...anyway about the Spanish

We've lived amongst them now for 4 months. We've eaten their food, drank their wine, beer, mojito's, tinto verano´s etc. Walked their streets, driven on their roads, swam at their beaches, been burned by their sun ...and the odd shopkeeper. We've laughed with them and at them, been helped and hindered by them, been beaten by them (Holland only) ..ah those funky Spaniards, so what do we think so far?

First let me say this for a bit of clarification. There are those who come to visit Spain, see the monuments, churches etc, eat the tapas, slurp the wine and then get back on the bus, lets call them type A. Then there are those who come to live in Spain, not for Spain but specifically for the sunshine and the cheap booze. Let´s call them type B. There are those who for work reasons might have to spend time here albeit temporary and already have an exit strategy in place, type C. Then there are those who have come here to live, embrace the culture, start a new life, find jobs, learn the language etc, type D. We're a couple of double Ds.

Type A never have to have any dealings with the Spanish apart from the bus driver, guide and the person in the souvenir shop. They are protected from having to speak the language, order food or try and negotiate the narrow streets with a map they printed off Google. Type B also never have to deal with the Spanish except the barmen who will pour them a warm beer, or the waiters who can serve up a full English breakfast 24 hours a day, karaoke machine operators and local police, who all speak English with British accents and these are confined to the Costa's, or ghettos if you like. Type C have everything done for them before they arrive to work here, visas, accommodation, residency papers, bank accounts etc. Really don't have to learn the language if they choose not to or eat a morsel of Spanish food ever.

Then there is us, the D's. Our 'local' friends... meaning people we have met here, made up of Dutch, Irish, American, British and even some Spanish have all marvelled at how much we have achieved in the 4 months since we landed in Sevilla. Indeed we have achieved many things. But we do look at them with some amusement, or delusion. All these things could have been achieved in four weeks anywhere else. Things take time, you need endless amounts of patience, tolerance, self control, anger management, more Spanish than we speak and lots of time. Heaps of it in fact. Here´s a few small examples. One of the first things you need to get when you arrive in Spain and you intend to spend time living here is an NIE number. You go to the offices, you fill out a form (hopefully the correct one for there are many many forms) take a ticket and wait. As you sit and wait for your number to come up on the wall ticket number display thing, you realise that you are number 410 and the display says 14. There are plenty of people also waiting, certainly not 400! After about half an hour the machine has clicked over to 15. A rough calculation says it will take about a year and a half to get seen. What you have to actually do is get up, walk into the room as if it was your turn and sit at a desk and hand over the crumpled ticket. In this room of about 10 desks, 5 are occupied, one is actually doing something, the other four are just sitting there, arms folded looking into space. Not even playing solitaire or online poker and pretending to be busy. Second was the social services office and Mags' attempt to get a social security insurance number. More forms, take a ticket and wait with the rest of the em..waiting people. After about half an hour a woman comes out from the offices to announce... anyone with a ticket starting with G, find something to do for the next hour because I am off to have my coffee! No one got upset, no riot, they just continued as they were, some drifted outside for a cigarette. Try that at your local office in Australia or Holland and see what happens.

If you are fortunate enough in Spain to have a job in the civil service, you have a job for life and no one is ever going to question whether you work or drink coffee all day. We are still coming to terms with the attitude of the locals. We knew before hand that things were very relaxed here. I don't think there is a word for stress in the Spanish language because that is a place no one here has ever been. They have what they call here a traditional outlook on life, they like how things are and have been since Franco got into power and many believe he still is and not dead over 35 years. We just call it backward. There have been some attempts to drag Spain into 21st century Europe, but this has met with too much opposition, mostly fear of change. We deal with the obstacles and the pig headedness with a smile between clenched teeth and the gentle stream of visitors keep us sane ...for the moment.

Take care

M&P

Get out of town...

Andalusia, this place they call the real Spain in the in the seventeen autonomous communities in the Kingdom of Spain, an historical nationality, 8.3 million souls (official) and a few million pommy ex-pats along the costas (un-official), along with the few scattered inland like us. The capital of Andalusia is called Sevilla. Currently the hottest place on the planet with the sun beating down on us from early morning till late at night which time the general population has turned crispy and crackly.

But what has this to do with being a month late with this blog? Ok, well not a lot, but, we did get out of town and down to the coast to slightly cooler temperatures and relief from the daily grind of long breakfasts, siestas, tapas bars, hanging out at the local attractions and monuments (note: when you´re a registered local you don´t pay into anything that tourists do ...handy for us and the budget) and generally trying to stay in the shade or shady places.

The coast is about an hour and a half away, Cadiz and Huelva are the main towns. Cadiz is beautiful, old and one of the most densely populated cities in Europe for it´s size and also home to the Spanish Navy, formerly the Armada, you know, tall ships, invasions, gold coins, pirates etc etc... Anyway, we hired a car over the past few weekends and ventured south in search of sand and surf. This is what we found.

Cadiz is lovely, old, interesting and great beaches. So we´re told but didn´t get to the sand that day we were there. Huelva is a bit more industrrial, more of a port city than Cadiz which was useful for Christopher Columbus spreading his Spanishness throughout the Western world.

Inland from there we stopped in a village called Vejer http://www.vejer.com/ a typical ´white´village but the most beautiful we had seen. If you were to sit in your garden sipping a mojito, listening to Paco de Lucia, chewing on a cigarello, tapas of olives and serrano jamon under your almond blossom tree (bliss) and trying to imagine in your mind the perfect Spanish whitewashed village, perched precariously on the side of a hill, then Vejer is it. So far by a long shot, our favourite Spanish town. If we get kicked out of Sevilla for complaining too much about the heat (que calor), then we will slip quietly into Vejer.

Anyway, back to reality. World cup fever has gripped the nation. The country are convinced, at the time of writing this, that Spain will annihilate the Germans and however, Mags has other ideas and believes that Holland will take the cup, I tend to agree.

This is the end of this report. Will add photos tonight and another report tomorrow. Hope you are all well...and keeping cool :)

M&P