The lack of logic in Spain doesn’t stop at the layout and inner workings of traffic-light systems, or at the fact that they serve tortilla in bread. (Not even just tortilla – everything in a tapas bar comes in, or at least with, bread, throwing my pre-arrival plan to stick to a healthy Mediterranean diet out the window a long, long time ago.)
No – it certainly doesn’t stop there. I recently had to buy ibuprofen from the farmacía here, after running out of my supplies from Tesco that I’d brought from home. The capsules from the Tesco packet contain 200mg. The capsules from the pharmacy in Alcala are 600mg. Each. How easy do you want to make it to accidentally overdose? The idea is that you’re supposed to half the tablets and take half at any one time – and here is where that big, empty space in Spain where logic and common-sense should take pride of place becomes glaringly obvious – why not just packet the tablets in such a way that you can take one at a time without having to worry about the fact that you may have just overloaded your body with a dangerous excess of chemicals?
Another example: I went shopping for hot pink tights last week (to dress up for an 80s party, not for regular personal use). Sure enough, I found them without much of a problem, but when I was looking for my size I was informed by the shop assistant that they were talla única (one size fits all). Okay, fine – that makes some sense taking into account the material tights are made from. However, I then went into another shop, found a T-shirt I liked and was informed that these were talla única as well. What?! How on earth can the same sized T-shirt fit everyone? It’s simply physically impossible. Take, for example, Cheryl Cole and Beth Ditto. If anyone can squeeze Beth Ditto into Ms. Cole’s shirts then I shall take it back – but for now I really can’t see that this concept works terribly well.
Clearly, this want of logic has filtered through into my own lifestyle, predominantly into my sleep pattern, which was pretty bad in Leeds but has now turned into something else. Despite it being an established tradition in Spain, I have no need for the siesta – waking up at three or four in the afternoon most days pretty much eliminates its need. To be fair to myself, this sleeping pattern does suit the Spanish lifestyle rather well in Spain, as I am up and ready in time for the shops to re-open and, more importantly, I have enough energy to get me through the nights out, which only come to a close for us at about five in the morning. I have set the bar high – the latest time I’ve got up here is 7.30 in the evening (although this was due to a particularly horrendous hangover) and the latest/earliest (?) I’ve got to sleep is 9.30am (obviously by getting up late, I am unable to sleep until the early hours of the morning). It’s a depressing thing to hear peoples’ blinds opening so that they can start their day or go to work when you’ve not caught a wink.
The final example, at least for now, is when I visited the city of Toledo (which is about half an hour away from Madrid by train) with my mum in October. The city is beautiful, its main attraction being that it is almost completely surrounded by water. However, it is also situated on very hilly terrain. Which is all well and good – apart from when you want to take the tour bus, or in this case, the tour tram. Why they decided that a tram, of all types of transportation, was a good idea for a city built on steep hills I shall never understand. On our return, this poor tram loaded with tourists was forced to struggle up a ridiculously steep hill in order to get back to the main plaza. There were several points during this hazardous (albeit ultimately successful) hill-climbing attempt where I genuinely thought that we were going to roll backwards, which reminded me of my equally ridiculous driving test. I’ve lived in the hilly area of High Wycombe all my life, so I mastered hill-starts and the like fairly early on in my driving career. However, no amount of practicing could have prepared me for what was presented to me on the day of my test: the most enormous man I have ever seen in my life appeared from the test centre and wobbled his way towards my car, and slowly it sunk in that this was my driving test instructor. Ordinarily, his size wouldn’t have mattered, but due to a gearbox problem with my driving instructor’s car I was having to take the test in my own car – a blue Cinquecento with an engine size of less than one litre (if you have ever watched The Inbetweeners you will be able to sympathise with the awkwardness of the ensuing situation). Although the problems began with him having to physically squeeze himself into the passenger seat, they certainly didn’t end there – every time I changed gear I accidentally rammed my fist into his leg, which was extruding in a most alluring manner over the edge of the seat. Despite not knowing whether to apologise each time (apologising would probably have brought more attention to the protruding limb than the accidental punching), we carried on quite nicely until I reached Marlow Hill, the steep hill that takes you out of High Wycombe and into the abyss of Handy Cross roundabout. With the microscopic engine size, my car sometimes struggled to carry the weight of my mum and I on practice drives, so you can imagine the strain it experienced up the town’s steepest hill with this new, well-padded passenger. Even with my foot flat on the accelerator and the engine screaming for mercy, it only managed about 20mph at most up the slope, and typically the traffic lights changed half-way, meaning that I had to stop. Again, this could have been cause for just a simple hill start, but in a car in which the handbrake didn’t exactly work, there was a slightly bigger problem, especially when the other passenger was packing a few (or several hundred) extra pounds. Luckily, clutch control got me through, but there were a few scary moments in which we could have rolled backwards if I’d have lost concentration for just one second. This is the reason why I am not generally impressed by hills. I specifically didn’t write down the University of Exeter as one of my choices after visiting the campus due to the amount of hills (the course content didn’t get a look in). But of all the hills I’ve laid eyes on, the use being made of the one in Toledo took the biscuit – it defies logic, even by Spanish standards.
What surprised me the most is the fact that we did actually return from the excursion. Taking a ride in the death tram is not relaxing or touristy in any way – firstly, after doing the tour within the city itself, the tram joined the main road, which was definitely an A-road and certainly more similar to a motorway than I would have liked, with the intention of showing us the city’s surroundings. Secondly, because obviously the tram was travelling pretty slowly in comparison to the rest of the traffic on this road (although for what it was, it was surprisingly zippy), we got tailgated a lot. This, added to almost falling out of the tram when going uphill, made sitting at the back end of the tram (and facing outwards) very uncomfortable indeed. Luckily, there was a pole to my right supporting the tram’s roof which I made very regular use of to save myself from death-by-tram. The final straw was that after suffering all this, it was impossible to get any decent photos – which was the whole point – because the driver refused to slow down at any point on the journey even when we hit an obvious tourist viewpoint. Thanks driver for my blurry bridges and cathedrals, what wonderful memory aids they shall make...
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