Party time

fi•es•ta
1.
Any festival or festive celebration.
2

4. Popular small family car

(In Spain and Latin America) a festive celebration of a religious holiday.
3.
The opportunity for a small Spanish town or village to go mental for a week or so,  usually          accompanied by lots of alcohol, odd costumes and ridiculous quantities of fireworks.

Well, there you have it, my online dictionary’s description of the Spanish fiesta. Okay, I made up the last bit because the worldwide interweb didn’t go into anywhere near enough detail and I think it should have done, and now, I’ll to attempt to put even more meat on the bones. Despite being hotter than Kylie Minogue without much on, August in my world is also the month where Spain, a nation seemingly stuck in a swinging sixties style time warp, begins in earnest to kick the arse out of the word party. Imagine an Olympic Games opening ceremony, any one of them will do, and then put it on the streets of a small town. That’s fiesta week!

Bad combo - beer + fireworks

Quite often the organisers will con you into believing there is a religious significance to all the mayhem, so called Fiestas Patronales, where the life and times of a Saint or Virgin, the patron of the town or village, are commemorated. For example San Fermin in the northern city of Pamplona, where, first thing in the morning twelve pretty cheesed off bulls are herded from their pen on the edge of town through cobbled streets to the Plaza de Toros, about a kilometre away, accompanied by loads of unfit and drunk people, some of whom will finish up maimed for life. Closer to my home, in June Alicante spends over a week hosting events dedicated to San Juan, which is just an excuse for a load of arsonists to strut their stuff. Wherever they take place and for however long, I reckon these local fiestas could just as well be a giant homage to San Miguel because gallons of the stuff gets necked!!

Squatters who refused to leave

A great many years ago Spain was conquered by a bunch of hooligans in sandals who snuck over the water from North Africa and made themselves at home here. For eight centuries. Eventually, enough was quite enough and the vanquished locals rose up, sending the wispy bearded rag-heads back from whence they came. La Reconquista or re-conquest is now celebrated the length and breadth of Spain and is better known as the Moors and Christians fiestas. Most towns and villages combine the two different types of fiesta and the resultant week normally descends into an orgy of music, fancy dress and drunken debauchery.

Home for me is Elche, which gives it big licks during it’s fiestas in August from the 7th to the 15th with two highlights sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. On the night of the 13th, the residents of the city, and by proxy much of the surrounding countryside, enjoy The Nit de L'Alba the most spectacular firework show you’ll ever see, in honour of the city’s patroness. Spectacular really is understating things a tad, for a full forty minutes Elche resembles a war zone, in 2009 some old folk in Benidorm thought the Costa Blanca was being invaded. Then, as if by magic, on the stroke of midnight the city falls silent and plunges into an eerie darkness as the Virgen de la Asunción, illuminated by a pyrotechnic halo, rises from the dome of the massive Basilica Santa Maria. A pretty unmissable event.

As well as all the traditional carnage, Elche’s fiestas are really built around the moving and deeply religious Misteri d'Elx  play. Performed in two parts on consecutive days, the 14th and 15th, act one, La Vesprà plots Mary passing away surrounded by the apostles. La Festa follows during which the burial, assumption and coronation of the virgin are depicted. These two days are the most important in the entire year and enjoy greater prominence in the city calendar than even Holy Week, (Semana Santa). In recognition of the stature of the event, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, (UNESCO), declared the Misteri one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Sure, quite a gobful but no higher accolade is bestowed for cultural expression. Apparently. 

No match for the towel-heads

For ex-pats fortunate enough to live by the coast, the Moors and Christians festivities start to get even more fun. And, if where they live also has a castle, then jackpot, it’s a racing certainty the town hall can put on the kind of opening ceremony to make even Beijing look a bit dull by comparison. In Santa Pola, the nicest place I’ve ever lived, the fiesta’s start on the 31st of August and run for nine days. They also tick all the right boxes. For a couple of hours of one morning the towns Levante beach is transformed into a kind of medieval D-Day but with a few less yanks. The idea is some of those naughty North Africans, complete with sharp knives stuck in their belts, try and sneak ashore only to be fended off by the local Home Guard who open fire in noisy and smoky style with trabucos, a kind of long barrelled replica rifle, a bit like a blunderbuss. Round two of the skirmishing inevitably takes place in and around the castle, where, this time Dads Army aren’t quite as lucky.

1977 and all that

It matters not where you live, during fiesta season the Spanish take very, very seriously their annual opportunity to err, not behave very seriously at all. The UK has nothing quite like the Spanish fiestas, sure, way back in 1977 there were a few street parties for Queenies Silver Jubilee and before that VE Day, but there really isn’t a fat lot to get excited about is there? You can bet your bottom dollar that within days of a fiesta, any fiesta, ending, the YouTube servers will be groaning under the weight of a mountain of new footage of pomp, pageant, pirates and quite a few pillocks. Visualise a week long combination of a typical British New Years Eve, (without all the arrests) and Bonfire Night and you’re getting there.

Sinead O’Conner once sang, “Nothing compares to you” She could easily have been referring to Spain.

We've had the builders in. Briefly.



Just like the ex wife's haircut

 We've got a bit of an archaeological dig going on at our apartment building at the moment, you know, the kind that never seems to be finished. Unfortunately, it's in the entrance hall of our apartment building, which is undergoing something of a transformation; from a perfectly serviceable reception area with lighting and post-boxes into a derelict building site with rubble, bags of cement piled up and bare live wires everywhere. The drilling, banging and dust creation began in the middle of January, carried on at a relentless pace for three days and then abruptly stopped. I'm assuming, maybe wrongly, the workmen must have knackered themselves that first week because they just haven't come back. What they've left behind is an absolutely hideous mess with no end to the chaos seemingly in sight. At the outset, their remit was to remove and replace ageing wall and floor tiles, lighten up the space, install a new intercom system and hang a new security door out to the street. Only half of one of those things has actually happened so far, but the fifteen or twenty new tiles on the wall aren't half a lovely colour and I'm sure the ceiling will look nice once the awful looking holes in the plaster contain spotlights.

You're supposed to put  letters in here mate

In the meantime, we and our neighbours, one of whom is quite elderly, have to navigate something akin to  the shop floor of  a branch of Travis Perkins to get to our front door. Even if we make it safely home, we may well resmble ghostly spectres and require an immediate shower, such is the quantity of dust we accumulate on the way up. As I once said to the ex wife when passing comment on her new hairdo, "it'll be nice when it's finished" What I am quite excited about is the possibilities of our postman acutally inserting our mail into the promised shiny new buzones, (postboxes - pronounced boo-thon-es), up until recently he just sort of lobbed people's letters in the vague direction of the stairs and left the residents to get on with a bit of a treasure hunt for their bills. Talking of archaeology, had Robeto the builder and his feckless chums used toothbrushes and spoons instead of hammers and a Black and Decker, the job might be nearly finished by now. Closer to home though - in actual fact inside my home - the story of apparently started and abandoned building projects looms very large, as well our once immaculate bathroom can now testify.

The ugly scar

The problem, not for one moment of our own making, started last weekend with a knock on the door from Jose, owner of the apartment beneath ours, who, it seemed was suffering from an ingress of water, from quite where nobody really knew. The local plumbers did though and very soon narrowed the problem down to a leaking pipe - inconveniently situated behind a wall in our salón de baño. Upon this diagnosis I immediately, and not without good reason, sensed trouble. Trouble duly came next morning, when, once the insurance company had given the green light, Pepe the Spanish plumber and his oppo set about the offending wall with gusto and two sledgehammers. Two hours, a pile of rubble and a massive great hole later, they'd located and replaced the offending leaky pipe, made a token effort to clean up after themselves and gone. That was last Monday and they've not been back. Discreet enquiries revealed it's now up to a new set of, err, "tradesmen" to make good the massive great gash the plumber left behind which stretches from half way up the wall to the ceiling and gets wider at the top. It looks like the kind of fissure in the rock potholers in Derbyshire might enjoy exploring. The thing is when I visit the bog with my newspaper or a good read, I don't want to have to do so with a helmet and safety lamp. More to the point it's most disconcerting to have the feeling something has just crawled out of the earth and is sneaking up behind me while I take part in one of lifes simple pleasures. 

It's not all gloom and doom though, on Friday my new and long awaited telephone finally arrived.


UPDATE FRIDAY MARCH AT ABOUT 2330
At long last progress and an impressive finished product to boot. After something of a frustrating two or three days because the newly cut security door keys wouldn't work properly without pulling or pushing the door itself, the entrance hall to our building has now been finished and looks mighty tidy. These days we now have spotlights in the ceiling, slinky floor and wall tiles and a brand new intercom system from the street to each individual apartment, which, presently doesn't work!! On the upside, the athletics theme continues uninterrupted. Previously, during the building process I used to have hurdle various builders requisites to get home, now the task is altogether simpler; the street door has a heavy spring mechanism, which, affords a competitive bloke me about thirteen seconds to sprint up the four longish flights off stairs before it clangs shut behind me. Great for keeping fit, but now, unfortunately, every flight of stairs I encounter has to be tackled at the double whatever I am wearing or carrying. Ho hum!!

That's only half the job though,  because Wookey Hole in our bathroom is still wide open and making an alarming noise

And then Spain went and spoilt it all.

Just a couple of short weeks ago there I was, in this very blog, eulogizing Spain as a place to live, when, all of a sudden Spain went and let me down very badly indeed. Clearly, I spoke too soon as my neck of the European woods began to believe it's own positive publicity and came over mighty complacent. Since my stubby index finger last pressed the space-bar, quite a bit has happened, and not all of it good.

Nice yacht - shite firm

I'll start with Telefonica - something I bitterly regret ever doing when I first arrived here in 2006 - who, frankly, deserve every word of bad press anybody has ever printed about them. Besides not being particularly cheap, their customer service department appears to consist of one man who hides his telephone in a drawer so he can't hear it ringing. This giant and hopelessly inefficient multi-national has twice replaced my wireless router in a forlorn attempt to provide me with an internet service that, if only for an  hour a day at three am, might perform fractionally better than a 1993 dial-up connection. This morning, ten days after this woeful organisation promised to upgrade my line speed, for which I foolishly/generously - you decide, agreed to pay an additional five euros a month, it took forty six seconds for my laptop to toggle between the BBC sport and news pages. Think about that for a moment, almost a whole minute for an aggravating green progress bar to complete it's short journey from the left to right hand sides of my screen. I'm seriously thinking about investing in a Telex machine.


El Corte eBay

 Not to be outdone, another famous Spanish name recently shamed themselves by almost completely failing to remember which one of the two of us, them or me, was actually the client. Before Christmas, El Corte Inglés, possibly the second most expensive department store in the world after Harrods, were given my watch to replace the leather strap. The watch itself is a reasonably expensive one, made by an Australian company better known for their good quality street and surf clothing, and, as such I was keen to replace the worn out strap with an original. I'll give 'em three weeks I thought and then pop by to collect it; after four further visits and countless telephone calls they called today to say it was ready. Thankfully I was sitting down when I picked the phone up. All excited, I went back this afternoon only to find the cheeky bastards had replaced the battery too and added another tenner to my bill. Now, I appreciate it was some time ago that they first had it, but I'm convinced it wasn't so long back the bleedin' battery would have conked out between times. Not only that, the lazy sods couldn't even be arsed to reset the time and date for me, which, when I collected it read August 2002.

I really want one of these

Obviously, any kind of whinge wouldn't really be complete would it without a bit of a dig at a mobile phone company, who, wherever you live in the world, just don't get Customer Service do they? I'm still waiting for my new smartphone, which is bound to be almost obsolete by the time Vodafone España eventually deliver it. I've known for ages that I'm not really much of a gadget freak in the way some blokes are, but, and it's an important but, when I order something, anything, I've really set my heart on I have to have it NOW!!  To make matters worse for yours truly, the girlyfriend ordered her new mobile at about the same time and it's been here four days. I think it's mighty impressive too because every quarter of an hour I get summoned to her side to "look at this" which I dutifully do whilst trying not to betray even the tiniest hint of jealousy. You'll need to trust me here when I say there's not much more frustrating than flicking through a Nokia user guide which runs to reams and reams of paper without being able to carry out their very detailed instructions on an acutal handset. When I've finished this I'm going to nip downstairs to the Orange shop next door to pick up their February brochure, just so I can remind myself what my new toy looks like.

Handy little flags

My personal award for utterly crap Customer Service has to go though to El Corte Inglés, obviously you'd expect Vodaphone and Telefonica to be completely and utterly shit and they rarely disappoint, but the sense of dismay I felt with Spain's flagship retail outlet was palpable. Putting their daft prices aside, the staff are usually kind and patient and some of them even have a little Union Jack badge to indicate they speak English, which is helpful sometimes. Thinking about it, I really shouldn't have been so facetious to the teenage shop assistant on my second to last visit when I sarcastically enquired whether I might spot my watch on eBay. Sorry señorita.