Goodbye Spain. Loved your easy charm, but …

some things about your colorful country are just plain loco.

First let me be clear, I had a great time in Spain and I will do a post with the highlights of our visit after I get home. I won’t be able to really give the research and writing the time it deserves until then because Musicman is working now and I’m entertaining Bunny.

But like any country, there were a few things that drove me absolutely nuts. Some are little and petty, some stressed me out, and some had me quite pissed off after awhile. In no particular order…

• The Spanish eat so much oily food that you can go to a tapas bar and EVERY item on the menu is fried. After two weeks, the most important question I asked when we were deciding where to eat was if the bar/cafe served salad.
• A mixed salad always has tuna in it. I don’t know why, but sometimes I just wanted a simple green salad, and they found this quite strange.
• Juice in Spain is always sweetened with sugar and sometimes is more like cordial. In Catalunya they take this further by serving up the sweetened orange juice with a spoon and a sachet of sugar. I tried asking for sin azucar, but this was usually ignored, leaving me to battle it out with Bunny over why he couldn’t dump two teaspoons of sugar in his already sugared juice. Yes, sugar sachets are huge here - at least two teaspoons.
• Even though the laws were changed to ban smoking in bars, cafes and restaurants, this is largely ignored. It is still common to sit in a small cafe/bar (they’re pretty much one and the same here) and have people smoking all around you. I found it really hard to cope with, particularly if I was eating. And it amazed me that people will light up in a confined eatery when they are sitting within a metre of a young child. To be fair, smoking is much more prevalent in the South than in the North of Spain, and Barcelona did have a few smoke free restaurants.
• In Sevilla we were actually served by a smoking barman and we could see the kitchen staff smoking while they cooked. Needless to say, we only ate there once.
• I noticed this a lot in the South, but it might happen in the North too: Spaniards often throw their cigarettes butts and rubbish on the floor so there is litter all around the bar area. Someone is then employed to walk around sweeping up this mess. They actually get in there between your feet and knees with the broom sometimes.
• In the South, siesta is strongly adhered to because of the searing heat and so you have quite strict hours as to when you can get a meal. If you get caught up sightseeing and snacking until 4.30pm, you’re out of luck. You’ll walk blocks and blocks in the vain hope of finding a bar or cafe who will serve you food. Lunch is usually 1pm to about 3.30pm. And if you want dinner at 7.30pm that’s probably too early too. Heading out to eat at 9pm is much more normal. In the North we had a bit more success with eating between 5 and 7pm, but we still had to hunt around.
• And the heat in Sevilla… it was a killer. I love hot weather and usually I choose travel destinations with a sun friendly climate, but Sevilla is by far the hottest place I have ever been. And it’s not even the peak of summer yet! We found ourselves getting so many cabs because Bunny was just wilting so quickly and we weren’t far behind. The locals cover up and many of them wear trousers, even on the hottest days. I joked to Musicman that it was because the ladies don’t want heat rash from sweat running down their thighs!

• Spanish inner city streets are so narrow (though gorgeous and full of character, particularly in Granada and Sevilla) that people park their cars on the curb, within a few centimeters of the buildings so they sometimes have to hop across to the passenger side to climb out. This also makes driving down these streets a nerve wracking exercise, especially for us Aussies who are used to wide roads and footpaths.
• The Spanish love to double park so you can turn into a street and get stuck because it’s impossible to go through with all the cars practically sitting on top of each other
• Roundabouts are massive affairs with up to 7 or 8 off roads and lots of lanes that everyone ignores. Cars and motorbikes cut in front of you barely missing your headlights to get where they want to go, and if you try and stay in the lines and follow the rules there’s a good chance you’ll be the one stuck and missing your turn off.
• Roundabouts can have lights which are there, but it’s hard to see which off road they’re serving. Sometimes the light in front of you is red so you stop, but then everyone keeps driving and apparently it’s for someone else, though god knows who.
• Sign posting to a destination is excellent until the final one or two turns and then there is nothing. You can get to a major intersection and there are no signs so you choose one and drive for another 5 minutes until you figure out you’ve got the wrong one. You then try another and it’s the right one because a sign to your destination appears within a minute or two. The question we struggled with is why there is no signage when you actually needed it!
• The arrows on road signs to indicate straight ahead are not vertical, they’re at a 45 degree angle. The first day we were driving, the missing road sign problem and the 45 degree angle problem had us driving in bloody circles for hours!
• In the South of Spain they have some of the most intense temperatures I have ever encountered, but for some reason they make the kids playgrounds with metal slides and play equipment. This means you can’t really use them until it’s night-time because the surfaces burn to the touch. This had Bunny constantly disappointed because he wanted to swing or go on the slide, but he couldn’t.

Okay, I think that’s enough; I don’t want to give the wrong impression about this wonderful country. But now you know what I won’t be pining for here in smoke free, eat at any hour London.

Will post about my time in London next. See you in a few days.

Kelly

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Tagged as: Health & Fitness