Spanish Bureaucracy.

Apart from being a really good title for a Guns'N'Roses B-sides album, Spanish bureaucracy is a really odd phenomenon. Let me explain. Just take a moment to consider your own idea of a typical Spaniard. Whether this is from the stereotype (in which case, try not to fixate on the sombrero) or your own experience of meeting Spanish people, you'll probably agree that they're tanned, relaxed, friendly, and enjoy cold beers, tapas, and long evenings. This is, I can report, true (bar the sombreros). Shop assistants and strangers in bars have forgiven my cack-handed grasp of their language, and smiled all the way through friendly half-conversations that would never even have begun in England. The attitude is relaxed. Even when our landlord managed to lock us in the enclosed back yard of our flat, and had to climb through a window to let us back in because the door-handle was broken, he shrugged it off with a broad grin: why worry, these things happen.

This is why it's so baffling that trying to do anything remotely official in Spain is so bloody difficult. In my life I've never had to sign triple-copies of as many forms as I did when I arrived. I always thought that things being signed and approved in triplicate was just a joke that Douglas Adams made about the farcically officious Vogons in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide books. Maybe Vogón is an Andalucian village where he tried to apply for rental car insurance.

Confusingly, though, it seems to be possible to bypass this endless red tape through having "friends in high places" (there's a specific noun in Spanish for this, but my mind's all tied up learning the past tenses at the moment). An example: setting up bank accounts. Before I arrived, I naively expected I'd just need a fixed address, a little revision of the "money" section of my phrasebook, and maybe a work reference. The proper process, however, apparently entails an hour of queueing to present passports, work contracts and photos, in order to obtain some sort of tax number and an appointment to finalise things, in February. Fortunately, one of our incredibly helpful and wonderful managers at the language school had a friend at the bank who was willing to set up some accounts for us through some back-door route.

It may just be me, but I find this whole idea hilarious. Surely the stringent rules of a tightly-run bureaucracy are pointless if you can skip past them by knowing someone who knows someone, and all that. It's a bit like a king ordering his army to build a huge, impregnable castle, then letting his generals have their friends over, as long as he signs them in and tells them not to touch the gunpowder. Well, a little bit like that. Sort of.

As I've said, the manner of most Spanish people I've met is totally at odds with this anal, exacting attitude. I like to imagine a cabal of senior government bureaucrats, desperately trying to put a regimented, pedantic system into place, only to be constantly foiled by the fact that everybody hates and ignores them.