So there we were, obviously a shifty looking crew, me, two kids, a grandmother and a big daft dog with a halter-type face mask on. We were plodding along the street at snail’s pace, the dog, huge as he is was neither pulling nor showing any interest in anything other than his ‘weans’ as he likes to keep an eye on them when they are gadding about.

On the other side of the street, a wee hairy mop of a dog was yapping its head off and slinging bribes in our direction, but Tito, to his credit, didn’t blink an eye at it.

That didn’t stop a police car from coming to a stop a couple of feet ahead of us and the coppers inside it, giving me a stern talking to about the fact the dog didn’t have a muzzle on. Actually the face mask he was wearing gives me more control than a muzzle would and also effectively pulls his mouth shut if there were to be any trouble. The pc on the other side of the car got our and bobbed about shouting that this was a dangerous dog. “No, he’s not!” my mother scoffed while Tito threw himself to the ground with a huge sigh of boredom.

Only a couple of days before an elderly lady had been mugged in the area by three local boys on a scooter. One got her round the neck, while a second grabbed her bag. In total they got away with about €150 in booty but they left the woman feeling very shaky and upset. Worst of all is that the locals say even the police know who the wee thugs are but can’t touch them because they are under 16.

Meanwhile, Tito’s eyes had glazed over and he rolled on his side totally disgusted with this interruption to our pleasant family walk. We were finally let off the hook after being threatened with a steep fine and assorted dire penalties if the dog was not wearing a muzzle the next time they saw me with him.

Do you think it would have made a difference if I told the police that Tito was under 16?

Yippeeee! Only a few days to go till Tenerife schools are in!

Having had the week from hell (or to be honest the last thirteen weeks from hell)  I am prepared to admit that mothering is not my forte. Love them to pieces as I do, I find my two darlings in concentrated doses makes me go more than a little round the bend. How I envy those unruffled women who glide through parenthood so smoothly while magically keeping their homes clean and sparkling at the same time.

In comparison at the end of each day my hair is standing on end and I am having palpitations at the scary thought of the mountain of clothes to be washed toppling over and suffocating me in the middle of the night. Then having finally said my last goodnight and waiting half an hour for the inevitable squabble and squawk to die down in the kids bedroom I can then enjoy a precious nugget of silence before Tito starts baying his silly head off at some innocent person out walking their dog past the garden gate.

Having never been a religious person I am more and more drawn to the vow of silence.

But I digress. Back to school or at least back to the subject of school. Oddly where in the past the little ones were taken in a day earlier so that they could get settled, it seems this year that the intake for both infantil and primaria is on the same time at the same day. That can’t be right, surely?

With one set of buildings on each side of a main road and a janny (a janitor to those who do not speak Scottish) who seems to take great delight in ramming the gates shut if you are a nanosecond past the 9.10 am while galloping from one school building to the other, there will be utter chaos on Tuesday.

There is also the matter of the subsidised school books. At third year in Primary, my daughter is entitled to have her text books paid for by the cabildo but what a holy mess they made of that last year.  The list of books was not handed out till the last minute and there were not enough books on the whole island to cover the demand.  If this is your first year dealing with the state school system in Tenerif e you can get an idea of what to expect by reading  The Tenerife TexBook Fiasco and Tenerife Textbooks – the Saga Continues.

So with crossed fingers and a song of hope in my heart I am skipping off down to the school reception this morning with my babies in tow to find out just WTF is going on. Tra la la.

I finally got round to putting up a little video about our Rafting Bike day out just before the weekend. (No cracks about ‘fat-bottomed girls’, if you please).

I made the vid with Windows Movie Maker which has an annoying habit of freezing the computer every 10 minutes so the little clip nearly never got finished at all. Despite a growing urge to turf the whole lot into the briny, I finally got the it done and am quite happy with the results. What do you think?

Did you know that there have been several alien sightings in Tenerife?

Very late one cloudless night I even saw a UFO myself but by the time my hubby had  come out to see what I was shouting about, the mysterious and silent craft that were flying across the sky in perfect formation had disappeared. With no photo to prove it (or have dismissed as a weather balloon or whatever) and the memory of my hubby’s look of deepest worry as he pondered whether I had finally lost the last of my marbles, I shrugged off the strange sighting, putting it down in my mind to ‘military aircraft’.

I have always found the idea of aliens more comforting than scary. The thought that someone out there knows what the hell they are doing is quite pleasing. In my version of events, the aliens will let us get ourselves into the worst mess and then step in with the Germolene and lollipops right at the last minute saving us all from the course of destruction that we put ourselves on long ago.

Movies are never like that though are they. Except for that sweet one about all the wrinklies getting their groove back in the swimming pool of their old people’s home, Hollywood always has alien arrival accompanied by blood shed, plague, weather anomalies and planes dropping from the sky. (OMG! Maybe they are already here?)

The latest alien abduction movie, The Fourth Kind,  is no different. It focusses on the real life disappearance of several people from Nome, Alaska in the recent past. Even the recurrent and ongoing FBI investigations haven’t thrown any light on the mysterious goings on and so it must be aliens, right?

Of course the psychologist who winkles chilling subconscious memories from possible alien abductees just had to be drop dead gorgeous and so Milla Jovovich was roped in to play the part of Dr. Abigail Tyler. The movie is supposed to be quite creepy so I am guessing the little green men won’t be handing out lollipops and that their agenda in The Fourth Kind has got nothing to do with saving us from ourselves.

Whatever they are up to in Nome, Alaska, I doubt the aliens could have picked a worst spot to fiddle with the population. Even at the height of the tourist season, the sleepy city would find it hard pressed to find enough warm bodies to fill a football stadium. It is obvious that in a place where everyone knows your name, the regular borrowing of the citizens for a little research and development in a flying saucer would not stay a secret for very long.

The aliens would be smarter to organise their hunting parties on any Saturday night in Las Americas. There they could find any number of people who not only would be unlikely to put up much of a fight, they also wouldn’t need much in the way of anesthetic and would be unlikely to remember anything at all the next day.

The local website Lo Que Pasa En Tenerife is a good place to check up on the daily complaints of Tenerife’s residents.

Today one of the topics is the proliferation of shopping carts that are left in the streets of Santa Cruz.

The citizen reporter who scooped this story gripes that this is becoming so common it’s almost fashionable and why won’t people just return the effing  things. Well, okay maybe she didn’t say that exactly but I bet she was thinking it.

The comments on the original page are funny.

One person opines that it is obviously the fault of the South Americans and globalisation. Boy, is that a leap or what?

I don’t think the invasion of the shopping trolleys is a new thing at all. I seem to remember my hometown being festooned with the things when I was growing up (in fact I am sure most people reading this blog must have trolley-jousted at last once when they were small) and I don’t remember one Peruvian or Brazilian living in Cumbernauld at the time.

Where I live in Tenerife there is a bit of community spirit. We swap dishes and gossip at garden bbqs, attend each others kids’ birthdays parties and share two communal shopping trolleys. They are used to ferry shopping from the car park to the houses. As the driver parks the kids scamper off along the path to retrieve the trolleys from the gate of whoever had them last.

Strictly speaking only one of the trolleys is communal. My neighbour (yes, she of the poo-slinging scandal) got so fed up of having her shopping trolley purloined by the vecinos that she wrote her house number and family name on it in big black felt pen. Quite bold of her, I thought, considering she must have half-inched it herself from somewhere. It’s not like you can stop off at the €1 shop and buy yourself a Mercadona or Netto trolley, is it?

Ready to Go

Cousin Jan and her wild bunch are returning to Tenerife for the third time next month. There can’t be many of the activities on offer on the island that they have not tried already (except perhaps spelunking down the lava tubes) and they will be revisiting their favourite adventures this time including Bike Rafting and Bob-Diving.

It was Jan’s  family’s  enthusiastic reaction to their day Bike Rafting that encouraged me to add the activity to my Tenerife portal website (eTenerife.com) in the first place knowing that if it was equally enjoyable to 50-something parents, a teenage boy and girl and an 11 year old girl all with vastly different characters and hobbies that it was a pretty safe bet that any website visitor booking through eTenerife would also enjoy the day.

Now, I can see what they were all raving about. Nino and I and two of his French rellies an four other people went Bike Rafting on Saturday and we all had a ball!

Put simply, bike rafting involves being picked up in a minivan and transported up the mountain to a starting point from where you sail back downhill the 22 miles to Los Cristianos (or Golf Del Sur or Playa San Juan). Being downhill all the way there is hardly any peddaling involved at all – something which came as a great relief to me.

The Journey Begins…

The journey begins in the pine forest corona at the lip of the crater. The pines scent the air and the view over Tenerife South is magnificent. Where everyone else seemed to breathe deep and grin madly at the scenery my tummy was doing backflips.

I don’t know if everyone on the Bike Rafting trip that day was as nervous as I was to start with but then my biking track record is pretty grim. I have had my lip stitched back together from a bike accident when I was three, a black eye from a lonely concrete post that stood sentinel at the bottom of a scruffy hill  along from my house when I was ten. I ran my cousin’s friend’s motorbike up the school wall in Belgium (and it had a crate of beer on the back at the time), nearly cut three old Belgian ladies off at the knees as I crash landed into them after trying and failing to brake in Aalst and caused the domino effect on a long line of bikes for hire in Yangshou, China which resulted in me being chased down the road by the furious business owner.

In the ten years flocks of bike rafters have been shepherded down the mountain no-one has ever had a serious accident. Even so, my disasterous biking experinces warned me that there was a first time for everything and if anyone was going to go careering off the road and down the hill the hard way it would be me.  It didn’t help that guide Thomas quipped that should anyone’s brakes fail to remember that we were heading for Los Cristianos.

I needn’t have worried. Almost as soon as we started, I began to relax and enjoy the ride.  The feeling of the wind rushing past, the smell of the pines, the silence and the spectacular views just wrapped me up in a bubble and carried me through that first nervous patch.

The pace is easy and relaxed. For most of the time brakes are applied to keep behind the guide but now and then there is a steep downhill slope followed by an uphill surge where all brakes are off and you pelt down hell-for leather in order to maintain the momentum to get you back up the rise without pedalling. It is totally exhilarating.

While the bike riding is the main event there is more to the day than that alone. Owner Mauricio and guide Thomas have the route so carefully planned that they have interesting stories to tell on each stop.  They also play off each other like an old comedy team and you have to keep a careful eye on Mauricio to know when he is pulling your leg. On the rare occasion when  the group of bikers is required to cross lanes of traffic Mauricio positioned his van and trailer across the road like a mother hen  spreading her wings  while her chicks scampered to safety on the other side.

The scenery was not restricted to the rural lansdscape either. We flew though the villages where the locals waved and bid us “Buenas Dias!” and then on down to just past La Escalona where we stopped for a drink and traditional Spanish nibbles. From there it was small sideroads all the way down to the highway into Los Cristianos and the day finish with a gallop along the beachfront and an explosive surprise from Mauricio.

If you are looking for something to do in Tenerife, I can not recommend this day highly enough to everyone.  So far Mauricio’s oldest participant is an 85 year old World War II veteran and young kids can ride along on a baby chair fitted to their parent’s bike. At about nine or ten years old a child will have enough strength and maturity (depending on the child of course) to handle their own bike and I imagine the day would give them a huge sense of accomplishment.

Book your Bike Rafting at eTenerife (my website) or direct with Mauricio at Rafting Bikes. If you do book direct with Mauricio please let him know you read about the day here so maybe he’ll give me a freebie the next time.

As part of the overall preparation plan should there be widespread infection with the H1N1 virus the government are considering an action plan which would involve moving non-infectious and elderly patients to non-clinical facilities like hotels, gymnasiums and schools to free up hospital beds for the victims of the pandemic.

However overly dramatic this may seem given that WHO are still emphasizing the relative mildness of the disease in the greater majority of patients it does point out how aware the government is in the woefully inadequate number of hospital beds and specialist public health care available – especially in the South.

Pandemic or not, I wish they’d get it sorted so that an appointment at Mahon can be expected within the same month that  it was asked for.

Hotels and Colleges Plan for H1n1