European Cars

Cars are expensive. In Europe they are WAY more expensive than back in the states. After pricing out many options and gradually acclimating myself to this new reality, I finally found a really good deal on a Peugeot. The French government runs a special program for tourists and diplomats that lets them lease a car without paying taxes. This practically cuts the cost of the car in half, meaning that the car is only 20-30% more than it would be in the US. The only problem with this program is that a tourist can get a car for a maximum of 6 months. With 6 months rapidly approaching, this means that I have to find a new car. My original plan was to have my wife get the car for the second 6 months. Unfortunately, the French government frowned on my new plan, and I was assured that any such attempt by my wife would end up with the car being rejected at the Spanish border. This has me back to pricing out the expensive alternatives.

Another problem with European cars is that lots of them are diesel. Now diesel is less expensive and gets better gas mileage than unleaded gasoline (all good) but it can lead to confusion. How bad can that be? Unfortunately I know the answer.

In Scotland I rented a large 8 person van. We were meeting my parents and I wanted to be able to zip around the countryside together. This worked great until the last day when we headed to the airport to catch a late night flight to Dublin. We had some extra time so I thought that we would save a few bucks by stopping and filling up the tank. My first problem was that I couldn’t find the gas tank. After walking around the car a few times, I even asked the attendant if she could help us. I’m not sure if I wanted her to find it, or not to be able to find it, thereby proving that I wasn’t completely inept. I guess the best would have been if she found it with difficulty, but that was not to be. No, she didn’t find it right away. She couldn’t find it either. (I know what many of you were thinking). My father finally solved the mystery by going to the owner’s manual where we found out that, between the driver’s door and the passenger’s door, the thin upper panel could be swung to the side to reveal that gas tank. This gas stop was already not going well, but it was going to get worse.

At this point I picked up the unleaded nozzle and headed for the car. I then hesitated and asked my dad, “It would say something on the gas cap if this was diesel, right?” To which he answered, “It couldn’t be diesel without them telling you.” Dads are not always right.

I now know the answer to what happens when you put half a tank of unleaded gasoline in a diesel car. You can go for about a mile and a half and then the battery light comes on and the car will no longer move. This happened to us in the fast lane of the highway about two miles short of the airport. Luckily we were heading into a roundabout so cars tended to be slowing down, but it was still an awful place to leave the car. We also lucked out in being able to flag down an empty cab that could ferry us to the airport. With two cab rides and my wife getting dropped off by a tow truck, we were able to just make our flight to Dublin. The only thing left to do was to pay off my inflated credit card bill.

As a final note, while waiting for the tow truck my wife noticed that the Hertz van rental required you to prebuy a full tank of gas. Stopping at the gas station was completely unnecessary. To her credit my wife has only ever mentioned this to me once. (Thanks sweetheart)

Spanish Level II

After successfully completing Spanish Level I, I am now enrolled in Spanish Level II (intensive). The intensive part means that instead of being 2 hours a day, 4 days a week, it is now 4 hours a day 5 days a week. This is a lot of Spanish.

Once again we have an interesting mix of people. There are only 3 others from my original class (one being my wife) and 13 new people. We now have people from Sweden, Finland, Georgia (nothing like Russia), Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Korea, and Palestine. Almost everyone speaks perfect English which is a little surprising since it’s definitely not true for most of the Spaniards. Not that I’m complaining. Talking with the other students in English is my favorite part of the whole class.

One thing we learned was that the Spanish big numbers go from “millones” to “billones”, but while “millones” corresponds to the English word millions, “billones” corresponds to the English word trillions. The word for billions in Spanish is just mil millones (one thousand million). I guess this wouldn’t bother me so much except that “billones” is so close to billions. The German guy told me that billions in German is also 12 zeros. My theory is that America wanted to be the only country that had billionaires. Of course Italy followed suit and made it so you could have 1,000 lira and not be able to buy a cup of coffee. But when everyone is a billionaire, it’s just not as much fun, so they ended up scrapping the whole thing and going to Euros.

We also had two interesting exercises about food. When we were learning the ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.), we had an exercise where we had to order the steps required for making the special Catalan garlic bread (Described in my post Can Borrel). There was the step to squish the tomato, the step to rub the garlic, and the step to add olive oil. I found this funny because you can really do this in any order, but whoever put together our book figured everyone would know the correct Catalan way for preparing such an important food.

The second exercise required you to guess different Spanish foods based on a Spanish description. If you got the entire foods right, they spelled a hidden word down the middle. If you’ve been reading this blog, you should be able to guess the word. It’s the Spanish food we found everywhere. It has 5 letters. It is … I’ll put it at the end just in case you want to guess.

Our homework assignment was also interesting. We each drew an outline of our home country on a piece of paper that was passed around the class. When a person got a sheet of paper, they added a word they associated with the country. When you finally got your sheet of paper back it was filled with Spanish words. You then had to write a composition about your country that included every word on your sheet. My sheet included Buffalo, Uncle Sam, The Death Penalty, Hot Dogs, Opportunity, NFL, War, Hamburgers, Hockey, Bush, Baseball, NBA, Ben Laddin, Great, and McDonald’s. My composition included wonderful sentences like, “The idea of America is that a person can get everything they work for and nothing more, from lots of money to the death penalty.” I’ll find out tomorrow what grade I get on this jewel of Spanish literature. By the way, if you couldn’t already guess, the mystery food was jamon.

Views From Our House

I think we have an interesting town house. The first picture is from the loft where I sleep. I know that it is hard to see in the picture, but the train to Barcelona is going by right in front of the houses in the distance. Getting to the train station is only about a 5 minute walk. There are also mountains that are hard to make out because it is a little hazy. In front of the train is the golf course. This is also hard to make out, so I thought I would go down two floors to our kitchen and take another photo.

This is the resulting shot from our kitchen window. I have yet to play on this golf course which is very sad. To play golf, you are supposed to get an official card that requires taking a golf test. I think foreigners can also play if they have a good enough handicap. I am fairly certain that there is a way around this because I've seen people playing in our backyard. These people do not have the required handicap.


Now you might be wondering what a picture of my dog is doing here. This is her doing her favorite activity. She is sitting out on the deck and watching people play golf. She is actually appreciative of the people with the high handcaps because her second favorite activity is retrieving golf balls that land in our yard.



And finally, this is a picture that has absolutely nothing to do with golf. This is from our loft looking out the front. I added it because it shows the STOP sign at the end of our street. What is a stop sign doing at the end of the street? There is a perfectly good Spanish word that means stop, para. It's the same number of letters and everything. Believe me, most people don't know English. All the other signs are in Catalan, or both Catalan and Spanish. Did the Spanish government get an especially good deal on surplus from the United States. I have no idea. If you know, please add an explanation into the comments.