Relief

It’s been more than a week since we had elections in Galicia. Well, Fraga and his thugs must say goodbye to the power seat since they have been voted out by the people. As El Pais said, the left will govern Galicia for the first time after 24 years of autonomy.

It is hard to explain the relief that I feel. I am not a political person, I mean, I have never worried too much about politics, although I have very clear ideas. I’ve never believed that changing the party in the power affects the average citizen’s life that much, even in Europe, where the differences between parties are huge when compared to the ridiculously close liberal and labour parties of anglosaxon countries. But this time I feel something different. The remnants from the Franco era, as Arturo Ruibal would put it, are leaving us, and I can only feel relief.

Elections in Galicia

Today, 19 of June, we have elections in Galicia. The party in the power, PP, together with its galician leader, Manuel Fraga, has been shamelessly ruining the country for sixteen years. Many people like me are puzzled on why we galicians have voted them to power again and again in the past. Well, one can wonder the same regarding Howard in Australia…

Today, for the first time, PP’s victory is not clear at all. They might win again, or they might lose. Some polls point to a clear drop in their popularity, but you never know.

I will follow the preliminary results of the elections and will let you know. I pray to Mother Earth and all the celtic gods that galicians have learned something in the last sixteen years and are voting for a change today.

Slow

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had bought Slow by Carl Honoré. I finished reading it yesterday.

I think it is a nice book. The best (and unexpected) thing is that the author explains everything as a personal experience, i.e. he has personally gone through each of the aspects of slowing down his life: slow driving, food, reading, sex, health…

The only significant weakness I can think of in the book is that, in the introductory sections, the author associated the slow movement with some traits that I don’t particularly agree with, such as the following: acoording to the author, Fast is controlling, analytical, superficial and quantity over quality, whereas Slow is careful, intuitive and quality over quantity. I disagree. One can be Slow and still be controlling, analytical and superficial. And one can be Fast and keep being careful and intuitive. And regarding quality and quantity, I don’t see why either of them has to be intrinsically “better” than the other, or why Slow must prefer quality while Fast tends to prefer quantity. I think the author has gone too far in making a well-defined (but poorly defendable) split between behavioural characteristics.

However, the book was enjoyable and, although not a revealing and mesmerizing source of insight, still an interesting read.

Going back to Galicia: Why: The unlivable city

And yet another rant on going back to Galicia.

Before coming to Australia I read that the three best cities in the world are Sydney, Vancouver and Vienna. I am not sure what “best” means in this context, but one would imagine something like cities with the best quality of living. Well, I’ve never been to Vienna, but I visited Vancouver last year for a few days and, although I didn’t dislike it at all, it didn’t strike any particular chord with me. And after three years in Sydney, I can honestly say that Sydney is simply unlivable for me. And don’t get me wrong: I stress the for me part.

In my experience, people tend to think of Sydney as a beautiful place, and this is the first myth than fell during the last three years. Yes, the geographic location of the harbour is beautiful. But I come from Galicia, country of the thousand harbours (if you want), and Sydney’s is nothing special compared with any of the Galician “rias“. Of course, Sydney is a very well known city (we could talk of city branding here) while Galicia is not, so the Galician “rias” will be unknown to most people in the world. This does not mean that Sydney is superior.

Going back to Galicia: Why not: Jobs

This is a new chapter on my reflection about the pros and the cons of going back to Galicia.

A good reason not to is jobs. Unemployment in Galicia (and perhaps all across Europe) is still significantly higher than in Australia, even for skilled labour. Even with the bad moments that IT is supposedly living here, finding a job as an IT professional is still much easier if you are in Sydney. The fact that Sydney is a large city (rather than a collection of mid-sized towns like Galicia) also helps.

Universities here advertise their vacancies. You can submit an application, hope to be called for an interview and, if you are good enough, be offered a position. The whole process can take a few weeks. This is unthinkable of in Galicia. There, universities rarely hire researchers other than as lecturers, which involves defending your research proposal against competitors and before a panel which is often strongly biased. Yuk.

Government agencies here work in a similar way: they advertise, select, interview and offer. In Galicia this is even crazier than with unis: you need to sit a series of highly competitive exams, usually with candidate/vacancy ratios higher than 20, which are prepared by some people for years, and all your merits are assessed based on your answers to the exam questions. No interview, no chance to negotiate. Yuk yuk.

It’s sad wanting to go back to a place like this.

Send post by email

I have just added a new feature to this blog. In case you don’t know, this blog has been fully implemented by me using Microsoft .NET, so I have full control over its functionality.

Since yesterday, the toolbar that appears at the bottom of each post shows a new link, “Send”, that allows you to send an email to somebody letting them know about a post. So, if you read a post here and you want to let somebody know about it, click “Send”, enter the name and email details, and off it goes.

I hope you like this. Feedback is most welcome. Thanks!

Should catholics be allowed to marry and adopt children?

Today someone suggested to me that catholics should be allowed to get married. She argued that preventing them from getting married would be unfair, because catholicism is not a disease, although sometimes we might think that catholics are a bit weird and perhaps we don’t like them very much. But, the truth is, catholics are normal people, like computer nerds or homosexuals.

My friend reasoned that some traits of the behaviour of catholics, such as their attitude towards sex, may look strange to the rest of us. Sometimes, even health issues could be raised, due to, for example, their systematic rejection to the use of condoms. Some of their habits, such as the public exhibition of tortured persons, can sometimes disturb some sensitive people. All these facts, however, are more an image made up by the media than a real thing, and are not enough to forbid them from getting married.

Some people could argue that a marriage between catholics is not a real marriage, since for them it is only a rite before their god rather than a union between two persons. In addition, and given that children outside marriage are strongly forbidden by the catholic church, one could be led to think that by allowing catholics to get married, we are incrementing the number of marriages celebrated just to obtain an “appropriate” appearance between other catholics or simply to obtain sex, also forbiden by catholics outside marriage. This, in turn, could surely increment domestic violence or destructured families. But we must remember that these problems not only happen in catholic families, and since we cannot know what is in other people’s minds, we should not try to judge their motivations to get married.

Going back to Galicia: Why not: University life

I originally came to Sydney to work as a researcher for a technical university. I am happy I made that decision because I have learned a lot and enjoyed a unique experience.

In particular, the kind of research I have been doing for the last three years would have been nearly impossible in Galicia. Here, the quality of research (as well as education) in universities is way above what we have over there. Although I don’t think that universities here really embrace research, what they do is done much better. Sometimes, when I check the website of my former university in Spain, or any other universities and research centres there, I feel some sort of sadness that is hard to explain. Two details are illustrative: first, many of the Spanish universities seem to pay more attention to the chancellor’s welcome than to making the website usable; secondly, whereas a “positions vacant” link is very often accesible from any Australian university home page, it is completely non-existing in most of the Spanish ones. What do these two little things suggest?

In addition, I happen to work for an excellent team and have a great boss, which is extremely uncommon and extremely rewarding. I will lose this when I go back to Galicia, which I regret.

Going back to Galicia: Why: Housing standards

One of the reasons that helped me decide to go back to Galicia is the quality of housing, especially when related to the price of it.

It is my observation that, in Galicia (as in many other places in Europe, as far as I know), rich people live in luxurious houses, middle-class people live in regular houses, and poor people live in poor houses. This might not be socially fair but it make sense from the point of view of one’s expectations. But in Sydney, middle-class people live in poor houses, and rich people live in average houses. For example: Isabel and I are both highly skilled and have both full-time jobs with above-average salaries. I would expect that, given this, we would be able to afford housing in Sydney of a decent quality. Don’t get me wrong: we didn’t have a luxurious house in Santiago, just an average one. Our neighbours were plumbers, housewives, secretaries and university teachers, a bit of everything. But the units are appropriately insulated, have central heating, car space, storage room, etc.

Going back to Galicia

As many of you know, I come from Galicia, a quite peculiar autonomous community in north-west Spain. I have spent most of my life there, in Santiago, a 100,000-people town with a large university and an a World Heritage listed city centre.

In mid 2001 I got an invitation from a very well known researcher in my area to join him at a technical university in Sydney, which, after some thinking, I accepted. At that time I was running my own company in Santiago, I had my home, my car and, in general, my life going on quite smoothly. So this offer to move to Sydney was unexpected and surprising. Isabel jumped on to the adventure so we decided to leave Santiago and move to Sydney. Our plan was to stay for two years and then re-think the situation and decide whether to stay longer or to go back.