Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis

Tree house seen in Sierra – hope kid never takes up architecture
click to enlarge

We just got back to the capital after spending 10 days in the Sierra to the north of the city. We got a lot of work done, saw almost no-one, and breathed a lot of fresh air. It was wonderful. As we drove into Madrid Marina asked me how it felt to be back. Not too bad. She dropped me off at the door to our building with all our bags, and then headed off to park in the underground car park around the corner. When she finally got upstairs she looked distinctly unhappy to be back in Madrid.

Apparently, as she turned onto the ramp down into the basement car park, another car was on its way up. So, she stopped, and began to reverse back out onto the street to let him up. Unfortunately another car was now coming down the road towards Marina, and stopped so close that she couldn’t reverse out enough to let the car coming up the ramp out. She turned and looked at the guy behind, a 50-something man in a BMW, and he crossed his arms in defiance and shook his head, making it clear he would not move, even though he had no cars behind him.

Marina got out, went up to his car, and asked if he would please move back so she could in turn reverse further and let the other guy out. He said no, he would not reverse (we’re talking 2 metres!), that she would have to go forward, drive round the block, and come back instead (which would take about 3 minutes!) At this point the famous Spanish caracter came into play, and Marina gave him a piece of her mind. He promptly reversed the 2 metres, allowing Marina to do the same and let the other guy up, who, of course, drove off without a word of thanks.

Another fine example of why Spanish women have had to learn to take no s*#t! (…and how a lot of people in big cities, or big cars, are complete w*#+!rs …)

Marina just left a long comment on our recent article about Spanish women and their inherent ‘feistiness’, known here as carácter. I think it is a valuable contribution, and worth posting here:

“Of course there are plenty of Spanish women who are not fiesty, but funnily enough, if I look at a lot of our foreign friends that have a Spanish girlfriend/wife, without exception they are all strong and full of Spanish character 🙂

I think to look at the reason for this, Franco or no Franco, we have to look back at least 30 years, and even a bit longer. For a person around my age (32) the difference in freedom and opportunities that our mothers had in their youth compared to ours is massive (I reckon that even my grandmother enjoyed more freedom than my mother when she was young). Being able to see how women have worked for their men and children, giving all of their time in usually not very rewarding tasks, makes one appreciate much more the freedom and opportunities that women enjoy nowadays, and I guess that makes us very protective and defensive about it. I guess what happens in general is that we apply the same protection to other matters in life as well, for example if someone jumps the queue. But here we should also take into account that Spanish society is a complaining society: The Spanish, in general, love complaining and do so, both men and women, in a much direct way than people from other countries.

Going back to equality… from what I’ve seen in England, for English women my age equality is not a big issue, mainly because they take it for granted. And even if in Spain, at least when I was a teenager, we looked at the North European women with admiration regarding equality, I’ve seen a few examples of chauvinist behaviour in young English couples that I wouldn’t accept, nor would most of my friends. One good example is taking your husband’s name when you marry. I know it is a cultural thing, but in Spain most of the women would laugh at that possibility. Even today parents can choose the order of their children’ surnames – people in Spain take two surnames, usually the father’s one comes first and then the mother’s one, but nowadays you can choose to put the mother’s one first.”

Ben and sister-in-law in skip…
I love skips. When I was young my father had a skip hire business and I spent a lot of time jumping in and out of and tossing stuff into them. We always seemed to have one at home, though I have no idea how we managed to keep filling them. So, how happy I was to hire one this morning for the in-laws place in the sierra. While they are away we plan to throw out a whole load of crap, which will either lead to a nice surprise on their return or the start of an almighty arguement (“I can’t believe you got rid of my X”).
 
Anyway, to get said skip I went to the web and did indeed find someone to bring one over on the same day (130 euros for 2 weeks, not bad). However, it was impossible to find out how big a skip we needed. None of the websites I came to via paginas-amarillas.es would tell me what a 10 cubic metre skip looked like. They didn’t even have photos or prices. So I put ‘skip sizes’ into google, and came up with a gem of a website in the Uk where they have actually unploaded videos showing you how big each skip size is. Click here for some classic footage of a 10 cubic yard model. Just what I needed (once I worked out how to convert from cubic yards to meters). Now there is a company that gets the web (they even have a skip blog!)
 
How long until the web shows this level of usefulness in Spain? Could be a while in a country that, unlike the UK, France, and Germany, doesn’t even have Amazon.ES