Some things just don’t change.

This week, wandering around Vigo, I’ve noticed a number of things that go on the same as ever. There are rather more empty shops than last time we were here and some of the menús del día have gone up by a euro or so but people are still as friendly and helpful as ever. We’ve ended our stay in the hotel we came to on our first visit here. Three and a half, almost four years on they still remember us and greet us like old friends. They know how to do customer service here, you see. But no, it’s nice to receive warm welcome.

People still stop and change direction in the middle of the street (that’s pedestrians not car drivers) without thinking about those who might be coming along behind them. Cars still park double file; well, parking is as bad as it ever was! There are still reports of all the road accident statistics in the news. In Thursday’s paper I read that in the first third of this year 54 people have been knocked down or run over by cars in Vigo, more than half of them on pedestrian crossings. No change there. On the bright side, only one in ten of these people was injured seriously. That’s OK then!

The cruise boats are still coming in. The Independence of the Seas was here yesterday and as usual there were tourists around in shorts, sandals and sunhats in the rain. (Rain, incidentally, that all our friends tell us we have brought with us from England, where it always rains: a well known fact!) I sometimes wonder if the tourists from the big boats don’t think to look out of the port holes before they set off, just to check the weather. Or maybe it’s optimism. They often have to disembark at eight in the morning and so they can be forgiven for thinking that it might brighten up; after all, they are in Spain!

Our flat hunting this week has been the usual sort of mix of interesting and frustrating as well. We have seen a variety of places, ranging from one that promised a view of the estuary – at least they included a photo of it in the stuff on their web page – but didn’t have one to one that had a sort of view if you stood in the right place and didn’t mind looking over almost all the roofs of Vigo first. The former was considerably scruffier than it appeared from the web photos and the latter was such a well-preserved old place that it was rather like a museum, complete with an old fashioned sewing machine and a corridor window etched with engravings of things Galician such as hórreos, the strange grain and food storage units on stilts. We were quite impressed with this last one but felt that we would have been afraid to touch anything for fear of spoiling the atmosphere: definitely a place to visit but not really to live in.

Eventually, it was the old who-you-know factor that solved the problem. We popped in to say hello to the estate agents who had found us our first flat in Vigo, knowing that they really only do sales these days. Lo and behold, they had a little place round the corner that we can rent for three months for the summer: only small but central and reasonably priced. There you go: some things never change!