Episode 8: Driving me to insanity

Coming to Spain and driving on the wrong side of the road wasn’t as difficult as people seem to think it would be for me. When I first met José, he couldn’t drive, so on our trips over here, I took us everywhere we wanted to go. Then, when he did drive, he didn’t want to drive over here as he was used to civilised driving in the UK on the correct side of the road, so I drove. Then when he became more confident and wanted to drive, I didn’t want to let him as he scared me and we couldn’t afford all the wing mirrors. So I drove. There’s a pattern emerging here. The point is I’m so used to it that I coped well. My one problem was a repetitive injury to the back of my left hand, when I forgot which side the gear stick was on and hit the driver’s door. It does sting after six or seven times in quick succession.

A Spaniard, asking the driver of the
other car to please move out of the way

No longer do I undertake the calm, sedate pootle to the office in a morning with the promise of the same on the way back home at the end of the day (albeit in a line of waiting traffic at the bottom of Harrow Lane). That has been replaced with el road rage. Never has the word rage been used so effectively than when it is applied to driving here in Spain. On further consideration of my daily bouts of anger and frustration, I decided to put together a little information pack to foreigners who wish to come to Spain and drive on these roads. There are certain rules that one should stick to in order to stay as sane and safe as possible.

RULE 1: Lights are just for Christmas

No Spaniard likes to use their indicator lights. Males, females, transvestites, they all drive the same, although there are more feathers and glitter involved with the latter. They just put their foot down, point the car in the right direction and go. If you want to turn right, just do it. Don’t worry about letting anyone else know as they’ve no right being in your way in the first place. FACT: Instruction manuals for Spanish cars do not have a section on the indicators, as they are never used.

RULE 2: There are no such things as dents in a car – these are badges of honour

Rather as a fisherman would say, “you should see the one that got away”, a Spaniard will proudly take you round his car and point out all the dings and scratches he can find, going through each one in minute detail (“Si, si Manuel, this one was when I very nearly hit a pedestrian. Missed the bugger so went for the bloody lamppost instead”) One doesn’t start what one can’t finish!

RULE 3: It’s never too soon to toot

When sitting at a traffic light, be sure to move off in something faster than 0.235 of a second, otherwise the car behind you will sound their horn and remind you that you’re slower than George ‘Dubya’ Bush Jr.  Anything between 0.235 and 0.418 of a second will get the car behind them tooting and if you’re up to a whole second before you move off, the whole line of cars will honk in a deafening cacophony, with any waiting pedestrians waving their umbrellas at you in a threatening way, just for good measure

RULE 4: Weaving is not always done on a loom

When faced with an empty road, make the
most of it and zig-zag down the middle!

When you find yourself in a busy three lane road into the centre of your local town, don’t worry about what lane you’re in and what lane you need to come off. Just pick a lane and meander left and right until you come upon your turning. If, when you need to go left, you actually find yourself in the left hand lane, then good for you. You’re in luck. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in the right hand lane, you have two choices open to you:

Choice 1 – just turn the steering wheel hard left and cut in front of all the other cars that are in the left hand land. No-one will toot you as you’re not at traffic lights, so you’ll be fine. 

Choice 2 – get to the junction and pull horizontally in front of the stop line. This will position you across the car at the front of the queue and will have the added bonus of stopping that car from going anywhere whilst ensuring that you are first out of the trap (as it were) once you have the ability to move off. (The ability to move off means that there is a gap of no less than 2 inches between cars, which is more than big enough to squeeze that Mercedes into)

The meandering rule above should also apply when you’re stuck behind slow drivers or any woman driver. Women shouldn’t be driving. They should be at home preparing the bread winner’s meals and keeping herself fresh for whenever the hubby fancies a little ‘afternoon delight’.

RULE 5: You don’t need to be able to distinguish between red and green to pass your driving test

Spanish Traffic Lights

Here in Spain, they have red lights, but when talking to other Spaniards about this, the response to that statement is usually an astonished “do they?” The Spanish Highway Code (El Highwayo Codeo!) says that you should stop at a red light, but in reality, this isn’t always necessary. In fact, you can tell the foreigners in Spain as they are the only people who do stop at red lights. That said, when we do stop at red lights, there’s no guarantee that the people behind will also stop. On several occasions, I’ve had people pull out from behind me and go through the red light, because they didn’t want to wait. These people are known colloquially as twats.

RULE 6: Numbers are for bingo

There are speed limits, but no-one knows what they are. The general feeling is that you go slow-ish in a built-up area, medium-ish on a ring road or a clear country road and fast-as-you-bloody-like on a motorway. To be honest, I have some sympathy with the Spaniards here. There are places where the number 60 appears, to be followed 3 yards later by a sign with the number 80 and then 10 yards later by another number 60. These numbers are more akin to my vital statistics rather than being of any use on the side of a road. I’ve adopted the Spanish way of doing things and drive at a slow-ish to medium-ish speed on my way to school each morning. I find that the safest bet.

These are not the ACTUAL signs of course!  The real ones are in Spanish

RULE 7: You don’t have to actually see the road to be able to drive on it.

When Spaniards get old and broken, there’s no reason for them to hand in their licence and stop driving. All that happens is that you should drive a little slower and listen more acutely for the screaming of either;

      a.       The passengers in the car with you, or

      b.      The pedestrians on the outside of the car whose lives you are endangering on a daily basis

This can be disconcerting when following lone drivers. When they have a carful of people, the screeching of petrified relatives is a comforting sound to me as the driver of the car behind, but lone drivers have no such points of reference. The tendency for these drivers is to turn the wheel a little to the left and with all things being equal, oversteer and turn swiftly to the right in an attempt to stay somewhere in between the lines on their side of the road. The result is a zig-zagging journey of cartoon proportions, with me too scared to look. Last week, the man in front of us was doing exactly this and very nearly went down the six foot ravine to the right of the road. I’d already decided I would be driving straight past him if that were to be the outcome. That shirt was brand new and I wasn’t getting it dirty to rescue some nonagenarian from a ditch. At that age, he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry; he could damn well wait until I went home to change.

RULE 8: Moaning, not waving

In the UK, should you be facing a kind driver who lets you out in front of them, the rule is that you wave your thanks to that person. Should that person be particularly kind back, they will wave too in reciprocation of your thanks. Should that person be very kind indeed, they will invite you back to their house where they will ply you with tonic wine, cover you in honey and proceed to flagellate you for three hours with a length of inner tube whilst Nana Mouskouri sings “The White Rose of Athens” from the stereo speakers in the background.........but it was only the one time and it was his birthday!

I still can't change a bike
tyre without wincing!

Here in Spain, if you let someone out in front of you, they think you have mental health problems. You will receive a gesture from the person you have let into the queue, but it’s usually the one with the index finger whirring round and round to the side of your temple, as mentioned in my previous blog. Other gestures which may need some translation are as follows:

     a.       Shrugging of shoulders which means I’ve no idea where to find the Spanish equivalent of Terry Wogan on this radio, but I’ll listen to the Spanish equivalent of Gloria Hunniford instead until I get home and I’ll blame the wife for changing the station

     b.      Waving arms frantically which means “you bloody women drivers are all the bloody same, why don’t you go home and cook some bloody dinner instead where you can’t do anyone any injury”

     c.       Waving arms frantically and pointing just as frantically which means “you bloody women drivers are all the bloody same, why don’t you go home and cook some bloody dinner instead where you can’t do anyone any injury, but you’ve got a nice pair of boobies and can you jiggle them about a bit for me”

Women, as a rule, tend not to gesture. They are far too busy concentrating on the less important aspects of driving, like making sure they are in the right gear and suchlike.

After the driving comes the parking, for which there are also rules; in fact that should be in the singular as there is only one rule when it comes to parking your car over here........any space is fair game when it comes to parking. When I first arrived over here, I thought that double parking was actually the law! When trying to park, if you see a space, just head for it, get out of the car and go perform whatever function it is you’ve gone there for. It doesn’t matter where you’ve parked as no-one will mind or say anything. I’ve attached a few examples of the wonderful places and ways that people park here, including the car park cross zoner and the incredibly tricky manoeuvre – parallel zebra crossing parking. The man at the wheel of the car in the last picture was around 109 years old and had only just perfected this after 82 years of non-stop driving, and what a beautiful manoeuvre it turned out to be.

These are all real examples of actual parking here in La Coruña. I doubt I will ever be as good. I can get a tricky ruffle out of a blouse with a hot iron in thirty seconds flat, which may come in very handy if I ever step out with Pam Ayres, but this Spanish driving/parking lark has me beat. What it has done is expand my vocabulary when it comes to the riper side of the Spanish language, so if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to skip the Spanish lesson on this particular blog!

There is one final word. You wonder why Spaniards drive the way they do?? Check out the name of this driving school.............I may start using the bus!!

Episode 7: Murcia Murcia Me!! (Part 2)

In my previous blog, I omitted to mention that the TV in the villa only showed english programmes. Shame that!! The massive satellite dish on the roof could have housed a small Indonesian nation but instead, it did it’s best to bring me, direct from the UK, programmes that I have been missing out on whilst here in Spain. It was only when I looked at the TV guide that I realised I didn’t like anything that was on all week, so we watched BBC News 24 and left it at that. The thing is that my in-laws survive on a diet of shouty TV shows and game shows. I mean, bless them, they’re in their 80’s so why not??? That said, I hate the damn things. The game shows I can deal with, they don’t bother me in the slightest. The problem I have is with the shouty ones. These are programmes that make Jeremy Kyle look like ‘Panorama’. Spanish TV will have it’s own personal blog post a little further down the line, but for the moment, you get the general gist.

The villa at twilight, with no shouty telly in the background

Needless to say, Pepe and María were more than a little miffed to find that they would actually have to talk to one another all week, rather than bury their brains in some sex scandal involving the next door neighbour of a woman who was on Big Brother (‘Gran Hermano’) in 1997 and who was evicted in the first week but made subsequent headlines because she was later filmed everywhere she went with her baps out. Fine if you’re on the beach; not too dandy if you´re going to the opera! Me? Well I admit to being more than a little pleased as those programmes fry my brain. I was just settling down to a life of relative bliss and calm in the sun trap on the roof when my father-in-law discovered a new instrument of torture……a short wave transistor radio.

Not your regular
instrument of torture.
Other brands
are available!

If you´ve ever listened to short wave, it´s the equivalent of sitting at the end of a tin can on a length of string and having someone shout into the other end from a room down the hall. I listened in abject horror as the station was tuned in and some guy started shouting through the tin can at his end. I swear the sound emitted from that thing killed an entire colony of ants who, rather than marching out to collect the sweet things we´d inadvertently left lying around, committed hari-kiri. I´m with the ants. I nearly chucked myself off the roof and had done with it, but I decided to soldier on.

Imagine then, my joy at coming back from a trip to the local supermarket to find that the outlaws were listening to the Scotland/Spain match on Tuesday evening. The shouty man at the end that night must have had a large catering tin can, as his shoutiness was much more pronounced than during the day and resulted in even our regular dining companions (the wasps) leaving us alone. I endured about 30 minutes of this whilst eating dinner until Spain scored. Oh my!! Instead of just shouting “It´s a goooal” like they do in the UK, the shouty man shouted "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL” I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. The shouting went on for so long that by the time he´d finished, Spain had scored again and Greece were halfway to sorting out their financial crisis. Eventually I´d had enough and had to go inside to do something a little less anoying instead, like banging my head against the kitchen counter for 20 minutes.

The next morning I got up around 9am (Ah, the memories!) and pottered around, but there was no sign of the in-laws. I thought they were still in bed, so went out and chucked myself in the pool for a little while and went up to the roof to dry off in the morning sun. Eventually José got up and opened his parents bedroom door, where we discovered that there was no-one in there. We were rather isolated up there in the mountains and went through the rather scary thought process that they could have been taken by aliens in the middle of the night and were at that moment hovering in an unseen spacecraft and being probed in areas where not even the hot Spanish sun shone. We decided to have breakfast though, as one doesn´t report alien abductions on an empty stomach.

Before we´d finished our wheaty-pops, the sound of keys in the gate stirred us and we looked up to find two grinning pensioners, looking for all the world like the cats who had the cream. We asked, of course, what was occurring and they showed us almonds, all-in-all, not what we expected. And there weren´t just a few almonds, but loads of the damned things. Thousands in fact. It was like a scene from The Great Escape as pockets were emptied and bloomer legs were shaken out in order to divest themselves of their booty. José was mortified but had it explained to him that there were hundreds of almond trees up the hill with these things on just asking to be picked. By now his mortification had turned to abject horror.

“You stole those almonds???”

“No of course not. They were sitting there and no-one was picking them, so we did”

“But they´re not yours to pick. You stole them”

“We didn´t steal them. No-one wanted them so we liberated them and brought them here to give them a new home”

José ran around the house, closing up doors and windows, as it was only a matter of time before someone reported them to the police and we were confronted by a whole load of squad cars waiting to take them to chokey. Nothing happened and so for the next few hours, the new instrument of torture was the sound of almonds cracking or the shell being banged on the dining table in order to open them. When the radio then went on to accompany this sound, I jumped in the pool and hid under the water for as long as I could.

Shortly before I went under

The next morning brought a fresh batch of almonds and by the evening, they were getting more organised. Bags were brought into play and the oldies were blatantly robbing the almond trees in the cut opposite our villa, which actually belonged to the people in the villa on the other side of the road and down the mountain a little. Nothing perturbed this almond gangster and his moll as they brazenly collected another stash of contraband before retiring to the comfort of our own patio and the pleasing sound of yet more almonds cracking.

Geriatric synchronised robbing from
Pepe Corleone and his moll, Almond Lill

You´d imagine that this would be enough. They´d already acrued enough almonds to put the euro butter mountain to shame, but no, the following morning they were out on the rob once again. This time they were busted. Someone walked by and shouted to them. They looked up and gave them that “we are in our eighties you know” look which meant that they could have committed first degree murder and got away with it. The guy they were speaking to told them that the almond picking season was actually in August and early September, so as it was October, no-one else was taking these and they could have as many as they liked. That was it! The thrill of the chase was gone and so they curtailed their thieving activities as quickly as they´d started them. They came back to the house with a few paltry almonds and couldn´t even be arsed to crack them. Pepe went back to swatting flies and his tinny radio whilst María retired to the kitchen and made a tortilla for lunch.

If she poked me with that stick
one more time, she'd have been
wearing it!

Our last full day in Murcia saw us take a trip up to the Mirador (or lookout place) in the mountains. Unfortunately, when we got there we realised that we´d not been told a 4x4 would have been useful, so Miguelito, our little Seat Ibiza, came to a grinding halt and would indignantly go no further. We got out to survey the beautiful countryside and I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was someone looking at us. I ignored the woman, but eventually could do so no longer as she was poking me with the large tree branch she used as a walking stick and insisting she knew me from before. The family rescued me and talked to her about her life there, how long she´d been there and, of course, what her almond yield had been like that year (memories of a previous idealistic and not altogether lawful time!!). She answered a little, but kept on about how she´d met us before, “particularly him” as she poked me again. Her 4 tombstone teeth made me wonder if she´d been a British holidaymaker to Benidorm in the sixties and had taken too many hallucinogenic drugs before deciding that she was actually Spanish and settling in the middle of nowhere.

Pepe wandered back to the car. He looked at me and made the whirring motion at the side of his head with his index finger. I hadn´t the heart to tell him that this wasn´t considered to be the correct way of suggesting that someone had mental health problems and just let it lie, although should I ever decide to go for a job in the mental health services here in Spain in the future, I could at least speak the official lingo in sign language. The poor old lady wittered on and on and on and I could see José and María getting a little fed up and trying to leave. No, she insisted, I´ve seen you all before. Eventually, we told her that we were The Nolan Sisters and that she would have seen us on TV a lot in the late 70´s and early 80´s. This seemed to placate her enough for her to let go of her grip on us so we could get back to the car and drive off.

It was only a matter of time before
Betty made it into my blog!

And so, after a 980km drive on the Saturday, we made it back to dear old Coruña and the news that the very lovely Betty Driver had died at the ripe old age of 91, may she rest in peace. The tinny radio has been replaced with yet more shouty people on the TV and María has cooked us a delicious lunch, which today was;

STARTER: ´Surprising´ gazpacho (surprising because it had almonds in it)

MAIN COURSE: Almond Chicken with douchesse potatoes

DESSERT: Bakewell tart

If anyone wants any almonds, just email me and I´ll pop some in the post in a jiffy bag.

Episode 6: Begging for Murcia (Part 1)

Bad Apple! Bad, bad Apple!

I guess that I should have told you, my loyal fans, that I wouldn't be around for a week as I was going away for a break to the south of Spain. The thing is, I'm fairly new to this blogging lark and the fact that there would be no blog for another week never once crossed my mind. Sorry! So, if you've been sitting there in front of your computer, pining for another instalment in what is fast becoming THE blog to read on the internet, then pine no longer, for I'm back. You need to know though that I could have been back so much sooner, but it was not to be. Whilst away in Murcia, Apple decided to update its operating system, which is lovely for them. Blog completed but not yet published, I decided to update the system on the iPad, which is where the blog was sitting comfortably, having enjoyed the 11 hour and 980km drive back to Coruña. My computer told me that it had backed up everything on the iPad and would restore it in time, once the new system had been installed. I'm here to tell you that it lied to me. Blatantly! When I went there this morning to take the blog off and publish it, there was no sign of it. Gone! When I investigated the site of the software I'd used to write it, there was a big message saying that there were known issues when updated to Apple's new software and they were working on this. I'm very pleased for them, but it means I'm sitting here, trying to remember what I once wrote and replicate this. Let me tell you now, the blog I wrote in Murcia was hilarious. I don't just mean funny, I mean laugh until a little bit of wee comes out hil-ar-i-ous. If this blog doesn't quite match up to that one and you are not incontinent of urine or any other bodily fluid when reading it, then please blame Apple and not me.

So, off to Murcia we went and living in Spain now meant that we could drive there and not have to take a plane. Most road movies concentrate on two chisel-jawed slackers or best mates or the unlikely pairing of one serious geek and one kooky blonde. Being two overweight gay men and a couple of bickering octogenarians, we were none of these. Nor were we searching for lost children/parents/our Holy Grail or to get away from abusive partners and find ourselves. Sure we have an irritating neighbour, but she's no reason to drive so far. The other thing about those movies is they don't show you at 3am in the morning, struggling to remember which way round your underwear goes on, so that you can hit the road before all the traffic builds up. Yes, we got up at 3am in order to get a head start on the traffic and finally got out of the door at 4am, which was as we planned it. Thirty minutes into the drive and José asked me if I'd remembered the keys to the villa. Thirty minutes later we were back at the house and I was running through the front door to fetch said keys. A further thirty minutes later and we were back where we were an hour ago. So much for getting up early and beating the traffic. Still the journey was uneventful and we were so looking forward to getting to the villa.

José and I don't make an issue of going back to the same place on holiday as we like to experience new things and places, but there's something magical about this place. Driving to the villa, you leave the motorway and join the Spanish equivalent of an 'A' road, then onto a 'B' road, then onto a mountain road, before leaving that to join a one track that leads up the mountain and into the middle of nowhere. We love the middle of nowhere and are always happy to get there. The cave house (or casa cueva - which is this week's Spanish lesson) is away from everything and set amongst the majesty and grandeur of the Parque Regional Sierra de la Pila mountain, although it does have one other tourist attraction we love; prostitutes.

Why not relax in a nice easy chair whilst waiting for punters. Seating comes with free Wi-Fi and douche

Leaving the villa, once back onto the main road and heading towards the motorway, there's a winding 'B' road that had a load of chairs by the side of it that we found puzzling the first time we came to this place a couple of years ago. We soon found out why on one of our journeys into civilisation. These chairs are occupied by ladies who like to make their money by doing what comes naturally; and I'm not talking needlepoint! This time, we decided not to tell my in-laws about them and see if they could see any for themselves. We weren't sure if they were in season, being October, but on the Monday morning we were rewarded with a glorious display, the likes of which we hadn't seen in the two weeks we'd been there in 2009. Two of these ladies, having been reclined in armchairs at a junction, had a customer. It was obvious which one of these ladies had won the gig, for as one slunk back to the discomfort of no earnings and a hot roadside, the other went bouncing around the car with her rather large bosoms exposed and jiggling for all they were worth. All this and the surreal sight of a gypsy riding past on his horse and trap with a wandering dog thrown in for good measure. If my father-in-law was going to have a coronary at that moment, he would have died a happy man. Even his loving wife couldn't slap the grin off his face several hours later! 

You need to click on this picture to get the full sense of the bosoms that are going on to the right 

As the week progressed, we loved watching out to see who we could see as we drove past, noting those we'd seen before, whether chairs were empty or full and to see if they'd got anyone picking them up. Sort of Bingo, but with tits! "Oh it's her with the white bra and tattoo of Delia Smith again. I win"

Chav-tastic!!

Sunday we decided to take a trip to Benidorm. You may ask yourself why this is, but we love Benidorm, although I hasten to add that I am now talking about the ITV sitcom and not the place itself. That said, we went there a couple of years ago and stayed in the old town area, which is really nice. The beach is quieter, the place is quieter and all in all it was much classier. They also have a new tram from Alicante to Beni which takes just over the hour and is as cheap as chips, which is something else they have an abundance of in Beni! Once there, we knew that the cast of the sitcom were filming the next series and that day were doing a book signing from 2pm - 4pm, so we headed for Morgan's Tavern, which is what doubles as Neptune's in the series. There were loads of people outside, so after getting the lay of the land - basically, no-one knew anything - we went for lunch and decided to come back once the queue had subsided a little. Lunch followed - yes, there were chips involved of course - and so we went back to the Tavern. The queue was still as large, but in our absence, someone had come out with numbers and given them all out. Basically, they were going up to 200 and no more, then if there was still time and people wanted to go in, they would do a few people who didn't have a number. We waited for an hour with those horteras (it means 'common people'........I just love that the Spanish have a word for it!!), amongst the bouncing boobs, beer guts and cheap ear-rings, but I soon started to itch (can you catch 'Chav'?). Eventually we decided to leave as it was obvious to us that we weren't going to get in. Each time the organising woman called another 10 numbers, about 30 people went in. It appears that one number equalled the person themselves, their partner, funny Aunt Agatha and her lesbian lover and their two adopted Himalayan children. One thing I did notice while I was waiting was the correlation between people who go to Benidorm and mouths with tombstones where once was shiny white enamel. It made me long for a break on Easter Island. We soon took the tram back to Alicante where at least the horteras have the decency to wear Prada, even if it is cheap looky-likey knock off tat.

There is more to come on our trip to Murcia, but I don't want to over stimulate you all by putting it all in the one blog. Tune in next time for tales of robbery and torture...........

Episode 5. The Road to Enlightenment

A whole new blog in itself!

Hello fans. I’m sure that by now, you’ve realised that we’re currently having the kitchen replaced. I don’t want to get too literary and high-falutin’ with my words, but this being Spain, the path to enlightenment and a shiny new work surface has been littered with the used condoms of frustration. The Constitution here says that nothing should be easy and true to their word, Spaniards follow this rule avidly. It’s just a shame that the same can’t be said for waiting at traffic lights, where it seems that anything goes; particularly if they’re on a red light, but that’s a whole new blog by itself.

Doors, similar to the one we've bought,
only we bought just one and there
are only 3 panes of glass in ours.........
and they're a different wood.

 I’ll share an example with you. We’re moving the door round from one wall to another and replacing the hinged variety with an unhinged one......no sniggers please. I’m still talking about a door, a sliding one to be precise. It will give us more space and will also cost us an arm and a leg; there’s nothing more that José and I like to do than choose the most expensive option when a perfectly good cheap alternative is available. Anyway, had we chosen to install a sliding door in the UK, a carpenter would have come, tutted, said it wouldn’t be easy, but would have then shown us the designs he could do for us; at a price. Would we like glass or plain wood? What wood would we like? Do you slide to the left or the right sir? He would have then gone away, bought the thing, made it and then fitted it. Do they do that here? Not on your Noelia!! Here, we went to the door shop and chose the one we wanted. We wanted one with some glass panels, but they don’t do that. They only do doors. It’s a door shop; not a door with glass panels shop. Only doors! So, we ordered the door and then we waited. In fact, we ordered the door three weeks ago and having been told it would be done “mañana” (or thereabouts), we’ve only just taken delivery of it. We then had to take out the panel frame where the glass will go, in order to have glass cut to the exact shape and size. The emphasis is on the ‘we go’. There’s no-one doing it for us. We have to schlep around and find a Cristaleria, choose the glass and have it cut. We then have to bring it back here for a carpenter to fit in the door, just before he fits the actual door in the new hole that’s been made for him by the builder. Having one person to chase up for the door is not easy, but imagine having to chase three of the buggers?

Those heels were murder!

There’s another concept so beloved of the Spaniards and that is to tell you what you will have and what is best for you. It doesn’t work so well when clothes shopping. I swiftly realised that when I went to school in a tweed two piece jacket & skirt ensemble with 3 inch kitten heels, which apparently didn’t suit me as well as the assistant said it would. Spaniards love to ask you what you would like and then tell you it wouldn’t look good. Continuing the theme above, let’s talk glass; glass for sliding doors to be precise. We went to the Cristaleria where a very pleasant but rather tiny little fat man told us we could have any glass we wanted in the space we had. We choose a rather nice plain opaque one, not going in for fancy patterns, only to have him suck his breath in. Mind you, given that he was a tiny little fat man, sucking his breath in meant he was now wider than he was tall, which was something I couldn’t take my eyes off. If you ever get the chance to see it, just ask me for the address of the Cristaleria and pop in. It’s worth the petrol! Anyway, I knew what was coming. It was a case of, “.......(once more sucking in his breath into his fat little lungs) that glass is very expensive and very difficult to get hold of...........I think you’d be better with this one” before pointing at another plain opaque one which we also liked, but not as much as the other one. We went with his choice. I’ve learned here that the path of least resistance is the path one should always travel, especially when one don’t speak the bleedin’ lingo. The lesson here is that you can have any type of glass as long as it’s the one we recommend. Take this lesson and apply it to anything here in Spain and you’ll be fine.

The little fat man wasn’t the first person to tell us what to buy. We’ve had all sorts of choices made for us since we’ve been here, so that’s why choosing the kitchen tiles was such a joy and a massive shock to the system. Yolanda is the most wonderful woman in Spain. Official! Yolanda serves us in the tile shop and she lets us wander around to our hearts content, fingering her tiles, moving her sliding panels all over the place and generally getting in the way. Once we’ve decided what we want, it’s all perfect. Yes you can have that. Yes it will look fabulous. No, there’s no problem at all. I think I love her. In fact, if I could, I would shop at Azulejos Rojas every day, just for the experience of not hearing someone suck a lungful of air in before telling us that blue would be nice and yes we could have those blue tiles, but yellow is this year’s blue and in fact those blue ones would look bloody awful!

The ruin that was once our kitchen

.............and so the kitchen moves on. It’s been just over a week since I wrote the above words and things are falling into place. The plumbers told us that the washing machine and dishwasher would be fine where we wanted them, but that we should swap them round as it would be better and in fact, they were going to do that. That wouldn’t be a problem, would it? The electrician told us that we could manage with the fusebox we had, but a new one would be better as things could blow at any moment, so it would be better to put a new one in. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? And the man who came to fit the false ceiling told me he liked the trousers I was wearing, but wouldn’t I be better wearing shorts in this warm weather and that I should go and change them immediately. All in all, a regular week here in Spain.

Boobies, but not my mothers. Both
of these are still attached
to their owner.

I won’t miss the old kitchen at all. There were things all over the place and the layout was terrible, so it meant we had no nice long run of units to work on. The one thing that all of the workmen have agreed on is that moving the kitchen door was the right thing to do as was changing the doors to the lavadero. This is the name for the little washroom that is off the kitchen (I told you before, this is more than a blog, so make notes, as there will be a test just before Christmas).  The old lavadero is now going to be a small storage space with a fridge freezer and a tall slim unit for veggies and other such fripperies. Prior to the changes, it was used as a lavadero and so there was always washing hanging and not just normal washing; mainly underwear. Many’s the time I’ve had a faceful of my mother-in-law’s gusset when trying to get to the back shelves to retrieve some potatoes for peeling or when splaying a chicken. José says that this is revenge for him handling my mother’s bosom when he was at home in Lincoln one time. I guess if nothing else requires an explanation in this blog, that particular statement does..........after a mastectomy some years ago, my mother has quite an impressive array of falsies. One day, we were searching through the bedroom drawers for something mum had mislaid when José opened a box to see if it was in there. Before I could warn him, my mother’s booby plopped lifelessly into his palm. Now, try and imagine you’ve just walked naked into a freezing cold shower. Picture your face now. That’s how he looked at that moment. Sometimes I still hear him murmuring in his sleep.

As I write this, we’re now three weeks into the kitchen changes and the work is almost complete. I say almost. The tiles are on, the floor is down, all the electrics are where they should be, we’ve a new fusebox, the boiler & the door have been moved, a false ceiling has been put in to hide all the tubes and pipes and so on and it looks lovely. We’re just missing one small thing.............kitchen units! The units can’t come until Monday as the builder won’t be finished until Friday afternoon. Yes, it has taken a long time and this is because the tiling goes in first. In the UK, most people tile around their kitchen units, but not here. Rather like my mother-in-law’s doilies, in the kitchen, if it doesn’t move, it gets tiled. Now, I hear you crying out in your millions, ‘why?’ you ask, ‘why have you had to pay out good money for tiles to be put where the sun don’t shine!?!?!’ I asked the same question. The answer was – suck in a large lungful of air – ‘well you could just tile the bits that people could see, but what if you want to move the kitchen around in the future? I could just tile those bits, but it won’t be right. In fact, you need to tile everywhere just in case. I’m just going to tile everywhere. Okay?’ And so, everywhere has been tiled and another expensive lesson in the way things are done over here has been learned.