Sounds good in theory like lets tell the cat to live in peace with the mice, why dont you tell it to the gyspies.

And as for you "living in a house does not make a Spaniard"
obviously it does not make you a Spaniard, not if you are Greek Chinese British or Icelandic.

it is nice, isn't it - I feel a bit like a washing machine or a wardrobe


I seem to spend a huge amount of time moving things from one to another, anyway

like I said - I personally have no idea if we're integrated - it's not something I think about at all really, not that I'm even sure what it means..............& I'm not sure I really care


we've been in the same town nearly 8 years, we know a lot of people & they know us - so we are part of the community, for sure

we live the life we live because it's convenient & comfortable

we speak Spanish - the kids have no choice at all, & I chose to learn because I didn't want to miss out on anything - and especially because I felt I had to for my kids' sake - my OH can't, but he is away a lot anyway

we watch Spanish tele now through choice - but for quite some time it was simply because we couldn't afford a dish or cable service for UK tele - now I'm glad, because I'm sure that helped with learning Spanish


& if I wanted to watch Eastenders or Corrie I'd for sure find a way

I just can't stand any of the soaps -didn't watch them much in the UK & certainly wouldn't go out of my way to watch them now

now go back and read the whole sentence as a sentence and not as disparate bits and pieces for you to take apart as you wish
thanks

Is "More integrated is better, less integrated is worse" what people on here feel?

Do people here look down upon the less integrated?

Or are people on here non-judgemental and feel that people should live their lives as they want to unless what they do affects others adversely?

Of course it is, but maybe there is a mitigating factor for those tens of thousands in illegal homes who have been cheated by the Spanish authorities at an appalling level. I won't mention the Priors. it's been mentioned too many times, but thousands more have worthless bank guarantees and have bought homes which were either never completed, of quite often not even started.

Hundreds of Spanish mayors, lawyers, bank officials, all kinds of politicians, even some police chiefs either have been or are currently before the courts charged with corruption running into millions.

Maybe we can forgive those expats who don't register for their stay in Spain, no one has ever been prosecuted for failing to do so and no one has ever been deported because of it.

And those who have stood in many a queue for hours now have a daft piece of paper to reward them, which serves no useful purpose.

I've got one, I've got a large cardboard box full of such nonsense.

Two wrongs dont make a right

I supose given the moral ineptitude of the banking fraternity, I would be within my rights to go and rob a bank any time I wanted since that is what the bankers do on a daily basis. They robbed another £85 billion of British people's money yesterday, about 5% of which will be directly paid as bonuses to just a few hundred bankers.

I happen to agree with you. Here's the link I should have provided along with my post about Spanish corruption:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...trial-marbella

no I cant believe that, it has been given to provide funding\loans for small and medium business with t/o of no more than about £50m pa.
That it will go to those at the top of the t/o rankings (they usually have better credit ratings) and nothing to the small business of 4 or 5 people is the scandal.

Bankers get paid bonuses on how much money they turn over

So yes, the vast majority is being targetted for small or medium businesses, but if a banker loans say £100 million over the next 12 months then he'll get a good % of that as bonus (perhaps not as high as 5%). So getting paid a bonus for money the bank never had in the first place and were given by the tax payer!

As I said yesterday to my in-laws. The Spanish rob illegally through corruption. They should be clever like the Anglos and get the government to change the laws that lets them rob legally by deliberately (yes deliberately) bankrupting their own companies (and countries!) while taking out hundreds of millions each year in bonuses.

Bankers are only interested about their slice of the pie. Once the banks eventually stop being rescued (this time will come) they wont care. They've stockpiled millions for their own personal use. Nowadays in the UK and US, government and banks are the same thing. No surprise that the British government is full of Old-Etonian sons of bankers.

I am one of the latter............

But there is a Whiff of oneupmanship about when talking about intergration.

A whiff? It's human nature, it goes all the way back to the caves when the biggest club got the prettiest ladies.

Sean Connery had a pretty big club and mixed well with Marbella society when he had his beach top villa there and haunted the local golf courses with his mates, the Marbella aristocrats.

He's hiding in the Bahamas now, hoping the Spanish anti-corruption authorities can't extradite him back to take his place in the dock of Marbella No1 court to join 95 of his former mates with whom he integrated rather too well.

More like a stench of snobbery...

Oh the irony...this thread cracks me up

Story time? It gets away from hairy-fairy speculations.

An English family moved into the end of my street some 12 years ago, nice people from the south coast. They came over with a baby and a 12-year old daughter.

Some six years later their marriage floundered and they returned to the UK. The daughter had flourished into a beautiful girl attending a Spanish school and attracted a horde of Spanish admirers of her own age wherever she went.

She returned home to England with her parents, but I saw her soon afterwards, squatting in the parents house.

The story doesn't have a happy ending, the daughter is still here, under terrible circumstances which don't need elaborating, an example of integration that went horribly wrong.