Lost in Translation

Viva La Duquesa!

2008-08-26T20:50:00.009+02:00

I don't know about you lot out there, but with the terrible events in Madrid last week chilling me to the bone, and nothing but talk of the economic crisis to fill the remaining pages of the newspapers, I for one am crying out for a bit of cheering up. So it's at times like these that I like to look to my elders and betters for inspiration, and who's elder, and indeed who's better, than everyone's favourite octogenarian party girl... La Duquesa de Alba!

OK, so she may struggle to be physically able to raise a smile, but she never fails to put one on my face with her antics, that's for sure. Whether it's waving her hanky in appreciation at Franciso Rivera's 1000th bullfight last week, or just gadding about town in her surgical stockings going from select social engagement to select social engagement, all the while persued by a hungry pack of reporters desperate for her to pass comment on her children's ever-present marriage woes (or even the possibility of an upcoming marriage of her own!), the woman is a true marvel and the best advert for the nobility since the Queen Mother downed her final G&T and toddled off to the hospitality tent at the big Derby course in the sky. Chin-chin!!

Here are some of my favourite Duquesa moments to treasure.

First we have the Duquesa giving the press a piece of her mind, telling it straight that they're nothing but a bunch of shits (which we all know they are):

And here she is again, as ever hounded by the press, making it clear who's boss. The way she shouts "Hijo de tal!!!" as she's aided into the car by her helper puts me in mind of a shoplifter who's being taken away in a police car. I almost expect the aid to put her hand on the Duquesa's head (like all good coppers do when putting criminals in the backseat) with a sarcastic "Come on now love... in you go... yes that's right... save your ranting for the Judge why don't you" :-)

So in times of ongoing war and destruction, nothing but misery all around, and the likelihood of a peaceful death in old-age looking so remote it could almost be classed as an acceptable career goal, it's time we all stopped a moment to give thanks for the one, the only, the institution that is.... María del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva, duquesa de Alba y de Berwick; de Montoro, de Liria y Jérica, de Arjona, de Híjar, condesa-duquesa de Olivares, marquesa de San Vicente del Barco, de El Carpio, de Coria, de Eliache, de la Mota, de San Leonardo, de Sarria, de Villanueva del Rio, de Tarazona, de Villanueva del Fresno, de Barcarrota, de la Algaba, de Osera, de Moya, de Almenara, de Valdunquillo y de Mirallo, condesa de Lemos, de Lerín, condestable de Navarra, de Monterrey, de Osorno, de Miranda del Castañar, de Palma del Rio, de Aranda, de Salvatierra, de Andrade, de Ayala, de Fuentes de Valdepero, de Gelves de Villalba, de san Esteban de Gormaz, de Fuentidueña, de Casarrubios del Monte, de Galve, de Santa Cruz de la Sierra y Ribadeo , vizcondesa de la Calzada, marquesa de Oraní. Phew!

God bless you ma´am, I for one think you're amazing!

Summer holidays

2008-08-15T22:50:00.004+02:00

More of a traditional blog entry today rather than a quirky take on some random event or other, which is what I usually aim to write about. Let´s see how I get on when sticking to chronological events!

Well, the summer holiday period has really hit me square between the eyes and I´ve had some great holidays and days out recently. Not content with that, I´ve now got plans for enough new trips in the coming weeks to make Judith Chalmer´s travel diary look like the summer itinerary of an agoraphobiac. I´ve been to Rome and Florence, had days out around the coast of Barcelona, am planning a week in Galicia, and just last night, I got back from my first ever weekend in the Basque country, after spending a couple of days in San Sebastian, and having left with a definite taste to return again in the future.

As I finish work at around 2pm on Fridays, I cunningly took advantage of the opportunity to cause a bit of jealousy amongst my colleagues by arriving that morning with that unmistakable “I’m going on holiday and you’re not” look on my face, fanning myself with my San Sebastian tickets, their faces rubbed further into the dirt by the sound of my trolley bag wheeling nicely behind me. The edge was taken off slightly when I had to admit I would be travelling on the bus, squeezed into a ridiculously small space for the 8 hour journey, but 10p millionaires like me can´t afford to be too choosey, and as I only planned the trip about 3 days before hand, I´d left it a bit late for any flight bargains and apparently slave-powered sedan chairs are outlawed these days who knew?!).

Boarding the bus at Barcelona Sants station was the usual example of confusion that could easily be avoided if only Spanish transport officials wouldn’t been so stingy with presenting simple information. They have numbered laybys for each bus, but refuse to show any information as to which bus is going where, so everyone is trawling up and down the narrow walkway dragging bags behind them that inevitably get in eachother’s way and having to ask each driver where he’s going. The buses have the destination on the front, but this doesn’t really help when you see that there are 3 or 4 buses going to the same destination, but via different routes and with different bus companies. You can’t even identify easily the bus company as they sub-rent buses from other firms to cover busy routes etc. Let’s just say, logic is not in abundance. Why they can’t have a simple screen (or even just a simple blackboard) showing the next departures at each layby, I just don’t understand. They have a departures board at Barcelona Nord station so why not at Sants? Anyway, we eventually found our bus, popped our luggage in the hold and joined the rest of the passengers in the collective hope that the odd looking individuals hovering around the station looking for something to rob, wouldn’t do what would be completely easy in the commotion and just take a suitcase from the bus’s luggage hold and casually wheel it away (presumably hoping to find more than someone’s dirty underwear and a cheap travel iron inside!)

Squeezed into my seat with knees pressed up hard against the seat infront and with the air-conditioning turned to a positively barmy “Arctic”, the next thing to happen was a visit from the Guardia Civil. I misheard him at first and when I saw his official police badge being flapped in my face (he wasn’t in uniform) I thought the bus company were just taking a particularly heavy-handed approach to correct seat allocation, until I realised they actually wanted to see our ID as the bus was going to the Basque Country (presumably the mode of transport of choice for your average separatist terrorist is a chilled sardine can on wheels). I thought he’d take a quick look at my ropey English drivers licence and my “wouldn’t last 5 minutes in Al Qaeda” facial expression and pass it straight back, but he actually collected up everyone’s ID and then left the bus with the lot. Half an hour later (and now way behind the official departure time) we appeared to have been declared terrorist-free as he came back to hand out the cards again in a Paul Daniels “pick a card, any card” kind of way. On seeing my driver’s licence poking out from a fistful of Spanish DNI cards, I felt a bit like the joker in the pack… literally, but I quickly decided that passing myself off as Purificación García Jimenez, or Miquel Angel Lopez Fernando was always going to be a tall order, so I sheepishly slid out the card with the most boring name in the pack and popped it back in my wallet where it had come from.

The journey itself was uneventful, apart from the moment we made a comfort stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere outside Zaragoza and left the fridge on wheels only to be punched in the face by the air temperature outside. The difference was spectacular and was just like the well-used analogy of opening the oven door while holding your face just that bit too close to the blast of air. 25 minutes later, and mildly sun-scorched, we were back on board and underway again.

A trip like this really reminds you just how much wide open space there is in Spain (and the north eastern strip of Spain is reasonably highly populated so goodness knows how much open space there must be in the southern regions like Extremadura for example) as much of the landscape, once outside of Barcelona until you reach the Basque country, is pretty bleak indeed. A mixture of sun-dried mountains and dusty open land, made green in places by the irrigation systems spitting out water over the crops. OK, it’s far from being like Death Valley, and is beautiful in many ways, but the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, it certainly ain’t!. However, the change as you cross the mountains and reach the Basque region is spectacular and made the not-very-nice bus trip much more worthwhile. The only way I can describe it is that it’s as if the theatre stage hand has mixed up his ropes during an amateur production of Bonanza and suddenly the wrong cardboard scenery has dropped down. Where there was previously an arid bleak landscape that you would easily associate with inland Spain, there are suddenly beautiful rolling green hills and lush forests as far as the eye can see. This surely can’t be Spain, but remarkably it is and it just seems to go on and on and on. The hills are sparsely dotted with the occasional village (or just a single house in many cases), often with their trademark Basque-style wooden shutters on the windows. If anyone out there is ever lucky enough to have a country summer house in Spain, you could do a lot worse than choose this part of the country. OK, it may rain a lot more here but the results of all that water speak for themselves.

We finally rolled into San Sebastian at about 11pm and were picked up by my friend’s father for the short ride to their house (taking in a bit of a nighttime tour of the city first though). Despite the lateness when we arrived, everyone was up and waiting to greet us… mother, brother, sister-in-law and even the 8 year old Ukrainian girl that my friend’s parents look after for 2 months of each year as part of a program to take sick or at-risk children away from the poisoned area around the Chernobyl site. After kisses were handed out all around, out came the food of course leaving us with full stomachs as we fell into bed.

After having been warned many times about the unpredictability of the Basque weather, I wasn’t expecting miracles, but we certainly got one the next morning as it was a gloriously sunny and pleasantly warm day without being too hot to enjoy it. Four of us went for a walk which, within about 100 yards of the front door found us by the sea front of a stunning natural harbour. “Our” side is called San Pedro, while the neighbours just across the narrow stretch of water live in San Juan, and after a stroll along our side, we took the little boat across. San Juan is prettier with quaint streets and houses backing directly onto the waterfront.

Later in the day we went into the centre of San Sebastian and took a long stroll along the prom. “Prom” is a good way to describe it as it has a definite Victorian English feel about it with its decorated ironwork seafront railings and low-rise buildings which easily conjure up images of the rows of well- kept B&Bs and guest houses that you might see in some of the nicer British seaside resorts. Of course, the presence of a crystal blue sea is something I’ve never seen in the UK but you get the impression. A trip up the funicular railway to take in the view of the entire city, followed by a walk to the edge of the sea wall to see “Los Peines de los Vientos” (metal sculptures jutting out of the rocks) completed our daytime activities and we headed back to the centre of town to grab a bite to eat before going home for a late siesta, an evening meal with all the family, and then drinks in town. Like all good Spaniards, we didn’t even leave the house until well after midnight, but the city was heaving with people. A jazz festival was being held on the beach, but someone had unwisely put two giant stages too close together so the fierce competition to be the loudest ended up spoiling them both. Now, I know jazz is often all about improvisation with whatever number of instruments you have to hand, but this was just too much. I’m not a fan of jazz music anyway so we decided to head away from the beach and have a look around the bars in the city centre. The fact that they were charging ridiculous amounts for drinks on the beach sealed the decision!

San Sebastian is not short of bars, and certainly not short of people to drink in them. And drink they do! I’ve gotten used to the calmer approach to drinking that exists in Barcelona (aside from the foreign tourists who are throwing up on La Rambla by 11pm while most Spaniards are still eating their evening meal) but San Sebastian seems to have a culture of drinking slightly closer to the British system. OK, not as bad, but certainly more so than Barcelona. There was no sign of trouble though and everything was very lively and good-natured. We had a walk around and combined a bit of late night tourism with a few gin and tonics until the early hours before heading home. The next day we had to catch the bus back to Barcelona so it would be a wasted day unfortunately.

Now I’m home again, I’m putting the final touches to my plan for another week away, this time in Galicia and Asturias. I head off there on Sunday morning, and absolutely cannot wait!

Bright eyes...!

2008-07-23T13:29:00.004+02:00

For quite a while after I arrived in Spain (and still occasionally to this day if heavily provoked) my brain automatically would assume that when dealing with strangers in Spanish, that I must surely be coming across as a “guiri perdido” (in other words, a hopeless pillock of a foreigner). It seems my logic was based purely on “how could it be any other way?”. Afterall, I was putting myself in situations guaranteed to irritate the local population, namely “talking to them”. I was potentially slowing down the queue in the bread shop because I didn´t know the name for the one type of loaf that I wanted out of the approximately 4582 types on offer, annoying the girl in the bank when she had to repeat 3 times how much the commission is on a simple transaction (in case you´re wondering, it falls into the category of "ridiculous"), or just generally peeing-off the entire bus when my ticket had gotten a bit twisted and would no longer be accepted by the onboard validator - this final example being my least favourite of all when I first arrived in Barcelona. The same little harmless looking machine which would emit a playful beep to each of the stream of locals as they pass their tickets through, but which would let out an almighty scream which would chill to the bone when I came along with the misfortune of having a slightly imperfect ticket that had been bending and flexing in my wallet a little too long. It may as well scream out “HEY EVERYBODY, THIS GUY IS TRYING TO GET ON WITHOUT PAYING!!! AND LOOK… HE´S FOREIGN!!!”. I was a lost cause, cruelly condemned to spend my life in eternal damnation by the judgment of nothing more than a ticket machine with a xenophobic streak.

Anyway, after a while things like this stopped bothering me. Partly because I found that my Spanish was improving to the point where I no longer had to visibly concentrate like crazy with a pained expression on my face in order to squeeze out a vaguely understandable sentence, and partly because I was struck with the sudden realisation, that quite simply, no one else really gives a rat´s arse! The guy slowing down the bread queue is just another guy slowing down the bread queue (and is probably going a damn site faster than your average Spanish pensioner, by the way!), the guy in the bank is just another customer to deal with (all of which I suppose are annoying in their own individual ways), and the noise of the screaming ticket machine is just more background racket that gets automatically tuned-out by the locals without even raising their gaze from their free newspapers.

So… with the initial fear-factor now gone, I then started to feel pretty much fine about dealing with all sorts of potentially confusing encounters with Spanish administration/shopping/transport etc, even actually looking forward to some of them on occasion. I´ve opened and closed accounts, given directions in the street to strangers many times, done tax declarations in person, successfully got through job interviews, and most proudly of all…. I´ve walked out of the bread shop with the type of loaf I walked in intending to buy. (Quite an achievement that last one!). I´m not saying that I´m now a vision of lingual perfection, striding about like Cesar, unfazed by any situation, but I am at least not putting myself in the frame of mind of “I-am-an-automatic-failure-before-I-even-open-my-mouth-so-please-don´t-bother-giving-me-the-time-of-day!!”.

The reason I got to thinking about this today was because recently, the same curious little seemingly insignificant thing has happened on a couple of occasions that had never crossed my mind before, and it happened again today in a more obvious way. I´ll explain some examples more clearly later, but basically, while I´ve been thinking that my lanky legs, pasty English skin and fair hair were a physical disability that would mean constantly being treated as a foreigner (and therefore fair game to rip-off or fob-off at any opportunity) they´re actually one of the biggest “door-openers” you can drag around with you, using them to your advantage without even realizing it or being aware that they are having an invisible benefit to you. For it would seem that, when dealing with those tall, pasty-looking, fair-haired northern European types like me who have clearly taken a bit of trouble to learn reasonably good Spanish, your average Spaniard sitting behind a desk or working in a shop (or whatever) will be happy to take more time to look after you, make sure you´ve got what you wanted, and generally be pretty god damn nice to you. I´ve bought fruit and veg on the market and been offered recipe ideas that I lack the culinary capability to carry out, I´ve asked the bloke next to me on the bus for the meaning of a particularly tricky word in my book and then spent the rest of the journey chatting about the book and being given more reading suggestions, asked a question about my tax deductions and suddenly found myself having a highly-paid expert who doesn´t normally deal with Joe Public hauled across the office to personally advise me about how best to frugally juggle my pennies…. the list goes on. Anyway, the “thing” that has now happened a number of times was actually nothing more than a passing comment about eyes. Apparently, if you´ve got the clear-eyed foreigner look and you´re prepared to dabble in the murky waters of speaking Spanish with the locals, you´re already at a massive advantage purely based on the fact that you´re “different” to the millions of those poor old genetically disfigured (stay with me..) Spanish folk with their beautiful dark eyes, stunningly even tanned skin and errrr what else?… hairy backs…? Ok, so that last one isn´t a particularly good example and doesn´t apply to all, but you know what I mean. Let´s face it, I´ve said it before, but the typical “Spanish look” is a pretty good one to have been born with, and it has to be said that Spain has been blessed with more than its fair share of stunners of both sexes.

If I ever get treated exceptionally well by local officialdom, I´ve always put it down purely to the fact that they must just be a nice person who appreciates hearing a bit of Spanish speaking effort in all its badly conjugated glory. But I´ve now had it suggested to me by friends that it´s actually the “look” that´s the deal clincher. A 100%, cast iron, money-back guarantee for good service (it would seem) is purely to be just one thing…. “different from the crowd”. Apparently, nothing brightens the day of that woman on the fruit stall than a prat with a sunburnt nose spluttering out the wrong words for the fruit he´s pointing to, or fills the tax officer with more pride than having to re-do an entire spreadsheet because the poor sap from England has given all his figures in UK pounds instead of Euros.

My friend who suggested this, grew up in a small town during the tail-end of the Franco years, when all things foreign held a certain glamour, so although I haven´t said this to him, I think he´s just bringing along an old hang-up from his youth and applying it to the present day. Afterall, any Spaniard who´s grown-up seeing the influx of foreigners over the last 30 years, with their kiss-me-quick holiday mentality and being sick in the street at barely 11pm on a Saturday night, surely can´t be holding the opinion that Brits (for example) are a glamorous bunch of go-getters blessed with a life that the yokels in Spain can only dream of. This isn´t 1970 and we´re not talking about illiterate villagers from the arse-end of Moldova (sorry to any Moldovians reading this!). Spain has got more capacity to cause an inferiority complex in other nations these days, not suffer from one. But nonetheless after brushing off my friend´s comment, another mildly comical example happened this morning…

We have a staff shop in the company I´m currently subcontracted into (a brewery) and we can buy cheap alcohol etc as there are daily staff special offers. Today´s offer seems to be the result of some over-enthusiastic ordering on the part of a junior in the Marketing Dept, as they were flogging for just over €3, a pack including a beach parasol, a mini surf board and 6 beer glasses, all branded with the company logos etc. After the first guy walked back into the office carrying his pack, there was a stampede of us heading to fill our boots! For the first time there was a phenomenon unheard of in the shop´s history…. a queue! The woman (a middle-aged señora with multi-coloured hair) clearly used to dealing with a slow stream of casual callers suddenly had a “panic buy” situation on her hands! I was watching her from my place in the queue, and she seemed to be getting more and more peed-off with the passing of each customer until, with just a couple of people in front of me (and a whole line behind), she ranted in Spanish with a snarl (I´ll translate the vague meaning!) that “everybody can just bugger right off” before switching to a warm smile to add “except for the tall guy with the nice clear eyes, he can step up to the hatch and place his order with pleasure!” She was obviously having a joke around, but it just reminded me of my friend´s earlier comment about getting “special treatment”… however off the cuff and insignificant it may have been.

So all in all, I´m still inclined to believe that good treatment of foreigners comes from only one thing, namely being pleasant yourself and making an effort to communicate, but I´ve now had my eyes opened to a new possibility.

And not only are they open, they are of course clear! :-)

Sore bums and tax returns

2008-06-25T22:41:00.003+02:00

Por el amor de Dios, has it been over a YEAR since I last posted on my blog?? Sadly, I do believe it has. Having this blog sat whimpering in the corner like an abandoned pet isn´t good for my catholic guilt (I´m not catholic, but I tend to feel guilty about everything in my life so I may as well get myself some Rosary beads and take up the Habit) so, like a weekend dad on a court supervised access visit, I´m here to show a bit of interest in my digital offspring. I don´t know what I´ll do… probably take it to the zoo or something. Buy it an ice cream and an X-Box perhaps. Maybe even promise to go to MacDonalds on the way home if it behaves itself. Nah, the cheeky little nipper probably won´t appreciate any of that, so I guess I´ll just write a bit about whatever crosses my mind in the next 30 minutes or so and see where I end up. As usual, it could be good or on the other hand it could be a pile of crap. I make no apologies if we go down the latter route, but I will promise to feel guilty about it! :-) Deal?

OK, the first thing that I want to talk about is my arse. (Now there´s a talking point worthy of internet space!) Basically, magnificent though it may be, it bloody hurts! Now, before the marketing whizzes down at Preparation H reach for their phones with lucrative offers of anal sponsorship and product placement opportunities, I should clarify that to my immense relief, the cause isn´t actually a sad decline into a hemorrhoid troubled mid-30´s, but rather the result of my recent seemingly harmless decision to buy myself a bike. Well I saw David Cameron going the wrong way down a one-way street and jumping red lights willy-nilly, and figured it looked like fun. Unfortunately for me, it would appear that the manufacturer of my particular bike has scrimped on the luxuries slightly by fitting what I can only describe as a “splintered chair leg” where the seat should be to cushion my bony bottom from the occasionally uneven tarmac of Barcelona´s streets. On my first venture out, I found that I managed to get more or less to my destination without incident, but was in total agony on the way home again. Presumably the manufacturers know that their cheap seats seem fine when you sit on them for a moment or two in the shop, but once you´ve ridden over a few potholes and attempted to drop down a curb at any speed greater than “stationary” and suffered the inevitable consequences, you´ll hobble back into the shop flapping an open wallet and demanding the softest, smoothest, most expensive replacement seat available. Nothing that hasn´t been invented as a direct result of the NASA space program will do. So I´m now the proud owner of a distinctly mediocre bicycle oddly fitted with a space age, gel padded, sweat proof, go-faster seat cushion. If my bum could talk (and why shouldn´t it?), it would smile broadly and say “thank you”. There you go then… problem rectified (no pun intended!)

My main reason for buying a bike is that last year, I would often go to the beach on hot days, and while it isn´t ridiculously far to walk, it can be time consuming especially if you´re just going for the final couple of hours of warm sunshine after work in the evening. Therefore I would have to go on the Metro, and being pressed up against someone´s sweaty armpit in the middle of summer is not on my list of pleasant pastimes (even though the Metro is air-con´d in the summer), so I figured it would be a more pleasant experience, and just as quick, to make my way there under my own steam. People are generally getting worse on the Metro, and body odor is high on the list of offences (everyone sweats, but there´s no excuse for a terminal case of BO) closely followed of course by those strange people who play tinny, unidentifiable music out loud through their mobiles. Why do they do that? No one can tell what it is, it sounds bloody awful, and it automatically puts the offender in the category of “pillock” without any need for debate. Mind you, as it´s usually someone with a mullet haircut, I suppose it´s pointless trying to find sense in their actions. Anyway, armed with my new two-wheeled friend, I´m now able to avoid all this, save myself a euro or two each time, and even get a bit fitter too. Bargain! I´ve been out loads lately and love to plonk myself on the sand, read my book, or have a kip in the sun. Luckily, Barcelona is fairly flat city for the most part so the gears on my bike, of which I appear to have about 863 judging by the various combinations available, are barely troubled. The city is blessed with wide streets in most areas that have plenty of room for cyclists, and the network of dedicated cycle lanes is pretty extensive and well connected (unlike the UK where a cycle lane will often unexpectedly end in the middle of a busy roundabout). Finally, to put the icing on the cake, I read last week that the City Council is going to remove a traffic lane from Calle Urgell right outside my flat in order to put in a cycle lane the full length on the street from Francesc Maciá all the way down to Parallel. Excellent news, and if it cuts the traffic noise, even better!

In other news recently, we had the San Juan (Sant Joan in Catalunya) holiday just yesterday, and the fact that it fell on a Tuesday meant that it was a lovely 4 day weekend for me and many others. The long weekend also coincided with a sudden heatwave so it made for the perfect opportunity to spend some time flaked-out on the beach. San Juan is celebrated in a kind of Bonfire Night style, with fires on the beach or in street junctions, and the constant sound of bangers all around the clock for days. I went for drinks in the evening with some friends followed by the beach party at about 1am where we found the entire length of the beach absolutely crammed full (and I believe there about 4-5kms of city beaches so that´s a LOT of people). There wasn´t space to swing a cat where we were, and although it was fun, the crowds made it tiresome after a while. The idea is that you dance until dawn and then bathe in the sea in order to bring you good luck, but we bailed out and headed home shortly before the sun came up, so I don´t know how many did this (I presume quite a lot).. The army of cleaners were out in force the next day to clear up the mountains of cans, bottles, broken glass and general rubbish that covered the sand. They do an amazing job, and the beach is soon looking tip-top again ready for the sunbathers to arrive.

It was back to earth with a bump again today though with the midweek return to work. Can´t complain too much though, as a 3 day week is not to be sniffed at. There´s a surefire headache coming on Friday though, as I have my second session with the sadists down at the tax office. I went last week to do my yearly tax declaration (my first in Spain) and was left battered and bruised by the torrent of confusion and general misinformation that the staff seem happy to dole out. It appears that they can´t draw a clean line between my UK tax situation and my Spanish one, so I´ve been told to go away and convert all my 2007 UK income and deductions into Euro´s using the exchange rate at the date of payment, and then come back and the will enter all this into their computer along with the Spanish income they already know about. Then presumably they´ll be some smoke and mirrors, and I´ll be presented with a summary of what I owe or not. I´m hoping for an easier ride this Friday though. If I get the Andalucian girl with the impenetrable accent again, I may as well just give up now and hand her all of my money and call it quits. I pride myself on being more or less able to follow mind-boggling instructions delivered in high-speed Spanish when I´m in work, but throw in a strong accent, along with the commotion from the screams of about 300 other Spanish taxpayers having the thumb-screws applied at the other desks, and it doesn´t exactly make for a clear exercise in comprehension. I´ll be lighting a candle and saying my prayers tonight in hope of an easier time. Now, where did I put that Rosary? I´ve got sins to confess…! :-)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the shower….!!

2007-06-11T21:19:00.000+02:00

Back in January, I made a new year resolution to try to get a bit fitter, so I’ve been going to the gym just across the road from my flat at least 3 times a week since then, and everything’s going well except one odd thing…

In a nutshell, we’ve got a freaky weirdo in the gym! I’ve never had any concrete evidence against him, so I’ve not wanted to do anything about it in case I’m putting 2 and 2 together and making 463, but this guy is always in the gym at the weekends. No matter what time of day I go, he’s there. Now, you might think he’s just a fitness freak, in which case, good on him for his dedication, but sadly the evidence suggests otherwise. The thing is, he’s only ever in the changing rooms. Not once have I seen him anywhere on the gym floor at any point (and it’s only a small gym so you can see everyone exercising from any point on the gym floor) nor in the swimming pool.

Every time I go down to have a shower, he’s there, walking about naked. Now, again you might just think “naked guy in men’s changing rooms – shock horror!”, and you’d be right of course. But, this guy is naked in there for hours on end. We’re talking entire mornings or afternoons spent down there. He seems to just make his way from the showers to the lockers and back again, all the while doing, well, not a lot it has to be said.

Now, I shouldn’t be cruel to anyone’s physical appearance, but I can’t tell the story fully if I don’t say that this guy is extremely unattractive. He’s probably about 35 years old max, and he’s very overweight with matted patches of hair all over his lumpy body, along with a miss-shaped arse that I don’t even want to think about right now, so I’ll crash on with the story…

The showers in my gym are individual cubicles, so they aren’t completely open. The dividing walls are solid and completely non-transparent, but of course there’s the usual 8 inch gap at the bottom like a toilet cubicle. Whenever I’m in the shower on a weekend, you can bet your bottom dollar that seconds after I enter, someone will enter the one next to me. No big deal there, but it’s odd that I’ve never noticed the water start running, and when I stop my shower running and am almost ready to come out, the person next door instantly leaves the cubicle before I have chance to pick up my toiletries etc and leave the cubicle myself. Then as I’m getting dressed by the lockers, the fat guy will be there, striding about naked again. Process of elimination over a few weeks leads me to believe that it’s this guy who’s in the cubicle next to me, but as I say, I’ve had no real evidence, and at the end of the day, he’s not actually doing me any harm.

Until…

This Saturday I went to the gym as usual. I did my exercises and went for a shower. I hadn’t seen our chubby friend at all so far, so it hadn’t actually crossed my mind that he might be about on this particular day. But sure enough, as I went into my shower, a few seconds later I heard someone enter the next door cubicle and no water started running. I could see the edge of a foot from the 8 inch gap at the bottom of the dividing wall, and it wasn’t moving at all, which you would expect it to if someone was showering.

Now, in the dividing walls there is a small hole cut out at the point where it joins the main tiled wall (the wall on which the showers themselves are fixed). These holes are for the pipes to run horizontally across from each cubicle to feed the water through, and they are at about stomach height. The holes are about 3 inches square, and as I say, they are against where the dividers meet the main wall, so you would literally have to squeeze your eyeball into the corner of the cubicle to be able to see through to next door….. yep, you know what’s coming don’t you!

The next thing I realised was that I could see the edge of a nose pressed up against the hole!! I nearly died!! What kind of freak goes to these levels to perv on people? This isn’t a cheeky glance at an opportune moment, this is full-on, 100%, bonafide, freaky perving! I wasn’t going to let this go on, so I did the only thing I could do…. I poked him hard in the face with my finger! I wish now that I’d rammed the end of my shampoo bottle through the hole as it would’ve really hurt him, but I think the finger did the trick.

I instantly came out of my shower and banged on his door, but he refused to come out… total silence! I kept banging, and asking “Qué coño crees que estás haciendo??” (What the f..k do you think you’re doing?) but still no response. I’d more or less finished my shower by the point the nose had appeared, but I just had to rinse my conditioner out, so I quickly stuck my head back under my shower, so I’d be done and ready to confront him fully. As soon as he sensed that I’d gone back in my cubicle… he was off like a whippet! (Albeit a very overweight and ugly whippet!). He ran as fast as he could (ie, not very fast) around the corner, and we clearly made eye contact as I was shouting at him, but he kept on going and went around the corner towards the swimming pool. I regret now that I didn’t just follow him. He was still starkers at this point, whereas I had the advantage of a towel around me, so I could’ve backed him out all the way to the public pool where he couldn’t really have gone any further, but I just started laughing at this point, and another guy who was just drying himself, asked me what was going on, so I suddenly found myself distracted busily explaining to him what had just happened.

Our freaky fat friend couldn’t come back into the main changing rooms and escape that way, because he would’ve had to have passed me, so I just carried on getting dressed and then made my way out. At reception, I explained to the girl on duty what had happened (which pushed my Spanish skills to the limit!) and she was stoney-faced in horror through most of it, although I couldn’t help laughing so she eventually cracked up a bit herself. She took it seriously though, and after my clear description of the “offender” she said “well, there aren’t many fat guys here so leave it with me and I’ll watch for him leaving and have a word”.

I went home at that point. As it was a hot day, I had my balcony doors open back at the flat, and I just happened to glance out about 30 minutes later and saw the fatman waddling sheepishly down the street out of the gym.

I was due to go back this morning, but I overslept so I’ll go tomorrow and if the girl is on duty, I’ll ask her what came of it. I’ve tried to think if I’ve over-reacted at all, but I really don’t think I have (your opinions are welcome in the comments section below! jeje). But to literally have your eye pressed up against the showers to watch someone, is extremely wrong, and the fact that with all the previous weeks evidence, this is clearly something that this guy does on a very regular basis. How many others is he spying on? Have they noticed? I just think it’s all a bit yukky, and I want him to be banned from the gym, and hopefully humiliated a bit in the process.

If only I’d followed him through to the pool, it could’ve been hilarious! It was already like a cross between a Carry On film and Porkies, but that would’ve really sealed his fate! Ah well, you live and learn…

Knob Wars!

2007-06-05T23:28:00.000+02:00

In a galaxy far far away….. or more precisely, in the flat directly below me, there appears to be trouble abrewing in our usual peaceful and tranquil lives. First the background… The flat I'm talking about has been empty for a while, and was bought by a doctor recently who has been completely renovating it from scratch since about January. The new owner knocked on my door way back in the new year and asked to come in. I didn’t have a clue who he was at the time, and the fact that he appeared to have one of his “heavies” with him, kind of put me off inviting them in for a cup of tea and a chat. (I’ve heard all the warnings about letting strangers in. I’ve watched Crimewatch, so I know the score! You think they’re coming to read your meter, and they leave 10 minutes later wheeling a widescreen TV out of the door while you look on helplessly in a pool of blood!) Anyway, after pulling a few strange looks and producing some very fine Spanish on my part including a not very polite “Qué coño quieres?” (What the hell do you want?), I finally got the message about who he was, that the “minder” was actually none other than his architect, and that they were wanting to come in, not to rob me and leave me for dead, but rather to take a quick glance at the positions of my interior walls. Slightly more plausible, maybe?? Certainly better than “Would you like to see my puppies?” that's for sure! Anyway, I figured that there was no way any potential murderers could’ve made it this far as they would’ve had to have passed our Portera lady, and at this time of day, I knew she’d have been on duty (lovely lady, but turns into a rabid rottweiler if crossed!), so I decided to take a chance and let them in. It was a fuss about nothing in the end, and after the quick glance at the walls and a few pleasantries, they were off. I checked the TV and it was still there, and I didn’t have any stab wounds, so we were all alright.

A few days after that, the noise from the works kicked in. Walls coming down directly below us, jackhammers on the go all through the day, it’s been unbelievable at times, and it’s the one reason why I’m thankful I’ve got a job that keeps me out of the house during the day. It seems they’re coming to the end of the worst of it now, as I peeped in the other day when the workmen had left the door open, and it appears that they’re finally making good progress and getting almost to the decorating stage.

Since I originally met the new owner back in January, I’ve bumped into him a few more times in my gym across the road. The first time I saw him, I went over to apologise for being so frosty when we’d first met, and I put it down to my bad Spanish and me not having understood what he wanted. He was very nice about it and laughed it off, and we chatted a while. He asked if the noise was a problem, so I answered honestly that, while it was horrific, it wasn’t so bad for me as for those who are at home all day. He was very apologetic, so it’s hard to be rough on someone when they’re doing their best and you know that the noise is unavoidable. I’ve renovated a house myself (well, I supervised while other’s did the work! Jeje) so I know what a hassle it is for everybody, and you just have to get on with it and shut up moaning. They still haven’t moved in yet, but it can’t be far off, so maybe they’ll throw a party for all the neighbours…. Except for one!!...

…And that brings me to the point of the story. One of our lovely neighbours today decided to stick an anonymous note on the door of the new guy’s flat saying that “this doorknob does not respect the aesthetics of the building!!” plus various other stupid comments that I can’t remember now. OK, the doorknob isn’t as shiny as perhaps most of the others in the building are, but come on, the guy’s just bought the friggin flat. They aren’t cheap in this area so he’s clearly paid a lot of money for it, and it’s obvious that he’s working hard to do it up to an extremely high standard. As if it matters for the moment that his doorknob is a bit tarnished??? I reckon the anonymous complainer is someone who’s tired of the noise and wants to pick on something just to be a Victor Meldrew type neighbour. My flatmate has mentioned a couple of times that the people in this block are either completely adorable, or total shits – there’s no inbetween.

I went back down a floor earlier with my camera to take a pic of the offending note (as it was really quite in-yer-face!) but someone had beat me to it and ripped it off, so I assume the new guy has come round to check on the renovation and has taken it down. When I see him next, I’ll have to ask him what the score is about it. Either that, or I’ll march over, demanding to talk to him about “the lack of shine on his substandard knob”!! jejeje

I must admit, after reading the note though, I took a more than glancing look at the knob on my door! Luckily, it’s pretty shiny so I’m confident we’re not going to be the target for the next hate campaign!!!

Recently, on Falcon's Crest...

2007-06-04T22:37:00.001+02:00

It’s been a nice long weekend thanks to the public holiday here today, and I’ve spent much of it being a “good tourist” and visiting a few places that have caught my eye for one reason or another. I just can’t do whistle-stop tourism though, I’ve learnt, and the thought of literally running from one tourist hotspot to another, thankfully isn’t a problem given that I have Barcelona on tap 24/7 whenever I want it. While I was in Madrid recently, I was queuing outside the Reina Sofia art museum and a group of girls in front of me had a cast-iron itinerary that left not one second open to chance. They’d literally split their time into hour-long slots with various sights given an appropriate amount of viewing time before shooting off to the next one. Just the sight of this sheet of paper over their shoulder made me feel a bit sick I have to say. Even though I only had a short time in Madrid myself, I was happy to stroll out of the Museum later and casually drift wherever the breeze took me (which not surprisingly was in the direction of a shady tree in the rather stunning Retiro park nearby with a good book).

I’ve kind of screwed-up my blog I have to admit, and time has ticked by so fast since my last entry that I’ve spent a few weeks thinking about how the hell I can start again without it seeming like a massive jolt caused by nearly 3 spacious months of potential blog entries that never made it into being. Do I frantically write-up everything based on my failing memory, or do I somehow skip the missing chunk of time? The whole point of blogs is that they are published “in the moment” and don’t hang around like some old politician waiting to retire (or die, whichever comes first) so he can suddenly feel free to slag-off in his memoirs everyone he’s ever known. The thought of such a jolt has put me off sitting down and writing something, so the problem has just got worse, and my blog has grown into the proverbial gorilla in the corner of the room that everyone knows is sat there gorping at us, but we’re all desperately trying to ignore. Well, I’ve now decided (again, because yes, I’ve been down this route before) that there’s no point waiting and moaning, so I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to come back from the dead as it were, is to do it in the style that Bobby did in Dallas. Let’s face it, nobody questioned anything in the 80’s, did they? We were all far too busy wearing giant shoulderpads and breakdancing, so I’m hoping the same logic will apply now to my blog. Yep, the last 3 months have all been nothing but a dream and I’ve now reappeared in the shower as if nothing as happened! Pretty nifty, eh? The episodes of “the show” where I had a fab weekend in Valencia for Las Fallas (apologies to TimG for not writing that one up!), and the marvellous time I had in Madrid, along with all the other great things I’ve done in the interim, were all just a figment of Pam’s overactive imagination. Either that, or she’d been drinking some of Sue Ellen’s “special” fruit juice again! If my blog ever slips again in the future (which it surely will), I reckon the next time I’ve got the perfect soap opera based solution to explain things… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju8YH6ewoqQ

Hello?? Can you put me through to Aaron Spelling, please?? (Like I said, nobody questioned anything in the 80’s!!) jeje.

Anyway, after all that, I feel better now, so it’s back to Barcelona and the here-and-now.

Mid way through last week, I made my mind up that the long weekend would be predominantly spent doing two of my favourite daytime activities – firstly, strolling around Barcelona and secondly, flaking out in the sun with a good book. I’m pleased to say I’ve managed to succeed on both scores.

I’d set my alarm nice and early for 9am Saturday morning (so naturally I didn’t get up until gone 11am, but hey, it’s Saturday). My vague plan to go to the gym for an hour before heading out to “be a tourist” had suddenly (and rather conveniently) become the first casualty of my weekend plan, so I sacked that off and just lazily got ready to head straight out. After seeing the film Perfume at the cinema last year, and recently watching it again on DVD, I wanted to check out one of the locations that they used, as much of the film was shot around Barcelona. The scenes where they are playing hide and seek in the maze and the twins are abducted were filmed at the Laberinto de Horta, which is not too far from here. So, that was my plan for today then - go to the Laberinto with my camera and practice taking some photos. Ah yes, that’s another thing that I’ve been moaning about a lot lately – the quality of my photos. In a word, they’re shit. Having a nice place to experiment seemed like the right way forward, so I set off, camera at the ready.

When I arrived at Horta, I was immediately pleased to see how tranquil and tourist-free it was. Crowds annoy me even at the best of times, so I didn’t want to get frustrated by them and end up heading home earlier than I should. First job – have an ice cream. Mission accomplished there and even had a pleasant chat with the old woman on the kiosk. Over at the actual entrance to the park-proper, I strolled past the security lodge with my MP3 turned on and didn’t hear the man calling me back at first. Turns out that you have to pay to get in! At €2.05 per person though, it’s pretty reasonable. But why the 5 cents? I asked the guy why they’d come up with such an odd price, but he just laughed and said he had no idea, but was sick of having to have stacks of small change for all the people paying with whole Euros.

Inside the park, it was absolutely stunning, so I immediately reached for my camera to take some snaps. Just my luck, my camera snagged and refused to fully open the lens. After fiddling with it for ages and trying to get it to come back to life, I had to give up, and so I continued my tour of the gardens a bit miffed that I couldn’t do the one thing I’d wanted to do originally which was practice taking some pics. I even tried as a last resort to get just a couple of pics with my camera-phone, but for some reason that also decided it wasn’t going to work either! Great.

After a while, I left the park and jumped back on the Metro heading straight through town and out of the other side slightly to the Palau Reial gardens near the University. These gardens are nothing to write home about (although nice enough) but I just wanted somewhere that I knew would be quiet so I could flake out in the sun and read my book. The book I’m currently knee-deep in is actually one written by a friend I know here in Barcelona. He’s a Cuban dissident (already sounds glamorous, eh?) and has basically written a book all about his experiences trying to escape from Cuban back around 1990. Joking aside, it contains lots of insights into Cuban life that fascinate me, so I’m loving reading it. It’s desperately sad in places, and even more so given that I know the person who all this has happened to. There are plenty of obscure Spanish words that I struggle with, so it can be a pain to read it when I’ve not got my computer handy but I know enough to follow it even if I miss the odd intricate part slightly. Ironically enough, the book has only been published in French so far, as my friend escaped from Cuba and ended up living in Belguim for about 13 years before coming to Barcelona. The copy I’ve got is his original Spanish pdf document version, as the book isn’t available in Spain, otherwise I’d be plugging it heavily here.

After here, I headed home to get showered and cleaned up ready to go back to where I’d bought my camera from just 4 months ago, in the hope that they’d replace it there and then. The guy on the service desk was polite enough, but he pissed me right off by taking one look at the extended (and jammed) zoom, and telling me “está torcido!” (it’s twisted) and that I’ve obviously knocked it at some point. One thing I’m sure of though, is that this camera has been well looked after, and there is no way it’s been knocked at any time. He just shrugged and still claimed it was still knocked despite the fact that I made him hold it up and see that there wasn’t a hint of it being off-centre. The upshot though was that it was still broken and the procedure is to take it to a place over near Sagrada Familia for them to fix it under the guarantee. Apparently, with a fair wind, they could have it back to me within a month. A month!!!! Christ tonight!!!

Anyway, I headed home extremely miffed (stopping for dinner on the way – pissed off or not, I still like to eat!). A bit of drama on the way home was that I saw a guy crash his motorbike. It was awful, but luckily he was more or less OK and immediately got on his feet. The bike made one hell of a noise as it slid down the road, and he was lucky that no cars were following directly behind or he’d have been run over for sure.

I got home and went to show my flatmate the camera evidence, and guess what!! It worked perfectly! The lens immediately retracted smoothly and without any problem at all! I couldn’t believe it but was very pleased. So far, it’s continued working fine, so I’m hoping that my luck holds out and it was just perhaps a bit of dust that’s worked its way loose again. I felt like going straight back to the shop and showing the snotty guy just how "torcido" my camera wasn't!! Knowing my luck though, it would've immediately jammed in his presence! jeje

Sunday morning, I managed to actually get up on time, so I went to the gym. This is always an eye-opening experience given the incredible spread of people that are members of this particular gym. We’ve got’em all! The usual musclemen who stand there staring at their own ever-expanding arms after every tiny bit of exercise, along with the skinny and semi-unfit types like me who go because they know they should, but aren’t entirely sure why! There are also some great characters in this particular gym too. My favourites are two old ladies who spend more time exercising their jaws while chatting than any other muscle they might have! There are two machines directly facing eachother – one for working your inside thighs and the other for the outside – and these two old dears spend most of their time on these, barely moving their legs at all and instead just gassing away to eachother! It’s all the funnier because one of them dresses in a J-Lo style terry-toweling tracksuit with giant gold earrings and tons of make-up. If she ever broke a sweat (which is unlikely) her entire face would just slip right off! There’s also a old man who comes to the gym in brogue style shiny leather shoes, socks pulled up to his knees, a pair of tight shorts, and an Air Force type shirt buttoned firmly up to the neck. What is he thinking?? Ah well, it gives me something to giggle at. I’m sure there are plenty of people pointing at me and finding something to laugh at. It all makes the world go around at the end of the day.

After the gym, I went to Horta again, in the hope of getting some pictures this time, and I wasn’t disappointed thankfully. The sun was shining and I had a lovely afternoon. I can’t describe it in words very well, so you’ll have to take a look at my lovely new Flickr webpage photo album that I’ve set up. Check it out here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pepino_esp/sets/72157600304804399/

The park is only relatively small, but I strolled around the park for a couple of hours taking as many pics as possible. I’m happy enough with the results. Much better than my usual standard, that’s for sure!

Well, I better wrap up now as it’s late and if I don’t finish this post tonight, I’ll never finish it!

Be good!
x

Train tickets and bird poo

2007-03-17T00:25:00.000+01:00

Well, yet another humongous break inbetween posts. I really haven’t got the hang of this blogging business clearly. I’ve seen blogs that people update almost by the hour, whereas mine doesn’t trouble the servers over at Blogger at all. It not as if I’m bored or haven’t done anything interesting to write about. Perhaps I’m just too busy to bother! Yep, that’ll do... I’m too busy having fun to bother writing about how much fun I’m having while not writing about the fun that I should be having fun writing about. Jeje. Well, to address this lack of posts, I figured I’d get one down today as I’ve got a busy weekend planned, and today’s been a bit weird in places.

It all started quite normally when I was woke up at 830 by the workmen doing the renovations on the flat directly blow us. The banging starts at this time every day and continues non-stop until about 6pm. It’s the only reason I’m glad I’ve got a job to go to! And with today being Friday, I have my extra short working day of just 4 hours in the office. That thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride came to an end at 2pm when I decided that I should go to the main station to collect my tickets that I previously booked on the internet for a trip to Valencia tomorrow morning. I was originally going to spend the afternoon on the terrace at home in the sun, but my theory being that I didn’t know how long it would take for me to get the tickets etc and leaving it until 5 mins before the train pulls away from the platform on Saturday morning struck me as a slight risk, when I’ve been excited about this weekend away ever since I booked it and didn’t want to ruin the whole thing through laziness. I’d been mildly impressed by the efficiency of the Renfe website when I bought my tickets, so I was hoping for a smooth collection too. However, little did I know when I arrived at the station, that while Renfe puts on a good show on the internet, the set-up at the station is like something from 1970’s Russia where people had to queue up to order a loaf of bread, then queue up to pay for it, and then queue up to be told that they’d sold out and could you come back in 4 months time and place a new order!

Anyway, Sants station in Barcelona has ticket booths along the entire length of the station, so I naturally just went to the one with the shortest queue. The girl there told me I actually had to go to another window at the far end because I was collecting tickets for travel after today. I was pleased by this as I found that the queues there were amazingly non-existent. I didn’t think it seemed right but didn’t want to question it, and was just about to stroll up to a window, when I turned around to discover there were hundreds of people clutching numbered tickets in their sweaty palms waiting their turn to be seen too, all glaring at me for looking as though I was going to try my luck at a window and demand to be served. Obviously, I backed away slowly, trying to look as though I’d meant to do this all along, and I really did know how the system worked!

To be sure I wasn’t going to join the mother of all queuing systems for nothing, I took a numbered ticket (in order to get the nearest number possible) and then, instead of sitting and waiting, I went to the information desk which was helpfully labelled with a very large sign in English saying “BRIEF QUESTIONS ONLY!”. (Evidently there had been trouble in the past with someone asking for ridiculous amounts of information and they had now decided to put a stop to it!!) I asked the guy, as “briefly” as I could, whether the place with the huge queue was really where those people with the foresight to have bought their tickets on the internet, really had to now suffer and wait to collect them. His answer was a very brief “yes”. “Thanks” I said, briefly.

Back in the queue I set about working out how long I’d have to wait. I had nearly 200 numbers in front of me, and judging by the length of time some people were taking at the booths, I calculated that, if I was lucky, I should be out by Christmas. In the end, after nearly 2 hours of waiting, the excitement at the thought that my magic number was near to flashing up was almost too much to bear, but I made it through, and had a very polite guy sort my tickets out for me. Job done in the end.

It was sunny and warm when I’d gone into the station, but it was cloudy and a bit miserable when I left, so any possibility of kipping on the terrace had gone out of the window. I set off walking home, and came within an inch of being pooed on the head by a passing bird. I saw “something” white suddenly drop infront of me, and when I looked down, discovered that it had caught me with a glancing blow down the shin of my jeans. Luckily it was only a mini-poo and a quick wipe got it all off (although, later when it dried, I noticed it had turned my jeans white like toothpaste! Jeje)

The rest of the day was pretty ordinary. The workmen were still banging away downstairs, so a sleep was a non-starter, so instead I went to the gym. After that, I realised I’d left my camera charging cable in the bag at work, so I had to walk back to the office, which luckily the caretaker was still on duty, and let myself in to get it.

It’s late now and I’m knackered, so I’m going to leave it there. I feel a bit like Arkwright at the end of Open All Hours…. “Eeee, it’s been a funny old day it has”.

Tomorrow it’s Valencia and the humongous Las Fallas festival. CAN’T WAIT for that!!! Jejeje.

Nite nite.

Jurassic Park comes to Barcelona

2007-01-05T15:01:00.000+01:00

After spending a really relaxing Christmas in England, it was back to Barcelona with a bump this week - literally in fact as the plane hit the ground with a fair old smack! A friend who works in an airport joked with me once that some budget airlines must get a discount for only using part of the runway, and that was certainly the case here! We hit the ground in what I suppose we could class as an “approximate” straight line and then immediately hurtled off onto the taxiway while still travelling at God-only-knows what speed. I’m surprised the goodbye announcement wasn’t something along the lines of… “On behalf of Captain McDuff, we would like to thank you for choosing Monarch for all your travel and whiplash needs. Please leave your neck-braces on the seats ready for collection”. :-)

Also, the taxiing takes forever at Barcelona airport these days (almost longer than the flight in fact). If I remember rightly, one of the runways here is new, but the only problem is that space clearly must’ve been limited as they’ve curiously decided to build it somewhere just outside Madrid, so we were trundling along for quite some time before we reached the remote stand that the airline obviously gets another huge discount for agreeing to use rather than park up directly beside the terminal building. Basically, to give you an idea, I think you’re out somewhere just passed where they park any hijacked planes in case they suddenly blow up! Jeje. How delightful. Thank goodness I’d only paid about 20p (slight exaggeration) for my flight otherwise I might’ve had half a mind to complain!

It’s good to be back in Spain again if only to escape the constant rain in Manchester over much of the Christmas break. The first few days were lovely, with clean blue skies perfect for walking with the dog, but after that, it was normal service again. Here today, the sun is shining and it’s a respectable enough temperature for January, so I’m not complaining.

My flatmate’s sister is staying with us at the moment, so she was at home to welcome me, which was nice rather than coming into an empty flat. When my flatmate himself came home later, he told me the bad news that our cleaning lady had demanded a 50% rise (I knew we should’ve bought her a Christmas present!), so he quite rightly told her to eff off, which she immediately did, so now we were without a cleaner and faced with the distinct possibility of having to clean our own toilet. Now, this isn’t a problem for either of us at all, and we both like to keep the place spotless, but I don’t suit the Mrs Overall “look” and after having a dedicated cleaner since I arrived here, I’ve become pretty lazy. I always keep the place completely tidy, but I never actually “clean” anything. Basically the rule of thumb is that, if it involves a cloth and some chemicals, I’m not interested. The good thing is that my flatmate managed to find a new cleaner the very same night so the panic was soon over and I could put my feet up again (well, I could’ve if I’d ever actually put them down in the first place!). This morning as I was getting ready, Char number 2 (I don’t know her real name yet) arrived with her “minder” (although he seemed more like a pimp if you ask me). I hope all is well, as she’ll be alone in the flat now and is probably riffling through my things as we speak. I hid my laptop under my dirty underwear pile, so she’ll be a brave soul if she dives in to retrieve that little nugget. And luckily, washing clothes is not in her job description so I don’t expect to arrive home to find my laptop in the middle of a rinse cycle. The good news about this little story is that Char number 2 is prepared to work for the same pay that Char number 1 turned down, so we’re all happy campers!

What else has been happening since I came back? Well, my ongoing fascination with the hairstyles of elderly Spanish ladies continues unabated. I went for a walk during lunch and saw that about 50 old dears were being taken out for a breath of fresh air from the local old folks home. They were all coming towards me in various states of consciousness in their wheelchairs (pushed by their carers) like a slow-motion version of that flock of Gallimimus dinosaurs in Jurassic Park - the ones where the kids have to dive behind that old log as they run by, remember? By the way, I’ve just had to look up how you spell Gallimimus on the internet and discovered that the description given is uncannily similar to the actual old folk coming towards me…

“Gallimimus was bird-like dinosaur with a toothless beak; the bottom front part of its beak was shaped like a shovel. It had long legs, a long neck, and hollow bones. It had short arms with three clawed fingers on each hand, and long legs with three clawed toes on each”.

The likeness is frightening! Jejee. I half expected Richard Attenborough to appear on the scene asking Sam Neill if he could be so kind as to fetch a gas jeep and go and collect his grandchildren! Anyway, my original point was that all these women had immaculately coiffured hair so I was genuinely pleased to see that the standard of care in Spanish old folks homes seems, on the face of it, pretty high. Either that, or Vidal Sassoon is a resident too nowadays, and passes his time doing French twists on his fellow inmates. In England of course, we like to treat our oldies with slightly less respect, normally treating them to a "standard" pensioner special haircut once a year, and sitting them in front of an un-tuned-in TV while convincing them that the fuzz on the screen really is Ready Steady Cook and that Ainsley Harriot always does look like that, while the "carers" nip out the back for a crafty fag!

This weekend in Spain is the Los Reyes holiday, which is traditionally the time that the children open their Christmas presents (although, more and more, this is moving to the 25th December so that the little darlings have more time to play with their toys and then get back to pestering their parents again etc). There’s a parade in the city which I want to go to, as they throw sweets to the crowds and I wanna fill my boots! Jeje. I don’t want to go on my own though, so I’m going to trawl through my rag-tag bunch of contacts and try to drag someone out at short notice.

OK, that’s all for now. If I make it to the parade, I’ll do another post shortly. Although, if I lose an eye in a freak “flying chocolate éclair” incident, my next post may be delayed!

‘sta luego :-)

Sniff up!

2006-12-22T23:41:00.000+01:00

Saw a couple of films recently that I really enjoyed. The first was the new Bond movie Casino Royale. I’m not a big fan of Bond at all. I like the old Sean Connery and Roger Moore films, but once we got beyond that, I totally lost interest. I like Pierce Brosnan as an actor but I don’t understand what the fuss about how “great” he is in the Bond films. I find all of his films really tacky (too tacky even for 007) and the gadgets were just getting plain silly, not to mention the ridiculous accents on the villains. Robbie Coltrane doing Russian was a particular low point. Anyway, things have definitely improved with Daniel Craig and not only with him in the role, but also with the whole approach to the film. It’s far more real, less idiotic gadgets, and decent action that keeps you entertained. The fact that we see Bond get quite badly beaten up on a number of occasions, is far better than having him completely immaculate in his tuxedo after having just seen off half the North Korean army. Oh, sorry, it’s not North Korea, as they always “invent” a country in those Bond films. I reckon Austin Powers summed it up best when they used “Kraplakistan” (or whatever it was! Jeje). The finale of the film takes place in Venice, so I had my Italian friend (who was with me in the cinema) nudging me to say “Es mi pueblo!” with a tear in his eye! Bless! Jeje

The other film I saw over the weekend was Perfume. I had no idea was to expect from it, as I knew nothing of the book (which as usual, apparently the whole world has read… except me) and hadn’t heard any comments from friends about it. The only reason I went was because I was in the mood for a film and there was nothing else on that I fancied. The film is set in pre-revolutionary Paris and is a murder story with a difference. Very little (almost no) blood and guts (if you discount the fish market scenes at the start!) and lots and lots of atmosphere. It was filmed partly in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, along with country scenes which were filmed up in Girona (about an hour north of here). The basic outline is that an orphan is born with a heightened sense of smell and a growing obsession to be able to capture smells in any way he can as he grows older. The whole film had me glued to the screen, and I loved the narration. The scenes filmed in Barcelona are great, and although I haven’t been to Girona yet, I now really want to go! (I have a friend who lives there, so I can visit her and check the place out at the same time). The end of the film is just plain weird, and I wasn’t convinced that it really suited the rest of it. I won’t explain it here, but you’ll know what I mean when if you've seen it! Overall though, I definitely recommend it wholeheartedly, and I believe it’s out in the UK on Boxing day, so I might even go and see it again while I’m over there for Christmas.

Can I tempt you to a Spam Fritter Ma'am?

2006-12-04T22:07:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been a quiet few weeks on the blog. Terribly sorry about that, but been pretty busy and couldn't psyche myself up into sitting infront of the PC to write anything, despite the fact that, once I get started, it usually takes me no time at all to fill a page.

Anyway, I'm back with a vengance and have got a fab update today that actually happened last Wednesday.

What happened was that my flatmate (he of the 24 carot gold social contacts) and his boyfriend invited me to a party at the new Cartier store on the Paseo de Gracia here in the epi-centre of Barcelona. At first I turned the invite down because I thought it'd be too out of my league, but my flatmate was appalled that I was about to miss out on such a cool opportunity and thankfully, he quickly talked me into going along. And I'm extremely glad I did. When we arrived, the street outside the store was carpeted in red and there were paparazzi and a huge throng of people waiting to see who was arriving. We turned up and made sure we lingered a little chatting outside! Only the invited were allowed to step onto the red carpet, all the riff-raff had to stand back! hehe. There were male models outside dressed in Cartier-type bell-boy outfits, along with a TV crew. The party started in the actual shop itself, which was absolutely beautiful, and afterwards it continued next door in a huge apartment next to the famous Gaudi building - Casa Batlló. You could practically “smell” the cash!!! It was amazing inside, and was divided into different coloured rooms, which each room represented by a different celeb in turn representing a nominated charity. Each room had a different coloured chain on a gold bracelet in a display cabinet, and a huge picture covering the wall, of the celeb in question - each one pictured wearing the bracelet, with just the bracelet shown in colour and the rest of the photo in black and white. The effect with the lighting was really quite stunning and the whole apartment was breathtaking.

We continued mingling around the apartment, drinking in the champagne while I tried to recognise some of the celebs. The only one I actually recognised (without help) was a guy from the TV called Boris who presents a show on La Cuatro. Other than him though, there was one of the most famous models in Spain – a guy called Andrés Velencoso (Google him for pics!) He was one of the “sponsors” of the bracelets. At one point, my flatmate pointed out that we were stood alongside the sister of the King of Spain! (Doña Pilar de Borbón). She was sat on a sofa directly next to where I was stood, and a waiter came over with a plate of tapas. Only 3 remained and he was just about to offer them to us when he noticed this lady, and kind of “froze” for a split-second, pulled the plate back and offered them to her instead!! The cheek! A second later and he would’ve had to pull the food out of our mouths! She refused them (apparently, the Royals don't eat anything at these parties), so he then turned and offered them to us again! How rude! Naturally, I refused them too! hehe. I don't want no sloppy Royal seconds!

As the party developed and the champagne did its stuff, things relaxed more and the bell-boys were brought inside with Polaroid cameras and sent round to take pics for people to take with them. There was also an official photographer, so I guess those pics could end up in next months Hola magazine! They're already on the internet at http://www.informativos.net/Noticia.aspx?noticia=47545 I’m going to have to take a truck to my local newspaper kiosk and buy every gossip mag they’ve got, just in case!! Hehe.

All in all, an amazing night. Not the type of party where you can truly relax for a moment, and I had to watch my Ps and Qs all night, despite the huge amount of champagne that I drank.

Talking of champagne, last night my flatmate dragged a huge suitcase into the flat. Turns out he's only managed to take a load of leftover champagne from the party! Our kitchen is now full of the stuff! How cool is that! We've already got a small branch of Interflora going on in the the living room with all the flowers that he's brought home!

OK, I better go. I need to prepare my aceptance speech for when I get my knighthood! Well, I think brushing up against royalty must surely entitle me to some fringe benefit or other!

Arise, Sir Dave. I like it.

Come to Magaluf - it's HORRIFIC!

2006-10-20T18:46:00.000+02:00

Thanks to the recent double Spanish public holiday last Thursday and Friday, I decided to tag on an extra few days of my own holidays and head off to Mallorca. It’s been planned for ages, as a friend back in Manchester has an apartment in Santa Ponsa which I’d arranged to rent. I set off on Monday on the “gruelling” 25 minute flight from Barcelona to Palma. I don’t know how I managed to control the jetlag from such a mammoth trip but I made it in one piece without even having had 40 winks on the plane (obviously the seasoned traveller these days). I’d arranged to meet another friend at the airport, as he was coming in from Manchester. His flight sounded far more comical than mine, as it was full of British sun-goers on their last minute cheap package trips before the resorts switch over to pensioner-mode for the winter. The highlight of the flight, (I have to mention this or he won’t be happy!), was the inflight entertainment. Basically, the hostie was doing her “Welcome aboard this Monarch flight to Palma” speech, and she then added (without so much as a hint of sarcasm) that “Monarch are proud to inform our passengers that today’s inflight entertainment will be a selection of silent TV”, to which a fellow sunseeker a few rows back shouted out loudly (in her OTT common accent) “Silent TV????!!! What the f**k’s Silent TV??!!” It turned out that Silent television was the only possible option on this particular aircraft for the simple reason that it hadn’t been fitted with earphone jacks in the seats. I guess the TV’s had apparently only been bolted to the roof as an afterthought at the last minute to save the cabin crew the bother of doing the safety demo themselves (and presumably give them a few minutes extra to have a crafty gossip in the galley before takeoff). So, Silent TV it was, which of course was a selection of clips from Mr Bean. (Enough to make you pray for a lightening strike to knock the plane’s electrics out!!). There was no time for such high quality entertainment on my ultra-short flight of course. I even missed the drinks trolley on account of the fact that I blinked!

The weather was fantastic when we arrived and we jumped into a taxi and headed off to Santa Ponsa. We’d seen pictures of the apartment and the complex before coming out but they’d been taken in winter and they didn’t do them any justice at all, as it really was absolutely beautiful. Perfect location set back just a couple of minutes from the town, with a huge pool and about 14 sunbeds for every person! (so no cheeky towel-reserving going on by the other guests!) The sun was shining so we did a quick change and flaked out by the pool for the rest of the afternoon. Fab!

Nightlife in Santa Ponsa in October isn’t going to trouble the noise police, and we also seemed to have arrived during the big change-over when the old-folk start arriving with their zimmer frames and aching joints, as the bars were all either pretty empty, or had just a few families and old dears (all British of course) sitting staring at eachother in silence with nothing to talk about except all those old favourite conversation starters that old-people seem to like when they’re on their hols…

“Oooh, it’s warm ‘int it”
“Oooh, it’s our last meal tonight. I think I’ll push t’boat out and have chicken in a basket wi’chips.”
“I can’t abide that foreign muck, gives me terrible wind.”
And so on….

I’d never been to Mallorca before but I’ve been to other British resorts in the Med and knew roughly what to expect. I think the trick is to not take any of it remotely seriously, take the piss as much as you like, and join in the fun so you become part of the whole experience and then other people can laugh at you too and therefore keep the whole horrific spectacle going. Yes, it’s full of Brits who think that saying “por favor” when they ask for their copy of the News of the World will be more than enough to endear them to the locals, and yes, the food is totally geared towards, well… “grease” I suppose. But I’m definitely not knocking it, and I reckon Franco knew what he was doing when he carved-up the island back in the 70’s and decided which resorts would be marketed in Britain, and so they’re just giving people what they want, and with over 30 years experience, they seem to be doing something very right. And before anyone thinks I spent the 4 days looking like I was permanently sniffing shit, I’m pleased to say that I was more than happy to tuck into my full English breakfast every day (not before lunchtime of course) and I thoroughly enjoyed it! (But I have to say, Ooooh, you can’t get decent bacon on the continent like you can back home!! Hehe)

When it came to evening meals though, we tried to swim against the tide a little bit by seeking out the restaurants that didn’t look like their entire kitchen consisted of just the one giant frying pan closely watched over by “Betty” from Huddersfield. We had a couple of great meals in some (fairly) authentic Spanish restaurants that we came across and I made sure I practiced my Spanish with the waiters etc as I was worried that a week spent without any Spanish practice at all would set me back even more on my quests to learn the language, and you could easily spend your entire life here not speaking a word of Spanish and it wouldn’t be a problem.

After our first evening’s gentle introduction to the nightlife of the island, we decided to head off to Magaluf on the second night and really see what the fuss was about. The second we arrived, we got out of the taxi and was immediately pounced on by the PR people from the nearest bar. Given that it was end-of-season and even the bars here were relatively quiet, trying to walk down the street without being hassled by EVERY SINGLE prop outside EVERY SINGLE bar was totally impossible. I imagine that, during the peak season, the large crowds in the street make it possible to slip through unnoticed most of the time, but there was no such luck for us. The bars are all much the same though, so we took advantage of the free shots they were offering and the cheap drinks, two-for-ones etc and soon got merrily wasted! Magaluf isn’t remotely gay and has no cheesy gay bars at all, so after a few drinks my friend decided this was a situation he couldn’t allow to continue, and stormed (well, I say stormed, but it was more of a mince really) over to the DJ to “have a quiet word”. It turned out that the DJ’s entire Dolly Parton and Sheena Easton (joke!) record collection had been mislaid (where, we don’t know, but 1983 was a likely suspect), so we had to make do with a bit of Scissor Sisters (which is pretty camp I suppose, so my friend quite rightly considered it a Mission Accomplished for one bar). We headed for the dancefloor and we seemed to be a bit of a crowd-pleaser as we were soon joined by plenty of others. The night continued like this, and after single-handedly setting Magaluf on it’s way to becoming the new San Francisco of the Med, we then…..

… well, the truth is, I can’t honestly say, as we haven’t got a clue! The huge number of shots we’d had, plus the ridiculous amount of gin and tonic too, suddenly reached its unavoidable conclusion and we haven’t got the foggiest idea what the hell happened next. Maybe I should write letters to all the bars and include our mugshots for identification purposes requesting that they fill in the gaps, as the next thing I knew, I was woken up back in the apartment by the washing machine doing its spin cycle. “I haven’t put a wash on today” I thought as I came round - on the sofa, (although my friend had done one better and made it to his bed). I slowly realised that the spin cycle was actually the towels I’d put in the machine just before we left the apartment the previous night at about 8pm. It was now almost midday the following day, and it was still going!!! More worrying was that, it isn’t the quietest machine in the world, but I’d somehow managed to sleep just a few feet away from it, spinning away at top note, for the past x number of hours without being remotely disturbed! It turns out that the machine seems to be faulty and gets stuck on its spin, so we calculated that it had probably been going for about 15 hours! I manually stopped it, and when I took the towels out, they were red hot!!! It’s not a washer-dryer, but the friction must’ve been pretty intense to have heated them up like that. Thank God we’d only put towels in there and not our delicate Alan Whickers!! Hehe And I must remember to tell my friend (the owner of the apartment) about this!

The final night, we decided we’d try Magaluf again (clearly, it’s too much to take in on one night). We took it easy this time though, avoided the shots, and went steady with the gin. This did wonders for our alcoholic well-being, but didn’t really help to give us the best overall impression of our fellow holidaymakers, as it meant we were sober enough to actually see the freak-show that was unfolding before our eyes (yes, and that we’d probably been a part of the previous night). Girls wearing, well not much really, with every available inch of dimpled orange-peel on full show. Guys with their highly imaginative shaved heads, still in their beach shorts, with tattooed legs and vacant stares, looking like their only source of calories on the holiday had been their Marlboro Lights and countless cans of San Miguel.

The flights home were fine. My friend’s departed well before mine, but they were the closest together we could get so it just meant I had to hang around the terminal for a couple of hours extra. The flight wasn’t delayed though, so it wasn’t so bad. And luckily for me, I was in the domestic section of the terminal so it was nice and quiet. The airport designers cleverly segregate all the Brits away from the rest of the travelling public once you’ve been through security, and when I’d waved goodbye to my friend at his section, they were all going through to the same terminal as my friend. I’ve not spoken to him yet, but I’m sure he’ll have enjoyed the screaming kids and rowdy teenagers! Most of all though, I wonder if he enjoyed his Silent TV on the way home???!!!

Overall, despite all the piss-taking (and quite possibly because of it!), we had a fantastic time. The apartment was truly excellent, Santa Ponsa itself was lovely (Thank God we were there and not in Magaluf), the weather was perfect, and nice food is there if you’re prepared to look for it. We’re definitely glad we went, and would go again without a doubt.

Finally, I’ll finish by saying that, if the local council of Magaluf is looking for a new slogan to market the town under, here’s a perfect one – “Come to Magaluf – it’s HORRIFIC!” hehehe.

Free food and big hair

2006-10-05T23:02:00.000+02:00

My immersion into Barcelona's social scene continues at a fair old rate, as last night I was invited to the opening of a trendy new restaurant on the Passeig de Gracia (the city’s most fashionable street). Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t personally selected as a guest on the strength of my own social credentials, but I went along as the “plus 1” of my flatmate who has infinitely better connections than I do. I didn’t know what to expect really, but it certainly wasn’t what I got! When we arrived, the place was heaving with the city’s glitterati. This mainly consisted of rich old men with their equally rich wives sporting their giant hair and inch-thick make-up. It seems that no self-respecting Spanish woman of a certain age with any real cash will ever be seen with grey hair, so these “do's” are all a lovely shade of beige. Evidently, “Caramel Surprise” is the only shade available in the local chemist. We sashayed our way in through the entrance (complete with mini brass band), scooping up a nice glass of Spanish Cava and made our way through the throng of glamorous hostesses.

The restaurant is on 3 levels and they’d prepared a funky little map (bit unnecessary really, as it’s not that big but I think it was to add to the "adventure" aspect) and also stuck arrows to the floor to guide us through the individual areas that offer different types of food. We went to the next floor up and took some more finger-food from the hostesses as they wondered around with trays of incredibly posh gourmet tapas. The comedy highlight for me was the girls handing out the “mini hamburguesas” (hamburgers) which were all on lollypop sticks and dipped in a sauce, and then carried round on a board with the sticks stuck in like some kind of strange meat-eater’s Chupa-Chup display. It was all good stuff though, and there was loads of interesting and tasty things to go around, which was a minor miracle given the number of people there. We spent an hour or so wondering round, chatting and people-watching as we swigged our Cava and ate our tapas. It was reassuring to see that, no matter how big your bank balance is (indicated of course by how thick your make-up has been applied), everyone without exception was only there to fill their boots with as much free food and drink as possible. This reached crisis proportions when I saw my life flash before my eyes as I got sandwiched in by about a dozen women and their Gucci handbags, as they pushed their way through to get to the food in the style of a heard of wildebeest after a collective botox session.

Lots of Cava later, we started to feel the effects, and my flatmate was clearly getting a bit tipsy which was hysterically funny for me to watch. Then the cocktail bar swung into life and we made our way over for string of trendy drinks followed by a load of Mojitos (I think it’s Bacardi, brown sugar, mint, bitters and soda, but I’m not sure). Anyway, given the generousness of the spirit measures out here, we were both even more tipsy before long.

One thing that seems popular out here (certainly on this night) is the number of men you see (young and old) with their sweaters tied around their necks in a “Sports casual” Alan Partridge style. My flatmate told me that this is a very Madrid thing to do, and you can instantly tell which of the people were Madrileños by this choice of signature outfit. Apparently, no one in their right mind from Barcelona would ever dress like that, and I must admit that I haven’t seen anyone like this since I arrived in Barcelona so he could be right (although I’ve never been to Madrid so I’m not sure how accurate or fair the stereotype is). Anyway, a couple of them had really taken the look to its limits by combining the sweater with chinos and espadrilles, so wherever they were from, we had to laugh.

All in all, we had a great night which went on until the early hours.
Getting up this morning was a chore and when I left for work, my flatmate still hadn’t got up....!

Crap TV

2006-09-27T21:49:00.000+02:00

I made the mistake the other night of turning on the TV back at the flat.
After flicking through a dozen channels (which were all showing adverts on a loop) I came across the Spanish version of Strictly Come Dancing called Mira Quién Baila (Look who’s dancing). Obviously I’ve no idea who the Spanish celebs are, but it didn't matter as I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the professionals and the amateurs! Not because the amateurs were so good, but because the whole thing was so crap! This may surprise some people now but believe it or not, I’m no Angela Rippon (although I was once mistaken for Rosemary Ford), so I’m not in a position to criticise anyone’s ballroom performance, but these people were all seriously rubbish! Once they'd done their little turns, the panel of experts (one of which was a guy who must’ve weighed at least 30 stone, so I’ve no idea what qualified him to give an opinion) gave their views as normal, but then it all went really strange. The female presenter was passed a box of chocolates from off screen, which she opened and started to coo over as if the Milk Tray Man had just burst in, and then some other people came on to pass more chocolates around the audience. I then noticed that the word “publicidad” had popped up in the corner of the screen, so figured this must be how programs are financed in Spain – by blatant plugging of random products in the middle of programs! (If this catches on in England, we'll no doubt have Bruce Forsyth plugging Tena Ladys!!) Suddenly, the reason for the 30 stone panel-member became clear (obviously, he’d been doing this program a long time and eaten a lot of chocolate!) Clearly, not much money must’ve been made on these particular chocolates because we then went to a proper break (presumably to bring in some serious advertising revenue), so I went to the toilet, casually made a brew and sat down and waited for the program to come back on. And waited… And waited… Few more adverts… Must be coming back soon… Few more adverts… (This has been going on for nearly 15 minutes now…) …still waiting. I thought maybe I’d sat on the remote and turned the channel over by accident, but no, this seems to be a fairly normal length ad break over here!

The TV over here really is awful to the point of being unwatchable. It’s frustrating but I have to at least try to watch a bit of TV each day to learn the language from it. I saw a talk show yesterday that was saying how something like 87% of all motoring offences in Spain are committed by men. The audience were nearly all women so there was loads of cheering, until the presenter said that the other 13% have all been committed by just one woman! (I’m sure that’s not realistically possible so maybe I miss heard the percentages, but it definitely wasn’t far off those figures). They then brought out this little old lady called Rosario who was in her late 60’s at least and looked like all she was missing was her mop and bucket, who is apparently the cause of this crimewave. The presenter then read out some of the highlights of her driving record and she just nodded and agreed with them all!! I lost the plot of what was going on after this, but they then took a “surprise” call from (I think) Rosario’s son who confessed that the offences where all his and that his mother was taking the blame for him to save his skin! Mental!!

Then of course, there's the Soap Operas (Telenovelas). If you thought Eldorado and Crossroads were bad, wait until you see these things! The highlight of the one I watched was a scene where an actor with a heavy moustache walked on, clearly tripped up quite severely, and then carried on with his lines as if nothing had happened!! The acting is truly awful but no-one seems to mind at all and it's all part of the fun. Presumably, they’re under a tight budget and only have limited time to churn out each episode, so quality has long since been forgotten!

Right, I'm off now to find out if Manuela's second cousin twice removed really is pregnant by the local Paella shop owners son!!!

Intercambio news

2006-09-27T21:14:00.000+02:00

Had my first official intercambio language exchange last night, and after all the talk I’d heard about them being a thinly veiled disguise for a blind date, I was a bit concerned what would happen. Anyway, it seems I managed to find the one local who is genuinely interested in perfecting his English, so it was really cool in the end. He was a bit of an expert at these things and has done loads of exchanges in the past, so his English was truly excellent. He’d learnt it from Americans so his accent was incredibly strong, and he found it difficult to understand my common-as-muck northern English accent at first. His approach to the session was very official and proper, and he was very strict about splitting the time precisely between English and Spanish, but I’m glad I followed his lead in this because it forced me to make more of an effort to finish all my sentences in full, in Spanish and without resorting to throwing in English words unless I was in a complete dead-end. I’d warned him that my Spanish is bit ropey (which is true) but I think he took me at my word and was expecting it to be little better than Hola and Qué tal, so when we switched over into the Spanish hour, I immediately floored him with a knock-out blow of basic, but well formed sentences without even trying that hard. I surprised myself even!! He made a point of saying how pleasantly surprised he was, and that out of all the intercambios he’d done with English people, my Spanish was the best he’d come across!! I was amazed by this and thought he was joking, but he was deadly serious, so I immediately felt miles better! I’m still reluctant to class myself as anything above lower/intermediate, but it seems that I have some kind of “twin track” ability in that when I can talk in a relaxed and quiet setting, where I don’t feel pressured, and with someone who speaks nice and slowly, then my level is right at the top end of intermediate (almost advanced even!) and my sentences are well constructed, but when I’m out in the street with all the traffic noise, in a busy cafe, or trying to join in with the banter in the office, that’s when I get shot down in flames and understand nothing and can’t even put a simple sentence together either. Qué tonto!!! It’s confusing because I would’ve thought that the background noise and speed problems would only affect my ability to understand the other person, but it also seems to cause problems with my ability to speak well myself. Barcelona doesn’t know the meaning of the word quiet, so I’m just going to have to concentrate my efforts on doing more intercambios like this until I gradually drag my level up to the point where I can start to follow conversations in more varied settings. Either that or I’m going to have to bag myself a librarian to talk to so I can take advantage of the quiet surroundings!

We've arranged to meet again next week, so hopefully, they'll be more improvements then.

Fireworks and Castles in the sky!

2006-09-25T00:27:00.000+02:00

OK, for the first time on this blog, I’m now in “real-time” with my posts and the dates shown are accurate. If you haven’t fell asleep since the beginning, you’ll remember that I had a few posts written down before I decided tonight to start an official blog and so I kind of pasted them in retrospectively. Anyway, we’re officially in business now. On with the update then, it’s a good one today!

It’s the La Mercé holiday weekend in Barcelona this weekend, and it’s been absolutely amazing. There’s loads going on around the city, so I’ve only seen a small portion of it, but I reckon I've got two of the best bits under my belt. Last night I went out with a friend to the “Correfoc” (“run” with “fire” in Catalan) which I was told was a firework display. “Oh, that’ll be nice” I thought, ”We’ll be scoffing on our toffee apples, lighting the fuse and retiring to a safe distance to watch the show then!” Or so I believed! When we arrived, and the show got underway with loads of noise from the drummers (not those “tinny” sounding drums like you might hear at the Changing of the Guard, but rather drums that you can feel vibrating in your chest because they are so loud and deep), I wondered why my friend and her mates were all putting on their hooded tops and pulling them tight over their heads. In England, there are only two reasons to do this… either we were going mugging old ladies, or we were planning to get ourselves thrown out of a Shopping Centre for looking like the type of people who probably would mug old ladies! But no, eventually my friend told me with a huge “knowing” smile on her face, that it was to protect them from the “Chispas”!! (the sparks). I was of course dressed appropriately… (not), in a t-shirt!! This wasn’t going to be like a firework display back home where the fireworks are sent into the sky and the crowd point happily, but rather, where the people in the parade come down the street literally “spraying” the firework sparks over the excited crowds while the brave amongst us dance in the shower of sparks!! It sounds incredible, and probably highly illegal in England, but this was all part of the official celebrations. There wasn’t a trouble-maker or rogue teenager in sight trying to spoil things like would no doubt happen back home. The people in the parade make their way down the narrow streets holding sticks with Catherine wheels attached to the top that spin around and cover the area in sparks. And of course, they don’t pay you the common courtesy of holding these sticks straight up and walking slowly, oh no, they dance around and wiggle them about in every direction making sure that no-one escapes the effects! It's brilliant! Anyway, the parade continued and, although I was covered like everyone else all over by the sparks, only two actually got me and did any slight harm – one in my hair which burnt my scalp for a second or two, and another on my knuckle which has left a tiny burn – a small price to pay though! As well as the guys with these sticks, there are large caricatures of dragons and the devil etc with more fireworks lodged in their mouths. These giant “dolls” are mounted on wheels and pushed along, and moved from side to side as they go, again showering the crowds. Unbelievable, but loads of fun! If I’d been dressed properly, I’d have definitely had a dance in the spray, but I had to settle for clutching onto my friend and trying to look brave while being (slightly) scared! Hehe. All this excitement went on for a while, before we headed off, relatively unharmed and fully charged-up for a great meal. The crowds were so big that it took a while to get anywhere and also to find a restaurant which could seat us all. Barcelona has restaurants, cafes and bars absolutely EVERYWHERE, so to struggle like this really does show just how many people were out enjoying La Mercé. Anyway, more about the night in general now….

… Basically, my friend from my office invited me out to enjoy, not just the Correfoc, but also a meal with her friends, who are an incredibly international collection of Germans, Catalans, a French guy, his German girlfriend, an Italian, a Basque, oh yes, and me… the only English guy there! They were all lovely, and the entire night was handled in a mixture of languages but was about 95% Spanish. I was of course very worried about all this, as it was my first real situation where I was going to have to rely on my Spanish in order to have a good time. I know I can get away with a bit of English in the office with most of my colleagues if I’m struggling, but my friend doesn’t speak any, and I wasn’t about to insist that all her friends switch languages for me! Also, I was very conscious of the fact that she had been kind enough to invite me in the first place, and I was going to make every effort to make sure that she was glad she did invite me, and not just because she thought I’m the new guy in a strange town etc and might need taking under her wing. Anyway, everybody was amazing and the night went incredibly well. I spoke Spanish loads (although of course, it was my usual collection of loosely connected nouns and adjectives with a liberal smattering of badly constructed verbs accompanied by various hand gestures and facial contortions!) The important thing was that I spoke loads (even when the pressure was on when the entire table of 13 people was listening just to me!), I got my point across reasonably well (I think), and my friend looked like she was really pleased I came along. I feel like I’ve learnt loads – nothing I could put down on paper, but just extra confidence and ability to understand what people are saying to me much more. After the meal, a couple of the group headed off, but we more than made up for that by having a few new members join us in a bar nearby where we took over an entire section of the bar. Luckily, during La Mercé, the Metro runs throughout the night, as we couldn’t get a taxi due to the crowds, and so got the Metro home (I suppose we could’ve easily walked though) and got in at about 4am I think (having gone out at 7pm). The Spanish approach to drinking seems to have rubbed-off on me though, as I was happily merry but nowhere near as drunk as I would’ve been on a similar night in Manchester (not that nights like this exist in Manchester!)

The fun weekend continued today, as I had told my flatmate that I really wanted to see the Castelleros (human tower builders) at the big show in Placa Sant Jaume and was happy to go even if it meant going on my own. Anyway, he kindly arranged for us to go together with his partner, so even more Spanish was called for, as my flatmate is encouraging me to speak in Spanish with him (despite his excellent English). We’ve sort of fell into a kind of Spanglish around the house, where we flick-flack between the two depending on how important the subject matter is. For example, basic chit-chat is normally in either language with the emphasis on Spanish, but anything important where I don’t want to misunderstand is handled in English, hence English was used the other day when he was showing me how to use the washing machine (crucial stuff!), and also what the arrangements were for the weekly visit from our cleaner! He wants to improve his English further, so it seems we’ve already slipped into a perfect balance of the two. Also, we already seem to have a sixth-sense for knowing when the other is tired, and therefore when we need to take up the slack and speak in his/my language to take the strain off his/my braincells.

The crush of people at the Placa was something I wasn’t prepared for. It was cheek to cheek and it took us a while just to get the last 20 yards into the actual square where we could see anything. The Castelleros (which I think is the correct name, although I think it’s Castellets in Catalan, but again I’m not sure) were out of this world. The basic outline is that a base layer of team members assembles itself on top of which more members climb, and depending on the type of Castell they are building, they follow a different (highly precise and well practiced) routine that’s like a visual geometry lesson in the street. More and more Castelleros climb up and the layers thin out after the first (usually two) thick layers and then the thinner “tower” part starts to go up. The people at the bottom are obviously huge guys, but the further up you go, the slimmer they have to be for obvious reasons. Nothing prepares you for the sight of a small child (probably no more than 7 or 8 years old) climbing to the top of this tower that’s often 8 people high!!! They then raise their arm to officially complete the Castell and the crowd goes mental! Then they slide down really fast. One of the first Castells was built directly infront of the balcony of the mayor’s office, and was a tower where it’s just one person on top of one other person and so on. How they keep their balance with no-one else to counterbalance them on each layer, I don’t know, but they did it, and the child at the top was then pulled over onto the balcony to massive applause!! The next towers were the really big ones, with a huge base and then a central column of 3 people on each layer to create the counterbalance. Only one collapsed while we were there, and luckily no one was hurt. About 2 months ago though, a 12 year old girl died of spinal column injuries when a tower collapsed. It really is THAT dangerous, and often the Castelleros know when a tower isn’t going up properly, and they abandon it and regroup for another attempt (which still gets huge applause – presumably for being so brave in the first place!) This happened just once today.

After the Castells, we went for a meal which was great, and again the chat was 95% Spanish. After that, we went to the cinema to watch an English film with Spanish subtitles. I can’t understand spoken Spanish in movies as it’s too fast and usually it’s colloquial Spanish, but luckily for me, my flatmate prefers to watch with the original voices and then just read the subtitles.

So, all in all, it’s been a fantastic and memorable weekend, and it’s not even over yet because it’s a public holiday on Monday (and I get Spanish holidays while I’m here!) so tomorrow’s agenda is fairly clear but the main highlight is that I have an intercambio language exchange planned (the half-English half-spanish get-togethers with local strangers in order to both improve your languages). I’m not sure if it will definitely go ahead, as I believe my willing victim has got some kind of family issue at the moment, so I’m wondering if he’ll cancel. If he does, I won’t be too worried as I’ve already spoken more Spanish this weekend than I could’ve ever hoped. Don’t get me wrong, my Spanish isn’t noticeably any better because of it, but it’s all a confidence thing and just the practice in itself is enough to be classed as a huge improvement.

I’m off to bed now, to recharge my batteries and mull over whether I want to become a Casteller!!! (I think the answer will be no! hehe)

The fog clears a little

2006-09-25T00:21:00.000+02:00

So, week number one is work is over and done with, and despite the horrendousness of my Spanish, I can’t say I’ve not enjoyed it. It’s a lovely city (completely bonkers of course, but lovely too in equal measures). My mood has lifted since my last post (when I sounded like I was about to top myself! Hehe). My colleagues are all fabulous, my flatmate is the best I could’ve wished for, the flat itself is beautiful. I could go on, but the point I’m making is that I’m now back in the land of the living and feeling much better generally.

Regarding my Spanish, I’ve decided to put myself in little situations where I need to use it for real with strangers, and this seems to be baring fruit. This morning, I decided it was high-time I introduced myself to our “Portera” at my apartment block, as she’s always in her little room next to the lift (probably guarding the place with an old machine gun left over from the Civil War) and while I always say Hola, I never actually stop to chat. Anyway, she seems to have appreciated it and I made sure I showed the appropriate respect for an elderly Spanish lady by using all my ultra-polite “usted” verb formations. She also seems to have a thing about lace and spends all day in that little room running up something new and lacey on her antique Singer sewing machine while watching Mexican Telenovelas on the TV. Oh, and that’s another thing about Spain - the TV. It’s shit. Enough said.

Also in my quest for Spanish enlightenment, I went to the Chemist (which is about 2 and a half steps outside my front door) for something for my cough. I explained how it feels and he understood, so I was happy again. I more or less understood all his instructions on how to take the medicine, but I figured it didn’t matter if I missed one or two of the finer points as, what harm can you come to with a cough medicine?

2 hours later….

I’m now typing this while having my stomach pumped at the local hospital….! Nah, I’m kidding. The medicine is fine. It tastes like the stinking sweat from a shotputter’s crotch but, don’t all the best medicines??? Let just hope it works because I’m bored with coughing, even if it is only in sudden patches from time to time.

Today was a cool day because I made my first proper friend. I met with an English guy in a similar situation as me. We compared notes and chatted about how clever we both are for having been brave enough to move to Spain etc. hehe. It was great to have someone to talk to who knows the score, so I’m sure he’ll be someone I see more often, assuming he wants to etc.

Not a bad day by all accounts!

Miserable of Barcelona

2006-09-24T23:57:00.000+02:00

OK, first full week in the office is well underway and faced with constant Spanish from my colleagues (my choice remember, as I know I have to learn) and I’m beyond knackered! It’s SO tiring having to think deeply before every word leaves your mouth, and even more frustrating when what comes out is just the biggest pile of shit ever. I’m wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of this, as the number of occasions just today even when people have said simple things to me, and I’ve not been able to come up with a vaguely proper reply is enough to make me want to tell them to switch to English full-time. I hate the feeling of uselessness when this happens, and I can’t seem to just brush it off as being “part of the learning process”.

The last couple of nights I’ve come home exhausted, and just wanted to sleep. My flatmate has been fantastic and is very supportive, but I still feel new around here and would happily swap everything to get some familiarity back around me again – my own house, my pets etc. I know it’s just the frustration talking but, there you go. I've also got an annoying cough that comes and goes, which is making me even more miserable.

Food-wise too, I’m not hungry most of the time, so although I’m having a decent lunch, I’m not eating anything when I come home in the evenings. Even when I am hungry, I can’t just stroll around the supermarket and buy ingredients unless I know what the end product will be and have it in my mind, and as all the ingredients on offer are unfamiliar (well, most are) it’s hard to even begin. I find myself putting crap in my basket just so there’s at least some food in the house, but it’s nothing that’s ever going to feel the heat of a frying pan.

Not going to say much more except I feel like crap, and hope it all improves soon.

Anyone for a G&T?

2006-09-24T22:53:00.000+02:00

First weekend in Barcelona, and I’ve had a great time. Mainly because my closest friend from back home has been over to bring the rest of my luggage and to stay for the weekend. Our mission was to try out the local nightlife, which I think we had a fair go at! The gay night scene is big in Barcelona, and my flat is very close to all the action, so we headed off with a list of recommended bars ready to see what we could see. The first thing about a night out in Barcelona is that you of course don’t actually do the “going out” bit until virtually the next day, so we only got the night underway properly at about midnight, which was cool as the bars were nicely busy (apparently, coming out at 8 or 9pm like we would in the UK would mean you’ll only have yourselves and a barman for company!) We tried one called Dietrich first which was cool, followed by one called Átame (which translates as “Tie me up” which was a worry at first, but was just a regular bar). We do have to be careful though, as there are some bars that cater for the “niche” markets and, although I won’t mention here what I saw on their websites, it’s not your average Saturday night entertainment (Brucie would have a fit!). Anyway, the bars we went to were great, and we got talking to some people, one of whom (an English girl) was clearly on drugs for something, and if she wasn’t, she should’ve been. She kept us entertained for a while though, so I suppose that what it’s all about. Then a couple of German guys latched onto us, and we spent a while chatting with them. Still no Spanish contact at this point, so no one to practice on. Although, walking past a hotel bar, we did get accosted by a girl trying to convince us to go in, despite the fact that we’d have been the only people in there, so of course we politely refused (in my best Spanish!). But... practice is practice! Hehe

After a working day, and my friend having flown in on an early flight, we were both tired, so we decided not to push the night too long and so headed home. The following night (Saturday) we would make more of an effort. We went to the same two bars, plus a couple of others, and then went to a club called Arena, which apparently has 3 venues. We opted for the “Arena Classic” because it said it played old favourites and dance classics, but most of the night this meant Spanish music only. Luckily, Spanish pop music is incredibly easy to dance to so, while we didn’t know any of the words, we were still in our element.

Another thing I notice over here is the size of the measures given when you drink spirits. A gin and tonic is poured free-hand and the so-called “3 second pour” that I’ve been told is recommended, is definitely not the norm over here. It just keeps on coming!!! It only took a few of these to see us well on our way, so despite the pricey cost of the drink on the face of it, you’re actually getting a bargain when you weigh up how much of the "good stuff" is in there!! We didn’t spend much, and had a great time. I must’ve been fairly drunk even when we arrived at the club because I actually tried to get in through the fire-door! (I must’ve lost my bearings!) Anyway, the guy on the door advised me of my “error”, and therefore that was another mini Spanish lesson thrown in for free. Oh, and I did accidentally stand on the toe of a local club-goer at one point on the dance floor, which I hadn’t noticed until his friend politely tapped me on the shoulder and formally lodged his complaint. I say “formally” because it was delivered in a way as if he wanted a written apology from my solicitor!! I just kept dancing and smiled with a shrug! I think the words “de nada” may have accidentally slipped from my mouth! Whoops. My planned new career as the Cultural Atache from The People's Republic of Lesbania is probably looking a bit shaky!

Ready Steady Cook!

2006-09-24T22:52:00.000+02:00

I've now returned from the supermarket with armfulls of incompatible foodstuffs. If Marina can suggest a recipe that can be made from a bag of apples, some yoghurts and a box of teabags, I'd be eternally grateful! The whole shopping experience was, well... an experience I suppose! Still primed and ready to learn, I homed-in on a lady on the meat counter because she was talking in the way only Spanish women can do... that's right, she was shouting at the top of her voice to an elderly customer who was a good 30 yards away at the other end of a very long counter. I figured I could pick up a few choice shopping-related phrases that might help with my next visit, but I think the shutters have been pulled down on my language-absorbtion skills for the day as I wasn't taking in anything unfortunately.

Oh, I have to tell you that I committed a minor felony in the store. On the fruit and veg section, the procedure here seems to be that you have to bag-up whatever you want and weigh it on the scales yourself (I didn't know this beforehand of course, but I eyeballed a fellow happy shopper and learnt by example). Anyway, the scales have about half a million (slight exageration, but only slight) miniscule pictures of the various products available, and it's your task as an innocent shopper to select the correct picture in order to receive a little sticker to put on your bag and be charged the correct price at the checkout. Simple really. The problem is that, in this particular supermarket, it seems a child was in charge of drawing the pictures, so everything is just a different coloured circle. It's like identifying individual M&Ms from a family-sized pack. Well, after about 30 failed attempts to locate the Granny Smiths (and overloaded with little stickers by this point) I just plumped for the cheapest one that looked a bit like an apple. It wasn't the same price as that on the shelf of course, but I was past caring by now. Anyway, I wasn't followed out of the store by the overweight security guard, and there hasn't been a knock at the door so far since, so I guess that means I don't have to consume 8 apples in the next ten minutes in order to destroy the evidence! On a brighter note, tomorrow is Friday which means I only have to work 10am until 2pm. My Spanish colleagues are green with envy at this, but this falls on deaf ears. This is what happens when your UK manager tries to convert an English working week into a Spanish one. My Mondays to Thursdays are fairly normal Spanish type hours, but by Friday, I have a massive surplus of hours to quickly get rid of, hence the early finish. Qué bien!

First day nerves

2006-09-24T22:50:00.000+02:00

Oh my God, how crazy is it being here! I love it but I’m absolutely exhausted! OK, my heads in bits but I want to get this down in writing soon in case I start to forget things, so here goes…First, the flat. I’ve totally landed on my feet with it as it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s in an old building in Eixample near to the Hospital. Actually, that’s one down side as we have the intermittent sound of ambulances (presumably rushing to casualty the constant stream of tourists who’ve made the mistake of trying to cross the streets of the never-ending grid system!). The interior is gorgeous though, and I have plenty of extras to help make it super-comfortable for me – aircon, balcony, humongous wardrobes, comfy bed, satellite TV etc). My flatmate is lovely, and is keen to improve his English even though it’s near word-perfect (some people make me sick! hehe) so we spent last night chatting in mainly English. Tonight we’ll split the language chores a bit more 50/50, as I desperately need the practice with someone patient.My first day in the office has left me worn out! I had a lovely welcome (I handed out posh chocolates that I’d brought from home for them, and they oooed and arrrr’d, which was nice). I wasn’t ready for how hard it is to deal in a foreign language full-time from a standing-start! Everyone kind of quickly realised that the “stand around the new guy and listen to how funny he speaks” approach, probably wasn’t going to tempt my brain into constructing the most impressive sentences possible, so we all kind of broke up and little conversations sprang up bit with individuals etc which was much better. When I returned from lunch, one of the girls was alone in the office, so I closed in on her like a velociraptor and we sat down together and had a really good chat about anything and everything, so I’d say that was my highlight of the day. Of course, my half of the conversation was made up of half-finished sentences and random verb constructions never before seen in the Spanish-speaking world, but she was really patient and we both got our points across more or less, which is all I could wish for at this stage. Hardest thing so far by a mile, is simply being outside of my language comfort zone, and therefore not being able to reply with quick answers. People would say something that I kind of understood, and I could potentially have given a perfect answer to, if only I could gather the Spanish words in my mind in time. But no, instead it was blank looks all round, a feeling of total inadequacy inside me, and lots of bueno…pues… etc etc. (Even more than what could be considered normal!). Nothing prepares you for the feeling of total uselessness when your mouth opens….. but nothing remotely suitable comes out! I don’t know if I’m the type of person who feels the pain more, but it’s absolute torture, so I guess I must be. hehe. Tonight has been declared a shopping night, so I’m off to the supermarket now to try to work my way through all the different product brands etc and actually come home with some ingredients that can actually make a meal of some kind. More shortly….

It's a boy!

2006-09-24T22:49:00.000+02:00

Hey, I'm here! Arrived this morning (Wednesday 13th September) and came straight to my new apartment. Met my landlady briefly before she had to shoot-off back to London (where she lives most of the year). Also met my flatmate, and all my worries have evaporated. He's really considerate and friendly, and is keen that I feel at home etc. He's moved around a bit himself and seems to appreciate just how much a few kind gestures can go when you're new somewhere. Can't write more yet as I'm heading out now, but will do a proper update asap.

All packed up and nearly ready to go...

2006-09-24T22:46:00.000+02:00

Well, at last the bags are packed, the pets have been distributed amongst various unsuspecting family members, and everything else is organised (kind of) and I’m all ready for my big move to Barcelona on Wednesday morning. Just thought I’d better squeeze this post in now, as by tomorrow, I’ll probably be in the middle of a “what the hell am I doing?” kind of nervous breakdown and therefore might not get time to write! heheI’ve got a busy first few days planned when I arrive. Meeting my flatmate is my first priority. I hope he’s sociable and likes all my mildly-psychotic (but extremely loveable) little quirks around the house. I’ll be hitting the ground running by going straight into work on Thursday and all my colleagues are under strict instructions that they should talk to me in Spanish, and not let me get away with any slacking on the language front (despite the fact that some of them speak beautiful English). That’ll be a laugh, as I’ve already been chatting with them in advance of my arrival and, although they’re all desperately polite, I’m getting the impression that my spoken Spanish level seems to be somewhere between “mildly incomprehensible but acceptable” and “hysterically funny”. I’ve checked on the DELE websites and these levels don’t seem to exist on the official list. Very strange. Then on Friday, normality returns for the weekend as my friend arrives for a visit (he’s bringing the other half of my luggage, hence the quickness of his arrival). We’ll be checking out the nightlife and so I hope to have a few recommendations of fun places to go (or maybe avoid) by early next week. I recall the first time I was in BCN, and I ignored the warning in the guidebooks that says quite clearly “don’t even dream of going out before midnight!” and I remember thinking that the famous nightlife that I’d heard was world-class was actually a giant con. Won’t be making that mistake this time! JRight, I’m off to dig-out my old tapes of Eldorado now, so I can brush up on my Spanish culture! (Any Brits reading will know that the dismally-bad, failed BBC soap-opera set on the Spanish Costas is quite simply the most accurate portrayal of authentic Spanish life ever made…… not! Hehehe)More later in the week….

So what's a blog when it's at home?

2006-09-24T22:43:00.000+02:00

OK, so I've decided to join the rest of the known world and get myself a blog. As I'm here in Spain for at least the next 6 months, it's probably a good idea if I get some thoughts written down. I've already been here just over a week, so I have some diary entries already prepared, so I'll post them again as if they're new and hopefully it will keep things neat and the only thing wrong will be the date of the post will be a week or so out. Anyway, here goes nothing....