Yesterday Spain was in protest. A lot of people were on strike the entire day (a day that gets subtracted from your paycheck) and during the evening there were protests. The reason for the strike is the deterioration of employee rights. Shortly it will become (much) easier and (much) cheaper to fire people. The politicians think that this will stimulate employees to employ more people, because getting rid of people will be easier and cheaper. Employees simple fear unemployment. The fixed contracts and job security will loose its value. More than 8 days ill? Fired. More then three month loosing money? Fired. Fixed contract? Fired with a small compensation.

In Las Palmas the protesters started their march around 6 o clock and there were a lot of people! A protest with a lot of noise and chaos. I estimate around 20.000+ people were protesting and this is quite an achievement for an island where the people usually just wait and see what happens in the Spanish mainland. Now we wait and see the aftermath of this protest, but usually the end result is a quiet acceptance of the changes.

It’s always nice to eat a tasty homemade hamburger. We bought some buns and a package of hamburgers. The hamburgers were all beef, because pig is bad for you. But what’s in a hamburger except for the meat? I looked at the list of ingredients and knew directly that checking the ingredients was a mistake.

Our hamburgers contain beef, but they don’t specify how much beef. In addition they contain grain, rice and oranges (!). Together with some additives for flavor, color and smell. It does explain the low price, and the burger tasted okay. Still, next time I will think twice when buying this ‘meat’ and probably get real meat.

Being Dutch driving a bike is as normal as walking. It is a part of my heritage. A part that I neglected a little bit here in Spain, but finally a perfect excuse arose. My work moved to a new office and the new distance was to far for walking. I immediately thought a bike would be the perfect solution.

The only problem is that in Spain the average car driver does not take into account the existence of bikes. They are not used to bikes and a bike path is very rare. This results in a high risk when you move around on a bike. Luckily a campaign is going on to rise awareness about bikes and they even prepared a couple of bike paths.

I’ll just go ahead and give it a try. I bought a folding bike so I can store it without to many hassle inside the office.