Life in Cartagena

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...

This post is very long. It's not the usual chit chat about something I've done or something that happened to me. I showed it to Maggie for checking. "It's a bit long," she said " And a bit of a rant," "Is it boring," I asked "Well, err, a bit," she said. But it took me hours to write and the typist's chair has made my back ache so I'll be damned if I'm not going to use it. You have been warned. ___________________________________________________ Drinking coffee. Huffing with indignation as another phrase sank into an oblivion of overcomplexity. The usual sort of scene in the bar Capitolio for one of my weekly intercambios - the exchange of English for Spanish conversation. We were talking about Spanish business, attitudes to work and education. Actually, before I forget, a little episode. We were leaving. We'd been in the bar nearly two hours and drunk just four coffees. The bill came to 3.70€. The pers...

I'm not good at names. I never have been. Some forty years ago home from University unexpectedly I spotted my dad looking in a shop window. I went over and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned on his heel, scrutinised me carefully and asked me who I was. It's a skill he passed on to me. Good Lord, it's just struck me that there's another possibility, but no, I'm pretty sure he was my father. This inability to recognise people is a bit of a problem where I work. I have some fixed classes and I generally remember the names of my regular students with only the occasional lapse. I have lots of classes though where I have no idea who will be in the class till moments before it starts and sometimes not till after it has started. It can be quite embarrassing to be greeted effusively by someone who I recognise but whose name has just escaped me for the moment. I have turned it into a bit of a joke, a gift reserved for age and suchlike. The National Statistical Of...

Those men and women who forged the Empire - the Sutherland Highlanders at Balaclava or those gin and tonic drinking rubber planters in Burma (for the malaria don't you know?) - would be ashamed of us. We got in the car and came home. Over in Murcia they have a week of festivities, the Spring Festival, as soon as Easter is over. The Murcianos think that Carnival is all well and good but, what with the 40 days of Lent and then the soul wrenching that is Easter, they reckon it's all a bit depressing. So why not let your hair down as soon as you can afterwards? We hadn't been able to get over to Murcia, what with having to earn a crust and all, but today we were free to go and have a look see. We were there in time to watch a few musical bands parade through the streets giving away small toys, we got to the firework display and we wandered the city full of life, drink, music and noise. With the exception of a Mexican band who were drilled to perfection it was all a bit sl...

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.

Maggie was looking at frocks or something in Zara and I was entertaining myself by staring at the chewing gum on the ground, reading posters and watching people go by. The posters on the boarded up shop opposite were for some bands at a venue called Sala Stereo . I always like the idea of bands. On the few occasions that I get to see any I find the noise deafening, get bored after 10 minutes and don't think they sound anything like as good as Such and Such a band that I saw some 20 or 30 years ago. Anyway Sala Stereo is safe. The bands they were advertising were for the 13th and 20th of March - long gone. Just in case I'd noticed them before the sell by date the organisers had wisely left out the address for the venue, the time of the performance and the entry price. Maggie was still doing whatever it is that women do in clothes shops before deciding not to buy so I went around the block to see if the Byzantine Walls Museum was open. I was sure I'd read somewhere th...

Sometimes we try to get involved with community things and go to village meetings. Maggie goes to her staff meetings of course. We laugh about it. Four Spaniards, five conversations. It can be isolating. It's like going to the pictures. With a romcom where one person speaks to another we keep up fine. James Bond on the other hand, where critical information is passed as 007 is being chased by lots of baddies, lost cause. I was just watching a gossip show on the telly. Two women were arguing, they were both speaking non stop but it wasn't like two British politicians shouting each other down on the Today programme. The Spanish women kept moving the conversation along despite the never ending stream of high volume words. I'm not sure we'll ever learn that.

I wrote this article for the October edition of The Inland Magazine. I thought there wouldn't be any harm in adding it to the blog as well. I often think that one of the most difficult things about settling into a new country, after the language, is getting a handle on the culture. As a Briton I know the significance of 1066, Morecambe and Wise, Alf Ramsay, Big Ben and the SAS. For most of us reeling off a similar list of Spanish dates, people or events would be much more difficult. Yet in every town and city there are clues plain for all to see in the names of streets, plazas and avenidas of all Spain. The number one street name in Spain is Calle Miguel de Cervantes – named for the chap who, in 1605, published the first of his two part work Don Quixote or more accurately el Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha probably the most famous Spanish literary work of all time, It's the book about the would be knight and his squire wandering around Spain having adventures- ...

Nearly everyone who visits us asks if the water is safe to drink. Some of our visitors try to bargain on market stalls. When a leftover donkey goes past it's as though that's the proper Spain, the Spain that wears flouncy frocks and sombreros. I was wandering through an Industrial Estate yesterday and thinking about how they're all so similar, everywhere. I'd got to the shopping centre and I was having a coffee in the chain ice cream parlour when an sms arrived from the garage to say that they'd finished servicing my car and that it was ready for collection. The man who completed my paperwork wore a white shirt that sported the name of the garage and his department. I had a conversation with my language partner about the endless varieties of coffee you can order in a bar (Spaniards have more words for coffee than Innuit have for snow!) and, as I walked home I saw a group of people sitting on the grass outside their block of flats on folding chairs with the inevi...

In the UK it's Friday the 13th but here in Spain it's Tuesday the 13th: the day when things go wrong. I was reminded when the presenter on the main morning show on state radio made it into a little pun - martes y trece - Tuesday and the 13th - because Martes y Trece were originally a comic triple act and later a double act. From a quick shufti at the You Tube clips they are not quite Morecambe and Wise, or even Mike and Bernie Winters come to that. I started to have a look why Spaniards go for Tuesday rather than Friday and why we Anglo Saxons as well as the Hispanics have it in for the 13th. The only consistent Tuesday complaint was that martes, the Spanish word for Tuesday, is derived from Marte or Mars the Greek God of War and so there were links with destruction and what not. Bit thin I thought. The thirteenth has the Last Supper link (13 around the table) and all the Spanish sites talk about how the 13th book of the Apocalipsis (which must be Revelations) introduces th...