Fines and justice!

Yesterday we went down into town to meet a friend and have some chipirones encebollados - baby squid served up with really tender onions - for lunch. We met in the bar La Porchaba, where they served such copious free tapas that when we moved on to the restaurant we opted to miss out the starter and go straight on to the main course.

How do bars and cafes make a profit when they give free food in such quantities? Three drinks and lots of food for less than the price of one glass of wine in the UK!

In the restaurant, the Rosalía Castro, near the port, the chipirones were slow to arrive but the wait was well worth it. Absolutely perfect!

 Later Phil went of a haircut, something he does almost every time we visit Vigo. He is greeted like an old friend by the rather aged barber and they swop opinions about this and that.he says he gets a better cut than he does at home in the UK.

While he was getting trimmed, I took a look at the paper. I discovered that a cyclist in Orense was recently fined €200 for having a flashing light on his bike. It seems that the Reglamento General de Vehículos states that bikes should have a fixed lamp front and back and reflectors on pedals and wheels. Well, none of the cyclists I see around here seem to have heard of that rule. Flashing LED lights are pretty standard bikes in the UK but here in Vigo no lights is the more common thing. I suspect that the police were doing a little revenue generating!

Incidentally, out and about yesterday and today I saw at least ten cars go through red lights. This morning a van stopped at a red light so that I could cross, with the little green man giving me permission. And then he set off and made his right turn, totally disregarding the light. The cars behind him obeyed the traffic lights. He was a white van driver, however, and they appear to have a different highway code to all other road users.

In my newspaper reading I came across an item about the Galician feminist writer Emilia Pardo Bazán. More specifically it was about her summer residence, lasTorres de Meirás. Here is a link to a youtube visit to the pazo.

After her death in 1921 and after the assassination of her son Jaime in 1936, the house was left to her daughter and to the widow of Jaime. They decided to donate the residence to the Jesuits, who in 1938, together with the right wing authorities of La Coruña, gave the llace to Franco as a summer residence. After that nobody from Pardo Bazán’s family was allowed in. A little unfair, all things considered!

In 2008 the pazo was declared a “bien de interés cultural”, a sort of National Trust property, despite the protestations of Franco’s heirs. In 2011, the doors opened to the public for the first time. And iw you can visit it on Fridays. However, the Franco heirs still use it in summer and try to prevent visits. They were fined in September lastvyear for failing to allow visits. Justice of sorts!

And finally, proving that every cloud has a silver lining, here I hope is a link to a newspaper report on Roman remains in Cádiz uncovered by the recent Storm Emma. Bits of an aqueduct and a roman road.

That sort of thing doesn’t often happen in Greater Manchester!