Gearing up for the Fiesta and Fair

This is pure conjecture.

The 10 day long Pinoso Fiesta starts officially tomorrow. The rides and stalls are already setting up in the town. Just from a quick look this morning I'd say there are fewer stalls than last year and last year there were fewer stalls than the year before.

Spain is a rich country nowadays. The IMF may say that the economy faces some serious challenges and the word crisis is still on everyone's lips. Unemployment reached a 13 year peak yesterday with over 20% of the working population idle. Nonetheless, the last time I looked we were still the ninth biggest economy in the World. In 1965 Spain was on the UN list of "Third World" countries. Quite a change in 45 years.

When I used to do Spanish lessons with a chap who lives here in Pinoso he told me that, in 1984, there was only one tarmac road through the town - in from Monóvar and out towards Fortuna - somewhere, I heard that mains electricity didn't arrive in Pinoso till 1974. I have photos of the town in the 60s and 70s. There's a mule in the street, dirt roads, poverty.

Pinoso is still pretty isolated, still a rural farming community. Imagine the annual fair and carnival twenty or thirty years ago. Stalls selling pots and pans, knives and agricultural implements. New clothes for the kids, toys, strangers in town. The fairground rides, the opportunity to eat strange food, to let your hair down.

Nowadays if someone wants a new fridge freezer or a garlic crusher they can get it in town or jump into their motor and zip off to the Aljub or Thader or Nueva Condomina shopping centres. If they want entertainment Elche and Alicante and Murcia are all less than an hour away. Terra Mítica, the huge theme park is an easy day trip.

Maybe the knife seller from Albacete, the ham and sausage from Galicia and the dodgems just don't have the appeal for the population that they once had. Or maybe I'm a foreigner and I still don't understand how Spaniards like to party.

Flies

One of the downsides of living in the country is the flies. Sitting in the shade with a cold drink in hand the little blighters start to pester. Their tiny little feet pitter pattering across your face, in your ears, up your nostrils, drowning in your drink.

I like to think I'm pretty zen about small beasties. Spiders removed from the bath before showering, beetles scooped up from the living room and released to the wild. Yesterday though there were more flies than I could cope with. Out came the fly swat. Tens of corpses surrounding the sun lounger; higher body count than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It ain't half hot mum

It isn't really. The highest temperature we've had here in Culebrón over the past few weeks has been 36ºC and normally daily maximums have been around 32ºC. For those dinosaurs amongst you that means our maximum has been about 97ºF and we're generally running at around 90ºF.

When we got back from holiday several of our English pals were keen to complain about the heat - suffocating, unbearable, nightmare - were common words. The complaints were nearly as loud as the moaning about the rain, icy winds and low temperatures of a few months ago. 42ºC was bandied about. At those sort of temperatures the State Meteorological Service starts issuing weather warnings along with advice about drinking plenty of water, wearing hats and buying a camel. It has been over 40ºC recently in several parts of Spain, it's been on the telly, but Alicante hasn't featured.

It's hot, no doubt about it, but it's far from unbearable. In the full sun (where the temperature zooms off the top of all the thermometers I own) the sweat will soak your clothes, dribble into your eyes and turn your hair into a dripping sponge but in the shade a heat haze just helps to increase the profits of beer and soft drink companies and it reminds me at least of one of the things I like about Spain. It's sunny. And I can't remember when it last rained.

Minimums, by the way, turn around twenty, it was 18ºC for instance last night so a perfectly pleasant temperature for sleeping.

Another little glitch

This is another in my series of moans about Spanish websites.

We booked a couple of days away with the Castilla la Mancha tourist website. I booked and paid online without any difficulty. I got a confirmation of the purchase by email. The next working day a courier turned up with the voucher and a really well presented booklet. I was well impressed; the website had worked, the organisation seemed efficient.

The package contained a voucher which can be exchanged for a series "weekend" breaks. I could either ring or send a request by email. So, for the usual reason of avoiding a phone conversation, I sent an email. The next evening I got one of those "This is an automatically generated message, delivery of your message has been delayed, you do not need to do anything, we will try to resend the messsage." I checked the email address and I even replied to the email that they had sent me as a foolproof way of getting the address right. I've just had another "undeliverable" message again on both emails.

Ah well, on the phone tomorrow then.

P.S: I did phone and they were dead efficient. They confirmed the details of our telephone conversation by email within moments, phoned through the confirmation in a couple of hours and sent the voucher for the trip at the same time by email.

The Floridablanca garden in Murcia

When I did the piece on gardening in Spain a couple of days ago I had a root around on the Internet for information about Spanish gardens and gardeners. One bit of information that I turned up was that the oldest public garden in Spain is in Murcia City and, as that's very close to home, we went to have a look today.

Nowadays the garden is a traffic island so it's hardly peaceful but it was certainly shady and well used by a mixture of strollers, newspaper readers and bench sleepers. The parkie was having a fag as we passed.

Apparently the garden was designed and opened in 1786 on what had been the tree lined avenue, the Alameda del Carmen. It was designed to a Romantic style and when it was remodeled in 1848 it was given a new name in honour of one of the city's notable citizens, Jose Moñino Redondo, Count or Conde de Floridablanca.

We'd never heard of the fellow before but at our next stop, the Hydraulic Museum, his name turned up again as the promoter of the old water mill which had doubled as a flood defence system.

Not Camarón de la Isla

I have lots of Flamenco records. We've been to several Flamenco concerts. I've even read books about it. Sometimes it's a fat bloke and a guitarist, sometimes it's tight flouncy frocks or a long haired chap with high waisted black trousers. Sometimes they dance, sometimes they stay stock still, sometimes there are dozens of people on stage. I have no idea what's good, bad or indifferent though I have personal likes and dislikes. Give me another twenty years and I may work it out.

This evening we went back to el Cortijo, the Brit run bar and restaurant out at Paredon where we saw the World Cup England v USA game. Good evening I thought with a bunch of snacks and a Flamenco troupe of three female dancers and a couple of musicians for just 10€.

The music was pretty lightweight but they put on a good show; an appropriate show for a non specialist audience who would soon have tired of anything heavier.

Oh, and they had Maggie up and dancing.

Gone to ground

I may have told this story before. I used to live in Cambridgeshire where agriculture is big business. A farmer friend had a visitor from Kenya. The farm visit over it was tea and scones time. As they went into the farmhouse the visitor asked if there was a problem with the land in the garden, was it not as fertile as the general farmland? My friend puzzled, said that it was good earth. "Then why are flowers growing on it, what a waste of good land, you can't eat flowers."

I think the Kenyan may be wrong, I'm sure I've eaten flowers in salads in expensive restaurants but the general principle is right enough.

I think Spaniards may have a similar appreciation of land - it's either good for crops or it is left to its own devices. True the Arabs built some splendid and fragrant gardens when they ruled Spain but I hear that is an attempt to recreate paradise as envisaged in the Koran. Those gardens were built around shaded patios and fountains.

A Spanish friend looking around our garden was being shown our various fruit trees. She commented, approvingly, that the earth between the trees was "clean" - bare soil in other words. Kept clear of weeds to help prevent fires.

We Brits of course like our flowers. Nearly everyone around here has land and all of our British chums set about landscaping the ground - belvederes, gravel here, plants there. Without constant watering nearly everything dies unless it is native to the area so palms and olives and figs and almonds and rosemary do well but lots of things you would expect to thrive in the sun simply curl up and die or are slaughtered by the first nippy evening.

I was reminded of this when Maggie asked me to escort her to the nearest garden centre. Garden centres are a reasonably new thing in Spain and none of them resemble the UK theme park type garden centres where ice cream vans vie for the business of the hordes of people who dress up and go there for a day out. Spanish garden centres have plants, compost, maybe a few tools and garden furniture but they are pretty basic affairs.

More cold calling

Our phone doesn't ring very often. When it does I usually blaspheme. I'm that grumpy.

This morning it rang twice. Maggie took the first call but I picked up the second one. It was someone doing some cold calling. I braced myself for the coming confusion arising from my dodgy Spanish and for the thanks but no thanks conversation. This was the ex state telephone company Telefonica, recently rebranded as Movistar, calling to tell me that they would like to thank me for my loyalty by giving me a discount of 10€ per month for the next six months.

That's the sort of sales pitch I don't mind.

I took up another offer they introduced a couple of weeks ago for free calls from the landline to all mobiles at the weekend. I suspect that, after years of a near monopoly, they are now feeling the pinch of the liberalised phone market and they're fighting back

Safe home

Maggie thinks that my idea of a holiday isn't much like a holiday. It goes something like this "Do you fancy going to suchandsuch?" So we book a hotel for suchandsuch and drive there. On day two we have no more plans. I say "thingummyjig, is only 200/300kms away do you fancy that?" We drive there and hunt around for a hotel which is usually a bit more pricy and a bit less pleasant than we hoped. We traipse the streets, we eat in a restaurant, we go in museums and churches.

I'm a bit fed up with them myself. I can't ever remember which church had the Churrigueresque door and which the Rococo. I quite fancy a bungee jumping holiday or a wine tasting one or maybe one of those themed history trails but somehow, instead, we seem to end up driving thousands of kilometres and forgetting where we've been.

Maggie wanted a cruise. Not too expensive as holidays go, your clothes stay in the wardrobe for the week, waiters serve you too much food, the bars are always open, the cities and museums and Rococo doors come to you and of course you can have a go at karaoke or bingo if you tire of the smooth sounds of the classical duo. Oh, and you're on a boat too.

We popped across to Mallorca on a local flight, got a boat called the Thomson Dream out to Italy where we did Rome, Pisa, Livorno and Santa Margherita then into France for Marseille and into Spain, well Catalunya, for Tarragona before heading back to Mallorca.

It was good enough. The people we met were pleasant though the passengers did tend to elderly and overweight (like me!) The sun shone. There were flashes of splendour and unexpected gems in amongst lots of ordinary. On the boat I realised how Eduardo the cat must feel when he's in the flat in Cartagena - plenty of space really but nowhere to go.

I won't keep rabbiting on but there are photos on the "some of my snaps" link. It's a bit like coming round for the holiday slide show but without the amusing anecdotes or sherry.

And here is the news

There is only one thing on Spanish telly and Spanish radio and in the Spanish papers today. Pictures of fans jumping in fountains in capital cities all over the World, Spanish troops dancing in Afghanistan, getting ready for the open top bus parade in Madrid.

¡¡Campeones, Campeones!! The newsreaders are beaming, the commentators have a lilt to their voices.

Here in Culebrón, like in Lake Wobegone, it has been quiet. Vicente, next door, let off a few bangers and we could hear the car horns and fireworks in Pinoso but we'd drunk just a spot too much to be able to drive in and join the celebrations.

Brilliant.

That'll do nicely

Spain 1 Holland 0

A sufficient sufficiency

Busy day

Back from 7 hours in the car and 615kms on a day trip up to Teruel province (see next post) we were just back in time for one of the two annual evening meals put on by our village association in Culebrón.

Maggie had been dragged off somewhere and I was alone for a couple of moments when one of the villagers waved hello to me. I said something about her having to use a mime show because my Spanish was terrible and she agreed and suggested I should be ashamed of myself for not being able to talk properly. For good measure she said that Maggie at least spoke Spanish. That made me feel really cheery.

The meal though was a hoot. As usual the long tables were under the pine trees just outside the village hall. I was sitting opposite the couple in the snap, Daniel and María Luisa. They're not a young couple but they like to dance and they like a laugh. They made the evening entertaining as did everyone within talking or listening distance actually. I had as good a time as I've ever had at one of the meals.

Some publicity

Yesterday we went to see our pal Pepa in Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel province. It's about 300kms from home. Pepa and her friend Jaime have built a house and kitted it out as a  "casa rural" a sort of country cottage available for rent.

We went to take some snaps that she could use on the website but the place wasn't quite finished off (no curtains, appliances still in their boxes etc.) and the website doesn't seem to be up and running yet either.  Close but not quite. A bit like my photos

Nonetheless it's a lovely spot. Trees, hills -  that sort of thing - and a couple of bars in the village too. We had a snack lunch of a really tasty fruit sauce and goats cheese salad along with an enormous sandwich in the bar of the public swimming pool maybe 200 metres from the house.  So if you're looking for a few days away from it all in the country you could do much worse than consider Vientos de Gúdar in Fuentes de Rubielos.

-- advert ends--

Where to watch the football?

For the past few days football has been everywhere in Spain. The telly is full of it, the streets are full of it. Only two hours to go.

One of the local villages is having its Fiesta this weekend and they have a big screen in the village square. That seemed like the obvious spot to me but Maggie isn't keen. Maggie thought the best place would be a British bar, the place where we saw the first England game, but I'm not keen on that.

We've just had a look around town and all the bars have offers on - free popcorn, TV on the terraces etc. but there's nothing more "official" in one of the public spaces.

So it looks like we'll be watching the match from our own living room. The alcohol flow is assured, the view will be better but it may be a bit lacking in ambience.

Take It Easy With A Cadbury's Creme Caramel

Simple things do have a habit of becoming complicated.

I ordered some jeans from an online shop in Poland. Dodgy or what? But in fact the English company handled the credit card transaction without problems, the Polish firm sent the jeans, the German carriers got them to Spain but the Spanish carrier couldn't find our house. I was able to check this relatively easily on a mixture of Polish, English and Spanish websites. When I say relatively easily we're probably talking an hour from start to finish.

All I need to do is to ring the Spanish delivery firm and sort out the pickup but none of the various websites involved in the order tell me which local office is handling the delivery. I took the coward's way out of writing an email to the carriers national office with the various reference codes and the like to ask which office I should contact. That saved the difficulty of a telephone conversation. With spell and grammar checking add another 20 minutes. Then there's just the phone call and the waiting in for the delivery van.

During the process of changing the roof, the already chipped bath enamel received fresh wounds in several places. As Maggie gleefully pointed out it won't be long before a stroke or whatever has one or both of us leaning on a zimmer or riding in a chair (I think she's betting on it being me rather than her.) She thought, and I agree, that changing the bath for a walk in shower was a good idea. We've also been having some problems with the flow and temperature of the water and a couple of other minor plumbing problems so we thought a plumber could sort the lot without too much difficulty. We even talked about installing solar powered hot water but blanched at the price and complexity. Anyway the plumber said he could do most of the jobs but that we'd need a builder for some of the work.

Does 2,500€ sound expensive to you for ripping out an existing bath and replacing it with a shower? It sounds more than we have whether the price is reasonable or not. So dealing with a plumber turned into dealing with a plumber and a builder and now we're going to have to find another builder to give us another quote as well as having to put off the first builder. All simple, all everyday but as well as the usual hassle there's always the language hurdle too. Smashing

Thanks to the Irish

Maggie thought it would be more entertaining in a Spanish bar than to sit at home and watch the football. I wasn't keen but the clincher was her offer to drive.

It was a scrappy game, none of the back and forth of Ghana and Uruguay, none of the precision of Germany whupping Argentina but in the end we put it away and one nil is as good as twenty nil in a knockout competition.

The bar was a bit subdued and there were as many expats as Spaniards but at half time a group of Northern Irish turned up and they made so much noise that the game seemed much more exciting.

Germany eh?

Let's ignore the 4.26 pints

We have a very sophisticated pool. Really it's an old irrigation tank painted white and blue. We fill it with water using a garden hose and hope that the water doesn't become too noxious with dead insects, rotting vegetation and the secretions from sweaty bodies over the summer.

Personally I'm not too keen on water: fine for car washing and making tea but every time I see people swigging the insipid stuff in the streets I'm reminded of my mother's admonitions about drinking from bottles. I even wonder about all those lorries full of all those plastic bottles travelling all that distance when the stuff comes gushing out of taps all over the place. The idea of immersing myself in it falls quite a long way behind plucking the small hairs from my ears and nostrils as a form of fun. Maggie though seems keen to be able to get cold and wet from head to foot every now and again.

We've poured 15.2m³ of water into the tank over the last couple of days or 3,343 gallons if you prefer. If we'd filled it with 15,200 litre bottles of Font Vella water bought from Corte Inglés that would have cost around 8,500€. Lucky then that we bought it from the local water supplier for 6.84€ - a substantial saving.

Gender violence

55 women died in Spain in 2009 at the hands of their husbands, lovers or ex lovers. 2009 was better than 2008 when 76 died. By the end of April this year 23 more women were dead through the same cause.

It was easy to find those figures because the number of deaths is a repetitive theme of Spanish news reports as are programmes about stopping the violence, support for victims etc. I tried to find the equivalent UK numbers but the emphasis in the UK is on the whole range of violence against women rather than the number of murders. I saw a couple of reports that suggest the recent figures have between 104 and 120 deaths per year.

I read on a local website that there was going to be a demonstration outside the Town Hall in Pinoso to highlight the violence against women so I thought I'd go and take part. The people who were organising it seemed a little surprised that I was there and didn't quite know what to do with me. There were only about 20 of us all told. When the time came I stood there, observed the five minutes of silence for the victims and left. No photos unless someone else took one of us.

016 is the helpline.

Digital certificates

The normal way to do something official, like change the address on your driving licence or pay your water bill here in Spain is to go and stand in a long queue, usually the wrong queue, and wait to be turned down because you lack an essential bit of paper such as your mother's birth certificate.

Things change though and Spaniards increasingly use the Internet to get official jobs done. Most government type websites require that users have some sort of digital certificate. Now, to be honest I don't really know what a digital certificate/signature is and I can't raise the enthusiasm to find out from Wikipedia. I think that it's a bit of code that websites swop with individual computers, a bit like a blind date, if the two click then splendid but, if not, no more conversations.

For lots of Spaniards this digital identity business is dead easy because their ID cards now carry a chip - bung the card in a card reader and you're in business. For we foreigners it's a bit more complicated. The usual form is that you go to some issuing body, prove that you're who you say you are and they then provide you with a system for getting the code onto your computer. When I did it the first time, a couple of years ago with the local tax collection agency they gave me a floppy disc. This week my bank just gave me a couple of passwords and a website address. Neither of the certificates worked though.

Official Spanish websites often provoke one of the various "Whoaa, careful!" warnings depending on which browser I'm using. They say something like  - this site has not returned the sort of certificate we expected, it's probably a fraud, if I were you I'd abandon the computer and go and get a cup of tea.

It only struck me this morning that probably the two things, faliure of the certificates and the security warnings, are related. I wonder if Spanish websites are built differently to everyone elses?

It's good to know that Spain is modernising her traditions. Once upon a time it was the chain smoking clerk who sent you away for having the wrong certificate now it's some jumped up little algorithm.

Life in the country

There are a lot more insects. Flying insects, crawling insects, insects that aren't insects, just beasties. Beasties that sing and jump and fly and bite. They particularly enjoy biting Maggie so that she comes out in lumps.

We're back in Culebrón; we packed most of the flat into the back of Maggie's Mitsubishi yesterday afternoon but, thanks to the generosity of our landlords, we were able to leave the larger items like the telly, tables and chairs in the flat ready for when we go back in September.

Maggie was badly affected by it all. She started singing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" apparently inspired by the line from the song - "I'm coming home, I've done my time." She seemed very glad that term was finally over.

As always it's cooler here than on the coast because we're some 600 metres above sea level or just a bit short of 2,000 feet in old money. Nothing noticeable, temperature wise, during the day - we left 33ºC behind and arrived to about 29ºC -  sunny and warm in both places. In the evening though the difference was quite marked, down at 16ºC here whereas it hasn't dropped below 20ºC in Cartagena for weeks. I considered a pullover.

Nice to be back though.