With the whipping Spain gave the Russians last night, I think they really could even beat the Germans in Sunday’s European Cup Final… though you can never bet on anything where the Germans and football are concerned. It’s going to be a hell of a night for Spain on Sunday though. Can’t wait! Come on Spain!!! Sorry, I mean ¡Vamos España!
Photo: Jarra and Terrace Awning
1.The Romanians
I was chatting today to two thirty-something Romanian guys who were cleaning a pool up here in the Sierra above Madrid. They told me something that interested me, that they would probably head back to Romania next year as the construction industry was going downhill so fast here that there was less and less work with the big contractors.
Plus the extra they did earn here compared to in Romania was hardly worth it these days, as prices in Spain continue to climb. “I’d rather earn 50 Euros less a week in Romania and live about the same”. I wonder if we’ll see a lot of Eastern European immigrants returning over the next few years.
2. The Ice Cream Seller
I was parking my scooter in Madrid the other day, next to one of those green plastic ice-cream and drinks kiosks you find on the streets of big cities. The owner appeared from the back and shook the remaining crumbs from an ice-cream cone bag onto the pavement. I was staring at him, so he looked up, smiled, and said, “It’s for the pigeons, they’ll probably all get diabetes. They need the extra sugar though, so they can, you know…”, and he slowly raised the index finger of his right hand and grinned, “…get it up and make lots more little pigeons!” Strangest conversation I’d had in a while. I must get out more.
[3. Conversation with myself]
[I had to delete a lot of unpleasant comments earlier this week, which made me think, “man, this place must be giving off some negative vibes, I can’t be doing with that!” Time to get back to the way things were, a return to the levels of Spain-loving positivity that actually drew complaints in the past, like the comment I found on another blog, “Notes from Spain is just too nice”. Hmmmm, feeling better already! Think I deserve a tinto de verano.]
We had lunch in a favourite village bar today up in the sierra an hour above Madrid. The bar has a ‘comedor’ (restaurant section) at the back, with two large rooms, the slightly smaller of which is joined to the larger one by a small flight of steps. To kind of comply with anti-smoking laws put in place a few years back (that state that any bar or restaurant over, I believe, 100 m squared must have a section designated for smokers that doesn’t exceed a third of the total floor space), the slightly smaller room up the steps has been deemed the no-smoking area.
Well, that’s a start, except for the fact that this room is only opened on weekends when there are enough customers to merit opening it up and either heating or air-conditioning the extra space, depending on the time of year.
So, we had lunch surrounded by the local Ducados and cigar-smoking obreros and oldies, while the door to the non-smoking section remained shut. Lovely. We like the place so much that we still go, but try to arrive early before it gets too smoky. We have asked to be let in the non-smoking area in the past, but it didn’t go down well (es que la calefacción no está puesta… … the heating isn’t on… ) so we’ve given up.
Theoretically someone could report the place but it seems unlikely as a) it’s a family run place that has been frequented by the same people for years, and everyone is fond of them, and b) everyone just accepts that this is quite normal and knows nothing would come of reporting them anyway.
How I wish Spain would join France, Spain, Italy, Ireland etc and sort smoking in bars and restaurants out once and for all… Come on Zapatero, get with the program!
Last night some friends and I were sitting in the front half of a drainingly hot, smokey, smelly bar watching Spain battle it out with Italy in the Euro-Copa quarter finals. In a large room behind us, 40 or 50 crazed supporters were watching the same game, on the same channel yet, infuriatingly, they were getting the signal 3 seconds ahead of us.
This meant that their ‘oooooooooh’s and ‘ayyyyyyyy’s would let us know that whatever was looking like an exciting dash towards the goal on our tele, was already another cock up in real time on theirs. Most annoying. Turns out they were watching an analogue signal on a huge old TV, whilst our plasma TV used the newer, but delayed, digital tuner technology. That’s the thanks you get for splashing out on a newer Television.
At half time we couldn’t take another minute of the the heat, smoke, and pre-emptive groans from the room next door, and went back to a friend’s house to see Spain eventually make it through to the semi-finals for the first time in a major competition in about 3,000 years. More of the same on Thursday!
In other (related?) news, classy on-line paper 20minutos.com reports that Spanish women are the most depressed in Europe (no doubt because their men are so obsessed with the football), whilst the men are the second most depressed after the British, and continent-leaders on the anxiety ladder.
Thinking this sounded unlikely (penalty shoot-outs aside, Spanish men don’t look all that anxious), I tried to google my way to the original article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, coming away only with this far more likely sounding article from 2001 in the Telegraph:
Liverpool worst city in Europe for depression. People living in Liverpool are more than twice as likely to be depressed as people in other parts of Europe … The lowest rate was found in Santander, where only one in 40 people was a sufferer.
Whatever the case, if Spain win when the final whistle blows against the Russians in Thursday’s semi-finals, expect half of Spain to become instantly, euphoricly un-depressed… followed by the other, more up-to-date half of the country with better TV’s three seconds later.
Many of you will have seen this already, but for those that haven’t, it’s worth noting a) just how a politician shouldn’t behave in pubic and b) the level of censorship employed on the PP-controlled TeleMadrid.
The first minute of the video shows TeleMadrid’s edited down version of Madrid President Esperanza Aguirre’s recent visit to a local hospital.
Jump to 1 minute 12 seconds to see the footage the channel was ordered not to show, where La Espe lost her cool …
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=49235
Although there are signs of negotiation between the lorry drivers and the government that may bring the current Spanish transport strike to an end, food is still running out in the supermarkets. Luckily we got some staple foods in, just in case. See the video above!
Update: South of Watford weighs in, intelligently, and amusingly!
“House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become voracious readers, devouring more books than ever before.”
It does seem that books are “in” these days. Certianly this week’s book fair in Madrid’s Retiro Park, pictured above, was so claustrophobicly packed with book-hunters that I could only manage 2 minutes of browsing before heading to the quiter corners of the park.
One thing I have always loved about Spanish readers is the care they take over their books. Often they are covered immediately after purchase, albeit with ugly brown paper, which makes it impossible to see what anyone is actually reading on the Metro. I wonder if this is becuase they are actually devouring “The Amorous Adventures of Don Libido”, but according to the Independent, literary taste these days is far more high-brow than that:
“Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s latest novel, El juego del Angel, soon to appear in English as The Angel’s Game, was published in April with an astronomical print run of a million, now almost exhausted. Ken Follet’s blockbuster World Without End, which is partly set in the Basque capital, Vitoria, has sold more than a million copies since it first appeared in Spain as El Mundo sin Fin last December.”
In other cultural news, I was shocked over the weekend to hear English coming out of our 14″ make-do-for-now TV. I rushed out of the kitchen to find that the cookery program being shown on TV1 was actually broadcasting a French guy speaking English without, as is the usual practice, overdubbing him badly with Spanish audio.
Instead, to my absolute amazement, Spanish subtitles flashed by underneath. Subtitles! When it is so easy to just turn down his English audio a bit and translate in Spanish over the top, leading to insanity for anyone who is acutally an English speaker and tries to listen to both languages at once.
They say that subtitles never caught on here either because there wasn’t enought literacy in Franco’s times to make them worthwhile, or because Franco could better censor the content of foreign films by cutting out the orginal dialogue and placing a censored version over the top. Perhaps it’s all this book reading that lead to their appearance on the cookery programme on Saturday night. In any case, I’d say strange times are ahead!
Photo: Murcia, Drying Up
“The Spanish Environment Ministry estimates that one-third of the county is at risk of turning into desert from a combination of climate change and poor land use. Still, national officials visibly stiffen when asked about the "Africanization" of Spain’s climate – a term now common among scientists.”
The above quote comes from a must-read article in the New York times. It is the first time I have heard the term "Africanization" applied to the future of the country’s climate, and it does not paint an optimistic picture.
Temperatures are rising, but as the article points out, in areas such as Murcia this also has a lot to do with water management, or mis-management perhaps, where the endless new golf courses are concerned. But then grass, when grown for golf courses, is said to be the most profitable crop on the planet, bringing in top tourist dollar (or euros) for local communities.
One thing is for sure, Marina and I often still dream of moving to the coast one day, but whereas we used to think about setting up long-term in Andalusia, we now think very seriously about making that investment in the north, just in case the worst-case "Africanization" scenarios come true in the next 20 to 30 years. After all, who wants to end up living in a desert?
As I am away for a couple of days, I thought I would leave you with a couple of interesting links. I’ve often heard that getting divorced in Spain is not a particularly good idea for men (people complain that the women always get the kids for example, though I have no idea if that is true), but here’s an interesting quote:
“I am a divorced man and according [to] spanish laws I don’t have the right to exist”
Read the rest at Stigma Rest Room (thanks to Charles for sending in the link).
Secondly, I’m probably the last person to mention the cool new ‘A la Carte’ section of the state Televison Española website. You can watch the best (?) programming from the last seven days from TV1 and La 2, uninterupted by ads, whenever you like.
I imagine the ads will creep in later, once they get the metrics in, but in the meantime it meant that Marina got to catch up on the latest episode of 1920’s culebron La señora, and I could get a few minutes fix (all I can take) of the super OTT documentary Comando Actualidad, all whilst sitting beyond the frontiers of Spain. The service is pretty good, and increases my hopes for the future of efficient digital content delivery in Spain.
Questions raised in this episode:
1. Is it fair that tax payers in Spain should be forced to decide whether to give a percentage of their tax bill either to the Catholic church or ‘social causes’? Shouldn’t we be given more choices? What does the church do with the money?
2. As people continue to pay good money to visit the place the Virgin Mary last appeared to three shepherds, how religious is Spain?
3. As Turkey also decides on a total smoking ban in public places, how long can Spain hold out? When will they finally ban smoking in bars and restaurants here as well?
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 