http://www.viddler.com/player/3af3199e/
A very interesting discussion is going to be taking place in the forum over the next few weeks, all about travel writing on Spain, and how the reality shapes up in comparison. The discussion is forming part of a fascinating research project by Tita Beaven from The Open Universtiy.
Please do join in if you can. The first discussion thread is here:
Travel Writing and Being There
Thanks!
For any avid present or future podcasters amongst you, there is a big event at the end of the month in Barcelona, and I’m really happy to have been asked to speak there.
I’ll be sharing the stage on Saturday afternoon (27th Sept) with Mark Pentleton from Coffee Break Spanish, and we’ll be talking about how on earth we ended up making a business out of Podcasting.
If you are interested in coming along, full details are available at http://www.podcampbarcelona.org/
Hope to see you there!
After a recent bout of the ceremonials in Valladolid, I thought it might be interesting to further explore the archetypal Spanish wedding…
Church or ‘Civil’
Everything starts with the ceremony. If as a guest you are lucky, this will be a civil affair, probably in the local town hall. Presided over by the Mayor (if you have friends in the right places), or a local councillor, the ceremony lasts approximately 2 minutes and 45 seconds, during which the bride (Novia) and groom (Novio – collectively know as the ‘Novios‘) are required to agree to a couple of legal statutes, swap rings, say I do, and get the hell out of there to stop wasting any more municipal time.
If you are less fortunate, you may be subjected to the the rigours of the Spanish church wedding. Of unknown length (bank on an hour) and religious ferocity, the church wedding is usually an unutterably boring experience that involves lots of catholic process completely unknown to your average guirri like me.
In theory you are allowed to skip the church part if you don’t fancy it and go straight to the party afterwards, but in practice you suspect your absence will be noted and feel far too guilty to sit this part out in a nearby bar where many of the more canny Spanish males are hiding out.
Note: to get married in a church in Spain, the Novios are required to go do several pre-training sessions at the church, where they swear their allegiance to the cross and generally become re-religiousified (I claim that word!)
In the ceremony itself they are forced to make all sorts of rash promises about educating their children in the ways of the church and the eyes of god and so on, promises they mostly have no intention of keeping. The fact is that 9 out of 10 couples don’t marry in the church because they are devout believers, but rather because it just looks nicer than the average town hall.
Also note: Getting married in the church is pricey. You pay a hefty fee, and are forced to use the churches florist and photographers, both of whom kick back to the guy at the altar.
After the service
What happens next is subject to a strict, practically unbreakable, formula. Everyone races off to a local restaurant/golf club/country house – anywhere that is set up to screw money from newly-weds in the mighty Spanish wedding business.
First up is the “cocktail”, where everyone mills about on the lawn outside or in some sort of reception area, being fed exquisite tapas (foie gras, jamon iberico, gambas rebozadas, tempura de verdura, that sort of thing), and the first round of booze.
Just as you feel you can’t eat another thing, it’s off to the tables for dinner, which usually involves a couple of seafood dishes, followed by meat and, finally, an almost inedibly sweet cakey desert of some description.
Throughout the meal white wine is followed by red, and Cava is served with the cake for everyone to toast the happy couple with at the end of the meal. Finally comes the coffee (dancing energy) and, as if anyone actually needed it by now, the liqueurs (pacharan, liquor de hierbas…)
Note: there are no speeches at Spanish weddings. However, it is customary for the drunker and younger members of the crowd to constantly heckle the increasingly annoyed happy couple throughout the meal, with shouts of ‘Viva la novia‘ (long live the bride) and, the one that really embarrasses them, ‘Que se besen’ (kiss each other!), which once shouted out is taken up and chanted by the entire room until the couple oblige.
This is considered slightly tacky behaviour in polite circles, especially when, during the resulting kiss, the drunkest table continues to chant ‘con lengua, con lengua’ (with tounges!)
Bara Libre and Baile!
Now for the fun bit! The Novios open the dance up with a traditional waltz that more often or not they haven’t bothered to learn properly in advance, but isn’t that hard after you’ve seen it at 100 other weddings and you’ve been on the vino all night in preparation for this moment.
While they sway around the dance floor, everyone except the oldies is completely ignoring them, hell bent instead on getting their first free copa of rum and coke or gin and tonic (top 2 drinks) from the free bar.
With the waltz out the way, a hard night of boozing, bad dancing and worse music, now ensues, with Spanish fiesta classics and international megamixes from the 80’s keeping everyone happy until at least 6 am (see also Spain’s coolest DJ).
And everyone is indeed extremely happy, something that may not only be down to the fact that they are drunk, and their friends/relatives have tied the knot, but also, on a deep psychological level, because they have paid to be here in the first place….
Money or Gifts, and the Corte Ingles Wedding List
Going to a Spanish wedding is a pricey affair. Apart from all the usual travel etc costs, you are expected to give a very decent gift, and 90% of the time that gift should be money. If you know the couple well (hay confianza), you get a bank account number long before the wedding (on rare occasions it arrives with the invite!) and you simply hand the money over the wires before the big day.
Alternatively you can slip them an envelope after the meal, hoping they aren’t drunk enough to mislay it. The big idea is that you are helping them to pay for the wedding, which seems entirely fair enough considering how much these things cost these days.
What’s the going rate? How much should you hand over? As a mid-thirties couple we usually stump up 250 Euros. As one heads off into middle age this number tends to increase, and I have a feeling those of Marina’s parents age may well hand over double this at the wedding of a close relative.
Some couples will set up a wedding list, more often or not at the Corte Ingles department store. You go in, choose a gift from their list (carefully created by the Novios to include objects in a wide range of prices) and pay for it.
What many people don’t know is that this money goes into a special Corte Ingles bank account that the Novios can then spend on whatever they like in the store. They may never end up with what you actually spent hours deciding to buy them.
Your Thoughts….
So there we have it, your typical Spanish wedding. What have I missed out? Please add your thoughts in the comments below!
3 a.m. at a family wedding this weekend in the depths of Castilla y Leon, not far from Valladolid, and the Grease MegaMix was playing full blast. Revellers hips were grinding (even those that had been recently replaced), and rivers of ‘Ron con CocaCola’ were flowing from the ‘barra libre’.
My Spanish brother-in-law pointed out the guy in charge of the music and said, “¡Por Dios! Look at the DJ! A middle aged guy with full-on moustache, jersey picked out by his mum, and specs. He looks just like a Guardia Civil! For god’s sake don’t put him on your blog, you’ll make Spain look completely ridiculous!”
Don’t worry, I said, I’ll keep the photo to myself 😉
Ten years ago today, on August 30th 1998, I left the UK for Spain. It was a move born to a great extent out of desperation. I was nearly 26, living in London, with no real job or income, and no reasonable plans. After making a few random applications, I had been offered a place on a TEFL course in Madrid two weeks previously, decided to go for it, and from there one thing after another just fell into place. A friend told me at the time that I was very brave, all I knew was that I was plain terrified.
Ten years later it’s fun to look back and see what Spain has given me:
A wife, new friends, a beautiful new language, endless travels and new landscapes and, through a hell of a lot of hard work, a business we love that keeps me and la wife out of an office job and covers the mortgage. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that last one!
Obviously a lot of those things could theoretically have been achieved if I’d stayed in the UK, or gone anywhere else, but it certainly feels like I was meant to come here, and that some of these things might not have happened so well had I not wound up in Spain.
An interesting part of living so long in a new country is that you become bi-cultural, but in a weird way which I’ll try to explain. I totally lost touch with the finer aspects of British popular culture years ago (who the hell is Russel Brand?), but still feel nostalgic if someone mentions British childhood favourites like the Magic Roundabout.
Conversely, I know lots about Letizia Ortiz and enough about David Bisbal, ZP, corruption in Marbella and the speed of Spain’s trains, but am completely lost when Marina laughs at jokes based on TV characters from her Spanish childhood (who the hell is el hombre de Pescanova?!)
So when I say I’m bi-cultural, I mean I’m culturally British up until the age of 26, then mildly imbued with Spanish culture from that point on. It’s a bit odd.
It means that when I’m back in the UK I get a kick out of the familiar homely tones of BBC1 or Radio 4, but am lost as to half of what they are talking about, as if I’d gone to sleep in the late 90’s and just woken up to a completely different version of the day to day UK. On the other hand, having not been born into it, much of Spanish popular culture (just about anything on daytime TV), really doesn’t ring the right bells, of hit the right spots…
None of this matters of course, it’s just a minor disconnect on both sides of Ben – English Ben, and Spanish Ben – that sometimes leaves me mildly… … Spanglish.
Other random thoughts:
Marina says that Spain has made me a worse driver, I agree. After 10 years of seeing how no one else pays complete attention to the all the rules of the road, it’s hard not to let standards slip oneself.
At home, Marina and I talk to each other in a terrible mixture of English and Spanish, often switching mid sentence, and occasionally mixing in our own made-up cross-breed words (“I’m feeling a bit agobiated”).
To my continued surprise, I really like Morcilla (blood and rice shaped into a sausage).
If England played Spain at football, I’d be with Iker’s team in a flash.
I sometimes feel at least 50% Spanish.
Spain has done me very very well, and as usual I’d encourage anyone thinking of making a similar (in fact, any) bold move in their life to go for it. Big changes need bold moves. When I made mine I was young, free and single, and that undoubtedly made it a hell of a lot easier. If you are none, or only some, of the above, you can still take a step into the unknown, just think carefully about what backups you should have in place first.
Anyway, enough of all that, here’s to another 10 years in Spain, and a whole lot more after that!
For more on my escape from London, my first three years in Spain and meeting Marina, don’t forget to read “Errant in Iberia”!
This is pretty cool, I’m sitting on the AVE from Madrid to Barcelona, Macbook on the table in front of me, hooked up to the orange 3G Internet Everywhere usb modem, landscape shooting by at nearly 180 mph, and all this tech stuff just works!
It was worth bringing all that crap after all!
Doh! Just went into a series of long tunnels, there goes that internet connection…
http://www.viddler.com/player/870ee501/
The above may appeal to the odd Geek out there. Marina and I are off for a few days to the Costa Brava to practice our Catalan and, as usual, can’t afford to leave the tech behind!!
Last week’s horrendous, tragic plane crash in Madrid led us and many others living in Spain to take firm decisive action: to turn off the TV, ignore news websites, and stop buying the papers.
The news media had gone (and continues to go) too far again. Within hours of the accident we had all the information we would need. The plane had lost control, crashed near the airport, and all but a few very lucky people (now 18), had died.
Yet the ‘news’, playing to the famous national ‘morbo‘, or morbid fascination with all horrendous events, has been camped out outside hospitals and the main convention centre morgue where bodies are being identified, trying desperately to secure images and, worst of all, interviews with emotionally destroyed relatives.
Occasionally it seems (OK, I have watched a minute here, a minute there of the news, all I can take), they strike gold and discover the story of the guy who tried to get off the plane before the second fatal take off attempt but wasn’t allowed, the text message sent to a friend about ‘problems with our plane’, and more emotion-twisting horror than your average viewer can take.
And still it goes on, 4 days later. Part of the reason it is so hard to watch is that it so closely mirrors the news coverage of the Madrid train bombings, a few years ago, when we were all glued to images of twisted train wreckage and dead bodies for days (or weeks) on end, trying desperately to understand how something so insanely horrendouns could have happened.
According to a conversation overheard in a doctor’s waiting room, all this Spanish morbo can be traced back to a lady named Nieves Herrero (nicknamed Nieves Horrores), who started the trend in the 90’s with a daily morning TV programme called ‘Cita con la Vida’ (A Date with Life), that scoured the country to broadcast the most upsetting, awful social and personal tragedies Spain was hiding in its quiet villages and city suburbs.
Here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s entry on Nieves Herrero that perfectly captures the current Spanish media behaviour, and the average night on Spanish TV:
“She was heavily criticised for the coverage given to the famous Crimen de Alcácer, making a live broadcast from this village the same night that the bodies of the girls were found. In the programme, they took advantage of the emotional state of the families of the victims, interviewing the parents about how they felt at the time, and converting their pain into a public spectacle to be broadcast to the whole country.”
The country became addicted to ‘other people’s awful lives’, the media discovered there was plenty of tragedy to go around, and no watchdog ever stepped in to say just how much horror they could get away with showing. The result is that you will see bodies, devastation, and emotional hell that you would never see in 100 years on the good old BBC.
But let’s face it, this morbo is not just a Spanish problem, it’s just more out in the open here. In the end, revelling in other people’s misery is a very modern, developed world phenomenon. I think it plays to either one of two basic human positions:
1) “Thank god my life isn’t that bad”
……or, perversly, (and please tell me if I’m wrong),
2) “If something that bad happened in my life it would probably give me the shake up I need to change things dramatically forever, and kick me out of the everlasting everyday mundane.”
Whichever the case, for many Spaniards this latest round of media morbo has been a step too far. Is it possible that one day an audience that just can’t take any more will switch off for good? Will we ever see the demise of this endless aggressive probing into emotionally-debilitating modern human horrors?
Comments welcome as always.
Like most people when they first move to Spain, when I arrived in Madrid nearly 10 years ago, I found it tricky to adapt to the crazy timetable during the first few weeks. I was eating at 1pm, but everyone else turned up at 2… or 3…. I ate dinner in empty restaurants at 8.30, the Spaniards came in as I was paying my bill.
Still, within about 2 weeks I worked out what was going on, and did as the locals were doing. Friends wouldn’t meet until 10pm on a Saturday night? No problem! Soon got used to that!
But recently something perplexing is going on. These days I get up at 7 a.m. and work from about 7.30 until 2. A quick rest after lunch, then more work until 6ish, when I am obliged (under new household laws designed to control my computer addiction and give me back some of my old life) to stop work, close the lid of the laptop, and pay more attention to my wife.
All fine… until we meet up with Spanish friends in the evening. By 11pm I’m shattered! By midnight, as the assembled locals start looking if anything even more lively, I’m sending pleading glances to Marina, hoping she’ll take the hint and announce it’s time to go home. By 1 am I’m downright pissed off!
I think I have three options to beat this very Madrileño problem:
1. Get up later (unlikely, and not very Spanish)
2. Start taking a 45 minute siesta on days we are going out (hmmm… tempting)
3. Take up coffee, in heavy doses.
How do you deal with the long end of Spanish timekeeping?
Car owners in Spain are required to have the following four things in place before they can take their vehicle out on the road: paid-up car tax, valid insurance, the ITV vehicle inspection certificate and, last but not least, a complete disregard for their own personal safety.
This was proven again this weekend, at an official level, when we took our car to sort out item 3 on the list, the ITV.
The ITV, or Inspección Técnica de Vehículos, is the equivalent of the British MOT. A new car has to take this test after 4 years on the road, then every 2 years for a while, then finally every year.
The test is administered at huge warehouses on the dusty outskirts of cities all over Spain, and involves checking exhaust emissions, suspension, brakes, indicators, seatbelts, and other small items required for general road safety like whether or not your headlights work.
Ours didn’t. At the very second the guy told me to turn on my headlights for this seemingly important part of the test, a warning light popped up on my dashboard telling me that the front left headlamp had failed. Oh No!
This blatantly meant we were going to fail the ITV, would have to drive back to Madrid, get it fixed, and come all the way back out to kilometer 20.4 of the A6 motorway to take the test again several days later.
As we queued up to get out ‘Fail’ certificate the injustice of this terrible piece of bad timing weighed heavily: why couldn’t the damn light have blown just 2 minutes later? I approached the desk and was informed by a nice young lady, ‘Here we are, no problems, 2 more years.’ The car passed the test!
Marina and I scanned the piece of paper to see how on earth this was possible. At the bottom there were two colomuns: Infracciones Graves (Serious, Your-Car-Is-Off-The-Road Problems) and Infracciones Leves (Little Fluffy Don’t-Worry-About-It Problems). Under the Small Problems column, where things that are not important enough to fail you and keep your car off the road go, we read ‘broken headlamp bulb’.
So next time you drive along a narrow Spanish country lane in the dark, and a nearly-impossible-to-see car with only one functional headlamp comes tearing round a blind corner nearly forcing you off the road in shock, don’t worry! Relax! It’s just an Infracción Leve, not in any way to be confused with something that might actually make the already scary roads of Spain any less of a secure environment for you and your family!
Spanish car-madness stories/experiences welcome in the comments below.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 