… and he seems to spend a lot of time designing shop window displays like this! (Large version)
Author: Ben
So, let’s see if I get this right. The socialist PSOE is the ruling party in Spain, but the Comunidad de Madrid (the Autonomous region on Madrid) is governed by the right-wing Partido Popular, headed up by Esperanza Aguirre. Earlier this year the PSOE introduced welcome, forward-thinking measures to stop smoking in many public and work places. Starting today, and only in Madrid, a law passed in Madrid by local PP boss Esperanza Aguirre allows people to smoke in work cafeterias again, if the cafeteria is under 100 m squared (if it is over, they can still smoke but only in a certain area). Why would she do this? Why put unhelathy measures back into place just when we were making some progress? Why make all those non-smokers who had happily regained their work canteen suffer again? To screw over the PSOE apparently. To make a (possibly illegal) point that in Madrid they are in charge. A point made at the expense of people’s health? This kind of thing really makes me dispair.
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Portero – NFS Spain Glossary
Our porter is a fat, 60-something man that spends all his time in a big blue boiler suit, sitting in our building lobby, behind a small desk, reading books and polishing coins (he’s a collector of some sort). He is also an electrician by trade and picks up extra pocket money when he can by fixing up the wiring in flats belonging to the building’s residents. He is rather nice to us these days, mainly because we are nice to him. It pays to be nice to your portero, and woe betide anyone that gets on the wrong side of him. Your heating may take unusually long to get fixed when it suddenly breaks down in the dead of winter. Post may go missing on its way to your letterbox. All pure conjecture of course, but no one risks getting on the wrong side of their portero, especially as they are also famous gossips.
Apartment building porters are extremely common in Spain. Every building in the smarter areas of town will have one, though there will be very few in slightly less well-off barrios like Madrid’s Lavapies. The porter is paid by the comunidad, the collective body of flat owners who pay a monthly fee, also known as the comunidad, for the upkeep of the building, cleaning of communal stairwells etc. A porter will be given a free flat within the building they look after, meanwhile paying off or renting out another property somewhere else, often in a village outside town, to move into when they retire.
One of my ambitions is to have lunch with our porter, whose wife drives the entire comunidad wild with the aromas of thick meat stews that pour from their ground floor flat into the lobby, hitting me just as I get back from buying something far less satisfactory from the local Ahora Mas supermarket. Perhaps I can bribe my way in with a couple of old British coins for his collection.
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Great Madrid Escape: A “P.S.”
A quick P.S. on the Madrid weekend: you don’t have to be a forum member to come along, or a long-time NFS listener, but the forum will be the best place to discuss the weekend as time goes on. We really hope this will be a collaborative effort, a great weekend discussed, planned and decided upon by all those that want to come along. You’re all very welcome to join us in April. See you there 😉
It’s really going to happen! A long time ago the idea was put forward that when we reached 1,000 forum members we should organise a big pary in Madrid for Easter 2007. Well we are nearly there, so we have picked a date so you can all start booking your flights! (And you certainly don’t have to be a forum member to come along!)
So here’s the plan: As many of you as can make it (the more the better!) will come to Madrid from Friday April 20th until Sunday 22nd, 2007. On the Friday night we’ll organise an informal get together (tapas til late? 😉 ). On the Saturday we’ll organise a trip around Madrid or a trip out to one of the beautiful nearby towns, it’s up to you. And on Saturday night we’ll have a big celebration meal. Then maybe a trip to the Rastro on Sunday.
The point is that anyone who listens to the podcasts, or drops by the websites, is very welcome. It’s a chance to meet Marina and I, and all of you, and to see some of the best bits of one of the most exciting cities in the world!
Everybody will be responsible for sorting out their own flights and accommodation (though we may be able to sort out a discount somewhere if enough of you are interested in coming!) We will obviously help with ideas on where to stay, and sort out the place for the meal on the Saturday night. The idea though is to plan this all together in a special part of the forum, where you will also find a list of who has signed up already.
Come and join us for a great weekend in Madrid! Just e-mail me (Ben) if you are interested in coming along!
UPDATE: Please read the important post about accommodation in the forum.
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A painting by my grandmother
I was looking through more of the pictures by Multum in Parvo (this months NFS flickr group winner), when I came across this one, of more abandoned greenhouses in Fuertaventura:
Seeing this made be spin around in my chair to look at a painting by my grandmother that hangs on our living room wall.
The painting is of fishermen’s nets hanging out to dry near Pasajes, a small fishing village on the Basque coast near San Sebastian. I have no idea when it was painted, but I would guess that it was sometime in the 1950’s, when my grandfather used to come to Spain on business for his engineering firm. One of his Spanish partners, Gaspar, still takes me out to lunch whenever he is in Madrid. How nice it would be to walk amongst the shadows of those nets.
Our NFS 2007 Photo Calendar shows you a great reason to visit (or move to!) Spain every month of the year. All of the large, colourful photos come from my personal collection, gathered over 8 years of wandering through this beautiful country. Much better than the usual calendars you see in the shops at this time of year, because, like everything else in the new Notes Shop, this one also helps support Notes from Spain! 😉
This image (see large version), caught my eye as I was browsing through the excellent offerings in our Flickr group this month. It made me think of the immigrants toiling away in terrible conditions in the mass-fruit-producing plastic greenhouses in Almeria.
As the author, Multum in parvo, explains, however, “it was actually on the road to Pozo Negro, a tiny fishing hamlet on the West coast of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. The Island is very barren and dry with very little cultivation to be seen. The road is through typically red, rocky soil and someone has obviously tried to grow something in this site as there is a vast area of ruined greenhouses. We saw the same ones last summer but much of the structure has now been dismantled and you can see the netting lying in rolls all over the ground. I suspect the whole thing will be gone soon. This time we managed to climb over the fence and go inside for a closer look, it’s very weird with black fastenings hanging from the ruined roof and the wind whipping the netting into fantastic shapes and making the most eerie noises. If you look at my Fuerteventura tags, you’ll see some shots of the road where the greenhouses are to get an idea of the colour and harshness of the landscape as well as pictures taken last year.”
These are what the Spanish are stooping to pick off hillsides in these autumnal days, the wonderful, bright orange mushrooms, niscalos, that we mentioned in the last Cuisine from Spain podcast. Personally if I saw these in a field I would think twice about eating one, but apparently they are very nice – so they should be at 9 euros a kilo!
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Notes Shop: the NFS T-Shirt and more!
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By popular demand the Notes from Spain and Notes in Spanish T-Shirts are here at last! NFS has teamed up with the web’s favourite T-Shirt maker, Cafepress, to bring you t-shirts, aprons, mugs, notebooks – with many of the designs based on suggestions made by you in the forum.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 