Life in Cartagena

Get out of that one if you can

2012-01-13T01:25:00.000+01:00

We got our house insurance renewal notice a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was a bit steep. 410€ for 30,000€ of contents and 150,000€ buildings. I think the premium has more or less doubled since we first took out the policy six or seven years ago. The renewal isn't due till next month so I did a bit of ringing around and quickly found another company offering slightly better cover some 90€ cheaper. I signed up for the cheaper insurance.

Just to avoid any problems come the renewal date I thought I'd tell the old company that I wouldn't be renewing the policy. Now I don't like ringing Spanish customer services. I don't like it because they make me pay for the call with their stupid 902 numbers (the equivalent of the 08457 numbers in the UK) which are excluded from our free calls packages and I don't like it because I have to speak Spanish.

I like email or writing a letter. Plenty of time to think and very impersonal. There was no mailing address on the renewal notice so it had to be email. The snag is that using email in Spain for anything semi official is a nightmare. The firms hide behind data protection laws and make it all very tricky especially for we foreigners.

After a lot of searching I found an email form on the insurance companies website. I told them that I wouldn't be renewing my policy and that I had cancelled the direct debit. They came back to say they couldn't respond to my email for security reasons but that in the way of general information if I wished to cancel a policy it was ESSENTIAL that I went to one of their offices because I have to sign some documentation to cancel the policy.

I was a bit cross. Seething in fact. The often outdated way of doing some things in Spain, the mania for personal attendance, the demand for identity documents from jumped up little clerks and the doubtful business practice of putting obstacles in the way of anyone wanting to change any arrangement were all going around my head.

I went in search of the email form to tell them what they could do with their ESSENTIAL requirement. As I searched I was working on the Spanish for things like "try to get any money out of my bank you tw**s." I couldn't find the email form and I've cooled down a bit now. Tomorrow I'll go to one of the hundreds of offices they maintain and speak to them. I do hope they don't give me a tough time because I know that if they do when I've finished hurling abuse and swearing at them in English I will feel a bit silly.

Different

2012-01-06T02:26:00.000+01:00

Cartagena is in the Region of Murcia. Lots of Britons, lots of EU citizens, live in Murcia. Alicante province has even more Britons, even more EU citizens.

Driving licences all over the EU all have a very similar design. It's dead easy to swap a British, or Belgian or Dutch driving licence for a Spanish one but lots of Britons (I'm going to stop adding in other European countries now but I'm sure you've grasped the point) prefer the home grown product. So, if by the simple device of getting a friend or relative in the UK to allow you to use their address you can hang on to a driving licence made in Swansea that's what lots of us prefer to do.

How legal a non Spanish driving licence is for an EU citizen resident in Spain has been a perennial bar room topic for years. I had my own understanding of the regs around driving licences and I sent my licence to be changed to a Spanish one last July just before I'd been officially resident for five years. The replacement still hasn't arived but that's a different story.

Laws change all the time in every country and public awareness of those changes is not always high. That's the case even when the changes and the publicity about them are available in your native language. In Spain where most Brits don't get their news from the Spanish media or even Spanish sources two things happen. People either know nothing about the changes or, more usually, several different interpretations of the changes start to circulate.

In our home town in Alicante we are lucky to have a much more relaible source than most. Clive wearing his UCL hat. Clive told us about changes to the driving licence requirements. Resident Brits were offered basically two options. Change our UK licence for a Spanish one or register our UK licence so that the Spanish authorities could find (and fine) us. The cut off date for the changes was 9 December.

Some of our friends here recently registered their UK licences with the traffic people in Alicante without too much bother. Maggie thought she would do the same today but she chose to use the traffic office here in Cartagena. Apparently she caused confusion and consternation amongst the workers behind the counter. They vaguely knew about registering EU licences but they weren't quite sure how so they took all the paperwork that Maggie proffered plus her licence and said they'd give her a call when they had some news back from Madrid.

It seems it's not just the Brits who get their legal updates in a haphazard and individual way.

We three kings of Orient are

2012-01-04T00:53:00.000+01:00

As I came home at lunchtime the streets in the centre of town were heaving with shoppers. In the little square by the Icue statue there was a long queue of youngsters waiting to have their picture taken with whichever one of the Three Kings was on duty. I know it wasn't the African one, Baltasar, and I don't think it was Melchor because, if memory serves me right, he has a big white beard to prove he's European so it was probably Gaspar the darker skinned Asian representative. I could be wrong of course because I wasn't brought up with the iconography of the Three Kings. Strictly Santa Claus in Yorkshire.

At work this evening one of my students seemed most put out that I'd never heard of Swarovski jewellery or more particularly their glassware. He'd bought his girlfriend something from their range for Christmas. Just to make sure that the message was rammed well and truly home my last student of the evening asked if I was ready for Christmas. She confessed to still having food to buy.

In the UK, and amongst the British ex pats here, Christmas may be done and dusted but that's not the case for Spaniards. The Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve meals have come and gone but the last meal of the Christmas four, Three Kings, is yet to come. For children too the evening of the 5th to 6th is still the big gift giving day despite the inroads that the Anglo Saxon Santa Claus has made.

I must remember to buy us a Roscón for the 6th. I wouldn't like to miss out on the last calorie bomb of the Christmas festivities!

The twenty second

2011-12-24T01:01:00.002+01:00

It was lottery day here yesterday, well maybe the day before yesterday if I type as slowly as usual and I end up posting on Saturday. Thursday was the day of the fat one; el Gordo. As usual the number singing children of San Ildefonso and who would carry away the new fatter than ever prize was the big news story for the morning news.

We have a new president though. Mariano Rajoy. Señor Rajoy and his new ministers had been sworn in the days before. The media stuttered but there was no doubt in my mind that the lottery ended up being relegated to second place. Something almost unheard of. The lottery here is huge.

What I found even more impressive though was the support for the new man. Not necessarily a political support but just the hope - the hope against hope - that this man and his new team can pull the country out of the deep hole that it's in. A hope that had the left leaning press pulling their punches. A hope that had hard bitten radio journalists finishing their interviews with new ministers with personal good wishes.

It reminded me of all those Apollo and Shuttle launches - swept along by the event - "Go, go, go!"

Spot the museum

2011-12-20T18:20:00.000+01:00

This is the Byzantine Walls Museum in Cartagena. It's a small, unremarkable place but I've been in much worse. It has an impresive facade don't you think? Not at all easy to confuse with a slightly run down block of flats.

Do you see the sign that says museum or the board with the opening times? No, neither do I.

It could have closed down of course. I haven't tried to visit it recently but, then again, it always was a discrete little spot

Beltrí, nuns and a cemetery

2011-12-18T18:37:00.000+01:00

Cartagena is loaded with Art Nouveau buildings and Victor Beltri was the architect behind a good number of the best ones. 2012 will be the 150th anniversary of his birth and there is a committee organising events to celebrate his life and works.

The cemetery or Cementerio de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios is on the outskirts of Cartagena. It was put there, far away from the town centre, so that the stench of rotting flesh didn't upset anyone important. I don't suppose that cemeteries are a hygiene risk anymore but if they were I suspect nobody would care too much as the neighbourhood closest to the cemetery looks like it's full of poor people. Poor people and drug dealers we were told.

There was a lot of mining money in Cartagena at the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th Century. Rich and powerful families were keen to have tombs that showed their wealth. Many of them employed Beltri to build their mausoleums. Then there was a bit of an economic crash and lots of that wealth just disappeared. No spare money to keep the tombs spick and span.

The Little Sisters of the Poor asked someone from the Beltrí committee or fan club to organise a tour around the cemetery. Today was the day. The donations would go to the Little Sisters to support their work with old people.

It was an interesting visit but perhaps a bit less exciting than I'd hoped for. Nowadays I can usually cope with Spanish but there are any number of counter indicators. The main one is me. If I decide I can't understand or that the situation is in some way difficult then I won't understand and I will begin to swear to myself and retreat into my shell. Some of the counter indicators though are very real and beyond my control. They're the sort of things that cause me problems in English too - stuff like the levels of background noise or incredibly strong accents or maybe just lack of interest. There were enough counter indicators today for me to start to switch off so I probably missed all the best stuff.

The Mausoleum in the photo is for the Pedreño family, a mine owner and 19th Century politician. The building was actually designed by Carlos Mancha rather than Beltrí. Lots more pictures in my December album.

That wouldn't be right

2011-12-17T20:24:00.001+01:00

The first time was in Santa Pola as I remember. We were new to Spain and I was in a shop that sold fishing tackle. I spent two or three euros. There were three of us. Despite turning up mob handed and the meaness of our purchase the shopkeeper pressed us to take a little something and to have a wee dram.

At Christmas it's not at all unusual for a shop, an office or even a bar to have a tray full of seasonal delicacies like turrón, mantecadós and polvorónes on offer for customers. Sometimes the offer runs to liquers or spirits. A touch of seasonal cheer.

I was in the dentist the other day. Lots of glistening packets. "Sugar free I suppose," I said, innocently. "Sweets wouldn't be sweets without sugar" said the receptionist.

Spain, still refreshingly unreformed and unrepentant.

An under-researched but interesting beer

2011-12-10T01:44:00.001+01:00

Ventura and me

Ventura is a pal of ours. He often turns up at the door of the flat bearing some local delicacy. Last week it was one of the traditional varieties of Cartagena Christmas buns, cordiales, and the week before it was piles and piles of toast. He's lived in Cartagena for a long time and he knows lots of people. They give him things and he hands on the excess to poor unfortunates like us.

We know Ventura, Buenaventura Albaladejo Meseguer, to give him his full name, because he taught at the school Maggie now teaches at. His past is intimately linked with the development of football in Cartagena.

He turned up at the door tonight to ask if I fancied a beer. He had a friend in tow. One of his old footballing pals. They were killing time before watching a footie match on the telly between Barcelona B and Almería. It didn't sound like a big match to me. More Halifax Town v Blyth Spartans than Espanyol v Atlético.

We had the beer outside "el Pani" a local bread and cake shop cum bar. Ventura pointed out a photo on the wall. The owner's actually called Francisco Hernández Solano but everyone calls him el Pani. He used to play for Tarragona, for Nástic, or Gimnástic de Tarragona to give the team it's full name.

I had been served a Galician beer. The feeling was that we should be drinking a more local brew, Azor (Goshawk) was mentioned. I've just checked. Azor was bought out in 1971.

Another man joined us. He was called Paco. He asked why we were drinking Galician beer. Ventura pointed out that he wasn't guilty; he was drinking peach juice. It turned out that Paco used to play for Valencia Football Club.

I was asked if I'd ever heard of a footballer called Di Stéfano. It's just possible I had but I said no, in case there was a follow up question. Apparently Di Stéfano was a famous player particularly during his time with Real Madrid in the late 50s and early 60s. Indeed he was so good that FIFA have him listed as one of the top five players of the 20th Century. I probably should have known his name! Ventura told me that Paco's job was to stop Di Stéfano when Madrid and Valencia met.

It's strange who you can end up having a beer with outside a cake shop in Cartagena on a Friday evening.

Slaughter

2011-12-06T19:21:00.001+01:00

Slaughter - now there's a good word. Slaughter - spurting blood, severed limbs and sinew, shattered bones. Blood and guts. Matanza in Spanish.

The leaflet said come and see the traditional slaughter at the Fortress of the Sun; the Workshop in Time. Nice wording I thought. The copy writers must have burned the midnight oil to come up with those.

We knew what to expect, at least from the slaughter. Lots of pig products. We've lived in Salamanca province where gutting a squealing pig in the back yard is still a bit of a family event. It's no longer legal to slaughter animals away from properly licensed premises but the home slaughter of the pet pig at this time of year is such a strongly ingrained tradition in some parts of the country that the authorities continue to turn a blind eye.

So we weren't expecting the pig to die in front of us. We were just expecting lots of cholesterol rich food and that's what we got.

Lorca is the place that was hit by an earthquake back in May. Nine people died and over 300 people were injured. We've been told lots of times by lots of people what a nice place Lorca is but we've never taken to it much. One of the reasons for going today was that the economic effects of the earthquake are still being felt. There are local campaigns to support Lorca by going there and spending a bit of money. So a Bank Holiday trip out seemed like a good idea.

The Castle wasn't bad. It had some walls and some towers and stuff like that though the towers were closed - one because of earthquake damage. They had tried hard to make something of what they had so the bakery had loaves and life size figures of bakers and they had little displays about water in one of the underground cisterns. They also had a king, an alchemist and the Spanish equivalent of a witch doctor telling us interesting things about the castle and life in the Middle Ages. There were birds of prey too.

And the sun shone.

Cross all over again

2011-11-25T13:30:00.001+01:00

The Spanish banking system drives me crazy. It's slow and ponderous with piles and piles of paper, incredible waiting times and outrageous charges. I've got used to it of course, even old people like me are very adaptable, but it did strike me that I could save about 160€ per year by closing one of the accounts that I no longer really use.

On the surface the banks are all very modern looking - chipped cards, Internet transactions and what not but not far beneath the veneer it's still steel nibbed pens and winged collars. I guessed that I would be expected to go to my own branch to close the account in person. The problem is that my own branch is 120km away. I got in touch with the bank's central customer services to ask how to overcome the problem. Their answer was simple. Only the one branch can close your account.

To be honest I didn't get particularly cross. I wasn't surprised. I've lived here a while now. And, after all this is the bank that, when I asked them how to get an electronic signature so I could contact them by secure email, replied that they could not answer my email because it was not secure. What I did do was go to the nearest branch of the bank with a plan.

I explained that I wanted to close the account. They gave me the same guff about having to go to my branch. "Can I transfer the account to here?" I asked, "Of course," said the clerk. "Fine, in that case I'd like to move my account to here and then I'll close the new account."

Remarkably the clerk suddenly thought of a way to close my account by having me fill in some forms which she will then send on to my branch. It's still to do of course, lots can go wrong yet.

Dancing while the bomb drops

2011-11-20T23:54:00.001+01:00

It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that Maggie loves the musician Pat Metheny. But for her I'd know him vaguely as a bloke who made a record with David Bowie years and years ago.

Cartagena has an annual Jazz Festival. We went to see Ryuichi Sakamoto a couple of years ago, possibly someone else too. This year people on the bill have included Wanda Jackson, Bettye Lavette, Herman Dune, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sly Johnson, Ryuichi Sakamoto (again), the Cowboy Junkies and lots more.

A new conference centre, El Batel, was recently completed in Cartagena. It's all walls of light and big open spaces. The auditorium has been used for some of the jazz concerts.

And guess who was on the bill of the Cartagena Jazz Festival programme at the new conference centre tonight - got it in one eh?, Pat Metheny. And we went. He's not a personal favourite of mine but I thought it was a good concert and as we were on the front row we had a good view. Such a good view indeed that I saw Pat drop a plectrum at the end of one number. I picked it up and Maggie now has it has a memento. I suspect she will have it framed or sleep with it under her pillow.

And when we got out of the concert hall and into a bar it was all over. 90% plus of the votes counted, 186 conservative seats to 111 socialist seats. The worst defeat ever for the socialists. Some of the smaller parties have done pretty well out of the collapse of the PSOE but the new, conservative, Partido Popular Government will have an absolute majority in both houses. There will be blood letting amongst the PSOE.

Left right out

2011-11-20T12:37:00.001+01:00

I'm feeling a bit left out. It's the day of the General Election today for both lower and upper houses of parliament and I can't vote. I'm not complaining as such but I'd much rather be able to vote for the Spanish politicians who affect my life rather than for the British ones who are largely irrelevant to me. I can vote in UK General Elections, in European elections here in Spain and in the local Spanish ones. Neither country allows me to vote at the regional level

I've just had a wander around the area close to our house to have a look at some polling stations. I found three in maybe a twenty minute walk - one was in a church building, one in a museum and one in a school. They weren't exactly overwhelmed with voters but there was a steady trickle of people exercising their franchise.

The system here is that you vote for a party. The parties put forward a list of candidates in each area and the number of candidates elected from each list is decided on a proportional representation system derived from the mathematically complicated d'Hondt system.

The papers with the lists of candidates are available in the polling stations but they are also distributed by the political parties, often by post but also by, for instance, street distribution or at political meetings. On the day the lists are put inside differently coloured envelopes for the different assemblies and, once the persons right to vote has been checked against the electoral roll, dropped into the transparent ballot boxes. This means that most people don't need to use the polling booth as they turn up at the polling station with their envelopes ready prepared. If there is some problem with the voter registration and you are missing from the electoral roll there is an office where you can try to sort it out on the day.

The polling stations have different "electoral tables" with voters being designated a table according to where they live. Each table is staffed by three citizens chosen at random from the electoral rolls. There are also people on standby and, if all else fails, the first voters who turn up can be pressganged to serve as scrutineers at the table. These people have to be there at 8am in the morning, the voting starts at 9am and they have to work through till the end of voting at 8 in the evening. I think, though I'm not sure, that they are also responsible for counting the votes. They get paid 62.61€ for the work and, if they are employed, they can also reduce their next working day by five hours.

We're off to a concert this evening. Afterwards it'll be out with the beer and peanuts to watch the results in. I wonder just how much of a pasting the PSOE is going to take?

Andalucia

2011-11-19T20:21:00.001+01:00

My Auntie Eileen used to live near Leyburn in North Yorkshire. She was a Conservative supporter. One day she invited my family to a Con. Club do near to her house. Family winning out over ideology I accepted the invitation and enjoyed a frank exchange of views with Leon Brittan, the candidate for the forthcoming elections. To give him his due he bought me a wine and I was weak enough to accept it. Years later I made it very plain to Jonathan Djanogly, the Tory candidate for Huntingdon, that I would rather buy my own. As my Uncle Steve said "The Conservatives could put up a donkey here and it would win." True for Richmond, true for Huntingdon.

It's much the same in Murcia where we live. Blue as they come. Not a lot of election activity. But Andalucia is different. Andalucia has been Socialist since the return of democracy to Spain. At the last elections though, the local elections, for the first time the Socialists took a trouncing in the region.

We skipped over the border into Andalucia today to do a bit of sightseeing and it was obvious that it's a political battleground. The signs are that the Socialists are going to get whupped hollow tomorrow but the banners in the street suggested that, at least, they're fighting.

Pardon?

2011-11-17T00:25:00.001+01:00

Back in 2008 when Heath Ledger died I heard the news on the morning radio. I knew someone was dead. I knew it was a film star. I could understand the biography but blow me if I could get the name. Then I recognised the Spanish title, En Terreno Vedado, as the equivalent of Brokeback Mountain. Deduction, my dear Watson, filled in the gaps.

There are pretty tight rules about how to say words in Spanish. There are variations of accents and what not but, basically, Spanish is a very phonetic language. Fine with Spanish words but a minefield for the foreign imports. I find Anglo names in Spanish mouths almost unrecognisable and words that Spaniards think are English but said with a Spanish lilt can be difficult too. This isn't much of a problem in speaking Spanish as I simply avoid the imported words and stick with the more old fashioned Spanish version.

The real problem comes with English words used to describe a product - a US film with an English language title, almost anything in a burger joint, several brands of alcoholic beverage or branded clothes for example. There is sometimes just no way round. If you want a Whopper with cheese and that's what it says on the list then decisions have to be made. Do you go for a Spanish take on the pronunciation of Whopper or the English one and do you translate with cheese or leave it as it stands in English?

It was a cheeseburger tonight. I tried my Spanish pronunciation. The young woman taking the order shrugged her shoulders, screwed up her face, said nothing and beckoned over a second server. The bilingual server didn't understand my English version either at first but we got there in the end. It was an unpleasant and uncomfortable exchange.

Little jobs

2011-11-16T00:35:00.001+01:00

Repairing things, not throwing them away and buying new, is still pretty normal in Spain. When the handle on my axe broke and none of the standard sized replacement ones in the ironmongers would fit the shopkeeper arranged for a chap to shape an appropriate new handle. After the nose-piece dropped off my 35 year old sunspecs the local optician soldered or brazed on, or whatever it is they do, a new one as I waited.

Of course the crisis, the financial ructions of the past few years, has a lot to do with it. Cobblers are doing brisk trade once again and the little workshops that alter and repair clothes have been given a new lease of life. I suppose a new and less artisan manifestation of the poverty is the huge number of "We Buy Gold" shops or the burgeoning number of pawn shops all over the city.

Anyway the increased visibility of the places that repair and alter clothes made me think that it may be worth having the ripped lining and shredded pockets of my leather jacket repaired. I took the jacket to a repair place. They said they could do it all right but the price was a bit of a shock - 60€ - and even worse I would have to supply the lining material. I'd just presumed that the repairer would supply the cloth but, apparently not. Sewing is their job, not selling cloth. Demarcation 70s style. They told me where to get the lining material though.

There were stacks of people in the cloth shop. One woman was buying 20 metres of pink fleecy cloth. Apparently she was doing the herd of pigs for the school Christmas show. Non Iberian pigs I presume; they're black.

I bought the lining and asked if the cloth shop could do the repair, fishing for a cheaper quote. The assistant looked puzzled - "We sell cloth," she said, "we're not a tailor though we know someone who is."

María Jesús, the recommended seamstress, asked me why I'd bought so much lining cloth. Surely I wasn't going to replace the whole lining? What a waste of time and money. Much better to just chop this bit out there and replace this bit here. "Good strong pockets," she said," I know what you men are like." Price 15€.

Now we're talking. And this metal bucket? Well with a new handle, a bit of patching at the bottom and just a tad of solder along this side seam it'll be as good as new in no time.

Bit of a damp squib then

2011-11-04T20:59:00.000+01:00

We've got a General Election here on 20 November. Interesting date, anniversary of Franco's death. It looks as though the socialists, the PSOE, are going to take a right pasting at the hands of the conservative PP. Everyone is so sure that it's going to happen that I wouldn't be surprised if the turnout is pathetic.

Official campaigning in Spain starts a couple of weeks before the election date with no campaigning the day before. So midnight last night was the start line. The normal routine is that there are lots of photos of the big candidates pasting up an election poster somewhere as midnight strikes. No photos like that in my paper this morning. In fact I haven't seen any posters in the streets yet although the volume of political tweets and posts to my Facebook page has rocketed in the past few hours.

No, the only time that I noticed that we are now in full campaign mode was that there were a couple of political adverts on the radio as I was getting breakfast this morning. iU, an alliance that includes the old communist party, has jumped on the bandwagon of 15M, the popular movement of people who are fed up with the whole political-financial nexus, with a slogan "Rebel" but apart from that I remember nothing about the ads I heard. It's not surprising really. The PP leader, a bloke called Mariano Rajoy, so far as I can remember, has never had an original thought in his head - he just complains about the other lot. The PSOE candidate is someone who's been around for years, I think he looks a bit seedy. He's been a key member of the Government that has watched Spain teeter on the brink of financial ruin and given the country 4,978,300 jobless.

Always good fun though, the electioneering pictures of politicians looking uncomfortable in tailored jeans or out with the kids to feed the ducks.

Rubalcaba to the left by the way (where else?) and Rajoy to the right (idem)

Caldero

2011-11-02T00:31:00.000+01:00

A caldero is a small cauldron shaped cooking pot. It has given its name to a fish and rice dish that is popular all along the Murcian coast and the Mar Menor. So caldero, like paella, takes its name from the pan it's cooked in.

I am told that in it's original form it was a cheap and easy meal for fishermen. They were able to use up the fish or fish parts that weren't saleable. The fish, along with tomatoes, local peppers, garlic and saffron is used to produce a stock in which rice is cooked. It is the rice that is the essential part of the meal but, if you have any decent fish available, that can be cooked in the stock too. Normally the fish is served separately. So it really is rice with fish rather than a rice and fish mixture.

The whole lot is served accompanied by ali-oli - an emulsion of garlic in olive oil - which lots of we foreigners mistakenly believe to be a garlic mayonnaise.

Now Spaniards eat a lot of fish. Even the smallest of supermarkets often have extensive fish counters. In landlocked parts of Spain fresh, not frozen, fish and seafood is readily available. Maggie and I aren't big fish eaters. I like seafood well enough but fish bones give me the willies and Maggie's just not taken with the fishy taste. Nonetheless we decided that living on the Mediterranean coast and being surrounded by fish resataurants we should give this local delicacy a go. We chose a restaurant that we've heard good reports about. It shares a fence with the fish quay. Being a Bank Holiday the place was heaving when we got there about 3pm. We had salad, mussels, prawns, cod fishcakes and croquettes followed by the caldero.

The caldero was alright I suppose but it was a bit like one of those student meals knocked up with anything left in the cupboards rather than a dish honed to perfection over the years. I much prefer the the paellas and fideuás of Valencia and if we're only talking about traditional Cartagenero food then give me the local bean stew called michirones anytime in preference.

Telly ads

2011-11-01T23:58:00.000+01:00

I was just watching Modern Family on the telly. "We'll be back in 6 minutes," said the message as we went into the adverts. I went to get a brandy and a snack. The programme came back on, I turned the volume up - 20 seconds more of Phil and Gloria and Mitchell and then WHAM "We´ll be back in 60 seconds." Groans from the sofa. Programme back on. Another 20 seconds and another WHAM "We'll be back in 2 minutes." Luckily there was nothing at hand to throw.

There are no adverts on the public channels anymore so a 90 minute film takes 90 minutes to show. It's much better than the olden days when there were (I think) 18 minutes of advertising every hour. One of the favourite tricks was to put the last crop of adverts on just before the end of the film. The denouement is seconds away - adverts - final 45 second scene of the film and it's all over. Infuriating especially at 2am.

So public telly has got much better. They still have long trailer slots from time to time but generally it's fine. The commercial channels have reduced their ad time per hour too but it still feels to be quite a lot of advertising especially when they use the end of programme trick.

One broadcaster, Mediaset, which has about five or six channels on the free to air digital stuff bases its advertising breaks on it's key channel. So on Tele5 the ads flow into the pauses in dialogue, the natural scene changes or the host talking us into the break but on the other channels the action suddenly stops mid sentence. There seems to be no routine to the ads at all. They're just there. Bizarre.

Mind you UK telly seems to have lots of ads on a regular basis which is probably equally annoying.

Selfishness

2011-10-28T14:37:00.000+02:00

Have you seen those adverts for expensive face creams on the telly? The ones where 84% of women agree that this product is more useful than the wheel. Sample size 78.

Well, I've done my research amongst Spanish people and 100% of a sample of five people agree with me.

Spaniards can be selfish or thoughtless.

An example would be making a turn signal in a roundabout. If the approaching car driver made a turn signal then I, and the five cars behind me, could move forward rather than continuing our futile wait. Or, in the supermarket, if the shopper parallel parked their trolley rather than leaving it at right angles to the shelves the way through would be clear. I wait, in finger drumming mode, as the fit and well people on the zebra dawdle across the road maybe stopping for a chat near the half way point. Shop doorways are another good place for stopping to read a text message or to engage their companion in conversation with the secondary function of blocking my way.

This isn't about the Murphy's law concept where the only people in an otherwise empty bookshop are gathered around the very spot where I want to be or when the man next to me in the waiting room believes that his mobile phone is defective in some way and is attempting to shout the message instead. That's just bad luck. No, what I'm talking here is where the other person fails to realise that their actions have consequences and that it is nicer not to inconvenience other people. It's not a majority sport but it is far too common.

In another recent survey (sample size 11) I learned that Spaniards believe that Britons always wear shorts, refuse to learn languages other than English, only think they have had a good time on the beach when their scorched red flesh makes it painful to move and drink far too much beer and wine.

Obviously that's just plain wrong. Maybe surveys shouldn't always be trusted.

Rooting about

2011-10-26T01:12:00.000+02:00

I was walking back to the car today and I saw a chap rooting around in one of the big bins by the side of the road. Nothing strange about that, "For you always have the poor with you" (John 12:8.) At the next bin there was someone else doing the same thing. And at a third. That was out of the ordinary.

Things aren't going well in Spain at the moment. The media is full of stories of finacial disater as disgraced rich gits plunder pension funds and flee. Spanish local government, having recently discovered fianacial cutbacks, is trying desperately to make up for lost time by slashing services left right and centre as they jack up local taxes. Spain is still far from being a poor country though and seeing so much bin rummaging in such a short time was a little disconcerting.

If I lived in the Arctic Circle and had to chew seal skins to be useful my teeth would be down to the stumps by now and I'd be out on the ice. Yesterday another one crumbled at the edges so I popped into a dentist that has recently opened up near work to arrange an appointment. My Spanish, as it so often does, caused some minor delay in transacting business but as soon as I'd turned "I have broken a tooth" into "A tooth has broken itself," we were in business and I was given a smart little appointment card. Later, reading the card, I realised that the place wasn't your common or garden dentist but one of those places where they rebuild shattered jaws or give you a set of flm star teeth.

Fearing that I'd got the wrong sort of place and that my mistake may seriously damage my wallet I went back. Disconcertingly, they remembered me by name. "I think I may have mad a a terrible mistake," I said, "This isn't a standard dentist is it?- I was just after a filling not a Tom Cruise smile." The woman holding an ice pack to the side of her face guffawed, winced and then told me off for making her laugh. The receptionist, addressing me as Kristofer yet again, assured me that they did ordinary dentistry too. I noticed the reception area included a Zen like fountain with shiny pebbles and trickling water. The staff were wearing tailored and colour co-ordinated outfits based on medical scrubs.

Scavenging and cosmetic dentistry. Odd world.

So I said to him, "Van, why did you cut off your ear?" and he said "You what?"

2011-10-14T01:24:00.000+02:00

I started work at 7.15 this morning and I finished about 15 hours later. I wouldn't like you to think I worked the whole day through but, when I got home around 10.30, a nice cup of tea and my comfy slippers beckoned. But no. Bright young things that we are we were off to Mr Witt, a local bar, to see a band called Deja Vu.

Deja Vu were perfectly good. Hardly likely to take the music business by storm but pleasant cover versions sung in a competent way. So why the Van Gogh joke? That's because lots of the audience had some sort of hearing loss and all the songs were accompanied by signed translations. The first time I've ever seen sign language used for something so everyday. Top marks to the bar and the band. Now I know how to applaud in sign.

Mr Witt by the way is a character from a novel by Ramón J Sender. Mr Witt was a fictional English naval engineer who worked in the naval Arsenal, just across the street from us. Through his Spanish wife he became involved in the Socialist uprising, the Canton, in Cartagena, in 1873. The Canton backed the First Spanish Republic.

History and right on-ness lubricated with Llagavulin. Who could ask for more?

Blinds

2011-10-09T21:23:00.000+02:00

It's not as though there aren't curtains in Spain. We've got nets on most of the windows in this flat and it was the same in the last place. We even had proper, bought from Ikea, linen curtains at one of the windows there. Not everyone uses curtains though and it's pretty usual to have none at the windows.

Where there are curtains they do not serve the same purpose as in the UK, at least not around Alicante and Murcia regions. They are not to block out light, deter snoopers or insulate the house. Drawing them is not the way to signal that your day is over and that you have locked yourself, snug and warm, into your little house. In Spain I think they are there to make the casements look a bit neater from inside and maybe to ensure that the dash from bathroom to bedroom is just a shade less embarassing for any neighbours who happen to be watering their plants as you drip by your window.

Spanish houses and flats do have built in blinds or shutters though. Holidaymakers who drop the blinds in their hotel room often find themselves getting up at 11 the next morning when they intended a crack of dawn excursion. The sun may be blazing away outside but the room is a hermetically dark box where it is perpetual Bo-Bo's time.

One of the odd things though is that people don't, necessarily, raise or lower them with daylight. We've often presumed a house is closed up and empty because the blinds never move. Then, one day a burst of activity alerts us to life behind the shutters. In fact, when I think of it, we only raise and lower two of the seven shutters we have here.

Lock in

2011-10-06T16:21:00.002+02:00

I drank quite regularly in the Postillion in Paston once upon a time, long before it became a Tesco. Only once was I included in the nightly lock in and only then because I was with a good looking young woman with long blonde hair.

Last night we were in a bar. As we paid to go one of the customers started to chat to us mainly about us being English but speaking some Spanish. The bar owner enticed us to stay with a free drink. The customer offered to buy us another drink. We didn't really notice that the door shutter had been pulled down; we'd been locked in.

But it wasn't illicit drinking they were after, oh no. As soon as the shutters were down out came the ciggies. Smoking in public places is no longer allowed in Spain. Luckily I had my cigars with me. One wouldn't want to be seen as churlish.

Beer and ragamuffins

2011-09-25T13:18:00.000+02:00

Cartagena has been celebrating its annual Carthaginians and Romans festival over the past week. There have been various re-enactments of key events in the story including weddings, seaborne landings, a pitch battle and lots of parades.

Yesterday evening we saw the parade of thousands of people from the various troops dressed in their outfits and we also went on to the big camp where each of the groups sets up a bar cum restaurant to raise money for the next year's event.

It's all pretty impressive but, at the same time, it's also old hat; we've seen it before. Alongside the camp there is a market. The traders who spend most of the year selling their overpriced sweets, jewellery and cakes dressed in medieval costume, at medieval markets, don togas for this one. We wandered around, we drank spiced "Roman wine" we ate garum but the stall that impressed me most was one selling a microbrewery beer called Icue.

There's a little statue in one of the main streets here that is called Icue and the locals all call the place he stands Icue Square even though there is no street name to back them up.The statue is of a young lad, one of the ragamuffins whose playground was the sea. The idea is that Icue embodies the Cartagena spirit, the links with the sea. A local sports pundit goes by the same name. The two minibus routes that run through the centre of town are called Icuebus.

The leaflet the beer sellers gave me stresses the quality of the Cartagena water, the quality of the barley and the hops and the American yeast that they use without frothing agents, preservatives, flavour additives, stabilizers etc. 100% natural. Better than the leaflet though was the taste. A really nice change from the usual lagers available here.

There may be microbreweries all over Spain for all I know. There were lots in the UK and I always did my best to help the profits of those enterprises but I don't remember ever seeing anything similar in Spain before.

I will be doing my best to support this particular local enterprise.

Keys and boxes

2011-09-23T13:29:00.001+02:00

Littlethings. We still notice the small differences though more and morethe Spanish way has become our normal way.

We'restill settling in to the new flat.

There area series of letter boxes in the entrance way to our block each with alock. For some reason the boxes don't have a label assigning each boxto each flat. On the front of the building there is a separatelockable post box. I presumed that somebody must collect the mailfrom the exterior box and then sort it into each interior box. So weset about finding out how to get hold of our mail.

The estateagent told me that the President of the Community (each block offlats has an annual President and there are meetings to decide thingsof communal interest) had the keys. When I asked him for our keytoday I was told that we do not have an individual box. I can get thekey from him any time and go through the post in the external box.Strange system I think but so Spanish.

We're alsotrying to get a phone installed. This is the fifth phone we'vearranged so the fact that it will take a couple of weeks and that anengineer actually has to come to the building to install a phone linedidn't surprise me at all. The engineer came yesterday and needed toget into a junction box to make the connection live. The box islocked. I guessed that the President would hold the keys. ThePresident didn't seem to be in when the engineer and I rang his bellso the engineer went away.

I triedthe door bell of what I had been told was the President's flat threeor four times yesterday and again this morning. Today someoneanswered but it turned out that the President lived next door. If theestate agent had given me the correct information in the first placewe would have a phone by now.

Slightlydodgy information is another Spanish given.

Off caps. Shun!

2011-09-22T00:27:00.000+02:00

I always think the Spanish National Anthem sounds a lot like the tune from the old advert for Standard Fireworks. That probably doesn't help anyone much under the age of 40 as I suspect that attempting to advertise fireworks in the UK nowadays is akin to organising a kiddie porn site. Capital crime.

Anyway, I'm on my way to get my paper before setting off to teach English. It's just before eight in the morning. I hear the anthem, a tinny version, drifting down the street. The flag is being raised outside the Naval Headquarters by two sailors, one in whites, the other in combat gear. I realise that nearly everyone has stopped. Years and years of training at the Odeon, standing, as She was sent happy and glorious long to reign over us, kick in. I stand and wait. Less than half a minute.

I've never seen Spanish people take much notice of their wordless but tuneful anthem before. Interesting.

Post script: It is now December and this evening I saw the flag being taken down at 5.45pm in the afternoon - just before dusk. Once the flag is furled the Salve Marinera, the Navy Anthem is played and then a recorded voice from inside the building says Cartagena, Buenas Noches.

It's odd what's odd

2011-09-20T14:58:00.001+02:00

When I started this series of blogs I didn't really want to write a diary of our daily lives in Spain. The idea was to comment on the things that happened to us and around us. I know the difference is subtle but, at least in my mind, there is a difference and I have tried to maintain that difference over the years.

I've just bought a takeaway lunch from "El Fogón de San Francisco." San Francisco is the name of the square where the takeaway is located and fogón means something like stove or gas burner. Maybe the San Francisco kitchens would give the correct sort of idea.

One of my students told me that this place existed just a few hundred metres from the new flat so I went to have a look. They have a daily takeaway menu. I got a salad, curry and rice with raisins, dates and other dried fruit and a spongy, trifly sort of pudding called pan de Calatrava for 6€, just over a fiver. The menu was pretty extensive.

Whilst I was waiting in the shop I thought that this little adventure would provide fodder for a blog post. Later, sitting at the kitchen table munching away, it struck me that for my average, English speaking, reader the idea of takeaway food is hardly original or different. So why did I think it was worthy of a blog entry?

The answer is that it is actually pretty unusual for Spain - at least in my experience. Obvously there is a takeaway food available. Lots of Restaurants will do a paella to order and spit roast chicken is a staple Spanish fast food. Chinese restaurants do takeaway and more recent additions like Pizza joints, McDonalds and kebab houses litter any Spanish cityscape. But this is not a country with sandwich shops and World cuisine takeaways on every corner.

No doubt about it. An appropriate commentary on life in Spain.

Going about

2011-09-09T18:14:00.001+02:00

I went to the Naval Museum soon after we came to Cartagena. I remember having to ring the bell to get in. I remember the piles of artefacts without sufficient labelling. I remember it as being an interesting visit.

When the University took over and converted the Cuartel de Instrucción de Marinería de Cartagena, the old Naval Training Barracks, into its Business Faculty they left space for a new Naval Museum in the building. I'm not sure whether it's a replacement for the old museum or an addition to the cultural offer in Cartagena. Either way it's now open, I wasn't working today so I walked down and had a look.

I was mightily disappointed. It didn't have the charm of the old place - where a scrap yard quality submarine battery would be displayed next to a model of some un-named 19th Century man of war - and neither did it have the whizz bangs of a modern museum. The rooms were a bit bare too and didn't show the building off to its best. Possibly though it's a work in progress because there were a couple of workmen doing some minor repairs and the museum staff were all hovering in the entrance. Maybe it's not really working at its full potential yet, not fully up and running.

There was a good little exhibition about the restoration and content of some big thick, leather bound tomes, related to the Spanish galleys that plied the Mediterranean back in the 16th Century. The exhibition told an interesting story in a clear and informative way There was even a video display. Otherwise though the museum had a few models, a few paintings, a lot of bare walls and nothing much else.

Perhaps the intention is that it will complement the other Naval Museum by adding something of the romance and philosophy of the sea to the simple (if confused) narrative of the other building. Or maybe it's just another poor Spanish museum.

Nice little idea

2011-09-02T23:53:00.000+02:00

The one place that offers general Spanish for foreigners courses in Cartagena - the Fundación de Cartagena para la Enseñanza de la Lengua y la Cultura Española - has an annoying habit of putting on its courses when we're working.

Maggie has never managed to find a course that has fitted in with her timetable but, just once in three years of trying, I did. We're an unreliable lot though, we foreigners, and after a few months my course fizzled out through lack of numbers. Shame.

The Fundación had organised something for this afternoon - a sort of club for foreigners to get together and speak Spanish. We met at the language school and then headed off for a local bar, the one in the photo. About a dozen of us all told: Dutch, Irish and Brits as well as the two Spanish teachers. Not an Earth shattering experience but not bad at all and all for 2€ per person.

Marketing

2011-09-02T12:14:00.001+02:00

The library is next to
Ramón's fruit stall

The first time I saw a Land Rover Freelander piled high with medical kit and set up as a rapid response vehicle I was impressed. It was in Huntingdon. Someone had obviously thought about a problem and found a solution. It wasn't the carrying capacity of a traditional sized ambulance that was important it was getting there quickly with trained, properly equipped, people.

Now that we live in the centre of Cartagena we have shops, bars, restaurants, museums and offices a stone's throw away. It's brilliant. However some services, like the cinema, big supermarkets and libraries are now further away than they were from our last flat. I checked on the library website to confirm that the nearest branch was, as I suspected, in the Cultural Centre about two kilometres from home but I found that there was a tiny library set up in a stall in the Santa Florentina Market. The market is a five minute walk away.

Now it's not exactly revolutionary but I did think it was pretty innovative for Spain where doing things as they have always been done is almost a phobia.

It was closed though - summer holiday.

Dodging, weaving and twisting

2011-08-30T16:42:00.000+02:00

Parking in Spain is odd. I've said so before. Most car parks in town centres, for supermarkets, for blocks of flats and the like are underground and very labyrinthine. Only the big new shopping centres regularly have surface or multi storey car parks.

The standard construction method for Spanish buildings is to build a frame from concrete pillars and then brick in between these weight bearing columns. The columns, logically enough, extend (or is it start) in the underground space. The spacing and placement of the columns is dependant on the form of the building above and the result is an interesting maze of very hefty obstacles for the parking motorist. Lots and lots of times the access is tortuous to say the least. Scratch marks along the concrete and the armoured protection for the ticket machines show that lots of motorists don't get it right.

Purpose built car parks, in the sense of places offering paid for parking, usually have gently sloping access roads to lull you into a false sense of security before cleverly placing the ticket machines at the apex of a curved entrance. There is a delicate balance between being able to reach the ticket with your finger tips and preserve the original bodywork design of your motor.

The entrance to the car parks beneath town centre supermarkets is different. The majority of their access ramps have angles of over 30º on the slope. Going down is like tipping over the edge on a roller coaster and you worry that the front edge of the car will bottom out at the bottom of the slope. Going up it's impossible to see anything in front, except bonnet, until you crest the hill. That can be hard on pedestrians who thought the pavement at the top of the ramp was safe ground. Bottoming out on the top lip is also a real possibility. The ticket machines are easy though, usually just close enough to the bottom of the slope to mean you have the rear wheels well above the front wheels.

Angled turns, straight walls meeting straight walls to provide a tight turn in a seemingly large space, are another standard design feature. Curved walls are for cissies or maybe the French. Low level obstacles are a definite must for any Spanish car park. Easy to see as you approach but then they disappear under the waistline of the car as you get close enough to bend metal. Heating ducts are a little bonus. You think you're safe, your motor is backed snug into a space, you flick open the hatchback and it smashes into the low level heating duct that you hadn't noticed till you heard the bang; your gaze is held by the paint chips floating gently to ground.

We have underground car parking beneath our new flat. The access ramp was easy and but for it being a bit tight getting into our assigned spot was easy enough too. One thing about private parking is that there is nobody behind urging you to hurry up so you have time to get lines right. As we were leaving, still on foot, someone was taking their car out from this garage. Our car being in the space opposite theirs had reduced their room for manoeuvre and, as they edged back to try to gain some forward space there was that crunching sound as car metal collapsed in that shock absorbing way it is designed to do. The driver took no notice and waved jollily as they pulled away. An everyday hazard.

I took mental note to take my time when I'm parking there in future.

Doubts and certainties

2011-08-30T15:16:00.000+02:00

Despite her tender years Maggie has seniority. She took up residence in Spain on 21 August 2004. I was with her then but I had to return to the UK and didn't finally arrive in Spain, along with Mary the cat and the MGB, for good, until 7 October 2004.

We bought the house in Culebrón on 10 January 2005. My diary for that day says, as we turned the key in the lock for the first time: "I didn't feel elated, I didn't feel doubtful. I didn't think we'd made a dreadful mistake. I didn't think we'd got a bargain. I'm not sure what we've got and I'm not sure how it will all pan out when the dust has settled."

Yesterday we signed the contract on our new rented flat in Cartagena, that's the fifth flat we've rented here since we started our Spanish adventure back in 2004. This time we're slap bang in the centre of town, within yards of Puertas de Murcia one of the streets with the big chain clothes stores on it. We expect it to be a great place to live.

As we turned the key in the lock I didn't feel elated, I didn't feel doubtful, I didn't think we'd made a dreadful mistake. I didn't think we'd got a bargain. I'm not sure what we've got and I'm not sure how it will all pan out when the dust has settled.

We knew that we were sacrificing things for the location. With the money we're paying in rent we could probably have got a really nice place on the outskirts but we wanted town centre - for the life, to enjoy the vivacity of Spain - the marcha - and we also thought it may be safer, trafficless, for Eduardo the cat.

There were two things that we'd accepted about the flat right form the start. The first is that it has only one bathroom; it will be the first time that Maggie and I have ever shared our habitual bathroom in all our years together. The second is that the flat is totally enclosed and has no views whatsoever; blank walls and our own internal patio are the only vista.

It's odd about choosing a house. So far as I remember I've never spent more than a few minutes looking around the houses or flats that I've subsequently lived in. When we got into the flat yesterday it was all a bit of a surprise. I didn't really have much of a memory of what it was like. It probably wasn't as good as I'd remembered, more enclosed somehow, and I thought some of the furniture was quite horrid.

What I do know is that, as we arrived back in Culebrón and I looked around I thought how much I like our house.

Bye bye Cartagena, for now

2011-07-01T01:57:00.000+02:00

The rental agreement on our flat in Santa Cilia de Jaca in Cartagena ran out at midnight on June 30th. I finished work at 10pm so we had two hours to pack the gear away in the car and head off to Culebrón.

We did well, the stuff was ready to go and we were away by 10.56 and back home by 12.26am - the usual 90 minute run and that despite the added advantage of the motorway speed limit reverting to 120kph at midnight from the experimental, fuel saving, 110kph.

I suppose I also became unemployed as midnight struck. My temporary work contract expired and my new one doesn't begin till September 1st.

So, for the next two months, all the fun over at Life in Culebrón.

Creatures of habit

2011-06-25T22:03:00.001+02:00

Julian told me that he had been busy on Thursday getting their house out on the coast ready for summer. He says that each year the family - mum, dad and two young children - abandon the town and head for a small house they own out at Los Nietos beside the Mar Menor where they will live until the children go back to full days at school in mid September. The San Juan celebrations are the trigger for them to start making preparations proper for the move because it is also the time, more or less, when children finish school for the summer. Some of my students had similar stories.

As we drove away from Cartagena today Maggie pointed out a family loading up the trailer on the back of their motor with lots of beach gear. Maybe they are off to La Manga. Lots of Cartaganeros seem to go there or to the resorts on the Mar Menor and nearby Med.

I've just been watching the nine-o-clock news. First heat wave of the summer, 40ºC all over Spain, here's some advice from a doctor. And some pictures from the beach. Odd how the cameras always linger on the topless women.

And, with the sun, the nasty bumps and lumps caused by insect bites and stings. Use factor 30 at least. Drink lots of water. Try to avoid sudden changes in temperature. Stay in the shade.

Aaah! Summer

Moving on up

2011-06-25T20:40:00.000+02:00

We're giving up our current flat in Cartagena on the last day of this month and we've just found a new flat for the next academic year.

This is our new barrio

We went to ask at an estate agent on Friday afternoon, saw four flats and tootled off to think about it. On Saturday we went back into town, strolled around looking at "To Rent" signs and eventually returned to the same estate agent and signed on the dotted for the first flat we'd seen.

The standard system here is that you pay three times the monthly rent when you take on a flat through an agent. The agent gets a third as a "finders fee," the landlord gets two thirds - made up of a month's rent and a returnable deposit. The finders fee is always a bit of a wrench, giving away money for nothing, but that's the way it is unless you can find a private deal.

So, from September, we'll be right in the heart of the town - about 100 metres from the High Street with an underground garage space for the car as a part of the package. We're both looking forward to being within strolling distance of nice bars, theatres, exhibitions, parades etc. For me it's probably slightly less distance to work than from the current flat but for Maggie it's going to be a bus ride.

Blowing up the World

2011-06-24T00:55:00.000+02:00

It's San Juan, the shortest night of the year. A night for setting fire to things, blowing up things,

We were set to go out to Cala Cortina, to an organised event with fireworks and Flamenco but we never got further than the streets around our house. Children, unsupervised, setting off bangers. Groups of older people sitting around, drinking it in. Ambulance sirens wailing. Family groups with dad setting the example. Fireworks bumping into buildings, bouncing off cars, exploding around our feet. More sirens wailing.

The city has certain advantages

2011-06-23T14:53:00.001+02:00

In 1965 I was 21 and, for my birthday, my parents bought me an Omega Seamaster watch. It cost the enormous sum of £68 and it finally gave up the ghost in 2003. Luckily for me my 50th birthday was just around the corner and Maggie splashed out £500 to buy me a Tag Heuer which has been on my wrist, more or less without break, ever since.

I needed a new battery for the Tag just after we got here. We had to travel from Culebrón down to Alicante to get it. Not a lot of fancy jewellers in Culebrón. 120kms and a couple of hours travel on top of the time to replace the battery.

Today, as I was teaching, there was an exercise where the students had 10 seconds to complete a task. I glanced at my watch and the second hand was jerking rather than running smoothly.

On my way home I popped into el Corte Inglés to get the battery changed. It took fewer than 10 minutes.

It's peaceful in Culebrón, the garden is smashing, the furniture is ours - all in all a great place to live. But cities have certain advantages.

Counting and spelling

2011-06-18T00:34:00.001+02:00

I bought a new camera this week. I put my last one on a bench in the street and left it behind. I bought the new one with my Barclaycard from an online shop and it arrived in a couple of days without any fuss or mishap.

I only have one credit card here in Spain. The credit limit on it is pathetically low, not like the heady UK days when I had nearly twice my annual salary only a swipe away, but it does the job.

Every now and again Barclaycard block my card. I've noticed that it happens almost every time I use iTunes. The card people don't usually tell me and I find out when the card bounces at the supermarket or petrol station cash desk. This makes me feel stupid and I phone Barclaycard in a huff.

The people who work at Barclaycard customer services do not have a long working day. They like a late breakfast and an early evening meal. Their switchboard is routinely closed when I call the first time and this makes me huffier. During working hours they try to soften me up by playing tiddly pom music on an expensive rate phone call - huff turns to seething rage. The operators are usually pleasant enough though and they promise to sort the problem out. The re-activation normally takes between 24 and 48 hours. Not quite the instant and 24 hour per day service I was accustomed to in the UK.

I bought the camera on Sunday and Barclaycard rang me late on Monday morning, well after breakfast. They wanted to check that the last string of purchases were mine. They were and we parted on good terms. Today I got a text message to say that they had blocked the card again. It seems that there has been some generalised fraud against Visa cards. This time they've not just blocked the card - they've cancelled it.

I don't really have any problems with numbers and spelling in Spanish but I also know that even the most advanced of my English students can be easily unbalanced by making them dance between the pronunciation of the five vowels or having them run through a series of numbers that end in -teen and -ty but with a similar stem -16, 17, 60 and 70 for instance.

When the Barclaycard operator asked me for my ID number today I reeled it off. She didn't hear a part of it and asked me for part of the sequence, I repeated the whole sequence - confusion reigned. She asked me for my home phone number - I had no idea, I know the old one but I've never really learned the new one - I stuttered over the number - confusion reigned. We sorted it out though. She was pretty sure that my new card will be with me within the next week or so (!)

Who knows it may have a chip this time.

P.S It didn't have a chip.

Asiático

2011-06-10T02:56:00.000+02:00

My students tell me all sorts of interesting things.

Coffee spiced up with spirits is available in any Spanish bar. Just ask for a Carajillo and you will get your coffee, usually, with a dash of brandy. It's also very common to see a Carajillo made with rum or whisky. The coffee is usually the short, thick solo (the Italian espresso) but people ask for every possible mix.

Round these parts they are very proud of a coffee called Café Asiático. One of my students ended up fighting his corner that this particular variation on Carajillo had been invented in Cartagena, specifically in the village of Albujon. The traditional recipe involves coffee whitened with condensed milk. The main tipple added is brandy but it should also, apparently, have a a few drops of Licor Cuarenta y Tres added. Licor 43 is a locally made liqueur. If you're going to go the full hog an Asiático should also include a couple of floating coffee beans, cinnamon topping and some lemon rind.

It sounded to me like a fancy version of a coffee we have in Alicante called Belmonte but my student was having none of that.

Today was a public holiday so we went to Albujon to see if we could find the bar where Asiático was conceived. Amazingly the place had a huge sign outside which made it easy to find. We had our coffee served in the traditional shaped thick glass. It tasted OK.

I took photos but then I lost my camera so the photos are not mine.

Shall I stay or shall I go?

2011-06-03T14:16:00.008+02:00

Potatoes and beer this weekend in Cartagena. "We're stocked up, we're ready to go, we've got in lots of Heineken." said the bar owner.

The US aircraft carrier, The George H.W. Bush, is due in Cartagena sometime this weekend after its tour of Libya. On board are 700 to 900 thirsty sailors. Shops and bars in Cartagena are waiting for them. The last time there was an aircraft carrier here the Americans were loose with their cash and apparently drank an average of four or five bottles of beer before they started on the food.

In the countryside around Cartagena there are about 4,000 hectares of land given over to growing potatoes. Production is 200,000,000 kilos of the things each year. The growers are miffed about the low price they are getting for their crops. Their response is a potato festival. They hope to make the public aware of the quality of the local product, to show off the varieties and to cook up some tasty potato dishes.

As I drove home from work the national radio station I was listening to handed over the lunchtime slot to local broadcasters and those were the two lead stories.

As you may imagine I was tempted to stay in town; try a few spuds, join the jolly Jack and Jill tars in a beer. What more could anyone ask?

A roundabout story

2011-05-20T02:15:00.000+02:00

Some years ago we were somewhere in Spain, Bilbao I think. All over town there were fibre glass cows. Each plain moulding had been assigned to a different artist and each finished product was different.

As we drive through Salado Alto there is a roundabout which features a stone circle a la Castlerigg or Avebury. I'm sure that in the future some clueless archaeologist will label the site as being of religious significance. In Abanilla the roundabout boasts an artificial lawn and a stone statue of the One True Cross. In la Romana it's twin towers, like two rough versions of Cleopatra's needle. Roundabouts as individual statements are everywhere in Spain.

Often, when I drive out to San Javier I see the Patrulla Águila, the Spanish Red Arrows, practising their routines. They fly out of the military airfield which currently doubles as the Murcia destination for Easy Jet and Ryanair. They trail red and yellow smoke and fly Casa C-101 Aviojets. On the roundabout by the Dos Mares Shopping centre one of those planes seems to be doomed to fly forever lower than an RAF Typhoon on active service over Libya. It has been turned into the decoration for the roundabout.

All that power

2011-05-12T00:58:00.000+02:00

As usual on Wednesday morning I was doing a couple of English classes at AES Cartagena. Somewhere in the conversation one of my students assured me that the three power stations in the Escombreras valley, one of which is operated by AES, are responsible for 17% of all the electrical power generation in Spain. Escombreras is just around the headland from Cartagena.

Chicken Surprise

2011-05-08T12:31:00.000+02:00

We've been living in Spain for over six years now. We've eaten as much rice, or paella, as anyone could reasonably do in that time. I still get slightly annoyed when Spaniards ask me if I've ever eaten rice as though we eat Roast Beef and Yorkshire pud all the time.

One of my standard meals is something that resembles a Spanish paella in that it has lots of yellow coloured rice. Maggie calls it chicken surprise because no two are exactly the same. She also says it smells and tastes a lot like a Vesta Meal because, rather than using saffron, I use a packet of some sort of commercial paella flavouring and colouring. Normally I cook it in a standard saucepan but I've begun to think that it's maybe coming out a little too moist.

On Friday as I popped into Carrefour to get the ingredients I went wild and spent 7€ on a proper paella pan. No Spanish home is complete without one.

I'm wondering about giving Maggie a real surprise next time. One of the traditional rice dishes in Valencia, reserved for Fridays when all good Catholics used to avoid meat, is a paella made from cauliflower and cod. It would be a particular surprise as she's not keen on fish!

La Manga

2011-04-23T14:48:00.001+02:00

Yesterday we took our guests out to La Manga. We ate patatas bravas, watched the kitesurfers and drove over the bascule bridge that allows taller yachts to get into the Mar Menor before turning around and heading back to Cabo de Palos.

La Manga is a sandbar about 19 kms long that separates a coastal lake - the Mar Menor - from the Mediterranean proper. It is an odd environment.

In the 1950s a chap called Tomás Maestre Aznar set about buying up the whole strip and with a bit of political support and a few court cases by the start of the 60s he was ready to put his master plan into action; to build a major tourist destination in Murcia. The first photo shows La Manga in 1963.

Tomás intended to build a private development aimed at the monied elite with a capacity for about 70,000 people. He wasn't going to urbanise the whole strip but wanted to conserve the original nature of the sand bar outside the walls of his complex. None of the biographies I can find on the Internet say quite what went wrong! Indeed the last reference I can find about the property developer has him defending the building of a sports marina on La Manga in the teeth of the environmentalists. Maybe it was just the money.

Nowadays La Manga is far from being a luxury development and at the height of the summer the population hovers around the 200,000 mark. Basically there is concrete and tarmac everywhere with big blocks of holiday flats and as many bars, souveneir shops, hotels and car hire offices as anyone could want. When the place is in full swing the journey up or down the strip is one long traffic jam and I suspect that there will be serious summer fights for prime car parking spots. If I were looking for a single adjective to describe La Manga it would be tacky. That's not to say that there is not a certain charm to its gaudiness and nobody could deny that both the Mar Menor on the inland side and the Med to seaward look absolutely stunning.

Left a bit, right a bit

2011-04-15T11:57:00.004+02:00

The man scanned the paperwork. It must have been the name that was the giveaway "Do you speak Spanish?," he asked. We do, well, well enough for this situation at least. Anyway I'm sure that it could all have been done in mime if needs be.

Yesterday Maggie's Mitsubishi passed its ITV, the equivalent of the British MOT, for the second time in its six year life. Once a car is four years old here it becomes due its first test. After that it's once every two years till the car is ten and then it becomes annual.

I've described the system before from the experience with my MG down at Redován in Alicante whilst the Mitsu took its first test in Ciudad Rodrigo in Salamanca. First time for any of us in Murcia though.

So far as I can tell private companies gain the licence to run a test centre in a particular geographical location and it seems that the charge also varies from place to place - market forces and all that. The system is different from the UK one in that the driver is a participant in the test because the series of checks are done on a conveyor belt type system. The driver takes the car through with the tester walking from station to station doing the actual tests "Rev it up will you, left indicator, right indicator, rock the steering and pump the brakes etc." First stop to check the lights, seatbelts etc, on to emissions, the rollers for the brakes, over the pit for the steering and general underbody safety and then, if all goes well, the sticker to pop on the windscreen to show you're legal.

Avoiding my homework

2011-04-09T20:14:00.001+02:00

Easter is big in Cartagena. During Holy Week the brotherhoods, generally dressed in the tall Klu Klux Klan type hats, parade with military precision through the streets, often in the dead of night, to muffled drum beats whilst carrying huge carved religious statues on their backs.

My language exchange pal, Carlos, told me a story about how one of the statues, Saint Peter, was maintained by the Navy. In order to pay for the upkeep of the float, for the costumes and other paraphernalia he is employed by the Navy and receives a salary. At Easter he gets his only shore leave of the year. An admiral sends him on his way with strict instructions to be back by midnight. But Saint Peter doesn't do as he's told and when he gets back to barracks he's drunk - he sways from side to side and he gets locked in the brig till next Easter for his disobedience.

It sounded like a strange story and one at odds with what I understood to be the sobriety of the events with floats called "the Agony" and groups called "The Crown of Thorns" or "The Sainted Christ of Flagellation" So I went in search of information on the Internet and, unfortunately I found it. Cut and paste produced sixteen pages of close typed Spanish text loaded with religious terms and strange words to describe the various traditions, costumes and gear of the processions.

I started to read it but I spent so much time flicking back and forth between the descriptions of the various groups, the glossary of terms and the make-up of the processions that it seemed easier to avoid my homework and come and type a blog entry in a language I'm more comfortable with!

Turn right by the insurance office

2011-04-08T01:31:00.000+02:00

I don't usually answer my phone when I'm teaching but ham fistedness on the buttons meant that I did the other day. It was a bit embarrassing as I exposed my doggerel Spanish to the listening students.

The phone call was from a parcel carrier who was coming to collect some orange juice in a cool box bound for Germany. As we were talking on the phone I gave street names and described features. Suddenly I knew he was in the right place - ah yes, there's the bank and the travel agent and the old warehouse - got it, oh, and the house number is in a big circle on the glass door - I left him to park his van, at least in my mind, and got back to the present perfect.

When I finished the lesson I rang Maggie to make sure the delivery had gone smoothly. It turned out that they still hadn't called. Then it dawned on me. The carrier was following my directions on Google Street View.

It just didn't seem Spanish somehow.

Spoiling the view

2011-04-02T15:35:00.000+02:00

It's called the Crisis here rather than the Recession or the Credit Crunch. A whole country teetering on the brink whilst some overpaid fat cats at Moody's or Standard and Poor's play with plus signs and their ABC to make some of their pals even richer.

The text books I use at work to teach English include several topics over and over again - holidays, music, food and work. I've learned not to ask "What's your job?" So many of my students, young and old alike, are without work and so I've altered the questions to give them at least the linguistic opportunity to maintain their dignity.

The current Spanish President said today that he won't be standing for re-election and the various new demands placed on the Spanish banks to placate the World's financial elite have Maggie's bank struggling after the scale of its debts scared off some potential merger partners the other day.

Whether it's persistent stories of spending cuts or individual tales of woe things still don't look too bright here. And then there's my view - the view from the balcony that is. The picture is the office supplies shop across the road. It seemed busy enough - people coming and going all the time but not any longer; now it has a For Sale sign up.

A bit bigger than 12 gauge

2011-03-06T22:36:00.003+01:00

If you ever feel the need to launch armour piercing shells weighing 885kg and loaded with 18 kilos of TNT a little over 35 kilometres out to sea then I know where you can find exactly the device to do it.

885kg by the way is about the weight of the current Fiat 500 car.

Just down the coast from us at Azohía there is an abandoned, but well maintained, fortress that houses two rather fearsome looking cannons. The fortress was constructed between 1928 and 1936. The guns themselves were built by Vickers. Their barrels are 17 metres long with a calibre of 38cm. Not quite wide enough to launch that Fiat but pretty big nonetheless.

You're going to need 20 pals to help you fire each gun and you'll probably need to fill in some official paperwork, this being Spain, but it would make you the envy of anyone who thought they were pretty cool because they owned a pair of Purdeys.

Fabulous location too. Nice bit of the coast.

Aren't belts interesting?

2011-03-06T15:59:00.001+01:00

It may not be a hard and fast rule but, in my experience, Spanish belts and English belts (presumably all manufactured in Indonesia, Bulgaria or China) are different.

In the picture a Spanish belt. See the stud a few centimetres from the buckle? It's not a stud, it's actually a screw and post fastening that unites the buckle to the length of the belt. Undo the screw, lop a length off the belt and put it all back together and you have a shorter belt that doesn't either have visible dodgy amateur holes punched into it or a loose tail that dangles and catches.

Spain: the place to buy if you're a belt wearer losing weight.

Making gestures

2011-03-04T19:33:00.001+01:00

One of the slots on the radio news channel, Radio 5, is full of tips for saving the planet. Insualte your house, burn horse manure, put gizmos on your taps to save water and unplug your mobile phone charger when not in use. The slot is headed up and rounded up with a phrase something like "Make gestures: your gestures are important. Fight Climate Change." The English word gesture and the Spanish word gesto, used on the broadcast, are subtly different but the idea is plain enough - make small changes; to do your bit for the environment.

Spain gets a lot of its oil from Libya and you may have noticed that Libya is a little unsettled at the moment. Consequently, the Spanish Government is a tad worried about the potential for an increased fuel bill and the disastrous consequences for the creaking economic recovery. Last week, the Interior Minister announced a reduction in the speed limit on motorways from 120 kph to 110 kph and a reduction in the ticket prices on suburban trains. Both measures aimed at reducing the fuel consumed in car journeys. Throughout the week bits and pieces of new legislation aimed at energy saving have been dribbling out - low consumption bulbs in street lighting, subsidies to buy low friction tyres for private cars, new biomass burning boilers in public buildings, use of military airspace to shorten journeys for civil flights and so on with about twenty ideas in all.

Complaints about the plans have come from every side. The bar talk is that the reduced speed limit is simply a trick to increase the income from speeding fines. The two biggish cities in Spain said they wouldn't be reducing the train fares without State subsidy. The opposition pundits talk of piecemeal and half hearted legislation instead of fundamental change.

I'm not going to argue any sort of case for or against the measures but it did amuse me how the furore exposed the fragility of the lip service paid to environmental concerns. To my knowledge nobody is disputing that the measures will save energy, though there have been plenty of arguments about how much. Instead the arguments have centred on the cost-benefit analysis (How much will it take to change all those signs?) or on the measures as the best option (Driver training would save much more fuel than a blanket speed reduction) and on the opportunity to complain about the political ineptness or opportunism of the Government.

Neither Al Gore nor Radio 5 seem to have worked their magic yet then?

Getting a word in

2011-03-02T01:26:00.001+01:00

Here in Spain the language is cared for by a committee of the great and the good, the Royal Spanish Academy. Every now and then they publish a new dictionary or a new grammar. In reality though it doesn't matter much what the academics say because native speakers the World over are, as I delight in telling my students, the owners of their own language. So if my nephews want to describe a thing as sick, meaning that it is good, then so be it.

Yesterday morning my Spanish class was a real headache; the teacher spent a couple of hours explaining the use of a verb structure to me that required not only a relatively complicated grammatical construction but also a philosophical understanding that was way beyond me.

In the evening I went in to work for my evening teaching sessions. What had originally looked like a free hour was assigned, at the last minute, to a young woman who had asked for extra tuition in preperation for an English exam. Her grammar text book was in Spanish but it was easy enough to understand. The thing she was having trouble with was "I wish" and the constructions associated with it such as I wish I had been there, I wish you could have seen him, I wish it were Christmas every day, etc.

Try as I might I couldn't find the logic or a simple rule to explain the construction to her. I'm confident that I can use the English faultlessly but the grammar book said that I was getting it wrong. Even worse my blundering description kept bumping into the way that the language she drank in along with her mother's milk deals with "unreal" situations. It was exactly the same difficulty that I'd had with my Spanish class but from the opposite viewpoint.

I came away feeling really depressed. Trouble understanding Spanish, trouble understanding English and maybe those grey suited men, and not my nephews, really do own our languages after all.

Guillermo Wilberforce needed?

2011-02-19T00:23:00.006+01:00

One of the key elements of my job is talking. This morning I was talking to one of my English students; working hard.

Murcia is an important vegetable growing area and my student works for one of the firms that grows salad crops some of which are destined for the UK market. From what he tells me the company sounds like a dynamic, safety conscious, modern, European business. He had been astonished when one of their UK trading partners sent a message asking for confirmation that his firm doesn't employ slave labour.

The student was scandalised. He couldn't understand why anyone in the UK would think that his firm may use forced labour. We talked about the many immigrant workers who find themselves trapped here, brought in under false pretences, their passports taken from them and forced to work in any number of degrading situations from building work to prostitution. I was reminded of the domestic workers in the UK whose bosses hold their passports, of those Chinese cockle pickers who died in Morecambe Bay back in 2004 or those blokes from Rajasthan working on the Sikh Temple in the UK for 30p per hour maybe ten years ago now. Bad people in every country taking advantage of the hopes and aspirations of the poor.

With the lesson done I drove off to my next appointment with the car radio chittering away in the background. I heard a piece about how the Guardian had printed an article recently uncovering the apalling conditions of immigrant workers in Almeria (the province of Andalucia that forms a border with Murcia) and, suddenly, it all made sense.

Good reactions on both sides I thought. Well done to those Brits for wanting nothing to do with such a filthy business and well done to my Spanish pal for being indignant that his firm could possibly be involved in anything so squalid.

Terms and conditions

2011-02-08T01:09:00.001+01:00

I got paid on Friday. I always enjoy payday. One of my favourite days of the month.

Normally I'm only iterested in the take home figure but today, as I collected my wage slips, I had to sign so many bits of paper that I was sufficiently stirred to ask my boss which convenio I work under. Convenios are the agreements that the Employers Associations hammer out with the Trades Unions and which set the baseline terms and conditions for any worker in every sort of job. I don't know exactly how they are organised but I presume that there are convenios for broad areas, like food preparation, with more detailed convenios within each sector; bakers for instance. I'm in a sector called something like Unaccredited Studies which falls under Private Education.

The convenios add all of the detail to the barebones contracts which seem, from my limited experience, to give only the essential information such as who's employed by whom, for how long and with what holiday entitlement.

Someone told me that only the "poor and downtrodden" actually work to convenio and that any employer worth working for always enhances the conditions above the baseline they set. Again I haven't actually checked whether that is true but it sounds reasonable enough.

I'd never thought about the system too much. A bit different to the individual contracts I was used to in the UK but the idea of a simple contract backed up by a negotiated agreement for each sector seems like a perfectly valid approach. Anyway, nobody ever reads their contract except in the first flush of a new job or when disputes arise. Maybe that's why none of my three employers to date have actually provided me with a copy of the relevant convenio.

It took me a while to find the document on the Internet as I kept coming up against dead links, but eventually I found all 26 pages of it.

The convenio isn't written in the sort of language that makes for a cracking read. Despite being available electronically it smelled of sealing wax and red ribbon. I've saved the document in a nice neat computer file alongside scans and copies of my other essential paperwork but I have this feeling that it will be a while before I even consider actually trying to read it.

Roll on next pay day I say.

De toda la vida

2011-02-04T19:18:00.002+01:00

A beef stew I thought, nice and warming. After all I'd had to scrape ice off the car windscreen this morning.

I'm in Mercadona, I've got the meat and one of those veg packs with carrots and leeks. In front of me the woman in the queue asks the till operator where the batteries are. "Which ones?" "The usual ones" or in Spanish de toda la vida, of all the life. The till operator pointed and the woman retrieved her batteries. Apparently the traditional size is AA. I felt old. I still tend to think of standard battery sizes as being the torch sizes I bought from Robertshaw's as a lad; either the big fat U2s or the slightly smaller U11s.

But how traditional is anything? What is the shared experience of "All the lfe?" At work, to teach English, there is a standard manual that I work from. One of the exercises uses pictures of the Beatles and Elvis Presley to teach comparisons. Lots of the students don't know either the Fab Four or The King and we end up comparing Lady GaGa and Beyoncé.

It was 20ºC outside as we ate the stew.

Basic Rights

2011-02-03T09:34:00.000+01:00

Life in Spain has been very ordinary for the last couple of weeks and we've not done anything very bloggable for a while. This entry is really to prove that I'm still here; it may not be worth your time reading it.

The local elections are coming up in May and the campaigns are beginning to hot up. I will be voting in the town elections in Pinoso but I can't vote in the regional elections. I'm not quite sure why and I decided yesterday evening as I was reading about some dodgy political dealing in the paper that I should make a little protest about that. After all one of the basic rights or responsibilities within a democracy is the right to representation through the ballot box. I get to vote in national elections in the UK and the locals and Europeans here but I am denied a vote at regional level in both countries. Time to get in touch with my European representative I think.

Another one of those basic rights written into the Spanish Constitution is the right to health care. I pay into the Social Security system and so I get health cover. The health system has a regional structure. Our house is in Culebrón, in Alicante which is part of the Valencian Region so my health card is issued by Valencia. I also spend a lot of time here, in Cartagena, in the region of Murcia but because my work contract and the letting agreement on the flat are both temporary I consider that my permanent address is Culebrón.

The system in such a situation is relatively straightforward. I go to the local health centre early on a Thursday morning every three months, stand in the slow moving queue for half an hour or so and ask for a "Temporary Displacement" which means that if I need a doctor for a routine type appointment their computer system will recognise me. Emergency treatment is covered anywhere in Spain by my Valencian card.

I went to renew the paperwork today and they started to give me guff about how I could only be temporary for twelve months. I argued the point and the clerk decided that it was easier to tap a few keys and give me the form rather than argue the point with the stuttering incompetent in front of them who was obviously incapable of any meaningful conversation. I suspect that I won't get the paperwork renewed next time. I wonder who I should talk to about that?

Ready when you are Mr DeMille!

2011-01-19T23:39:00.000+01:00

Alex de la Iglesia is a well known Spanish film director and also the current president of the Spanish equivalent of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. His new film La Chispa de la Vida or Spark of Life, or at least a part of it, is going to be shot in Cartagena and the recruitment of extras has been going on in the city for the last couple of days.

We'd heard about the queues of people waiting patiently to be one of the 1,000 people chosen so we went to have a look and there they were standing patiently outside the Palacio Molina.

Something I'd not really noticed before

2011-01-19T02:39:00.001+01:00

When I was a lad living in Elland there was a bit of a furore when the local council decided to introduce parking restrictions outside one of the town's busiest newsagents. People would park outside as they popped in for 10 Woodbine and a copy of the Daily Express. Peak hours were from around 7.00 till 8.30 as people went off to work. The Police delighted in using up their stock of parking tickets in early morning raids.

Newsagents, like milkmen and bakers have always worked ungodly hours. I suppose that milkwomen do too.

At the moment El País newspaper has a promotion for a notebook computer for under 70€. The method to get hold of the computer is similar to another boyhood memory where picture cards - Great Locomotives of the World or European Butterflies - came inside packets of tea. In fact it's a bit less sophisticated than the cards as I have to clip a little token from the newspaper and stick it onto a card that came in the Sunday edition a couple orf weeks ago. If I miss too many tokens I won't get the computer.

Normally I buy El País two or three times a week but, whilst there are tokens to be collected, I'm having to be more disciplined.

I had to choose a newsagent as the delivery point for the computer and, reasonably enough, I chose the kiosk I normally use. What I hadn't noticed was that it doesn't open till around 9 in the morning. Tobacconists don't open till 9 either and, like most shops, they all close down again for the lunchtime slot before opening up again in the late afternoon/evening. My work pattern and their opening hours just aren't meshing. Of course I could just take pot luck and buy the paper anywhere but, when collection time rolls around, that could prove awkward with the rather taciturn newsagent. The problem was hardly insurmountable. I simply asked the chap to keep the paper for me. He misspells my name with a rather disconcerting variation, Crist, but, otherwise, the system seems to be working well.

It just made me realise what all that fuss was about all those years ago outside George Whittaker's shop. Surely, nowadays, it must be written into some sort of EU or UN charter that we all have the inalienable right to pick up our morning paper without let or hindrance?

Telegraph pole out yer ead

2011-01-14T23:21:00.001+01:00

I was talking with some students about Spanish wedding traditions. Amongst other things they told me that it's usual for the photographer to take the bride and groom off to some local beauty spot to take a couple of romantic snaps.

This morning I'd stopped by the little cove of Cala Cortina on my way back from a bit of in house teaching for a crafty fag. An old Peugeot drew up and a bloke got out who seemed to be having trouble with the waistband and flies of his trousers. Next was a plumpish young woman dressed in her finery. It took a while for the bride to emerge from the back of the car. She complained about the comfort of the stockings she was apparently wearing beneath her meringue like wedding dress. Her husband wore a very creased long tailed two tone beige suit.

The trouser trouble bloke was the photographer. He carefully arranged the Happy Couple in front of the handrail just beside the litter bin with the sea in the background. The groom was scratching his balls. I feared for the result.

Popping out to Spain

2011-01-14T23:00:00.003+01:00

You may have noticed that I live in Spain. Most Spaniards who are studying English firmly believe that a longish stay in the UK will turn them into fluent English speakers. I'm not so sure.

At home Maggie and I speak to each other in English and we live an English sort of life. At work my job is to talk in English. At home. on TV, the majority of series, dramas and films are American and they are broadcast in their original language version as well as the dubbed Spanish versions. We watch in English.

At work I must be doing something either wrong or right as they keep upping my hours. My contract was originally just 15 hours per week but from next Monday I will be teaching 34 hours. This doesn't leave me a lot of time for those little adventures that took us out to Spain - going to the pictures, roaming the area, doing the exhibitions and what not.

Most weekends we retire to Culebrón which is great in the relaxing sense but a disaster as regards our Hispanicisation. All of our pals in the area are Brits and Pinoso isn't exactly the centre of a thriving cultural scene. We tend to stay home and we even have British TV.

It's San Anton this weekend and in Cartagena there are different cakes and different variations on the themes that we saw in Ciudad Rodrigo when we lived there. I'd have liked to have a look but Culebrón took precedence. Nonetheless I did have a couple of conversations with students this morning that sent me scuttling to a speciality food shop that sells products from Salamanca province and to a bakers. I was a while buying the Salmantino stuff and the shop owner talked to me quite a lot because I amused him. That's why we had farinato for lunch. It turned out to be poor stuff - nothing like the farinato we ate in Ciudad Rodrigo; close to horrid in fact. In the bread shop I bought some of the Rollitos de San Anton - the aniseed flavoured biscuit rings associated with the animal blessing saint. I needed eggs to go with the farinato and, unable to find the specialist egg shop, I bought those from a little supermarket where all the women in the queue knew each other. I listened in to their tittle tattle and realised that for maybe the last forty minutes or so I'd been in Spain and not some British protectorate.

Who knows, if I went out more often I might end up agreeing with those Spanish people who think that a stay in a country helps with language acquisition?

Doing as they're told

2011-01-07T21:03:00.000+01:00

In general I find that women are much more concerned about the cleanliness of toilets, the public variety, than men. A more intimate experience I suppose. One of the less savoury aspects of Spanish toilets is that there is often a notice that says please don't throw the toilet paper down the toilet - use the waste basket. Presumably older drains tended to block up. The other day I saw a different notice - please do not throw the paper in the basket - throw it down the toilet!

Meanwhile the anti smoking laws are still a big talking point. Apparently the number of applications for licences for pavement tables outside bars has shot up and those big, mushroom shaped, gas heaters - to keep the drinking smokers warm - have sold out all over Spain.

At work I heard a discussion about how the smoking laws have generally been accepted without too much fuss - occasional stories about assaults and other problems but no overwhelming backlash. If the notice says "No Smoking" then people seem to be doing as they are told. The discussion was about how pliable Spaniards have become.

I do hope the other notice causes just as little fuss.

Make way for the roscón

2011-01-05T22:17:00.000+01:00

I bought a roscón this afternoon. After all the Three Kings will be delivering Christmas presents all over Spain tonight and it seemed churlish not to join in by chomping my way through one of these large, doughnut shaped cakes that are part of the traditional fare for the celebration.

The Three Kings were on the news - arriving by boat in Cartagena, Barcelona and Alicante, by helicopter in Ceuta, on the AVE train in Albacete, cruising in stretch limos and riding elephants and camels in Cantabria.

I was at work till eight and the parade of the Kings through Cartagena began at six but, on the off chance, I joined the throng of last minute Christmas shoppers and the people milling around simply because that's what you do before and after the parade. It was hard walking, fighting the prams and strolling, chatting, snack eating pedestrians but down near the port it was obvious that the crowd was still awaiting the arrival of their Majesties the Magician Kings.

I watched the parade pass. I was bombarded by the sweets thrown from the passing floats. The crowd of people pushed and shifted. A woman arrived who wanted to get to the other side of the street. "Let me through, I have a roscón," she said and the crowd parted like the Red Sea.

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

2010-12-22T16:28:00.000+01:00

It's a bit difficult for me to say how many ships there are in the Spanish Navy. The English language Wikipedia entry has 29 whilst the Spanish Ministry of Defence website lists 105. I suppose it depends how big a boat has to be to be listed and whether sail training ships and similar count.

For decent sized boats I'm going to go with 29.

At any one time it's quite usual to see five or six navy ships berthed in Cartagena, one of the five main naval bases in Spain. Unless the other bases are deserted that must mean there are very few ships at sea at any one time.

Anyway, the other day, I heard on the news that the patrol boat Infanta Cristina had come home after five months at sea. She's been patrolling the seas off Somalia and mainly involved in escort duties though there have been a couple of skirmishes with modern pirates. It occurred to me that whilst I was in town I should take her snap and do a blog entry entitled Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum or maybe something starting with Avast!

The photo was pretty poor, into the sun with no contrast and lots of lens flare. Worse, just now, as I was about to post it I realised that my snap was of the Infanta Elena and not the Infanta Cristina (same class, different princess.) Elena hasn't been doing anything heroic because she's been in the local shipyards for ages after they managed to put the engines in the wrong way around after a repair!

I should have abandoned the entry of course but after all that research on numbers and which boat was which there was no way that was going to happen. The photo is someone else's. It's the heroic one.

We must have one!

2010-12-22T15:05:00.002+01:00

Maggie sent me to the Iceland Supermarket. She wanted me to buy big tin of Quality Street to share with her workmates.

As I wandered the shelves I was tempted by all that pre-packed, pre-cooked food, that is so absent from supermarket shelves here. I resisted but then buckled as I passed the Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies. I plead a single and solitary past.

The next day I bought some veg to go with it and headed home. Oven heating up, water in pans, veg ready to slice and then I started to hunt for a tin opener. No tin opener. Who needs a tin opener nowadays with all the ring pull stuff? I went and rang at the neighbours door to borrow one. No good, they were out, and being lunchtime all the shops were closed. The pie had to wait.

Times tables

2010-12-08T10:55:00.001+01:00

I'm often vaguely amused when buying things in Spain. Ten stamps please; the stamps are 32 cents each - out comes the calculator to arrive at the 3.20€ - the basis of a decimal system seems to have escaped the shopkeeper. Two packets of cigars please 2.50€ a go, calculator time again or, this morning, 1.50€+1.20€ at the paper shop - more work for Texas Instruments.

Yesterday the report of the Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development released its report on educational performance in 65 countries. Shanghai (China must be a big place to survey) was top in maths, science and reading comprehension whilst Kyrgyzstan was bottom. Spain was below the OECD average in all three areas coming in the mid 30s. I noticed that Castilla y Leon, the authority that Maggie was teaching in at the time of the survey, did much better than Murcia, the region she teaches in now. The Spanish news reports all used words like mediocre.

I suppose that explains it then

Five nil

2010-11-30T00:55:00.000+01:00

You have no idea how the game between Barcelona and Real Madrid galvanises this country unless you've seen it. The papers and TV have been full of it for at least a week. The elections in Catalonia, the threat of financial meltdown are as nothing in comparison to the Barça - Real debate.

I popped into a bar at around 6pm this evening to get a coffee. Bar stools had reserved stickers on them and some people were already in their seats. Kick off was at 9pm.

I suspect there will be some sore heads in Catalonia and all over Spain tomorrow morning.

Circuses and Christmas

2010-11-26T21:11:00.001+01:00

Christmas is only just about to get underway here. The shop displays are still a bit half hearted and none of the Christmas lights are lit yet but at least the circus is in town.

In fact there are circuses in both Cartagena and in Culebrón at the moment so we have ample choice. Not that I've been to a circus for twenty or thirty years and not that I'd go anywhere near any of the many Spanish ones that still degrade bears, lions, elephants, horses and (If the poster is to be believed) crocodiles in front of their audiences.

They are very much part of the Christmas run up in Spain and I do keep thinking that if there were one where the only acts were of the strong men, contortionists, knife throwers, tightrope walkers and juggler type I'd give it a go. Maggie is dead against the idea though and the thought of sitting there alone and friendless amidst the glittery costumes and grease paint just seems a touch too Smokey Robinson.

The Yanks are coming!

2010-11-12T21:23:00.003+01:00

In its time Spain has controlled lots of the World; Holland and Belgium, parts of what is now Italy and a rather large chunk of America from somewhere up by California down to the tip of Argentina - oh, and a bit of Africa. So, it was a shock for the Spanish when the USA took the last few remnants of that Empire - Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillipines - off them in double quick time in the Spanish American War of 1898.

One of my English language students told me that after the defeat the Spanish people and government alike thought it a real possibility that the United States would invade. A consequence for Cartagena was that the string of defensive forts that overlook the harbour were strengthened and new ones built.

I have no idea whether it's true or not but I thought it was an interesting idea.

An explanation

2010-11-10T01:31:00.002+01:00

You may have noticed that it has been a while since I posted anything: This is because we haven't done anything much for a few weeks. So why this seeming lethargy?

The main reason is work. Despite my apparent long periods of idlesness I've actually worked for about 4½ of the six years we've been here. Maggie, of course, has had full time teaching jobs right from the start. Generally though work, whilst being an unavoidable bugbear, has left us plenty of time to do things together.

It's not like that at the moment though. I'm still only doing about 30 hours "proper" work but I also have a few hours of private English classes. Maggie does about the same. Add on the inevitable travelling and prep time and vastly different timetables and we're hardly bumping into each other at all. The free afternoons that we enjoyed all last year to go exploring have fallen by the wayside and my not finishing till 10pm at night on two or three evenings a week seems to be bumping into all the evening music and theatre events so that we're neither getting out of town nor enjoying the advantages of city life.

Weekends are still free of course but Culebrón is hardly the hub of the happening Universe and when you perm in darkness by 6pm and the cooler weather we are tending to stay put on the sofa rather than sallying forth for new adventures.

Just so you know.

Faster than a speeding bullet

2010-10-28T09:20:00.000+02:00

Because we are live permanently in Alicante, which is part of Valencia, our free health care is provided through the Valencian Health Authority. We can get emergency cover anywhere in Spain but in order to get cover for routine access to doctors and other medical services here in Murcia we need to go along to our local health centre every three months and renew a "displacement order."

When we came back to Cartagena in September we renewed the dispalcement order and for some unknown reason the cover was only extended into October. My order ran out yesterday and as the form can only be renewed on Thursdays we went to do the renewal first thing this morning.

There was one person in front of us. He seemed to be renewing his health card which is a very routine procedure. It took 20 minutes for the dozy looking clerk to deal with him.

When we got there it turned out that Maggie's form expires on 30th October so they turned her down flat. Bizarrely my form, renewed on the same day by the same person, ran out on the 27th. He tried to send me away too but when I finally convinced him that today is the 28th not the 26th he tried again. Then he tried to tell me that my Valencian Health Card was out of date. It isn't, it doesn't have a "sell by" date but he'd entered one on his computer records and that was where the trouble lay. Finally, another twenty minutes later I had my temporary cover.

There were seven people behind me in the queue. If he maintains his work rate and doesn't have to go off for breakfast the last person in that queue will get away from the counter in just under three hours.

Art in odd places

2010-10-28T01:33:00.001+02:00

There is a series of arts events on in Cartagena at the moment grouped together under the banner of Manifesta 8. The exhibitions are looking at past and present day Cartagena with a focus on links between Southern Spain and North Africa.

We've been to three of the eight venues so far and top marks to the organisers for choosing interesting spots.

In the Casino, once a Gentleman's Club and now a sort of social centre with incredible tile work and extravagant decorated ceilings there's an exhibition that focuses on the mining, now long gone, near La Unión. The link is the silver on the glass photographic plates, the very same metal that the miners dug from the earth.

In the 18th Century "Autopsy Pavilion" where medical students once learned about anatomy by cutting up corpses there was a silent film looking at the defences in and around Cartagena and the Navy presence in the town.

Venue wise though the old Prison of San Anton opened in the 1930s and only recently closed was definitely my favourite. Some exhibits were in individual cells, others in the warders staff room and another in what looked like the old washroom. The whole place was dank, foreboding, cold and bare and the exhibition focused on the stories of immigrants and emigrants to and from Spain.

Most of the remaining venues are more traditional spaces but there's one in the social centre of an area of the town that has a less than savoury reputation - that should be fun.

An illustrious audience

2010-10-25T23:30:00.000+02:00

I was doing an English conversation class with about eight students the other night. We were talking about important dates in their lives and one of the students explained how he had been a team member of the Spanish handball team that had won the World Championships in Tunisia in 2005. I was impressed.

A couple of days later I was giving an individual class to a young woman who had been in the group of eight students along with the handball player. Somewhere along the way we ended up talking about her job as a swimming coach. This young woman has a visual impairment. She told me that she had competed in the Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004 and again in Beijing in 2008. I was impressed.

A small step forward

2010-10-11T19:58:00.000+02:00

Last year we were thwarted in our attempts to find a Spanish class in Cartagena. This year there's nothing for Maggie because of her work pattern but, as I'm free on Monday morning, I've been able to get a place on a course run by a set-up called called Funcarele. I can't get to the session on Wednesday but something is much better than nothing.

It was the first class this morning. Just six of us and a very pleasant young woman teacher called Rocio.

I suppose they'll change my timetable at work now.

Go away

2010-10-11T19:45:00.000+02:00

In the Third Century BC Hannibal used the silver mined from the area around what is now La Unión to pay for his elephants. In fits and starts tin, iron and lead have been mined from the same hills right up to 1990.

La Unión looks like a pit village, not exactly the prettiest town in Spain, but top marks to the locals for setting up a park based on the archaeological history of the area. Bottom marks for letting people into it.

We tried to get into the park when we went to the Mining Museum one Wednesday afternoon but we were turned away as it was nearly closing time. We had another go last Saturday and they attempted to turn us away again.

"There's only one train per session and it's gone and you need to reserve a ticket"
"So can we reserve a ticket for tomorrow?"
"No it's full"
"Can we walk into the park then?, the leaflet says you can"
"No we only have guided visits"

Bit of a flutter now between the two people on the desk, a bit of computer tapping and then,

"OK, we can book you in for tomorrow - but the visit is only in Spanish, are you sure you want to go"
"Yes"

On Sunday morning we turned up at the appointed hour. We paid our 10€ apiece. The train is one of those roadgoing diesel tractor units pulling a couple of carriages and, only ten minutes late or twenty five minutes after the time we were told to be there, the train pulled away.

The train took us into the park, each carriage load of people was appointed a guide and then we went into one of the old mines. They even gave us safety hats. Not a bad tour, reasonable explanation of the processes and perils of mining. The guide then took us to a spot where we could see the place where the material dug out was washed to separate the minerals from the valueless rock and that was it.

After that we could walk the site as we wished. We had a look at a couple of other mine entrances, the zig-zagging chimney, the dynamite and gunpowder store and the "wash-house."

Whilst we were strolling the train passed us three times. So what was all this about only one train per day?

Just for once I asked because I was cross. After all we could have done most of what we saw the twice we'd been there before and why hadn't they simply booked us onto the next available train when we'd asked instead of turning it into some big deal? It turns out that there is only one train per session during the week but at weekends they run as many trains as they can fill but they insist that you reserve beforehand by phone. Yes, of course we could walk into the park whenever we wanted but then we would miss out on the guided tour so why would we want to do that?

Sometimes I do despair of how Spaniards arrange things. Tourists, "go away!"

The Hippopotamus Song

2010-10-09T22:09:00.001+02:00

We went to San Pedro del Pinatar today which is a small town on the edge of the Mar Menor.

The Mar Menor, the Little Sea, is a hypersaline lagoon linked to the Mediterranean Sea only by a series of locks and weirs. It's shallow and warm and, particularly at it's northern end, it has a mud that people like to slart all over themselves for its therapeutic qualities. Apparently Hippocrates, the oath man, recommended mudbaths sometime between 460 and 337 BC and what's good enough for him is good enough for we Murcianos.

As if Hippocrates weren't sufficient a 1995 study by the University of Murcia "revealed" that the mud contains a high percentage of cations, anions, calcium, magnesium and potassium fluorides, chlorides and sulphates which can be absorbed by the skin to improve skin conditions like ulcers, boils, sores and acne. What's more it also eliminates toxins and reduces the inflammation caused by rheumatism, arthritis and gout. Good or what?

It's an interesting spot though and I was interested to discover that the short piers, used as access points to get into the water to bathe or to get to the mud are locally called balnearios which is the word normally associated with the more traditional sort of health spa resorts. I did find myself humming the old Flanders and Swann song though;

Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me follow me, down to the hollow
And there we will wallow in glorious mud.

Underwhelmed

2010-09-30T00:53:00.000+02:00

There wasn't much on at the pictures so I suggested we have a look at the mining museum in La Unión. It was a mistake.

Look at the photo. This museum was opened in 2001. It looks like something from the 1950s. Over detailed information on how to use a chisel and hammer to make a blast hole then cases and cases of unlabelled exhibits.

Definitely up there as one of the most tedious museums I have ever visited. Mind you we picked up a leaflet about the new "mine route" and that looks like it should be good so we're not done with La Unión yet.

Me and the strike

2010-09-30T00:39:00.001+02:00

I teach English to the admin staff of a shopping Centre in San Javier and today, the day of the General Strike, was one of my days there. I wondered if I may be faced with a picket line as the Unions had mentioned shopping centres as one of their targets. I'd decided not to cross it if there was one partly out of respect for my old Union boss, Jeff Brass (Stand thi ground lad, stand thi ground!) and partly because I've heard that Spanish pickets have a tendency towards violence. Jeff had a nice turn of phrase but Shakespeare's or Falstaff's "The better part of valour is discretion" seemed like sound advice too.

I didn't have to decide. No pickets. In fact the only way the strike affected me personally was that my regular newspaper wasn't on the news stand. I also saw a few placards passing down a street parallel to the one I was driving on.

It wasn't a washout though. Most of the heavy industry in Cartagena like the shipyards and the construction work on the new refinery closed down and there were no buses early on because of action by the pickets. Nationwide there seems to have been a fair bit of action.

Trying hard for that sale

2010-09-27T21:14:00.000+02:00

Canal+ is the big provider of pay TV here in Spain. Like Sky used to be when I lived in the UK.

Recently they have started to provide their services via a terrestrial broadcast system. Plug their card into the back of the telly, pay them 15€ a month and hey presto loads more channels. I was interested but I don't like to sign up for anything without reading the small print.

I searched the website looking for their conditions but, so far as I can see, the actual contractual details are not there. Lots of information on prices, services etc. but all the headline stuff rather than the fine print. Nothing, for instance, about the length of the minimum contract period or any pledge to maintain prices for so long after first contracting.

So I used their customer service contact form. Ten days after my initial question they have responded referring me back to the pages where I started.

Hmm. If that's the sort of service they can manage in the selling phase I think I'll stick with the free to air telly.

Algameca Chica

2010-09-26T19:59:00.000+02:00

S'funny. We've lived in Cartagena over a year now but still there are parts of the city completely hidden to us.

Over the summer, in Murcia, we saw a photo exhibition that featured some snaps from a barrio called Algameca Chica in Cartagena, a district that isn't on the maps. We asked in the tourist info office where it was. "Run along the back of the naval dockyards and just before the military checkpoint take the dirt road - and there it is." New territory to us.

Maggie seemed to think we may be robbed at any moment. I was re-assured that the tourist people hadn't warned us off. In fact the only things that anyone said to us as we wandered around, me with an expensive looking camera in hand, were "Hello" or "Nice day" or some such.

Strange place, houses built out of old planks and second hand looking building materials next to a little inlet on the coast. There seemed, from a hand written notice, to be some sort of internal organisation developed on a co-operative basis, a way of sharing the costs for electric and the water that was stored in big blue drums on the rooves of most of the houses. It may be a place where poor people live and some places definitely were full time dwellings but I suspect that for the majority it's more the equivalent of having an allotment in the UK. Somewhere to get away from it, in this instance to mess around in boats, to swim or do a bit of fishing.

Romería

2010-09-26T14:16:00.001+02:00

Romerías are religious, Christian, processions that involve taking a graven image from one spot to another.

I'd seen a romería advertised in La Palma just outside Cartagena for the two "sainted doctors" San Cosme and San Damián who were going on a little trip from La Palma to the chapel at Los Vidales.

These two Christian brothers trained in Syria and practised medicine in Sicily and became famous for their kindness to people who were too poor to pay for medical treatment. Come the persecution of Christians their high profile made them easy targets and they were eventually decapitated for their faith.

The fighting chickpeas

2010-09-26T01:44:00.000+02:00

Tapas, as I'm sure you know, are little snacks. They used to come as freebies when you ordered a drink in a Spanish bar and sometimes they still do but it's more normal nowadays to simply order a tapa along with your drink and stump up for it at bill time.

Tapas routes have become relatively common. A number of bars agree to provide a snack and a drink at a fixed price and the organisers find some little gimmick to hold it all together.

On Thursday there was a chap in front of me in the supermarket queue wearing a short skirt, a long cloak, a plumed brass helmet and carrying a sword. Normally I'd find this a little odd except that this week there have been people all over Cartagena in togas, funny headgear, furry boots and breastplates.

Cartagena was once the principal city on the Spanish peninsula for the North African state of Carthage. The struggle between Carthage and Rome is the theme for one of the biggest festivals here - Carthaginenses y Romanos. Parades, battles, performances, competitions and events taking place all over the city.

The organisers of our tapas route have given it the aspect of a battle. The thirty or so participating restaurants and bars have sided either with the Carthagineses or with the Romanos. We punters have to vote for the best ones and not only will some cook come out as the supreme champion but either the Romans or the Carthaginians will be able to chalk up another victory for their band.

I rather approved of the fighting spirit of the man who gave us the potted history of the chickpea as he handed over our hummus based tapa on Saturday evening. Introduced into Europe by the Carthaginians according to him.

To the barricades!

2010-09-23T12:23:00.001+02:00

I don't suppose the students will be driving the trams - at least not in Cartagena mainly because there aren't any trams. Nonetheless we do have a General Strike planned here for next Wednesday - 29th September.

It's in the news of course but I've only heard one conversation about it between ordinary people. Then again we are rather cut off from the mainstream of everyday conversation with the Spanish person on the equivalent of the Clapham Omnibus. So whether it will be as damp a squib as the strike of Civil servants and local Government workers called just before the summer I don't know. To be honest I suppose that nobody will know till the day. So far none of my workmates have proposed militant action at the language school where I work.

Considering the deathly hush I was rather surprised when lots of posters and placards turned up close to the flat. This large one was hand done. Nice to know thre are still a few local activists.

Rain etc.

2010-09-18T19:27:00.000+02:00

It was raining as we left Cartagena for the weekend. The temperature had dropped too, minimum was only 20ºC. Autumn is definitely on the way.

Weather is definitely a Spanish topic. Yesterday on the news there was a story about a town in Extremedura that had been whipped by wind, rain and tennis ball sized hail.

Today, in El País newspaper there was an article about the extremes of the Spanish weather. Apparently a street in Murcia, half way from Cartagena to Culebrón, holds the record at 47.2ºC. That record was set in 1994 yet some of the Britons around here were quoting temperatures higher than that in their back gardens this summer! The record for the lowest official temperature, -32ºC, is held by Lleida (near Barcelona). In 1987 the most rain recorded in one day, 817 litres per square metre, fell on Oliva just 100 miles away whilst three of the driest spots in Spain are the local airport at El Altet, Alcantarilla in Murcia and that same street in Murcia that boasts the highest recorded temperature.

So if you fancy some extremes of weather come and live near us.

Back in the groove

2010-09-15T09:38:00.000+02:00

Britons work 9 to 5. I don't think I actually ever met anyone who worked 9-5 but the idea is straightforward enough. Spaniards on the other hand work split shifts.

Spanish shops, as an example, often open from 10 till 2 and re-open for the 5 to 8 slot whilst offices probably run 9.30 to 1.30 and 4.30 till 7.30. Official offices and banks open a longer morning shift and then close to the public.

Britons don't adapt well to this routine. The long, and by our standards late, lunchtime slot makes lunch the main meal of the day whereas we Brits tend to eat our main meal in the evening. Finding a Spanish restaurant that starts to serve before 8.30 is almost impossible. Why open when everyone is still at work? Meals at 10 or even later are commonplace.

To make the most of a day we need to get out early, otherwise we find things closing down on us. Start out a bit later and the museums, shops and what not have closed down for lunch just as we get there leaving us stranded till the afternoon session or maybe the next day.

Lots of my working life I've done evenings. Evening visits and meetings as a youth worker and evening sessions too for adult education, for evening classes.

In my new job I've been doing morning acclimatisation sessions and then straight on to afternoon work at the offices of a company whose employees are being subjected to my teaching style. Yesterday, for the first time I worked a morning slot and then a 7 to 10 evening. As I strolled home through the pleasant evening warmth I couldn't help but think that it was back to the old routine.

Grammar school

2010-09-10T15:29:00.000+02:00

Maggie thinks that we should do some more formal Spanish lessons. So yesterday we went down to the Palacio Molina where there's the only language school that we know of in Cartagena that teaches Spanish to foreigners. Actually we'd tried on Monday too only to find a note on the office door that said "Estamos en el Casino" - we're in the Casino. We thought the office must have moved but a chap we asked about a language school in the Casino answered us as though we were daft. "There are Tango classes here but no English classes" - maybe the young woman from the language school was dancing away her idle moments.

On Thursday though the office was open. We asked trick questions like "When is the course?" which, obviously enough brought forth an evasive reply - "Probably in the mornings but maybe not." She made us do a test though. What a hoot, 80 odd questions with multiple choice answers. They all looked like good answers to me.

"We'll be in touch tomorrow, or maybe Monday," said the young woman. We shall see.

Now where have I heard that before?

2010-09-10T00:03:00.000+02:00

In one of my English classes today I was talking to the operations manager of a large shopping centre. For the past three days the auditors have been in, not for a financial audit but for an environmental and health and safety audit.

The man was complaining about the lunacy of the things he was being asked to do. He was happy with the need for someone working at height to wear harnesses, safety gear etc. but he didn't understand why there should be a second person on the ground to watch the worker. "Is he supposed to watch the man fall or, maybe he's supposed to catch him?" He had other examples.

Strange; we Brits think that Spaniards are very cavalier about H&S yet here's a professional setup making exactly the same complaints about the over complexity and inadequacy of the safety demands being made.

I used to have similar conversations with H&S people myself - imagine the look of bewilderment, of disbelief "You want a risk assessments for adults to walk from one classroom to another?"

Just a tad out of kilter

2010-09-09T00:43:00.000+02:00

We've been back in Cartagena for a week now and we still haven't really settled.

Temperatures have dropped to the high twenties so it's not been hot but it has been very sticky. Opening the windows for a cooling breeze brings traffic noise.

Maggie is back at school but the children don't return till next week and she's still trying to organise this year's teaching timetable. The usual routine of school life has been replaced by planning meetings and preparations.

I've started work too without yet getting into a rhythm. I'm used to jeans and T shirts but for work it's more formal. The sweat dribbles inside the polycotton shirts. I've done a few classes, some at the centre and some on the premises of client companies, but I've still not settled to the teaching materials or house style. My hours keep changing too as my boss tries to juggle being nice to me with effective use of my time.

The household routines have fallen victim to my changing timetable. The flat is a bit grubby, the mealtimes moveable and the laundry more haphazard. I'm not listening to the radio, watching the TV news or buying a daily paper so I feel vaguely disconnected. It's the same with my "intercambios", the sessions speaking Spanish and English which I can't re-establish until I know when I'll be free from week to week.

Of course it will all sort itself out in time and we'll get ourselves organised but at the moment it's all a bit of a muddle and both unsettling and unsettled.

Headed off at the pass or a result?

2010-09-03T21:32:00.000+02:00

It only took three more longish calls to get to speak to someone about cancelling a service on my mobile phone. Then they banjaxed me, "What if we give you a 50% discount for a year?" - it sounded like a good offer to me, Internet on the phone for the whole year for 60€ so I said yes.

Amongst other things I was quite pleased with myself for just keeping going and not giving up the unequal struggle with the behemoth Movistar and the whole of the Spanish language. Interesting though how the several phone calls were like a vocabulary lesson, by the end I knew the phraseology for what I wanted to do which made the whole process just slightly less intimidating.

Ever decreasing circles

2010-09-02T20:37:00.000+02:00

I don't make many calls on my mobile phone. Very few friends. Very few business calls.

A little while ago the daily wash and spin cycle did for my cheap phone and I went mad when I got another - tactile screen, Internet, mp3, GPS - the works. I took out the very cheapest contract though at just 9€ per month.

I just got my third bill. The first bill was for zero because in transferring from a pay as you go I had credit in hand, the second was 11€, around the figure I'd expect. I tried to check the (paperless) bill online but the Movistar website was having none of it. The third bill was for 25€. Now for someone without any pals this seemed a bit high. Persevering I beat the Movistar website and got to see the breakdown. The problem is that they are charging me a monthly fee for Internet access rather than the "pay as you go" option I asked for.

I went back to the shop where I bought the phone. Movistar logos and stickers everywhere but the young woman behind the desk said I'd have to phone Movistar direct. Seeing my dejected expression she relented, "OK, come back when I'm not about to close (it was 8.25, closing time 8.30) and I'll make the call." I did, I waited patiently for the 25 minutes it took her to sell someone a dongle. She made the call. "They want your ID number" she said, passing me the phone, and then set about the next paying customer.

"Computers are down," said the man on the phone, "ring back later." Computers down? Good Lord! I haven't heard that for years. Obviously I was on my own so I abandoned the shop and came back to the flat.

It's sticky here in Cartagena. I stick to our leather sofa, my hands are sticky, the phone is sticky and with the windows open the traffic noise is frightening the cat. I phoned billing. I had to do that thing of saying which department I wanted and I was amazed when it understood me. The woman was patient with me for a while but basically said the shop had made the mistake so it wasn't anything to do with her. I persisted in deteriorating Spanish, she spoke slowly to the idiot on the phone. "But I don't want Internet, I want it cancelling" "Ah, then you need contracts not me - hang on I'll put you through." She couldn't though, all their lines were busy. I tried again and phoned contracts via the robot interrogation. The man who spoke to me had a strong South American accent and appeared to be at a music festival from the background noise level at his end. "Not me," he said, "I'm new contracts, you want cancelling contracts - hang on I'll put you through - aah, all the lines are busy, you just wait, they'll answer eventually." I put the phone on speaker and unpeeled myself from the sofa. Twenty minutes later it was still "Please hold, our friendly and consummately trained operators will be with you in the merest twinkling of an eye." I gave up after about twenty minutes on hold.

If you've stuck with me so far I'm amazed. You must have a high tolerance for tedium. I know that speech recognition software, difficult accents, serpentine call circles and ultimate failure are part of dealing with customer services in every country in the World but we're back on that old language chestnut of having to screw up the courage to make the call in the first place and I just wanted to share that with someone.

La vuelta al curro

2010-09-02T00:18:00.000+02:00

Certain Spanish soft news stories do the rounds each year. Spanish summer ends on 1 September and as people return to work the news always includes little filler pieces about how difficult it is to go back. In a couple of weeks time the story will be the cost of text books as the youngsters return to school. Back to school is la vuelta al cole, la vuelta al curro is what I've just done, back to work.

In fact we both started work today. We intended to leave Culebrón yesterday evening so we could unpack but the cat sensed something and scarpered so we had to put it off till this morning. Horrid, up at 5.30 - long before dawn. It was bad enough for Maggie after two months off but pity me - eighteen months since I last had a proper job. The strain! - polished shoes, shirt with collar, new people to meet, new routines to learn.

I'm working at the Wall Street Institute in Cartagena and everyone was welcoming and friendly. The centre has a good positive feel to it and the teaching methods and general approach looks pretty solid too. All I did was read manuals, drink disgusting coffee and talk about the routine with one of the old hands. I'm due to start teaching next Monday, not at the centre but in the offices of the admin team for one of the nearby shopping centres.

Throughout the day I kept thinking it's a good job these people are buying my English rather than Spanish language skills as my Spanish seemed firmly stuck in flip flop and deckchair mode!

Out of town for the summer

2010-06-30T07:12:00.000+02:00

We're off to the hill station. Too damned hot in the city over the summer don't you know.

Maggie finishes school today, the term is over. The children have been on holiday for the past week but the staff holidays don't start till July 1. They end on August 31.

So, for two months it's goodbye to coffee at Bar Fran just a hundred metres from home, goodbye to intercambios with Lourdes, Carlos and Miguel, goodbye to popping out on foot to Mercadona for the food, to the kiosk for a newspaper or to tobacconists and banks within a stones throw. Goodbye to public transport, Corte Inglés, well shops in general really, and to museums, exhibitions and the cinema. Goodbye to water pressure and an unfailing power supply as well.

On the other hand it's hello to a bit of peace and quiet, hello to plenty of space, to home comforts and a decent sofa. Hello to lots of our compatriots too and I suppose there are a few shops and bars in Pinoso only a ten minute drive away.

So, for two months, expect Life in Cartagena to fall silent. With a bit of luck I'll have something to say about Life in Culebrón other than to complain about the flies.

Until September.

Eshtop im!

2010-06-30T00:01:00.003+02:00

I'd been to one of my language exchanges just before the match with Portugal. I wasn't able to get home in time so it had to be a bar. Fortunately it was a bar with a copious supply of cheap brandy.

It looked like a scrappy first half to me, but what do I know about football? The second half seemed much better. In those last ten minutes, the ones where one goal doesn't seem like anywhere near enough of a cushion, we were one up. The bar was on tenterhooks. Every time the Portuguese had posession the tension mounted. Stop him, stop him! I mouthed into my brandy. Maybe I was louder than I thought. I noticed the Spanish man sitting at the table to my left staring at me.

The Portuguese pushed forward again. ¡Eshtop im!, ¡eshtop im! shouted my neighbour.

And they did.

More fun on the number nine

2010-06-29T17:52:00.003+02:00

Riding the Nº9 is often a diverting experience.

Today an older chap and I were waiting at the stop together. When the bus came he told me to get on first. As he boarded the bus the driver told him something that I didn't catch. She'd said nothing to me. Anyway, half way around the route the bus parked up at a stop and the driver and a friend of hers who seemed to be on the bus for an extended chat got out to have a fag. From the conversation between them and the two other passengers I realised we were waiting for someone in a wheelchair. There must have been a phone booking.

The man in the chair turned up, he paid his 35c fare and his carer said they were going to a place way off the normal route. The driver checked where the rest of us were going. We went to the stop for the bloke in the chair first. I asked if I should get off, "Of course not, I'll get you there," she said, and that's exactly what she did.

Buses that carry wheelchairs are obviously dead standard nowadays but I thought the personalised taxi service was remarkable.

Whizzbangs

2010-06-23T22:24:00.003+02:00

It's San Juan tonight, the celebration of Midsummers Day. In Alicante and, apparently, round these here parts too the way to celebrate is to light bonfires and set off fireworks. In Spain fireworks aren't usually Catherine wheels, volcanoes and traffic lights - they're things that go bang (petardos) and things that go high and then bang (cohetes.)

We've just been to the flicks and walking home the streets are exploding. In every garden, park and bit of waste ground there are youngsters, sometimes supervised by their parents, setting off bangers. On the bigger bits of waste ground there are bonfires. The disregard for safety is either refreshing or outright stupidity depending on your point of view.

It all got a bit busier around midnight and the participants became older teens and young adults. As I sit here typing, there are lots of explosions coming from every direction but most noticeably from the waste ground where I habitually park my car. The motor is now in a more official and less flamable car parking area.

It's very much like the bonfire nights of my youth but without the charred spuds and tooth breaking toffee.

Football (again)

2010-06-23T18:42:00.000+02:00

It's rather good having "dual nationality." All the Spanish World Cup games are on the terrestrial channels so we were able to watch Spain win, but fail to demolish Honduras as they should have, in the comfort of our own living room. The bulk of the live games though are only available on the equivalent of Sky Sports. Today, to see England play football for the first time this competition, we had to go to the local boozer where they have subscription TV.

Unfortunately it wasn't so straightforward. We went to the bar I use a lot. They have stickers all over the place to say that they have the subscription channels but it was a lie. Drinks in hand at 4pm some soppy B movie came on - the bar owner apologised profusely, they didn't have the right package. We drank up and went to the next nearest bar where England were in full flow. We weren't exactly welcomed and there was a moment of doubt when a regular customer wanted to see the USA/Algeria game which was on at the same time. Fortunately Maggie's fervour won out. As did the boys.

Tittering along

2010-06-18T11:06:00.001+02:00

Last night we went to the Mandarache shopping centre where they have been advertising turns on Thursday and Friday evenings for the past couple of weeks. Nice to see the place a bit livelier than usual. There were tables all over the square where a slightly confused waiter provided us with cheap brandy in tumblerfuls and weak but expensive mojitos.

The act was a woman comedian. She did one of those things that comedians do, she talked about commonplace things and events but pointed out their ridiculous aspects. I understood maybe 20% of the gags. I was pleased with myself; 20% isn't bad as a language score given the circumstances but what pleased me more was that I recognised the situations she was ridiculing, the adverts on the telly and the people she described. Spanish culture slowly but surely seeping in through the pores.

It's goals wot counts

2010-06-16T17:59:00.000+02:00

So we saw England muddle to a draw and Spain lose despite controlling all of the game except the bit that mattered. No shouting in the streets here, just mumbling as they left the bar.

Corialanus, Hero Without a Country

2010-06-11T18:22:00.001+02:00

You presumably know the film. All star cast headed up by Gordon Scott, made in 1964 I think.

Last night, at the local archaeological museum there was a free screening of this quite remarkable Italian film dubbed into Spanish. It was free so we were there. In fact we were the only people there when the film began at its advertised start time of 9.45pm though there may have been as many as thirty in the audience as we sneaked away after thirty minutes of wobbling scenery, hackneyed script and wooden acting.

Good idea though with a museum based on a Roman necropolis screening a film with a Roman plot. Maybe they'll have something a bit better next time.

Horse muck and frilly frocks

2010-06-09T22:11:00.001+02:00

Today was a local holiday in the region so we chose to pass some of our day watching a procession of horses and carriages in La Aljorra.

I generally try to keep clear of the fore and aft of horses. One end has a tendency to smash jaws. The other, I'm sure, like camels, goes for the occasional disembowelling. As I mingled with the crowd taking snaps I was very aware of being too close to the dangerous parts of horses. There were horses everywhere, more than you could shake a stick at, of every shape, size and colour.

Yet again I found myself wondering why there was so much Andalucian influence in a Murcian event. Flat hats, fancy hair styles, flouncy frocks and high grey striped trousers in every direction. Maggie tells me that it's because there was a lot of immigration of Andalucians into Murcia. I reckon it's because the Murcianos like to dress up and Andaluces do it with a certain panache.

Funny humps and knee pads

2010-06-09T22:07:00.001+02:00

On the way home we passed a sign that read race circuit so we went to take a peep. Maggie says she has told me about it before. Amnesia, I've always suffered from a touch of amnesia - often mingled with a banging headache.

There were just a few bikes practising. We both noticed that there was not a single poster advertising any forthcoming events at the circuit. Can you imagine that being the case at Donnington or even Snetterton?