Life in the UK

I've just been back to the UK. Here are a few things I noticed.

Beer. I went in a pub and bought a pint of bitter. I had no idea what to ask for from all the strangely named brews but whatever I bought tasted like proper British beer. I have nothing against the beer I can get in any bar in Spain but the stuff I was buying in England was much more interesting. I had to be sure though so I visited a fair number of pubs.

Heat. It's hot in the UK. It was sometimes a tad cold outside but inside it was roasting. I haven't walked around in shirt sleeves inside in Spain for months. It was horribly dark though. Grey.

Streetfood. From time to time people eat in the street in Spain but, generally, only where there is some sort of event - like a Mediaeval Fair or fiesta. In the UK people were walking down the street eating all sorts of take away food. In Cambridge the woman on the bench next to me polished off a whole tray of sushi using chopsticks whilst the wind blew and the sky drizzled.

Restaurants, takeaways and food outlets were everywhere. We have plenty of bars and restaurants here too but the huge variety of food in the UK was noticeable.

Shops seemed much more adventurous than the shops I have become used to. There are plenty of interesting places in bigger cities here but I was in St Ives and Ely, as much as Cambridge, and even there the breadth of retail was impressive.

Work. Lots of people asked me about my work and I responded by asking about theirs. Work is a long way down the list of conversational topics in Spain: long after family, food, Spanish, the weather etc.

Money. No wonder everyone in the UK waves their credit card at the machine to pay for everything. Things seemed expensive to us though I suppose price bears a direct relationship to income. Nonetheless things do cost a lot of pounds and you would need to carry a lot of cash to keep up. I know young people use credit cards more than older people here in Spain but the terminals are not as obvious and ubiquitous as they are in England.

I was constantly taken unawares by cars driving on the wrong side of the road. More than once I thought a car was out of control simply because it was on the side of the road I am no longer accustomed to.

English. Everyone tells me that the UK is full of people from different countries but it was great to be able to speak freely and competently. Well except in Starbucks where successfully buying a cup of coffee seemed to require passing the specialist subject round on Mastermind.

Police. There weren't any. Short of the vested and impressively armed police at the airport I didn't see a police officer on foot. In Spain the police walk around all the time.

Bags. We still get plastic bags when we buy things in Spain. It struck me as a good thing that they are not given away with gay abandon in the UK but it did leave me struggling with armfuls of small items at times.

Skin. I nearly forgot this. In all seriousness I asked Maggie's niece if there was a fashion for women to wear very white face makeup with bright red lipstick and pronounced eye makeup. The answer was no. Apparently Britons are a fair bit paler skinned than Spaniards.

And a special mention for the guided bus. It's an ordinary bus that can be driven around the streets but, between Cambridge and St Ives the bus runs along the route of the old train lines in a sort of concrete conduit with little guide wheels sticking out to the side. Most impressive.

The people have spoken

The last time that the people of Pinoso voted, in the December General election, they went, overwhelmingly, for the Partido Popular - the conservative side. The time before that they voted just as definitely for the PSOE - the socialist side; well yes and no. That time, in the Local Elections they voted for Lazaro and Silvia and Paco and César and the reat of the list. They voted for people they knew and a group that had a track record, of which they approved, in the town.

The Mayor of Pinoso is my Facebook friend. I don't think this means that much. I'm sure if you asked he would say yes to you too. I knew one of his councillors pretty well at one time in the past though nowadays we don't even always nod and say hello in the street. When there were only really two political parties in Spain I tried to join the PSOE a couple of times without success.

A few years ago I went to a couple of  Agenda 21 meetings here in Pinoso. The meeting I remember involved a  bunch of us sitting in a room and talking about what we thought was important for the town. Not much happened, except that we got an invitation to visit the local clock tower, but, at least, there was lip service to the idea of a Citizen's Forum; to people contributing their hopes, ideas and concerns. Shortly after those meetings I moved to Ciudad Rodrigo and then to Cartagena and La Unión. When I finally came back to Culebrón to live I was still working in Fortuna and the meetings and my work day did not fit together. I was always pleased though that the meetings were still happening and also that my name was on a database somewhere so that I continued to get text message invitations to the sessions.

Last week I got an SMS to say there was another Citizens Forum meeting. I got two days notice but maybe I missed the earlier publicity. I intended to go. The time of the meeting meant that I could go directly from work but, in the end, laziness and a touch of forgetfulness meant that I didn't.

I read the press report about the meeting. The agenda looked pretty sterile and it was noticeable that it was Town Hall driven. I'm sure that people are interested in what to do with the old flour factory, interested in hearing about the 3 million euro fine the town has to pay and, finally, complying with the law and renaming streets and removing, emblems which celebrate the Francoist dictatorship. I hardly think though that any one of them would be the first idea on the whiteboard at an open brainstorming session.

There's nothing wrong with a Town Hall feedback session. In fact it sounds like a good idea but it's a long way from the original purpose of those meetings. I was also a bit rattled by the photo that accompanied the piece. It showed the politicians and experts on the top table, a table that was raised above the audience and a table that came with microphones. It didn't look like the most particaptive set up and the power relationship was glaringly obvious. I'm only guessing of course. I wasn't there.

It made me wonder. The last time I heard the Mayor giving one of his welcome speeches both Maggie and I commented on the length and the triteness of it. I seem to remember, in the past, that he tended to be an interesting and snappy speaker. I also thought about the dealings between the local Neighbourhood Association committee, of which I am vaguely a member, and the Town Hall. I found myself bristling at the autocracy of those negotiations but then I get angry about almost everything nowadays.

No coman pipas

Don't eat sunflower seeds. It was a little notice on the wall of what is now the Centre for Associations in Pinoso. It made me laugh.

I'd popped into town to see one of the events built up around International Women's Day "Sarah y Nora toman el  té de las cinco" - Sarah and Nora take afternoon tea. It's a play about the personal and professional rivalry between Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse.

In all the publicity Bernhardt is spelled as Bernhard. Spaniards don't take long to Spanishise anything they don't like the spelling of. I was reading a book the other day and it took me a while to equate taper with tupper taken from the trademarked plastic containers Tupperware which is used as the generic for plastic food containers. It's a word I know and use but I'd never thought how it was written. The misspelling, nonetheless, made me laugh.

The Director is, I think, a Spanish bloke but the company is Mexican, from Durango. I turned up at 7.59 for the 8.0 clock performance. I know that the possibility of a Spanish event starting on time is the same as the hell bound cat's but old habit's die hard. Actually we didn't wait long. About ten past the Director stood up and started explaining the background to the play. During his discourse the councillor, whose department was sponsoring the event, showed up. Maybe they are a bit more punctual in Durango than in Pinoso. That made me laugh too.

The play was fine. Competent acting and easy enough to understand which is always a bonus. It made me smile from time to time though it didn't make me laugh.

Road signs

There are a lot of road signs in Spain. Most of them are pretty standard and give orders, warnings or advice in the way that road signs do all across the world. Some of them though, particularly speed restriction signs can be really difficult to work out.

In general there are fixed speed limits on roads which do not need to be signed. They are the default. They vary for different types of vehicles so I'll limit myself to cars. On motorways the speed limit is 120k/h, on roads with a wide hard shoulder it's 100, on standard two lane roads it's 90 and in towns it's 50k/h. All of these speed limits can be amended by the usual round sign with a red border and the black number on a white background. I didn't realise till I was checking details for this post that there is also a general minimum speed limit which is half the maximum. So you could be fined for going faster than 120k/h or slower than 60k/h on a motorway.

There is also an interesting exception to the 90k/h rule. Where there are no signs on a normal two way road you can exceed the speed limit by 20k/h during an overtaking manoeuvre.

Speed limit signs and no overtaking signs are everywhere on Spanish roads. I often wonder if someone powerful has a brother in law who makes road signs because, at times, the proliferation of them seems so excessive. It's very normal for instance to count down from the open road as you approach a town or a hazard such as a roundabout. 80k/h, twenty metres, 70k/h, twenty metres, 40k/h.

One of the key places where there are no overtaking signs and speed restrictions on what would normally be considered "the open road" is around a junction. These signs are usually backed up by changing the central road markings to single continuous white lines. These signs can be odd. Often there will, for instance, be a 60k/h sign a couple of hundred metres before a junction but, after the junction there will be nothing to say that the restriction has been lifted. Sometimes there are signs to mark the end of the no overtaking rule which I always take as showing that you can speed up again but, often, you seem to have to presume that once the hazard has been passed you are back to the general speed limit. In the case of a T junction this can mean that there are different speed limits on the opposite sides of the road because the hazard is only important on the side of the road where the junction is.

Another interseting one is where the sign is more descriptive. For instance there is an 80k/h limit on the way through a wide spot in the road outside Pinoso called Casas Ibañez. A few metres inside the 80 zone is a second sign which says 50k/h in the crossing. A few hundred metres later there is a second 80k/h sign. So I know where the 50k/h restrction ends but I have no idea where it starts.

And then, there are the completely contradictory signs. In the photo at the top of this entry the 20k/h sign is obvious but, on the road, the markings say 30k/h. Actually I understand that the cycle way marked in red is actually at variance with the rules for bikes which says that they should keep as close to the edge of the road as possible and means that cyclists using the track could actually be fined.

Hey, ho!

Custom and Practice

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill.

Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on.

I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredients which come in jars and so on. A second is a variation on the TV show Come Dine With Me and there's another on preparing a romantic dinner. In all of them the end product is to produce a meal of starter, main course and pudding. I've always presumed that the minor confusions around starter and main course were simply linguistic ones. Yesterday though when we popped in to a restaurant for a meal something clicked. The eatery, on the outskirts of Fortuna, only had British clients. Maggie and I chose different starters from the set meal but we had the same main. I noticed that the menu, the list of food with prices, didn't use the Spanish equivalents of starter and main. Instead there was a list of first and second courses followed by the dessert. It wasn't something new to me but I suddenly realised that my interpretation wasn't quite right. The difference is subtle. Here we have two courses of equal weight rather than a lighter starter followed by a more substantial main course. If we were going to emulate that in Spain it would be much more usual to share the starters in the centre of the table. So there is an ever so slight difference between the structure of a standard three course "English" meal and a standard three course "Spanish" meal. Just enough of a difference to discombobulate my students.

Someone who works in the school that I work at in Cieza has been suggesting that we should get together. On Thursday he seemed determined to make it this weekend. He said that he thought he was free for Saturday "por la tarde", and he'd be in touch. When he didn't phone this morning I just presumed it was off. A couple of hours ago I noticed a message from him on my phone saying that he was sorry but things had changed and he wasn't free. When he said tarde to me I automatically translated it to my English idea of afternoon. Now, even to we Brits, afternoon is reltively flexible. It may, technically, be bounded by 6pm but I think the interplay between afternoon and evening is much more subtle than that - a combination of daylight, activity and time. It's similar in Spain except that tarde covers both afternoon and what would be relatively late evening for us. My pal's mental picture of having a drink in the "tarde"and mine were poles apart. It wasn't a translation error it was a cultural error.

I know that a couple of Spanish people read this blog from time to time. It's possible that they will dispute my reading of the situation. I would point them to Restaurante and Mesón. Several Spaniards have told me that there is an obvious difference. When pressed though they don't seem to find it so easy describing those differences to me. It all becomes a bit Cockburn's - one instinctively knows. In just in the same way I remember entertaining a couple of Spaniards in the UK who were perplexed as to why this was a pub and that was a bar or why this was a restaurant and that a café. I knew, indeed it was obvious, but I was unable to enumerate those differences in any logical way.