Typically typical normality

In Spanish shopping centres, like everywhere else, the fronts of shops are, often, open. The idea is obvious enough. The shops want to make sure that there is no barrier to you buying something.

It's not the same in small towns. There shops not only have doors but they are also, often, locked. You have to ring a bell to get in. It's not for security, not in the jeweller's shop sense, but it is because the staff in lots of smaller businesses aren't exactly waiting, poised, for the next customer. It's not just shops. For instance you have to ring the bell to get into the Footwear Museum in Elda.

So I went to buy an inner tube for my bike. The fly curtain covered the front door of the shop. There was a bell. Once upon a time I would have found this odd but I've rung so many bells here that it's just normally normal nowadays. I rang it. Nobody came. I realised there was a note on the door. It said ring the bell. It also said if we don't answer telephone this number. I rang the number. Nobody answered.

I abandoned the bike shop and went to a tyre place. One of those Euromaster type tyre and battery chains. There the barrier at the entrance is of a different nature. The franchise in Pinoso is run by the sort of bloke you meet in a UK boozer when you'd hoped to have a quiet pint and read the paper. One of those blokes who speaks with a Haghill Glasgow or a Byker Newcastle accent and hasn't got his teeth in today. Or he could be a bloke who plays dominoes very loudly. Not that the Pinoso man was from Haghill, Byker, toothless or playing dominoes. I'm trying to paint a word picture to describe a sort of non stockbroker belt sort of person.

He was putting new tyres on someone's car but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I didn't wait till he'd finished to get served. "A question", I said. This is the phrase which is used all over Spain (in Spanish) to queue jump. "Do you sell inner tubes for bikes?". Apparently my pronunciation of inner tube (cámara) and mask (mascarilla) are similar enough for a moment of misunderstanding but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I simply repeated the word more loudly and with more roll on the R. Individual words became the order of the day on his side. Size? Valve? I was still on fuller phrases. Give me two, car type valve, how much? The answer to the latter was 9€. I handed over a ten and he returned the 1€ in a Barnes Wallis style bouncing the coin across the counter. I smiled, he grunted and all three of us said goodbye one to the other.

Later, cooking lunch, my phone rang. I answered. The person on the other end asked who I was. I told the truth and she apologised and hung up. Later I realised it was the bike shop person checking who'd phoned. Do people do that in the UK? Lots of people do it here; phone the missed call number that is.

All unremarkable really but all quite Spanish. 

Just to finish and because this tickled me rather than because it has anything to do with shopping. Today is the last day that you can turn the old Spanish currency, the peseta, into Euros. You've been able to do it whenever you liked for the past twenty years but today was the very last time and people were queuing around the block at the central banks in Murcia and Valencia. Strange behaviour.