Today in the Market 2

February 10, 2011November 8, 2014 ~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

There is no excuse in Granollers for wearing ancient threadbare knickers.
You can’t buy hot chillies or coriander but almost every second market stall sells pants

I am not easy with taking photos in the street – can’t wait to get my Smartphone so I can secretly snap one while pretending to write a text.
It does look a bit suspicious photographing underwear so I went to a stall and asked the woman
‘Te molesta si hago una foto de tus calçetes?’

This is a mixture of castellano and catala (which is how I normally speak here) and in English means
‘Would it bother you if I took a photo of your pants?’

Surprisingly she told me to go ahead!

Today in the Market

February 10, 2011November 28, 2014 ~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments

Today in the market I saw this man

What is in his hand?
They are bird cages – many people not only have caged birds here but sometimes carry them around with them. Some of the market stalls have their birds behind the table, just as you might have your dog.
Walking around the streets I have been noticing recently the increase in bird song – unfortunately much of it is coming from the balconies where the cages are hung.
They have competitions too – for the best singing bird.

There is also a plaça where they have all the chickens and ducks for sale. I always have to scurry across there to get to the fruit market. Today the quacking almost reduced me to tears but it’s one of those things I won’t allow myself to avoid although I hate it.
The dark corners of these photos are due to my camera lense not always opening fully after it’s unexpected encounter with the kitchen floor. I quite like the effect here. But will try to remember to open it by hand in future.

How to use a Treadle Sewing Machine

February 8, 2011November 8, 2014 ~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

After an hour I got the threading right – of course I broke it several times and also had to change the dreaded bobbin after getting all the thread in a knot deep inside

It is many years since I used a treadle sewing machine – at Barassie Street Primary School where we girls still had sewing lessons while the boys did Woodwork. Those afternoons in the sewing room, warmed by a wood fire (can that be right?) with 20 other girls making shoe bags seem like a dream from another world. We also had Cookery classes when the boys did Metalwork and produced rice puddings while learning that you can judge the worth of a woman by the state of her tea towel drawer.

I had to get help from the trusty internet after spending ages trying to get the foot pedal going.
Is it stuck? Should I oil it?
No – you need to turn the hand wheel towards you first and then pedal away with both feet – the right one slightly in front of the left. (the video clip is silly but made me laugh and relax and do it right)

“A treadle machine makes stitches far superior to those of a modern electric machine”
In the right hands I am sure it would

But it was lovely once we found our rhythm and of course the fantasies started – patchwork quilts, tango dresses, bags…

But today it was curtains and work had to stop when dark fell and the lovely long sewing room got too cold even for me

Learning a Second Language

February 7, 2011November 13, 2014 ~ Kate Wilson ~ 4 Comments

It all began like this

An early start to the day to queue up for a place in one of the free Catalan classes that are organised by the Generalitat. I cycled over for 7.00am and found one person already waiting. Luckily for me she was someone I knew so we spent the next 3 hours chatting before the doors officially opened.

After a short and very tricky language test we were both allocated to Basic 1, the bottom level!
I had been listening to and reading Catalan for months but didn’t have even a soft grip on the grammar.

For 6 months I went twice a week to the school. My class was made up of three or four main groups. The majority were women from Morocco. Next was the group of castellano speakers from Latin America or Spain. Then a tiny group of two African women but they rarely came on the same day so could hardly be called a group. And lastly my German friend and myself – the Anglo Saxons.

A long time ago I read a book about immigrants to America who were going to an English class in New York. It was a humorous story about diverse strange characters brought together only because of this shared goal. I can’t remember the name of the book nor the author but being in this class reminded me of it all the time. Learning a language because you need it to live and work somewhere is different from being a language tourist, or a student of a foreign language in your own country.

A typical lesson.

I arrive breathless dead on 2pm
The Castellano group is already there studying
We start the class with perhaps 7 students
Slowly the room fills up over the next half hour. When the Moroccon women arrive they stride across the room to their normal seats, sit down and rustle in their bags for a while, talking all the time to each other in Arabic
Our teacher is a nice man – he wants to take the pace slowly so that everyone has a good grip of the basics. Unfortunately this means very slow indeed as more than half of the group only put in an appearance every now and then.
We work our way through the Passos book, asking ‘Com et dius?’ and ‘Quants anys tens?’ and ‘On vius?’ for several weeks
I practise learning the names of the other students. It is interesting how my brain takes in the familiar and resists the unfamiliar. Every week I write down who is here and where they are sitting but I always have to look up my aides memoires. I am so much slower to remember that Nadia is the young woman in pink, that Najad has blond hair and is very smiley, that Latifa is the one who giggles all the time. So many new names in the last year – Montse, Jaume, Ximena, Xavi, Esteve….all Catalan names that have also taken me longer than usual to remember.
I practice loving acceptance of my ‘bete noire’ – a large woman who always arrives late, chats loudly throughout the class, chews gum, has no books, never does the homework and sits with her eyebrows raised all the time as if to convey that the whole thing is a waste of her precious time. When we did the exercise on ‘Quants anys tens?’ I was amazed when she said 36. I had assumed she was much older than me. One week she arrived so late she couldn’t sit in her preferred seat and ended up amongst the Castellano group. I was happy that she wouldn’t be able to chat all the time to her friends – but I was wrong – she just did it across the room.
About 15 minutes before the end of class most of the Morrocon women start to rustle again and one by one they get up and leave, with loud farewells to all.
I did learn a lot of Catalan in this class but it was painfully slow and now at the end of the first level I have been upgraded to Basic 3 – missing out Basic 2 altogether. I hope I won’t swing to the opposite extreme and go from bored to overwhelmed.
I also enjoyed being with this very friendly group of people who in my normal everyday life I would not meet. It helped me let go of my over-studious approach to lessons and to just take in whatever new thing was on offer. Next week I will have to join a new group and will probably not have time to do anything else except try to keep up.

After class some refreshment is always needed in one of Granollers lovely cafes

A Peacful Place

February 6, 2011November 8, 2014 ~ Kate Wilson ~ 2 Comments

Please don’t think that writing so many posts in January has dried me up!
I have plenty of things to write about but sadly no camera at the moment. The night of the Burns supper it was dropped on the kitchen floor (what did I say about the whisky?) and stopped working.
I borrowed a camera to take these pictures yesterday

In need of some fresh mountain air we drove up to Pla de la Calma, a high plane 1000 m above sea level from where in every direction there is a glorious view of mountains and sky

It was a beautiful sunny day. Snow on the ground and on the distant peaks. As the afternoon passed by the shadows lengthened and I was able to play with my idea of concentrating on form rather than detail.
We grew longer and longer legs