Archive for the ‘Expatriate Life’ Category

A shameful website in expatriate Spain

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

DesignOne of the main reasons why I started this blog is that I was appalled by the standard of Web site design in expatriate Spain.

Of course, most of them were property sites and rental sites, cashing in on a temporary boom. If visitors were looking for something definite, they could cope with the most amateurish of sites.

The property boom is over, especially for British expatriates, with the pound approaching parity with the euro. We really need to move on from sites built from templates, and sites built by teenagers in love with Flash.

So why do we have sites as fundamentally dreadful as the site for the “Iceland” shops in expatriate Spain?

The shop is fine
I shop frequently at my local “Iceland”, in Benissa. It is a fine shop, with produce shipped in every day from Britain. It has a fantastic English butcher, a serious range of frozen ready meals, and bottled real ale, like Hobgoblin and Bishops Finger. So I have nothing whatsoever against the company.

The site is shameful
It’s just their Web site which is so awful. If you have ever read a post in this blog, you will know that Web site design begins with thinking about visitors. It is an extension of researched marketing. It is not about the scenery.

Before they take it down, have a look at their page which tells you where their shops are.

What does any visitor want from such a page, at a bare minimum? Opening hours would be good. I can’t find them anywhere on the site. Next, a visitor will want to know where their nearest shop is, and how to get to it. This should be the page to do it. Just take a despairing look.

At the top it says, Below you will find details on Overseas Imports stores located in Tenerife. We are currently expanding our business to mainland Spain, so expect more addresses to be added here shortly. Since there are half a dozen shops in mainland Spain on the page, you would have expected the company (someone paid them to do the design) at least to rewrite this sentence.

The real crime, however, is their map. This is designer-centred design so bad it has to be called ‘teenage design.’ It aims to impress rather than inform—and it doesn’t inform at all. The tiny maps in the circles are of no use. Who could drive anywhere using them? In the case of the Benissa shop, they have a bit of a map which shows an area which is half an hour’s drive from the shop—and the arrow is pointing to a crazy spot on the main map.

If you look at the other pages, you will see graphics-free text pages with lines stretching across the page. And then this page, which uses huge static graphics. Google maps, with a simple enough API for real Web site designers, are free. I use them on almost all my expatriate Spain sites. I just can’t work out where the Web site design company responsible for the “Iceland” site is coming from.

In expatriate Spain, we are having a hard enough time. We deserve better from our Web site designers.

German men on the Costa Blanca

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Comic German man I’ve been to Germany more than once. I found the people there charming and friendly, from lorry drivers and waitresses to teachers and business people. Even here on the Costa Blanca German women are often a delight. So why do German men here tend to be such poor ambassadors for their country?

I’m not just talking about the way that, as soon as there’s any sun, they take off their shirts to show us all their beer bellies. I’m talking about unawareness and downright rudeness. German men will barge in front of you, bump into you, cut you off in their cars, you name it. More than once I’ve been waiting at a supermarket lift with my shopping trolley, only to have a German man come up and thrust his trolley into the lift in front of me, as soon as the doors began to open. When about to pay at a petrol station, I’ve had a German man walk in to the shop and try to pay before me.

The German for ‘good manners’ is gutes Manieren. You might not know the expression. Nor, it seems, do some German men on the Costa Blanca.

The rain in Spain (revisited)

Monday, October 29th, 2007

When I wrote a whimsical piece on this topic on the 26th of August I had no idea that, in October, rains would bring devastation to the Costa Blanca—or the part of it where I live. Storms and floods destroyed cars, brought down a bridge, savaged buildings and wrecked entire beaches. The precipitation may have been as high as 400 litres per square metre, in 24 hours. The area was officially declared a disaster zone, the Vice-President came to see the damage, and for days the rains were the main item of news on Spanish TV.

A friend of mine had to swim out of the ground-floor of his apartment block into his garage, where he found his car submerged in water. It had been a new car; it was now a complete write-off.

The Peñon d'Ifach overlooks devastationFor some really revealing photos, have a look at the webshots.com album put together by Chris Young (from which I have borrowed my tiny thumbnail).

And where was I while all this rain was falling? In Manchester. (Yes, the irony is a little oppressive.)

However, I did get the start of it. It had been bucketing down all night when I got up on Friday to go to the airport. Since I was staying for a while, I’d decided to go by coach, and had ordered a taxi. It never came. When I telephoned, the dispatcher said it was impossible for a taxi to get to my urbanisation, because of the water. (more…)

The rain in Spain

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

In 2001, when I first came to live in my present house in Calpe, the hill across the valley to the east was a sandy brown. A desert hill, which made you wonder what had ever been grown on its ancient stone terraces.

It seems there was very little rain in Calpe in the 1990s—and I know there was a drought all through Spain. I visited Madrid two or three times a year in that decade, and travelled around much of Spain. (Of course I spoke much better Spanish then, before I came to settle among expats.)

Torrential rains came in October 2001, and have been coming back—several times a year—ever since.The green hill I’ve heard that the Jet Stream is going to bring warmer weather in September and October, but it’s been raining through much of August this year. We blamed the drought on global warming; no doubt it’s responsible for all the extra rain too. Whatever the reason, the result has been to turn the Costa Blanca green.

Now there is a green hill, and it’s not far away (as in the hymn). It’s just across the valley from me.

No Spanish please, we’re English

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

Just yesterday, in a supermarket, I witnessed something I’ve seen dozens of times, but which never fails to astonish me.

A man, of about my own age, needed to pass through a queue. “Excuse me,” he said.

If I’d been in Basingstoke or Hull, nothing could have been more normal. But I wasn’t. I was here on the Costa Blanca. This was a Spanish supermarket, and the queue was made up of the usual motley group of Spaniards and expatriates. The man had absolutely no reason for supposing that any of them were English.

People talkingI’ve also heard expatriates—German and French as well as English—reply in their own language when the long-suffering girl on the till spoke to them in Spanish. I don’t know what makes these monolinguists tick. From the looks on their faces, it’s as though they can’t really believe that there really are foreign languages. Their own language is so natural to them, they can’t face the fact that it’s just one among many. Surely, their faces seem to say, everyone must understand the only language I speak.

I’m not talking about casual holiday-makers. I’m talking about the expatriate population.

Ah well, let’s end on a positive note. If you want to know the politest way to say “Excuse me” in Spanish, it’s “¿Con permiso?” It’s a question, and you say it the same way you’d say “May I?” in English. So you wait for an answer. A polite Spaniard will immediately say, “Si”, and move aside for you.

Of course, if you say it to another monolingual expat… Sigh.

The new countryside

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

The girls who make the cold calls are always certain there will be no problems. The engineers who turn up always say it’s impossible.

The Spanish countryside

The Internet has redefined “the countryside”. It is no longer a place where farmers grow crops, or the unspeakable pretend to be hunting the uneatable.

In the early twenty-first century, wherever you live on the planet, you live in the countryside if you live too far from a relay station to get broadband.

Is my computer a horse?

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

I am alluding here to a famous remark made by the Duke of Wellington. He was born in Ireland, to English parents. He hated people calling him Irish. Sometimes they would say, “But you were born in Ireland.” He would reply, “If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?”

A couple of days ago I found myself on the main page of a famous search engine (not Google). It was all in Spanish. I know enough to recognise the word Preferencias, so I clicked on it, expecting it would allow me to switch to English. No such luck. I could set all sorts of preferences, but not change the language. My computer was in Spain (they could tell from its Internet Protocol address) so I must want to talk to it in Spanish.

I talk to Spaniards in Spanish, and I am very happy to do so. But my computer is not a person (or a horse). I prefer to talk to it in English.

Google of course allows you to switch to a fantastic array of languages. I haven’t looked recently, but it used to include Klingon. I always fancied surfing the Web in Klingon—but do I know enough Klingon to change Google back to English afterwards? That has always deterred me.

To come back to my serious point: it may be a kindness to offer languages based on the IP address of the given computer. It is also essential, in 2007, to offer alternatives.

Are you having a trouble focusing?

Sunday, May 27th, 2007

No, there isn’t a typo in the title (this time). These are the very words which confront any visitor to the English homepage of the Barclays Bank website here in Spain. They are part of an animated ad for the bank’s deposit account.

adOf course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “mass”, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.

I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.

Extraño, ¿no?

No hacemos que hables inglés

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Don Quixote and Sancho PanzaA couple of months ago, I was chatting to a taxi driver when he told me that some recent ‘fares’—I think that’s what you call a taxi driver’s customers—had told him off for speaking Spanish, and for not knowing their language. (To keep the record straight, I should say that they weren’t English.) I would hate any reader of this blog to suppose that an attitude like this informed my earlier post on Internet Explorer, or Brenda’s comment on PayPal.

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Microsoft sends in Spanish

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

I know, I know. MicrosoftThe most predictable and boring thing you can do in a blog is to slag off Microsoft—and people often slag them off from a hidden envy. The company is so successful. Bill Gates is so rich.

However, the company can behave in a totally high-handed way. What has got my goat right now is what they’ve done to my copy of Internet Explorer 7.

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