Hurting Spaniards celebrate big Christmas lottery wins in more than a dozen locations

By The Associated Press - Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 7:27 AM - 0 Comments

MADRID – Winners of Spain’s cherished Christmas lottery — the world’s richest — celebrated Saturday in more than a dozen locations where lucky tickets were sold, a moment of uplift for a country enduring another brutal year of economic hardship.

Initial reports said there were winners of the maximum prize of €400,000 ($530,000) in 15 towns or cities. In Madrid, two lottery outlet workers who sold a top-prize tickets celebrated with sparkling wine as curious neighbours gathered. The fortunate winner had yet to make an appearance.

The lottery sprinkled a treasure chest of €2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in prize money around the country.

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The danger of a Greek exit and why it matters to Canada

By Erica Alini - Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 2:57 PM - 0 Comments

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Spain’s matadors return

By Mika Rekai - Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 6:20 PM - 0 Comments

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

Before Mariano Rajoy was elected prime minister of Spain last year, he promised the return of fiscal prudence, economic prosperity and gut-splattering bullfights on prime-time TV. So far, the Conservative politician has kept at least one of those campaign promises.

Last week, Spain’s public broadcaster TVE aired its first bullfight in six years. Broadcast live from the northern city of Valladolid, the fight featured one of the country’s most famous matadors, a man known as “El Juli.” To many liberals, who view the fights as barbaric, it marked a huge step back. To conservatives, who consider the sport a celebration of Spanish culture, it marked a glorious return.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government banned bullfighting on public television in 2006. Bullfights were shown on private, pay-per-view channels, but banned from public airwaves as inappropriate for children.

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Smile when your lungs are aching, smile when your heart is breaking

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, August 10, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP

Synchronized swimming is one of the rare smiling sports at these the London 2012 Summer Games, which are usually more about pant, sweat, grimace and grunt. Smile when you win, smile when you lose; smile at the judges and pray they didn’t decide the results two weeks ago over dinner.

There was Canada’s all-Quebec synchro team after a stellar, acrobatic performance Friday, smiling in their beaded, neon-hued swimsuits and their waterproof makeup, excited and proud that they’d given their all in a joyous, technically demanding program.

They’d been in fourth Thursday after their technical routine. Their free routine Friday, inspired by Cirque du Soleil, moved them to first, but they must have known, standing in a nervous pack in the bowels of the Aquatic Centre, that it wouldn’t last. The judges had left plenty of point room for the powerhouses of the sport who had yet to perform.

In the end, to the surprise of no one, there was no change from Thursday. Russia won the gold, as Russia does—the fourth consecutive team Olympic gold and sixth straight overall gold. China finished second, with Spain taking bronze. It would have required an epic failure by one of the top teams to get the judges to move Canada beyond the fourth it held Thursday and the fourth it finished in Beijing. That didn’t happen.

Tracy Little, one of the nine-person Canadian crew, said afterwards that she was “pretty down” after the fourth-place ranking Thursday. The team awoke Friday, determined to make this “a good Olympic moment,” come what may. She thinks they delivered that in the pool. “I didn’t care what the scores were for the first time in my synchro career,” she said.

Whether the judges ever move the team beyond fourth is not something the swimmers can control, she said. “If we swim perfect or not, who knows if they’re going to give us the same marks?” She only knows how hard they worked to deliver in that pool. “They can’t take that away from us. This moment of being proud right now, no matter what I finish I’m going to have this forever.” She said that, of course, with a smile.

European benefits fly in the face of austerity

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, July 16, 2012 at 6:30 PM - 0 Comments

Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Can anyone help Europe if it won’t help itself? The question seemed pertinent last week after the European Union Court of Justice ruled in favour of Spanish department store workers demanding the right to reclaim any holiday time lost to illness. The decision by Europe’s highest court is binding on employers throughout the EU, including Britain, and came as Spain put the finishing touches on a request for an EU bailout. No surprise, then, that the decision was met with hisses from economists and politicians. “Most employees accept that if they fall ill while on holiday, it is unfortunate,” said Norman Lamb, the U.K.’s employment relations minister. “But they do not expect extra vacation.”

Maybe not on Lamb’s side of the Channel. On the continent, things are different. The new rule joins a cornucopia of workplace benefits that remain even as troubled eurozone economies groan under crushing debt and staggering unemployment. Spanish workers get an extra two weeks off for honeymoons, and 20 days of severance even if they’re fired with cause. In France, companies must give extra paid leave to staff who work 39 hours per week instead of the statutory 35, even if the workers are paid for the overtime. In Italy, firms that lay people off during an economic downturn can face years of costly legal proceedings. By way of remedy, Rome is proposing a law requiring employers to pay laid-off workers a whopping 27 months in wages.

Gold-plated entitlements like these persist despite complaints from economists that they discourage companies from hiring at a time when one in two Spaniards and one in three Italians under the age of 25 are unemployed. They’re also adding to the burden on public-sector institutions, which had been the last redoubt of employment growth since the financial crisis took hold in 2008. Spain’s government-paid workforce actually expanded by 11 per cent in the three years that followed the meltdown. Last week, Madrid warned that mass layoffs of civil servants may be necessary to contain a deficit nearing $90 billion.

Are Europeans oblivious to the crisis before them? On one level, the recent decision reflects long-held views that benefits, more than just nice, are necessary, says Kurt Huebner, a professor with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for European Studies. To them, “vacation is like bringing in a car for maintenance,” he says. “It’s necessary to get basic repairs in order to function properly. Thus it is logical that if you become sick during this period, you should have the opportunity to recover.” And though the verdict “flies in the face of austerity,” Huebner adds, many Europeans believe workers have done their part in the past decade, as wages have decreased as a share of GDP while profits have risen.

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Good news, bad news: June 8-14, 2012

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Good news

Tim Rooke / Rex Features

Keep bailing

The $129-billion bailout plan hatched last weekend for Spain’s banks was the surest sign yet that European leaders are committed to the task of rescuing the continent’s economy and its monetary union. Many questions and concerns remain over what happens next. Spain’s economy, the fourth largest in the eurozone, is still in a deep funk. Other countries, like Italy, may soon need a bailout, and Greece could still exit the eurozone. It’s a chaotic situation, with officials rushing to put out one financial fire after another, but it is better than the alternative: a total meltdown.

Game of Kings

The Stanley Cup finals didn’t capture the imagination of many Canadians. The Los Angeles Kings’ early 3-0 series lead over the New Jersey Devils made the team’s Cup victory this week seem a foregone conclusion. But those who did watch saw some dramatic hockey, featuring two of the game’s top goalies and what every Canadian says they want—fearless physical play. It’s too bad one of the teams wasn’t Canadian; then again, the victors did have 15 Canadian skaters in their lineup.

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Bailout request closer, sources suggest

By Gustavo Vieira - Friday, June 8, 2012 at 8:46 AM - 0 Comments

Spain is expected to request a bailout to its European partners on Saturday, say sources quoted by Reuters. If confirmed on Saturday’s conference call amongst the finance ministers of the 17 member-states to the Euro’s currency area, the bailout request would come only two days after Fitch Ratings downgraded Spain’s sovereign credit rating on Thursday.

A Spanish bailout would be the fourth in the embattled Eurozone, after Greece, Ireland and Portugal, all of which got financial assistance from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. None of those aid packages have been able to placate the crisis that has spread throughout the old continent, threatening the Euro itself as a currency, as well as the Eurozone’s existence, while looming large over the world’s economy.

From Reuters:

There was no immediate official comment from the Spanish government. The EU and German sources spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Fitch said the cost to the Spanish state of recapitalising banks stricken by the bursting of a real estate bubble, recession and mass unemployment could be between 60 and 100 billion euros ($75 and $125 billion).

An International Monetary Fund report, due to be published on Monday, is expected to estimate Spanish banks’ capital needs at a lower figure of 40 billion euros, but market conditions have deteriorated since that data was collected, officials said.

A Greek exit: Good idea, hard to do

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

It may be time for Greece to leave the eurozone. Analysts have been saying since late last year that a Greek exit, now known as “Grexit” among economics dorks, was a likely scenario. Last weekend’s messy elections and this morning’s bombshell statements by the country’s left-wing Syriza bloc make it all the more likely. So what would a Grexit actually look like, and would it be good or bad for Canada and the rest of the world economy?

The short answer is that letting Greece slip out of the eurozone is a good idea in theory, but a hard one to pull off without disastrous consequences in practice. David Smith, economics editor of The Sunday Times, summed it up nicely in a post he wrote before the election results came out:

“A Greek exit, should it occur, would eventually be good for Greece and remaining eurozone members. Getting there, however, without triggering a domino effect, and without a hugely damaging impact of the banking system, is the difficult part.“

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Europe on growth: All together now?

By Gabriela Perdomo - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 3:13 PM - 0 Comments

(Markus Schreiber/AP Photo)

Last week, we wondered whether Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German officials were too stubborn to notice that their push for austerity is choking Europe’s economy. There’s a chance they aren’t.

On Wednesday, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi called for a European “growth compact,” acknowledging that fiscal austerity is “starting to reverberate its contractionary effects.” Merkel agreed with Draghi, though she immediately specified what type of growth she would–or rather wouldn’t–like to see:

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Is Argentina becoming the next Venezuela?

By Gabriela Perdomo - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 3:10 PM - 0 Comments

In a shocking move, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the government would seize control of the country’s leading oil and gas producer, YPF. Its parent firm, Repsol, is based in Spain; the country expressed outrage at the takeover and offered its full support to the conglomerate. Kirchner, who announced the nationalization on live TV, will grant Argentina a 51 per cent controlling share in the company; she also dumped CEO Sebastián Eskenazi, installing two of her top aides, Julio de Vido and Axel Kicillof, in his place. The populist move is sure to win Kirchner points on the homefront, where there is a widespread sense that oil profits are being shipped elsewhere, but it comes at a steep cost internationally.

Repsol’s president, Antonio Brufau, claims the takeover was an excuse to cover up Argentina’s “social and economic crisis.” Spain’s industry minister is warning of “diplomatic, commercial and energy” consequences. Even Argentina’s two main newspapers were sharply critical: Clarin, the country’s largest daily, claimed Argentina risks scaring off investors. “The price,” it wrote, “is not just the court cases but the risk of ending up a little further away from the rest of the world.”

Spain’s Catholic Church using social media to recruit new priests

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

“I do not promise you a great salary, I promise you a permanent job.” With that vow of full-time employment, Spain’s Catholic Church is hoping to recruit young men to the priesthood. This week it launched a social media campaign, including a Twitter feed and Facebook page, with the goal of filling its seminaries. Though half of Spain’s youth population is unemployed, it isn’t certain how many will accept a job that comes with one major drawback—a life of celibacy. And the pay isn’t exactly stellar, starting at around $1,000 per month. “I do not promise you will live a luxurious life, I promise your wealth will be eternal,” a priest explains in the new campaign’s YouTube video.

The Church and its influence have been on the decline since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Today less than 15 per cent of Spaniards attend mass regularly, and the number of priests has dropped 25 per cent in the last decade. Still, tough economic times appear to be helping the Church fill its increasingly empty pulpits. Last year the number of recruits rose slightly to 1,278, the first uptick in decades. And this ad strategy is generating much needed publicity. As its video asks, “How many promises have been made to you that have not been fulfilled?”

Spain to boost productivity with holiday bump

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Unions and employers in Spain have agreed to shift public holidays to Mondays or Fridays, the Wall Street Journal reports. The vacation bump is meant to stop Spaniards from skipping extra days every time a holiday falls in the middle of the week. The practice, known as bridging, is said to cost the Spanish economy hundreds of millions of Euros every year. Those in the hospitality business are not impressed. “Anybody who thinks we have to continue this stupid austerity to save the euro is totally wrong,” Adolfo Castro, who runs a 19th-century lodge near Madrid, told the paper.

Juan Carlos’s bad year

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

EPA/Keystone Press

This hasn’t been King Juan Carlos’s year. Since June, the Spanish monarch has had his right knee replaced, had surgery on his left Achilles, and suffered a black eye and injured nose after colliding with a door. However, all those health problems pale in comparison to an intensifying corruption scandal centred on his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, that threatens to damage the monarchy itself.

Urdangarin is under investigation for allegedly siphoning millions from his non-profit foundation, the Nóos Institute, into private companies under his control. An Olympic handball player before being elevated to duke of Palma when he married the king’s younger daughter Infanta Cristina in 1997, Urdangarin headed the foundation from 2004 to 2006. As well, leaks from the prosecutor’s office in Palma, the capital of the Balearic Islands, state the institute charged inflated fees and prices on big public contracts to organize events in the region. Police have raided Urdangarin’s offices and removed documents. He’s expected to be named a formal suspect within weeks, with charges coming later.

Urdangarin broke his silence this week, telling the news agency EFE, “I deeply regret that [the accusations] are causing serious damage to the image of my family and the house of his majesty the king, who have nothing to do with my private activities.” His lawyer says “he is fully innocent.”

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Spain’s Mariano Rajoy isn’t popular—but he’s way ahead

By Jane Switzer - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 3 Comments

Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images

Spaniards think he’s boring, but anger over Spain’s economic crisis is expected to propel opposition leader Mariano Rajoy to victory in the country’s Nov. 20 election.

Rajoy’s conservative People’s Party is expected to win a landslide parliamentary majority with 47.6 per cent of the votes, according to a Nov. 13 poll published in Spain’s centre-right El Mundo newspaper. The second-place Socialist Party, led by Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, trailed the People’s Party by 17.8 percentage points, with a predicted 29.8 per cent. Various polls also widely declared Rajoy the winner of a Nov. 7 televised debate against Rubalcaba, the sole face-to-face exchange of the campaign.

Rajoy, 56, and Rubalcaba, 60, squared off on how to solve Spain’s debt crisis and kick-start its stagnant economy. Rubalcaba accused Rajoy of hiding plans to cut benefits and pensions to curb Spain’s growing deficit: “If you tell people the plans you have in your head, not even your own party members will vote for you,” he said. But Rubalcaba’s interrogation did little to stop Rajoy, who rebuffed his rival by evoking the spectre of Spain’s debt crisis: “I think Spain needs a change and needs it urgently.”

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Spain honours a Canadian who joined its fight against fascism

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 4 Comments

Jules Paivio

Yesterday, under grey skies by the banks of the Ottawa River, Spain fulfilled an old promise to a 94-year-old Canadian.

In 1938, Spain’s republican government was fighting a doomed war against a fascist insurgency led by the Spanish general Francisco Franco and backed with troops and hardware by Hitler and Mussolini. In a futile effort to force Franco to send his Italian and German allies home, Spain announced it would do the same to the thousands of volunteers who had come from around the world to share its struggle.

The Spanish government held a goodbye parade in Barcelona for the departing internationals. Dolores Ibarruri, the Spanish Communist leader more popularly known as La Pasionaria, gave a speech: Continue…

ETA to lay down arms

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

ETA, a Basque separatist group that waged a decades-long campaign to carve a homeland from parts of Spain and France, declared a “definitive cessation of armed activity” Thursday, bringing to end a conflict that claimed more than 800 lives. The breakthrough, hailed by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as a “victory for democracy,” came after a one-day meeting Monday with international figures including key representatives from former Irish paramilitary groups. “Ours will be a democracy without terrorism,” said Zapatero, who led a crackdown on the ETA shortly after his election in 2004, “but not without memory.”

CNN

Can the EU be saved?

By Jason Kirby and Michael Petrou - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 16 Comments

Reuters/Yiorgos Karahalis

Until recently, the tiny German town of Guben was best known—to those who knew it at all—for two things. With only the narrow Neisse river separating it from the Polish town of Gubin, it is one of few place where Germans and Poles live so close together. That, and Guben is also where the controversial anatomist Gunther von Hagens, famous for his museum displays of skinless human cadavers seated at poker tables, set up a factory six years ago to treat and preserve corpses.

Now Guben’s mayor, Klaus-Dieter Hübner, has set off alarm bells in Europe by calling for border controls to be put in place to stop Polish “criminals” from looting German businesses. Since 2007, when Poland joined the Schengen zone, a border-free travel area consisting of 25 European countries, Germans and Poles have freely criss-crossed into each other’s countries to shop, dine and work. With his call for security checks at the border, Hübner has challenged one of the pillars of modern Europe: the free movement of people and goods between nations.

Taken on its own, the border squabble in Guben is a seemingly minor concern, but it comes as the twin forces of economic stagnation and surging nationalism threaten to tear Europe apart. Even as European leaders struggle to halt the spread of the debt crisis—a task that they increasingly appear unable to handle—a wider backlash against European integration poses an existential crisis for the continent. Europe is failing, both economically and politically, leading to the question: can it be saved, or is Europe destined for the embalming slab in Guben?

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Atlantis—in a swamp?

By Erica Alini - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments

As killer waves wiped away entire towns on the coast of Japan, another city said to have been obliterated by a tsunami thousands of years ago may have surfaced for the first time on archaeological maps. A U.S.-led team of researchers, including three Canadians, says it has located the remains of fabled Atlantis, buried in marshlands in southern Spain. “This is the power of tsunamis—it can wipe out 60 miles [almost 100 km] inland, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about,” said Richard Freund, a professor at the University of Hartford who led the effort to pinpoint the true location of the legendary city. His team used a combination of satellite imaging, digital mapping, underwater technology, and deep-ground radar to locate the site. Freund claims that the existence of ancient “memorial cities” in central Spain, supposedly built in Atlantis’s image by survivors of the tsunami, offers compelling evidence that what he has found is, in fact, the famous city-state of antiquity.

The only known mention of Atlantis comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, who described it as sitting on an island in front of the “Pillars of Hercules,” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in the ancient world. That’s why archaeological searches have been focusing on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the most likely sites.

Zapatero zapped

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

81 per cent say Zapatero inspires little or no confidence | Andrea Comas/Reuters

This could be the beginning of the end for Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The local branch of his Socialist party was beaten by the conservative and nationalistic Catalan party Convergència i Unió (CiU) in regional elections in Catalonia late last month, dealing a major blow to Zapatero’s government as he attempts to tackle the country’s floundering economy and sky-high levels of unemployment. The CiU won 38 per cent of the vote, clobbering the Socialists who took just 18 per cent, although the CiU failed to get a majority in the regional government.

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'How can I escape the insanity of my life?'

By Jane Christmas - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 5 Comments

For many, walking Spain’s hilly 800-km pilgrim’s route is a life-altering experience that resonates long after the blisters are gone | Alvaro Barrientos/AP

Recent research from the University of Innsbruck in Austria revealed that Westerners no longer give a fig about whether their lives have meaning. Tell that to the more than 400,000 people who trod the Camino de Santiago de Compostela (literally, the Way of St. James in the Field of Stars) in the last few years.

Modern-day quests usually begin with the universal complaint: “How can I escape the insanity of my life?” Before you know it you’re trolling the aisles of Mountain Equipment Co-op convincing yourself you’ll be perfectly comfortable hiking through a country you’ve never visited and whose language you don’t speak.

Walking Spain’s ancient 800-km pilgrim’s route with the barest of necessities has become a popular New Year’s resolution. It’s not for wimps, but many a wimp (I am one of them) has been known to hike the entire thing. There are steep hills aplenty—more than you can shake a walking stick at. The trail ends at the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, where it is said that the bones of Christ’s apostle James (a.k.a. Santiago) are buried. As legions of pilgrims will attest, the Camino is a life-altering experience that resonates years and decades after you’ve pried your hiking boots from your hot, blistered feet.

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Catalonia's orgasmic politics

By Erica Alini - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 14 Comments

Still from Spanish election orgasm commercial

“Votar és un plaer” (voting is a pleasure) reads the sign at the end of an electoral campaign ad by the Young Socialists in Catalonia, a group within Spain’s Socialist Party. It’s such a pleasure, apparently, that it ends in orgasm. The video, in fact, features a young woman becoming progressively aroused as she approaches the ballot box—and reaching climax upon slipping in her vote. The aim was to “show how important it is that all young people in Catalonia go to the polls,” the authors of the clip, released ahead of this month’s regional elections, told El País newspaper.

Unsurprisingly, the ad caused a stir among Spanish politicians on both the right and the left, who called it “crude,” “misleading,” and an “attack on the dignity of women.”  But many among the Spanish public were unfazed. “References to sex, as is logical, sell,” quipped El País in a separate article. And the Young Socialists’ video isn’t the first message in this campaign to use erotica to turn on the voting. Another candidate, Montse Nebrera, who heads her own party, went on camera wrapped in just a towel: “If we were seeking a media sensation I would take it off,” she said, “but we don’t think everything should be politics.”

Star turns

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

James Devaney/Jason Kempin/Getty Images; Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP

Justin Timberlake
Always deeper than his image let on, the 29-year-old has officially completed the loop from tween heartthrob to serious acting talent, wowing critics this fall with his turn in the Facebook movie, The Social Network. Timberlake’s take on Napster inventor Sean Parker combined innocence and calculation, conveying evil beneath a sheen of effeminate whimsy. Not bad for a guy who got his start warbling country tunes on Star Search.

Caroline Wozniacki
Serena Williams’s outfits might steal the show at most tennis tournaments, but these days Wozniacki supplies the substance. The 20-year-old Dane won an amazing six tour events in 2010, including the Rogers Cup in Montreal, to claim the No. 1 rank in the world. She’s no slouch in the looks department, either, but with her crashing serve and her relentless work ethic, her opponents had best keep their eyes on the ball.

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How to spot a prostitute

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 10 Comments

Laurent Sansen/Zuma/Keystone Press

Street prostitutes working near the Catalan city of Lleida now share a uniform: fluorescent yellow vests. Local police have ordered the women, who troll a local highway for work, to put on the high-visibility clothing in order to prevent road accidents. Anyone who opts out of the brightly coloured bib faces a $57 fine by the Mossos d’Esquadra, the regional police.

A spokesman for the force emphasized that officers were not singling the women out; prostitution in Spain is legal in most cities (though pimping is not). Instead, this crackdown is in accordance with a 2004 law, which stipulates that anyone on a highway, including those with broken-down cars, must wear a fluorescent bib.

Most women have incorporated the sleeveless jackets into their previous uniform of short skirts, tall boots, and revealing tops. The police say that if they continue to abide by the law, the women have no other reason to face fines. After all, the road they work falls just outside the boundaries of Lleida, one city that recently banned street prostitution.

Spain on the eve of war, and an appeal to book publishers

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 1:35 PM - 1 Comment

Late this summer a letter arrived at my Ottawa office from a woman living about 40 minutes away in the Quebec village of Wakefield.

Gunda Lambton had read my book about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War and wanted to get in touch. She had a personal connection to Spain and its civil war, having lived in the country as a young woman for about a year in 1934 and 1935.

I telephoned Gunda and promised to visit, but then the autumn got busy and I didn’t make the trip until yesterday. I wish I had gone sooner. Continue…