R.I.Chalmers Passionate About English

I know what a whale feels like. I don’t mean that I’m immensely fat and try to avoid Japanese tourists wherever possible. What I mean is that I have just been eating camarones. Camarones are small shrimps. I say small, but they are actually tiny, and their tininess, and the fact that I was dropping them into my mouth by the thousand, made me think of whales. Whales eat krill, and camarones remind me very much of krill.

Shrimp, or prawns, come in a wide range of sizes here in Spain. You have giant things as big as your hand and you have the tiny camarónes at the other end of the scale. To show you what I mean, I took a photo of a standard sized Spanish prawn from my refrigerator next to a Camarón and my finger for scale.

You can see that the standard Spanish prawn is rather a handsome beast, and as succulent and delicious as a succulent and delicious thing that has just visited a salon dedicated to making things as succulent and delicious as possible.

The camarón, on the other hand, seems somewhat pathetic and about a succulent and delicious as school dinner gravy.

A friend of mine does not like camerones because she believes that they devour the corpses of dead people and animals that happen to end up in the sea. For my part, this does not bother me. I am not adverse to drinking a bottle or two of chilled Perrier water, which gets its flavour, if legend is correct, by percolating through old plague pits before emerging from the Perrier spring.

I thought about my friend’s reasons for not liking camarones and decided that as I was about to eat the corpses of many thousands of dead animals I was not too far removed from them myself and so bought a quarter of a kilo. The cost was 2 Euros. The haul was immense.

As you can see from this photograph, you do get a lot of camarones in a pound. To give a sense of scale, I took a photograph with a ruler in the foreground. The markings are in millimetres.

You eat these tiny shrimp by the handful. The texture is like crunching on soft-bodied ants, but the flavour is exquisite. (I don’t wish to offend any ants here, and am open to the possibility that they, too, possess an exquisite flavour if eaten by the handful – though I have yet to know what an anteater feels like) If you can steel yourself against the natural squeamishness of having to chew down on heads, bodies, eyes, and other bits, a mouthful of camarones is a seafood-lover’s delight.

If you are lucky enough to visit Spain, look out for camarones. You will find them freshly cooked like in the photos above, or in an small fried pancake called a “Tortilla de camarón”. These tortillas are a great way for the squeamish to eat camarones. The camarones are buried in a pancake of flour, parsley and garlic, and you would never notice their eyes staring mournfully up at you from your plate. Their eyes are so small anyway that it is hard to imagine anyone noticing them.

A delicious plate of Tortilla de camarónes

A traditional recipe for this dish

Half a pound of live camarones. If you can’t find them in your local supermarket, try inventing a machine that will shrink anything you point it at (like the one in “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”) and point it at fifty pounds of king prawns. If the Camarón turns out to be a bloke with a beard, you’ve got the wrong kind. He’s a popular Spanish flamenco singer. See below for details.

Half a pound of semolina flour, or chickpea flour will do just as well. Both are pretty much impossible to get where you are anyway.

Half a pound of finely chopped onions, and I mean finely chopped. Non of your wishy-washy diced stuff.

2oz of fresh parsley

Water to make the dough

Extra virgin olive oil for frying not drizzling!

Salt – extra virgin Mahatma Gandhi sea salt. This will make the camarones feel more at home.

Dump the flour in a bowl and little by little mix in the water to make a slightly liquid dough. Throw in some salt to taste.

Throw the live camarones into the mix with the onion and parsley. Leave it for an hour.

Spoon tortilla-sized plops of dough into the extra virgin olive oil and fry them on both sides (obviously! Why am I even telling you this?) until golden (not black and carbonised)

Eat them. Tell your friends about this great website.

DANGER! This is the wrong type of camarón for your recipe:

This is the right type:

Translation? Sorry! A picture says a thousand words, so switch off your speakers and watch the film. There are thousands of pictures and millions of words.

Posted under Lifestyle

“Andalusia and flamenco are two concepts which cannot be separated, and neither one can be fully understood apart from the other.” This statement from Juan Polvillo, one of Seville’s leading dance teachers, perhaps best explains why so many aficionados from all over the world come to the city to study flamenco.

If you want to dance you have to come to Seville. The teachers are there. The atmosphere is there, is a common belief held by many students who study the dance form. Often you can be in a bar and a small group with a guitar will just start playing and people will start to dance. There is a passion and a naturalness about flamenco in Seville that you just do not find anywhere else.

Many students find it difficult to study flamenco in their own country. There are few dance schools outside Spain, and if a student wants to progress they have to travel to Spain, and Seville in particular. Some of the greatest teachers of flamenco teach or have taught in Seville. The Andulusian city is, after all, the birthplace of flamenco.

There are many forms of flamenco. These include, the Tango, Bulería, Alegría, Garrotín, Guajira, Tango de Málaga, Solea por Bulería, Caña, Seguiryia, Tiento, Sevillanas, and the Rondeña. Each form has its own choreography anc there are various parts to each dance such as the letra, the escobilla and the silencio.

Schools normally have classes of between ten and thirty students. The classes specialise in the different techniques with lessons that allow students to master the use of the arms, the practice of footwork, and turns.

Schools also teach the techniques of the Bata de cola, the traditional skirt, and the Mantón de Manila, or shawl, in forms such as the Solea, Alegría, and Solea por Bulería. To complement dances such as the Guajiras, Alegrías and Caracoles, students also learn traditional fan techniques. The compás, or rhythm, is integral to each form and students learn to distinguish the different types of compás from the simpler rhythms of tangos to the more complicated rhythms of the bulerías. Many classes have guitar accompaniment.

Typical courses last two weeks and cost around three hundred Euros. The price normally includes three hours tuition every day, Monday to Friday, with other classes of compás y palmas, the handclapping.

Besides the cost of the course, and the necessary airfare to Seville, students must find suitable accommodation for their arrival. For most students who have no contacts in the city the Internet is one of the easiest ways to find a place to stay. Many students find accommodation through many of the local websites. The amount that you pay for accommodation depends on whether you want a one-bedroom apartment or the cheaper alternative of a shared flat or a stay with a family.

A typical private room in shared accommodation in the centre of the city close to the schools will cost around two hundred and fifty Euros a month. This compares very favourably with even the cheapest hotel accommodation in one of the city’s many pensions. Prices rise during Semana Santa, the Easter Holy Week, and during the city’s spectacular Feria, the traditional April Fair, when tens of thousands of extra visitors descend on this vibrant city.

Flamenco is a wonderful way of making friends and meeting people from all over the world who share a common interest. Many classes will have students from as far afield as Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, and France. The Japanese are also very interested in flamenco and most courses have some Japanese students.

With so many nationalities, language is not essential, though for taking the classes it does help if you speak some Spanish. Students are normally advised to relax, listen, look and learn. They are also told not to worry about the lessons too much and just enjoy the experience. Most of the students who have the energy and the obsession for flamenco go to Seville and most have a great time.

Obsession is a word that is as synonymous with flamenco as Seville and Andalusia. For many students flamenco becomes a little bit of an obsession. Like drugs, it gets inside you. It comes from the soul. Great dancers have an extra, almost indescribable something known as “duende”. It translates roughly as soul or spirit and it’s been described as the artist becoming the dance, instead of the artist doing the dance.

Most students would agree that flamenco is a passion. It is something that you have to have in your soul. Many students have said that once they have seen it once they just have to do it. They can’t stop. For many it gets to deep inside their soul.

Flamenco and Andalusia are inseparable and obsession plays a big part. While Seville exists, flamenco will exist, and students will flock to the city in their thousands each year to satisfy that something in flamenco that searches for everything, all their weaknesses, all their strengths. It is this something that can only be defined as “wonderful” that will keep flamenco forever alive.

Posted under Lifestyle

An article of mine that appeared in Living Spain in 2003

© R.I.Chalmers 2003

The Village School

The location of Salteras is not something that you would have learned in any geography lesson. A small village in the hearth of Andalusia, it stands on the high land to the east of Seville and looks across a hazy plain of scorched fields and olive groves that stretch towards the Sierra Morena. Italica, the birthplace of Trajan and Hadrian, is close by. Both Roman emperors would even now recognise a familiar landscape that suggests that nothing about the place is going to change soon.

But one thing has changed recently among the confusion of narrow streets and whitewashed houses of this traditional pueblo. In July 2001, the village became host to a very English institution, The Village School. Now that a second school has just opened in the adjacent village of Olivares locals might be forgiven for thinking that The Village School will soon be in every pueblo and they will all soon be speaking English.

“Not so,” says Ali Benwell, the feminine half of the brother and sister pair behind The Village School. “I really like being a teacher. It’s fun. The last thing I’d want to be is a manager driving up and down to different schools all day.

Rob, 38, and the younger of the pair by two years, came to Spain in 1991 after completing a course in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in London. After a series of unfulfilling jobs in the UK and a year travelling, Ali decided to take her TEFL course in 1997. A telephone conversation with Rob had convinced her to do the course in Spain rather than in the UK. “Rob said he’d help me out with accommodation,” she recalls. “So I decided on Seville.”

TEFL is an alternative and less complicated way of getting to Spain than opening a bar or a guesthouse. Many of those who take the TEFL route to Spain do so primarily to travel, to spend a year or two learning Spanish, and to experience the culture. Some decide to stay and make TEFL a career. For a few, like Rob and Ali, it becomes the basis for a profitable and rewarding business.

Like Rob, Ali quickly found work with one of the established schools in Seville, but it was not long before she began to share the thoughts of many teachers in Spain. “I think a lot of teachers working for someone else think they could just as easily work for themselves if they only had the setup around them. I was getting a bit bored with teaching in the school where I was working and felt that the time was right to open our own school. Rob and I mulled over the idea for about a year before opening the school in Salteras.”

Finding a suitable property was the biggest problem. ”A lot of the premises we looked at had massive difficulties,” recalls Ali. “Many were on the first floor of buildings and needed lifts putting in. Often the buildings were simply shells without floors or ceilings and the expense was going to be enormous. Because of these problems we kind of dropped the idea.”

As with so many things in life, chance played its part, and in June 2001 Ali made a discovery in her home village of Salteras. “I came up to buy some bread and found the bread shop closed, with a ‘for rent’ notice on it. I asked to see inside the property. As soon as they opened the doors I thought, “Oh yes, I can see it happening here.”

Incredibly, it took just two weeks from finding the property to opening the school. The only work that needed to be done was to divide the one large room up into two classrooms and a reception area. Then came the task of deciding on the look and feel they wanted for the school.

The original sign for the shop was still over the door and Ali liked the bright orange background, feeling that it provided a striking contrast with their chosen lettering. “We chose a blue for the lettering that reflected the Andalusian sky, that really distinctive blue colour that you see when you look straight up.”

She came up with the name of “The Village School” while sitting in a bar with her Dad who was visiting at the time. “We had a list of names like ‘institute’ and ‘centre’ but they all sounded wrong. We wanted something that everyone would understand.”

For legal and financial help with the business they decided to use local people. They found the bank manager very helpful and willing to provide the necessary funding to set up the business. Because there was no need to buy in stock, the initial expenses were not great. The most important thing was to find enough students from the start to provide a salary for both Rob and Ali and for a secretary who they decided was essential.

“The secretary is very important as the children need someone who can deal with their problems and someone who can deal with the parents,” says Ali. “It’s very important that when the students are here that we’re able to concentrate on being teachers.”

The decision quickly paid dividends and the school soon enrolled around 75 students. However, it quickly became apparent that while there was plenty of development going on in the village, with a consequential population growth, there would only ever be a finite number of potential students.

Ali recalls the decision to open the second school in the bigger village of Olivares. “When we opened the school in Salteras we had quite a few students from Olivares. We got to the point this year where we were thinking that if we don’t open up there someone else might.”

Olivares proved to be a far more complicated proposition than Salteras. The most suitable property they could find was on two floors and needed considerable construction work before it could be used. “The upstairs part had nothing in it,” remembers Ali. “It was just bricks, with a concrete floor, bricked-up windows and no ceiling. The owners organised the initial building work, but the last few bits, like getting the suspended ceiling put up, were a nightmare. Rob was up there every afternoon for a week waiting for these guys to come. They kept saying, “We’re on our way,” but they never turned up. The electrician still hasn’t turned up.”

In June 2003 the new school began to enrol students for the new school year. As in Salteras, the courses on offer cover the whole range of student ability and age groups. Students can start as young as 4 years and the school caters for adult and advanced learners too.

Running a village school may be a far cry from running a bar or a guest house but Ali and Rob have had to face the same challenges as anyone else looking to start a new life in the sun. The biggest challenge has been the language. Neither spoke any Spanish before they arrived and they have had to learn quickly. “My Spanish has improved a lot since we opened the school, out of necessity really,” says Ali. She still has a problem knowing at what level to pitch the language. ”I often wonder if I’m being too polite or too formal, especially when I have to deal with parents for the first time.”

The telephone remains the most difficult means of communication as there is none of the immediate feedback that is present in a face-to- face conversation. It is impossible for the other person to see the puzzled look on your face when they say something that you’re unclear about. Maintaining a sense of humour helps, as Ali points out, “Some people’s accents are so strong that you can’t understand a word they say and you resort to smiling and nodding your head. You just hope you’re doing so in the right places, though you could just as easily be smiling happily when you’re being told that their grandmother’s just died.”

Language difficulties apart, neither Rob nor Ali have any regrets about opening the schools. The enthusiasm the students and the local people have shown for the school has impressed them both and ensures that neither have any plans to move back to the UK any time soon.

“The kids really have an enthusiasm for making the place their own. They wave when they pass by and often call in outside of class hours because they feel that they can come in. That’s really nice. I don’t think either me or Rob expected that the kids would be quite as enthusiastic as they are.”

A student who has been with the school from the start is eight-year- old Alejandro Barquan. “I like it because I like it,” he says with the simple yet enthusiastic honesty that seems to sum up why the school has proved so popular.

Ali’s advice to anyone thinking of making the move to Spain is simply, “Just do it! What’s the worst that could happen?” Coming from a teacher who has taken her own advice and turned her dreams into reality it’s a lesson that anyone considering a move to Spain might be well advised to learn.

Posted under Clips