Life in Culebrón

Get to Know Spain is a companion book for GCSE exams written by Rosemary Hunt and first published in 1980. In the section on climate it says - In most parts of Spain the climate is extremely harsh. As I've said in another post we haven't seen much rain over the last two or three months but for the past couple of days the temperatures have dropped (27ºC daytime 15ºC overnight) and the sky has been threatening rain. And today it came. Buckets and buckets of the stuff. As usual our interior patio started to fill with water and I had to wade out to unblock the drain, our next door neighbour is apparently, as I type, trying to stop the water flowing down our joint track from carving out a mini version of the Grand Cañon, our aljibe, the thing that collects run off water, is overflowing, we keep losing the electric for a few seconds after every lightning flash and we've unplugged all the computers from the mains just in case. The hail was bouncing off the cars and patio furn...

I was with a British pal yesterday as we went to the fruit and veg stalls in the town market. He had been charged, by his wife, to buy potatoes and tomatoes. At the stall he pointed to the potatoes, showed five fingers and said kilos, he repeated the mime for the tomatoes (though with a different number of digits) and then held out a handful of small change from which the stall holder took the appropriate amount. His wife mentioned that they have been living in Spain for six years.

Back in Culebrón for the weekend and I noticed that there were a lot of small moths hanging on to the kitchen ceiling. Something similar happened a couple of years ago we had tens, if not hundreds, of moths inside the kitchen cupboard where we keep the dried goods. Being murderous and ecologically unsound I set about them with the fly spray which worked to a degree in that the moths had soon gone. I forgot all about them but later Maggie noticed that there were grub like caterpillars undulating their way across our ceiling. Horrid. Manual harvesting along with a thorough clean out of the flour and cereal cupboard seems to have done the trick for the moment.

We Brits have been running auctions at two spots around Pinoso for a while now - one at the Country Hotel, La Pinada and the other at Bonnie's Bar and Campsite. We went along to Bonnie's as we were looking for things for the flat in Cartagena. My guess is that we will not be regular attenders. Don't forget: with our weeks now split between Culebrón and Cartagena new posts will be on both sites.

Because I used to own an anorak I keep records of maximum and minimum temperatures. I thought it would be reasonably interesting to log the summer temperatures bearing in mind that it was much cooler in Ciudad Rodrigo (where we were living in June) than it has been in Alicante for July and August. Despite what our friends and neighbours say the temperature only reached 40ºC on one day, the 24 July, and our lowest overnight temperature here in Culebrón was 16ºC on 18 July. Looking at the spread of temperatures I would say that a sunny and warm day with a minimum of 19ºC and a high of 32ºC would be the most typical whilst we've been here in Culebrón. Turned out nice again then.

We went out for lunch with our old pals John and Trish today and we went to a reasonably decent restaurant in town. We had, probably, the most traditional meal in Pinoso and I was a bit surprised when it seemed to be something a bit out of the ordinary for them. Then I checked the blog and found that I've only once made reference to it here on this blog. A wrong to be righted. Rice, cooked in a paella pan is a standard meal all over Spain, all over the World come to that, but the famous paella, the one from Valencia usually has prawns, other seafood and chicken. The one in these here parts comes with rabbit and snails. The meal in and around Pinoso goes something like this. First you choose an assortment of bits and bats to start that are put on the table for everyone to share. Toasted and oiled bread served with some alli olli and grated tomato, salad, olives and nuts come more or less as standard. The rest will be to your choice, whatever they have on today plus some stapl...

It would be hard to describe Pinoso as good looking. In fact if I were searching for everyday adjectives to describe our home town I'd go for words like scruffy, messy, boring and dusty. The one horse has most definitely left. In truth Alicante province is a bit short of handsome towns - a few like Orihuela and Elche have a collection of monumental buildings but generally the townscape consists of anonymous and boring concrete boxes. What's more there is a mania for pulling down anything old but ordinary to use the space for something much more utilitarian. Nonetheless there is a traditional style of Alicantino house. Originally the facades were of plain stone - something like dry stone walling but with mortar holding the irregular sized stones in place - though with time the facades were rendered and then painted in bright colours. It's usually two or three storeys high and the windows are tall and rectangular with grills or rejas and surrounding casements. The door is...

Mil means 1,000 in Spanish, euristas is derived from Euro, the currency, and, to finish the word off it is personalised with that ending istas. So Mileuristas are those people who earn around 1,000€ (£870) per month. I aspire to be a mileurista, I've never been paid as much as 1,000€ per month either before or after tax whilst I've been in Spain. Fortunately Maggie breaks the barrier easily enough. There was a report yesterday that said that 63% of the Spanish workforce earned less than 1,100€ per month - that's less than 13,200€ gross per year. The average wage here is 18,087€ gross (before tax etc.) If we were doing this in sterling we'd be talking £15,727 per year. In the UK it's around £24,000. Now we all know that averages are rubbish, I'm almost certain for instance that you have more than the average number of feet! Nonetheless it feels true that Spanish people earn derisory amounts of cash by European standards. I heard one of those "dolebuste...

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

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...