Christmas at Casa Montgomery

We are always, always late putting up our Christmas decorations. This year was no different except that this year we toddled off to Portugal shortly after Christmas Day to return on the night when the decs were due to come down again. So we didn’t really have a lot of time to enjoy them.

Instead of leaving them up in the house for 12 months and risking bad luck, I thought I’d post some pics on here, so I can enjoy the house dressed for Christmas for just a little bit longer.

Instead of a Christmas Tree we have a Sprayed Branch, Lights and Old CDs.

Our Only Tree.

By the Light of the Stars.

Bucks Fizz on Christmas Morn.

The Door Handle that Requires a Strong Wrist.

Symbols of Good Luck.

Stars and Discs.

On the Outside Looking In.

Why I Won’t Watch English Language Movies in Spanish

The obvious answer is that Spanish dubbing is so bad that ripping out your ear drums with a butcher’s hook is kinder to those weird protrusions on the side of your head than subjecting them to The King’s Speech sounding more like Once Upon a Time in Meheeeco.

But that’s not the main reason.

There used to be two mainstream cinema complexes on Tenerife where you could catch the latest-ish movies in their original language; at La Villa in La Orotava and at Gran Sur in Costa Adeje. Each screened one V.O. (version original) a week. Sometimes the movie was good, sometimes it was bobbins.

The one in La Orotava didn’t last long; there’s just not a big enough audience for English language movies in the north of Tenerife.

The south of Tenerife is a different matter. In some municipalities up to 75% of the population are non-Canarios. Not all of these are English speaking, but there’s a massive percentage who are.

And yet every time I’ve been to the Gran Sur Cinema to watch V.O. There has been less than 10 other people in the cinema with me. Doesn’t matter how good the movie is, even the likes of Inception and The Adventures of Tintin didn’t bring in the English speaking crowds.

I just don’t get it. Andy and I think nothing of the 90 minute journey from Puerto de la Cruz to Costa Adeje if the movie warrants it. DVDs are wonderful, but you can’t beat watching BIG movies on the big screen. So, as most ex-pat residents on Tenerife live significantly closer to the cinema, why aren’t audiences bigger? It’s a mystery to me.

The apparent lack of support for the V.O has had me worried that it might be pulled (I say apparent because for all I know, the place is teeming on the days I’m not there).

Sure enough, for the last two weeks the V.O. movie has been absent from Gran Sur. They say that it might be back, but if they don’t re-introduce it I’ll be gutted.

I’ve been a massive fan of the movies since leafing through my mum’s Photoplays when I was knee high to a popcorn seller. I love movies and I especially get a thrill out of seeing them at the cinema.

And because I feel this way about films, I won’t watch dubbed ones.

You might think that as I live in Spain, I should watch movies in Spanish. I do…but only Spanish movies. I also watch French, Chinese, Brazilian, Swedish movies etc…all in their original language (with English subtitles of course).

Movies aren’t just about the visuals – without the performance of the actor, the movie is nothing. And that’s why dubbing is irritating in the extreme.

Dubbing lessens a movie (well maybe not one with Van Damme, Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris). You can’t tell whether a film is good or bad when you’re listening to some wooden performance from a professional dubber. Where’s the richness of voice? Where’s the emotion? Where’s the intonation or the subtlety in the performance? With dubbing you lose all of that…and subsequently you also lose the soul of the movie.

How can people who watch dubbed movies know how good an actor Leo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt is? The answer is that they can’t.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was on Spanish TV last week. I’d forgotten how delicious Richard Burton’s voice was. Imagine casting those rich vocals aside for some part-timer from Valencia with a voice that grates like nails down a board.

It would simply be a crime.

Living on Tenerife and Trying to Understand a Different Culture

Living on Tenerife involves a lot more than simply moving to a climate where you can sit back and soak up the sun…well unless you live in a bubble that keeps you well away from having any interaction with the real Tenerife.

In some ways, the British and the Canarios are similar and in some ways the culture couldn’t be more different, occasionally to the extent that it can make your head want to explode.

This week as Andy dropped off some Real Tenerife guides at the post office, I spent my time waiting for her at the car by, as usual, observing daily life in Puerto de la Cruz. This normally involves listening to the old guys at Bar Aqui Me Quedo sounding as though they’re arguing about everything under the golden globe, and enviously watching the slick moves of the pupils at the dance academy opposite where we park. But on this occasion there was the added bonus of a car crash right in front of me.
Actually it was more of a gentle bump, but what developed illustrated the gulf in cultural responses to certain situations.

The road where the bus station is now located is a slow one and accidents like running into the back of another car when you’re driving at 20 kph shouldn’t occur. Who knows what had grabbed the woman driver’s attention as she drove too close to the car in front, maybe it was the moves at the dance academy, but when the car in front stopped for people at pedestrian crossing, the woman behind didn’t and subsequently drove straight into the back of it.

It wasn’t a big bump, but it did result in a small dent on both cars. Both drivers were out of their cars pronto to inspect the damage and that’s when the cultural differences came to the fore.

The car in front wasn’t a Toyota but was a hire car and was occupied by two German visitors who looked at the bump on the fender and then reached for their documents. This didn’t go down well with the Spanish driver who didn’t feel that the damage was serious enough to warrant exchanging insurance details.

The Germans couldn’t speak Spanish but clearly understood the gist of what was going on. One of them pointed to the hire car label on their car. It was obvious to me that they were trying to communicate with the woman that as theirs was a hire car, they had to do this by the book. But she was having none of it and became more and more agitated, flinging her arms in the air and pointing out over and over again that the damage was minimal. Despite their requests she refused to give the Germans her insurance details.

Then, with an impasse looming, the German woman did something really smart. She took out her digital camera and snapped a photo of the ‘culprit’ driver’s number plate. When the Spanish driver asked what she was doing a ‘helpful’ local onlooker stepped into the fray.

Instead of pointing out that the Germans were in the right, he told the Spanish driver they were taking a photo of her number plate because ‘they were German and were trying to get money out of her.’

It was an interesting take on events and not a conclusion that I would have reached. This is what I mean about the occasional chasm between our cultures. In this case the Germans were judged to be in the wrong because they wanted to do things by the book which the culprit believed justified her annoyance at them.

She was the one who drove into them…yet she was the one who was angry. That is the sort of skewed logic that makes your head want to explode.

A few months ago Andy was sitting in the car when a local man we know reversed straight into her. Our car was in a car park and was stationary at the time which made it all the more bizarre. But the guy’s reaction was even more incredible.

Instead of apologising, he rushed across to the car, furious with Andy for, get this, ‘being parked there’. This type of thinking just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Similarly, what did the driver do when the Germans took a photo of her number plate? She jumped into her car, reversed (nearly hitting another car in the process), pulled around the bemused Germans’ car and drove off,  leaving them and their car isolated in the middle of the road.

Thirty seconds later the police arrived. I was gutted as I really wanted to see how they would have dealt with the situation.

When I witness situations like this and the approach to what I’d consider are basic laws of the road, Pirates of the Caribbean always enters my head.

I have a sneaking suspicion some drivers on Tenerife have a similar view to the highway code (codigo de la circulación) as Captain Barbossa does to the Code of the Order of the Brethren – i.e. that ‘the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.’

Why Many Businesses on Tenerife Don’t Have Websites

Apart from the stunning vistas, one of the first things that caught my eye in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco was that even in remote Berber villages, where access was by dirt track only and houses were mostly made from mud and dirt, ramshackle signs on the sides of buildings advertised their owners’ websites.

I’d already noticed that riads in Marrakech had particularly good websites compared to Tenerife where websites can still be conspicuous by their absence. But in remote villages the contrast was all the more noticeable.

It was a surprise to find that a poor and relatively underdeveloped country seemed more advanced in IT terms than its more affluent off-shore European neighbour.

I mentioned this to a guide at one point. His answer was simple, yet possibly glaringly obvious, and revealed what spoke volumes about the differences between Tenerife and Morocco in relation to attitudes regarding using the internet as a promotional tool.

“We have had to work hard for our tourists.”

Touché

The Whiskas Chronicles, Rise of The Planet of The Cats

It’s been a long time since there’s been a chapter in The Whiskas Chronicles. In my naïve human way, I believed it was because we’d all matured a little. Whiskas was no longer getting medieval on my legs and subsequently I was no longer fighting him off with the hose. We believed we’d reached an unspoken pact, where peace reigned and we lived together in perfect harmony…like ebony and ivory.

Wrong. The cat had just raised his game. He had another range of tricks up his fluffy sleeve that he’d kept hidden from us.

I should have known better (this is turning into a blog full of dodgy song lyrics). This is the master criminal who actually played possum during a storm to avoid being thrown out into the dark night; got into a bathroom cupboard and somehow managed to close the cupboard door behind him and hid from us by standing still underneath the duvet hanging over the side of the bed (given away only by the curve of his belly causing a ‘bump’ in the cover).

During these hot nights his MO is that once he’s eaten his dinner he trots out of the back door to cool down somewhere outside – or so I was led to believe. I’ve watched him do this on loads of occasions and seen him leave the premises by way of the gently wafting curtain between the bedroom and the back terrace. What I only discovered last week was that he was implementing one of his cunning plans.

As usual I’d watched him leave but this time I had to go outside a few minutes after he’d gone. But there was no sign of the cat. As I came back through the bedroom and into the living room something caught my eye. The damn cat was sitting motionless, as though playing statues, on Andy’s pillow watching me intently to see if I’d spotted him. He was abruptly despatched from his throne with a shout and a helping hand on his furry backside.. God knows how long this has been going on, Andy has been suffering with an allergic bout of sneezing for weeks. We thought summer, but cat hair on the pillow was clearly the culprit.

I’ve tracked him since and discovered that as soon as he exits the house he does a U turn and comes straight back in again via the other side of the curtain which is out of my line of sight. Obviously with us thinking he was safely outside, he’s been free to jump up on the bed and curl up on Andy’s pillow for most of the rest of the night…or until one of us made a move. Since being found out he still makes attempt after attempt to get back to what has become a favourite spot so now we have to shut the doors from the bedroom to the garden, closing off our source of air conditioning in the summer.

You cannot trust this cat for a moment, he has schemes galore in his arsenal and I had simply forgotten this or, more likely, been lulled into a false sense of security. Who knows what else goes on in that Machiavellian head.

Maybe whilst the chimps have been taking over the planet in the cinemas, the cats have been plotting and hatching plans like Billy-o. By the end of the decade we’ll all be their slaves, feeding them mice as they recline on the sofas we once lounged about on…mark my words.

What Is There for Blue-Eyed Redheads with Flat Feet to do on Tenerife?

Before I had reached spotty-faced teendom I, like every other boy of my generation, owned a Scalextric track. We weren’t well off so my track was of the classic no frills, figure of eight variety where a racing green and a red car raced each other around the circuit with endless monotony. I can’t imagine there was much of a thrill for the little plastic drivers; they knew that around the bend was another bend and so on and so on. The scenery never changed and they couldn’t veer from the groove that kept them a safe distance from each other except from when they negotiated the dangerous crossover bit. In truth, the only excitement was when our collie dog plodded across the track like a chaos causing furry mutant monster.

Some people’s lives seem to be no different from those little plastic racing drivers. They’re born and someone sticks them in a little groove that leads all the way through school, work, meeting someone, getting married, having 2.4 children, buying a house in suburbia and so on and so on. But in their case the circuit doesn’t go on for evermore, it ends when the groove in the track runs out at a  polished wooden box beside an ominous hole in the ground.

I’m not knocking it, mostly we all live a variation of being socially conditioned otherwise life would be very anarchic. But it can be depressing when people take it too far and forget that they’re individuals by living their lives like a human version of painting by numbers. I saw it this week on the way to watching Manchester United give a master-class in football. A woman in her thirties pushed a pram in front of her which presumably had the latest addition to her family. At her side was a girl of about three or four, who was pushing a pram with a baby doll in it. She was being placed firmly in that groove from a very early age.

But what really started me off on this was a thread on Tripadvisor which said something like ‘What is there for grandparents to see and do on Tenerife’.

What the hell does that mean? Is there some sort of rulebook handed out to people when they become grandparents that says ‘that’s it guys, no more late nights gallivanting at pubs and clubs. No more Kings of Leon, from now on it’s Tony Bennett or nought…and as for sex you can forget all that business from here on in.’

I was tempted to clarify by replying ‘I’m not sure what you’re asking. Are you asking where are the nice benches so you can sit looking vacantly out to sea, the shops where you can rent a Zimmer frame and the best places to buy bovril?’  

I just don’t know what it means.

Are there similar rule books handed out when someone reaches fifty? I’ve seen that one on more than one occasion – ‘what is there to do for a couple in their fifties?’ Sometimes it’s even ‘what is there to do for a lively couple in their fifties?’ By asking that question it reveals that they really aren’t ‘lively’ in the slightest.

Surely what you like is determined by who you are not by an undiscerning label?

I’m really tempted to start a thread on one of these forums that asks ‘what is there for a blue-eyed redhead with flat feet to do in…?’ and see what happens.

I’m afraid I must have been bunking off somewhere when these rulebooks were handed out as it’s never crossed my mind that when I reach certain milestones in age that I have to start behaving in a preordained way. Stuff that for a game of soldiers. Others can live their lives on a Scalextric track. I much prefer the idea of being like one of those chunky all-terrain toy vehicles that when you set it running it bounces of walls and rocks and changes direction never sure of exactly where it’s going to end up when the Duracells run out.

Impressions of Tenerife, Arrogance or Ignorance?

There’s an episode of The West Wing where Josh Lyman, against the advice of his assistant Donna, logs in to an online chat forum to correct an inaccuracy. Of course it all goes wrong and Josh finds himself batting off abusive replies. People, generally speaking, don’t like to be told they’re mistaken.

Every so often I come across something on the web that’s been written about Tenerife that has me furiously typing a comment to correct some outrageous assumption, perception or downright fiction. However, the smart part of me tells Andy what I’m doing prompting the warning‘remember what happened with Josh,’.

Usually at that point the sarcastic/outraged/acidic comment is deleted. But over the past few weeks my finger has disobeyed my brain and screeched towards the send button before I could stop it. The  authors of the pieces haven’t exactly welcomed my ‘constructive’ assistance. These included a holidaymaker, a copywriter and a travel blogger.

The Holidaymaker
Some guy left this comment on my twitter account – ‘(Tenerife) is a barren land in desperate need of some good old Spanish culture, as well as a few sandy beaches, but the parks were fun!’

His comment suggested a few things. He stayed somewhere where there was very little Spanish culture, it was barren and there were no beaches (I’m guessing somewhere like Costa del Silencio or Golf del Sur). It also was clear that he hadn’t ventured out of his resort except to somewhere like Siam Park. I replied by linking to a photo of the Anaga Mountains and Playa las Teresitas with the comment ‘I take it you haven’t been here or here then?’ thinking that it had more impact to show him his knowledge was…err…limited rather than tell him. But no, instead I entered the Josh scenario. This was the reply.

‘No I didn’t, but face it, there aren’t many beaches and the vast majority of the land could use a lot more rain..’

Forget facts, reality or anything like that. This guy just knew better. Verdict – Ignorance. No more time wasted there.

The Copywriter
There was one of those copy-written blogs sponsored by a travel company a couple of weeks ago that was so riddled with howlers about Tenerife that I felt I had to comment. One of these was that gofio was a type of meal that you ordered in a restaurant. When I pointed out that gofio was grain that was toasted and milled etc. they came back with a defiant ‘no it isn’t, it’s a meal’. Although the author had never been to Tenerife  they felt confident enough to argue the point because they had a source – another blog where there had been a few incorrect assumptions made. There was a lesson to be learned by this copywriter. Never write copy about a place you don’t know by using only the one source.
Verdict – ignorance again.

The Travel Blogger
One of the world’s best known travel bloggers was in Tenerife on a flying visit recently – 48 hours in and out again. It’s difficult to establish a rounded picture of a location in 48 hours but sometimes when you’re travel-writing you don’t have much choice and if you talk to the right people you can at least get a flavour of a place. But there is clearly a danger that some of your perceptions won’t be always right on the mark and it was clear from the subsequent short blogs that some assumptions had been made. When an indigenous resident added a political comment to a blog about The Canary Islands, the blogger felt that they knew enough to argue the toss with them. After only a few days in a place it’s pretty impressive to stray into political discussions…or arrogant. I had also added a comment but when an equally bullish reply was posted, decided, like the first of my examples, that there would be no concessions here.

The One I Didn’t Reply To
I didn’t leave a comment on the one that had left me most speechless with its seriously skewed perception. Actually it left me aghast…and there aren’t many situations where that word pops into my head. Somebody on holiday in Puerto de la Cruz had started a thread on an English language forum asking if anyone knew of any decent restaurants as they had only been able to find the usual tourist haunts with pics of food outside them.
What had me ‘aghast’ was this reply from a resident living in the south of Tenerife – ‘it’s not the greatest place for food, we didn’t find much.’

To describe Puerto as ‘not the greatest place for food’ shows that whatever they did experience , it wasn’t the Puerto I know. The town boasts approx 300 restaurants  from rustic traditional to chic modern Canarian/ Mediterranean fusion; wonderful harbour-side fish restaurants; restaurants in old Canarian mansions and houses, stylish tapas bars, Spanish and so on. But it doesn’t really have any decent British restaurants, so maybe it depends what personal preferences are. But the point was that someone felt they knew it enough to make that judgement to the online world even though their perception was way off  the mark.

It was probably the one that most deserved a comment but by this time I was ‘Joshed’ out and anyway what the hell, savvy visitors will always be able to tell the difference between knowledge and nonsense. As it happened a few other forum members diplomatically ignored the comment and posted some more usefully accurate advice.

With all of the above it’s not about getting it wrong, we all make mistakes or have perceptions based on our own experience that may not be 100% accurate. It’s about how you react when someone with a different view – or information – engages with you.

My Attempt at Cooking Fabada Bean Stew

This was a dish that had pleasantly filled my belly in a quite unique restaurant in Oviedo – eating in a barrel was definitely a first for me. Trouble was neither I nor my dining mates had realised it was a starter. They’ve clearly got good appetites in Asturias as this hearty mix of beans, chorizo, morcilla and bits of pig is a main meal in everyone but Desperate Dan’s book. There, the fabada was followed by a Mount Teide-sized platter of grilled meats. After that meal they could have stuck me beside one of their cider-spouting wooden barrels and no-one would have noticed the difference.

But despite my tum’s moaning and groaning, I was impressed with the flavours of the popular Asturian stew and picked up a recipe from a woman in Oviedo’s market who had a stall that sold only ingredients for fabada.

Funny thing is that on my return to Tenerife and a visit to the supermarket I spotted lots of little fabada packs with morcilla, chorico and tocino (a bit like belly of pork) that I’d never noticed before. In fact there were about five or six different varieties, so this week I threw one of them in the trolley.

Fabada is a peasant dish; one of those meals where you throw everything in a pot and leave it whilst you go and thresh the wheat, milk the goats, feed the hens, kick the cat for chasing the hens…you know the sort of thing.

The recipe I had was obviously fabada 101 – big, dobbing great haricot beans thrown in a pot with the morcilla, chorizo and tocino, saffron and salt. We threw in a couple of bay leaves as well just for good measure…oh and some paprika just because it felt right.

The whole lot is covered with water and left to simmer for three hours. There must be a few variations on how to cook this meal, because it seemed to me that the morcilla and possibly even the chorizo wouldn’t take three hours of simmering and in Oviedo the beans had been served separately from the meat. Anyway within seconds the house was filled with the sort of aromas that have you salivating when you walk down any traditional street in Spain at lunchtime.

Three hours later it was ready for eating. The beans looked similar to the fabada I’d eaten in Asturias but sure enough the morcilla and the chorizo had been largely absorbed into the mix. Although it didn’t quite match the Asturian fabada in the looks department it tasted pretty much how I remembered it – meaty, savoury…filling – and was considered a big enough success to be given the thumbs up regarding featuring again on the Montgomery menu. But next time I’m going to take a different approach with the morcilla and chorizo, so a bit more research is in order.

The New Real Tenerife Website

My personal blog posts have been few and far between of late on Living Beneath the Volcano. This is partly due to work commitments (YAY- food on the table) and partly because we’ve been developing a couple of new websites; Buzz Trips – which is about our travelling experiences outside of Tenerife and The Real Tenerife.

Having another Tenerife website may seem excessive considering we’ve got two websites and four blogs already related to Tenerife (and that’s only the ones we own outright, not all the ones we write for). But that’s partly the reason. Each was set up for a specific purpose. Real Tenerife Island Drives was established to accompany the guidebook of the same name but grew to be much bigger in its own right. The Real Tenerife blog was established as a record of life on Tenerife that was connected to the Island Drives website. Going Native in Tenerife was set up to accompany that travel guidebook. Walking Tenerife was created for people interested in exploring Tenerife by foot and evolved from a page on the Island Drives website that proved far more popular than we had anticipated. And Living Beneath the Volcano was my ‘den’, the place where I could write about the things that made living on Tenerife a joy and have a right old moan about the things that rattled my cage.

But it was all too much and there has been an increasing danger of things being diluted and becoming rushed and staid. We decided a serious shake up was in order and…drum roll…so The Real Tenerife has been launched on the world…quietly, because it’s still in the early stages of development.

Basically just about everything is getting pulled under the one virtual roof (except Real Tenerife Island Drives and Walking Tenerife which still have a specific purpose).

We’re really excited about the changes because it means we can have a static website and a blog rolled into one which we think will be a much more dynamic animal. It gives us the freedom to try out some new ideas and include more information that hopefully will be useful to everyone who wants to discover the Real Tenerife.

As for Living Beneath the Volcano? Well I still need a place to blow off steam, so I will continue to to be annoyingly opinionated on here whenever I feel the urge

Photographing Tenerife, Viewing Things Differently Through a Lens

A thought occurred to me as I focussed my camera on a sun-dappled, tree-lined street populated by smiling strollers wearing chic summer clothing; the women in colourful, light cotton dresses of various lengths that complimented their curves; the men in loose shirts and three-quarter length pants that were both casual and stylish. The camera liked them.

The thought that occurred to me was that my camera likes some places on Tenerife more than it likes others and that has possibly fashioned my view of some of the towns and resorts on the island.

Over the years I’ve photographed many towns, resorts, villages and hamlets on Tenerife for print and web publications. For many of these I use the images to compliment the text by trying to show the subject at its best. This isn’t always easy as there are lots of places on Tenerife that I don’t find particularly photogenic.

You can more or less point and click in La Orotava and get a result

The old towns and cities are easy. There are places like Garachico, La Orotava, La Laguna and Santa Cruz that I could return to again and again and still find new things to photograph. The rural places like Masca and Santiago del Teide have scenery to boost their lack of streets and historic buildings.

Towns with a fishing community have harbours, colourfully bobbing boats, fishing nets piled high and grizzled fishermen and those are always good subject matter.

Hill towns can sometimes pose a challenge, especially when the population has grown and breeze block buildings are in the majority like in Santa Ursula, La Victoria, La Matanza, San Miguel de Abona and Granadilla de Abona. But these have history and there are always quirky corners to uncover.

It's got a church and the buildings are inoffensive - but it's 'blah' lifeless

It’s the purpose built resorts where I struggle. Remove the beach from the equation and there’s usually very little left to interest the camera. Being new they don’t even possess any urban grit.

Funnily, Playa de las Américas, which is often unfairly held up as Tenerife’s tackiest resort by those who don’t know it has a lot of potentially interesting shots. Whereas once I move away from the beach at Playa del Duque in ‘upmarket’ Costa Adeje my camera positively yawns with boredom.

Worst of all are the purpose built resorts without a beach where the architecture is new-ish and often characterless. What the hell do you photograph there? And if there’s no sunshine, forget it. I’ve tried Callao Salvaje, Playa Paraiso, Golf del Sur and Costa del Silencio a number of times and never been satisfied with the result.

I tried to use the holes in the wall in Playa Paraiso...but still no cigar. Just can't get a decent picture.

Of course that could be my limited creativity, but search Flickr for any of the above and the evidence suggests otherwise.

The upshot of this is that there are places on Tenerife that bore me in photographic terms and subsequently I avoid spending time in them.

Another thought occurred to me as I focussed the camera and that was the people in the photograph. I point a camera up La Noria in Santa Cruz and the people in the frame are very, very different than if I point it along the promenade at…say…Puerto Colón. But that is the topic for another blog completely – and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to go there…for the moment.

If there’s anyone who has managed to get really good shots of the places that I mentioned I struggled with (I don’t mean HD, sunsets or over processed so that they don’t match what the eye sees) I’d love to see them.