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September 24, 2007

The Abandoned Shoe Factory of Haro

On Sunday the festivities of San Mateo were well over. All of Logroño was quiet. I suspected the few people milling about were severely hungover. I had read in the paper today that Sunday was "Logroño sin Coche" day. This was probably a good thing as most people chose to shuffle across the intersections rather than walk.

Luis and I took the car up to the center of town in order to find some tourist information on exploring La Rioja. We started off late in the day and although there seemed not to be a car moving anywhere in the city, all of the free street parking was taken. I showed Luis the beauty of the empty municipal ramps.

We arrived at the tourist office to find it closed for siesta. We decided to burn the hour and a half waiting for it to reopen by walking around the northern part of the city snapping photographs with my Holgaroid instant camera. It was an utterly perfect day: warm sun, a light breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. Luis had commented several times on how the Holga was "a fine piece of mechanics."

We crossed the river Ebro twice and made a loop around the Plaza de Toros. I tried but failed to find any evidence of scorching in the hills from when they were set ablaze during the fireworks display. The local paper had said that it was caused by a stray shell that somehow had been pointed directly against the wind and at the mountains.

As we were returning to the tourist office I spotted two girls in long skirts with black name tags, "LDS members!" I exclaimed, and they spun on their heels to come and talk to us. One of the girls was Spanish and the other was from Florida. The girl from Florida seemed as though she had been starving for English and we started up a genial conversation on the merits of hominy grits.

All this chit chat about the finer points of American cuisine ("did you know that you can find them at Al Campo?" I had told her) seemed to bore her Spanish compatriot and she began to fill out an informational form inviting Luis and I to meet with her LDS group some other Sunday ("you can even speak English there!" she told me). It is such a pity when people are all business. I informed her as gently as I could that I was quite comfortable in my heathen ways, being as one with my animal nature and all, but that I have a great respect for LDS as I haven't met an rude, uneducated, LDS member anywhere. It is good to go out and meet the world, no matter the context you do it in. It is a shame that more Americans do not get out of the country, walk around and talk to people even if it is only about the merits of hominy grits.

The man in the tourist office was exceedingly nice. He gave us an English and Spanish copy of everything he had. I even asked him about the possibility for taking Spanish classes and he took the time to search the local university's website for information. Again and again we saw information on a city called "Haro" and so Luis and I decided to drive the car to discover what was there.

Forty kilometers and twenty five minutes later we pulled the car into a much smaller version of Logroño. We parked the car and made a bee-line for the central square of the city and staked out a place for us to return and have a drink later in the evening. We referred to the map and decided to hike to the highest point in the city in order to check out the view.

Finding the route to the highest point was easy: all we had to do was look for the wiry crowns of the cell towers peaking above the roof line of the apartment buildings and walk toward them. The hill was directly in the center of town. Eventually we found ourselves ascending a long abandoned road of broken and eroded concrete dotted to one side with large abandoned factory buildings.

A smashed television marked the head of a trail to a hole in the side of a factory where rubber shoes and the remnants of the cardboard containers that held them were quite literally hemorrhaging outward onto the hillside. This was perhaps the last rubbery burp of production of what appeared to be this town's final experiment with any industrialization beyond wine. I couldn't help myself but to climb inside and explore and goad Luis into following me.

Shoes and cardboard covered the floor like giant post-industrial latex laced snow drifts. It was obvious that nobody in town needed a pair of rubber shoes. They looked like they had been there for decades, the does were pristine while the cardboard around them was slowly decaying.

There was a surprising lack of graffiti. Most of the windows were intact save for a few that had been blown out by a stray rock or beer bottle. There was a large hole in the side of the building opposite the hemorrhaging burp which provided a spectacular view of the city below. The sun was setting through the broken windows and inside the building it felt like one of the last days on earth. We took some pictures and took our leave.

Around the hill at the same level as the show factory there were some two or three other industrial buildings with some other product littering their insides. We opted not to enter any of them and continued climbing to the top. It was worth it.

There was a white geographic marker at the top of the hill placed there by the Spanish government and marked with a plaque informing people that those who would desecrate the marker would be punished under the law. Surprisingly on this hill covered with broken beer bottles, graffiti and abandoned factories this pristine white obelisk was left unmolested. Its was as white as the day it had been painted.

We looked all around us and tried to count off all the other little towns we could see around us dotting up between the vineyards. Each of them were situated around another small hill with the apex of a church rising higher than all of the other buildings. The sun was sinking lower on the horizon and everything was golden. It was a glorious view.

We climbed back down, again past the shoe burp, and down into the narrow streets of the city. We were hungry but too early for a sit down meal. We past several little bars and finally came upon one filled with fresh tapas, good smells, and old men.

We ordered drinks at the counter from a middle aged woman, her three year old son hitting her in her stomach with his fists and throwing a general tantrum behind the counter. I asked her what was good. She gave me an exasperated look that she really should have been giving her son and said everything is good, what do you like? I told her anything spicy and she pointed to the stuffed fried peppers.

These peppers were the first genuinely spicy thing I have eaten since my time here in Spain. They were red peppers that I suspected had at one time been dried but now had been reconstituted, stuffed with cheese, herbs, ground pork, then finally coated in egg batter and fried. There were positively delicious. We ate all of them that she had on hand.

While we were eating, old men kept filing into the place. Wordlessly the bar matron would present them with a drink. All of the drinks were different. She knew each of her patrons preference and served them soundlessly with incredible efficiency for someone who had a screaming three year old locked around her ankles.

The old men obviously knew that we did not really belong to the place and made little jokes to each other about how this was a good opportunity to practice English. They would pass the notion to each other with a little wink and a punch in the arm. Nobody ever approached us and for the entity of our meal we remained nothing more than a mutual curiosity to each other. We ordered more tapas.

There was fried ham stuffed with cheese and skewered pickled peppers with little fillets of anchovy. There were olives. There was tongue that for lack of a better description resembled a somewhat more lingual version of veal scallopini ("look who's talking now?" I ventured in Spanish, but nobody got the joke). We ate and drank our fill, payed our 16 € for everything and headed back to the town square.

We took a table and I ordered an aperitivo. It was the first time I tried "orujo con hierbas" which is a sort of strong grape spirit, not entirely but somewhat like grappa, infused with a bouquet of things that make you hiccup up a bouquet.

About the most remarkable thing to see in the square was the one kid who road his bike around and around the square the entire time we sat there. Up the same curb, around the same set of tables, then down the same curb. Around the streetlight and back again. Over and over again he did this. He resembled some of the caged and pacing animals at the zoo. From the little door where the food comes in to the tree, from the little door where the food comes in to the tree, from the little food door where the food comes in to the tree...it was little wonder that there were people with children and old people. The ones just old enough to leave seemingly had done just that perhaps only to return when they realized just how good they had it.

Posted by jordanh at September 24, 2007 4:12 AM

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