The Mossos swarm the neighborhood

The doorbell rang this evening and it was a Mosso. He was wearing a jogging suit but showed me his badge, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to know if the car parked in front was ours, since it wasn’t registered to an owner from the neighborhood. I guess we should have updated the address on the drivers license.

Looking from the balcony we saw that the whole street was filled with police running this way and that. We heard shouting coming from the neighbors across the street and what sounded like two gun shots.

The police spent the next hour searching around with flashlights. Not sure who they were looking for, but from their body language, it looked like they got away.

We made extra sure that everything was locked up tight. Everyone here goes away for the weekend, so I assume that it was burglars.

It added a little bit of excitement to our otherwise uneventful evening.

I’ll go tomorrow and see if I can find any bullet holes.

Update: They did catch them. From Cugat.cat:

The Autonomous Police arrested three people Friday evening suspected of attempted robbery at a house Valldoreix. Cugat.cat has confirmed with the Catalan police that events happened around half past nine at night, when residents of nearby street of Panama noticed people inside the house and warned the security forces. Several police organizations participated in the operation which culminated in ten arrests by quarter past ten. It is expected that the suspected thieves will be in court Monday morning.

Changing the effective date on a Spanish driver’s license

One of the downsides of getting your drivers license here in Spain is that you lose your safe driving history and get crappy insurance rates.

Turns out that there is an easy solution:

Get the driver’s record from your home country and the consulate in Barcelona can write you a letter saying that you got your license on a certain date.

You can take this letter to the traffic office in Sabadell and they will set your start date on your license to match when you originally got your first license in your home country.

W00t!

Psychology of the “puente” in Spain

In North America, holidays are general shifted to the nearest Monday or Friday to ensure optimal long weekends for the public. In Spain, this is not the case, leading to cases of holiday Tuesdays, Wednesday or Thursdays. If the holiday falls on the weekend, tough luck, try again next year.

As we say at work, the Spanish have turned this bug into a feature. Especially for Tuesdays or Thursdays. These are called “puente” (bridge), and are designed for combining one vacation day in the middle with three holiday days on either side for a four day weekend. The observable output is traffic chaos as everyone tries to leave at the same time. These events are called “Operación salida” (there’s major one that happens at the beginning of August). The rather macabre and graphic traffic reports in the news usually feature a scorecard of how many people got killed or severely injured. Perhaps it is good training if Barcelona ever needs to be rapidly evacuated due to some disease outbreak or pending terrorist attack.

I did point out to a Spaniard that you could take a vacation day if there was a holiday Monday and also turn it into a four day weekend. She looked at me as if I was smoking crack.

This year, there’s a “mega-puente” coming up for December 6 (Constitution day) and December 8 (Immaculate Conception), so be prepared for traffic chaos.

Catalan time-keeping

One of the slightly bizarre features of Catalan is the archaic time keeping protocol. We always have to laugh when we’re listening to the radio and the announcer says “four minutes to three quarters to four” instead of 3:41.

So yesterday we waiting for a long time at the doctor’s office, and I mention to an older gentleman that we’ve been waiting since ten-to-five. He turns around to his wife and translates in Catalan for her benefit “they been waiting since five minutes past three quarters to five!”

Only a quick kick in the shins stopped me from cracking up.