Golf, Flamenco, and the President

Hello all, and apologies, should such be needed, for the hiatus between entries.  I must say that I am always impressed that folks who write for a living are every day able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard without being distracted by the infinite universe of vaguely agreeable and diverting things that could be done instead of composing a piece – especially as the vast world-wide time wasting web beckons at every idle moment.  A toast to professional wordsmiths the world round for their diligence.

Since last update we’ve had a long Fourth of July weekend, trips around the area, and visit to a bull ring for a flamenco opera, and a visit by the President.  Our Golf TSI has arrived from San Diego, the weather has moved into full Spanish summer mode, and we’ve started Spanish lessons with a private tutor.  Our house-to-be is now a mere 12 days from being ours-in-fact, and the trickle of Hospital folks coming and going from the Command has become an ebbing and flowing tide as new faces arrive with every Wednesday’s rotator flight and familiar ones are seen no more.

I shall try to describe each event briefly in the following, and see if I can find a few pictures to add a bit of interest to maundering and meanderings, but I will post this tonight come what may.  Let’s see how far we get.

We had initially planned to take advantage of the weekend of the Fourth with a trip to Lisbon, a few hours’ drive to the north of us, and by all accounts one of the favorite sites of the folks here to visit.  We had reserved a hotel located near the beach, on the train line between Lisboa  and Sintra – the summer home of Portuguese royalty,  known for a gorgeously whimsical collection of summer palaces.  Alas, the boy began to feel unwell, and I began to have reservations about dog sitting arrangements, so figuring no vacation is worth too much stress we pulled in our horns and decided to stay local.  And on reflection, everywhere we look we’re surrounded by….Spain!  So it’s not exactly a sacrifice.  We explored a couple of locales right outside the base at first.

We devoted the first morning to finding a popular local churro stand in the town of Rota.  I know that Taco Bell  and Disneyland sell "churros" but these have the same relation to Spanish churros that Wonder Bread has to a crisp, hot French baguette.  These guys are fresh made to order, flash fried and sprinkled with sugar or drizzled with chocolate and then served with a cup of hot chocolate that is so thick the churro will stand up in it.  Absolutely, decadently delicious.  I'm not sure that Spain ultimately profited from all the gold it took out of the New World, but they definitely knew what to do with chocolate when it arrived here.  They are served out of a large wheeled kiosk - think Food Truck with no actual truck - and taken away in paper cones and small paper cups.  I think we made it 5 steps before a shady bench offered us a chance to feast in greedy, lip-smacking bliss.  We spent the rest of the morning wandering through the old heart of the city, finishing with tapas for lunch at a sidewalk bar in the shade of some buildings past which a cooling breeze made a merciful transit inland from the sun roasted beach.  The sun having reached its zenith we retreated through the rapidly emptying streets, and joined our host nation in a mid-afternoon siesta.  What a civilized custom.

The next day, all agreeing on a yen for shawarma (who knows what sets the gustatory imagination to work?), we headed to El Puerto de Santa Maria to a local Middle Eastern place located almost on the banks of the Guadalete river, near the historic center of the city.  We made our way past the huge buildings occupied by the sherry bodegas (El Puerto has a long history as a sherry transshipment point, and boasts a couple of estimable producers of its own), past the castle one so often finds buried in the center of old Spanish cities, to the riverfront and parking.  Shawarmas eaten (not exactly the flavor I recall from the food stands at home, but pleasantly spiced and  a bit more exotic ), we walked out to see the castle and check in with the folks at the Oficina de Turismo, only to find both in the last moments of closing for the day.  The remains of an antiques fair were being noisily stacked away and loaded up in the courtyard outside the castle walls.  We stood a bit to take in the scene, the Castillo de San Marcos resplendent in the early afternoon sunlight, and then turned tail and made our way home.  This siesta thing is an infectious idea!  How have we let this escape us in the States? 

We spent the next two days running around the base gathering together the various documents, receipts, and official endorsement stamps required to pick up our car, which had arrived by truck from Bremerhaven.  We had last seen her on a bright San Diego morning, dropped off at the shipment office in El Cajon, California.  She was trucked to Galveston, loaded onto a freighter and made the ocean crossing to Europe from there.  The company website had allowed us to track her progress, but we could never get more specific than “On a ship at sea” or “In Bremerhaven awaiting inspection”.  This had an effect not unlike that of the NORAD tracking of Santa Claus’s progress on Christmas Eve has on eager children for us.  She’s getting closer!  She’s on land! She’s on a truck!  She’s almost here!  She’s here!  She’s here!  So, naturally we were on fire to get the paperwork out of the way and collect the car.  Had this been a base in the US it would, of course, have been impossible on a long holiday weekend.  As it turns out though, although there is a substantial US presence and infrastructure here in Rota, we are on Spanish base – more like visitors on a prolonged AirBnB stay than lessors of property.  So…all the Spanish folks, who we have hired in honoring our agreements with the Spanish government, were at work in the various offices we needed to visit.   Now, come the next Spanish holiday (that will be St. James’ Day on the 25^th of July) they will be off, but the arrangement seems an eminently practical one.  As an aside, the fact that this is Spanish base accounts for the fact that the US flag does not fly, except for on the 4^th of July and other special occasions.  It is quite a deal here when Old Glory is raised and lowered making the event even a bit more special for its rarity.

The car was eventually collected from the shipper’s offices, temporary passes displayed, and parked in front of our on-base house.  She seems no worse for her travels, and has but a few more inspections and formalities to go before getting her Spanish plates and – hopefully – blending imperceptibly into local traffic.

We next set off to Arcos de la Frontera.  Arcos is one of the Pueblas Blancas , a collection of impossibly quaint white washed villages  that occupy often breathtakingly high hilltops and promontories in the Andalusian provinces of Malagá and Cadiz.  Many of them have been occupied since pre-historic times, and have undergone the typical succession of rule in the intervening millennia.  Arcos de la Frontera was a Moorish possession in Al-Andalus until Alfonso the Wise took the town in the 13^th century.  Looking at the place, which is set atop a narrow ridge at whose base the Guadalete river winds around all but one side, I believe that Alfonso deserved his epithet for dislodging what I imagine must have been a determined enemy at considerable tactical advantage. The town subsequently earned the “De la Frontera” moniker by being on the front line of Moorish/Spanish conflict until close to the end of the long Reconquista.  It is as lovely a place as you can imagine.  We parked at a plaza in the new town below the ridge and hiked up to the ancient village.  We explored a bit, although we had arrived just as the churches, castles and museums were closing for a midday rest.  We did make it through the doors of the Convento de las Mercedarias Descalzas in time for Donna to step to the closed window inside the foyer, ring the bell on the wall, and, when the window was opened, to place money on the lazy Susan which rotated out, ask the somewhat discontented sister for galletas pinos, and then step back out into the sunlight with a box of delicious homemade cookies.  We were probably the last customers of the day, and I am sure that additional heavenly mercies will be accorded the nun who had to put up with this final group of ignorant tourists who could only just figure out how this dignified process was meant to go on.  May blessings be upon her; they were good cookies!

We headed up the street to the main square, Plaza del Cabildo,and  peered over the balcony at one side down the precipice and away to the South over the hills and fields of Cádiz province.  We had a lovely lunch at the Parador de Arcos, splitting a half bottle of cold palomino fina, a crisp white  wine made from grapes that would normally become sherry but decided to go in a different, very appealing, direction.  After a couple of hours sipping, nibbling and gazing out the window across the Spanish countryside we headed back out into the plaza.  The cathedral and the rest of the city were still a couple of hours from coming back to life, so we made our way back to the car, planning a next visit soon and early enough to visit the cathedral, and to get more cookies!

The week that followed was short one, during which each day grew warmer and more humid, and the essential wisdom of the southern European way of life – ceasing work when the sun is at its most potent, and heading out to begin social life at 10pm when the sun has been down an hour and the heat has begun to dissipate – became abundantly clear.  Modern times these may be, but most Spanish folks do not use air conditioning at home and really on this sort of adaptation to cope with summer.  Anyway, on Saturday evening with the day beginning to fade we found ourselves en route to the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. 

The town has many points of interest that I shall explore some other time at length, I hope.  It was, by way of example, the port of departure for Columbus’s 3^rd voyage to the New World, as well as the port from which Magellan’s small flotilla left on its way to circumnavigate the globe, and to which the last surviving vessel of his expedition returned.  It is also the home of my very favorite sherry varietal,  manzanilla.  We were headed there for none of these reasons however.  Instead we were on our way to La Plaza del Toros, where Salvador Távora’s spectacular rendering of Carmen – she of Bizet’s irresistibly hummable opera – as flamenco spectacular was to be staged.  And here, a couple of hours from the cigar factory in Seville, in a bull ring, in the heart of flamenco itself, how could we not attend?

I shall not be able to describe the production adequately, I am afraid.  The music owed very little to Bizet, and was provided by a drum and cornet band long famous for its performances in the processions that mark Seville’s Holy Week.  The tuning sounds at first high and discordant to an unaccustomed ear, but it fits the action and the setting unerringly.  In fact, about two thirds of the way through the piece a recorded section of Bizet’s score is played  (the habanera) and the lush, harmonious chords seem oddly facile and prettified for the earthy and passionate nature of the performance.  The essence of the show though is flamenco dance, flamenco song and flamenco guitar.  The guitar you have likely heard, and it was expertly played by a small group who strummed, picked, drummed and shouted the melodies and rhythms.  The flamenco song itself, sung passionately by two female artists, was as powerful a thing as I have heard.  Plaintive, elemental and altogether bewitching. The dance – which carried the bulk of the narrative of the story – was simply breathtaking.  Both male and female leads again and again demonstrated both athleticism and grace, carrying the audience along with sinuous motion and irresistible rhythm.   As it turns out, Spanish audiences really do cry “Olé!” when moved by a spirited performance and it was cried many and many a time during this one – both by my neighbors in our tiny plastic seats on the sand of the bull ring, and by yours truly on several occasions.  It was lovely, and indescribable, and I wish you had all been there.  There was a point at which the dancer playing Carmen performed a flamenco pas de deux with one of Andalusia’s legendary dancing horses, and it was marvelous.  The horse really does dance, and I’m sure had  better footwork than me.  No great claim perhaps, but he’s a horse!  Oh!  I could go on and on, but I suppose I have done.

The last of the weekend’s events was a visit by the President to address the troops here at Rota this past Sunday.  Tickets were distributed a couple of days before, so Donna and I grabbed a pair, and met up with some friends to carpool to the event site.  We stood in line for about an hour or so as we were all filtered through ID checks and metal detectors into a huge hangar where folding chairs had been set out and a podium had been erected.  It was a diverse crowd of Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force and civilians, as well as row upon row of Spanish military folks, all accompanied by spouses dressed to the nines.  We sat for a fair stretch, serenaded occasionally by the Navy Band, until the “Whoosh” of Air Force One landing on the airfield behind the hangar could be heard and the press corps ran off to photograph the official party.  We waited a bit longer as the Commander in Chief was whisked off to the pier to tour one of the USN Destroyers stationed here, and then – head visible above the crowd – the President strode into the hangar and onto the stage.  I wish I could report that the address was inspirational or stirring, but what it really was was inaudible.  That is to say there was sound, but with the echoes in the cavernous hangar and the constant whir of large fans pushing hot July air around the building, what one heard was something like  “ Murmur mumble rumble murmur Troops!  Rumble murmur grumble Spain!  Grumble murmur rumble Families!  Murmur murmur the USA!...”  I will observe that the President is an engaging enough speaker that we all clapped at the appropriate moments (or most of them, going back later to review the whitehouse.gov video), and then went back to snatching words from amongst the aural chaos.   Mr. Obama then thanked us all, climbed off the podium and - giving his Secret Service Detail fits no doubt – made his way through a rapturous crowd, shaking hands.  It has charmed me immensely in the days since to meet folks who are still moved to have been so greeted by the sitting President.  God Bless him for taking the time.

Anyway, then home for your exhausted correspondent who has only today recovered sufficiently to relate all of this, however poorly, to you my patient reader.  I’ll add some pictures tonight, and send this out forthwith.  I’m on call next weekend , and thus restricted to close by the base, so I promise my next will be briefer.