Rose tinted Spain

I feel that so far I have been painting an overly rosy picture of our lives in Spain. And it is generally pretty great. But maybe it’s time to have a good old whinge about some of the stuff that really gives me the shits about this place.

The Meat

Yes, meat is abundant. As the song says, everything has meat in it. Vegetarians would have a hard time of it and would pretty much be restricted to cheese sandwiches and patatas bravas, and vegans would probably starve to death. But abundant as it is, the meat tends to come in strip or chunk form, rarely in the form of a hulking great slab of steak. Man, I want a good steak so much right now. I mean, it is possible to get steak, but it tends to be quite expensive and not always the best quality. But if you like your steaks wafer thin, with a generous helping of gristle, garnished with salt and then served with a side of salt, Spain is the place to be. If you feel the need for a chunk of meat, why not try cabeza de jabali? Scrapings of boar's head topped with a layer of gelatine. Tastes as good as it sounds.

The Post Office

The post office is utterly baffling. There are four counters, each with a different function. One is for sending things, one is for picking things up, one is for buying mobile phones, and the final desk seems to just sell pens and is for some reason the busiest. Each desk has a little electronic number display next to it that corresponds to a ticket number, but to begin with I wasn’t sure where to obtain a ticket. Given Spain’s notoriously pedantic bureaucratic system, I thought maybe you had to fill out a form somewhere and they’d mail you a ticket and an assigned time to go to the post office, but then I realised that you would then have to go to the post office to pick up your ticket number, which you wouldn’t be able to do without a ticket, so I dismissed this theory as merely the hysterical reaction of my brain to administrative centres of all kinds. Eventually I located the ticket machine tucked just inside the vestibule. It is a 1970s era dispenser with cardboard taped over most of the panel, so that your only options are to take a ticket for the ‘sending’ or ‘picking up’ desk. If I needed to buy a pen I don’t know that I would be able to figure out how to do it, let alone face the hazards of the mobile phone counter. Once you actually get to the desk the process is quite straightforward, except that no one who works in the post office seems to be aware of the existence of either Australia or England, and they treat with distrust anyone who seems to want to send things to these obviously made up places. Picking up stuff is even more fraught with suspicion; the lady behind the desk assumed that I was Russian because of my name, and tried to ask me where in Russia I was from. When I told her that I was in fact not Russian, she gave me a look like she was about to set the security guards on me to arrest me for mail fraud. Luckily, the guards aren’t the nimblest looking guys and I was able to make my escape before anything too complicated went down.



Smoking Indoors

S

I actually don’t mind sitting next to a smoker at an outside table, and I don’t even especially mind being in a room with a smoker. But as it gets colder here, people tend to sit inside cafes and bars more, and there are no laws to stop them from smoking indoors here. A law banning smoking in restaurants is on the books, but it is massively unpopular. Jo pointed out that rather than having ‘no smoking’ signs up in bars and cafes, they tend to have ones that say ‘it is permitted to smoke here’, and they are displayed almost as a point of pride. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any ‘no smoking’ signs anywhere other than in shops. Everywhere else is open season, and it’s getting to the point that not only coats and shirts smell like cigarette smoke when you get home after a night in a bar, you can smell it on every layer of your clothes, right down to the delicates. My pillowcase smells of smoke. My handbag smells of smoke. My socks smell of smoke.

Opening Times

We worked out the whole siesta thing pretty quickly (shops open at about ten in the morning, then close from about two to five, and then stay open until about nine or ten at night), but then they keep changing the rules on us. Some weekends things seem to shut down at midday on Saturday. But then sometimes they stay open all weekend. Public holidays are even more confusing. And you’ve got to admire the balls of a country whose economy is shot, and yet where it is perfectly acceptable to close your business for two weeks, leaving a sign in the window saying ‘cerrado por vacaciones’ (closed for holidays). And the worst thing is that everyone is in on it except us. It sometimes feels like a conspiracy to drive foreigners crazy, or at the very least to keep them in a state of bewildered submission. I’m not saying for a minute that I think that shops should be open all the time – I actually really like the idea of having one day a week on which all the shops are closed, I think it’s good for people to have to delay their shopping gratification occasionally. But, to quote the great Tom Stoppard, ‘consistency is all I ask’. 

Ah. I feel much better. Now I’m off to eat pinchos and look at the Christmas decorations in the Plaza. Will this torment never end?