sun burnt and glasses

One of the most annoying things about getting sunburnt is that you don’t necessarily know that you’re getting burnt until it’s too late.

Or do you?

Has anyone else ever noticed that if you look at your skin through some sunglasses you can tell if you’re already burnt because the skin looks much redder than if you look at your arms with the naked eye? Has anyone else ever noticed this or am I imagining it?

If it is real and it’s not just me, what could cause this? My guess would be that polarised light and the way the skin’s properties change once damaged.

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ElGuiri, sunburn, sunglasses

What to wear

Flags mean different things to different people and rarely are these feelings slight...

So, how is it that I ended up at a birthday party with a Spanish flag wrapped around the waste and a mix of Spanish beer and cider curdling in the stomach?

My girlfriend and I were invited to a birthday party in which we were told we needed to wear a pareo. The closest tranlslation I’ve found for this is a syrong. I hate parties and places that ask you to dress up in anything other than what you feel comfortable in. I'm uncomfortable enough in my own body without being uncomfortable in my clothes too.

While I could pretend that this principle was the product of rationalised ideas based on evidence and desires of equality, I suspect this “principle” is the product of burning rage stored in a glass barrel in my psyche from the occasions I wasn’t allowed in night clubs in Britain because of my shoes or clothes or whatever the bouncer’s beady eyes had spotted and found a dislike to.

But with a friend’s birthday party "principles" are just the heads of American schools. But I wasn’t going to buy sarong. I’m not likely to wear it again anytime soon so it’d be a waste of money and anyway I wouldn’t have a clue where to go to buy one anyway.

Some bright spark sugguested I wear a British flag, which with a belly full of tapas and the tides of blood stranding alcohol on the shores of my brain, seemed like a good idea.

It, of course was a terrible idea. I often wonder what kind of statement English people who live in Spain and walk around wearing an England football shirt are trying to make. May be I’m too cynical, but I don’t think its the one positive statement I can think of: “Here, at the end of history does it really matter what nation’s football shirt I wear?”

Sadly it does still matter, and a Briton who lives and works in Spain and wears a British flag is making a statement. I use my mouth or my keyboard for statements, or possibly two fingers at a push.

As I have written before the national or regional flags of Britain and Spain are sometimes closely or not so closely related to facsism.

The idea of wearing a Spanish flag however came late in the day when all other avenues had been explored and the deadline of the party drew near. It has to be said that it was a hit, and although it was a decision I made in haste, more out of desperation than considered thought It has dawned on me that I was probably the only person at the party who could wear that flag, such is the power of its connotations.

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ElGuiri, Immigration, Spain, symbols, flag

Strawberries & cream

Yesterday I did a very stupid thing, I went out to take photos of a sign I'd seen on the old road to Murcia. It's a difficult cycle ride for an occasional cyclist like me as there are some very steep, but low hills between here and there and some strong winds that seem to batter the plains. Most difficult of all however was the mid-day sun.

Initially, I blamed myself, but the more I thought about it, the lower down the scale of blame I was. First of all I want to blame the last minute rescheduling of appointments meant I only had the midday to make the excursion, then I can blame Nintendo for making the WiiFit which gave me a deluded sense of fitness, then I can blame the western industrialised countries for global warming and the resultant extra sunny days down here. That put me behind several hundreds of millions of people:

1. Appointments(2)

Nintendo employees(3,768)

2. North America(337,740,600)


3. Australia(21,350,000)
   


4. Europe(497,198,740)
   


5. Russia(141,912,800)
   


6. Me

By my calculations this puts me 998.205.911th in order of blame

Out for dinner last night I was mocked for my new stereotypical English look. Cruel words such as fresas y nata(strawberries and cream) were used. Spanish people, as a whole turn dark, dark brown. Even those of northern stock like my girlfriend. A genetic legacy of the Arabs in the Iberian Peninsular that’s more wholescale and lasting than the relatively little effect on its languages.

Here’s the photos I took as I fried for two hours, I’m not sure they were worth it:

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ElGuiri, Spain, Spanish, weather
photography

Slippery when wet

The light, but epic rain which trapped us indoors last weekend and induced a peculiar sensation of homesickness in me, affected large areas of the peninsula. Ben From notes in Spanish up in Madrid reminded us all of the Spanish proverb:

Hasta el cuarenta de mayo no te quites el sayo

Which translates quite nicely as:

Don't put your cloak away until the 40th of May



So it comes to this. blogging about the weather..

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ElGuiri, weather, proverb, Spanish
rain

rant alert

I am angry.

Not as angry as the lorry drivers it seems, and more of that in a moment, but pretty angry and embarrassed. The magazine known as “The Voice”, one of those free magazines and that bother English speakers here in Spain, has always been good at maintaining the little Britain abroad attitude that either awakens in some people once they become property owners here or is the reason they wanted to leave Britain in the first place. My first introduction to the organ was by a laughing Spaniard, who wanted to laugh at the articles with someone, an that's why I used to pick them up, as a laugh. Paid for by advertising it is a collection of opinion pieces and editorials sandwiched between adverts for English builders, Spanish teachers called “Patrick”, those collections of hilarious photos and comics your most annoying friends forward to everyone in their address books, and news stories about property prices and what other English people are doing with their lives in the area. The May edition includes the opinion of regular writers “The grumpy old man of Cehegín” who can normally be dismissed as ignorant, but has learnt some of the more complicated names for Tapas dishes and “Damocles” who I've never bothered read before.

This month, the “The Grumpy old man of Cehegín” begins his vague rant at how things were better in his day, by daring to complain at all foreigners filling up Britain's crowded shores. Cehegín is a town in Southwest Spain, by the way.

Damocles complains how it's okay for foster parents in Somerset can be homosexual, disabled, recipients of benefits and have a criminal record, but can't hit the children in his care. Surprisingly he hasn't examined any scientific evidence to come to the conclusion this is wrong, but it was how he was hit as lad and it didn't do him any harm, if anything it taught him to respect his elders/authority/policemen/the preisthood etc.

I normally ignore “The Voice”, I don't want to spend my life being angry and writing rants as they do in "The Voice", but I am reminded of this article I recently read in The Guardian

About The Strike:

The day before yesterday the petrol stations around the town ran out of petrol as they have all over Spain. A friend who works there told me that an irate English person dared to angrily deem my friend's English as bad. This was after the motorist failed to understand that there was no more petrol left. Just for the record, this exchange between was conducted in English in a town in Spain.

This ends the rant for today

water veil

Yesterday(Monday the 10th of June) Was a regional public holiday. It rained all day. It was a constant, light rain that pulled the range of your sense to a few hundred metres. Apparently unusual for here my girlfriend told me. It was Galician rain, she claimed. It made me feel homesick and cosy

Public holidays and rainy days have something in common here: Only foreigners and emergency workers are working.
I was trying to take a photo of the stream of water that was pouring down the centre of the street, but a fear of water damage to my precious new camera and a pensive flash meant I moved the camera before it was ready. In the end, although very different to what I wanted, I liked the mix of still and blurred and the few drops of rain caught like rabbits in the headlights of my flash

Swifts, swallows and may be a bat too

Music: www.musopen.com/music.php?type=piece&id=226

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ElGuiri, Spain, video