¡España es diferente!

Yesterday morning I bought, among a whole of other things, half a dozen eggs from the supermarket. Half a dozen free range eggs. Now, when I buy free range eggs from a British supermarket, and as a rule I prefer free range, those eggs have been selected to be of a uniform size. These Spanish supermarket free range eggs were all different sizes. One was most certainly a large egg, two were definitely small, but not to an equal degree of smallness. All six were quite clearly of different sizes. The only time that happens to me back in the UK is when I buy eggs from the fruit and veg man at the local market. It's one of those odd things about supermarkets here; some of them are like large corner shops. This one next door to our block of flats, because it is in a place where there is a quayside for fish to be brought in at, will occasionally announce the arrival of fresh fish, not just ordinarily fresh but fresh from the quayside. 

 The same applies to seasonal fruit. As a rule they stick to the seasons. Oh, yes, they have strawberries at the moment, which certainly is not right. Strawberries are a summer fruit and should only be sold as such. The ones they grow under glass all year round and then sell all year round are not the same class at all. But still, you are more likely to find seasonal fruit here than you are in the UK. Apart, once again from the small markets, farmer's markets and the like. Our local market, the one I tend to go to on a Wednesday for fresh fish, has apples, pears, tomatoes and the like that the stall holder will proudly tell you have come from "our place in Kent". Of course, when he tells us that the coxes apples he has on sale today are the last of the season, he may be spinning us a line to persuade us to buy. But his apples and pears certainly taste better than the ones they sell in the supermarket. 

Later in the morning, Phil and I walked into the centre of town to sort out a couple of things. We both have Spanish mobile phones, simple uncomplicated things that do no more than make and receive phone calls and, oh yes, tell you the time. No cameras, no internet connection, just bog standard, old fashioned phones. If you are lucky, they connect to the radio. Anyway, when Phil switched his this time on it told him, "SIM card recognition failed". So we went along to a Telefonica shop to try to sort it out. It turns out that because he has not put any money on it for a few months his number has been kind of re-absorbed into the system. All trace of him has been erased. Perhaps his number has been given to someone else. If so, they might be surprised to receive calls from the chess club here. Do pay-as-you-go phones work in a similar fashion in the UK? I have no idea. 

The upshot of it was that he needed a new SIM card. So we tried to buy one, only to be reminded that to do so he needed to produce his passport. This is, as we really know, standard practice here in Spain, where everyone carries their ID card around at all times. And, of course, we were not yet in proper Spanish mode and the passports were in a drawer under the bed. Consequently the purchase of a new SIM card and the acquiring of a new mobile number was put off until the afternoon. 

At that point we realised that other purpose of our visit to town would almost certainly also fail. We wanted to renew the dongle which gives us temporary mobile internet access for the laptop. We would need to produce the passports for that as well. So back home we went, had some lunch and prepared ourselves for a further trip into town in the afternoon. 

Everything was eventually sorted, although it did generate an enormous amount of paper work. This is another Spanish anomaly: when you purchase an electrical device it seems to demand that lots of documents are printed and handed over to you, normally, neatly packaged in an official envelope. Come to that, opening bank accounts also leads to this sort of thing. Back when we managed to open a bank account, we ended up with half a telephone directory's worth of printed pages - contract, agreement, terns and conditions, and goodness knows what else. And as far as I can tell, the computer age has done nothing to reduce that. 

These little, or perhaps not so little, differences make life interesting, if a tad frustrating at times.