Category: Spanish Culture and News

The Guardian has this interesting piece on the drastic water situation in Barcelona:

The tanker Sichem Defender arrived at the port of Barcelona yesterday carrying something far more precious than its usual cargo of chemicals. Nearly 23m litres of drinking water – enough for 180,000 people for a day – was the first delivery in an unprecedented emergency plan to help this parched corner of Spain ahead of the holiday season.

Used to carry chemicals, now water? Nice… With two weeks of rain behind us (hopefully), it seems hard to believe there is still a shortage. No doubt a year’s worth of downpours is what is really needed though…

For those that were not already aware, yesterday also bought new sad news from the North:

One policeman was killed and three others were wounded when a powerful bomb exploded outside a police station in northern Spain, officials said today. […] Police immediately blamed the attack on the militant Basque separatist group Eta.

It’s San Isidro here in Madrid this week, Spain’s premiere bullfighting fiesta, with daily corridas seeing exorbitant wages paid to big-money matadors: “José Tomás recently negotiated a deal worth €450,000 a bullfight during San Isidro – a figure that caused outrage among aficionados as part of it was paid by Madrid city council.”

This according to a must-read article in the Guardian, that also outlines the following interesting facts: “…only half of the country’s 1,268 bull breeders made a profit last year. […] Of the 351 members of the Union of Bullfighting Breeders, the second biggest industry body in Spain, only 50 escaped going into the red last year […] A Gallup poll carried out in 2006 found that 72% of Spaniards had no interest at all in watching bullfights. In 1987, a similar poll found that only 46% were not interested in la corrida.”

So, the Spanish are getting less interested in bullfighting, council’s are subsidising fights, and bull breeders are in debt. Perhaps none of this should be surprising in an age where Playstations and the quasi-Hollywood appeal of ‘La Liga’ (the professional football league) are far more glamorous to younger generations, who probably see bullfighting as an activity better suited to their cigar-toting grandpas.

But, as the Guardian also points out, “… As a whole, the industry records an average annual turnover of about €2.5bn. It employs 200,000 people, from matadors to farm hands.” Those are big numbers, and clearly the industry isn’t going to give up without… a fight.

I’ve been to two bullfights, one in my first month in Spain, nearly ten years ago, and again a few years later in Valencia during Las Fallas. I found the spectacle both fascinating (this is just a historical hair’s breadth away from Roman gladiatorial events), and abhorrent: a magnificent animal enters the ring and, with the odds stacked overwhelmingly against it, is horrible tortured and mutilated to death.

As an outside observer, the horror left a far stronger impression than the culture, and whether Spain likes it or not, in today’s global opinion network, the outside observer has increasing influence. What I’m trying to say is: on the world stage, Bullfighting makes Spain look bad.

And in this animal-loving and rights-respecting day and age, it is harder to swallow the age-old aficionados‘ excuses like, “this is art”, or the ethically suspect “these bulls wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the corrida” – lots of other animals have been ignored into extinction by humans, and I’m not convinced we are doing fighting bulls a favour by breeding them up for a torturous demise.

So how long can it last? 200,000 people’s jobs are on the line, so it’s not going to disappear overnight. I suspect the spectacle will slowly fade away, becoming increasingly shunned by the Spanish intellectual classes who will continue to distance themselves from the gore, remaining instead a marginalised hobby for those with enough cash to breed fighting bulls without need for profits, and councils rich enough to subsidise the event for important bull-related fiestas.

How long do you give bullfighting?

The local government in the Autonomous Region of Valencia has come up with a bright idea: immigrants should be made to sign a contract promising to follow Spanish customs and principles (“las leyes, los principios y las costumbres españolas y valencianas“). Only two problems: no one has actually bothered to define exactly what these typical Spanish customs are, and secondly, the Valencian Generalitat (government) has admitted, eventually, that nothing will happen to those that refuse to sign.

“What we are trying to achieve here,” said Rafael Blasco, minister for immigration and citizenship (and silly plans) in the Valencian Government, “is that people that come here integrate themselves not only work-wise, but also that they become fundamentally integrated in our values, our system of living together, our customs, our traditions, and that this integration results in continuing social cohesion…”

So basically, either immigrants to the Valencia region do as the locals do, or the very fabric of society is at risk! Which in turn can easily be taken to mean, “don’t bring your funny customs over here, we’re having none of that, be like us or back you go.” Now there’s a message that’s bound to lead to increased social cohesion!

Fortunately Zapatero’s central government has been quick to tell their Valencian counterparts to shut up, that the only thing that matters is that immigrants comply with Spanish law, which seems fair enough, but one big unknown still remains… what does it mean to follow Spanish customs, principles and traditions?

That’s the question I was tested on this morning on Radio M80’s ‘No somos nadie‘ programme. As a typical foreigner who’s had plenty of time to adapt to Spanish ways, I was put to the test to see whether I’d be up to scratch with the Valencian regime, and had to answer the following key “how Spanish are you?” questions (see how you do too!):

Q. Do you throw cigarette butts, olive stones, serviettes etc on the floor in bars?
A. All the time! (except the cigarette butts…)

Q. Lack of punctuality?
A. I’m still a bit English on that one… so, no.

Q. Do you drunkenly dance Paquito el Chocolatero at fiestas?
A. Ah… Yes!

Q. Do you walk out of restaurants with a wooden toothpick in your mouth?
A. No! (I’m always afraid I’d bump into someone and swallow it!)

Q. Do you slag off your neighbours?
A. Yes 🙂

So how did I do? … They said I failed and should be deported immediately! Vaya…

You can listen to the full radio interview via this mp3 link, read more about the Valencian contract mess in El Pais, and please let me know in the comments:

Would you have passed Radio M80’s test? What Spanish customs are you most fond of that they could have added to the test?

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?