What's going on back home

Every day I try to keep track of the world news, and to do so I try to read some Spanish newspapers. Probably that’s not the best source of news, since most Spanish newspapers are highly biased and with strong opinions, but a mixture of several of them plus actually thinking about what is being said on the news is enough to get an idea.

The general picture right now is that Spain is going to shit. Which is evident, for a number of reasons.

For starters, the main Spanish parties are completely rotten with corruption. Every day there is a new article about a new corruption case being found and investigated, from small towns to the central government, and it usually involves the two main Spanish parties, PSOE and PP, plus some others, like CIU.

After this problem, there is the issue of unemployment.  6 million people in Spain are currently searching for a job, and we’re not including people who just gave up and are not searching any more.

Third problem would be the prices of apartments and houses. It’s still way too high, making lots and lots of empty residences that no one can buy.  The construction market is dead, but there’s people that are still trying to reanimate it, which would just restart the whole thing and we’d have the same problem later on.

Fourth problem is Catalunya’s government wish to consider independence as an option. All parties, in Catalunya and Spain, are fighting over this and the different options and reactions it should have.


In the case of the first problem, there’s no clear solution. The big parties involved control more than enough of the government and parliament to protect themselves.  Most politicians that have arrived to a position of important power in these parties are currently not fit to rule, they’re just very good at manipulating people and flattering the higher-ups. There’s lots of examples of politicians that do not have any studies, and they just climbed inside the party backstabbing people and centering on themselves. Once in a position of power, they started to work for themselves and their relatives and friends, hiring companies owned by themselves to do public work, evading taxes, hiding money, etc. And people still vote them. 

In Valencia, the corruption cases are embarrassing. The party with most cases, PP, has people that were declared guilty. However, since the crime was done 10 years ago, it didn't apply any more  even if they were guilty.  These people are still in power, and they won elections. One gets the feeling that the situation is similar in the rest of Spain. Basically, there’s a lot of people that follow this party blindly. There’s other people that follow other parties blindly, but in the case of PP, this number is really huge. I believe the cause of this is, in part, pure fanatism towards their ideas ,and in the other part, a strange feeling of proudness to the fact that they’re smart enough to steal money.

The other side of this problem is the people that, by ignorance, still believe PSOE is a leftist party(the people ruling the party and in Spanish parliament are definitely not leftists, even if lots of less important members may be it) and that they’re the solution against PP. Even if they fight each other, and they do try to screw each other lots of times, both are quite happy to alternate themselves as the ruling parties of Spain, and both just blame the other for everything, while doing almost the same when they’re in power.  PSOE voters are finally catching up to this fact, and the party is sinking quite fast. The leaders of the party are trying to find solutions, but the real solution would be if those leaders abandoned the party, and this is not going to happen, of course. Still, it will take a while for them to really sink. The leftist people are usually smarter and they will abandon them faster, but there’s still going to take a while. Maybe in this time PSOE will fix itself, but somehow I doubt it, since the people with most power are of the parasite type, not really problem solvers, as they have demonstrated themselves when they were ruling the country.

When PP and PSOE have controlled more than half the parliament, it is normal to hear that people that got condemned because of corruption got pardoned. While they can control the government and the parliament, corruption will run rampant. And of course, they will do whatever they can to keep the power, including laws like the one created recently, that makes it very hard to create a new political party if you don’t have people in the parliament already or a huge support beforehand.

If other parties took the power, we would have a chance of cleaning the big parties of corrupt people, but while this does not happen, things will be the same, and while there is no money for healthcare or education, there will be enough to hire a bad company owned by a friend, which will inflate the bills and do an inferior job.


The second Spanish problem is unemployment. The causes for this are several. The main one is that Spanish economy was based in constructing houses and other things. But instead of house prices decreasing, they increased. Eventually the situation became unsustainable, prices started to went down, nobody wanted to construct anything any more  and a huge lot of construction companies started to fire their people, since they didn't have work for them. Since banks were owners or close friends with lots of those construction companies, banks started to get loses, and they started to fire some people as well, plus they stopped giving money in the form of credits to other companies. These other companies didn't have money to pay their employees, so they started to fire them as well.

These unemployed people could not consume and buy things, so several companies that were trying to produce things also got loses, and so on. It was a huge chain reaction. The solution to this requires a big structural change. Spain is currently designed to get money by constructing. This is very idiotic, since the demand is not high enough or constant enough to be a perfect solution forever. We basically need to invest in research, to support new industries and services. However, the ruling parties have too many friends in construction, so because of the first problem, this second problem won't be solved. Instead, the ruling parties are making laws that make it easier to fire people, and to hire people for less money and with worse conditions.  People will get paid less or nothing, so there won't be consumers, so local industries won't be able to prosper. But somehow, big companies cannot grasp this concept, and their logic is something more like "I will lower salaries and fire people, so my company increases the benefits when selling things to people", without reaching to the next logic step, which is that if everybody does the same, people will not have enough money to buy anything in the first place. 

In general, the second problem is also caused by stupid rulers that didn't try to improve the situation, because their friends were getting lots of money in the process. 


The third problem is also related to the other two problems. Right now house prices are still very high compared to a normal salary. If renting an apartment, or buying a house, represented a small percentage of the total salary, people would have more options. This is not the case, but the prices are slowly getting down to more achievable values. The problem is that the majority of empty apartments are owned by constructors or banks. The same people who's friends with the government. If capitalism was really applied, since there is a huge offer and a very small demand, prices would sink to incredible levels. However, government and companies are modifying laws and playing with numbers, not trying to sell apartments, to keep the prices high. In their little minds they still think that they will be able to sell all these houses for a huge price, and get a profit. That's not going to happen, but meanwhile we have the absurd situation of people without houses, while there's millions of empty ones that are not for sale or rent. 

Again, while we have such levels of corruption and the same rulers, there's no solution to that. 


Finally, the fourth "problem", it's not as important as the rest, but it's showing how stupid is the current Spanish situation. 

First, the central government has started to propose a number of retarded laws that basically want to eliminate Catalan things. Starting with the language and it's presence in schools and government, followed by Catalan laws,  Catalan taxes and Catalan auto-government, Catalan culture, etc.

I'm not really against being Spanish, and I mentioned before that Spain was formed from Catalunya and other regions. However, lately we're being told we cannot be Catalan and Spanish. And they expect us to follow the logic of becoming only Spanish. Well, fuck that. 

Second, Catalunya's government after elections was indeed formed by CIU with the help of ERC. However, ERC didn't want to be part of it, since they're against some of CIU's actions. That's a good thing, since it allows ERC and other parties to force CIU to negotiate and not impose their ideas, which is basically to help their CEO friends. Anyway, CIU, ERC, ICV(left party) and CUP(left pro-independence party) have decided to sign some document saying they want to make people vote about catalunya's independence. 

The reaction of the other parties has been really really stupid. First, PP said that was antidemocratic, because it was not legal and not in the constitution, a constitution voted by all Spanish people. Let's start with the constitution argument: That was almost 35 years ago. I did not vote for it, and plenty of people that voted for it are dead, or they may have different opinions now. At the time, it was that or the threat of another dictatorship, so people went for that. The constitution was voted, yes, but it needs to follow the times, it needs reforms, and it needs to be voted again from time to time. The same way we vote each 4 years, instead of only voting once 35 years ago and keeping the same parliament since that moment. 

Second thing is the fact that a vote about Catalunya's independence is not legal with the current law. Well, yes. However, maybe the point of this is that we should change the laws. After all, it's more relevant if something is morally "good", or ethical. If lots of people want to become independent, or at least they want to vote for it to see what happens, that doesn't sound like a bad thing per se. Denying things because they're not legal is a dictatorship's tactic. A Dictator may declare that talking bad about him is not legal. So, if it's in the law, we should obey it blindly? Specially after considering that the current laws are managed by extremely corrupt people that think only about themselves and their friends, like a communal dictatorship? Yeah, no way. 

Third thing, is the most hilarious one: Since it's not legal and it's not on the constitution voted 35 years ago, it's not democratic. Excuse me? Voting is antidemocratic? Yeah, the level of stupidity in this reasoning is impressive.

Of course, PP is not alone in this stupidity, and Ciutadans, a weird party that has an unclear program (but tends to be from the right) is using more or less the same arguments. 

PSOE (or PSC, as the Catalan branch is named) is a funny case. In one side, they repeat PP's and Ciutadan's arguments, and voted against the idea of asking the people. However, in their program they said people should be asked about it. Besides that, they're defending to create a new Spanish model, with federations, as a solution. They say they defend this idea, but they never ever tried to put it in practice during 8 years of ruling Spain. Now those same rulers keep saying they want to propose this idea. Well, you had your time. Do you expect us to believe you now? However, inside PSC there were some voices saying PSC should vote together with CIU, ERC and the rest. And 5 people voted in favor of the document. According to the founding documents of the party, you cannot do that, and they got punished with a fine. 

And that's the last sign that Spain is not a democracy. The parties have a single view, and if you don't follow it, you get punished, or even expelled form the party. Well, then why do we need so many people in the parliament? We can easily reduce it to one person that has a certain share of the votes. If 30 people cannot say what they think, and they need to act without complaining, why do we need 30 people? One will be quite enough for that, and much safer for the party. 

Well, that was a long and slightly pointless rant. With all that, I wanted to say that I would like to live in Spain( or Catalunya, if Spain does not want to allow us to be Catalan and Spanish, I'd rather be Catalan). I really like living in Barcelona. However, if things do not improve and people start being slightly less stupid, Spain will keep being deep in shit.... 

Well see....the situation seems to be reaching a boiling point lately....

New Year Vacations

I have not written in a while...

The explanation to that can be found in the new year´s vacations. We went back to Barcelona for 12 days to celebrate New Year, and it was a great time. We managed to see friends and family, even if we missed people that we didn´t have time to meet in the end, and we had friends from Vilnius around most of the days.

All these things meant that for 12 days we were rather busy. We scheduled our days to the last minute, and we spend most of the time visiting people, meeting people or walking around the city. We did that for 12 days. And we loved seeing all the people that mattered to us.

However, Olia and I are not the most sociable people. So even if we enjoyed it, afterwards we were destroyed. As in completely tired and wanting to do nothing and not leave the house for several days. It hit me specially hard, and I didn´t want to do anything apart from reading, watching series and movies, or playing games.(things that do not require very high mental processes).

We have to say that we were "lucky", and we got a couple of extra days of isolation to rest and recover. When we were going back, our flight with Turkish airlines (a very good company, with big seats, a tv in front of you, and food during the flight) was going to pass through Istanbul, were we had to wait a couple of hours. It seems that during these dates, there was quite a big snow storm in there. We didn´t know, and in Barcelona´s airport they told us that, and that our plane had not left Istanbul yet. There was a 2 hour delay.

Of course, our first thought was that we were screwed, since the other flight was 2 hours after the first landing. However, they told us that the chaos was general, and that the other flight would be also delayed. With this reassurance, we went inside the airport and waited in front of the Gate. The plane arrived as expected, and we were ready to board....but we didn´t. Time passed and passed. Eventually, we boarded the plane, and had to wait a looong time before taking off. When we landed in Istanbul, we spent looots of time in the airport tracks, waiting for a place to stop the plane and get out.

Adding it all up, we were 4 hours late at least, and it was 1:45 am. Our plane to Sochi, even if delayed as well, had already left some minutes before that, and we were, in fact, screwed. Considering that, we went to claim new tickets, since the airline should help us in these situations.

After a big queue with all the people of all the flights that got delayed because of the snow, we were told that next possible flight was in 2 days, but that the airline was giving us a room in a hotel and had paid for our food and transfer. With  no other option, we went to enter the country.

To our surprise, Olia passed without incidents but I was told that I required a Visa, for being Spanish  We tried to go back, but they didn´t want to let Olia, since she was officially inside Turkey now, so they kept her passport. We went to an office 20 meters away, and were told that Visas were all for 90 days. We asked for the price, and it was just 15 euros. We paid, they stamped a little thing in my passport, which took 5 seconds, and the police control was happy to let us pass.  It was quite embarrassing, not a real Visa, just an entrance fee.

Next thing was to recover our luggage. We went to the office of lost luggage, and we were told that it could wait in the airport for 2 days. We needed it back for our stay in the hotel, so we asked them to bring it to us. They said it would take very long, like 2 hours, but we had no choice. It was rather stupid too, since they should have an easy way to keep track of baggage in transit, and in other circumstances they are able to transfer the baggage from plane to plane in less than 20 minutes...but well, airports are terrible disorganized messes everywhere it seems....

After 2 hours waiting, we were able to reach the desk of the airline in the airport that would transfer us to the hotel. They told us, again, that we would have to wait an hours or so until the shuttle arrived. So we waited some more, taking the chance to have some kind of breakfast (after all these queues and waiting  it was after 8 am already). We finally got the shuttle and the transfer to the hotel, we checked in (10 am), and we just went to sleep. We woke up to eat (it was paid by the airline), and continue sleeping, for the whole day and part of the next. We also read, and stayed in bed for a long time. It was quite awesome, actually.

On the second day, after lunch, we decided to actually go and visit something, and we found out that the hotel was right in the centre of the city. We were able to see the blue mosque, and to pick a cache in the process. It was quite nice, even if rather cold. We spent an hour or so walking around, and then went back to the hotel to rest some more and get ready to go to the airport.

We managed to give our suitcases, after having to transfer some weight from one to the other, since we were forced to put duty-free things inside and the total weight had increased. We went to the plane, and this time everything went fine, although the plane took a little longer than planned to take off.

We arrived to Adler, and spent lots of time trying to pass the border and get our suitcases. We didn´t have any problems, but it just took extremely long. Eventually we arrived home, dead, and we went to sleep at 6 am. I had to wake up 2 hours later and go to work, so I did. I had missed 2 extra days of work, but at least it meant that it was Friday. I survived the day, and with that weekend and several days of rest we got used again to live here in Russia.

Now that I have recovered, I´ll write sooner I hope. There´s lots of things that have happened in the world that I´d like to rant about, and I have lots of new computer games that I´d like to comment.

We´ll see....