To talk to you about life in Spain right now

[Changednamesorry]

In case UK follows many other countries and tightens the rules, I made a post about what it's like here in Spain.

A few things worth buying. Vitamin D for kids in case you are not allowed to take them out from next week, especially if you have no outside space. Craft materials (these are now very scarce here as supermarkets have had to close that section if they had it to discourage browsing). Disney Plus for movie nights. Microwave popcorn!

I live in Spain. We have an apartment in the city centre and no outside space at all. I am separated from my son's father but we chose for him to move in just before the lockdown as we saw it coming in the news and wanted to ensure the kids were not separated from him for months on end. We get on very well, I appreciate this is not an option for everyone. We also have a flatmate who is a lovely 27 year old Portuguese guy. So we are 3 adults and 2 kids in 115 square metres of space..... And that's better than some of our friends who live in 60 or 70 square metre apartments. Spanish children have not been outside for 3 weeks. My sons are 9 and 3 and normally active boys doing lots of sports and we are normally out of the house every day between 8am and 8:30pm. That has all changed. Schools are fully closed and have been since 13th March, no exceptions.

1. How are people coping with kids?

Varying levels of coping, of course. Here with the little one I bake, do drawing, dance, play football inside etc. For the older one I made little bags. One has basketball drills (his favorite sport) which he does 2 a day. One has exercise sets (I will post an example), one has different amounts of screen time and one has activities linked to school (maths, history, Spanish, English, science projects, baking etc). He chooses 3 of those.

1. Grocery shopping.

My ex goes to the shops once every 6 days. That's it. You are asked to carry a paper justifying your journey. You can not go to whatever shop you choose. You must go to the closest one to home. If you are caught turning this into a walk you will be stopped and fined between 600 and 30000 euros. If the police decide you are covering up a walk with a "shopping trip".... Fined. Someone I know was fined 200 euros for only buying a can of coke and a chocolate. We have not seen scenes of panic buying or bulk buying here, possibly because in cities most do not have a car so you take a granny trolley and a couple of bags for life so no space for millones of toilet paper etc. This may be different in rural areas but there haven't been many reports of it (I haven't seen any, in fact). People wear a mask and gloves and supermarkets make you queue outside 2 meters apart and don't let many people in at a time. Most supermarkets also provide gloves and require you to wear them.

1. What can you leave the house for?

Essential food shopping, pharmacy, medical appointments, essential workers, walk your dog (but only so he can go to the toilet... No big long walks) Only allowed to leave the house individually unless you are accompanying someone who is unable to go alone.

4.Can you use your garden or roof terrace?
If it is for private use, yes. If it is for communal use (shared garden or roof terrace with other flats), no. You'll get fined as if you were outside.

1. Clapping?

Yes. Every night for keyworkers at 8pm. Most people join in. Slight difference with UK is its unusual for kids to be in bed before 9pm here. Occasionally will be extra one for kids at 6pm.

1. Doctors appointments

All non urgent appointments canceled. Telephone appointments with emailed prescriptions available and I had one within an hour of asking.

Please stay safe. It's difficult, but it's not forever and it will be less time the more people abide by the rules. Feel free to ask any questions and I will try to answer. It's tough, but we are coping. So will you if the UK tightens the rules for a while.

It depends on where you live though. In unpopulated areas you could do that quite easily without significantly increasing the risk of infection.

But by doing that someone says, well Bill in the outer Hebrides is doing this, just because I live in a London suburb why should I do anything different?

For those of you in Spain and Italy. What is the exit strategy? How and when (at what point) will they loosen lockdown?

There is one 75 year old in my block of flats who may remember Franco, 50 other young families and middle aged like me in the block (49) probably don't remember a facist regime (hmm)

Good to read. Interesting. A few things jump out at me
1 we already can't get craft materials!
2 clapping at 8pm is indeed annoying when you have just got the little ones to bed
3 everyone seems preoccupied with keeping kids entertained. I think we need to worry more about single people, elderly people and NHS workers. To me that seems far more stressful. In these days of the internet, it is so easy to keep kids occupied reallly.

Wehttam sorry my response was to MN threads that I have seen the knee jerk reaction (and the love of drama for some) not directly to your post I should have thought more carefully about it first

Yes it’s still new and there is a concern for what happens when people run out of money, I am not sure if there is better provisions in Italy against this I am aware there is more poverty particularly in some areas of the south

@Iwantacookie it happened very fast. 2 days from school shut down to full lockdown and it happened over the weekend. Also, for reference, we had approx 6500 cases the day schools closed.
Things like returning a library book wouldn't even enter people's heads here atm. I don't mean that as a dig, just that it is so far away from reality here that it's amazing to me to read it as something anyone would be thinking about atm.

@Poetryinaction

* everyone seems preoccupied with keeping kids entertained. I think we need to worry more about single people, elderly people and NHS workers. To me that seems far more stressful. In these days of the internet, it is so easy to keep kids occupied reallly.*

I am baffled by this.
Parents are rightfully preoccupied with how to keep their children stimulated and engaged given this isn’t a holiday (well, now it is but not before and won’t be in a week or so) and their brains would be firing up and absorbing new skills and information on a daily basis if they were at school.

Am I concerned about stress levels of NHS workers? Of course

Am I concerned about stress levels of single people? Not really. In a general sense of the mental health of society generally being impacted yes, but specifically single people? No

The elderly, again concerned about their particular vulnerability to this illness and possible loneliness

However my key concerns as a single parent with no family.... revolve around my children.

I can’t take on single people etc aswell!

@Changednamesorry

No reflective of many, I can tell you that! I can’t imagine anyone I know giving a same about returning a library book before full lockdown!

“ people are terrified of dying”

Insanity. Do they think they’re immortal?

No that's fine that's exactly what I was trying to get at we saw what was happening in other countries so wanted to get irrelevant things sorted. I used the library book as that was my example.
It's almost surreal to think us Brits had time to sort that kind of irrelevant stuff out.
Thank you for doing this thread. Very informative.

I'm glad you're allowed out to 'toilet' your dog. Ours just won't go in the garden, he's not been trained that way, he just won't do it. Take him 20 steps away from the house and he'll go.

There is a nature reserve type area near us. The entrance gate has has been closed to prevent access to the car park. Yet people are still driving there and parking dangerously now on the main road. Morons.

But by doing that someone says, well Bill in the outer Hebrides is doing this, just because I live in a London suburb why should I do anything different?

People in London suburbs wouldn't know what Bill in the Outer Hebrides is doing if it wasn't for the fact that the media insists on putting it out. The fact is some people are in a position to have a lot more freedom than others without increasing their risk of catching the virus if they live in a very unpopulated area or have a huge garden.

putting pointing

@LilacTree1 I mean, they probably DON'T think they're immortal if they're worried about dying....

It's also worth noting that cities are way more residential here so it may be easier to police than the UK where there are so many people in houses. Here blocks of flats people tend to know their neighbors and check in via whatsapp ir phone, eg the old lady living ob our floor one neighbor shops for her, she leaves her trash in the hall and we take it out for her, we call her bow sbd again to check if she needs anything sbd so on.

Thanks for the insight OP. I think Spain is one of the greatest countries in the world and we are so lucky that we can travel there for holidays or even to live there. It is a tragedy to read the stories in the Spanish newspapers on line and also the reports of so many deaths.

I think there may be a number of reasons why the Spanish and Italian people are more compliant.

Of course there are the large number of deaths which creates anxiety and fear. Also so many people in both countries are used to the lifestyle of communal living in apartment blocks rather than individual houses though of course they exist. As you say, the police in these countries are more authoritarian and are licensed to be more,,err,,,,assertive. As someone else also mentioned, there is the legacy of living under past dictatorships. Best wishes and i hope things return to some semblance of normality soon..

I'm also in Spain, about 20 minutes outside a big city in Andalucía. I have heard virtually no reports of people behaving badly and very few examples of curfew breaking. The ones I have read about have been fined anywhere up from 1.500€.

I'm also self-employed and have had virtually no work since this started. There may be some help with social security payments in Andalucía, but so far the help isn't much use to self-employed people so I'm just being careful and hoping for the best really.

The clapping happens every night and is usually preceeded by the Spanish version of I will survive on loud speakers (at least in my street) and now we're in Holy Week, which is HUGE in my city, followed by a bit of the brass band music that accompanies the processions.

There's no feeling that you have to participate, but it's nice to feel part of something bigger and see other people in their windows for a few minutes when you basically can't go out.

I think it is such a shame that people aren't abiding by the lockdown in the UK, it's the worst thing to not be able to go out for a walk. I can't believe people can't even stick to that. I'd give my right arm to be allowed to walk a bit in the countryside right now.

My kids haven't left the house since 14th March. And they won't be going out until the end of April and probably not then either as I expect the lockdown will be extended again.
Library books weren't something that worried me particularly, but our local library has just extended everyone's loan until the summer, so there's no need to worry about that.

I think it is such a shame that people aren't abiding by the lockdown in the UK

The vast majority are.

Very interesting!

In our village the social services (a department of the local council) has been organising shopping and getting medicatons for the elderly and vulnerable.
Our streets have also been disinfected.
The city I live near and surrounding towns have organised a system where children who have their birthdays during quarantine can contact the local police and they come round with the sirens on, or playing happy birthday on loud speakers and wish the children happy birthday from a distance.

Tanith I didn’t think for one moment that you disbelieved me, I posted it because for me in Spain it was genuinely uplifting to see that and I thought you and others might find it interesting. No other agenda I promise. 💕

Indeed, a real positive I have seen out here and what has made the whole thing far more bearable is how people have come together and applied their ingenuity. Where we are for the first time we have fresh vegetables and fruit, milk and bread on the resort, and an internet butcher delivers once a week. The tractors on our resort were driven by local farmers on behalf of the Council, and our local maintenance staff have covered other areas. I am massively grateful to them all, all local heroes.

A positive view of this is obviously this bugger can be killed!

People can either quetsch and be negative and miserable ( and I fully accept there are plenty of reasons to be miserable, you are being spared the full details of the illness massively), or get thinking about what they can do to be helpful. Literally anybody can do something to get us towards the other side of this thing, and we need to get through it. We WILL get through it.

Spain is not the U.K.
Spain has a more militaristic police who are used to stopping folks. On my last holiday 8 was stopped by police randomly while driving looking for drink drivers, this has never happened to me in 22 years in the U.K.

To pp asking about DA rates, there has been no increase in DA in the since lockdown.

Burglary and robbery are down.

Indeed, a real positive I have seen out here and what has made the whole thing far more bearable is how people have come together and applied their ingenuity. absolutely. The local farmers provided their tractors here for spraying the streets and the national broadcaster got together with 12 educational publishers to organise educational programmes. They produced 300 hours of programming in 4 days. There's a subject (maths/language/science) every day, an hour for each primary age group. All schools have been completely shut since 14 March.

I have, on the whole, felt massive pride of my adopted home. (20 years here).

To pp asking about DA rates, there has been no increase in DA in the since lockdown

That’s interesting. Domestic abuse reports have increased by 36% since lockdown in France.

The principal reason most people are complying in Spain - including expats of various nations - is that things have been so awful that everyone apart from the terminally stupid accepts that - just for now - this is how things need to be, so we can begin to return to normal.

People do need shocking into “ getting it” I’m afraid. It seems life needs to get nasty so some people start doing the right thing and we can start getting back to normal.

These are not normal times.