Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Spain is different 8: Gibraltar: Logic: & The internet.


The Spanish - both adults and kids - get far less sleep than any northern European counterparts. One reason is that prime time TV programs start so late they don't finish until the small hours of the morning. The Minister of Health is now putting pressure on TV companies to start these programs early enough for them to finish by 11pm. All of this, of course, reflects the crazy Spanish timetable under which only 50% of people are home by 8pm and 80% by 10pm.

Spain is Different 8:


  1. The Spanish are not good tippers. The common advice is 'whatever small change you've got in your picket'. Which possibly explains the 5 cents on a 3 euro bill I saw in a café yesterday. My own rule is: 10% in the places I go to regularly and 5% everywhere else. But you may find things have been ruined in tourist haunts. 
  2. There are more syllables in the average Spanish word/sentence than in its English equivalent. You can say a lot more in a minute in English than you can in Spanish. Unless you speak much faster. Which they do. 
  3. Spanish women have never gone in for feminism very much. Consequently, they're more 'feminine' than, say, British women. And they have no problem with emphasising their sexual characteristics. No woman here wears baggy trousers and all TV announcers are beauty competition  winners. 
  4. Despite the wealth of the country, beggars are still a common sight in Spain. And there are even unfortunates displaying their leg sores or their stumps, for example. 
Under the last government, which implemented a successful policy of tripartite dialogue, there were very few 'incidents' between Spanish and Gibraltar police. Under the current (right-of-centre) government, there are hundreds every year. Go figure. The latest is a tug-of-war tussle between police vessels in respect of a boat suspected of smuggling drugs, in which a Spanish cop was injured. Naturally, there are diametrically opposed explanations of how this happened, with the Spanish version featuring aggression on the part of the Gibraltar police. Madrid could stop this nonsense overnight, of course, but it plays well with an electorate not otherwise well disposed towards it. So, it won't. And certainly not while Motormouth Margallo is the Foreign Minister. 

I asked my cleaner last night whether the TV had been on when she'd made the first of her 3 visits when I was away. "Yes," she said. "I wondered whether you'd left it on on purpose and was going to call you but then I noticed that there was no sound. So I decided you'd deliberately left it on." I didn't bother to seek the logic behind this statement. Life is too short.

Finally . . . Nice to see someone's gone from 3 megas to 10 megas download speed from Telefónica. Some of us can only dream of 3. Or even 1. My bill, by the way, says "Up to 10 megas".

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