Life in Culebrón

There are lots of English language Facebook pages dedicated to living in Spain and aimed at Britons. There are Citizens Advice pages, Civil Guard authored pages, one from the British Consulate and subject specific pages like After Brexit and more. They are all alive with Brexit problems. Twitter is also aglow with similar stuff. Originally it was pros and cons but now it's practicalities. Apparently, since January 1st, British people who live in Spain, but are in the UK, have been bumping into problems getting home. Some of it seems to be the teething problems of new requirements at the border - the officials don't recognise the documentation and stuff written in Spanish makes no sense to them - but it has left people stranded. One of the things that sometimes makes me snigger and sometimes exasperates me is the lack of understanding and failure to grasp the basics of the paperwork that most of us have here in Spain. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the rest of this post b...

I got my new Brexit inspired ID card a while ago. I'm sure you read the blog entry! A chum asked me if I'd help him get one too. Actually I can't help him much in that they won't let two people go in to the foreigner's offices together for some sort of anti Covid procedure. Filling in those forms and standing in queues is all a bit of a pain in the bum so I wasn't exactly overjoyed by the idea but I said yes anyway. That's what friends are for and other cliches.  Then another pal told me that, yesterday in Murcia, when applying for their new card they'd bumped into an official who said that they needed not one but two appointments. One to apply for the card and one for the taking of fingerprints. I'm pretty sure that's not the procedure but, faced with someone who won't let you pass it doesn't really matter how right you are and how wrong they are. The somebody told me they stood their ground and actually got the card. Another example o...

I went to pick up my new Foreigner's Identity Card this morning. All pretty straightforward. I'm now an immigrant foreigner instead of being identified as a Citizen of the European Union. I've never cared for the glib way we Britons use the term expat. I think that it borders on the racist. It's a semantic dodge to try to make a clear division between immigrants and us. Now there's no doubt about it at all. I'm a foreigner living here with a card to prove it. Just like a Cambodian or Cameroonian. As I was waiting in the queue a couple of things crossed my mind. I was quite happy to be getting the card and yet I'm dead set against ID cards. They are an obvious and essential means of control. Nobody would try to run a totalitarian Government without first having everyone registered and documented. When Dicky Attenborough and Gordon Jackson were getting on the bus in the Great Escape what were they asked for? Exactly. Documentation. Spain introduced ID card...

Maggie and I went for our new TIE cards, Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, Foreigner's Identity Card, today. The idea of this entry is to explain the bare bones of the process for someone who has to do it and who already has one of the green residence forms or cards. Now that we are no longer European Union Citizens we Britons can get this ID card, we have been able to since Monday. We don't have to, at least for a while, but we can. The advantage is, in a country that uses and demands ID all the time, we will have a credit sized card that will save us the bother of carrying around our passport and other floppy bits of paper. I think, though I'm not sure, that it also allows us to sign in for certain online transactions. The process was pretty straightforward. I saw, online, that there were some appointments available and didn't hesitate to book them up straight away. Getting appointments for lots of the official procedures has been difficult for months, no...