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A stop in Castilla La Mancha
It’s 4am. The bus is parked up in a service station. Just outside Albacete. A group of weary travellers cluster around the door, talking to the driver, their fags like glow worms in the night.
The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick and bleach. It’s almost deserted, dozing – a woman scrutinising her finger nails at the cash desk a man with a broom and us. Sandwiches too tired, dry, expensive.
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 part 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 a henna streaked beard, a hat made of carpet fabric, one of those long shirts, looking for all the world like someone in an Afghani Al Qaeda camp on the nine o’clock news and wearing the obligatory polyester anorak, got off the bus and disappeared into the night.
There are a few Spaniards too of course. No one looks rich to me. In fact, most look poor – dishevelled and tired. Like the plump woman with an ample backside inside tight black ski pants, high heels and with yellow accessories. An ensemble that screams market stall into the dark.
Four continents at least – continental drift.
I’m there too, lost in a strange country, another immigrant – the struggling poor.
At 4am on a bus bound for Madrid.
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Parador Hotels
By Culebronchris
Fancy staying in an old castle or monastery? Then one of the state chain of hotels, a Parador, may well be for you. Paradores are a product of a dictatorship in Spain, probably not the last one but the one before. The dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera that lasted from 1923 till 1930. Primo thought that well heeled tourists might come to Spain bringing plenty of spending money if there were somewhere pleasant and interesting for them to stay.
 The first Parador was built in the Gredos mountain range and in some ways it’s a much more normal Parador than the stereotypical converted fortress or nunnery that hotel chain tend to use in their advertising nowadays. When we turned up there one dull, wet day the building looked like something from the Scottish Highlands. The original building has been added to so that parts are modern and parts are old. It’s been done with style – all wood, grey slate, overstuffed chairs and brass standard lamps but it is essentially new build.
 The second Parador was built in 1929 in Ciudad Rodrigo a town that I lived in for a while. We used to take our guests there for a cup of coffee. It never failed to impress, a real 14th Century castle with battlements and halberds on the wall.
There are plenty of Paradores that are new but they are usually in splendid locations. Clipped lawns and large swimming pools overlooking the sea or halfway up some tree covered mountain. Nearly all of the hotels provide themed holidays or specialist packages – bird watching or painting here, mountaineering and folk dancing there. Christmas breaks, New Years celebrations and any other date on which they can hang an event.
 I’ve only stayed in about four of five Paradores but I’ve eaten in or at least had a drink in lots more. In most of them the restaurant and bar staff will wear the traditional costume of the area and the restaurant will specialise in local food. The food and drink isn’t cheap but it isn’t outrageous either. They do veggie too as a matter of course. You can still get a menu Del dia for around 30€ though the drinks aren’t usually included. It’s the same with the rooms, pricey but not exorbitant especially if you hunt out one of the, always available, deals.
I like Paradores, they have a certain charm but they can be disappointing. The one in Albacete for instance I remember as looking like a builders cabin set in the middle of a wasteland. The coffee bar was littered with old napkins. We didn’t stay. The one in Ceuta, where we had a room, was blessed with terribly slow bar service and high quality but down at heel rooms. Often the bars are deserted and after the obligatory gawp at the oil paintings and coats of armour you begin to wonder if the bar is actually open. Nonetheless, when someone does come to serve you they will be highly apologetic and I’ve often thought that the staff make up for any deficiencies of the general management of these hotels.
Rooms vary; most are much like any modern hotel but some are terrific, designed to fit in with the ambience of the place – four poster beds, oil paintings and high, vaulted ceilings. The restaurants are nearly always good and usually pretty busy. It’s the sort of place that Spaniards take their Granny to celebrate her birthday, the sort of place where tourists wear linen trousers and Spaniards their chinos and Ben Sherman’s.
If you’re anywhere close to a Parador and you see the sign why not go and have a quick shufti. Decide for yourself.
http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/
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Stranger in a strange land
by Culebronchris
I really like Spain. I complain about it all the time, I am appalled by some of the organisation and behaviour, by the failings, by attitudes and sometimes even by people. I had very similar thoughts about the UK when I lived there. There is one big difference here though. Here I am a foreigner and I always will be. I know I’m foreign because, when it comes down to it my sympathies are with Drake and Nelson and because I can never remember which city Osasuna football club are from despite somehow knowing that Wolves home ground is called Molyneux.
 One of the main things that marks me out as different here is that here I have become stupid. I can tell that people think I’m stupid when they speak to me in the tone of voice usually reserved for asking children if they believe in the Tooth Fairy. Good grief I have lived here for five years – I’d have to be hiding in a ditch not to have eaten rice once or twice. I even know that it’s a mouse that carries away the teeth here and not a fairy. I do know though that I will never be able to have one of those slightly drunken conversations about whether the Spanish equivalent of Pilot, Bucks Fizz or Black Lace were the worst pop group of all time. I don’t share, and I never will share, that wider culture built up through years of simply living through it all.
And then of course there’s the radio. Why, when the alarm comes on does it speak to me in foreign? Oh yes, because I’m a foreigner in Spain.
It grieves me how poor my Spanish is. No matter how hard I try to learn vocabulary, decline verbs and jot down useful phrases I still fall apart when I have to speak Spanish. People tell me that a few mistakes are all part of the fun, that it’s all about communicating, but it’s not, at least it isn’t for me. I can go to Elda train station and with two fingers, the word Madrid on a bit of paper and a back and forth motion of my arm I can get two return tickets to Madrid. I understand that people buy chickens by clucking. However, my birthright is Shakespeare and Marlowe and Enid Blyton. I want to say what I want to say, to mould language to my will and I’ll be damned if I’ll be reduced to flapping my arms.
I got involved in helping someone from the UK, brand new to Spain, to get a new clutch for his car. He had never met me before, didn’t know what I was saying in the garage and decided that he could assist me by miming clutch. He stood on his right leg and moved his left leg in a clutch-pumping sort of motion. I knew what he wanted and I could see the link between the action and his need. The garage-man on the other hand didn’t and couldn’t. He watched the action, turned to me, and asked if the man was dancing. Sometimes words are the only way.
 I don’t actually have much trouble getting what I want using Spanish and not only in the places that give you a head start. Back at Elda railway station, you are hardly likely to be after that chicken. In the butchers, on the other hand they handle very few travel enquiries. Stroll into the Town Hall though and it could be anything from drains to a consumer complaint. I can do that, I can go to the Town Hall and get what I need. I suspect that I sound ten times worse than Colin Firth at the end of Love Actually where he goes to express his undying love for Aurelia in rapidly learned Portuguese but he got the girl and I can get the water leak fixed.
It drives me spare not being able to communicate fluently. I know that it can never be perfect. I was reading the (Spanish) paper one evening at home and the (Spanish) telly was on in the background. I suddenly heard a Brit speaking Spanish. Actually, it wasn’t a Brit it was Ian Gibson and he is Irish. He has lived here for years, he is an author who writes learned books in Spanish, but it took me fewer than three seconds, when I wasn’t even concentrating, to spot the pace and the rhythm as being like my own. I cannot do that with Rumanians or Norwegians but I presume that they too have a style to their Spanish that is a lot more than just accent. You just listen to a Spaniard say Hola and then to most Britons doing the same. We just don’t do it right.
But Antoine de Caunes and Bruno Tonioli do perfectly well with their funny accents and cadence so that shouldn’t be the stumbling block. Why then am I paralysed by my linguistic inability? I go to buy bread at Mercadona or Consum where I can pick it up off the shelf rather than go to the much more convenient bakery. No speaking required at Mercadona. That little pain will have to get a lot worse before I go to a doctor. I’d walk rather than try to get a bus if it would mean asking directions. Lots of it is about me, about a person who does not like to perform in public but I know that if you live in Spain and you are foreign you know what I mean and you have done something similar.
Did I mention that I really like Spain?
Ho, hum
Chris Thompson: male, fifty something, white haired and portly. Born and bred in Yorkshire, moved around a bit and then spent twenty plus years in Cambridgeshire. Liked Spain from the moment he got off the bus in Barcelona some 28 years ago. Upped sticks in late 2004 and drove to Santa Pola in a brown MGB GT co-piloted by Mary the cat. Currently lives alternately in Culebrón, near Pinoso in Alicante and Cartagena, Murcia with Maggie the teacher and a newer cat called Eduardo. Fighting a losing battle with Spanish. http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/
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IRONMONGERS (AKA THE FERRET SHOP)
By Culebronchris
 I had a nice new picture to hang. That meant a visit to the ironmonger’s (ferreteria) to get some hooks and some rawlplugs. As usual the shop was crowded and, as usual I began to fret about what I had to ask for as I waited in the queue. In the UK of course, you just pop in to one of those giant superstores and search amongst the racks for what you want. It’s easy to tell what size and shape you need, especially if it’s Sunday and you’re there because the toilet cistern is leaking, as the shelf that holds the vital part, the shelf that is bugling under the weight of every conceivable bit of a toilet cistern ever made, has just the one empty section where the part you needed should have been. But I digress.
So in the UK knowing the name of some arcane piece of do it yourself kit isn’t a problem. In Spain though an ironmonger is still an ironmonger. The shops have a whole wealth of ironmongery treasures available for tiny amounts of money. You have to ask for nearly everything you want by name or, more often for we Britons, with a bit of show and tell, a mime or maybe a hasty sketch. In our local shop, amongst the plethora of exciting and interesting things hung up on racks, there isn’t a single thing I don’t know the name of in Spanish neither is there anything that I want. The stuff that I do want and don’t know the name of will be under the counter or in the Aladdin’s Cave of the storeroom. Never for me the soft option.
I called them rawlplugs. I presume that’s a trade name, a more obscure version of the UK Hoovers for vacuum cleaners and the Spanish Kleenex for paper hankies. Not knowing the official name makes it tricky looking up the Spanish in the dictionary. Fortunately rawlplugs are pocket sized and easy to conjure up in the shop. Not so easy though when you want the netting to make fly-screens or a swimming pool filter cum pump.
 I suddenly had a flashback. A couple of years ago I was just on my way out to buy the plugs, hooks etc. when Clive turned up at the place I then worked – “See you later Clive, I’m off to get some hooks” says I, “Ah, interesting word hook in Spanish – alcayata for the L shaped ones, hembrilla abierta for hook type hooks and hembrilla cerrada for the round ones that aren’t really hooks” says Clive (he’s like that). I’d been impressed, I’d written it down in my little vocabulary book at the time. I had the vocab book in my pocket. I looked it up now. I’d been going to use the word I know for a hook – gancho.
The ironmonger understood the words and when I said I wanted the plastic things that the hooks grip on to he gave me some without recourse to my visual aid. Actually he gave me six because I’d bought six hooks – not a packet, just the six hooks and the six plugs I needed.
 Spanish ironmonger’s are a joy. The shops even smell right.
And a rawlplug in Spanish, by the way, should you ever need one, is a taco
Chris also blogs here:
http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/
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Taxing times
By Culebronchris
I did my tax return last week. It didn’t take me long. The tax people, usually referred to as Hacienda rather than their fancier, official name – Agencia Tributaria – send me a document through the post that says what they think I owe them or what they think they owe me. If I agree all I have to do is go to their web page and confirm the details and that’s it done for another year.
 If I hadn’t agreed then I could have changed the details online and confirmed those. I presume that, after a change, some tax clerk or maybe a computer programme, checks the changes and, if they seem reasonable, the confirmed but altered details are given the OK and processed.
The first year I had to do this I went to a local accountant who charged me a few euros, 30€ as I remember, to complete the original form and get me into the tax system. Once I existed on the Hacienda database they began to log any salary and tax payments made by my employers or by the state unemployment people so that they could calculate whether I had over or under paid at the end of the tax year. The tax year is the calendar year.
It doesn’t have to be done online. Accountants can deal with the paperwork as can the local tax offices and I think that banks can too. It’s obviously more difficult for someone with a business or with multiple income streams but for someone with finances as simple as mine it’s dead easy.
My partner gets notification that her draft is available online via a text message to her mobile phone which includes the appropriate reference number. Rather swish I think. I wonder why I still get my first contact by post?
Best of all they reckoned they owed me a few euros and, what’s more, it was paid into my bank account within a couple of days.
For more http://www.aeat.es
Or see the adverts for Tax Services in The Inland Magazine
Chris Thompson: (aka CULEBRONCHRIS) male, fifty something, white haired and portly. Born and bred in Yorkshire, moved around a bit and then spent twenty plus years in Cambridgeshire. Liked Spain from the moment he got off the bus in Barcelona some 28 years ago. Upped sticks in late 2004 and drove to Santa Pola in a brown MGB GT co-piloted by Mary the cat. Currently lives alternately in Culebrón, near Pinoso in Alicante and Cartagena, Murcia with Maggie the teacher and a newer cat called Eduardo. Fighting a losing battle with Spanish. http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/
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Hug the Earth
By Culebronchris
Much of Spain is rural. It’s rural in a different way to most of the UK though there are some similarities and parallels. For instance, like the Lake District, lots of rural areas here make their living principally from tourism rather than from, say, agriculture or manufacturing.  Also, around Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or Seville well off families may move to the countryside to take advantage of a more relaxed lifestyle, less pollution and the like. They travel into town in the same way as all those commuters in all those dormitory areas stretching out for 100 miles from London along every train line or the Mancunians nestling in their Pennine villages.
Here rural often really does mean rural. If you own a four wheel drive motor it will get covered in mud and dirt clambering up unmade roads. You probably have to use a generator for electricity, water may still be well water, the pile of wood outside will not only heat your house but may well be the fuel you use to cook over too. If you can get a “landline” telephone it may actually be a radio phone.
I was thinking of this as we went for a weekend drive across a very sparsely populated corner of Castilla La Mancha at the weekend. Some time ago I lived in Salamanca province and a website I subscribed to called Abraza la Tierra (more like Embrace the Land than Google’s translation of Hug the Earth) sent me an email about a community meeting in the area called Sierra de Francia. They were calling for the same sort of things as rural communities ask for in the UK; infrastructure investment in things like broadband access and start up support for new start small and innovative industries. The reason they gave was that their villages were dying but dying in a spectacularly real way. As the old folk die there’s simply nobody coming on behind. There are lots of villages with lots of houses used at weekends and for holidays but with only a handful of full time inhabitants.
There are stories about whole areas being taken over by immigrant groups, like the Polish in Teruel or Ecuadorians being offered financial incentives to move to rural Galicia to repopulate areas and villages.
Alicante and Murcia are rural in an English sort of way with lots of people, many of them incomers, choosing to live up a track in a big stone pile of a house. It’s definitely different in the majority of the rest of Spain.
There’s a most amusing website, well it made me laugh, called The village in which nothing ever happens It’s about a village with 12 inhabitants in Teruel province that is trying to stimulate tourism through a website. Even if you have no Spanish you should have a look – it’s a hoot.
Editors note – Sorry looks like this site, like the village (?) has disappeared…..
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Pub quiz questions
By Culebronchris
How many land borders does Spain have?
Obviously, there are the pukka borders with France and Portugal. Andorra of course. Then, there are the enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta on the North African coast with frontiers to Morocco. Finally, there’s one with the UK, well I suppose it’s the UK though I never have quite understood the legal standing of Gibraltar.  Strange to think that we got hold of it because a French army commanded by an Englishman beat an English army commanded by a Frenchman in a war between two rivals for the Spanish throne. Five in total then – more than most people think of at first.
How many official Spanish languages are there?
We all talk about Spanish but those of us who live in Alicante know about Valenciano. Now I don’t want to have some local activist popping around with a spray can so I’ll leave the linguistic argument about whether Valenciano is a language or just a dialect of Catalan to people better qualified than me. Generally though the Spanish languages are recognised as being Galician (from Galicia), Basque (from the Basque Country), Catalan (from Catalonia) and then the one that is spoken all over the World, the one we all tend to call Spanish – Castillian. I have purposely anglicised most of those to avoid any arguments about what the languages are called and where they are from. The Spanish Constitution recognises the right of Spaniards to use any or all of those languages but it places a duty on Spaniards to be able to speak, read and write in Castellano. There are other minority languages too – equivalent to Cornish in the UK – that local communities are trying to resuscitate but the official answer is four.
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Things That Are Surprisingly Difficult To Buy
By Culebronchris
My mum came to visit. “You’re looking thin,” she said, though I’d actually put on several kilos. We were stocking up in Carrefour. “Can we get a nice piece of pork, some apple sauce and some stuffing?” I wasn’t sure about pork. It is very easy to come by, but would it be a nice piece, or at least my mum’s idea of a nice piece? As I understand it, Spanish butchers cut their animals up differently to British butchers. Apple sauce may be in the international section or maybe available as baby food but stuffing was off, I was sure that stuffing was off. “But everyone has stuffing with pork” she said. “We’ll be able to get it from one of the British supermarkets later,” I said but, as we were shopping at 8pm, they would all be closed now. I could see I was a big disappointment to my mum. Wasting away, still living off student food instead of a nice joint and now lying to her about the availability of Paxo.
Spaniards don’t eat sage and onion stuffing of course nor do they drink tea with cold milk. Britons who want to live in Spain but who wish to continue eating as they did in Tadcaster or Rochester will generally be able to do it. Certainly, nobody is going to make you eat paella with rabbit and snails. You can still have your dinner at dinner time if you want but if it’s Marmite, Branston pickle and pork pies that you hanker after you’re going to end up in specialist shops. Or living where there are so many of us that even the big supermarket chains find it worth their while to pander to our eccentric tastes. Though you would think that self-raising flour, chillies, limes, and coriander would be easier than they are.
Away from food, I’m still sometimes surprised by what you can’t buy. That’s untrue, there is nothing you can’t buy in Spain if you are willing to hunt, pay through the nose, get it delivered from the UK by someone with a van, or nowadays the Internet of course. If you must have Brylcreem, there’s a way. Therefore, I’m talking about things you can’t buy easily.
 You try to get an electric kettle anywhere except on the coast for instance. We lived in Ciudad Rodrigo in Salamanca for a while and our kettle blew up. We scoured Castilla y Leon for a new one but we had to wait until we were back in Alicante. There is not really a Spanish word that most Spaniards recognise for kettle despite what wordreference.com says. I can see your come back here – kettles are unfair, after all Spaniards don’t use boiling water on tea so why would there be kettles in the shops? Pillows though are another thing. Spanish people definitely sleep and they use pillows but their pillows are as wide as the bed and they are sort of flat hard things or they’re shaped like a sausage roll. The pillow cases are different too because they don’t have sealed ends. That different solution to the same need turns up frequently. Let’s say you want to keep the land between your olive trees as free of weeds as you kept your herbaceous border in Stowmarket; piece of cake but you’re not going to be doing it with a Dutch hoe but with something that looks like a trenching tool.
I was teaching English for a bit. I wanted some file paper, lined A4 file paper. Squared paper, blank paper and spiral bound notebooks with double lined paper were all available. All would have done the job admirably and they were all very similar to what I was after but they weren’t quite right. It became a crusade. I got some finally but only in packets of 25 sheets at a time. Perhaps there is something of the national character expressed in paper items because I had some trouble with a diary too. My diary writing career spans 40 years and all I wanted was an A4 page per day diary. You can get them in any WHSmith in the UK for about a tenner but here I had to order it specially and pay 29€ and it had a floppy cover and it was spiral bound. Birthday and Christmas cards are the same, much easier in the coastal areas nowadays but still largely unknown to Spaniards.
The old tourist slogan for Spain used to run “Spain is different.” Nowadays when everywhere is more and more alike I think it’s rather comforting to know that getting knitting needles you understand is going to be an uphill struggle.
 Chris Thompson: male, fifty something, white haired and portly. Born and bred in Yorkshire, moved around a bit and then spent twenty plus years in Cambridgeshire. Liked Spain from the moment he got off the bus in Barcelona some 28 years ago. Upped sticks in late 2004 and drove to Santa Pola in a brown MGB GT co-piloted by Mary the cat. Currently lives alternately in Culebrón, near Pinoso in Alicante and Cartagena, Murcia with Maggie the teacher and a newer cat called Eduardo. Fighting a losing battle with Spanish. http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/
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Just say No
By Culebronchris
I have recently been using an UK debit card to pull Euros from Spanish hole in the wall machines. The UK account is, obviously enough, in Sterling.
 So I go through the process, push in the card; choose a language, what sort of transaction, how much etc. Eventually a screen message comes up that reads something like 300€ will cost you £285 including commissions and fees. Do you wish to proceed? The obvious answer is “yes,” of course I wish to proceed. If I were to say “no” the implication is that, the transaction would be cancelled. Nonetheless the better answer is “no.”
When you answer “no” the transaction continues anyway and the conversion between Pounds and Euros works in your favour because you buy rather than sell – or is it the other way around? And we are not talking pennies here. The average rate offered on the screen is around £283 to buy 300€ but the actual cost has averaged out at around £270 when I have answered “no.” That is thirteen quid a pop in the bank’s favour.
If I didn’t know that banks were honourable and upstanding institutions constantly striving to improve services for their customers I’d be ready to classify this as a bit of a dirty trick designed to confuse people exchanging money abroad.
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Now we’re cooking on gas!
By Culebronchris
Even in the big cities the majority of Spaniards don’t have access to piped gas. It’s beginning to change but it would still be true to say that the majority use gas bottles.
There are two main types, the silver ones and the orange ones. The orange ones have the huge advantage that they are usually delivered by someone who takes all the muscle injuries on your behalf as they lug them into your living room or wherever. The silver ones are lighter, easier to contract for and more available at petrol stations and other pickup points. I usually get our silver bottles from the local bodega for instance.
 We passed a lorry delivering gas bottles in Valencia a couple of days ago and I was amused by the housewives in the flats yelling their orders from the windows to the men with the lorry. We were in company with a Spaniard and she told us that in the olden days, long before telephone ordering, the gas lorries would stop outside the blocks of flats and the “butaneros” would rattle the bottles in the rack to advertise their presence. The sound is very distinctive.
Did you notice that bit about contracting? When we first moved here we inherited a gas heater in the flat we rented. When the gas ran out I had to go to a compound on the edge of the town, far enough away for an explosion not to do too much damage I suppose, and exchange my empty gas bottle for a full one. After a couple of visits, emboldened by my success, I asked if I could have two bottles instead of one. I was made to feel like Oliver Twist asking for more!
The chap at the depot sent me to to an office in town. I’d been in Spain about four weeks by this time and I was incensed, appalled and totally confused when they seemed to need everything short of a DNA sample to sell me a gas bottle. Even worse I would have to pay for an engineer to check that my gas heater before I could sign a contract for a second bottle.
I gave up and did what most Britons do. I found someone who had a bottle spare, paid them 5€ for it and then went to the garage and got a fresh one. Nowadays of course, with my fluent Spanish (oh yeah!) and having become used to giving my date of birth and showing my passport when I buy an iced lolly I didn’t have any problem arranging for an engineer to come and check all the gas appliances. That done I got an appropriate contract with a local  supplier. I must say that, despite the faff, I rather approve of a system that insists that you have the appliances checked for safety on a regular basis. People don’t bother of course, particularly poor people and foreigners with language problems, but there are far too many stories on the news about blocks of flats ripped apart by gas explosions for us to take the chance.
Give me another couple of years and I may get around to ordering the replacements by phone. Sheer luxury!
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