On the road

The rights and wrongs of running cars in Spain, originally registered on foreign plates, is one of the staples of the many expat Internet bulletin boards. Whatever the legal technicalities the idea is pretty simple. If you live in Spain your car should have Spanish plates, Spanish insurance and the rest whilst if, for instance, you live in the UK your motor should have UK plates, tax, insurance and safety checks. Living here means you spend more than 183 days of the year in Spain.

A Swedish chum who lives in Pinoso was pulled over at a police checkpoint a couple of weeks ago. Her car, which was running on Swedish plates, was briefly impounded until she was able to register the vehicle on temporary "tourist" plates. Now she is going through the process of re-registering on Spanish plates. The police told her they were having a bit of a blitz on foreign cars and that there would be no fine (I can't remember whether she said that could have been two or three thousand euros) if she got on with the re-registration.

Obviously, as EU passports are no longer stamped with entry and exit dates, keeping track of where a car lives has become much more difficult. I presume too that a year means a calendar year so it wouldn't be enormously difficult to organise a perfectly legal stay of nearly 12 months with a short six months on each side of the new year.

My guess is that all the police look for is a full and current set of paperwork whether that be Spanish or from another EU country.

Villazgo

On 12 February 1826 good King Ferdinand VII granted independence to Pinoso from the larger nearby town of Monóvar. Nowadays, on the most appropriate Sunday nearest the 12th, the town puts on its gladrags, well lots of traditional smocks and frocks, to celebrate the town's coming of age.

The main event centres around eating - as do all Spanish celebrations. In this case punters buy eight tickets which can be swopped at the participating stalls for a drink, a snack or other edibles. It starts slowly but by 2pm the site is heaving with people balancing wine glasses and local delicacies on paper trays as they elbow their neighbours to create enough eating space. Spaniards have a remarkable facility for eating without stopping speaking and the noise level is incredible. As it all starts to tail off the heaps of rubbish and food on the floor become more noticeable and make for an interesting orienteering exercise.

As well as the food there is a traditional competition a bit like horseshoes, there's a stage for local bands and dancers, a street market and stalls by most of the local community associations. Some of the stalls, both from professional vendors and the local groups are really well done and echo ages old crafts and traditions. Pinoso was big for shoe making for instance so one of the stalls encouraged passers by to don the apron and sit amidst the heaps of ancient tools doing their Pinnochio's dad impression.

Lots of photos on the my snaps link or here.

Who goes there?

The town Hall in Pinoso produces a glossy magazine each month, called el Cabeço, as a way of keeping its citizens up to date. It's always good fun with plenty of argy bargy between the political parties in amongst the real news and those human interest stories with a local flavour - Pinoso man moistened; Titanic sinks!

Big stories this month included the idea that Spain's strategic oil reserve may be pumped from the refineries at Cartagena into the caverns formed where salt has been "mined" from our local mountain. There are our new water prices too, a new tiered pricing system which will see those houses that use most charged a massive 1.10€ for every 250 gallons of water - luckily for us we don't like washing much and I expect we'll be in the 28 cents per 250 gallons bracket.

It was the population figures that I lingered over most though.

At the start of 2010 there were 8,031 people living in Pinoso (that includes the villages such as Culebrón), 6,627 or 82.5% of those people were Spaniards and the next largest group? Go on, you've guessed, I can see that little knowing smile - yes, us, the Brits with just short of 8% of the population or 624 people whupping those Ecuadorians (162), Ucranians (95) and Moroccans (81) by miles. There are 42 different nationalities in Pinoso.

Bin and gone

I hear that in the UK it's only MENSA members who have a chance of keeping track of which rubbish has to be put out on what day and date - Tuesday for the organic stuff, every third Friday for household waste etc.

Here in Spain there are no household collections. There are big containers dotted all over the place though. Round Pinoso the basic green jobs are for general stuff then there are the recycling bins - yellow ones for containers, blue for paper and light green for glass. You have the responsibility of getting the stuff to the bins.

The general rubbish is picked up overnight in urban areas and maybe two or three times a week in rural areas. The recycling bins are cleared less frequently.

It's a simple but effective system.

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.