OK, there are a million reasons why Spain is great, and after the first three entries, I could continue this series forever… But I’m off on holiday to find even more reasons why Spain is great, and in the mean time, I wanted to wrap this series up by asking YOU why you think Spain is great.

But first of all, here are my final thoughts, a few more of the things that Make Spain Great:

1. Professional waiters who’ve been in the job for life and don’t do a bad job while simultaneously trying to charm you for tips.

2.Eating and drinking on outdoor Terrazas in summer when the air buzzes with happiness.

3.Spanish girls in summer (OK, all year round…)

4. The amazing diverstiy of landscapes from the green north to the deserts of Almeria, the mountains, plains and sierras…

5. Morcilla.

6. San Sebastian, Granada and Cadiz.

7. The fact that friendly Spanish people aren’t scared to touch your baby’s feet.

8. … or touch each other in conversation without flinching.

9. Dos besos.

10. Over to You - What would you put at number 10? Answers in the comments below please!

You know what this is all about. There is a country not far from here, where I come from, where things have gone a little bit mad.

Children in my good old UK are not allowed to have much fun anymore, lest they should hurt themselves while someone else is looking after them and courts of law get involved… they are often not allowed to run in playgrounds, and should they wish to use Blu Tack at school, they may be required to wear goggles.

In the good old days, I was allowed to take a penknife to school (the teachers only took it away from me once, to engrave my initials on it for me so I wouldn’t lose it, then they gave it back).

We played conkers (without safety glasses!), and in winter the sloping playground was sprayed with water at night to make an impromtu ice-run for the purpose of doing fun, long skidding slides down.

All banned now. No one ever got hurt when I was at school, but you know, just in case…

Adults have less fun these days where I come from too, as far as I can tell. They aren’t allowed to indulge wildly in public in many of the great pagan festivities that used to make life, well, more fun…

They have to STAND WELL BACK at exciting things like fireworks displays, once again, JUST IN CASE. They used to be allowed to get really close to the action, but now they mostly stand at A SAFE DISTANCE behind big barriers erected for their own good.

In fact the entire country where I come from is pretty much a ‘don’t do that, just in case’ culture these days as far as most of the old fun things are concerned, and much of this ‘just in case-ness’ has been enforced by silly but very strict laws.

(It seems the only thing that people are allowed to do with wild abandon and without restriction is to drink lots of alcohol… often until they are very very ill, and often while moaning a lot about all the things they can’t do anymore… This is also very very dangerous, to life, limb, and morale, but ironically it IS allowed and often encouraged as a way to RELAX… But is isn’t very relaxing when someone else that has been doing a lot of wild-abandon-drinking decides he doesn’t like the look of you and wants to kill you, and you don’t have time to retreat to A SAFE DISTANCE. This happens a lot on Friday and Saturday nights, even in nice towns, like Oxford.)

Spain isn’t like this… whereas people from the UK are advised to stand well back all the time, Spanish people like to stand very, very close to the action. Without barriers or hard hats, or security cordons, or silly laws banning fun things they’ve been doing for ever anyway.

For example, if they want to burn down very very flammable wooden statues in very tight streets, while standing very close, despite the risk that the whole city might catch fire and be destroyed forever, then that’s just fine. It happens in Valencia and is called Las Fallas.

If Spanish people (OK, OK, in this case Catalan people who are often unjustly lumped into the geographical notion of Spain for the sake of articles like this, but anyway…) want to stand on top of each other making improbably tall human pyramids, and send small children scrambling to the top of these pyramids at the risk of life and limb, then that’s fine too. They do that in Tarragona alot.

And I can’t say I approve of it anymore, (despite having done a bit myself) but if Spanish people want to run around in front of half-tonne bulls which could easily trample them to death, then go for it! You can literally grab the poor bloody bull by the horns if you want.

Why is all the above allowed in Spain when you wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting any of those fun plans past a UK town council these days?

Because people in Spain still believe in letting each other decide how to get their kicks. They still believe in doing crazy things that have been going on for generations, just because, well, that’s what’s been going on for generations, and history is more interesting than health and safety.

Mostly though, I think they just like to feel alive, and their government is often OK with that.

All this has it’s dark side of course. Lots of animals don’t have any fun at all when some Spanish people do very bad things to them.

There are other negative things, some of which I wrote about before in the post that got me into all the trouble, so I won’t go into any of that.

And let’s face it, all this irresponsible free-will-to-act-as-they-please may not last forever.

Far more speed traps on the roads in Spain these days. British people have been moaning about that for years, and I’m sure they are right… it’s a sign, one of those nanny-state things…

Few years back the citizens of a small town in Aragon were told that they couldn’t drop a live goat out of their church tower once a year anymore. Great news for goats, I’m delighted, but again, it could be a sign… Things might start getting BANNED a lot…

But for now, Spanish people seem to have quite a bit more freedom when it comes down to doing mad-crazy-dangerous things just for the fun of it, and that is to be commended (as good ideas go, that one’s dying out). It is just one more of the things that Makes Spain Great.

Discuss…

Let’s stick with eating and drinking, and look at another reason why Spain is great/the Spanish are great.

There is something wonderful about going out to a bar or restaurant with friends, and ordering a few different plates of ‘raciones‘. Like a larger version of tapas, raciones, as you probably know, are just a big plate of only one thing - jamon, calamares, cheese, gambas (pictured above)…. and the idea is to order a few of these and share them.

Everyone picks a bit from one plate, a bit from another, and keeps eating until there’s no need to order any more as everyone is full and contented.

I’ve known non-Spaniards, including myself at the beginning of my time in Spain, to be perplexed by this, even to feel exceedingly anxious in fact at this whole concept - some people just want to have their own plate of food without anyone else attacking it… that way you know just how much you are getting, and no-one is going to start stealing it from you!

How nice it is when you get over that attitude, and really really start to share, without a single worry about whether the person sitting opposite you is going to have one more croqueta than you, one more bit of finest jamon… I have to confess that even now, the selfish Brit in me still has his eye on that last croqueta, occasionally feeling pained to see it open to the table… It’s something I’m working hard on!

But the sharing doesn’t stop with the actual food, it carries on into that nightmare of nightmares in many cultures… the division of the bill.

Amongst the Spaniards I have met, one of two things will happen.

1) There is an almighty argument about who should have the pleasure of paying the entire amount, to invitar everyone else - this can go on for up to 5 or 10 minutes, getting fairly aggressive, until one party gives way, and either the bill is paid by just one of the party who is delighted to treat the rest, or…:

2) The bill is shared equally amongst those present, no matter what anyone had to eat or drink! There is none of the famous ‘who had the prawns’ careful analysis of every single thing that every single person ate, it’s just “it’s 40 Euros, there’s four of us, so 10 each” - end of story.

Occasionally someone will arrive very late and eat much less, in which case they’ll be either be paid for by everyone else, or will put in a token amount, but the rest will always be split, evenly, without a hint of fuss. It is a quite enormous relief and saves an untold amount of stress.

So here’s to complete, relaxed, contented sharing! Food, bills, wine, good times… just another reason why Spain is so extraordinarily great!

I was recently asked (in reference to my new Madrid Confessions audiobook), just what was so great about Spain, so I’ve decided to dedicate a mini-series this summer to answering just that question. First up, the honesty system…

It never ceases to amaze your average Brit that you can walk into most bars in Spain, order as much as you like to eat and drink, and pay nothing until you are about to leave when, quite often, the barman will ask you to remind him what you had!

Clearly there is massive room for abuse here. Had 5 cañas one night but only want to admit to 4? The worn out guy in the sweat-stained shirt who’s been working since 7 am isn’t going to notice… but as far as I know, this system is rarely exploited.

The most amazing example I’ve seen of the honesty system in practice was in San Sebastian.

You walk into a bar there and find the bar top covered in plate after plate of incredible tapas, or pintxos as they are known up there (see photo above), help yourself to as many as you like, and then casually inform the barman (who hasn’t been taking a blind bit of notice of your eating habits) just how much you’ve had. You then pay him and leave.

Can you imagine how much that system would be abused in other parts of the world if suddenly introduced over night? Yet in Spain this has been going for years. The bar owners trust the customers, and the customers basically act honestly in return…

…Except for those that feast outrageously then ‘do a runner’, or a simpa as it’s known in Spanish, but that’s a tale for another time… All in all, the honesty system is without doubt one of those things that puts the ‘great’ into Spain. Would you dare to abuse it?

This post answers one of the many intriguing questions tackled in the ‘author q and a’ bonus that comes with the outrageous Madrid Confessions audiobook.

A common question Marina and I are asked, as a Spanish-British couple, is ‘What language do you speak to each other?’

The answer is that we absolutely interchangeably speak English, Spanish, and rubbish.

Let me explain: We are both very good at each other’s language, so we can easily talk to each other in English, or Spanish, and communicate perfectly. I would say we speak a touch more Spanish, but it really depends on factors like how tired one of us is (I always defaults to my own language when I’m tired)…

The problem is that our easy interchange between English and Spanish doesn’t just happen on a daily basis. It doesn’t just happen on an hourly basis…

It often happens on a sentence to sentence basis, or worse, a word to word basis!

For example:

Marina to Ben: You look exhausted, qué te pasa love?
Ben to Marina: Nothing, I’m just feeling a bit agobiado…

Oh dear. You see the thing is, in sentences like this we’ll change languages when a single word or phrase works better in one language than another. Qué te pasa just works better than ‘what’s going on’ for Marina in the above example, and in the case of my reply, I use the word agobiado becuase it does a one-word job that English doesn’t have to explain a general feeling of stress/anxiety/over-work/too much on my shoulders.

And Marina understands what I mean perfectly, just as I understood her! Why speak in one language at a time, after all, when we have all the wonderful lexical tools of two at our disposal? We have a reached perfect, hybrid-bilingual communication at a sentence to sentence, word to word level.

Here´s the problem. Well two problems really.

Problem one, things get worse. Our hybrid-bilingual model quickly gets out of control. Let’s take my sentence from the above example again, and look at another version, that is almost more likely to be used these days:

Ben to Marina: Nothing, I’m just feeling a bit agobiated…

AgobIATED! Spanglish at it’s best! Yet it just sounds right, and I know that Marina knows exactly what I’m talking about, even if I am effectivily speaking the third language of rubbish!

But here’s the biggest problem of all: We are trying to bring up our baby to be bilingual. What chance has he got with words like ‘agobiated’ flying around the house?

Time to ditch the private language I think, and stick to those good old staples of English and Spanish, and preferably just one at a time!

You can find un huevo mas of confessions like this one in Ben’s super-guay Madrid Confessions… narrated 99.9% in English, 0.1% in Spanish expletives. Click here for todos los detalles!

As some of you know I am recently obscenely biased towards a positive outlook on life, and abhor ‘victim-mentality’ winging and complaining. It only brings bad things upon said victim, and in the case of complaining about Spain on this blog, it has only brought hateful messages from hate-filled people or proud, defensive Spaniards.

That said, I have a complaint. If any proud Spanish people are reading this, then please, do not get cross. You do indeed have a wonderful country, but perhaps you too might see this is annoying, badly implemented, and endemic to administrative and bureaucratic systems in Spain. Here’s my complaint:

I can’t avoid it any longer, I have to renew my NIE foreign resident ID card this month. Marina has just renewed her National ID card (called the DNI).

What happens when Marina the Spaniard wants to renew her DNI:

She Phones a hotline where an automated message answers immediately and connects her with an operator who gives here a fixed appointment at a local police station, where her DNI is renewed within 20 minutes.

What happens when Ben the foreigner wants to renew his NIE:

He phones a hotline which is CONSTANTLY ENGAGED and won’t be answered in a million years because no one gives a shit, so he is forced to go directly to the only police station in Madrid that deals with foreigners’ ID card renewals where he will have to join a queue of several hundred people and waste hours of his valuable working morning to probably find out that he hasn’t got the right bits of paper with him, which he couldn’t possible have known as no-one answers the phone to foreign people interested in renewing their residence in Spain so that they can continue to pay 40% tax to the local government who might think of investing some of that money in a new system to make their foreigners feel slightly more welcome and something more than a SECOND CLASS CITIZEN for whom it is not worth picking up the phone and who can queue like an idiot for hours to do something that takes a Spanish person just half an hour!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Thanks for listening. Madrid, sort it out FFS.

(Ben: Marina, is it bad to moan on my blog about this?
Marina: No, es una queja fundada.
Ben: True, OK.)

UPDATE: Feeling slightly better, and slightly more forgiving… after desperation at previous engaged phoneline, I phoned 010, the solve-all-citizens problem in Spain, and was given a new number to try, 902 565 701 where I was told I would indeed be able to make an appointment. Wow! So I called the number…

First four calls led to an automated message that told me all the operators were busy… not funny if you consider 902 numbers are Premium rate numbers… on the fifth attempt I was put on hold for 5 minutes before, I have to admit, being spoken to nicely by a polite woman who has made me an appointment at a fixed time next week to get my new document sorted. Sounds very hopeful compared to the queue hell I went through last time and describe above…

However: Before the appointment I have to go somewhere completely different first to get the appropriate forms, I then have to go to a bank to pay a €10 fee, and I have to return to the place of the appointment later to pick up my new resident’s papers. So, that’s still 4 visis to Marina’s 1… still room for improvement!

First of all, STILL not official confirmation of whether Marina has indeed been landed with the worst job in Spain, and is in fact ‘La Nueva Presidenta de la Comunidad’!

We are avoiding bringing up the matter with the porter, who is bound to know, working on the assumption that what you haven’t been told in person, might still not be true!

Secondly, some of you know about the ‘Notes in Spanish Forest’, 120 cherry trees in Asturias bought with proceeds from the sale of our ‘Crisis Collection’ pack, over at our Spanish learning sister-site Notes in Spanish. Well, the trees have just been planted, and the charity, Fapas, has put a really nice photo-story up on their site about the big event. Do have a look.

Marina has made a Spanish video about it too, here.

Have a great weekend! - Ben

You live happily in your big old flat block in the middle of Madrid for 5 years without so much as a hiccup, then all of a sudden, one day your sister-in-law overhears a bit of gossip in the building lobby that changes your life forever… something so serious that you have to pretty much immediately start looking for a new place to live… an utterly compelling reason to leave your dear, sweet home forever… without so much as a backward glance…

Not cockroaches in the bathroom, noisy neighbours, burst water pipes, or a dial-up internet connection (none of which we suffer, thank god) could be worse than this…

The catastrophic conversation overheard by my sister-in-law on the way up to our flat just minutes ago, between our porter and an elderly resident, went like this:

Old guy: “So, the new Presidenta is Marina Diez?”

Porter:”Yes, it’s just been decided in the residents meeting…” [that we avoid like the plague]

Old guy: “The girl with the baby…”

Porter: “Yes, that’s the one.”

Yes, my wife Marina has apparently been made Presidenta de la Comunidad… Marina, ‘the girl with the baby’… and the business to run… and no time to so much as stop once a day for a glass of gazpacho… handed the worst thing that can happen to you in Spain…

… the sooner we get out of here the better… our very sanity, and with it our health, is at stake. Marina has been landed with the one job no-one here in planet-Spain would beg for in a million years.

Let me explain:

The ‘comunidad‘ is the collection of people that live in this building. In our case, Marina has been nominated boss of said ‘community’ for a year and will be required to take on associated administative responsibilities.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? And after all, the post is changed once a year by a fair system of rotation (apparently) - everyone gets a go.

But let’s look at the facts. There are ONE HUNDRED flats in our building. The above-mentioned “collection of ordinary people” that live in them is HUGE, mostly elderly and bored, and often somewhat mad.

And when they find out who has been nominated, albeit by this fair rotational system, to be in charge of them for the coming year, they will become psychotic, oppressed, moaning whingers, who’ll be beating down our door on a daily, no, an Hourly basis with the most inane building, neighbour, lost cat, cracked basin, just-a-bit-lonely/bored and god-knows-what-else related complaints they can possibly come up with, whenever they can possibly think of an excuse to come up with them!

That’s not even considering all the trips to the bank, document signings etc Marina will have to take on and, worst of all, worse than having all these people coming to our door for a year… Marina will have to chair the dreaded “residents’ meetings”… where the great unheard flat-owning masses of our dear community are all put in one room to rant, rage and olympicly moan at the same time!

We await official confirmation… with a gathering sense of dread. If it’s true, which seems 99.99% certain, then there is only one allowable way out. To leave the building, better still, to leave town. We’ll be heading for the hills. Flat (maybe) for rent. Watch … this … space…

I’ve just sent this email out to everyone on our big newsletter list that hasn’t picked up “The Madrid Confessions” yet, and I think this time-sensitive info is important enough to reprint directly here:

That’s it, time’s up… The really big discount on The Madrid Confessions audiobook ends tonight, at the end of this sunny Thursday May 28th, so if you want the super-discount price, act now!

Here’s the link:

http://www.notesfromspain.com/shop/madrid-confessions.html

And here’s the latest review, just in from Bella_b on our forum:

“I bought the audiobook yesterday. It is simply brilliant! I loved it! It was everything I was expecting, and more! It had some quite funny moments in it, but also some more sombre ones as well. Very interesting and really inspiring! … Great audiobook, I really recommend it!“

Get it before the mega-discount disappears tonight! (Don’t forget the two super bonuses as well - the Author Q and A where you get to ask me ANYTHING, and the special, exclusive ‘Marina Confesses’ podcast in Spanish - with transcript).

Last chance at the big discount here (ends tonight!), I don’t want you to miss out:

http://www.notesfromspain.com/shop/madrid-confessions.html

Saludos desde Madrid,

Ben

…don’t be a version of anybody, you have to be unique in yourself, you have to be creative, unique… don’t imitate anybody… be yourself, be genuine to yourself and build yourself. - Nawal El Saadawi

I listened to the most tremendous podcast this week, an interview on the BBC’s World Book Club with Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi.

What a fascinating woman! A doctor and writer in her late 70’s, she has some of the most refreshing, interesting views on life and creativity I’ve heard for a very long time. If you are interested in the creative process, in writing, in living, I urge you to listen to this interview. It focuses on a novel of hers called ‘Woman at Point Zero’, which I shall order at once.

Helping a friend with a research project yesterday, I was asked what I missed most about the UK (family and friends aside, of course), and I came to this conclusion: Listening to Radio 4 (and programs like this) in the car. That even more than Marmite on toast. Or Cornwall. Thank god for podcasts.

Finally, this post was not at all started as a way of promoting my new audiobook, but I want to make one comment. The Madrid Confessions is the first solo project of mine where I feel I have produced something that would live up to Nawal’s quote above. I feel it is me being genuine to myself, and is not (at least consciously) imitating anybody. My earlier book, Errant in Iberia, was my version, my imitation (hopefully a good one) of many of the other ‘traveller abroad’ books that came before it (Brenan etc).

For years as a photographer I imitated Edward Weston, Man Ray, even though I was obsessed with having my own ’style’.

But, to my surprise, The Madrid Confessions is me being unique in my own way, not imitating or ‘versioning’ anyone else. It is a product of our 3 years of podcasting, creating a new kind of more spontaneous creative process for me (narrating stories without a pre-written script), and I’m very proud of that. As Nawal says, build yourself… I’ve worked very hard to build the me that narrated this latest book!

Comments welcome on any of the above, e.g. what you miss, the creative process, other podcasts as stimulating as ‘World Book Club’… and do listen to the Nawal El Saadawi World Book Club podcast, that was the whole point of this post!