DIA DE CANARIAS

DIA DE CANARIAS = CANARIES DAY

On 30th May each year Tenerife, together with the other six Canary Islands of Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, celebrates Canaries Day - the anniversary of the inauguration of the first Canary Islands Parliament in 1983.

Everywhere you go you will see people dressed in the traditional costumes and hear the local music. Schools celebrate the day before, and Parque de la Reina is no exception. Here are some photos I took of the school parade on Friday morning.

A local band

I was given one of these buns baked by the school.

 

Nothing is more refreshing than a slice of watermelon

One of my early morning walk friends with her, granddaughter and great-granddaughter 

AND - if you want to buy an apartment in Parque de la Reina, mine is FOR SALE

Click on APARTMENT at the top of my blog to see the photographs.

SCRAP- and a 100 word story

A couple of years ago a fence was erected round the undeveloped building land in our area.



Already the fence has been breached, in some places by dog-walkers who resent being dispossessed, in others by the youngsters who occupied the rough ground years before the construction comany acquired it. They're doing no harm by walking their dogs or simply by sitting outside on sheets of cardboard enjoying the warm nights of Tenerife.

What surprises me is that the fence is bent back but still there.People are so desperate for cash that most of the metal was stolen for scrap before the fence went up - electric cables were stripped for the copper, the aluminium lamp shades have all gone, and every drain cover is missing.

The holes have been filled with rocks to avoid accidents.

AND NOW - a 100 word story about scrap, written for Friday Fictioneers and prompted by this photograph posted by Rochelle on her blog. https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/

TIP BOSS

Santosh held the wire in the glowing heart of the fire – there was no shortage of fires here – and then fixed it precisely in place before leaning over to kiss Jacinta.

“What have you made?” she asked, “It’s monstrous.”

“I call it Tip Boss.”
Santosh stared at other groups huddled round other fires for mutual protection. Taking a deep breath of the stink that passed for air on the tip, he stroked Jacinta’s belly and promised her, “Our son will not live here – I will sell my art.”

A year later ‘Tip Boss’ was the centre-piece in Santosh’s own gallery.

I HEAR THUNDER - a 100 word story

After a fortnight away in England visiting family we have decided to drop the price of our apartment. I have therefore spent the last few days re-advertising it. If you like the idea of owning an apartment in Tenerife, the details are on the APARTMENT page of this blog.

Now I can concentrate on writing again, here is my contribution to FRIDAY FICTIONEERS prompted by a photograph on Rochelle's blog   https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/



I  HEAR  THUNDER

After months of hiding in cellars, trembling at each explosion and venturing out only when driven by hunger, Shira crept away through the ruins.

Carrying her daughter among broken timbers and glass shards, she dodged from shadow to shadow until they were in the fields.

Even in the ditches they dropped flat every time a bomb fell, but when they reached the hills the sounds of war were mercifully distant.

Sheltered beneath a tree, they slept until woken by a crash directly overhead. The child screamed, but Shira said soothingly, “Hush - it is only thunder. See, here comes the rain.”

BLUEBELLS and a 100 word story

I have spent the past two weeks in England visiting family. I won't bore you with the details except to say that roughly 60 people attended my granddaughter's christening, and about two-thirds of those were related to the baby!

Spring in England is glorious, and especially so in Sussex and the South Downs. One lovely morning I went with my two daughters, their husbands and the baby to admire the bluebells around Ditchling Pond, and this photograph prompted my first 100 word story of the month.

TROLL

 They peered over the rail, trying to locate the source of the sound.

“I told you to tiptoe across,” Mandy scolded, “Now you’ve woken it up.”

“Nonsense - that was only a frog.” Alan raised a chauvinistic eyebrow at Jon and they stamped their feet defiantly.

“Stop it!” Debs pleaded, “I’ve just got her to sleep,” but it was too late. As Millie began to whimper, Debs wheeled the buggy away towards the bluebell field. Mandy treated the lads to a withering glance and followed her sister.

“Women’s hormones,” Jon scoffed, just as a huge hairy hand grabbed his ankle.

ZUMO, ZOTE & ZANAHORIA - the end of the A-Z Challenge.

ZUMO in Spanish means juice.  I begin every day with a walk, a shower, and then breakfast, which always has to start with fruit juice. Oranges are around a euro a kilo and make the perfect base for whatever other fruits are in season.

Bananas - we bought some of these this morning at the local market -

mangoes,
strawberries,
or papayas.
This papaya tree is just up the road from where we live - I didn't know before I saw it on one of my morning walks that the fruit grows directly from the trunk.

Continuing my Spanish words theme - here's another one.

ZOTE is a Spanish word meaning dimwit, though whether that is a strong enough word to describe the people who deliberately set fires. Every summer our bomberos – most of whom are volunteers - have to fight to save homes, livestock and crops from total destruction. The fact that they eventually succeed, despite the difficult terrain of steep barrancos and inaccessible cliffs, is a tribute to their courage and training.

                

I love the way words can still surprise me, and here’sanother Z word I found.

ZURCIR = to darn. I presume this means mending socks but, like the expletive “Darn it!” in English, another version is used colloquially – “¡las zurcan!” means “to blazes with them!” which ties in nicely with the previous paragraph.

ZANAHORIAS  are carrots - this was one of the words it took me a long time to learn when we first arrived. 

This road sign in Las Galletas amuses me. The road is about ten metres long, one step from the beach, and the rest of the alphabet is nowhere to be seen - every other road in this small village is named for some dignitary with three names. Calles A to Z would have made life much easier!

AND FINALLY

Until a few years ago all cars registered in Tenerife had the prefix TF followed by four numbers and then letters indicating the year. 

This one is about 20 years old, but bang on target for my final A-Z post.

If you've stayed with me throughout the A-Z Challenge, thank you - your encouragement has kept me going - and if this is your first visit, welcome and feel free to browse.

 My experience of this year's blog-fest has been like the curate's egg, but thank you to the A-Z Team for their sterling work. I shall continue to visit as many blogs as I can, but I am flying to England on Friday for a fortnight with family and friends, so forgive me if I fail to respond immediately to any comments left on my blog. 

YARDS & YAYO - a story for the A-Z Challenge

YARDS  Americans call a garden a yard and it always used to throw me. To me the word conjured up an image of an unloved space with a dustbin or two and marauding cats – not a lawn and flowerbeds and trees. 

But here in Tenerife a lawn is a luxury – it takes too much maintenance and has to be watered constantly. Also the majority of us live in apartments without a patch of dirt to tend, so we build little walls or plant flowers in pots and call them gardens.

This is our ground floor terrace garden complete with baby lime tree – (did I mention our apartment is for sale? Click on the Apartment for Sale page so see more photos) - 

-  some back yards and alley gardens in our neighbourhood -

- this one could do with more water -

and if you only have a terrace you can still create YOUR YARD IN THE SKY. Our neighbour likes the sun but he is very tall!

Here's a piece of flash fiction I wrote last year - a finca is a small-holding rather like a large garden, and the story is set in Tenerife. Yayo is another name for grandfather - its English equivalent might be Gramps..

YAYO

My cousin was getting married but I didn’t want my grandfather to go – the truth is I was afraid of what he might do. “Yayo – it is twenty years since you left the south and it will be a long day," I said, but he rolled a cigarillo with fingers stained by seventy years on the land and said, “I will go.”

Outside the church Yayo stood obediently for one photograph and then sat under a tree so peacefully that I relaxed, but on the way to the restaurant he said, “Now, take me to the finca.”

“But Yayo, it was sold years ago.”

“I am old, not stupid, Tomas – I know it will be different.”

As I feared, where his fields had been were only houses.

“There’s nothing left,” I said, but before I could stop him he’d unzipped and pissed against a figtree. “Yayo! People will see," I cried, mortified, but he was unrepentent.

“Let them – I planted this tree.” He plucked a fig, split it open with a horny fingernail and sucked the flesh. “The taste has not changed! In a good year this tree could yield a thousand kilos – Consuela made wonderful liquor from these figs.” He spat out the seeds and settled his hat jauntily. “Let’s go, Tomas – the party can’t start without me.”

XENOPHOBIA - A-Z Challenge

XENOPHOBIA
has been in the news lately, and Tenerife is no exceptoin to this prejudice. It is a difficult subject to broach and discussions can become heated. 
I am British, and a large number of Tenerife residents are also foreigners here, but every nationality seems to have sent more than its share of  perceived stereotypes to the Canary Islands.
For example, Rumanians are often in the papers for committing robberies, and drugs come in from South American countries on a regular basis. This makes everyone view both nationalities warily.
More personal is our own experience that if someone shoves to the front in the market waving a €50 note for a bunch of bananas it is always a German. The experiences of far too many gullible tourists prove that you have to be very careful when buying a camera or a phone in a shop owned by an Indian, and when a drunken idiot falls from a hotel balcony it is usually a Brit.

We have friends from many countries, and we are all embarrassed on occasions by the way some of our own countrymen behave, but the instances above are indisputable facts. Small wonder that, although most Canarians are lovely, welcoming people, a few are xenophobes – you’re just unlucky if you are served by one in a shop or cafė.

A few years ago there was a flood of Cayucos – those unstable wooden boats that crossed 300 kilometres of ocean from Africa. I was actually in Los Abrigos when one was escorted in out of the night by a lifeboat, and I saw the exhausted people being given bread and water by the local restaurateurs before the Cruz Roja took them away in ambulances.

 The sight of their empty boat the next day, with its home-made urinals and rotting food scraps, brought home to me how desperate they must have been to embark on sugh a journey.  Most of those people were re-patriated as illegal immigrants, but some stayed, and there are a lot of Africans here – every promenade has its ‘lookie-lookie’ boys with their sunglasses and watches, or groups of hair-plaiting women..

But it's not easy being black here.
One black friend told me he used to drive a fancy car but the policia stopped him every time he went out in it. The assumption was that if he was black he must have stolen it. Now he drives a nondescript car just for a quiet life. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to make these minorities bitter – perhaps the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Our Centro Cultural hosts a Nigerian party each year, and when I was drawn by the music I stopped a toddler from escaping into the night. I picked him up and a moment later his mother claimed him – I thought she was never going to stop thanking me, and I was invited in and given a plate of food and a beer. A memorable evening.

We always remember that we're strangers here too - XENOPHOBIA flows both ways.