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.

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.

Shops, shopping and clicking

First my habitual opening diversion. Over the years there has been a fair bit of controversy from time to time about the skin colour of the actors who interpret Othello in the Shakespeare play. You probably know that the full title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Moor, from Blackamoor is an outdated and offensive term to describe a Black African or other person with dark skin. In Spain the word moro is the direct equivalent of moor. It's used to describe dark skinned people, usually people from North Africa: Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Sahrawis. As with other, similar, words its use can be racist or not. Generally though, for most Spaniards, moro is just a descriptor, like the use of Eastern European, Whilst the media shy away from the word ordinary people don't. I haven't heard many suggestions of a name change for the Moros y Cristianos events though there are plenty of concerns about white people blacking up during those, and other, events.

Over in Petrer there is a shopping centre. Until recently it was called Bassa el Moro; Bassa the Moor. The  reason for such an odd name is that the shopping centre stands on the site where Bassa surrendered Petrer Castle to the Christian King Jaume I in 1265. The shopping centre recently changed name. It's now Dynamia. When I saw the name I immediately imagined some muscled bloke wearing his purple underpants over his tights but I'm sure the idea was to try and give a new image to the shopping centre which has been a white elephant for years. We used to go there quite a lot because it was home to our preferred cinema but then the cinema closed. We popped in the other day just to have a look at the new paintwork. It was sad. The place has almost no open shops. The cafes and restaurants have closed. Good luck to the new owners on revitalising it though it seems to be generally accepted that physical shops are in decline as we increasingly shop from our phones. The obvious problems of the Dynamia shopping centre made me think there may be a blog about the current situation of other local developments.

In broad stroke I suppose it's fair to say that shopping malls, the shopping centres where lots of individual retailers cluster together in purpose built buildings, are a 20th Century phenomena while department stores, one retailer building a big store with separate areas for separate types of goods, are more 19th Century in origin. I notice that the Burlington Arcade now advertises itself as the original department store so perhaps my homespun definitions aren't correct. Nonetheless it is true that department stores are having a tough time. Here in Spain the near legendary Corte Inglés, a quintessential part of Spanish city life, is struggling, laying people off and closing stores very much like John Lewis and Debenhams in the UK. This ties in with the idea that physical shops are now an outdated concept and that online sales are the way to go. We were in a shopping centre in Elche just a few hours ago though and, given that we are talking about Wednesday afternoon shopping, it looked to me as though lots of people haven't heard that they should be buying online.

Normally we venture into shopping centres because we are going to the cinema but from time to time we do go specifically to buy things. The one I like best, because it's big and because it has a bookshop, is probably Nueva Condomina which is over the border into Murcia. I think that the buildings were originally owned by the supermarket chain Eroski but they got into a lot of trouble with property speculation and sold the centre on a while ago. The last time we were there, over a year ago now because of the travel restrictions, it was still doing well with lots of bag laden shoppers, queues outside the cinema and a wait to get into the fast food cafes and restaurants. 

The other centre we tend to use, for shopping, is the Aljub in Elche; that's where we were this afternoon at the cinema. It's not a particularly big centre and I think that it's main attraction for us is that it's the closest to home and the easiest to get to. Again it was Eroski owned but they hung on in this one by reducing the size of their store so that other shops could open in the freed up space.

If those two seem to be doing OK the shopping centre almost literally across the road from the Nueva Condomina in Murcia, the Thader Centre, is dying on its feet. Every time we pop in there are more and more empty units. Probably it's saving grace is that it's home to one of the successful low price supermarket chains, Alcampo, and on the same site there is IKEA which seems to have some sort of fatal attraction for any number of people. It's the same story at the Puerta de Alicante centre which is, obviously enough, in Alicante. There even the shops opposite the string of tills in the Carrefour hypermarket are unlet but, just across town, the Plaza Mar 2 centre in Alicante seems to be doing OK. It could be because it's more central, it could be because the tram stops there or it could again, be the lure of Alcampo. Whatever it is the last time we were there, at the end of December, the Christmas shoppers were knocking us aside with gleeful abandon in their shopping frenzy. Of course personal perceptions can be wildly misleading. Busy does not, necessarily, mean profitable and it could be that we only ever see the places at their best but it certainly appears that there are big differences between the different developments.

While big shopping centres and online shopping are right enough we've been trying to do that shop local thing recently and I must say that whilst it might be more efficient getting stuff online from Amazon or in the flesh from a series of shops in the same space the service you get from our local shops can be much more uplifting and personal.