Life in Culebrón

There is only one thing on Spanish telly and Spanish radio and in the Spanish papers today. Pictures of fans jumping in fountains in capital cities all over the World, Spanish troops dancing in Afghanistan, getting ready for the open top bus parade in Madrid. ¡¡Campeones, Campeones!! The newsreaders are beaming, the commentators have a lilt to their voices. Here in Culebrón, like in Lake Wobegone, it has been quiet. Vicente, next door, let off a few bangers and we could hear the car horns and fireworks in Pinoso but we'd drunk just a spot too much to be able to drive in and join the celebrations. Brilliant.

Spain 1 Holland 0 A sufficient sufficiency

Back from 7 hours in the car and 615kms on a day trip up to Teruel province (see next post) we were just back in time for one of the two annual evening meals put on by our village association in Culebrón. Maggie had been dragged off somewhere and I was alone for a couple of moments when one of the villagers waved hello to me. I said something about her having to use a mime show because my Spanish was terrible and she agreed and suggested I should be ashamed of myself for not being able to talk properly. For good measure she said that Maggie at least spoke Spanish. That made me feel really cheery. The meal though was a hoot. As usual the long tables were under the pine trees just outside the village hall. I was sitting opposite the couple in the snap, Daniel and María Luisa. They're not a young couple but they like to dance and they like a laugh. They made the evening entertaining as did everyone within talking or listening distance actually. I had as good a time as I've eve...

Yesterday we went to see our pal Pepa in Fuentes de Rubielos in Teruel province. It's about 300kms from home. Pepa and her friend Jaime have built a house and kitted it out as a  "casa rural" a sort of country cottage available for rent. We went to take some snaps that she could use on the website but the place wasn't quite finished off (no curtains, appliances still in their boxes etc.) and the website doesn't seem to be up and running yet either.  Close but not quite. A bit like my photos Nonetheless it's a lovely spot. Trees, hills -  that sort of thing - and a couple of bars in the village too. We had a snack lunch of a really tasty fruit sauce and goats cheese salad along with an enormous sandwich in the bar of the public swimming pool maybe 200 metres from the house.  So if you're looking for a few days away from it all in the country you could do much worse than consider Vientos de Gúdar in Fuentes de Rubielos. -- advert ends--

For the past few days football has been everywhere in Spain. The telly is full of it, the streets are full of it. Only two hours to go. One of the local villages is having its Fiesta this weekend and they have a big screen in the village square. That seemed like the obvious spot to me but Maggie isn't keen. Maggie thought the best place would be a British bar, the place where we saw the first England game, but I'm not keen on that. We've just had a look around town and all the bars have offers on - free popcorn, TV on the terraces etc. but there's nothing more "official" in one of the public spaces. So it looks like we'll be watching the match from our own living room. The alcohol flow is assured, the view will be better but it may be a bit lacking in ambience.

Simple things do have a habit of becoming complicated. I ordered some jeans from an online shop in Poland. Dodgy or what? But in fact the English company handled the credit card transaction without problems, the Polish firm sent the jeans, the German carriers got them to Spain but the Spanish carrier couldn't find our house. I was able to check this relatively easily on a mixture of Polish, English and Spanish websites. When I say relatively easily we're probably talking an hour from start to finish. All I need to do is to ring the Spanish delivery firm and sort out the pickup but none of the various websites involved in the order tell me which local office is handling the delivery. I took the coward's way out of writing an email to the carriers national office with the various reference codes and the like to ask which office I should contact. That saved the difficulty of a telephone conversation. With spell and grammar checking add another 20 minutes. Then there's ...

Maggie thought it would be more entertaining in a Spanish bar than to sit at home and watch the football. I wasn't keen but the clincher was her offer to drive. It was a scrappy game, none of the back and forth of Ghana and Uruguay, none of the precision of Germany whupping Argentina but in the end we put it away and one nil is as good as twenty nil in a knockout competition. The bar was a bit subdued and there were as many expats as Spaniards but at half time a group of Northern Irish turned up and they made so much noise that the game seemed much more exciting. Germany eh?

We have a very sophisticated pool. Really it's an old irrigation tank painted white and blue. We fill it with water using a garden hose and hope that the water doesn't become too noxious with dead insects, rotting vegetation and the secretions from sweaty bodies over the summer. Personally I'm not too keen on water: fine for car washing and making tea but every time I see people swigging the insipid stuff in the streets I'm reminded of my mother's admonitions about drinking from bottles. I even wonder about all those lorries full of all those plastic bottles travelling all that distance when the stuff comes gushing out of taps all over the place. The idea of immersing myself in it falls quite a long way behind plucking the small hairs from my ears and nostrils as a form of fun. Maggie though seems keen to be able to get cold and wet from head to foot every now and again. We've poured 15.2m³ of water into the tank over the last couple of days or 3,343 gallons...

55 women died in Spain in 2009 at the hands of their husbands, lovers or ex lovers. 2009 was better than 2008 when 76 died. By the end of April this year 23 more women were dead through the same cause. It was easy to find those figures because the number of deaths is a repetitive theme of Spanish news reports as are programmes about stopping the violence, support for victims etc. I tried to find the equivalent UK numbers but the emphasis in the UK is on the whole range of violence against women rather than the number of murders. I saw a couple of reports that suggest the recent figures have between 104 and 120 deaths per year. I read on a local website that there was going to be a demonstration outside the Town Hall in Pinoso to highlight the violence against women so I thought I'd go and take part. The people who were organising it seemed a little surprised that I was there and didn't quite know what to do with me. There were only about 20 of us all told. When the time cam...

The normal way to do something official, like change the address on your driving licence or pay your water bill here in Spain is to go and stand in a long queue, usually the wrong queue, and wait to be turned down because you lack an essential bit of paper such as your mother's birth certificate. Things change though and Spaniards increasingly use the Internet to get official jobs done. Most government type websites require that users have some sort of digital certificate. Now, to be honest I don't really know what a digital certificate/signature is and I can't raise the enthusiasm to find out from Wikipedia. I think that it's a bit of code that websites swop with individual computers, a bit like a blind date, if the two click then splendid but, if not, no more conversations. For lots of Spaniards this digital identity business is dead easy because their ID cards now carry a chip - bung the card in a card reader and you're in business. For we foreigners it...

There are a lot more insects. Flying insects, crawling insects, insects that aren't insects, just beasties. Beasties that sing and jump and fly and bite. They particularly enjoy biting Maggie so that she comes out in lumps. We're back in Culebrón; we packed most of the flat into the back of Maggie's Mitsubishi yesterday afternoon but, thanks to the generosity of our landlords, we were able to leave the larger items like the telly, tables and chairs in the flat ready for when we go back in September. Maggie was badly affected by it all. She started singing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" apparently inspired by the line from the song - "I'm coming home, I've done my time." She seemed very glad that term was finally over. As always it's cooler here than on the coast because we're some 600 metres above sea level or just a bit short of 2,000 feet in old money. Nothing noticeable, temperature wise, during the day - we left 33ºC behind and arrived t...