with recognizable style of illustrations on its cover and they come back ten steps later to offer you the Watchtower in Russian instead
• you go to a grocery store for your weekly supplies and pick up a laundry bag (name spelled out in English) only to discover the rest of the information on the package is written in the three Baltic languages and not in Spanish and Portuguese as you've gotten used to seeing on labels here.

Córdoba

A Narrow Street

is most famous for its Mosque, La Mesquita (otherwise known as the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption). That is what we went to see. Less than two hours north from Malaga on a nice highway, it's easy to get to. Also, if you arrive in town after 2 pm on Saturday and wear your lucky shirt parking on the streets is free. Or, if you get to town around 8.30 am, the entrance to several of the town's museums is free for the first hour (according to the town's official tourism site).

We chose the first option mentioned here. Walked around the wide palm lined boulevards and narrow white housed streets, making our way to Mesquita. It turned out to be a very long yellowish building. On aerial photos you could see it as a rectangle, stretching several blocks where about 1/3 of the rectangle is taken up by the evergreen courtyard. Those are orange trees planted in rows.

Inside the mosque-cathedral are rows and rows of columns of granite, marble, jasper, and onyx. It all started with those columns, salvaged or taken from old Roman temples when the construction started on the 8 ^th century. Throughout the centuries, Mesquita grew, with each new ruler adding on to the older part, not to be outdone by the size of the expansion, and sometimes demolishing parts of the old (as when they built the cathedral in the 16^th century).

Striped Arches of Mesquita

By now there are what must be 30-some chapels, each one of them elaborate and lavish, lining the four walls of the monster structure. There's the mihrab (the niche indicating the direction of the Mecca) tucked away somewhere among the chapels, and an exquisite choir and chancel in the very middle of the building.

Main Chapel of Cathedral

The cathedral has a marble altarpiece, and mahogany pulpits and choir stalls; it is supposed to include Gothic, Baroque, and Renaissance elements.

What is interesting is that before the work started on the first mosque, the site had a basilica on it and it was used by both Christians and Muslims. Then, for centuries, it was used for Islamic worship, then, from 1236, for Christian. At the beginning of this century the local Muslims asked to hold their own services in the Mesquita but they have been turned down.

Puerto Rico vs Spain

It's not a baseball game. It's a dilemma we had. About where to escape this winter. And unlike the game we watched at Hiram Bithorn a year ago where Mr Beltran & Mates scored 3 over 0 against the Figueroa Brothers & Co our quandary came down to more like 2 to 1 the other way. Andalucia's proximity and sights won over San Juan's temperature. Sun they have both.

Botanic Gardens

it seems is something that generally needs hiding and seeking. Take Tallinn's garden - it's somewhere in the woods about 10 km outside the city center, and I think easy to miss if you ride on an older bus that doesn't display the names of the stops. San Juan's Jardín Botánico is actually in the middle of the town and you can ride the train to Cupey station, no problem. But when above ground, the neighborhood might scare you off even at the very beginning of the 2 km walk.

Founders' Mansion (Winter)

Malaga's Jardín Botánico-Histórico is actually outside the city. You take a bus to the northern end of town and walk back and forth, under and over highways on deserted roads for a kilometer if, again, those roads seeming to go nowhere don't frighten you to turn back.

According to La Concepción website the gardens were started by a wealthy family almost 260 years ago. The City bought the gardens in 1990 and opened it to the public four years later. The gardens are said to have more than two thousand species of plants growing. It seems that most of them have been planted to the center of the gardens as a cute little subtropical forest. It has numerous winding pathways, some runnels, and cascades. This forest part is very compact.

View from Jardín Botánico

For walkers, and especially those that would like to walk the Andalusian hills without the fear of getting lost or being attacked by local goats, I would recommend the 3/4-mile Forest Trail. It is labeled as moderately difficult and runs along the perimeter of the Gardens on a higher altitude, allowing good views of both the garden grounds and the city.

Next time, I would pack a food basket with lunch to nibble at any of the nice picnic tables and find out when the wisterias are in full bloom to sit in the shade next to the mansion. I wouldn't also mind scheduling my visit to coincide with the Malaga Tour minibus timetable to skip the aforementioned walk.

I learned to drink coffee

by the end of last year and I'm glad I did. I would have missed out in Spain.

Romantic week

(Valentine's Day!) it hasn't been. Perhaps hectic. I won't record too much though. Other that there was a lot of packing, rolling, folding, and stuffing; there were numerous meetings and visits, questions and requests. Everything worked out in the end as it always does when Mike from Tallinn is involved.

We even had time to wish well to the guy we assumed was the owner-operator of the sandwich franchise that opened up its second store in Tallinn right under our noses in the twin building opposite from us. Whereas it took a long time for the brand to be brought to Estonia (see this yearning here), the second store opened quite quickly after the initial one and was put up perhaps within three weeks, four at the most.

The first day

of the new year. This one Chinese. The Year of the Horse. For a long time, perhaps for a dozen years or so, I believed myself to be a Horse. Let's assume I've known my astrological sign for much longer than my zodiac sign. Let's assume for some reason the latter system wasn't widely spoken about in the Soviet Union. But then, somewhere in the late 80s perhaps astrology became popular and so I learned about the years of the animals. I learned that each year was named and ruled by an animal, and according to the list I was a Horse (just like pretty much everyone else in my class was). Well, years later I realized the Chinese years didn't necessarily start on January 1st. So I'm not a Horse after all. But I get along well with them.

Another phenomenon I've heard of but had no clear understanding of, are the first day covers. As I send letters maybe a bit more often than my average countrywomen I also visit post office quite regularly and do my research on stamps of various denominations and designs (just to see if anything new and cute is out there). So I'd heard about first days for new stamps, and had heard that they put special cancellation seals on mail. I guess I never bothered to figure out how exactly those things were done.

Today, however, I was in the post office sending a package and noticed there was a group of gentlemen huddled over a desk. I needed a counter space of my own to polish the package so I went and sat among the group. One of the men told another how he has a friend that really likes squirrels and the other one said to have a pal interested in all things Oriental. I couldn't help but had to glance over to see what kind of men were they, chatting about such unmanly things. Then I noticed they were lining up stamps on colorful cards or envelopes - oh, philatelists! And then I noticed they took turns reaching into a cardboard box in the middle of the desk, taking out a handstamp, and pressing it down on their deliverables - oh, first day of issue cancellations! So, I waited for my turn, and reached in my hand, and put down a cancellation myself. I'm not saying it would be the last time, either.

An outside thermometer

we have not. So when venturing out, we have to rely on visual observation  for precipitation and types of clothes worn by passersby and on various, sometimes contradicting, weather predictors on the web. On Friday morning around 10 I clicked open one of those bookmarked weather pages and was told that the temperature outside our windows was -19° C, that's -2° F. Up on top of the page I was informed that the weather at that time (3 a.m.) in Terre Haute, IN was -19° C or -2° F.

Believe me, it's on

In the evening we just had to go get us some Indian food, in the restaurant located up the street from Raekoja Square. When we got back home, the temperature had dropped to -21° C. That had no effect other than it made us think of warmer climates, such as Southern Spain with its daytime highs of 19°C or so.

Oh, ok, I admit it made me want to turn on the sauna which I did and sit in there for a bit.

The backbone of the winter

has been broken. I guess it was that woke up Winter and reminded it to come pay us a visit. So the winter has finally arrived. There were two activities worth recording that happened this week.

I used the self check out station in a grocery store. There are two supermarkets within five minutes from our apartment that I go to for our daily supplies. One is closer but smaller and less well stocked (I guess since it's new) with tighter check out area. The other one is a bit farther away but more spacious and with larger selection of goods. Both stores belong to the same Red chain originally from Sweden. Their biggest competitor is a Green chain originally from Finland. The Green chain tends to build its hypermarkets into or next to shopping centers some distance from downtown. I don't go to the Green stores too often, neither do I subscribe to their newsletter so it came as a surprise to me when shopping in one that I spotted some shoppers standing around in one spot that was in line with the cash registers but without any cashiers nearby. The shoppers seemed to be scanning and bagging their purchases. There were, however, two employees sitting behind a computer, seemingly keeping an eye on the buyers/purchases. So self check-out it was. I recalled our visits to a certain convenience store near the port in San Juan a year ago where it seemed we had to wait for a human assistant every time we tried to check out by ourselves. So I was a little weary giving this machine a try but as I only had one item with a nice looking bar code on it I decided I would. Turned out I needed no assistance so I might try again next time I happen to be in that store. By the way, it was probably less than a month ago than Mike and I discussed this modern practice and agreed amongst ourselves that we won't be seeing it in Tallinn's stores in the near future...

Another somewhat unique activity I judged worthy of chronicling involved a machine as well. This was a coin counting device housed in the museum shop of Estonian Bank. You see, it's been three years since we had to give away our kroons and take up euro as the new currency but according to some source there are still almost 50 million euros worth of kroons out there. We had them, too. Close to 300 coins and perhaps 30 notes. Coins are extra weight for people about to move, right? So we decided to take the coins back to the bank where they belong in return for a lesser number of some brand new, unused euros. The coin counting machine in the museum was like any other, nothing special about it. But the museum itself was pretty interesting if small. What I liked was that they featured wax figures of the people depicted on kroons, that they showed news reels about the issueing of kroons (I remember that day in '92 when the adults came home from the temporary exchange point in town and grandpa gave us some new smooth bills to keep), that they had some thousand year old coins on display, and that the bank/museum is still in the same beautiful house it used to be in almost a hundred years ago.

White Christmas

is something I boast about yearly. I take it easy and also without doubt that whatever the few weeks leading up to Christmas are like, there would certainly be snow by the big day. Well, not this time. No snow for Santa and his sleigh, no snow for kids yearning to go out and play, no snow to make it easier to find one's way in darkness in the cemetery. So these Christmas were different. “Surely, there would be snow and cold at the beginning of the new year,” was the next deadline I came up with. After all, the winter's back would be broken i.e. it would be half over (2.5 months gone, another 2.5 to go or something like that) by the middle of the month. But the mystery continues. I'm sure there are people out (t)here being greatly disappointed by the lack of snow and opportunities it brings but I personally am beginning to prefer this type of winter. I remember the five previous Januaries when I had to wear my warmest layers when going outside, I had to pull on good-tractioned boots to stay upright on those icy sidewalks, I had to remind myself to glance upwards every now and then to make sure there weren't any ominous looking icicles hanging above my head. Not to mention I really prefer warmer temperatures to colder ones. So this winter has been among my favorites so far.