Spanish views from a small town

When you buy shampoo and the bottle says, maybe, three hundred milliliters, that's never what you're getting. Oh, yes, it's in the bottle. But that's where it's going to stay.  You're about to wash your hair and you haven't been shopping. There's still some shampoo in the bottle that you've been squeezing and shaking. You haven't finished it, there's enough for another wash. So, confident you can shake your way to clean hair, you turn the bottle upside down and shake. And shake. And shake some more. After five minutes, a thin, slow stream of shampoo pours into your hand. There's more in the bottle, but there's no way you can get it out. You look at the quantity. There might be enough to wash a doll's hair, but not the wet, cold mop on your head.  Or you're washing all the dishes and cookware from lunch and you eye the dishwashing detergent. It's a bottle of nine hundred milliliters you bought a month ago and there'...

Yesterday afternoon my daughter came home on the bus to attend a funeral. I drove her back in the evening to her student apartment. The round trip, going by highway (with an eagle eye out for radar guns) takes around an hour, depending on how long I stay to chat or the traffic in the city. Last night it was over an hour and a half. At least fifty minutes were spent trying to get into Santiago. I took the usual route and at a rotary where I would have had to turn right into the city, there was an informative policeman. He was turning many drivers away, who then went around the rotary and back where we came from. It was my turn and I asked, "Can I get to the street Carmen de Abaixo through the South Campus?" No, impossible. I could only do it through the back lanes which I had no idea how to get to. I would have to go through the center of town. The reason? The tractorada . A tractorada is a parade of tractors blocking traffic. I later read in the digital newspapers that the...