Spain still maintains a lot of its traditions and there are processions and festivals in Xàtiva several times every year. I love them, as they usually involve the participants dressing up in traditional costumes. I went to the Fallas celebrations in Valencia a couple of weeks ago, which also involve processions in the traditional costumes, but those are modelled on medieval finery, these ones are based on religious dress, especially the “Capirotes” which were worn by the Spanish Inquisition.

Zebra crossing for traffic from 2 houses

But someone forgot to tell our local government. Last week they resurfaced the road junction and installed a new zebra crossing 500m from our house. The road it helps pedestrians cross has two houses on it – one is only used at the weekend and not at all in the winter. So it is obviously high priority to provide a crossing with so much traffic visiting those houses…

On Christmas day we had two invitations – one in the afternoon to have British Christmas dinner (I have to say “British” because we were invited by a Scottish guy and he gets a bit touchy when we refer to things as “English”!), which was with all the trimmings, and then in the evening we went round to my Spanish teacher’s house to meet her family and neighbours and have some Spanish nibbles. Most of the conversation not explicitly directed at us was in Valenciano, so we will definitely have to make an effort soon to learn at least the basics of Valenciano, otherwise we will not able to participate in many conversations in this part of Spain. Christmas was quite a difference from last year, when we were in the throws of unpacking and assembling furniture after our move to Spain! Much more pleasant. I have to admit that even 12 months after unpacking here, we still have quite a lot of sorting contents of cupboards to do…

In the time between Christmas and the New Year Ruth started work on a sister-quilt for the one we already had in the guest room – with a similar red, white and black color scheme. The quilt is not quite finished, the hanging sleeve needs making still. You can see the quilt on Ruth’s blog. We also bought some curtain material to make roman blinds for the windows and terrace doors in the lounge. We’re not big fans of curtains generally, but there is quite an expanse of glass in the lounge, and at night in winter that is a lot of black glass to look at!

I have also been making a new web site for Saffron’s (my Spanish teacher) husband. He runs a car valeting company and the first phase of the site is up and running – we have to add another 2-3 pages, but we thought it would be good to launch the site already and let Google find and index it. Once the Spanish / English version is complete, I am going to translate it into German too.

We’d been waiting until two or three weeks ago to have the damage repaired – we needed a period of dry weather. The repairs finally started at the end of November and have now been finished – you can see them above. We have had drains inserted around the drive surface, and a 33cm diameter pipe laid to take the water to storm drains at the back of the house. We also had problems with some decorative wooden sleepers at the side of the house which had floated away when we had heavy rain. They were good at slowing down the torrent of water, and preventing the sand being washed away, but of course wood floats. So we had them replaced with rows of stone set in concrete – they should also slow the water down, but definitely won’t float!

Now we just need to have some more heavy rain to test the changes!

Growth of GDP per capita in the USA 1300 – 2100

Gordon sees three waves of innovation which fuelled the growth:

1. Steam and railroads (from 1750 to 1830)
2. Electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals and petroleum (from 1870 to 1900)
3. Computers, the web, and mobile phones (from 1960 to the present)

He thinks growth in GDP will return to pre 1800 levels unless we discover a new technology or resource to enable us to continue the rapid growth of the last 250 years.

It costs $5 to download the paper, or you can see a summary of it here.

Schmitten – Nov. 2010.
Lots more white stuff to come in the next years?

The record loss of Arctic sea ice this summer may mean a cold winter for the UK and northern Europe. The region has been prone to bad winters after summers with very low sea ice, such as 2011 and 2007, said Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University…

Energy is not going to get cheaper in the coming years, so heating bills are likely to rise. This week in Germany oil for central heating has fallen slightly in price, but at over 95 cents / liter it’s not cheap (2 years ago, in December 2010 – when oil is usually more expensive – we paid 69 cents a liter).

Helpful e-mail from Iberfone

They probably need to hire a smart 12-year old to sort out their e-mail encoding…

We’ve often seen them in the evening, drinking from the pool. They swoop low over the water and take a sip in flight. I hadn’t realised they also do that in the morning. By the time I’d retrieved a camera, things had quietened down a bit, but there were still individual birds drinking. They are quite unafraid of humans, and I keep meaning to set up a tripod to get some nice sharp photos with a telephoto lens – but these are just grabbed hand-held. Here is a link to someone else who had more success getting photos of house martins, including one of them drinking from a pond.

Above the Spanish Mediterranean coast

The woman who gave us our certificates told us they had had a letter recently stating that in future they may be asked to retain British passports (specifically “British” – no mention of other nationalities). She didn’t know why; maybe concerns about the possibility of the Brits holding a referendum in future about staying in the EU? Thats just my speculation, don’t read too much into that. Anyway, she told us that as our application had already been processed when she received the letter, she was not going to keep our passports. Just as well, as we have flights booked with Ryanair shortly, and Ryanair requires a passport if you want to board their aircraft!

We have to go back to the government offices in Kronberg in a few weeks time to collect our new passports and ID cards. The Brits are quite anti-ID-card, but I think they are a great idea. In both Germany and Spain you are supposed to carry a passport or ID card all the times, and a credit-card sized ID is much easier to keep with you than a passport.

We weren’t the only ones coming from abroad – guests arrived from as far away as New Zealand and Australia. We were very lucky with the weather, as they had a picnic after the ceremony, and the weather was hot and sunny – just the day before it had been raining.

A great time was had by everyone: the picnic was fun, the food was great and so was the company!