Dawn

Dawn

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Times may well be straitened but, here in Pontevedra, summer fun continues as ever. This week we're enjoying the always-impressive Jazz and Blues Festival. This is the 20th. year of this event and the town council have marked this with a 24 page colour brochure, giving us 18 pages of info on the acts of earlier years and 6 on this year's performers. For those who speak Gallego, it's pretty informative. For the rest of us, whether residents or tourists, rather less so. Worse, I've just checked it for the time of tonight's concert, only to find there's no details of this. But, hey, it's not glossy so they've obviously made some savings.

Speaking of straitened times, I've been doing some more (unscientific) research on the shops in Pontevedra. As I suspected, closures within the indoor galerías are even more numerous than out on the streets. Tentative conclusions are that dress and shoe shops have been the worst hit and that most of the new shops opening up are selling bags, scarves and other accessories. It's as if someone has identified that the only people left shopping are wealthy women who haven't got enough bags, etc. and who can buy their dresses and shoes at the very expensive shops which haven't closed their doors. For one reason and another, Pontevedra has quite a few of these. Wealthy women, I mean.

Regular readers will know I'm quite fond of the Mercadona supermarket chain, if only because it's nowhere near as bad at customer service as Carrefour. Anyway, I was shopping there last night when, to my surprise, I was offered two innovations. The first one, a whole chicken in pieces, was rather humdrum but the second – fish burgers – was at least different. I didn't see the third thing the young woman was holding but it might well have been marinated meat. At this rate, we might have some Portuguese wine on the shelves before year end.

En route to lunch in Vigo with my friends, Anthea and Phil, today I came upon a car with the name Duster. I thought it odd to name a car after a cleaning cloth but Anthea wondered whether it wasn't named after the long jacket/coat favoured by the protagonists in Spaghetti westerns.

When my friend, Mike, went back to the UK a week or so ago, he left behind some breakfast cereal called The Food Doctor. I tried it once or twice but decided it wasn't for me. Throwing it out this evening, I noticed it was actually a porridge and not the muesli I'd thought it was. Have you ever tried to eat uncooked porridge? I don't recommend it.

Finally . . . Here's what's said to be a Beginner's Guide to Galicia, and here's an article on the Cies islands I visited last weekend. Worth reading, if only because they make fewer mistakes than usual.

And here are my friend Dwight's own fotos of “The Galician Seychelles”. Which is a label I've never heard used before. And, having lived there for a year, I'm not too convinced by the claim. Not that this makes the place any less pretty.









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