Tuesday 17 August 2010

To work with the sand and the sea..

I’m rocking out to Plan B’s album “The Defamation of Strickland Banks” in the beach bar rather loudly, dancing away, stocking the fridge with my phone sitting between my shoulder and my ear, a cold beer on the side. England take note- this is how work should be.

Last year me and Vincente ran the joint and had blast inventing cocktails and theme nights, drinking and partying as much as the customers. This year however, he decided that it was too much work, and even though he comes and sits on the end of the bar and drinks buckets loads of whiskey and sprite whilst rolling joints for himself most weekends, he flatly refuses to work this summer. (A fellow graduate who has decided his brain needs a rest from any kind of strenuous activity. His answer to the ‘post-uni question’ is to drink and smoke until summer is over. Then worry about it.)

So this year when I arrived back to Spain, I was pleased to hear they specifically wanted me to work another season in the same place- what I didn’t realize was that they were all going to disappear when I started my shift at 8pm.

If you looked up ‘typical Spanish man’ in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Juan- the boss of the beach bar. He has curly black hair, a hairy chest and wicked sparkling eyes that flash when he smiles. Juan beams and smiles and growls and yells all at the same time in a continuous roll of elated speech, talking to himself customers ands and staff in gravelly tones, rolling his ‘r’s so it’s hard to tell whether he’s purring or growling at you. Spanish people work ridiculously hard along the coast as they make the most of the summer season; Juan along with various sons and nephews (who all seem to be called Juan too) run the beach bar seven days a week, ten hours a day all summer.

After pats on the backs and welcome back and hugs etc, I’m handed a cold beer and a set of keys, told about banking- (which in Spain rarely has anything to do with a bank and generally involves hiding the takings in obscure places. My ex-boyfriend used to hide the day’s takings in a biscuit tin somewhere around his bar out here (!?) and once rang me in a frantic temper yelling at me not to put the washing machine on because he’d left an evening’s takings in his pocket- about 800 euro.) I hear “adios!” and various scooters zooming off into the horizon.

Bye? He leaves me to it. Apparently Juan trusts me enough to have the whole bar to myself, I can close when I want, and depending on which amigos pop down for a visit or theme nights I invent, I stay open til 7.30am, 5am or 2am, whenever. Liberating. If not slightly scary.

Following the model of last year, over the next few weeks there are a few theme nights, including melon night, white night and Hawaiian night, where I was given pretty ropey looking pair of plastic coconuts which apparently would serve as a top. (Nice try Juan) I compromised and wore my bikini top and a grass skirt. The grass skirt I liked and had loads in a box in the ice cream cupboard- and gave them out to various customers and friends. I was particularly happy to see two customers (male) wearing them as part of fancy dress outfit the next evening in a different bar. (The deal was they could wear them if they told everybody that asked, which bar the skirts came from. At the point I saw them, I’m not sure they could remember their own names, let alone remember that I gave them the skirts..)

When I say beach bar- I mean it- it’s a wooden 'chirenguito'- meaning shack- on the sand and my uniform consists of bare feet, and whatever skirt shorts or dress takes my fancy. It so hot in the day that the heat leaks into the night and I’m rarely ever cold even with the sea breeze. It’s very well built; wooden paneling and cream wind-breakers (withstanding the odd tornado), at the back are a row of BBQs where the food is cooked during the day, which at 8pm when I start are usually slowly cooling. There’s a hut attached to the side that has all the ice-creams in and a small porta-loo on the other side. It doesn’t get dark until about 10pm and one of the best things about this job is watching the sky and the sea change colour as the sun goes down. The sea and sky and even the sand seem to fade into shades of mauve, soft purple and lilac and before it goes dark- setting behind the bar over the mountains- but it rises on the sea. It’s worth it being knackered and shuting the bar at 7am to watch it light up the sea, turning the sky red, orange then slowly a clear blue colour as it hits the water. The only thing that rivals such a sight is the smell and the noise. Sea air, with the salt and the warmth feels so fresh and clean- it wakes you up, energizing, and hearing the waves crash on the sand, pulling back and surging forward is for me, so calming.

So anyway, I’m busy dancing away to Plan B (track 3, my favorite) and my friend on the phone is telling me to turn it down. I love him a ridiculous amount but he is well-known in our little circle as pretty much impossible to understand on the phone. He has a Murcia accent which means you pretty much loose the consonants at the end of all words; ‘terminado’ becomes 'terminao,' 'complicado' becomes 'complicao' and so on. This seems to translate to his English so you pretty much loose any chance of a coherent string of conversation with the lost letters. He’s telling me about the BBQ he’s having the next day, and being a man bought so much meat the fridge had a heart attack and died (perhaps it was a vegetarian fridge) and was in the process of moving the meat to another location. I can’t quite decipher where he is now and where the hell the meat is going, but I make a note to myself to not eat anything all day tomorrow if I want to be able to keep up.

“Put on what the paying customer wants, Spanish people don’t want Plan B,” he tells me. Apart from some pretty good house music, ‘Gasolina’ in a variety of forms seems to appear in the majority of bars, that and the world cup anthem- a Spanish version which is rather popular- reminding anyone that possibly missed the news that yes, Spain won the world cup and yes, they rock.

How wrong he is. I’m one of those annoying people that when I like a song, or indeed in this case, an entire album, I play it over and over again untill me, along with the rest of the world, are completely sick of the sound of it. A table of Spanish customers drinking a variety of complicated coffees ask me the name of the group and the album. Pah. Perhaps I sold it to them with my awesome shape-making. Perhaps not. In England we have white coffee, black coffee and if we’re feeling a bit pretentious we stretch to a franchised latte, cappuccino or even a frappuchino. Spain is a different story. When I first worked in a bar out here at 18, I was confronted with café bon bon, café carajillo, cortado- let-alone when you start mixing in the possibilities of decaf- from the machine, sachets of it etc. They take their coffee and ice-cream very seriously- ice-cream parlors are often open as late at the bars, a wide variety appearing in various shapes and forms for all the family. And I can honestly say, it took more time and effort to understand their bizarre coffee taking habits, that to get a good grasp of the Spanish language.

Suffice to say Plan B continues since I am head DJ, head bartender and the head of whatever I want since its just me, and I’m completely unfazed by the fact that I’ve played it over and over all evening. The Romanian security guard that keeps an eye on the beach bar is bemused but comments he particularly likes track 4 ‘She Said’ - good choice.

(He’s a really interesting guy, speaks 5 languages and was in the French legion, and from what I can get out of him has been in some pretty hairy situations. He says random wise sayings that sound out of sync because I never quite know what language or culture he’s translating them from- by the time it reaches me in Spanish it comes out like this for example; “If you knows everything and have nothing to learn more, I just kill you so knowledge is for next person. Life has no use for you without learning.”
I assure him I’m a graduate and have every intention of one day doing a Masters so definitely have a reason to not be killed. He‘s over 6 foot 4 and built like a New Zealand rugby player- I watch him pick up 5 huge parasols in one arm that would take me or my friends two people per brolly, and he was pretty firm about this blog- I’m not allowed to mention his name or his work (shit) and I’m slightly afraid to ask the massive fellow- who I’ve convinced myself is a gentle giant- quite why he has to be so secretive. Perhaps it’s better not to ask? More of him in the next post…)

A group of my mum’s friends from back home are staying in a nearby resort in La Manga, and having descended on little Mil Palmeras for a day at the beach with various children and patient husbands in tow, they come to say hello and have a ‘one for the road’ drink on their way back. (Essex is one of those places where the inhabitants seem to stick together and follow each other around, subconsciously. I‘ve come to believe that Essex is a race of people, not a county or reigon- at uni and out here, everyone gets very excited when you find a fellow Essex-lander, and an instant bond and unsaid understanding that you will be friends, happens simultaneously.)

I’m telling one of them about the Hawaiian theme night; the costumes, plates of kiwi and pineapple on the tables and free pina-colada cocktails when someone yells excitedly “Awww Marelene, another pina-colada Marlene?” (Only Fools and Horses right?) This subsequently becomes the drink of choice for the evening. I make a bucket of the stuff and ladle it out into ‘fish-bowl’ glasses, decorated with colored straws. (There was much disappointment that there were no umbrellas.) The huge round glasses that could quite easily house a goldfish or two, seem to be the typical style of glass for bars out here- they need to be this big as rather than measuring spirits in 25ml or 50ml, Spain goes by the ‘count to six and a bit more for luck’ pouring style when it comes to spirits.

The gang manages to take up most of the bar and I give out a range of crisps, olives and variety of ice-creams to keep various children happy so that the parents are able to enjoy the flowing pina-coladas. “Marleeeene” I hear over and over- apparently it doesn’t get old.

After they leave, I dash to the porta-loo and am minding my own business when it all goes very dark. I scramble about uncomfortably until I find my way out and find that it’s pretty much as dark outside as it is inside. Power cut. Some else the Spanish don’t do by half.

I find some candles and a few random lanterns in the ice cream hut and hang them along the bar top, the sea breeze making them gently sway and flicker. (Dripping wax everywhere I later discover.) The whole town of ‘Mil Palmeras and the neighboring town ‘La Torre’ have gone dark, and it seems to make the sea louder. Black waves crash on to dark warm sand and the light lost in the towns seems to have transcended to the stars. They are so unbelievably bright, without the distraction of street lights, music from bars and restaurants- there seems to be nothing but stars, so clear I feel I could pick them out.

The sand between my toes, still warm from the heat of the day, the salty sea breeze so fresh it makes me feel cleaner with every breath, and those stars- if this doesn’t make me feel good, nothing will. I am completely engulfed in that moment, grounded from the sand up to the stars, and I feel really really good.

I snap out of my hippie one-with-mother-nature moment and realize with no electricity, there is consequently a hell of a lot of melting ice-creams and ice in the bar…

One of the chefs come down to see if I’m ok out on the beach in the dark- and shows me a little trick of opening the till by sticking a knife in the back of it (I don’t ask where he learnt that trick) because of course with no electricity, there is no till.

The bar looks so pretty, I sit on one of the fridges, have a beer, and kind of just wait. The lights show no sign of reappearing, but no one seems too surprised. This is Spain with it’s ‘manana manana mentality’ (tomorrow tomorrow). I give customers candles at their tables and resist the urge to do a bit of singing to make up for the lack of Plan B on the music system. By the time I decided to shut up shop, the lights come back on as I lock the last door and hide the money in one of various genius places as instructed. I wander home- hearing tales of people’s brief encounter with no electricity- ranging from the peril of ovens turning off in busy restaurants, to the atrocity of missing Sherlock Holmes on T.V- the gentlemen was extremely displeased.

I wonder if I was the only one that noticed the stars.

Saturday 14 August 2010

the mystery of the missing dog and an 800 Euro reward..

Essex girl tales from a life in Spain...

So there were posters up all over town- a picture of a little Yorkshire terrier looking mournfully up at the camera- with a hefty reward of 800 euros for the creature’s immediate and safe return. Eight hundred! For a dog! Now having never owned a dog- perhaps I’m missing the point, but that’s a holiday to the Dominican Republic, a Mulberry handbag, a second hand car- a whole lot of things more than a yapping ball of fluff.


The missing pet in question belonged to the family that ran one of the restaurants in this little town; their windows were plastered with more of these posters than anywhere else, the family serving tables with broken hearts, nodding sorrowfully at customers when they asked about the posters that were blocking any light or view at their tables. Lilo the dog was missing. And everybody knew.

Now I was working in the same beach bar I am now- but perhaps was slightly more liberal with my alcohol intake on shift that summer. Me and my fellow bartender Vincente had a whale of a time coming up with theme nights from ‘Hawaiian night’ to ‘Melon night’ to ‘White night’ (a slight disaster when I told my friends the wrong date for that one and they arrived at the bar head to toe in white clothes only to find they were merely a strange group of people that looked like they belonged to some religious cult.) Vincente was a also a student making money in the summer and worked very hard, but on quite nights we would sometimes end up drinking more than the customers. (Free of charge, of course.) I assure you this is just the way we do things out here but have to admit this probably was a pivotal factor in this unfolding story.

I was walking up from the beach bar after work towards my apartment one Thursday about 4am- it had been a good shift- me and Vincente had pretty much perfected our signature Mojito cocktail; we’d brought in mint plants that we were growing out the back, (along with something else he was growing out the back which had nothing to do with me) brown sugar, fresh lemon and rum. The only problem was that we’d had to try a few before we’d got the measurements just right. So in al honesty it was perhaps more of a stumble up to my apartment rather than a walk.



I saw a little creature scavenging a chicken bone out from the bins, a little pink hair tie on the top of its head and thought the animal looked strangely familiar. The poster came to mind, as did the price tag attached to it and I lunged towards the dog, trying to catch the little bugger as it attempted to scarper, catching its leg while it yapped at me. After I slight struggle, I was triumphant and held on tightly to the little meal ticket until I could work out what to do next.

Now of course I was excited about reuniting a distraught family with its lost pet, but to be honest, I worked part-time at a beach bar and spent the entirety of my wage every week on partying in between to the point I realistically had no money for an air-fare home. I had planned to beach bum around until the student loans company put money in my account to I could physically afford to go back to university and be a civilized human being again. That 800 euros, looked extremely appealing…

I found one of the posters and held the little dog up to it; low and behold, it was a perfect match. I rang the number given and woke a sleeping Spanish lady to tell her the wonderful news. She told me to wait outside their restaurant as they lived nearby and I sat on the porch, a shopping list forming in my mind with the change from my air-ticket..

‘LILOOOO’ I heard, and a large Spanish lady in her dressing gown ran towards me, arms flailing (not holding onto the dressing gown tight enough.) She screamed and cried and was in hysterics to the point the dog began to desperately struggle in my arms attempting to run in the opposite direction. I made sure she had a good grip on the wriggling ball of fur before I felt confident letting go and in between sobs she hugged me ever so tightly (I was praying that the god-damn dog wouldn’t suffocate between us in this emotional embrace)
‘Gracias gracias; por Dios, gracious,’ she wailed. I may have even had a lump in my throat too- I would be revered by the family, they’d wave and smile gratefully every time I’d walk past, (perhaps even clap) free paella and pizza whenever I wanted;
‘Ah this chica doesn’t pay,’ they’d say to passers by, ‘ she saved our little Lilo, she eats free for life!’

The daughter by this point had joined in this little 4am parade and they led me by the hand towards their house behind the restaurant, towards my 800 euro, a way home and eternal glory when the daughter stopped.
‘Lilo?’
Perhaps the dog had been missing for so long it forgot its name; perhaps it was a particularly dense animal- I don’t know how dogs work. But the daughter held the animal up in the street light and said ‘Lilo? Lilo?’
The dog yapped and wriggled desperately and flatly refused to acknowledge the call. She put the dog on the floor and attempted to call it to her but the plan backfired as the dog vanished into the distance. We spent the next 20 minutes running around like crazy people behind all the restaurants screaming ‘LILOOOOO’ (I was just calling it, definitely not screaming) until I managed to spot it at the door or the restaurant at the top of the strip. The daughter beat me to it and sat on the steps with the dog who up here, ceased to struggle. She shook her head;
‘This is Lilo’s daughter.’ She said.


WTF huh?
This town is too small, even the bloody dogs are related to each other. At this point a disgruntled figure appeared at the window above us- the owner of the little bugger that ruined my night. This Spanish lady was convinced I was trying to sell her dog for a profit (only half true- its wasn’t done intentionally) and I spend an embarrassing 15 minutes apologising left right and center, sobering up quickly and leaving a dry minty taste in my mouth from all the mojitos and mortification. Lilo’s daughter (Nena) was taken to bed after her night of adventure, the owner seemingly unfazed by the fact that her dog had escaped and was wandering around the town in the middle of the night in the first place.

I now felt terrible. In more ways than one. The mother and daughter expanded on their tale of woe- the dog had been missing for 4months, and they’d had repeated prank calls from people ringing up with false information, kids and teenagers ringing saying that they’ve killed to dog and gross stuff like that. It was now nearing 5am, and this family had to run a restaurant all day and I squirmed on the steps, patting the two crying women on the backs desperate to run in the opposite direction and hide under my bed. They kept telling me ‘no pasa nanda’- don’t worry, that I thought I had genuinely found their beloved pet.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them, that after 4months, little Lilo was probably not coming home- 800 Euros or not.

Suffice to say, there has been no free paella, or pizza, or clapping at all…

Monday 2 August 2010

Bushwaka Antics- 'Bikini Party'

“Bikini party! We’re all getting dressed up! “ I’m told by my group of lovely boy mates, who I love so so much, but tend to pretend I don’t know them when they go into fancy-dress mode. I have visions of the boys turning up in bikinis or man-kinis but am pleasantly amused at their effort when I get to the infamous “Bushwaka bar” that evening… They’re kitted out in an assortment of brightly colored swim shorts, water pistols or ‘super soakers’ as I am corrected, goggles, tight fitting swimming hats, and little yellow arm bands.

Apparently I’ve missed some lewd paddling pool action on the stage of the bar involving a banana and a female volunteer, but never fear, I am updated with excruciating detail, before I remind my lovely friends that they may count me as one of the boys, but I definitely don’t need be involved in trade-secrets like one of the boys..

They’re not small lads by any stretch of the imagination, and the armbands “suitable for 3-4 years old” cunningly serve to highlight any appearance of a bicep or two. (Very clever boys.) One of them comes up with the ingenious idea of rubbing suntan cream into every girl that wanders past with bare skin- “Sun cream is part of the fancy dress, it’s a bikini party” I’m told. I’ve underestimated them. They turn themselves into a bit of a tourist attraction; girls wanting photos with the soggy group of half naked boys with very big grins on their faces. I’m not quite sure if this tactic will actually win them a lady at the end of the evening, but they definitely get a few hugs, a few cream rubs, and lots of attention…

This particular bar has girls dancing on the bar surfaces- a very clever tactic on busy nights; men are too busy staring at the scantily clad chicas balancing between glasses and bartenders pouring drinks (health and safety would have a fit) so customers are distracted from any sort or queuing system and tis much easier for non-gawping customers to slide effortless to the front and get served quickly, i.e, me.

At some point I end up with a blue beach bucket on my head and a rubber ring around my neck but when I look around, I see this actually makes me fit in quite well. There is a random assortment of colored plastic spades dotted around the dance floor, people waving them around and bashing each other over the head enthusiastically. Three of them end up in my handbag by the end of the evening (spades, not people) and we decide its is completely necessary that we make an octopus out of sand tomorrow on the beach. (I’m not quite sure where this idea came from, but true to form with our stolen spades, an octopus is created on the beach the following afternoon.)

As the evening progresses, buckets of water are being thrown around the bar, and I look at the manager’s face- expecting him to be roaring at his employees for drowning his bar and making a hideous mess, but actually he is semi-naked too, happily splashing about with everybody else, receiving gallons of water in his face and laughing. Note to self- I want his job. The job I definitely don’t want is of the other bartenders; I have to wade out towards the door, not just through people, but through water- it’s going to take more than a bucket and mop to shift it.

Outside, the 300 wet people in various states of dishevelment begin to wander in several directions- towards Pacha nightclub, the kebab shop (one cleverly built right opposite), or home. I think our group is going towards to the home option when a waterfall drops from the sky, quite literally and nearly drown us. I look up, unable to tell if it’s coming from the bar or from someone’s apartment in protest to the noise. In response, everyone looks at each other in mock-horror (girls who have had their carefully applied makeup and hair ruined- real horror.) To be fair, if you had moved to Spain for a more relaxed life, for Spanish style siestas and ‘manana’ mentality, and you ended up in an apartment directly above the Bushwaka bar where it’s like every day is your birthday and the parties never stop- I would probably be jumping off the balcony, not throwing water off it.

We take it in good jest (considering we’re all wet anyway) and I fit in a taxi between boys and armbands and a battered swimming hat that is being flicked about like catapult.

Another day, another party…

Three Dancing Chicas and a Rabid Dog...

The music overcomes us- that’s the only way to describe it.
The “We no speak Americano” song with its repetitive beat does something funny to us three girls- we start spazaming around the living room- I can’t really call it dancing, that would be pushing it a bit far in reference to the shapes we were making. It’s one of those songs that this summer, every time it comes on a nightclub, you jump up and down like a 5 year old on Christmas morning, poke a fellow shape-maker in the arm and proclaim ‘choooon!’ Unless of course, you’re me, and get too over excited and shout ‘song!’ instead. (It doesn’t have the same effect.) It’s 5am but that’s not stopping the volume button sliding up, (entirely of its own accord, of course.)

It over-spills onto the patio where we start a West-End musical style dance routine, (if I do say so myself) going down the steps of the apartment leading out onto the street; three other friends arrive out of their taxi and stare in amusement from across the road. In truth, the look on their faces lay somewhere between awe/ horror/ and most notably, embarrassment.

When the beat overcomes you in moments such as these, any sense of time melts- the neighbour, however, had a much keener sense of time. A neighbour with a dog.
Now this dog had been scaring the b-jesus out of me for the entire week- it was some sort of rabid Alsatian, eyes gleaming with some inner turmoil of madness, saliva dripping from fangs every time meat would innocently wander past- primarily in the form of me and my two female accomplices. Every time we went to get into our apartment, it would jam its head between the pillars of the patio, gnashing its teeth ferociously, the desperation to kill so strong in its eyes, it made me doubt the strength of the stone pillars that separated me from death.

Now, I’m all for pets. At one point we had 5 cats and a pair of hamsters that refused to stop multiplying. In my mother’s kitchen back in England there is currently a royal python sitting in a glass tank, putting off any unwanted guests (and unsuspecting plumbers.) BUT , a pet that would make you quiver in your bed for fear of the beast wanting a midnight snack in the form of your throat? This is not a pet. This is a hazard.

I digress. While me and my fellow dancing amigas are busy being overcome by the awesome never-ending beat, the dog awakens… Now, as its 5am at this point in the story, there is no point trying to convince you that we were sober. With this in mind, we decide it would be hilarious to goad the aforementioned dog-of Satan, by flicking water at it at the same time as agitating it with our jerking shape-making. It barks and snarls (I swear I saw it spit) until an even worse creature consequently appears from the depths. The owner. Crazy-Spanish-neighbour-lady does not appreciate being woken up at such an un-godly hour by us or her equally crazy dog, and lets us know this by screaming at us. We retreat instantly, the three of us locking ourselves in the bathroom as she threatens to set the dog on us. The flimsy lock on the bathroom door will defiantly not withhold from an attack from devil dog and I silently apologise to the gods of twisted fate for all the water flicking. Our three remaining friends who were watching our performance from the street as they got out of the taxi are still outside, and we shamefully leave them to take the rap. And possibly be eaten.

We meekly appear from our refuge 20 minutes later to face 3 stony face-boys who probably don’t want to be our friends any more, (although no bite marks are apparent nor any limbs missing thank the Lord.) We offer cups of tea. And turn off the i-pod…