benimaclet, a picture diary of my neighbourhood, part II

The main drag in the old part of the village of Benimaclet. Man, am I going to miss my little morning walks to the panadería and frutería, staring occassionally at stereotypical old world sights I'd once thought lost, like the old ladies chewing each other out and waving their breadsticks at the sky in reprimand.

With the sun shining down and the blue sky overhead, you can´t help but be in a good mood here, especially if it´s 11am and you know you don´t start work till 6:30pm...suckers!

Ah yes, the garbage bins. A figure on just about every city block, these yellow (plastic), green (glass), grey (garbage), and blue (paper) bins stick out like sore thumbs to the western eye, but I've nearly come to appreciate their tidy out-of-placeness. I suppose they must encourage a certain awareness of recycling, for what that's worth, but I'm not sure how environmentally-friendly chucking your beer bottles into pieces is, especially when they could easily be re-collected and re-filled—as they are in Ontario: The Beer Store reports a bottle return rate of 99%. Fuckin eh!

Benimaclet has what too many of the newer neighboorhoods in Valencia—and places in Toronto like Bay Street—lack: light. The buildings, even the four-story post-war flats, are just low enough and far enough apart to create a sense of coziness without blocking out the light, or one´s view of the sky, a friendly dose of which every day is, I think, necessary for the maintenance of a certain degree of mental health.

The houses in Benimaclet also sport larger-than average windows: they're nearly floor-to-ceiling, unlike the typical modern Spanish flat.

Small windows suck, especially when you can't even see the sky out of them standing up—and you're only 5'9'. Floor-to-ceiling windows are probably too much to ask, but, maybe we could settle for at least ceiling to thigh, instead of forehead to knees, like in my flat where, though the light of day is clearly discernible, only a vague sense of sky actually creeps in around shoulder height. I have to bend down to tell you if the sun is shining, and snuggle up close to the window so that the light falls on my page when I'm reading. Apart from being a pain in the ass, this can be really depressing.

I've also noticed that, in general, the furniture here is lower, the kitchen counters, for example, only come up to mid-thigh, the toilet appears mischievously distant as I ponder it from above, and I have to bend down to wash my hands afterwards. Between leaning over to look out the window, wash the dishes and check for evidence of splashback, I've really put a strain on my lower back.

For me, this is a real design flaw, and given that I'm, at best, average height, I can only think that the kitchen counters must have been installed with grandma in mind, frying-up a storm, as she obviously does more or less from morning until night (when she's not brandishing bread sticks in the street, or hobbling over to the frutería to discuss tomato prices with Consuela and Ahmed, the Pakistani guy who sells us fruits and vegetables).

Spanish homes tend to be set up like personal little fortresses: equipped with practically light-proof persianas (blinds, which, I must admit, I am a fan of—apart from the back-rattling sound they make everytime you pull them up or down), they're the ultimate refuge from the street, which is great, because, as far as I can tell, only 3 things seem to go on in the average Spanish household, and none of them require outside imput: eating and meal preparation, sleep (both of the post prandial, and nocturnal variety), and television-watching. Thus, the lack of light and general unfriendliness presented by the blinds-down faces of the buildings doesn't really matter to people here.

When the blinds are down they're not out on the street taking a stroll remarking to themselves how cold the area seems during siesta or at night. Only crazy foreigners or people running home late do that...No, they're either asleep, nearing sleep, or watching tv, as far as I can tell from the street that is, noting the tell-tale buzz of the buk-tube and the peaceful stillness of happy citizens vegetating away...

The design of Spanish flats does (as I've perhaps made clear) bother me, which is why I spend most of my time either inside doing my best to imitate my sometime compatriots, or outside, basking in sun amid the openness of the street and Valencia's cafe culture.

Calle de la Alegría, or, as the Spaniards say, en Cristiano: HAPPY STREET. Fuckin right! This is the happiest little street in my neighbourhood, mind you he doesn´t look especially happy, neither, for that matter, does she, but that´s par for the course here. Back to the street. Nothing much happens on it, really. It´s just a quiet little, particularly content-seeming, street. Cool!

benimaclet: a picture diary of my neighbourhood, part I

Benimaclet used to be a village in its own right; it is now a neighbourhood in transition, existing in a strange flux between village, neighbourhood, country, and city. About 200 metres from my 10 year old apartment block—a 12-story C-shaped structure with a semi-public patio garden in the centre—Benimaclet ends and the farm fields begin. The change is not softened by any musical flow into the country, there´s no soundtrack and Beethoven´s 6th symphony does not gradually and triumphantly usher you into the pristine, pastoral countryside. It just ends. You walk to the edge, there´s a huge empty roundabout, its 5 shiny black asphalt lanes throwing the sun into your eyes. Beside the roundabout there's a (famous) Horchatería, whose semi-paved parking lot fills up every Sunday night as Valencians from across the county come for their Horchata and Farton fix. On your right, beyond the green overgrown (cultivated?) ditch, which the Horchateria's patio (with it's farton frying hut!) looks out on, you can see green fields;

they're so flat they seem nearly to be set in a depression. On your left, there's a—rather decrepid looking—football stadium. Straight-ahead and beyond: an 8 lane road, some semi-abandoned-looking fields, and, behind that, what looks like more city, or maybe suburbs, or maybe something in between. What you see in the distance is actually Alboraya, which, like Benimaclet, also used to be a village in its own right, and still remains more self-contained than Benimaclet, but appears also to be rapidly losing ground to development.

This photo is pretty representatitive of the low country surrounding Valencia. You can see the sea in the background. The distances look closer because of the flatness of the land. Don't ask me what they grow here, but I've seen some cucumbers and watermelons. There's a horrible smell that occasionally invades the city from the North. We call it the chorizo queso podrido smell because it smells like a mix of rotten cheese and salami. I've figured out—one particularly pestulent day when jogging through the countryside—that this odour originates from the fields, specifically, out of the irrigation chanels than run alongside them and which carry the spent drain-off from the fields. That's why the smell comes in waves and only on certain days: when the farmers decide to get their revenge on the city dwellers.

Some people are angry about this (not the watermelons—I stuck that part in after, nor, for that matter, the smell, which was a still later addition). A community group called perlhorta ("for the Garden?"—horta is Valencian for huerta, which means garden. It's the name of this county in the province of Valencia) http://www.perlhorta.org/nova/ has been fighting to save La Huerta, organizing protests, workshops and even a "mini-university" out in those green fields beyond the Horchateria. Their graffiti, as well as their website, is written in Valencian: "save our land!"..."Live Benimaclet!" I discovered this group a few weekends ago at the Alternative Fair in the Turia gardens. It was encouraging to see so many dirty hippy types buying organic produce, eating vegetarian at the food stalls, slugging cold(ish) beers bought from entrepreneurs toting ice-filled garbage bins, talking to representatives from GREENPEACE, the local Palestian rights organization, etc. There seem to be lots of people in Valencia who care about saving the world, eating healthy food, and having a good time. I've never seen the Turia so dirty as the day after the fair though. It smelled like urine, beer bottles and broken glass were scattered across the ground, and each and every one of the skylights of the new subway station under the bridge (both of which are designed by Calatrava) were smashed into pieces. I grabbed some photos off the perlahorta website (the two pictures of fields and the last picture of a construction site). You can see the fields of La Huerta as well as some of the buildings typical of those being thrown up around Benimaclet.

Cuba Trip

I´m going to Cuba!!! (September 1st to October 3rd). Amanda and I just got back from a weekend in La Sierra Pobre (the Poor Mountains), which is located about an hour outside of Madrid, where we attended a pre-departure meeting of Sodepaz (http://www.sodepaz.es/), the NGO with which we will be travelling to Cuba. It was a lot of fun. There were people from all over Spain who will be travelling this summer, in various groups, to Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Palestine.

Sodepaz is an NGO that focuses on international cooperation and solidaridy. This means that they're not a charity, nor are they politically aligned. They do, however, encourage a closer, more open look at some of the regimes we traditionally approach (at least in the main-stream media) with a (usually negative) pre-formed opinion or bias, such as that of Fidel Castro in Cuba. With this goal in mind, Sodepaz organizes trips to, usually under developed, countries in order to come closer to understanding the reality lived by the people in those places. Some of these trips involve working in some sort of project that the NGO is developing in that country, others, like the trip to Cuba, focus on education (ours) and making connections, as well as more traditional-style tourism. We will be travelling in a small group, meeting-up with academic groups, citizens groups, members of the Communist Party, as well as visiting various projects being developed by Sodepaz and their partners, such as CubaSolar, a group that is installing solar panels on rural doctors offices, or to an agricultural school in the countryside.

The idea of the, supposedly mandatory, meeting this weekend near Madrid was to get to know the organization, learn a few things about the country we're going to visit, and meet the people we´ll be going with. Unfortunately the other 4 people in our group didn´t come, so Amanda and I had to do the touchy-feely team-building drills in pairs. We—among other stunning achievements—successfully climbed a tree (working in-tandem) and developed a strong sense of team membership, as well muscling-out some impressive group dynamics. We also threw some tennis balls around in a circle, demonstrating impressive coordination, and applied face paint while detailing our deepest travelling fears. Anyway, we met lots of cool people (from other groups)—that was the only real drawback of the weekend: that we didn´t get to meet the other members of the group we´ll be going with—,enjoyed the tropical-themed mojito disco, and left the weekend pretty pumped: the trip sounds AWESOME. It's 21 days (traevlling with the SODEPAZ group). We start in Santiago and wend our way through the island, finishing in Habana, then we´re going to stay on another 10 days or so wandering around on our own.