5: Routines - the odds and ends

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle.

If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too.

There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pressure wash a car. 

I try, when possible, to do all my shopping errands on one day. The most time consuming, by far, is the weekly supermarket shop. We have four chain supermarkets in Pinoso and a couple of smaller grocery shops. None of them has one of those self service auto checkouts, so we still wander around the shelves, with a basket or trolley, and then go to a manual checkout where we unload to the belt, wait for the items to be scanned and then reload the trolley or pack everything into bags. Although most people take bags with them you can still buy plastic bags at the checkout in Spain. You may see it as an advantage or a disadvantage that being served at a till in a small town means that there are a lot of check out conversations - it's nice if you're the one having the conversation and not so good if the person in front has a long medical history or family trauma to relate.

If any of the supermarkets have an internet service up and running for Pinoso, I'm not aware of it. The supermarkets are only big enough to be food shops plus a few other household items. The nearest superstore, the sort of place that sells underwear, car tyres and muesli would be the Carrefour in Petrer, some 25km away. Most of the supermarkets have some sort of loyalty card/application, but not all.

Our home cooking too has a Spanish bent. Maggie cooks the lunch for Mondays but I generally cook the lunch the rest of the week. Our rural power supply was 2.2kW when we first bought the house. That should mean that if the 2kW kettle were on when the fridge kicked in, then the main circuit breaker should pop. Luckily, there is a lot of elasticity in the supply, so we had very little trouble. We later increased the supply to the maximum permitted without getting all the wiring rechecked, at 3.45kW. Nonetheless, we knew that the electricity was limited, so we chose a gas water heater and gas hob to reduce the load on the system. The gas comes in bottles or cylinders. Even today, piped gas is not particularly common in Spain. It's much more available than it used to be, but in the seven houses and flats I've lived in, none of them has had piped gas. It's easy enough to get cylinders delivered, but we've never bothered. We just take the empty cylinders back to any of the several places where you can exchange depleted cylinders, and money, for full ones. The blokes (I've not see a woman doing it yet) who deliver the gas are called butaneros and the jokes and witticisms around them are exactly analogous to the milkman stories of the UK.

Tuesday is usually cinema day for two reasons. It's the day when we pensioners get a special price at the cinema, just 2€, and when our closest cinema in Petrer shows films that are subtitled rather than dubbed. If there's an English-language film worth the trouble, then Tuesday is a good day to go. Even if there is only stuff in Spanish, it's a good day to take advantage of the low prices. There are other cinemas and other times to go, but Tuesday is a favourite. Mind you our nearest cinema, next door to the underwear selling Carrefour, so the same 25km away, is showing a more and more restricted range of films. Hollywood pap amd nothing much else which means we often go to the cinema in Elche - a round trip of 8okm.

And that's it. Now I have to think of something else to write about.