Spanish views from a small town

My daughter has been cleaning her room these days, and she has found a time capsule. Well, not really, but it seems like it. She has unearthed stuff from years ago, including a catalog from autumn/winter, 1993-1994. It's a catalog from the German business, Quelle, and I must have received it after ordering something from another, earlier catalog. I do remember buying some clothes from them years ago. My daughter must have had that catalog since she was a little girl, and used it like I used to use an old Sears catalog. I had no need for video games, tablets, cell phones, or other electronic diversions when I was a child. I had an old Sears catalog from God-knows-where, an old mail-order catalog my mother picked up from the trash in her office-cleaning job, and the sales flyers from the Sunday newspapers. The last, I picked up from the first floor apartment, when the tenants left the old papers by their door, ready to give to the garbage men on Thursdays.  I would pore over the ...

Though the moments of greater travel were last week as people scrambled to be home with family for Christmas, there are still people travelling home for the New Year. My brother-in-law and his girls came to spend that holiday with the grandparents. We went to pick them up at the airport last night. Theirs was the last flight into Santiago for the night. As we awaited them, others arrived through the door. The first one out was a youngish woman. She walked up to an older man and a little boy and a big smile lit up her face when she saw the boy's reaction. Another woman, close to her in age, shouted, "No!" She backed away, then ran into the traveller's arms, and the two engaged in a prolonged bear hug. Apparently, the traveller and the man who seemed to be her father had made her believe they were awaiting someone else. It was a surprise that made many around them smile in complicity. Others started straggling out. Some were older couples, who appeared through the d...

Another year, another Christmas lottery. Yesterday morning the house was filled with the sing-song voices of the children of San Ildefonso School chanting the numbers and their prizes on the televised, hours-long extraction. That lottery marks the official beginning of winter and the social beginning (lights and commercialism notwithstanding) of Christmas. After it was over, news vans travelled all over Spain, interviewing winners and losers. (We're neither - nor this year, we recuperated all the money we spent - not much.) Winners shouted out a hundred and one ways to spend the money (€320,000 after taxes), and the losers lamented their luck. Among most people, the Christmas lottery day is the day of health. Because the optimists among those who don't win anything tend to say, "Well, at least we have our health." But we losers have so much more than that. I saw a meme this morning that reminded me that we did win the lottery. We've won the lottery of luck. We...

I finally got around to going to Vigo this past Friday. There is an art store there, that, while it's not fully comprehensive, still has more material than the small ones in my radius. I also wanted to walk a little along busy city streets in the largest city of Galicia. A few hours in the morning wasn't enough, though, so I'll probably return during Christmas vacation. What caught my attention the most, even though it was daylight, was all the Christmas lights in all the streets in the center. There was a tangle of cables and designs in wire overhead that defied the eye. On a large corner where the pedestrianized main shopping street began there was a large round structure that seemed to be a tree bauble. Along that pedestrian-only street there were many winter decorations, as well. They were comprised of a mound of earth, with real fir trees, and different structures, such as snowmen. One had small house structures that were still being set up or fixed. But those mounds...

The holidays are coming, the holidays are coming! Actually, they've been coming for a month, now, and are as yet to be glimpsed through the fog and mists of December days that still separate us from them. But, if one turns on the television or goes anywhere near a store or two, one would think Christmas is tomorrow, and we still haven't done anything about it.  Because, of course, one must buy presents. For everyone. You are such an absolute cheapskate if you don't buy something for the mailman, who hasn't stopped by in over a year now that you do everything online. Or for that cousin five times removed you happened to bump into yesterday for the first time in ten years. And if you don't buy anything special for your sister's furry companion you are the lowest of the low. Your tree (because, of course, you've already put up the tree; how could you not?) by now should be surrounded by at least a hundred little packages all expertly wrapped in the most expen...

Spain is now no different from other European countries in a sad way. We now have an extremist right wing party with elected officials, which David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, congratulated. This past Sunday, there were elections for the regional parliament of Andalucía. Vox gained twelve seats, mostly thanks to the almost 54% of elegible voters who decided not to vote, because "they're all the same." But, they're not all the same. It's true, the local Socialist party, which has been ruling in Andalucía since it was declared an autonomous region, is riddled with corruption. That's the problem with holding power indefinitely. A glance at the Franco family with it's ill-gotten gains, and their friends from the dictatorship, can tell you what a long time in power will do. Power does corrupt. It may not corrupt all who hold public office, but it will cast a pall over those in office at the same time as the corruption. If the Socialist party had ...

Yesterday I had an appointment with my nurse to check my blood pressure (normal) and my weight (going up after having gone down; not good weather for walking). Since I was there already, I also asked for my flu shot, because I have asthma and it's not nice to have to sit up in bed to breathe during a bad bout of the flu. She said there wasn't any problem and went to get it. I clenched my teeth, closed my eyes, and grabbed my chair with the other hand as she jabbed me. (No, I don't like needles.) Then, I just picked up my purse, gave thanks and left.  I didn't have to open my purse to take out money. I didn't have to swipe a credit or debit card. I just asked for a service and received it. It's not free, of course. Our taxes pay for this service, and that's it. Once our taxes have been paid, we have access to all health services. That's the beauty of this system. We only have to pay for a percentage of our prescription medications, or full price for any...

Two different, disparate things come to mind this morning. One is the tear gassing of innocents along the Mexico border. The other is the blood red Christmas decorations color-blind Melania put up in the White House. Different, yet, they seem intimately related. Millions and millions of dollars were spent sending the United States Army to the border with Mexico to obstruct the entry of the caravan of asylum seekers that had travelled north from Central America. The occupant of the Presidency even declared that he gave them permission to fire if the soldiers felt threatened. So, when a group of them got too close to the border fence, the soldiers fired tear gas at them, and forced them to run. But the people who got too close weren't the thugs and criminals Trump sees in every poor person outside the borders of his mind; they were families with small children. Photos of parents running from the expanding mist dragging small children created outrage in just about the entire world. ...

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, and a regular workday in Spain. Today, as I walked around on errands, I saw many "Black Friday" sales signs. Of course, instead of exporting the idea of a day set aside for giving thanks, they exported a day in which to clean our pockets and honor consumerism. Such is worldly nature. I remember Thanksgivings as a child when my father would receive from his employer (a small, family-owned construction firm) an enormous turkey just for the three of us. My mother would bake it in the oven, surrounded by potatoes, and stuffed with a stuffing she made up. Before putting the turkey into the oven, she would chop up potatoes and onions, mix them with ground beef, and cook them in the frying pan. Then, she would stuff the turkey well with it, the extra overflowing onto the pan. There was no stinginess in her cooking.  We were never into the pies and dessert business, though. Nor into any vegetables cooked on the side. Our business wa...

The Spanish government announced this week that in 2040, just a little over twenty years from now, no diesel nor gasoline cars would be manufactured, and that by 2050 they will not be allowed to wander the roads. All in the name of climate change. On the one hand, I consider it admirable. It probably won't be enough to slow down climate change, but it's a start. Fossil fuels will still be used in places other than cars. But, it's a beginning, an incentive. What I find inadmissable, however, is the lack of planning. There was no mention of federal grants to research and development on more autonomous, cheaper car batteries, nor mention of how the population is going to be able to afford buying new electric cars to replace the ones they have and need. There was also no mention on re-educating workers in the car industry, nor of replacement jobs, since electric cars apparently need fewer workers to mount. And there was no mention of increasing public transport fueled by clea...

Time. Each of us views time differently, depending on our cultural world-view. In the West, time is linear. In the East, it's circular, and the past, present, and future co-exist. Much has been talked about this weekend of the Armistice, signed a hundred years ago this past Sunday, ending what was then called the Great War, and is now known as World War I. What was to have been the war to end all wars merely became the prelude to another century of war, this time practiced on a much larger and much more cruel scale.  When I was a little girl, reading my scrumptious history books, the War seemed a short while ago. Anything after 1900 was not old. After all, it had only been sixty years. There were still people living that would march in parades on Veteran's Day that had fought in the War. And now, suddenly, it's a hundred years behind us, and the last eyewitness, unless a very young child at the time, and a very old person now, has passed into Time itself.  It was a self...

The last time there was an assassination in Spain, was when Admiral Carrillo Blanco, head of Franco's government, was blown sky high by ETA back in 1973. Those were the last days of the dictatorship, when people were trying to shake off the grey yoke of Franco, and bring Spain forward into the light of the rest of Europe, and ETA decided to take advantage of that social unrest.  Juan Prim in 1870, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1897, José Canalejas in 1912, and Eduardo Dato in 1921, were the previous heads of government assassinated by anarchists and republicans during convulsed social moments in Spanish history. The latest moment of social tension is happening this year, between francoists and less nostalgic people, over the exhumation of Franco from his Valle de los Caídos , the Valley of the Fallen.  When earlier this year, the new Socialist government announced its intention of removing Franco's body from the monument he created to those fallen in the Civil War, and w...

The Spanish judiciary is coming under fire from all sides lately. The truth is, judges are smacking of everything except impartiality. The latest ruling on a case in which they had to determine who pays the tax on a new mortgage, has shown that many judges prefer to maintain the status quo on the power of the banking industry. The case was originally decided that, because of a change of wording in tax law four years ago, the client was not supposed to pay the tax. The Supreme Court judges ruled last month that the banks should pay it. This tax, in Spain, is on 1.5% of the value of the mortgage taken out, and can reach a few thousand euros. In other countries, it's a much lower percentage. Up till now, the client has had to pay it. This ruling was supposed to change that. It also opened the door to retroactive refunding of the tax paid in the last four years. The bank would have to pay the clients the amount of tax they had paid when they signed the mortgage.  But the banks neve...

The natural state of mankind is chaos and selfishness. That is the conclusion I have come to after the election of Bolsonaro to the Brazilian presidency, and the rise of neo-fascist groups just about everywhere in the world. Most of these groups are really authoritarian, rather than simply fascist. They embrace the free market, mostly in their own interests, while they promote love of country above all other things. The most striking similarity with the old fascist way of thinking is the hatred of equality and individualism.  Their rise in these later years, might be seen as a reaction to the increase in personal and political freedoms embraced by the West since the end of the Second World War. Like previous fascism, most of these movements are spurred by fear and hatred of change, and loss of privilege. Whether they succeed or not in their design, depends on how much those who have the least privilege fight to be able to better their lot. At the moment, political apathy seems to...

If the United States can go overboard, it will. If the rest of the world can copy it, it will, too. Not only does the rest of the world copy the clothes, it also copies the foods. Fast foods of all kinds, with all different kind of flavors, have appeared all over the world. Fast food franchises, from McDonald's to KFC, to even Dunkin' Donuts, have opened up in a great number of foreign cities.  When a craze appears in the U.S., it spreads everywhere, and touches everything. I have read that pumpkin flavored foods are in every supermarket once September hits. Some of the foods thus flavored are too weird to even think about. Pumpkin pie cheesecake ice cream? Greek pumpkin pie yoghurt? Pumpkin spice English muffins? Pumpkin spice coffee creamer? Pumpkin spice liqueur? Pumpkin spice cream cheese spread? Pumpkin wine?? Mexican chile pumpkin mole?? Pumpkin spice Kahlua?? Pumpkin pie spice butter spread?? Pumpkin spice puffed corn???? Have we gone insane with the pumpkin?  Well,...

Beer is going the way of the dodo bird.  I'm sure that sounds like the ultimate catastrophe to many. That foamy beer after work, with friends, on a sultry summer's afternoon, will become a luxury item until it disappears altogether. Nooo! Well, yes. It's really an idea that has been around for a few years. A few days ago a study came out showing it is true. The quantity of hops and barley will wither thanks to climate change. When one stops to think about it, it's really very simple and predictable. The hotter temperatures don't only affect us, with simmering heat waves and increased storms, they also affect our crops. So, climate change affects us in more ways than one. It also affects our stomachs and our taste buds. In 2009, it was estimated that crops were moving north about a quarter of a mile a year. That means that the ideal growing zones for a specific crop were changing. Soy and corn crops were moving north into areas previously planted with barley, a...

Rain is a primal part of Galicia from late September onwards. My husband tells stories of winters that began in the middle of September and let up only when June arrived. Winters of days that awoke in rain, and went to bed in rain. Winters of only a few days when the sun could be seen. Winters of water. The weather is now changing, and in these past years, October has been an oasis of summer. Perhaps that is also changing our mindset, and we have begun to assume that the rains of winter won't arrive until much later. Which is why, when a cold front with its associated rain and wind passed by last week, we were surprised.  We were mostly surprised because we were caught off guard. The morning after the intense rainfall, I went out and saw many people cleaning the debris from gutters that had overflowed, and saw where rain and mud had crossed the road because of stuffed up ditches. Most of the small floodings that happened were due to ditches and gutters that had filled up with t...

Rodrigo Rato, one of our home-grown political criminals, has just had his jail sentence of four and a half years confirmed, and he will have to start serving his time soon. He was found guilty of swindling over €90,000 from Bankia through the use of "black" credit cards. Those were credit cards issued to several high-ranking members of the bank's direction illegally. When those cards were used (for just about everything but official bank business), the funds tapped were the actual funds of the bank's deposits.  Rato is going to jail for that particular crime, but he was also involved in schemes to bilk people of their money by having them invest in "preferentes" , funds that invested money in the actual bank, but could not be touched for more than a hundred years. But that was in the small print and in absolute legalese that most small investors (overwhelmingly retired people) could not read or understand. How the mighty are fallen; from ex-director of the...