It feels time for another long, rambling, and self-indulgent reflection on Spanish life and culture.
It certainly feels as if there are aspects to Spanish culture (and likely this is true for other cultures as well, including the USA) that one can only notice and begin to appreciate by living in that culture for an extended period of time. For example, I wrote in an earlier post about line waiting behavior; we’ve also alluded to the jamón (ham) culture here as well. I had an experience earlier this week that seemed to illuminate another aspect of Spanish culture, as I’ll describe below.
To begin, I first need to note that I’ve taken up a new sport. It is called padel (sounds just like “paddle”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padel_tennis For people who play racket sports, here is an easy way to understand what padel is. The rules are very similar to squash; you play with tennis balls on an outdoor court that is kind of like a miniature tennis court; you use a racket that is the same size as a racquetball racket but is made of solid hard foam. As a racket sports player, I find padel to be very easy to pick up and very fun. Not the least of which, hitting the ball with the padel racket produces a really satisfying “pop” sound, sort of like when you hit a really hard and good shot in tennis. Our urbanizacion has a padel pista or court (this is not unusual), and the deportivo (sports complex) nearby (about a 10 minute walk) has many. I take lessons at the deportivo in the mornings twice a week – along with a group of extremely nice upper middle class Spanish stay-at-home moms. There are two very small classes that meet at the same time – a “Level I” class with 3 or 4 people and one instructor Jaime, and my “Level II” class with me, one other player, and our instructor Andres.
As further context, on Tuesday of this week, there was a Spanish national holiday – no school for the kids, all shops closed, etc. Because this holiday was on a Tuesday, the status of Monday was very ambiguous. For all Madrid public schools, classes were cancelled on Monday, giving everyone a 4-day weekend. But because our Jewish school has had so many class cancellations for holidays recently, our kids did have class on Monday. And shops were by and large open on Monday.
My padel class meets every Monday morning. So come this past Monday, after dropping off the kids at school, I went over to the deportivo for my class. But no one was there when I arrived. I began to think that, due to the ambiguous holiday-ish nature of Monday, perhaps we didn’t have class. (In general, there is no system in place for determining when class is held and when it is not held here. If it has rained a bit and/or the courts are wet, there is no way that I can find out whether class is being held or not, other than showing up at the court.)
But in a few minutes, a friend from the Level I class showed up, as well as Jaime, the instructor for the Level I class. The friend and Jaime then started to have a long conversation about whether or not class was cancelled. In this conversation, it came out that the status of the class was very uncertain. Jaime, even though he was the instructor of the class, did not know if class were being held that day. Eventually, Jaime went into the deportivo main building and found Andres (the other padel instructor) there, but Andres did not think that we had class so he didn’t come to the court. But he also was not sure about the official status of Monday’s class. In the end, my friend, Jaime, and I hit the ball around for most of the hour.
Now note that the national holiday was not a surprise to anyone. As of many months ago, it was clear that the holiday was going to occur on a Tuesday and that schools were going to be cancelled on Monday. I would have expected there to be some advance notice – to coaches and to class enrollees – that class would not be held on Monday, if this were indeed the case. But the status of class on Monday was (and, to my knowledge, still is) uncertain. When I told my friend in the Level I class that it seemed a bit odd that no one (even the instructors) seemed to know anything about the status of class, she shrugged and said, “Es España” – this is Spain.
In the end this situation was no big deal – I got to play a bit of padel on Monday. But the wheels in my brain are trying to make sense of how this situation can occur in this country. How is it that no one knows (or is bothered by the fact that they don’t know) about the status of the padel class on Monday? Here is my analysis.
I get the sense that everyone (e.g., the instructors, the managers at the deportivo, etc.) assumed that someone else would be making the decision about the status of classes on Monday. Of course no one knew who would be making the decision, when the decision was/would be made, or what the decision was. Thus individuals were very reluctant to take action based on their guess of what the decision was, perhaps for fear of being wrong.
I can’t decide whether this attitude should be characterized as “certainty” or “uncertainty” – perhaps it exists somewhere in between the two. Everyone was completely uncertain about the decision re: padel class on Monday. But they were unfazed – very certain of their uncertainty – and thus in no need to address this uncertainty.
I feel that this interpretation helps me understand some of our experiences at the Spanish consulate in Boston and the Spanish immigration office here in Madrid when getting our visa paperwork. In Boston, there was this tax that someone mentioned we might have to pay when getting our visas. However, (a) no one seemed to know whether or not we’d have to pay the tax, (b) no one seemed to know how much the tax would be, and (c) no one knew how they or we might find out more information about (a) or (b). Similarly, here in Madrid, one week before we went to pick up our residency cards, there was the same issue. A tax had to be paid before we picked up our cards. But no one knew how much the tax would be, and no one knew how this issue could be figured out. They just said to come back in a week or so. (And we did, and the issue was somehow resolved.) From Heather’s cousin Mary, we hear similar stories about her experiences with the Spanish bureaucracy.
I’m not sure exactly how to characterize this state of affairs. Comfort with bureaucratic indecision, combined with a reluctance to deviate from the perceived chain of command? Resigned acceptance of one’s place (or lack thereof) in arbitrary decision-making processes? Somehow Spaniards seem to have this comfort/acceptance in all aspects of dealing with bureaucracies – governmental and otherwise.
It is difficult, however, for my USA DNA. I have come to expect that (a) an ultimate decision maker exists – that someone somewhere knows or determines the answer to these types of bureaucratic questions, (b) it is possible for someone at a lower level of the bureaucracy to figure out who this ultimate decision maker is, and (c) there is a known time or time range when the decision maker will or has made the decision. I have found that none of these three US-centric expectations exist in most bureaucratic decisions here in Spain, and that most Spaniards don’t seem to mind.
I’m sure that there is a dissertation somewhere that has studied this, but how did I develop the attitude that I have about bureaucracies, and how did Spaniards develop their attitudes? From the Spanish side, does the fact that Spain was a dictatorship for so long factor into the development of these attitudes? I’ve heard of similar attitudes in Italy, but not from Germany, for example – does this support the dictator theory? Spanish friends or those who have experienced similar phenomena in other countries, I would be interested in your thoughts.
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