Rainbow

We had an entertaining enough day, but the photos I took didn't really reflect it. We went to the festival of new wine in Calonge. This town, not all that far from Sant Feliu, claims to be surrounded by "a sea of vines". Well, if you're from the Corbières, it just isn't. There's a handful of small producers who produce a few thousand bottles each -- whereas the relatively small cooperative in our village alone produces two million bottles a year.

The town hall in Calonge went so far as to host an exhibition for which they had constructed an artificial vineyard, complete with tractor, inside a hangar. That's how few real vineyards they have :) But we chatted to a couple of producers and tasted their wine, which was very nice. Unfortunately, when we returned later to buy some, they'd packed up and gone off for lunch. We had lunch too, but they hadn't come back by the time we'd eaten our tapas and drunk our beer.

So we went off to La Bisbal, as part of my quest to assemble all the necessary elements for Christmas cake, which I've been trying to do for several weeks now. I'd managed to buy dried fruit and candied oranges at the market in Palafrugell, and on his trip to France last week S brought back my springform cake tins. But I was lacking a kitchen scale, and I refuse to make cake without weighing the ingredients. Yesterday I made a special trip to Palafrugell to buy one. I found one in a Todo Cien-type shop (the equivalent of a pound shop) for 9.50 euros. It looked like a child's toy. I took it home and put a kilo bag of sugar on it. 250 g, it announced. Then it stopped working altogether. I was not pleased.

After some difficulty we found a ferreteria in La Bisbal that was actually open, and the nice lady there had a choice of no fewer than three scales, the cheapest of which cost all of 14 euros and looked like a serious bit of kit. We tested it in the shop. Result!

At home, the only remaining barrier was that half the dried fruit had mysteriously gone missing, so S had to be dispatched to the supermarket to buy some more. All is now well; the fruit is soaking in Spanish brandy ready for tomorrow's cake-making.

Anyway -- I didn't like any of my photos of any of these events, so here's some abstract graffiti in Calonge.