Yesterday I linked to an article in the Telegraph by a young woman who didn’t like all the smoke she had to put up with while pregnant in Spain. The article mirrored sentiments of my own and, importantly, those of my wife Marina when she was pregnant here in Madrid.

What I found shocking, was the ferocity of the comments left on the Telegraph website, after the above-mentioned article (they were almost Daily Mail bad!) Most were along the lines of ‘stop complaining – if you don’t like it, leave Madrid – it’s not your country, so deal with it’.

But here’s the point. If the expat who wrote the article complains about the smoking in Madrid, she is lambasted as a moaning foreigner with no right to do so… no matter how long she’s been here…

If Marina, a Spaniard, moans about exactly the same thing, no-one would doubt that it’s her right to do so.

So the question is, how long do you have to live somewhere, be it Madrid, Sydney, or Bangkok, before you really do form part of the framework of your new home country, before you really can call it your own, and thus have the right to make the exact same complaints as the locals?

Just thinking out loud, but it’s a tricky one…

I’ve just returned to reality after 10 days living in the land of flu, which served to remind me of one important thing: how great Spain’s public health system is. You feel ill, you call the doctors in the morning, they see you that same day, for free, and prescribe you medicine that you only have to pay a tiny percentage of.

OK, so that’s the same all over most of Europe, but I just wanted to point out again how fast and efficient the whole process was. Can’t say the same for the flu unfortunately. It was slow, and annoying.

Back to another of my favourite gripes (I think that might have been a bilingual pun!), Being pregnant is a fag in Spain is the title of an interesting article in today’s Telegraph, in which Michaela Rossi can’t believe the attitude to smoking and pregnancy/kids in Spain. It’s a good read, and seems totally accurate.

Fortunately for Michaela and other parents (like ourselves) who don’t like mixing kids and smoke, the health minister, Trinidad Jiménez, has been out this morning promising once more that there will absolutely be a full smoking ban in closed public spaces, including restaurants and bars, in 2010.

Let’s hope it’s early 2010! And in the mean time, Melissa, don’t forget downstairs in Casa Mingo.

Casa Mingo, Madrid - click to enlarge

If only all restaurants in Spain were like this! It is classic (hasn’t changed in decades – neither have the waiters, who, by the way, are friendly!), opens at 11 am, and is non-smoking!

What this means it that we can go there with our baby and eat with him before 1pm! Seeing as he has a siesta at 2pm, there is practically no other restaurant in Spain we can eat lunch at these days – oh, and all the others are mostly smoky too, so 100 more points to Asturian Cider House Extraordinaire Casa Mingo for keeping the nicotine out as well.

(Meanwhile, here’s an amusing article in El Mundo where bar and restaurant owners weep for their certain future of economic ruin if the Health Minister continues with her evil plans to remove smoking from every bar and restaurant in Spain: ‘Nos arruinan a todos’. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think every bar and restaurant in the UK, France, Italy etc went to the wall when smoking was banned there!)

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be another anti-smoking post, just a message from a parent thankful to have a clean atmosphere to take his son out to an early lunch in – “Ole por Casa Mingo!”

(How to get there etc: links)

P.S. Oh, and this photo of the best Asturian Chorizo in Madrid is for Jose/Valenciason – I think Gary would like it too:

I’m back in Spain after a month away, a 3,000 km odyssey via France (where I managed to get totally offline for 2 weeks for the first time in … years), two wonderful family weeks in the UK, and finally the ferry home from Portsmouth to Santander (Thanks Colin for putting us on to the joy of Brittany Ferries!)

A note on the ferry: we dreaded spending 24 hours on a boat, but enjoyed it immensely. Yes, the normally rough Bay of Biscay was calm as a lake, but the boat was huge, our cabin was big enough, and a nice lady from whale charity ORCA gave us a talk on the evening we departed about wildlife we might see, and the following day helped us spot dolphins and whales from the heliport deck.

Apart from common and bottlenose dolphins, we saw two fin whales, the second largest animal on the planet (after the blue whale). Others spotted sperm whales and pilot whales. Either we are very lucky, or the Bay of Biscay is teeming with life!

Here are some of my first impressions of Spain (from the drive home from the Santander ferry to Madrid):

1. There are a ridiculous amount of brothels along the highway around Valladolid – part of the route we took home. These are known as ‘clubs’ and are identified by the garish coloured neon strip lights around the edge of the buildings. Libido must be wild in Castilla y Leon, these things are everywhere!

Sadly they are full of girls from Eastern European countries and beyond who have been conned, abused, and forced into working there.

2. People walk into bars here to smoke, instead of walking out to smoke. Much as I hate smoking in bars and restaurants, there is something great about seeing the Spanish casually do something much of the rest of Europe has renounced so fiercely. No one tells Spain how to behave!

3. Highway driving here = appalling. You’re in the fast, overtaking lane, about to pass a lorry, when an SUV undertakes you at crazy speeds, and squeezes into the tiny gap between you and the lorry, just so he can get past it before you do. Scary. Unnecessary. Seen less in the UK.

4. It’s still bloody hot (compared to the UK!)

5. More soon. Suffice is to say that it’s great to be back. But it was wonderful to be away.

My recent comments about smoking in Spanish bars and restaurants received the usual amount of moody replies, many of the more offensive ones deleted. There are two possible reasons for this: 1. Smokers hate criticism, 2. Negative blog posts lead to angry replies. The latter is certainly true.

I don’t like being critical of Spain, but as the years go by it seems that one finds more to be critical about. The other day whilst walking around the Retiro park, I tried to work out why, and came to the conclusion that it is simply the product of living somewhere for a very long time.

After the honeymood period wears off, one starts to see the chinks in the armour. But what made me fall in love with Spain in the first place?

The new-found freedom you get when you escape abroad, wild escapades with friends to different fieasta-ful corners of an undiscovered country, stunning fresh landscapes to look at, wander through, and photograph, a beautiful new language to learn, new people to interact with, a wonderful, rich, new culture to get to grips with, new food, the Spanish love of outdoor life, Spanish film (not TV!), fine wine, fine ham, beautiful people, a passion for valuing tradition… the list is long.

But then you live here for five, eight, ten years and you start seeing beyond all of that to the workaday country beneath. A country with the same problems as the one you came from, with it’s own silly annoyances that you realise do come to infringe on your everyday life (like the smoking thing).

You start moaning about the same things the locals do, but when you do it, there is a real danger that, as one commenter put it a few months ago, you just become “yet another foreigner sticking his nose into complicated issues and drawing the same old negative conclusions about Spain”.

The same conclusions a Spaniard will draw, but as a foreigner, woe betide you if you mention these things in public!

Anyway, what am I on about? I knew long ago that Spain would be a ‘life-partner’, like a great wife (like mine) that you know you plan to keep forever (hope Marina reads this, few bonus points here for the taking perhaps?!)

And just as we go might go through rough patches with a husband/wife/boy-girlfriend, in the end the best thing to do is to find a perfect middle ground where we live happily together, in love with each others’ virtues, and putting up with the foibles.

So my plan is to get my head out of my office, and start enjoying those virtues again, keeping everything positive (as is my wont), and putting up with the day-to-day annoyances that probably crop up wherever you live. I mean, if I still lived in the UK, I know I’d be moaning a hell of a lot more. (Then again when I phoned my great uncle recently, and he immediately commented on the weather, I felt deep pangs for such wonderful Englishness!)

Have you ever fallen in and out of love with somewhere you’ve lived for a long time?

[rant]

Now we have a baby in tow we obviously need to find places to eat that are non-smoking. This is hard.

OK, there are options available via a quick search at www.nofumadores.org, but if we try to think of favourite old restaurants that are smoke free, we can only think of four. Two are pretty expensive for a weekday lunch, one is completely over the other side of town, and the last is a wonderful Hare Krishna center where you sit on the floor and eat rather delicious Tali, but again, quite a metro ride away.

So come on Spain, SORT IT OUT!!! If the French, the English, Irish and Italians can all do without smoking in restaurants and bars, why can’t Spain? In brand/image terms, this smoking thing is going to make your country start looking pretty intelectually and sociologically backward pretty soon.

Yes I know you passed some half-arsed ‘less-smoking’ law a few years ago, but it only applies to places over 100m sq., of which there are about 3 in Spain, and everyone ignores the legislation anyway!

I also realise that at street level, hardly anyone really gives a damn. A friend told me the other day about going into a bar with 3 sets of parents, each with small children in prams/strollers, and ALL of the parents smoking! The smoke was so bad that my friends left the bar! We see parents breathing smoke over their kids every single day, so this is not an isolated, or surprising, case…

So come on Spain, work on your self-image AND your nation’s health a bit, and get with the damn program. Look at the French! No one smokes like the French (except the Spanish), yet they have done it – 100% non-smoking bars and restaurants now a pleasure to be in, a pleasure to enjoy that wonderful food in. Spain Spain Spain. How long til you sort this out?

[/rant]

Feel better now. Still can’t find anywhere smoke-free and local for lunch though. Grrrrrrrrr

We had lunch in a favourite village bar today up in the sierra an hour above Madrid. The bar has a ‘comedor’ (restaurant section) at the back, with two large rooms, the slightly smaller of which is joined to the larger one by a small flight of steps. To kind of comply with anti-smoking laws put in place a few years back (that state that any bar or restaurant over, I believe, 100 m squared must have a section designated for smokers that doesn’t exceed a third of the total floor space), the slightly smaller room up the steps has been deemed the no-smoking area.

Well, that’s a start, except for the fact that this room is only opened on weekends when there are enough customers to merit opening it up and either heating or air-conditioning the extra space, depending on the time of year.

So, we had lunch surrounded by the local Ducados and cigar-smoking obreros and oldies, while the door to the non-smoking section remained shut. Lovely. We like the place so much that we still go, but try to arrive early before it gets too smoky. We have asked to be let in the non-smoking area in the past, but it didn’t go down well (es que la calefacción no está puesta… … the heating isn’t on… ) so we’ve given up.

Theoretically someone could report the place but it seems unlikely as a) it’s a family run place that has been frequented by the same people for years, and everyone is fond of them, and b) everyone just accepts that this is quite normal and knows nothing would come of reporting them anyway.

How I wish Spain would join France, Spain, Italy, Ireland etc and sort smoking in bars and restaurants out once and for all… Come on Zapatero, get with the program!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[Download MP3]

Questions raised in this episode:

1. Is it fair that tax payers in Spain should be forced to decide whether to give a percentage of their tax bill either to the Catholic church or ‘social causes’? Shouldn’t we be given more choices? What does the church do with the money?

2. As people continue to pay good money to visit the place the Virgin Mary last appeared to three shepherds, how religious is Spain?

3. As Turkey also decides on a total smoking ban in public places, how long can Spain hold out? When will they finally ban smoking in bars and restaurants here as well?

Hurray! I’ve been looking for this for ages, and now regular NFS commenter Parubin has found it! Here’s his great comment, from an earlier post, in full:

“@ Sandy : “Is there any website we can see a list of smoking and non-smoking establishments in Spain?”

As an example, in Madrid city there are listed :
- 139 bares y cafeterí­as.
- 297 restaurantes
- and only just 1 pub?? ”

Thanks to Sandy for the quesion, and Parubin for the link we’ve all been waiting for. Shame there are no non-smoking bars or restaurants listed in my corner of Madrid!

OK, so that isn’t a very unbiased headline, but there is something so unappealing about the Partido Popular these days, that I really didn’t want them to crawl their way back into power again.

For deep analysis of the voting, see the BBC, or the front page of any major Spanish news site (El Mundo has pretty charts). Suffice is to say that although the PSOE once again failed to get an absolute majority, they did better than last time.

One final word, then no more politics on this blog for some time:

What I’d like to see the PSOE do over the next 4 years

- Find a new approach to the internal terrorism problem, and solve it once and for all

- Improve the lot of, and respect for, immigrants

- Find a way to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse when the construction trade tumbles

- Ban smoking in bars and restaurants, in line with so many other western European countries

What would you add to the list?