We’re near to a school, so we rise at around 7.00 with the sun and the sons and daughters that arrive at school across the way. Our home is one of those three-storey terraces that grace the streets of many old cities in Europe, ours being the oldest, I need to remind you. The portico is the entrance hallway to our home and the patio is the reception area. So the new patio is on the second floor open to the elements, with a few steps to the huge flat roof.
Outside to the right the residences open out on to the best fish restaurant in town, pedestrians weaving their way through the tables which are all occupied every night. To the left and round the corner in Calle de las Palmas are lower price cafes and restaurants where they sometimes have music and local community flamenco, which we were involved in one night, squeezed improbably in behind stacked tables moved aside for the occasion. Two minutes away the shopping streets get busy with tourists.
After our long morning walk, it is back to our home and we can smell the paella scents that come from a less known cafe. Jaime, the owner, is creating something special on the upstairs patio. Ana, his partner is there along with her Ukrainian parents, Vita and Sasha, who are visiting. We are fortunate to have Ana to translate but it is work for her because she is an interpreter.
We talk as the chef, unusually serious, cooks his prize dish, the gorgeous liquid bubbling away as he adds first the seafood and then the rice with me ,trying my very amateur ‘bit shaky’ hand at videoing the process. It is time to eat so we go through the drink cheers with Valdepenas vino, Albali Verdejo Sauvignon Blanc, from Jaime’s home town in three languages, then the corresponding bon appetites. Sasha shows us a video of a type of cossack dance, their closest copy of the flamenco and tells us their paella is a vegetable soup that is their ‘go to’ food eaten at any meal.
The paella is certainly superb, made tastier by the atmosphere within which we ate it. The owner of our home had made a connection with two old Aussies such that he invited us in to the inner sanctum of his very personal life. It was as though we had a longer and deeper connection from years before, and not just a vacuous Tripadvisor plug. But we will use this technology to stay in touch and look forward to swapping my video with his detailed recipe. It’s strange that we have made friends throughout Europe on our walking adventures, but none from Spain, Corrie’s second tongue, but now due to an indirect lodging request, we at last have one.
