August stuff!

The sound of festivities over at A Guía, where the Teis fiesta has been going on, continued until about 2.00 this morning. I can still see the tents and stuff over there so I suspect it may well continue for a few more days yet. At this rate I shall have to close my windows to shut out the noise if I plan on getting any decent sleep.

The pool here was still fairly empty this morning. There was just me, a sunbathing couple, a mother and daughter and a couple of teenage boys, one of whom I have watched grow up over the last few summers. He used to come down to the pool with his mum. Now he was there with a friend. These kids will keep growing up and becoming independent!

 I suppose a lot of people have gone off on holiday. It is August after all and the weekend just gone saw all the news reports of traffic queues as everyone and their grandmothers set off on holiday at the same time. It’s rather like all the bank holiday weekends rolled into one. The French do it as well.

As we get into August, pretty soon English teenagers, the older ones anyway, will be stressing about their A-Level results, hoping that their grades are sufficiently high to get them into the university of their choice. When I was a sixth form college teacher I used to cut my holidays short to go in and help my students deal with the system, phoning universities to see if they where accepted or not. So much for teachers having long holidays!

Here in Spain university entrance does not depend on the bachillerato, more or less the equivalent of A-Levels, but on a separate exam called “selectividad”. When it was introduced, many years ago now, there was a bit of an outcry with some people saying the bachillerato should be sufficient, but now it seems to work reasonably well, the marks at “selectividad” deciding which kinds of courses students can apply for. I came across an interesting statistic in the local paper the other day: in Vigo state schools on average do better in “selectividad” than private schools. Now, I wonder why that is. 

Here’s another little item I found in the newspaper. There is apparently a bit of a problem with beachgoers doing a bit of shellfish collecting while at the seaside. I have done this myself when staying at my sister’s in Andalucía but on a very small scale. We would catch tiny shrimps and then make them into omelettes. Here in Galicia,it seems, people go hone with a handful of clams, or maybe a small bucketful, enough to serve up with a bit of pasta. According to representatives of the professional shellfish collectors if you put it all together this can amount to thousands of kilos of illegally collected shellfish. Who would have thought it? People are surprised when challenged, but I doubt that it stops them repeating their “crime”. Some people, of course, take it to extremes. One person was found with 7 kilos of clams, surely rather more than his family could easily consume!

The spokesperson for the professionals told the journalist that in her opinion the worst thing was that most of the illegal clam-pickers were Galicians who knew exactly what they were doing!

Well, of course, your average “guiri” (foreign, most likely English) tourist would not know where to start.