Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Driving in Spain; Ice-bucketing; Butterfingers!; Noise; Spanglish;& La Tomatina madness,


My car is now almost 2 years old and has all the scratches you'd expect from driving in Spain - delivered by high kerbs, pillars in impossible underground garages and holes in car parks that allow the bumper/fender to hit the ground. One day soon I'll get them all re-painted and the process can start all over again.

The ice-bucket phenomenon is naturally entering a crazy - and dangerous - phase. Someone was injured this week in Cataluña when a plane dropped a helluva lot of cold water on him. What's surprising is that anyone was surprised. And that he wasn't killed.

Talking of accidents . . . A Spanish patient has been awarded damages against a hospital which lost his severed fingers on the way to surgery. It's not unusual for things to go astray in the mail here - particularly from the UK in my experience - but things have never sunk to this extreme. Perhaps they got the digital code wrong and the extremities couldn't be tracked.

On the final day of their visit, I took my young visitors across the border to a restaurant I favour in Portugal. As ever, it was very quiet. So much so that even the 4 Spaniards on the next table felt constrained to keep their voices down. A very pleasant - albeit brief - change from raucous Spain.

Back here, though, of couple of men on holiday down south fell out over the endless barking of the dog of one of them during the siesta hour. The 3.30 row ended when one pulled out a shotgun and killed the other. Something, I confess, I've felt like doing on more than one occasion.

Two more English gerunds have been pressed into Spanish service:-
El catering: The provision of, well . . . catering. But with a short 'a' sound. Also El cáterin.
El bumping: Forcing a special key into a lock so as to gain entry and commit burglary.

Finally . . . One of Spain's oddest festivals is La Tomatina, down in Valencia. Lots of pix here.

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