It’s Christmas Day in España and los dos have been here two and a half weeks. Things are not as chaotic now as was the harrowing migration here. We’ve had time to explore Córdoba and we’ve done a couple of day trips. Which means we have some pix to share, along with some updates that aren’t quite so crazed at this stage, but still a bit fraught from our kinda crappy Airbnb in a land where we haven’t run into any English speakers. We’re doing out best to get by with a little ungrammatical Spanish and a lot of creative sign language.

Sharing a buncha Gary’s pix here, since our arrival in Córdoba. Donna’s been dropping hers in Facebook so check those out too!

The AirBnB. We found the place while in the U.S., way back in May, when we were getting our visa applications together. Spain requires applicants for the retirment visa to provide an address where one intends to live for at least the first 90 days. Finding such a place for the fall that allowed pets was something of a crap shoot. So we’ve landed in a sort of odd, rundown place that we’re hoping to move out of as as soon as possible. The owners are nice enough, but don’t speak English, really, and we don’t see much of them in spite of the fact that they live 50 feet away.

We wondered when we arrived, where the garbage can was for the AirBnB. Our second day here a bag of trash appeared outside our host’s door and sat there all day. Surely garbage collection was not done door to door. No, it’s very much self serve. Every hundred yards or two, along Avenida de la Arruzafa, the city has set up collection points.

Trash and recycling go in one of several of these bins. Glass to the left, containers (juice bottles, beer cans and water bottles) in the center and, at the end of this little trash island, organic waste (materia orgánica). Which containers cohabitate with which along the street is a bit of a mystery. Not shown are the containers for paper and the container labeled “Resto,” where you deposit your plain old trash.

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You may know about the oranges here. Or not. Valencian oranges are pretty well known. (Though I was surprised to learn that this reknowned varietal was actually brought here from California.) There are orange trees everywhere in Andalucía. (There’s a pretty large one in the courtyard of our Aurbnb, doing its level best to help prevent sunlight from entering the place.) If decorating the streets, the oranges are generally not harvested and certainly not eaten. They’re only good for juice. Or decoration. And they profilerate here and perform their decorative role admirably.

We’ve been exploring Centro, the center city, which is anywhere from 50 to 500 years old. Córdoba is much older, one of the earliest establishments founded by Muslim migrants in the 9th century. For years it was an important center of commerce and learning in Andalucía where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together. The oldest part of town is known as the Judería.

There’s one prominent remnant of Roman times near Centro, the Templo Romano, from the first century AD. It was unearthed only in the 1950s, which explains its very odd juxtaposition to city streets, a little island of antiquity that’s not all that hard to miss although it always seems to me to be hiding among urban development.

On another note, it being Christmas, Spain doesn’t really dress up for this holiday as it’s done in the United States. Few home have any decorations. Córdoba and other towns hang some lights over the streets, between buildings, but businesses do almost no decorating. It’s honestly a relief, shopping, to hear so little Christmas music, which just wears me out by Thanksgiving and plays in the ear like driving on a flat tire until Christmas.

Maybe the Christmas images get weirder and weirder because it’s just what caught my eye. I did a Google search for this odd hanging Santa thing and did not readily find out WTF this is about. But we saw a few more of these here. And saw them available for purchase as well. What I was able to dig up is that kids don’t get visits from Santa on Dec 24/25. They get presents from the three kings on Jan 6. Got me… We don’t understand enough Spanish to work this out with our new, weird, countrymen.

A few more Cordoba pix and some bureaucracy before signing off….

Finally, some paperwork. The venerable Modelo 60-444. The application form for the Empadroniemento, better known as “The Padron”. For tax purposes and headcount in a jurisdiction, all good Spaniards must update their Padron upon relocating. So we applied. It will take 5 or 6 months to get the Padron, by which time we will have gone elsehwere and submitted yet another Model0 60-444. Bureaucracy like this can be quite fun given the right attitude.

You can’t get your Foreigners ID Card (or Tarjeta de identidad de extranjero) without the Padron. So while the Padron doesn’t seem like that big a deal by itself, the TIE card is like a driver’s license and Social Security card combined. You have to have one. (Just another bureaucratic rite of passage we are soooo excited to deal with!)

OK, I know we should be posting updates more than once a month. But we’re busy here! Figuring out what’s what. And what the hell everyone is saying!

En poco más tarde amigos! Y Feliz Navidad!