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

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

I remember when we made the decision to move to Spain. It wasn't because there were people with guns in the street, not a sign of religious fanatics demanding that girls stayed covered and away from school. It wasn't even as though we were working in terrible conditions for a pittance. I, we, thought it would be good to move from one prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms to another prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms.

I can hear the guffaws at that last sentence. I've read the Tweets and Facebook entries that suggest Spain is only one step short of being some Banana Republic, where nothing works as it should. I agree with some of the complaining. I'd like to be able to get my ID card without any effort too just like I'd hoped that my British passport wouldn't have a turn around time of four months. I might even prefer not to have to carry any ID. I understand the concerns about the ways that some animals in Spain are treated but the name of the RSPCA suggests the problem is not just Spanish. I wonder why there aren't more complaints about the strange Spanish dichotomy which is quick to introduce same sex marriage legislation (for instance) but still laughs along with the local theatre group as they parody Chinese people in the most grotesque manner. It would be nice if my Internet connection were a bit more stable but my sister says exactly the same about hers in rural Cambridgeshire. I do sometimes fret about the freedom of information in Spain and the clearly unrepresentative election system and over combative politicians but, again, Spain is far from alone and it wouldn't take much time to think of a couple of matching British concerns.

So, Julie Andrews, Sound of Music, Sonrisas y lágrimas in Spain, ringing in my ears I decided to change tack. What is it that are as good as warm woollen mittens and packages tied up with strings? And I'll keep away from the heavier stuff. Just fluff.

The restaurants. One of the things I most like about Spain, and I was reminded of the other week when we ate at Casa Eduardo here in Culebrón, is how the meals progress. My co-diners were obviously unimpressed with the food but we all seemed to be having a good time. I squinted at the pile of debris around us, the spills on the table cloth, the different coloured remnants of all that wine, water, beer and Fondillón in the glasses, the crumbs and crumpled napkins, the remains of the meal. I looked across to the family nearest to us packing up to go; the children getting their mouths wiped. The aftermath. The style of eating, the sharing, is something I approved of long before we moved here. Just as I approve of the meal times, of making the main meal of the day at lunchtime and, in doing so, saying that the essence of life is more important than work. Yep, dining out is always good fun. I like the food too. I know lots of people don't but even if you don't care for the food you must approve of the fact that it obviously didn't come, ready prepared, in a packet. 

The traffic. I know that on the coast, in Madrid and even in Petrer the traffic is just as bad as it is in Peterborough or Brum but I live in Pinoso and all of the roads around here are close to empty. I used to do a daily work trip to Cieza and I was sure that one day I would do the run from the A33 motorway to the Pinoso border without seeing a single car. I never did but two cars in 22kms isn't bad.

Car parking. It's becoming increasingly frustrating to park in Pinoso. What the terraces of the bars haven't swallowed up then the builder's skips have. In truth though there is plenty of free parking here and, even in the bigger towns and cities, you'll find something if you are willing to hunt around.

Cheap booze. I mean, honestly. Even something as recent as the newish explosion of varieties of national and local bottled beers cost less here now than they did when they were first introduced to the UK back in the 1980s. Or a gin and tonic where that description and not tonic and gin may be accurate. If you don't like booze then the price of a coffee is a treat too. Even better if you're on a nice terrace with the sun shining and the world passing by.

The weather. Or maybe not. I really love those days in July and August when the earth creaks with the heat but winter is horrid. Winter inside that is. The violence of the storms also rattles me, I expect the trees to fall as the wind whistles and the car to suffer as the hail batters down. When the sun shines, outside, at any time of the year, it's lovely but in an unheated bathroom on a cold December morning I'm reminded of my life in Britain when Harold Macmillan and Lord Beaverbrook were in charge.

Fiestas. I enjoy the fiestas and romerias and ofrendas and what not. The best ones, to my mind, are the ones where you end up sort of mixed in with the event, rather than the ones where you stand behind a line, real or not, to watch things go past. Nonetheless, even the pure spectator events - like Carnaval or the Cabalgata de Reyes are pretty good. I've long been a fan of pre-historic sites, Avebury is probably my favourite, I like the idea of continuity and sometimes, as the romeria carries the figure of this or that saint past the unfortunately parked Toyota hybrid, that same sense of continuity invades me, even though it's not a past I share. 

Places to visit. If the fiestas sort of come to you then the things to go to, the castles, cave paintings, ancient sites, galleries and museums and what not are everywhere in Spain. It's a long time since I spent much time in the UK but I remember lots of great places there from the Monkwearmouth Railway Station and the Crich Tramway Village through to the Ferens and Walker galleries. There is no denying though that the offer here is full and excellent. There's nearly always an exhibition or a gallery or a church or a castle or a tower or something to be visited in any size of town and mostly the entry is free.

Ironmongers. Shops with a counter and someone to serve you can be a bit intimidating in another language. Easier to browse the shelves in the Chinese Bazaar but if you want some solution to hanging something on a hollow door or the right glue for the job then the ferreterías are an Aladdin's Cave of fun. And, anyway, shops with counters that sell individual buttons or just the right sort of shirt are still an experience. 

The scenery. I mean without going to the Sierra Nevada or the Pyrenees or Guadarrama or the Gredos, the road from Pinoso to Yecla has its moments. Or that bit down from Hondón de los Frailes to Albatera and so on and so on. And what about the Med? It may be a filthy sewer in reality but it often looks spectacular. Mind you I suppose that's a bit unfair. Whether you're in Russia, Costa Rica, Australia or Dorset there is likely to be some great scenery too and it's probably true that lots of the things I like here I've liked in all the other places I've ever lived. Maybe that's a cue to stop listing.

I still think Spain was a good choice though.

Interior and exterior lights sweetie

We start in the UK. Back in the 1980s Anglepoise lamps became trendy. Of course they weren't real Anglepoises they were just an accessible Ikea copy. For those of you who missed the last century, or who have never been to Ikea, the real Anglepoise lamp is a balanced-arm lamp design in which the joints and spring tension allow the lamp to be moved into a wide range of positions where it will remain without being clamped in position. It was invented by British designer George Carwardine in 1932. The lamps were enormously successful, particularly the 1227 model.

Shift of scene to Spain. One Sunday in 1964, so the story goes, Luis Pérez Oliva, a designer and Pedro Martín, a scrap dealer, met in the Rastro flea market in Madrid and fell into conversation. As a direct result of that meeting the men formed a company called Fase (the first two letters from Fabricaciones Seriadas or Serial Fabrications in English) to produce desktop lamps. Fase went on to be a big success with their most famous model, the President, bagging a bit role in the Madmen TV series as in the photo here.

Now I knew, vaguely, of the real Anglepoise but I knew nothing of Fase until I heard a piece on the radio. The next week in the same slot on the same programme they talked about Caramelos PEZ or PEZ sweets. To get the idea think tic-tacs but not quite. PEZ is an Austrian brand of sweet sold as a little rectangular lozenge. They come in dinky dispensers which hold 12 sweets. The name, PEZ comes from the first flavour the sweets were available in, peppermint or pfefferminz in German. Eduard Haas began to sell these sweets in 1927 and their original market was smokers who wished to mask the smell of smoke. The little dispenser was cigarette lighter shaped and fitted neatly alongside the packet of fags. Over time the company introduced lots more flavours but, more importantly, they designed hundreds of different novelty dispensers. I think one of the first and most famous had a head of Mickey Mouse. The packaging was designed to attract children to the sweets, like Kinder eggs in reverse. Nowadays there is a flourishing market in collectible dispensers. 

I'd never heard of either of the companies but it's always good to find out things about the place I now live. The radio suggested that these products were well known in Spain but I've always found that what's common knowledge depends on who you talk to. I must say though that recently I've found out something new from almost every extended conversation I've had with someone Spanish. 

I was talking, online, with Susi this morning. I was trying to explain about the British Christmas decorations, both interior and exterior, but especially about exterior lights on houses. This meant that I had to try to explain about where we tend to live in in the UK; about the distribution of housing in cities, towns and the countryside, about town centre gentrification, about where the suburbs begin and so on - the whole nine yards. Have you ever thought how difficult it is to encapsulate the idea of a cottage? Susi, by the way, is not at all anti Christmas but she has no exterior or interior Christmas decorations of any kind in her flat and has never sent or received a Christmas card in her life. She is very young though.

We often think we have shared experiences and that the rich world is pretty standardised, that everything is much of a muchness but, when you get down to the detail, if Spain is anything to go by, the differences are generally unimportant but still quite marked.

Do you have doubts Charles? Do you?

I'm not a particularly sociable type so I don't get a lot of phone calls. When I do it nearly always takes me by surprise and I fumble with the phone controls and miss the call. This time I was half way up a palm tree, cutting off the branches that hadn't done that Confucian thing of bending like a reed and had chosen to break like the mighty oak instead. It was from the bloke who fixes my car. One of his Spanish customers had been complaining about the cost of the photos for his upcoming wedding and Julian, for that's his name, had mentioned to the customer that he knew someone with a decent camera.

Now, as you know, I take a lot of snaps. I like to take snaps of things with bright colours and a lot of contrast. I've got lots of pictures of people too but I'm not good at pictures of people. Friends take much nicer people photos than I do. And that was my initial reaction, well that and worrying that I'd somehow cock up taking the photos at all. Rather than saying no directly though we agreed that Julian would give the soon to be Bridegroom my phone number.

Palm tree trimmed I set about the weeds listening to the Capitán Demo podcast. I began to think about taking wedding photos. The pressing the shutter button is a very small part of it. Wedding photographers do all that ordering people about. Parents here! Get rid of that cigarette! Mother of the bride - button up your jacket! Bridesmaids - come here! And of course that ordering about would have to be done in Spanish. Then I thought about the ceremony and the routine. I know the UK routine, more or less, but I've only been to one Spanish wedding and the structure is different. How do priests feel about having the photographer stand behind them in front of the altar? Is that what you do anyway? Would I know where to be to get the appropriate snap? Do Spanish couples sign the register, open the telegrams, make speeches, dance the first dance and go off with tin cans tied to the back of the car? Are there photos of garters and legs, do bouquets get tossed to the expectant crowd or is that all too sexist for words? Wedding photography has fashions. I have seen Spanish couples piling out of cars at local beauty spots to have their photo taken with a seascape as a backdrop but, to be honest, I have no idea what's expected. Do they still do those blurred at the edges shots or frame the happy couple in a heart shape? Would I be expected to be there from the make up session at the Bride's house to the last sozzled guests checking the beer cans for fag ends before drinking?

All of those things aside let's presume that I managed to get some decent images on the SD card. My guess is that there would be at least a thousand and maybe more. Just a quick scan for the blurred, ugly and mis-framed shots would take a while. Is there an expectation of photo shopping, of editing out double chins and spots? I never bother with my own pictures but then most of my snaps never get past the digital format; they go on Google photos or Facebook and that's it. I've hardly ever printed photographs since getting a digital camera. Presumably, nowadays, you produce one of those photo-book things but, for all I know the happy couple expect pictures on T-shirts and mugs. How much does it cost to print photos? Which firms are reliable? Who does the photo selection anyway? Is the photographer the arbiter of which photos get chosen or the couple? What sort of quality, meaning what sort of cost, is expected for the finished album? I vaguely remember that, at the one Spanish wedding I've been to, several prints of the ceremony were being passed around during the meal. That must mean that the photographer had immediate access to a photo quality printer rather than relying on BonusPrint. The more I thought about it the more I realised where the high cost of the package offered by wedding photographers comes from and the less interested I was in doing it.

Anyway, when the bloke calls, I'll probably miss the call.

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I got the photo at the top of this post from Google. It said that it was labelled for non commercial re-use but, just in case it isn't the firm that took it is Retamosa Wedding Stories from Torrent in Valencia.

Suavina

The other week I was driving around, enjoying the sun, when I heard an interview on the radio. The interviewee was called Vicente Calduch and he was talking about Suavina, a lip balm.

Back in 1880, in the town of Vila-real in Castellón, the local pharmacist, Vicente's great great grandad or maybe it was great great great grandad, spookily also called Vicente Calduch, created an ointment. He called it Ungüent de Vila-real. His target market were the local citrus farmers who got cracked and chapped lips as they worked on their crops.

That first Vicente had four sons, all of them became pharmacists and all of them sold the lip balm. One of them settled in Castellón and, in 1916 he opened a small laboratory to manufacture the ointment and gave it the more catchy name of Dermo-Suavina.

Laboratorios Calduch still make the balm. The formula is unchanged from the original but the packaging changed from wood to metal in 1940 and then from metal to plastic in 1965.

The packaging looks pretty retro. The little plastic tub is inside a small box and the typeface on both is sweet. I know that because I was in a chemist the other day and I suddenly remembered the story. I asked if they sold Suavina; they did. Very traditional, very vintage said the person serving me. And quite an interesting way to spend 2.20€.

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.

Without news

I've just been scanning through a number of other English language blogs looking for inspiration. It's time to write a blog entry and I can't think of anything to write about.

I could do New Year of course but I must have done cava (which is not, by the way, pronounced carver - but more like kavva), red underwear and the twelve grapes about as many years as I've lived here. I've already done a bit of a Christmas piece so I can't do that again even though it's still in full swing with the shopping centres clogged with cars and the telly full of perfume adverts. It's still a week to Kings and I've done Kings so many times that regular readers must be able to imagine what a Roscón tastes like. We haven't done many non British Christmas events but, even if we had, there's not a lot of mileage in living nativity scenes, carol concerts or Christmas story telling. I didn't get caught by any jokes yesterday on "Day of the Innocents" (think of it as Spanish April 1st) nor did I make the well trodden journey to see the egg, flour, fire extinguisher and firework fight in Ibi. 

I wondered if I could do something on the Valenciano language or yet another entry on speaking, or not speaking, Spanish. The thought came to me when I remembered the bit of a language triumph I had in the KFC in Elche the other day dealing with the bastardised Spanish pronunciation of isolated English words. I didn't hesitate once in the twenty question interrogation that is now the routine for ordering the simplest thing from the Good Colonel. Then I remembered that, only a few moments before, it had been exactly the opposite in asking for tickets for Wonder Wheel (the latest and shockingly boring Woody Allen) when I had to resort to mispronouncing the old man's name - Gwuddy Al-in - because my versions of gwanda weal, wander weyl and anything else, all the way back to a well modulated English pronunciation of Wonder Wheel, just left the ticket seller looking blank. I'm still a long way from writing that handy little booklet - "How to pronounce English words like a Spaniard."

The weather is always a good mainstay - Spain has had its second borrasca, or big storm, over the last few days since the new naming regime came into being. Storms of a certain intensity, it seems, now get named alphabetically - like hurricanes. This one was Bruno, we had Ana a while ago. It killed a couple of people across Spain and the snow and coastal storms looked really impressive on the telly. Here in sunny Culebrón though the worst that happened was that I had to get out of bed at 6.25am to secure a few things because the wind was blowing pots and chairs around. Hardly the stuff of a riveting blog.

Something with the students then or something from the news, the television, the radio; a second hand tale? My bosses have a Christmas play-scheme so they've laid me off for a couple of weeks leaving me with no students to talk to. No students, no stories. At home, with it being Christmas, the British TV companies have spent lots of money and Maggie has been watching their special offerings. Nothing there then either. Without the structure of work the routine has gone out of the window so I've not been keeping up with the news as well as usual. Anyway half the journalists are taking a few days off. And in Cataluña, which has more or less monopolised the news for months, it's all very quiet because all the politicians are horse trading, some of them via Skype, after the inconclusive elections. No blog fodder.

No. Another lifetime ago, I was in Saudi Arabia one Christmas. Lots of people I worked with went back to the UK to eat turkey and snooze on the sofa and, when they got back to Wadi Al-Batin, we asked for their Christmas reports. They were like José Moscardó, the bloke in charge of the fascist defence of the Alcázar in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. The fortress was under siege, Franco sent troops to relieve it and, when they got there the siege was lifted. Moscardó was asked for his report. He said "Nothing new in the Alcázar." I know the feeling.  Nothing new in Culebrón.

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

Custom and Practice

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill.

Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on.

I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredients which come in jars and so on. A second is a variation on the TV show Come Dine With Me and there's another on preparing a romantic dinner. In all of them the end product is to produce a meal of starter, main course and pudding. I've always presumed that the minor confusions around starter and main course were simply linguistic ones. Yesterday though when we popped in to a restaurant for a meal something clicked. The eatery, on the outskirts of Fortuna, only had British clients. Maggie and I chose different starters from the set meal but we had the same main. I noticed that the menu, the list of food with prices, didn't use the Spanish equivalents of starter and main. Instead there was a list of first and second courses followed by the dessert. It wasn't something new to me but I suddenly realised that my interpretation wasn't quite right. The difference is subtle. Here we have two courses of equal weight rather than a lighter starter followed by a more substantial main course. If we were going to emulate that in Spain it would be much more usual to share the starters in the centre of the table. So there is an ever so slight difference between the structure of a standard three course "English" meal and a standard three course "Spanish" meal. Just enough of a difference to discombobulate my students.

Someone who works in the school that I work at in Cieza has been suggesting that we should get together. On Thursday he seemed determined to make it this weekend. He said that he thought he was free for Saturday "por la tarde", and he'd be in touch. When he didn't phone this morning I just presumed it was off. A couple of hours ago I noticed a message from him on my phone saying that he was sorry but things had changed and he wasn't free. When he said tarde to me I automatically translated it to my English idea of afternoon. Now, even to we Brits, afternoon is reltively flexible. It may, technically, be bounded by 6pm but I think the interplay between afternoon and evening is much more subtle than that - a combination of daylight, activity and time. It's similar in Spain except that tarde covers both afternoon and what would be relatively late evening for us. My pal's mental picture of having a drink in the "tarde"and mine were poles apart. It wasn't a translation error it was a cultural error.

I know that a couple of Spanish people read this blog from time to time. It's possible that they will dispute my reading of the situation. I would point them to Restaurante and Mesón. Several Spaniards have told me that there is an obvious difference. When pressed though they don't seem to find it so easy describing those differences to me. It all becomes a bit Cockburn's - one instinctively knows. In just in the same way I remember entertaining a couple of Spaniards in the UK who were perplexed as to why this was a pub and that was a bar or why this was a restaurant and that a café. I knew, indeed it was obvious, but I was unable to enumerate those differences in any logical way.

Hello bed, hello room

There's one of those professional looking videos that does the rounds on Facebook that I rather like. In it a succession of people walk into a bar and greet nobody in particular. Then someone comes in and sits down at the table without saying a word. There are meaningful looks between the waiters and the bar becomes a little less lively. The bar owner goes over to the customer and asks "Is it that we slept together?" The client immediately grasps what is being said and restores calm and good humour to the bar by saying hello to everyone and no-one in particular.

It's absolutely true. Spaniards say hello to the room. Waiting in a bank or post office you get to greet lots of strangers. Maggie and I were in a hospital waiting room yesterday morning and everyone who came in said hello or good morning as they looked for a space to wait and most people said goodbye too as they came out of the consulting rooms and headed off somewhere else.

I know this is the custom. My trepidation over speaking Spanish does not stretch to problems with saying hello - though there is a little linguistic catch. There is not the usual match between a couple of paired words in the morning greeting - it's not buenas días it's buenos días. Spaniards do the opposite of Britons by shortening, for instance, "good evening" to "good" rather than following the English language habit of cutting "good evening" to "evening". The easy thing about this is that I can avoid this potential arror by simply saying "buenas" and, even better, that easy to say word will work at any time of the day.

There's something though that stops me greeting the room. I have no idea why but it doesn't seem to be just me. I was thinking about it this morning and I'm sure that most Britons who live here, Britons who are well aware of the practice, don't generally follow it either though I'm sure there are exceptions.

The dilemma

I need to write something. Not that I have a psychological need or anything but it's about time. Blogs need fuelling.

As I washed the few evening pots before retiring to bed last night and as I weeded the, not as bare as it should be, earth of our garden this morning I've been trying to think of a topic.

I thought I had one. The things that have changed in the time we have been here. Emails and puddings were uppermost in my mind.

There was a time when sending an email to someone in Spain was just a way of putting off the conversation that you didn't want to attempt in Spanish. Nobody ever replied and you had to phone in the end. Nowadays, people seem to check their mail and most respond though not all.

The pudding thing is that the restaurant offer is now so much better than the once ubiquitous flan, ice cream or seasonal fruit choice. I do miss watching people use a knife and fork to peel, section and eat an orange though.

But the topic didn't set my pulse racing. If email and puddings were the top of the list what, apart from dark sociological trends like parking ailing relatives in care homes, was going to be at the bottom?

So that idea got banged on the head.

As traditional as...

We were in Jumilla today for a while. Jumilla is a town just over the border into Murcia. They have "always" produced wine in Jumilla but it just keeps getting better and better. Today we were there for a very small part of their Fiestas de la Vendimia -the wine harvest festival.

So wine is a traditional crop in Jumilla just as pelotas and gazpacho are traditional food. We Pinoseros also claim wine and gazpacho as our own but as we are only 35km away I suppose that's fair enough. After all it's Yorkshire Pudding not Barnsley, Ripon or Cleckheaton Pudding though thinking about it we do have Bakewell Tart and Caerphilly Cheese. Anyway.

So when do things become traditional? Family names, surnames, generally pass from generation to generation. Surnames like Thompson, son of Tom, are equivalent to the Arabic ibn or bin names whilst the Spanish tend to use -ez endings, as in Dominguez. But why did it stop? My Dad was John so why am I not a Johnson? And if it's Fletcher and Barber and Smith why not Mr. Web Designer?

Although they are quite different outfits Spanish bullfighters, the ones who fight on foot, wear costumes based on 18th Century dress as do their horse mounted counterparts. Why did it stick at the 18th Century - why not the 16th or why aren't they dressed, like cyclists or swimmers, in the latest technologies?

So. Just 35kms between Jumilla and Pinoso but in Pinoso the traditional dress for women, in the Fiestas at least, is an incredibly ornate affair The local women folk dancers wear a much simpler skirt that seems to be of circle of cloth made to work as a skirt by multiple pleats. In the Villazgo festival in Pinoso traditional dress for women is more practical, less ornate and the men wear a black smock and neckerchief. Over in Jumilla the costume is much simpler again. It actually looks like something that people may have worn everyday at some time in the past. Cloth and woven grass shoes, simple skirts or trousers, white shirts for both sexes with shawls for the women and waistcoats and cummerbund like sashes for the men

This traditional clothing is only trotted out for traditional events. Women heading for the supermarket wear everyday skirts and jeans and shirts and tops. If anythinng were traditional summer dress for women at the moment it would be shorts and vests. For men shorts and T-shirts. Flip flops or sandals and not the traditional rope soled alpargatas.

I'm pleased to say that this divide between what's trotted out as traditional and what people actually do is not true of the wine or food. Just as Lancashire Hotpot is alive and well so are local traditional foods. In fact maybe it's time for a nice longaniza sandwich with a drop of monastrell to wash it down?

Corpus Christi in Elche de la Sierra

Elche de la Sierra is a town in Castilla la Mancha. The journey is from Culebríon in Alicante to Murcia and from Murcia to Albacete Province in Castilla la Mancha. The President of the community is a big noise politician in the ruling Partido Popular and I recognised her as she went into church for the Eucharist service. Those of you who know me will realise how remarkable this is.

I do some on-line surveys. One of the favourite topics is to ask if I recognise some celebrities and then to say whether I think they would be good stars for TV ads. I usually don't recognise anyone except the most internationally famous. I missed Shakira in the last one for instance until they gave me a clue! So recognising de Cospedal was out of character.

We were there to have a look at the sawdust carpets. These are exactly what they sound like. Individual groups are given a bit of street to decorate. Beforehand they make masks which are then placed on the street and coloured sawdust is sifted onto the mask to leave a coloured pattern on the streets. There is a competition for the best scene.

The church procession features lots of children who have taken their first communion this year and lots of women in mantillas and peinetas (the headdresses and high combs) and worthies like the President of the Community who escort the Eucharist displayed in one of sun shaped monstrances (custodia.)

The procession follows a route marked by sheets, table cloths, shawls and the like draped from balconies (at least that was what a woman told me but as all the rest of her information was wrong so this may be too) The procession also stomps all over the sawdust carpets.

Interesting little trip.

Diversity

I occasionally see British TV and it is full of people who don't have "Anglo" names. Presumably their families went to the UK from all around the world. They are just there - no fuss, nothing different - getting on with their jobs as reporters, soap actors, presenters and the like. It's so normal, so routine that it's completely unexceptional.

Back home in Pinoso I was reading through the list of entrants and prizewinners in a competition to design a poster for some event a while ago. I was half looking for a British name. The last time I saw any information there were 42 nationalities represented in Pinoso yet, amongst the names of the entrants there was not a single one that didn't have a double barrelled Spanish surname. I may be wrong but I've never noticed anyone in the Carnival Queen competition who isn't Spanish either and whilst I have seen the odd Brit amongst the dance troupes and choirs I haven't noticed Algerians or Senegalese doing anything similar.

I didn't bother to Google my figures and the numbers will have dropped recently but there were something like six million foreign born residents in Spain from a population of some forty seven million. We EU Europeans have a right to live here but lots of nationalities like Ecuadorian, Moroccans, Ukrainians and Chinese have to become nationalised if they wish to remain in Spain. So there are lots of people here with their family roots in other countries who are now full blown Spanish nationals. Lots of them must be well into second or maybe third generation by now.

I don't watch much Spanish TV, the home-grown product that is as distinct from US imports so I am not a reliable source. However, I can only think of two regular TV faces who aren't Spanish. One of them is Michael Robinson the ex Liverpool and QPR footballer who is a football commentator and pundit and, until very recently, there was a young Korean woman called Usun Yoon on a satirical current affairs programme called el Intermedio. There are almost certainly others but I don't know them. Obviously there are all shapes and sizes of people on TV all the time because Spain buys programming from all around the world and because there are celebs and sports stars doing what they do as well as turning up in the adverts. Nonetheless the nationally produced stuff seems remarkably monolithic.

I was at a music festival over the weekend and I was talking about this phenomenon to Maggie. I realised that there were very few black people, Latin Americans etc. among the crowd or even among the musicians.

Maybe it just needs a few more years.

The Real Spain

We were probably as guilty as anyone. We wanted the Real Spain. That's the one where dark skinned men ride donkeys and raven haired señoritas swirl their skirts. Houses should probably be whitewashed and bougainvillea trimmed. A BMW xD35i would be a cause for young boys to point. Benidorm and Torremolinos would, like Bhopal or Fukushima, be places to avoid.

Not a lot of donkeys in Cartagena.  Though we did get the Friday off work because it was Dolores  - Nuestra Señora de los Dolores - Patron Saint of Cartagena. There were bands marching up and down the street getting ready for the processions, fine tuning their timing for Holy Week. They were surrounded by shoppers. All next week it will be big time Catholic ritual as the brotherhoods, dressed in robes that became the model for the Klan, parade around town carrying huge religious statues. One of my students told me that he dislikes the religious parades but he loves being in Cartagena for Holy Week. The town's alive he says.

On the way home to Culebrón we stopped in the industrial estate between Santomera and Abanilla to go to the restaurant that shares a metal box type industrial building with a sweet manufacturer. Lovely sugary smell as we left. We reckoned the restaurant would have a cheap set meal because there were lots of production line workers sitting at the tables outside having a smoke. We were right; the bar was heaving and the food was cheap. There were maybe five blokes behind the bar and the waiter dealing with our section was actually running between tables. It was as typical a bar as you could possibly want though there wasn't a whiff of bougainvillea.

We've got builders in. There are a couple of blokes plastering as I type. They'd said they'd be here around 10.30 and one of them did show up pretty punctually for a builder at 11.10. Before coming here they'd been to check that the solar powered hot water system they'd installed somewhere else yesterday was working properly. One of them couldn't come straight here after he'd checked that job because he had to take his daughter to her swimming class.

So, you see, we got the real Spain after all.

Venta Viña P

All over Spain, at the side of the road, there are places called ventas. From the outside they just look like restaurants or bars but, as the word venta is related to sales and selling I wondered if, traditionally, they were a bit like roadside inns cum general stores. Ventas get a mention in el Quijote, Don Quixote in English, and in the Richard Ford travel books so they must have been around for quite a while. I imagined farmers buying their seeds and tools there whilst they drank large quantities of rough wine.

My thinking was conditioned by the traditional difference between English inns and taverns. As I recall, technically, an inn is a place to stay, drink and eat whilst a tavern is a place to drink and eat. It's a distiction that's long gone of course. I thought it was probably something similar with ventas. But the definitive Spanish dictionary says simply of ventas: a posada established by the side of the road to put up travellers. For posada it says a place to put up travellers. The only difference then is that a venta is, traditionally, out in the countryside and not in a centre of population.

I went in a venta today for the first time. It was certainly away from a centre of population.

Twelve lucky grapes

Tonight when the clock (Reloj de la Gobernación) on the old Post Office (Casa de Correos) in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid starts chiming midnight  people all over Spain will start popping grapes into their mouth trying to eat at the rythm of the boings.

If you manage to eat all twelve grapes in the alloted time then the idea is that you will have a prosperous year.

The tradition appears to have started at the very end of the Nineteenth Century in Madrid but it was popularised all over Spain in 1909 by grape growers from Murcia and Alicante who had a glut of grapes and found a clever way to shift them.

The sorry looking white examples in the photo will provide the twenty four grapes for Maggie and me. They have been sitting on the one vine that we have in our garden which grows reasonably well. I think it may be because its roots are very close to our cess pit! We covered the bunches with paper bags back in October to try and keep the grapes relatively fit quite a while after they are ready for picking. I have no idea why we get black and white grapes from the same vine but we do.

¡Feliz Año!

Twelve hundred hand crafted figures

Twelve articulated lorries to transport it all, 30,000 watts of sound and light, six kilometres of electric cable and 3,000kg of glass fibre to tell the simple story of a child born in a stable.

Nativity scenes, Belenes are a traditional part of the Christmas scene. We have a little Belén in our house, the municipal one here in Pinoso will be opened on Christmas Day, just after Midnight Mass, the one in Cartagena mentioned in a previous post (The Goose is getting Fat) was opened last week and today, in Elche, we went to have a look at the version mounted by one of the Savings Banks.

It was extremely good; the figures and backdrops were much more carefully crafted than is usual, each figure made by hand, but they didn't half labour the point. First we had to wait for the one visit every half an hour, then we had to take a seat in front of a screen before somebody, dressed like a bank clerk, raced through her lines with somewhat less modulation in her voice than the speaking clock. Two longish videos next before they finally let us see the real thing. Even then we were held in check for a few minutes as we had to watch a guided sound and light version before we could eventually rest our chins on the guardrail and gawp.

Razor sharp

When I was in Ciudad Rodrigo I read a book that described life in the villages of Salamanca province in the first thirty or forty of the last century. One of the stories was about the knife grinder cum bucket mender who turned up from season to season. Days long gone.

We were in Pinoso today. This chap was plying his trade

He loved Big Brother

I signed up for the Spanish eBay today and I had a bit of a struggle entering my NIE - the 9 character code that identifies we resident foreigners - it annoyed me a lot.

Everyone in Spain has to carry ID. The most usual way for Spanish nationals to do this is to carry their DNI, an identity card.

Youngsters don't have to hold a card until they are over 14 but it is usual to apply for a DNI for a child as soon as their birth is registered. If a family decides not to apply for a DNI for their child "at birth" then the details of the minor have to be entered in the "family book." Foreigners have to carry ID too, usually a passport.

Foreigners who are resident in Spain have to apply for an ID number as does anyone who wishes to carry out any financial transactions here whether they are resident or not.

The identity "number" for Spanish Nationals, the DNI, has 8 figures and just one control letter whilst the one for foreigners, the NIE, has a letter at both the beginning and the end with seven numbers in the middle. Spaniards are always surprised, nay shocked, to find that UK passport numbers change from issue to issue. Their Spanish ID numbers follow them through life appearing on passports, driving licences etc.

The Spanish ID card carries simple details like a photo, name, date of birth, place of birth, address, names of parents etc. Until recently it also carried a finger print but the newest cards carry the characteristics of that print in electronic form on a chip and also provide a digital signature for electronic transactions. So every Spaniard is fingerprinted - something currently reserved for criminals or suspected criminals (oh and motorists) in the UK.

Everyone, but everyone, thinks they have the right to see your ID. I needed it for eBay, I needed it to register my mobile phone, to sign on the dole, to rent a flat, to register in a hotel, to hire a car, to get a credit card, to pay by credit card, to open a bank account, to register for health care, to get gas bottles and even to join a classic car club.

You don't need to know you account number at the bank or your social security number at the tax office so long as you have your DNI/NIE. Everything, but everything, is connected to your ID number. Lots of official Spanish databases are linked and I suspect that it would be very easy for someone to access lots and lots of information about anyone living in Spain.

The Spanish ID card was introduced by Franco, a dictator. He got card number 1 and he left the numbers up to 100 for his family and for the Royals. Our King has number 10.