Going thirsty

I have my little ways. When the sun's shining and I'm sitting outside a bar I like to drink cold beer. I tend to ask for tercios, the beer bottles which contain a third of a litre, hence the word tercio, a third. I started with bottles because they hold a definite amount, unlike glasses which can vary quite a bit from bar to bar. Especially when driving is on the cards I like to know how much I am drinking. Nowadays there is also much more variety in beer styles in bottles than on draught. I don't care for those smaller bottles, the botellín or quinto. Logically, with quinto meaning a fifth, they hold a fifth of a litre. Neither fish nor fowl.

The most usual way to ask for a draught beer is to ask for a caña. One of the reasons for drinking cañas, rather than, say, buying and sharing a litre bottle, is that beer warms up quickly in the Mediterranean sun and most Spaniards like their beer cold, cold, cold. Caña is an imprecise and yet detailed way to describe a specific glass; something of the same order as drinking champagne from flutes or sherry from schooners. The first definition of caña in a Spanish dictionary is rod or cane and the occasional, waggish, barman (it's always men) will play around with the potential double meaning. Caña is definitely the most common way to ask for a glass of beer in Spain though -ponme una caña, por favor. The size of a caña is a bit imprecise but it's in the 200 to 300 ml category. Around here the bigger, half litre, nearly a pint, glasses are usually tanques, but they might be jarras and, if you were in Marid it would be a doble.

Anyway back to my sun dappled but shady table. I've asked for the bottled beer and they ask me if I want a glass - un vaso. Lots of people don't because, if you've paid the higher price for a bottle of beer or if you've gone for some fancy craft beer, you probably want to show how discerning you are. So no to the vaso.

But for some reason wine doesn't come in vasos. It could, and in lots of older films it does, but nowadays you would generally ask for a copa, a stemmed glass, when you're asking for wine. So for the wine drinkers it's -ponme una copa de tinto- or some such. I don't drink a lot of wine. I was going to add that those flat bottomed, very small glasses that are sometimes used for wine are call cullín but Google doesn't agree; Google says the most common name for those is a cortito. In some parts of Spain they are called zurito or penalti. I'm pretty sure it's culín around here though. Probably something to do with a culo, a bottom, as in bum. When I was a lad wine glasses were less voluminous than they are now. They weren't for swirling they were for filling to the top and they were made by the French firm that made the school water glasses, Duralex. A Spanish bloke told me they were called chatos and that chato is used to describe someone with a snub nose too.

What made me think of all this was the word chupito. If my summer drink is a nice cold beer then my winter drink is a coffee paired with a shot glass sized brandy, un chupito. We were out with friends the other day and I said I'd have a coffee and a chupito. Then it dawned that I wasn't the designated driver so I left the table and went to the bar to change my order to a café y copa. I got my brandy in one of those balloon shaped brandy glasses. Later my friend, generously, thought he'd order me another brandy - he'd heard my chupito order but not the change to a copa so he asked for a chupito. The brandy, as it should, came in a John Wayne at the bar drinking redeye sized glass.

Money for old rope

I've been a hostage to opticians for years. I have bad eyesight. When I was very young my mother and father insisted on pointing out sheep and suchlike. I would stare into the middle distance, puzzled. My parents thought I was well down on the learning spectrum until the problem was diagnosed when I went to school. Nearly 8 diopters in the worst eye said the optician on Monday.

Generally I wear contact lenses, old rigid style ones that are relatively cheap and reasonably durable. I still need specs though and my four year old ones are very scratched and the hinge is a bit wobbly so they need replacing.

I bought a lens hood for one of my Canon camera lenses last week. The one with Canon written on it cost 35€ which I thought was taking the mick. To be honest I was not that cock a hoop with 15€ price tag on unnamed version that I eventually bought.

Canon obviously charge for their name. Their RF 28-70mm F2L USM is a pretty good camera lens though even if it does cost 3,249€. For your money you get 19 elements packed in a sturdy barrel with all sorts of little motors built in as well as precision threads and what not. My arithmetic says that each element in that Canon lens, complete with their name on the barrel, costs 170€. The optician wants 240€ for each "mid range" lens. And 80€ for the plastic frame. 560€ for a pair of specs.

It's quite difficult to shop around amongst opticians. Spanish opticians aren't keen to give you their fitting information or prescription and even if they do the second optician always suggests that they can't trust the first's work. Obviously that changing lenses in that funny goggles thing and saying repeatedly - better? worse?, requires years of training.

Contact sport

I'm hypermetropic and astigmatic - long sighted with funny shaped eyes. When I was young my family thought I was stupid because I had problems telling cows from sheep. Maggie still often thinks I'm stupid when I can't tell Ryan Reynolds from Ben Affleck but I suppose that's different. I think they noticed that I couldn't see very well when I went to school. I wore glasses all the time till I was about 25 - not all the time really but you know what I mean. Thick glasses. Opticians told me I couldn't wear lenses but I insisted on trying them and, nearly 40 years, later I'm still wearing them or rather their successors. Because of the astigmatism they are hard lenses, little plastic lenses that float on the tear layer on the surface of my eyes. I presume the technology has changed a little since the first ones I had but they are nothing like the floppy disposable lenses that most lens wearers use.

One of the first bits of advice that I got on putting in and taking out the lenses was to put the plug in the plughole. The little blighters can escape. A few weeks ago, whilst I was putting them in, I dropped one of them. Half blinded I searched around but I couldn't find it. I went looking for an old pair. I found one set so dried up that the lens just snapped when I picked it up and the only serviceable pair were really old and quite painful. Fortunately as I cleaned up the washbasin, blinking hard, I found the missing lens caught on the grid of the plug hole. Time to buy another pair I thought.

My last pair were about five years old, bought in Cartagena. The optician had been painstaking in getting them to fit properly. I thought about going back because finding a good optician is like finding a good dentist. Once you have one you like it's worth a bit of effort to stick with them. But it's a 240 kilometre round trip to Cartagena and I decided to shop local instead.

The optician in Pinoso that I chose seemed a little off hand to be honest. It had none of the white jacket, almost medical, mentality, of the Cartagena place. The Pinoso optician was much more like a hairdresser's - people coming and going, a sort of community atmosphere, the sort of place where you would get called "love" in the UK.  Actually they seemed to delight in my name - Kreest-off-air.

The eyetest was normal enough though there was none of that red and green background with a circle thing nor the little puff of air but they had some impressive looking machine for scanning the shape of my eye. Once they had the prescription and the measurements they asked the manufacturer for a price - it was a reasonable 350€ so I said yes. A while later they phoned me to say they had the lenses. The next time I was in town I popped in to make an appointment to try them.

"We won't do the test now." they said. "They take time to settle in, take them away, wear them a few days and then come back and we'll have a look."
"What about the money?", I said. I wasn't keen on handing over cash till I was sure the lenses were OK.
"Oh, you don't want to pay until you know they're OK".

So they let me walk out of the shop with 350€ worth of lenses without knowing much about me. True enough Pinoso is a small place and everybody knows someone who knows you but it was still my first time with them and I could have been in Pinoso on holiday for all they knew.

It was a good system though. The lenses did definitely settle in but, even then, the left lens wasn't right. It was sitting too low and they've sent it away to be changed. They also sent a video of my eye full of fluorescein, an orange dye which, under UV light, shows how the lenses and the cornea interact, so the manufacturer could get the lens right. I still have the right lens though and I've been wearing it for over a week now. And I still haven't paid.

Small town life. Small town Spanish life.