As Colin over at his blog 'Thoughts from Galicia' will tell you, our friends the Spanish sometimes fail to tune in to what is happening around them, which explains their approach to roundabouts, queuing and indeed smoking.
And, I suppose, feeling any embarrassment.
I was in the pharmacy for what was probably just a few minutes, locked in a queue behind some customers, one of whom was loudly telling the rest of us about her aches and ailments. The one at the head of the queue was taking a long time and, I confess, I lost patience, gave up and left.
There’s another chemist just around the corner and, well, nobody was there. I got my packet of aspirins from them and felt that some progress had been made after all.
The printers, the main reason I had come all the way downtown, was closed. It apparently shuts on Saturdays. Bloody thing – I needed to get some photocopies made.
But, come to think of it, back near the house, there’s an estanco, a cigarette shop – and they have a printer which would do the trick (kind of, I would need to aim a little lower and just print up a few photos).
Another queue, this time outside as I stood behind a couple of elderly ladies – one of them without much of a voice: more of a shrill pant than anything else.
Makes me glad I gave up the gaspers a long while back.
We finally boiled into the shop, the two old girls and me. There, things suddenly slowed down as the inarticulate lady wanted some smokes, but wasn’t sure which ones she was after.
‘Marlboro… Nobel… Ducados…?’ asked the stringy-looking attendant.
‘No’, she managed, ‘the pic-picture’.
‘Let’s see. I’ve got a fellow with his throat out; a rotting leg; no teeth and a dead baby’ said the shop-keeper checking through her stock of fags, ‘oh and one here of a collapsed eye’.
The two customers conferred as I wondered which one they’d choose.
‘The gentleman with his throat out’, they decided, passing across a 20€ bill.
No comments:
Post a Comment