So, we’ve handed over the reigns to the guest bloggers for the rest of June! We hope you will enjoy and comment on their (each others’) wonderful articles and stories, and visit their great websites of course! In the first of our guest blogging series, Gary Child, who runs a website offering great free resources for primary school classrooms, has a run in with a less than helpful hostel receptionist:

My last visit to Spain was in April this year when I attended the GME organised by Ben and Marina. The whole event could not have been better and the Hostal Tijcal II I had booked in at was clean and reasonably priced. Though the shower measured only 24 inches by 24 inches square, we managed.

On the morning of the day before I was due to fly back to the UK I approached the receptionist at the hostal, who was maybe in his early 50′s, and asked if he would mind booking me a taxi for the airport. From behind his paper and, apparently at great personal inconvenience, he informed me that there were no taxis:

“No, taxis!?”
“No taxis señor.”
“What do you mean, no taxis?”
“There are no more taxis, I have booked three already.”
“But this is Madrid. It’s a capital city, there must be more than 3 taxis.”
“I have booked all the taxis I can book for today.”

And with that he returned to his paper.

This is what your typical Brit imagines your typical Spaniard to be like. I was aghast and I’m ashamed to say that I felt a Basil Fawlty moment welling up. I would ‘reason’ with Manuel – the customary two finger jab to the eyes should do the trick. But no… I had a vision of sirens and blue flashing lights, of being carted off to jail kicking and struggling, missing my flight and of she who must be adored hearing about it on the six o’clock news.

With a sigh and a shake of the head I declined to comply with the stereotype and resigned myself to make alternative arrangements.

In the end I shared a taxi home with another forero. He was staying in Hostal Tijcal I where the concierge was a good deal younger and more affable, but even he took some persuading to book us a taxi.

Is it a Madrid thing? Is it a taxi thing?

Who knows, safe to say it neither put me off the country nor its capital and once the winter flights are announced on the budget carriers I look forward to returning – often.

I even like grumpy Spain!!

When not living it up in Spain, Gary runs a free primary education resources website.

It only occurred to me halfway through my dinner that I might have a split personality thing going on. Left alone for the evening I didn’t rustle up a very British Bangers and Mash but, instead, and without a second thought, prepared myself Chorizo sausage in white wine… and mash! Nothing wrong with a good bit of Chorizo al Vino, but with mashed potato? Surely neither the true Spaniard nor the true Brit would go for that combination, but to my culturally schizoid mind it was absolutely delicious.

It’s not the first sign of the confusion of my cultural roots: when one old friend realised she had lost my email address recently, she was quite surprised to discover that I came out in the top spot when Googling for Spanish Ben!

Where will it all end?

ETA says their ceasefire with Spain and the Spanish government will end at 00.00 hours tomorrow, Wednesday, when they shall return to a defense of their principles with arms. Zapatero’s government is blamed.

Oh well, balls to optimism then. When ETA announced their ceasefire in March last year I, for one, was optimistic. After all, don’t we live in an age where, in politically advanced democracies, internal terrorism just doesn’t seem like a viable option any more? Changing attitudes since 9/11 and all that… How sorry I was then, when that ceasefire was originally announced, to see so many Spaniards on the TV declaring that this was just another smokescreen, that it was a meaningless gesture that wouldn’t last a year. Yet how right the pessimists, or perhaps they are realists, were. Where oh where does the process go from here?

Links:
December’s Barajas airport bombing obviously didn’t bode well.
BBC: Eta to end ceasefire with Spain
20minutos.com: ETA anuncia en un comunicado que da por finalizado el alto el fuego

3 years ago my youngest sister arrived in Spain for a 12 month Erasmus study abroad program with little or no Spanish. Within months she was teaching Marina who, of course, is as Spanish as you can get, new words and phrases she’d never come across before. Part of her secret ‘learn Spanish sickeningly fast’ recipe involved sitting up in bed at night reading through the dictionary, picking out words that both fascinated her and later just stuck, for good. Sickening.

Anyway, much the same approach that my sister used to get ahead in Spanish could also be applied to Spanish culture, with Valerie Collins and Theresa O’Shea’s book In the Garlic. It’s an amusingly written A-Z of practically every aspect of Spanish culture you could begin to imagine, from Almuerzo (mid morning snacks) to Zara (Spanish version of Gap, sort of), via Chiringuito (beach-side or fiesta bar or restaurant/shack), Gilipuertas (polite version of Gilipollas – idiot) and Payo (gypsy term for non-gypsies). Apply my sister’s bedtime reading technique to this dictionary of Spain and you’ll soon be teaching Marina things she never knew about her own country!

But seriously, do you need this book? Well, here’s a little test. If you know what all of the following mean then you are definitely en el ajo (in the garlic = in the know) enough not to need it at all:

Llave inglesa, pataleo, piñata, selectividad, callista, dominguero, Ikastola.

How did you do? Definitions in the comments below please, and remember, if that little list completely stumped you, the book is available here!