Beginners guide to table manners

Very occasionally I write a piece for the blog which forms a part of the Country Fincas website. Country Fincas is the estate agent that Maggie works for in Pinoso.

Having written it specifically for them I thought why not use it myself? So here it is.

The English are ironic. The French don't like to wash. Germans are humourless and efficient. Well so they say. But the chances are that it's not actually true. There are some generalisations of course that are generally true. For instance punctuality is important, culturally important, in some countries and completely irrelevant in others. Punctuality doesn't really matter much if someone lives in a place without timepieces or where there are no trains to catch. My guess is that a Nigerian farmer in the middle of the countryside doesn't really care what time they start work so long as the work gets done.

Anyway, Spain is very similar, in most ways, to the rest of Europe. There is law and order, traffic is organised, water comes from taps, children go to school, supermarkets have lots and lots of food, cows are not sacred, head covering is optional, men can cut their hair as they wish, people only use chopsticks to eat under certain circumstances. In nearly all of the big things Spain is very much like the UK. There are hundreds or thousands of detail differences though and some don't seem so small when you are faced with what seems to be interminable bureaucracy or animal cruelty to give a couple of examples.

We've lived here for a while now and lots of those detail differences now seem so normal to us that we don't really notice them. When friends come to see us from the UK though it's different. They do notice. So here is my guide to eating and drinking. I'm sure that I will miss things out or overgeneralise but it's a good starting point for the tyro.

In a bar or café the server will come to you. It can be a little difficult deciding sometimes whether a place is a restaurant or whether it's a place where you can get a drinks and a snack. Table cloths usually indicate that you are expected to eat. Obviously you can choose to sit at the bar but you do not, usually, need to approach the bar to get served. Sit at your table, either inside or outside (on the terraza), and someone will come to you. If the terraza is deserted or if the bar staff do not have a clear view of the terrace it can be quicker to go to the bar, ask for your drinks, or whatever, and then sit down and wait for them to be brought. You do not need to pay until you are about to go though, if you are only going to make one order, it can be quicker to pay when the things are brought to you. If you pay the bar staff will presume that you do not need more service. In some seaside places or when a bar is crowded because of an event you may be asked to pay at once to avoid people slipping away without paying or to make life easier for the servers.

At events, music festivals, town fiestas etc. where there is a bar a bit like the beer tent at some British event, you may have to queue to get tickets which you then exchange at the bar to get the food or drink. The idea is to avoid the temporary bar staff stealing money by centralising the money taking.

Food is usually served from around 2pm through till 3.30pm for lunch and dinner from around 9pm till maybe 11pm. In tourist areas or where there are a lot of non Spaniards opening times are often earlier. Cold snacks, the famous tapas, are available at any time but anything that requires cooking may only be available when the kitchen is staffed for lunch or dinner. In the big cities food is available around the clock in many establishments. In lots of places there will be a display counter on the bar where you can browse some of the tapas on offer and order by pointing. Spaniards often order a lot of tapas to share rather than ordering a more formal meal.

Whether there will be a list of the things available or not is a bit hit and miss. Again lists and menus are more likely where there are more non Spanish customers. It's very usual for the server to list the things available and, when you ask for the bill, to simply tell you how much you owe without anything being written down.

The main meal of the day for many Spaniards is lunch rather than dinner. One way to eat cheaply and well is to have the menú diario or menú del día - the set meal - where you will usually be offered a range of first courses, second courses and desserts with a drink and bread. We Brits tend to think of the first course as being a starter but that's not usually the case and the first course is often as substantial as the second. The word menú suggests a set meal, the Spanish word for what we think of as a menu is actually carta. If you don't want to take one of the fixed options you can usually choose from the carta. The set meals are usually much, much cheaper. If you are wandering from restaurant to restaurant checking the set meal prices look to see whether the price includes bread (pan), bebida (drink), postre (pudding) and coffee (café). One of the little tricks in tourist areas is to miss those items off the list so that one 10€ menú includes everything whilst the 9€ menú next door charges extra for one or more of the items. It is very common for the menú to list postre o café, pudding or coffee so, if you have both, expect to pay a tad more.

Another little trick for tourists is that you see a blackboard outside a restaurant offering the set meal. Once you sit down you are given the carta and in it there is no mention of the fixed meal. Confused by the situation you then order from the carta and end up paying more than you intended. If there is a board offering a set meal then there is a set meal. Ask for it and you will get it.

Some places do a fixed evening meal too but it is much rarer than the daytime equivalent. Normally you will choose from the carta in the evening. One of those little differences is that if you choose something from the entrantes, starters, the serving staff will presume that it is to share with your fellow diners so the starters will be put in the middle of the table for everyone to have a go at.

I could go on but that's probably enough to digest for now.

I wave my hat to all I meet And they wave back to me

Somewhere I came across a newspaper piece about Los pueblos más bonitos de España, the prettiest villages in Spain. The organisation that promotes this list seems to be a not for profit organisation. Whatever its origins or purpose it gave us a simple holiday plan.

We have friends who run a casa rural, a country house for rent, which goes under the name of Vientos de Gudar in the village of Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel. With a visit to our friends, and their house, as our ultimate destination we decided to do a mid distance tour from Culebrón up through the villages listed in the provinces of Castellón and Teruel with our end point being Fuentes.

The first stop on the list was Vilafamés then on to Peñíscola, Calaceite, Valdearobres, Morella, Cantavieja, Puertomingalvo and Rubielos de Mora. We also stopped off in La Fresneda and Beceite which didn't feature on the list but were recommended by locals.

The villages varied. Peñíscola for instance is a busy seaside resort with the old town built around the castle. Anyone who has seen, and remembers, the film El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren knows the outline of Peñíscola old town. Morella too was packed with visitors, so many that the local police funnelled traffic into a huge car park. Once inside the walled town there were countless shops selling local produce and knick knacks, alongside tens of restaurants touting regional menus, all of them aimed fairly and squarely at tourists. Calaceite on the other hand, well the old town at least, was full of huge stone buildings and steep streets but there was hardly anyone around; we couldn't even find a bar to buy a cold drink. Valderrobres was something half way in between; more huge stone buildings, more steep streets and stone staircases lots of them almost deserted whilst, in the main square, the bars and restaurants were doing a brisk trade with we day trippers. Maggie says she liked Valderrobres best. Puertomingalvo was, perhaps, my favourite. More stone, more steps, a gigantic church, a small art gallery, a splendidly different restaurant and several people posing for snaps but still quiet enough to hear the birds singing.

As I said, our destination was the casa rural owned by a couple of old friends. They had the house built from scratch and they have been running it as a business for a few years now. Our pals said that bookings for their house weren't bad but they thought that rural tourism seemed not to be recovering from the economic crisis as quickly as beach tourism. In summer their adopted village comes alive with summer residents. In the past, the bar at the local swimming pool has been run by a group of young women who wear harem pants, sport nose studs and cook things like hummus and cous cous - pretty alternative for Spain. We were looking forward to snacking there but it seems they were outbid by another outfit for this year's summer contract.

Now obviously, as we were away from home we needed somewhere to stay overnight. We've used a lot of hotels in Spain and it's usual to be able to find something decent in the 50€ to 60€ bracket and often less. The weekend before we set out on our road trip for instance we'd gone to Madrid. We stayed in a central hotel there and we were mysteriously upgraded so that our 57€ bought us a junior suite. Also this month I made a bit of a jaunt to Ciudad Real, a small provincial capital, where the centre of town four star hotel cost just 39€. When I was trying to find hotels or guest houses for our three nights in Castellón/Teruel I had to discount lodgings in several of the villages we were visiting because they were beyond my financial reach. The choice seemed to be either expensive or slummy. In the end we paid 60€, 63€ and 70€ for the places we stayed. All of them looked great from the outside but all had pretty dodgy Wi-Fi and one didn't have aircon. None of them were bad, or dirty, or unacceptable but only the 70€ room could be described as anything other than ordinary.

I suppose there are sound motives, from a business point of view, for the higher prices (and snail like Wi-Fi) in rural locations but I did wonder if one of the reasons for the slower recovery of rural tourism is simply that it isn't price competitive with either its beach or city rivals.

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One of my shorter pals had relatives who were horny handed sons of toil. Generation upon generation of farmers. They lived, as I recall, on the edge of the English Lake District. When the Ordnance Survey began to mark scenic viewpoints on their one inch maps (my long term memory is still fine) suddenly lots of cars began to pull up at the top of the farm lane to have a look see. The family turned this to their benefit by setting up a stall selling fresh eggs.

We were in Madrid for the weekend. We went on the AVE, the high speed train which, as usual, was on time both there and back. I only saw the indicated speed on the carriage displays once during the journey, a disappointing 296 kph. We stayed in some really nice hotel close to Alonso Martínez underground station. For some reason they gave us a junior suite with two washbasins, two tellies, a sofa and a king sized bed.

Straight off the train we dumped the bags and walked across the road to the Reina Sofia Museum - well museo in Spanish though it's a gallery not a museum for us. Four floors of culture. Although I've been to the gallery a couple of times, at least, in the past, it's years since I've actually been inside. We spent a couple of hours padding around the top two floors along with plenty of other people. There was no hustle and bustle. Lots of space and time to stop and stare. I was enjoying myself but my old feet and legs began to ache. We went for a sit down and a snack but, taken aback by the prices, we settled on a couple of overpriced drinks. We were generally overwhelmed by Madrid prices because of our hill-billy incomes but we got by anyway. The break though was fatal. We realised we were done for so we decided to have a look at Guernica (one must, mustn't one?) and then call it a day. There were a lot more people milling around that floor but there was no element of elbows or jostling; just maybe twenty people gazing in awe at Picasso's famous painting.

Next day and we did more wandering. Maggie was keen to see the Bosco exhibition, that's the bloke we call Hieronymus Bosch. He's a bit of a star in Spain partly because the Prado and Escorial have quite a lot of his work and partly because the paintings are bizarre. So we got in the shortish queue and waited for maybe twenty minutes to get some tickets for later in the day. It was about noon now and later in the day turned out to be quarter to seven. So we touristed away until the given hour and then joined the throng. This time it was a throng. People standing, apparently in raptures, ten centimetres from the surface of a painting and scrutinising the detail, lots of people laughing at the strange elements of the paintings, lots of barging, lots of gentle, art crowd, pushing. Museum staff were milling around to keep an eye on the punters and they were kept busy.

The strange thing is the last time we were at the Prado we went to have a look at the Boscos. That time there was nobody much around. There were a few of us but then it was similar, crowd wise, to having a look at the W. Eugene Smith photos in the Reina Sofia the day before. Not a lot of foot traffic, not a lot of scrutiny by the gallery staff and plenty of time to stand and stare.

My mind wandered to OS maps.

In the same place as always

I've mentioned it before, The poster that misses off the where or the when. The poster which tells you that the event is in the usual place. So, last night, with guests, we went down to Elche to experience the Nit de l'Alba - the night of dawn. I didn't need to check the info. It would be like always. Of course because I assumed it would be it wasn't.

Basically the Nit de l'Alba is an orgy of fireworks somehow miraculously loosely tethered to something religious. The origins are supposed to be that in the Middle Ages families in the city offered thanks to the Virgin for each of their children by launching one rocket for each child on the holy day designated to her. Nowadays all over the city, fireworks, aerial fireworks, are launched into the night sky in one long session of rolling thunder. I thought it was usually from quarter to midnight but Maggie told me that the city authorities were going to do something new this year in launching six enormous palmeras from different parts of the city at quarter past eleven. A pyrotechnical palmera is launching a huge number of fireworks from a concentrated area so that the tongues of flame and colour rise into the sky and fan out like the fronds of a palm tree, or palmera in Spanish. Elche is the city of the palm tree.

We headed for the Basilica church, where, at midnight, the most impressive of all the palmeras is launched from the highest of the church's towers. I read somewhere that it reaches over 250 metres into the sky. Sounds a long way to me. Anyway the square around the basilica de Santa Maria was closed. It seems that it has to do with European Health and Safety regs which have meant that several of the launch sites for the fireworks have had to be changed too. So, if things had to change, the city decided that it would try to improve the spectacle as well. Last night they pumped 64,000 rockets into the night sky and set off 390 of the palmeras using over two tons of gunpowder in the process. And that process started in earnest at half past eleven, just as we had arrived at the fences around the Basilica, and were discussing whether to go and get a drink or not. We waited whilst the lights of the city, at least in and around the square, were turned off. We waited whilst the fragment of the famous Elche mystery play - el Gloria Patri - boomed out from the loudspeakers and, as the sound faded away, the huge palmera from the church burst into the darkened sky. Impressive, With the lights back on the habanera type song, Aromas ilicitanos, got its turn to fill the square. It always says in the tourist write ups of the event that all the ilicitanos, the people of Elche, sing along with the song. Maybe so and maybe not but I can confirm that at least one young man was doing his best to make up for the recalcitrant, just in my left ear, at top volume and with obvious pride in his city.

We went on for a tapa or two and I forgot all about the firework battle, the guerra de carretillas, which I had described to one of our guests. In fact this morning I wondered if it still existed and I found that it does but that it has been renamed Carretillà to do away with the bellicose reference. In fact it was depressing reading for anyone who approves of the reckless abandon of some Spanish traditions. It seems the event, which once upon a time was a pitched battle between firework wielding youths, now has a specific, and purposely delayed, start time, is limited to one part of the city inside a fenced compound and that potential participants have to go on a training course beforehand.

One of the aspects I like most about the Nit de l'Alba has nothing to do with the organised part. It is that the city is simply rocked by bangers, rockets, Roman candles, flares and jumping jacks for hours. Fireworks exploded around the car as we searched for a parking space, we watched tiny children throwing bangers as we ate, the pavement was crunchy with rocket sticks. It would require a better writer than me to describe the way that the city simply booms and sparkles for hours but that's what it did and I think our visitors thought it had been worth the journey and the latish night.

Holiday, holiday, holiday time

I was born in Yorkshire. Summer holidays were short as I remember, a week usually, and our standard destinations were close by - Scarborough, Brid, Cleethorpes, maybe over to Morecambe or even Blackpool. Relatively local with the occasional long haul down to Newquay or maybe away from the beach in the Lakes. Apart from the school trip to Switzerland I didn't get to Europe till I was eighteen and, even then, it was only to Paris.

Nowadays my pals back in the UK tell me that they've been to far flung destinations - Bali, New Zealand, Goa, the Maldives, Abu Dabi. To be different you have to give Skyscanner a good workout and head for Kazakhstan or Greenland and even then it's just another destination.

Talking to Spanish students about their holiday plans is a reminder of my Scarborough days. They seem perfectly happy to go to the nearest seaside resort, if it's not too far, or otherwise they head for some rural destination equally close to home. It's a massive generalisation of course but I read something today that backs up my perception.

The Spanish Holiday Habits survey carried out by Madison Market Research for Cerveceros of Spain found that 90% of Spaniards prefer to stay local during the summer holidays. Half of those interviewed, irrespective of their age, said that the beach was favourite though trying new cities and new cuisine was good for about a third of the sample. It's been the same for the past forty years.

The survey did note one change though. The family holiday home is now less popular than staying in a hotel. The other big change is what goes in your luggage. The mobile phone obviously goes but so too do the laptop and the tablet. It's no good simply going on holiday you have to prove it to your pals by posting where you are online. Facebook is the favourite social network followed by WhatsApp and Instagram.

Over four of every ten people said that their favourite holiday drink was beer. First day essentials were going for a beer on a terrace, the space outside the bar, and having a siesta. I suppose that they prove that you are on holiday and not caught up in the usual round of work and domestic tasks. 

Forgetting Lionel Richie

Spain is in full fiesta season. Our local town, Pinoso, has just finished its fiestas or, more accurately, is about to finish in a couple of hours. The fairground has already left town, the barriers will be taken down tomorrow and all those temporary road signs removed. I would say we'll be back to normal but after so many days of non stop action lots of the town's bars and restaurants will be locked fast for a couple of weeks as will a lot of other businesses and we won't be back into the usual routine till September.

When we first got here I was keen to go to most of the various types of fiesta from the tiny village celebrations, where the fun might be a foam party or a bouncy castle, through to Moors and Christians, Semana Santa, Carnaval, Three Kings and all the other big events with thousands of people, late nights, lots of revelry and long, long processions. It would take ages to go through the various types of events we've been to. Maggie got tired of fiestas ages ago. She wasn't, for instance, for bothering with Romans and Carthaginians as long ago as when we lived in Cartagena.

I'm a bit underemployed at the moment. The real problem with not working is not earning. Time rich, cash poor as we used to say in the nineties. Maggie is working - all summer. So, if I do anything it costs money, which I don't have, and I have to do it alone.

I did think that I'd take advantage of the local fiestas this year as a cheap and easy to access form of entertainment. The truth is that my unwillingness to speak Spanish coupled with my increasing churlishness and a good dose of been there, done that means that I simply can't be bothered. I took one look at the children beating each other with the sausage dog shaped balloons at the village fiesta and turned on my heel. I grimly resolved to get involved in the Pinoso celebrations but I took the insinuation that I was some sort of sex offender quite badly and decided that a beer in front of the Spanish version of First Dates on the telly was a much more entertaining option.

I promise I will try to get out and about to a few more fiestas in the three weeks left of summer but I'm not guaranteeing anything.

Being two short ones

A man called Matthew Hirtes contacted me. His little description on Twitter says Going Local in Gran Canaria author covers Spain+ for the likes of Telegraph Travel & The Huffington Post. I was impressed. Well I've heard of both newspapers and I actually read one of them.

He was asking me to do something with him on Spain Buddy which is one of those English language sites with lots of information, news and interviews about Spain mixed in with the inevitable advertising.

Always happy to get involved in a little self promotion I said of course. But the contact had been via Twitter. By the end Matthew must have been tearing his hair out at my failure to understand what I'm sure he considered to be simple instructions. I read Twitter entries reasonably regularly but I've never understood quite how the topic linking works with @ and # so I'm a bit of a passive user. We got there in the end though so if you got here via that link sorry for the circular motion. Plenty of other entries below to keep you amused.

Oh, by the way talking about using things I don't understand I've got a Tumblr account too now. No idea what you're supposed to do with that. It's probably for young people.

Image control

I have a friend who takes pictures for one of the stock photo libraries. The rules about which photos are acceptable, with exceptions for editorial use, are pretty strict. No logos, no designs that would be recognisable as logos and no recognisable people. I found the rules very difficult to follow especially the people one.

Yesterday I was at the opening ceremony for the fiestas in Pinoso. I got bored of the speeches and wandered off to take some snaps of the funfair. An English chap told me not to take pictures of one of the rides because his kids were on it. I didn't but I was peeved. There was a suggestion that I was taking the photos for some very unpleasant reason. Actually if he'd ever seen any of my after dark shots he wouldn't have been concerned as recognising anyone on them is impossible as they are so blurred!

Anyway I was putting the snaps on Facebook and there was a picture of the ride in question before the chap had said anything. I decided against posting it just to be safe but then I did a bit of Googling. It looks as though taking pictures of people, especially children, without consent in Spain is something you can go to prison for.

I asked the question on a couple of English language forums and one response took me to the source legislation. The law is basically about protecting people's dignity and privacy. Spanish law is not easy reading but, as you would expect, there are no examples with the law, that comes later in the courts. So the law, whilst being specific isn't much use in deciding how to behave.

But then the questions. Imagine we're at the Sagrada Familia or the Alhambra. You would have to work pretty hard to take pictures that didn't feature people. What about the street parades? I think it's reasonably safe to assume that the people dressed up and waving at the crowd expect to have their photo taken so they have given their consent but what about the family on the other side of the street, the ones behind the Walt Disney characters? I asked that specific question, the crowd question, to someone on one of the forums who seemed pretty hard line about this because he said he had taken legal action against the kindergarten his children attend for publishing photos without his consent. Consent that he says he would have withheld. He said, about being photographed in the crowd, "I will take measures to have it removed whether it be direct contact with you or via the platform which you've posted it on"

I don't suppose there is any problem with taking the photos as long as nobody objects at the time. The real problem comes with publishing them. Actually it takes me quite a while to load photos to Facebook and the like so, if I were to stop, it would save me hours. I have to decide now whether to stop doing it but, if I do, it will mean that my mum, sister and even my partner will never see my snaps.

Ah well. One person's security is another person's restriction.

I think the header photo is safe enough though.