events

This was my first evening in Roses, the photo is timed at 20:49pm.  Everyone has left the beach and things are quiet once more.

I very much liked Roses, it was a relaxing place to be.  No shops really, most everywhere was geared towards paraphenalia for tourists, t-shirts with "I ♥ Roses", sun cream, lilos, books but only best-sellers, clothes and jewellery and the like.  

Most of the tourists, almost all really, were french.  Which made it doubly difficult for me to change chips; that is to say to switch from speaking french, which I'd been doing for almost three weeks, to spanish.  Especially since most of the spanish didn't speak castillano but catalan.  So I was making horrendous mistakes.  Hell, at one point I asked for "rojo" instead of "tinto" for red wine.  I don't think I've done that since I first started to learn Spanish almost twenty years ago!

This is the morning after the morning after, Saturday 30th July, I must have had a day without any photos at all.

One day I went to Figueras to try and buy a book since none of the shops called bookshops, librerias, actually sold books as their main product.  Books were alway's a side line to lilos, newspapers, beach attire and the like.  When I went to the tourist office to ask if there was a bookshop in town the guy was a little snotty.  Not the first time this had happened in Roses in their tourist office.  

"ah, you mean a specialist bookshop",
"yes", I replied,
"I need a bookshop that specialises in selling books".

So, I went to Figueras and managed to find a bookshop that sold books and bought my'self the book you see in the next photo.  It helped.  A day of listening to music with spanish lyrics and reading El Asedio made it a lot easier.

It might sound pretentious, and it shouldn't since I'm not that good at languages, but what I might be good at is actually changing the way I think.  In France I think in french, albeit bad french, and in Spain I normally think in spanish.  I was finally getting to do that.

Or Arroz Negro in Castillian, my favourite I've decided.  With a small bowl of alioli and a glass of red wine this has to be the nicest thing to have for lunch.  Actually, I pushed the tourist boat out and had a glass of sangria as a kind of aperitif.

Oh, and spot my new book under my sunglasses.

This was my penultimate day, tomorrow, at 1.00pm I would have to catch the European Bike Express bus back to blighty, 30 hours of coach travel.  So, and I have no photos, I ordered a paella valenciana for the most un-spanish hour of 12.00pm.  Which would give me time to eat, cycle the short distance to the bus stop and get the bus back home.

A wonderful trip.  It's funny, I spent a couple of weeks pedalling wanting to get to Spain and now I was regretting there was no more pedalling to be done; at least until next year.