Life in Cartagena

Hard times Mr Gradgrind. On the surface Spain looks fine. I hear all the time about unemployment, I know lots and lots of people without jobs. There are loads of empty shops, I see the evictions on the telly but I also see the crowds of people out for the fiestas, I go in bars bursting at the seams with people eating their way through mounds of tapas and, even if the sales figures are dire, the cars on the road look new enough. It's difficult to tell. One thing though. A few months ago I started to see a couple of blokes collecting the cardboard boxes that the shops leave outside for the dustbin lorries every night. Armed with a Stanley knife they cut the boxes down and piled them neatly onto a trailer that they had built to tow behind a bike. They were able to get a prodigious amount of card on the little trailer and I supposed that they would go to weigh it in somewhere. I rather admired their grim determination to keep going. A couple of weeks ago there was an old Transi...

I've just walked back from the pictures. This is not an exciting event in itself. In fact this isn't an exciting post. It's here because I'm feeling a bit guilty. I've just realised that I didn't make a single Life in Cartagena entry all through December. How can it be that there's more to write about in sleepy Culebrón than in the city? So back to the pictures. We tend to go to a multiplex run by a local cinema chain in the Mandarache Shopping Centre. The truth is that but for the cinema the centre would almost certainly have closed by now. It's a shopping centre that has never worked properly. The majority of the shop units are empty, even the Burger King closed down, but for months now there has been structural work going on and a big gaudy sign outside to say "  Economato -  Opening Soon." I just presumed that Economato was the name of some ultracheap supermarket chain but apparently not. In the past economatos were stores that sold t...

I'm aware that I'm not posting very often. I know this is not a good way to maintain faithful readers. With nothing much to report I have been tempted to start commenting on the things that are happening in Spain rather than the things that are happening to me, to us. Not quite yet though. So, we've been back in Cartagena for a week now. Some observations. True to tradition summer, that's summer proper, ended promptly on 1 September. Temperatures plummeted all over Spain but we added to our personal autumnal descent by moving from Culebrón to here. Cartagena has a microclimate, the locals, the Cartageneros, say that it never gets too hot in summer nor too cold in winter. They quietly forget to mention that the town is incredibly sticky. A wet heat that has one dripping in sweat after a five minute walk. So we lost 10ºC on the daytime highs but gained self moistening clothes. Nothing to complain about really though with sunny days and daytime temperatures of around 2...

Crisis, it's said like kreesys here, everywhere, all the time. bad news rolling in, wave after wave lapping on the shore. The news is full of it. On the radio today I've listened  to stories about Local Authorities, unable to pay their creditors, being bailed out by Central Government to stop the businesses they owe money to going belly up. In Catalonia they're going to start charging everyone a euro for every prescription. The pay of Local Government workers is being cut at the same time as working hours are being increased. Another hike in VAT is on the cards.There will be a General Strike on the 29th of this month. And so on. The news is one thing though and personal experience is another. In our house, from this week Maggie has been expected to work two hours more per week than she has been up to now. A pay cut or a work increase sliding under the wire. I teach English to a bunch of people in a local business. It's a strategic industry and, as such affected ...