Life in La Unión

My finances are a little stretched at the moment. Two months without pay over the summer and then a month with very few paid hours in September has left a delicate balance between outgoings and income. Provided my October pay gets to the bank before the 6th there won't be any problem but there's the rub. Transfer money from an account in Spain to another and your money disappears for a few days. It goes from the sending bank immediately but it can take four or five days to show up in the other account. I don't often go to a bank but, when I do it's always a pain. The queues are interminable. Every transaction seems to take an age. There are notices on the desk to say that they will only accept recibos, which so far as I know means receipts or bills, between 8.30 and 10.30 and that always makes me worry that they will send me away. I can't complain about the charges from my current bank. Basically there aren't any but, in order to maintain free banking, I h...

I needed to get myself an Internet connection. Now Spain isn't exactly the third world. On the telly the big phone operators like ONO and Jazztel are offering fibre connections of up to 100Mb. La Union is small but it is a town, or at least a large village, not some rural hamlet, so I didn't expect any problem in getting a decent deal on a connection. I thought there may even be fibre. Using a combination of my mobile phone and borrowed internet connections I had a look around the suppliers. ONO looked good but when it came down to it they have neither fibre nor ADSL to my new building. The Jazztel website seemed determined to cause me grief - it has those pages that lose all the details if you want to change something and annoying popups with offers to get someone to phone you. They didn't have coverage either. One of my work colleagues suggested a small local operator but it was the same story for La Union. They suggested another local firm who bragged of offerin...