Life in Culebrón

Have you ever noticed how things can be difficult to find in Spanish supermarkets? It seems to me that these Spanish shops arrange their products to a logic that I didn't share and I've had to learn.  Imagine I want peanut butter. My Britishness tells me to look for it with the jam or honey but my recent experience tells me to look for it near the chocolate bars, near the Nutella. Peanut butter isn't a good example because peanut butter is about as Spanish as celebrations on the 4th of July. Nonetheless, the next time you're in a Spanish supermarket, provided you're not Spanish, look around and I'm sure you'll find things that don't quite mesh with your idea of where they should, logically, be. Why aren't the crackers with the pitta and other bread substitutes? Why is the juice distant from the pop? Why are the kitchen and toilet rolls not alongside the cleaning products? In Pinoso we have quite a few supermarkets and each one of them has a differen...

Apparently the bank holiday in Spain today, Immaculate Conception, is to show how much the state believes in the dogma that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without original sin. Oh, and because a surrounded Spanish army of 5,000 soldiers was able to grab victory from the teeth of defeat after finding a representation of the Immaculate Conception during a battle in the 80 Years War in Flanders. I have no idea when the 80 Years War was but one of the eighty was 1585. On Tuesday it was Constitution Day, another bank holiday. So this week has been more time off than time at work. Paid time off is one of my favourite things. It's been a quiet day. The weather hasn't been great, things are closed and Maggie's not here so I basically stayed at home. I did go to the pictures though. I went to the pictures yesterday too. It's a good thing to do when you're by yourself. I highly recommend Animales nocturnos/Nocturnal Animals. Very striking production all together....

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death. Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries. It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this custo...