Shopping mission

Despite occasional rain and clouds, there's little wind now, daytime temperatures are around 18-20C, and there's the scent of orange blossom in the air, here and there. I had a lie-in and de-stressed after the craziness of yesterday's journey to Salinas. After lunch, I walked through the road tunnel to the Plaza de la Merced, aiming to see if I could trace on foot the proper route for getting out to the autovia following the rio Guadalmedina. 

I wandered briefly around the Mercado de La Merced. It's had a modern makeover, with half of it now being dedicated to specialist bars and restaurants and the other to traditional food stalls. I have yet to visit and find it bustling with activity, and I've been there at several different times. Once I'd walked in the right direction, I was able to join the dots in my mental road map. I then wandered up side streets, and discovered where some of the modern university buildings are. 

I called in a Chinese store near the much busier Mercado Atarazana to buy some replacement light bulbs, then crossed the river to reach El Corte Ingles, to see if could get a motion activated light to install above the door outside the apartment. It's terribly dark there, as the landing light has a time switch. The switches are hard to see in the dark because of their positioning, and the tell-tale light in one of them by the stairwell doesn't work. It's irritating and just a little risky, so I decided the best thing to do was find and install something suitable. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, as the saying goes. First, I had to work out the right thing to ask for - una luz con interruptor de detección de movimiento would do the job, in the absence of a slang term or brand name to quote. Before I had a chance to ask someone, I found the shelf in a corner of the hardware basement, and instantly identified what I needed. And reasonably priced too.

From there, I went up to the computer department and bought a Devolo wi-fi network booster plug for the apartment. I meant to do this on my last visit but didn't. Given the L shaped layout, and the amount of steel in the apartment framework, it's no wonder that kitchen, hallway and side room have no signal at all.  I just hoped it would be the simple solution needed.

Setting up the booster for use later on, I didn't succeed using the router's WPS button to broadcast the access code to handshake with the plug's WPS. There are no instructions for the the route to tell how long the WPS button has to be pressed for its signal to be picked up - if it works at all. I was, however, able to use the manual setup option, and key in the passcode. I used the office Windows 7 computer to do this, as I couldn't find out how to access the setup routine using my Chromebook. In the course of trial and error obtaining a WPS signal, the router lost its internet connection. I had to switch it on and off several times before connection was re-established, and each time the reboot was slow. Never mind. It took half an hour instead of five minutes, but it makes such a difference being able to listen to Radio Four news on a phone while I cook or eat a meal in the small dining room next door to the kitchen. NOw I need to borrow a drill and install that light!

Art to make you think

My fourth weekend here, a new month, and today is Owain's 39th birthday. It's hard to believe that my youngest child was born that long ago, at home in St Agnes Vicarage, Badminton Road in those days, just a bit to the east of the St Paul's Area 'front line' in Bristol. A little over half a lifetime ago. I was fortunate to have him here with me last weekend. Tonight he'll be in Cardiff with Clare, Kath, Anto and Rhiannon for his birthday celebration, and then we'll talk as best we can for a while over any VOIP connection we can establish.

This afternoon, I went into the Old Town to hunt for a shop selling herbs, to find some nettle and mistletoe leaves, as requested by Clare. Quite close to the Cathedral I found a herbolaria called 'Escencias de Sevilla' selling a wide variety of herbal medicines, including the ortiga verde which I was after. No luck obtaining the muérdago, I also needed, although I was pleased to have conversed in Spanish and made myself understood without recourse to English - except for the one word that wouldn't stick in my memory - muérdago. Altogether I had to look it up using Google Translate no less than three times in a couple of hours. Annoyance was compounded by the fact that the phone I was carrying was down to its last 5% of battery, so I had to keep it switched off, just in case I really needed to call in an emergency. Vocabulary retention deficit is a rather humiliating crisis to keep on repeating.

I tracked down a Bio shop in the Old Town, but it was closed for siesta. Rather than return to the apartment, I used the hour and a half wait to revisit Lagunillas barrio up behind behind La Merced. Conservation measures have retained many features of the main Old Town area, with its rich architectural diversity of 17th to early 20th century dwellings. Further out, older humbler domestic and artisan dwellings have been obliterated to make way for modern apartment blocks of 5-6 stories. The ancient street plan, squares and churches are retained, but the rest has a uniformity of character, despite efforts at design variety. These dwellings haven't evolved, but were 'organised' for the good of the artisanal classes by urban planners and developers. Disappointingly.

Some older streets of Lagunillas barrio have so far survived in a state of delapidation and awaiting demolition, no doubt. Remarkable high quality artistic graffiti cover walls here and there, and there are signs of a grassroots resistance campaign to stop demolition and regenerate the older housing stock rather than destroy it. This makes a lot more sense to me now than during my visit last year, maybe because my Spanish is improving.

I also spent time in the Plaza de la Constitucion, with an open air photo exhibition entitled 'Genesis' by Sebastião Salgado, portraying some of earth's great and awesome wilderness spaces in 38 huge black and white photos, mounted in double sided iron frames. The aim is to raise environmental awareness, and to get the public to think about natural treasures we're in danger of losing for good. Quite apart from the excellent high quality photographic work and its production, the subject matter is indeed chosen to stimulate thought and reflection. For me it was an experience of the sacred right in the heart of a key public place in the city.

When the Bio shop I'd located finally opened, I had no success in obtaining muérdago. As a last resort I'll visit the Mercado de Atarazanas on Monday morning and see what hidden treasures there are among the stalls - another proper herbolaria, hopefully.

After supper I had a Viber conversation with the family, all in Meadow Street after a visit to The Conway pub for supper. I managed to give them a visual tour of the nearer reaches of the apartment using the front camera on the tablet, but it kept dropping out as the signal is poor beyond 10 metres. It's so annoying and frustrating. I thin I must splash out €30 on a wifi range extender for the place fairly soon.