Life in Culebrón

Web sites in Spain are very frustrating. I like to think of myself as a very average sort of person. I've always been able to buy a suit off the peg without having to worry that the sleeves will be too long or the trousers too short. So I presume that my use of the web to find things out, buy things etc. is pretty typical. I've become used to being able to sort things out from home sitting at the keyboard. Apparently in a survey of the top 35 Spanish firms (the local equivalent of the FTSE 100) only 25 had websites. Of those some ridiculously small number (just one I think) managed to keep it's website fully functional for 30 days on the trot. Antena 3, a TV station, was dead on the average by keeping its site up for just 8 out of the 30 day test period. That's my experience too that often the sites are simply not running. But, when they are. You can't rely on the address being www. I read an article the other day about being able to watch legitimate movies from var...

I just thought this was an interesting poster site. The one on the left is an advert for Easter week and the one on the right says "Shield (or coat of arms) Festival - the Invasion". I presume that it's some sort of battle re-enactment.

All over Spain there are containers, like the rectangular green one (far right) in the photo, for rubbish. If they're in a town then you're supposed to take the stuff from your house to the street bins between 9 and 11 in the evening. The bin lorries come around every evening from around midnight and take the lot away. The collections in rural areas are less frequent. Our container, for instance, which is about 40 metres from or front door, is emptied on just Monday and Friday. This picture, taken in a street in Cieza in Murcia, also shows a couple of recycling bins. Usually it's light green for glass, blue for paper and card and yellow for containers such as tins, cans, tetrapaks and the like. Even in the countryside there are quite a lot of the recycling bins and they seem to get emptied pretty regularly.

"I fancy going to Cartagena, what do you think?" "Good idea", said Maggie, "unless there's something better locally." It was my fault, I took too long borrowing the drill and buying a phone card up in Pinoso. "Let's go to the Mediaeval Fayre in Novelda now it's so late", said Maggie. We went with Trish and John our next door but one neighbours. There were jugglers and acrobats and bands and stalls at the fayre.

Incredible. We now have power in the garage. I borrowed a drill and some 45cm long drill bits from Charlie. I drilled a hole through the kitchen wall, behind the cooker hood, through into the garage. More accurately I drilled a 45cm hole and then borrowed a 60cm bit from John to actually get through to the other side. Pushed a bit of cable through, connected it to the input for the cooker hood at one end and 2.95€ worth of plug socket at the other end. Bingo! power outside the house ready for summer music and fairy lights. No bodge up this time.

After a few phone calls to Carrefour to sort out whether we could have the aircon fitted or not suddenly it all happened. Someone phoned me yesterday morning and made an appointment to fit the thing at 4.30. Two Argentinian lads turned up at 5.10 in a beaten up old van (see earlier post about white vans) and spent the next two and a half h0urs lashing the units to the wall. They said that our pre instaltion was all wrong (though they didn't suck on their teeth) but they got it up anyway. They took their 190€ fitting fee and cleared off. True it's a bit skewiff but it sems to work. Now to find out which of the competing stories is true. The owners of Firstline aircon units say they're fine, people who own more expensive units say that that Carrefour own brand stuff is unreliable.

When we were getting ready to move into our new house we had three big items on the shopping list. A sofa to sit on, satellite TV so Maggie could watch East Enders and air conditioning so we could sip our G&Ts in comfort. Somehow the simplicity of that original list escaped us and we found other things to buy before we finally got around to that sofa. However, this last weekend we went ahead and bought item number two on the list - a cheap air conditioner from Carrefour. We weren't sure; an unknown brand from a supermarket not famed for the longevity of it's electrical products. The aircon unit itself is underpowered and it's not an inverter type we'd intended to buy but it was pretty cheap and we had decided that as we hardly needed aircon last year cheap would do. We still have to get it fitted and the man at Carrefour seemed to be a bit cagey about that suggesting that their tame fitters don't like coming this far out into the country. More to come on air...

When I say Spanish newspapers I really mean El Pais. Apart from the local rag, El Canfali, published every Friday and obviously written by a journalist who believes there's always a longer and worse word I can only comment on El Pais because it's the only paper I buy. It's compact, not a broadsheet, and the headlines never dominate the front page. The rather blurred picture of the front page reproduced here is pretty typical. By UK standards it lacks photos and there are several pages of editorial comment and featured writers with no photos at all though they usually put in a political cartoon to break up close spaced text. The standard of photos is high especially on the Sports pages which take up quite a lot of space. The only sport that competes with football (i.e. with Barcelona and Real Madrid) for top billing is Formula 1. Alonso seems to be a bit of a hero. Articles have a bold first paragraph to encapsualte the main point of the story as they do in the UK but the p...

About 30 kilometres from us, in the province of Murcia there is a hot spring resort called the Baños de Fortuna. Hot, saline water bubbles out of the ground heated to 52ºC. The water is supposed to have therapeutic properties and a tourist trade built up around the hot springs at the beginning of the 20th Century. The hot water is mixed with cold before it flows into a pool that looks just like any other outdoors swimming pool. The place is a bit down at heel now with a sort of gently fading elegance but it's still an interesting place to stop for a coffee. I suppose you could even have a dip if you were that way inclined.

The ground between trees in Spain is supposed to look like earth. Apparently the idea is to avoid fires by keeping the ground clear. It is considered very bad form by the locals to let the weeds grow even if they look pretty. The space between our trees looks like this. So I spent a fair bit of the weekend clearing back weeds and generally sorting out the more boring bits of or garden. As you can see I have truly embraced nature.