el peregringo

I’ve just spent an hour trying to buy a train ticket with Renfe, the Spanish rail company. I simply cannot understand how a company, in this day and age, can get away with such an awful mess as their online system. Even using a Spanish credit card, it was virtually impossible to actually buy my ticket.

Things were looking good until I got to the point of actually charging the card. Renfe includes a disclaimer saying that the window that was going to open was from the bank and that if the user had trouble, that it wasn’t Renfe’s fault. I did have trouble, and I still blame Renfe for not having a better system.

Part of the problem may be with the Caja Navarra bank. They have the single WORST online banking I have ever seen. They don’t even include a valid doc type or encoding method in their html, and then once connected, they use frames in places they’re unnecessary and have spurious scroll bars in unlikely places. The National Bank of Middlebury has an online banking and bill paying experience that is orders of magnitude superior to the Caja Navarra.

So this post is in the “things I hate” category, but I want to make it clear that I don’t hate the catholic church. I just really really really dislike it. I do, however hate the control that it has in Spain. For someone who was raised with a constitution which establishes the separation of church and state, the system here seems to have been forged in medieval times and not updated since.

In the news recently I’ve been following a story that’s very disturbing to me. Here’s a link to a follow up version of it. The basic story is this: Even in public schools here, students are essentially required to take a “religion” class. Now the class is always called “religion.” It is not called “Catholicism.” It is called “religion.”

Now think about that. If you signed up for a class called “religion” how would you respond if the content of that class was 100% Hindu propaganda? 100%. No discussion of other religions, or of the nature of religion. 100% propoganda in which not only are you not introduced to other religions, but in which you are told that all other religions are wrong. Well, that’s the situation in Spain with the catholic church and its formalized relationship with the public school systems.

So a teacher at a public school in the Canary Islands, María del Carmen Galayo Macías, was fired because as a divorced woman, she lives with another man who isn’t her ex-husband. The catholic church fired her. She filed suit with the State. You know what? The State upheld the right of the catholic church to fire “religion” teachers, even though it is the State which pays their salaries! I find this absolutely unbelievable. María del Carmen Galayo Macías is not a nun. She’s not a member of any religious order. She has taken no vows. She’s a teacher who teaches the “religion” class, and from everything I’ve read, she even teaches the very narrow and bigoted curriculum as prescribed by the catholic church. But the church feels that she shouldn’t be teaching since she’s not “living the pure faith.” And the State upheld the church’s right.

Unbelievable. Is this horse shit or what? I expect, and sadly must endure, this forced indoctrination of my daughters since they attend a catholic school (I had no choice in this matter). They are apparently getting a good education in other areas, though I dislike the fact that the catholic church is forcing lies and bigotry down their throats that will take me years to undo if the damage can ever be undone at all. At least we have seven years back in real schools before we have to endure this again.

OK, so hate is a pretty harsh term, but as a single word antonym to love, it works pretty well. I mean does anyone really love chocolate, want to marry it and have it’s babies? So for the category, hate is a convenient term. Real hate I reserve for the truly hateful, like Bill Gates, Microsoft, and George Bush.

I hate the pillow cases here. Everyone knows what a pillow case is. It’s a bag that you stick your pillow in. Of course the thing that makes a bag work is that it has an opening, and a bottom. I mean, come on, you go to the grocery store and they ask you “paper or plastic” and you don’t have to wonder if they mean “bag” or like the Spaniards, if they might just mean tube.

Spanish pillow cases are tubes. You buy pillow cases and they’re open on both ends. This is quite frankly, stupid. Do you know how much muscle memory there is in holding the pillow with your chin while dropping it into the pillow case? Here, they just drop right on your feet, and you’re left holding the bag, er, tube.

Many Spaniards have seen the folly of the system and when they buy pillow cases, the first thing they do when they get them home is sew up one end… they way they should have been sold in the first place. It might be a conspiracy. Some homes keep a sewing machine just so they can turn what they just bought into something actually functional. Others buy their pillow cases and stop at a tailor to have them sewn up there. More research needed here…

So the pillow cases are bad, but my god, the sheet fiasco here is beyond comprehension. I’ve just spent 4 full days in bed with the worst flu I’ve ever had. I nearly died. Not because of the flu, because of the friggin’ sheets here. For some absolutely incomprehensible reason, when one makes a bed here, they leave something between 3 and 4 FEET of extra sheet at the top that gets folded down over the blankets. Sure looks pretty, but have anything approaching disturbed, feverish sleep, and you’re bound to end up with those 4 extra feet of sheet wrapped around neck and struggling to breath. Somehow this is considered “normal.”

I’ve heard several other ex-pats mention this, which makes sense since I know of no other culture that routinely tries to strangle foreigners in their sleep (more on Spanish xenophobia later). But I have never heard a Spaniard complain when in the the US that they really miss those extra yards of superfluous fabric, though I have to say my wife, if left to her own devices, will gradually lengthen the amount of top sheet until I beg for a reprieve (maybe she’s trying to get rid of me?)