No more worries for a week or two

Summer is an interesting time in Spain. When the sun shines the country slows. In August the country treads water. It's not as true as it once was and it's never been 100% true but it's true enough for a blog.

The first to prepare for the Spanish summer, which lasts from 1 July to 31 August, are the TV advertisers. From the beginning of June happy groups of friends and families will begin to appear on TV screens, sitting around big tables in the garden eating paella or pizza and drinking beer. Most of the rest of Spain begins to prepare for Summer around San Juan, June 23. Those who have a beachside or country property start to ackle it up for the summer. It's amazing how many people have access to a country home or a seaside flat. In both cases the trick is inheritance. The money from the sale of Grandma's house made the flat affordable. The other option is that Grandma's house is where the family now spends Summer. The house gives the family roots, they may live in the big city, they may eat takeaway but this is where they belong. Even if you don't have a flat on the coast or a house in the country you may well have friends who do and who are willing to let you use, or even share, the place with them. If not, well, plenty of places to rent.

Then the schools close so the families have to arrange summer camps or playschemes or just the long suffering grandparents as childcare. A surprising number of people get laid off work for the summer. "Non state" teachers, the ones who work in academies or in private schools, are a good example. They find that their fixed discontinuous contracts come into play. The job will still be there when the new term starts in September/October but, in the meantime it's a case of drawing the dole or finding a summer job or, if that fails, simply hunkering down with the family and spending nothing.

Traditionally lots of Spaniards would take a month's holiday in summer. All of August for instance. Lots of local and government workplaces would close and several still do. The Health Service goes into an, almost, emergency only situation. Lots of businesses change their working hours to be from early morning to early afternoon rather than the traditional split day. Who wants to work and swelter in the summer afternoon heat? 

For most people a whole month off is no longer feasible and horizons have broadened. The tendency now is maybe a fortnight at the beach/pueblo keeping some of the holiday back for Christmas and other times of the year. There's also the other possibility that the flat or pueblo house is pretty close by. Lots of Ilicitanos, people from Elche, have places on the coast in El Altet or Gran Alacant or Santa Pola for instance. That distance is commutable so people go back to the coast at the end of the reduced day. If that isn't the case then, unlike the US Marines, Spanish families do leave men behind. At least it used to be men. They were abandoned to tread the melting tarmac of, the almost deserted, Madrid while the family paddled at the coast or gossiped in the country village square. Any man in that situation could explain it quickly with the phrase "estoy de Rodríguez". Nowadays I suppose who stays behind, in the holiday spot, providing the childcare, and who commutes to work or stays in the city depends on individual circumstances. If nobody is left in the summer home to look after the kids then that's what grandparents are for.

There are lots and lots of summer habits to be observed: the beach bar or chiringuito, the silver foil wrapped tortilla sandwich, the 2pm exodus from the beach, the queue at the fountain with water containers or just trying to mimic that particular swooshing slapping sound that Spanish men elicit from their flip flops as they move along the beachside pavement. July and August are just stuffed full of "we've always done it that way" events. The municipal swimming pools as a centre of neighbourhood or small town activity, particularly for young people, the outdoor cinema, the village fiestas with their orquestas or show bands, concerts in the parks etc., etc., etc. 

Strangely most Britons won't see a lot of it because so much takes place late at night as the world cools down. A concert that starts at midnight just smacks of summer madness to most of we Brits. For Spaniards of course a late night start just about gives them time to get there after the evening meal. Different rhythms.

Maintaining stereotypes

Everyone knows that Germans don't have a sense of humour. Everyone knows that people from the United States are fat, that Jamaicans have dreads and smoke ganja all the time or that we English are very formal and reserved. And everyone knows that those generalisations are all totally untrue. Jada Pinkett Smith is American, Usain Bolt is Jamaican and all those people vomiting on the payments in Magaluf are British. Bear that idea in mind as you read.

Here are some things that Spaniards do or don't do. The converse is that somebody else typically does do, or doesn't do, these things.

1. Spanish men don't wear shorts once summer is over and until the summer weather comes back. A warm day in February doesn't count.
2. Spaniards don't put butter on the bread - not on sandwiches and not on the plate to go with the bread roll at table. It is true that, in some parts of Spain, Spaniards put butter on toast, with jam.
3. Spaniards do not drink warm drinks - tea, coffee type drinks - with food except with toast or the pastries at breakfast.
4. Spaniards don't put milk in tea. This means getting a standard type British tea is a bit of a struggle - té clásico con una pizca de leche fría.
5. Spaniards do not put pepper on the table to go with the salt, oil and vinegar.
6. Spaniards do say hello as they enter a bar, a bank, a post office or the like. They greet everyone.
7. Spaniards say goodbye as they leave a bar etc.
8. Spaniards tend to speak quite loudly!
9. Spaniards won't have a hissy fit if a stranger comments favourably on a baby, musses up the hair of a four year old or speaks to their child.
10. Spaniards never sing along with their National Anthem. That's a bit of a trick really because the current Spanish National Anthem doesn't have any words. I can't remember what it is but there is some accepted version of tum tey tum, or hmm hmm hmm if a football crowd feels it needs to make a statement.
11. Spaniards never eat paella in the evening; it's just for lunch.
12. Spaniards do not put carpets in bathrooms and they think it's a disgustingly unhygienic thing to do so.
13. Spaniards hardly ever drink anything alcoholic, until late at night, without eating a little of something alongside - nuts, crisps, olives etc.
14. Spanish washbasins, baths and sinks hardly ever have two taps.
15. Spanish queues don't usually involve a line of people. A person joining the virtual queue has to ask who is the last person there so they can take their turn accordingly.
16. Spaniards take a start time as a rough indication of when to be at an appointed place. Punctuality has improved incredibly in the last few years but if the theatre performance is billed to start at 8pm then 8.15/8.20pm would be good going.
17. Spaniards eat to quite a fixed timetable. 2pm to 3.30pm to start the main meal of the day and around 9pm to 10pm for the much less important evening meal.
18. Spaniards would not consider going to a (normal) restaurant before 9pm in the evening. 
19. Spaniards do not care for spicy food.
20. Spaniards do not consider tipping to be any sort of duty. The idea of a fixed percentage is very foreign to them. Spaniards do not tip when service is bad.
21. Spaniards don't wait to be noticed by bar staff at the bar. They make their presence known.
22. Spaniards, in this part of the world at least, do not heat their homes, offices or workplaces adequately. This is becoming less true.
23. Spaniards let their children stay up very late and Spanish parents and carers include their children in lots of late night activities.
24. Spaniards don't eat in the street - that is they don't eat a sandwich or other snack type food as they walk.
25. Spaniards don't (generally) binge drink.
26. Spaniards have power points in bathrooms.
27. Spaniards talk to their families, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc. very, very regularly.
28. Spaniards do not drink tepid beer or soft drinks.
29. Spaniards don't, readily, invite people into their homes.
30. Spaniards, when driving, do not, in my experience, acknowledge friendly gestures from other motorists. Let someone into a lane of near stationary traffic and there will be no upraised palm to say "thank you".
31. Spaniards, most Spaniards, don't particularly like flamenco

There are tens more but that will do for now

Some quick, possibly wrong, information about the Pinoso Easter celebrations

Easter Week, Semana Santa, is huge in Spain. After all Easter is at the very heart of the Christianity and lots of Spanish events are still tied in to the Roman Catholic calendar.

Easter Sunday is the culmination of Holy Week when, so the story goes, Jesus Christ rose or was resurrected, from the dead. On Good Friday Jesus was executed by crucifixion and he was put in a guarded tomb. When some of his women followers visited the tomb on Sunday they found the tomb empty. It is an article of faith with Christians that Jesus rose from the dead.

Between Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, through to his crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday there are lots of other Easter scenes: the trial by Pontius Pilate, Peter, Jesus's follower, denying - three times - that he knew Jesus before the dawn cockerel crowed, Jesus's walk up to Golgotha or Calvary carrying his own cross and the help he received along the way, the crucifixion scene itself with three crosses, Jesus in the middle, his cross inscribed with INRI, flanked on each side by a common thief. The Roman soldier wounding Jesus with his spear. All of these events, and others, are represented in the various statues that are carried, or rolled, on tronos, pasos or floats, through the streets of Spain during Holy Week or Semana Santa.

Easter is celebrated lavishly in Pinoso. With a bit of luck the programme is here I failed to find the official programme on a website so, if you're interested, you'll have to download the pdf from my saved Facebook page.

The various groups, or cofradías, that take part wear different outfits, (the hood or capirote/capuchón, the túnicas or robes, the capas or capes and emblemas for emblems), take care of various statues, (pasos, tronos or imágenes) which are given outings in relation to the part of the Easter story they depict. Generally the participants have covered faces to show that they are penitent and to ensure that everyone has the same status. The participants are often called Nazarenos which is obviously from some reference to Nazareth, Jesus's home town, 

There are lots and lots of other traditions, religious rites, masses and church events associated with Holy Week and I don't know enough about it to write anything more detailed. However, I did think that you may be interested, if you live in Pinoso, to know who is who so that, with a bit of detective work, you can work out who will be out for each of the processions.

Sorry about the gaps between the pictures. I don't seem to be able to get blogger photos under control!

Hermandad de San Pedro Apóstol

Brotherhood of Saint Peter the Apostle

Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno

Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth

Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Brotherhood of Our Lady of Sorrows - it looks like a Sisterhood to me but there you go.

Centuria Romana

Roman Centuria

Cofradía del Santísimo Cristo de la Buena Muerte, Santo Sepulcro y Santa Mujer Verónica

Confraternity of the Holy Christ of the Good Death, Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Veronica - Veronica was the woman who gave Jesus a handkerchief to wipe his brow on the way up to Golgotha. The cloth was left with an imprint of his face. In fact, if you want to see the very cloth (!) then it will be on display in the Santa Faz celebrations in Alicante, this year on 28 April.

Hermandad de San Juan Apóstol y Evangelista

Brotherhood of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist

Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad

Brotherhood of Our Lady of Solitude

Los Penitentes

The Penitents

As you may suspect I have blogged about Easter before. Here are a selection of past blogs

Link1 

Link2 

Link3 

Link4

HERE for the 2024 Easter programme I hope

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.

Moving forward together

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea. 

Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how you decide that someone is competent in a particular language. What's the threshold for somebody to be able to say that they speak English, Spanish or Swahili? Some people have less education than others, some have learned more vocabulary, some have different ideas about how language should be used but who is to say which form is better than another? What says that the Radio 4 pundit talking about early 20th Century Art speaks better English than the geezer with the barrow having a beer in the Queen Vic? Where is the level? If an ordinary Spaniard doesn't know a word that came from a novel does that make the novelist highbrow or the non word knower lowbrow or are they simply different people?

This does mean that some things that come easily to locals require much more effort from we outsiders. I know a little bit about Spanish history and politics because I've made an effort to do so but it's much more difficult to latch on to everyday things. Consider, for instance, events; things like sports matches, theatre, concerts, guided visits, exhibitions and demonstrations. Sometime, shortly after we got here I had a bit of an email battle with one of the local tourist offices which had published a calendar of events. Most were without dates. Why bother to put dates when Mother's day is always the first Sunday in May and "everybody" knows that or when it's common knowledge that International Book Day is the 23rd April. I suppose that, among Britons, Christmas Day wouldn't necessarily get a date either but it does suppose that everyone shares the same knowledge. There was a time when Ramadan and Diwali would have passed unremarked in the UK but, nowadays, that isn't the case. The argument I made to the tourist office was that they needed to remember that not everyone in their town shared the same, Spanish, Catholic background. 

I was thinking about this yesterday just after I'd spent ages trawling through the Facebook pages and other tourist offices and town halls websites to see what sort of things are happening locally over the summer. Some of those things are repetitive, they turn up regularly  - like Burns Night, The Grand National, the Lewes Bonfire, Trooping the Colour, Turkey and sprouts, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne - whilst other things are one offs - concerts, weddings, race meetings, car rallies, election hustings, break dance competitions and so on. Some are things that you might anticipate and plan for. I don't know when Henley Regatta is or Royal Ascot or the Manx TT but it's relatively easy to find out and plan for them if you fancy getting involved. Here in Spain I might do the same for Holy Week in Malaga or the candle festival in Aledo. The flip side is that the only way to know that Villena tourist office is going to do a guided tour of the village of Zafra is to check their publicity. Checking Villena's website, well that and the other thirty that go along with it, is turning into a right slog.

Mind you finding out about local things isn't always such mind numbing toil. I was in Castilla la Mancha the other day and I went for a set menu in a restaurant. One of the dishes was called Galianos which I'd never heard of but turned out to be a pheasant and rabbit dish. I was pondering Galianos and its position in "the popular database". My guess is that many Spaniards wouldn't know what Galianos is either but I also suppose that the situation would be akin to me eating with my, relatively young, nephews. Imagine bubble and squeak or toad in the hole was on the menu. Ny nephews may never have heard of them, they're old fashioned foods after all. I have though so we could pool our experience. In return I presume they would help me out with what to order in a Korean restaurant on the basis that they have probably eaten Korean when I haven't. 

Some things we just know. Some things we learn. Some things we have to search out.

When?

For this post to work you're going to have to pretend that lots of generalisations are true. For instance that a man and a woman living together and caring for a few children is the historically normal family unit or that, through time, women have worked at home while men have worked elsewhere. You can't bridle either at the idea that people in the UK go to work in the morning, have a lunch break and then go home sometime in the early evening; 9 to 5. Likewise, for Spain, we're going to agree that people go to work in the morning, stop work in the early afternoon, start work again in the late afternoon and then go back to work till mid evening. Again, Pitman style, we'll call it 9 to 2 and 5 to 8.30.

So, in this generalised world, Britons have a shortish lunch break during the working week which means that they eat their main meal of the day in the evening. Spaniards on the other hand, with a longer midday break, eat their major meal of the day then. This is not to suggest that dinner is non-existent in Spain but it is, usually, a much less substantial meal than lunch. This can cause British holidaymakers to Spain some distress when they want to follow their habit of eating more in the evening. They wonder why so many restaurants are closed in the evening especially out of season or away from tourist areas.

Remember that we are in some sort of world where Victorian values have been restored. As the man comes home his expectation is that his woman will have his food ready. In the UK we're presuming that workplaces finish around 5pm so, with a bit of travel, the mealtime, set by the man's work schedule, will be sometime a little later, maybe 5.30 or 6pm. In Spain the man leaves work at around 2pm so the food should be on the table around 2.30 or 3pm. Spanish men come home from work twice a day, the second time he'll be home around 8.30 so mealtime will be around 9 or 9.30pm.

Leisure activities tend to fit around the work and meal schedule. As a, going to the pub before going on to the disco to get turned down by any number of young women, youth in the UK in the 1970s I would arrange to meet my chums at maybe 8pm in the bus station. That would give me time to eat whatever my mum had cooked for me before putting on my going out clothes (washed and ironed for me by my mum). If I'd been a Spanish youth, and I was working, I'd still be at there at 8pm and even if I were studying or out of work I'd still have to wait for my evening meal. So a Spanish youth would arrange to meet his or her pals in the estación de autobuses at maybe 11pm. In British and Spanish cases we're meeting our pals a couple of hours after mealtime.

It must have been around 1985. I was staying with some chums in Valencia. They asked me if I wanted to go out for the evening and I said yes. They rang a few friends and suggested meeting in a bar at midnight. I thought this was as hilarious as it was outrageous. What a ridiculous time to meet! Surely midnight was a time for coming home after a skinful not time to go out to get one? Remember that at the time British pubs closed at either 10.30 or 11pm. To be honest the thing I most remember about that meeting was not the time, it was the bar. It was like entering Bedlam. The noise, the smoke, the crush of people and the overwhelming nearness of it was impressive but somehow my pals magicked a table and chairs from the chaos and then waited to be served. Table service and paying the bill at the end seemed strange to me too. 

This time shift takes some learning; some deprogramming. To we Northern Europeans used to a different schedule these timings just seem ludicrous. Nonsensical. We don't understand why the Pinoso town fiesta, for instance, has an opening ceremony at 10pm, why the firework display starts at midnight and why the folk dancers will be on stage sometime around one in the morning. It's the same, but in reverse, for Spaniards at the moment. They are having a lot of difficulty with the idea of a theatre performance at 6.30pm or the last session at the cinema being one at 7pm so that everything can be done and dusted for you to be home before the evening curfew.

Down the bar

I was in a bar this morning. The bar is called Arturo but the boss isn't; his name is Salvador or Salva to his friends.

Arturo is a nice bar, an ordinary bar. Plenty of Britons use it but we tend to be mid or late morning users. Earlyish morning it's a pretty Spanish environment. Clientele wise it's for anybody and everybody from pensioners and office workers to parents on the school run and working class blokes.

From what I can gather lots of Spaniards seem to leave home without a decent breakfast. I get the idea that most shower the night before so they're ready to go in the morning. It seems to be up and out rather than dawdling over toast and cereals. But regular food stops, and a real interest in food, are very Spanish traits. Anytime between nine and eleven in the morning overall wearing blokes down tools and open up their lunch-boxes. In a similar time slot bars the length and breadth of Spain fill up with people getting something to eat as a sort of more substantial mid morning breakfast.

Back in Arturo's it's around ten-o-clock and I'm sitting at the bar waiting for someone who never turned up. The noise level is high, I mean high, really high. Spaniards are not particularly quiet people as a rule, especially where they feel comfortable. It's not class related. The after show hubbub in the theatre lobby and the noise level in a truck stop transport cafe are pretty much the same. In Arturo's, every now and then, laughter, raucous laughter, breaks through the general din. The young woman who's only been serving here for a couple of weeks looks a bit shell shocked. Salva is working like some sort of machine handing out bottles of wine, bottles of vermouth, cans of soft drink, finger spreads of wine glasses. Ice chinks, the coffee machine hisses, the door bangs. Salva can I have more bread?, What's that there Salva?, Salva give me some of those red chorizos, Gachasmigas Salva, Three with milk and one black when you can Salva, Toast with cheese and tomato today Salva, Salva, how much is that?, Go on then Salva I'll have a brandy too.

A group of four men hit the bar at the same time, two of them have their shoulders against mine, they all have that sort of workshop smell - oil and grease. They're talking to each other, they're asking for things. Salva is answering all four of them and talking to the cook in the kitchen at the same time. I marvel. It's not something new, it's not something unknown, it's not even surprising but I did notice it and it did make me chuckle.

Sorry about the snap. I didn't have any pictures of busy bars and none of the Google ones were any better.

Home and away

There's a strangeness about being home and yet being a foreigner.

Last week I asked the lad who served me coffee how his birthday celebrations had gone. He'd told me his plans the last time I was in. I got the full story. Later, in the same bar and in the same session a different, and new to me, waiter asked me if I wanted another coffee. He asked in broken English - to him I was just another foreigner.

There were a lot of political meetings running up to the local elections. I went to one of them and the prospective, now elected, candidates were lined up against the wall in a show of solidarity at a political rally. A couple of them greeted me by name. We knew each other because I'd taught them a bit of English. I'd actually worked alongside another of them several years ago.

Alfredo, the barber, nods through the window - he cuts my hair and I didn't get his daughter through her B1 English exam. And so it goes on and on with example after example of knowing both Spanish and British people in Pinoso.

We've been here a while. If a road in town is sealed off, and they often are, I know how to skip around. If I need knicker elastic, tracing paper or knitting needles I know which shop to use - actually nowadays I'd probably go to the Chinese shop but I'm sure you take the point. There are new things to learn all the time. We're as local as local could be and yet we are still foreigners.

I walked past one of the three British run bars in town and there were a bunch of young (to me) people outside. They were talking estuary English. My father, who was so politically incorrect that I probably wouldn't speak to him nowadays, if he were still alive, used to describe people speaking languages other than English on the streets of England as jabbering. I wondered if he would think the same of our very noticeable presence on the streets of Pinoso?

We Britons are obvious here. Most Spanish people I meet presume I know next to nothing about Spain. I'm not surprised. From what I can see the majority of my compatriots have very little idea of the country around them. I don't mean in the sense of filling their car with fuel, buying bread, getting a drink or paying the electric bill. They are perfectly well able to get on with their lives but culturally, linguistically, geographically and historically they are clueless. It's a choice. I have never worried myself too much about football yet I know people whose very existence would be much meaner without the beautiful game. Lots of Britons here are much more "integrated" than me but there is another group who continually surprise me with how little they know of the place they have chosen to immigrate to. It's that choice though; they have chosen a sort of voluntary isolation.

He hasn't been on at me for a while but there used to be a Spanish bloke who read and commented on this blog. He blamed me for the hubris that lots of Europe lays at the door of we Britons but he also took me to task for my British perspective on things. That's true. I do. I must. Just in the same way as his viewpoint would be a Spanish one. Our backgrounds are coded in through years of experience. I remember, years ago, in Cuba. I forget where we were, Trinidad maybe or Cienfuegos. We were beginning to get the idea that everything in Cuba was in short supply even if you had dollars. "Do you have alcohol other than rum?," we asked. "Of course, for tourists we have everything," said the owner. I missed the irony. "Okey dokey, she'll have a red wine and I'll have a beer, please." The man came back and put down two rums - "Here's the beer and here's the wine," he said. It's often not a good idea to presume that you've got the measure of a place.

The Spanish health system, the medical system, traffic law, the voting system and the way that parliament runs are exactly similar to the UK. Well they are in broad-stroke yet they are completely different. The British first-past-the-post voting isn't the Spanish party list D'Hondt method of proportional representation. Actually even the mechanics of how you vote, crosses on paper and lists in envelopes is different. The effect is the same though and both produce democratically elected governments. Externally verified end of secondary schooling GCSEs are not the same as the internally marked ESO, the certificate recognised as the successful completion of obligatory secondary education, in Spain. Both have a similar purpose and similar recognition by employers or higher education establishments too. Nearly everything has a different equivalent from electricity bills to the etiquette of using a knife and fork.

All of this is because someone commented on one of my blog entries. The one about washing up. I could write the blog with any number of perspectives. I've generally written it based on the things that happen to us or around us. I've wondered about making it more current affairs and I've wondered about doing the sort of information pieces that I used to do for the TIM Magazine. In the end though I decided to stick with the mundane and everyday with references to those wider issues as I bumped into them. The entries are often too wordy but, in general, I think I'm happy with it. I'd be interested in any views you may have about the blog in general though.

Just get the form, fill it in and get it notarised

I still look at various expat forums every now and then. On one of the forums, the administrators try to rouse the troops a little with something they consider to be potential conversation starters. One of the questions that's cropped up a couple of times is about cultural differences. I maintain, and I still maintain that the differences between Spain and the UK are minimal. I don't mean that the two countries are the same but the basic premises on which they run are very similar and lead to similar ways of doing things.

In Spain traffic is organised and regulated, doctors wait, stethoscope poised, in health centres, dustbin lorries come with monotonous frequency, I can take photos of more or less what I want, I don't have to join a particular political party to prosper, health and safety laws are strong, you are unlikely to be slaughtered in a gunfight, slavery and human trafficking are not tolerated, the state doesn't kill people, there are laws to protect animals and consumers, entering and leaving the country is a reasonably simple process, I, and more particularly women, can dress as we wish, my internet access is not controlled or censored, people are not persecuted for their ethnicity, corruption is punished, bribery is not endemic, people pay their taxes and a long etcetera. Now that doesn't mean that everything is fine but, without needing to look at a map or consult Google, we are not talking about the problems you might encounter in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Myanmar, China, Nigeria, South Africa, The United States, Mauritania, Tibet, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan or Cuba.

I'm not saying that everything is hunky dory. Gitanos, gypsies (and I've never heard anyone suggest Romany People) get treated badly in tens of ways, there are racists here as there are everywhere, rich people find life much easier than poor people, transexuals get a rough time at school, children are abused by adults, the legal system seems to work better for the rich than the poor, dogs are abandoned in the streets and some donkeys, and sometimes trades unionists, get beaten with sticks. There are prostitutes controlled by evil pimps, there are laws which can be used to limit what I consider to be basic freedoms and builders will sit atop scaffolding dressed in shorts and flip flops and then suggest you pay in cash without the need for VAT. At times the process for getting planning permission or an insurance claim sorted out can seem interminable. I could go on.

I can't pretend that I don't notice the differences. But differences have a way of becoming normal. It's ages since we had to deal with the skein of bureaucracy that we had to deal with when we first got here. Residence documents, identity documents, registering with town halls, this and that piece of paper, new bank accounts, new insurance policies, cars to be bought, phone contracts to be sorted, new power suppliers to be compared, builders to be hired and a hundred more things, right down to recognising bleach in the supermarket, were a challenge at first. Those things came in an avalanche of activity. Nowadays they come along one at a time. It's just as much of a pain in the backside getting a new passport from the British as it is exchanging a driving licence with the Spanish. I'm helping somebody get a document we all call a residencia at the moment. The paperwork isn't particularly complicated but there is lots of detail that's a bit tricky. Just dealing with that one thing reminded me of that deluge of paper at the beginning. It's a miracle anyone survives it. It must be exactly the same for anyone heading for the UK from elsewhere.

Of course I actually keep a weather eye out for the differences because they give me to something to blog about. Visitors are good for reminding you just how many things have become ordinary that aren't that ordinary to a British sensibility. We have visitors at the moment. We popped out last night to see the statue of Santa Catalina get moved from one house to another during the fiesta in her honour, had a look at the mediaeval market and just strolled around. The people milling all over the place, the apparent disorganisation of it all, the actual idea of shifting a statue around escorted by a brass band, the unshaven priest, the mayor mixed up in the crowd, the number of police officers on hand, the odd looking buildings, children on the street quite late in the evening, not paying at a bar until you're about to go, bonfires set up in the middle of the road and complete strangers offering you glasses of wine or barbecued sausage were all just a bit different. And we were only out for a couple of hours.

Mind you it's not all whimsical drollness. I had to work this morning so Maggie has taken our guests off to a bodega and restaurant after. Whilst they've been away, I've been talking to a pal who appears to have been swindled over the sale of the kit to heat her pool. She's bumping into something else that is just as normal a part of everyday life in Spain. The difficulty of complaining when something does go wrong. Again I'm not so sure that's all that different from the UK but it can seem like a very uphill process when you are faced with the intransigence of a company, a company that doesn't answer your phone calls or return your emails, a company that speaks a different language and a company that knows its way around whatever legislation there is much better than you do.

All squishy

There's a certain tendency to euphoria sometimes. It would happen from time to time driving across the fens or maybe with the MGB in the Cotswolds. Just feeling glad to be there, to be passing through. It happens a lot here. As I drive across some Spanish landscape with, maybe, high hills, or never ending plains or, perhaps, just watching that ochre yellow dust trail as a car or van drives along some dirt track I start grinning for no particular reason.

Maybe it's my age but nowadays I've got to the point where small pleasures cheer me up quite as easily as things on a grander scale. Maybe it's always been like that. Lots of the films that I've liked most across my lifetime of cinema going have been the ones that are classed as independent film.

There are lots and lots of celebrations in Spain. They are everywhere if you look. I wonder if they have a more obvious impact in small towns and villages. The centre of Pinoso is more or less closed off for the eight or nine days of the fair and fiesta in August. We were in Bilbao once, at Easter, and a parade was routed down one side of a dual carriageway whilst traffic continued to flow on the other carriageway - the place is simply too big to stop because of an Easter parade. I thought the penitents looked lost and out of place in a way that they don't as they invade the streets of Jumilla or Hellín. Mind you they close a lot of the centre of Valencia to traffic by the Fallas, Alicante for Hogueras and Murcia for the Spring Festival so I could well be wrong.

Lots of the events are religious in basis, Catholic in fact. Not a lot of Divali or Eid celebrations in the streets here. Often, when I say to Maggie, "Do you fancy coming to see the san Antón stuff in Villena?" or "What about going to see the sawdust carpets in Elche de la Sierra for Corpus Christi?," she'll answer "I'm not a Catholic." Well, neither am I but I'm beginning to really like some of the smaller scale, home grown parades and what not. Actually I think that for most Spaniards the events aren't that religious either; they are more cultural or traditional or just theirs.

Pinoso fiestas is full of happenings. Fireworks and folk dancing here, mascletàs and vermouth sessions there and big events like the concerts and the fancy dress parade. And my favourite event? - the flower offering. Old costumes, lots of flowers and heading to the church to lay them at the feet of a carved wooden statue in the church, with the inevitable mass - not that I've ever been to the mass. Strange choice. I know what I think the reason is. I think it's because I'm soppy. It's like that line in Wonderful World about shaking hands. In the ofrenda there are little groups - from the villages and from organisations but there also seem to be family groups and just, well, people. They wave at their pals as they pass, they break rank to say hello, the smiles are enormous. The pleasure is infectious.

I went to see a little procession in Chinorlet last night. Chinorlet is only about 3kms from our house but it belongs to Monóvar rather than to Pinoso. I didn't know which figures were being moved about so I asked Google. The first result was the 1998 fiesta programme. Heaven knows why. It gave me the answer though. Twenty years ago the procession was at the same time on the last Sunday of the fiestas. The billing says Solemn procession of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sainted Virgin of the Rosary. Solemn? Well sort of. There were a lot of candles and nice frocks and suits for some of the men alongside a couple of second commandment graven images. The statues are on either wheeled floats or carried on strong shoulders and backs. All through this little village, of fewer than 200 people, there were knots of people sitting on chairs outside their homes, standing around chatting, passing time waiting for the procession. I suppose that "everyone" who has a weekend home in Chinorlet was there over the weekend.

It's a bit odd. I'd decided to write this piece yesterday evening suggesting that this was something about as Spanish as mantillas and peinetas. This morning, on my Facebook feed, there was a photo of a bunch of people loading a carved catholic figure into the back of a decorated pickup truck. I presume that they were setting off on what is called a romeria here in Spain. The photos were from my brother in law from when he passed through Messajanes in Portugal. It reminded me that I've seen those carved virgins making the rounds in the background of lots of Sergio Leone and Robert Rodriguez films. But, who cares about facts? The next time I watch the Virgin of the Assumption heading up the little road to Caballusa or another Virgin trekking from Aspe to Hondón de las Nieves I'll think that I'm watching something as Spanish as it gets and I may well grin.

A cashless society

Going into a bank in Spain is often the proverbial pain in whatchamacallit. I don't have to do it often. Cash comes from holes in the wall and most things get dealt with on cards or online. If I do have to go into a bank I always think it looks as though the clerks have never dealt with this particular procedure before. It's all a bit slow, a bit ponderous and there are always multiple documents to be signed.

We have a few banks in Pinoso but there isn't a branch of my bank, the Santander. There is an office with a big sign outside that says Santander and I once foolishly supposed that I could go there to pay in money. I can't. A bit like the wrong type of snow, on the railway, I have the wrong sort of account. It was originally opened with a bank that was later absorbed by the Santander. The name of the account has changed at least four times since then but, apparently, it still bears some Mark of Cain which makes it inferior to a proper Santander account. Whatever reason the man in the office in Pinoso cannot put folding money into my account. I have had trouble with the other banks too. They simply don't offer services to other bank's customers. Some will take my money off me and pay it into my account but they charge several euros to do it.

I had a period of being paid in cash and, to avoid charges, I would drive to the nearest branch of my bank in Monóvar, about 15 kilometres away. The process was simple enough but the wait could be mind bendingly long. At least I learned not to be coy about using the Spanish queuing technique of asking who was the last person in the bank so that I knew when it would be my turn. Spaniards do not, generally, care for the one in front of the other British queue.

At work, for reasons, I was paid with a cheque. I last saw a cheque in Spain about ten years ago so I wasn't sure what to do with it. I took it to the issuing bank and asked. Well, first I waited for about twenty five minutes before I got to speak to anyone. The two cashiers dealt with a total of three people, in front of me, in that time. I showed the teller the cheque;

"Can I pay this in to my account?"
"Of course you can."

So, I asked her to do it. She explained that she meant that if I drove to my bank and queued there then I could pay it in myself. She did say that her colleague could give me cash for it though. So I went back to waiting. I handed over the cheque and asked for cash. I was asked for ID and the man made some huffing and puffing noise when I handed over the A4 piece of paper that is my official ID document. It's been in my wallet for a long time and it looks a lot like those remnants of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then he asked me for photo ID. This is all pretty normal. Everybody in the world seems entitled to ask me to prove that I'm who I say I am so I wasn't phased. I handed over my passport and asked if he'd prefer something Spanish, like my driving licence. He said he would. He asked me if I were resident and I suggested that a Spanish driving licence and a residence certificate may be a clue. He gawped at the computer screen for a while, made a copy of my passport, got me to sign two bits of paper and then, the part I really liked, bearing in mind that we are now closing in on 45 minutes.

"You shouldn't use cheques, you know, they involve a lot of bureaucracy."
"And is that my fault?," I snapped back, in Spanish.

He'd been condescendingly talking to me in English despite the fact that I addressed him in Spanish. He responded in Spanish that time. He assured me that I was not responsible for whatever process the Caixa Bank had agreed with who knows what supranational banking system and handed over the few euros that the cheque was worth.

Sometimes there are still reminders of the years that Spain stagnated while the rest of Europe moved forwards.

They think it's all over

I spoke to my mum on the phone today. She said that she'd had a good Christmas and New Year but that she was glad to be back to normal. Later I popped in to town. I went to a cake shop that I've only ever been in once before, that time it was to order a birthday cake for Maggie, one with icing and a message and candles. This time it was to order a roscón. I can't remember whether I ordered the custard filling (crema) or the cream filling (nata) but either way I'm expecting better quality than the ones we usually buy from the supermarket. The last time we bought a baker's shop roscón was when we lived it Cartagena. I have a vague and nagging memory that I was shocked at the price then but, hey-ho, Christmas tradition and all that. The sensible eating can start when Christmas is over after the 6th.

I've written about Roscones before, the traditional Roscón de Reyes cake, a bit like a big doughnut that gets eaten on Kings, at Epiphany, on 6th January when the Three Wise Men have delivered the presents to the baby Jesus and to all the good boys and girls. The bad ones get coal so the Kings are obviously more generous than Santa who leaves nothing for bad children!

As I passed the lottery shop I did something else I don't usually do. I went in and bought a lottery ticket for el Niño draw, the Child, the second Christmas lottery. The prizes for el Niño are less than for el Gordo Christmas draw on 22nd December but, I think, there's a better chance of winning the big prize and excellent chances of, at least, getting your money back (1:3). I read that the chances of winning the 200,000€ top prize are something like 1:100,000 which is about the same as the chance of being stung to death by a bee or poisoned to death by a snake. They had a number that had obviously been spurned by Pinoseros in general, there was a caricature promoting the number, it was parodied as el Feo, the Ugly. Obviously enough that's the number I bought.

So, if the roscón does turn out to be really expensive when I pick it up on the 5th I can always hope that just getting the 20€ ticket money back from the draw on the 6th will at least pay for it. Or I can hope that the fine taste of the "home baked" version will be enough to make me forget this last gasp Christmas spending.

Jingle bells

There's an advert on the telly at the moment for el Corte Inglés, the big Spanish department store, which uses lots of Christmassy images. There are turkeys, there are Christmas trees, there are Santa Claus hats and there's lots of snow. Well I think of them as Christmassy images but that may not be the same for lots and lots of Spaniards.

I can only generalise here but I think that Christmas is an incredibly important time for Britons. Even if it isn't, in fact, much more than a couple of days of family arguments, overeating and snoozing in front of the telly the build up to it, the folklore around it, the customs associated with it, are deeply entrenched in British culture. Put a picture of a robin, in the snow, on the front of a greetings card and it's a Christmas card and Christmas cards are one of the symbols, the rites, of Christmas even if you're going to do it all on Facebook this year. Although Britons eat chocolates all year round most British houses don't have tins of Quality Street and the like except at Christmas time. You may be vegan, you may be going to have Indian food this year, but, if I were to ask Britons what the traditional Christmas lunch consists of, the answer would be turkey with all the trimmings. Holly, mistletoe, houses lit up with lights, the works do, Salvation Army bands, carol concerts, Christmas trees and all the rest are obvious and persistent Christmas symbols.

As we approach Christmas I usually do a bit of English language Christmas vocabulary with my students through songs, stories or quizzes. I wouldn't expect them to know mince pies just as I wouldn't expect most Britons to know about traditional Spanish fare like turrón, mantecados or polvorones. But I'm always surprised when I ask students what colour Santa's clothes are and the answer doesn't appear to be obvious to them. I find it strange that I need to explain that Papá Noel - which is the most common name for Santa here and which I presume comes from the French - is also known as Father Christmas or Santa Claus or Santa. Surely, just like me, they have seen hundreds of soppy Hollywood films loaded with this imagery? I never understand why the question about which animal pulls Santa's sleigh, or what a sleigh is, are more problematic than simply knowing the vocabulary for reno (reindeer) or trineo (sleigh). Explain as I might that the sound that a bell makes is called jingling there is no link, for the majority of Spaniards that I've ever taught, between bells, jingling or not, and Christmas. Even the Christian type questions - why was Jesus born in a stable?, what did the Wise Men follow? - don't seem to have the pat responses learned from an arsenal of memorised Christmas songs.

Some things are the same in both countries, for instance most towns have Christmas lights in their main streets and families get together to eat. Other things are completely different in Spain to the UK but equally widespread. For example nearly all the Spanish bars have raffles for Christmas baskets loaded with food and drink and the big Christmas lottery moves millions of euros. Other things are variations on a similar theme. Santa isn't particularly Spanish for instance, he's a recentish import, but the Spanish do have gift givers, the Three Kings, (Three Wise Men to you and me) and they turn up to hand over their gifts on the evening of the 5th January in big parades the length and breadth of Spain.

As an outsider, an outsider who has seen a lot of Spanish Christmases now, I'd say that there are plenty of Christmassy Spanish things but that they are nowhere near as standardised as they are in the UK. Ask Spaniards what they are going to have for Christmas lunch and the answer will vary from suckling pig or lamb to sea bream and local dishes such as pine nut flavoured meat balls. Putting up the Nativity Scene is a big thing in some Spanish homes and in others it's simply another little seasonal routine. Plenty of houses have trees and many have lights too but if your Christmas house is no lighter and just as treeless as at any other time of the year then nobody would see that as being bah, humbug! In fact, so far as I know, there are no literary equivalents to that Dickensian story. Gift giving, gift exchanging, is nowhere near as widespread here as it is in the UK and if there are Secret Santa type things at work I've never come across them. The expectations of Spanish children for Christmas gifts seem to be far less demanding than their British peers. On the couple of occasions that someone has given me a Christmas gift, associated with my teaching, I've been really surprised. Charitable organisations, like the Red Cross, do produce Christmas cards and, if you know where to look, you can buy them. One year, when Corte Inglés didn't have any cards and I couldn't afford the UNICEF ones at the Post Office, I had the bright spark idea of going to the local office of the Red Cross to buy some. I kept about half a dozen bemused people mildly amused for about five minutes as I tried, in my variation of Spanish, to explain why I might want to buy Christmas cards as a way of donating to their organisation.

Finally, and almost incomprehensibly for most of the Britons I know, Christmas isn't really celebrated at the same time. For Spaniards the evening of Christmas Eve is big - the family gets together and eats. Christmas Day is Christmas Day and the family gets together and eats. The 26th is non event - Boxing Day is only the very routine St Stephen's Day. New Year's Eve is New Year's Eve with grapes and underwear and fizzy wine. Probably the liveliest day of Christmas is the evening of the 5th January when the Three Magic Kings deliver their gifts. The parades and the last minute shopping frenzy give it a feel very similar to Christmas Eve for we Anglos.

What would you like to drink?

I went last night, as I often do, to the Monday evening intercambio session at the Coliseum bar in Pinoso. The idea is simple enough, an English speaker is paired up with a Spanish speaker and the hour long session is divided in half - the conversation is in English to start, or in Spanish, and then, for the second half, it's the other way around. It's supposed to run from 8.30 to 9.30 but we're always a
little late starting and so a little late finishing. There is no cost but there is the expectation that you will buy a drink or two.

If things go well, if the conversation flows, as it often does, I really enjoy the sessions because they are an extended chat. They add to my cultural briefing on Spain. The exchanges have to go further than "hello, how are you?" and people are expecting linguistic problems so there is none of the feeling of failure if one of the speakers tries an extended discourse. Serpentine as the monologue of one of the speakers may be, however many times there are attempts to reform the phrase so it makes sense, the other person tries to hang on to the sense and to encourage the speaker.

There are some interesting characters; a bloke who doesn't eat anything that's been cooked, another, an Argentinian, with a Uruguayan background who is a rice chef at a classy local restaurant and a professional waitress who has been moving between jobs trying to find something more permanent. Last night I got a man who has sent the last dozen years teaching Spanish in Serbia, in Belgrade, with the Cervantes Institute.

But it wasn't the intercambio that I intended to write about. It was that thing that the only expectation on the attendees is that they buy a drink, or two.

Despite avoiding water I think I drink quite a lot. I drink tea in a pint pot and, when I have the time, I think nothing of drinking a couple of pints on the trot. I drink juice with breakfast, I drink pop, coffee and non alcohol beer in bars. I tend to drink quickly too. I drink wine, brandy and beer at the same sort of speed as Coca Cola which is one of the reasons that I'm trying to have a bit of an alcohol break at the moment. I don't think I'm unusual. Maggie drinks plenty of liquid too and so did my mum's friends when I visited the UK a couple of weeks ago. There aren't many Britons whose first offer to a guest entering their house isn't a drink - tea, coffee, soft or hard depending on the time of day and the circumstances. At any British event the bar is usually pretty crowded.

Spaniards drink too of course but my impression is that they drink less. This isn't a bad or a good thing, it's not comparison of alcohol consumption, it's a comparison of volume and something I think marks a difference. I did look for empirical evidence and I found something from the European Food Safety Authority which listed the UK consumption, per person, as being 1598ml per day as against 820ml for Spaniards but it was a long and learned paper, which I couldn't be bothered to read, so there may be all sorts of provisos against those figures.

In all of the weeks that I've gone to the intercambio I have at least two drinks and sometimes three. We are, after all, sitting at a café table. My Spanish partners don't. Everybody has a drink but they usually stop after the first. Whilst I feel slightly uncomfortable occupying a table with an empty glass or cup in front of me neither the bar staff nor the locals seem at all worried that people are doing just that.

Obviously there are exceptions. Spaniards go out drinking too and they can put plenty away. A good meal is often accompanied by copious quantities of alcohol and the "botellón", a gathering of young people in a public place to socialize and drink alcohol, is very common and is considered, by some, to be a social problem.

Right, that'll do, piece written, I think I'll put the kettle on and get a cup of tea. I deserve it.

With no added preservatives

I went to have a quick look at the tanganilla competition in Culebrón this morning as part of the weekend long fiesta. Tanganilla, I think, also goes by the name of caliche, hito, bolinche and chito and there seem to be variations of it all over Spain.

Tanganilla isn't a difficult game to organise. A line in the dirt, a 10cm high (or thereabouts) wooden rod and some 7cm across (or thereabouts) metal discs plus some players - maybe a referee. The rod is set up about 20 metres from the line - I understand that one of the variations, and there are lots, says that the distance is 22 strides. Isn't that the length of a cricket pitch? The basic idea is to knock over the rod but from watching there seemed to be other rules about how close the thrown discs were to the fallen rod. Amongst the many regional variations a common one seems to involve placing a coin on top of the rod and then measuring the distance of the discs from the coin once it has been knocked off the rod. Dead easy and complicated at the same time - like pétanque or crown green bowling. I thought that the game was one of the innovations of last year's fiesta but a reader of the blog put me right - apparently it was a feature of fiestas in the past. The reader reckons it disappeared in 2008 or 2009. Obviously as my gut expands my memory shrinks because I don't remember having seen the game in the village before. If innovation isn't correct then revival is and I thought it was a good thing. A traditional game, no cost a bit of fun plus an easy opportunity to drink beer.

The other day in my English class, where I nearly always start off with any sort of Q&A session, to get everybody warmed up, I asked about fast food. Do you prefer burgers, pizza or kebabs? What's your favourite fast food? blah, blah. It's not the first time I've asked similar questions. When someone answers hamburgers I then ask whether they prefer McDonald's, Burger King, Fosters Hollywood, TGB and so on. Then I ask what they order?, what side order?, what drink?, diet or standard? But it didn't go that way with my Pinoso students. They liked burgers OK but they liked the ones from the local butchers or the ones that their Gran makes. It's the first time that I've asked the series of questions outside of a reasonably big town. The Pinoseros were re-assuringly dismissive of the floppy, semi warm burgers that the chains have a tendency to serve up. It was particularly re-assuring because Maggie and I have been shocked recently to see the queues of traffic waiting in the Drive Thru lane at the McDonald's in Petrer as we leave the cinema. Spaniards tend to like and enjoy food and it seems strange that they would queue for burgers.

I suppose the difference is that Petrer, or the side by side towns of Elda and Petrer, have a population of about 90,000 - somewhat larger than the fewer than 8,000 of Pinoso. Tanganilla and home made burgers - symbols of a rural idyll?

Looking for an epiphany

We've been to see a few Easter parades these last few days. When I was a schoolboy Mr Kemp and Mr Edwards, my Junior and Secondary school headteachers, were keen that I was given a good Christian Education. Whether I asked for it or not they made sure that I got it. Although I haven't really looked at a Bible or happily gone inside a church for well over forty years I still remember the basics of, for instance, the Christmas and Easter stories. At times it's not enough. So when I saw a float in a parade with the title of Aparicion de los Discípulos de Emaus or The Appearance to the Disciples at Emmaus it meant nothing to me. Fortunately other teachers tried hard to persuade me that finding things out and knowing how to find things out was easily as important as actually knowing things. It's much easier now than it used to be. Google knew. Emmaus or Emaus is one of those early Resurrection sightings.

In the same way that I have a well grounded but essentially partial grasp of Christian lore I have a reasonably good handle on Spain. I know a bit of history, a bit of culture, some politics and more. I keep trying to add to my knowledge. My sieve like brain is a perfidious ally in this attempt to learn and those funny foreign names don't help either but sheer persistence has worked for me in the past and I see no reason why it isn't a workable plan for, at least, the near future.

The last Easter float had passed us by. As we walked away the chair hire companies were loading their plastic seats into the back of myriad vans and the road sweeping machines were pirouetting around the streets which moments before had buzzed with spectators. As we neared our parked car we saw that there was something going on in the park, el Malecón, by the river. We've seen fairs and markets there before so we went for a nosey.

There were a bunch of temporary restaurants. They were busy. Most were called Peña this and that. Now peña is probably a word that I don't understand. Or maybe it's a word I understand perfectly. It seems to be a multi-use word - all peña usually means is that it's a group of like minded souls - Peña Madrileña for Real Madrid fans. It seems too that peñas can either be very open groups or quite closed groups. I've heard peña used to describe the garage hired by a bunch of mates during a town carnival to drink beer and hang around in. Often, within fiestas, there are peñas which are set up by associations of one kind or another. Your neighbourhood may be going to do some things in a town fête so the neighbourhood sets up a temporary HQ in an unrented shop. They call it a peña and it becomes a sort of social centre for anybody who has affiliations to that neighbourhood. Some peñas seem to be more permanent than others.

Anyway, so we've diverted to have a look in the park and we find all these restaurants and they are all called Peña this and that. We have no idea whether they are something to do with the Spring Festival, which always follows on from Easter in Murcia, or whether they are tied in to the Holy Week celebrations. We have no idea but hundreds and hundreds of people do, they are having their lunch there. Some of the peñas have price lists, most are completely full. We don't know if it's a walk in proposition, whether we need a reservation or if it's a members only deal. It doesn't matter. It's not as though we want to eat. We've already eaten in a bar in town. The reason we are interested is simply because we don't know what's going on. We are quietly and individually distressed. It's discomforting simply because we don't understand. It's another Emmaus moment.

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it

We went into Pinoso on Wednesday to see the Procession of the imprisoned Jesus. He was escorted by the Roman Century and two of the be-hooded brotherhoods plus a couple of groups dedicated to different incarnations of the Virgin. To be honest I have no idea what was actually happening despite having seen this, or processions very similar to it, tens of times in our time here. In fact a British couple newly arrived in Pinoso were asking Maggie which of the long Good Friday programme in Pinoso were the ones not to miss and, when it came down to it, we were guessing.

One of the events IN CAPITALS for the Good Friday programme for Pinoso is the encounter between The Verónica and Our Father Jesús. Google tells me that The Verónica, according to the Christian tradition, was the woman who, during the Viacrucis, handed Jesus a cloth to wipe away his sweat and blood, a cloth on which his face was miraculously imprinted. Then I had to Google Viacrucis. It seems to be Jesus's journey from Palm Sunday to the tomb via crucifixion, which Wikipedia tells me is interpreted as the Stations of the Cross in English. I'm sure that the Spanish interpretation is Jesus dragging his cross up to Golgotha.

The point is that I have been a spectator at several of the events that mark Holy Week all over Spain but I don't really know what is happening or why. People often think of Spain as being a very religious, read Catholic, country. I don't think that's really true any longer. I think it is true to say that there are still a lot of fervent Catholics in Spain but they tend to be from the older generation. What there is a lot of in Spain is tradition that is based on Catholic iconography and dogma. So carved wooden saints or Virgin Mary statues turn up time and time again in various sorts of ceremonies. Priests bless animals and police cars, Baptisms and communions are a societal rite of passage and an excuse for a meal. Spain is a country with lots and lots of traditions and because, in the past, those traditions were linked to the Catholic Church the tradition still looks like and is loaded with Catholic symbolism and ritual.

Last night as the wooden figures were paraded around Pinoso amidst an enormous crowd everything suddenly went quiet, The procession halted and somebody, somewhere in the distance, sang a saeta, the traditional style of song only sung at Eastertide. I have no idea how all those people knew to stop, maybe it was preplanned, maybe the people who control each group are wired into some sophisticated communication system but everybody stopped. Even the gum chewing lads with the funny haircuts and the noisy children sitting in the gutter knew to shut up while the song lasted. When it was done, the crowd applauded loud and long. Very Christian and absolutely nothing to do with religion for the majority of the crowd.

Easter has other traditions. aside from the processions. A mass exodus from the big cities to the coast and lots of road deaths is one but there are also traditions around food just as there are in the UK. Maggie always bemoans the shortage of hot cross buns and chocolate eggs in Spain. Traditional Easter food includes torrijas, which takes all sorts of shapes and flavours, but are basically fried, sweetened, egg soaked pieces of bread. The mona de pascua is typical of this area - it's a sort of sweetened bready cake with a hard boiled egg in the middle. And, truth be told, chocolate Easter eggs are pretty common nowadays alongside gold foil wrapped Lindt Easter bunnies.

We were in Santa Pola for our first Easter in Spain. For us Easter was the British long weekend starting on Good Friday and ending on Easter Monday which is nothing like the timetable in Spain. One night I was getting really angry. There were obviously a couple of lads on their way to Boys Brigade band practice who were pounding their drums outside our window. I couldn't stand it any more. I went on to the balcony to tell them to shut up and found myself staring at a religious float being wheeled through the streets accompanied by people who looked like Klu Klux Klan members beating muffled drums. For those of you who know just as much about Holy Week, Semana Santa, now as I did then here is my brief guide to the Spanish Easter. A disclaimer. There are as many Easter traditions as there are towns in Spain so this is a very generalised view.

The first event is usually Palm Sunday, Domingo de Ramos, which can vary from huge processions, as in Elche, with lots of participants carrying palm fronds some of them woven into the most intricate designs imaginable, through to tiny processions with a small band of people waving any old greenery that they have found somewhere alongside the way following the local priest to or from the church up in Salamanca.

From Holy Monday on there are processions after processions in nearly every town or city of Spain through to the joyous celebrations of Easter Sunday. Semana Santa is everywhere but it's especially enormous down in Andalucia, especially in Seville and Malaga. All week long there are processions of penitents dressed in long cloaks with tall pointed hat and hood combinations with eye slits. They are usually called capuchas though there are several local names. The penitents are usually accompanied by eerie music based on drum beats and shrill horn blasts. The penitentes encapuchados (hooded penitents) or Nazarenos (Nazarenes) belong to a cofradía or hermandad - a brotherhood - usually associated with a particular church or cult. Each brotherhood has a distinctive design to the cloak and hood. As well as the brotherhoods there are often other groups with affiliations to a particular cult and or effigy. Women wearing the long lacy mantillas supported by a peineta, usually all in black, Roman soldiers with clinking armour and a whole range of other styles of uniform are common.

The penitents and sometimes the other groupings, accompany a paso or trono (tableau or float) nearly all of which have some reference to the Easter passion: Jesus on the cross, The Last Supper, some part of the Easter story featuring one of the Apostles - for instance Peter and a cockerel. The pasos vary in size, some are on wheels but the most impressive ones weigh a couple of tons and are carried by men (and nowadays women) four or five abreast. The crowd applaud the management of some of the bigger floats, often ablaze with chandelier style lanterns, and even for non believers the intricate design, the effort that goes into their preparation and the sheer size of the tableau is something to behold.

The slow and sometimes, literally, painful progress of the tronos is regulated by el capataz, the boss, who has to look after the team of bearers and make sure that the tableau avoid the overhanging balconies, negotiate the right angle turns and arrive safely to their destination. Along the way as the tronos stop, that's the time that the balcony based singers take their opportunity to sing the saetas. Usually the different brotherhoods take the lead in one of the processions sometime during Holy Week but they often process several times. The processions can be at any time of day and towards the end of the week there are more daytime events. The majority though start in the early evening, around eight or nine, and often go on well into the next morning. Usually all the brotherhoods of a city or town are on the move on Maundy Thursday as the day becomes Good Friday. Silent processions with towns blacked out for a short while around midnight are common. Seeing bands of hooded figures carrying carved statues on their back in the pitch dark is something to stir the spirit. Very eerie.

Some processions are much more serious than others, more religious. For instance in Pinoso and around the corner in Murcia the penitents often carry bags of sweets that they dole out to the outstretched hands of children. On the other hand, while I was getting a coffee in a bar on Wednesday, everyone stopped to watch the television as engineer soldiers (los gastadores) of the Spanish Foreign Legion changed guard on the Cristo de Mena, a carved wooden statue famous in Malaga. Imagine the precision of the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace, by soldiers with spades across their back, to stand silent and motionless to guard a wooden religious statue. Bizarre. When we lived in Cartagena the precision of the penitents  as they marched was remarkable. We have seen people denied a place in the procession because their gloves were not the correct shade of white or because the would be penitent had painted toenails poking from their sandals. On the other hand one of the tronos in Cartagena is a serving navy sailor, Saint Peter the fisherman. He is granted shore leave but ends up confined to barracks for another year when he returns drunk after meeting with his apostle colleagues in the wee small hours of the morning. The drunken return of Saint Peter involves the float bearers dipping and lifting the heavy tableau in unison. In Hellín people wander around the streets drumming with no particular organisation or purpose that I could see and drumming is big all over Castilla la Mancha. Watching the TV news the breadth of costumes and traditions is breathtaking.

Spain is just about as Spanish as Spain gets at Eastertide