Team New Zealand flittered $130 million on its failure in Valencia last year, and more than a quarter of that came from the Government.

In John Key-ese, that’s equal to about 3,217,350 blocks of cheese the government could have given to hard-working families. Instead they preferred to blow the $33.75 million on a rich white man’s sport.
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The last government elections in Spain has brought the deepest crisis in the second most important political party in this country, the Popular Party (PP), led by Mariano Rajoy.

Since March 11, one day after the general elections, the conservative party, which unites former fascists to libertarian ideologists, has fallen into a semantic internal war.

In one side, is the right wing of the party led by Esperanza Aguirre, president of the prosperous Madrid Community, in the other, Mariano Rajoy, who after the two consecutive defeats has decided to moderate the ideology of his party.
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We head to Chefchaouen in the hope of things getting easier. Our time in Morocco so far has been, well, trying. The effect of Ramadan greatly intensified the culture shock in Casablanca and Larache: we staggered around famished during the day eating whatever we could get our hands on, only to find at night that the dining-out culture in Moroccan society is very very male dominated. Cafes brim with men leisurely drinking tea throughout the evening; women are barely seen at all in the street after dark.
We’ve heard that Chefchaouen, despite being full of hash-peddlers, is a chilled out tourist-oriented town. We book a hotel run by Spaniards, which in itself puts us at ease: as red-neck as that sounds, it’s comforting to know we will likely share at least a basic cultural frame of reference after flailing about in deep and completely unfamiliar cultural waters so far.
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It wasn’t till we reached the beach that I realised that the taxi driver didn’t speak any French. Goes to show how effective my last minute language cramming had been. He’d nodded at my repetition of “vingt-cinq dirhams”, holding out five coins in his palm which I thought at the time were 5 dirham pieces but now, I realise, were worth 10 dirhams each. We were essentially in the middle of nowhere and the trip had been longer than expected, so we could do little more than to sigh and hand over what the old man demanded.
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The day’s fasting had long finished as we walked through the dark, empty streets of Casablanca. Or so it felt wandering light headed in search of somewhere to eat. In reality, the sun had set barely half an hour ago, people still sat in doorsteps on the street hungrily slurping down the last of their meal.
We’d given up on directionless wandering and were hungrily retracing our steps to a Salon de The that we’d past earlier. My rusty French suggested that they only served breakfast, given the number of pastries on the 2,50 euro set menu displayed in the window. But it was food, and at least there were a few women in there eating too.
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Easter in the south is a curious event. Visiting the small town of Priego I was caught up in elaborate traditions involving spectacular processions, excessive conglomerations of people, and some surprising peculiarities.

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I thought Spain was out of the Fascist era, but I do wonder sometimes. My eyes fell upon a short news article over the shoulder of a fellow metro passenger the other day. I had to read it three times before I was sure I really had the meaning clear. The news was that a court had allowed a couple to name their daughter Julieta. That shouldn’t really be news, right? But it is, because last year a judge had deemed such a name inappropriate for a child.

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I finally had a tenuous grip on my Friday afternoon class. Okay, to be completely honest, I’d given up on telling the slackers to stop talking, and was making the whole class copy questions off the board and answer them in their own words. Then another teacher comes in – the Head, or Deputy Head, or someone else with an inflated sense of self importance. No sooner had she opened the door than she starts tearing strips off a kid at the back of the room. Read the rest of this article »

Today is the anniversary of the day I was born, and the day former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. He finally kicked the bucket in 1975 – which is quite recently really, and the memory of the dictatorship remains clearly a part of the public consciousness. So each 20^th of November there are big demonstrations all over Spain. What could be better for my birthday than a bit of politics in action, eh?

The “fascists” come out and chant “Long Live Franco”, and the “anti-fascists” come out in force and tell them to sod off and grow up and chant “Long Live Democracy”. Or something like that. (I don’t mean to take the mickey or anything by using the quote marks and term fascist, I am actually quoting the terminology of the young politically-left here).

So how did it all go on Saturday night? Read the rest of this article »

I set aside all of Thursday morning to apply for my “Foreigners Identification Number” (NIE), essentially a barcode which I need in order to be paid. (Bear in mind that the Spanish morning generally lasts until 2 or 2.30pm). I’d heard some horror stories about the officials’ vaguely unhealthy adherance to the rules, and on Wednesday around 11am I’d been to the Police Station where these golden tickets are issued and not been able to face waiting in a queue that stretched out of the station, down the street twenty metres or so, across the road and back up the opposite side.

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