Pic by lilinhah

Low in Funds

I received an email from Jill who wants to stay a bit longer in Tenerife but whose funds are running low. After her contract expired Jill looked around to find cheaper accommodation but the best she found was an €18 a night B & B in Los Cristianos. That’s daylight robbery!

My neighbour’s comfortable two bed/2 bath with terrace and garden has been reduced to €450 a month from it’s previous rate of €550 because of the crisis which makes it cheaper to rent for the month than one measly room in a hostel.

Of course, you can’t get long-term rates on short-term stays and neither is anyone likely to hand you the keys to their pad unless you are in gainful employment and have both a down payment and a deposit in hand. So what can you do?

Hunting for Flat Shares in Tenerife

Well, look for a flat share is the answer. You will still really be paying for one room plus use of the flat’s facilities but you’ll get a much better price and who knows you and your new flattie may just get on like a house on fire. Er… maybe that’s not such a great idea!

Anyway, where to find these fabulous flats shares in Tenerife?

A good place to look is the notice boards in any Cultural Centre or some of the supermarkets.

As it was on my mind I cast an eye over the notice board in Las Galletas Cultural Centre and found three possibilities right away.

Flats to Share

1. Rent of one room in a two bedroom apartment in Guargacho. €180 per month. Tel: xxxxxxxxx

2. Flat share in Las Galletas (sea view) €200pm Tel: 922 xxx xxx

3. El Fraile flat share – no price given but it says economico! Tel: xxx xxx xxx

(Contact details have been removed but these are real examples of rates on offer.)

Any of these would be a better bet for a budget-conscious visitor than a pay-by-the-night hostel.

There is a humongous notice board in the Los Cristianos Cultural Centre and if I were looking for a flat share that is where I’d start.

And if anyone reading is looking for a flat mate then you are welcome to say so in a comment below. You never know…

Happy hunting!

The local website Lo Que Pasa En Tenerife is a good place to check up on the daily complaints of Tenerife’s residents.

Today one of the topics is the proliferation of shopping carts that are left in the streets of Santa Cruz.

The citizen reporter who scooped this story gripes that this is becoming so common it’s almost fashionable and why won’t people just return the effing  things. Well, okay maybe she didn’t say that exactly but I bet she was thinking it.

The comments on the original page are funny.

One person opines that it is obviously the fault of the South Americans and globalisation. Boy, is that a leap or what?

I don’t think the invasion of the shopping trolleys is a new thing at all. I seem to remember my hometown being festooned with the things when I was growing up (in fact I am sure most people reading this blog must have trolley-jousted at last once when they were small) and I don’t remember one Peruvian or Brazilian living in Cumbernauld at the time.

Where I live in Tenerife there is a bit of community spirit. We swap dishes and gossip at garden bbqs, attend each others kids’ birthdays parties and share two communal shopping trolleys. They are used to ferry shopping from the car park to the houses. As the driver parks the kids scamper off along the path to retrieve the trolleys from the gate of whoever had them last.

Strictly speaking only one of the trolleys is communal. My neighbour (yes, she of the poo-slinging scandal) got so fed up of having her shopping trolley purloined by the vecinos that she wrote her house number and family name on it in big black felt pen. Quite bold of her, I thought, considering she must have half-inched it herself from somewhere. It’s not like you can stop off at the €1 shop and buy yourself a Mercadona or Netto trolley, is it?

Surprise, surprise. A Kodak Lens Vision Centre poll revealed that men spend almost a year of their lives ogling women.

Prime goggle territory is, it seems, the supermarket though I suspect the result is skewed by lack of beach and swimming pool opportunities wherever the study was held.

Given the acres of flesh on display on an average day in Tenerife I guess Mercadona would come in a very poor second as a leering location. I know I only have to glance out the patio door when I am visiting Gaga to be slapped in the face with naked boobs and moobs of all sizes or dental floss trussed backsides wobbling unattractively around the pool.

Going topless doesn’t bother me at all really. In general the human body is a beautiful thing but god in heaven what are these people thinking? I see children in g-strings round the pool and I think to myself that if the child is allowed to look this overtly sexual at seven or eight what chance have her parents got of keeping her from leaving the house looking like a tuppenny tart by the time she’s fifteen?

At the other end of the scale are the great wobbling blancmanges which having already consumed the dental-floss g-string look ready to do the same to the nearest small child. What on earth possesses these people to think that they should inflict their huge white bums in such a manner on the rest of us?

I admit I am no Aphrodite myself but then I don’t go baring my wobbly bits for the world to see. Some may say if you’ve got it flaunt it. I say if you’ve got too much of it, please tuck it away in a normal swimming costume.

Back however to our study on men eyeing up women. They are not alone in their appreciation of the opposite sex and it’s not only meat and two veg for tonight’s tea that many women are mulling over whilst they are fondling the cantaloupes apparently. The five top spots that women look at men are at the pub, at the shops, on public transport at the supermarket and at work.

Hmmm. About the only totty I am interested in whilst heaving my overflowing and wonky trolley round the narrow aisles of the supermarket is the kind you layer over mince and veggies to make a shepherd’s pie but to each their own I guess.

The online Tenerife News reports the latest statistics on family income for the Canary Islands.

In total 707,824 households were included in the survey and of these 59,588 homes stated that their monthly income was less than 500 euros. Apparently Tenerife has the highest number of these low income households with 24,800 families earning less than €500 per month.

Quite honestly I am shocked by that number. What is even more surprising is that only 32% of those in this low income bracket said that they had difficulty making ends meet. We certainly don’t live high on the hog but I can’t see my family making it through a month for €500.

In the high end bracket, Tenerife had the most families earning more than €3,500 per month which represents 42%. Interesting divide, don’t you think?