El Holandés de la Casa

Just a note on politicians. Today, the municipal elections are being held. The mayor of Madrigal de la Vera told me last week that he had seen me on the census... I have the right to vote. Immediately after, he told me they were going to repeat the course I gave last year (implying a well payed job for me). That's a politician!

Real life experience on the Spanish highways, through-ways, byways, and other roads. You'll always get lost! No kidding, this is the way Spanish roads have evolved... organically. Every single time I'm going someplace new, I get lost. I was ever so happy when Nieves gave me the GPS. However, you can't rely on it for everything. In Madrid it gets confused by reflecting signals from high buildings. There are roads that are not mapped, etc. I've been talking with some Spanish people I know and they also tell me they get lost ever so often. The problem are the traffic signs. There are non-existing signs . Those are real sweeties. Imagine coming to a roundabout and there is no sign whatsoever...  There are late signs . You are traveling  at 90Kmh (or more) and you see your exit as you fly past. Single occurrence signs . No comment. There are small signs . Very much related to the late signs, and of course with the single occurrence sign. WTF signs . You are travel...

We have changed our dry cleaner for a number of reasons. Our former dry cleaner is a very nice man, so it took us some heart to change. Here's the story. We try to have a clean business. As clean as can be. That includes the bedding and towels that go strait to the dry cleaner. Every Monday it gets picked up and every Thursday it gets returned. No problem there. The sheets should all be folded the same way. That facilitates the bed making. But this was not the case, so we told him about it. 'That's because of the new girl' was the reply, but nothing changed. The sheets should be grouped for size. That should be obvious. It's highly annoying to try to make a double bed with single bed sheets. So, we told him. 'Ah, it's easy to tell them apart' was the reply, but nothing changed. So, when a friend of us started working for another dry cleaner, we gave him the business. And I called our former supplier. I just told him we were going to try the other...

Ours is the cleaning business. We established that when we first started. Everything should be clean as can be. My wife calls that 'mother in law clean'. That's clean! We do the studio apartments from left to right, from top to bottom. We dust, vacuum, wash, rinse and polish. In most hotels, cleaning is done in 20 minutes. We spend two solid hours in each apartment. We do the stairs, the dining rooms and the toilets. The restaurant kitchen is cleaned daily. We got a very good review last week and one of the things they found was the cleanness. That's exactly what we want to offer to our clients.