I am excited with the possibility of meeting the children that were born after I was there last time and the ones that have doubled their age in the meantime. I like the idea of spending some days there catching up with my cousins and aunt. Will we still get along well? We’ll see

I hope BAA doesn’t make me stay in Spain longer than planned!

I have a bunch of rejections that I will treasure for future searches. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, doesn’t it?

Looking back I think I have achieved my target, I am relaxed, willing to go to work and do my best and looking forward to my first day, it almost sounds as if I have to go shopping for some books and pencils for the new school year.

The sleeping beauty castle was impressive:

Castle

And if it rains one day, you can always take the train to go around the park, and stay in it until you feel you’ve rested enough!

The train that goes around the park

On our second night we went to the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and had dinner there whilst the show was taking place. One of the best shows we’ve ever seen. If you go to Disneyland Paris, you cannot miss this! (I am not going to spoil it with explanations…)

THE Show

When you arrange the holiday online, you are offered half board vouchers that will allow you to have dinner in some of the Disney restaurants. Everybody said in the reviews that it was worth it, so we went for them. Not sure if they were worth it because we didn’t try the other option, but it was handy to pay with a voucher and forget about extra budget. We had a Disney card that allowed us to pay everywhere in the park and clear the bill at check out time. Very well organised.

The roller coasters and different attractions were good, I was fascinated by the Pirates of the Caribbean area and their water attraction or by the Robinson Crusoe’s tree house. We had lots of fun. We queued a lot, too… That was the worst part, the queues. At some places we had to stand for 45 minutes to be able to use an attraction, some times they’d break up and make the waiting time even longer, up to 60 minutes. All worth it for the minute of enjoyment and stress free feeling.

Sinking boat

Robinson Crusoe's Tree House

One of the places we enjoyed most was the Small World. It is a water attraction with enjoyable music and lots of scenes from around the world represented. Very nice feeling being cheered by the animated figures there.

I must admit after 3 times on the Space Mountain I didn’t want to go in there again, opting for less bumpy and more enjoyable attractions. The shops and the merchandising are amazing, you have anything from clothes to table dressing… anything to make children and childish people happy. We were scared of being the only young couple without children there but there was plenty of young groups of people, and not so young without children, so we didn’t feel out of place at all. There were two parks, the Disneyland Park and the Walt Disney Studio Park, we also loved the Hollywood Tower Hotel at the Walt Disney Studio Park… very scary!

Walt Disney Studio Park

The Tower full of haunted lifts...

Now, I am looking forward to visiting Disneyworld.

Luckily he was fine and was happy to go back to his cage with some cereals to make him walk and make sure he was not traumatised. My finger has suffered a bit but is getting a lot better as hours go by. I called the NHS because I didn’t know what to do, it didn’t seem big enough to go to a doctor but I had no idea how to treat it. The NHS asked me on the phone whether there was saliva on his teeth, which I find bizarre as a question, isn’t there always saliva on all animal’s teeth? Plus, the last thing I thought of when he bit me was checking whether there was saliva in his mouth… I didn’t want him to bit me again! They recommended me to clean the injury with cold water every 10 minutes for a while and then cover it with some sanitized plaster or so.

I learnt a lesson today, if he doesn’t want to go out of his cage, don’t force him or there will be consequences.

This time it is a bit trickier, because I am not looking for any job but for a job that will keep me motivated and entertained for the years to come. I am asking for money and for technical challenge. I am asking to be given the opportunity to shine, to do what I do best in a company that allows me to develop further my technical skills. Not easy.

The first thing I realised when I started to look for a job is the market is different from the one I was used to. I had to create a CV that can be read in less than 45 seconds. It has to be good enough for a recruiter and a company to decide they want to know more, but not long enough to bore them half way through. How do you condensate your career in two pages without ommiting important details? You cannot when you’ve been working for 10 years or more, but you can put there only the details that you think are most important, the ones you feel better about. You put in your CV details that tell the story of your career, achievements that make you unique and different from other candidates. It is very interesting the feedback I am getting so far… but the process feels veeery sloooww.

During these months of absence, a new member joined our little family in London. Hamsters require less space for living comfortably than chinchillas or ferrets, so given our limited space at home we thought a hamster would be the best option.

He is a very nice Syrian hamster that is learning to behave as we speak. At first he peed all over the place, now… he’s learnt to use a little toilet we placed on the cage. He likes cucumber and broccoli. He runs in his wheel, endlessly, every evening. He doesn’t even stop to watch the football… Taking a picture of a hamster is one of the most difficult things, you cannot use flash because it would scare him (it can even cause them sudden death) and they do not stay quiet for very long. I enclose a couple of attempts:

This is my wheel

Where is the broccoli??

This week I feel particularly proud of being Spanish. The Spanish Team has made wonders playing during this World Cup, at first I thought they were lucky and they probably were, but now they are history in the making. Whether they win or not next Sunday doesn’t really matter, Spain never made it before to Semi-finals, we were never second in a World Cup. That’s an achievement.

This morning reading the news some people were saying that winning this World Cup may put Spain in a better position economically. I don’t think this is true, but what it is true is that Spain has needed from a very long time ago a bit of optimism and happiness. This is what they are getting. This is what we are getting. But let’s put things into perspective and do not forget the unemployment rate.

Nevertheless, good luck Spain!

I think being a civil servant is boring. I think it is one of the biggest problems Spain has, the lack of self improvement that sits on top of a numb population. Why does someone young and with a bright future ahead want to be a civil servant? Why is no-one bothered with innovation? Why are people so scared of the private sector? I believe this is cultural and comes from older generations; we have been educated to value certainty over self improvement, easy money over investing a lot of effort in being the best to earn more money, not working hard if you can be the one with a salary for doing nothing.

If you have a friend in the public sector, you are in. If you have a friend that may have a friend somewhere important, you are in. Your CV doesn’t really matter. If you don’t have friends, you spend years and years trying to get in, somewhere from 2 to 10 years; nobody questions that, you are studying for a competitive examination, good for you! Police, doctors, public transport, government, courts, anything. The whole working market revolves around the friendship of who is in charge or in being resilient enough to be there when it is finally your turn to get in.

Spanish people do not work to be the best; they work to earn the money that will pay their mortgage and will make them look cool in front of their acquaintances. It has to be a big mortgage so that everyone is jealous of the flat. They have to wonder how are you able to afford that. On top of that you need a good car, they cannot afford it either, but they get the money from the mortgage and forget about it, start showing it to their friends. You have to suffer with a mortgage all your life as everyone else’s, because renting a flat is wasting money, it doesn’t give you the status you need, it is not stable (even though in Spain renting is way more stable than in England, the landlords cannot force you to leave very easily). When you rent you are paying someone else’s mortgage… and that is not acceptable.

It is much better to get a flat that you don’t know if you’ll be able to afford or live with your parents forever. After all it is nice to have someone to clean after you, cook for you, care for you and not ask you for anything in return, just 200 euros in case you can spare them.

Spain likes democracy and likes civil rights. They like to be given money for nothing. They like to skip taxes, anything that makes you think you are clever and getting money that is not entirely yours. They like it. They don’t see the big picture. They are still playing by the rules of 1975. That is why Zapatero is our President. That is why I don’t live there anymore and I would be very unhappy if forced to get back, ever.

This said there is hopefully some people starting to see things more clearly, starting to overcome these old patterns that make Spain the small town it is at the moment. Hopefully, at some point, there will be a critical mass of people thinking forward instead of backwards. Up until now, we are a minority and most of us are forced to leave our country to find a better life.

Zapatero has always been a puppet in someone else’s hands. He is the typical politician that buys people’s votes by giving money to large unhappy sections of the population, for example, he promises better pensions and he gets the votes from the retired people, he promises 200 euro to young people that is not able to pay rent and he has got their votes this way, that is how he won the last election. The previous to the last one was won by a bomb placed in Madrid’s underground three days before the general elections.

Zapatero has always denied that Spain was in bad shape of any kind, I have only heard him say that “Spain is good, we are safe”. Even with a 20% of unemployment he kept saying that things weren’t that bad… and this was the biggest rate of unemployment since Spain became democratic. But things change and last week there were some politicians in Europe saying that Spain, Italy and Portugal were also going to need rescuing very soon, in the same lines as Greece, if the euro union was meant to last and have a prosper life. All you could read in the Spanish press and people’s comments to the news was that the opposition was starting rumours about it, but they weren’t true. Even Zapatero himself said that the rumours were unfounded… a week later he is announcing a set of cuts to be able to pay part of the Spanish debt by July.

These cuts are controversial, because they are affecting civil servants salaries (cut by 5%), pensions (freezing them for next year), help to families with new born babies (2500 euro, one off payment), and the government salaries, slashed by 15%. Zapatero’s government promised retired people to leave their pensions untouched, but he didn’t deliver. He also created some useless ministries that he is keeping even in this difficult time.

People are shocked, civil servants want to go on strike, the pensioners don’t know what they are going to do but some of them are complaining that they won’t be able to live with these cuts. Some pensions are ridiculously low, how this works is difficult to understand in countries that do not have pensions paid by the government. I am shocked that Spanish people are in so much denial. Zapatero is a puppet and a useless President. I agree. But the population should be a bit more intelligent. They have been manipulated and used for the President’s needs, they have been kept in denial when all the world press were saying that Spain was in trouble all they heard were the soft words of their President. Now it is time to cut on salaries that the government is paying to save some money to pay the debt, not to affect the euro and with it all the other countries in the European Union… and they are shocked.

I am shocked that people with salaries of 1200 euro in Spain have bought flats and have mortgages that they cannot afford. I am shocked that after seeing what the government was doing in terms of economy there were people voting Zapatero in the last election, they were bought with the promise of an easy live instead of the promise of the opportunity to work to have a good life. Now they will protest because of the cuts, not because there is no job for 20% of the population and the ones that have one do not earn more than 1000 euro. Only because the people with jobs guaranteed for life are affected and angry. Sad story.

I think sometimes we have what we deserve. It is in days like today that I am ashamed of being Spanish.