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!

Fighting Elephants

On Friday, as I have already said in a previous post, we were obliged to listen in to the mobile phone conversations of a lady on the bus from Porto to Vigo. At one point as she loudly lamented so problem in her life which she had decided was insurmountable, I heard her say, “Yo contra elefantes no lucho” = “I don’t fight elephants”. I tucked the expression away for another day. 

 Last night I went to the Alliance Française in Vigo to attend the monthly book club. I hadn’t actually read the book. Had I realised back in the summer that I would be here for this month’s meeting I would have collected a copy and read it but that was not to be. Anyway, I was really going to say hello to some old friends rather than have an in-depth discussion about a book. 

 The book in question was “Les Tribulations d’une Caissière” = “The Trials and Tribulations of a Supermarket Cashier”. (Incidentally, I wonder why the English has both trials AND tribulations while the French only have tribulations. Is it that we are a more problem-laden, or at any rate more pessimistic, nation? Or is this another example of the richness of the English language, having several words for the same thing?) It was written by a thirty something young French woman who worked part time in a supermarket to finance her university studies. Having achieved her degree, she found there was no other work available and so she continued to work in the supermarket. This in itself led to much discussion about the job situation in Spain, France and just about everywhere else in the European Union.

Meanwhile the overqualified cashier wrote a book, making wry observations about her job: one way of fighting elephants I suppose. Mind you, as our group organiser kept reminding us, her book is amusing but can’t really be called great literature so I don’t suppose she’s going to have a great new career. However, she has the chance to make a bit of money. After all, a fair number of poorly written best-sellers have made their authors rich. I wish her the best of luck! 

On the subject of badly written stuff, I must comment on a discussion I am involved in on Facebook. For quite a long time I have had a running argument with my daughter about the past tense of the verb “to text”, as used about messages sent on mobile phones. I maintain that if you use that verb (and, yes, I have reluctantly accepted the transformation of a noun into a verb) then the past tense in “texted”, not just “text”. You can’t say, “I text you last night”. It’s just plain wrong. 

Now last night, exasperated by several examples of this mis-use I moaned about it on my Facebook status. The result has been a whole host of comments back, almost all agreeing with me and some raising other queries, such as what is the plural of the noun “text”; is it “texts” or “textes”? Now that’s just silly. Those of us who taught the old A-level modern language courses received lists of “set texts” every year. 

And I am reliably informed that my original grumble is the subject of a wider debate. There is even a forum about it: The verb 'to text (someone)'- what's the past tense? - General Discussion - Digital Spy Forums

 Clearly this is an elephant worth fighting.

Back in Vigo once more.

On Friday morning we waited outside MacDonald’s on Avenida Aliados in Porto for the bus to Vigo. A rather anxious German couple were also waiting. When they asked us whether the bus went to the airport we assured them that in our experience it usually did so, before continuing its journey to Vigo. However, when the bus arrived and the couple checked with the driver he appeared to say no and indicated either a stop further up the street or possibly the metro station Trindade about five minutes walk away. We assumed that the bus route must have changed and hoped it meant we would arrive in Vigo a little earlier than usual. Then the bus set of and went ... to the airport!!! Why had the driver told the German couple it didn’t go there? Did he misunderstand their question? No idea. 

 At the airport a model child got on the bus with his mother. He could have been no more than four years old but he sat and coloured pictures almost all the way to Vigo, keeping up a whispered commentary to himself in Italian all the while. Such concentration! At one point he wanted to watch his portable DVD player and was bemused to find that there was nowhere on the bus to plug it in. This was the only time he pestered his sleeping mother. I spoke to his mother later and she told me that although they had been travelling since three in the morning the model child had been angelic all the way. His only fault was a refusal to speak to her in Spanish – she was Venezuelan. He clearly understood her and could speak Spanish when he chose but he made a game of speaking Italian to her as she spoke very little. A sense of humour as well. 

He was clearly an ideal travelling companion, unlike the lady who sat near them and had a busy mobile-phone social life going on. The phone rang frequently, which was bad enough. To make matters worse she was one of those people who don’t realise that you have no need to speak at top volume in order to be heard at the other end of the phone call. 

Mind you, we are noticing a trend to speak not only loudly, but also extremely fast, especially amongst young Spanish women Goodness me, I can’t even THINK that fast. Anyway, we got back to Vigo and took a taxi to our flat: €5.40, much better value than the £13.50 I paid for a similar journey in Manchester. 

Just time to sort ourselves out and then go and have a late lunch. And for that we found a place just nearby offering a very traditional Gallego meal – main course of fish, potatoes and salad – for €7.50. Very good value indeed. 

After lunch we went on and recharged our dongle/modem so that we have an internet connection. How quickly will we use up €25’s worth? 

Buying odds and ends in the local supermarket I noted that Christmas is well on the way here, as well as in the UK. Shelves of chocolate tree-decorations sit alongside stacks of the more traditional turrón. No advent calendars or mince pies though. I wonder if they’ll import those as well as other Englishness. For it was in the Eroski supermarket that I spotted a strange hybrid-language sign: “I heart-symbol ahorrando”. Now “ahorrar” is Spanish for “to save” so the sign must be intended to mean “I love saving”. But what an odd idea to mix the two languages in that almost totally meaningless way. 

Closer to the town centre, the hole in the ground that might one day be the high-speed AVE train station has made progress, but not a lot. I am concerned at the amount of ground that is being covered with concrete. Where will all the rain go? Maybe this is what taxes the minds of the numerous men who stand and watch the work. 
 

Meanwhile, Vigo treated us on Friday to almost the whole gamut of weather: wind, sun, cloud, rain (but not torrential, so not quite the full range) and even a rainbow. Not to mention a fine sunset. And yesterday the sun shone and the temperature got up to about 16°. Today has been a bit cloudy but still warm enough to go for walk to A Guía. 
 
No complaints then. 

Good to be back.

Flying Etiquette

Here we are, in Porto one again, en route to Vigo. Slightly earlier than originally planned because of the vagaries if low-cost airlines. Our idea was to visit Vigo at the end of October, UK schools half term time, with the daughter and offspring in tow. At the end of that week said daughter and offspring would return to the UK and we would stay on another week or so, daughter finding alternative occasional childcare for that period. Then, on investigating travel, we discovered that flights between Liverpool and Porto, so convenient for us, finish on November 4th, not starting again until the spring. So we reversed the order of things and we have come now. 

And so we played the budget airlines game of fitting as much as possible into 10 kilos each of hand luggage. With a certain amount of stuffing things in pockets you can manage that. At Liverpool airport, we watched as people put handbags inside suitcases (myself included) prior to the ritual weighing of bags. 

What surprised me, however, was the number of people who took the handbags out again once they were in the queue for boarding. It was a bit like the schoolgirls who pass the “no make-up” check as they go into school and then rush into the toilets to put on their mascara. I suspect that it’s only the speed of turn-around which prevents further checking up by the airline. 

On the plane there was the usual scramble for seats with intermittent lengthy holdups while passengers try to stuff oversized bags into overhead lockers, which have to immediately above where they are sitting of course. This time we reached the point of hearing an announcement that if we didn’t take off in the next six minutes we would be delayed for an hour, so would passengers PLEASE take their seats NOW!!! 

Our flight was clearly suffering from the worst case of “naughty class syndrome” that I’ve seen in quite a while. As the plane was still taxi-ing down the runway at some speed, the first disobedient passenger got up and opened the locker to get his bag. Once the plane stopped but still the seat-belt signs illuminated a mass of others followed suit. Instructions to remain seated were broadcast, to no avail.

 Eventually the cabin crew had to march up and down the aisle persuading and sometimes manhandling passengers back into their seats and then slamming lockers shut. It was all quite amusing in an odd sort of way. 

And finally the train into Porto and we arrived at our hotel, the one we’ve stayed at many times before. Time now for breakfast and then the bus to Vigo.