Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

With the rapid rise of the Catalán language just over the border in Spain the problems in communication with those coming north have been magnified considerably.

Starting earlier this year we began to receive guests from “Spain” who could barely speak French or English and simply refused to speak Spanish. Since we don’t speak Catalán we’re increasingly finding ourselves pretty much resorting to sign language with some of them.

Aside from anything else, that makes sending out of our acknowledgement e-mail something of a problem. The majority of those coming from south of the border are from Barcelona and that’s a very cosmopolitan city with Spanish from all over the country and indeed Latin America living there but obviously with a large Catalán component. The only language that we know they all speak is Spanish yet sending out an acknowledgement e-mail in Spanish will clearly insult the Cataláns.

The net effect is that we’re considering calling it a day with e-mails to Spain yet that causes complications for them and in fact we’ve already received a complaint from one Catalán couple (in English, as they won’t write in Spanish and nobody outside Spain can understand Catalán) because they say we were closed the night they’d booked. In fact, because they’d refused to read the directions e-mailed to them in Spanish, they were banging on the door of our neighbour’s house and he was off on holiday.

We’ve noticed a distinct hardening of the attitude of the Catalans in Spain over the last couple of years which has been gaining momentum of late.

Two years ago, any time there were brochures in shops and whatnot, they were always in Catalan and Spanish. 18 months ago that stopped and since then they have only been in Catalan.

18 months ago, we could speak to the shopkeepers in Spanish. Since about 12 months ago, they have refused to serve us in Spanish.

A year ago, we could speak to all our Spanish guests in Spanish. For the last 6 months or so they have refused to speak to us in Spanish. This is particularly crazy as few of them speak French well and many don’t speak English well either. Twice recently we have virtually had to resort to sign language although both they and we speak Spanish! The latest booking was quite comical in many ways as I can understand Catalan reasonably well but can’t speak it: the potential guest could speak neither French nor English yet refused to acknowledge my replies in Spanish which she could understand very well.

Wendy tells me that recent developments indicate that already demonstrations have taken place in Catalonia. Can violent ones be far off?

Let’s face us, the vast majority of us know diddly squat about the situation in Burma.

It’s one of those peculiar places in south-east Asia that aren’t on the flight path of the major airlines that we tend to get around on so there aren’t any stopovers there such as are commonplace in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. So, very few of us know anyone who has been there on holiday and therefore we know even less about it than we do about many countries around the world in this day of widespread international travel.

So, in many cases it is a country that simply doesn’t appear on our radar until something really serious happens there.

Sadly, that “something really serious” is happening right now. The government (if such a word can be applied to the people running that country) don’t want us to know about it but thanks to the communications infrastructure in place these days, the only thing that they can do is try to round up those that would write about it from within the country and yet still the news gets out despite their major-league clampdown on freedom of expression. So we have the Burma Blog among many others.

Buddism is one religion that just doesn’t get into any kind of conflict so it must be some measure of how bad it is when even they have been dragged into events taking place in Burma.

Let’s hope that the situation is resolved as quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.

If you’re a blogger you certainly should because growing numbers of your colleagues are in jail in China.

Have you ever called for the government to change? That’s what Guo Qizhen did and he’s been in jail for the last year because of it with no real prospect of release before the Olympics are over.

Many bloggers will have their little rant now and again about something annoying that their government has gotten up to. That’s OK in a democratic society but try it somewhere like China and you can easily end up in jail.

Run a political blog? Not an option in China unless it’s one that consistently supports the government.

So, if you value freedom of expression, make a point of saying so now and again.

It used to be pretty handy living here and learning Spanish. After all, we’re just 30 miles or so from Spain and we get a lot of guests from Barcelona so it’s obviously easy to get a lot of practice in, isn’t it?

Well, no actually, it isn’t. Up until about 18 months ago it certainly used to be but the Catalans have become a whole lot more militant about their language since then. The immediately obvious impact of that was that since around then brochures in shops are only available in Catalan instead of being in Spanish too as they were previously. Similarly all signs are only in Catalan these days.

In the last 12 months we’ve found that the Catalans quite simply refuse to serve us in shops if we speak Spanish. I think that’s because we come across as residents of the area and therefore they expect us to speak Catalan. However, that’s not possible for us because even though we live in French Catalonia the French have all but stamped out that language.

Recently we even had a Catalan guest who insisted on speaking in very bad English rather than Spanish so we expect that it will get worse in the coming years.

It’s getting quite difficult for us because although we get a lot of guests from Barcelona, not all of them are Catalan and neither do all of them speak or read English yet all of them speak and read Spanish (or Castillian as the Catalans call it). Therefore we acknowledge reservations from Spain in Spanish.

Will they eventually become as militant as the Basques? Who knows, but it certainly seems to be heading that way.