Valladolid day 2

I knew as soon as I was in Europe that I seemed to dress differently to the locals. The people in Milan, Marseilles and every place so far in Spain all dressed better than me, they all had button up shirts, trousers or jeans and jackets, leather jackets are very popular. I wear baggy cargo pants and T shirts almost regardless of the weather. On my first morning in Vallodolid it was 3 degrees Celsius but the sun was up, no clouds and the forecast was 17 degrees, T shit weather. So baggy cargoes, bright yellow T shirt, white cross trainers and out I went. I not only got the usual strange looks from the relatively well dressed and rugged up locals but the attention of the police. Another awkward conversation with my Spanglish and his Spanish I worked out he wanted to know if I was a local. I told him I was a tourist from Australia and that seemed to satisfy him, visual discrimination I call it.

The tourist office was very helpful and before long I was on a bus to the pueblo (village) of Penafiel, the “n” is supposed to have a tilde across the top giving it a “nya” sound, pen-ya-fee-el. At the top of the hill overlooking the pueblo is the magnificent castle built by (for) Don Juan Manuel, he later became a waiter at a small hotel in Torquay England when he was short of cash. No one in this town spoke English so it was a bit of a challenging day, for some reason buying two bananas for breakfast was a bit of a no no as the woman in the shop tried to stop me from breaking two off a bunch:

“Dos solo por favor”
“Dos kilos”
“No dos, para desayuno”

She then muttered something unintelligible and gave me two, never argue with a fruiterer wielding a knife.

The main industry of this town involves repeating a biblical miracle, they change water into wine by pouring it onto grape vines, growing the grapes, harvesting the grapes, crushing them to extract the juice, fermenting it in barrels then putting in a bottle; it's a bloody miracle.

The sensational old castle at the top of the hill is now a wine museum. I was in heaven, the ruins of an old castle surrounded by vino, all I needed was a surf beach out the front and I think I would have stayed there forever.

The siesta caught me out again, I was going to walk around the local wine centres in the town but at 2.00 they all closed, in the end I decided not to wait the 2 hours for them to open again so it was on the bus back to Vallodalid and a lazy afternoon doing not much.