The Spanish government will withdraw the expats’ right to vote.

I'm gonna copy here a text I read at Big in Finland and I found quite important to spread. I didn't write it but I agree with what it says.

Back in high school, my bearded history teacher asked the class which Spanish citizens are not permitted to vote. Kids as we were, we immediately thought of adults who didn’t possess their full mental faculties, or convicts serving time in prison for major crimes.
We were all wrong.

Our teacher explained to us that in Spain, every adult has the right to vote, and that this right could only be withdrawn from an individual via court order.

Until this year.

The two main Spanish parties — who currently hold 323 out of 350 votes in the parliament — recently agreed on something: that Spanish expats will no longer be able to vote in local, regional, nor general elections. One of the basic and most fundamental rights of every citizen, gone. Democracy just for some.

Let’s break it down into parts.

The problem

The “Historical Memory Law” was introduced to compensate the Republicans who fought in the Spanish Civil war and who suffered reprisals from the dictatorial Franco regime, as well as their families. You can check the details in the Wikipedia.

One of the things this law introduced was endowing the descendants of exiled Republicans with the right to apply for Spanish nationality — applications which would be automatically granted. In the coming years it is expected that there will about 300 000 new Spanish citizens, many of whom have never even set foot in Spain.

Besides, and also related to the Civil War exiled Spanish citizens, there was a problem in some little villages on the north of Spain. In these villages the Civil War exiled vote could actually decide a local election. In fact, there were reports of electoral rigging using the votes of already-deceased exiles (since the Spanish embassies never received any official notice of death for these people they were never removed from the census, and thus were still considered valid “voters” while in fact being scam votes).

So there are two problems: a problem that the law introduced and didn’t prevent, and this local problem.

How the government wants to solve these problems

Instead of solving the local problem locally in these mentioned villages, and instead of preventing the problem introduced by the Historic Memory Law by restricting the ability to vote of the new Spanish citizens (only granting the right if they moved to and spend time in Spain) they (the government and opposition) decided to withdraw the right to vote from 1.3 million Spanish expats.

Why is this so bad

What they are doing is turning a local problem into a national (and even international) problem. What they are doing is turning their lack of foresight into something as outrageous as removing a fundamental right from the citizens they are sworn to protect.

The right to vote was introduced gradually. First for rich people. Then, it was expanded to every man who knew how to read and write. Afterwards to women. Finally to every adult, even the illiterate. Some countries have restrictions like those mentioned at the top of this article, but not Spain.

The withdrawal of this core democratic right that expats will be stripped of three degrees.

Expat can no longer vote in local, regional, nor national elections for the Spanish parliament.

Local elections should be something that is regulated throughout the European Union. If we have free movement of workers within the Union, a European directive should be created to transfer in an effective way the right to vote from city to city no matter which country the European person is living on. Nothing like this should be unilaterally decided and set by a single Government of the Union.

Here I can understand why it makes sense to withdraw this kind of vote: if you don’t live in a city, town, or village, you wouldn’t be exposed to the consequences of your vote. Besides, it would be difficult to have an informed decision on who to vote, considering that expats would not be familiar with the parties’ agendas at the local level. Instead of removing the vote, it should be effectively transfered, though.

A similarity can be drawn here with regional elections, but it is definitely more complicated. Spain is divided into Autonomous Regions. This kind of organization is a trade-off between a centralized Spain and a decentralized one. The powers of each region are negotiated with the State.

People in Spain have strong feelings for their particular region. Each of them has its own culture, heritage, and many even have their own language. It is common for a Spanish person abroad to say they are Spanish, but from a certain region, and we are proud of it!

These regional governments, while negotiating with the state also perform international branding campaigns. This is something at the regional-level that all citizens should have the right to vote for.

The final, and most outrageous of all, is the removal of the right to vote in national general elections. Expats will no longer be able to decide which government represents them. The national government has a direct impact in the lives of the expats, as their actions will be the business cards of the Spanish people abroad. Their decisions can build or break relations with other countries. Their resolutions are every Spanish person’s business, not just the ones who live in Spain. Not everyone may know a Spaniard, but they will know for sure the polemic decisions of Spain’s government. If their actions influence the ideas foreigners have about Spanish people, and we don’t have the right to influence our own government, we’re doubly-defenseless to the opinions they have about us.

The Spanish government and the opposition are currently “studying” the final text, but it is already quite clear that both parties intend to vote yes on this amendment. Instead of solving the problems when they were still small or could have been easily prevented, they have created a much bigger and more dangerous problem. For the very first time Spanish politicians, and not a court, will withdraw the right to vote from their citizens — all 1.3 million of them.

What to do?

People who know me are aware that I am not much of a complainer. I prefer doing over talking; actions toward solutions and not whining.

So, for my first action, I would like to let my international friends know all about this. I want them to tell even more people. You can already find many Spanish expat bloggers writing about this in Spanish, but I feel we need the attention of the international community to act together with us. Everyone who believe that basic democratic rights should be preserved and never reduced.

Every (non-Spanish) person I mention this topic to have no idea that the Spanish government and opposition are doing this.
More people need to be made aware of this!

We must spread the word together, and then hopefully the European Union will tell Spain loud and clear: you shall not withdraw the right to vote from your citizens.

If you agree that the basic right of democracy should not be withdrawn from Spanish expat citizens, please help us. Copy this text in your blog. Link to it. Record it on audio and share it. File a complaint with the European Parliament (if someone reading this knows the specific procedure to do this, please share it in the comments). Write your opinion about this in your own blog. The Spanish people need your help. I am asking for your support.

You can also share your opinion in audio so your voice is heard. Click on the widget below to send it to us.

Send me your track

Also you can show your support by joining the Facebook group Support the Spanish Expats’ right to vote.

Thank you.

Time of changes

In the world history there's never been a time in which so many changes have been going on as it is right now. The acceptance towards change, the reflexive search of alternate futures is key to the survival of civilization and maybe human beings. Ours is the first generation that has been raised with the ideas of Sci-Fi.

Carl Sagan - "Broca's brain" (Page 104 in the Spanish edition)

Carl Sagan

We are in a really important time of our evolution as species, we need to adapt as well as possible to all the changes we have been living for a while now. The Sagan's quotation I've wrote before is from his book "Broca's brain", published for the first time in 1974. Already then he managed to notice all the changes coming to the human society. Today it's obvious. How the day of tomorrow's going to be depends solely in how we do things today.

In my humble opinion, we're fucked, although time to time we can see some hope. We've got lot to improve, and a lot to do.

The Sauna

Firewood Sauna

The sauna is between the most known habits from Finland, something that is taken really seriously by the inhabitants, so much that they even have a cultural asociation. Before I start telling you my stories, I give you the link to the Wikipedia article about the sauna, where you can find much more information than what I can tell you. Anyway, there's lots of people coming to the blog, searching for stuff about the sauna (mostly photos ¬¬) and I see Wikipedia has some restrictive rules about how to use a sauna, so I'm gonna give you my opinion and tell you about my experiences.

I'll start talking about the sauna in Finland, another time, in another post, I'll talk about the sauna in Spain. There's no building in Finland which has no sauna, usually there's one common sauna for everyone living in that building and you can reserve some time to use it by your own. There's also some days that you can use them without reserving it, with times separated for women and men. But there are some other buildings that have a sauna per apartment, anyway it's not that common since saunas take a lot of electricity. In both cases the use of the sauna is the same, it's a heater with stones on the top, where you throw water to get the steam. The only difference is the size of the radiator and the number of stones. There's usually a bucket and something similar to a big spoon to get the water out of the bucket into the stones. Also those typical wooden benches with different levels, if you want to "suffer" a bit more (the higher, the hotter).

You can see a good example with the buckets, the benches and all the stuff in the next photo:

The inside of a sauna

I do not have many photos of the inside of a sauna. Usually it is on and there's naked people inside, so it wouldn't be that polite to take photos, nor polite neither good for the camera! Actually, that photo is the only one I've got. And now that I mentioned it, about the nakedness in the sauna, Finnish people are really open minded about it, the sauna it's for purification of the body, it has nothing to do with sexuality. So it is common to share the sauna with your family, or closest friends and not to make different turns for both sexes. Although in case it is a mixed public sauna, you are obliged to have a towel or swimsuit. The other way around, no one is obliged to be naked, but it's not really well seen; you are going there to sweat, to clean yourself, so the clothes get in the way, and it gets really dirty. To have a swimsuit in the sauna, is one of those things tourists often do.

Other things about the sauna, well, normally there is another room to sit down and rest (also drink and change your clothes) and also some showers. If there's no shower that means that there's a lake close by. It is really important to have showers before going to the sauna, also after the sauna, and in the meantime! Every time you get a rest of the sauna, it is good (and nice) to have a quick shower (just water). If there's no shower, you've got the water from the buckets, so you can throw some over your head. If nothing is available, I bet you can throw yourself into the lake and swim for a little while. Also it is common to see people with soap, the Finns normally take a shower after the last time they got inside the sauna.

What about the time you must be inside the sauna? There's no more rules than never to stay longer than you want and feel okay. You've gotta guess how long you want to stay and how many times you want to go inside the sauna. That's completely personal. Be careful with braveness demonstrations, staying too long in the sauna may be dangerous, let the Finns show their sisu with their competitions.

There's few things left to tell, not all saunas are electric, there are many (usually far from civilization) that are wood powered. They are harder to use (you've gotta chop the wood) and it takes longer to warm up (start making the fire like half an hour to one hour before you want to use the sauna), but they have something special on them that makes them nice and worthwhile. For example, depending on the wood you use, the sauna will have different kind of smells. You can also fake the smell in electric saunas with a special liquid really common in Finland, they are supposed to be mixed with the water you'll use in the stones, and sometimes they come with a special stone with holes where you can pour the liquid too. A homemade trick is to use beer on the stone (not much, just a little), and it will smell something similar to toast bread, I loved that!

And to finish with this long post, I'm gonna tell you two Finnish habits related to sauna. First, easy and known, in the winter you can bath in a frozen lake (which previously had a hole made), or you throw yourself into the snow. I did it, it was okay, but nothing really great, it's more the fun of doing it with friends (by the way, don't stay longer than a minute in the water, usually a few seconds are more than enough, really, it could get bad). I still prefer to swim in a lake in the summer before the sauna. The second habit is less known, not done by tourists. It's about using some branches as a whip on yourself, it's a special kind of branch, don't remember the tree, but they say it is really good for the skin. I never tried, and I don't miss the idea of trying. You can see in the previous photo the branches in the bottom-right corner.

Well, it was long, but I had to explain before I could really complain explain my experiences related to saunas in Spain.

Finnish Flag Days Calendar

A long time ago I wrote (in Spanish) about the Finnish flag, its history, the days you've got to hang it up... And long after that I decided to move the info about the Finnish Flag days to a public Google-Calendar with information about every day and everything. So today I'm bringing that calendar here, in case you want to add it into your own calendar. All the information is written in English.

You can find the calendar clicking here. And if you want to add it to your calendars, you have to press in the bottom-right corner, where you see a '+' followed by "Google Calendar".

I've remembered about this calendar thanks to a post of BigInFinland (Spanish blog about Finland, one of the best in the web in Spanish). The post is about the Sami National Day. And I found out that Sami population raise their flag in this day, between others. So now I'm gonna add all the information about Sami Flag Days too, luckily not too many.

Sami Flag

Finnish Flag

ComicAgg and CBML

Now that I'm back in the blog, I'm gonna advertise myself a little bit. I'll start with CBML (short form for Can't Believe My Luck), a comic strip a friend of mine has been doing for some years already, and in which I've worked most of time as a translator. Although once I draw one and there are more to come.

So don't forget to pay a visit to http://cbml.es and leave some comments, you'll make us happy! :D

Second, I wanted to give you a really useful link to a great web application to follow web-comics. It's an app that a friend of mine did a while ago to follow comfortably his favourite web-comics, and everyone around him started using it too. It's grown quite a lot since then I think, although I don't have numbers on how many users or anything. But at least the number of web-comics has increased a lot and every few days there are more and more new comic pages added. I don't only tell you to use it because a friend did it, I recommend it because it is really useful if you have lots of web-comics you like and follow. I have around 40 or 60 new comics every day to read, I would have never been capable of following so many if I had to visit each website one by one. And by the way, one of the comics you can follow is CBML (English version included).

So you know, if you like web-comics, visit http://comicagg.com and create an account for you.

My blog ain't dead yet

It's been more than a year since I wrote in my blog, but if you're reading this, you mostly don't care, as I wrote in Spanish before. It's been a long year and many things have happened, I'm not here to sum them up, I've come to start over again.

For a long time I've been thinking what should I do with my blog, since I came back to Spain from my Erasmus year I haven't been feeling like writing much. Finally, I've put myself to write again, but I won't say how often will I do it, it'll be most probably irregular, but I prefer to write interesting stuff than just stupid things to fill the blog.

But mostly two reasons have pushed me to write again. First, I got an N900 from Nokia with Maemo in Maemo Barcelona-Long-Weekend and I've been testing an app to write in blogs (called MaStory, really cool). Actually, even though the phone is pretty expensive, I wouldn't doubt to buy it if I had none. It's plainly the best phone experience I've ever had, closer to a netbook than a phone actually. I haven't tested the NexusOne, but as far as I know, the N900 is the best out there.

Second reason, this blog was created to narrate my adventures around the world, and I'm travelling in less than a month. I'm gonna go to USA to visit a friend and I'll use the blog to tell stuff about the trip and upload photos. I'll tell more in the upcoming days.

Well, that's mostly what I wanted to say, I don't know how many people out there might be interested in having the blog in English, so please say some words if you want me to keep writing with both languages. Consider it will be a bigger effort for me, as I manually translate the posts, so if I don't see interest in the English version I'll stop writing in it. Also, I'd appreciate a bit of info on what you might prefer reading, it could be about the books I've read and I feel I should tell the world, TV-shows, technology (N900, FreeRunner, Hanlin e-reader...), continue with Finish stuff... I'll be writing what I feel I've gotta write, but your opinion is important for me and it might push me as well to write about something else.

PS: I forgot to mention that I'm using Twitter and you might as well follow me to keep up with stuff I do, anyway I mostly use it to keep in contact with people.