FREE
Your Essential Weekly Read
Tel: 966 701 060 E-mail: office@costablancapeople.com Web: costablancapeople.com
Tues 24th Nov - Mon 30th Nov 2015
The‘expat’effect ■ SUZANNE O’CONNELL
suzanne@costablancapeople.com
It’s always interesting to read about the perspective that the national press have on your own nationality when living in a foreign country.
A
RECENT ARTICLE in Spanish newspaper Información takes the time to consider the ‘expat’ phenomenon and the mentality that isolates ‘expats’ in their adopted country of Spain. This long article by Andrés Valdés begins its exploration of the thinking of the ‘expat’ with the football hooligan – although this species has only a tenuous link with the traditional ‘expat’; sharing perhaps no morethan nationality.
The British call themselves ‘expat’ when they live outside their own country, the column explains. However, it does move on to list, as part of the expat experience, the younger British student and professional who usually lives in Madrid or Barcelona. Then there are the retired, usually 55 years upwards,who have settled here too. Not surprisingly, it’s Alicante that the author of the article comes back to and the tens of thousands of British who live here. The paper claims that only 10% of these are integrated into Spanish society and the rest live in an archipelago of settlements where the foreigner is the Spanish speaker, where shops display pound signs and services from the plumber to legal advice are provided in English. The article looks at some of the history of the British relationship with Spain and what draws us to the country in the first place. The pull was perhaps originally triggered by the works of the Anglo-Saxon writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Valdés suggests that these writers created a romantic image of the country that perseveres. A perspective that depicts Spain as lacking in modernisation;a place for adventure that has great qualities but perhaps is a little behind the times. Spain continued to have literary representation through Hemingway and his fascination with its fiestas, through Orwell’s reports of the civil war and descriptions of Gerald Brenan’s life in the Alpujarra. Images of Spain that those coming here still expect to find, it’s claimed. More than 50 years of tourism and 20 years of settlement later,the British still speak of the friendliness of the Spanish and their openness. But there is also a perception that work ethic isn’t always high here and that the Spanish make a priority of their family and home life. There are contrasts here between the level of tolerance of the Spanish and the extent to which they can also be closed to new ideas, says Valdés. Spanish
bureaucracy is decried almost unanimously by the British who refer to the fact that there is always one missing document, that bureaucrats are not always
available due to their ‘second breakfast’ mid morning or due to another fiesta. Continued on page 2