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To Asturias please!

Monday, late afternoon.  If Mecki and Mike were in Rheinbach right now, they would be setting off with their cycling buddies - best wishes to you guys - for an after-work ride in the Eifel.  But Mecki and Mike are not in Rheinbach, they are in Oviedo in northern Spain for a good six months.

Northern Spain, how come?  Well, the fact is that Mike has a very nice employer - his University of Applied Sciences in Rheinbach - which releases their department heads, as a thank you and to compensate for the fact that they have spent four years almost exclusively dealing with other people's problems, into a research sabbatical semester, to treat them with six months working on their own things.

Half a year, what an opportunity!  Especially as the children have grown up and left the house.  Mecki and Mike make plans and think back and forth, because great opportunities come with a long wish list.  Most importantly, Mike has to find a university with a mechanical engineering department where he can get by with English and which is happy to accept him in the first place.  Then comes the long list of nice-to-haves: someplace beautiful would be nice, preferably in a larger city with an easy going housing market and in beautiful surroundings for cycling and hiking, as well as in a country whose language - if it's not English or French - you can learn a bit of, and with a delicious local cuisine.  But so many good things at once, doesn't that only exist in fairy tales?  Nope, it also exists in real life, in Gijón in the northern Spanish region of Asturias.  Mike’s colleague José Manuel at the Escuela Politécnica de Ingeniería is delighted to have Mike around for a semester, and because his department offers a English mechanical engineering program in English, Mike can also give some lectures, which he always enjoys doing.

That’s why six months in Asturias are now on the agenda:  Cordilleras Cantabricas instead of the Eifel, the Bay of Biscay instead of the local swimming pool, wine instead of beer, Spanish instead of German.  Mecki is very much looking forward to turbot, monkfish and hake, as well as the classic climbs of the Vuelta - for those of you not into cycling: the Tour de France of Spain, so to speak, particularly because the Alto de Angliru, the most famous, but unfortunately also the steepest and worst of all these climbs, is just 20 km away from Oviedo as the crow flies.  Mike is also really looking forward to cycling in the Cantabrian Mountains, albeit more across the more moderate passes, and he is looking forward to his new colleagues at the Escuela Politécnica, to Réal Oviedo against Sporting Gijón - the big derby of the Segunda División - and the red wines from Castilla and La Rioja.

That leaves the language issue as the only tricky problem.  After all, you don't learn a foreign language just like that.  But again, luck is on Mecki’s and Mike’s side, for with Elena and Paola - best wishes to you both - they manage to hire two excellent Spanish teachers who don't shy away from students whose learning windows were, how shall we put it, more open in the past.  With Elena’s and Paola’s help, Mecki and Mike were finally able to set off for Asturias having passed the A1 language level.  Which, unfortunately, mustn’t be confused with A+ language skills, as A1 is actually the lowest level in the so-called Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.  But it's better than nothing and can be improved, even in an entertaining way.  That’s why Mecki and Mike go to the movies in their very first week in Oviedo.  Mike thinks of this as one of his more practical ideas, because in German movies, he always loses track of what's going on, which is something he doesn’t have to feel so embarrassed about when the movie is in Spanish.  And besides, who knows, maybe Mecki and Mike do in fact learn a bit of Spanish that way.  By the way, “Que la fiesta continúe” is the title of the movie that we don't know whether we should recommend it or not due to a lack of understanding.  But going to the movies was definitely a recommendable thing to do because it was lots of fun.

Finally, some first impressions of Oviedo.  Oviedo is a beautiful city, with stately old buildings in its center and a good 200,000 inhabitants, and it’s the capital of the province of Asturias.  Mecki and Mike live at the Plaza de Riego right in the city center.  From there, it is a 5-minute walk to the Gothic cathedral and also just 5 minutes in the opposite direction to the market halls with fruit, fish and cheese vendors as well as butchers and a bakery.  Mecki and Mike’s first cycle tours take them around Oviedo and are already very promising because they are full of tough, stinging climbs.  Twice they had to push their bikes downhill (!) because it was simply too steep to brake safely.  And should the immediate surroundings be fully explored one day, the Cantabrian Mountains, a veritable high mountain range with passes over 1,500 m, are within a day's cycling distance.