Mañana, mañana

The washing machine that we brought with us from the UK started playing up a few weeks ago and, because we have another washer in the flat in Cartagena, we were a bit tardy in doing anything about it.

One of our problems was that the machine is a make that's not generally on sale here so we couldn't just ring up the official service people. After a bit of a half hearted search and ask around we couldn't find anyone to fix it. Some pals did give us a contact, an English chap, but he failed to turn up as promised.

So this evening we went to a shop in the local town to see what they'd got. We thought the prices were OK and we asked when they could deliver if we bought one today. Tomorrow they said. So Maggie handed over the money and then they changed their minds! They couldn't deliver tomorrow, they could deliver this evening.

So from the moment of paying for it at around six this evening to the moment that the chap drove away having delivered it and set it working was maybe two hours.

Lies and white lies

Our house in Culebrón isn't well suited to the cold. The living room is warm enough with the log burner doing its stuff but the bedroom is like an icebox and our water has already frozen. The TV news this evening is predicting overnight temperatures of minus 7ºC for our area! This morning we awoke to find a light dusting of snow. It proved a good day to put up our Christmas tree. Odd when you think that on Thursday the temperature was over 20ºC in Cartagena.

Come to sunny Spain.

On the phone

I have tried, lots of times, to use Spanish Yellow Pages and Directory Enquiries. Usually without success.

One of the problems is that Spanish phone books are divided geographically but not always consistently. For instance our phone number is listed in Pinoso but that for our next door neighbours is listed in Culebrón - maybe the ten metres makes a difference! And both our listings are incorrect anyway. One reason is because the English and Spanish forename and surname systems are different. As Christopher John Thompson I am listed as Sr. Jhon (sic).

Another problem is that lots of people simply aren't listed at all. They just aren't there.

Yellow Pages seems to be based on the ordinary phone book so it has the same general structure. If you want a plumber then you look under the section for plumbers. Next you have to look under each town or village as well. In Culebrón the local town is Pinoso but if there's not a listing there you have to start going through the nearest towns, Sax, Salinas, Novelda, Monóvar, La Romana, Alguena, Elda, Petrer etc. So it's a lot of flicking back and forth as you search for that elusive plumber.

The operators at Directory Enquiries don't necessarily live near us. For all I know the call centres are based in Peru or Ecuador - all they have to go on is a database. So, if you ring asking for a plumber in Pinoso and there's nobody listed for Pinoso (remember lots of people aren't) then they too start asking for nearby towns. It can be very wearing.

The online version is better in that it trawls wider so having asked for a plumber in Pinoso it lists almost all the plumbers it can find anywhere. The trouble there is that the numbers are often simply wrong. When I was looking for a solicitor (ages ago) I rang the first six numbers. Four of them were private houses and two were unobtainable. I gave up.

I just checked, there are no plumbers listed for Pinoso in Yellow Pages. I know of three firms personally. That's why the only reliable way to phone someone is to know their number and that's why we collect business cards.

On email

Most spanish websites, when they are working, have some sort of contact option on them. Usually one of the choices is email. Now I like email because it gives me time to prepare the question in Spanish. The replies too are easier to understand as there is time to study them. Well I suppose they would be except that I've never had a reply so that has to be pure supposition.

Sometimes the emails yield results. My bank repaid a mistaken charge as the result of an email but they never wrote back or acknowledged receipt of it. In fact, one time I went to the branch about a week after emailing. I asked the chap why he hadn't responded. He looked in his inbox, found my email and said that he never read his emails as he was too busy.

I had a brief skirmish with my credit card company when they reduced my credit limit drastically without mentioning it and for no good reason. I would email and they would ring me on my mobile. The fact of clicking on the box marked "email" in the section asking how I would like my response never made any difference.

I think that not responding to email has something to do with the Internet still being relatively underused in Spain, something to do with poor customer care, because Spaniards like to talk and because keeping information to yourself seems to be something of a Spanish obsession.

Winding up the genny

This house belongs to a couple of friends of ours. As you can see it's hardly in a built up area. In fact it's so far off the main road that normally, when we visit, they come and collect us in their four wheel drive to save our cars from crashing and bumping up the unmade road.

For most of Spain the model is that rural communities lived in villages. There are almost no individual buildings for miles on end in the Spanish countryside. Farm workers travelled from the villages each day to work the fields. Alicante province and some surrounding areas are different in that the houses are scattered around the countryside. I was told, that this is because the irrigation system, built by the Moors back in the first Milennium, made it possible for farmers to locate more or less where they wanted.

When things began to change the isolated nature of those country houses made it costly to supply them with mains electric and water. It's one of the reasons why so many rural properties were available to the Northern Europeans who have invaded Spain over the last two or three decades. They brought sufficient wealth from their homelands to run power lines and water mains in to these buildings and the Spanish owners were more than happy to swop their picturesque, but impractical, stone piles for enough money to buy a nice little flat in town. Gross oversimplification but basically true.

Not all the incomers were quite so wealthy and many traded off practicality for picturesque settings or stunning buildings. Their power is supplied by a mix of generators, solar panels and batteries and many have their water tankered in every so often.

Our friend's house isn't an old property but neither does it have mains electric nor water. It's a good place for John to practice his guitar though - not a lot of neighbours to upset.

More on street names

Over on Life in Cartagena I published a short piece about street names. About how they are small clues to the history of the country and the people it honours.

Now that we only come here for weekends I'm not really keeping up with the local news so, just now, I was sifting through the Pinoso websites trying to catch up. On one of them there was a lot of political toing and froing reliving some of the old Francoist/Republican arguments. After a bit of digging around it seems that the reason is that the local Socialist party suggested at the last full council meeting that several street names should be changed. The street names celebrate Francoist victories and heroes of the last Spanish Civil War.

There's a recentish national law that says that all the stuff that glorifies the old dictatorship should be removed from public places - statues, street names, commemorative plaques etc. The Socialist suggestions were for names of Socialist heroes and, not surprisingly, the right of centre parties were't too taken with that idea. It now remains to be seen whether, at the next council meeting, the majority right wingers maintain their opposition to name changes or if they compromise on safe anodyne names.

The photo is of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. As well as having a street named after him in Pinoso he was a writer and thinker associated with the formation of the Falange party in 1933 along with José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He was a minister in Franco's Government in 1939 and 1940 and he wrote some of the lyrics for the Fascist anthem of the time.

The Neighbourhood Meal

There are two "free" neighbourhood meals each year, one at Fiesta time in high summer and the other one in November associated with the Annual General Meeting. We missed the November meal last year but not this. Turnout looked a bit down to me but we still made plenty of noise in the local Social Centre.

Our welcome seemed genuinely warm and there were two other Britons there which made extended conversations somewhat easier. I'd been worried about getting there on time but I shouldn't have been so Brit as the meal actually started about 1½ hours late! Starters were things to pick at in the middle of the table - lupin seeds, olives, local sausage, prawns, salad, bread and crisps. Next we had the choice of both the staple local specialities: paella with rabbit or gazpacho (a sort of rabbit stew with a pasta type dough) - I managed to have some of each. Pudding was locally grown mandarins or melon and then a choice of "Gypsy's arm" - a bit like a sticky Swiss roll with either cream or chocolate filling - yumee! Coffee to finish of course though Maggie had some sort of pretend tea and then the spirits just to settle our stomachs.

For the first time in ages I didn't take too much advantage of the free booze so I enjoyed the stroll home

Sunny days

Apparently Spain is the second largest producer of solar generated electricity in the World after Germany and the third largest producer of wind generated power after the US and Germany. It's hardly surprising that there is more solar power here than in the UK - 180 times as much per head of population but is there really 9 times as much wind in Spain as there is in the UK? And why Germany?

A couple of years ago we went to a local fiesta to celebrate the wine industry in Jumilla. One of the displays had an information board that read something like this - "the only way to succeed in today's cut-throat World market is to introduce new strains of grape to beat off the threat from new producers like Chile, South Africa and California or, even better, yank up all the vineyards and bung in solar panels instead!"

I hear that one of Spains growth exports is renewable energy technologies. There are not a lot of wind turbines around here, though there are stacks of them in nearby Castilla la Mancha but there is a lot of solar stuff in both Alicante and Murcia. Maggie really likes the solar panels, I prefer the turbines myself.

Sliced motorcyclists

The Spanish are doing really well at cutting the number of accidents on the roads. In the last 5 years road deaths have dropped about 46% though that still means 2181 people were torn apart on the roads. More people died in the UK in the same year, 2538, but as the population of Spain is some 44 million and the UK about 61 million then you have more chance of staying alive in Dagenham than in Mostoles.

A disproportionate number of motorcyclists die though. In fact until 2007 whilst motorist deaths were dropping steadily bike deaths were going through the roof. Last year, for the first time, the number of dead bikers dropped but it was still over 300.

The bikers of course blame a range of factors particularly car drivers for bumping into them. I must say that they always seem like a sober bunch of individuals to me and hardly any of them go too fast on monstrously powerful machines. And those young lads on the bikes in town, as well behaved as my Aunt Lizzie hoped I would be.

I was reminded of this because today, as I drove home, I noticed lots of shiny new lower rails on the "Armco" barriers on the road between Mahoya and Pinoso. Apparently when the bikers come off their bikes and slide across the road they get sliced into little pieces as they pass under the usual height barriers - hence the addition of the lower rail.

All Saint's Day

My usual November 1st post revolves around how lots of Spaniards make a day of visiting the family grave complete with scrubbing brushes and bunches of flowers.

This year we avoided any morbidity and headed for the fair at Cocentaina. Spain is quite good at themed market type fairs but there are certain staples for them all - crusty bread that costs 25€ per loaf, the people from Guijuelo with boxes of cooked and cured meats for just 40€, big yummy sweets made with real fruit juice that cost 5€ for four and mustard flower soap that costs 12€ for the smallest slab. See the theme?

This one seemed a bit different though. For a start it was huge. We didn't quite know what we were going to and as we approached the town there were cars parked all over the verges of the roundabout we used to come off the main road in that amazingly higgledy piggledy way that Spaniards have. No flower bed too small to park in. We presumed there must be something going on right there and tried to park up ourselves but being scaredy cat Brits we couldn't find anywhere. We did discover though that the mass parking went on and on and on. We eventually found some space in a field but by now we'd sort of gleaned that it was a big market type fair. There was another odd thing, by now it was about 2.30pm, well into eating time, the time when Spain slows to a crawl on any day and on Sunday, well like Wales in the 1950s, nothing opens. But this fair was definitely open.

The whole centre of the town was in use as the market place with different zones being used for different themes - the horse fair, rides and toys, local products, food, an Arab suq, an area selling agricultural machinery and biomass burning stoves plus, the tourism area, the environmental area and lots more. All the usual suspects were there but it was also very different and much, much bigger. I was really impressed with the food stalls and Maggie had to stop me buying a slurry spreader as we browsed the agricultural section. I took the name and address of the people who did the family sized olive presses though - pretty and useful I thought.

New for old

In June 2008 I mentioned this house as being an important HQ for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

Someone has been doing some work on it. With its new yellow finish it is quite difficult to tell that the house has any history at all - it looks nearly new.

I've just read that the last Republican Prime Minister, Negrin, fled Spain as the Republican forces admitted defeat in March 1939. Negrin left on 6 March and the last Republican cities, amongst them Cartagena, fell on 30 March. His departure airfield was the one next to this house.