Happy Friday! It turns out that once we ignore the external pressures of image-makers and lifestyle marketers, we are all a lot more successful than we thought we were… “make sure our ideas of success are our own” – Quite right!
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Have a great weekend, feel free to comment as ever, how successful are you feeling these days?
If only all restaurants in Spain were like this! It is classic (hasn’t changed in decades – neither have the waiters, who, by the way, are friendly!), opens at 11 am, and is non-smoking!
What this means it that we can go there with our baby and eat with him before 1pm! Seeing as he has a siesta at 2pm, there is practically no other restaurant in Spain we can eat lunch at these days – oh, and all the others are mostly smoky too, so 100 more points to Asturian Cider House Extraordinaire Casa Mingo for keeping the nicotine out as well.
(Meanwhile, here’s an amusing article in El Mundo where bar and restaurant owners weep for their certain future of economic ruin if the Health Minister continues with her evil plans to remove smoking from every bar and restaurant in Spain: ‘Nos arruinan a todos’. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think every bar and restaurant in the UK, France, Italy etc went to the wall when smoking was banned there!)
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be another anti-smoking post, just a message from a parent thankful to have a clean atmosphere to take his son out to an early lunch in – “Ole por Casa Mingo!”
P.S. Oh, and this photo of the best Asturian Chorizo in Madrid is for Jose/Valenciason – I think Gary would like it too:
Ben and Marina record a new podcast about the battle for our baby’s language skills, why we want to leave Madrid, the trouble with summer in Madrid, and baby timetables in Spain.
Comments welcome!
A few months ago I was interviewed by a terribly nice bloke called Graham who lives and works as an estate agent in Valencia (you may know him too from his many useful comments on this blog).
Well, Graham interviewed me and a handful of other expats who have managed to make something of a success of this whole ‘new life in Spain’ business, and after 5 months hard work, he has come up with a really interesting audio book that I would like to heartily recommend (and I don’t get any kind of commission for doing so – I just think this is great stuff!)
The thing is, all the people he interviews are so nice and friendly! And their Spain stories are so interesting, that it’s just a pleasure to listen to – the stories are inspiring too, as these are mostly people who came here with nothing, and ended up making a damn good life for themselves.
Get hold of the audiobook here (and get inspired!)
Marina, my Madrileña wife, has a theory: that there is less OCD in Spain than the UK.
She bases this idea on the fact that she knows quite a lot of people connected to my circle in the UK who complain openly about having OCD, or knowing people that have had OCD, and, in all honesty, her husband (me) has been through some slightly more obsessive-compulsive periods of life than is strictly useful, helpful or necessary.
But she really can’t think of more than about one of our circle of acquaintances in Spain that falls into the OCD typology. Same socio-economic group, over a similar range of ages (teens to old age), yet only one OCD case here compared to, well, muchos in the UK.
My theory is that this just isn’t true, that it’s just a) more fashionable to admit to having OCD in the UK (as insane as that might sound, and as insulting as it might seem to anyone that has been through the hell of it… like me), and b) that the Brits are just less bothered about admitting such things when they do happen.
(And when I say fashionable, clearly I don’t mean it’s cool, but it’s like ADD – no-one every really mentioned either of these afflictions until a few years ago, and now everyone is happy enough to be labeled with them – in Spain I don’t think OCD has entered the lingual currency enough to be had by enough people yet… am I making any sense?!)
Certainly there are enough people with mental problems in Spain, our psychiatrist friend who works for the social services here and deals with a huge number of schizophrenics, chronic depresessives and drug psychosis cases constantly contests to that.
But is it possible that Marina is right, that the Spanish are less obsessive? That they are just more… well… chilled out in general, and as such less prone to obsessive compulsive tendencies? Or am I right in thinking that OCD, like ADD, just isn’t a recognised part of the mental health landscape here, yet bubbles away under the surface to the same degree that it does out in the open in the UK
Thoughts welcome, about Spain, the UK, or where you come from too…
I recently received an email with an article that you may find interesting. From investorsinsight.com comes this, “Spain: The Hole In Europe’s Balance Sheet “. It makes for a depressing read, but much of it makes very good sense:
“We believe that Spain is a disaster waiting to happen [and] is set for a long, painful deflation that will manifest itself via a very high unemployment level for an industrialized economy, a real estate collapse and general banking insolvencies… Spain had the mother of all housing bubbles. To put things in perspective, Spain now has as many unsold homes as the US, even though the US is about six times bigger. Spain is roughly 10% of the EU GDP, yet it accounted for 30% of all new homes built since 2000 in the EU. Most of the new homes were financed with capital from abroad, so Spain’s housing crisis is closely tied in with a financing crisis… Spanish banks, in our view, are now facing a very bleak outlook. Spain’s unemployment rate reached over 17%; there are now four million unemployed Spaniards and over one million families with not a single person employed in the family. “
It’s 11 years and a day since I moved to Madrid, a move which turned out surprisingly well, and which, as usual, I can highly recommend (especially if you are young free, single, and bored… as I was!)
We’ve just got back to Madrid after 2 months away, and boooooooy is it hot. Still.
We have to move flat in the very near future (which should make for some interesting stories), but first of all we have to decide where the hell to live! With a baby in tow we are keen to head out of the massification that is Madrid, towards greener climes…
Possibilities so far include: Sierra north of Madrid (not that green, let’s face it…), Asturias, San Sebastian… and just about anywhere else in the entire world. As one friend points out, I’ve been talking about moving out of Madrid since I got here, and it hasn’t happened yet… so watch this space…
Meanwhile, to celebrate my birthday we are holding a very special sale at our Spanish learning site, notesinspanish.com – watch the special video here for full details (while the sale is still on!)
Saludos desde Madrid – Ben
In a survey I recently took about being an expat in Spain, I was asked whether I had every ‘put my foot in it’ culturally or linguisticly since arriving 11 years ago… and one experience came straight to mind.
A few years ago Marina and her sister were swimming in their parents’ pool up in the sierra beyond Madrid. As I sat on the edge lazing around, Marina’s sister swam up behind Marina and, as one does in swimming pools, playfully ducked Marina’s head under water.
Marina emerged seconds later with a wild exclamation of: “ZORRA!”
Zorra (noun) = female fox, or (slang) whore
“Zorra Tu“, shouted Marina in return, and they both splashed about laughing.
Now there’s an inventive use of the language I thought, one for the databanks, can’t wait for an opportunity to try it out myself!
The next day, back at the poolside, two of Marina’s oldest friends, a married couple, came round for tea. Pool antics ensued, and when Marina pushed me from the side into the water, I seized my chance to try out my favourite new word:
“Zorrrrrrrrrraaaaa!” I cried in delight, when I resurfaced….
” – – – “, replied Marina, a mute expression of total disgusted horror on her face.
Later, long after they had left, and Marina still hadn’t spoken to me for about 5 hours, in desperation I managed to corner her in the kitchen for the following enlightening conversation:
Ben: “What the hell is wrong?”
Marina: “Are you stupid or what?”
Ben: “Clearly, because I haven’t got a bloody clue what’s wrong with you!”
Marina: “Don’t be so ridiculous, I can’t believe you don’t know why I’m so pissed off…”
Ben (pausing for divine inspiration): “Ummmmmm… Nope.”
Marina: “YOU CALLED ME A WHORE IN FRONT OF MY FRIENDS, IDIOT.”
Ben (wracking brains for proof this might be true): “Um, are you sure?”
Marina: “You called me a Zorra when I pushed you in the pool!”
Ben: “Oh yes that, ha ha, I’d been waiting to use that for ages!”
Marina: “…eres un gilipollas, vamos…” (=You stupid d*ickhead)
Ben: “But… but you and your sister said the same thing to each other in the pool just the day before!”
Marina: “THAT’S DIFFERENT!”
Ben: “???”
And so another part of my Spanish education was complete. Your wife may call her sister a whore in front of you, and her sister may equally be-whore her in return, and it’s all good fun!
But woe betide you if you dare to presume to learn by mimicry. What works for one person in situation A, is by no means available to you in the similar, but almost-inappreciably-different, situation B.
I tried to explain this to Marina of course, that I was just a victim of the ‘witness, commit to memory, try it out soon’ school of language learning, but sadly she was still slow to forgive. Took about four years if I remember correctly before the whole event was truly forgiven (but not forgotten).
So be warned! A Spanish woman may be a zorra in front of her sister, but never in front of her friends.
I was recently talking to a 70+ year old friend of my grandfather’s. After asking him if he’d lived in the same city all his life, he said:
“In Spain we have a saying: you are born where your parents come from, and you die where your wife comes from…”
The more I thought about this, the more examples I found to back it up. Married couples do often end up living where the wife orginally came from.
Now this could be a completely unfair conclusion, and is certainly no slight on women in general (I can feel myself getting into trouble here…), but it is just the kind of ‘warning’ you hear when you first end up getting together with a Spanish person, male or female, on their turf…
I received another such warning when I first got together with Marina. A teacher friend kindly passed on words of advice from another teacher who knew what I was up to. “Tell Ben to watch out,” she had said, “he has no idea what he is getting into with the Spanish family.”
This ‘adivce’ haunted me for months…
I guess she meant the fact that the Spanish family stays close, that you’ll be eating with them every weekend, and there may be quite a few extra visits during the week… all true…
BUT, doesn’t that happen in other countries too? A mother-in-law is a mother-in-law where ever you come from – ever present, in one way or another.
So according to received wisdom, if you move to Spain and get together with a Spanish person, you will end up living where they come from forever, and have to hang out a lot with their family. That pretty much accords with my experience, but you know what?
It isn’t all that bad!
Thank god Spain still has a culture where the family is respected, nurtured, kept tight! While western culture is doing it’s best to dissemble the traditional family (extended and nuclear), the Spanish still want to get together as often as possible for a good feed-up! Good for them!
And the idea you might get stuck in Spain forever? I say jump in with both feet, you’ll soon end up realising you were always destined to be here anyway.
[P.S. I miss my own family lots and wish we were all nearer!]
I’m back in Spain after a month away, a 3,000 km odyssey via France (where I managed to get totally offline for 2 weeks for the first time in … years), two wonderful family weeks in the UK, and finally the ferry home from Portsmouth to Santander (Thanks Colin for putting us on to the joy of Brittany Ferries!)
A note on the ferry: we dreaded spending 24 hours on a boat, but enjoyed it immensely. Yes, the normally rough Bay of Biscay was calm as a lake, but the boat was huge, our cabin was big enough, and a nice lady from whale charity ORCA gave us a talk on the evening we departed about wildlife we might see, and the following day helped us spot dolphins and whales from the heliport deck.
Apart from common and bottlenose dolphins, we saw two fin whales, the second largest animal on the planet (after the blue whale). Others spotted sperm whales and pilot whales. Either we are very lucky, or the Bay of Biscay is teeming with life!
Here are some of my first impressions of Spain (from the drive home from the Santander ferry to Madrid):
1. There are a ridiculous amount of brothels along the highway around Valladolid – part of the route we took home. These are known as ‘clubs’ and are identified by the garish coloured neon strip lights around the edge of the buildings. Libido must be wild in Castilla y Leon, these things are everywhere!
Sadly they are full of girls from Eastern European countries and beyond who have been conned, abused, and forced into working there.
2. People walk into bars here to smoke, instead of walking out to smoke. Much as I hate smoking in bars and restaurants, there is something great about seeing the Spanish casually do something much of the rest of Europe has renounced so fiercely. No one tells Spain how to behave!
3. Highway driving here = appalling. You’re in the fast, overtaking lane, about to pass a lorry, when an SUV undertakes you at crazy speeds, and squeezes into the tiny gap between you and the lorry, just so he can get past it before you do. Scary. Unnecessary. Seen less in the UK.
4. It’s still bloody hot (compared to the UK!)
5. More soon. Suffice is to say that it’s great to be back. But it was wonderful to be away.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 