Life in Culebrón

The queue outside the post office in Elche was pretty orderly, maybe 20 or 25 people. Not exactly military in its straightness but orderly enough with at least a long metre between individuals. The habitual Spanish queuing technique involves finding out who was the last person to arrive before you so you can follow that person when it's your turn. For months now the number of people permitted into shops and offices has been limited so that people have to wait outside. Although the "who's last" queuing system is still alive and well the atypical line type queue has now become commonplace. Lines are easier to join.  British Post Offices have always been little outposts of Government as well as a place to post a parcel or letter. That's not the same in Spain and, even before social media, email and the rest made a lot of surface mail redundant many Spaniards hardly ever used post offices or postal services. There is very little tradition of Spanish junk mail by post ...

If you need to go to a bank in Spain think about it taking a good part of your morning. You may be lucky. Correct desk. Person not at breakfast. No wait. No complications. I'm sure it will happen one day but even when it's been a relatively problem free run it has seldom taken me less than twenty to thirty minutes. It doesn't matter where it is, as soon as there's a physical or virtual queue it's going to take time. Obviously the Post Office falls into this category. Yesterday I had a package to post. I went to the Post Office. Because the number of people who can be inside the office is limited the queue was in the street. I stayed for a while but after 20 minutes nobody had gone in and nobody had come out. My mask was getting tacky; I gave up. I popped back twice more in the next two hours. The queue was going nowhere. The main man in our post office isn't the sort of person to get flustered. He doesn't hurry. I thought I may be able to sidestep the que...

My bank sent me a letter, well there was a message on the website, to say that I should ensure that they held the correct details on me. Apparently this was going to help them combat money laundering. I can see that. Anyway the documentation said I was a teacher and, as I have an official looking certificate to say that I am in receipt of a Spanish State Pension, I thought it would be easy to do. Going into a Spanish bank requires time. A lot of time and the patience of a halo wearer. I very seldom have to go to a branch but, yesterday, I did. There was the usual confusion about which desk to use - not a linguistic confusion. In this case, four desks, three of which seemed willing to deal with people and one of which seemed to be doing something on his computer which may have been high finance or he could have been playing Fornite Battle Royale. I behaved like a good Spaniard, I staked my place in the general queue for the cash desk, just in case it was there, then I asked the spar...

We have a couple of very active theatre groups in Pinoso. One of them, Taules, was even the joint winner of a prestigious national award for amateur theatre this year. Taules usually put on a show for the August fiesta and another for Christmas. For some events in Pinoso you can buy tickets online but for most of the events in our 400 plus seat theatre you have to get tickets, or invitations, from the box office which opens for a couple hours for a couple of nights before the event. It's a bit of a pain for us because we're not usually in town in the evenings so we have to drive in specially. We've learned that normally we can chance to luck and there will be tickets available on the night. You can't do that with Taules though. I'd misread the programme information. I thought tickets were on sale from 4pm. In fact it was 6pm. I didn't realise though because, when I got there, there were about 40 people waiting. Now the Spanish have a queuing system that I...

There aren't many self serve checkouts in Spain. They have them at Ikea, the scan your goods, push in your credit card type and they have some at Corte Inglés though I've never seen them in use. At Carrefour they used to have self serve but they changed to a single queue system - Checkout Number fourrr please. Generally then supermarket queues are stand in line, stuff to the rubber belt, the person at the till scans your items, you put them into a bag and then you pay, maybe scanning your loyalty card in the process. You can still buy plastic bags at the checkout but most people don't. Consum, probably the largest supermarket in Pinoso, works exactly like that. I'd gone for my usual 30-40€ worth of every second day shopping. There were four of the six tills on the go, the deputy manager was on one till, the women from the deli and fish counter were up too. All the tills in use were busy. The days of the ten items or fewer queue are long gone. I stood in a queue....

Going to the bank on Spain is a pain in the backside. The queues go on for ever. There aren't enough tellers whilst there are far too many bank workers shifting paper around on their desks and waiting to sell some dubious financial product. Lots are at breakfast too. For a number of reasons, so tedious that even I would hesitate to record them, I've had to go to the bank at the beginning of each month for the past several months. Despite being in the largest bank in Spain there isn't a branch in Pinoso. I have the choice of being charged 6€ to process the payment locally or driving to nearby Monóvar, if 15 kms is near. Queues in Spain are usually orderly but amorphous. Often the routine is that as you get to the people hanging around to be served you ask who was last there. You take your turn after them. The next person joining the queue after you asks the same question and your place in line is now secure. This system has multiple issues for non Spanish speakers...