Waiting in line in Spain

It’s not quite the free-for-all that it looks like, there are certain rules:

• If someone needs to temporarily leave the line, they reserve their spot with the person in front of them (not the person behind them, as in Anglo-Saxon countries).
• Friends and acquaintances can be let into line, and you can let them get in behind you.
• People make up random reasons for why they shouldn’t  have to wait. “I was here an hour ago but had to leave” is a good one. Ignore them or pretend not to understand.
• If you come somewhere (like the bakery) and there’s a mass of people waiting, ask around for who is the last person and go after them.
• Spanish people are pretty strict about enforcing rules if the line is static. Once it starts moving though, all bets are off and you need to defend yourself. The trick is to hang around in the vicinity of the front of the line and pretend you are doing something else. Once the gate/door/etc opens, use the confusion to slip in and no one will even notice.
• Special rules apply to grannies. They get away with murder… the other day one scooted in front of me while I was waiting for the vegetable scale at the supermarket. She then proceeded to yell at the guy paying at the cashier because she had parked some of her items at another cashier (who had closed in the meanwhile) and thought that she should still be first in line.

Interior ministry tries to blame judge for Barcelona riots

The Catalan interior minister Joan Saura tried to blame a judge, who he thought had not been fast enough to order the eviction of a building in Barcelona prior to the general strike.

Embarrassingly enough, now it turns out that the judge never actually ordered any eviction, because no one had actually asked him to.

It seems that the police actually had some evidence showing that violence was being planned by the occupants of the building, which did turn out to be correct.

But then, since the police ended up acting without the judges approval anyway, why the police chose to wait until Wednesday?

Violence in Barcelona during strike

Looks like more of the same stuff happened yesterday as per after Barca games. The violence was blamed on “anti-system” groups, which is the first time I’ve heard this term. Perhaps this is a newer and more modern anarchist.

From what I heard, this anti-system group had been squatting in a building for some time now, and the Mossos had the brilliant idea to choose this day to forcibly evict them.

It’s kind of sad that in most of the scenes you see about 10 mossos beating the crap out of one or two protesters while about 10 reporters are snapping pictures.

Warning, pretty graphic video:

Private schools in Sant Cugat for foreigners

If you are coming to Sant Cugat with your children and are looking into private schools, keep in mind that unless you stick to a foreign-language school, most private schools are very bad at teaching Catalan or Spanish to non-speakers.

For that reason, if you don’t want to go an international school that matches your culture, public schools are a good choice. Sure, Catalan is pretty useless as a language, but at least they have specialized teachers and are dedicated to helping your kid learn how to speak the language. Once they know Catalan, Spanish/Italian/French isn’t too far off (we tell ourselves this to make us feel better).

Recently I heard of one case of a kid (who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish or Catalan) going to pretty good non-international private schools , arriving in class and being given a Catalan/English dictionary and being told to start at ‘A’.

The bottom line is that you should check to make sure that the school you are sending your not-yet-fluent victim kid has an actual program to teach Catalan and/or Spanish to non-speakers. Just letting your kid’s teacher wing it is most likely going to end in disaster.

Sleeplessness and Malcolm

Since the beginning of school, life has been crazy with the kids getting sick and the new baby (did I mention the new baby?).

We’ve been watching “The Thick of It” lately, which makes us all thankful that we never entered politics.

I wonder how Malcolm’s carrot and stick approach would work with our kids…. Although the kids haven't regressed to the point of forgetting their potty training, the amount of whining has started to be really annoying.