Judgement of nations

Doris and Bill are becoming anxious. 'There's nothing, Doris. We're getting nowhere.'

But Doris is shading her eyes with one hand and seems to have spotted something. 'Over there, Bill. Quick! Go and grab it!'

This is the trouble when you pour off a cruise ship along with fifteen hundred other people and, at around eleven in the morning, everyone wants a drink.

There are plenty of cafés in San Sebastián, more than enough to support the locals and a normal quota of visitors, but the cruisers are a challenge. It's like one of those Guinness Book of Records attempts, how many drunken students can you cram upside down in a Nissan Micra - there are always going to be a few stragglers left disconsolately outside.

But Bill is now sprinting towards the vacancy Doris has detected and looks set to reach it ahead of another guy galloping from the other direction. Breathless, he leans on the table to address the two people already sitting there. 'Are these other two chairs free? Mind if me and the wife...?'

Irene and Ted wave amicably - 'Sit yourselves down!' - and soon the four of them are chatting like old friends. We watch them covertly from our own table, whose spare seats have already been snatched away. Meanwhile, Arturo is happily skipping around the outdoor terraza delivering jugs of sangría and plates of ham rolls.

Arturo and his wife Marta approve of the cruise ships. Especially the British ones. It seems your typical British cruise passenger is generally inclined to linger in the town rather than haring off around the island. They enjoy just pootling about the streets, wandering around historical sites and the park, maybe venturing briefly into a museum or gallery but above all, sitting in the sunshine sipping from a sparkling glass of something cool.

'And the best thing about the British,' Arturo explained on a quieter morning, 'is that they mix, they make friends. They sit around in little groups at my tables, they buy each other drinks. They're well behaved, they drink but they don't get drunk, they're polite - always plees, thenkyu - and they spend their money here, in the town.'

This is wonderful stuff if you're accustomed to headlines about football fans throwing paving slabs at each other in Paris or Bucharest. Somebody likes our British visitors! For Arturo and Marta, they're the best!

So how about the other nationalities, how do they rate those? Arturo already has this well worked out. 'Los alemanes are okay too, the Germans. Perhaps not so good at joining up with others, getting together in little groups. And when they do they can be a bit noisier.' He does the Spanish horizontal hand-wobble that means so-so. 'But yes, generally they're fine, los alemanes. The main problem is that most of them want to see the island, they take themselves off in coaches or taxis.'

We've heard this from the taxi drivers too, who therefore much prefer German cruise ships to British. This is a little wounding - have we Brits lost all sense of adventure? Where are the fearless explorers of yesteryear? But perhaps it's more a matter of the cruise category they choose. The British cruise ships that call here mostly cater for the senior sector of the market. Walking sticks obligatory, Zimmer frames preferred. That's exaggerating of course. Well, slightly. What it boils down to is that these are the contentedly retired who just want to float around some calm seas for a week being fed, watered and entertained, with occasional stopovers to buy postcards of palm trees.

By contrast, the German cruisers typically carry a younger and sportier clientele. Some of the ships come pre-loaded with surfboards and little yachts for their customers to skim around the bay, and with knobbly-tired bikes for the even tougher ones to wind their way up the zigzag roads then whizz down again with the wind whistling through their helmets.

So that's the Brits and the Germans pigeon-holed, and these two nationalities account for the vast majority of cruise passengers. We get a sprinkling of others from Holland, France and Scandinavia for example, and occasionally a bijou high-luxury cruiser will bring in a handful of Americans, but these are too small a sample for Arturo to make a balanced judgement. (We once had a visit from that floating American city, The World, whose passengers managed to look wildly rich while clad only in jeans and summer shirts.)

Arturo is perfectly happy to judge the Russians, though. Russian in this context can be taken to include almost anyone living east of Vienna. These tend to arrive not so much on cruise ships but on ferry day trips from Tenerife, and Arturo is not so keen on them, as a species. 'They take over the place,' he complains, arms indicating swarms of beefy Russians sprawled around his café. 'They behave as though they've bought it.' This is probably because they have indeed bought an awful lot of everything everywhere, although not so far in La Gomera. Disclaimer: I'm quoting just one café proprietor's opinion here, and he's no doubt hopelessly biased and unfair.

Just out of academic interest, though - who would Arturo place at the bottom of his list of favourites?

He doesn't hesitate. 'Los españoles,' he confirms, the Spanish. 'Sin duda alguna,' without any doubt, he adds, as his wife Marta nods from behind the counter. Specifically, Arturo clarifies, 'los peninsulares,' those from the Spanish peninsular, the mainland.

Oh dear. We rather like the Spanish. What have they done wrong? 'Well, you've seen them!' Arturo says. Yes, we have.

'They push into my café like a herd of goats and yell for service across the bar, all at the same time, as though I've got twenty coffee machines.' Yes, they do.

'They complain there's too much milk in the coffee or not enough, it's too hot or it's too cold, they want extra straws for little Berto's orange juice...' They do, they do.

'They move the tables around and block up the entire terraza and expect me to fly through the air to reach them.' Oh, it's all true. No Spaniard will hesitate to move café tables around to accommodate grandma, five kids and three sets of aunts and uncles.

'And half of them come in just to use the toilets, then walk out again without buying anything.' By now Arturo is flushed with indignation.

Yes, but the point is - the point is - well, the Spanish who come here feel at home. This is their country. This is their way of life, more or less, although Canary Islanders are marginally less noisy. When you live in Madrid or Barcelona you get used to yelling.

And this Hispanic furore never lasts very long. They turn up in coachloads, take a guided walk around the town, are released to create a brief bedlam in Arturo's café or one of the others, then they all scramble back into their coach for a trip around the island. And suddenly the place seems terribly quiet.

I don't mind our Spanish visitors from the Peninsular, they're disruptive but fun. And the truth is that they leave Arturo's cash till nicely filled up, so he's not really complaining either.


Notes for the serious student
The cruise season lasts from around mid-September to the following Easter. There are several cruise ships that call in regularly with about 1500 or so passengers, and occasionally larger ones of over 3000 now that the jetty has been lengthened to accommodate them. In San Sebastián's neat little port, these give the impression that someone has towed in a six-block hotel complex from Tenerife.

Doris and Bill who feature in this story also appeared in an earlier one, The clandestine emigrants, 21 December 2016.