The Good, the Bad and the Downright Silly! 2 - The Bad!!

Well, I've made a list of the good things now for some negative points.

The Bad.

• The rather gruesome reports of road accidents, often with quite graphic pictures, telling us how many people died or were injured in our locality every weekend. Many of these report that the victims were not wearing seatbelts, which leads me to another point.
• The continuing lackadaisical attitude to wearing seatbelts. Apparently it has long been a requirement that the driver wears a seatbelt but as this was originally only out of town many still ignore it. Most frontseat passengers just seem to "forget" that the seatbelt is there. When I was the middle rearseat passenger in a car recently and could not find the seatbelt (it was trapped down the back of the seat) one of my fellow passengers reassured me: "No te preocupes. Si pasa algo, te agarramos fuerte." (Don't worry. If anything happens, we'll hang on to you.)
• The genuine anger expressed by a member of my reading group about public information adverts on the TV, reminding people of the imprtance of wearing seatbelts. She felt that it was wrong to make people who have had a member of their family hurt or killed in a road accident feel guilty because they had not prevented it by making them wear a seatbelt! No comment!
• The lack of child-safety in many cars: clunk-click every trip is not an automatic reaction. In one of the local free newspapers in January I read that O Consello de Ourense is offering a service to low-income families with small children. They can borrow child safety seats for use in their cars. I applaud the intitiative but not the need for it.
  
• The smoking. Aqui se permite fumar!!! It is still almost impossible to find a smoke free bar. When la ley del tabaco was introduced a few years ago, Spanish friends of mine in the UK were delighted that Spain was ahead of many other countries in banning smoking. How wrong they were. In small bars the owner decides, usually to allow it. That year we found one tapas bar in Salamanca, two bars in Madrid and I discussed the matter with the owner of the corner bar near my sister's home in the south of Spain. He had initially banned smoking but had changed his mind when his bar remained empty for several days on the run. His regulars went elsewhere. There's the problem!
• The smoking. Despite the ley de tobaco requirement that restaurants have a separate area for smokers, most just ignore it and put ashtrays on all the tables anyway.
• The smoking. I keep having to dodge round people in the street to get ahead of the (far too numerous) smokers!
• Less serious this one! The fact that, despite all the fine buildings in the city, the Vigo skyline is dominated by a blue-green monstrosity.
• The fact that, despite a number of perfectly charming smaller squares, Vigo does not have a traditional plaza mayor.
• Oh, and the weather! When it rains, it just comes down in bucketfuls, usually accompanied by some really good wind. No wonder you find broken brollies in the bins!

The Good, the Bad and the Downright Silly! 1- The Good!

Back in the UK, lots of friends have asked me what I think about living in Spain, so far. Well, here we go with the positive side.

The Good!

• Asociaciones de Vecinos, or neighbourhood associations, like the Fonte do Galo where I discovered a free gallego conversation workshop and where I go to yoga classes. To attend classes and activities you must be a member of the association, but not necessarily a resident of the immediate area. You pay a yearly membership fee of around 15 euros and then a monthly fee to the person organising the activity. So for two sessions of yoga per week I pay 20 euros a month, which seems like good value to me. Next door to us for one of the sessions is an extremely noisy English class. In the entrance hall at the same time, because there is no other room for them, is an arts and crafts class. The centre also offers dressmaking, dance, pilates, tai chi and occasional rambles to local beauty spots.
• A healthy attitude towards children. When children are running around on the terraces of cafes, they seem to belong to almost everyone and almost everyone looks out for them. They are accepted without fuss in most restaurants but their parents usually insist that they sit properly and eat. During carnaval no-one appeared to think it odd that complete strangers patted little Zorro on the head or stroked the cheek of Snow White. In schools, teachers don't seem to be afraid of normal physical contact with their pupils. And, so far, no-one has challenged me for taking photos in playgrounds and parks just because their children will be in the picture. Political correctness has not yet gone mad here.
• The clubs de lectura at the local library. It costs nothing to join the library. It costs nothing to join one of the reading groups. There are groups for Castillian Spanish/gallego, English and French. The library provides copies of the books and the discussions are great fun, if sometimes a little surprising and generally dominated by women. The club de lectura de frances even boasts ONE male member - his arrival was greeted with great enthusiasm - and on the first Monday of the month transfers from the library to a cafe around the corner.
• Wonderful plazas mayores like this one in Orense, with the traditional arches all around the edge.

• And the total spontaneity with which a school group or young people's outing of some sort just organised an impromptu circle game in the emptiness of the square.

• The cafeteria round the corner where you can get a salad, good chicken and chips, a dessert, a glass of wine and a coffee for 8.50 euros.
• The range of restaurants that offer a good menu del dia.
  
• The perfectly decent wine that you can buy for only a couple of euros and the excellent wine that you can get for not much more.
• The public transport, despite what the locals say about it; it is reasonably priced and so far as we can tell fairly reliable.
• Being able to get a good cup of coffee at a reasonable price without having to state that you want standard or double and then get a small bucketful of inferior coffee.
• Being able to pop across the road to buy fresh bread for breakfast.
• I could go on and on.
  
• Oh, and of course, the weather. Three weeks of sunshine in February is not to be sneezed at!

That language thing!!

Now, I know that the English have borrowed like mad from a range of other languages, including Spanish. We say hasta la vista, baby and put off our deadlines with a cry of manana. We talk about machismo and don't know whether to pronounce it (correctly) Spanish style with a CH (as in cha cha cha) or Italian style with a K (as in che sara sara).

The Spanish borrow from us and even change the spelling to match their own system. Thus, leader become lider and meeting becomes mitin. And OK seems to have become international.

But when, I ask myself, did the Spanish start using ciao as a way of saying hasta la vista?

I think I first heard it about three years ago but now, as I go around the town, I hear it all the time. And it's not restricted to age groups either. All ages use it and as far as I can tell it has not been subjected to any spelling change. I imagine it would have to become chao. As far as I can tell, it has become international; maybe this is Italy's way of establishing a linguistic empire.

While it's not true that all Spaniards speak English, it is true that they are interested, are aware of the importance of speaking some English for improved employment opportunities and go out of their way to try to learn more. Toddlers are sent to bilingual nurseries, teenagers are sent to extra lessons at the various escuelas de idiomas and adults, at least here in Vigo, can go to the Club de Lectura de Ingles (two levels: intermediate and advanced) at the local library.

Then, of course, there is the great gallego versus castellano debate. All the schools give many - in some cases all - of their lessons in the local language, which opponents dismiss as a kind of Spanish with poor spelling, a sort of dyslexic Spanish. Those who want to pass their oposiciones (competitive exams cum interviews) to get posts as funcionarios must demonstrate proficiency in the language and to that end the local authority offers free classes. Mind you, it is quite hard to sign up for these if you have no gallego as all the information about the courses is in that language.

However, for a Spanish speaker it is not really too hard to understand it when you hear it, at least not the version they speak around here. I have been told, though, that the gallego they speak in Orense (Ourense) or Lugo is much more difficult to follow. That, of course, is another of the problems: which version is correct. Academics have been studying the language for a good few years and have recently published as novas normas (the new rules), provoking further debate as to which words are REAL gallego words and which just cannot be accepted. Some Spaniards say they have difficulty reading it but, personally, I find that saying the words out loud helps comprehension; that's when you realise that maybe the gallego word really could be just an alternative spelling of the word you knew all along.

Be that as it may, there are regular letters to local papers about the rights of parents to choose the language in which their children should be educated and the relative merits and benefits of both. Some politicians are also regularly criticised for jumping on the bandwagon and speaking gallego almost exclusively at election times and then for speaking it badly.

Some English visitors think that it doesn't matter if you speak neither castellano nor gallego. As for me, I think having a go in both is part of the fun of being here as well as being just plain courteous. However, some friends of ours who came to Vigo for the day - yes, on a cruise ship - proved that it is possible to have a good conversation and establish a relationship using very little Spanish indeed.

On the day of their visit we went along to a local restaurant for lunch. After a glass or two of wine one of our friends decided to ask the waiter why Manchester United was not represented among the many football scarves decorating the walls of the restaurant. With minimum Spanish on his part and minimum English on the waiter's, the conversation continued: the quality of modern football, the number of Spanish players in English teams, David Beckham, which teams each preferred, all in all a comprehensive discussion of football. The upshot of the whole thing was that our friends promised to send a Manchester United scarf to us so that we could deliver it to the restaurant. This we duly did in December, to everyone's delight.

That was when our friendly waiter told us that in actual fact his favourite English football team was not Manchester United at all but Liverpool; after all, half the team seems to be Spanish! Maybe next time ....

Fact is stranger than fiction or at any rate mirrors it!

Local government elections are upon us here in Spain. Inevitably the newspapers have been full of items about the different political parties and their various activities. Earlier this month I found a throwaway item in El Pais, biggest selling national paper according to its website, which reminded me of something.

In the American TV series The Wire at one point the drug dealers use disposable mobile phones: use them and ditch them! They were trying to avoid police wire taps and other surveillance devices: a security measure that worked quite well until their discipline fell apart.

Apparently the Comunidad de Madrid local government majority group, the Partido Popular, has been doing the same thing, more or less. They use pre-pay mobile phones which they change once a fortnight to prevent their political opponents from spying on their "conversaciones delicadas". Now it's every two weeks but during the 2007 electoral campaign it was every week!

"Funcionarios", civil servants, are organised to collect old phones and distribute the new ones which have all the numbers of all counsellors programmed in already. A wonderful recipe for chaos, of course! Some counsellors forget their phones and so yet more "funcionarios" have to spend time running around collecting them. Thus the phone swop is spread over a longer and longer period of time. And then, naturally, there are those counsellors who simply refuse to cooperate and just put the phones away in a drawer!

Mind you, maybe the PP has a point. I seem to recall seeing another item just the other day about someone hacking their way into Jack Straw's mobile!!!!

On fiestas and festivals and such.

At the end of October a little train appeared at the start of the Principe shopping street. In fact, it was not a train at all but a machine for roasting chestnuts, disguised as an old-fashioned steam engine. I also started to see signs here and there for magosto, the chestnut festival, a speciality of Galicia and a few other northern regions of Spain.

I had first come across magosto a couple of years earlier when my college's international Comenius project took me and a few other teachers together with some students to a school in Cambre, la Coruna. On our first day in the school we discovered that lessons for the afternoon were cancelled so that students could take part in games and activities related to magosto. My students were perplexed and so were some of the teachers; as far as they were concerned, chestnuts were conkers and you didn't eat them but put them on a string and tried to smash your opponent's prize conker. It was just as difficult explaining that to the gallegos as it was persuading Salford seventeen year olds to eat chestnuts! But the roast chestnuts were delicious!

Hot on the heels of magosto came Hallowe'en, an American (not even British) import which has overshadowed somewhat the more Spanish observance of Todos los Santos, All Saints Day. I had to correct the everso helpful Monica at the bank about the date of Hallowe'en. Her small son goes to a bilingual nursery where he spends part of the day speaking English, after a fashion. He had told her, correctly, that Hallowe'en was on Friday 31st October and she had tried to persuade him that he was wrong, that it was on Saturday 1st November, probably because some of his small friends were having parties on the Saturday.

The Saturday, of course, was Todos los Santos, when Spaniards traditionally take flowers to the cemetery and tidy up family graves, just like at the start of Almodovar's "Volver". In Mexico, so I am told, they go so far as to make a party of the occasion, taking food and drink so that the deceased members of the family can join in the celebration: maybe a little too extreme! Whatever the case, in Vigo bakers' shops were selling huesos de santos (saints' bones), little marrow bones made of marzipan, the florists advertised special offers throughout the preceding week and all the shops, except the bakers', closed all day on Saturday 1st November.

That celebration was no sooner over and done with than Santa's little elves got busy. The shops started wishing us Happy Christmas, yes, in English, in all their window displays. El Corte Ingles began to play Christmas tunes, yes, mostly English. And the street decorations began to go up. We were woken in the middle of the night by the noise of decorations being strung across our street. Every street had stars, bells, snowflakes, angels and other Christmassy objects hung from their lamp-posts. Down by the harbour they had what looked for all the world like seahorses made of Christmas lights! Big, important shopping streets merited stars AND angels! Our street, however, being quite narrow and less visible, just had a series of sausage-like objects (all right, made of sparkly Christmas lights!) strung from one side to the other at regular intervals. I felt strangely let down!

There then followed a whole series of letters to the local papers about the rights and wrongs of switching on the Christmas lights. Was it ecologically sound? What about the carbon footprint? In this time of crisis, could one justify spending huge amounts of money lighting up the city? On the other hand, did we not all need some brightness in our lives to lighten the gloom of winter and the great economic problems facing us all? In the end a compromise of sorts was reached and the lights were switched on for about two hours in the late afternoon, early evening. On a December visit to Pontevedra, though, I noticed that their lights were still blazing away as midnight approached!

When we returned to Spain after a Christmas visit to the UK, the street decorations soon disappeared. The Happy Christmas signs in the shops were replaced with SALES, REBAJAS, REBAIXAS, SOLDES, SOLDI. Every language imaginable encouraged us to SPEND, SPEND, SPEND. Only now are we getting the notices of the last days of the sales rapidly approaching.

However, I began to suspect some of the street decorations had been forgotten. At the junction of Urzaiz, Principe and Colon (Columbus Street - not a part of the human body), at Puerta del Sol and in Plaza de la Constitucion huge canopies of lights had been constructed and remained there, unused! Maybe someone believed in the old superstition that if decorations were not taken down by Twelfth Night they had to stay up for the whole year on pain of bringing misfortune down on one and all? And then, it all became clear; they remained in place for Carnaval!



Principe was festooned with carnival masks. Across Urzaiz, in big, bold lights, veryone was welcomed to "ENTROIDO", Gallego for not actually carnival but "entrance" as this festivity marks the beginning of Lent.

Spanish friends tell me that their city does not do as much for Carnaval as some places do. "Mucho mirar, poco participar" : a lot of looking, poor at participating.




But there were verbenas or street concerts taking place, lots of competitions and games and plenty of clowns, Zorros, Snow Whites and Minnie Mouses (Minnie Mice?) around.

Now, in the United Kingdom, we eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, to symbolise giving up rich foods and sweet things for Lent. Here they have a whole carnival, culminating on Ash Wednesday with the Entierro de la Sardina - the Burial of the Sardine.

There are processions through the streets, lots of audience participation and finally, at around ten thirty at night the sardine is buried.










Aside from the fact that they appear to be starting the period of abstinence a day later in Spain than in the UK, I wondered why they buried a sardine, of all things. And it's not just in Vigo. Television news teams reported the burying of this sardine all over the place in Spain.

Apparently, it is a tradition which began in the nineteenth century; the sardine symbolised the meat which was not to be eaten throughout Lent. Nowadays, my Internet source told me, for most people it just symbolises the end of Carnaval, which, of course, includes in its name the meat - carne - which will not be eaten for a while, a hard thing for the Spanish, but that is a story for another day!

If you go up hill from the crazy horses ....

Still on the subject of what the cruise people do not get to see in Vigo, let us imagine that, having arrived at the crazy horses statue in your walk up from the estacion maritima, instead of turning left back down into the centre, you turn right and continue up the hill of Gran Via.

As you walk along you will see the coloured rooftops of a housing estate. Just like people in almost every other country, many Spaniards also crave a house of their own with a patch of land or at the very least a little garden. Most still live in flats in high rise blocks in the centre of town, one of the things that makes city centre living in Spain so vibrant and safe. But those who can afford it often buy themselves a "chalet" in the outer suburbs. Arranged around quiet, fairly narrow streets, they are like, and yet strangely unlike, a Britsh housing estate. The most modern have underground parking spaces to avoid congestion.


What they lack, however, is the collection of small shops which are almost always there on the ground floor of the blocks of flats: bakers and greengrocers, haberdashers and hardware stores, small supermarkets. Instead, the inhabitants of these well-designed modern houses with their little gardens and views over greater Vigo, have to head for the Centro Comercial Gran Via, a glass and concrete affair with all the shops imaginable and a huge Carrefour hypermarket to boot.


Beyond the Centro Comercial, not far from the houses with the coloured roofs, threading your way through allotments where people grow sprouts, herbs, potatoes, you name it, you will come eventually to the Castrelos park, a wonder of greenery where you could imagine you had escaped from the city if it were not for the incessant hum of traffic, everpresent in the background.

Magnificent in the autumn, now that we are heading towards the end of February, the park is already showing signs that spring has arrived.


The Castrelos Park houses the "pazo" or "palacio" Quinones de Leon, a stately home still with formal mazes in the garden, which is now a museum and art gallery.

Other odds and ends that the cruise folk might miss!

It's very likely that, having come to Vigo on a large boat, the cruise folk will not be inclined to get on another, smaller vessel to cross the bay and visit Moana, which is a pity as they will miss the splendid view of the small town in the early evening. This is how I saw in on the evening of the great chess victory in mid-November.

My Phil had entered a chess tournament there so we took the boat across and I went walkabout while he played. On my way back to the venue I walked along the beach and came across a strange contraption, looking from a distance like a huge wheel with a motor of some kind attached.

As I approached from one side to examine it more closely, so did someone else from the other, carrying a bundle which he proceeded to spread out on the sand. As he did so it became apparent that this was the canopy of a motorised hang-glider; the wheel was the motor. He was not sure if there was enough wind for him to take off but he managed to do so and set off into the sunset over Vigo.

The chess tournament also had a happy ending of sorts, not a great win but a grading prize which was sufficient to pay the entry fee, our ferry tickets and a couple of beers on the way home. Not bad for a mid-November evening!

Another beach beyond the reach of those who have only a few hours to get to know the city is Samil, about a fifteen minute bus-ride away from the city centre, unless, like us, you get on the circular bus in the wrong direction and visit other, less fetching parts of Vigo en route.


On a crisp, cold, windy winter's day, Samil was bracing to say the least but the views were excellent and the promenade was clearly well equipped for the visitors who would be there in the summer months.