We Nearly Drowned Watching The ‘Poseidon’ Movie

Watching this Movie is Dangerous

You’re going to think this is ridiculous, but we both were in serious danger of drowning as we watched the movie ‘Poseidon’ last Friday night.

We hadn’t planned on watching Poseidon, in fact it was supposed to be Woody Allen’s ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’, but the 100s of copies on display in Al Campo the previous week had mysteriously disappeared. I don’t think they were sold out. For a start they were in the ‘cheap section’ (€4.99) because, if Spanish TV is anything to go by, the general Spanish public seem to prefer a diet of Steven Seagal, Jacky Chan and, for some bizarre reason, Ashley Judd films. You can almost bet that there’ll be one of their movies on every week on the main Spanish channels. So ironically, good movies end up in the cheap section, whilst the trash stay at full price (works for me).

Anyway, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ was a bust, so I settled on Poseidon. Okay, it was a complete change of genre, but Empire movie mag (which I trust completely) had awarded it 4 stars out of a maximum 5. Sure it wasn’t going stick in the mind long after the final credits had rolled, but a thrilling piece of escapism every now and again is part of what movies are all about.

As Empire had promised it was an exciting, fast moving film with more than its fair share of tense moments as characters (a still square-jawed Kurt Russell and a gay Richard Dreyfuss amongst them) battled against overwhelming odds and an ever-rising ocean inside an upturned cruise liner coffin.
Part of their attempts to escape a watery grave involved swimming for long stretches under water to find ways to move onwards and upwards. These nerve-jangling scenes prompted a discussion between Andy and I about how we’d fare if we were unfortunate enough to find ourselves in a similar predicament.
One thing led to another and before we knew it we were both holding our breath with the characters as they blindly swam through a murky underwater corridor and into dead end after dead end.

I’m sorry to announce, we were those guys who didn’t make it. Tragically we drowned a few feet before our heroes finally discovered a hole leading to life giving fresh air.

Clearly we didn’t really drown, but I can tell you it felt as though it had been a close thing as we sat on our sofas red faced and gulping in huge breaths of air.

The thought really tickled me though. What would investigators have made of finding two drowned corpses in their own living room with Poseidon playing on the DVD – freakily realistic special effects or what?

TripAdvisor Tenerife…The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But…Unless You’re Liquidised.

I’m outraged of Puerto de la Cruz. I’ve just been censored on TripAdvisor Tenerife, or as one expert wittingly coined the phrase…liquidised.

This happens when members go ‘off-topic’, or post abusive, offensive or racist comments and TA Big Brother steps in and wipes out their post. This seems to have been happening more and more recently. Anything that’s remotely juicy disappears, replaced with the intriguing:

-:- Message from TripAdvisor staff -:-
This post was determined to be inappropriate by the TripAdvisor community and has been removed.

When you dip into TripAdvisor Tenerife, you’ll notice that many of the queries don’t make for engrossing reading, so a little contentiousness adds a bit of welcome spice now and again. When I log in and see the ‘message removed’ post my curiosity is aroused; what could have been so bad to have warranted being ‘liquidised’?

Well I’ve just found out.

A musician who sang in the Casablanca Apartments resurrected a post about Puerto de la Cruz from a couple of years back to mention that they were now singing in the Shamrock Bar in town (cue post removed for self promotion), but that wasn’t what prompted me to reply. What prompted me was this from an earlier comment:

“I cooked quite a bit when I stayed at the Casablanca cos we found it difficult finding a decent English restaurant, I live in Spain and never found Spanish food tasty, I live near Benidorm and I like good old English carveries etc. You will really enjoy your holiday, don’t get me wrong but I wouldn’t recommend Puerto for its restaurants.”

Now somebody having a severely limited palate is their own business. But when they go on a public travel advisory forum and try to tell people that Puerto’s restaurants aren’t very good they make it everybody’s business. They are putting their empty head above the parapet and should therefore expect to be shot at.

I felt compelled to comment, to put the record straight…and found myself subsequently liquidised.

Okay, there might have been a hint of sarcasm in my reply (it could and probably should have been a lot worse) but basically I confirmed that if anyone wanted English restaurants, then Puerto de la Cruz was not the place for them. However, if someone was looking for cuisine which reflected the Canarian, Spanish and South American influences found in authentic Tinerfeño towns then maybe it was.

My advice is gone, but that of someone who is clearly gastronomically challenged remains…and we wonder why a lot of people continue to view Tenerife as little more then Britain in the sunshine.

Okay, what language are we speaking here exactly?

¿No se puede hablar español? ỊSi, pero a veces yo creo que no puedo entender Canario!

Sometimes it has to be said we can be a bit late off the starting block. Although we’ve been paying national insurance stamps for years, we’ve never actually had anything back in return. By this I mean reduced prescriptions, or reduced travel etc.

It’s our own fault; to get these involves a few more hurdles which, in true ‘mañana’ fashion, we’ve never gotten around to vaulting.

The other day we decided to take the bull by the horns and apply for a ‘tarjeta sanitaria’ (national health card) and, as Andy tackled the Correos, I headed to the health centre in Puerto de la Cruz armed with every document issued to me in the last 40 years (I’m not sure that the Duke of Edinburgh award was going to be helpful, but I thought that a certificate showing that, amongst other things, I was a marksman might come in handy…just in case anybody really pissed me off).

The first surprise was that the reception was almost completely empty. I began to think that maybe it was my lucky day, but as I approached the counter and asked the receptionist if I was in the right place, he told me that that a new centre had opened in a different part of Puerto de la Cruz and I’d have to go there. Or at least that’s my take on what he said. What he actually said was:

“Blah, Blah centro nuevo blah blah blah La Dehesas blah blah blah. Blah blah llegando blah blah arriba blah blah…entiende?”

Actually that’s not 100% accurate, because there are far more consonants in blah blah than this guy used. I don’t know if he was practising ventriloquism or something cos I swear, his mouth didn’t move a muscle.

My Spanish is nowhere near as good as it should be; I’m only too painfully aware of that. On the other hand how can anyone understand people who don’t P-R-O-N-O-U-N-C-E their words? I know I’m going to struggle with the old guys up in the hills, but I sort of expect someone whose job is to man an information desk to maybe speak a bit clearer.

If someone dropped you in the Gorbals in Glasgow, the chances are that you would find it difficult to understand some of the locals – but that wouldn’t mean you couldn’t speak English. Same can apply here. I was reading on a forum recently about a guy who had a Spanish girlfriend from Malaga who struggled to understand some Tinerfeños.

There are signs in some government buildings which say that if you don’t speak Spanish you should bring an interpreter. I’ve always believed that it was aimed at the punters…maybe I was mistaken.

You think you’ve got the measure of us…think again.

I realise that I may be starting to sound obsessive about the Correos (Spanish Post Office for the uninitiated), but they just keep coming up with new ways to confound us and make life that little bit more difficult.

Their latest gem was a cracker and a perfect insight into the ‘mas o menos’ culture that emigrants to the island must learn to adapt to…or end up walking the streets babbling away to Chuffy (obscure Armstrong and Miller reference) like a demented madman (or person if we want to be PC about it).

I handed over my two packages to the girl behind the counter waited to hear the price I’d already worked out in my head whilst I’d spent half an hour waiting my turn…€6.30 (and no, it didn’t take me the full half hour to work it out).

Instead of simply stamping the packages, she dug into a drawer, pulled out three sheaves of paper, each one half the size of the individual packages and proceeded to try to stick them on to one of the envelopes. They were clearly far too big and also weren’t self adhesive, so she had to stick them on with cellotape.

“What are they?” I asked, worried that this unsolicited addition was going to cost.
“Oh, just a promotion,” she answered.
On each sheet was a picture of the Spanish national football team. The Correos were obviously making sure that the world was made aware of their country’s success in the European Championships…and why not.
However, I noticed that in the centre of each sheaf of paper was a small stamp. I sort of got the feeling that it was supposed to be detached from the rest of the paper before the lot was stuck to envelopes. But hey, she’s the one who works there, so I left her to it.
It must have taken her between five to ten minutes to stick the sheets to the two packages (not the best example of time management in my opinion, especially when the queue is heading for Guinness Book of Records proportions).
Finally she tapped information into her computer and turned to me.
“Seven euros,” she smiled.
“How much?” I asked her to repeat the amount, just in case I’d mistranslated.
“Seven,” she confirmed.
“Err, that’s not right,” I insisted, thinking ‘hear we go again’. “Did you charge me for those bits of paper that I didn’t ask for in the first place?”
“No; there’s no charge for them,” she printed off the receipt and pointed to the total printed on it. “See…seven.”
“I think there’s been a mistake,” I kept my voice calm; I was going to need her with me if we were going to sort this out. “Each envelope is €3.15, yes?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And two envelopes at €3.15 each is €6.30, agreed?”
She grabbed her calculator and tapped away at its buttons. A frown spread across her face.
“Agreed…that’s strange,” she looked at her computer screen. “But it says here seven euros.”
“But it’s mistaken, yes?” I felt progress was being made.
“Clearly,” she agreed. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

I handed over my money and left her still frowning at her computer, her faith in its infallibility shaken…until the next customer. I know it was something to do with the additional stamps, but I’d been ready cause the exact same thing had happened to Andy two days previously. The thing is, we know how much our postage is down to exact grams, and we can speak enough Spanish to challenge obvious mistakes, but the innocent visitor probably wouldn’t know any better and would blindly pay what they were asked.

I truly and honestly believe that these kinds of scenarios aren’t schemes to rip unsuspecting customers off. In my experience Canarios have proven over and over again to be about the most trustworthy, honest and genuine people (except taxi drivers of course, but that’s a given) that I’ve encountered anywhere. It’s simply a symptom that runs throughout the psyche; a certain lack of attention to detail – the ‘mas o menos’ factor. It can be as frustrating as hell especially if, like me, you’re prone to pedantry, but it’s all just part and parcel of living on the island of eternal spring.

Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho…and really bad eggs

We’ve just added a brief history of Pirates on Tenerife page to our Real Tenerife Island Drives website. It shouldn’t have been, but it was surprising to discover that some ‘big names’ in pirate folklore were frequent visitors to these shores. I say that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise because at the time the New World was attracting blackguards and scurvy sea dogs, the Canary Islands were the last stop before merchant ships headed across the Atlantic, subsequently returning ships put into port here, so there were treasures galore waiting to be plundered. It makes sense that some ‘A’ list pirates would turn up.

There were some great stories about these miscreants; I particularly like the one about Francis Drake’s nephew, John Lovell who was seriously lacking in tact and diplomacy, or Amaro Pagaro, who sounds as though he came from the Johnny Depp school of piracy and was mischievous right to the end.

The other thing that occurred to me was that most of these guys didn’t simply appear on the horizon, cannons blazing. They seemed to have business partners on the islands, so the line between piracy and business dealings seems to have been a rather murky one. Take the case of Sir Francis Drake. To the British, a naval hero; to the Spanish, a wheeling and dealing privateer.

But I suppose it’s that grey area between good guys and bad which makes pirates so fascinating, even if many of us do view them through romantically nostalgic rose tinted spectacles.

How to avoid gridlock – Tenerife Style

After the end of Los Realejos’ Flypa 08 festival on Sunday, we left El Socorro beach and headed back to the car, parked about a kilometre up a steep hill on a semi-circular road which also served as the approach to the main road.
As we drew closer to where we’d parked, we could see that chaos had descended on the area. Cars seemed to be pointing in all directions, bonnets to boots, boots to boots and bonnets to bonnets. A quite incredible feat of engineering had clearly taken place. The upshot being that nobody seemed to be able to manoeuvre anywhere. In the middle of chaos central stood a bewildered policeman. We wandered past and soon found the source of the problem, right next to our car. A large minibus was stuck in between two lines of parked cars, unable to go forward because of a badly parked white Berlingo (what is it about Berlingo drivers?) and unable to reverse because of the trail of cars behind.

A portly, agitated woman blocked my way.
“Do you have a mobile phone?” She asked in Spanish, spoken with a strong German accent.
“Err, yes.”
“Then phone the police,” she demanded.
I pointed to the policeman thirty yards behind us, who had acquired a growing number of advisors.
“I think they might already know about the problem,” I replied, leaving her to her flustering.
It’s interesting the way different nationalities react to the little frustrations living in Tenerife can throw up. The Spanish, shrug heir shoulders and adopt a philosophical approach, whereas the Germans, and to a slightly lesser extent the British, huff and puff and make outraged noises.

The minibus’ manoeuvring was taking it within inches of our Fiat Punto, which although not contributing to the problem, was far too close to the action for my liking. When we’d parked, there’d only been parked cars on one side of the road. Now they lined both sides making progress for anything bigger than…well bigger than a Punto, difficult.

No matter how carefully he eased forward, the mini bus driver couldn’t make enough space for the bus to pass. Then somebody on the bus must have had a brainwave. Its doors hissed open and a group of Canarian men emerged, laughing despite their predicament. They surrounded the Berlingo and with a heave and a minimum of fuss made a much better job of parking it than the owner could ever have managed. Then, just for good measure, they ‘re-arranged’ the position of the car on the other side of the bus as well.

It was simple, but effective and it created enough space for the bus, and the rest of us to continue merrily on our way without the need for calling in the boys in blue.

Smokin’

Anyone who tells you they’ve done/seen it all probably stopped learning about the world they live in years ago. There’s always something new to discover…something that may change long held perceptions and cause you to view your world in a different light.
All of which is just a long winded and roundabout way of admitting that, for the last four years, I’ve completely been wrong about Tenerife cheese, which I’ve always considered bland and tasteless.

In my defence I blame a restaurant in Los Gigantes for this. It was British owned, but was one of the few places that actually served any Spanish cuisine and they had tapas on the menu, so Andy and I sat at  table and asked if we could order some racions, prompting the waiter to announce, bizarrely:
“Ah, you’re the people who won the radio competition.”
This clearly confused the hell out of us.
“Errr, no…not that I’m aware of,” Andy replied.
 “It’s just that you’ve ordered tapas and we’ve been expecting a couple who won a tapas meal in a radio competition.”
Now he was confused.

We had to insist a couple of times that we definitely weren’t that couple before he believed us and took our order. Looking back, it seems quite dim. He was trying to give us a free meal and we talked him out of it.

What I found strange about the whole exchange was that the restaurant was pretty full. Surely it couldn’t have been that unusual for someone to order tapas. I mean to say, ordering Spanish food in a Spanish province…how radical is that? I looked around at what the other clientele were eating. Burgers and chips, toasties and chips with an extra serving of chips, baguettes with ham and cheese…hmmm.

The food was fine, but the only tapas dish I remember from that day was the local goat’s cheese. It was Mr Bland of 62 Bland Avenue, Blandsville. It was the Orlando Bloom of cheeses and since then I’ve avoided Tinerfeño cheeses like the proverbial plague. Even in my local supermarket when an assistant stuck a platter of cheese under my nose and asked me if I wanted to try some. I dismissed her with a snooty ‘I prefer to eat cheese with stronger flavours’.
It was insensitive and a mistake on so many levels. I’d rejected her and dissed her homeland’s cheeses. She was understandably miffed and has never forgotten it. Since then whilst other customers are offered free brandies, albóndigas, cakes, choccy donuts etc, I get diddly squat, but I know the shape of her back pretty well. All thanks to that place in Los Gigantes.

Recently, I was carrying out research for a short article about Tenerife’s cheeses and figured if I was going to write about it, I’d better remind myself what it tasted like. I bought a wheel of smoked goat’s cheese from Arico and, expecting another trip into Blandtown, hoped that my poetic licence was up to date.

What a dolt. For four years I’ve been denying myself some of the best goat’s cheese that I’ve ever tasted. It was smooth and smoky with a flavour that was fresh, yet full of subtle flavours. Its aroma transported me to a small clearing in a tropical forest where there was a wood-smoke fire liberally sprinkled with herbs.
I’ve seen the wheel off in less than a week. I’ve put it in salads, drizzled honey over it, wrapped it in Serrano ham and simply just nibbled on it like a mouse who’s just discovered nirvana.  All accompanied with a sigh and a: “Wow; that is good…this is great cheese.”

It’s probably just as well that this revelation has eluded me for the last four years, my cholesterol levels would probably be through the roof by now (even if goat’s cheese has less cholesterol than cow’s). And I’ve learned a valuable lesson. One bad experience doesn’t make something fact.

The Forbidden Country

We’ve lived on Tenerife for four years and despite having walked all over the island, we’d never explored the dramatically monickered ‘Barranco del Infierno’ (Hell’s Ravine). As we’re currently writing features about the best places for hiking on Tenerife, it seemed an opportune time to discover whether the ‘Barranco del Infierno’ deserved its status as one of Tenerife’s most popular walking trails.

The mistake we made when Andy phoned to make a reservation (they only allow 200 hundred people a day) she told them that we were planning to write a feature about it.
The man on the phone’s attitude immediately changed and suddenly he started behaving as though he was in danger of catching leprosy from us.

Voice on phone: (Hesitation) Err, you can’t, it’s not possible.
Andy: Why?
Voice: You need permission.
Andy: To walk in the country and take some photographs?
Voice: Exactly, this is a conservation area and we have to be careful.
Andy: But isn’t the countryside open to everyone?
Voice: I’m sorry, but you need permission.
Andy: From whom?
Voice: The medio ambiente office.
He read out the number.
Andy: Okay I’ll do that, but can I make an appointment with you now.
Voice. There’s no point until you have permission.
Andy (exasperated): Didn’t you used to work for NCP car parks in Stockport.

Andy duly phoned the medio ambiente office (the environmental department) and a similar conversation took place with a girl who was very pleasant about it, but confirmed that we needed to send a fax for them to be able to grant permission. Apparently an email was no good; permission had to be given on paper (considering this was the environmental dept you might have thought they’d be keen to reduce the use of paper). The problem was that she didn’t have the authority to give permission; that was town hall’s responsibility. She gave us a name and another number to call.

Call number three. Of course, the person we needed to speak to had left for the day. The girl on the other end of the phone took our details and told us someone would phone back, but it would probably take a couple of days for permission to be granted. 

What had started out as what we thought was a simple task had taken us half the morning and we hadn’t progressed one iota. Because of deadlines, we were committed to travelling to the south of the island the following day, which left us with two options:

1. Forget about the ‘Barranco del Infierno’ for now and write about the neighbouring municipality instead.
2. Turn up at the Barranco and, if it wasn’t fully booked, pay our money like everybody else.

Sometimes common sense has to triumph over officialdom.

We’re still waiting for the call back.

A university student in India half-jokingly once told me, “The British might have introduced bureaucracy to India, but we perfected it.”
I know of a couple of Spanish town councils who could challenge that claim.

Hey Gringo – where’s my performance?

Thank god for DVDs. They mean I can actually enjoy movies in their original language, a reprieve from having to watch movies dubbed into Spanish on terrestrial TV. The Spanish do dubbing appallingly. When I watch a foreign language film, I watch it in its original language with subtitles. I want to hear the actors’ voices and appreciate the nuances of their performances, but I do appreciate that as the majority of movies are filmed in English, it’s unreasonable to expect people in non-English speaking countries to sit down to a diet of subtitled ‘foreign language’ films. Could you imagine the outrage there’d be in Britain if the main TV channels aired subtitled movies during primetime?
So, I suppose the Spanish have no choice but to dub movies, but they could at least make a decent attempt at it instead of using the same couple, a fat bloke and his wife from Burgos, to provide the voices for every movie and every character in it.

The result is that Dakota Fanning sounds as though she’s a sixty year old midget with a forty a day habit and Will Smith sounds as though he’s a Mexican bandit holding up a stage coach. In fact every female sounds the same, as does every male. Irrespective of age, sex, nationality, ethnic background, the voices are always the same.
It raises the question, how on earth do the Spanish (I say Spanish, cos I’ve seen dubbed German films and they seem to use actors who actually sound a bit like the person they’re dubbing) know who’s a good actor and who isn’t? What’s an award winning performance and what’s a bag of shite? Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Gérard Depardieu– all sound exactly the same, Mexican bandits the lot. Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Halle Berry, Keira Knightley likewise; all washed up hookers who’ve been on the booze and ciggies for far too long. It’s enough to drive you to hold up the Wells Fargo coach. Actually, I’m being unfair, there is one exception to the rule; good old Sean Connery. They can do him pretty well, but then can’t everyone?