Posts Tagged ‘living’

Feliz año / Happy new year!

We didn’t have Jools Holland grinning at midnight, instead, at about twenty to, Cova remembered the grapes. “We’ve got to prepare them,” she said. So a cup for each person with twelve grapes was produced and Liz got busy with a toothpick to deseed hers, Cova meticulously peeled her dozen. Julio and I scorned such shortcuts, we would eat the whole thing, pips, skin and all.

At five to midnight (bearing in mind we hadn’t actually reached dessert yet, having just finished the main course of roast veg and greek dips) we turned on the telly to find ‘The Channel Five Angels’ Marta Fernández, Sara Carbonero y Pilar Rubio counting down to midnight in front of the Puerto del sol in Madrid (a rather warmer version of the Trafalgar Square bash). On the stroke of twelve, a little pac man and a dozen dots appeared on the screen and the counting and eating began…

Presenters of channel five

Definitely not Jools Holland

I knew of this tradition, of course, but hadn’t realised that everybody would be doing it, or that the tableful of celebrities eating grapes would be replayed, and still available on the channel five website.

The other new year’s tradition we had done was the day before. The walking group had invited everyone to their headquarters to wish each other a happy new year and they’d put on a buffet spread which finished with the Roscón de los Reyes, this is basically a big ring cake with candied fruit and fruit paste inside. In the Roscón there are two little gifts… a figurine (representing Jesus) and a bean… Liz got the figurine, and a (paper) crown. Ana, the secretary of the group got the bean, which means she has to pay for the Roscón next year!

Rosca de los reyes

El roscón de reyes

After the grape eating we went for a stroll, ending up in a cafe at around two. The night was just getting started for the young Ovetense who traditionally take advantage of the new year celebrations to tog themselves up very smartly. Being lightweights, we headed home at around three. A pleasant start to the new year.

No tuvimos Jools Holland sonriendo abiertamente a medianoche, en su lugar, a las doce menos veinte recordó Cova las uvas. -Tenemos que prepararlas- dijo ella. Así que producimos un vaso de doce uvas para cada persona y Liz empezó trabajando con un palito para quitar las pepitas, Cova las pelaba meticulosamente la docena suya. Julio i yo desdeñamos tal atajos, las comeríamos enteras, pepitas, piel y todo.

A las doce menos cinco (tener en cuente que todavia no habíamos llegado al postre, justo acabó el plato principal, de verduras asadas y salsas griegas) la encendimos la tele en que encontramos  ”Los ángeles de telecinco” Marta  Fernández, Sara Carbonero y Pilar Rubio quien contaban para atrás hasta medianoche delante de la Puerta del sol en Madrid (una versión mas cálido de la fiesta en la plaza de Trafalgar en Londres). Al dar la medianoche aparecieron un pequeño pacman y doce puntos en la pantalla y empezó el contar y el comer.

Ya lo sabía la costumbre, pero no me había dado cuenta que lo haría todo el mundo, o que la mesa de los famosos habría una repetición instantánea, y queda todavía disponible en la pagina de canal cinco.

Hicimos otra costumbre de la temporada el día anterior. El grupo Naranco había invitado a todos los socios a despedir el año en la sede. Prepararon unos embutidos y un roscón de reyes que es un bizcocho en la forma de un anillo, que lleva frutas confitadas y dulce (tradicionalmente se come el día de los reyes pero como el Christmas Pudding vale en casi cualquier día de las fiestas). Dentro el roscón hay dos regalos, una figura y una faba.  Liz cogió la figura (y la corona de papel), Ana, la secretaria del grupo, cogió la faba, lo que quiere decir que ella tendrá que pagar el roscón el año que viene.

Después de comer las uvas salimos para dar una vuelta. Acabamos en un café a las dos, la noche estaba empezando para los ovetenses jovenes quienes aprovechan tradicionalmente la nochevieja para vestirse muy elegante. Como no somos muy dados a ir a los bares, tiramos para casa a las 3. Un principio del año muy agradable.

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Radiator

It started small enough. Just an occasional dripping sound every now and then. At first I thought it was coming from the bathroom sink, which does drip, but it didn’t sound the same. Subconsciously I must have recognised that because I didn’t feel like I’d resolved the problem. A few days later I´m sitting at the computer and I hear it again, this time I don´t rest after seeing that the bathroom tap is not dripping and I go looking for the source of the sound. It turns out to be the radiator in the hall, a small, old-fashioned cast-iron thing. It’s dripping slowly so I put a bowl underneath it, tie a cloth round it to direct the small amount of water and resolve to call the landlord the following morning.

woman fixing a radiator

How fixing a radiator should go... if you're from the past

I realise something’s wrong in the morning when I sleepily stand in the hall and notice that my feet are wet. The leak had got bigger overnight and when I removed the cloth I saw that it was coming from a tiny hole in the middle of one of the sections. I went to find the portera and see if we could turn off the heating in our flat but she said that it would mean draining the entire system and that would cost €70 but here, she said, passing me an allen key, you can isolate it with this. As it turned out I couldn’t, it’s too old. There’s no isolator. So I fashioned a plug from some cork and duct tape and called the landlord. He said he’d get someone to phone me and arrange a time. Three days later (he travels a lot) I got back in touch with him and said that no one had called. At this point the tray I had under the radiator was filling up every eight hours (which gave me enough time to sleep at least). We finally managed to track down Ariel the plumber and arrange a visit. Ariel turned out to be an Argentine so we chatted as he removed my duct tape repairs and then stopped chatting to let him whistle through his teeth and say that the radiator was jodido (knackered / screwed in polite parlance). The portera had told me that the system was due to be drained anyway at the end of May so Ariel said he’d try and fix it temporarily and then plan to replace it then. He made the most rubbish attempt at fixing it, the paste he was using didn’t stick, then it didn’t harden, and then when it did harden it didn’t stop the water coming out. We ended up removing his repair and putting mine back. Fast forward to today, he arrives ready to remove the radiator, and then spends two hours on undoing a bolt, finally succumbing to the inevitable and wandering off, only to return with two mates to give him a hand, coincidentally, at this point I get a phone call from another plumber (probably the one we tried to get weeks ago) trying to arrange when he could come… this confused me somewhat. After removing the old radiator Ariel and chums head off to buy a new one, and come back this evening to fit it. Whereupon they realize they need another part. So at the last count it’s taken three people six hours to change a radiator. And they still have to come back in the morning to finish the job. Still, he’s a nice enough chap, I’m just glad he’s not charging me by the hour (or at all).

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There’s an exam for that…

Abstract building

Pretty near the hospital

“How’s are you?” I asked, sitting down and getting my books out of my bag as the doctors put their white coats on and stuffed their pockets with scraps of paper, reference books and stethoscopes.

“It’s not a good day.” They said, “How do you say despedida in English?”

“Depends what you mean, can you explain a little more?”

“Yesterday some doctors were despedida’d and sent home.”

“Fired or made redundant?”

So it turns out that yesterday, with no warning fifty-some doctors were made redundant. This was a bit of a shock. Many had more than ten years service in the hospital. So now they face having to move to another part of Spain to find work, because all over Asturias the lack of tax revenue due to the economic downturn, la crisis means that public sector workers are facing a difficult future.

One of the problems is that to get a job in the public sector you have to do exams called oposiciones or opos. That’s for pretty much any public sector job. You want to be a rheumatologist, there’s an exam; a teacher, exam;  a council worker, exam; police, prison guard, you name it, there’s an exam.

Except when there isn’t.

In the hospital, in that department, there haven’t been any opos for fifteen years because there are no available places. If you get the top marks in an opo, you get the job you want and it’s for life. Which is why so many Spanish folk are preparing for them (I know half a dozen people who are in the process of doing opo preparation, there’s a whole industry of academies and tutors out there). If there are no opos you may still have a job but it’s an interina, a temporary job and you can be tossed out like these doctors were (with no more than one month’s pay).

Oposiciones were instituted, I’ve been told, in response to the old way of doing things, which was to know the right people, and to have the right politics (and it was right being the Franco era) in order to get a job. The exams were supposed to bring about a certain egalitarianism in candidate selection. Which it did. But then it went a bit far according to some Spanish friends, and the whole job-for-life at the end of it seems to encourage a certain lethargy  in those who have achieved that holy grail.

So to be a doctor, first you need to get the degree, then do an exam called the MIR in order to get onto a speciality (if you do well you can pick your speciality, if you don’t then you’re headed for wherever they tell you, you didn’t want to be  a GP? Tough.). then you have to complete the residency requirements and then to progress from temporary contracts to permanent, the oposición. Up until that point you have no more job security than anyone else, and, in these times of crisis, it seems, less.

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Time for…

Shaft…. john shaft… erm… Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Time is different in Spain. Most people know about the customary late-nightness but it goes further than that. I was asking some students about what they did at the weekend and their answers were confusing. They went to a party which began on Friday afternoon and finished on Friday morning. So we discussed it a little:

Madrugada, often translated as early morning (sometimes dawn) is often used with what we would consider the day before, so Friday Madrugada is for us, Saturday Morning (between midnight and 3 or 4am). Although it is commonly used for early morning as late as 10pm (such as today, when Liz met someone at the shops they said what an early riser she was (que madrugadora!)

Mañana, also morning, usually refers to the time from dawn to lunch, which could be 2pm or later, so sometimes I get confused when students say good morning.

Tarde, afternoon, which runs from after lunch to dinner, so until 10pm. When something starts in the afternoon here, it’s often at 6pm.

Noche, night, usually from 9 or 10pm to midnight (after which it’s madrugada). The prime time for TV programmes is 10pm, the equivalent of newsnight begins at around 12:30am.

It takes a long time to get used to the changes, it’s still surprising to hear our neighbours chatting away and watching telly at 2am on a week-night… according to the newspapers, the Spanish sleep less than any other nation, because after those late nights, a lot of them still get up and go to work for 8am.

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Wine

Minimalist wine Originally uploaded by Bald Monk.

The other day Liz came back from the supermarket, I had rustled something up from the veg in the kitchen and some meatballs from the market.

“I got the expensive wine today”

Oh? I asked, how much?

“€1.80″

We have both noticed people buying cheap wines in the supermarket, but there’s an inbuilt aversion, it seems, to buying wine that would be less than £1.50 a bottle. So many other people can’t be wrong (well, they can of course, but when it comes to wine the risks are pretty small). So: Liz had spotted one of the neighbours buying a couple of bottles of this €1.80 wine and decided to have some too. And it was pretty good. Admittedly the meatballs had more garlic in than a garlic factory on garlic delivery day, so our taste buds might not have been in the very best of tasting condition, but the wine went down pretty well.

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Paper chase

Part Of The Queue Originally uploaded by semantico.

Well, after the ease of my initial brush with Spanish beaurocracy, Liz didn’t have such a simple time of it. She needed a social security number to get a contract to work legally. The academy’s accountant prepared the form and the director gave it to her and told her where to take it. At the social security department she was told she’d need an empadronamiento, and directed her to the appropriate building. This sent us scurrying to the dictionary.

The empadronamiento is the piece of paper saying that you’re recorded in the padron, the electoral roll or the census. Now I didn’t have to do that (for whatever reason… I’m not sure why not) but Liz, being dutiful, and needing her social security number, headed off to see the wizard, sorry, the census bloke. Who promptly told her that she needed to show him the contract from the flat to empadronarsela (to ‘encensus’ her). The contract on our flat had run out so we emailed the landlady and told her the situation, asking for a new contract.

The landlady was not impressed. She was very clear in her desire for us not to show a contract to the council, citing a friend, who had had nothing but trouble since this had happened to her. Reading between the lines, I guess she’s not paying certain taxes that she ought to be paying. Which is not uncommon, according to my payslips over the summer I wasn’t being paid as much as I actually was. She said we only needed something proving our address, like a gas bill or something.

So we wandered back to the council bloke and I took along my social security receipts, my medical registration, my foreigner’s certification, all of which had the address on. The bloke didn’t seem like he was going to accept any of them, and kept saying we needed a bill or a contract, we kept pleasantly saying we didn’t have them and these had our addresses and smiling like idiots. Eventually he gave in and stamped the form (twice), before printing out the two empadronamientos, stamping each of them and signing them in the margin (otherwise they’re not valid).

Then Liz had to go back to the social security place and get them to get the number, but this time it worked flawlessly.

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Can-you-ist

We had planned to go on the Friday, but due to the rain we postponed it for a day and so on Saturday we poled up in the bus to Ariondas (gateway to the Picos) ready to do a descent of the river Sella by canoe. A few thousand other people had the same idea.

The descent of the Sella is a classic of Asturian tourism, it’s also what they do for an international canoe race the first Saturday in August, when Ariondas becomes a bacchanalian nightmare (or a really good weekend out, depending on your tolerance for drunks).

It’s also really easy, there’s no white water, just a couple of slightly faster narrow stretches in the 16Km run. We set off amongst hundreds of others in similar plastic, non sinkable, practically indestructable brightly coloured canoes, our belongings in a white plastic tub at my feet.

It was really nice, not too hard, although after 10km we could feel it in the arms. There were plenty of places to stop for a picnic, and most of the Spaniards opted for a couple of them where enterprising folk had set up speakers (for summer Europop) and served cider. We, on the other hand stopped at the quieter stretches.

It was a good choice, to postpone from the Friday, becuase the weather on the Saturday was glorious. The steep limestone mountains gave us a nice landscape to look at and the antics of the less able canoeists gave us a laugh. We only had one issue, when, with my view blocked by Liz, I paddled us straight onto a rock in one of the faster sections, leaving us teetering. I had to get out and push.

Great fun, and available all year, they provide wetsuits in the winter though.

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Before the summer timetable at the academy I’m working in, I was able to head to the swimming pool for their opening at 9am. Now I have classes at 10 so we had to pick a different time. Fortunately I’ve got a decent break between morning classes and evening. Even so I was a little wary, it’s the summer holidays, would the pool be full of yoot? Would we get a decent swim?

I needn’t have worried. We went to the pool in Parque Oeste (West Park) and because it was after 11am the outdoor pool was open. They have two 50m pools, one inside and one outside. And there were only two lanes in use, and a half dozen sunbathers lying around the edge of the pool. As soon as I dived in I realised why. The water was a tad chilly, we were only in July and I guessed it would warm up.

Now, the water’s a lot warmer (well a couple of degrees, very important degrees) and there are a few more people, so many that Liz and I have to share a lane (with each other!) Still, the outdoor pool is fantastic, crystal clear. It feels like a private pool, there are so few folk. The lifeguards have the easiest job in the world, because almost all of the swimmers are proper swimmers, no old ladies three abreast yakking, last time we went there was only one chap who wasn’t doing crawl, and that’s because he was with his two sons. There are plenty of other pools in which messing about is the norm, and of course, there’s the sea too, so it’s really nice to have a place where you can actually get your head down and just swim, without worrying about collisions or splashing the blue rinse brigade (giving rise to the immortal Halifaxian quote: Oy, we don’t need no channel swimmers around here).

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Vino

Love Wine Originally uploaded by Firenzesca.

I was behind an old chap in the supermarket checkout queue in my local supermarket (El Arbol). I noticed he just had three identical bottles of wine. This in itself is not unusual, it was 2pm and folk were heading home for lunch. Then I noticed the till said €3.60. At first I thought that the checkout person had made a mistake but she hadn’t. Three bottles of wine for pennies (almost). It was young wine (joven), as opposed to the aged stuff (crianza) and probably tasted like ribena but it reminded me of how different the wine market is here.

In the UK I was used to a wine section in the supermarket being a mini world tour (with the exception of Asia) but here I haven’t seen a single bottle of non-Spanish wine for sale. Oh wait, yes I have, a half bottle of Moet Chandon in a bar. When I asked a couple of my students about this they looked at me as though they didn’t understand the question. Why would we want to drink wine from anywhere else? They said, Spanish wine’s the best in the world. I kept my counsel, and didn’t ask how they knew, if they never drank anything but Spanish wine. My Dad said, on his recent visit, that he hadn’t had a bad wine while he was here, and this was with a slight note of surprise (not that surprising really, the difference between a Rioja on sale in the UK and what they drink here is marked). Even the first glass (white, in the Airport cafe, costing less than €1.50) was more than acceptable.

The other thing is the price. Wine here is cheap. Not that the wine tastes cheap, no. You struggle to pay more than €5 a bottle in the supermarket and the bars where they do wine rather than beer, even the expensive wines are €2 a glass, and that’s often with nibbles. It’s a fine sight to see in a bar, lunchtime or evening, blokes who, in England, would be on pints, sitting at the bar sipping a glass of something red and picking at a tiny dish of octopus.

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A national apology

When I started working I thought I’d have to spend a day in some queue waiting to get a social security number. I was wrong. The accountant at the Brooklyn school (the place where I have a contract, as opposed to the places where I work without a contract) took my address and passport number (English or Irish I thought… I went with Irish just for fun). A week later I got a letter from the social security people with my new number and directions to go to the nearest medical centre and register. Oh boy, I thought, that’s where the queue will be. I was wrong again, I’ve just got back from the medical centre, it’s round the corner. The receptionist took my letter and my passport, typed on her computer for a while and then handed me back the letter with a new sticker on it. ‘That’s your doctor,’ She said, ‘This is the phone number. That’s it.’ Yesterday my medical card arrived, no fuss, no messing about, no pointless queuing. I also have a library card, and that took none of the two proofs of address that seem to plague libraries in the UK. That’s probably because they posted it to me. Now, isn’t that a good way to prove your address.

So I apologise unreservedly to all Spaniards for thinking I would be lost in the bowels of beurocracy.

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