Travel problems.

At the moment it seems that the best part of the day is early in the morning. Oversleep and you miss it. On a number of occasions I have been out and about early, off for a run or making my way somewhere, and let myself be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that we were set fair for a good day. However, a good number of these days that start so promisingly end up grey and damp and drizzly. Such a disappointment! 

Today was a case in point, although it has to be said that there were other annoyances today as well. On Monday I get up at the crack of dawn – serious crack of dawn stuff, still dark outside and last Monday with frost everywhere to boot – and drive to my daughter’s house. There I hand the car over so that she can drive away for a day at university while I get the small people up and organised for school. The car is left at my house on Sunday evening so that we can do this as there is no public transport at that time of day. After I have dropped the small people off at school, sometimes involving a game of tig in the playground before they go in, I stroll along to Stalybridge railway station, about 25 minutes walk, and catch the train home. 

This morning it was fairly grey but not raining as I walked to the railway station: although a little chilly, not unpleasant. By the time I reached the railway station it was starting to drizzle. It was at this point that the day started to go a little pear-shaped. 

 First of all, the train I planned to catch had been cancelled. No problem, thought I. I would just catch the next train in the opposite direction, get off at Ashton Under Lyne and pop into IKEA before catching a bus home. According to the station electronic display, that train should leave from platform 5. 

Now, the Stalybridge station I have known for some time has always had only two platforms, the usual sort of arrangement with one platform on either side of the tracks. So where had platform 5 appeared from? There has been some re-vamping of the station and there are now sidings which are pretending to be platforms. What used to be platform 1 now comprises platforms 1, 2 and 3 while the former platform 2 is now platforms 4 and 5, depending on where you stand. Anyway, I found platform 5 ... eventually. 

The due time for the train’s departure approached but the train did not. Several other prospective passengers and I enquired about this and were told that we would be better heading for platform 3 (formerly known as platform 1) to catch a delayed Huddersfield to Manchester train. Just as we were about to trudge through the tunnel to do this, a train pulled in to platform 5. We were pleased, briefly. A host of angry people got off the train; they were supposed to be going to Huddersfield but had just been told that the train was terminating its journey at Stalybridge. We asked the driver. He had no idea; until a few minutes earlier he had thought he was going to Huddersfield. So we went through the tunnel and eventually caught a train. 

Apparently all this chaos was caused by signal failure somewhere on the way to Huddersfield, resulting in trains being delayed, cancelled, restarted and generally mixed up. Trains were in the wrong places. It was beginning to be like one of those children’s games you used to get with a load of letters in a square frame to push around until they made words. Somehow they had to get the trains to the right places to get the schedule back on track. Very frustrating for the travelling public. I was very glad not to be commuting to work or heading for an important meeting. I kept overhearing mobile phone conversations along the lines of, “Well, my train’s been cancelled. I won’t make it to the meeting on time. Expect me when you see me.” 

Mind you, from the travel news I had heard on the radio earlier, it was no better on the roads in the Greater Manchester area! 

Then I walked through the drizzle to IKEA with the idea that I was going to buy some more of a certain fabric I had found there to make cushion covers for chairs in my kitchen. I knew exactly what I was looking for but the textiles department appeared to have disappeared. That too is being re-vamped and will be re-established, bigger and better, in a week or so. How very frustrating! What’s more, the drizzle was now turning into rain! 

So I picked up some essential supplies from a nearby supermarket and headed for home, rather later than planned and less than pleased with my morning! 

Not all days are grey, however. On Saturday I went into Manchester with our eldest granddaughter and found the city centre crisp and bright, looking its best. 

We were heading for the Whitworth Art Gallery to look at some pictures. We saw some Hogarth and some Hockney, the latter echoing the former’s Rake’s Progress with a series of drawings from his early days in New York. Most interesting! 

What we really wanted to do, though, was take a photo of the view from the huge picture window on the ground floor which framed the trees in the Whitworth Park beautifully. However, there were “No Photographs” notices all over the place. And then, by the time we came out the sun had either moved or gone behind a cloud and the park looked much more ordinary and less photogenic. So we headed homewards.

 And Saturday’s travel turned into a kind of pre-cursor of today’s problems. We waited for our train, watched it pull in to stop at the platform and then saw the announcement change from “On Time” to “Cancelled”. We were not the only ones to give voice to cries of “What?” and “You can’t just cancel a train, just like that!!!!” A station employee explained to us that the driver was perfectly prepared to take the train out but they had no guard. In a time of high unemployment they can’t find people willing to work as guards on trains! Unbelievable! 

We discovered a train going part way to our destination, to Ashton Under Lyne in fact, from where we could catch a bus. So off we trotted, out through the barrier, in through another, up some stairs and over a bridge. And then came the announcement that the previously cancelled train was now running and ready to depart. So back over the bridge, down the stairs, out of one barrier and in through another we went. And we sat in the train for ten minutes before it finally departed! And it was so crowded that we never saw the guard! 

It’s exhausting getting around by train!

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.

The stress of getting in touch.

Before we head back for the UK on Sunday, we wanted to have lunch with an old friend. Would that be possible? Yes. Could we maybe find a time when his wife was also free? (Last time we came she was always busy working and we saw very little of her.) Well, it turned out that her place of work was “making a bridge” – a Spanish expression for extending a public holiday (yesterday was All Saints) to make a long weekend. So Friday – today – looked good. Would the children be along too? Yes, their school was also making a bridge. 

As a result we decided to see if another friend would like to join us. He is back working in Vigo and his wife and children have been visiting this week as it’s half term back in Ireland. We thought it would be good for the children to get together. 

It’s amazing how difficult it can be to organise things like this. The so-called “social media” are supposed to make it all easy. Young people manage to organise botellón and gate-crashing parties with ease. I however was having problems. 

At various points both friends’ phones sent me to “Buzón Movistar”, the answering service, telling me that “mobile number xxxxxxxxx was switched off or out of service” and asking me to leave a message. I left messages ... to no avail. 

I also sent emails and sent messages on Facebook. Oh, yes, and texts asking them to read their messages. 

Eventually all parties got in touch but, boy, was it hard work! Am I getting too old for social media? No, surely not! 

In the end we had lunch just with the first friend and his family as the second had work commitments which kept him and his gang away. This was a shame as we went to the Cata & Come restaurant in Bouzas where there is a nice safe space for small people to run around and play. And, what’s more, the sun shone! At least over lunchtime. 

On our way home we saw the cruise liner “Independence of the Seas” towering over the A Laxe shopping centre: truly an amazing thing! Two monstrosities together! 

We popped into the shopping centre to look at electrical good in MediaMarkt and serendipitously missed the rainstorm. 

We came out in time for the rainbow. 
 

That was fine! Who needs a pot of gold when you’ve got the rainbow?

The traditional view of things.

On Monday I came out of retirement briefly and became a teacher again for the day, standing in for a friend of ours who couldn’t manage his classes that day. It was quite fun for a change but I can’t say I’m seeking full time employment. I’ve always said I wasn’t going to doso unless I began to feel hard up and that hasn’t happened yet, fortunately. I only did it on Monday as a favour. 

One of the things I did during my lessons was ask some of the students about Hallowe’en, a festival I have commented on before now and which has been introduced into Spain, probably from the USA, rather like Starbucks. One of the students told me that he preferred the more traditional Galician “Samaín”. Now, I’ve seen posters up around San Joan do Monte, close to our flat in Vigo, advertising a “Samaín” party so I decided to Google it. This is what I found: 

“Samaín is the most important Celtic origin festival of the pagan period, which dominated Europe until its conversion to Christianism. It's celebrated on the night of October 31st and November 1st as the end of the harvest season and it was considered as the Celtic New Year and the beginning of the dark season. 

Etymologically, the word Samaín means the end of summer. The person who rediscovered this tradition in Galicia was a primary school teacher from Cedeira (A Coruña), Rafael López Loureiro. He realised that this tradition still existed all over Galicia less than thirty years ago. 

He also discovered its survival in areas of Caceres, Zamora and Leon, where Galician language and traditions are alive. He also studied the relationship between the pumpkin tradition and the death festivities similar to British traditions. He even discovered some peculiar things, like in Quiroga (Lugo), where the emptied pumpkins are left to dry and kept to be used as masks at Carnival (Entroido). 

Nowadays, Samaíin is still celebrated year after year in many cities and villages in Galicia, such as A Coruña, Ferrol, Cedeira... The village of Ribadavia (Ourense) celebrates the "noite meiga" (the witches' night), when the village gets full of ghosts, witches, vampires and Ribadavia's castle is the perfect setting for this terrifying landscape.”

 So there you go. Now we know. 

However, the fact is that everywhere is selling Hallowe’en costumes and banners wishing people Happy Hallowe’en. And there are a lot of very strangely dressed people around this evening. At least it’s not raining on the trick or treating, which I understand is happening back in Saddleworth. 

I suppose all the Hallowe’en stuff means that the people off the cruise ships will feel at home. And today there were two of them, not the biggest I’ve ever seen but still pretty large. 

This reminded me of an item I saw in one of the newspapers on-line about Venice where quite a controversy has sprung up because cruise liners are sailing twice a day up the Giudeca canal. Passengers on the boats get a wonderful view of the Piazza San Marco and other sites which must be lovely for them. It must come as a bit of a shock to other tourists who are strolling round the city. 
 
Venice is one of those places where each corner you go round gives you another spectacular view, another photo opportunity. Imagine what it’s like to turn one of those corners and come across a floating city towering over the place and overshadowing your view! 

And then there’s the conservation angle. Venice is having enough difficulty maintaining its heritage, beautiful buildings mostly perching on stilts. Having a whopping great boat going through, even very slowly, must make a lot of waves, undermining the eco-system. Why can’t the boats dock outside the city and disgorge their passengers, like they do in every other place they visit? That way the tourists could spend money in shops and cafes and maybe the city could survive a bit longer for future generations of tourists. 

On the other side of the world they’re having their own eco-problems as Hurricane Sandy is still causing havoc. A friend of ours posted a video on Facebook of the trees in her garden waving around and threatening to fall at any moment. 

And then I read that the replica ship The Bounty, built for the film Mutiny on the Bounty back in 1962, has been sunk by the storm. It seems the captain and crew decided it was better to head out for sea and try to avoid the approaching storm on the basis that a ship is safer at sea than in dock in such a situation. 

This time, though, the scope of the storm was greater than anyone expected and they didn’t manage to outrun the danger. All bar one of the crew was saved but the ship went down. What the mutiny couldn’t do, Hurricane Sandy managed. 


 What a shame! I don’t imagine they’ll ever rebuild it. If they need such a ship for a film in the future, they’ll do it with computer generated images. Clever technology but not the same thing at all. After all, you can’t go and stand on a computer generated image.

Sunny weekend

At the weekend the small boats come out onto the estuary: really small boats and lots of them. You see them sidle out of the harbour in single file like a very long line of ducklings and later you see them make their way back in, all in an orderly manner. In between times they bob about all over the place, presumably learning to manoeuvre properly. On Saturday they seem to stay out until late afternoon but on Sunday they all head back into port in plenty of time for family lunch, or at least I imagine that is their destination. Yesterday was very windy and I watched a number of them appear to tip right over. As they righted themselves after a few minutes and continued sailing, I assume that no lives were lost. 

The wind became so strong during the night that I had to get up and shut windows as the moaning howl was keeping me awake: one of the disadvantages of living on the seventh floor of a building already on a high point of the city. This morning, though, the wind had practically gone and the estuary was like a mill pond. 
 
In yesterday’s wind we walked up to the top of the Castro Park; we can’t visit Vigo without going there at least once. The autumn colours are getting along nicely and the wind blew the fountains around, creating mini-rainbows which I tried to capture with my camera. 

Earlier in the day there had been a knock on the door. On opening it, I saw two teenage girls who told me politely that they were organising the “Fiesta de Fin de Curso” – end of year party – for their school and would I like to contribute? Well, actually, no, I didn’t feel like contributing. Ten out of ten for effort and all that but shouldn’t they do a little more than go round begging from the neighbours? I didn’t get round to asking when this party was to be but the end of the year seems a long way off to me. And why should I pay for their fun? Isn’t that what parents are for? Maybe I’m turning into a grumpy old woman. 
 
Anyway, I didn’t let it spoil my weekend which has been pretty good on the whole. I suppose you could say it started on Wednesday really when we went to stay with a friend in Pontevedra for a couple of days, which was very nice. On Friday we brought him back with us to Vigo and we had a reunion lunch with some other old friends at El Puerto restaurant where the fish was excellent. Yesterday we had our walk in the wind and today we strolled in the sunshine on the coastal path round A Guía, paid for by EU funding, according to notices along the way. 
 
Nothing to complain about today then!

Cultural exchange?

Some time ago my husband subscribed to a system in our region of the UK through which the local police send him an email from time to time letting him know about things they are doing to reduce crime in the area, information about increase in types of crime locally and stuff like that. 

The latest newsletter talked about a disturbing trend for large groups of young people, some as young as 13 or 14 to gather in local parks to drink and make merry. They organise themselves through the social media: mobile phones, Facebook and so on. Last weekend apparently some 150 got together in a park, got very drunk and threw fireworks around: drunk and dangerous! 


The police gather up underage drinkers and escort them home. They send warning letters out to parents reminding them to make sure that they know where their teenage children are on weekend evenings. They point out that selling alcohol to under-18s is against the law. 

 Now there have always been groups of youngsters standing around outside the Spar shop asking likely-looking passersby to pop in and buy them bottles of alcohol, usually cider. But these were always small groups of local kids trying their luck and, assuming someone gave in to them, they would sneak off somewhere quiet for a drink and a smoke. This latest phenomenon, however, is something else again. Youngsters from all over the place are gathering, not outside their own local Spar but in a more central venue and in bigger numbers. 

The Spanish have a name for it: botellón. I believe it started as a university-student activity, even at one point having almost competitions to see who could organise the biggest botellón. It soon spread upwards and downwards, including young teenagers (causing much consternation as they were being introduced to alcohol much sooner than their parents liked and with the new-to-Spain idea that the object of drinking was to get drunk) and up to 30+ year olds. Some places have even tried to control it with organised venues called “botellonodromos”. And I have known parents (not many, I have to admit) who have gone along with their teenagers to a botellón for the fiesta de San Juan in June. 

 However, I always thought the British climate, especially in the North West and even more especially in Saddleworth, didn’t really favour such gatherings. Sitting on wet grass in the rain doesn’t strike me as a great way to spend a Saturday night. Except that I suspect they are not sitting around eating pizza with their drinks and listening to the music someone has brought along – which is what happens here in Spain – but standing around, pushing each other about, daring each other to do daft things in that particularly drunken-British way. 

There are other Spanish drink-related habits I would rather see exported: the social activities that still go on in bars here such as dominoes and cards which have often disappeared in English pubs; the mix of ages you see in the bars; free tapas with your drinks, thus discouraging the drink-to-get-drunk attitude so common in the UK. But no, it seems we are getting the botellón. 

So what is Spain getting in return? Well, yesterday in our local Eroski supermarket I saw advent calendars, Sponge Bob Square Pants advent calendars!! 

When I was a child all you found were advent calendars whose little doors opened to reveal pictures of Christmassy things such as robins, holly, snowy scenes, culminating in the final scene of the stable at Bethlehem. When our children were small you started to see a few with chocolate treats behind the doors. I resisted them as long as possible. But at least they usually had Christmas themes. Nowadays all you can get are the chocolate variety. And what has Sponge Bob got to do with it? No idea! 

 No doubt someone is going to tell me that these things have been around here for years but it’s the first time I have seen them and I am not impressed. I wonder if they do specially extended calendars to go as far as the arrival of the Kings with the presents for the children! 

It’s bad enough that Hallowe’en, an American invention, seems to have taken almost over from All Saints but at least the Spanish tradition remains alongside it to some extent and they still sell “Huesos de Santos”, marzipan “Saints’ Bones” in the cake shops at this time of year.

Reading Matter.

While we were here in Galicia in the summer I read a book by Antonio Muñoz Molina in which he wrote about his reading and writing habits. One of the writers he praised was Max Aub, born in France in 1903 but brought up and educated in Spain and then forced to live in exile after the Spanish Civil War. He died in Mexico in 1972 and so never returned to Spain. He described Aub as one of the great writers about the Spain of the pre Civil War period and I was determined to read him but simply ran out of time before we returned to England. 

 So on Monday, after the rain eased a little, I made my way to Vigo library and looked for “El Laberinto Mágico” or at least the first two or three books in the series. Now, according to the computer all the books were available and I followed the numbering system around to the correct shelf. There they all were, except for volume two.

 So I took out volume one and informed the librarian of the problem. I’m not entirely sure why I bothered to do so for all I received in return was a bored-sounding, “oh, debe de estar mal puesto” – “Oh, it must have been put in the wrong place” in a kind of what-do-you-expect-me-to-do-about-it? tone of voice. The idea that someone might from time to time do a quick number check to hunt for books which have been “mal puestos” didn’t seem to occur to the helpful people working in the library. 

Anyway, I’ve made a start of book one and will return to see if book two has been relocated. This first book, “Campo Cerrado” – “Closed Field”, follows the progress of young Rafael López Serrador from small village to larger town and eventually to Barcelona, with his gradual political awareness as he goes along. It reminds me a lot of the work of Arturo Barea whose autobiographical work covers the same period. 

Max Aub’s work also includes comments on Spanish attitudes. At one point we see young Rafael going to a bullfight. The writer comments: 

 “The only thing a Spaniard does NOT think about when he goes to a bullfight is death. If this were not so, the spectacle would be unbearable, as it is to many foreigners who come in search of that bitterness. There is nothing more cheerful and optimistic than a bullfight.” 

Well, all right; it’s a way of looking at things and I have heard others say that the brilliance of the spectacle just carries you along but I’m not sure I quite see it myself. But then, I don’t go to bullfights for just that reason. 

Maybe it’s like being a flamenco dancer; you have to be born into the tradition!