Spanish views from a small town

Most of Spain has been in an intense heatwave this week. Today, it just started to touch us here. Temperatures of well above 100ºF/38ºC have created one of the earliest heatwaves in recent memory. Normally, the first heatwave hits around the end of June, but this year it decided to show up early to the party. As a result, school is still in session. The last day is still a week away, on the 23rd of the month. Children are having a hard time of it in school.  They're having a hard time because the powers that be have decided schools do not need air conditioning. The regional head of health services in Madrid, when asked about the lack of air conditioning, and how students should fight the heat, answered that air conditioning was not a solution for everything, and that the children should use hand-held fans to cool off, suggesting making them from paper as an "important occupational therapy."  This after giving advice on combating the heat. Yes, the man is a doctor.  Th...

I am once again accompanying a family member in the hospital, because illness does not take into account the seasons nor the weather. From one hospital, the family member has been taken to another. This is all absolutely normal. There are three public hospitals in Santiago. One is the the Clinical Hospital, also a teaching hospital. Then there are two other small hospitals, the Provincial, also known as Conxo because of the neighborhood it’s in, and the Gil Casares, whoever he was. They take the overflow of admitted patients and also have outclinics for the able. The Clinical is about twenty years old, large and with modern fixtures. It replaced the original Hospital Xeral, the original building of which was opened in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, that old building is all that’s left of the Xeral. The others, which were built some years later, were demolished soon after the hospital was shut down. The building boom was at its height then. But the crisis arrived and no...