Life in Cartagena

School term is over in Spain. It's summer. Nearly everyone from Cartagena is at the beach. The town is quiet and we are done, at least till the new academic year when I'll be back to do a bit more English teaching. We've cleared everything from the flat. We've carted our belongings up the road to Culebrón. We've handed over the keys of the flat. So goodbye to town life for a while and goodbye to Cartagena till I get back there in hot and sticky September. In the meanwhile you can follow our adventures (sic) at Life in Culebrón

I was in the vet a few weeks ago. There were a couple of Spanish women in front of me talking about their English neighbours. They seemed to think that the couple were nice enough but they soon got on to complaining about how they didn't try to speak Spanish. The veterinary nurse agreed that none of them/us tried to speak Spanish. Everyone agrees that I don't look Spanish. It's not the hair, or the height or the clothes or the skin colour. I don't wear Union Flag underpants and, if I wear sandals, I go sockless. But everyone agrees I look like a Briton. There are often boatloads of tourists in Cartagena. Literally boatloads. They come in big boats early in the mornings and they are usually gone by mid afternoon. Today it's the Royal Caribbean Independence of the Seas with a potential roster of 4,370 passengers. On Friday there will be the Windsurf and the Thomson Dream. The cruise ships usually moor in the port, basically in the heart of the town. Passengers s...

So, I'm in the waiting room in the health centre at eight in the morning. The process for taking blood is quick, a production line. There are maybe thirty of us in the room. I'm sitting there with my left leg crossed over my right. I shuffle, right over left. I'm reading. As the electronic scoreboard closes in on my number I lose interest in the book and my gaze wanders around the room. I am the only person with my legs crossed. Everyone else, young and old, male and female has their legs akimbo - both feet firmly planted on the floor. I mentioned this to Carlos. I asked other Spaniards. Amazingly they confirmed, with plenty of exceptions and extra detail, that crossing ones legs is not very Spanish. I still don't really think it's true. Interesting if it were though.

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...

Once upon a time in a land far, far away nasty men applied for jobs working with little girls and boys. Their intentions were not good. So Police checks became common and employers, such as schools, started asking the police to provide them with reports on the criminal past of people about to be employed. In time the system became more widespread and the checks came to be known as CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks. Now, apparently, the name has changed and they are DBS or Disclosure and Barring Service checks. Now Maggie has worked in three schools whilst we've been here in Spain together. I may be wrong but I don't think that any of them has ever asked to see any form of Police check. I remember she did fill in a form (that we got from a tobacconist ) when she first started with the bilingual project but it was the British element of the project that was worried about the check. The local headteacher in Ciudad Rodrigo quietly slipped the form in a drawer and mumbled som...

I've not felt so well over the last week or so. Mostly the regular aches and pains that come from late season sniffles and colds but  this time there was something new on top. So, for only the second time since we first arrived here I feel the need to talk to a doctor. Despite a recent wave of cost cutting there's a good, generally free, state medical system in Spain. Dentistry, for adults, isn't included and there are prescription charges but it's basically free. Oh, there must be charges for prostheses too because there was a recent news story about some lad who had his modern splint replaced by a plaster cast when he couldn't pay the charge. Lots of Spaniards seem to choose to take out relatively inexpensive private health cover as well but mainly for queue jumping rather than quality reasons. Parallels with the British National Health System are pretty obvious. Anyway I'm registered with the health service in my home community - la Communidad Valencian...

It has recently become necessary for foreigners to declare any overseas holdings in cash, property or goods with a value of over 50,000€. This has caused a bit of a stir amongst some of our compatriots. I was checking to make sure that there wasn't any small print which affected Maggie or me. The stories of problems of interpretation, using the form etc. were legion. Recently I completed my annual tax return. I was happy to do so because this year I got a rebate. Whilst I was in financial mode I sifted through a few of the expat websites to check that my Teachers Pension, a government pension, as distinct from the state pension, was not eligible for Spanish tax as it has to be taxed at source in the UK. No problem. I seem to be perfectly legal. As I read I realised that lots of Britons who are living on their UK state pension here in Spain want to be squeaky clean and declare their pensions to the Spanish tax people. As the amounts they get are covered by the Spanish tax...

Spaniards love their food. They are convinced that it is the best in the world. The Spanish talk about food a lot. There is a movement in Catalunya for independence from Spain which does not sit well with most non Catalans. As a result lots of Catalan achievements are disparaged by other Spaniards but nobody had a bad word to say about those nice Roca brothers when their restaurant in Girona was recently chosen as the best in the world. One of the traditional dishes from Cartagena and the Mar Menor area is caldero which is basically a slushy rice and fish stock dish. Three of us were talking, in a gruff voiced, manly, sort of way about caldero. I asked whether the alioili or al-i-oli usually served alongside the rice is a vital ingredient or not. Just for the moment think of alioli as garlic mayonnaise. The atmosphere stiffened when one said yes and the other no. My father and I used to have a similar discussion about the pros and cons of lamb with or without mint sauce I ha...

I've thought of a wizard wheeze to keep the number of posts up. It was Cruces de mayo over the weekend. May Crosses - shrines I suppose dominated by a cross and with an Andalucian theme. Obviously this is blog material even down to the brightly coloured photos . The trouble is I've done it before. We also went to a sort of Mediaeval re-enactment up in the Castillo de la Concepción but that smacks a bit too much of the "dear diary" sort of blog. One problem for your average ethno-sociological commentator is the unflinching cyclicity of Spanish life.The same things keep coming around. I've complained before about the posters for circuses and other shows which say "in the usual place" The fact is that, as a circus operator, you can save a bundle of advertising costs by printing just the one size fits all poster. The circus will be in the same place as it was last year and the year before that and so on. It's only the occasional outsider who wil...

I learn a lot about the country I live in by prying into the private lives of my students. Sometime last Autumn I asked the inevitable Monday lesson question about what a student had done at the weekend. The young woman in question had spent some time putting away her summer clothes and bringing out her winter clothes. I was impressed. Such order. Come Spring I asked the same student if she had liberated her summer clothes from their Winter storage yet. A couple of weeks still to go she said. I was relaying the story of this, to me, remarkable behaviour to another group of students as a prelude to a similar question to them. I didn't get very far. They all thought it was perfectly normal behaviour. They did it too. Today on Ondacero radio there was a mention of one of their more well known presenters, Carlos Herrera, talking about this very phenomenon on his show last week. Obviously this is a nationwide event in Spain. I'm pretty sure that we Brits don't do go thro...

We keep doing flamenco. Most Spanish people are a bit surprised when we mention it. They ask, in a sort of unbelieving way, "You like flamenco?" Flamenco certainly has a strong following amongst the Spanish but I don't think it's exactly popular. It's not the most accessible music. Suddenly the audience will mouth alé and there will be a ripple of approval but I never quite know why. The words are completely unintelligible to me, well I catch occasional phrases now and then but basically nothing. I don't find myself humming any of the tunes when the concerts over and often, to tell the truth, I've been shuffling in my chair for a while before it's all over. But I keep going back for more. I told my mum I was going to some flamenco and she said that, to her, it was all just noisy stamping. Certainly people dance flamenco and I have more than one English language student who dances. But my idea of flamenco is not a dress swirling, finger clicking, ...

We've been busy this weekend. Flamenco, old pals and lots of eating. Last night we went for an Indian with a couple that we met in the UK some years ago. She's Spanish, he's from the UK. We went relatively early and got to the restaurant about 9.30. It was odd, a big pink industrial unit on a small industrial estate in not the most exciting part of the region. The pink building had an elephant motif. There were lots of cars parked outside. Inside it was humming. Nearly all the tables full. Waiters rusing here and there. The odd word of Engliish floated through the ether. Most of the diners were, like us, slightly pink from the recent sunny days and British. The Spanish member of our group took on minor celebrity status amongst the waiters which lasted the whole evening. We had to wait a few minutes for a table. We got our drinks. We read the menus. We ordered. As we crunched through the papadums people were leaving. As the waiter handed out the various rices and mai...

I didn't think it was a difficult question. What do you have for breakfast? It's one of those traditional little questions for English language learners. Now Maggie often guffaws at those adverts on the telly for beauty products. You know the ones, 83% of all women think that our wonder cream reduced their wrinkles in just seven days. She is sniggering at the low sample given in small print at the bottom of the screen - from a sample of 86 women. My sample is even lower but earlier this week in a conversation class I asked a group of beginners what they had for breakfast. It isn't the first time I've asked the question and so I wasn't surprised that people drank milk, ate biscuits or considered that pouring Nesquik type flavoured milk on their cereals constituted both food and drink. The next day I used the same question about breakfast instead of the more usual question about what they had done the day before, over the weekend or some such. The difference wa...

Maggie's text read that Laurel and Hardy were in our flat. They agreed with us that it was the water heater that was the problem. As I type a different double act are wreaking havoc in our kitchen. There's a puddle of rusty water on the floor, the shelves have been dismantled and jars of chickpeas and jelly sweets are spread across all the kitchen work-surfaces whilst the body odour of one of the men is assailing my nostrils even though he's at least ten metres and three rooms away. One of the great delights of rented property is that someone else will be paying. I reckon the tank alone will be about 450€ without the comedy duos time. It's not really our concern how ham fisted the tradesmen are as long as it all goes back together, more or less as before and that it all works in the end. It'll be better when they've gone though. For the past few days, the circuit breakers in the house have been tripping at the most inopportune times. Alarm clocks that don...

In my formative years those French went in for that kissing each other thing. Britons on the other hand, shook hands. I know; we were all repressed. I am aware that nowadays if we don't hug our kids, high five at the least pretext or perform a mutual back massage on everyone we meet there is a real risk to our self esteem and general mental well being. Personally I don't really care if someone I hardly know wants to slap me on the back or give me a bear hug. Well apart from thinking that it's hypocritical tosh that is. It's a bit like "I love you" at the end of a phone call. Fair enough, nice sentiment and especially when said with feeling. But as a sort of Christmas cracker motto substitute for goodbye? I don't like the hugging though for a very practical reason. I have no idea how I am supposed to do it. As vague acquaintances move into my personal space in their attempt to hug, kiss or exchange bodily fluids with me I usually end up treading on th...

I've told you about tapas trails before. The idea is that lots of participating bars and restaurants offer a drink - wine, beer or soft drink - and a little snack for a fixed price. Usually they are run as a competition to find the best tapa chosen by popular vote. This year the Cartagena trail ran from the 20th February until yesterday. The price was 2.50€. Seventy seven establishments took place, well 76 really as one of our favourite restaurants seems to have gone bust between signing up for the competition and it starting. There is a little leaflet listing all of the participating eateries and when you buy a tapa the bar or restaurant stamps your list. Providing you visit at least six places you can then vote for your favourite tapa and there all sorts of prizes for the participants most of them depending on a draw from amongst the returned leaflets. It's a really nice idea in that you get to see the inside of restaurants that you might never otherwise visit either be...

My father used to complain that having a bath was like soaking in a tub of soiled water. His heavy water use compromise was a soak in the tub to relax and then shower to clean up. In our house we still wash up by hand. At school there was a poster explaining how it should be done properly. Fill the bowl with very hot water then wash by turn first the glassware, then the crockery and finally the pots and pans. Cutlery can be added at any stage. By the time you get onto scrubbing the pans the floating grease and food is quite noticeable. Afterwards air drying or tea towels were both acceptable. The Spanish system has, traditionally, been to swill the debris from the plates under running water then to use a soapy cloth/scourer on the stubborn stains again under running water. Generally they go for air drying rather than tea towels with lots of kitchens having neat drying racks hidden in what look like kitchen cupboards. We were talking today, in one of my classes, about using les...

Today, as we walked past a church in Cartagena, La iglesia de Santa María de Gracia, Maggie commented on the number of people coming out of the building. "Very religious.... in Cartagena," she said. I wondered if there was so much toing and froing because of the Pope's retirement. As we passed the door there was a notice "Entrada Besapie" - foot kissing entrance. Neither of us had the faintest idea why. We were on our way to lunch. As we ate, on the telly in the corner, the Queen was kissing the feet of a statue which, with a bit of Googling, I found was the Cristo de Medinaceli. The Medinaceli Christ is a carved wooden figure which was crafted in Seville sometime before 1650. It fell into the hands of the Muslims some thirty years later when a Spanish garrison in Morocco was overrun. The Spanish got it back about a year later. It is now in a church in Madrid. On the first Friday of March people queue up to kiss the feet of the statue in the hope of having t...

Cartagena is an important port on the Med. Cruise ships, tankers, gas carriers, container ships, fishing boats, pleasure craft and all sorts of warships are a common sight from the town's seafront. To the East and the West of us there is a lot of untouched coastline where rugged hillsides drop precipitously down to the sea. We can boast a natural park with unspoiled beaches at Calblanque but, to be fair, we also have the huge port and industrial complex of Escombreras with refineries and all sorts of stinking chemical works as well as one of the most polluted beaches on the Med at Portman. Heading a a fair way to the West out of Cartagena is Mazarrón and to the North and East you bump into La Manga, the strange narrow piece of land which seperates the Mediterranean from the inland strech of salt water called the Mar Menor. Around Puerto de Mazzarón, La Manga and the Mar Menor there are several typical low key Spanish seaside towns - low key in the sense that they don't ...

Outside the flat we have a box for all the advertising blurb that people deliver. The supermarket offers, mega deals on beds or super special deals on computers. Most of it goes straight to the recycling bin. The other day though there was a small ad for a dog walking service. I thought it was interesting. Most Spaniards I teach are relatively well off. Talking to them I don't get the idea that many of them have "servants". If the kids need parking somewhere before they are old enough for nursery, kindergarten or school or after they come home from them it tends to be with the grandparents rather than with child minders. Cleaners are pretty common but they don't seem to do the ironing or the laundry. My perception is that, unlike middle class Britons, there is not a culture of buying people's labour to give the better off middle classes more free time. So a dog walker is out of the ordinary. Of course it may well be someone just having a go, they may not rea...