Spanish views from a small town

And along comes an Englishman to get Spanish readers in a kerfuffle. The more things change.... Two Sundays ago, Chris Haslam of The Times , wrote a mostly tongue-in-cheek  article on Spanish habits. To begin with, a visitor should know the difference between tapas and pintxos . To be sure, I don't know the difference myself, only that pintxos is a word written in Basque, so perhaps it would not be wise to ask for a pintxo in Cádiz. Getting a tan and learning the language are also important. Well, while I know the language from babyhood, the tan has escaped me all my life.  Then, he says, to pass as a Spaniard, one must act like an extroverted pig in a bar, shouting and hugging and kissing all and sundry, and throwing everything on the floor. I beg to slightly differ. While it's true that effusive greetings are common among people that know each other, especially in smaller towns and villages, any stranger that just wanders in off the street and starts greeting purely ...

Those with a sweet tooth who have tried the famed hazelnut spread, Nutella, know how rich and creamy it is. Nutella is the original Italian brand, Nocilla is the Spanish version. I remember eating sandwiches of it on a vacation here when I was a child. I also remember the joy at finding Nutella in an Italian grocery shop in Boston's North End once. To me back then it was a minor miracle; a taste of vacation and summer and country air and tasty warm fresh bread and sweet goodness. But from appreciating something rich and sweet to punching people just to get a jar is a large leap. Yet, that is what happened these past couple of days in many Intermarché supermarkets in France. Food in general is more expensive in France, Nutella included. So, when the supermarket chain decided to give a 70% discount on jars that normally cost €4.70, leaving them at €1.41, droves of people made the supermarkets look the the craziest of Black Fridays in the United States.  I've never lived throu...

The picture of an eight year old boy with icicles in his hair and frostbite on his hands this month highlighted the poverty many children suffer in rural China. Little Wang from Yunnan province has to walk over an hour to get to school every morning, and his clothes were less than adequate. He is a "left-behind" child. Those are children whose parents have to migrate to work in larger cities, leaving behind their children with relatives. Even sending home some money every month, the relatives don't have enough money to buy winter clothing, or even meat. But the boy has never missed a day of school, even in the frozen winter. He wants to study to be a policeman and "catch the bad men." The publication of his picture, taken by his teacher, in social media, has led to an outpouring of clothing and money. Two fourteen year old boys in a working class neighborhood of Bilbao brutally murdered a couple in their eighties in their home to rob their valuables. They were...

Big Brother is here. He's been here for a while, and more and more often now, we're inviting him into our homes and our lives. Orwell was right, though he was wrong about the date.  We value our privacy. Those of us who have read 1984 have folded themselves with Winston into his special corner in his apartment to savor a moment without surveillance, of thinking our own thoughts, and just of being ourselves. We have cringed at the thought of such total surveillance that, when we put down the book, we seem to have gasped for air and started to breathe again. Yet, we now consent to have people and computers monitor us at will, without giving it a second thought. One way we invite such voyeurs is with our computers and smartphones. They can easily be hacked, their cameras and speakers activated, and our every movement and conversation followed. Hello, Ministry of Justice. In the mornings, I check Facebook. Every time I click on a post, the holy algorithms gather information o...

It's winter, and we're at the height of the flu season. This year, between summer and fall, the type of virus changed slightly, and the vaccine is being less effective than other years. Since the epidemic began some weeks ago, thirty-eight people in this region of Galicia have died.  It doesn't sound like a lot, out of a population of a few hundred thousand, but it's still sobering that a little virus you've suffered from many times can still take you out. Eighteen of those that died didn't get the vaccine, yet they were within the group in which it is recommended. I, with my asthma, have been getting the flu shot for years. So far, I haven't had the flu, though a cold or another some other year might have been the flu virus attacking me, though attenuated by the vaccine.  The last time I knowingly had the flu, was the year the A virus erupted onto the scene. I had been vaccinated for the usual B virus, but I fell ill one weekend. So did my husband and d...

It's not particularly cold these days, at least not by New England standards. The thermometers show temperatures in the low fifties, upper forties during the day, and upper thirties at night (max. 13ºC, min. 3ºC). Yet, I get out of bed shivering and stay shivering most of the day I'm at home. Inside the house it's not much warmer. While, in the mornings, the contrast is greater, it's not really warm inside the house. The joys of having a wood stove as the only generator of heat in the house. When I get up, I try to move to warm up. If I'm going out, so much the better. While driving, I turn on the heater, and the car warms up, sometimes too much. Whatever store or office I step into is warm and heated. I'm warm, my feet are warm, and so are my nose and fingers. I don't usually wear a coat, because the reality is that it isn't cold . Walking and stepping in and out of heated places warms me enough.  At home I light the fire. If I don't go out, I w...

Yesterday, I did my weekly shopping. There is a supermarket I visit that has a tiny bazaar area. Their offerings vary by week. This week there was a range of children's clothes. An older woman was pawing through some t-shirts, and said to her husband, "Look at these cute shirts." Her husband replied, "Who are they for, the cat?" I couldn't help but laugh, and so did the wife and husband.  I bet that woman has grown children and is eagerly awaiting news of an upcoming grandchild. I'm sure she mentions it often whenever she sees her children, "Well, when are the grandchildren going to arrive?" So many women are like her in these villages! When I first married, my mother wanted a grandchild, though she didn't say it to my face continuously, just took it as a matter of course that we would have children soon. My mother-in-law was the one who was always asking about the stork's arrival. It became trying after a while. Even after our daught...

Wreckers are a thing of the past. A thing of romance and darkness along the old coasts of Cornwall in England. But the Cornish coast is not the only jagged shoreline where it would be easy to entrap ships to rob of their cargo. The Costa da Morte here in Galicia, that northwest corner where the Iberian peninsula curves south, is also a jagged coast, where need and poverty once drove a few desperate souls to wrecking. The legend says a cow's horns would be wrapped with rags dipped in fat or other combustible and lit, then the cow would be led along the coastline to confuse ships and bring them onto the rocks. Then, amidst the cries of drowning sailors and passengers, the wreckers would descend upon the remains of the ship and strip it of everything worth carting off.  True wreckers, in the worst sense of the word, have died away, but the habit of salvaging everything that could be salvaged from a wreck remained. Even in these latter days, when need is not as desperate, what the se...

The road from Galicia to Madrid is called the A-6. It is a newish highway that has taken the place of the old road, the N-VI. It's the fastest and most direct way to get there from here. Taking advantage of its relative speed, and the ease of crossing the Guadarrama mountains through its tunnel, it becomes a tollway from Adanero, about twenty kilometers before the tunnel. It ain't cheap. If I remember correctly from the last time I travelled along it, it costs about eleven or twelve euros from Adanero to the emergence from the tunnel on the other side of the mountains.  Last Saturday was Epiphany, a national holiday here, and almost the end of Christmas vacation. Many decided to travel home that day, instead of Sunday. The forecast was for snow in the mountains, but the Dirección General de Tráfico, charged with keeping traffic moving fluidly, announced on its web page that all roads were passable. They announced this well into the afternoon, when that was no longer the case...

This area has been in the news for a week. Just about everyone in Spain has heard the name of our town, Rianxo. But not because of a happy reason. Rather, for the most heinous of reasons. It turns out that Diana Quer, an eighteen-year-old who went missing in August, 2016, in nearby Pobra do Caramiñal while on vacation, was killed and her body hidden here. And her killer is a neighbor.  As the story unfolded, we went through the stage of denial, of shock, and are now reaching the stage of acceptance. Yes, we know him; we also know his family. That is part of our stages of denial and shock. It's a normal family, neither better nor worse than any other family around here. It wasn't a broken home, like one might assume would nurture a serial rapist and killer. It was a home where all the children were taught the difference between right and wrong. It was a home where love abounded. Yet, this individual twisted himself in the most unnatural way.  The man was on his way to becom...

A new year, a new start. But it's not really, except for certain things. Holdovers from last year are still beating hard, such as local news that has gone national, or Christmas vacation for schoolkids, which still has a week to go. The rain that has decided to wait for winter to roll in has also continued over from the past year. Weather doesn't care about calendars. For other things, it is a new start. My husband went back to work today, his broken rib healed, though the nerve endings still jangle and he sometimes needs a painkiller. It's also a new start for price hikes of all kinds. Except salaries. Those only go up a tiny percentage point, such as old-age pensions, which have only gone up .25 percent. A quarter of one percent, which means the lowest pensions might only go up little more than a euro a month. Then there are the salaries that haven't gone up in years, such as my husband's, which has been frozen for I forget how long. Like him, many, if they have...