Carrión de los Condes

Christ surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists

Carrión de los Condes is a small town with two fascinating churches and a monastery.  There is not much more activity there now than there must have been in the times of El Cid.  The Condes, or Counts, of Carrión were two cowardly rascals who ran away from El Cid's pet lion, one of them hiding himself in the toilet chute.  Imagine a medieval castle's water closet and you get the idea!

Against his better judgement the hero married his daughters to these two ne'erdowells.  On the journey back to Castilla they stripped the girls, tied them to trees and whipped them, saying that they were not noble enough to be married to real counts.  Of course they got their comeuppance, which you can read about in the Romance del Mío Cid.  I have the version in Menéndez Pidal's Flor Nueva de Romances Viejos.  If you want an English version, you could try this one:  The Lay of the Cid, but I haven't read it and can't say if it's any good.

Archivolt Carvings Church of Santiago- two fighting knights

The Church of Santa María is slightly older than the Church of Santiago, but the main doorway of the latter is fascinating, with archivolts showing a range of figures, including dancing acrobats, a grieving woman and fighting knights.  I hope you can make them out from my picture.

This is Romanesque art.  Carrión is on the Camino de Santiago which is one of the best places in Europe to study this early medieval artistic style.  And walking along under a perfect blue sky across the rolling flat and empty plains of Castille, you can almost feel the pounding of horses' hooves in the distance and sense the imminent arrival of El Cid on his batte charger!

Parsnips: the Taste of Winter

The parsnips grew beautifully this year.  They thrust down their milky fingers deep into the soil and seemed to grasp hold of the earth.  More than one broke as I was digging them out earlier this month and they were so juicy that the sap immediately gathered in beads on the open end.

Now we are eating them.  To sweeten a soup they are divine; roasted with potatoes and pumpkin (also from the garden) they are excellent; but boiled and mashed to purée we cannot have them.  Carmen has discovered they make her 'repeat'.  It's a shame: mashed parsnips with a sprinkle of black pepper are a real wintry taste.

We used a whole bed to plant parsnips because you cannot buy them in Spain.  What is more, if you go into a shop and ask for 'chirivías', the Spanish word for parnsips, the shop assistant will more than likely look at you as though you are asking for jellied wombat.

There is no getting away from growing your own, then.  And I have learnt a lesson for next year: add a little sand into the clayey soil, to make the harvesting a little easier!

The Pedant's Apostrophe

Street signs have been the theme of the week for me.  Last night I snapped a picture of the sign that you can see here.  That simple misplaced apostrophe does not lose its power to irritate me even when it is a humble Asturian shopkeeper who has no business knowing how to place it correctly in the first place.

There is a famous Spanish knicker shop called Women'Secret in Gijón.  (It is on Calle Menéndez Valdéz, which I think of as Calle de las Bragas for the number of lingerie stores there.)  Every time I walked to work last year that sign with the misplaced apostrophe offended my pedant's eye.  What is wrong with writing Women's Secret?  If Toys R Us is a rock you stub your pedantic toe on, Women'Secret is an irritating grain of sand that gets stuck in your eye.

I should not complain.  It is also amusing to stand in the street taking photographs of shop signs.  People walk past and look at you as if you are completely crazy, especially when it is raining and dark.  It is one thing to look a little crazy and quite another to look like a pervert, however, and that is why there is no picture of Women'Secret here.

Here are two more street signs in English to enjoy.

Travelling: you really have to say it with a Spanish accent- the -ll- makes a -ly- sound and the accent then goes on the second syllable.  It comes out as travEying.

Shoespiel combines shoes- pronounced show-es in Spanish- and piel, which means skin.  So these are skin shoes, leather shoes.  At first I thought it might be Shoe Spiel with that hint of Yiddish telling you they really know their shoespeak here!