Spanish views from a small town

From across the pond more news of excess flies to our ears. This time, it's the Postal Service. Thanks to the devil virus, during the primaries this year, many people requested mail-in ballots. This summer, many are requesting mail-in ballots for November. Among them are my daughter and I, though ours would have been absentee ballots even without a pandemic. Whether our vote counts or not, though, depends on the speed with which the ballots are delivered. The new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, appointed this May, announced from the beginning he was going to put into place cost cutting measures, including no overtime, reducing personnel, and closing some offices. All this during a pandemic, with people ordering online, and the Postal Service delivering most of that merchandise, and during an election year. As a result, the speed with which the mail-in ballots will be delivered is in question. States have their own criteria on how long it should take the ballots to arrive and...

This morning dawned hot and breathless. Not a leaf was moving, and the sun was gathering strength. In the rest of the peninsula, a heat wave is melting the country, as well as our neighbor, Portugal. Even Bilbao, northern city of mist and grey skies, was forecast to reach 40ºC/104ºF, the hottest it's been since 1947. But at midday, a wind started to blow from the southwest, and fluffy bits of wool started to gather, and the fog has now enveloped us and is leaving us with a misty evening. I think it's the first time this month we've had cloud cover. At the moment, it's 19ºC/66ºF. Thank you, sea breeze.  What's also gathering strength, is Covid-19. There are about twenty-odd cases in the larger area serviced by the hospital at Santiago. In Spain there are over 2,700 new cases today. Most of those are in Catalunya, followed by Madrid, Aragón, and Euskadi. However, deaths remain relatively low, with ten in the last seven days. What is fueling this reappearance is di...

Is anybody at the wheel? Is it just spinning wildly as the bus plies the road, leaving the marks of rubber on the road as its driver swerves under the effects of only God knows what? The latest headline makes one think the bus is about to plow into a stone wall. "Trump's new Covid-19 doctor believes in alien DNA." As I was perusing Facebook yesterday evening, my eyes were arrested by that link. I thought that surely it was something from The Onion, or some other satirical outlet (really, with the way things are going, the normal news sounds satirical enough). I saw that it was from The Daily Beast, not exactly Pulitzer journalism, but I decided to look it up. Sure enough, different news outlets of different stripes carried news of a Stella Immanuel, who pushes hydroxychloroquine. She also pushes demons, alien DNA, the Illuminati, and claims of vaccines to stop people from believing in religion.  Seeing what Trump is like, one can understand how he can fall for somethi...

Yesterday, my daughter went to pick up the paper that allows her to drive while her definitive license is still being pushed through the system. I drove her up, and waited, then drove back part of the way, and let her drive the rest. If you ever want to watch a snail crawl by, ride as a passenger with a brand new driver. Aside from her lack of experience, she is cautious. Very cautious. If the limit is 50 kph, there's no reason why she has to drive exactly at that speed; she can drive under it. Apart from that, she was taught that to incorporate onto a highway, she has to push on the gas so she can get to the speed everyone is driving at, quickly. But our car has a problem with the clutch that needs to be fixed, and if you press too quickly on the gas, the revolutions will go up too much and too fast. Our car admits only a slow and steady acceleration. At least it saves gas. After she exited the short trip on the highway, she had few problems on the regular roads. Today, we wen...

Yesterday evening I was feeling like a round meatball, with that tired feeling that comes when you've been eating all afternoon. More than anything, what you want to do is stretch out on a flat surface and vegetate until that fullness slowly disappears. We went to a First Communion yesterday. My husband's nephew received the host yesterday, and it was followed up by a celebration at a restaurant nearby. Thanks to the devil virus, the total number people in the dining room was twenty, including the children. While it still seems a lot of people to me, I think most of us had not have been in a situation in which they might have been infected.  The day started out at midday. We went down to the church and, while we waited outside under the trees, slowly, people started showing up. It turned out there were two First Communions at the same Mass, and family and guests showed up for both, as well as the usual Sunday Mass participants. In the end, the church was a little crowded. E...

Today is a regional holiday, and on my morning walk it was most evident in the lack of cars. It almost seemed like during the lockdown, when people were first allowed to exercise outside. Though, towards the end of the walk, there were cars passing back and forth. What there were plenty of, were cyclists. First, I will say that there are cyclists that are well aware that the bicycle does not offer the protection of a car, and do not try to emulate one. There are aficionados of the bicycle that are attentive, polite, and eager to move out of the way to allow the fluid flow of traffic. Then there are the ones that give all the rest a bad name. The ones that act like they are kings of the road, and that absolutely everyone else has to give them the right of way. The first day I went walking, when it was allowed, one cyclist passed me, giving me a wide berth, since no cars were coming. The second one huffed past me, on the very edge of the road, not ceding one centimeter to maintain a ...

Today is the sad anniversary of the train accident at Angrois, entering Santiago. Seven years ago, on a misty eve of the Apostle St. James, a train came around a sharp curve at almost two hundred kilometers per hour, where the limit was eighty. It derailed, car piled upon car, and eighty people died, a hundred forty four were injured. That night, the revellers awaiting the fireworks in front of St. James cathedral were told there would be no fireworks and no joy. Neighbors climbed down to the train tracks and tried to help people out of the wreckage. Others brought blankets and coffee to comfort stricken passengers. Ambulances came and went continuously, and firefighters and local police crawled through the crumpled cars, searching for survivors.  It was one of the worst accidents in Spanish rail history. The worst happened back in January, 1944, in Torre del Bierzo, where a mail and passenger train collided head on with a locomotive inside a tunnel, and another cargo train ram...

There is an association in Spain that has a web page with a red list. That red list is composed of historical structures in danger of disappearing. The structure doesn't have to have been involved in direct history, it can simply be part of the cultural heritage that changes as time continues. On the red list, this week were added some telleiras , or tile factories. There are two in Valga, one in Catoira, and another on this side of the Ulla across from Catoira, in the village of Quintáns. They were probably abandoned in the middle of the twentieth century, but had been producing at least by the end of the nineteenth century. The buildings were leased by a man from A Guarda, on the Portuguese border, who brought two Portuguese workers with him to run the factory. Eventually, he married a local woman, and after some years rented the one in Catoira, leaving the Quintáns factory because it had less production capability.  The best thing going for these artisan industries, was that...

Things are getting worse on the virus front.  Contagion keeps rising in Catalunya, especially in the Barcelona area, and many other places, like Aragón, Navarra, Madrid, and Andalucía. Everyone is pointing fingers, but it seems that, in the rush to open up, all the regional health systems assured the Ministry of Health that they had hired enough people to trace contacts of an infected person to thereby reduce contagion. But it seems that some regions needed, at least, a thousand more tracers than they actually have.  A patient in Madrid complained that, after being told he was positive, he wasn't asked about people he had been in contact with. He himself had to call people he remembered being with, and tell them he was positive. That doesn't sound good, especially with tourists from Madrid travelling all over the country.   In the last twenty-four hours, 730 people have tested positive, mostly in Catalunya. There are 224 outbreaks in the entire country. Some plac...

Long gone are the days when, with a twist of a thermostat, we could warm the house. Or when, with a phone call, we could order more fuel. Those times remain back in Boston. Here, we have a wood stove. And that's it. While it doesn't warm the house to Boston winter standards, it's still more pleasant inside than outside in the winter. But to achieve that pleasant tepidness, we need firewood. The time to make firewood is in summer. During the winter and spring, my husband scouts woods and dales, checking different plots where trees can be cut. Either that, or calling up a provider, who can bring a tractor load of felled trees to be turned into blocks of wood that will later be chopped. When the logs have accumulated, my husband cuts them into rounds.  Then, in high summer, these past years we've rented a wood chopper. It takes three of us most of the day, during two or three days to chop up all the wood, and leave it to lie in the sun to fully dry. This year, howeve...

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  Very early yesterday morning, when a group of young men in Vilagarcía were deciding on which last bar to hit before retiring for the morning, they encountered another group of young men, but, from Madrid. Probably the locals recognized the others from their accent. Or perhaps they had already seen them around and knew where they were from. At any rate, the locals recriminated the outsiders, telling them to go back to Madrid and stop bringing the virus here. Things got a little heated, perhaps someone mentioned someone's mother, and a fight erupted. So much for social distancing. In the end, eleven were detained, and the group of madrileños are filing charges for harrassment. Yes, the general perception here is that the presence of the virus is due to outsiders bringing it in. The first known case back in March was a man who had travelled to A Coruña from Madrid. The others who were mostly affected, were senior citizens who had become ...

This afternoon, the weather was fine, not too hot and not too cool, so we went for a drive down the coast past Vilagarcía. We went down the coastal roads and streets to Vilaxoán, and Vilanova, past the popular beaches that dot the seaside. During the winter the very same drive is solitary, with clear views to the waves smashing on the beaches. In summer, what you see is a sea of parasols before noticing the water. It's a good thing we hadn't wanted to go to the beach anywhere around there this afternoon, because we would have had to park a half hour's walk from the sands. Not that there was much room on the sands, either. It was just after high tide, and people were very obviously not following social distancing. There were a couple of small beaches with few people, but because they were smack in the middle of town, and without amenities of any kind, right in front of a cannery.  Some were wearing masks, but the majority were not. No, there weren't any police offi...

It's still hot, though not quite as much as yesterday. I did my shopping this afternoon, and with the mask and the sun, got a headache, which I am trying to get rid of within my darkened study. Tomorrow, it's supposed to go down a notch, but the house has now accumulated heat which it will need a few days to lose.  Later, when the sun sets, we'll probably sit outside on the doorstep for a while, enjoying whatever slight breeze might pop up. Last night, I remembered about the comet Neowise. So, we sat outside until the sky darkened enough to see the stars. The street light right next to us wasn't helping, but we managed to see it, looming in the darkened sky above the trees like a ghost. It wasn't there if we looked directly at it, but out of the corner of our eyes we could see the sweeping tail. I brought out my camera and set it up on my car roof. Pointing toward where the ghost hovered, I set the exposure for eight seconds, and then bracketed with six and ten ...

Today feels like someone turned on the oven and left it on with the door open, even after the cake was taken out. There's a yellow warning on for extreme temperatures in our corner, with highs forecast to reach at least 36ºC/96.8ªF. When my last student left at five, I closed the window and the blinds at the front of the house. Maybe, I'll get a bucket of ice cream from the freezer to eat in the half-darkened kitchen in a little while.  What I am not going to do is go to the beach. I don't like the thought of slow-roasting an hour or two. Besides, the water temperature is freezing. I don't do from oven to freezer. My baking dish might; I don't. And now, the regional government, in the question of safety, it must be said, is making it obligatory to wear masks at all times when outside the house, even if there is a distance of at least a meter and a half, as long as there are people around. Even at the beach, if you are walking along the surf line or getting up to...

Finally, after battling on and off for the past five years, our daughter passed her driving test.  She had the appointment yesterday morning at eight o'clock. She spent the night at a friend's apartment, rather than get up at an ungodly hour to catch the earliest bus available.  The examiner in Spain sits kitty corner to the driver, while the driving school instructor sits in the front passenger seat. My daughter was nervous, and when she was told to set off, the car stalled. She had taken the foot off the clutch too soon. But she got underway, and followed the instructions. She took a curve in third gear instead of second, and then started off on the left side of a lane in a parking lot instead of the right. But it was a short drive that she was made to do, and she passed. Not the kid who took his test after her, though. His nose almost got shaved off by a truck when he was incorporating onto a road. The instructor had to grab the wheel, and the examiner made him return...

After having planned to go in March, then pushing it to April, then intending to go in June, I have finally returned to the hair dresser's.  Seven months after the last trip to the scissors, my hair had gone rogue. For the last month and a half, I've had to pin it up with a hair comb. My bangs had grown down to my lips, and one day that I forgot to put mousse in my hair, they became a perpetual curtain. Frustrated, I grabbed the kitchen scissors, and lopped off enough to leave my eyes clear of fur.  My hair dresser accepts walk-ins without any problem. I check out the time of day she has few people, walk in, and ask if she can cut my hair, or cut and color my hair if I'm feeling adventurous and don't mind spending over an hour with a towel wrapped around my upper body, drying any drops that might dribble down my neck. But the devil virus has changed things. Already, I had been planning to just drop in yesterday afternoon, after classes, but then I had a thought. W...

When learning a foreign language, one comes across many strange problems. Sometimes, those problems, like spelling, are already a problem for the native speakers. The lack of quality in spelling in modern times tends to reflect a lessened habit of reading, and a greater habit of writing short messages on a phone's keyboard. Whenever I see k for que , I feel like skinning the author. In English, this abbreviation has also led to things like 4 yu . For the love of sore eyes, is it so damned hard to write out for you ? You don't even have to hit the number keys for any reason. English really has a problem with spelling, because there are so many ways to write a sound. The vowel sounds, for example, can be written in a variety of different ways. There are at least six ways to write a long e . There's -ey, -ie-, -ei-, -e, -ea-, -ee- . Examples, key, field, receive, be, meat, seed . It's no wonder foreign students (and some native speakers) have such a hard time learning t...

Well, the regional elections have come and gone. And we're back where we were the day before. The conservative PP have won another majority for another four years. Why was I expecting any different? Yesterday morning, when I drove by, there was an evenly spaced line outside our parish polling place. It seemed participation was up. But, when we went after lunch, the place was mostly empty. Most likely, those who always vote, went in the morning, so as to go to the beach in the afternoon. We were greeted at the door by a cousin of my husband's who works at the township. He put sanitizer on all our hands and told us to follow the lines on the floor, placed so no one would bump into anyone else. In front of the urn, instead of handing my identity card, I had to put it in a box, so the person in charge of the table could read my name and number to the others, who were crossing off the names of those who voted. Then, I could move aside a paper on top of the urn, and deposit the e...