It is traditional here to eat twelve grapes when midnight strikes on New Years Eve.
You have to swallow all of them before the clock finishes striking the hour.
It’s not easy and especially when they have seeds in them
Lucky me – someone very kind peeled and deseeded my grapes to help me out!
Happy New Year!
Soon it will be 2mil12 the year the Mayans have called the end of the world.
I wish everyone a wonderful ‘end of the world as we know it’ year.
I hope this coming year will be full of new experiences, new love, more laughter, stronger connections with all other life on the planet so that we can create the world that we dream of rather than the one we fear.
I hope it is a new world of respect for animals and nature.
I hope we can all find the courage to change our worlds and to follow our hearts.
Today we are going to drive just a little bit north along the coast to a place called Santa Susanna where there is a campsite by the sea. We have hired a bungalow for two people and three dogs! I hope to prepare for the New Year by walking along beach, watching the dogs enjoy the water and the sand, reading my book while listening to the waves, meditating on the past year and what I have learned and enjoyed as well as what I have resisted and lost.
I want to thank everyone who has helped me through this last year of change – every contact I have with you helps me through my day – and I am incredibly grateful.
I send you all much love and all my best wishes for the coming 2012.
2012 – Let’s imagine the world we want to live in and start to create it NOW!
The piano tuner came today. He was here two and a half hours and it cost 100 euros. I thought that was quite expensive but perhaps comparing prices between Barcelona and Penzance is not a good plan!
We talked about humidity which I found funny as the piano has been in Lamorna for 17 years – I imagine it can cope with the humidity of Granollers. But cold perhaps is an issue so I was advised to put some protection behind and underneath – we had a long conversation in Catalan as he tried to explain the material needed and in the end I think he suggested cork.
He explained that the piano’s pitch had gone down a lot and that it needed tuning up to get closer to the ideal which is 440. But he would need to come back in the summer to complete this task as it had fallen so far it couldn’t be raised up all in one go.
I don’t think a piano tuner has ever explained the mechanics of it to me before. And this was in Catalan!
He is now off to Columbia where he spends the winter which led us to an interesting discussion about moving between different environments. I have moved from a damp mild climate to a dry hot one which is dry and cold in winter. I have never felt so healthy as I am here – I hardly have asthma and my joints don’t ache. The piano tuner also has lung problems and he benefits from leaving wintry Catalunya to spend months in a Columbian summer. Then there is Blue who seems to be benefiting already from her change of home – she fairly dances along the street and bounces up and down the stairs in a seemingly painfree bunny-hop.
We will see how the piano copes with its recent life change.
PS what was the first thing I played after he had left?
Walking three dogs is a bit like painting the Forth Road Bridge. No sooner have you finished than you have to start again. I am experimenting with taking a longer walk in the morning with the two agile ones while Blue sleeps at home after her shorter trip to the square. Hoping to gain some time for myself after lunch
As I said yesterday Granollers is spread along the banks of the Congost – not a great rushing river but a good enough stream of water to have ducks and today – a heron
You can walk upriver – away from Barcelona and towards La Garriga – then cross the bridge and come back down on the other side. Today we went via what we call the New Park which we have been visiting since it was under construction. It is still mostly doggy people who know about it and those mystery rubbish dumpers haven’t yet started to do their worst.
Further upstream we crossed over to return on the road side which is much used by runners and cyclists and has signs marking the kilometers and strange contraptions for exercising along the way
I saw a charm of goldfinches.
A lone duck sitting on an island in the stream.
And a little bit further away a grey heron balancing on one leg in the shallows.
There are some new cultivated parts.
People seem to claim a little patch and then clean it up and plant vegetables
These hortas suddenly appear, seemingly without effort as I have never seen anyone doing anything more strenuous than a casual sweep around of leaves. I’m sure these allotments are not official but they are tolerated and create a lovely garden feel to this industrial landscape.
We also bumped into Lolita and her owner – he also has an horta with chickens and ducks. My first border collie friend in Granollers was walking free and came over to see me – then her master too arrived to ask in Spanish how I am getting on. Bonnie and Lolita greeted each other with a collie kiss. It’s really all very lovely down there by the river.
I always wish I had taken binoculars and that I could find a bird expert here to help me identify all the birds I see. I have the feeling there are lots of species living in this long snakey un-peopled belt of water and greenery, so close to industry and commerce but a little world of its own.
Granollers is a long town built along the banks of the Congost River and surrounded by hills. When you go up to the tower behind the hospital you can see the shape of it, and how although it feels very built up and in parts industrial, it does have edges and there are natural spaces all around
It’s so very different from walking the dogs along the coast path in Cornwall but the high land with the tower is beautiful in its way and one good thing about dog company is that they don’t complain, they just get on with enjoying what is there. So long as there are smells and they can run free, they are happy. They even call a truce and investigate the same paths and bushes.
There are lots of olive trees up here – old ones with thick gnarly trunks.
Unfortunately there is also the inevitable rubbish which you find everywhere here unless you are far far away from ‘civilisation’
I wonder who are the people who take the trouble to carry televisions and cupboards and lumps of concrete up a hill to dump it under a tree? Catalan people? Andalucian people? Moroccan people? Old people? Young people? Men? Women? Who are these people and why do they ignore the council dump which is conveniently situated at the bottom of this hill? It makes me sad but also curious. Anyone have any ideas?
I don’t want to finish on that image so here is another. It’s in Montseny the mountain I can see in the distance from Granollers and where I am hoping to take the dogs soon for a winter ramble in the sunshine
