Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Gib (of course); Brand Spain; Amazon Spain; Airports; Borja Art; and Spanish customs.

The Gibraltar saga has now degenerated into comic opera. A Spanish ex-general (retired from some planning position under the last PP government) has accused the current PP government of offering its bare bum to Britain for not taking measures - like what, I wonder - to stop its 'air and naval group' entering Gibraltar harbour. Shame he's not an ex-admiral, allowing us to invoke Gilbert & Sullivan. Anyway, I suspect he's wrong and that only one of the ships will enter the harbour. But what are facts when you want to provoke the only fight you've been involved in all your working life, and beyond?

As with the all the financial losses fraudulently inflicted on property-buying foreigners down in Andalucia, the Spanish government appears to care not a jot for its reputation abroad. Despite all the empty talk about Brand Spain. Worse, it seems not to care about what's being done to its own 10,000 citizens being forced to wait at the border for up to 7 hours in the sun as they try to get to work in Gibraltar. Needless to say, Catalan politicians are making hay while this sun shines, regretting the "improper bullying and harassment" by the Spanish government. If you're pushing for Catalan independence, it pays to be able to depict the Spanish government as a nationalist bully.

But anyway . . . I've tried Amazon Spain for the first time - for the TV I finally decided on. They don't really seem to have got the hang of things yet:
9 Aug: I got a message saying the product had left the store and would be with me some time on 13 Aug. i. e. yesterday
13 Aug: As I sat in waiting for this delivery, I got another message at 12.15 saying it had just left someone else's warehouse and would be with me 'within the next 48 hours'.
Which is quite a large margin. As my elder daughter said to me last night: "Dad, you still haven't learnt to moderate your expectations". The first rule of a happy life in Spain.
The good news is that it arrived late yesterday afternoon. So, all's well.

Here in Galicia our 3 small international airports continue to compete the life out of each other via ever-larger subsidies to airlines such as Ryanair. The upshot for the poor customers is that flights can suddenly move from one (convenient) airport to a different (inconvenient) airport. Meanwhile, Oporto's facility continues to grow at the the expense of the Galician trio, not least of all because it has a superior attitude to customer service. Most recently, they've improved the bus service which will take you from several Galician towns direct to the Portuguese airport. The problem is that, while the case for rationalisation of the 3 Galician airports is incontrovertible, no one's going to have the political will to take the decision to implement it.

Talking of incompetence . . . You'll all remember the Spanish artist who turned the fresco of Jesus in her local church into something resembling an orang-utang. Well, she's now had an exhibition of her works and, in truth, one or two of them don't look half-bad. Click here for more on this.

Finally . . . I occasionally take my daily tiffin in a café on the edge of Pontevedra's main square. One of the pleasures of doing so - outside - is watching the ebb and flow of people. If you're familiar with Spain, you'll know that the square throngs with folk until around 2, when suddenly it's deserted, as everyone goes home for the main meal of the day. Here's a foto showing this. When I took it, there were more beggars working the café than there were people in the square.


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