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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.
The other day I was telling my sister-in-law about a relation of mine who has just landed an important job at Reuters UK, a job gained entirely through hard work and personal merit. “In Spain”, she replied, “that job would only be for the son of someone important”, (‘solo para el hijo de.‘ were her exact words, and no, she wasn’t swearing.)
The point is that nepotism is rife in Spain. From getting a decent job, to finding your way onto an oversubscribed course, to having your internet connection up and running faster than anyone else – if you have a friend or relation in the right place, known as an Enchufe, you’re sorted.
The interesting thing is though, that no one in Spain really seems to mind. There is very little resentment of the enchufe system (until it’s your turn to loose out). This is probably because everyone is enchufado (plugged in) to some extent, and as long as their pizza is arriving hotter because their mate rides the delivery bike, or their son gets a better promotion because daddy knows someone who knows someone in HR, then everyone seems quite happy to let this little bit of sociological corruption run and run.
And if you are worried that as a foreigner in Spain you’ll never get Enchufado, just how many good reasons do I have to give you for getting an intercambio?! 😉
We all know that there has been a lot of corruption in local councils and town halls over recent years – half of Marbella’s politicos are permanently in and out of prison these days… But things must be pretty bad when President Putin uses Spain’s woes to make Russia look good.
There is obviously no point in putting too much faith in his comparison, as one quick Google Battle easily proves!
The recipe details for last week’s Cuisine from Spain podcast have been added to the post.
Many thanks to all who gave us some feedback on the future of Notes from Spain.
The main conclusion (yours and ours) was not to meddle too much and to carry on doing what we have been doing so far, which essentially means producing lots of podcasts and, to an extent, making the rest up as we go along! So nothing will change too much, but we certainly do intend to expand in new interesting directions.
For a start we hope to get the Spanish conversations going a bit better in the forums (maybe with the help of some competitions – if anyone wants to offer a prize, please contact me!), we want to add more video and pictures (including billboards and ad hoardings, as requested 😉 ), we are going to make it possible to put your video in the forums and, above all, we want to carry on building on and encouraging the fantastic Spain and Spanish-loving community we have in the forums.
Finally, we want to make NFS more useful, by offering useful services to visitors to the site. I have no idea what that means yet, but our aim has always been to make this one of the best Spain sites on the net, and as such the more useful it is the better. Any ideas?
One of my favourite bits of your feedback, which we shall try to follow to the letter, was that it is better to be “slightly arnarchic, unplanned and flexible. Embracing serendipity, idulging your instincts and seeing where it takes you could, as it has, be the most successful plan.” Sounds like fun to me!
Today is ‘Armed Forces Day’ in Spain, with a big military parade and fly-by here in Madrid. Marina and I were standing on our terrace watching the fighter jets zoom by on their way to the King and other assembled dignitaries in the Castellana, when I felt a strange sensation, a stirring of emotion… it took me a few seconds to realise what this was: pride! An unprovoked feeling of pride at seeing the Spanish planes flying overhead! This is getting worrying…
Right, we are off to the beach to make some more podcasts. We’re taking all your great feedback with us, to think about what lies ahead for NFS. Worry not though, nothing much will change, just more content, more podcasts, more videos and, hopefully, more great involvement from you lot!
If so these groups might interest you: I LOVE learning Spanish!, set up by me, or Catavino – For Spanish and Portuguese Wine Lovers and Ex-Patriots in Spain, set up by Ryan at Catavino.net.
Personally, I’m new to all this social networking business, but it looks fun to explore for a while!
Notes from Spain is over a year and a half old now and has grown into something neither Marina or I could have imagined. Most of this has been due to your involvement – commenting on the blog, listening to the podcasts, and joining in over at the forum. And now we find we have a vast project on our hands. NFS podcasts and posts cover travelling in Spain, living and working in Spain, food, not to mention the Notes in Spanish side of things. So, the question we would love you to answer, below in the comments, by e-mail, or in the forum, is, what would you like to change? What would you like to see more focus on? More travel? More about living and working here? More about (our) daily life in Spain? At the moment it feels like we have a (big and friendly!) monster on our hands, and we’d love to steer it gently into the future! Your opinions really count. Most of the good ideas on this site have come from you, the readers/listeners, forum-goers, so, please let us know what you think. Thanks, Ben and Marina.
Ben and Marina will be on holiday in the UK from September 23rd until September 30th, so I won’t be posting here on NFS this week. We will still be logging in to the forums every day however, and posting at Notes in Spanish.
So, until next week, why not come and say hi in the forum? – Ben and Marina
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 