Spanish views from a small town

I have a small camera that I keep in my purse. It's small and inexpensive. I got it when my phone camera started doing strange things and I was reluctant to send it to be fixed. Eventually, I did, but that small camera is still in my purse. Whenever I'm out on errands, or simply on a drive, I will almost always find something I want to remember.  I have always loved photography, though I'll never become a professional photographer. When I was eighteen, my parents bought me a Canon SLR with two lenses. I learned to use it and loved how I could almost always capture what I saw or wanted to see. Back then it was film, though, and a roll of 24 or 36 pictures wasn't cheap to develop. I couldn't shoot all the pictures I wanted whenever I wanted. But in over the twenty years I used it, I took many pictures.  Then digital came along. At first I resisted. To use film correctly and creatively, you had to have a minimum of knowledge and bracket above and below what you con...

This week Denmark has approved a law that permit s refugees' belongings to be searched at the border and any assets or valuable objects over €1340 in value seized, "to be used toward the accommodation of the refugees." Other countries already have such a policy in place. Switzerland has had such a law for twenty years, in that any money or valuables worth over €900 can be confiscated from anyone seeking refuge. In Germany, two Lands are implementing such laws. Bavaria, that will take anything worth more than €750, and Baden-Wuerttemberg, which will allow refugees to remain destitute with only €350 to their name. In the Netherlands, the government is slightly more generous. It allows families to keep up to €11,790. Though, when they are permitted to work, they have to pay from their earnings a levy for being allowed to remain in the country.  All these new laws (and Switzerland's old one) have mostly been voted into place by national and regional governments to det...

Monday morning and rain. And a parking lot that is always overflowing. That was the bane of my existance today. And it included a clueless driver who doesn't read traffic signs.  My father had an appointment in the outpatient clinic at the nearest hospital, which services almost 400,000 thousand people in its area of influence. It seemed like all 400,000 had an appointment this morning and drove there in their cars. The appointment was at eleven o'clock, so we left the house at ten. That gave us slightly less than a half hour for travel, around fifteen to twenty minutes to park, and ten to fifteen minutes to cool our heels in the waiting room before the hour. Normally that timetable has always worked. Not today. The trip was fine. I dropped off my father in pouring rain at the porte cochere leading to the clinics. Then I went to park the car.  Let's understand the parking situation. Ever since this hospital opened, in 2000, it has been surrounded by a pretty parking l...

We're still in January, and the days are still cold and short. It's not good outdoors weather for the most part. So, tourist towns are still servicing their own residents, quietly awaiting the warm weather and the onslaught of the hordes. There are some places, like Barcelona, that have tourists all year, but the tourists of January are not the same as the tourists of July. In July and the other summer months it seems that the black sheep of each house travels abroad. Some areas, such as Magaluf in Mallorca, and Lloret del Mar or Barcelona in Catalunya, seem to attract them like flies. At Magaluf there is drunk carousing almost every night. In Catalunya some cities are copying the drinking free-for-all. A working-class neighborhood in Barcelona has gone on to the next level of sick and tired with all the tourists that rent cheap apartments and travel there just to get drunk and act like uncivilized toddlers. All-night parties that won't let the neighbors rest, and people ...

There are many different types of thieves. There are the thieves that so proliferate in the upper echelons of companies and governments that neatly steal millions of euros with no violence whatsoever. Then there are the thieves, that armed with what they can find, break into a house, a store, or a car to take anything of value. The worst thieves, for many people, are those who wave a gun in the face of the victim. That's what the storekeeper of a bakery in the province of Alicante must have thought the other day when a man in a ski mask walked into the establishment, took out a gun and demanded the money from the cash register. The woman, scared, backed up to the door leading to the kitchen, and called her husband. When the husband came out, a burly guy, the thief got second thoughts and put away the gun. Innocently, he asked how much a pastry cost. The husband, bewildered, responded, "Forty cents." The thief took out the money, paid for the pastry, and left.  (As I l...

There is one thing I hate about winter. I hate it with every ounce of my soul and my breath. Cold feet. No, I'm not scared of doing something, my feet are simply two blocks of ice. Two frigid blocks of ice that send waves of cold upward through my frame, and try to turn me into one large popsicle. The only time my feet are warm is at night in bed, and in the evening after I drink some wine with my dinner. Other than that it's almost impossible to feel them warm. Sometimes, when I go shopping or somewhere with central heating, my feet respond to external prompts. But since at home heating doesn't exist, and I'm not about to live at the mall, my feet are cold most of the day.  It doesn't matter what I do. I have bought sturdy winter shoes with a good, thick sole. I have worn wool socks. I have put warm wool insoles in the shoes. It doesn't matter. My feet still get cold. They may stay warmer longer in the morning with those attentions, but, in the end, they fe...

There is an article that is useful and necessary in rural Spain. At least in Galicia. It's used for everything, from carrying water to holding wet clothes, to holding corn to carrying grapes and firewood. It is the universal black bucket. There is no household without at least one (or two, or ten). The black bucket is a container made of black rubber with two handles. It's flexible and bigger than a normal bucket. Here we call it a capacho or a capazo . There is really no accurate translation of this word. Bucket doesn't do it complete justice, because it's bigger, has two handles, and is quite flexible. Depending on what you carry in it, you can carry it with both hands, or you can pull together the handles and carry it in one hand.  It's one of those things without which life in a village encounters problems. There's only so much you can carry in your arms or in a small pail. Wooden boxes can be an option, but they're difficult to find. I suppose tha...

School has recently begun again after the Christmas vacation. Kids are waiting at the bus stops in the morning to go to classes, most of them only anxious to see friends again and play with them at recess. In our township there are three large schools, along with the high school. But the younger children in some of the villages still attend the local escola unitaria .  These small unitarias , as they're called by most people, are one or two room schoolhouses. The classroom is on the bottom floor, and on the top floor is a small apartment for the teacher. The smallest are only one classroom. The biggest have two classrooms, and apartments for two teachers. In the middle of the parish where my husband grew up, there are two buildings with two classrooms each, together. Practically all these small schoolhouses around here were built in the 1940's and 1950's, to bring a certain order to education. My mother-in-law went to school in a private house where the teacher was boardi...

Like coffee? Spain is your place. But only if you like strong coffee. If the coffee you like is the regular American, drink-five-mugs-at-one-sitting coffee, don't touch Spanish coffee. Because if you do, it'll taste like paint stripper and one small cup will probably keep you awake for two nights. It's not as strong as the Turkish drop-of-coffee-in-a-shot-glass kind, but your eyes will still rival an owl's. I once made the mistake of drinking five coffees on a Saturday night. I had gone out, it was cold, I didn't feel like alcohol or soft drinks or water or syrupy juices, so I drank coffee. My heart was beating the conga when I finished the last one. Suffice it to say I didn't sleep well that night and that I didn't repeat the mistake. Since then I have gotten used to Spanish coffee. I can now drink a cup in the evening and sleep well, but I won't take my chances on five cups again. My husband, however, has no problems with it. One afternoon and evenin...

From the outside Spain has always appeared to be a profoundly Catholic country, where religion and politics seem to be intertwined and everyone goes to Mass on Sundays. That was true once upon a time. Until the middle of the nineteenth century and a wave of anticlericalism by liberal governments, everyone had perforce to belong to the Catholic Church. The Inquisition made sure of that. After the "separation" of Church and State, a Spanish citizen could belong to a different religion without civil retaliation. But the Church still remained a force to be reckoned with. When George Borrow travelled the length and breadth of Spain as he described in The Bible in Spain in 1843, Catholicism was still the only religion allowed, though Protestant preachers were permitted to enter the country. As of 1868, though, freedom of religion became the law. Which did not mean the Church lost power. While it had lost a lot of property during the nineteenth century, it did not lose all of it no...

This is getting ridiculous. It has come to the point of keeping a lookout for the mailman so I can collect the letters from the mailbox before they become a sopping mass of wet paper and colored ink. Mopping becomes an all-day event. I mop but it doesn't dry, even after passing newspaper over the area. Clothes can only dry at the stove, slowly, piece by piece. Which leaves the kitchen looking like a laundry most of the week. I'd almost forgotten what a partly sunny day looked like until today that the rain decided to give it a rest.  Unfortunately, tomorrow another front will waltz through the region, setting off alarms and swelling swollen rivers just a little bit more. A high pressure area is supposed to come in at the end of the week, but more rain on Sunday. And on it goes. Yes, Galicia is the land of rain. Yes, rain is what makes this land so green. But 257 liters per square meter in just three days is a little too much. That is the amount of water that fell in Cuntis be...

It was a dark and stormy night, and I was driving on the highway home. The rain slashed at the car and the wind rocked it as I kept well below the speed limit. More than anything because I could only see black space around me. There were faint lines on the road, and reflectors along the guardrail reflected a memory of light. As I passed incorporations and exits, the tall streetlights might have been nonexistent, tall dark posts they were, not practicing the functions for which they had been placed there. In places, instead of wicking away the water, the asphalt simply let it lie there for the car before me to spit on my windshield, making me even blinder. And for the privilege of risking my life, when I left the highway after eighteen kilometers, I had to pay €2.25. This highway, the AP-9, is the busiest highway in Galicia. It connects Ferrol in the north, with Tui in the south. From Tui it crosses the river Miño into Portugal and connects with the Portuguese highway, A3-IP1, which g...