Andalucia Steve

 

Posts in Category: Spanish

Adios

This is the last of my regular weekly postings
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, December 27, 2020 5:02:00 AM Categories: Andalusia blogging Christmas Coronavirus Covid-19 dystopia Poetry Spain Spanish Spanish culture

 

It's four in the morning. I've been binge-watching 'Mindhunter' and I just went to the kitchen to check on the sink, which has had problems draining. I boiled another five litres of water and poured it down with a litre of 6% wine vinegar which had been languishing at the back of the cupboard for years but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I'm at that stage in a non-practical man's life where I'm counting the times I buy the namby-pamby drain-cleaner solutions from the supermarket, comparing the cost with biting the bullet and getting Eduardo the plumber in to give a more lasting solution to the blockage. First world problems I know, but if the sink doesn't empty, the dishwasher might overflow and flood the kitchen, and if I can't use the dishwasher then I'll have to wash the plates by hand in the bath, which is a fate too tedious to consider.
 
Anyway that's my morning so far. Today however is a milestone, as it is the last day of my self-enforced blog publishing time-table. A year ago I made the New Year's resolution that I would draw up a weekly publishing schedule for my blog and spew out an original piece of content each Sunday. Much to my surprise, I've managed to stick to it. This is issue 53. I aimed for each post to be about 1000 words which I stuck to more of less, so that is 53,000 words. That's a lot of words, nearly a book in fact!
 
The exercise has taught me a lot. Sticking to a time-table has brought me a loyal if small regular reader-ship of about 60 people who take the trouble to read what I write. Some even comment and get involved with discussions which have at times become a little heated, even though I've mostly steered away from politics and religion. I've only marketed the articles on Facebook and Twitter, a single post for each article on each platform. On both, the topics that have had the most traction are Spain and Brexit, probably a reflection of the folk I interact with most on each of these.
 
I had no idea when I started these regular postings that 2020 would be the year of Covid-19. I had no idea people would be trapped in their homes and that I too would have a vastly different pattern to my daily activities. Looking back on it, the creation of a timetable with deadlines was probably the single best thing I could have done, as it helped me give form to a week where days could otherwise have been indistinguishable from one another, save for the occasional trip to the shops. If you're fortunate to live with other human beings, I can tell you first-hand, that being on your own during the pandemic has been far more trying than in regular times when one can come and go at will. At times it has felt like being in solitary confinement and I for one will be glad to see a return to normality in 2021, even though I'm not personally a very gregarious person. Even now my sleep patterns remain largely divorced from the clock as I'm so used to the feeling that there are no appointments to keep and nobody is going to be knocking on the door. (Hence writing this at four in the morning!)
 
I suppose, on reflection things could have been worse in 2020. Yellowstone could have erupted. No civilisation-killer asteroids crashed into the earth. Aliens haven't invaded and started shooting up the place. Apart from the pandemic and Brexit I think we've got off quite lightly really!
 
For those of you who are disappointed that my regular postings end today, I will continue to post sporadically as the mood takes me, however I plan to take the timetable principle and the allotted time to devote to another potentially more lucrative activity. I have not made a final decision as to what that might be. Someone suggested I should weave the Spain related anecdotes into a book which had not occurred to me. I had in mind a couple of other writing-related ideas, so I want to spend some time teasing these out and look at the best one to pursue.
 
In the mean time, here's a poem wot I wrote. I haven't written a poem since I was at school so don't laugh, but it's just a stream of consciousness thing about the things my nose encounters here on a daily basis, so don't go looking too hard for rhyme!
 
Of sun-born olive-branch bonfires
Of over-revved two-stroke engines
Of early morning bleached pavements
Of just-baked loaves off the bread-man's van
Of coiffured old women pebble-dashed in talc
Of elderly men dripping in Tabac
Of expresso and tostadas 
Of the secret smell of budding ganja
Of churros and chocolate
Of workman's sweat and builder's dust
Of puros scenting up the street
Of frying squid and boiling octopus
Of brandy, ponche and anis
Of sun-scorched earth and tar then rain, reminding us of life again
These are the things I smell in Spain, of life, of love, of being sane.
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Units in Spain

How some old units of measure endure to this day.
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, November 29, 2020 2:25:00 AM Categories: Andalusia Electricity Math Murcia Spain Spanish Spanish culture Spanish utilities

100 Pesetas

My first souvenir from Spain was a banknote. Back in 1972, my sister's boyfriend at the time had a fortnight in Torremolinos and gifted a One Hundred peseta note to me on his return, knowing that collecting foreign banknotes and coins was my childhood hobby. I remember I was quite taken by the images of the people on each side of the note. They looked so dignified and interesting in a foreign sort of way. Spain abandoned the peseta in 2002 when it joined the Euro (and achieved world-record sales of BMWs and Mercedes as bundles of black money which would otherwise soon be rendered worthless, were quietly withdrawn from under mattresses nationwide and laundered through car dealerships who had never had it so good).
 
So it came as quite a surprise when I first moved here and started to parlez with the locals, that the value of most assets, houses, cars and so on were still valued in pesetas.
 
This became a bit of a nuisance when I started working with a Spanish estate agent. Typically I'd be in the middle of a conversation between him and some English speaking clients, translating with my crude command of Spanish.
 
"How much would it cost to build a pool in this property?" They would ask, and I would translate to the agent.
 
"Two million pesates" would come the reply.
 
As a rule of thumb, a million pesetas is 6,000 euros, so I'd translate,  calculate and tell the client 12,000 euros for the pool. A similar process would be required when folk asked me for quotes for kitchens, bathrooms, outbuildings etc. At times it became quite a challenge!
 
It was interesting though, travelling around the country while working with the estate agent. He had lots of property all over the place, mainly in Murcia but also from Valencia down to Almeria. One thing I'd often see in old houses were mains transformers. Spain used to use a 110V electricity supply, and apparently still does in some places. Although all electrical equipment sold today is designed to run on 220V, there are still houses out there which I have seen that have a mixture of 110V and 220V appliances used in the same house thanks to crude transformers that are often unboxed and look like rusty relics from a bygone age.
 
It wasn't just the volts and pesetas that gave me a jolt back to the past. Another thing I noticed was that although Spain adopted the metric system in the 1850s, it was still common to hear other units used to described land length and area. The first one of these I came across was the fanega,  which the estate agent would use mainly when talking to farmers about the size of a plot in the country. My Spanish wasn't really up to diving into the conversation between two old guys rabbiting on at ten to the dozen in their thick regional, country accents, so I used to enlist the help of a young girl who worked in the office to figure this stuff out. She told me that a fanega was a unit of land area that was used in Spain in antiquity and that the funny thing about it was there was no consistent standard across the country. So a fanega in Murcia could be a different size altogether to a fanega in Andalucia. The web didn't help me much at the time (this was about 2005) but while researching this article, I came across a conversion chart that confirms this to be the case https://www.sizes.com/units/fanega.htm#land_area Just look at the Square Metre column and the wide range of different values across Spain. It's a wonder they managed to do any deals at all!
 
And the fanega wasn't the only one. Another measure I came across while working there was the  tahúlla which was used more in the north east of Murcia up towards Valencia way. Again, at the time I couldn't find much out about this online but I've just checked and the tahúlla possibly dates back to Islamic times, but is still being used today by some folk in Spain who can't get their heads around hectares. For the record, a tahúlla is equivalent to 1118 metres squared.
 
I thought I'd write about the units used in Spain as many of them would be unfamiliar to lot of my readers. However one unit used here will be familiar to everyone, even if the word used is different. Like most countries in the world, Spain measures TV screens and monitors in 'pulgadas' which means inches.  You can't keep a good unit down!
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Language Learning Tips

A few ideas for improving your command of Spanish
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, November 1, 2020 9:01:00 AM Categories: Andalusia language Murcia Spain Spanish Spanish culture

 

It's a bit  cheeky of me to be giving tips about language learning. You might as well ask Donald Trump to teach you how to dance the ballet. I've never been good at languages. It was the only thing I failed at school and after nearly twenty years of speaking Spanish I'm still far from fluent. That part of my brain that processes language just doesn't seem to work very well in me.
 
However, having tried all sorts of things to improve my Spanish I am perhaps in a good position to say what has worked for me and what hasn't. Classes haven't. I think classes may have been the reason I struggled at school. Classes are the exact opposite of one to one' learning. My mind tends to wander when not engaged. I don't think I'm alone in that. I distinctly remember at school, there came a point after three years of French where there were one or two swats sitting at the front doing all the heavy lifting with the teacher while the rest of us were really just marking time until the next lesson, completely disinterested as to what was going on. I don't really blame the teacher for this, I just don't think a language should be taught to thirty or so people at a time.
 
Looking back on it, making the decision to learn a language and promising myself I would stick to it was the crucial turning point. I'd had what I'd later heard Tim Ferris describe as a  Harajuku moment, an enlightening self-realisation arrived at by defining a fear rather than a goal. I'd always dreamed of retiring to Spain one day and the fear that I faced up to was that this was unrealistic unless I knew the language, and that learning the language becomes harder as you get older. Therefore I drew a line in the sand and promised myself to do a little language learning every day. This was November 1999. To this day I still engage in a daily activity to increase my knowledge of the language.
 
I dug around on the Internet and found a few resources. In those days courses were nowhere near as plentiful on the web as they are today but the BBC had a Spanish course as did Manchester University, both of which were free. Neither however were very effective in getting me started on the road to speaking the language. The turning point came when I discovered the Michel Thomas method. 
 
The Michel Thomas method is an audio course that places you in a conversation between a teacher and two other students. Questions are asked and both you and the students offer your replies. Often the mistakes the other students make help you understand the correct answers. The course relies heavily on pointing out the similarities between English and Spanish, for example drawing your attention to word endings and giving easy to use formulas for converting between one language and the other (a technique that had been pioneered in the books of Margarita Madrigal's Magic key to.. series). The amazing thing about the course is that it enables you to start forming quite advanced sentences comparatively quickly because one learns rules for generating words, rather than lists of words themselves, thus building confidence. After completing the course I felt I'd really turned a corner and became quite thirsty for more Spanish resources.
 
I was still living in England at the time, though certain Spanish media were available online or via satellite. Euronews was a TV news channel that had audio streams that could be changed to a number of European languages. The stories would rotate every 10 or fifteen minutes or so and I found it useful to watch a story in Spanish, then rewatch in English to see if I had the gist. Spanish football was also available with Spanish commentary, so I started to follow that. Soon I was learning the words for corner, goal, penalty and chants like "estas ciega" when asking the referee if he was blind. The most revered word in football of course is 'goal', which is shouted long and loud by the commentator when someone scores. I was listening to a program on the wireless one day called 'Radio Estadio' that was broadcasting an important game featuring Real Madrid. At six o'clock the programme was interrupted briefly for the evening news and there had been a grave incident somewhere in the north of Spain with loss of life, so Prime Minister Aznar was making a solemn statement to the nation. He'd only managed to get a few sentences out when the commentator interrupted shouting "Gooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal a Real Madrid". Clearly nothing is more important in Spain than a ball hitting the back of the net!
 
In an attempt to build vocabulary, still back in 1999, I bought a Spanish newspaper and a highlighting pen. Each day I would read a story, highlighting any words I didn't know and looked them up. I found this a valuable way to build vocabulary and one learns a little of the culture and current affairs of the country. Over time I found if I learned about ten new words a day that was about right. More than ten was hard to remember. Less than ten and I felt I wasn't making any progress. Later on I realised there is only a certain vocabulary of reported speech in newspapers that is quite different to how people speak in real life, but it is still a good way to learn words.
 
I love music so I also sought out Spanish songs. The Columbian artists Shakira and Juanes were popular at the time so I got hold of the lyrics to some of their songs and learned to sing them. This was very good practice for pronunciation, as to be in-time with the music it is often necessary to enunciate faster than one would do by speaking, thus giving the mouth and tongue a workout. It also came in handy years later in Spain when belting out the Gypsy Kings Bamboleo at Karaoke as I'd already learned the words! Learning to speak fast is quite important. Try to plan what your're going to say in your head then say it as quickly as possible. People hearing you speaking slowly start thinking "Oh he's a foreigner, he won't understand me" then freeze like a rabbit in the headlights!
 
The wife and I finally made the move to Spain in the Autumn of 2003. The town we moved to had only a small number of maybe a few dozen Brits out of a population of 16,000 so my wife argued, quite correctly as it turned out, that we should avoid the English speaking community and only speak Spanish. This we did for over a year, making lots of Spanish friends in the process. It was during this time that I battled to make the transition from speaking textbook Spanish to that uttered by people with local accents, as described in my previous blog post the Gargoyle Folk. It was an important time that cemented everything together. I didn't speak to another English person other than my wife until over a year later, when a woman trying to arrange a delivery in a furniture shop turned to me and asked 'How do you say when in Spanish?' Seeing how far behind me in learning the language she was, I delighted myself in how far I had come.
 
During our year in isolation we made many Spanish friends. Though we lived in the countryside and some of the owners of the neighbouring properties only visited at weekends, they were nonetheless keen to get to know us and invited us to all sorts of social events, which really helped develop conversational skills. One to one learning is much more effective than a classroom situation. A good way to go is to find a Spanish friend who is keen to learn English, then meet up and do a half hour conversation in each language. 
 
We also watched Spanish television during our first year, mainly in the afternoon. There was an extended weather forecast was on at 4pm which was great for beginners like us, because the weather uses small vocabulary of words that are repeated most days like cloud, rain, sunshine etc so these soon become imprinted on the brain. We also watched Telenovelas which are like ultra-melodramatic mini-series. In one 'end of series' cliff-hanger I remember there was an evil step-mother who pushed a baby in a pram into the middle of a bull-ring then released the bull! God knows what was going on there!
 
These days there are so many more online resources than when I started to learn Spanish, many of which are free, ranging from language exchanges to online courses like Duolingo. I won't go into detail about any of these as there are already a million blogs telling you all about them. Instead I'll end with one last tip which helped me a lot in the early days. Don't worry too much about tenses. Tenses confuse beginners and can seem like a mountain of complexity to learn. The fact of it is though, Spanish people are much more accepting of the present tense than we are in English. It's perfectly OK to build a sentence like "I go to the shop tomorrow" where the tense is present but you use the word tomorrow to specify the future. I go to the shop yesterday would also be understood. Being understood is far more important than being correct. This is my motto for getting by in Spanish!
 
 
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Funny Things They Eat in Spain

Warning: Don't read this if you are vegan/vegetarian
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, October 25, 2020 2:02:00 AM Categories: Andalusia Cusine food Murcia Spanish Spanish culture tourism
 
It was during my first week in Spain that I ascended an escalator in a big supermarket, turned a corner in to the meat section and was greeted by a rack of pig faces. It was quite a bizarre sight! It looked as though the left half a pig's head had been placed in a polystyrene tray and wrapped in cling-film. There were dozens of them, all looking the same way, which of course prompted a question in my ever curious mind. Where were the right hand sides of the pig's heads? Was there another shelf somewhere with dozens of pig faces looking the other way? I never found out. I consoled myself that at least they all had their eyes closed. Were they open, now that just would have been weird!
 
Even though I'm a meat eater, I was still troubled the first time I bought what I thought was an oven ready chicken in a small local supermarket. It looked like the ones in blighty, again sitting in a polystyrene tray wrapped in plastic. However when I unwrapped it I was in for a surprise. The head was still attached and dropped onto the counter with an unexpected thud! What I was supposed to do with it I don't know to this day. I think I actually closed my eyes when I cut it off with scissors and threw it in the bin. Yuk!
 
Spain is obviously a different country with a very different culture to the Britain I grew up in. The food they eat here and the relationship to food and to animals takes some degree of adjustment. The first house I bought was a country house, and the owner had a shed full of rabbits he bred for the table. I had him remove them before I took possession of the house as I didn't fancy myself having to kill and butcher rabbits. However a short time after I moved in, a neighbour invited me around for Sunday lunch. He introduced my wife and I to our meal, which was a live, white rabbit that was hopping around in his garden shed. You know what's coming next don't you? Yes he killed and skinned the rabbit before our eyes. Within the hour, bits of poor bunny, including his head were on a plate in front of me. I understood being served the head was quite an honour, but one I could have lived without if truth be told!
 
Heads are quite a thing here. One of the restaurants in Cehegin used to serve roasted goat's heads on a Monday night. They were brought out on a tray from the oven and placed on the bar. Each head was sawn in half, and as I recall served face down, so you could see the brain, tongue, sinuses etc. I'm going back a few years, but I think half a head and a few roast potatoes was pretty good value for one euro fifty.
 
My rabbit murdering neighbour invited me out a few weeks later to go snail hunting. Eager to integrate myself into Spanish society I was accepting all such invitations at the time as it seemed the right thing to do. The day came and I went with him and some family members on a walk in the 'campo' along a quiet road where I was assured lots of snails would be found. Now I'd seen bags of snails for sale in the market and they all had ornate spiral shells, which I'd assumed was the hallmark of some special edible species. How wrong I was. All sorts of varieties and sizes of snails were apparently fair game, some looking distinctly like the ones I'd had to put pellets down for in blighty to stop them chewing my Hostas. After a while, we had amassed several buckets full of sundry snails, which my neighbour took to the kitchen of his country house. I was hoping they would be well cooked or at least boiled for long enough to kill any remnants of 'snailness' but alas no. All he did was put them in bowls of vinegar and pop them in the fridge. The next day I was invited around for a snail feast. They were served in some kind of sauce which I had not been privy to the making of, but it tasted quite spicy, as though some cumin and chilli was involved. Much to my surprise they tasted quite good, though I don't think I'd go to the trouble of making them myself. Incidentally, this incident revealed the answer to question that had puzzled me since I first bought my house. The grounds were fenced in, and the fence mounted atop a small wall, two breeze blocks high. Dotted around the property, ceramic tiles were lent up against these walls. It turns out they were snail hotels, deliberately placed to provide a cool, moist, comfortable space for the snails to repair to so they could be easily harvested. I'd inadvertently purchased a snail farm!
 
Probably the most unsavoury thing I've known the Spanish to eat are wild birds. I've not seen this with my own eyes, but someone who does it showed me the equipment he used. I visited the country house of a friend of a friend one Sunday morning for a barbecue. Breakfast barbecues are not uncommon on a Sunday in Murcia when the weather is good which is often. On this occasion we were eating six week old goat (yes I know, animal lovers must be cringing by now, but when in Rome). So we were talking about barbecue and the bird topic came up. The guy went into his shed and brought out a large black net and a device that looked like a camouflaged military radio. It turns out it was a bird-caller. He turned it on and within a minute or two, birds started flocking into the olives trees around us. He explained how he would setup the net between the trees, play the bird sounds, and when enough birds had arrived, he would gather the net entrapping them. Then he would pick them out of the net, and, miming the action, described how he would spike them on a skewer, presumably while still alive, and cook them on the barbecue. 
 
"Which birds" I asked, visibly wincing a little in anticipation of the inevitable answer.
 
"All types" he said. "Whatever is in the net."
 
As you can imagine, I was extremely glad not to be invited back to see that in action.
 
The same chap provided the meat for a birthday party I was invited to a few months later. He worked in sales and drove all over Spain for a living, so contrived to bring back two baby pigs from a trip to Segovia, which those in the know will tell you is the best place to go in Spain if you're into eating piglets. The pigs were placed on olive branches which were laid inside a bread oven. I can't remember the cooking time but I think it was a good few hours, and when the pigs came out of the oven, the meat was succulent and falling off the bone. As is traditional, they sliced the pigs up with dinner plates which were then ceremonially smashed, and everyone was served piglet slices on a paper plate, which seemed somewhat ironic. I must say though it was delicious. 
 
The list of odd things I've seen in bars here goes on and on. Pancreas was something I tried but didn't care for. I was hoping it would taste like liver but no, it tastes, well, like pancreas. One bar surprised me by selling frogs legs as tapas. On the bar in a glass case in lots of steel trays were all the usual suspects. There was Russian salad, eggs stuffed with tuna, anchovies, tigres (stuffed mussel shells), then, unusually, a tray full of frogs legs. The tapas was free with a beer so I had to try them. They tasted a little like chicken. I was surprised to see them in Spain. This was in a transport cafe on an industrial estate, so it is possible they were there to delight visiting French lorry drivers. I pondered for a while as to what happens to the rest of the frog when it loses its legs. Perhaps there were choruses of ribbiting frogs pushing themselves around in wheelchairs somewhere.
 
Possibly the weirdest thing I've seen someone eating was after a bullfight one day. When a bull is killed, the animal is taken out and butchered. The meat, known as lidia is quite prized, as a bull bred for fighting is in pasture for five years to gain the necessary weight for the ring. I've never eaten any myself but it must be along the lines of Wagyu beef. Anyway, I happened to be in a bar near a bullring one day after a bullfight and witnessed a chap chewing a raw bull's testicle! I know it's rude to stare but it was hard not to look!
 
Probably my favourite curious culinary delight is Mondongo. There was a gastronomical society that met once a month in Murcia, mainly patronised by elderly folk who revisited their youth by dining on some of the meals they ate during the Franco period. As a foreigner it was quite an honour to be invited to join the club and I went to many meals over a number of years. We were even featured on regional television, such was the interest in what we were eating. You may know, the Franco years were characterised by extreme hardship, so good meat was expensive and hard to find. Mondongo was an ingenious use of two cheaper more readily available cuts of meat, sheep's stomach and cow's knees! It doesn't immediately sound very appetising, but trust me it was delicious. The dish is rice based and cooked in a large paella pan (I know I know, you don't have to say 'pan' because paella means pan). The tripe, bones and a little stock is added and, as it cooks, something magical happens. The cow's knees have very little meat on them, but the gelatinous fat in the bones melts and gets soaked up by the tripe and the rice. When it is served, the trick is to get a palm full of oregano, then rub your hands together to grind the leaves over the rice, and then the flavour of the herb gets drawn in by the fat. I really couldn't believe how something so simple and potentially unpalatable could taste so good. I don't have much contact with Murcia anymore these days, but if there was one reason to go back it would be to relive the Mondongo experience!
 
 
 
 
 
 
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The low down on Spanish weddings

What's it really like to go to a wedding in Spain?
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, October 18, 2020 1:50:00 AM Categories: Andalusia Spanish Spanish culture

 

I stumbled across a DVD I made a few years ago of a Spanish wedding that I was invited to. I've been to several in fact, and I've noticed there are quite a few differences to Spanish weddings, some of which may seem a little odd to outsiders.
 
Firstly, one doesn't necessarily need to know the bride and groom to be invited to a wedding in Spain.  In one instance I was very friendly with the groom's father but I'd never met his son or the wife to be. On the big day, although I attended the church, I didn't actually meet the happy couple for the first time until the reception where they shook hands with everyone on the way in to the venue. I used my pigeon Spanish to explain I was sorry for not having met before, but sensing my awkwardness, they brushed aside any embarrassment and welcomed me to join the celebration and enjoy myself. I did just that! The food was excellent. It was explained to me there were two function rooms used for weddings in town, one which was a bit 'posher' and this one which had better food. They must have had a large kitchen as there were hundreds of guests there, with waiters buzzing around like bees, bringing plate after plate and wine bottle after wine bottle. The father was milling around talking to people but kept checking up on me to make sure I was OK. 
 
"Did you like the prawns" he said, obviously knowing the the answer would be yes, given the huge pile of shell casings in front of me.
 
"Have another plate.."  He snapped his finger at the nearest waiter and another plate of prawns arrived. Now I'm no prawn connoisseur, but these things were damned good. Larger than most prawns and a deep red colour. I didn't know as I was shovelling them in my cake-hole but I made enquires about them the following week and learned they cost a euro each. I'd probably eaten my way through twenty or thirty euros worth!
 
Which brings me to funding. By convention, if one is lucky enough to be invited to a Spanish wedding, one is expected to contribute to the cost of the celebration. They way this is done is by making a discreet enquiry before the event as to the probable cost per head. Then one brings this money in an envelope as a gift to give at the reception. Some people, close family members and friends may give more, but the general idea is to cover the costs with hopefully a little left over to start married life together. I think it's a great idea and from what I've heard, the generosity of  the guests never leaves the bride and groom out of pocket. 
 
One thing I've seen at a lot of Spanish weddings, not just ones I've been invited to, but ones where I've happened to be a passer-by at the church, is when the couple exit the ceremony, fireworks are set off. I don't know how or why firing rockets into the air in the middle of the day became a thing, as the explosions are almost impossible to see in bright sunshine. The noise is most likely the reason. They also enjoy riding around town in a cavalcade of cars all beeping their horns in celebration. In a small village like Olvera it's impossible to not know a wedding is taking place!
 
Another difference at Spanish wedding receptions, at least the ones I've been to, is that there are no speeches. Nobody clinks their glasses or makes a toast. No 'best man' gets up and makes rude jokes about the groom. Having been used to the format of British wedding receptions, I recall feeling robbed of entertainment. I've also had Spanish friends tell me they have seen movies like 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and were quite envious of this but in Spain, people just don't seem to want to take the leap to address the room. Instead of being punctuated by speeches, the progress of the reception seems to be marked by which course is being served. There are generally lots of courses, multiple starters, a couple of fish courses, a couple of meat, desserts, even cigars. At one wedding I went to each man was furnished with a big cigar and each woman with a miniature commemorative five-pack of cigarettes! 
 
As with wedding receptions the world over, when the feasting is over the dancing starts. All the weddings I've been to featured discos rather than live music. What is different is the duration. Even at weddings that take place at midday, you will still find yourself dancing at six o'clock in the morning and sometimes beyond. I've never had the stamina myself, but I've been assured that the celebrations often continue back at the groom's house up until lunchtime the next day. That's one thing you can't deny about the Spanish. They sure do know how to party!
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Eight Great Reasons to Visit Spain

Why Spain is a great place to take a vacation
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, October 11, 2020 4:15:00 PM Categories: Andalusia Spanish Spanish culture tourism

 

I felt I was unduly negative in last weeks blog post. To be fair, I was directly ranting at the folk in charge of tourism in Spain, not the country, which is rich in reasons to visit. So, to redress the balance somewhat, here are my eight great reasons to visit Spain.
 
 
1) People have been here since prehistory.
 
The first time I stayed in Cehegin, the town in which I spent my first six years living here, I booked into a hotel that had copies of rock art on the wall. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but these images were taken from cave art found in the Peña Rubia, the big hill behind the town. It's said that the Peña protects Cehegin from the worst of the rain as the clouds tend to go around it one way or the other. I'm not sure how true that is but the town does seem to have a favourable climate. It was some time later I learned about the caves and rock art in the Peña Rubia and I hoped to visit them but they were unfortunately closed for security, restoration and research. I understand the caves can be visited today if one makes a booking in advance with the tourist office. https://www.laverdad.es/murcia/planes/larutaconunpar/201405/07/cuentos-edad-piedra-20140505190930.html After I learned about it I often marvelled that as long ago as 3500 BC people had made the place where I was living their home. Of course, the Peña Rubia is one of many prehistoric caves containing early rock art in Spain, the most famous of which is Altimira in Cantabria, the discovery of which was the subject of a fascinating movie 'Finding Altamira' starring Antonio Banderas.
 
2) The Romans
 
The Romans had an enduring relationship with Spain which I first learned about when a neighbour told me the land on which my house was built in Cehegin was the site of a Roman cemetery! No names no pack drill, but a Spanish chap I met in the same town invited me round for a family lunch one day to his country house. The garden was full of Roman columns, statues, busts and frankly looked like a museum. He told me he ran a construction company excavating roads and railway lines. Work would often stop because another piece of history had been unearthed. Such delays were as unpopular with him as they were with the firm contracting him, so often isolated pieces would quietly disappear into the boot of his car so that work could continue! The rape of Roman ruins was not limited to the private sector though. I saw a group being guided around the ancient Roman ruins of Acinipo near Ronda in Malaga province. A woman stumbled across a piece of pottery which she showed to the guide, who much to my surprise told her to keep it as a souvenir!
 
 
3) Nightlife
 
The Spanish certainly know how to party. Ibiza is the party capital of the world but nightlife is great all over the country. My wife and I stayed with a friend in Alicante for a week while first looking for houses here. Towards the end of our stay, he suggested when went night-clubbing and he showed us around all of the local gay bars. There seemed to be dozens of them. I recall dancing along to something camp like Kylie Minogue in one of them, when I noticed video being played on the walls around the bar, then I realised they were filming the audience and playing the tapes on subsequent nights. I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling of sympathy for the future punters who would have to endure my interpretation of The Locomotion. Despite this it was one of the best nights out ever, as partying with gay people often are. You don't know you've lived until you've been 'cruised' by a George Michael lookalike in the Bang Your Head bar at 2:30 in the morning! Changing tack slightly I've noticed a marked trend for nightclubs in Spain to be empty one minute and full the next. It seems the locals move in packs from one bar to another, so if you happen to arrive at the wrong time you might think the place is not happening. Don't panic though, have a look for evidence of activity. If there are glasses waiting to go in the dishwasher you may have missed the 'pack', but if it looks 'clean', have a drink and give it half an hour. Chances are the party is on the way! (Also nightclubs in Spain never have the word 'Club' in their name - that is reserved for another type of establishment altogether where the dancing is more horizontal than vertical if you get my meaning!) 
 
 
4) Beaches
 
I'm not much of a beach bum but even so I've visited dozens of beaches over my many years in Spain, all the way from the Mar Menor in the East to Tarifa in the West. With over 5000 km of coastline, Spain has all kinds of beaches imaginable, so you're guaranteed to find something to your taste. My favourite is probably La Playa de la Cortadura at Cadiz which is a sandy shoreline so long you can't see the end of it. Even in the busiest part of the season you're able to find a quiet spot!
 
5) Quaint Villages
 
The Spanish landscape is pockmarked with picturesque towns and villages. I recall reading somewhere there are about 5000 though I've been unable to verify that figure for the purpose of this blog. While I've mentioned in previous blogs the threat of rural depopulation hangs over the future of many of these, it's also true that there are more opportunities than ever to find accommodation in them thanks to the Internet and services like Airbnb. I met some American cyclists recently (well, pre-Covid) who were riding from one side of Spain to the other with no formal plan other than accepting the hops that booking their next accommodation online took them. I thought that was a great idea. I wish I was brave enough to do it!
 
6) Architecture
 
Whether you love modern architecture or megalithic monuments, Spain has it all and everything in between. We have 2500 castles and just shy of a 100 cathedrals. Particularly notable in the south west of Spain where I now reside, is the influence of the Moorish period and the colonial period where huge wealth came back from the country's expansion into South America. Much of these riches came via Seville and spread out all over the region, reflected in fine old buildings all over the Western provinces of Andalusia.
 
7) Scenery
 
Spain has a remarkable variety of countryside. I've driven back and forth between Murcia and Andalusia many times and I'm always struck by the way the views change. Driving out of the elevated pastures of Caravaca that look like a scene out of the Sound of Music, I would round a bend at the other side of the Puebla de Don Fadrique to reveal a break in the mountains revealing a huge plain, then keep driving to see the snow capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada then beyond them on to the desert of Almeria. The landscape is constantly changing. How many places in the world can you be skiing in the morning and swimming in warm sea water in the afternoon?
 
8) Wine 
 
I don't think Spain's wines get the international recognition they deserve, which may well be because their focus has most recently been on the domestic market. Grapevines were thought to have first been brought to the peninsula by the Canaanite tribe of the Phoenicians roughly around a thousand years before Christ when they settled in Cadiz, (making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe). The Romans later fell in love with the sweet wines from Cadiz province, particularly from around Jerez, much more of which was turned over to grape production back then than it is today. The Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis wrote of the primitive sherry saying it was "highly regarded in Roman circles". Winemaking in Cadiz is currently undergoing a renaissance with many farmers replacing olive trees with vines. The olive oil industry is under threat from stiff international competition from New World countries however there is little to differentiate one brand of oil from another. Although wine faces similar competition, the difference in character between one bottle of wine and another is much more marked and so today's marketplace is rediscovering the wines of Cadiz with similar joy to the Romans 2000 years ago. 
 
These are my solid reasons for visiting Spain but there are many more. What is your favourite?
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Tourism in Spain - why aren't they thinking ahead.

A rant about tourism
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, October 4, 2020 2:13:00 PM Categories: Andalusia Economy electric vehicles Envrionment Spain Spanish Spanish culture Sustainability technology

 

I received an official looking letter through the post this week. You know the sort, covered in barcodes and government logos. Roughly translating the label on the outside of envelope, it was from "The Institute of Statistics and Maps of Andalusia Council of Economic Transformation, Knowledge and Universities'. While mouthing the words represented by the three letter abbreviation 'WTF' to myself, I opened it up to find I'd been one of 5000 lucky people to be selected to take part in a survey about tourism. I say 'lucky', but reading the small print suggests that completing the survey is compulsory. I'd hate to be clapped in irons for not filling out a form, so I hastily took to their website to submit my responses online.
 
My first though was that I'd been singled out for selection as what they term over here as a 'residential tourist', which always makes me think we're regarded as foreigners who live here but they are expected to up sticks and go home at some point. But not so. This was a survey intended for Spanish folk, asking about their travel habits over the last few years. As the questions moved from past to the present  they were clearly designed to figure out what affect Covid has had on people's ability and desire to go on holiday.
 
I've read elsewhere in the Spanish press that certain bodies within the Spanish travel industry are pushing to refocus away from the international traveller towards the national internal market. I think this is quite a mistake. The whole point about international visitors is they bring wealth into the country that didn't exist here before. Encouraging internal tourism, trying to get folk to move around within the country, is only going to move around wealth that is already here, though clearly with the intention of sweeping more of it into the pockets of the folk behind all-powerful hotel lobby who are probably the authors of this initiative. In case you haven't come across the hotel lobby before, they were pushing to ban Airbnb a few years ago, alleging they were stealing trade from hotels across Spain. They didn't succeed but they arm-twisted government to bring in stiffer regulations to private landlords wishing to rent out the homes to tourists.
 
Tourism in Spain is in my experience a myopic, inward looking affair anyway. As I understand it, people need a degree in tourism to work in a tourist office but it doesn't seem to obligate them to speak English or any other commonly spoken European language. I've personally visited at least a dozen tourist offices here where Spanish is the only language spoken. Locally, strategy and planning to attract tourists seems frankly uninspired, seemingly going little further than adorning the old town with flower pots and slapping a bit of paint here and there. Olvera has its own official tourism website which is fittingly blank http://turismolvera.com Regionally and nationally, efforts to promote tourism seem to be equally parochial and archaic. I had a flick through the latest government report from the ministry of tourism, which was lamenting the demise of Thomas Cook and boasted of strengthening ties with the airline industry. To be fair I suppose, they didn't see Covid was going to come along and upset the apple cart. Elsewhere in the report though, there is a heavy emphasis on ecotourism and one gets the impression they are trying to attract a 'certain class' of client with a preferred profile. This is evidenced in the official Instagram feed of the Spain's Tourist board @Spain where images of cathedrals and churches outnumber beaches by about ten to one and gastronomy, nightlife or even wildlife pics are near non-existent. It's almost as if they are purposefully trying to attract the sort of tourists who do a lot of brass-rubbings!
 
My mission here today isn't to totally trash the Spanish tourist industry, but I would like to drop an idea their way. I did so at the end or the survey when they asked me for any other thoughts and I shall relay what I told them here. (Sorry to regular readers that I'm rehashing an idea I put forward in an earlier blog post but I think it's perfectly OK to plagiarise myself in the promotion of a valuable idea!)
 
The EU has in sight the phasing out of the internal combustion engine. Diesel engines are set to go by 2030 and petrol will probably go soon after, possibly as early as 2035.  (https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/end-fossil-fuel-car-eu-agenda)
 
This means that road traffic by tourists from northern Europe will be transitioning to electric over the next ten to fifteen years. 80% of tourist traffic in the past has been by plane, however Covid has decimated the air industry and the future of fossil-fuelled flight is almost as precarious as that of the petrol engine.
 
If however you try to map a route to drive an electric vehicle though Spain today you will find your journey is dictated by the paucity of charging stations in rural areas. Overlay the charging stations on a map of Spain and the image resembles the wheel of a bicycle. There is a dense hub in Madrid in the centre, then a fairly dense ring around the cities and towns in coastal Spain. In the interior of Spain is like an electric desert. 
 
One could argue that this will improve organically as the number of EVs sold in Spain increases over time. It seems to me though that the essences of attracting tourists, especially to a small town like Olvera, is by providing the transport infrastructure they need. If we had a Tesla Supercharger in Olvera it would be the only one between Madrid and Malaga. Imagine how many affluent northern European Tesla owners would see the charger on the map and plot a route to head through here on their way to the coast. Until another charger appeared somewhere else in this electric desert, this would be practically all of them!!
 
This is the way towns grow. My home town is Surbiton in Surrey. Before 1838 it was little more than a hamlet, at least compared with the neighbouring town of Kingston-upon-Thames. Kingston was an important stop on the route from London to the naval base at Portsmouth back in the day when Britain ruled the waves. As such, it had a well established and lucrative coaching house industry. When it was proposed that a newfangled railway line from London to Southampton would be running through Kingston, the coaching industry were up-in-arms that they were going to lose trade, so lobbied the council to reject the scheme. The line was instead re-routed through Surbiton. A station was built there in 1838, from which the South London commuter belt grew. The town never looked back. ( Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surbiton#History )
 
I have heard that attempts to install charging stations in rural towns in this part of Spain have met opposition. I don't know for certain but it wouldn't surprise me if this came from petrol station owners who are worried about losing trade. I hope not. I hope they see the future belongs to renewables and don't use their influence at a local level to discourage the development of the economy of towns like ours. As I mentioned in the blog post Spain's Problem With Rural Depopulation ( http://andaluciasteve.com/spains-problem-with-rural-depopulation.aspx ), towns like Olvera need every bit of help they can get to stay afloat. We should be lobbying like crazy to make Olvera an 'Electric Vehicle Friendly' town. Opinion!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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The fallen. People who have moved to Spain and later returned to the UK.

What makes the difference between those who stick it out and those who don't.
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, July 26, 2020 3:45:00 PM Categories: Brexit language Spain Spanish
 
A few thoughts this week on 'The Fallen' (no I'm not talking about contestants who didn't make it in the Hunger Games, though sometimes it feels like that) I refer to those expats who moved to Spain later to give up and return to Britain. Sorry if it is a bit of a gloomy post but it's not all sun, sea and sangria over here!
 
This is a topic that has hounded me as I've known quite a few folk over the years, many of whom were good friends who have upped-sticks and moved back to blighty. Some of them have seemed really committed to Spain and have really surprised me with their decisions to return whereas with others, I've known they wouldn't stay the course as soon as I met them. Anyway, no names no pack drill but I'll outline a few case studies here to try and dig into the reasons people join the ranks of 'The Fallen'.
 
Certainly in the case of the ones I've known immediately that are not suited for expat life, one group that sticks out are the spenders. These are people who sell their property in the UK and find themselves with more money than they've ever had in their lives but instead of investing wisely, just 'spend spend spend'. One family I knew burned through their savings in one mad year, eating and drinking out every night and filling a rented house with a ton of things they didn't need from ridiculously expensive TVs to quad bikes. They seemed to reach a tipping point where they realised they need to work but couldn't find anything to do because they didn't know the language and ended up flying back home with their tale between their legs.
 
The language barrier manifests itself in other ways than making work hard to find. Several elderly couples I've known had an imbalance where one partner knew the language really well and the other couldn't pick it up at all, leading to the linguaphile acting as a translator for his or her partner. In the instance that this partner dies, it can make it much more difficult for the remaining partner to cope. Several people I knew that found themselves in this position gave up and returned to Britain.
 
Family ties are often behind people's decision to bail out on their lives in Spain. It's quite common for parents to undertake the move to Spain after their children have grown up and all they're leaving behind is an empty nest. The problem arises when grandchildren start to appear. The desire to be close to the grandchildren so as not to miss out on their growing up is clearly a strong draw, but also the grandparents seem to feel a renewed sense of purpose, a feeling that they should be helping out and baby-sitting etc. This suddenly makes a life in in a deck chair sipping sundowners seem a selfish waste of one's life.
 
I've long held the view that there is a knack to emigrating successfully which is to get the goal right in the first place. I seriously think a lot of people imagine living in Spain is going to be a endless holiday, which is completely the wrong mindset. Unless you are of retiring age, few of us are lucky enough to be sufficiently financially secure to avoid the need to work. Yet on message boards and forums I often see questions from folk of working age with kids planning to move over with little or no idea of what they are going to do to support themselves. A classic fantasy-fallacy I've seen is from people with zero experience of the pub trade saying they are thinking of opening a bar, with no idea of what hard work and little reward this entails. One bar owner here told me he was afraid to open his letter box for fear of receiving yet another unexpected bill, such as the one from the council demanding payment for the health inspectors that are required by law to inspect his kitchen! Folk who come over here without having a strong income strategy are generally doomed to give up and go home at some point.
 
Even with a work plan, I think its prudent to lower one's expectations here compared with Britain. Wages are generally lower here and demand for goods and services are smaller. Spain was hit very hard by the 2008 crash and there is no social security net to fall back on. Property sales came to a halt in 2008 putting many real estate agents immediately out of work and the construction trade, albeit slower, came to a similar collapse. With less work to go around the competition forced wages down, particularly in black money which forced many trades people to repatriate. One competent plumber told me his reason for returning was 'he was fed up of being poor' a phrase you would rarely hear from a plumber working in the UK even in the midst of a recession.
 
While I've seen a lot of people rushing to escape the UK for Spain before the January 31st 2021 deadline, curiously I've known several people who have returned to the UK because of Brexit. While I've asked several of them what has prompted this decision, I'm not sure the answers they have given me are completely satisfactory. One chap expressed concerns that the healthcare cost would rise for him, which is fair enough I suppose, but other reasons people have given me have been less convincing. I suspect some people were just living 'under the radar' and would have to become registered tax-payers if they stayed.
 
Finally one thing I've seen many times is that couples with relationship problems often move to Spain thinking it will be a new start that will magically fix everything. At some point down the line however it becomes clear that far from being a remedy, the battle of coming to terms with the new environment, making new social contacts and probably spending more time together than they ever had in the UK puts more stress on their relationship. Invariably a split happens and one or both partners end up on the plane home.
 
My advice then for people looking to make the move to Spain is look before you leap!
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Views on Spanish Cuisine

What's the inside track on the food we eat in Spain
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, June 7, 2020 3:03:00 PM Categories: Cusine Spanish Spanish culture
I'm on comfy ground writing about food. I like it. I eat some every day. In fact I'd struggle to live without it. So here I'm going to dispel a few myths about Spanish nosh and probably make myself unpopular with the tourist board into the bargain.
 
Or maybe not. In the village in Murcia where I lived until 2009 there was a chap who worked in the tourist office called Santi, who was born and raised in the Basque country. While chatting one day I asked him what he missed about being so far away from home.
 
"The food" he said. His face was a picture as his mind drifted away in deep culinary reverie. Now I'd heard the reputation of Basque cuisine first hand since my neighbour Manolo and his wife had not long returned from a gastronomic coach trip touring eateries from Galicia to San Sebastian. Santi confirmed what they'd told me, that the food in the North of Spain is a cut above the food in the South. He put forward a bold theory that the high temperature experienced by the South of Spain for much of the year was a deterrent against cooking. Who wants to be stuck in a hot kitchen all day? In fact the kitchen is often purposefully kept away from the house. I'd been working with an estate agent at the time and I'd noticed a trend for houses to have 'summer' kitchens, often in a separate building. One old lady giving me a tour around her property showed me a pristine kitchen that looked as it had been totally unused, and probably it hadn't, because she then took me to another hut four doors up the street where she said she did most of her daily cooking!
 
Another consequence of Santi's conjecture is that simplicity is a common characteristic of the culinary art in the South. Generally the dishes here are prepared with as little fuss as possible, again as a conservation measure in the battle with the heat. I'll cover a few dishes I've encountered while living here, all of which will be noted for their simplicity.
 
The first thing I was taught to cook here (by my neighbour Jose - he of the Swimming Pool Saga post from last week) was chicken in garlic. If you've not had this you must try it. The same process can be used to cook rabbit and works just as well. Fry the chicken in oil on a medium heat for 15 minutes until it is nearly done, then near the end of the cooking process, throw in a handful of chopped garlic. Let the garlic cook for a few more minutes, then just as it threatens to brown, pour in half a cup of vinegar. As if by magic the vinegar boils, taking the garlic flavour into the meat and leaving a dry saucy residue. Plate it up and eat. Couldn't be simpler! I understand this technique was popular in Portugal, and was taken by Portuguese sailors to India during the Age of Discovery where it was adopted and developed into Vindaloo (from Carne de vinha d'alhos meaning meat with wine and garlic).
 
Another friend gave me a good lesson in cooking garlic prawns (Gambas al Ajillo). You can Google the recipe. It's pretty simple and widely available online. Tips I got from her was that she heated the individual sized clay dishes (cazuelitas) on the stove top - I'd always assumed they were heated in the oven. Also she used the cheapest olive oil called suave or refinado. I thought it would be all extra virgin but no, with the strong flavour of the garlic, the prawns and the cayenne pepper pods, you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference between the flavour of the oils so use the cheapest!  
 
Of all the dishes Spain is famous for however, seafood paella must be the best known. Strangely I don't think I've ever had it once since I moved here. This is probably because I live inland. Don't get me wrong, they get the paella pans out here and cook rice in it, but I've rarely seen fishy ingredients. Rabbit yes, vegetables yes, chicken yes, snails oh yes!! Again, it's an easy way to cook and a a rabbit and a kilo of rice will feed ten people from a one metre pan. Rabbit with rice (arroz con conejo) was therefore a popular choice during the summer fiestas of the towns in and around the North West of Murcia. Another popular fiesta treat is tortilla in bread. I found the doubling of carbs in having potatoes in a baguette quite heavy going but they serve them by the hundreds at the local feria. 
 
Tray of chicken straight from the bread oven
 
If you've never been to a Spanish feria, these are local events where a town or part of a city takes three or four days to party, with food and drink forming a big part of the celebrations. My best feria food-fest was in an office I worked in. The boss's extended family turned up in number to the office and on this particular day they brought with them a huge kitchen tray, about a metre wide and a metre and a half long. They filled the tray (pictured) with dozens of chicken quarters, added potatoes, tomatoes, lemons, onions, garlic, oregano and lashings of olive oil. Then half a dozen people ceremoniously picked up the tray and proudly marched it to the local bakers where it was cooked in the bread oven. I don't think I've eaten anything quite so delicious made from such basic ingredients! This has influenced the way I roast a chicken - now I always add the same ingredients and it tastes much better. 
 
One disappointing note about the cuisine in Southern Spain is the lack of vegetables, making it tricky for vegetarians and vegans to eat out. I find many restaurants think of meat/fish first, then add chips and maybe a little salad by way of a garnish. If it's a posh place and you're lucky you might get some goo that consists of a few varieties of seasonal veg boiled to death in tomato sauce for a couple of hours so you can barely identify what you're eating. Bread is served with everything, which together with the obsession with chips and dearth of vegetable makes me very sceptical about the merits of the so called 'Mediterranean Diet'. As someone explained to me recently, the chap who came up with the notion (Ancel Keys) did so after visiting the island of Crete, noting how fit and well-aged the population was. Apparently he visited the island during lent so had a rather skewed view of what was being eaten and he neglected to take into account his visit took place just after WW2, a period of harsh austerity when food was scarce and the population aged artificially because of the younger members of society being killed in the fighting. Untroubled by such facts, Keys got it into his head that the diet was the cause and went back to America creating his famed Seven Nation study to prove his idea, the results of which have since been widely discredited. However the myth that the food in this part of the world is some kind of panacea persists to this day.
 
If however your appetite has been whetted by all this talk of grub, I suppose it would be fitting of me to offer you something for afters to finish with. Many of the desserts in Spain are things you would find elsewhere, ice cream, flans, rice-pudding etc. One that was new to me which I took a liking to was fresh peaches soaked over night in red wine - yum! By experimentation I found this works best by adding a little brandy too and by soaking the peaches in the fridge it makes the perfect supper for a hot summer evening.
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The Swimming Pool Saga

This is the story of a swimming pool. Moreover it illustrates how folk work together to get things done in Spain.
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, May 31, 2020 12:00:00 AM Categories: Spain Spanish Spanish culture
 
The missus and I bought an old farm house in the latter part of 2003. One of the things that drew us to the property was a walled courtyard of about 15 metres by 15 metres which afforded us the opportunity to sunbathe in the nuddy. 
 
Towards the end of the following spring it started to get really hot. By the end of May the wife got the unshakeable notion in her head that a swimming pool would be required to get us through the summer. We made enquiries and got the same answer everywhere, that a proper sunken pool starts at two million pesetas (about 12,000 euros). Spain joined the euro on the 1st January 1999 but to this day, many Spanish people evaluate large purchases such as houses and cars in terms of pesetas. Curiously in the run up to the changeover to the euro, Spanish car-dealers did a roaring trade in Mercs and Beamers as panicked savers snapped up luxury cars as a way to launder the black money under their mattresses. I was told Murcia sold more 'Berliners' than anywhere in the world that year, a fact which I've been unable to verify but it sounds highly likely!
 
Anyway getting back to the story, 12,000 euros was way over budget so we looked at alternatives. We hit on the idea that an above-ground pool would not only be a cheaper solution but a quicker and easier one. We could easily fit one into the courtyard and by not having to dig down (which would require re-routing sewage and water pipes) we would make life a lot easier for ourselves. At this point we enlisted the help of our Spanish neighbour Jose who went with us to the shop to choose a pool. Involving Jose turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Although he worked in fruit canning and juicing factory, like all Spanish men he seemed to have innate knowledge of the building trade. What I knew about mixing cement at that time could have been etched on the head of a pin, so I was very glad when it became apparent that we needed a concrete base for the pool, that Jose volunteered to help build it. 
 
My wife unsurprisingly went for the largest pool we could comfortably fit in the space available. I can't remember the exact price but it was in the region of 1500 euros, a far more reasonable figure. It was roughly eight by four metres in size. There was a large steel skirt that went around the perimeter of the pool which was supported by metal buttresses, so we marked out on the ground a kind of 8x4m rectangle with legs every metre or so for the supports. Though the courtyard seemed level to the eye, it dropped by about 30 centimetres from one end to the other. This meant our base was 30 centimetres deep at one end, which required far more concrete than I had expected.
 
Jose led the work, turning up in his van with a cement bath, shovels, hoes and buckets etc. All this was new to me. We began by creating a mould with old bits of wood that followed the design we made on the ground, then Jose showed us how to mix the concrete. If you're not familiar with a cement bath it is a poor man's cement mixer, a metal tray about two metres long and a metre wide having the depth and appearance of a squared-off bathtub. The idea is to mix the concrete by using a hoe, pulling it backwards a forwards to bring all the ingredients together. We soon found it was back-breaking work, especially since it was already reaching 30 degrees at nine in the morning.
 
We all took turns mixing the bath and carrying bucket after bucket to fill the mould in the yard. It took the three of us the best part of a day but we finally had a base to be proud of. As we surveyed our work, Jose said he would return at the weekend with his family to erect the structure of the pool. It didn't sink in when he said 'the family' but because the steel skirt was so heavy it would take more than the three of us to manhandle it into place.
 
The Saturday came and several cars pulled up in the drive. Sons, brothers, sisters, in-laws, aunties and uncles teamed out of the vehicles, many of whom we'd never met despite having been to many social events at Jose's country house. There must have been twenty or thirty people, all cheerfully helping the foreigners build a pool. We trooped into the courtyard and unrolled the massive metal skirt. Even with Jose's skillful direction it took a good half an hour to manoeuvre the huge steel structure into place, with everyone holding their section and shuffling back and forth to get the perfect fit. Then we started to bolt on the side supports. It took a couple of hours until everyone could tentatively let go of the skirt and start the other tricky task of fitting the giant pool liner. The thing that most struck me throughout this process was how all these people, some of them complete strangers, were not only volunteering their time, but all the while they were happy, joking and generally having fun! I've since come to love this feature of the Spanish people. There should be a word for it but I can't think of one. What's a word for the joy shared in the co-operation with others? Answers on a postcard!
 
As soon as the job was done they all disappeared. I was frantically thanking them, offering beer and money but they were having none of it. They just smiled, waved goodbye jumped in their cars and left, completely without ceremony. It was this kind of event that often causes me to reflect on why I'm so extraordinarily fortunate to live in Spain. They are truly remarkable people!
 
Jose had one more gift of knowledge to impart. He said if we just turned on the tap and filled the pool it would cost a fortune. 32 cubic meters of water would take us over the limit of our monthly quota. I didn't even realise we had a monthly quota, but the way the water company prices the water is based on volume tiers, so as long as you keep consumption within the lowest tier the water is cheapest. Jump a tier and the price doubles. Jump another tier and it doubles again. His advice was that since it was near the end of the month, half fill the pool, then wait until the next month to top it up. I later checked the small print on the back of a water bill and he was correct, so we had to wait a week before the pool was finally full but then we were off to the races.
 
I offered to pay Jose for his help but he of course declined. I later repaid him with favours such as videoing his son's wedding and converting his old family videos of previous weddings and communions from VHS to DVD . This is the way things work in Spain, sort of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", though one is never made to feel obligated or be in anyone's debt. It's a great way to live!
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