Catalan politics

Last Sunday Catalonia had elections and they were a BIG DEAL. Voter participated spiked by 10% here.

One way elections are different in Spain than in the US is that voters elect the party, rather than the politician, to govern. Then the leaders of the elected party assume whatever political posts were up for election.

In Spain elections usually have 5 or 6 parties that win seats in congress. The two largest parties in the country as a whole are the PP (popular party, conservative), and the PSOE (workers' party, socialist). But Catalonia has it's own right and left.

Catalonia, while part of the Spanish state, has autonomy that allows it to do things differently when it wants to. Especially regarding education, and speaking Catalan (which was suppressed during the Franco years ... the 40s to the 70s). There has always been nationalist sentiment in Catalonia, but it is running especially high right now. People are talking about independence from Spain.

This dude is the current president. He is from the CiU, the Catalan right. Traditionally this party has not favored independence from Spain, but responding to popular opinion, now it does. (Sorry the photos are so bad ... they are of campaign posters in the metro, hence the black eye). The current president called early elections and promised that if he got more than 50% of the total votes he would arrange a referendum to vote on Catalonian independence from Spain.

But he didn't get more than 50% of the votes. In fact, his party got fewer votes than in previous years. The party that did gain votes was the leftist Catalan Party, the Esquerra. This party is all for a radical, total break with Spain.

The Esquerra candidate. 

Together, the two parties do have an absolute majority, and both favor Catalan independence, but the problem is that they will have a hard time forming a coalition government together to push that agenda through because one is conservative and the other is liberal.

So, basically, Catalans have voted for independence, but didn't decide which party would do a better job of it. 

No matter how crazy Catalan politics are, what didn't seem crazy was that campaign propaganda only appeared two weeks before election day. People didn't have to live with the ads for months. That's definitely something we could adopt in the US!

Port Vell

Today I went to see the port after looking at apartments. To get to the port, you get off the metro at the stop 'Barceloneta,' which is in a neighborhood where all the fishermen used to live. It's really old (that probably goes without saying ... EUROPE IS REALLY OLD) and full of tiny apartment buildings and there are a lot of sea food restaurants.

From the metro you walk to the sea. There is a circus near there and I stopped inside and watched the tight rope walkers rehearse inside the big top for a while before I saw the ships!

The harbor was redeveloped for the Olympics ... a big shopping mall and whole pedestrian streets were added. I guess before that it was just kinda sketchy and industrial. And now it connects to the Rambla, with a roundabout that has this huge monument to Christopher Columbus in it.

The maritime museum of Barcelona, which aims to "preserve Barcelona's maritime cultural heritage" maintains an seagoing fleet of five ships. How cool is that??? The ships are restored to get them back to their original structure (take away any motors and stuff that were added later), and kept in the water. The idea is that the best way to preserve the ships is to keep them in good working order. (Basically the same philosophy that living printing museums have about presses.) This one is called the "Santa Eulalia" and you can just walk on board her from the sidewalk!

Yes, those are palm trees. In November. MN≠BCN.

The Santa Eulalia was mostly used to transport dry goods around the Medeterranen, but she also took trips to Cuba. She was a smuggling vessel in the 1930s, and in the 1970s she was used as an "auxiliary vessel for underwater work." In 1998 the museum acquired her, restored her, and put her back in the water. 

They let you climb around on the ship and see all of it, inside and out. Also, on Monday mornings at 10am they take this ship out on a spin and you can sign up to go.

The ship slept 12 men. Each bunk has a light, curtain, and storage. That little box in the wall has signal flags.

A table for reading and storing maps. Unfortunately the drawers were locked.

The kitchen was above decks because, if it was in the mail hull, a kitchen fire could end up burning the whole vessel. The tour guides still use it to make coffee and lunch!

This is Barcelona

Everyday things that make me smile: suspicious lady and adorable puppies on the metro.

This is Barcelona

Everyday things that make me smile: surreal door knocker on the AV/ Diagonal. Apple, anybody? :)

Archival Box

We learned how to make these in class last week.

Boxing a book can be useful for presentation or preservation (ie if a book is falling apart but it will lose value if rebound (restored), you can construct a made-to-measure box for it to live in).

This box is made to hold A4 sized sheets of paper. It's lined with a screenprinted paper from India and the cloth is 100% cotton. You can kind of see in the paper where the screenprinted design was repeated.

What surprised me most was that you don't have to pay attention to grain direction of paper, cloth, or book board when you are making a box! So box making would be a good way to use up scraps of stuff.

This is Barcelona: everyday things that make me smile.

old men playing bocce ball in front of the sagrada familia.

note the man bags.

Cizallas y cicatrices

The bookbinding shop at school is pretty incredible. Here are some photos to drool over. 

We have two of these antique cabinets filled with antique tools for
foil stamping. They were rescued from a shop in Madrid that was
closing. 

A close up of the tools. It is a pretty incredible collection and,
like a lot of our equipment, should probably be in a museum.
The school is very careful with it all and you can only be in
the shop when the professor is there too.

This platen needs someone to love it/clean it (me?)

Each student receives their own work surface and storage space.

Some of the equipment, like this guillotine, is just so beautiful. And
each piece tells a story ... most have a little plaque attached with the
name of the original equipment dealer or manufacturer and the year.

The cizalla ... or at least one of them. I'm not used to this one yet and yesterday
I banged my head on it. Since the equipment in the shop doesn't meet current
 safety regulations, part of what we pay in tuition goes into an "emergency room" fund.

Also, try to say "cizalla" five times fast. (THE - THI - UH).

Views of Barcelona

That's the title of the post I wish I was writing. But actually I have spent a fair amount of my time in Barcelona looking at this:

While the interior of government buildings is not Barcelona's best feature, the part of getting a visa that hasn't been frustrating has actually been pretty informative.

I thought a visa (which is attached to your passport) allowed you to study and live in Spain, but the visa+passport combo doesn't actually serve as official ID for the purposes of opening a bank account, enrolling in school, and renting an apartment. But you can use the visa to get a residence card, which allows you to do all those things. 

Cards for people from the EU are processed in one office. Cards for the rest of the world (including the US) are processed in another. I would say that most of the people waiting this morning at the latter hailed from Latin American countries. 

So, for many of those who need to apply for residence, the language barrier is not a problem. But I honestly don't know other how people manage to figure out exactly what paperwork they are supposed to do, since the Spanish Government doesn't have much of it posted online. My source was the security guard at an immigration office who gave me metro directions to the right office and a verbal list of what documents I was supposed to bring. 

People who are applying for residency start forming a line outside the office at about 5:30 am (which in Spain is a very unholy hour ... and also just half an hour after the metro starts running). The office opens at 9am and closes at 2pm. Here is the line at about 6:45am, from the end (there are about 50 people waiting):

By 8am it was four people thick and wrapped all the way around the block. The office serves about 200 people a day. You cannot make an appointment in advance. 

Apparently work permits are even worse ... 12 hour lines that start at 3am, anyone? 

Then, when you finally get inside the building, there's this looming feeling of desperation. The waiting rooms always remind me of this Joaquín Sabina song, which talks about "salas de espera/sin esperanza."

Spanish culture is, in some respects, laid back, but deadlines and paperwork are not flexible and no exceptions are made. I feel really grateful that I was able to get my residence card today and I'm ready to see some real views of Barcelona!

Beach - Badalona - 03 Nov 2012

Firsts

This is my first post from Spain!

I have had two weeks of classes now, but this is my first finished book! One of the reasons that one book can take four of five classe to make is that sometimes you have to wait a day or so between steps. So you're always working on several books at a time.

This is a pretty traditional structure, and a sturdy one. We are using butcher paper for the textblocks of our first few books, but I actually like the contrast between the fine, 100% cotton cloth and the rough paper. I'm going to look into acid-free papers with a similar color/texture.

The headband is machine made but we are going to learn how to make them by hand.

I made paste paper endpapers for this little guy.