A story from Ray

Thank you to Ray who lives in Australia, he is a regular viewer of the Old Stuff and has sent this story about his time spent here in the 60s ....

   Back in the sixties there were only three brands of bottled beer available on the Costa Brava.   San Miguel was the most popular beer, followed by Estrella Dorada and there was a minor brand named Moritz.  Throughout the 1962 season I worked as a barman at Chez Biel in Tossa.   I see that the same building still overlooks the Tossa beach from the northern corner of Carrer Mar and Passeig Mossen Cint Verdague (Catalan street names according to Google Earth).   Google Street View is not available for Tossa so I could not find out whether that building still bears the name Chez Biel.  Mr Biel ran the large bar on the ground floor and his sister ran a restaurant upstairs where the distinctive arched windows face the beach.   My working hours were 8am to midnight with a two-hour lunch break and a one-hour break for the evening meal, giving 13 working hours per day, seven days per week with no days off during my five months there.   In my final months I found that I was thinking in Spanish instead of in English!!!

 

One day in 1962 at the Tossa beachfront bar named Chez Biel, a drink-waiter walked out to the terrace tables to serve bottles of San Miguel beer, but when he prepared to open the bottles he noticed a lizard inside one bottle so he hastily retreated inside and got a replacement bottle.    The customers did not see the lizard.   The bottle containing the lizard was still unopened and I took it on my lunch break to show to my friends.   The following day when the San Miguel man came to take away the empties and deliver more beer, he made the lizard bottle disappear so quickly that he should have been a magician.   It turned me off San Miguel beer for a few weeks.    It was a large lizard too.

 

In that same year, Tony Batey and Eric Richards were in partnership with an American named Chuck and Chuck’s girlfriend Mercedes at the Club Internacional, inside and against the fortified walls, and Tony and Eric moved to Lloret and opened the Captain’s Arms in the following year.   I did not meet up with Tony and Eric in 1962 because I was working day and night with no time for bar hopping.   However they obviously had heard about me because Eric came looking for me on my second day in Tossa in the following year (1963).