Doubt and uncertainty

I'm on the dole. Not drawing cash you understand but signed on in the vain hope of finding a job and being eligible for retraining. Being on the dole also maintains my entitlement to free health care.

For lots of technical reasons I am registered at an office in Alicante province about 25kms from here and about 140kms from my weekday home in Cartagena. I only need to sign on once every three months and last time I made a lot of effort to get into the office but, once there, I realised that I could have signed on using the Internet.

Official Spanish websites are notoriously difficult and unreliable. I got up about 7.15 this morning to try to sign on. If it all went pear shaped that would give me time to get to the Elda office.

After about 40 minutes tinkering I seemed to have got a result except that I couldn't download or save the document to prove that. The website stressed that without the document I had not signed on. Problems with the website were being complicated by the mobile phone, dongle type, Internet access we have here. Now it worked, now it didn't.

In desperation I went to the local Morrocan run Internet place. The man on the desk spoke neither Spanish nor English but I got a machine at last. The website showed no record of me signing on today but it wouldn't let me sign on again either. It said today wasn't the due date which suggested that I'd succeeded in my attempts from home. I still wasn't sure though so I decided there was nothing for it but to drive to Alicante and sign on in the office. Then I had a brainwave, not much of one, and it shows just how conditioned I am to the face to face dealing in Spain that it hadn't struck me till that moment. I rang the office.

"Yes, you're signed on; tell you what if you're having difficulty with the website we'll post your paperwork on." It was just after 10.30 as I put the phone down.

I never really intended that this blog should be any sort of reference site, there are hundreds of expat sites that do an admirable job of providing information about living and working in Spain but following on from a comment I received I have added a link to the SERVEF website above. The national jobs site is here but your best bet for looking for work on the Internet is probably something like the InfoJobs website. There are hundreds more just a Google search away ranging from continent wide to the more local

Odd behaviour

Pinoso, our local town, is keen to promote tourist activity. After all tourism was one of the engines of the Spain's recent economic growth and it is still an enormously important industry here.

So Pinoso has been getting involved in promoting a wine trail, is talking about turning part of the huge marble quarries into a tourist attraction and re-equipping the old flour mill as a museum. Good stuff.

As a part of this drive they have just opened a new tourist office. It's only open weekdays from 10 till 2 at the moment to see how business develops. Being blessed with clairvoyant powers, I predict that it will be an utter failiure. Maybe if they had put it somewhere in Pinoso town rather than over a kilometre from the town centre, in the last building before open countryside, there might have been a better chance. Who thought of that?

We went to the building where the tourist office is today because they also stage exhibitions there from time to time. We were the only people in the building and we had to ring a bell to get in but the custodian was welcoming enough. I liked the exhibition though Maggie didn't so whilst I was looking around Maggie talked to the chap about the upcoming Villazgo celebrations.

Villazgo is a festival to celebrate the town's identity. It's a good event and it attracts plenty of people. It could attract more though if the publicity were not available only in Valenciano, the local dialect of the Catalan language. The main language of Spain, the one most people call Spanish is more accurately called Castellano. Nearly every Spaniard speaks Castellano but Valenciano, obviously enough, is spoken mainly in Valencia though what percentage speak it varies from town to town. Valenciano is not spoken in Murcia. Pinoso borders onto Murcia so the populations of two of the largest nearby towns, as well as anyone else outside Valencia, will have to guess at the programme.

I really think whoever is driving forward the tourist drive in Pinoso needs to reconsider their strategy.

And in the hills

Down on the coast, near Cartagena, I mentioned that there are gangs working the fields to crop cabbages and similar green winter produce. I also tried my hand at picking oranges. We've just arrived back in Culebrón for the weekend and we stopped off to pickup 5 litres of the local wine (5€ well spent) ready for an evening in front of the telly. Our bodega is also an almazara, an oil mill, and people were queing to unload their crop. It's olive harvest time up here in the hills.

They weigh in the olives, get a chit and they can either swop the chit for cash or for the equivalent in fresh pressed oil. Roberto thinks it is quite amusing that we Britons always take the profit in oil whilst the Spaniards take the cash.

The TIM blog

Along with a group of other people I'm doing some bits and pieces for the blog of a local, English language magazine. I've added the link in the box to the right but, if you want to have a look it's here

Where do I live?

I'm told that there has never been much of a tradition of written communication in Spain and that's why the postal service here is a lot weaker than that of the UK.

Its great that we no longer get piles and piles of junk mail but it still seems strange that Spaniards don't expect or send birthday or Christmas cards and that post offices don't have the "semi official" status they have in the UK. If you want to sort something about your car here you go to the Traffic Office or the Town Hall, the Police deal with passports and if you want some sort of official form you will probably get it from the tobacconist.

The Spanish post has a pitiful reputation amongst Britons and I think it may have something to do with addresses.

All my life, in the UK, I've known my address. In Cartagena and Ciudad Rodrigo the addresses have been simple and well established and the post has never been the least problem. But, here in Culebrón, it wasn't so easy and we certainly lost a lot of mail when we first moved in.

The deeds to our house say Partida Culebrón, the local Town Hall in giving us our "local citizenship" certificate called it Caserio Culebrón. The post office database says our postcode is 03658 but the local post office told me to use 03650. When I talk to people on the phone (who live in a house with a proper address in Madrid or Barcelona or Valladolid) about some service or other and our address doesn't turn up on their databases they have to invent an address that works. So, for the electric people we live at in the lower floor of a flat in Culebron street in Culebrón. Some of our friends have an address that has the format something like - The pretty house, The spot by the big trees, zone 7, plot 49.

New houses, even in urban areas, have a similar problem. Spanish beauracracy is slow and it takes a long while to get around to adopting new streets, putting up signs etc. So people living in new houses who need to arrange services have to guess at their address from their property deeds. Just like us rural folk they end up with multiple and sometimes contradictory addresses!

It is truly bizarre when you cannot be certain of your own address. When I ring up a bank or a utility provider they, reasonably enough, start by asking my address "Well", I say, "My address is this but you may have this or that and you could have either one of these two postcodes."

We now use a post office box (Apartado de Correos) and because the post office knows where that is they deliver promptly and reliably.

Hard news

We were in Pinoso. Maggie drew my attention to the smoke. It's probably the bakery I said but it wasn't. There was a fair bit of action so I thought I'd have a nosey, camera in hand.

Thankfully the fire was put out pretty quickly. We didn't hang around to get details but my guess is that the owner of the Peugeot was adding on some electric gadget and managed to set fire to the wiring loom of the car. He rolled the vehicle backwards, out of the garage, to save the house but, by then, burning plastic and rubber had fallen on the floor filling the garage with smoke.

We heard some female passers by discussing the number to ring for the police because it is they who act as the clearing house for local incidents. A neighbour appeared with a bucket of water. The man in the red jacket went to the bakery where he collected the extinguishers that all businesses have to keep on the premises and they did the job. Cool thinking in my opinion. The owner of the car rolled around on the floor sobbing and screaming. He was still there as the police car screeched around the corner and skidded to a halt. We were on our way by then. Excitement over.

A dual life

I'm not sure if readers of this site are aware of the sister site Life in Cartagena or not.

Because I spend about as much time based in both places I post to both sites more or less equally. There's a link on the right hand side of the page.

Rice and seafood

Clicking castanets, bulls, frilly frocks - the clichés associated with Spain. Most seem to be linked to the region in the South of Spain called Andalucia but one of the things typically Spanish, paella, is associated with this area and more particularly with the area around Valencia.

Paella is a rice dish. There are tens if not hundreds of varieties from the chickpea and sausage ones baked in the oven to the rabbit and snail one we eat around here. However, the variety that both Vesta and I think of as being most usual has yellow rice, seafood and maybe some chicken along with a few bits of veg to add colour - the paella mixta.

On Sunday as we left Valencia we stopped off at the Albufera, a big wetland area. The water is used to flood paddy fields to grow short grained rice. Just across the way is the Mediterranean teeming with life.

Ah, ah - rice and seafood and veg all in the same place.

They think it's all over

We were in Valencia over the weekend. As we went back to our hotel on a bus it was noticeable how much traffic there was - lanes and lanes of the stuff stretching on apparently for ever. Being Spain the bus lane was just as crowded as the rest. It took us ages to get to the hotel though I think that the friend who was with us gained some caché by travelling with two Brits speaking excrutiatingly bad Spanish. Light relief that other Spanish passengers on the bus could guiltily share with her. It was busy because everyone was out Christmas shopping.

A Spanish friend, who mentioned in her card that she'd only sent two, posted her card on 29 December. Plenty of time before Christmas.

When we finally settled down in front of the telly last night there were at least ten perfume ads in a row and one breath of fresher air with an amusing little advert from Scalextric.

This is because Christmas isn't done here. Shops will continue to sell as much as they possibly can right up to late night closing tomorrow evening. They hope to be assisted by the crowds brought to towns the length and breadth of Spain to see the Three Kings parade through town throwing sweeties to the assembled hordes. Some of those parades will be camel and elephant riding all singing and dancing and others will be three blokes with dodgy beards (and a blacked up face) riding in the back of a chum's tractor trailer. No matter, no child in Spain will be denied seeing the Kings close to their house. Tomorrow evening Spanish children will go to bed hoping to waken up to piles of Assassin's Creed 2 and Wii Sports rather than the coal reserved for bad children. And on the 6th with all the shops closed Spanish families will reassemble for the last big feast of Christmas before the children go back to school on Friday. Just time for them to get down the Sales and spend their Christmas money.

Me pones una sin alcohol, por favor

I was just in town so I went for a drink. I had a non alcoholic beer and as I sat at the bar I noticed that of the eight other people having a drink three were on the beer flavoured pop too. It's a very common drink possibly because, once it's in the glass, nobody is going to know it's not the real thing and try to force lots of beer on you. It's to do with drink driving of course. The limits here are 0.5mg/ml as against 0.8 in the UK and there are even more stringent levels for new and professional drivers.

Nonetheless Spaniards drink and drive. I've always thought that drivers aged 50 plus were likely to be the worst offenders. After all to have a couple of glasses of beer during the morning, a glass or two of wine with lunch and then a brandy to top it all off before jumping into the Audi and zipping off to the office would be absolutely normal behaviour. So, if it's been OK for years why change the habits of a lifetime? And, until recently I think that was true but with random breath tests, points on licences, the possibility of prison or community service plus heavy fines the older Spaniards have realised that they have something to lose.

I've just been trying to hunt down the statistics for drink driving in Spain and I've found it really difficult to find anything definite. For instance it seems that alcohol related traffic offences have been falling steadily year on year but with some reading between the lines that may not be true for 2009. The figures seem to be being presented differently with a different emphasis - my guess is that with doing lots more random tests and by changing the patterns of where they test the Guardia and Police have actually caught more people. Locally, there is circumstantial evidence of that. I know lots of Britons who have a skinful and then travel home on very minor roads and tracks. A friend of ours, a non drinker, was pulled over on one such road at around 1am in the morning. I suppose that if Britons do it then Spaniards will too so those controls may be catching a disproportionately high number of people. I also tried to find out whether my personal take on the age profile of drink drivers was right. It doesn't seem to be in that the "Minister of Transport" avoided the question but said that it was neither the very young nor the older drivers who were the drinkers. He said that over 50% of the prosecutions are for 20 to 40 year olds. No mention though of the distribution of the other nearly 50%.

Anyway, it's definitely true about the non alcoholic beers.

In praise of maps

I must have been to Murcia City at least twenty times. It's only about fifty minutes from Culebrón and a bit less from Cartagena. According to a list on Wikipedia it's the 9th largest city in Spain. Anyway, nearly every time we go there we go to the square outside the Cathedral, wander around a bit, maybe get onto Gran Via and then decide there's not much going on and leave.

Sneakily they seem to have opened a tourist office in the Cathedral Square without us noticing. So today, for the first time, we had a map as we wandered. What an amazing difference. It wasn't just that we got to see an exhibition about Alfonso the Wise, went to the Archaeological Museum, wandered the Christmas Market and nearly went in the Fine Arts Museum, it was that we knew where we were and, maybe because we went a sensible way from one place to the next, we went past scores of new and interesting places.

The town felt really nice too. It was a warm day, I dumped my jacket and pullover and still felt over warm in a T shirt, and the Christmas lights, Christmas happenings and Christmas crowds made it an exciting place to be. Our luck must have been in too because the Cathedral was open. It was the first time we've ever got inside.