Challenging Arts & Crafts: Andalucia

Now that I bade farewell to my corporate world officially, I divide my time between Vienna and Southern Spain. We live in Axarquia a couple of months of the year to escape the cold days in Central Europe.

Axarquia is a region in Andalucia composed of many traditional townships and municipalities that grow wine, avocados and mangoes. In Winter, Southern Spain is warmer by about 10 °C than most northen countries in Europe and so a lot of Northerners flock to this side of the world.

So what have we done during our stay here? What have we accomplished?
I finally found the wall plate I´ve been looking for that I intended for the
fireplace.. It´s andalucian in design.

Our second home needs a new kitchen and since we have more time now, we were
able to install a new tiny kitchen after planning it for almost a year. We could
have done this long time ago , but our previous stay had been too short.
I had to get the taller cupboards on top that they almost reaching the ceiling.

The kitchen maybe that tiny but I have all the space I needed to store those

things not frequently used. It´s not the traditional andalucian kitchen though,

but everything is there for me to cook properly.

With just a couple of weeks of rain and cloudy skies, we´ve had almost 100 days of

beautiful weather which was far better than the one back home. There was

almost drought in Southern Spain last summer because it didn´t rain and the lakes

were at its lowest levels.

The farmers must have been rejoicing and praising God for a week of rain in

November. Yes, the farmers needed the rain, we understood their feeling (!!!)...we

were once avocado growers ourselves having about 300 trees that were thirsty

all the time.

Once settled after arrival, we often visited our german friend of almost 20 years... I love her matured garden. She has many varieties of cacti and succulents and lots of aloe veras (photo above) and she has a green thumb and everything seems to grow anywhere in her place once she gets hold of anything green. She gave me all these newbies (without roots) to plant in my yard and I started setting-up my cactus garden . A few succulents without roots ( photo below) have grown since I planted them last year in April.

The photo above shows the cactus garden in progress ..at the back of this raised bed is a stone wall that is yet to be finished. Some of the stones were gathered in the nearby areas of the plot and mind you...they were heavy to carry, but thanks to the wheelborrow. I wanted to do the whole garden myself without help so I can claim to have done it alone....Lol!

We will come back soon in a couple of months and hopefully I´d finish my stone wall and the cactus garden.

The Christmas season in Spain is always quiet. I guess the spaniards have a different way of celebrating it. In my home country, the Philippines, people are very religious. We go to church rain or shine and celebrate the Holy Mass.

Everyone pays attention to the Misa de Gallo, a catholic mass that starts at the very early morning of Dec. 16 -24 and ends at midnight with a mass at "Noche Buena" which is the Christmas eve. I miss those days of our traditions.

Speaking of food on Christmas Eve, the austrian tradition is to eat roasted goose with red cabbage for dinner. I have roasted one and we ate it for lunch since this would be too heavy for dinner.

It´s the same procedure with our New Year celebration, we ate the heavy food for lunch

and opted for a steak with lots of braised vegetables... Finger foods were there for the evening eaten while streaming Amazon/Netflix movies to be able to stay awake, til the countdown began.

The finger foods consisted of baguette topped with various sausages, ham, various cheese, veggies and salad greens with mayonnaise, egg and liver spread as well as hummus.