Independence?

This is going to be a long rant about the small region I'm from, Catalunya. Recently there was a demonstration there asking for independence from Spain, and it was a huge success when it comes to people  going there.

To understand this, we need some background. We'll start loooong ago. In the middle ages, before the muslim invasion of the iberic peninsula, there was no spain. It was after this invasion and the reconquer (around year 800) that several kingoms appeared in the spanish region, and they evolved into 2 main ones as they conquered more territories, Castilla's kingdom and Aragon's Kingdom. Aragon's Kingdom was formed by the union of two other kingdoms, and one of them was Catalunya, so Catalunya was an important part of that one.

Castilla and Aragon joined in a big kingom (around year 1500 ), while retaining a lot of independence from each other. Each had its own rules, laws and governments, but shared some of the big decisions, and formed the spanish kingdom. This point already proves one thing....in recent years, Catalan people, me included, have said sometimes "Catalunya is not Spain". Well, this is evidently not true, Catalunya formed the original Spanish kingdom, and it was a big important part of it. However, it was an important part of it while retaining a lot of independence, that is also true.

Years passed and Castilla prospered more than Aragon, since Castilla controlled the newly-discovered American regions, while Aragon had it forbidden to try and colonize these territories. Castilla became more important in Spain, and Aragon lost power and territories. Meanwhile, Spain participated in a lot of wars(most of them organised by Castilla), and Castilla wanted Aragon to participate in money and people too, since its independence meant they didn't have to help as much. In one of these wars, against France (around year 1600), Castilla sent soldiers through Catalunya, and they started to act like an occupying force, destroying fields and doing whatever they wanted.

Catalunya revolted, and allied itself with France, becoming part of it for a short time. However, France started to act exactly like the rest of Spain, with the French army acting like Catalunya was enemy territory and central France denying Catalunya's independence agreements and trying to centralize all government. Therefore, in the end Catalunya became part of Spain again (after Spain conquered it from France), losing territories to France. Spain agreed to respect Catalunya's laws, so at this time it retained a certain independence.

However, shortly thereafter (1700), there was a new civil war to determine the new Spanish king, and in that war Catalunya decided to support what would eventually be the losing side. The winning side supported absolutism, so the new king was not happy with Catalunya's (and other regions') attitude, and removed all forms of government independence, together with trying to eliminate other languages from being official, centralising universities, and  putting military in charge of the regional government.

It was at this time that the idea of Spain, and Spanish people, was really created. Before that, the Spanish kingdom was considered a union of different kingdoms, with one common king.

In the next century (1800), even if it didn't have any independency in its government, Catalunya became very important again, since it managed to industrialise itself, a thing not many spanish regions achieved.  This created a lot of new rich people that were unrelated to the old noble system. These people became very important inside Catalunya, and their families have been always very influential since that moment. These new rich people were the ones that created the political idea of catalan nationalism: Basically, the idea of becoming more independent again, promoting Catalan, the catalan culture and the old catalan government institutions.

This also shows one thing...Catalanism was invented by rich industry-owners (CEOs, let's say) that basically got enough time to think about these things, in a period where normal people were just happy to be able to eat and were working 12 hours per day at least in factories that resembled slave colonies. At that time the worker's political ideal was to join all states and get rid of the rich and noble people that were oppressing all of them, and Catalanism was the opposite idea.

Later on Catalanism was adopted by workers, when it became part of a political party that supported workers as well, and then we're already in the 20th century, with Franco, its repression of anything not Spanish, and all that.

After Franco died (from natural causes without ever stopping to rule, a thing that should be considered the most shameful event that has ever happened in Spain), Catalunya became an "autonomous community", which means it had a certain degree of independence.

All this was just a long introduction, to mention a number of things:

1-Catalunya's Region (more or less) was almost independent until 300 years ago. It was at that time that Spain introduced the idea of "total unity" and "centralisation", trying to make all regions the same and controlled from the centre.

2-That doesn't mean Catalunya was not part of Spain before that, it was actually one of the main "founders". It just had a lot of independence when it comes to government, and it had its own culture and language, different from Castilla.

3-Catalanism was an invent of posh people, that originally had no space for worker's rights or anything similar. This idea, originally, was more important that people having better lives.

To all that, I would like to add that nationalism, or feeling proud of being born somewhere, it's rather stupid in my opinion. You may be happy to have a certain culture, with the ideals and thoughts it brings, and you may have a certain language and want to use it normally, in everyday conversations with other people that speak it, but being proud of being Catalan, or Spanish, just because, doesn't make much sense to me. It enters in the category of being proud of a number of people playing some sport, as if they cared about you or you had raised or trained them personally.

All this would point to the fact that I may not want independence, but I actually do. It's just that I didn't mention many good reasons yet.

Right now, the whole region in Spain has a huge crisis (it affects all Europe, but Spain is one of the worst areas). Spanish government is controlled by two main parties, that are completely corrupt (at least at the high levels. Little towns may have decent politicians). One of them is a direct descendant of Franco's friends and ideas, and the other, even if more moderate, cares only about themselves and don't do anything, just small little things to pretend they are a leftist party, when they're just moderate right.

The "left" party lost a lot of supporters recently, because people who may support them want social policies. The "right" party, however, has a number of loyal unwavering supporters that vote them no matter what, around 10 million Spanish people, close to one fourth of the total population. It's impossible to improve the situation without turning these two parties into more minor ones, or make them actually work for the votes. And these 10 million people won't change the support.

In Catalunya, that party got around 400.000 votes, which represents around 5% of the total population. Catalunya has a third "nationalist" party, currently ruling, that is also very corrupt and has a lot of permanent followers, but there is more variation and more parties have power, less extremism, and this "new fascist" party doesn't have that much of a support.

Summing it up, it's easier than different parties take control of Catalunya's government. However, if the laws do not allow to do much, and the central government decides what to do, and centralises power more than before, these parties won't have much power to change things. If Catalunya was independent, this wouldn't be the case. Sure, we'd still depend on Europe, but with smaller population and more variety things like Iceland would be easier to happen (where the population took control of things, put order to the political and economical corruption, and now it's getting out of the crisis).

This is not exactly my only reason, but it's a very important one right now. It may seem "selfish", but the truth is it would be easier to actually produce changes if the different small Spanish regions had the power to do whatever they wanted. And I would like that.

Catalunya's current problems are caused a lot by the current government, that destroyed lots of social victories and then disguised everything as Spain's fault. We need to get rid of them. But getting rid of them won't get us rid of the Spanish politicians, so if this same government manages to separate Catalunya from that other problem, I'd be quite happy . In a perfect world, we would be able to solve Spain's problems, but we do not live in one, so every little thing helps, and I think independence could help a lot...

Moving Out

We're finally back in Barcelona, and the last days in London have been quite busy. Moving is always a little bit stressful, and it requires you to do looots of things...

The last week we tried to meet with everybody who's living there, all the time, which required a lot of organising and planning. We more or less managed to see them, but in the end there were some rushed up good-byes and short meetings.

While doing that, we tried to start packing to move out of the apartment. That was quite horrible...

Moving is hard, but moving by using the plane is extra hard, because of the limitations in weight and volume that you have. Even when we already knew we were leaving furniture behind there were lots of things to pack. So, after several failed tries, we managed to send 3 initial packages and start filling the first suitcase. The initial plan was to use 3 suitcases, and that's what we had booked.

After seeing that we were not making much progress, we decided to leave it for the final two days. that's always a nice extra motivation to finish, the fact that there is no more time left. We already had 3 suitcases, but one of them was broken in several spots and we didn't trust it would reach Barcelona with full integrity. Therefore we bought a new cheap one from Tesco, just to survive for this trip, and the night we had to pack everything we threw away the broken one. We checked in to the flight with 3 suitcases, and we were ready to start packing.

We originally came with 3 suitcases, and we also sent 2 packages. We bought some things, but we did get rid of lots of winter clothes in trips to Vilnius and Barcelona, and we sent 3 packages with things we bought while in London. We thought it was going to be the same as our arrival.

Problems started when we finished the first 2 suitcases. We still had way too many things to pack. Clearly it was not going to be enough with one more suitcase. So we got a box from the garage that we still had from a received package and decided we were going to sent another one.

We filled the box, and still there were too many things. Remembering the thrown suitcase, we ran towards the trash, and luckily it was still there. Sure, it was broken, but if we wrapped it in plastic it would probably survive. With 4 suitcases we managed to fit most things, with some left for the hand luggage, but the 4 suitcases weighted close to 24 each. British Airways is generous, but the maximum weight per suitcase is 23, and we didn't want to risk it, so we started a nightmarish process of removing a little thing, weighting the suitcases, putting it somewhere else, and weighting them again.

We finally decided to load all extra kilos in the most resilient one, which reached 28 Kg, and we would pay the 40 pounds charge for one overweight suitcase. At this point it seemed a cheap solution...Only thing left was to add a suitcase to our plane ticket.

So, we proceeded to the flight booking information, and tried to add a suitcase. First, we had some trouble finding a place in the web where the suitcase could be added, but well, we managed to access it after making some google searches. We had the page, and there was a combo box where you mark how many suitcases to add to you booking. The combo box was in the 0 position, so I went and tried to change it....unsuccessfully.

After checking it with several browsers with same results, we read that once you had done the on-line check-in, you could not add more suitcases. That was stupid and made no sense to us...well, except for the fact that if you add them at the airport it was twice the price. This way if you make a mistake they can get more money out of you.

This made us angry, for obvious reasons. It was a cheap trick to get money. Therefore, before surrendering and waiting to be in the airport to add baggage, I went back to the webpage for one last experiment. With Chrome I decided to have a look at the combo box. Indeed, the html code marked it as disabled, and having only the "0 suitcases to add" option. Well, we didn't want that. So I edited it, changed it to "enable", and added a new value in the combo box, a simple "1". With the combo box active, I selected the "1" value, expecting the page to fail in some way.

The javascript function that got activated by changing the combo worked fine, and informed us that we were going to add a suitcase to our booking. Therefore, we sent the "edited" form. This is the step when your information is processed by the server, so it doesn't matter what you did before, the server rechecks everything. All the editing that I did was just for fun, to see how the form would fail when resent. The only thing, it didn't.

Everything was perfectly fine and in order according to the website. We just needed to pay the online fee, and we'd have a nice new suitcase in our booking. We paid, while being rather surprised....but yes, checking the booking from another computer showed 2 suitcases instead of 1. What we did is illegal, we're pretty sure...but we shouldn't be able to do it, and that's illegal as well, not to protect yourself from these things. We paid everything anyway, we just avoided a trick to get money out of customers...

Just in case, we saved the bill of the new suitcase, finished packing somehow, and next day we went to the airport, with the help of Dani Fernandez. We had printed the boarding passes and the bill, and we went to baggage drop. We had one overweight suitcase, but we knew that and it was fine. The clerk there checked our information, and then told us that we only had 3 suitcases.

We kind of expected that, so with the most innocent face we could make, explained that we had bought the extra suitcase, and presented the bill as proof. We said we did that before check-in, and the clerk decided to make a call, I guess to check our booking somewhere else. When he asked about suitcases they told him that it was 4, and the clerk proceeded to say everything's fine and let us drop everything.

So, there was no technical problem in letting us add a suitcase after check-in. They could have added this option and just resend the check-in information if some part of the booking was changed, but they didn't let us, in order to get some extra money the moment we made any mistake...

Anyway, after all this troubles we managed to safely get back to Barcelona. We've been some time there now, and we're getting ready for Sochi, but we won't move there yet. We'll explain more about all these new preparations some other time, in another post :)