Me pones una sin alcohol, por favor

I was just in town so I went for a drink. I had a non alcoholic beer and as I sat at the bar I noticed that of the eight other people having a drink three were on the beer flavoured pop too. It's a very common drink possibly because, once it's in the glass, nobody is going to know it's not the real thing and try to force lots of beer on you. It's to do with drink driving of course. The limits here are 0.5mg/ml as against 0.8 in the UK and there are even more stringent levels for new and professional drivers.

Nonetheless Spaniards drink and drive. I've always thought that drivers aged 50 plus were likely to be the worst offenders. After all to have a couple of glasses of beer during the morning, a glass or two of wine with lunch and then a brandy to top it all off before jumping into the Audi and zipping off to the office would be absolutely normal behaviour. So, if it's been OK for years why change the habits of a lifetime? And, until recently I think that was true but with random breath tests, points on licences, the possibility of prison or community service plus heavy fines the older Spaniards have realised that they have something to lose.

I've just been trying to hunt down the statistics for drink driving in Spain and I've found it really difficult to find anything definite. For instance it seems that alcohol related traffic offences have been falling steadily year on year but with some reading between the lines that may not be true for 2009. The figures seem to be being presented differently with a different emphasis - my guess is that with doing lots more random tests and by changing the patterns of where they test the Guardia and Police have actually caught more people. Locally, there is circumstantial evidence of that. I know lots of Britons who have a skinful and then travel home on very minor roads and tracks. A friend of ours, a non drinker, was pulled over on one such road at around 1am in the morning. I suppose that if Britons do it then Spaniards will too so those controls may be catching a disproportionately high number of people. I also tried to find out whether my personal take on the age profile of drink drivers was right. It doesn't seem to be in that the "Minister of Transport" avoided the question but said that it was neither the very young nor the older drivers who were the drinkers. He said that over 50% of the prosecutions are for 20 to 40 year olds. No mention though of the distribution of the other nearly 50%.

Anyway, it's definitely true about the non alcoholic beers.

In praise of maps

I must have been to Murcia City at least twenty times. It's only about fifty minutes from Culebrón and a bit less from Cartagena. According to a list on Wikipedia it's the 9th largest city in Spain. Anyway, nearly every time we go there we go to the square outside the Cathedral, wander around a bit, maybe get onto Gran Via and then decide there's not much going on and leave.

Sneakily they seem to have opened a tourist office in the Cathedral Square without us noticing. So today, for the first time, we had a map as we wandered. What an amazing difference. It wasn't just that we got to see an exhibition about Alfonso the Wise, went to the Archaeological Museum, wandered the Christmas Market and nearly went in the Fine Arts Museum, it was that we knew where we were and, maybe because we went a sensible way from one place to the next, we went past scores of new and interesting places.

The town felt really nice too. It was a warm day, I dumped my jacket and pullover and still felt over warm in a T shirt, and the Christmas lights, Christmas happenings and Christmas crowds made it an exciting place to be. Our luck must have been in too because the Cathedral was open. It was the first time we've ever got inside.

Posting wine

Maggie wanted to send some wine from our local village bodega to her family in the UK. The bodega has a website on which they offer to send their wines (and olive oil) to lots of European countries so we thought it would be a piece of cake to pop over there and get a few bottles into the post.

Antonio told us it wasn't worth the cost but it may be worth checking with Roberto. We went back a couple of days later to ask Roberto. Better talk to Paco in the office he said. Paco said he would have to talk to the transport company. Could we come back tomorrow? The transport company hadn't quite got around to sending the rates by email as they'd promised when we went back. Paco phoned again and got the carriage rates.

It all seemed perfectly reasonable and we shipped 36 bottles at an average cost of 4.59€ per bottle.

Talk about fostering international links or is that international drinks?

Twelve hundred hand crafted figures

Twelve articulated lorries to transport it all, 30,000 watts of sound and light, six kilometres of electric cable and 3,000kg of glass fibre to tell the simple story of a child born in a stable.

Nativity scenes, Belenes are a traditional part of the Christmas scene. We have a little Belén in our house, the municipal one here in Pinoso will be opened on Christmas Day, just after Midnight Mass, the one in Cartagena mentioned in a previous post (The Goose is getting Fat) was opened last week and today, in Elche, we went to have a look at the version mounted by one of the Savings Banks.

It was extremely good; the figures and backdrops were much more carefully crafted than is usual, each figure made by hand, but they didn't half labour the point. First we had to wait for the one visit every half an hour, then we had to take a seat in front of a screen before somebody, dressed like a bank clerk, raced through her lines with somewhat less modulation in her voice than the speaking clock. Two longish videos next before they finally let us see the real thing. Even then we were held in check for a few minutes as we had to watch a guided sound and light version before we could eventually rest our chins on the guardrail and gawp.

Mañana, mañana

The washing machine that we brought with us from the UK started playing up a few weeks ago and, because we have another washer in the flat in Cartagena, we were a bit tardy in doing anything about it.

One of our problems was that the machine is a make that's not generally on sale here so we couldn't just ring up the official service people. After a bit of a half hearted search and ask around we couldn't find anyone to fix it. Some pals did give us a contact, an English chap, but he failed to turn up as promised.

So this evening we went to a shop in the local town to see what they'd got. We thought the prices were OK and we asked when they could deliver if we bought one today. Tomorrow they said. So Maggie handed over the money and then they changed their minds! They couldn't deliver tomorrow, they could deliver this evening.

So from the moment of paying for it at around six this evening to the moment that the chap drove away having delivered it and set it working was maybe two hours.

Lies and white lies

Our house in Culebrón isn't well suited to the cold. The living room is warm enough with the log burner doing its stuff but the bedroom is like an icebox and our water has already frozen. The TV news this evening is predicting overnight temperatures of minus 7ºC for our area! This morning we awoke to find a light dusting of snow. It proved a good day to put up our Christmas tree. Odd when you think that on Thursday the temperature was over 20ºC in Cartagena.

Come to sunny Spain.

On the phone

I have tried, lots of times, to use Spanish Yellow Pages and Directory Enquiries. Usually without success.

One of the problems is that Spanish phone books are divided geographically but not always consistently. For instance our phone number is listed in Pinoso but that for our next door neighbours is listed in Culebrón - maybe the ten metres makes a difference! And both our listings are incorrect anyway. One reason is because the English and Spanish forename and surname systems are different. As Christopher John Thompson I am listed as Sr. Jhon (sic).

Another problem is that lots of people simply aren't listed at all. They just aren't there.

Yellow Pages seems to be based on the ordinary phone book so it has the same general structure. If you want a plumber then you look under the section for plumbers. Next you have to look under each town or village as well. In Culebrón the local town is Pinoso but if there's not a listing there you have to start going through the nearest towns, Sax, Salinas, Novelda, Monóvar, La Romana, Alguena, Elda, Petrer etc. So it's a lot of flicking back and forth as you search for that elusive plumber.

The operators at Directory Enquiries don't necessarily live near us. For all I know the call centres are based in Peru or Ecuador - all they have to go on is a database. So, if you ring asking for a plumber in Pinoso and there's nobody listed for Pinoso (remember lots of people aren't) then they too start asking for nearby towns. It can be very wearing.

The online version is better in that it trawls wider so having asked for a plumber in Pinoso it lists almost all the plumbers it can find anywhere. The trouble there is that the numbers are often simply wrong. When I was looking for a solicitor (ages ago) I rang the first six numbers. Four of them were private houses and two were unobtainable. I gave up.

I just checked, there are no plumbers listed for Pinoso in Yellow Pages. I know of three firms personally. That's why the only reliable way to phone someone is to know their number and that's why we collect business cards.

On email

Most spanish websites, when they are working, have some sort of contact option on them. Usually one of the choices is email. Now I like email because it gives me time to prepare the question in Spanish. The replies too are easier to understand as there is time to study them. Well I suppose they would be except that I've never had a reply so that has to be pure supposition.

Sometimes the emails yield results. My bank repaid a mistaken charge as the result of an email but they never wrote back or acknowledged receipt of it. In fact, one time I went to the branch about a week after emailing. I asked the chap why he hadn't responded. He looked in his inbox, found my email and said that he never read his emails as he was too busy.

I had a brief skirmish with my credit card company when they reduced my credit limit drastically without mentioning it and for no good reason. I would email and they would ring me on my mobile. The fact of clicking on the box marked "email" in the section asking how I would like my response never made any difference.

I think that not responding to email has something to do with the Internet still being relatively underused in Spain, something to do with poor customer care, because Spaniards like to talk and because keeping information to yourself seems to be something of a Spanish obsession.

Winding up the genny

This house belongs to a couple of friends of ours. As you can see it's hardly in a built up area. In fact it's so far off the main road that normally, when we visit, they come and collect us in their four wheel drive to save our cars from crashing and bumping up the unmade road.

For most of Spain the model is that rural communities lived in villages. There are almost no individual buildings for miles on end in the Spanish countryside. Farm workers travelled from the villages each day to work the fields. Alicante province and some surrounding areas are different in that the houses are scattered around the countryside. I was told, that this is because the irrigation system, built by the Moors back in the first Milennium, made it possible for farmers to locate more or less where they wanted.

When things began to change the isolated nature of those country houses made it costly to supply them with mains electric and water. It's one of the reasons why so many rural properties were available to the Northern Europeans who have invaded Spain over the last two or three decades. They brought sufficient wealth from their homelands to run power lines and water mains in to these buildings and the Spanish owners were more than happy to swop their picturesque, but impractical, stone piles for enough money to buy a nice little flat in town. Gross oversimplification but basically true.

Not all the incomers were quite so wealthy and many traded off practicality for picturesque settings or stunning buildings. Their power is supplied by a mix of generators, solar panels and batteries and many have their water tankered in every so often.

Our friend's house isn't an old property but neither does it have mains electric nor water. It's a good place for John to practice his guitar though - not a lot of neighbours to upset.