Life in Culebrón

Driving licences are a regular bar conversation topic amongst expats in Spain. One line runs something like "We're European citizens, we have a European driving licence, we're entitled to drive." At the other end of the spectrum there's the "We're resident here so we have to change our licences for Spanish ones." Actually it's somewhere in between. Once you're resident there's a time limit on using the UK licence unless you register it with the Spanish authorities. It's easier and a bit cheaper to simply exchange. No need for another test or anything and for the first licence at least you don't have to do the medical. At the beginning of July I took my licence to the local driving school, filled in a bundle of forms and handed over 75€ so that the chap from the driving school would do all the legwork for me. I could have popped down to Alicante, stood in a couple of long queues and done it myself but I chose the lazier, ...

We're having a very British weekend in Culebrón. We've just had lunch at a new bar restaurante run by Britons on the outskirts of Pinoso. It's now called Rafael's and it's using the building that once traded as RústicOriginal. I used to work for Rustic three or four years ago. It was strange to be back in the building that was so familiar and yet so different. The place looked good, the staff were very welcoming, the Spanish translation of the, all British, menu read pretty well and the food was tasty, well presented and reasonably priced. All in all it was a very acceptable if not outstanding meal. In the UK, when I lived there, I used to often eat in those chain pubs. I'd read the menu and think that the "freshly caught North Sea cod covered with organic wheat batter and accompanied by rough cut, blanched and deep fried potatoes," sounded good. I was surprised when I got fish and chips. In Spain menus tend to be straight forward, at least in the ...

Culebrón, the name of our village, probably derives from the word culebra meaning snake. Add the -on ending to a word in Spanish and it often gives the idea of big or oversized. Big snake then. Maybe the village achieved fame because of a big snake? Culebrón is also the Spanish word for a soap opera presumably because the story goes on and on. When we tell Spaniards, who don't know the village, that we we live in Culebrón they usually think we've mispronounced the word but, when we persist, they laugh. What a strange thing to call a village they say. There is another village just up the road called Paredón. Like Culebrón it's part of the municipality of Pinoso. Paredón means the place where people are executed by firing squad. Spaniards from outside the area think it's an even stranger name for a village than Culebrón. My mum lives in St Ives in Cambridgeshire. She posted this photo on Facebook of their August Bank Holiday fete at the vicarage. Pinoso has an act...

Spain has a proud record on organ donations. Although donations fell a little in 2010 (1502 donors and 3,770 transplants) from the all time record of 1605 donors in 2009 Spain still tops the Worldwide list of donors and donations. Based on the donations per million inhabitants it's Spain, then Croatia, Portugal, The United States, France, Austria and Italy. Their main methodology here seems to be to talk to families after someone has died rather than to rely on donor registers. Nonetheless, there is a donor register and I signed up for it on the Internet last week. That's why I'm telling you this as my donor card arrived today. The card has no legal validity, it just indicates to my family that if there is any part of my poor and degraded body that may be useful to someone else I'd like them to have it. Just one thing: please get someone to check that I'm dead first! So now you know