Town Mouse and City Mouse

Where do you live? I happen to live in a town. Well, according to the natives here, we live in a city. They’ll tell you proudly that it says so in their coat of arms: "…Very Heroic City… ". But what really makes a town a town and a city a city? According to Spanish people, a city is a place that holds more than 30,000 people. But to me, a city is a place where you can go for a walk without finding anybody you know and feel obliged to say hi or find out people have been talking behind your back. It’s a place where there are more than two buses, one yellow and the other red, which pretty much have the same route. And more importantly, it’s a place where there is more than one water pipe going into it. Last month the whole town had no water for three days, yes three. Imagine no flushing, or bathing or anything else. The supermarkets were making a fortune selling bottled water and those that weren’t, had none in their shelves. So shouldn’t having more than one water pipe be an important factor considered for a definition of a city? As far as I am concerned I still live in a town.

TV or not TV, that is the question…

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. All of a sudden, all my appliances have conspired to start acting weird or simply stop working. Last week, the washer decided to open its door right in the middle of the cycle pouring all the clothes out onto the floor. The TV followed by deciding not to turn on. So we have been without television for several days now.  It's been sitting there in a virtual coma, but there has been no sign of life. And the question is do we spend our money on fixing it or splurge to get a new one? I hate the new flat panel TV sets that might look great in your living room, but have a limited viewing angle. Of course finding an old TV set like mine that works is out of the question. You see, in Spain, second hand stores are non-existent or really hard to find. Somehow this country doesn’t believe in second hand recycling. This society believes in buying new stuff every time something breaks or not. And that says a lot about a country which is in a big time crisis and has almost five million people unemployed.