Life in Cartagena

A friend, over from the UK, was telling me how he had nearly slaughtered a whole zebra crossing load of pedestrians as he turned right at some traffic lights. He had waited, dutifully, for the green but there is a standard difference to the light sequence here in Spain as against the setup in the UK. Traditionally the UK system gives the cars which have been released a clear run as they go either straight on or make a turn. In Spain cars are often stopped again by the same set of lights on turning right or left. If you're not expecting it finding a bunch of pedestrians crossing in front of you, as you accelerate away, can be a bit of a shock. Roundabouts are different too. In reality most Spanish drivers behave as their British counterparts do. They attempt to cut the corners in the roundabout and they use all the available traffic lanes. But the rule is different. Technically you have to be in the outermost (the longest) lane in order to leave the roundabout. The only people w...

Plenty of Spanish people ask me why I came to Spain. They expect my answer to be "for the sun" but usually I say "It's because you're all anarchists." This meets with various levels of approval from "How dare you!" to the equivalent of "Ha, ha!" In truth though I don't think that it rings a bell with the majority. I may think the Spanish are anarchists but they don't. Lots of people die in traffic accidents here because they don't wear their seat belts. Police officers don't wear seat belts when they're driving. Major building work in a town centre will often have JCBs dodging around the milling shoppers. Safety gear is still a bit mamby pamby for most workmen. The sign says "Keep off the Grass" yet the grass is littered with picnicking families. Dogs must be on a lead - and of course they aren't. Parents snatch the sticky sweet papers from their children and throw the litter to the ground. Standing a...

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 repla...

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 ...

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 lul...

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 ...

Consider turning across traffic - left turns here, right turns in Ripon. In Ripon the cars stop in the middle of the road and wait to turn. Continuing traffic dodges by on the passenger side of the road. There are plenty of junctions like that in Spain too but a different, and very common, solution is to move the car into a sort of lay by on the passenger side of the road. This effectively takes the car off the road where it waits for a suitable gap before making the dash across traffic. It's an elegant solution and it works really well on quiet but fast country roads. The difficulty is that the lay bys only usually have space for two or three cars. Use this solution in heavy traffic and the tail back from the lay by stretches into the road and causes traffic to have to move to the driver's side of the road, sometimes into the face of oncoming traffic! Then there're the crossroads that use a variation on this system. Imagine a roundabout with one of the major carriageways...

Taking a car into the centre of a Spanish town or city is not yet a capital crime. The result is that finding an on street parking space is only slightly less arduous than the search for the Holy Grail. Normally, when there's the least difficulty I head for one of the multi storey car parks. The difference being, from their UK counterparts, that they tend to go down rather than up. Hectares of car parking buried under city streets. The protocol is headlights on. My only complaint is that whoever designs these places must laugh wickedly to themselves as they ensure that the entrance ways are as narrow and as curvy as possible with lots of hazardous protrusions. The paint scrapes along the walls testify to the fact that other people find them tricky too.

Spanish drivers are very good about not knocking down pedestrians. In fact they are almost too conscientious and often pull up when there is nothing behind them to let a pedestrian across. The photo is of a street just at the back of our flat. There are three crossings in the single shot. It's a quiet road but I'm sure you can imagine the near chaos this causes in busy areas where a few dawdling pedestrians on a series of crossings can cause tailbacks into major junctions.