Life in Culebrón

I usually start most phrases in Spanish with a mistake. It comes from my insecurity about speaking. This, as often as not, is the cue for any Spanish person who can manage a few broken words of English to take over the conversation. Yesterday we went to the tourist office in Yecla to pick up a map that we knew existed showing the delights of Murcia province. I vaguely remembered that there were cave paintings close to Yecla which means within easy striking distance of Culebrón. I fluffed my lines but the Information person picked up what we were after and produced said map. Then she started to explain about the place we wanted to see, we asked a question, she expanded the detail, she produced another map - and so it went until we had a fistful of leaflets and maps and all the information we needed. She never once doubted that we understood what she was saying or talked to us as though we were imbeciles Maggie commented, as we walked away, on the quality of the tourist people in M...

I've said before that I rather suspect that our planet will shrug off humankind has it has so many other "supreme" species in it's history. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to try to recycle carrier bags, walk when I don't need the car and make all those other little cynical gestures that I'm told will "save the planet" for "future generations." You can still buy ordinary incandescent bulbs in Spain but generally we use low consumption stuff wherever the situation allows. The other day the bulb in one of the ceiling fittings started to flicker and the spares we had on hand were the wrong wattage. So, when I was back in Cartagena  I walked up to one the big supermarkets and got a replacement and a couple of spares. Three bulbs, 24€. I notice on the (excessive) packing that it says the bulb will last eight years. Hang on though, the ceiling this bulb was attached to wasn't there till Easter 2009 because we'd only just got a...

We haven't ventured out at all today but the next time we do it will all be different. From 2nd Jnauary the new anti tobacco law will be in place in Spain. About five years ago a no smoking law was passed in Spain which made it illegal to smoke at work but gave public spaces, like bars, the option of being either smoking or non smoking within certain limits to do with the size of the space. It was all a bit of a mish mash and, basically, it meant that the vast majority of bars and restaurants remained smoky. Lots that tried to go no smoking saw their trade collapse and quickly went back to ashtrays on the bar and fag ends on the floor. The new law is much more straightforward and says that nearly all enclosed public spaces will have to be smoke free. The terraces of bars continue to be smoker's havens but even there the definition of when a space is enclosed is quite strict and some of the more weatherproof terraces will be non smoking. I know it's happened all over t...

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 wh...

We have a Tom Tom. Excellent little device for getting you to somewhere and getting you away again. It does mean though that I have even less idea about where I'm going and where I've been. The machine just tells me to do this or that and I do. One disadvantage of allowing the device to take you to a place in Spain is that lots of the streets in the old town centres look like the ones in the photos. Narrow and with difficult angles. Tom doesn't worry too much about road widths and it's possible to find yourself in a street with a nearly impossible right angled turn. Scrapes along the walls show that other people have found it tricky too. Nowadays of course roads are built with modern traffic in mind and they are perfectly navigable. I have this theory though that to compensate the designers of underground car parks have mimicked the labyrinthine design of the old Spanish town centres. Many underground car parks have huge pillars in strange places, a bizarre layou...

Over the past couple of days we've passed the Giralda a couple of times, we've seen the Torre de Oro, the Maestranza bull ring, we've drunk sherry, eaten salmorejo and today we were in the Mezquita and on the Roman Bridge. For those of you who have as much trouble with geography as I do that means we've been in Sevilla and Cordoba; we're in Andalucia. Andalucia is the part of Spain that provides all the tourist clichés - the swirly frocks, bullfighting, sherry, flamenco, prancing horses and castanets. We were strolling the old streets of Cordoba, we weren't the only foreigners. In fact the visitors may well have outnumbered the home crowd. We passed a bar (something I try to avoid) and sounds of flamenco floated out into the street. For once we weren't put off by the little knot of people huddled around the door. We pushed through, leaned against the bar and listened as some old chaps passed the guitar between them and took turns strumming and wailing fl...

There have been high speed trains in Spain for a long time. As visitors to the Seville Expo in 1992, before we met, Maggie and I both went on the one that links Seville and Madrid. Until today that was the last time for either of us. On December 19th this year the newest AVE or high speed line was opened between Madrid and Valencia with a spur off to Albacete. This now makes Spain the country with the second longest system of high speed rail links in the World, after China. Albacete is only an hour and a half by road from Culebrón and at just 22€ for the round trip it sounded like a good way to pop into Cuenca for lunch. At one point the speed indicator inside our carriage showed us as doing 301 kph. As the take off speed for a Boeing 747 is 290 kph that must mean today I set a new personal land speed record. The journey only took us 30 minutes and though I can't find any detail about the rail distance between these two provincial capitals the road distance is 160 kms. To be ...

Teaching English to adults is a good way to gather local information. Coming up to Christmas an easy topic is holiday traditions in Spain and the UK. Whilst it's not true that "everyone" in the UK eats turkey on Christmas day it is as true as saying that there are no longer pea soupers in London and that we Brits don't all stop for afternoon tea (still firm beliefs for most Spaniards.) "On Christmas Day we will have roast turkey, carrots, sprouts and various forms of potatoes followed by Christmas pudding - what will you eat?" The Spanish answer is that there is no answer. If there is any sort of routine it seems to be that the starters will be lots of small dishes and nearly everyone seemed to include gambas or langostinas in their list of starters - what I'd call prawns - unshelled and dead tasty. The queues around the fish counters in every supermarket we've been in over the past week add circumstantial weight. Main courses were as varied as t...

As a follow up to the last post (not the haunting melody but my last entry on this blog) I wrote out my appeal against the new drainage charge using the official form downloaded from the SUMA website. On Tuesdays I meet with a Spanish bloke called Carlos to do a language exchange. I fail to speak Spanish and he talks some English. I asked him to check the grammar and what not of my appeal. "No problems," he said, "all the right boxes filled in and the explanation is simple but clear and accurate." The last item asked me to list any supporting documentation I was sending and as I had none that's what I'd written. "You should send a copy of your DNI," said Carlos. The DNI is the Identity Card that all Spaniards carry. I have an equivalent but it would never have struck me to send a copy. Thinking about it though I knew that Carlos was right. Everyone, but everyone wants to check your identity here and it has become so routine for Spaniards to s...

The majority of the local taxes in Alicante are collected by an agency called SUMA. So the water bills, the rubbish collection, car road tax and the equivalent of the council tax all come from SUMA despite actually being set by the local Town Hall in Pinoso. SUMA, in my experience, is an efficient organisation. I pay most of my bills by "direct debit" and SUMA's notifications always come a couple of weeks before the due date reminding me to check that I have sufficient funds in the bank etc. So unlike the banks, phone company and electric people who just take the money on random dates often without notification (though to be fair the phone and electric people have improved recently) SUMA do it the correct way. So the other week a notification arrives that says that there has been a bit of a cock up on their part and that for some tax period they have either made an error in or forgotten a charge relating to sewerage and sewage charges. The language is the archaic stuf...