zhisou

I am white. I am English, from a long line of Englishmen and Englishwomen.  I am not religious, but I bear the cultural hallmarks of a northern English protestant upbringing.  I am a WASP.   On paper, pretty much a textbook WASP.  This is perhaps why I sometimes don’t get the hothead Catholic Latin thing.

Giles Tremlett wrote of something similar in his excellent “Ghosts of Spain”, about how he had come to accept having one foot in and one foot out of Spanish culture.  Forever an Englishman, a foreigner, in a foreign country, however welcome you’re made, however much you fit in and feel at home.  He came at it from a different angle than I did. He overshot, became more Spanish than the Spanish, taking up flamenco: the whole nine metres.  I did the other thing, I crept toward this equilibrium slowly, not sure if I wanted to fit in, pretty sure that I wasn’t really Spanish-enough.  Now I know I’m not, but I don’t care.  One foot in, one foot out.

When we hit Zamora - day one of the holiday - we planned to stop for lunch.  Zamora is a busy little town in the middle of not much else.  There is nothing else for miles.  Nothing.  It’s old, like Roman old, and hugs the lovely and impressive River Duero as it ambles towards Porto and the Atlantic.

I expected something sleepy and charming,  ancient stone walls and droopy trees.  I planned to have lunch in some old bodega, sipping the local Duero reds, and tearing at the famous beef the region produces.

I got that one wrong.

We’d only been within the city limits for five minutes when some admitedly tourist-like ill-disciplined driving (by me) in the complex system of one-way lanes that skirt the modern centre led to some angry horn use from an irksome teen in his company van.  I can live with that.  A bit of cheeky hooting in response to a wayward moment of driving is playing to par in Spain: a touch rude, a little unnecessary, but regulation behaviour nonetheless.  But he carried on, way beyond what could be termed gentlemanly.    Not satisfied with this pointless agression, he pulled alongside and rolled down his window and hurled abuse at us. 

Very nice.

Glowering, he sped off to tell his friends and I pulled up gently to a red traffic light.  That was my second mistake.  The thing is, because the Spanish don’t bother obeying laws unless they have to, it’s pretty much necessary to stick a policeman at every junction.  This fella took his job seriously, he clearly didn’t see the point of having both a policeman and a traffic light if they just said the same thing.  That’s just a waste of resource.  He saw his role as making cars go on red and stop on green.   He stroppily blew his whistle, waving hard, looking exasperated that a driver would be so stupid as to stop on red.

We took a right and got all tangled up in narrow traffic-clogged alleys.   Small-minded drivers pushed their cars in the way, pushing and shoving down every little street.

Fuck this, I thought.  Let’s go and eat on the road somewhere, there must be an idylic house of homemade treats overhanging that banks of the Duero, nestling in a vineyard, serving famous this or speciality that.   At least the road to Portugal would host a few eateries for weary travellers.

You can see how I’m setting this up.

Eventually I found my way out of the maze, back with Officer Crosspatch who was busy shouting at pedestrians who’d tried to cross on the green man at a Pelican crossing.

Out of Zamora and the road empties.  Climbing gently up into the border country, there is nothing.   No houses, no towns.  The land is wild, it’s beautiful but whatever: you can’t eat beauty.

Fearing a long hungry drive to Bragança and a serious mixup of meal times, I took a chance on the next town: Something-on-the-Duero. 

Being an English WASP,  I assume all villages are posh.  In England, the villages are twee with pubs that do hearty grub.  The old post office is a cottage called The Old Post Office and has an aspidistra flying in the front window.  In England you can discover countless precious gems by trawling through the villages and eating off piste in the pubs and restaurants there.

Spain is different.

In Spain, the villages tend to be working places.  They are not full of bankers and stockbrokers who drive BMWs to the city.  They are full of farmers and fishermen and people who have lived there for centuries.  Literally.  They are genuine, real.  Authentic.  Shit.

Utter shit.

We parked in the centre of Godforsaken-on-the-Duero and looked a little confused.  There was no Duero for starters.  There were no restuarants either.  There were no undiscovered gems, no diamonds in the rough.  Just rough. Lots of rough.

The only place that did food was an open-air pool on the edge of “town”.  We drove up there, avoiding the mules and shit.  

They only did sandwiches. 

So we had sandwiches.

Then the wasps came.   Dozens of the little fuckers buzzing about, equally keen to get in on the sandwich gig, perhaps equally bemused that Shithole-on-the-Duero didn’t have a fucking restaurant.

We jumped and danced, trying to flick them away, but they didn’t go anywhere.

“This is nothing“, said the waitress, “You should have been here in July!”

No we fucking shouldn’t have.  We shouldn’t even be here now.  We’re better than this wasp-ridden hellhole.  Better.

“Go and eat in the changing rooms,” she said, “everyone else does.“

Now, I’m not a snob – but I draw the line at eating lunch in a toilet in a shitty shit town in the middle of nowhere.

Or rather I don’t.   I draw the line at being stung by wasps in a shitty shit town in the middle of nowhere whilst trying to eat a sandwich – even if that means eating in a shitty toilet in a shitty toilet of a town.