Squid Ink: The Book of Costa Blanca – a Spanish travelogue

Curso Siete

Nerja

We embrace the Spanish adventure as a family. I enroll in a Spanish language school in Nerja in June and my son and I began a journey into immersion Spanish together. We figure, if he starts to learn the language at age 11, we should have an interpreter in five years. It takes less time than that.

Nerja, a classic whitewashed Spanish pueblo, sits against the sea 50k from Malaga on the Costa del Sol. Of course, tourists congregate along the sea, near the famous Balcon de Europa, but a few blocks up into the old town, near a bustling neighborhood plaza by our hostal, Spanish families spend their days around the school day routine just like we do.

We take coffee in the morning before our school day begins at the Plaza Cantarerdi, while school kids walk by with their parents. In the evenings we sit in the shade at the same plaza with gelato and Cruz Campo while the summer temperature cools. We walk the narrow cobblestone streets like explorers taking in a new Andalucian pueblo. Exploring a small European town is a natural intrigue for both travelers and for children. Every walk and every trip to the market or to school invites an adventure. We get lost some days after school and we have to surreptitiously take out our little tourist map to find our way back to the hostel for siesta after lunch. The name of our street is Bronce for a distance of five or six blocks and then curves and turns into Mendez Nunez. The sky turns brilliant robin’s egg blue every June day against the whitewashed stucco walls of the buildings and we take refuge at the Hostal Lorca’s small pool in the afternoon to stay out of the heat.

I run along the empty streets and the beach on the south side of Nerja before the sun and heat come up in the mornings. I run in the morning when the street cleaners sweep and the other runners this time of day look like footballers. I run back on forth on a 2k stretch of dirt beach at the Playa el Playazo and the breeze at the sea feels cool and the air feels fresh. I try running out of town to the mountain trails but I find the hard polished cement of the streets really bad on my knees. The street cleaners are probably used to seeing way stranger things in a Spanish tourist town than a woman in running shorts when revelers often don’t leave the bars until dawn. Spanish people stay out late, especially when the days are hot and these street cleaners are vital to the city’s image as they pick up after the summer beach goers finally go home.

Once again, just like in Finestrat, we get caught up in the rhythms of our tiny street as I try and decipher the Spanish routines. Next to the hostal, run by an awesome Danish couple, the same group of little old Spanish men hang out in a market about the size of my bedroom but lengthwise. The narrow isle of this neighborhood market is jammed with crates of local fruit, small necessities like soap and razors, tall stacks of Spanish soda, cookies and junkie cracker snacks. I finally get up the nerve to go in and buy a Fanta Limon and a can of Cruz Campo one afternoon after siesta. Buenas Tardes takes on a new meaning here as you say good afternoon until it is dark, which is close to 9 p.m. I make the old man at the market repeat the price three times. He does not speak English and I still don’t understand the price after he says it three times. I think he says the price in total cents instead of single euros which makes it a rather large number for me to know. I make a sort of joke about not knowing my Spanish numbers very well and he laughs with me. The Spanish people in Nerja act super friendly when we try and speak our newly learned Spanish—except the cashiers at the Super Sol market when I forget to weigh the produce. They have genuinely happy expressions when we talk and ask for things in Spanish. The waiters especially like to joke with my son, who knows more Spanish than me.

We eat a small breakfast at the Cantatero around the corner. This allows me to catch the everyday rhythm of the neighborhood. In Spain we take coffee, tomo un café, and eat croissants or tostadas for desayuno. The bar/coffee/ice cream shop is on the way to our Spanish school and food is the best bribe I have to get my son out of bed in the morning for school. All I have to do is ask him what he is going to choose for breakfast. He gets up excited, bless his little dudeness, although he’s rightfully groggy because the time is 2 o’clock in the morning in Colorado. The ice cream shop has a bar full of regular customers with a Spanish vibe like the Moli Dos in Finestrat.

I watch the little old men come in the bar and get their first drink of something cold. They drink one shot of something served in a chilled shot glass. Without chit chat, a small weathered man downs a shot, throws coins on the counter and he’s gone. Another skinny old man in clear jelly slippers takes his shot in a cognac glass with a little agua con gaz. My son drinks Cola Cao, hot chocolate, stirred into steamed milk and I drink perfecto café con leche. Maybe it’s just the thick creamy milk which resembles the consistency of soy milk, but the espresso machines in Spain at every bar, airport, ice cream shop or restaurant steam out their café like music.

We enjoy Nerja, but I am lost in verb conjugation land at the end of a week of immersion. I have no time to learn regular verbs before we go right into irregular verbs. In contrast, my young son with the full capacity brain flourishes and doesn’t even think about the learning. He just absorbs it all. After we learn Spanish volleyball at the beach and explore every tiny alley, we take a taxi to the town of Frigiliani because we hear there is a festival there.

Sure enough, there is a Spanish carnival, a town feria, in full summer action complete with prancing Arabian horses and Spanish vaqueros dressed dashingly in black. The highlight for us is a parade of donkey carts pulled by full sized Spanish bulls with blinders over their eyes. They are apparently not so aggressive when they cannot see. We eat dinner high on the cliff side of Frigiliani watching the diving swallows and the blinking lights of the carnival rides. We find a taxi back to our hostal in Nerja, and happily sleep through the hot night, despite the noise from the open windows. After a week in Nerja, we have gotten used to the night noise and the crazy old man who walks the streets yelling the same sing-song phrase in Spanish. He seems to be yelling some warning about the end of the world, or his lost jelly slipper. The noise level in any Spanish town ranges high because this is summer and the Spanish love to be social.

After a week in Nerja, we hook up with my husband at the Alicante airport and we make our way back for two weeks in Finestrat. As with other trips, we have big plans to drive north to different climbing areas, but we get lulled into the rhythm of the town once again. After all, the Festival of San Juan can last a whole week in this region of Spain. We stay at the Orange House because now it feels like we are staying at a friend’s house. We can arrive any time of day or night and know where to sleep and where to find the tea kettle and the cold beer. Everything is as normal. Some climbers are just coming in from Benidorm at the same time climbers are leaving to climb the Puig de Campana at five in the morning. And el tiempo esta caliente everyday. It is only feasible to run before it gets light at 7 in the morning. The days feel super humid which makes the smoke from the Spanish fires stick to the air and feel thick like an August day in Florida.

We climb at Sella when it is cool enough and cross over to the Pared de Rosalia to climb up high in the shade. There are a few 6a routes and we spend a few hours climbing in the cool air. I love going back to Sella to climb. The climbing at Sella is my favorite type with big pocketed handholds and dishlike limestone footholds on slightly overhanging rock.

When we get tired of hanging out with climbers or when we need a full night’s sleep without little gnats buzzing in our ears, we go to La Plantacion, the quiet rural hotel on the other side of town. The owner of La Plantacion opened a rural restaurant and hotel after working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia. You can tell that he and his wife love what they do. The rooms are exquisitely clean, con aire acondicionado, and decorated in North African décor and the food is absolutely amazing.

They greet us like their best customers, as they do everyone, and we eat mouthwatering dinners of rape a la plancha (grilled monkfish) and pumba ribs from the barbeque. When our son gets squirmy, he gets up and runs around the hotel with the owner’s son and a Spanish terrier yapping after them, speaking universal boy language, like Pokeman, while we finish dinner on Spanish time. I’m starting to rely on these kinds of moments when I am in Spain and this is why the pull gets greater and greater for us. As we dive deeper into the place, it gets lovelier in its many layers. This happens when a traveler starts to know people and places and begins to plant wonderful memories. One night when the restaurant is not too full, the hotel owner’s wife, Angela, brings out her own Spanish tortilla for us to sample. She makes it for the family’s dinner, but it is such a perfect soufflé of eggs that she wants to show us. We marvel at her extraordinary cooking from elegant sauces to simple tortillas and we feel like royalty sampling a tiny sliver of her exquisite tortilla. Its Spanish food made mouthwatering simple.

We spend a day at the beach at Cala Moraig and this cove of sea smacks of the perfect Spanish beach. Not because of the nude Germans sunbathing at the far end of the beach, but because the water beckons for swimming and for deep water soloing. We get cocky on the drive over and don’t use a map and take a wrong turn in the town of Benni something. All of sudden we are driving up a steep cobblestoned hill where the streets get smaller and the pedestrians get thicker. This kind of driving turns my knuckles white, but my husband just pulls in the rear view mirrors and has his little adventure. Driving might just be considered another one of the Spanish extreme sports and since there must surely be an overzealous number of extreme adventure seekers among the Spanish, driving is ridiculously fast and furious. For me, it is like leading a route that is way too difficult for my leading ability. I get sewing machine legs and my palms get sweaty. My mountaineering husband just goes for it and finds a way out of every difficult little turn without an extra breath.

We come out of Benni something, Benissa or Benitachall, at a stop light and carry on to the white villas on top of the Cala Moraig cliffs. My Spanish is still so bad that it’s hard to pronounce the names and so many towns in this part of the Costa Blanca seem to start with a B.

Two beach bars have opened for bocadillos and helado (ice cream) at Cala Moraig. The bars are set up so beach goers can tuck into a big Spanish seafood lunch too. Serving paella is a kitschy way to catch tourists, but at some of these small beach restaurants along the Costa Blanca, the paella is superbly authentic and fresh. Paella originated in Valencia after all.

The typical paellas are grilled in a big wok-like pan full of rice, meat and seafood over a beach barbeque. The most common types of paella are paella de marisco and paella de carne and they are yellowed with saffron and slightly burnt on the bottom. Paella is made with meat or seafood and a few vegetables and look like a sort of yellowish rice pilaf. Beware though, the paella de marisco usually has meat in it as well as seafood and in paella, the bones are often left intact. Paella Negro is made with the juice, or the ink, of squid and the squid ink turns the rice a sort of blackish color. You may also bite into bits of octopus, shrimp and flakey fish in this Valencian rice extravaganza.

Before we get into the lunch scene at Cala Moraig, we let my son go cliff diving with his friends—an event that would have been highly illegal anywhere in the United States except maybe over an abandoned quarry deep in the woods of Arkansas. He doesn’t jump off of anything too high, but it makes for some good boy stories. We kayak to a little beach accessible only by boat and enjoy watching small yachts sail by. The boys kayak to a cave and only after the fact did I hear that they held their breath and dove under a rock to get into the cave. That’s two death defying sports I let my 11-year old American boy do in one day.

That cliff diving day at Cala Moraig was definitely an only in Spain kind of day. But I remember this underwater caving adventure when I see a whole Rick Steves television episode about some tourists who are led by boat to underwater caves near Naples. Hordes of tourists pay boat owners to row them out to spectacular underwater caves. The boat guides time the waves just right so they get the boats into the caves without getting the tourists too wet. My son did his adventure with a group of climber boys and there were no other boats and no money paid, which magnified the element of danger and excitement when the boys dove under the rock. The cave was icy cold and filled with large fish and he remembers taking turns jumping off the boat afterwards into the warm Mediterranean Sea to get rid of the cave’s chill. There is no way to call ahead for those kinds of adventure reservations.

We climb near Altea at a place called Olta and we enjoy the day on the high sea cliffs climbing as a family. Olta cliffs out at the end of a dead end street with an amazing drop off to the sea. There are only a few routes, with lots of gentle sea wind to cool them off, and so this area is a pleasant cliff to while away a few hours. Then, after we finish climbing, the town of Altea is close. We park by the railroad tracks and walk the steep cobbled stairs up and up to the center of Altea and find a table in the square. We eat pizza and drink café in the sun at a small Italian place. Italian restaurants are a sure bet because, as Americans, we recognize foreign food words like pizza and spaghetti. Problem solved. A few artisan shops are open, but as usual, we have stopped in town when the shops are closed for lunch. I can only stare in the windows and hope to shop someday.

One afternoon, I go with my husband to meet Vicente, the real estate agent, in Finestrat. Inspiration hits, or maybe it’s the Spanish espresso. This is the day we find our village house. I guess it’s like true love, when you find the right one, there is no turning back, for better or for worse. There was also a point I knew I had to push my husband to actually pull the trigger and buy a piece of property. My breast cancer had returned that spring and my sense of time, now warped by recurring disease and nasty drugs, gave me the instinct that there was no time to wait. We saw the house, heard the price and just sort of melted. It was time to figure out how to do this thing.

The house is actually an artist’s studio on a corner lot with an incredible view of the Puig Campana. It sits on a corner with a colorful row of village houses that the city tourism site boasts as an antique street. The little yellow and white house is the cheapest piece of real estate in town at that moment, and, like good bargain hunters, we seize on the price. It is very, very small, but we lived in small one room cabins in the mountains in Colorado when we were young. We had already walked by the little house a hundred times on every trip to the Costa Blanca and so it seemed like destiny. The outside is painted bright yellow and blue and the thick wood door is painted with Picasso-like cats.

And so the prelude ends and the real tale begins. I feel that I am still being introduced to Spain and I have no true perception of the people, the culture and even the land. There are so many mountains in this region that I can never figure out which way the storms are coming. I pride myself on reading the sky and knowing the weather, but the weather patterns blow entirely different here. One wind storm will bring rain from France and another wind storm will bring hot winds from Africa. I feel disoriented. Anyway, suddenly, with the help of our real estate agent, we start the legal process to get official papers and follow all the rules, written and unwritten, to buy a piece of property in Spain.

We need to leave in a few days to go home, so things begin to fast forward. The Spanish always think we are crazy Americans because we come to Costa Blanca for such a short time. The first thing our real estate agent does is to send us to downtown Benidorm to get our NIE numbers. Vacation comes to a halt and we start filling the days doing tedious things like, opening back accounts and standing in long queues and searching for big government offices in skuzzy downtown Benidorm.

An NIE number is a Spanish identification number, Numero de Identificacion de Extranjero. You need to have one of these numbers to legally buy property, cars, and boats or do any official business in Spain. It seems easy enough to do this if you are British or from another European Union country, but the numbers are not doled out to Americans as frequently. An extranjero is a foreigner, but in the case of being American or even Canadian, you might as well be an extraterrestrial. If the particular police official that you handed your form to, does not like Americans, or has not had his mid morning coffee, then you are denied. Our house-buying escapade takes place during the reign of George W. Bush, and we are pretty well screwed. Most Spanish don’t like Americans during the republican presidency. We need the NIE number to buy our little village house and also to get a bank account. So, here was another only in Spain issue. We need a bank account to buy the house, but we need the NIE number to get a bank account. It is a classic chicken and egg question that remains unanswered. The guidelines are unclear and different officials give different answers.

The first thing anyone needs to do to get the NIE number is to go to the local police station and get the form. That means your Spanish needs to be good enough to ask for the form—first round of elimination for us. The local police station, in the case of Finestrat, happens to be in my favorite town of Benidorm. Luckily, our real estate man gets our form and drives with us through a maze of downtown offices and city shops and tiny underground parking lots so we could stand in an epic line at the local police station in Benidorm. It feels like standing in a food stamp line. We need our passports, photocopies of our passports and two passport photos. We duck into some sort of papeleria that happens to have a copier and a camera to take passport photos. The real estate agent has clearly done this before. You could buy stationary, candy, tobacco and get photos taken in this store. I guess it is like a Kinkos, the Spanish version. Then we walk back across the street to the Benidorm police station to stand in line. There are no exceptions. Everyone has to stand in line and everyone seems to want a NIE number. The police guard the stairs into the building so no one cuts the line. People watch through the big glass window of a hotel across the street, maybe watching their relatives get their numbers. Every once in a while, someone asks the police some sort of question and they get to move to the front of the line.

It seems that rules have gotten stricter in obtaining NIE numbers, despite the fact that Spain’s population of legal immigrants has grown by millions. Not only are refugees from several parts of Africa trying to get legal, but the immigrant of the day seems to be the Romanians. The economy is bursting in Spain when we first start this house buying process, and there are jobs thanks to the European Union. Romanian families stand in line everyday and try to get Spanish identity numbers. So, we stand in a hot line of sweaty non-Spanish speaking people smoking rings of cigarettes despite the heat. We are in the middle of high rise downtown, the dirtiest, dingiest part of Benidorm and the sun is scorching the sidewalk where we wait in front of a large brick policia municipal.

It isn’t long before the heat and the cigarette smoke make me feel wildly faint. We wait in line for over two hours that first time. After enduring this long line of smokers, the police tell you when to walk up the marble stairs into the cool, shaded building. Some people have numbers and some people seem to randomly be able to talk their way up the towering marble stairs. Once inside a fast talking, Spanish official tells you that your papers are not in order and you must try again with better paperwork. Other people get their papers stamped.

Even though our real estate agent speaks for us, he is told that we do not have the proper paperwork. He argues and shows the real estate contract and copies of the municipal drawings of the property and still the answer from Mr. Grumpy Spanish official is no. I don’t blame them for denying some people their NIE numbers, but we are not the ones trying to scam health care or jobs and we haven’t figured out how to launder money or buy a big white villa with a spill-over pool. The Romanians and the other people standing in line need a NIE number to get a job or a driver’s license.

Our real estate agent’s boss, Miguel, was livid that we had been denied and he calls up some chief of police in Alicante and argues about what paperwork we really need. It seems that the rules have changed, again, but nobody has bothered to tell anyone else the rules have changed. We leave the paper work at the real estate office and wait to hear from the real estate agent.

Two days later, we go back again and stand in line for two more hours in the sweat hot streets of Benidorm only to be told, definitely no again. That was deterrent enough for me. I was sickened by the hot smells of the downtown Spanish city and all this waiting did was make me want to go home. The Spanish official had made us feel stupid for our lack of Spanish and seemed to not want any Americans to buy property in his country. He was one of a dozen officials seated behind old metal desks, but his sentiment most likely was carried throughout the office and no doubt made for good coffee break discussions. I also had to wonder about our last name. Downing is about as British a name that was ever invented. We were being punished for our blood line, or maybe I was feeling like they were trying to squeeze blood out of us. This was Spain and true blood is black, like squid’s ink.

We do our farewell party for the summer on La Cala Finestrat in celebration of the feast of St. Juan. Summer is just starting. It is the summer solstice party and a Catholic celebration of St. John the Baptist. Big bonfires are required as a symbol of the sun. The Spanish set up long tables on the beach and eat dinner, grill sardines and drink until dark. Then the fireworks start. Another dazzling display of intense fireworks explodes over our heads. We get hit with hot sparks and again I wonder abut safety. Someone explains to me that this is not like America. The Spanish feel that safety is a personal responsibility. If you choose to sit under the fireworks, then the consequences are yours. The fault is clearly your own. There are no questions of liability. At midnight, all the men of Finestrat, young and old, strip down and get into the sea. The traditional ritual is to swim in the sea and to make three wishes. Dancers jump wildly over the bonfires and at around 2 in the morning, the summer night is just ramping up.

We leave Spain shortly after the Noche de San Juanand do a tour around Switzerland and the French Alps. The rest of Europe is covered with wet and cold rain and in a few days I miss the blue heat of Spain. The air in the Alps feels heavy like cream from a Swiss cow. We drink hot chocolate and schnapps and I long for one of those ensalada mixtas with corn and olives that every little Spanish restaurant serves. I dream of fresh pescado and cold Cruz Campo. And, as if I need another dangling carrot, my husband promises me a trip back to Murcia to shop for kitchen cabinets at a Spanish Ikea, once our house deal goes through.