Hot stuff.

Yesterday the temperature here reached 27°, possibly higher because I’m just going by the signs outside chemists’ shops. That seems pretty hot for the end of May and they’re predicting up to 38° in Ourense at the weekend. Just a tad excessive! All the places with pools will be opening them up early this year. If it’s going to be a hot summer I will really miss the place with a pool that we rented a couple of years ago. 

According to the local free paper it’s all the result of a mass of hot air that’s moved up from Africa to affect all of Spain. However we can expect rather more cloud and possible thunderstorms. I believe the thunderstorms here have started already as we had definite rumblings in the middle of the night. 

They’re also warning about the increased dangers of forest fires all over Spain because the country is in a dry cycle apparently. There have already been quite a lot of fires in April, many of them here in Galicia. 

The paper also gives details of the public holidays for next year, some of which are national: 1st of January, 6th of January (Three Kings), Christmas Day and so on. Others are decided by the Xunta who this year have gone for the 24th of June, Fiesta de San Juan (or San Xoán in Gallego) and the 17th of May, Día de Letras Galegas, because they are both good Galician festivals. Martes de Entroido, Shrove Tuesday and the start of Carnaval here, lost out to San Xoán because the latter falls on a Monday and so can be tagged onto the weekend without having to “make a bridge” (i.e. take an extra day off to join the public holiday to the weekend) and so will be less disruptive to production in these times of crisis and austerity. I bet it won’t stop people making bridges at other times of the year and taking Martes de Entroido off anyway. 

I mentioned the lack of manual for the washing machine yesterday. For a brief moment I thought we had located it but it turned out to be the installation manual. Useful at the time of installation but of little use for actually washing your clothes. So far I have made it wash but not spin. It’s a good job the sun is shining. I did find one on the internet but would have had to pay for it, which rather goes against my idea of what is right, especially as it’s quite an old model. The search will continue. 

A final note: despite the heat yesterday I did not see any men sitting outside bars with their chests out. There were plenty of people out on the terrazas but all were respectably dressed. I suspect that your average Spaniard is too image conscious to go half dressed to the bar. It must be a purely English phenomenon.