Do you want to know the best way to learn Spanish in Tenerife? Have kids. No, really! Just have a couple of kids and pop them into a local guarderia until they are old enough to enrol  in the Spanish state pre-schooler programme and Bob’s your uncle – in no time at all they will be coming home with garbled messages from the teacher that you are going to have to interpret.

You’ll be learning Spanish nursery songs and sooner or later a magical spell about a frog’s bottom that heals all bumps and bruises (Sana sana colita de rana si no sanas hoy sanaras mañana). There will be  books about Pepo, Pablo, Lua or Tico and possibly a class log in which you will have to make a long entry describing your family life and including photos and colouful doodles.  In Spanish, of course.

Your little one will start correcting your Spanish pronunciation. “No! Not ‘otra vez, otra veh’!” Thanks son, you’ll say between gritted teeth doing your best not to remind him that it was only yesterday he asked you to sing ‘Oh Flower of Iceland’.

Other mothers will rush up to you in the playground and gush a great spurt of words all over you. If you are not to drown, you must get a sprinkling of Spanish vocabulary to hang on to like floats in a swimming pool. Once you’ve gotten used to picking words out of the raging torrent, it will get a bit easier. Instead of floats, now you have stepping stones to help you wade through the conversation.

Your Spanish/English dictionary will become your best friend because as soon as your child progresses to reading comprehension homework you will hear questions like “What does ‘chiflado’ mean?”.  (Though I suspect that she was taking the mickey on that one!) After a wee while of this your mother tongue will be  Spanglish: “Right! Now I am enfadada. Get to bed!”

So there you have it. Forget the expensive language courses. Rip up the timetable for your Spanish course at the Cultural Centre. Just get pregnant and you’ll be speaking Spanish in no time (well, in about five years actually.).

Well done to the A.M.P.A (parents assoc.) in Las Galletas for organising the 1st Festival Infantil which was held in the schoolyard on Saturday 14th March. Entrance was free to members of the A.M.P.A while non-members were charged only €3 per kid for hours of fun.

The A.M.P.A. organise various after-school activities and charge only €10 per year so this was also an opportunity to top up membership. My two have done clay-modelling classes and what not via this group and its always been very worth the small annual membership fee.

Once through the gate, kids were let loose to jump from one bouncy castle to the next or participate in the Uno, Dos, Tres, Quatro dance animation, have their faces painted by ‘Atty and Friends’, enjoy the drums of the Tambores Urugayo or sit and scream at the clown.

Was it a success? Well the bars and cafes round about certainly thought so. After a couple of hours of ear-shattering kids entertainment, I don’t think there was an adult within a two mile radius that didn’t need a stiff drink to recover. Anyway, the kids definitely enjoyed themselves and that was what it was all about after all:

Kid’s Party Contacts

The giant paella was prepared by the lads from Comidas La Union (mob: 606 52 04 38).

The bouncy castles were provided by
Globo Diversiones (mob: 620 255 150) and I think they supplied the bouncy dance animator too.

Face painting, balloon modelling and other kids activities were provided by Atty and her friends (mob: 649 21 65 58).

Like most webmasters, I am always looking for services that might be of use to visitors and that might in return throw the occasional peanut my way. With this in mind and with an eye to bargain basement prices I wanted to find the best supplier for cheap and cheerful flights to Tenerife for the visitors to my destination website, eTenerife.com

So my flight path this morning has been testing out various flight price comparison websites like Wegolo and Terminal A. There are quite a few of these sites and their job is to take your preferred dates and travelling party and run through all the airlines’ prices and schedules before finally coming up with offers ranged by price or convenience (as in direct or stopovers, etc).

While I do use these sites myself to do comparative research before booking flights, I’d have to say you need to go a step further and look into the specific airline’s small print for added charges and fees.

Just as an example, lets pretend that myself and another adult are travelling with two kids to Tenerife in August.

On Wegolo the cheapest outbound for the the family including taxes and surcharges on 4th of August is: €488.04. How did that breakdown?

(What? Why are the kids prices so high?)

The return journey is similar. The cheapest option is €472.12 and the costs were:

Again prices for the kids are just incomprehensible. The airline in both the inbound and outbound flights in these cases is Ryanair, which is currently in the news while the media try and figure out if boss, Michael O’Leary, is kidding about forcing paying passengers to spend a penny if they need to spend a penny on one of his flights.

Oddly enough all you need to do is take a look at the standard fee schedule for Ryanair and Mr O’Leary’s claim that the only reason he is not already charging customers is that Boeing don’t yet offer pay slot mechanisms on their toilet doors as a standard option doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Or so funny.

Keep it up Mr. O’Leary and no family will be able to afford to fly anywhere.

I left the house to walk Tito with the two kids in tow yesterday afternoon and headed to the coast. A man at the head of the track I wanted to take waved me off from a distance. I recognised him as the ‘cat walker’ and presumed he didn’t want my huge Presa anywhere near his precious puss.

That was fine. He was leaving the area anyway so I just waited far enough away for him to collect his cat and wander off up the road and then we all carried on to the rocky coastal path. With my attention on Tito, I had almost walked into a swarm of bees before I noticed it. Maybe that was what Cat Man had been waving about?

There were so many bees that I could feel the buzzing in my sternum. Or maybe that was my heart pounding. I’m not usually a big fearty but I didn’t fancy attracting the attention of this lot.
Even after we’d past the main mass of bees we were passing stragglers (or scouts?) for ages and they all seemed to be frantic about something.

‘Imagine if this was Tom and Jerry,’ Sami said, ‘…they’d whistle for the rest of the swamp.’

I didn’t actually hang about long enough to get a good look at the insects so have no idea if they were honey bees or indeed bees at all. While Tenerife produces excellent award-winning honey and there were a couple of hives on spare ground at the village at one point, most of the apiculture tends to be done much higher up where the pollen-rich broom grows.

Lastly, after my little bee experience with the kids, I poked around on the internet (as you do) just to find out a bit more about bee swarms. I found a little fact sheet which includes the sage advice: Get away from bees as quickly as possible. Oh. Okay then.

For more information about Tenerife honey visit the Casa de Miel .

photo credit:
fussball_89

My early morning walks with the dogs are most often pretty quiet. With the kids to get ready for school and him-indoors ready to leave for work, I need to be up, out and back with two relieved rovers by just after seven. While a lie-in would be lovely now that the kids are off school for a week, it is very hard to sleep with two large dogs dancing cross-legged through the bedroom.

From November to January the mornings have been inky black but now, they’re getting lighter and it’s possible to see my hand in front of my face without the help of my trusty torch. Skye, good girl that she is, potters about and does her business without any fuss. Tito is more skittish and behaves like a shy schoolgirl getting ready to pee behind a bush. Every noise or car door slamming miles away has his head up, ears cocked and all thought of the toilet flushed out of his brain.

This morning as I stood about waiting for Tito to perform, up his head went again and he stared off to the side, into the murk. I looked at him, then off to the side to see if I could see what he was looking at. Not a bean in sight. I huffed a breath impatiently and turned to the front and … WHOOSH … I just missed getting scalped by a huge bat!

I gave an involuntary gasp and staggered back a few steps clutching at my chest to try and massage my heart back into action. Mr. Alert by my side was by this time happily in the middle of business and cast me a glance which was obviously meant to tell me to stop messing about and give him a moment’s peace.

To the Chinese, one bat is lucky but five bats even more so. I suppose I am lucky that I wasn’t mobbed by five bats. But seriously, bats are cool. Not one of life’s winners in the looks department, granted, but imagine how many more tons of mosquitos there would be to keep you awake if bats were not around to eat them.

The Canary Islands has its own species of bat. Called Plecotus Teneriffae (or more commonly the Canary Long Eared Bat) these little guys are on the endangered list and live on only three or four of the Canary Islands, surviving in rapidly shrinking forest habitats. If this was my morning mugger than I was very lucky indeed to nearly be decapitated by such a rare specimen.

I suspect, though, that my batty friend might have been Rousettus aegyptiacus or the Egyptian Fruit Bat to his friends. Alleged escapees from Loro Parque, these fugitives are wreaking havoc on Tenerife’s endemic flora and fauna.

The wiki page for Rousettus aegyptiacus includes the information that their fur is very soft and their wings feel not unlike pantyhose (what was that writer on?). The males also have a large scrotal sack apparently which makes me feel not only lucky but highly blessed not to have been hit in the head by this creature.

Added April 14th 2009: I still don’t know if the photograph shows my morning mugger but I did eventually manage to get a little video of the bats early morning antics which at least shows that they are of a significant size. Look at this for batty acrobatics.

In recent years, the last day before the schools knock off for the Carnaval holiday has been a huge event for the whole town. All the kids in school get dressed up, as do all the teachers and a hefty percentage of the parents and there has been a colourful (if shambolic) parade round the streets.

If anything hints at the effect of the current recession on the community it is the curtailing of this event on a local level (as well as the abandonment of all school excursions). This year only the infants get to dress up and there is to be no parade. Even so, the costumes the little ones wear are fabulous. Whether home made or store bought they are all wonderful and a far cry from the cobbled together fancy dress cossies of my day.

In days gone by,
When I was five,
And dressed up for celebration,
The trick back then was coloured pen,
and huge imagination.

This year the theme of the Las Palmas Carnaval is Pirates while horror movies are the focus of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Carnaval (that is a link to the official website for Carnaval 2009, though honestly I wouldn’t waste my time. You’d be better of popping over to Secret Tenerife where writer Pamela Heywood is doing a far better job of providing info about the event than the touruist board. Shame on them, really…

Anyway, it was no surprise to see quite a few scary skeletons and quite a few pirates. There may even have been a scary skeletal pirate though I admit that one did not catch my eye.

As always, Spiderman was hugely popular and there were more Disney princesses than you could shake a broomstick at. Minnie Mouse was popular this year while a brilliant Ninja costume was a new one on me and on Sami who found it most annoying that he couldn’t tell if the Ninja was really his friend, Noel.

The Paris Marrakech restaurant is tucked away on the ground floor of the C:C: Paris shopping centre in Playa Del Duque. It is a bit of an odd location but as soon as you are settled the wrought iron grille round the restaurant and colourful Moroccan decor wrap you in an exotic bubble and you can just relax and enjoy the great Lebanese and Moroccan food and entertainment.

The belly dancer, Ursula, was lovely – in all senses of the word. Not only did she charm all the men in the room with her seductive moves but she had me and Gaga charmed by her kindness to my daughter.

Both kids were made to feel very welcome and even though I had to practically sit on Sami to stop him demonstrating his break-dancing technique while his big sister was getting all the attention, he was thrilled with his night out especially his humongous serving of ice-cream.

Dinner and drinks for three adults and two kids came to less than €100 which was very reasonable.