That’s a quote from the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), found on the bbc website.
I don’t read the news much, so I don’t know all the details… (obviously I’ve heard rumours about the imminent collapse of capitalism), but wow, that quote above sounds pretty end-of-the-world-is-nigh…
Should I start stocking up on rice and beans again? Someone clever fill me in please! What happens if we do reach “systemic meltdown”?
Time to catch up on a few important things that have been whirling around these past few weeks. I hope some of them might be useful. So, in no particular order:
1) Two weeks ago I turned comments off on the blog… and stopped blogging. I think there may be a connection, so I’ve turned them back on again. There goes that experiment! I’d love to keep hearing from you as usual 🙂
2) Turning off comments and stopping blogging meant I got far far far more done in the last two weeks, supporting the theory that the only way to get anything done is to a) remove all distraction and b) have a real mission to get on with. In this case it was to finish our latest Spanish project before baby turns up!
3) I’m loving the new ‘Genius’ feature in the latest update of iTunes. You pick a song you like, hit the ‘Genius’ button, and it makes you a playlist from all your other tunes, based on that first pick. It’s a wonderful way of rediscovering old music from your collection.
4) I’ve rediscovered “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” by “Buffy Sainte-Marie” as a result. What a song!
5) I’m going to be living vicariously through Tom, one of my oldest bestest mates, over the next few months, as he travels across South America. He’s started out in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where he is doing a Spanish course. Check out his progress and podcasts at http://www.earthoria.com/
6) Just got back from the market. Walking up the hill with 7 packed shopping bag, the question once again came up, how do those Spanish grannies manage to so effortless occupy the ENTIRE pavement/sidewalk, while moving at 0.2 km/h, thus making it impossible for anyone else to pass them EVER, or get home before the combined weight of the shopping bags turns your hands BLUE?!
7) Had to have a number seven. Anyone know what it is about the number 7 that is so important? If you ask someone to think of a number between 1 and 10, most people will say 7. Why?! (P.S. this is a good party trick – you guess 7 when you ask people to pick a number, and they think you have ESP or something…)
genius
I’m missing the writing and the comments so both will be back asap, with an explanation. For now, suffice is to say that the huge Spanish project we’ve been working on is finished, so I’m going to have more time from now on.
If you are an interested (and keen!) Spanish learner, you can check it out here:
We think it’s great 🙂
There is a reason for the recent silence here on the blog. We’ve been working away like crazy on a big project for notesinspanish.com called ‘Real Spanish Control’. This has meant putting all those time management theories I’ve been obsessing about recently through a rigourous test, and I’m happy to say, they work!
More on Real Spanish Control soon, but in the meantime, if you are a Spanish learner, you have to see the 3 videos we have lined up this week.
The first is ready, and includes instructions on how to see the other two.
Click here to watch the first video
More soon… Ben
Hmmm…. where to start. With the big news I suppose, followed by all the consequences!
Marina, my wife, is just about 8 months pregnant. This is wonderful. Wonderfully wonderful. But it certainly adds a new edge to life, a new urgency as THE BIG CHANGE approaches, fast.
What can I tell you about having a baby in Spain?
In Spain the question isn’t “Are you going to find out the sex before it’s born?”. Instead everyone asks: “Is it a boy or a girl?” Why? Because everyone finds out the sex of their baby as soon as an ultra-sound can tell them (around month four).
In our case the answer is ‘boy’. This means finding a boy’s name that sounds good in Spanish and English (for when we take him back to the ‘old country’). My current favourite is Rafa, after my number one tennis idol and all round super hero, Señor Nadal, but Marina still needs some convincing!
So what else does this mean?
It means I’ve got to get my shxt together! We run a business from home, and now we’re going to be running a child as well… in the same office, so to speak.
Hence my recent obsession with time management. (By the way, forget anything else I’ve said about that, and buy “No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs”, immediately! Do what he says, he’s totally OTT and even more obsessive than me, but it really really works.)
Managing time better means cutting down on certain luxuries, one of which is the commnets on this blog. I’ve turned comments off for the time being for all past and future posts. There are a few reasons for this:
– As well as having a baby (or because of!) we have to concentrate 99% on our Learning Spanish site, notesinspanish.com, over the coming months. This means I just won’t have time to reply to comments left here, and I feel really guilty when I don’t reply to comments!
– We have the wonderful forums right here on this site where wonderful discussions go on, so please please go and comment and discuss things there instead! Feel free to take any topic I discuss here in the future and expand on it there. I’ll be popping in a lot to join the conversations there.
– Having comments very occasionally makes one write ‘for the comments’. It makes me think ‘I wonder if this topic will get lots of comments’, rather than, ‘I think this is the most interesting thing I can write about write now for the readers of this blog, regardless of whether people are likely to comment or not’.
(This may be a very inside-baseball bloggers point, but I think it will free up, and improve the writing here. As for the ‘is a blog a blog without comments?’ discussion, Yes it is!)
What will I be writing about?
Creativity, Spain, having a baby in Spain, anything else I deem of interest to those kind enough to keep showing up to have a look.
I often say to Marina “I wish I could write about x or y, not just Spain, I might start Notesfromben.com again”. She says, “Just put that stuff on the Notes from Spain blog”, so that’s what I plan to do.
I can’t promise how often I’ll be posting. I made a list recently which on one side said ‘Cool things’ and on the other ‘Not cool things’.
On the cool things side it said: Writing blog posts when I’m in the mood.
On the uncool side it said: Writing blog posts because I feel I have to (blogging pressure).
I’m going to take the ‘cool things’ approach. (By the way, I highly recommend you make two of these lists, one for not-work life, and one for work. You then do everything you can to remove the things on the ‘not cool’ side of the lists from your life, to concentrate on the cool things list).
So, enough rambling. Keep coming back, I’ll keep posting good creative content whenever I’m inspired, I hope it will be useful and helpful, not just ego-to-pixels blogging. New times are coming!
http://www.viddler.com/player/3af3199e/
A very interesting discussion is going to be taking place in the forum over the next few weeks, all about travel writing on Spain, and how the reality shapes up in comparison. The discussion is forming part of a fascinating research project by Tita Beaven from The Open Universtiy.
Please do join in if you can. The first discussion thread is here:
Travel Writing and Being There
Thanks!
For any avid present or future podcasters amongst you, there is a big event at the end of the month in Barcelona, and I’m really happy to have been asked to speak there.
I’ll be sharing the stage on Saturday afternoon (27th Sept) with Mark Pentleton from Coffee Break Spanish, and we’ll be talking about how on earth we ended up making a business out of Podcasting.
If you are interested in coming along, full details are available at http://www.podcampbarcelona.org/
Hope to see you there!
After a recent bout of the ceremonials in Valladolid, I thought it might be interesting to further explore the archetypal Spanish wedding…
Church or ‘Civil’
Everything starts with the ceremony. If as a guest you are lucky, this will be a civil affair, probably in the local town hall. Presided over by the Mayor (if you have friends in the right places), or a local councillor, the ceremony lasts approximately 2 minutes and 45 seconds, during which the bride (Novia) and groom (Novio – collectively know as the ‘Novios‘) are required to agree to a couple of legal statutes, swap rings, say I do, and get the hell out of there to stop wasting any more municipal time.
If you are less fortunate, you may be subjected to the the rigours of the Spanish church wedding. Of unknown length (bank on an hour) and religious ferocity, the church wedding is usually an unutterably boring experience that involves lots of catholic process completely unknown to your average guirri like me.
In theory you are allowed to skip the church part if you don’t fancy it and go straight to the party afterwards, but in practice you suspect your absence will be noted and feel far too guilty to sit this part out in a nearby bar where many of the more canny Spanish males are hiding out.
Note: to get married in a church in Spain, the Novios are required to go do several pre-training sessions at the church, where they swear their allegiance to the cross and generally become re-religiousified (I claim that word!)
In the ceremony itself they are forced to make all sorts of rash promises about educating their children in the ways of the church and the eyes of god and so on, promises they mostly have no intention of keeping. The fact is that 9 out of 10 couples don’t marry in the church because they are devout believers, but rather because it just looks nicer than the average town hall.
Also note: Getting married in the church is pricey. You pay a hefty fee, and are forced to use the churches florist and photographers, both of whom kick back to the guy at the altar.
After the service
What happens next is subject to a strict, practically unbreakable, formula. Everyone races off to a local restaurant/golf club/country house – anywhere that is set up to screw money from newly-weds in the mighty Spanish wedding business.
First up is the “cocktail”, where everyone mills about on the lawn outside or in some sort of reception area, being fed exquisite tapas (foie gras, jamon iberico, gambas rebozadas, tempura de verdura, that sort of thing), and the first round of booze.
Just as you feel you can’t eat another thing, it’s off to the tables for dinner, which usually involves a couple of seafood dishes, followed by meat and, finally, an almost inedibly sweet cakey desert of some description.
Throughout the meal white wine is followed by red, and Cava is served with the cake for everyone to toast the happy couple with at the end of the meal. Finally comes the coffee (dancing energy) and, as if anyone actually needed it by now, the liqueurs (pacharan, liquor de hierbas…)
Note: there are no speeches at Spanish weddings. However, it is customary for the drunker and younger members of the crowd to constantly heckle the increasingly annoyed happy couple throughout the meal, with shouts of ‘Viva la novia‘ (long live the bride) and, the one that really embarrasses them, ‘Que se besen’ (kiss each other!), which once shouted out is taken up and chanted by the entire room until the couple oblige.
This is considered slightly tacky behaviour in polite circles, especially when, during the resulting kiss, the drunkest table continues to chant ‘con lengua, con lengua’ (with tounges!)
Bara Libre and Baile!
Now for the fun bit! The Novios open the dance up with a traditional waltz that more often or not they haven’t bothered to learn properly in advance, but isn’t that hard after you’ve seen it at 100 other weddings and you’ve been on the vino all night in preparation for this moment.
While they sway around the dance floor, everyone except the oldies is completely ignoring them, hell bent instead on getting their first free copa of rum and coke or gin and tonic (top 2 drinks) from the free bar.
With the waltz out the way, a hard night of boozing, bad dancing and worse music, now ensues, with Spanish fiesta classics and international megamixes from the 80’s keeping everyone happy until at least 6 am (see also Spain’s coolest DJ).
And everyone is indeed extremely happy, something that may not only be down to the fact that they are drunk, and their friends/relatives have tied the knot, but also, on a deep psychological level, because they have paid to be here in the first place….
Money or Gifts, and the Corte Ingles Wedding List
Going to a Spanish wedding is a pricey affair. Apart from all the usual travel etc costs, you are expected to give a very decent gift, and 90% of the time that gift should be money. If you know the couple well (hay confianza), you get a bank account number long before the wedding (on rare occasions it arrives with the invite!) and you simply hand the money over the wires before the big day.
Alternatively you can slip them an envelope after the meal, hoping they aren’t drunk enough to mislay it. The big idea is that you are helping them to pay for the wedding, which seems entirely fair enough considering how much these things cost these days.
What’s the going rate? How much should you hand over? As a mid-thirties couple we usually stump up 250 Euros. As one heads off into middle age this number tends to increase, and I have a feeling those of Marina’s parents age may well hand over double this at the wedding of a close relative.
Some couples will set up a wedding list, more often or not at the Corte Ingles department store. You go in, choose a gift from their list (carefully created by the Novios to include objects in a wide range of prices) and pay for it.
What many people don’t know is that this money goes into a special Corte Ingles bank account that the Novios can then spend on whatever they like in the store. They may never end up with what you actually spent hours deciding to buy them.
Your Thoughts….
So there we have it, your typical Spanish wedding. What have I missed out? Please add your thoughts in the comments below!
3 a.m. at a family wedding this weekend in the depths of Castilla y Leon, not far from Valladolid, and the Grease MegaMix was playing full blast. Revellers hips were grinding (even those that had been recently replaced), and rivers of ‘Ron con CocaCola’ were flowing from the ‘barra libre’.
My Spanish brother-in-law pointed out the guy in charge of the music and said, “¡Por Dios! Look at the DJ! A middle aged guy with full-on moustache, jersey picked out by his mum, and specs. He looks just like a Guardia Civil! For god’s sake don’t put him on your blog, you’ll make Spain look completely ridiculous!”
Don’t worry, I said, I’ll keep the photo to myself 😉
Ten years ago today, on August 30th 1998, I left the UK for Spain. It was a move born to a great extent out of desperation. I was nearly 26, living in London, with no real job or income, and no reasonable plans. After making a few random applications, I had been offered a place on a TEFL course in Madrid two weeks previously, decided to go for it, and from there one thing after another just fell into place. A friend told me at the time that I was very brave, all I knew was that I was plain terrified.
Ten years later it’s fun to look back and see what Spain has given me:
A wife, new friends, a beautiful new language, endless travels and new landscapes and, through a hell of a lot of hard work, a business we love that keeps me and la wife out of an office job and covers the mortgage. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that last one!
Obviously a lot of those things could theoretically have been achieved if I’d stayed in the UK, or gone anywhere else, but it certainly feels like I was meant to come here, and that some of these things might not have happened so well had I not wound up in Spain.
An interesting part of living so long in a new country is that you become bi-cultural, but in a weird way which I’ll try to explain. I totally lost touch with the finer aspects of British popular culture years ago (who the hell is Russel Brand?), but still feel nostalgic if someone mentions British childhood favourites like the Magic Roundabout.
Conversely, I know lots about Letizia Ortiz and enough about David Bisbal, ZP, corruption in Marbella and the speed of Spain’s trains, but am completely lost when Marina laughs at jokes based on TV characters from her Spanish childhood (who the hell is el hombre de Pescanova?!)
So when I say I’m bi-cultural, I mean I’m culturally British up until the age of 26, then mildly imbued with Spanish culture from that point on. It’s a bit odd.
It means that when I’m back in the UK I get a kick out of the familiar homely tones of BBC1 or Radio 4, but am lost as to half of what they are talking about, as if I’d gone to sleep in the late 90’s and just woken up to a completely different version of the day to day UK. On the other hand, having not been born into it, much of Spanish popular culture (just about anything on daytime TV), really doesn’t ring the right bells, of hit the right spots…
None of this matters of course, it’s just a minor disconnect on both sides of Ben – English Ben, and Spanish Ben – that sometimes leaves me mildly… … Spanglish.
Other random thoughts:
Marina says that Spain has made me a worse driver, I agree. After 10 years of seeing how no one else pays complete attention to the all the rules of the road, it’s hard not to let standards slip oneself.
At home, Marina and I talk to each other in a terrible mixture of English and Spanish, often switching mid sentence, and occasionally mixing in our own made-up cross-breed words (“I’m feeling a bit agobiated”).
To my continued surprise, I really like Morcilla (blood and rice shaped into a sausage).
If England played Spain at football, I’d be with Iker’s team in a flash.
I sometimes feel at least 50% Spanish.
Spain has done me very very well, and as usual I’d encourage anyone thinking of making a similar (in fact, any) bold move in their life to go for it. Big changes need bold moves. When I made mine I was young, free and single, and that undoubtedly made it a hell of a lot easier. If you are none, or only some, of the above, you can still take a step into the unknown, just think carefully about what backups you should have in place first.
Anyway, enough of all that, here’s to another 10 years in Spain, and a whole lot more after that!
For more on my escape from London, my first three years in Spain and meeting Marina, don’t forget to read “Errant in Iberia”!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 