It was with a mixture of pleasant anticipation and dread (OK, probably slightly more of the latter) that Theo and I embarked on our expedition to Caceres in Extramadura to take in the sights and sounds of the WOMAD festival. It's been held in the city for the last nineteen years and as well as boasting quaintly picturesque streets and plazas as a perfect way to set off the festival stages, the added attraction is that it is completely free. Theo and I went last year and had a wonderful time watching some fantastic world music being performed in the May sunshine. So we decided to make the journey again this year, but with an obvious alteration to our entourage: we had a baby in tow.
Because of a long-winded problem involving our car insurance which I won't go into now, we elected to take the train from Atocha Station in Madrid to Caceres. Accordingly, we boarded two buses on Friday morning (one at a time) carrying a gigantically stuffed-full rucksack (Theo) a flowery backpack with essentials for the journey (me) and pushing a pram containing our Precious First Born (Theo, mostly).
Stage one went well. We got to Atocha horrendously early and although Rosie remained awake for the journey from our flat, she sustained a cheerful countenance. We killed some time by having a cuppa in a cafe - with a waitress who was so slow fulfilling our modest order (orange juice and a Colacao) we started to fear we might never get our drinks before we had to go.
Getting on the train with our baggage was challenging, but we managed it and after Rosie decided she didn't want to stay in the sling (she tends to protest if whoever wearing the sling isn't in constant motion), we put her in her car seat/pram seat where, following a feed, she obligingly fell asleep (with a little help from a muslin providing some strategic tenting). Rosie slept for well over an hour, awoke and enjoyed looking around the train carriage and watching the passing scenery, then after another snack from Mummy, dozed off again in her seat. We felt cheered - this was proving to be an unmitigated doddle!
Rosie only woke up again when we alighted at Caceres station, but was quite content to ride in her pram to the hotel where, once ensconced in room 608, with a clean nappy and another feed inside her, she took another nap. Our spirits continued to rise. A well-rested, contented baby was nine-tenths of the battle for winning an enjoyable weekend. Anticipation started to win over dread.
Our first hiccup came when we sallied forth to check out the festival under suspiciously brooding skies. Theo decided we should keep Rosie in the pram, despite my disappointment at not being able to be a proper hippy mum and have her in the sling (plus I was dubious about negotiating narrow, deeply cobbled streets and crowds). But after only ten minutes, it started to chuck it down and our unwaterproof pram and lack of rain cover suddenly seemed like a bad idea for baby transport. In the shelter of a doorway, I hastily donned the sling, popped Rosie inside and stuck up a brolly. After ascertaining that the rain and wind (which was gusting pretty strongly and called for some serious jockeying of our bucking umbrellas) had momentarily postponed the WOMAD entertainment programme, we turned tail and retreated back to the hotel to dump the pram in the dry and make a second attempt at our trek into the historical centre of Caceres.
This time we were more successful and actually managed to catch bits and pieces of some of the acts, do a little shopping (purchasing some Indian-style head-wear made by our friend Rosie) and eat some home-baked pizza while Rosie (our offspring, this time) was snugly tied to me in the wrap. Impressively, she proceeded to sleep through an incredibly loud Spanish ska band in Plaza Mayor, only waking to the more modestly-volumed folk ensemble, Spiro in Plaza St Jorge (which also featured a Bristol acquaintance of ours, Jon from The Wraiths).
But all good things come to an end. Rosie started to lose patience with her situation after a few hours so we rushed back to the hotel while she wailed loudly at us to hurry up because clearly she was about to starve to death.We constructed a tent over Rosie's babynest in our room and after a feed and change, she was content to go off to sleep with minimum fuss. By now it had stopped raining, but there was a distinct chill in the air and although Theo and I both offered a babysitting service to the other, none of the acts was sufficiently captivating to tempt either of us away from the warmth of the family bosom (which must be mine, I suppose). We did the rock'n'roll thing and had an early night.
Saturday dawned dank, overcast and, well, crappy. Rosie gave us an unwelcome alarm call in the form of a spectacular poosplosion, which leaked out of her nappy and went....everywhere. After dealing with the excremental crisis, we took it easy in our room, munching on fruit and croissants while reading and babyminding until afternoon came and we decided to venture out again. This we did, to find almost nothing going on, so after scrutinising the market, downing some food and having our photograph taken while chatting to trilingual Eduardo (Spanish, English and Hindi...oh, and he was also busy learning German) with his strapping 9 month-old daughter, Anouk, we went back to the hotel.
Back out again and this time we took part in a dance workshop led by an exuberant Kenyan band - something that Rosie seemed to enjoy (or at least, tolerate) in the sling with Theo. He was also voxpopped by Spanish TV and made a pretty decent fist of it, in my opinion.
After some veggie curry, the rain returned in earnest so we took shelter under a stone archway, gave Rosie a feed and rather glumly surveyed the situation. The downpour, depressingly British in aspect, showed no signs of abating. Although it was only about 7.30pm, we decided we'd had enough. Perhaps without the responsibility of a three month-old baby, we would have shrugged off the inclement weather, downed a few sidras and kept ourselves warm by dancing to some of the more lively bands. But Rosie was showing signs of getting fed up and the charms of the meteorological conditions had long worn thin. Back to the hotel, then.
This time Rosie was more cantankerous about bedtime, despite our attempts to mollify her with a relaxing bath (which she enjoyed) and it took much swaddling and un-swaddling plus several attempts at feeding and pacifying before she finally gave in to sleep. Unfortunately, she then woke up wanting a comfort feed every two hours after that, so by morning I was feeling somewhat jaded, to say the least.
We packed up and took a cab to the station, deciding against walking once we had observed the horizonal rain outside. And guess what? We were three quarters of an hour early, so once again we holed up in the station caff with orange juice and Colacao while Rosie gazed in fascination at the screen pumping out Spanish MTV above her head.
The train journey back to Madrid was nowhere near as easy a ride as the one to Caceres. Rosie fussed and cried and having had her routine disrupted for three days now, had obviously decided enough was enough. In desperation, I fed her while standing up in the train corridor, hoping the white noise and motion would help calm her. It did. She finally consented to get some sleep in her chair and we breathed a sigh of relief. It was not to last. Another poosplosion abruptly woke her out of slumber and Theo and I had the joy of changing a baby, whose lower half was liberally coated with her own excrement, on a train seat. Thankfully, teamwork won the day (and Rosie, thankfully, treated the whole thing as a grand escapade put on for her own entertainment) and with the judicious use of babywipes and travel changing mat, we had the situation back under control.
Unfortunately, that was when Rosie's patience, such as it was, ran out and I spent another half hour trying to calm her down (including a second breast-feeding sojourn in the corridor) and persuade her back to sleep. Ironically, it was as we waited in the press of passengers to get off at Atocha that she finally consented to doze off. Impeccable timing.
So, what with one thing and another, it was a relief to make it back home. All things considered, we figured we'd mainly got away with it from Rosie's point of view. She could have been much less tolerant of the venture but as it was, only the minimum of time was spent baby-calming and we were impressed that we'd managed to keep her generally good-natured throughout. No, the main drawback of the whole affair was the miserable, un-Spanishlike weather. But you couldn't blame that on the baby.
1. Language practice with wine and food - invite Spanish and Venezualan friends home for traditional English cuisine (curry)
2. Visit the enormous Madrid book fair in Retiro park - tomes in dozens of languages, catering to tastes ranging from obscure Manga to far left Argentinian political polemic and pretty much everything else you can think of. Note to self - next time don't leave it until twenty minutes before closing time to try and browse the 357 stalls.
3. Drink coffee in Plaza Chueca - Chueca is Madrid's gay district and if a visitor couldn't work that out from the number of same-sex couples ambling hand-in-hand, the barrio's mixture of saunas and shoe shops would probably give it away. We sat on a bar terraza sipping our drinks watching local colour in the form of a young man who looked like he'd been kicked out of the house by his boyfriend that morning, hit the bottle in despair and passed out on a stone bench at the side of the plaza. As we watched, he crumpled gently onto the ground among his flowing scarves and other belongings and was covered with a coat by a solicitous passer-by. "He's been sleeping there since this morning," she told a table of lads who were also enjoying the spectacle.
4. Have a cana in La Latina. We avoided the temptation to go inside the dingy-looking but gloriously named Latina Turner and opted for another of the many funky bars in the area...
5... then ended up in La Alhambra in the Sevilla area, an authentically feeling Spanish bar, for another cana and some patatas con salsas.
6. Watch the Madrid version of Critical Mass swarm around the glorieta beside Metro La Latina - as it was Saturday evening, it didn't cause much of a traffic gridlock, but there was a big chequered flag, some colourful wrestling costumes and a goodly number of cyclists shouting and blowing whistles. Five minutes of carnival, if nothing else.
7. Eat left over curry at home.
8. Get up early(ish) on Sunday morning and go to the Rastro to hunt for bargain sandals. There were plenty in evidence, but I was too fussy to actually buy any. A pleasant stroll, though and we enjoyed the didgeridoo player and the man creating an incredibly haunting tune using 24 glasses and his fingertips. We didn't buy the CD though.
9. Drink fresh orange juice and cafe con leche on the terraza of Taberna Tirso de Molina and buy flowers (in Theo's case) from the neighbouring stall to present to the wife. Aw!
10. More Spanish practice - meet friends fresh from the European vote for a few drinks outside a bar in Atocha. Olga's husband Fernando speaks no English, so it was another excellent opportunity to give our newly acquired language a decent airing. I found myself actually understanding a fair bit of what they said to me too - yes!!
11. Go home and eat more left over curry.
12. Finish the left over fruit crumble as well. Yum.
We nearly didn't make it to Valencia at all.
The signs weren't good. When our Valenciana friend Amalia suggested a trip en masse by people from the Pueblo Ingles La Alberca programme end of October 2008, at least twelve people said they were interested in joining the party.
By the time we had got to the week before, everyone had dropped out (for a variety of understandable reasons) except Theo and me and Lynne, who was flying out from London. On Friday, I checked the weather forecast and guess what? After three weeks of unbroken warm sunshine across much of Spain, there were black clouds and big fat raindrops all over the map of Espana, especially the Valencia bit.As it was, Theo and I had to curtail our visit a tad because of his timetable - rather than arrive very late after his classes on Friday night, we opted to take the train at a reasonable hour on Saturday morning - it was only a three-hour journey with Renfe and we would arrive early in the afternoon.It all started very well. We arrived in plenty of time at Atocha station, which resembles an airport terminal with attendant baggage x-rays and check-in desks. "This is going to be a breeze," we thought, as we sat down for a cuppa before boarding the train.Except it wasn't. A train, that is. As we handed our tickets ready to embark, the lady in the smart uniform said something in rapid Spanish which sounded suspiciously like "bus". Some Spanglish later, we had established that there was a problem on the train line and we would need to take a bus as far as Alcazar de San Juan - adding an extra hour to the journey. Great.
Ah well, we had sandwiches, books and backgammon with us, we could afford to be philosophical.The journey began uneventfully. After we got out of the southern Madrileno suburbs, there wasn't a great deal to look at out of the window so Theo snoozed while I enjoyed myself reading the man in front's book over his shoulder and looking up all the words I didn't know in my Spanish/Ingles dictionary. Very educational.
After a couple of hours on the road, we made an unscheduled stop in a one-horse town off the motorway where the driver stopped and spoke to a passer-by. It looked suspiciously as if he was asking for directions. A few passengers exchanged glances, but apart from the group sitting behind us, who'd been complaining about the bus-replacement ever since we'd got on board, no one made a big deal of it.A few more kilometres down the road and we were off the motorway again, round a couple of roundabouts and back on, this time travelling in the opposite direction. This didn't look good. There were a few rumbles of consternation.
Eventually we entered Alcazar de San Juan and started making our way to the town's railway station. At least, that was the intention. After he'd stopped twice to talk to passing pedestrians, it was clear our driver didn't have the faintest idea of where we were or where we were meant to be going.Then he saw a policeman in a squad car and flagged him down. By now, all the passengers were watching the driver's progress through the town with a mixture of anxiety, irritation and amusement. So, with a police escort, our bus picked its way through the narrow streets, only just avoiding pinning several passing cars to the wall, or at least forcing them to drive over the pavement so they didn't hit us. We passengers had a moment of elation when we saw the railway line at the end of one of the streets, but it didn't last long. We drove on past. But it was clear, even with the policeman indicating the way to the station, our bus driver had other ideas. We got stuck in another small street, hemmed in by the traffic in front of us and the station still tantalisingly out of reach.By this time, the passengers had decided to take matters into their own hands and with typical Spanish directness, they started shouting for the driver to open the doors. When he did so, everyone grumpily climbed off, pulled various bits of luggage out of the coach's cavernous hold and stomped off to the station on foot.
Thankfully, they held the connection or we would have had to wait until 4.30pm to catch the next one - well after we were supposed to have arrived in Valencia itself. So, we made it - late, but still in one piece.
When we told the story to our Valencia friends later, they unhesitatingly reached the conclusion that this was entirely typical of Spain. "You must write and complain!!" they said. We might do. After all, it would have been a lot cheaper to just get the coach the whole way - we would have arrived no later and saved ourselves a bunch of money.
Still. The rest of the stay was lovely. Yes, the weather was pretty rubbish, but the hotel Theo had booked as an anniversary surprise was lovely and only five minutes from Valencia's historic centre, which is a charming and interesting place. It was fun seeing Lynne again and Amalia, Juanvi, Jose and Maria proved, once more, to be excellent partying companions as we moved from one bar to another, then a tapas restaurant, then another bar, then a club.We could have done with the extra hour the Spring clock-change stole, but we were up early enough on Sunday to get a personal guided tour around Valencia's beautiful streets and buildings from Amalia and her sister, Maria.
The visit was topped off with a long-promised Valencian special dish, paella, including a delicious veggie version for us sin pescado, sin carne types.
Thankfully, the train going back didn't require any buses to help out and we made it back to Madrid Atocha without incident. Not as entertaining, sure, but by that time we were too tired for any kind of bonus cabaret.
Valencia, by the way, is lovely. But next time we go, we'll either drive ourselves or get the bus the whole way.
Getting on the train with our baggage was challenging, but we managed it and after Rosie decided she didn't want to stay in the sling (she tends to protest if whoever wearing the sling isn't in constant motion), we put her in her car seat/pram seat where, following a feed, she obligingly fell asleep (with a little help from a muslin providing some strategic tenting). Rosie slept for well over an hour, awoke and enjoyed looking around the train carriage and watching the passing scenery, then after another snack from Mummy, dozed off again in her seat. We felt cheered - this was proving to be an unmitigated doddle!
Rosie only woke up again when we alighted at Caceres station, but was quite content to ride in her pram to the hotel where, once ensconced in room 608, with a clean nappy and another feed inside her, she took another nap. Our spirits continued to rise. A well-rested, contented baby was nine-tenths of the battle for winning an enjoyable weekend. Anticipation started to win over dread.
This time we were more successful and actually managed to catch bits and pieces of some of the acts, do a little shopping (purchasing some Indian-style head-wear made by our friend Rosie) and eat some home-baked pizza while Rosie (our offspring, this time) was snugly tied to me in the wrap. Impressively, she proceeded to sleep through an incredibly loud Spanish ska band in Plaza Mayor, only waking to the more modestly-volumed folk ensemble, Spiro in Plaza St Jorge (which also featured a Bristol acquaintance of ours, Jon from The Wraiths).
But all good things come to an end. Rosie started to lose patience with her situation after a few hours so we rushed back to the hotel while she wailed loudly at us to hurry up because clearly she was about to starve to death.We constructed a tent over Rosie's babynest in our room and after a feed and change, she was content to go off to sleep with minimum fuss. By now it had stopped raining, but there was a distinct chill in the air and although Theo and I both offered a babysitting service to the other, none of the acts was sufficiently captivating to tempt either of us away from the warmth of the family bosom (which must be mine, I suppose). We did the rock'n'roll thing and had an early night.
Saturday dawned dank, overcast and, well, crappy. Rosie gave us an unwelcome alarm call in the form of a spectacular poosplosion, which leaked out of her nappy and went....everywhere. After dealing with the excremental crisis, we took it easy in our room, munching on fruit and croissants while reading and babyminding until afternoon came and we decided to venture out again. This we did, to find almost nothing going on, so after scrutinising the market, downing some food and having our photograph taken while chatting to trilingual Eduardo (Spanish, English and Hindi...oh, and he was also busy learning German) with his strapping 9 month-old daughter, Anouk, we went back to the hotel.
After some veggie curry, the rain returned in earnest so we took shelter under a stone archway, gave Rosie a feed and rather glumly surveyed the situation. The downpour, depressingly British in aspect, showed no signs of abating. Although it was only about 7.30pm, we decided we'd had enough. Perhaps without the responsibility of a three month-old baby, we would have shrugged off the inclement weather, downed a few sidras and kept ourselves warm by dancing to some of the more lively bands. But Rosie was showing signs of getting fed up and the charms of the meteorological conditions had long worn thin. Back to the hotel, then.
This time Rosie was more cantankerous about bedtime, despite our attempts to mollify her with a relaxing bath (which she enjoyed) and it took much swaddling and un-swaddling plus several attempts at feeding and pacifying before she finally gave in to sleep. Unfortunately, she then woke up wanting a comfort feed every two hours after that, so by morning I was feeling somewhat jaded, to say the least.
We packed up and took a cab to the station, deciding against walking once we had observed the horizonal rain outside. And guess what? We were three quarters of an hour early, so once again we holed up in the station caff with orange juice and Colacao while Rosie gazed in fascination at the screen pumping out Spanish MTV above her head.
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