Contrasts and comparisons

I’ve always been rather fond of the Spanish ¿ and ¡. My Spanish teacher of long ago – a splendidly eccentric lady who once told us she had been trapped in the Alhambra Palace gardens by a guide who wanted to have his wicked way with her – always used to say that the upside down question mark or exclamation mark was intended to give advance warning of a question or exclamation on the way, just around the corner as it were. It always sounded good to me. 

(Needless to say, she resisted the guide’s attempted seduction and escaped with her virtue intact and her ego rather flattered. She was also prone to tell us girls that we were noisy but lovable; I try to imagine a teacher in a modern school saying such a preposterous thing to a class of 14 year olds. On another occasion, when a friend of mine had piled her long hair in curls on top of her head, a style fashionable for a while in the 1960s, our Miss Brown was heard to ask her if she really felt old enough to “put her hair up”. Was 17 not still a little young for such adult hairdos?)

Anyway, I was amused to see the upside down exclamation mark transferred into English punctuation by whoever did the translation work for MediaMarkt in the A Laxe shopping centre, inviting customers, in English: ¡¡¡Look at our prices!!!! Wonderful!!! 

Well, yesterday we said goodbye to Galicia for a while. Conscious that we were going to spend a good deal of time sitting around Oporto airport and then sitting in a plane, we were glad to be able to walk to Vigo bus station to catch the bus to the airport. Trundling our suitcases along pavements which appeared to have been deliberately laid for maximum noise from suitcase wheels we felt rather sorry for anyone hoping to have a quiet Sunday morning lie-in! 

En route we went past a cafe in the Calvario district of Vigo which had a large laminated cardboard owl fixed to the top of its awning. Clearly another attempt to scare off the pigeons and seagulls that try to scavenge scraps form terraza tables. Usually they are large plastic models rather than a cardboard cut-out or more-than-life-size photograph. Our friend Colin  has one he sometimes carries down to Pontevedra to give him some peace as he sits outside a cafe. If a cardboard cut-out works, maybe this would be a more portable solution for him. 

In the airport I took this photo of a cup of coffee. Why? Because this was described as “grande”. For the Portuguese, a coffee this size – comparing it with the Kitkat alongside the cup, you can see that it is not huge – is large. In the UK, in almost any coffee-vending establishment, this would be considered small, if not very small. That is one of the differences between the UK and most of continental Europe as far as I can see. 

 I have also been doing some price comparison: prices of stuff that you buy all the time to stock your kitchen. As far as I can tell, milk – proper fresh milk, not the nasty sterilised stuff – is cheaper in the UK; in Vigo I paid 82 céntimos for a litre while here I pay just a little more for a 2-pint bottle. Maybe this is because in this country people actually use more of the real stuff whereas in Spain many people seem quite happy to use the inferior sterilised kind. 

On the other hand most fruit and quite a lot of veg is cheaper in Spain. Then there’s the way it’s sold. Here you buy individual oranges, grapefruit, avocados and so on, same price per item no matter that one orange, for example, may be bigger or smaller than another. In Spain you pay for fruit by weight: three oranges in a bag and the price is sorted according to weight. This even applies to garlic. A much better system if you ask me! I’ll look out for other price comparisons. 

Final contrast; we have had a day of crisp, cold sunshine while my Vigo friends on Facebook tell me they have had miserable rain. So it goes.