Invisible customers

It may be unfair but the UK comparison is Kwik Save. If Tesco's has clean aisles and lots of open tills then Kwik Save has shelf stackers who bump into you and only one, rather reluctant, assistant on the single open till. Most supermarkets in Spain are Kwik Save. Día, Aldi, Lidl, Consum, Árbol, HiperBer, Upper - all the same. A bit messy, a bit small. Not invariably but generally. Mercadona is a bit smarter but even there the shelf stackers and floor sweepers expect you to give way to them. The big stores are Carrefour and Eroski - at least around here.

Only Eroski and Carrefour, to my knowledge, have the 10 items or fewer cash desks. Even they only have a couple of cash desks open in the 2pm-5pm afternoon lull in which case the same problem arises as with smaller stores.

Queues are slow. Time saving strategies like having your cash or card ready, preparing your shopping bags or not having a chat about something of great import are not the Spanish way. So, if you just pop into the local supermarket to get a few items it can take a frustrating while. The seasoned Spanish shopper out for only a few things has a strategy. They buy the main items and park their basket in the queue. They anticipate the slowness of the queue and leave it to inch forward whilst they abandon the basket and finish shopping. Of course those last things always take longer than they expect or the queue moves with unusual swiftness and it is soon the basket's turn with no owner present.

I am always the person who arrives at a cash desk to find the queueing basket. Or maybe competing queueing baskets. The way is symbolically blocked. I could step over and ignore the presumption. I usually though stand dutifully behind fretting over the virtual race between the checkout process and the absent shoppers.

It happened today. The absent owner returned just in time. In reality she was two customers as she divided the contents of her basket into two piles. Now where is that coupon? Oh, I probably need some bags. Money? Oh, yes I probably have my purse here somewhere - now where did I leave it? Terrible about that little girl isn't it? Let me see I may have the coppers somewhere.

The Black Cap is too good for 'em I say.

Combining the blogs

I have never quite understood why this blog - Life in Culebrón - is much more popular than my Life in Cartagena blog.

Not many people look at either to be honest but there is a marked difference in the number of visitors to each. I have just discovered a tool on the Blogger design page that allows me to combine the various blogs I still write - Cartagena and Culebrón - with the now moribund Ciudad Rodrigo.

I have also added a tab for some articles I have written in a local magazine.

So, by just clicking on the tabs at the top of this page, you can quickly navigate between all three Life Ins and the magazine articles.

The cars out in Pinoso

I used to own a 1977 MGB GT. It came to Spain and it was beautiful. But poor insurance and a shortage of money turned it into a battered jalopy. I sold it on four years ago.

When we first arrived I had a five year plan. To be a local councillor. I expected my Spanish to improve and being a councillor would indulge an interest in politics and an idea of becoming a part of my new community. Part of the plan was to join a classic car club following Richard Vaughan's advice to join a group where a shared interest would make it easier to practice my Spanish. I joined the Orihuela SEAT 600 Club but somehow it never worked out. There were other Brits in the group and the Spanish, keen to make us feel at home, always coralled us into a little group together. I never had the courage to break away.

Even though I've been without a classic car for four years the secretary of the club continues to send me information about their activities so I knew that today they were out in Pinoso. I drove in to town to say hello. I didn't though; the ever present diffidence. I sat in the café where the group was having breakfast and didn't say anything though Jesús, the secretary, spotted me and came over. He also invited me to lunch. I won't go of course. I might have to speak.

Boom boom

I began to laugh out loud. My head was ringing. It was about 2am and all around me people dressed in a motley uniform of black robes and red scarves plus any number of personal touches from cigars and sunglasses to multicoloured wigs were walking up and down banging the hell out of drums.

Big drums, little drums, every size of drum. Children, adults, teenagers. bang, bang, bang.

I was in Hellín where they celebrate the Resurrection by banging on drums. They call it a tamborada from tambor the Spanish for a drum. As far as I could see there was no organisation to the event. People turned up with any number of friends or family and banged drums.

I laughed because I suddenly thought how mad it all was.

Not a decent snap all night. The flash ones look horrid and the ambient light ones are all blurred. But you should get the idea.

Drains

We have to pay for drains that we don't have in Culebrón. Fair enough really. We don't have children either but we're happy to pay tax towards the schools. So we have a pit. I've never known whether it's a pure cess pit or a septic tank. I don't really know what the difference is, apart from having the vague notion that a septic tank produces clean water to drain away. It would be easy to find out. Google knows everything but I have different things to do with my time.

The bathroom off our bedroom smells a bit. As we used to say in the 60s it pongs. Then again the two flats in Santa Pola and the one in Ciudad Rodrigo whiffed a bit at times too. I've been told that it's something to do with Spanish toilets having a different, and less efficient, trap design than their UK equivalents. So sligtly more aromatic toilets are a fact of life in Spain.

Maggie had some sort of concern about our tank because the shower she uses isn't draining as well as it did and she wondered if there was a damp patch on the garage floor. So we opened up the pit and had a nosey the other day. It looked like the mud you get in a river estuary - oozy and shiny.

Anyway, so Maggie did a bit of Googling. The search engine told us what a couple of locals have said before. If things begin to smell a bit hurling a supermarket chicken or some roadkill into the pit can help. We've always stuck to the more genteel and commercially available yeast and sugar mixes which do the same thing by helping the beasts that do the digesting to multiply. They also told us what we already knew that the kinder you are to the beasts - less bleach, no oils, less paper etc. - the longer the tanks can go without needing pumping out. The big surprise though was that, apparently you are supposed to have the pits sucked dry every year. We haven't done anything to ours for seven years.

Whoops - fun to come then.

Whilst we're nearby

We hadn't been to La Rioja, a small wine producing region in the North of Spain, for a while so we decided to put that right. We stayed in a Parador, visited the capital Logroño and toured an upmarket bodega. And, as we were nearby we extended the trip to Bilbao and finally to Canfranc.

I'd mentioned a place in Bilbao that I had read was worth seeing. Maggie looked on the map and thought as we were in La Rioja why not wander over the border into Euskadi (nobody seems to call it the Basque Country anymore) and have a look? The place I'd read about is called the Alhóndiga and it turned out to be a sort of arts, culture and fitness centre rolled into one. It took us a couple of hours to drive to Bilbao from Logroño.

I also noticed that a sensible route home passed through the Huesca province of Aragon. This time I'd heard a programme on the radio about the Canfranc International Railway Station. The place was built as part of a railway project to unite France and Spain via an 8km tunnel dug through the Pyrenees. The station was opened in 1928, worked well for a while but the line went into decline after the 1940s. The railway was finally closed in 1970 when a bridge on the French side became unusable and repairing it just didn't make economic sense. By all reports, in its heyday, the station was like a mini embassy in that part of the station was considered to be French territory on Spanish soil.

So our route was set and hotels booked accordingly. It was only when we typed the destinations into the TomTom that the horrible truth hit us. From Bilbao to Canfranc for instance is just short of 300kms and three and a half hours of driving. Spain is a big country but the mean map makers fit it onto the same sized bit of paper as we use for the England and Wales side of the map of the UK. It catches us out every time.

The round trip was 1993 kilometres.

Toast for breakfast

In Pinoso, in Cartagena and in Culebrón, if there were a bar, a typical breakfast food would be toast. In Alicante and Murcia that usually means a portion of a bread stick (they always ask if you want half or whole when you order) toasted and with something on top. By far and away the most popular are either oil and salt or grated tomato. Adding a slice of ham is optional and not standard but very common.


In Madrid on the other hand if you ask for toast in the morning it's usually a thick Mother's Pride type slice served with butter and jam. Down in Seville the breadstick type toast usually comes along with a three sectioned dish containing grated tomato and various fats (sobrasada and lard are common.) In Catalonia they seem to rub the tomato directly onto the toast rather than grate it first and rubbing the bread with garlic as well as tomato is very common.


So, this morning we were in la Rioja, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada to be precise. "How do you do the toast around here," I asked, "Do you have it with tomato?" The girl leaning on the bar didn't look too sure. Shell shocked by my appalling pronunciation I presumed. Then she asked her mum who was in the kitchen - "Butter and jam," she said,  "Did we want sliced bread or normal bread?"

Interesting little regional variation I thought.