Sketches Of Spain

Well, not exactly sketches, but I couldn't help but do homage to Miles in the title. Five random impressions then:

It's an incredibly clean country in terms of appearing litter free. I mean, I'm looking at what you might call the tourist areas, but there are lots of them, and there's just no litter. In a shopping centre in Madrid today I caught sight of my first actual cleaner, working in the middle of the crowds. She was the only one I saw and she was clearly unhurried, somewhat underwhelmed. My guess is that this level of cleanliness is connected to a sense of community of the richest kind.

There are lots of children to be seen, everywhere. This is a good thing. Like all children they are incredibly cute, but they also appear remarkably well-behaved. Again, this seems at some level to be about community.

Lots of women of all ages smoke. I don't know why I am mildly shocked by this, but I am.

There's a quite a bit of graffiti on display - a lot more than in Morocco. Initially I was taken aback on seeing quite a lot on a wall in Seville since it was obviously a 'nice' wall. But I now realise that the graffiti seems limited to definitely selected walls, usually, though not exclusively, of unoccupied buildings. Spanish graffiti, by the way, looks the same as graffiti everywhere in the world - including Morocco. Why do graffiti artists have so little individuality if what they are up to is an expression of the self?  

The crisis in the economy is not at all obvious at street level, at least in the tourist areas - though the crowds are not quite as dense as one might have expected before Christmas. But once you really get talking to people the sense of worry is palpable. Unemployment stands at 25% generally, I'm told, and a good deal higher in Andalusia. Property prices are falling in Madrid. Trouble in paradise.