Having recently returned from Bilbao I can conclude that I shall not be returning to Spain any time soon. It is only since my return to Blighty and talking with those that are more Spanish-ly inclined than myself that I can say that I would even bother with returning to Spain at all; I’ll just skip over the Northern bit and go to the Southern/Mediterranean areas.
My resounding memory of Spain is that of a lazy, disorganised and largely unhelpful people. Having experienced hot weather countries before I was expecting a certain level of decelerated life compared to that of the temperate world. What I wasn’t prepared for was the entire population to shut down at 1pm leaving the city in a state somewhere between ghost town and zombie apocalypse until 5pm when the whole thing seems to come alive for another 4 hours.
Whilst I understand the idea of siestas I thought they had largely been dropped in favour of actually getting home around the time of industrialisation if not certainly the time of air conditioning. An odd experience certainly if one is not prepared for it. Especially if you wake up late and are looking for lunch come half 2 / 3 o’clock; those not tend the few remaining open cafes and bars look at you like you’re mad requesting food.
You then also look mad if you try to request dinner before about half 9 although slightly more willing to pander to your silly English ways if you try to eat at 8.
And it is with this respect that I find myself saying (which I never thought I would) the French are actually far better at the whole tourism thing. Even just your typical person on the street in Spain seems to take some perverse pleasure out of teasing tourists with poor / little Spanish; that or they are just not well versed in language.
Take for example, we took a camping stove so that we could eat Supernoodles and avoid the horrendously priced festival food. However, in order to do so required the buying of propane (apparently the carrying of highly flammable materials in pressurised containers is frowned upon in planes). So, we managed to found ourselves a little camping shop and went in and asked in our very best Spanish (phonetically) “key-sierra Pro-pane”. Now being a chemist, I know that propane is propane around the world, yes there will be some regional differences in how it is actually pronounced but there are international naming conventions in place so that chemists around the world can talk about chemicals without confusion. Our request was returned with a blank stare.
Next I tried “pro-pan”, it’s like propane just with a bit more of a Spanish twist. I also spotted a canister at this point and pointed toward it. At which point the shop keeper responded with “ohhh pro-pan-o!”. “Ci pro-pan-o”. So yes, we were in a camping show in a touristy part of town and the guy couldn’t get from pro-pan to pro-pan-o. Whilst in the same shop, Liz also wanted a towel.
So after having said “towel” between us a number of times
“How do you say towel in Spanish?”
“I dont know, towel? Towel?”
“How do you even demonstrate towel?”
We got to the point of desperation and Liz had to gesture the movements of washing and then drying one’s self. The guy’s face lit up instantly and said “Towel-o!” whilst then digging some out of a draw behind him. Personally I found that one took the piss some-what. I could deal with the fact that you had to ask for coffee-with-milk not white coffee I could even (despite my loathing of brand names) deal with having to order Coca-Cola all the time instead of Coke (also a brand name) or Cola. But towel-o really?
Needless to say I digress. The overall performance of the festival was pretty poor. Having turned up at 11am the day before the festival started, we expected the campsite to be open and for us to quite happily stick up our tents. Instead, what we got off a roady guarding a gate that some with no English and a heavy accent was that the campsite didn’t open for until 10 o’clock that evening. Another said it was 6 o’clock and another said it was 4. All-in-all, no one knew what was going on and in any case after just lugging it open a mountain side and definitely not going back down, we had a minimum of 5 hours to kill. Somewhat luckily we found a pub nearby, to pass the time and at 6 o’clock we eventually got to set up our tent.
And then there was the festival itself. Getting our tickets and wristbands was needlessly difficult. Despite we having a booking number, passport and credit card all saying that my name was Mr Morgan H Bye the guy kept going down the first page as far as Be… , concluded that my name wasn’t there and then assumed that my surname was obviously Morgan then and found a Miss K P Morgan but wouldn’t give me the tickets because the credit card numbers didn’t match up. Go figure. It took the best part of 15 minutes of me trying, pointing at my passport and Steph (a former fluent speaker) and another ticket guy to sort it out. As it turned out a Mr M H Bye with the right credit card number was found 5 lines down on page 2 of his list. Why? Oh why? Did the organisers think that putting a guy that cant read let alone speak English man the ticket collection for all the Brits and Irish was a good idea I don’t know.
The main stage was a pain in the arse because
- It was right next to the entrance
- On the other side it was right next to the disco tent
- There was a massive scaffold tower for the sound decks and lighting rig in the middle of the arena about 30m back from the stage, right where the crowd wants to be and obscuring the whole stage for everyone slightly further back.
- And at the back they’d recently planted a load of trees. Meaning that you couldn’t sit at the back and watch the screens.
- No where in the arena accepted cash, instead you had to queue up for a stupidly small kiosk that gave you monopoly money in exchange for real money that could then be used for food and drink
- The whole arena had only 3 food stalls all next to each other, none of which producing anywhere near enough food (and closed very early)
- The starting of music at 6 o’clock meant that the headers didn’t come on to midnight and the last bands (after headliners) didn’t come on til gone 2 in the morning, so by the time they finished the sun was starting to rise again But after the festival, the hotel was very welcome, even if it had its own quirks. Quirks like there being a clear wall between the bed and bath/shower, no kettle, and the tap water being completely undrinkable (trust me, I tried, the mild stomach upset the next day made me regret the choice of the half glass). Oh and the hotel swimming pool costing €30 to use for guests.
But then, how much time do you really spend in a hotel awake? Especially when you have a TV that only speaks in Spanish, no way of hydrating yourself there and cleaners that seem determined to barge entry and bang on adjacent room walls. Some we had plenty of time to explore Bilbao city, which was a shame cos there really was very little to explore. After day 1 with someone that decided it would be a good idea to slip their passport out of their pocket at the Chinese restaurant the previous night and then miss his plane as a result, there was little else of the city to see. The shopping was nothing spectacular and the tourist attractions were limited to about 3 museums that only labelled anything in Spanish or Basque.
This did mean however, that we got to see an awful lot of what actual Basque life is like. The city centre itself had two areas, that of the very old and that of the relatively new. Walk 2 streets outside of that main area and you are into massive council estate style tower block living. Which apparently is very typical of Spanish living, they don’t understand house living unless in very rural locations, so I’ve been informed. So it is likely my British judgement that associates horrible looking tower blocks with inner city living and poor living conditions that are typical in the UK.
So (Northern) Spain in my judgement is certainly a pass for my next holiday location. The climate was hot and humid. The people generally rude or ignorant with no time for tourists or anyone with anything less than perfect Spanish (though that may be as a result of a nearby American airbase, and we all know how wonderful the yanks are abroad). Culturally, there is a Guggenheim museum (for those of a modern art disposition) and some space invaders on walls and some other museums requiring much Spanish to do anything more than stare at shiny things.
And just when you think that you’ve had enough and all you really want to do is go home, you’ll head to the airport two hours before the flight (as EasyJet) instruct you to do thanks to the new security measures. Only for the check-in desk tell you there is an half hour delay and Spanish security just wave you through without even standing or vaguely looking at you. But no, life is never to be that easy. What you really want is for the plane’s expected time to keep delaying.
Upon questioning the EasyJet rep as to why, all she could say was that the flight had not yet left London (so a minimum of 1h50 away) and that they were not picking up the phone at the other end to give her any information. She did however elute to the fact that the airport closed at quarter past one in the morning and if the plane did not turn up before 1 o’clock we wouldn’t be leaving that night. Which led to some very interesting faces as the clock turned, ever closer to 11 o’clock. Not just from the only remaining 150 or so people supposed to have already landed but from the EasyJet rep, that seemed to relatively new as she had absolutely no idea as to what to do if they closed the airport. She knew as much as we did, we’d need a hotel but all of our luggage will have already gone through security and none recoverable, as well as the airport being ~10 miles out of the city with no feasible hotel in proximity, no buses (they finished at five to 10) and no taxis (no stopped when the last plane came in at 10).
Fortunately, the plane did eventually arrive. And we had a whole 7 minutes to spare by the time we took off. Thanks in part to a significantly stressed cabin crew. But stressed cabin crew snapping at passengers that have just sat around for the last 4 hours seemed like a high risk strategy to me. It was only as the captain gave his announcement as we departed did we actually have any information as to the cause of the delay. Apparently there had been some rather heavy rain over continental Europe which had backlogged all flights. So now you know, whether in Germany can stuff up your trip in Spain, who knew?
So that just left getting out of Stansted and the drive back at half 3 in the morning to Cambridge in what can only be described as monsoon weather that started half way down the M11.
Sometimes, you just feel like you need a holiday to recover from the holiday.
More photos on (flickr)[https://www.flickr.com/photos/morganbye/albums/72157624410989835/]
This page previously appeared on morganbye.net[^1][^2]
[^1:] http://morganbye.net/2010/07/memoirs-of-northern-spain) [^2:] http://morganbye.net/uncategorized/2010/07/memoirs-of-northern-spain