Together again

 Anthropoid Phoenician sarcophagi. Cadiz Museum

Gentle reader, it's been a busy and wonderful week.  Wednesday afternoon the rest of the family joined Charlie and I here in Spain.  All of a sudden the spartan and orderly life of a geographic bachelor and his dog blew up in a hundred wonderful ways with the addition of wife, teenage boy and Basenji.  It is so nice to have the little temporary house filled with bustle, disorder and conversation.  To his credit, Charlie had carried the burden of being my sole conversational outlet for a month tolerably well, but I believe he is glad to be relieved of the responsibility.  He is sleeping contentedly now on the cool floor as another warm day fades toward twilight, with the air of a hero who has accomplished great things and now is happy to bask in the glow of his glorious past.  The basenji, an African to his very bones, is stretched on backyard flagstones soaking up the last of the westering sun.  Though only here a scant 5 days, he seems at home this close to the haunts of his distant forefathers.  It need hardly be mentioned that the teenage boy is sleeping...


I'm embarrassed to report that the morning following the arrival of my reinforcements from home, I  bundled them into the Citroën, and whisked them off to go a-house-hunting. The next day, Donna was unceremoniously deposited at the Housing Office for her turn at the housing brief, and then collected at lunch time and once again dragged off to look at properties.  The end result of all this unseemly dragging of jet-lagged family members (for the boy uncomplainingly followed along in all this) hither and thither has, however, been worth the bother.  We have selected a house!  Donna is off to Housing tomorrow morning to stake our claim to a delightful walled garden home, not so far from the base and handy to shops.  There is grass for the dogs, a pool for the boy, a couple of citrus trees and, most important to your humble correspondent, the end of searching.  Ulysses can have been no more relieved to finally see Ithaca and fair Penelope than I shall be to sign the rental agreement.

The week was not all taken up by the quest for Spanish digs however.  On Saturday we bundled into our rental car and headed off to Cádiz.  There are many ways to reach the erstwhile Agadir of the ancient Phoenicians from this side of the bay, including passenger ferries and train service from  El Puerto de Santa Maria.  We wanted to drive though, because as long as I've been here the graceful curve of La Pepa, the new bridge, has beckoned from across the water.  It's an amazing structure - a 3 kilometer long, 187 meter tall, cable-stayed suspension bridge that swoops in a long graceful arc above the bay.  It was only opened months ago, and is point of pride for all the Spanish folks I have mentioned it to.  After detouring around El Puerto we found the highway entrance to the bridge, and across it we sped.  The view of the city, the bay and the mainland - distant mountains gauzily visible through the late morning haze - was magnificent.  It required a fair amount of concentration to keep up to the speed limit and not slow to enjoy the panorama.

The name "La Pepa" deserves a little bit of explanation. The official name of the bridge is "The Constitution of 1812" bridge, celebrating the place of Cádiz as the site where the first Spanish constitution was proclaimed, back during the Napoleonic war for the peninsula.   It would be overturned only 6 weeks after the restoration of Ferdinand VII, but was by all accounts a  foundational document of classical liberalism, and served as a model for constitutions around the Mediterranean and the New World.   Anyway, the Spanish people nicknamed the 1812 document "La Pepa", a diminutive form of the name Josephine, because it had been proclaimed on March 18th, the Feast of  St. Joseph.  I love the idea of a grave and formal document being given a nickname!  It's like calling the Federal Tax Code "Old Stinky Pants", or the Bill of Rights "Molly".  Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, safely parked in an underground parkade on the outskirts of the old city, we headed out on foot.  At the Tourist Office we picked up a map. Each of 4 possible scenic strolls was highlighted in a separate color on the map, and as it turned out, indicated by a matching colored line painted along the sidewalk.  How civilized!  We headed for the purple line, but soon took off among the labyrinthine streets in search of Plaza del las Flores on a quest to find one of Cádiz's famous freiduras - the original takeaway fried fish stands it is claimed.  30 confusing minutes later we were at a table at Freidura Las Flores, and tucking into cold beer and hot fried seafood.  The place was thronged on a hot Saturday afternoon, and there was soon a line waiting to be seated.  We crunched our way through an assortment of flash-fried finned and tentacled delicacies (maybe 30% of which I could tell you the names of), and then paid up and headed off down the purple line.

I have no idea what I'm eating, but I like it.

After more meandering, with a stop for ice cream, we came to the Museo de Cádiz - the province's major museum.  It was about 2:30 pm by this point, and the folks at the admission kiosk indicated that the museum closed at 3:00, but that we were free to explore the archeological floor of the museum until then if we wanted (and very kindly declined to charge us).  This was fine with me, as the two things I had really come to see were a couple of truly extraordinary archeological specimens.  The museum's collection itself had really been founded on the basis of the discovery of a magnificently preserved Phoenician sarcophagus during the construction of a shipyard in the city in 1887.  The bearded figure of this "anthropoid" sarcophagus (he's on the left above) was crafted around Sidon in the mid 5th century B.C.E, probably by Greek artisans and shipped to some wealthy Phoenician merchant here at the farthest extremity of the (then) known world.  It wasn't until almost 200 years later that the even better preserved and more richly carved female figure from about the same time was discovered, and the pair united in the Museo's collection.  I've been trying to find out a bit more about the circumstances of discovery of the later, female figure but have not found much.  I'll have to go back with better Spanish and more time.  I hope that the two of them got along well with each other in life is all...

The rest of the weekend was devoted to rental cars, groceries and the constitutive processes of homemaking wherever one is located and I shan't bore you further with recounting them.  There was some truly amazing tapas by the docks in Rota (oh, the shrimp and garlic!), but perhaps I shall tell more of it another time.

We are all together again.  Hooray!

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