The Spanish, and indeed most Europeans, have a much more relaxed attitude to sex than we do in England. By sex I mean pornography and prostitution. When you first arrive in Spain, it’s a concept you may have difficulty adjusting to. There are sex shops, just like in the UK in certain downtown areas, but the Spanish have no qualms about selling the sort of things you’d buy in the sex shops along with everything else.
You may be in a souvenir shop, (recuerdaria) looking for a nice pack of playing cards for your Aunty Vera, who loves to play cribbage. Alongside the cards with maps of Spain and beach scenes, you’ll find cards with such titles as ‘red hot poker’ and ‘beautiful babes.’ I’ll leave you to work out what’s on the reverse of those!
On the DVD stalls on the market, right next to the flamenco DVDs and cartoons, you’ll find hard core pornography for about 3 Euro per film. They’re so cheap, people smuggle them back into England to sell at 4 or 5 times the price. I wouldn’t recommend this as a way of subsidising your holiday, though. If you are caught with large quantities of pornography, you face a heavy fine and/or imprisonment.
In Spain, there are shops, similar to English ‘Pound Shops,’ where everything is cheap. Many are owned by the Chinese, so they are often called ‘Bazaar Chino.’ Here, you can bag some real bargains. In among the clocks and Spanish dolls, you’ll be astounded to find a wide range of sex toys. I was in our local one last week when a lady came in with her mother.
Mother, intent on causing mischief, picked up one of the more spectacular items and asked her daughter if she thought she should take one back as a present! The whole store was in uproar, as English, Chinese and Spaniards alike had a laugh at the expense of the poor daughter.
In the local English language press, together with the plumbers and builders, you’ll find adverts promoting other services. This week, Jason and Jasmine from Algorfa are offering discreet but comprehensive services in their garden apartment. You can have one of them or both of them, and they'll come to you if necessary. Quite appropriate wording, really - only the preposition is wrong!
The problem is, we also have a garden apartment in Algorfa, so now our friends have re-named us 'Jason and Jasmine.' Tony's quite proud of that, actually, although he says that at 79, he might have a bit of trouble keeping up with the state of play in a threesome.
While the red top tabloids in England have adverts for phone sex, you never see such blatant advertising of prostitution in a family paper. I was quite taken aback by it at first, but now I don't really take any notice, although I suspect the column is well perused in some quarters.
Sorry the image is a bit boring, but there's a limit to what you can use to illustrate a post like this, and this is a family friendly blog, after all!
