Most days I love my life being a transcriber out here in Spain, basking in the sun for over 300 days of every year, looking out of my office window all day every day to the lush green mountains and being able to take a quick dip in the pool when either you or the temperature gets a little bit to hot to handle, and having countless sandy beaches only a stones throw away isn’t that bad either!
But none of this matters out here, firstly because the people where I live just don’t care about such trivial things. We have no traffic jams, no road rage, in fact you’re more likely to get stuck behind a herd of goats than sitting there for hours on the M4 just trying to get to work. Also when your ‘New Transcription Office’ is just a step across the hallway and for over eight months of the year it’s permissible in terms of ‘Dress Code’ to wear a pair of shorts and flipflops into work is a truly added bonus.
Little old ladies say ‘Hola’ to you in the streets. They even wash their own doorsteps and sweep their bit of the street every day and they look like they’re pushing 100 years old!
After nearly five years of living and transcribing here, I do not kid myself, my Spanish is still rather rubbish but all generations of Spanish people, whether it be young or old, appreciate the fact that you have made an effort to speak to them in their own native language.
However, just going to the supermarket is a minefield around which one has to carefully navigate in terms of language. For example, the word for eggs in Spanish is almost identical to the word Thursday. ‘I’ll have half a dozen Thursdays please.’ Blank looks but you can always see a smile in their eyes. And as for the word for chicken; well without being too explicit that is almost identical to a certain rather unique part of a man’s anatomy and so one always has to remember to be careful ordering a chicken for Sunday dinner at the fresh meat counter! I always get a sly wink from my regular butcher when he sees me either in or out of the supermarket around town.
But don’t get me wrong; life out here can also be very complicated and stressful.
Spain is a country obsessed with red tape and paperwork. Who would believe that you have to show all your residency papers just to pick up your dry cleaning! Want to buy a car? Well, it’s possibly easier in terms of paperwork to get the whole of the European Union to sign up to a new European Treaty. And don’t get me started on internet provision and Sky TV; we could be here for hours.
The standard charge out here is 70 Euros a month for download speeds of 1 Meg. If you’ve got a big group discussion file to download you may as well pop into town to do your weekly shopping it takes that long. Superfast broadband out here; forget it. Your internet’s not working, you ring up the helpline, and press the ‘English speaking’ option on the automated selection, because whilst I can order a hamburger with chips and a glass of wine to go with it in a restaurant, I’m far off the level of speaking about technical IT matters over the phone; I can barely do that in English! If the person you eventually end up speaking to doesn’t like what you’re saying or perhaps just couldn’t care less, they just put the phone down on you. Spain is not a country renowned for its great customer service.
Planning on watching the last ever episode of Mistresses that you’ve been following for years; forget it. You bet your last Euro that you get about seven minutes in and up pops ‘There appears to be a technical fault with this channel’. Let me tell you, Play.com have got a lot of business out of me over the last five years I’ve been here having to order box sets of things because I’ve missed the last episode.
And then we have the weather; beautiful for the most part which kind of makes you feel sorry for your work colleagues back in the UK who in the middle of July are wearing wellies and three layers of waterproof clothing just to pop to the shops, but not much! Here, when the air-conditioning breaks down and it’s 100 degrees in the shade life becomes less fun. When the rain comes and it’s too dangerous to leave the house for days on end. When you have the most spectacular storms that you watch from your window but then takes down electricity pillions and leaves the whole town without power and water for days on end reminds you that Mother Nature is a powerful force and one that touches us no matter where you live in the world.
But would I ever leave here? Never in a million years.
Blog written by Julia Page
