Fútbol,

Mijas, Spain

 

I'd bought the chorizo, the Serrano ham. A bowl was piled high with green olives; the vino was opened.

            But before my husband, Jim, and I sat down to watch the European soccer championship final, I sent an e-mail to Spain– VIVA ESPANA! - to a bar/restaurante in the Andalucian village of Mijas.

            During our stay in Mijas last winter, something lured us into this place. Not the décor – gritty tile floors; smoke-stained sports memorabilia hanging on thumbtacks; two large-screen TVs. But the welcome felt warm and the bar-top assortment of bite-sized tapas tasted as good as it looked. Jim's photographer eyes scanned the room.

After lunch he went back with his camera. "Photo? Sí," the bartender told him. "But then come back tonight for the football. 10 o'clock. Barcelona plays Villa Real. The place will be full."

            It was – mostly of men and of smoke. Someone motioned us over, brought two chairs and made sure we sat where we could watch the TV. He asked where we were from, then turned back to the screen. When in Rome… we followed. We sucked in our breath (and tried not to cough) when Barça – Barrrrrr-sa - came close to a goal. We threw up our arms in despair when they missed. And whenever one of our players slid onto the grass, we called a loud, "Foul!"

            I'm not sure there was a test but we passed. Every few days the bartender/chef had more news– "Game tomorrow, muy importante." Or, "Tomorrow's Sunday. The whole village comes for my paella – get here in time." In the farthest corners of town, we'd encounter a wave and a hearty "Hola," then hear it explained, "They've been to the game."

            In time we learned names – Felix, the fair-locked Chilean waiter whose "Did you like it?" was always so eager; Rayan, the chef/barkeeper with the gravelly voice who pumped a fist downward when Felix reported back that we had; Ilyess, the second waiter whose dark eyes crinkled in an unending smile.

By our fourth match, we were fans. We'd learned to cheer Ronaldinho who bounced onto the field, dreadlocks flying, whenever the coach decided more offense was needed; Messi ("the flea") who darted, it seemed, through the legs of opponents. When the game broke for half-time, Rayan brought Pepe, "el presidente," to our table to meet the Canadians. Pepe told us he'd loved Barça since he was a boy and that it was he who'd started this place - the Peña Barcelonista de Mijas - the official chapter of the Barcelona team's club for the great fans in Mijas.

At the end of a month, alas, it was time to go home. Our final meal? It would be nowhere else but the Peña. Ilyess slid an extra large helping of olives onto the table. Rayan, whose daily soups I'd dubbed the best in the world, made one today that he knew was my favourite. There were hugs all around and after we'd paid, Felix brought out some wine, "a little bit finer."

When all of Europe gathered this June to find out whose footballers were best, this time I cared. When Spain made their way to the final, well, we just had to be there. I made olives with garlic and bay leaves, oregano and red pepper just as Ilyess had told me. Jim pulled from our cellar a wine that was "un poco mas fino," and in front of our TV we cheered, albeit smokefree, with the boys at the Peña. We stopped breathing when Germany threatened to score and started again when they missed. At the lone goal of the game, Spanish of course, we leapt up and pumped fists to the sky.

Two days later my e-mail brought a reply, "OEOEOEOEOEOEOEO CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!!! CAMPEONES!", signed "Pepe, Rayan, Felix, Ilyess, y amigos de la Peña."

They added, "Un saludo (a greeting) y un abrazo muy fuerte (and a very big hug). We hope that you soon will be with us."

My wishes, too.

 

©Copyright: Sharon Blomfield

 

Violetta

Kartuzy, Poland

 

“I send you the smell of a Kashubian forest,” was the poetic end to Violetta’s e-mail, “the quiet of a village and, of course, my smile.” This from a woman that until two months before, I had never laid eyes on, had never heard of … and who I had struggled to speak to because her English was only marginally better than my almost nonexistent Polish.

 

 

Jim and I spent last May in a small hotel in the Kaszuby region of northwest Poland where Violetta is a receptionist. The Hotel Korman is a place where briefcase-toting business people pop in for a day or two and Polish-Kaszub families celebrate weddings and First Communions in the flower-encrusted dining room.

 

Clearly we were novelties here. Fresh-faced dining room waitresses resisted any suggestion that they might know a few words of English and giggled at our mangled attempts to order in Polish. Finally we understood - never before had the Hotel Korman had any Canadian guests. Actually we were probably the first Canadians any of them had ever met.

 

Violetta was fascinated. “Why you come to Kaszuby?” she asked and every time we returned to the hotel, we did our best to answer her eager interest in our adventures of the day. “You stay four weeks?” This dumbfounded her the most. “Why?”

 

How do you explain, when communication is so limited, your purposes for being there - that you’ve come with friends, Raymond and Debbie, for a week of exploring the region that Raymond’s great-great grandparents left 135 years ago, and that Jim and I will stay on to photograph the farms, the villages and the churches to show today’s few thousand Canadian Kashubs what their ancestors’ homeland is like? And how do you explain why Antoine and Veronica, Raymond’s great-great grandparents, left this land of gentle green hills and sweet-smelling forests knowing they could never return from the wilds of Canada?

 

I guess Violetta explains why we travel as we do. No hurried here-for-a-day traveller would find her anxiously waiting for their return. No package tour participant would hear, “Maybe you come to my house for tea,” and have that “tea” turn into a full supper and the privilege of experiencing an extended Polish family’s welcome to their most honoured guests.

 

Communication, I’m learning, takes time to develop and, even when you don’t share the same words, the result is often pure poetry.

 

©Copyright: Sharon Blomfield

 

 

 

Walking with the Great Explorer

Southern Spain & Portugal

 

What did that say?

           

I skipped back a few paragraphs in my Rough Guide to Spain and reread the line. “In a harbour near Huelva lie replicas of the three caravels that carried Christopher Columbus and his crew on their first voyage to the new world,” 

           

Duh!  Long-buried images of grade five and a stern teacher bidding us to open, yet again, our well-used social studies textbooks sprang to life.  Southern Portugal and Spain.  Prince Henry the Navigator.  Where voyages of discovery were hatched and then launched.   Spain - Ferdinand and Isabela - Columbus.

           

Southern Portugal and Spain - I would be there in a few weeks.

           

I hatched my own plan - a trek to find the sites that Columbus had touched, to walk in the footsteps of Spain’s most treasured hero and the man that we’d learned, had opened the world.

           

I began at the end - the gilded tomb in Seville’s cavernous Gothic cathedral  that stands perched aloft on the shoulders of four bronzed noblemen.  Imagine - I marvelled - it was these very stones that Columbus crossed often on his way to prayer.  Next door in the Alcazar, the royal palace, I passed through the same Moorish arches that framed the triumphant returning explorer as he strode to greet the courtier delivering letters signed, “I, the King,” and “I, the Queen.”

           

I stared into the misty horizon at Sagres, Portugal, Europe’s extreme southwest corner where Prince Henry the Navigator launched his school of navigation and the fifteenth century craze for exploration.  As giant waves thundered to the ragged edges of this rocky cape, the ground shook and I understood how ancients conjured up a frightful abyss that swallowed ships foolish enough to venture too far.

           

“Columbus convinced the king and queen of Spain to sponsor his voyage” our grade five teacher pressed onto our brains.  But she never told us how tiny were the caravels, the Nina and the Pinta, and how fragile the Santa Maria’s timbers to brave ocean swells.  I had never heard of Palos de la Frontera, whose men of this quiet town Columbus somehow persuaded to sail with him to the ends of the earth.  I never learned how its cobbled streets, so quiet today, quaked on March 15, 1493 with the clamour of pealing bells and the thunder of feet as the entire town dashed toward the docks and the returning Nina and husbands and fathers they feared had been lost forever.

           

The nearby monastery of Santa Maria de la Rabida, with its modest chapel and the simple wood cross that heard the fervent prayers of these worried sailors on the eve of the voyage, never found its way into my history book.  Nor had the fact that seven years earlier, a desolate and discouraged widower and his son, his plan rejected by the King of Portugal, stumbled upon this simple monastery and asked for lodging.  And here he found Antonio de la Marchena, its abbot, the one man in the world who could help turn Columbus, the son of an ordinary Genoese weaver into the Spaniards’ revered Don Cristóbal Colón, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of the islands which he discovered in the Indies and onto the pages of schoolbooks the world over.

           

Sometimes, you find what you need where you least expect it.            

 

©Copyright: Sharon Blomfield

 

 

 

Travel where the Nose Leads

 

A glass of white wine sipped in the kitchen of a two-hundred-year-old chalet in a summer pasture high in the French Alps.  The Alice-in-Wonderland house in Molokai we were toured through by its proud owner.  A feast of fresh fish cooked for us by our new Greek fisherman friend.  An invitation into a family’s 15-century wine cellar in the Czech Republic’s South Moravia and, now that I think of it, another glass of white wine.

           

Not one of these adventures would have happened to Jim and I (and sometimes to one of us alone) had we been trailing along, name tag in place, behind a tour guide.

           

As our travel evolves, we stay longer and cover less distance.  We carve our own path through this world.  And we make connections, usually where we least expect.

 

This morning, I received a note from France, from Jeannine Lagneau in whose Beaujolais vineyard B-&-B we stayed a couple of years ago.  Jeannine was full of news.  The grapes have blossomed and there is already fruit forming on the vines that produce the Beaujolais-Villages and Régnié wines that she and husband Gérard make.  Son Didier won a silver medal in Macon for his Côte de Brouilly wine.  Daughter Sophie is now playing in a rock band, Les Moyens du bord, and will entertain revelers on April 29 at this year’s Fête des Crus Beaujolais in the winemaking village of Juliénas.  

 

In 2005, I wrote a story about Beaujolais, about Jeannine and Gérard and their vineyard.   Just in time for that fall’s Beaujolais Nouveau release, my words flew into the netherland via the Boston Globe and its electronic tentacles.  And yes, although I often wonder, someone read them.  Someone in the U.S. who saw the story and passed it on to a friend.  That friend in the fall of 1971 was in Beaujolais - at Domaine Lagneau to be exact - picking grapes for Gérard’s parents in the annual vendange (harvest).  He read my article and contacted Gérard and Jeannine.

 

Jeannine is thrilled.  So am I. 

 

Jim and I make connections and can never predict where they will lead.  And none of that would happen if we weren’t so darn independent.

 

©Copyright: Sharon Blomfield