The Sea in Catalan

We took the train to Blanes, where we intended to stay, but we boarded the wrong bus and ended up in a southern outskirt of Lloret-del-Mar. We found a little pension in a dirtyish deserted alley. It was very cheap, simple, pleasant and clean with nothing we didn't need and a relaxed and friendly woman at the reception and it was in the center of the city although it was not a big city and I did not even know its name.

The first snorkelling we did was south of the main beach. We walked around the headland, through a very little tunnel underneath what looked like a castle but was actually a private house in the form of a castle, and went into the sea over a rocky shore.

We saw many jellyfish and several kinds of fish some of which were size enough to spear. The water was clear and clean at depth but littered with rubbish near the shore, so that it was more comfortable to swim a meter below the surface to avoid the plastic bags and bottles. The water was clear and pleasant but I was cold before an hour was through and we got out at a beach and walked back along the shoreline and went out for dinners later - the first in a pleasant home-fashioned sangria bar decorated at the entrance with rows of hanging hams and in the dining area with assorted paraphernalia on the walls and hand-made wooden stools on the floors, stools which looked good and caused me to comment boringly on their good-lookingness but which were easy to rock over. The memorabilia hanging on the wall were homely, telling of a rugged history, rusted and faded and interesting and apparently genuine, but also with a cheapness to the presentation - the frames of the pictures and the bland whiteness of the walls robbed it of what would have been a deeply charming ambience. Our waitress was an elderly local lady, very pleasant and quick and obviously enjoying what she did, slapping the table lightly and with friendliness when we had ordered and telling us muy bien. We drank sangria and ate piquant cheese with bread.

It was a good day, and the next, today, was better.

I slept greedily and well after the deprivation of the previous week's conference and we woke midmorning to what seemed a cloudy day until we pulled the curtains and peered up out of the four walls of the inner courtyard to the blue sky high above.

Breakfast we ate in the southern section of the city at a crass cheap tourist cafe, which fit in with the cheap neon feel of the main parts of the city we'd walked through the night before. The croissants and coffee were not bad, surprisingly, and afterward we walked around the southern headland a way and up through a low pine forest and down a rocky path to the shore where the rocks fell without moving into the sea. We went in there and snorkelled for an hour and it was pleasant again and even more plentiful with fish. It was deep and with enough rocks and sand and fascinating gullies in between, but the day had become clouded which made us cold even when we got out and lay in the sun for a long while. The one beach, like most in that region, was made of tiny pebbles, not real sand, and the colours and style of them arranged randomly on my hand reminded me strongly of Gaudi's broken tiles in the Park de Guell and the natural lines and arrangement of all his work.

We thought of walking home because the sun was not hot and we were on the edge of cold, I already shivering at first touch of the water. We did not though, we swam back and this time my mask did not leak nor fog and I was free under the water like I sometimes am and the water seemed clearer and more sparkling than on the way there and I was under water with much delight, and the fish were again plentiful and sometimes in strange constellations of large and smaller and very small. I saw a flounder on the sand, exceptionally well camouflaged when it was not moving with its two eyes on the same side looking up, holding itself there bravely until the last moment of my approach and then flicking quickly away in a cloud of sand and settling down again, immediately into the sand and invisible and thinking that it could not be seen.

José was too far away to show him the flounder but a little later I found him swimming past the severed head of an enormous fish, probably a tuna. He did not know he was swimming past the severed head of anything but he was not shocked when I showed him. The head was larger than my own and it was an odd sight to see this hacked-off hunk of fish floating on the sunny surface, coming apart slowly, entrails disgorging and with masses and masses of splayed gills fanning out and disintegrating, and the mouth wide open showing the gullet and through the gullet the sea behind it, the mouth too wide open to be threatening but mildly macabre. I do not understand why other fish were not eating it, nor why they were not eating the dead bream I found a little earlier lying on the sand with its mouth caught on a hook attached to a large sinker.

There were more of the picturesque jellyfish, with brown-orange bodies that fade to transparence at the pulsing edges and globules of differently sized purple and white tentacles that do not sting humans. I played with one of them and laughed aloud to see a whole family of tiny scared-looking fish swimming around within the tentacles, frantically swimming to stay within its protective folds as I pushed the whole sea-craft gently through the water backwards.

When we were nearly out of the water I found another dark hole in a rock that went all the way through, only 3 meters deep but 10 or maybe 15 meters long and broad enough to be called a cave. I swam into the narrow mouth and felt it close around me and open out into the cave and it was dark but nicely dark with the clear outline of the exit before me, an inverted silhouette, and there was a stillness and quietness that is not usual under water. I saw that I was committed because turning around would be harder than going all the way through and although I made it through easily and with no danger of hitting anything, I had an instantaneous rush of fright that is very nice when it is so brief. Despite the stillness, the waves were pushing water through and the way through was harder than the way back and I went through a second and third time, revelling in the marvellousness of being underwater and exploring, almost able to believe I was the first person to have been there except for the silver bubbles of water, like splashed mercury, caught in the crags of the ceiling, telling of other air-breathing creatures having passed through.

Lunch afterwards was very pleasant, sitting in an alley off from the shore. The paella and grilled vegetables were nothing special but the whole was more than the components as it should be and I enjoyed the meal.

We are now on a bus back to Barcelona and tomorrow we will be in Osnabrück again.