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Bureaucracy

Yo soy británica (and other form filling challenges)

In case you were bored with red pandas, here are some sociable lemurs. ‘Lémur’ en Español.

Children are playing in the park outside my window. There’s something comforting about the sounds they make. A mixture and squeals and delights. They chase each other in circles around a pole that holds up the slide, wave their arms like windmills and skip or run where an adult would walk. Their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and occasional male relative sit on park benches, leaning forward, elbow to knee, in deep conversation. The swings swing alone in pendulum motion.

Javier Marías, I believe, has such a window in Madrid, one that looks out on the world with a birds-eye view. I look out upon a giant rubber tree.

En España usted dice <planta de caucho>.

I know this because I own a small rubber plant back home, and it’s one of the many things I gave a masking-tape label to when I began learning Spanish in July.

Yes, July.

Julio

And the very end of July to boot. Which I don’t think is a particularly long time to be learning a language before you end up in the justice office trying to get a criminal background check. In case you were wondering, the right thing to do is pick up a form from the desk and a ticket from the machine, fill in the form and wait for your number to be called. Then you take your documents to the person everyone else is pointing at in a desperate plea for you to get a move on, since they haven’t got all day and and didn’t intend playing this game of sardines. The room smelled of deodorant. The scowling look I received, as I feebly handed over my passport and semi-completed form, I’m going to put down as the justice chap’s problem not mine.

Today I learned the word ‘británica’. Which, in case you didn’t realize it means British. I needed this word for the form I filled in at the library as well as the form in the justice office. ‘Reino Unido’ is United Kingdom. I needed that one when I got my Spanish mobile phone number because it was a drop-down box on a computer screen. Luck was on my side in both the library and the phone shop.

The librarian gave me a tour of the library and helped translate the form I needed for a card, then she advised me on housing. When I returned from the bookshelves a little while later, her colleague was incredibly patient as I failed to spell my surname with the Spanish alphabet.

El alfabeto.

The lady in the phone shop didn’t speak a word of English, but she spent an hour going through exactly what she was doing in simple Spanish and using a translation app. Then she called the service supplier to activate the card, put a limit on the amount of money I could spend so that I wouldn’t go over, switched off the answerphone and told me that if I needed any further help whatsoever with my phone, to come right back to her. The best part of this was her wonderful pronunciation of my surname to the person at the other end of the phone line. If you know any Spanish pronunciation, just try it.

(o is like u oh, u is like oo, i is like ee and e is like eh)

O-ug-tib-rid-ge

Anyway. Today has been a great success. Not only do I have the certificate to say that I haven’t been a criminal, I have a bus pass (bought from a tiny shop in a corner of a square that’s nowhere near anything else) and a Spanish keyboard. I can now write mañana and ádd ás mány áccénts ás Í líké without hassle. This makes me very happy, albeit exhausted.