Spanish stereotypes

In the last post about Albacete I mentioned an exercise I use with my students as a conversation starter. It's not my piece, I took it from a Spanish source and translated it into English.

I disagree with a couple of them, I don't whoeheartedly agree with lots of them and I don't actually know what a couple are getting at. But it's an easy post and I rather suspect that at least one of my readers - that sounds posh doesn't it? - will have a response.

Spain: bulls, guitars and flouncy skirts

This is how tourist guides, written in France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia describe Spain. The old image of bulls and castanets may have disappeared but are these new generalisations any more accurate?

What do you think?

1 Spain is the European country where the fewest number of newspapers are read and where the most popular newspaper deals only with sport.

2 Spain is a desert for vegetarians and a place where ham is considered to be part of a vegetarian diet.

3 Spain isn't all sun but then again everything is conditioned by the sun.

4 It's the place where breakfast in a bar includes a shot of the hard stuff alongside a coffee.

5 Spain is a country where almost nobody gets drunk in public.

6 Where chocolate is sweet and thick.

7 In Spain body hair on women, particularly underarm or on the legs, is socially unacceptable.

8 Where everything, or almost everything, closes down for the afternoon.

9 Where people parade from bar to bar greeting friends and eating tapas before having dinner.

10 RENFE trains are clean and efficient.

11 Where pedestrians are terrorised by motorists at every junction and every zebra crossing.

12 Where life begins as the rest of Europe dons its pyjamas.

13 Where restaurants still sell a bottle of drinkable plonk for 5€.

14 Where crossing yourself and calling on God is still an everyday part of many transactions.

15 It may be Europe but Spaniards aren't Europeans.

16 Where the toilets are clean but never have toilet paper.

17 A country where it's dangerous to get involved in chit chat.

18 Where everyone is criticised - except for the King.

19 A country whose past is marked by hunger and famine.

20 A country that has no cuisine to speak of.

Two down, three to go

Avoiding people who aren't looking where they are going because they are glued to their mobile phones is an unremarkable modern day hazard. I was surprised though by a couple of lads riding their bike down the pedestrianised bit of a tree lined avenue in Albacete yesterday. No hands riding for both as they scrutinised their phones with one saying that there was a Pokemon in another fifty metres. The next three groups of lads I passed were also engrossed in the display of their phones, apparently, also in search of Pokemons. Pokemon Go in Albacete?

I'd gone on the train for a bit of a lark. It was one of the mid distance trains so I was a bit surprised when the TV monitors revealed that the train was doing just a tad over 160 k/h. My ticket was on my phone. The lad next to me was watching an episode of Vikings on his laptop whilst he whatsapped to his chums and those rolling Manchego plains slipped by. Most of the passengers were doing something with their phone so that the woman with a paper newspaper seemed a bit out of place.

I have an English exercise I use with students on the subject of Spanish stereotypes pulled together from  a series of travel guides published in Russia, Japan, the UK etc. The cliches aren't the bulls and sangria type but things like body hair on women, particularly underarm and on legs, being socially unacceptable or that nobody gets drunk in public. One of these supposed cliches is that RENFE trains are clean and efficient. Both my trains were dead on time and clean.

Maybe I'm on a bit of a Munro type mission to bag all the provincial capitals of Castilla la Mancha - Ciudad Real last week and Albacete this. The city has a bit of a reputation for being boring and it's true that there's not a great deal to see  but it seemed very clean and tidy to me with lots of open spaces and a lot of greenery. It's not the first or even the tenth time I've been there but it was still a pleasant enough day out.

Part of that was down to the tourist office. I really appreciated that, after the question as to whether I could understand his Spanish or not, the man talked to me like any other tourist rather than as someone who knew nothing. He gave me a map with some tourist routes on it, explained what was open and what was closed (nearly everything) and sent me away.

That's it really. A bit of an empty post. I didn't even buy one of the knives the town is famous for. I actually meant to but a queue at the bank machine left me a bit strapped for a while and, by the time I'd monied up, the shop I went to had closed for an early lunch because of the reduced summer hours. It certainly was warm enough, around 36ºC and sunny which is a nice temperature for a city hike

And I forgot to buy cheese

In the end I wore jeans for both days. I'd packed shorts but they're not my favourite wear; I appreciate their functionality but I simply don't like them. I'd decided to go to Ciudad Real in Castilla la Mancha. I chose it because there is a train from our local station to Ciudad Real so, to be awkward, I decided to drive.

Castilla la Mancha is Don Quixote, El Quijote, country. A lot of it is a gently undulating plain covered with wheat, maize, sunflowers, vines and olive trees. There are other crops but as I couldn't identify them we'll pretend they don't exist. It's not that far from home, around 350kms. Most of the way I drove along long, arrow straight ribbons of almost empty tar surrounded by yellows, greens and earth redder than Tara. I drove with the windows open and a rebellious strand of hair whipping my face. I like aircon in cars less than I like shorts. I gurgled with delight at the openness of it all and the shimmering heat. I really like the flatlands of Castilla and it's dead easy to imagine Pancho, Rocinate and the Don trotting across the landscape heading for the next village. In Alicante and Murcia we have scattered houses all across the landscape, somebody told me it's because of the Moorish irrigation system, but in much of rural Spain people live in villages rather than in isolated houses. So La Mancha is generally empty land peppered with villages.

I thought this little snatch of poetry from Caminera by Enrique de Mesa sums it up nicely. Apologies for the translation.

Sol de mediodía. Castilla se abrasa.
Tierra monda y llana: ni agua, ni verdor,
ni sombra de chopo, ni amparo de casa.
El camino, blanco. Ciega el resplandor.

Noonday sun. Castilla bakes
Pared and flat, no water no green,
neither shade of poplars nor the protection of home.
The track, white. The brightness blinds.

On the day I set out the news was full of stories of an ola de calor, a heat wave, and one of the places predicted to be as hot as hell was Ciudad Real. In the end it wasn't that bad, it only got to 39ºC, but it was warm enough. The Tom Tom and Google maps were both confused as to the location of my hotel. The reason, it turned out, was that it was in the dead centre of the city in a pedestrianised zone. I asked a policeman for help and I followed his car up restricted entry roads. He left me on the paved area outside the hotel and the only way out was between a newsagent's kiosk and a flower stall and across a couple of pavements. Ciudad Real wasn't exactly boring, nice enough city, but not a lot to look at. In fact, for something to do, and to sit in the cool, I went to the pictures, Infierno Azúl, the one with Blake Lively and a shark - it was watchable enough.

On the way home I went to Aldea del Rey, Almagro, Villanueva de los Infantes and the wetlands near Daimiel. Almagro is famous for a theatre season, for a colonnaded main square and for a "Shakespearean" type theatre but all the villages I went to had big red stone churches, the grand houses of rich families, rows of white houses with balconies and fancy ironwork and shops with impossibly old fashioned window displays. It wasn't that sunny but it was plenty warm and I wandered around taking snaps and drinking copious amounts of non alcoholic beer and a sort of hand made lemon slush puppy called granizado. The bars were, like Andalucía, very generous with the tapas.

Daimiel, as well as being a village is the name for one of Spain's fifteen National parks. It's a wetland fed by the Guadiana River and a place with lots and lots of wildlife, particularly birds. I got there at around three in the afternoon and I fully expected that it would be locked firm shut but, although the information office and the shop were closed, there was nothing to stop me wandering around to my heart's content. Nice place I thought.

And that was it, a bit of a jaunt, something to break the routine for a couple of days.

Just a note, it's a long time since I drove along it but I think it's the A9 in Scotland, possibly the bit in the Cairngorms looking at a map, that is just lovely to drive. Good surface, swooping bends with the occasional stag to be spotted alongside. The N322 from Villanueva de la Fuente to San Pedro doesn't have as many stags but that's a hoot of a road too.

Uninformed

I'm sorry but I've been reading again. La familia de Pascual Duarte this time. In it, at one point, the "hero" of the book is wondering about taking a steamer to America. He has to queue. When he finally gets to the front the clerk gives him a list of prices and sailing times. He complains that that isn't what he wanted. He wanted a conversation about the possibilities. To my mind this is a real difference between we Brits and the Spanish. We like to read our information and Spaniards like to talk to someone to get theirs.

With a bit of a push from me, and despite a little opposition, the village now has a couple of WhatsApp groups. I wanted one group but some little territorial dispute apparently made that impossible. So we now have a quick, effective, cheap, reasonably inclusive and only slightly confusing channel for sharing information. It's not helped much though. We had an outdoor film in the village last Friday. Nobody seemed to know what film we were going to see till it started. And on Monday I found out that I should have booked up for the fiesta meal last Friday.

I'm sure that it's just the reading and talking thing and nothing to do with that old Knowledge is power chestnut.

Feeling Big John

It was hard to believe but, when I got up yesterday morning, the sun wasn't shining. In fact it was trying to rain. All day it was dull. Of course half of Spain is similar to the UK for summer rain with lush green meadows and contented cows but not our bit, our bit, not far from the Med, is picture book Spain. I've written about summer before but it's just such a wonderful thing that I can't not mention it again.

I haven't worn socks for weeks. My only real fashion choice is which colour T shirt to choose today. The sound of flip flops on the pavement is a summer sound. Generally the sun just comes on in the morning and goes out in the evening. And the light; it's just lovely - crystalline skies so blue that they're like a child's painting. The air is dry, a sort of dusty yellowy dry, that plays hell with the cleaning and makes the plants wilt but just makes it feel so - well, summery. And there are noises too. Things sort of move with the heat. Lifeless things move, things creak with the warmth. Live things move as well. The damned flies, millions of them. Little lizards often turn up in our living room as do any number of strange creepy crawlies. Nothing untoward, nothing too bity so far, but lots of them. And here, in the country, it's just one long sound concerto. The birds are relentless - chip, chip, chirruping as long as there is any light. Then of course there are the cicadas and the grasshoppers, with their incessant reverberating drumming. The dogs don't care whether it's winter or summer. Country dogs bark and bark and bark and shatter the evening quiet whatever the season.

Beer is always cold in Spain and chilled glasses are as common as muck. In winter that can seem out of place but in summer it's as right as right can be. The drops of water form on the outside of the glass. You have to be careful though - it's so easy to just have a "cervecita",  in the shade, without thinking about it being alcohol. If you have to drive, never mind, the pop is just as chilled but, somehow, it doesn't feel quite so Mediterranean. And if the drinks are chilled so is the food - fruit and salads and things that glisten with summer colour replace those tasty but drab and calorific winter dishes. Lovely.

Alicante summers are simply splendid.

A leisurely time when women wore picture hats

I've read a few books by a Spanish author called Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867 -1928). A couple of the books were about life in Valencia, about the new bourgeoisie, the sort of people who didn't make their money by the sweat of their brow but by playing with money. The sort who despite being in debt need a new carriage to keep up appearances, the sort who would go on to be politicians if only they would stop impregnating the scullery maids. I found the picture the books conjured up of Spanish life at the tail end of the 19th Century fascinating.

We went to Valencia to catch up with one of Maggie's nieces who was in the city for a European Arts Project. Maggie had booked a hotel that was about 3km from the Cathedral, near to the City of Arts and Sciences. It was in a district full of the sort of buildings that conjured up the characters from the Blasco Ibáñez books.  Big impressive buildings with lots of decoration, ample windows, high ceilings and fancy facades. The streets were lined with trees and there were lots of shaded little squares. Just around the corner was the old course of the River Turia. For the Blasco Ibáñez characters the circuit round and round from one side of the river to the other offered the perfect opportunity to show off those new carriages, flaunt that Parisian dress and even to allow appropriate, chaperoned, conversations between young men and women.

Valencia city centre is another showcase for those big turn of the Twentieth Century buildings that are so typical of the centres of many Spanish cities. We don't have anything similar in Culebrón or even in Pinoso. In fact there were quite a few noticeable differences between the Spain that I live in and the one that we visited for a few hours.

Somebody complained about some of the generalisations that I often make on this blog. They told me that I shouldn't draw conclusions about Spain from Pinoso or Cieza or Fortuna, which they referred to, as España profunda, Deep Spain. I took issue with my reader on the grounds that nowhere is particularly isolated nowadays. If you can watch Akshay Kumar and Nimrat Kaur in Bollywood's Airlift as easily as you can watch Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones on your mobile phone, if you can follow the progress of some round the world cyclist as they cross Uzbekistan via their Facebook page and if the drones overflying Afghanistan are controlled from Lincolnshire then it stands to reason that nowhere offers a safe haven from modernity. Even those who want to live in a cave will still find the world chasing them down through old technologies like television and radio. That said there are major differences of course. Living without running water in Havana or being enslaved in Nouakchott, Mauritania bears little comparison to living in Chelsea or the swanky bits of Mumbai. Conversely Pinoso and Valencia are hardly worlds apart.

So we were in Valencia and I thought these houses are nice, I liked the dappled light effect from the sun shining through the trees. I liked the variety and the choice of cakes in the tea shoppy sort of bar we went to. In the central market the stalls were perfectly ordinary but they were selling in an innovative way - micro brewery beers here, oriental vegetables there - a little twist on my everyday. I know a mango smoothie is hardly a hold the front page moment but we are a bit short of smoothie stalls in Pinoso even if you can buy the product in the supermarket. There were hire bikes, the segway groups, the guides showing people around the Old Exchange and the good sounding tour from someone explaining the War of Succession in Estuary English to a bunch of Dutch and French people. All something for we yokels to gawp at. The bars were a bit trendier, the shops were a lot more diverse, there were buses and taxis to take you where you needed to go. On the other hand I was quite sure there was some skulduggery with the addition on our first bill in that tea shoppy bar, the noise of those buses and taxis and bikes and cars pounding down those sun dappled avenues was extremely unpleasant and the interminable hunt for a parking space amongst those leafy squares was exasperating to say the least. The crowds of tourists following the raised umbrella kept bumping into me and spoiling the snaps. There were a lot of people who approached us with outstretched hands or hoped that we would pay to hear them play the bandoneón. It was great, it was interesting, we were surrounded by galleries and great architecture. There were expensive cars and things happening and tourist information and people from all over the world and there were business people doing their thing with suits and posh skirts but it was even better when the motorway quietened down and the countryside opened up and we saw Almansa castle in the distance and the dusty little towns and countryside of Deep Spain spread out before us.

Culebrón

Culebrón is one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Culebrón is an unusual name for a village. Usually the word Culebrón is related to snakes. Big snakes. Or soap operas. Most Spaniards simply presume I'm mispronouncing the name when I tell them where I live. The last headcount said 112 people live here amongst them three British families with a fourth currently rebuilding an old house.

Culebrón is dusty and a browny, beigy, yellow colour. It is not a place where dogs, cats or humans worry too much about traffic - there isn't a lot. It would be wrong to describe Culebrón as pretty but it's not ugly either. There is a complete mix of houses but most tend to be old and look typical for the area - stone built, maybe with concrete facings, blinds and grilles over the windows, various colours of paint jobs. Plenty of oddly shaped concrete and corrugated iron sheds too. There is quite a lot of greenery and trees, mainly pines but with wild figs and pomegranates. The village is surrounded by vineyards, olive and almond groves and lots of crops I don't recognise.

Children are the usual beneficiaries of Spanish wills so houses generally pass to the sons and daughters. Most Spaniards don't like to live in a village so, until we foreigners arrived, country properties were unwanted. In the end the brothers and sisters would agree to keep their inherited house for family use simply to avoid the faff of selling it on. Of course some families live in Culebrón all year round but it really livens up during the summer when people move out of the towns and to the villages where, local wisdom says, it's cooler.

The village is basically cut into two unequal halves by the CV83 road which joins Pinoso to Monóvar. Most of the village is on the North side of the main road but there are a couple of smaller clusters of houses to the South; we're in one of them. Addresses in Culebrón are just numbers. So number 1 is on our side of the village on the slopes of the Sierra del Xirivell. Just on the other side of the main road is Restaurante Eduardo and he's number 17 so my guess is that there are seventeen houses in our little group.

Eduardo's restaurant is one of two businesses that I know of in Culebrón, the other is the Brotons bodega and oil mill. There have been a couple of attempts to make a go of businesses alongside what was the old main road but, like the Bates Motel, moving the road made them untenable. Nowadays, apart from various farmers, the restaurant and the bodega there is no obvious business in Culebrón. There were businesses in the past - for instance a building near to us used to be a shoe factory not so long ago. There are no shops so vans and lorries bring essentials like bread, cheese and bottled gas to some impenetrable timetable. Of course there may be thriving Internet businesses or cottage industries that I don't know about but I rather suspect that the 8Mgb download speed  and the less than 2kw power supply to most houses may be a little limiting.

Services are few and far between. I think a bus stops outside Eduardo's once a day on the run to the hospital down in Elda but that may be old information. The village school which was opposite the little square has long gone, there's a bit of a run down basketball/football area next to the recycling bins, the post box and post delivery is a bit unreliable, the public phone was taken away a while ago but most of the village (not our part) got mains drainage and fire hydrants a few years back. There is also a little chapel, an ermita, used principally during the village fiesta as well as a social centre which is used for community and private events. We do have a Neighbourhood Association which occasionally organises trips and always runs a couple of meals each year.

Our village fiesta is a weekend in July. There is a repetitive programme on the fiesta weekend but it's then when the village is busiest. My guess is that the talking and socialising is infinitely more important than the gachasmigas competition, the chocolate y toña session or even the Saturday evening meal with live music under the pine trees. Mind you for the past three, or maybe four, years there has also been a morning walking and running race organised to coincide with the fiesta and that brings hordes of people to Culebrón.

There's lots more to Culebrón but this piece is already too long so that will have to do. Good place to live, advantages and disadvantages like everywhere, but not too shabby at all.