Climbing in Lleida

Lleida is one of the most famous sport climbing areas in Europe, and is in our very own Catalunya!  This area was one of the factors that intrigued me when thinking of moving to Barcelona, as it's only a 2-3 hour drive from the city (or a 1-hour fast-train ride away as I learned yesterday!) 

Sadly, I haven't been able to cavort as much as I'd hoped to in this region.  You really do need a car to get out and climb loads in Catalunya. And climbing friends that know where to go!  I had even resigned to the idea of selling my unused Lleida guidebook back to the used bookstore before leaving town, when an opportunity to see it arose!  

I recently joined a group of nice international & local climbers that climb together through an the Barcelona Hiking & Climbing MeetUp group, and meeting them led me to Lleida on a random Tuesday I had off from school. The holiday? "Worker's Day."  

I took the train to Lleida in the morning, got picked up by a caravan of climbers in cars and headed to the first crag.  Crag #1 was in the area called Camasara, one of the closer places to the city of Lleida, and one of the first established in the region with over 20 years of climbing development behind it.  The cliffs are spread along the River Segre. The first sector we went to was called Marcant Estil. Some nice warm-up single pitch routes.

 Here's Lili on the rock:

Here are some spring flowers growing out of the rock.  If you're wondering what colors are in this spring, it's purple with a hint of yellow.

We couldn't have picked a better day weather-wise.  

The next area we drove to was called St. Llorenc de Montgai. My friends wanted to do a multi-pitch climb, but as I haven't climbed multi-pitch in a few years and it was only my second day out this season, I listened to that little voice in my gut that said "not today" and took a walk through the gorgeous countryside while they completed the climb. And gorgeous it was!  Holy smokes!

Before heading out, I eavesdropped on a quick refresher about creating belay stations:

Then followed the poppies... as usual.

I headed down the country road, but snapped pictures of the crag as they made progress.  The first climber sets out:

As I was walking, a little old Catalan woman stopped to talk to me on her evening walk. She asked where I was from and how I learned about this place, and when I told her I was an American but stuttered in Catalan trying to explain how I leaned about Lleida, she asked, "Chris Sharma?" with a very cute Catalan accent.  

Chris Sharma is an American climber, supposedly the best sport climber in the world in terms of climbing the most difficult route, and he made Lleida a famous climbing area when he bought a home here and dedicated himself to spending half the year here climbing.  When I said, "Si, Chris Sharma," she told me that he lived in her village -St. Llorenc de Montgai- which we could see in the close distance.  She said his house was between us and her village pointing just downriver.  I have to admit, I got a little starstruck.  So this was Chris Sharma's playground.  And this was the valley he got to stare at for a large chunk of the year.  Wow.

Continuing my walk towards the village, I stumbled upon this protected archeological dig. Some signage told me they had found evidence of a Neanderthal settlement here from 50,000 years ago.

The road to Sharma's village :)

 A little anti-dictator sentiment...

This panorama kills me it's so beautiful! My friends were climbing a route in the middle of it.

 The town of St. Llorenc de Montgai.

Though tempting and warm enough, a sign told me not to swim even in good weather for risk of flooding due to the dam and power station.

 Irises!

Here they are on the multi-pitch route:

I am definitely not selling my Lleida guidebook to the used book store.  I would love love love to return to this climbing area for much more than a day of climbing, camping, and exploring! Maybe an annual trip :)

Dinner in the Dark

One of the more striking and memorable experiences I've had lately was eating dinner in the pitch dark at a restaurant called "Dans Le Noir."  It is a restaurant chain (there is one in London as well as Paris) where the waiters are blind, and the restaurant is completely dark so that the patrons' sense of sight is suppressed.  A non-blind person can have the reverse experience of being uncertain of his surroundings while the blind staff who have learned to function in the dark are quite comfortable.

Before I met my girl friends at the restaurant, I wrote a little bit about my expectations. Firstly, I was afraid that I would get sleepy and maybe even fall asleep- that my awake & sleep patterns are matched to patterns of light and dark.  I also thought we'd giggle a lot during awkward pauses.  I was curious what our small talk would be about since there was nothing to see and comment on.

Once at the restaurant, we started off our experience in a lit bar and reception area where our host explained to us how the evening would go, and then introduced us to our blind waitress, Pilar.

To enter the restaurant, we had to walk through a series of thick curtains by holding on to the shoulders of the person in front of us.  Then Pilar guided each of us to our chairs and helped us to sit down.  

The first surprise for me was that I felt really motion sick as soon as we sat down.  Because my eyes had nothing to focus on, my inner ear must've been freaking out.  My nausea came and went the whole meal.

Whenever Pilar handed food or drinks to us, she would say "Hola" and our name, and after we would respond, she would ask for our hands.  We would find each other's hands in the dark then she would place a glass or plate in them and feel our hands to make sure we had it before letting go.

At first my friends and I talked about our sensations. We each narrated each of our own movements. We reached out to feel each other's hands once in awhile to "see" where everyone was. And we all leaned in really close the whole meal. If someone were to take our picture, I think we would all have been in kissing distance.  Perhaps this was for fear of not being heard, or perhaps to be as close as possible since we couldn't have the comfort of seeing each other's presence.

The food was chosen, I think, for its different textures and tastes. Nothing was a typical dish that you'd easily be able to recognize, like pork chops or lasagna.  For instance, one of the appetizers was tapioca in mint and lemon on a plantain chip. Not something I cook every day for myself.  None of us used our forks.  At one point, we narrated to each other that while holding the fork properly in our right hand, we were eating with our left hand. We needed to feel around on the plate and touch everything before putting it in our mouths, perhaps to help us anticipate the taste.  

One of the dishes was meat in the shape and size of a snowball which we thought to be duck due do its thin fibrous texture. I kept commenting on how weird it was that the meat was shaped in a ball. Well, we learned afterwards that it was "the cheek of a pig" (a typical Catalan dish). Had I known this during the meal, I may not have been able to stomach it.

Another interesting fact was that they had to shush the crowd often.  They had explained before dinner that just like when a person talks loudly on a cell phone because he cannot see the listener, people tend to talk louder than usual when eating in the pitch dark.

I never fell asleep, though I did find that my eyelids were heavy and it was more relaxing to keep them almost shut.  I stared down at the table the whole meal with my eyes half-open (like our waitress Pilar's eyes were when she came to greet us in the lit lounge).  My friends reported that their eyes were wide open and staring at the spaces where they imagined each other's faces to be.  By the end of the meal, all of us reported having shut eyes.

I was also surprised at one point when we stopped talking about the experience we were having and starting chatting about life, about our summers, travel plans, etc..  We were able to forget about our situation for a good half hour in the middle of the meal.  But by the end of the meal, we all felt done and wanted to leave all of a sudden. I felt myself really craving the light.  My nausea returned, and my friends reported feeling uncomfortable and off-balance.

At this point, Pilar had us all stand up and hold the shoulders of the person in front of us again to exit the dining room.  We all reconvened in the lit lounge. The light hurt, and I noticed we all had the need to touch each other's hands and shoulders again perhaps to verify that we were seeing each other, to match our sense of sight with our sense of touch once again.

We learned that we had been in the dark for 2 1/2 hours.  I was surprised so much time had passed so quickly.

The hosts then went through each food and had us guess what we had eaten, and then shared pictures of the meal.  I would say we correctly identified about 75% of the foods.  One thing they told us during the pre-dinner talk was that 90% of people cannot tell the difference between red, white, and rose wine in the dark. Although we were determined to fall among the other 10%, sadly we misidentified our two glasses of different wine as well.

I really am glad I experienced this.  I didn't like how the hosts played up the guessing-game part of the experience; I felt this to be a bit of exploitation of a blind person's experience. But perhaps in case people hated the experience, the guessing could make some light fun out of it.  But I enjoyed learning how my other senses, such as taste, were affected by lack of sight, and how an experience socializing and connecting with other human beings becomes so different when I couldn't see them.  And of course, I came away from this experience cherishing my own sense of sight, for whether a blind person sees pitch dark black or a fuzzy grayness, I thought what an opaqueness!  What an impenetrable wall, a dark space to spend your existence.  The presence of light literally and figuratively add lightness to our experience in this world.  What a different journey it would be without our sense of sight.

Up the Costa Brava to Pals

Last weekend, a group of teacher-friends and I, on a much-needed R & R getaway up the Costa Brava, stayed at our friends Cachi and Julia's family condo on the beach near the town of Pals.  

This was the view upon opening the blinds.  Not a bad sight for a Friday evening, considering just a few hours earlier we were in our classrooms teaching.  

The weather was stormy on Saturday and sunshine-filled on Sunday. So we enjoyed the best of both worlds... curling up on the couch to the sound of rough waves & rain one day AND walking in the sunshine exploring the rocky coast on the next.

On Saturday, we visited the medieval town of Pals for a little meandering through 14th century streets.

We caught the tail-end of a Saturday open market. It was a special one; we were told it was the annual Rice Competition.  I guess this region is famous for its rice.  But we bought olives.

Fields of mustard in the countryside below:

A Gothic church:

The Romanesque Torre de les Hores (Clock Tower):

We ended the day with dinner at home complete with a fire in the fireplace. You can't get much cozier than the sound of crashing waves and rain outside, while warm inside next to a crackling fire.

The ambiance outside was quite ominous and the scenario (six teacher-friends go away for the weekend to a beach house) seems a bit Stephen King-esque, wouldn't you say?   Luckily, when we did the headcount on the car ride home Sunday, we all were still there.

The next morning, Julie and I took a walk down the trail paralleling the coast.

We stopped in this little town for a drink:

Julie and I accidentally disturbed this hot date:

There were lots of oober rich villas perched right on the coastline.  We conjectured most were probably owned by our students who are always talking about their sailboats and yachts on the Costa Brava.

A yellow poppy?!

See the little dude carved on the log?

The Red Island. Everyone's favorite rock of the weekend.