Life in Culebrón

We did it. We went and voted. An odd experience. For a start all the candidates, or at least a good number of them, were just hanging around the polling station. I think that in the UK candidates have to stay some set distance from the ballot box but apparently not so in Spain. The current Mayor said hello to us, the second on the list for the centrist party had to step aside to let us pass, the socialist party candidate, our pal Eli, did the cheek kissing thing and a woman on the conservative list who I'd talked to at one of the meetings explained which table I needed to go to. That was a bit disconcerting because I felt there was a touch of personal pressure even for someone as unknown as Maggie and I; it must be really tricky if you're friends with one of the candidates but aren't a big fan of their policies. The system is actually simple enough. Each of the parties, five in our case, puts forward a list of candidates. The list is printed on white paper for the town elec...

Jorge Drexler, the Uruguayan singer songwriter was on in Elda at the Teatro Castelar last night. We'd bought our tickets through a system run by one of the local banks (pay online, pick up from a machine in most of their branches) so when we turned up at the door we had no idea where we were supposed to go. Whenever I'm lost and confused I get cross and that's what happened as we wandered around the foyer. Maggie applied a much better approach and asked one of the theatre staff where the seats were. He directed her in English. Good seats, a box about a metre higher than the stage, right at the front, maybe 20 metres from the man. Plenty of room to shuffle, good view. The theatre was a bit like the ones in both Yecla and Villena that we've been to. Dark "Edwardian" places with boxes, balconies, gilded columns, marble detail. Elda was mainly red velvet and dark wood. No ice cream though. Señor Drexler was good too, nice gentle songs, very intimate and cosy with ...

The local elections are this Sunday so all of the parties are running a series of last minutes meetings. I went to listen to Ramón Cerdá from the UCL (Central Liberal Union) last night. The meeting was fine but as it's the fourth I've been to I'm getting used to the routine. However, if the meetings follow a similar pattern the gifts don't! I am becoming a bit of a connoisseur. The Conservative PP definitely won out on this competition - a calculator with pen set and an electronic thermometer, the UCL gave away a nice little notepad and a fag lighter but their biro didn't click in and out properly. The Socialists didn't do so well - their fag lighter is OK but the biro is shaped like a space rocket with a wide bit where the main engines should be, presumably so it will stand up - most odd.

The first of the village fiestas around Pinoso took place over this weekend in Rodriguillo and we, sort of, failed to turn up. We did have a look on our way back from the market at Algueña but we didn't go for the dancing or the gachamigas or the barraca. In fact the thing I noticed most was the wiring on the wall in the photo. I just left the picture of the horse and cart to add a touch of Spanishness. We went to the Moors and Christians in Petrer too. No pictures from there either. Is Fiesta fatigue setting in?

Last Thursday I queued for my resident certficate or "resdencia" at the Alicante Foreigners' Office run by the National Police Force. Whilst I waited at the front of the queue I heard the police officer guarding the gate say to tens of people "From Monday the system changes and you will be able to apply for a residencia at any National Police Station" - he would then go on to ask people where they lived and tell them which their nearest station was. Maggie had, like me, been booked in for an appointment for the old style residencia card and she'd booked time off work to go and do it. Today was the day. We thought we had the choice of our local office in Elda (queue from 7.30am to get a ticket for the session that starts at 10am - or at least it was last time we tried it), go to Elche, where Maggie works, and where neither of us knew the system or go to Alicante which has always been the main office and where I knew the system from as recently as last week. W...

We have five parties fielding candidates in the local election. The five people who lead each group went out for a bit of a meal together as a sort of joint press conference. From left to right (not politically) Ramón, José Maria, Elisa, Vicente and Juan Carlos. Each party fields 13 candidates so that's 65 people or close to 1 in every 100 residents of the town standing for election. The woman in the waistcoat decided not to stand.

I bumped into a pal who just happens to be the Socialist candidate for Mayor. She told me, conversationally, that she was holding a meeting at my local village hall that evening. No posters, no newsletters, nothing in the local paper, no note from the neighbourhood association - just chance that I got there. I never know how it is that everyone else seems to know. The meeting started at 8.30 so I was obviously the first person there (other than the keyholder) when I arrived at 8.40. The meeting got under way at around 9.20. The prospective mayor and five of the pospective socialist councillors sat facing the 25 or so people in the audience - about a third of the village's population. Eli, the candidate, seemed to know the name of everyone in the room. In fact everyone knew everyone. Good presentation; the chap who would deal with the economy told us how reliant the town was on the income from our marble quarry, the woman with the health portfolio talked about new care in the commun...

Spaniards have to carry ID at all times. They have a little card that has their photo and a scanned version of their fingerprint. Foreigners, like us, living in Spain have an ID number. Its format differs slightly from the one for Spaniards. It's called an NIE. Getting the NIE number is dead easy, a bit of form filling and a queue. The next step, once you've been in Spain for at least 6 months is to get "resident" status. There are legal implications but basically for most Brits it means they get an ID card, which everyone calls a residencia, that looks just like the card Spaniards carry. It is recognised everywhere for guaranteeing credit cards, receiving registered mail etc. Maggie and I tried to get a residencia last summer and we were turned away being told there was no need for us to have one. As EU citizens the NIE gave us everything we needed. Unfortunately as the NIE is just a piece of paper, without a photo, it doesn't serve as a form of identification so...

Our voting cards turned up yesterday. Not a big event in itself but, in Democracies, voting is an essential part of having your say. Nice to know we really will be involved.

The meeting between the Mayor and the Brits finally happened. In fact he turned up with at least half of the list of prospective councillors. The best part was the beginning; we were given an electronic calculator and an electronic thermometer both bearing the Partido Popular logo. From then on in it was all downhill. A long winded complaint about the lack of town centre parking on the one day of the year when there is a big event in town. A marathon moan about the lack of facilities for stray dogs in Pinoso. One chap held the floor for at least fifteen minutes about his particular problem with his health card. It went on. The Mayor smoked a lot, the tanslator tried hard but buckled under the stress of rabbiting, idiomatic English. I was dead sensible of course (well it is my Blog) and I asked a straightforward question about the plans for the drainage system in our village and got a straightforward and concise reply. We didn't see the end. Maggie could bear it no more.

Every year students and teachers from the Adult Education Colleges in our area get together for a bit of a celebration. Each of the participating towns takes it in turn to host the event and this year it was the turn of Monforte del Cid. Twenty of us doing courses in Pinoso went to do our bit for intercollegiate solidarity. First thing, naturally, was a bit of something to eat and drink just in case the 30km journey had worn us out. The food was set out on long tables in the town square. Next on the agenda was a tour of the town. Our group was guided by a young person from the host college. I think our original guide may have been on a basic skills course as a young woman had to take over the reading of his prepared notes when anything with more than two syllables caused him real problems. We saw museums, music schools, churches, old cemetries, the headquarters of various of the Moors and Christians groups and the Town Hall. We were all flagging by now so the upholstered seats in the t...

This evening I went to the meeting organised by the Partido Popular to woo the British vote in Pinoso. That's the one mentioned in the Elections and Information post of April 24. Unfortunately the PP's candidate didn't show up. The people who owned the venue sort of expected him but then again they weren't quite sure whether he was coming or not. Now there's a vote winning tactic!

May Day, a public holiday. How did we pass our time? A cultural odyssey, a relaxing meal, a boozy day in the pub or a trip to the seaside? No, we went to the opening of the new "English" supermarket, bar and Internet cafe in Pinoso. Majorettes marched to the tune of the British Grenadiers, a chap with a shaved head and an ear ring sang to a sort of karaoke backing track and we nattered with lots of other Brits about the quality of the free sausage rolls.

Ya.com phoned us up at the end of February. Would we like a cheaper, faster ADSL connection? We signed up. A couple of days later our current Internet provider, Iberdrola, told us they were going to stop all Internet services at the end of April. What a happy coincidence. Despite their contract being full of guarantees about speedy installation etc. Ya.com have still failed to hook us up to their system. And April has passed. Iberdrola haven't turned us off yet but I expect to be offline soon - and for a while.