Spanish web sites

Web sites in Spain are very frustrating. I like to think of myself as a very average sort of person. I've always been able to buy a suit off the peg without having to worry that the sleeves will be too long or the trousers too short. So I presume that my use of the web to find things out, buy things etc. is pretty typical. I've become used to being able to sort things out from home sitting at the keyboard.

Apparently in a survey of the top 35 Spanish firms (the local equivalent of the FTSE 100) only 25 had websites. Of those some ridiculously small number (just one I think) managed to keep it's website fully functional for 30 days on the trot. Antena 3, a TV station, was dead on the average by keeping its site up for just 8 out of the 30 day test period. That's my experience too that often the sites are simply not running. But, when they are.

You can't rely on the address being www. I read an article the other day about being able to watch legitimate movies from various websites. There were seven on the list, only two worked and only one was www. This was a typical address http://videoteca.cvc.cervantes.es As you can see they like to keep them simple.

Or, for instance, I want to transfer 175€ from the CAM bank account to the CajaMurcia. If I go into the bank and do it I will pay nothing but to do it over the internet costs 2.70€ in commission.

I want to put a classified ad in Información, one of the local newspapers. Every time I try to pay the site rejects the payment but it also wipes out the information that I've typed into the various boxes so I have to start again with my ID number, name, address etc. When I eventually give up and phone the paper to place the ad they tell me that the website hasn't worked properly for a couple of months and won't take any sort of bank card payments. Ah! except it sometimes works with BBVA cards.

My ID number is called an NIE (Foreigner's number.) Spaniards all have a DNI (ID number.) When I manage to get my hands on a DNI it will be the same number as my current NIE. Every Spanish website that asks for any personal information asks for an ID number. On the official form my NIE number is X-5693545-X but if I try to put that into most sites it cuts off the last X. This is because the websites will only accept the number in a particular format and that format doesn't like hyphens. When I cut both hyphens to give X5693545X the websites often just sit there waiting for me to add the ten characters they require so I have to add a zero to get X05693545X. Then again some like to miss out the initial letter but stick with 9 characters 05693545X. It can be very frustrating especially as they seldom give an example of the format they are using.

Not all the websites offer the option to put an NIE instead of a DNI. They ask for a passport number instead. The trouble is that the next time I go back to this site it asks me for my DNI, NIE, CIF (tax identity) or passport number plus my password. When I typed in the information the first time I wasn't aware that the site was going to do this so I kept no record of which number I finally managed to use. Consequently, I have to go through the whole lot, complete with all the hyphen and zero variations, to get back into the site. Often though, and the websites don't tell you this, you only get three chances to get the number right before it stops taking any notice. I often use all the variations only to have them all rejected unless I remember to log in anew after every third failed attempt.

Or the required fields - Christopher for forename - Thompson for first surname - I leave the box for second surname blank as I don't have a second surname. This means the website rejects my name, tells me that I've forgotten my second surname and usually wipes out any information I've typed in to that point. I have tried inserting a space as my second surname, or a hyphen but the websites generally reject that and the only foolproof way is to put John as my first surname and Thompson as my second surname. It does mean that I get addressed as Señor John but it's better than the other options.

Addresses can be fun too. The majority are built up as street name, number, descriptors for flats (first floor, left hand door) etc. So the sophisticated websites have a drop down menu for each of those elements: street, avenue, drive, passage, place etc. They often do not have one for PO box (which is what we use) nor do they have one which says none of these. Our village is so small that the house identifier is just village name plus a number. It's a bit like number 5 Cambridge. We're not allowed by many of the websites not to choose street, avenue etc. and our postcode is based on the local, more important, town. So instead of being able to put our address as number 5 Culebron we end up with something that says Culebron street number 5, Pinoso which is a very plausible adress. It just isn't ours.

I used to use SMS messaging from the computer quite a bit. Telefonica, the phone company, offer the facility to send SMS messages, via the computer, charged to our fixed line phone. It works OK except that the box for the phone number will only takes nine numbers (a Spanish mobile phone number) which means it is impossible to send an international SMS message via this route.

And if I want to recharge my mobile phone via the internet I can, of course. But first I have to go to a Telefonica shop and sign a contract before they will give me a password to use on the website.

I can pay my Council Tax and water rates on the Internet but, again, I have to go to the office first to get a digital ID certificate and Iberdrola (the power company) took three weeks to send me the email with my password to access their "virtual office".

For anyone used to the majority of UK and US based websites Spanish websites are a real frustration.

Not for any particular reason

I just thought this was an interesting poster site. The one on the left is an advert for Easter week and the one on the right says "Shield (or coat of arms) Festival - the Invasion". I presume that it's some sort of battle re-enactment.

Putting out the rubbish

All over Spain there are containers, like the rectangular green one (far right) in the photo, for rubbish. If they're in a town then you're supposed to take the stuff from your house to the street bins between 9 and 11 in the evening. The bin lorries come around every evening from around midnight and take the lot away. The collections in rural areas are less frequent. Our container, for instance, which is about 40 metres from or front door, is emptied on just Monday and Friday.

This picture, taken in a street in Cieza in Murcia, also shows a couple of recycling bins. Usually it's light green for glass, blue for paper and card and yellow for containers such as tins, cans, tetrapaks and the like. Even in the countryside there are quite a lot of the recycling bins and they seem to get emptied pretty regularly.

What a varied and interesting life we lead

"I fancy going to Cartagena, what do you think?" "Good idea", said Maggie, "unless there's something better locally."

It was my fault, I took too long borrowing the drill and buying a phone card up in Pinoso. "Let's go to the Mediaeval Fayre in Novelda now it's so late", said Maggie. We went with Trish and John our next door but one neighbours.

There were jugglers and acrobats and bands and stalls at the fayre.

Every day another advance

Incredible. We now have power in the garage. I borrowed a drill and some 45cm long drill bits from Charlie. I drilled a hole through the kitchen wall, behind the cooker hood, through into the garage. More accurately I drilled a 45cm hole and then borrowed a 60cm bit from John to actually get through to the other side. Pushed a bit of cable through, connected it to the input for the cooker hood at one end and 2.95€ worth of plug socket at the other end. Bingo! power outside the house ready for summer music and fairy lights. No bodge up this time.

And then we had it fitted

After a few phone calls to Carrefour to sort out whether we could have the aircon fitted or not suddenly it all happened. Someone phoned me yesterday morning and made an appointment to fit the thing at 4.30. Two Argentinian lads turned up at 5.10 in a beaten up old van (see earlier post about white vans) and spent the next two and a half h0urs lashing the units to the wall. They said that our pre instaltion was all wrong (though they didn't suck on their teeth) but they got it up anyway. They took their 190€ fitting fee and cleared off. True it's a bit skewiff but it sems to work. Now to find out which of the competing stories is true. The owners of Firstline aircon units say they're fine, people who own more expensive units say that that Carrefour own brand stuff is unreliable.

We finally bought an air conditioner

When we were getting ready to move into our new house we had three big items on the shopping list. A sofa to sit on, satellite TV so Maggie could watch East Enders and air conditioning so we could sip our G&Ts in comfort. Somehow the simplicity of that original list escaped us and we found other things to buy before we finally got around to that sofa. However, this last weekend we went ahead and bought item number two on the list - a cheap air conditioner from Carrefour.

We weren't sure; an unknown brand from a supermarket not famed for the longevity of it's electrical products. The aircon unit itself is underpowered and it's not an inverter type we'd intended to buy but it was pretty cheap and we had decided that as we hardly needed aircon last year cheap would do. We still have to get it fitted and the man at Carrefour seemed to be a bit cagey about that suggesting that their tame fitters don't like coming this far out into the country. More to come on aircon I'm sure.

Spanish newspapers

When I say Spanish newspapers I really mean El Pais.

Apart from the local rag, El Canfali, published every Friday and obviously written by a journalist who believes there's always a longer and worse word I can only comment on El Pais because it's the only paper I buy.

It's compact, not a broadsheet, and the headlines never dominate the front page. The rather blurred picture of the front page reproduced here is pretty typical. By UK standards it lacks photos and there are several pages of editorial comment and featured writers with no photos at all though they usually put in a political cartoon to break up close spaced text. The standard of photos is high especially on the Sports pages which take up quite a lot of space. The only sport that competes with football (i.e. with Barcelona and Real Madrid) for top billing is Formula 1. Alonso seems to be a bit of a hero.

Articles have a bold first paragraph to encapsualte the main point of the story as they do in the UK but the paragraphs are not quite so punchy and it doesn't seem to be a rule that the verbs have to be active as they nearly always are in the UK. Although my language skills are obviously a bit weak to comment on the literary style the articles seem to be generally well written. Strangely though Spanish newspapers seem to have a tendency to use words that may not be so common in everyday speech. I seem to remember that UK newspapers were good at using common everyday words whereas the Spanish equivalents is to use words that are "only" used by newspapers. Difficult again to translate but in loose translation people fail rather than die and accidents become disasters.

Quite a strange thing by UK standards is that, as a national newspaper, El Pais has a section dedicated to Valencian news. Spain is divided into Autonomies, or Regions, which in turn are generally subdivided into provinces. So we are in the Valencian region in the province of Alicante. We get the Valencian edition of the paper. I presume there's an Andalucian one, a Catalan one, a Basque one etc. This means it acts as a local paper so I can use it to check what's on the local TV or at the nearby cinemas.

The only reason I thought to comment was that one of today's articles roughly translates as "Blair's swansong" and it's about selling peerages, sleaze and Gordon. I find it quite odd how much UK news there is in the Spanish media in general. They must be interested in us as a nation.

Baños de Fortuna

About 30 kilometres from us, in the province of Murcia there is a hot spring resort called the Baños de Fortuna.

Hot, saline water bubbles out of the ground heated to 52ºC. The water is supposed to have therapeutic properties and a tourist trade built up around the hot springs at the beginning of the 20th Century.

The hot water is mixed with cold before it flows into a pool that looks just like any other outdoors swimming pool. The place is a bit down at heel now with a sort of gently fading elegance but it's still an interesting place to stop for a coffee. I suppose you could even have a dip if you were that way inclined.

Embracing nature

The ground between trees in Spain is supposed to look like earth. Apparently the idea is to avoid fires by keeping the ground clear. It is considered very bad form by the locals to let the weeds grow even if they look pretty.





The space between our trees looks like this. So I spent a fair bit of the weekend clearing back weeds and generally sorting out the more boring bits of or garden.







As you can see I have truly embraced nature.

Lirios

My mum tells me that the crocuses and daffs are out in the UK. Maggie tells me these are irises. They're by the side of our drive.

Fancy an exchange?

I mentioned a little while ago that I'd put an ad on the local radio and TV station to see if anyone wanted an "intercambio", an exchange where they get to speak English and I get the opportunity to speak Castilian.

I met with Remedios a few times but then she went and got herself a job so that put paid to our 9am meetings in the coffee bar in the local market. Those were pretty good for me as her English was pretty poor. I know from past experience that the main language becomes that of the person with the strongest second language.

Cesár rang me on the same day as Reme but it had taken till today to actually meet him and even then I had to miss most of my weekly Spanish lesson to do so. He works as a cameraman for the local TV station I advertised on. He knows what pejorative means in English and he asked me how to pronounce Rumplestiltskin. He told me that when he had asked about an exchange with a couple in Dublin they had presumed it was some sort of sex exchange and they ran away. I think we may be going to speak a lot of English together.

And then when I got home tonight, just pouring the milk in my tea, when a chap called Antonio phoned up. Maggie and I are going to meet him on Saturday afternoon.

Even if the Castilian doesn't get better it means we know more people.

How famous is our couch?

I was on the phone to an old friend in the UK tonight. She said nice things about the blog. She also mentioned how rewarding it had been for her to finally see a picture of the couches that we had moaned about not owning for so long.

So here, for all of you, who would like to see a picture of our living room - here it is. It's a dodgy photo but it's the only one with the new curtains, lampshades and rug!

Smashing up the house: Part II

I got the silicone so I could fasten the glass in. Unfortunately I stood on the piece of glass and smashed it. I sorted it in the end though.

I sorted the doors too. Two hours of filing, which seems to have damaged my hand quite badly so that I now have no grip and reduced sensation in three fingers, finally removed enough metal for the door to close. I couldn't face filing down the second door and I removed the tape. Then I had a brainwave and put the tape on the other face of the doorpost. It worked fine. What a lot of time I wasted.

Ironmonger

I had to go to the ironmongers today to get some hooks and some rawlplugs. As usual the shop was crowded and, as usual I was a bit worried about what I had to buy. After all, in the UK, you pop off to one of those giant superstores and search amongst the racks for what you want.

Actually you could always tell what you wanted, especially if it were Sunday and the toilet cistern was leaking, because the shelf that held the vital part would have just one section that was empty - the bit where that essential part you needed should have been. But I digress.

So in the UK knowing the name of some arcane piece of plumbing kit isn't a problem. In Spain though an ironmongers is still an ironmongers. They have a whole wealth of ironmongery treasures often for tiny amounts of money. You have to ask for nearly everything you want by name or, more often for we Brits, with a bit of mime and maybe a pen and paper. In our local shop called Demetrio's (Heaven knows why as the owner is called Olegario not Demetrio) there are lots of exciting and interesting things hung up on racks. He does make a point though of ensuring that nothing I can't ask for in Spanish is out on the racks. Not for me the soft option.

I called them rawlplugs, when I started this note, and I would ask for them in that way if I needed to ask someone for them (as distinct from taking them from the shelves) in the UK but I presume that's just a particular brand for those wall plugs that screws and hooks go in to. I don't even know what to look up in the Spanish dictionary to find a translation and rawlplugs are pretty straightforward to mime. What about when you want the netting they use to make flyscreens or a pole for a wardrobe with slot in fastenings!

I was just on my way out to buy the plugs, hooks etc. when Clive turned up where I work - "See you later Clive, I'm off to get some hooks" says I "Ah, interesting word hook in Spanish - alcayata for the L shaped ones, hembrilla abierta for hook type hooks and hembrilla cerrada for the round ones that aren't really hooks" says Clive (he's like that). I'd been going to use the word I know for a hook - gancho.

Olegario understood the words and when I said I wanted the plastic thing that the hooks gripped on to he gave me some. Actually he gave me two because I'd bought two hooks - not a packet, just the two hooks and the two plugs I needed.

Spanish ironmongers are a joy. Next time you're here pop in to one and get something interesting to take back.

And a rawlplug in Spanish, by the way, should you ever need to buy a couple, is taquete

Making out like bandits

A couple of friends who live in the UK have a place down on the coast. They were here for a few days and we went to meet them in Guardamar. We had a very pleasant evening at some Chinese place where they cooked the food you chose. Allan and Brenda also brought us a food parcel from the UK - marmite, stilton, tea, a pork pie, shortbread and a tea loaf. What a haul, what a kind thought.

It's amazing how kind people are. When a couple of other friends, Alan and Hilary, came they brought Ardbeg whisky, shortbread and a vase. Having a house in Spain is a bit like having a wedding. You get gifts just for doing it.

Smashing up the house

Not a good day on the D.I.Y. front. I decided to do a couple of simple jobs around the place. I thought I'd grease up my car and drain off the excess oil put in at the last service. The oil draining went reasonably well except for the puddles of oil on the drive. The greasing went less well. I couldn't find the grease points so I ended up covered in filthy grease but none went in the right place. I ran out of light. I'll have to try again later. What a bodge up.

I also stuck some insulation strips onto the exterior door frames. That worked well, they stopped the draughts remarkably well. The problem is that the doors won't lock properly. I can do it OK but Maggie doesn't seem to have the strength. I've spent ages trying to file out the striker plates but to no avail. What a bodge up.

Inside the house we have a door with wrought ironwork on one side of a glass panel. The painters didn't bother to take the glass out to paint the back of the ironwork when we moved in so I thought I'd do it now. Remarkably I got the glass out without smashing it but I can't get all the encrusted paint off the glass and I also realised that I had no silicone to seal the glass back in. So that we now have a very draughty living room until I get the silicone and I'm worried that if I try harder to get the paint from the glass I'll smash it. What a bodge up.

A High Wind in Culebrón

On Sunday, back from our trip to IKEA (100,000 people visited the new store in Murcia during the first five days), we set about our weekend cleaning and fettling tasks at home.

Though the day was bright and sunny there was a stiff breeze from quite early in the morning. By 3 .00pm in the afternoon the gusts were apparently reaching 120kph. Bits and bats were flying all over the place and our pool cover (the pool is actually an old irrigation tank) made from some black polythene sheeting did an Orville and Wilbur and made several short, aerial hops. I cut a lot of the plastic loose from one of our fences to stop it being blown over. One of the three guy wires that keep out TV aerial upright snapped at about 5.00pm and I had to go onto the roof to retrieve the flailing wire and tie it back onto something solid. The little "tin hat" on our chimney creaked, groaned and banged and the noises it made echoed down into the living room. All through the night I lay there, listening to the various bangs and clatters, waiting for the TV aerial to fall over and take the roof with it. But it didn't.

Monday was bright and sunny with a gentle breeze.

A brick in yer ed

About a month ago a brick from an old chimmney breast fell through our suspended ceiling. I was very concerned that one day it would be more than a single brick. Today I thought I'd do something about it so, armed with a lamp and wearing filthy overalls and goggles I went to have a look. This is some of what I saw



I managed to get the old bricks down without them smashing the ceiling. This is the stuff I removed. I felt very pleased with myself.

Yo tengo diez palabras de Castellano

It means I have ten Spanish words. I use it a lot as a way of showing that I can manage more than "A bit" as the response to the question "Do you speak Spanish?"

By the way, I use Castilian, in Castilian, to be more precise. There are several Spanish languages - Galician, Basque, Catalan and it's many variants, Valencian (a linguistic argument to be had with the Catalans about whether it is a language or a dialect) - and the one that is now the third most common first language in the World, Castilian. It's Castilian that is generally thought of as Spanish but, because we live in an area where Valencian is the first language for many people, I try to remember to say Castilian instead of Spanish

Anyway, for one reason or another I have been speaking a lot more Spanish than usual over the last few days. Notable successes have included a voicemail message that actually produced a plumber at a client's house and an enquiry about where to buy autogas that ended up with a full tank. I feel particularly cool when I am speaking to someone and then someone else I know turns up and greets me in Spanish. This has happened when Paco the man from the glass place, turned up in a house where I was collecting some furniture from Consuela and when Maribel turned up as I was having a discussion with Eli on the behaviour of town councillors. One day I will be able to maintain a reasonable conversation in my new language without having to make excuses as I stutter through a list of words.

The world ranking for languages by the way is now Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English in that order. Though as a second language English is still way out in front. I felt I had to check this out when my language exchange pal was adamant that Castilian had more words than English. It doesn't; English probably has about twice as many words as Spanish but nobody knows for sure as it is so difficult to count them!

More on the drains

Excitement mounts as the drainage contractors move ever closer to our house with their diggers and big concrete pipes. At the moment one of the access roads to our house is closed off so they can dig a big collecting pit and one of our neighbours had a chat with the workmen who confirmed that the drainage system is definitely coming our way. Apparently we'll have to do the final connection from the current septic tank to the new mains drains at our own expense but that doesn't sound so bad.

That Bottle of Brandy

I think I may have found the Lord.

Apparently Lent started today, I know this because I saw a news item on the TV where lots of Spaniards were throwing flour at each other. You may also remember the blog I did in February called "Drinking too much?"

We have been drinking far too much booze and, as giving something up is what you do for Lent, Maggie and I have decided to go on the wagon for the forty days.

Cutting a log in Murcia

IKEA opened its doors in Murcia city today, just 60kms from Culebrón. Nobody was trampled to death and there were "only" about a thousand people in the queue to get in as the store opened at 10 this morning. We've been waiting for it to open so we can buy a CD tower and some new covers for our chairs - proof positive of our exciting lives.