Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Spain’ Category

You kind of expect parks aimed at kids to be child-safe, don’t you?

Port Aventura is aimed mainly at children from around 7 or 8 up as most rides are limited to those 1.2m or taller (it charges full-price from age 4 but I’ve yet to see a 4 year old that clears 1.2m) but does have a number of small playground areas for fairly young children.

We went right through the Polynesian area of Port Aventura without finding a ride suitable for our 4 year old so he was very keen to get into the playground in the Chinese area of the park when we reached it.

Within about ten minutes, he’d fallen on one of the slides. Well, several by then as that’s what kids do. However, the final one he fell on turned out to be a very rusty metal one with lots of jagged pieces of metal sticking up and so he cut his eyelid quite badly.

We were very surprised to see how poor the maintenance was and would have expected that particular slide to have been replaced long ago. Additionally, whilst we were expecting the park staff in the area to make a point of assisting us with a child with a potentially quite serious eye injury, we were just vaguely directed to the medical centre. It also set us wondering if the rides are similarly poorly maintained and just awaiting a major accident to have that discovered.

To some extent, the excellent Port Aventura medical centre suggests to me that the number of accidents caused by various aspects of the park are fairly significant and that the park isn’t nearly as safe as it should be.

So, do be careful in Port Aventura with your kids even in the “safe” areas for infants because they aren’t as safe as they should be.

We had decided to have a short holiday in the lull between the rush of guests through to mid-October and those that arrive for the Halloween break.

When the panic button was pressed in the UK in August, the effects were seen here the next day, but did it have any lasting effect?

The small shop in our local airport doesn’t sell much wine or honey these days as it mainly sold those whilst people were wandering around after they’d checked their luggage. The wineries are none too pleased as there was a considerable amount of wine taken home as hand-luggage before the scare. A pilot who was staying with us recently thought that he’d be able to get his little case of wine onboard by showing his pilots license ’til I reminded him that the guys that flew the planes into the twin towers also had a pilots license.

I was expecting at least some increased level of security on my flight from Barcelona to Santiago but if anything the security was much lower than I’d been expecting. Thanks to the wonders of online check-in I was never even asked if I’d any sharp objects in my luggage, if I’d packed it myself, etc. In fact, the only contact that I had with anyone prior to boarding the plane was when someone had a fairly cursory glance at my passport just before I walked out onto the tarmac.

What about the increased security in the UK airports though? Delays in flight arrivals are much more common as the increased security level means that minor discrepancies result in flights being held until the source is identified. Earlier in the week one of the flights was an hour late because someone had dropped their boarding card for instance. Is that crazy? No, because the effect of the error was that it looked like someone who should have been on board the flight actually wasn’t.

What doesn’t seem so sensible is the very arbitrary reduction in the maximum size of carryon luggage. Is it really a co-incidence that the size corresponds to that of a laptop bag? I doubt that very much. The other aspect is that it now takes much longer to collect luggage from flights as almost everyone has checked baggage these days (quite a nice little earner for the likes of Ryanair with their charge for checked luggage).

I also can’t see that the security staff will maintain their vigilance in picking out potential terrorists. In todays world what they will more than likely do is to stop and question anyone who looks Muslim. OK, I will grant that this tactic will presumably pick out a higher proportion of potential terrorists than just picking out people at random in that the threat is, in practical terms, originating from the Muslim world. However, it’s also going to alienate Muslims in general and it may well sway the views of some middle of the road Muslims towards the anti-west mind-set which isn’t in anyone’s interest.

To indicate how ridiculous this kind of method of picking out potential terrorists can be, consider the flights from Belfast to London 10 years ago. They were all met by a couple of officers from the Metropolitan police. The ONLY people that they stopped to question were men walking by themselves. I used to travel back and forth from Belfast to London quite frequently so was able to experiment with this. If I was travelling on my own, all that I needed to do to avoid being stopped was to walk alongside a woman. Any woman: I didn’t need to speak to her, or do anything other than walk alongside her. I wonder how long it will be before the security people start picking out their subjects for questioning on the basis of some equally silly thinking to “single guy alone = terrorists”?

Arnold