A stop in Castilla la Mancha

It's 4am. The bus is parked up in a service station. The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick. The man who's been sitting next to me on the bus may well be Ethiopian or Somali - he looks like he's from that bit of Africa but as he speaks neither English nor Castilian I'll never know. There are Moroccans too - lots of Moroccans and South Americans, mainly Ecuadorians. In Albacete a man with henna in his beard, one of those long shirts and the obligatory nylon anorak got off. A few Spaniards too. No one looks rich. In fact most look definitely poor. Like the plump woman in the tight ski pants, high heels and with yellow accessories. It screams market stall. Four continents at least - Continental drift. And I'm there too, a mileurista - the struggling poor. At 4am on a bus to Madrid.

I should never have doubted

The MG passed its ITV yesterday. The ITV is the equivalent of the MOT back in Blighty. It cost 39.90€ to get that little sticker but I think it was money well spent.

The test centres are huge hangar shaped buildings with a number of entrances - one for HGVs and coaches, one for motorbikes, another for cars etc. In the MG's case we went into lane 5 at the Redovan test centre. Each test centre is a private enterprise.

In the first bay they checked noise levels, emissions, headlight alignment, all the lights, horn, indicators, wipers etc as well as technical details like the body number. From there we basically drove in a straight line stopping at a couple of stations along the way. The first one is a rolling road, where the front wheels were dropped into the rollers and the brakes tested. They did the same with the back wheels on both the footbrake and handbrake, they checked the speedo worked. Onwards we to drove over a pit where the wheels were set onto a moving plate which jiggled the front wheels around whilst the man went down the pit to check the various joints and linkages. I had to turn the steering wheel back and forth whilst the man shone his torch at the steering set up from underneath. He checked brakepipes, suspension linkages, tyres, exhaust and general underbody whilst he was down there. That was it. I had to wait whilst the man wandered around a bit, brought his colleague to look at the car and then went back to a little podium in the hangar where he wrote out the paperwork. He called me over.

Me: "I suppose it failed"
Him: "No, no problems, the emissions were good for such an old car, carburation is spot on"
Me: "Great, excellent, I'm hoping to do it up this year"
Him: "Yes it's a bit rusty"

And so we were through. Reading the paperwork afterwards it does say that the bodywork has some(!) rust and that it should be fixed before the next test.

We drove home up the road like that Muslim Guardian Angel I read about who greets you dancing and singing in the morning.

Ham

Last week sometime my boss and I were talking about how much we enjoyed a nice bit of ham.

Hams are big in Spain. They don't go for boiled or roast ham anywhere near so much as for cured ham. Lots of bars have pigs legs hanging from the ceiling ready for sale. Lots more have a single ham behind the counter that they carve up as customers ask for slices. There are special knives for cutting it. In some restaurants people are employed specifically to cut the ham off the leg in almost transparent slices. Regions and producers are famous for their hams. There are D.O. hams (a guarantee of regional authenticity), acorn fed hams, snow cured hams, white and black hams. People argue about ham. People pontificate about ham as people do on wines and cigars.

Luckily for us the bar in Rodriguillo specialises in ham so as we happened to be driving that way we popped in for a plateful. Scrummy.

The Wicker Man meets Guy Fawkes

Dress a few people up in red Devil outfits, give them several hundred fire spitting fireworks, turn out the street lights, and tell them to point the fireworks at anyone who comes near and you have the main elements of corre foc which I think means running with fire in Valenciano. Throw in a spectacular sort of fire storm in the Town Hall car park at the end and that's that for another year.

I came home with singed hair surrounded by the smell of burning wool overcoat!

Giants and bigheads

Gigantes and cabezudos paraded through the streets of Pinoso today. There was the home team of and groups from other Alicante towns including Santa Pola, Benetusser, Novelda and Petrer. Other Brits I saw in the street kept asking me "Why are they doing this?" "Why do Morris Men dance?" was the best response I could come up with.

On being lost - again

A pal asked me if I could help him with his mobile phone. He couldn't retrieve the messages because it spoke to him in Spanish and he couldn't understand it.

A couple of pals asked me if I could go with them to the consumer's office so they could complain about not being able to get their faulty new pool repaired. One of the problems for the chap in the consumer's office was that the contract was written in English so it had no legal validity here. They'd preferred the English language contract because they could understand it.

I often worry about the limits of my Spanish and think it must be really hard work for those who have even less language than me but, then again, maybe they watch Sky telly and read the Daily Mail and don't bump into Spain too often.

Fit as a fiddle

They made me press buttons on a computer display to anticipate the movement of a blob, I had to drive a little circle along a computer track, they took my blood pressure, listened to my heart, checked my eyesight and hearing and took a thorough medical history. Searching questions included:

"Do you drink?"
"Yes"
"A lot"
"No"

Twenty five minutes and 40€ later I had a certificate to say I was fit to drive.

The clinic were shocked when I told them we don't have driver medicals for everyone in the UK. They couldn't believe that someone could pass a driving test at 17 and drive till they were 70 without anyone ever asking them if they could still see and hear. I suppose they have a point.

Mind you, whether the medical certificate is going to be much use to me or not I have no idea. The licensing people here don't have any record of me and because of that the clinic couldn't process the paperwork in the usual way so they just gave it to me. I thought that would be OK, if I ever have to prove that I passed the medical I have the form but I notice there's a little note at the bottom of the certificate to say it expires in 90 days.

Having had the second appointment cancelled on me I thought that I'd finished when I finally got my check up at the third attempt but I should have known better. More phone calls I suppose.

Not tonight Josephine

Sometime last week I acted on the advice from the driver licensing people and made an appointment to get my driving licence medical in the nearby town of Monóvar. I explained what I needed and why I needed it to the woman on the phone who obviously didn't think I was right but she humoured me and told me what paperwork to take.

When I turned up for the appointment this evening the receptionist asked me for a piece of paper she hadn't asked me to bring along but I've lived in Spain long enough to take every piece of official paperwork to every type of even vaguely bureaucratic appointment. One to me. We had the same conversation we'd had on the phone. She still didn't believe I needed a medical and, because I was now in front of her the question set was more exhaustive. I produced a copy of the piece of paper I'd got from the traffic authority people. The woman snorted but was obviously quelled. Two to me.

A man in a white coat appeared. He read the piece of paper and told me to come back on Thursday. I was a bit cross and asked why I had to come on Thursday after having been given an appointment for Tuesday. I also complained that the Thursday appointment was in working time. "Well Thursday's when we do it" was the only answer I could get. Game, set and match to them.

Wrapped up

Christmas is still far from over in Spain as the traditional gift giving day - "Kings" - when Their Majesties the Kings of the Orient leave gifts for good children (and coal for the bad ones) in the shoes left out for the purpose has still not arrived. The Kings turn up in every Spanish city and town on the evening of the 5/6th January.

So the shopping frenzy goes on. It's absolutely standard for your average shop to gift wrap anything destined to be a gift. I was amazed the first time that someone offered to gift wrap a 3€ dish that Maggie bought for someone. Today when I was in a shopping centre in Salamanca I noticed this stall (sorry about the quality of the snap). Shoppers can take anything they've bought in any of the stores in the complex and get it wrapped up. It's the same in the big supermarkets, like Carrefour, and even when there's nobody at the wrapping point to do it for you there is always paper, tape, scissors etc. so you can do it yourself.

El Escorial

Philip II was the Spanish King who had a bit of a tussle with Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I.

Philip built a few ships to invade England in 1588 but whilst they were waiting to pick up an army from Holland a bit of a problem with the English fleet, the reputation of a certain Francis Drake and most particularly a spot of bad weather rather put paid to his invasion plan.

His home palace was this place, El Escorial. Quite a pile of stone. Bit austere. We were there yesterday.

Valley of the Fallen

Apparently Franco (the dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 till his death in 1975) didn't want to be buried in the underground basilica at the Valley of the Fallen (el Valle de los Caidos). I don't suppose the 20,000 Republican prisoners who built it, and who were able to "redeem" days from their sentences by working on its construction, were that keen to be there either.

The monument consists of a Benedictine Abbey where the priests recite a perpetual mass for the dead of the war, a 152 metre high stone cross - the tallest memorial cross in the World - and an underground crypt carved into the granite mountain parts of which were left unconsecrated when Pope John XIII declared it a basilica in 1960 to avoid it rivalling St Peter's in Rome as the largest basilica in the World.

Franco had it built "to honour those who fell during the Spanish Civil War" but as Republicans (the defeated Left) were not knowingly buried there till 1958, as the place is plastered with "Fallen for God and for Spain" inscriptions, as the only other person buried inside the basilica is José Antonio Primero de Rivera (founder of the Spanish falange or fascist party) and as the architecture has obvious stylistic links to buildings in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany the monument is still a tad controversial in a Spain that has just passed a law to ban all tributes to the fascist victory.

The valley is just outside Madrid, in the Cuelgamuros valley, on the route between Culebrón and Ciudad Rodrigo and so Maggie and I thought we'd make a detour and have a look at the place as we travelled from one home to the other.

Political precedents aside the place was spectacular as much for the setting as for the construction. It was one of those crisp, blue sky days. Snow capped peaks, piercing sunlight scenery in sharp relief, ice crunching under foot, breath smoking in the cold and the air smelling of wood and soil. Grey granite isn't a particularly impressive rock but set out a huge open plaza with the stuff, cement it together into heavy giant figures, carve a huge underground temple from it or pile it high into the sky and it does the trick.