Author: Ben

How hard is it in the 21st Century to run a decent postal service? The UK has managed it for years, yet in Spain everyone accepts that Correos, the national postal service, simply cannot be relied on to work.

Let me give you an example. This week I phoned RENFE (the train operator) to make a reservation for some tickets to Toledo. They asked as usual at the end of the call whether I would like the tickets sent to me in the post, or would collect them from the station. Like any sensible person used to living in this country, I opted to collect the tickets in person, knowing not to trust that they would arrive in time by post.

So instead of picking them up in my mail box this morning (when in an ideal world they might have arrived), I have just spent one hour going to the station to pick them up. So, there’s one hour lost for a start, due to my friends at Correos. No doubt similar time is being wasted all over Spain every day of the week.

Marina always says that there is no culture of buying on-line here in Spain as a result of the fact that people don’t trust the whole mail-order concept. In the UK, it was easy to go from phone ordering (with postal delivery) to internet ordering (with postal delivery). Yet here in Spain mail order never took off, and even now, 5 to 10 years after people have happily been ordering online in the rest of the world, Spain still has to get everything from the shops. No one trusts the post.

That means no Amazon.es, and nothing remotely as efficient as US DVD postal-rental service Netflix, two services I would really love to see here in Spain and am very jealous of. But my frustrations aside, hardly any online commerce must mean less spending in general – not good for the nation’s budget.

Speaking of Netflix, there are Spanish copycat services, where you book films online and they supposedly arrive at your house, but guess what, they are widely slandered online (in Spanish forums etc), and I, like many, didn’t risk signing up. While researching such online-postal DVD rental services last year, I came across the following report:

Logistics: Correos, the Spanish postal service, presents two clear problems for the online sector in Spain – reliability and the incidence of loss of discs. So great are these difficulties that one key player has developed an alternative delivery system and is keen to abandon postal delivery altogether. For the remaining competitor using the system, delivery times cannot be guaranteed to customers, with average turnaround at three to four days. During the summer months the average becomes considerably higher […] The importance of a reliable postal service is underlined by the fact that the Spanish company that still depends on it told Screen Digest that unhappiness with the postal service is one of the main reasons that customers give for canceling subscriptions.

I think it’s going to be an awfully long time before we see an Amazon.es operating fruitfully in Spain.

So, through votes by the public, Spain has come up with history’s most ridiculous, embarrassing, and frankly absurd entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (the most ridiculous, embarrassing, and frankly absurd music competition on the planet), and I only just found out. For those that are not yet familiar with the song that, to the detriment of this great nation, is going represent Spain’s musical talents before all of Europe this year, here is a short excerpt (plenty, believe me) from Rodolfo Chikilicuatre’s Baila el ChikiChiki:

What are the odds that this ends up the ‘cancion del verano‘? Catchy tune, silly dance, need for large amounts of alcohol to be fully appreciated – it’s got all the ingredients of a top summer smash hit!

For Spanish Cultural scholars who would like to delve deeper into the ChikiChiki phenomenon, see this interview with Buenafuente. Warning, parts of this clip are extremely unbearable.

After a couple of months without a television, we have ended up with a tiny 15″ set that we lent to a relative last summer, and have now had returned. This means the occasional return to Spanish tele in the evening – medical dramas for Marina (House, Grey’s Anatomy) that I can’t watch, and bad films for me, that she can’t watch.

The last two nights have been a real treat, with two trashy, poorly dubbed Steven Segal films – he obviously goes down well over here. Anyway, there I was enjoying the second one last night, “Belly of the Beast” (which gets a stellar 4.3 out of 10 on IMDB), reveling in the awesome final fight scene between big Steve and his psycho Thai nemesis, and at the very climax of the film, just as said nemesis had Steve down on the ground, ready to deliver the killer blow we knew would somehow be avoided, in fact in the very middle of the baddies final ‘now you die’ sentence… an ad break.

A twenty minute ad break in the middle of the films biggest moment. Again, right in the middle of the films biggest sentence! We had ads for every big internet provider, several cars, Andalusia, 6 trailers for other shows from the same channel, and god knows what other crap. Finally, when I was about to drop the little tele from our 6-floor balcony, the film was allowed to conclude.

So, classy stuff from TV1, Spain’s state TV flagship. What I’d really like to know though, is does this carpet-bombing approach to advertising actually work any more? What are the recall figures for ads presented in 20 minute batches? Is anyone actually taking this ad format in anymore? The fact that I was left with a an overwhelming desire to go to Andalusia might sadly provide an answer – I’m shocked and ashamed to say that one of those 20 ads did actually get through to me as I waited furiously to see big Steven Segal escape that killer blow and save the girl. Life was better without TV.

(Image courtesy wikipedia).

What is it? A high-energy, powdered milky chocolate drink designed to send kids loopy or adults to sleep. Or visa versa (see below).

Not to be mixed with: Drunk people with cigarette lighters. Who knew?!

Useful if: You can’t light your barbeque.

Not to be confused with: Estoy coloca’o, meaning, I’m stoned/totally spaced out.

Cast your votes below, what Brands would you add to the ‘Spain wouldn’t be Spain Without’ selection?