Life in Culebrón

We've just got back from a few days in Berlin. Like Passepartout I left the gas fire on all the time we were away! Comparing Culebrón to Berlin would be a little unfair. One is the capital city of of one of the most powerful nations of the last two centuries with a population of three and a half million and the other has a postbox. I wouldn't presume to compare two countries either. I have around a hundred hours recent experience of Germany, glimpsed through the distorting mirror of a capital city, against eleven years in Spain. So these are no more than personal impressions of limited interactions in a strange language at an odd time of year. People in Germany don't like serving other people. We've had some very abrupt service indeed and, with two notable exceptions, very little helpful, friendly or even indifferent service. Indifference would be how I would pigeon hole Spanish service. The waiter, the person in the shop, the doctor says hello, asks what y...

As I abluted this morning - is it a verb? - I listened to the radio as usual. The, apparently intentional, forest fires in Asturias apart the only news was about the General Election which is taking place today I don't get to vote of course. Perhaps I should throw some tea into the harbour or something. So, as I sat looking at the computer screen pondering on the outcome - PP (Consrvatives) to win I suspect with PSOE (Labour) coming a distant second in some places but generally being ousted by Ciudadanos (Liberalish sort of tinge) and Podemos (talk the talk leftist bunch) a disappointing fourth and with a couple of other national parties being annihilated - I wondered who I would be voting for if I were able to vote. The voting system in Spain is a list of candidates for each party. So, if we were talking something similar in the UK the list would be headed by Cameron with  Osborne second then May, Hammond, Grove, Fallon etc. and for Labour Corbyn, McDonell, Eagle etc....

I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps for my Christmas cards but there was a big queue. Now it can take fifteen minutes for Enrique, the guy on the Post Office counter, to shift two people so five or six people and I thought maybe I should carry food. Alternatively I could go to a tobacconist and buy the stamps there. I chose the second option. In Spain there is a price for normal mail and a different price for what must be classed as abnormal mail. I mentioned this to the woman selling me the stamps in the tobacconist. She thought it was so much nonsense and limited herself to selling me stamps at 42c for national delivery and 90c for stuff to the rest of Europe. The other side of the world cost just 10c more. I wrote my cards but before I stuck on the stamps I checked what constituted normal and abnormal mail. The price differential was substantial and most of my cards were definitely abnormal. Being an honest sort of bloke I thought the best bet was to explain myself to...

I had a bit of a problem with an email group the other day. I'd never seen one before and it took me a few minutes to work it out. The person who'd set up the email also put together a group on WhatsApp before mistakenly deleting themself from the group. I bacame the group administrator by random asignation. Again it took me a few minutes to work out what was going on and reinstate him. Crikey I thought. I'm getting old. Losing touch with the technology. We have a general Election on 20 December. I was listening to some pundit, presumably from a party that hadn't done well out of a newspaper poll, saying that polls were no longer a fair reflection of the voting population. His argument was that, because the pollsters telephoned people randomly on fixed phones, the sample was self selecting as only old people have fixed phones now. I bristled. That's not true I thought defensively. It's true that even I access the Internet more often from a tablet or my p...