Back with the death on the roads theme… The Department of Traffic has a web page where you can look up accident black spots. Now what’s the point of that? To make you drive extra carefully in those spots? Should we all be checking where we are most likely to wipe-out before we get in the car? I thought the idea would be that once they know about them, they should do everything in their power to identify the problem and stop these stretches of road from being black spots permanently.

Then again their latest slogan is ‘No podemos conducir por ti’, we can’t drive for you, so they probably think that just telling us where to be careful is enough – we can do the rest.

Click here to see the black spots and stats for one of the busiest stretches of motorways in and out of Madrid (40 kilometres of the A6). And keep a real eye out as you approach Valencia on the A3! Scary stuff.

Costa del concrete – an interesting blog post on a subject dear to my heart – the endless over-construction of the Mediterrean coast.

So this is a famous case and every single one is just as important, but two things are so wrong about the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. First of all the death penalty is just so crazily ethically corrupt – especially in a country run by a religious zealot who ought to set some store by rules particular to his religion such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’…

And secondly because the man perceived to be behind this decision, even if he is only a puppet figurehead, is ‘Arnie‘, a once famously slightly ridiculous muscle man who somehow made it into politics.

Anyway, Amnesty International explains the rights and wrongs of this far better than I.

Here’s the story in Spanish.

So, the double December bank holiday week is over and we have the usual figures to contemplate: 98 dead in 80 traffic accidents – an average of 10 deaths a day. A third of those that died weren’t wearing a seatbelt, and 45 % of the accidents involved excess speed. No figures on the involvement of alcohol yet but I’m sure it played a significant role.

I still believe that a bit of ‘mano duro‘, no-messing discipline is what’s needed here. A year ban for drink-driving on any scale, and higher fines or bans for everything else. Many Spanish regularly drink and drive, speed like crazy, and drive 2 feet from the car in front. Up the punishment and double the level of enforcement, and maybe these figures will fall to rest-of-the-world levels one day.

Meanwhile, in related news, 5% of drivers that died on the roads last year had cocaine in their system, double the figures from four years previously.

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Santiago de Compostela and the Santiago Way. A walk through the old town and tapas for supper.

Includes an extract from Tim Moore’s book Spanish Steps – I’m still only on chapter 5, but very ineresting and entertaining so far, with loads of facts, history and info on the Santiago Way.

Click on the Firefox button over at the top of this page’s right hand column, and get the Firefox browser. Firefox is far better than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Why? Because you can have several sites open in just one window at the same time, using ‘tabs’. Because there are loads of invaluable extensions to add which do loads of cool things (like tell you the weather, search wikipedia etc), and because Firefox is far less vulnerable to Spyware. Plus a little bit of top-quality competition for Mr B. Gates is never a bad thing!

And for everyone who downloads a copy of Firefox via NFS, I get up to 1 dollar from Google, much needed for funding my charity India bike ride!

Metro Madrid has just announced an 80% drop in smoking-related complaints, with 411 people fined for smoking underground since the beginning of a clampdown this time last year. Gone are the days when you would step onto a platform to find smokers puffing away whilst chatting casually to the very security guards that were meant to be fining them.

Soon it’s to be the turn of civil servants and bankers. There is nothing worse than dropping into the local branch of your bank, to find the teller drawing hard on a high-tar Ducados on the other side of the desk. Or going to ‘hacienda’ to sort out your tax declaration, only to spend ten minutes with an extremely unhealthy sounding woman who breathes smoke at you for the duration of the interview.

Yet at last Spain is due to catch up with the rest of the anti-smoking world on January 1st, when smoking is finally banned in the workplace. An air of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ hangs over the city, but if Metro Madrid can pull it off, then I for one am optimistic. Stay tuned for an update next month, I think I’ll be saving all my banking chores until then…

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Posted from on the road in Galicia ( a wi-fi connection at last… ). Car problems and the seedy side of Lugo…. Photos coming very soon!

We’re touring around rainy, green Galicia in Northern Spain for a few days. As soon as we find a hotel with decent internet (tomorrow with any luck…), I’ll upload the first podcast from our trip. ¡Hasta Pronto!