Thoughts from Galicia:14.9.17

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

Life in Spain

• Here's my fellow-blogger, friend and Business Over Tapas author, Lenox Napier, on the question of why the Spanish aren't a nation of consumer complainers. As he put it:  After almost forty years of democracy, the DNA of the Spaniards still does not incorporate the culture of claiming their rights as consumers. So, guess what happens.

Someone's cited 10 dishes you must try if you're visiting the UK and here they are:-

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding

Pork pie

Omelette Arnold Bennett

Scotch eggs

Golden syrup steamed sponge

Rice pudding

Welsh rarebit

Fish and chips

A 'Full English breakfast'

Afternoon tea

I've actually eaten some of them. Well, most of them, in fact.

CAMINO NEWS . . .

Colmenar Viejo is an odd place. And it seems to be a one-taxi town. I tried – using the number displayed at the station - to arrange a cab for my friends arriving an hour after me, to be told that they'd have to wait at least half an hour before it was free to pick them up. The most outstanding aspect of the place was that most shops seemed to be obliged to have particularly unattractive signage from (presumably) the same company. Which I assumed belongs to a relative of the mayor/mayoress.

But – unlike my friends and hour before – I found the basilica open and was impressed by its splendour:-

As ever, though, the only other people in it – in this country of moribund Catholicism – were a group of 6 or 7 elderly (presumed) widows responding to a voice on a PA system leading the chanting of the Lords Prayer and the Ave Maria. My guess is they do this every evening, more for company than for anything else.

Finally . . . I fled from the horrendous throbbing backbeat noise of the hotel for the old quarter at 7 yesterday evening but made the mistake of entering a quiet bar en route for a shandy. Whereupon the bartender put on music at a level even louder than that of the hotel. Just for me, the only customer. In fact, it was so loud I couldn't hear her when she told me how much I owed her. This is one aspect of Spanish society I will never be able to adjust to – the correlation between having fun and deafening everyone within a 100 metre radius. With the concomitant and total lack of consideration for those who aren't 'having fun'. When I asked the hotel receptionist when the noise would finish, he replied that he didn't know but assumed it wouldn't continue at night. This is a nothing answer in Spain, where this could mean it could end at any time between 10 at night and, say, 5am. Fortunately, it didn't. The music started to fizzle out during the evening and ended before 9pm.