Saturday, February 25, 2017

History evenings

I went to a little bilingual talk last night about the history of the nearby village of La Romana. It wasn't at all bad. The local expert, Francesc Gallardo, did his stuff and answered, knowledgeably, the questions he was asked. He was ably assisted by a woman, Anabel, who handled the translation. She was the same woman who did the talk back in December.

I had no real trouble understanding nearly all of the Spanish part of the talk and my English was up to the English part though that didn't seem to be everyone's case. I'm not talking about the Spanish; I'm talking about the English. I thought we had some most amusing culture and translation problems.

In the Q&A session someone asked in English about a building that had a "big flat stone" inside, "probably" for processing grapes. The translator turned the English into Spanish and talked about grapes and wine to the Francesc, the speaker. He said he didn't know of any bodegas (wineries) but, in his answer, he mentioned almazaras, oil mills, places to press olives. The translator, missing the cultural confusion of what was being processed, didn't mention the oil mill reference at first. It was all sorted out in the end of course. The big flat stone was for crushing olives - oil not wine. Back in Elland we Britons didn't process a lot of wine or oil either.

Someone else asked about the history of some cave houses. They asked if it were true that the houses had originally been dug in Roman times so that people with leprosy had somewhere to live away from the village. As we'd just been told that basically there wasn't a village of la Romana until the turn of the 20th century and that no Roman artefacts had been found in the area the answer was going to be disappointing for the questioners. I could imagine the number of times that story had been told to visitors.

I don't know about you but I don't really have any trouble with American English. If someone talks about fawcets and car trunks I am not confused.  And if neither pronounced one way and neither pronounced the other are American and British English then I have no idea which is which. Although I may be dissimulating I think I remember being taken to see South Pacific and, if I do, I would have been four at the time. So I have been watching Hollywood movies (films) for a long time. I would suppose the true is same for almost any English speaker worldwide.

So, last night, there is a second question about cave houses in nearby Algueña. There is some initial confusion about which cave houses and where. There is a secondary question, in English, in the air, from an audience member, about whether these may be the cave houses behind the petrol station. The translator picks up this question and relays it to the speaker. The Spanish word gasolinera for petrol station, service station, comes back in the translator's American English. "Are these the caves behind ther gas station? The original question asker says she doesn't know anything about a gas station in Algueña and the whole question just sort of evaporates. I don't know Algueña well but the petrol station on the main road through the village is obvious. I'm sure the original questioner knows it too. So this time I think we have a linguistic problem related to gas, as in cookers, as against gas, as in gasoline.

The group that made me aware of this event - Spanish International Alicante - says that its aim is to promote friendship, integration and interchange of languages through social evenings, events and cultural activities. That was certainly going on last night.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Colloquial contractions, prepositions and phrasal verbs

When I was at university, a lifetime ago, I was asked how much say I thought students should have in the learning programme. My answer, then, was almost none. Nobody had yet persuaded me that participation was the way to go. Nobody had then persuaded me that it was the learning that was important.

It used to be that language teaching, English language teaching, in Spain was pretty straightforward. The teacher started with page one, went on to page two and so on. There was a lot of writing and copying and not much talking or listening. I'm sure it's no longer like that.

Having been brought up in another country it never struck me to teach in that traditional Spanish way. Even when we have a course book I tend to drift off the straight and narrow. I try to talk them through grammar. I don't think that a grammatical rule with one line of explanation followed by a page of exceptions is going to be very helpful to someone who has to juggle with vocabulary, structures, idioms, grammar, rhythm and pronunciation as they try to get something to eat in a café.

The other night I was having a bit of a discussion in a bar with someone who is doing an English course at the Official School of Languages. She had been told that unless she demonstrated her ability to use certain constructions, we talked about inversions, things like, "Not until I heard my name did I believe I had won the race" or "Hardly had I begun to speak when I was interrupted" would she be able to demonstrate that she had achieved a B2 level. What the B2 descriptor, of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, actually says is that someone at this level can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialisation, can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers possible without strain for either party and can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

Not much mention there of inversion. Obviously the text books have to try to build more complicated language into their various levels but the truth is that the CEFR is all about communication and not about grammar - the grammar is there to describe how the communication works. I saw a direct parallel between trudging through a text book as a way to teach English and a modern day student being told that the level of effectiveness in speaking English is in the complexity of the language.

At one of the places I work my boss said that a student had complained that we spent all the time talking and listening and reading stuff and suchlike in class and that what we should be doing was doing more exam papers, more filling in the gaps in grammar exercises. The complainer thought I should, certainly, be setting more homework rather than urging people to check those things they found difficult, to read things in English to help with structure and form and to consult grammar books to help them work out how to say the things they wanted to say or write.

Page one it is then.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Plans and plots

A while ago we got something from the Catastro, or Land Registry, saying that we needed to stump up 60€ to have our entry in the land registry updated. I did a fair bit of research at the time to find out what was happening and why. I came to the conclusion that the Catastro was doing two things at once - updating the rateable value of houses and checking that their details for each house were correct. If there was any discrepancy between their records and the actual state of the property they were systematically fining people a standard 60€ for regularising their records throughout Spain. I read somewhere that, in Pinoso, about 1,000 households had been charged the 60€. Considering that there are fewer than 8,000 people in Pinoso and presuming that more than one person lives in most houses it sounded as though a good percentage of the records were skew whiff in some way.

The system here is a lot like the old British Rates system. Each property has an assigned value calculated on the sort of land it occupies, what use the buildings or land are put to and the area it occupies. Basically then the Catastro says your property has such and such a value - a value that bears no relation whatsoever to the market value. Each local authority then sets a local multiplier. To give a completely fictitious example a 100 square metre house might have a notional value with the Land registry of 50,000€. The local council then sets its charge at, for instance, 0.5% of the value. In this case the rates would be 250€ per year. The last time our rateable value was updated was, I think, in 1987 so I expected a bill, a settling up.

Maggie picked up the new valuation and the updated bill from the Post Office the other day. It wasn't for a few euros extra it was for 1600 of the little blighters. It would take me about nine weeks work to earn that amount. By the time I got home Maggie had been investigating. She had been pretty sleuthlike and she'd discovered that, when they had updated our details, the Catastro had added in most of next door. So although it was bad we did, at least, have an obvious error. Well it's obvious to us and we just have to hope it's as obvious to the people at the Catastro.

Local taxes are collected, in most of Alicante, by an agency called SUMA on behalf of the local authorities. I went to the SUMA offices in Elda, about 25km from home, to see what I could do. The woman who dealt with me was pleasant, efficient and helpful. She told me that the bill had to be paid otherwise we'd find the bailiffs on our doormat or that our bank accounts had been embargoed. I asked if I could break the payment down into instalments and the answer was yes. She quickly sorted out the details. The good news is that, provided the Land Registry agrees that we are paying more than we should, they will pay us back. I asked the SUMA woman how long Catastro normally take to respond - well months, usually, she said, sometimes years - they're not quick.

And the process? Well, basically I needed to collect together a bunch of documents and write an explanatory begging letter. Literally. I used a verb at the end of the letter which is rogar a verb which translates as to beg or to plead. I used it because it's the sort of verb that I've seen in this sort of letter. Spanish letters from local and national government tend to an over complex and archaic language. I asked my friend Carlos, the author, to check the letter I had written and he didn't comment on the verb. I asked a work colleague to check the letter, she didn't comment on the verb. To beg, to plead is obviously an adequate verb when talking to the Catastro.

Today I handed in all the paperwork. The man I dealt with was a bit negative when I started, maybe he wasn't keen on dealing with another tongue tied Brit, but by the time I was getting ready to go he seemed to think it was a pretty simple and fixable error. Let's hope he's right and that it doesn't take months and months to get a reply.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)

When driving in Spain crossing solid white lines, in their many manifestations, is a bit of a no-no. I did it innocently in Cartagena in front of a passing police car once and got that crooked finger "come hither" symbol along with a sound telling off. On the telly the traffic cameras in the helicopters metaphorically click their tongues as lorries, cars and motorbikes, on completely deserted roads, take the direct line through the curves.

Culebrón, our village, is split in half by the CV83 road - or more accurately split into something like a big bit and a little bit - and it's our part, the little bit, that is the cast aside orphan of the village. Our access road is made from dirt and it is criss crossed with rivulets carved by the occasional storms. Some of the gullies are suspension torturing deep. Our street lighting is vestigial and intermittent and about half the houses are just beyond the reach of the mains drainage.

But, more than that, we are marooned behind solid white lines. Getting in and out of our part of the village requires either long detours to stay legal or nerves of steel as you make that not strictly legal, well definitely 300€ worth of illegal, turn across those stubbornly solid white lines. If anyone were to make that illegal turn - which, of course none of us do - they would also worry about the outright safety of it all as the traffic on the main road whizzes past at a lot more than the 60 km/h speed limit.

We really need a roundabout but my guess is that roundabouts don't come cheap. As I took the legal route the other day I wondered if a bit of extra signing and some re-organisation of the white lines might do the trick.

On the Town Hall website there's a form - it's a form that smacks of quill pens and  "I remain your humble servant" despite its downloadability - that seems to be a catch all for any general petition to the local council. So I filled it in and popped it into the Council offices on the way to work. I got a bar code and everything. The Town Hall doesn't have jurisdiction over the main road but I asked if they might make an application to the regional Government for we badly done to Culebroneros.

I know what will happen. Absolutely nothing. I mean nothing. Nobody will turn me down or reply but the form will simply cease to exist. Nonetheless, as I walked away, checking the Spanish of my copy for the umpteenth time, I felt that, at least, I'd tried.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Old familiar ways

I do a Spanish class each Monday. I do it to make sure that I speak at least a little Spanish each week. Otherwise I probably wouldn't. One doesn't need much Spanish in a supermarket or a bar. In my job the expectation is that I speak English. At home Maggie's English is as good as mine and she makes sure that we watch English speaking TV.

Last week the young woman who teaches me Spanish had written a short piece about a local festival. I noticed that it was tagged as level B1. This is one of the levels of the Common European Framework for language learning. The description of level B1 says that someone at this level can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in everyday situations and can deal with most situations likely to arise in an area where the language is spoken. People who do level B1 English courses with me can, in reality, hardly string two words together.

Yesterday we went to see a film called Tarde para la ira which translates as something like Too Late for Anger which is a film that won lots of awards in the Spanish equivalent of the BAFTAs or Oscars. Without the pre film blurb and without the images on the screen I would have had no idea what was happening at all - it was far too hard for me to understand.

Today we went to the village restaurant, Restaurante Eduardo. Restaurants are easy. The language is easy but today I was lost for most of the time. Eduardo is usually a bit vague and the trick is to ask for what you want and see if he has it rather than expect him to tell you what he has. But today I had hardly any idea what he was talking about.

When I was young it would have been an experience that I would have described with the, then, very trendy adjective of surreal. Today, as I wondered what Eduardo was saying the adjective, in English, that sprang to mind after all this time here was pathetic.

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Kiko makes me wonder about local honey

We've just been to the presentation of something called la Mostra de la Cuina which is a sort of gastronomic showcase  for the food local to Pinoso in a selection of local restaurants. The title is in Valencià and Google translate says it means Cooking Show which doesn't quite have the same ring as the original.

Pinoso, like all of Spain, is proud of its traditional food particularly the dishes based around local produce. The star of the show around here is a rice dish with rabbit and snails cooked over sheaves of twigs. Unlike the paella from a bit further North in Valencia, the local rice dish is much thinner, usually only a grain or two of thick, it's a lot drier, often verging on burned, and it's a muddy browny green colour instead of that saffron yellow and, of course, it doesn't have chicken or seafood or whatever it is that Valencia paella has in it. Locals often make the difference in the name, ours is just arroz, rice, and the Valencia dish is paella named for the pan that it's cooked in. I much prefer the Pinoso rice.

The idea of the Mostra de la Cuina is that participating restaurants cook a full meal built around the same main dish on the same day at a fixed price of 30€ - rice one day, the rabbit stew, gazpachos, on another, gachamiga (a garlic, oil and flour pancake), ajos pinoseros (rabbit and wild garlic) and fassegures (meatballs in broth) on the others. Each day there are a couple of common starters - local sausage and a pepper and fish dish called pipirrana - with each restaurant having free rein over the other starters on the different days. The puddings, including a typical cake called perusas, and the drink are included. It also looks like there is a strangely anachronistic  gin and tonic included in the line up this year.

So we went to the launch. It was due to start at 7.30. This is Spain, one expects things to start late and the late start is excused with something called courtesy time. I always bridle at the thought that something so discourteous, to the people who turn up on time, is called courtesy time. I think we were nearly half an hour late in starting. At least there was an apology for the "slight delay".

This time the local Town Hall has gone to town on the publicity. Being the 21st century and all, a bunch of social media pundits, bloggers and the like, were invited to come for a day out in Pinoso. They've been given the grand tour - the bodega, a sausage maker, a baker, the clock tower, the marble quarry, the local wine and marble museum and of course, they've been eating all day. They also got the front two rows at this evenings presentation. And the godfather, the padrino, for the launch was a two star Michelin chef Kiko Moya from the nearby town of Cocentaina. His restaurant is called L'Escaleta and he seemed like a very personable chap. He probably took less time to talk about his food philosophy, about the qualities of the food he'd seen today and about his restaurant than it did our Mayor to do the introductions. Kiko's video was nice too.

We'll be out for a couple of meals I'm sure. I fancied the ajos or the gachamiga but they are both on workdays so it will probably be fassegures and arroz. But which of the five restaurants we still have to decide.

14th to 19th and 24,25 and 26 February.

Sunday, February 05, 2017

L'oratge

Writing the blog entry the other day about the two weather stations and the variations in a very short distance sent me looking for those weather reports I mentioned. I found both the January 2017 report and the full roundup for 2016.

Apparently in Pinoso in the whole of 2016 we had 54 rainy days, 12 days with sub zero temperatures, 165 days with dew, 23 foggy days, no snow, no hail, 4 days with electrical storms, 163 sunny days, 133 days with sun and clouds, 45 cloudy days and 25 days with complete cloud cover.

Some of those I'm not so sure about. First of all I don't quite know what it means. If the day starts with full cloud cover and then the clouds part and the sun shines through is that both complete cloud cover and sunny or is there some sort of generalisation made? If it's a combination then why were there 624 days in the year? There are other things I doubt too - OK we may not have had torrential rain and what not from more than four thunderstorms but I'm pretty sure there were a lot more storms than that flashing away in the sky. And no hail, really? I don't like hail, I don't like the idea of great lumps of ice falling from a great height and bouncing off my car; off the cats. I'm sure that I had hail on my head more than once in 2016 - we get a lot of hail, it smashes down crops, it breaks things.

The factual stuff is much easier to interpret and to agree with. Apparently the hottest day of the year was September 5th when we hit 41ºC and the coldest day was 17th February when we suffered -4.5ºC. We got 359 litres of water per square metre in the 366 days. When I was at school I'm sure that my Philip's Atlas used to show the average rainfall for Manchester as being around 40" per year but I've just looked now. Manchester 33", Cambridge 22" and the wettest place in the list is Dartmoor at 77". It turns out that 359 litres per square metre (which sounds like a lot) works out at about 14" per year (which doesn't). By the way if you lived in Mawsynram in India close to the Bay of Bengal then you would get 477" of rain in a year which is a lot. The highest wind speed recorded in Pinoso was 77k/h in February. We had 87 days, nearly three months, with maximum daytime temperatures over 30ºC (that's more than 86ºF mum - just a bit warmer than your living room).

For January 2017 from the same weather station in Pinoso: 4 days with rain, 15 days with temperatures below zero, 11 days with dew, 2 days with fog, no hail, 1 day with snow, 12 sunny days, 12 days with sunny spells, 4 cloudy days and 3 days with complete cloud cover.

The last two days of the month tied as the warmest days, though they weren't very warm, at a miserable 16.5ºC and the coldest was the 18th of January. with -5.5ºC. We got 63 litres per square metre over the month (2.48") and 54 litres of that came on the 19th as snow. Maximum wind speed was 54k/h.

And today it's very breezy, sheets of cloud but with occasional sun and occasional showers too. I wonder how Capito will list this one?

By the way I hope the title means "The weather" in Valencià but I may be wrong.