Here's something from the Spanish Shilling that made me laugh out loud.
Don't really know why:-
My
Camino friends and I have been trying to book rail and bus tickets
for June this year. It's been what the Spaniards call a calvario.
Or perhaps even a pesadilla. Booking Renfe rail tickets from
the UK costs an outrageous 10 quid per ticket. And trying to book bus
tickets ran into the problem that each of my friend's credit cards
was rejected at the end of the (repeated) long process. When I
contacted the company here, they said it was because her cards
weren't issued in Spain and so extra protection was needed via a
digital fingerprint or something like that. So now I'm trying to book
their bus journeys from here but keep getting an error message that's
clearly wrong - Passenger number one doesn't have a seat
allocation. None of this is doing anything for Spain's
reputation. On the other hand, for journeys booked here in Spain,
I've found Renfe's site perfectly OK - once you've deciphered all
their little symbols and registered as a Renfe User. At least this
means you don't have to fill in a form twice every time you make a
booking. Though you do still need to provide your identity number
every time. Just as my friends in the UK have had to provide passport
numbers when booking (or trying to book) train and bus tickets in
Spain. Why, for God's sake? I'm sure the bloody conductor/driver
isn't going to ask for them. Do they go onto some central Interpol
database perchance? Or just give the Spanish police the satisfaction
that they can track guiris. Presupposing they gave accurate
numbers.
Ain't
it funny when your subconscious thinks it's the next day? Despite my
conscious mind denying today was Sunday, I kept wondering why, for
example, the cost of the paper was less than it normally is on a
Sunday. And why it didn't have the Business Section. Not as bad as
wondering why last night I couldn't get the score of tonight's
Champions' League football match between Madrid's 2 football teams.
And why the bars weren't full of fans.
A
friend of my daughter's advises that, if Gibraltar is on page 1 of
Spanish newspapers, one needs to look at, say, p.6 for the real news
of the day. The news that the government doesn't really want to pay
too much attention to. I must check. Meanwhile, from either Lenox or
David Jackson comes this snippet:- Far
from easing up on the border controls that cause long lines of
traffic at the border between Gibraltar and Spain, the Spanish
government is planning on increasing them. The Office for Diplomatic
Information claims that “Britain has not adopted the necessary
measures to fight smuggling,” and that, “unfortunately,
cooperation by Gibraltarian authorities, far from improving, appears
to be regressing." Of course. It's all the fault of those
perfidious Anglos. Nothing to do with internal politics. And there's
no smuggling in Spain. Least of all in Galicia.
There
are 39 choices available to Spanish voters in tomorrow's pretty
pointless and utterly boring EU elections. If you're a glutton for
knowledge, the details are here, with a HT to Lenox.
Finally
. . . Here's one Spaniard's take on his country's politicians, with
which an awful lot of people would surely agree:- The Spanish
politicians who are now asking citizens for their vote are the worst
in Europe, judging by their mistakes and the damage to this country
and its people. They have turned Spain into a landfill that only
stands out internationally for its dirt and its dramas: the traffic
and consumption of drugs, abortion, school failure, prostitution,
money laundering, institutionalised corruption, unemployment, more
poverty, privilege for the political caste, inequality, homelessness
and the breakdown between citizens and their politicians. Faced with
this situation, instead of asking forgiveness and resigning en masse
for their failures and the havoc caused, they ask once again for your
vote, as if it represented an award for and recognition of their
dreadful work. To vote for any of the parties who are guilty of the
Spanish Disaster, above all those who have ruled in recent years, is
itself the realm of idiots and slaves.
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