A Boring Tax Bit and an International Spy Denial

I managed to get into a spot of bother over my social security last week. Having been told that the job I have on contract was paying it, I'd assumed that this meant that I didn't have to pay it my self as an autonomo, but apparently it doesn't really work like that so I wound up with a €80 fine. I'm still not sure quite how it works to be honest, despite getting on better at the social security office this time armed with a bit more Spanish. My only guide is my friendly English speaking bank 'cashier' (for want of a better word) at La Caixa (which isn't even really a bank... it's complicated). Now I've got to worry about my British tax return which I've got to file online by 31st Jan, because I was self-employed in England. My tax return for this year will be a nightmare: having been both employed and self-employed in both the UK and Spain this year!

Anyway, so far, so dull, I've also been following with complete fascination and amazement the story of the undercover police that have been living in the environmental movement in the UK for years (you can read a bit about it here if you've missed out). It's of course utterly bizarre that they'd waste that amount of time and effort on interfering with a peaceful protest movement, especially as it seems as if this guy has actually helped facilitate several actions, acting as a driver, as well as being an informant, as well as providing funding. Having just been through the court process for this kind of thing, I find it particularly wierd that he used police money to pay court fines for activists! What a huge waste of time! It occured to me, however, that I'm someone who, having been (very sporadically) involved in the environmental movement, has just suddenly upped sticks and left the country... I'm hoping that friends in Manchester aren't now suspecting me! I'd like to reassure them that I'm just a whimsical individual with an inclination to move around rather than being a police spy on the run!

A techy side note, I've put a thing on the side with all the tags from posts, so that you should be able to click on 'jobs' for example and get all my posts that say something about getting a job etc. I thought it'd be useful seeing as people keep asking me about various aspects of moving to Spain, but please still send me a message if you do want to know anything else and I'll be happy to tell you all I know!

Hitching to Barcelona, Quitting and Wrapping Things Up

Time for a catch up, coming in three parts. As someone pointed out to me, not having internet was one of the least important and least interesting reasons that I haven't posted all week – its everything else thats been stopping me rather than a lack of connection. But today I have nothing better to do than sit at my laptop outside a cafe (its still just about warm enough to do that) and work through my tinto verrano hangover (essentially wine and lemonade, very cheap and very available) by telling you, good reader, whats been going on over here in Spain. <this was written on Saturday>

Hitching to Barcelona

After a false start on the Friday, I set off early to hitchike from Madrid to Barcelona early last Saturday to meet my friend Simon who lives there and some other old housemates coming over for the weekend. Instead of going back to the place I'd tried the day before, I got the train right out to Guadalajara, quite a way out, and then a bus to the tiny village of Taracena next to the E-90 motorway. Unfortunatly this took rather longer than I'd planned and I was stuck waiting for a bus for half an hour in very autumnal looking Guadalajara. Autumn feels really weird in Spain. The trees are losing leaves, and you can feel in the air somehow that its that time of year, but the suns out and its actually quite warm. I find it quite unsettling!



Anyway, I finally got to the little Repsol petrol station that hitchwiki had recommended and set about chatting to people at the pumps with my 'Hacia Barcelona' sign complete with little Union Jack in the corner. People think its less weird that you're hitching in Spain if you're foreign, it gives you a non threatening reason to be doing something so odd. I've hitched in Spain before, on my way to Morocco on a sponsored hitch and found it fairly easy but it isn't really the done thing here (its much easier in Britain) and people do think your crazy, so to begin with I got a lot of shaking of heads and excuses about living locally but then a car pulled up, the driver got out, and I caught a strong whiff of cannabis and thought, here we go. Sure enough the woman told me to hop in, she wasn't going far, but it was a start. An unexpected side effect of my journey was discovering quite how much Spanish I knew. When your thrown into a situation like getting a lift, where the person doesn't speak any English, its amazing the things you come out with! I picked up a few new words with every lift I got as well, and got plenty of tips on pronunciation. I got dropped off at a bigger service station about 50k down with a parting 'Suerte!' (good luck!) and straight away realised that now there was no turning back, I was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with no services on the other side of the road, and if I didn't get a lift, I was sleeping here. But after taking and then ignoring some advice on where to stand from the petrol pump guys, I got a lift with a lovely English speaking couple. The (heavily pregnant) woman was very chatty and I spotted her German accent straight away. It turns out she'd come to Spain to learn Spanish for 3 months and ended up staying for 8 years, meeting her husband and starting a life here. Made me wonder how easy it'll be to leave after living here a year...

If I thought I was in the middle of nowhere before, now I really was. The servicio they dropped me at in the beautiful red/orange mountains between Madrid and Zaragosa, with little castles perched on steep atolls and dramatic drops into vast valleys, looked very remote indeed. But no sooner had I sat down with a sandwich after a confusing chat to the service station guy about whether or not I was on my way to see El Papa (the Pope, who was in Barcelona on Sunday), when a guy wondered over and offered me a lift to just outside Zaragosa. It was now about 3pm and I was getting a little nervous about all the short lifts and getting another once it got dark but the chances of me getting a lift direct from this spot was pretty slim. He turned out to be a forest firefighter on his way to run a marathon with his wife in Zaragosa (it does tend to be interesting types who pick you up in Spain) and we chatted away in halting Spanglish whilst driving through more incredible scenery. Its basically downhill all the way from Madrid, Europes highest capital city, to Barcelona on the coast, and the land is continually dropping away from mountains onto vast plains that then drop off again, and all a fantastic reddy orange that looks amazing in the evening sun. There's a huge windfarm just above Zaragosa which is pretty impressive too. So I was feeling pretty good about how things were going when he dropped me off at yet another Repsol garage just outside of Zaragosa, with the sun just setting behind the hills. And thats when things started to go a bit wrong.

With it being November, darkness falls very quickly and the temperature drops dramatically when the sun goes down, and an hour later I was still there, shivering and trying not to scare drivers at the pumps. Every single one claimed to be going to Zaragosa and not past it. I really wanted to get a lift direct to Barcelona, knowing that it would be very difficult to get another, but after a while I was just trying to get out of that place. Having been there now for 3 hours, I was just trying to get into Zaragosa but by now there were hardly even any cars pulling in. You know things aren't going well when you find yourself looking up 'anywhere' and 'desperate' in your English-Spanish dictionary. At 10.30, four and a half hours after getting dropped off, I admitted defeat and traipsed over to a nearby motel that I'd scoped out earlier.

The next morning, I tried the same place for half an hour before deciding the damn place was cursed and heading down the motorway in heavy wind to see if there was another sliproad to try. There wasn't. My face stinging from the wind and cold, I headed back to the garage wondering if I'd have to go to Zaragosa and get a train. The first woman I asked looked at me like I was an alien, and then unexpectedly, after talking to her husband, beckoned me over. I don't think I've ever been so glad of a lift!

She turned out to be an opera singer, and spent a good part of the way practicing her English by explaining what the songs on the stereo meant (“Hee love herr, hee buy herr theeng, but she no love heem!”). They dropped me off at a servicio with Monserrat (“the heart of Catalonia”) looming nearby and trucks full of pigs, sheep and cattle headed for Barcelona slaughter houses giving off a powerful smell. A couple more short lifts (an old couple and a young guy on his way to a poker tournament – “suerte!”) and I was in Barcelona! It had taken 2 days and 6 lifts but I'd do it again, its certainly an adventure, you meet all kinds of people and get a good workout of your Spanish.

I met the guys at the palace on top of a hill with a great view over Barcelona, a good place to start, and we headed off for some patas bravas, which are a much bigger deal in Barcelona than Madrid. The next day we took a bike tour of the city with a very random tour guide, whose English drifted between heavily accented and incomprehensible and descriptions ranged from interesting to surreal to simply baffling. I'm not that big on churches but the most impressive thing was definitely Gaudi's cathedral, the Sagrada Familia, still being built about 90 years after it was started. The old side looks incredible, like the stones melting and dripping off and whole casts of characters, fruit baskets on the top and lizards crawling down the sides, while the other side has the whole story of the crucifiction embedded in it. Barcelona feels like a different country to Madrid. Spain's, a big country and it looks and feels very different from the centre, the culture, the architecture, the plants, the air. Also, everyone speaks Catalan, which for someone just getting their head around Spanish is a nightmare! All in all, I have to say, I don't regret moving to Madrid rather than Barcalona which I was worried I might. It's very pretty and lively and a great place to go on holiday but Madrid's just more of a fully functioning major city. The coach journey home wasn't nearly as interesting as the trip there, but I did manage to get international editions of the Independent and Guardian to keep me busy for the 8 hours.

Matt Peel this is your personal mention

Quitting Smoking

I've been planning on quitting for a while now, and in Barcelona I decided that I shouldn't put it off any longer. So I had my last cigarette before my classes on Thursday and gave the rest of the packet to a student. I could probably write 10 pages on quitting smoking but I'll try to keep it brief. I've quit twice before, once for 11 months and once for 4, both times going cold turkey after reading The Easyway to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr, which is actually a really effective method. But I just couldn't face reading it a third bloody time and surely I know the score by now anyway. Cold turkey is the only way in my opinion (read the book for reasons), and its 20 a day or nothing for me. Also, I'd just been having a conversation with Mike, who passed through again this week on his way to fly to Mexico after his boat trip didn't work out, about my belief in free will and choice, and realised afterwards that if I really believed that then I should be able to quit, so its now a point of principle as well!

Lee and Luke, smoking whilst drinking

Its a weird thing, quitting smoking. It should be easy. All you have to do is not do something, but of course its actually incredibly difficult. And yesterday I was struggling quite a bit and felt like a social retard. I felt pretty tense and just couldn't focus on what people were actually saying to me. I do find though, that when you're really feeling like one, it helps immensely just to say to someone “I really want a cigarette”. We had people over round ours last night (hence the tinto verrano hangover) with a good deal of fags being smoked, but I wasn't as tempted as I expected actually. I think I've accepted the fact that I'm going to do it now, which is more than can be said for Lee and Luke who are supposedly quitting too (“I'm allowed when I'm drinking”). It is amazing though how much you realise your life revolves around smoking. I include cigarettes just subconsciously planning what I'm doing – go to shop, smoke cigarette, get on metro – or I buy a drink mainly to accompany a cigarette, and that takes a while to stop doing. I woke up really angry this morning because I'd dreamt I'd smoked a packet of Marlboro reds (a 10 pack, it was a very precise dream) and was furious with myself. It took a good 10 minutes to realise it was a dream, and I was much happier (but still hungover) after, and I think its good that that was my response! I'll keep you updated anyway.

Tying Things Up

I felt like I had good reason to celebrate last night because I just opened a bank account and paid my Social Security which marks a bit of a milestone for me – I've now done all the 'set up' stuff to live and work in Spain. No more running around to tax offices and sorting details for work, or manically looking round flats, I feel like I can relax a little. Flat, job, NIE number, social security, bank account, accomodation paperwork, phone, internet (sort of). It's all time consuming, expensive and a bit of an ordeal for the non-Spanish speaker. Opening a bank account was pretty easy actually, particularly with an English speaking bank person (cashier? banker?), although apparently la Caixa, who I'm with, isn't actually a bank... I tried to get the bank person to explain this but all I could get out of her was “its not a bank, its a caixa, you don't have them in England”. Eh? It gives you a card and so on though so I don't really care.

So its been a bit of a ride but now I'm ready, I can relax, and maybe start Spanish classes. It's definitely been worth it!