Christmas In Spain

Today, I arrived in Spain for Christmas with the family. Since me and my brother have now moved out for good, my parents have been free to flee the country and start a new life in Spain - something they had always planned to do but that I never thought would actually come to fruition.

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about the whole thing... I suppose I'll see them less often that I would have done otherwise but I'll see probably get out to see them twice a year and then they will be frequenting the UK a couple of times a year as well so I might even end up seeing them more then I normally would!

This was my first unaccompanied flight and I was a bit apprehensive at first but all seemed to go to plan, I didn't forget anything important, they didn't check my overweight hand luggage and I didn't run into too many problems at the airport - a small hitch with some perfume I'd bought my mum for Christmas (I had to swap some change with a small child in order to buy a clear plastic bag to put it in) was the only minor hitch. I was slightly confused by the lack of boarding announcements - apparently they don't do that any more - but managed to get to the gate in plenty of time.

A woman tried to get on the early bus with me to the airport this morning but tried to pay her £3 fare with a £20 note. Needless to say the driver was less than impressed and refused to take her - in Birmingham, the policy is exact change only, they would have happily taken the £20 but she wouldn't have had any change.

Anyway, back to Spain. The house here is actually rather nice. It's a fair distance from any major towns but it's very homely. There are some particularly interesting quirks that come with the package of being in a rural area - most notably, the lights dimming whenever you use some electricity, kettles, ovens and dishwashers all cause a very noticeable drop in the lighting levels and it is really quite distracting.

My biggest mistake so far was almost the cause of some intense boredom over the coming week. Having carefully packed my bag with all the essentials, I neglected to pack my laptop power supply. Thankfully someone else has a HP laptop and they are compatible otherwise I wouldn't be writing this post. This has happened to me several times now and the one thing I am almost guaranteed to forget - you'd have thought after doing it once I would learn but apparently not! I've also discovered that my mobile phone doesn't work abroad. My old phone worked fine but apparently I was supposed to contact orange before I left to enable roaming. Perhaps this is a consequence of being on a contract rather than pay as you go? Either way all of the local providers have been blocked thus rendering it useless until I return to the UK.

That's all for now, no music this week either as I've genuinely not heard anything new worth mentioning which is a shame. I will have my round up of favourite music from 2011 at some point around new year and will probably mention something about the BBC's Sound of 2012 list too but I've not had a chance to peruse the long list yet.