Courier in Spain – how to get the best value – The only Discount Internet Spanish Courier Parcel, Letter, Baggage and Luggage service.

Here in Andalucia the neighbours are incredibly generous.  They almost never come to see us without bringing plenty of presents and, as most have invernaderos, the plastic greenhouses that litter the coast between Nerja and Cabo de Gata (and then a bit further) we end up with a glut of vegetables.  The season starts with aubergines and then continues to Swiss chard, onions, lettuces, tomatoes, nisperas (a sort of plum like fuit), apricots, melons, watermelons etc.

We grow our own fruit and vegetables because we like to pick them when they are young and at their most tasty but, without a greenhouse, they mature well after the invernaderos have packed up for the summer as July and August are so hot that anything inside a greenhouse just burns.  Our neighbours grow for quantity rather than quality.

So what has this got to do with a courier in Spain?  Well, at the risk of seeming ungrateful, it is a huge time consumer.  The problem is the quantity, there are only two of us and to get through 30 aubergines or 200 large tomatoes is a nightmare.  The Swiss chard is huge so are the lettuces, they grow them on to massive proportions while we pick ours at salad size, it has to be hidden in the middle of the compost heap so they can’t see it or we leave it by the municipal rubbish bins whence needy locals collect free food.  Some aubergines we make into babaganoush, a Middle Eastern dish, some into Mousaka but what do you do with 200 tomatoes?  The freezer is full!  We have puréed tomato, curried tomato soup, ordinary tomato soup, gazpacho, fish soup (containing tomato), tomato paste, tomato chutney, tomato ketchup, oven dried tomatoes …. And this is all before our own tomatoes come into season and allowing for tomatoes on toast for breakfast.

Unless you have done it you will be surprised at the time it takes to process all these tomatoes and aubergines, we give away what we can but last weekend I probably spent 8 hours just processing tomatoes (I burned the aubergines), luckily a lot of the recipes require onions too.  So, thank you neighbours, but I don’t want to see a tomato, an aubergine, any Swiss chard nor any of the other things you so kindly give us.  I have to get on with our main business of sending international courier packages from Spain!

Well, actually they couldn’t duplicate the clever bits like the quoting system and the PayPal payments so they haven’t been able to cheat any potential customers out of any money (although both PayPal and their credit card company would have paid any cheated client back).  It is a clear breach of copyright of FedEx logo, Citibox trademark and my own prose in writing the website along with http://www.mods-net.com/ Richard who designed our website.   Why did they do it?  I cannot say, the information on the person who cloned our site is available from http://whois.domaintools.com/ and, as it is in the public domain, I can reveal that it was one:

Registrant: John Richards (jonathanchildress2004@yahoo.com) 105 summer streeet Malden, MA 02148 US             646-256-8734         Record created on Feb 12 2012. Record expires on Feb 12 2013. Domain servers: ns1.x10hosting.com ns2.x10hosting.com Domain Service Provider: ridgecourt

Keep a good watch on this man, he has registered other websites recently.  It was a clear copy of all our pages except the protected parts, why I don’t know except for malicious reasons and I have no knowledge of why I have upset Mr Richards (if he exists, his telephone does not accept messages, his emails does not answer and the telephone message gives a false contact email).  The host company took down the website within 24 hours so (apart from appalling communication) thanks to www.x10hosting.com .   So what is the lesson behind this?  Firstly to keep searching for your website to make sure you take down clones and web site pirates at the earliest opportunity and secondly to expose these people who steal website pages and try and make sure they can’t do it again.

I have an excellent translator named Salvador to whom I wrote the letter below but it just won’t translate into Spanish as it shows the eccentricities of English language.

Many thanks.  No criticism but at one point you used costumbres for Customs and not Aduanas.

I know English is a really difficult language and it is stupid to have two meanings to the same word but I try and use a capital C when I mean Customs = aduanas.

One of the excercises (another double meaning for both school work and physical excercise) they give the children in elementry school in the UK is to think of words that sound the same but with different meanings.  Bat as in a mouse with wings, bat as in a thing used to hit a ball at cricket (which itself can be a game or an insect).

How easy Spanish is when you think that in English bough, meaning a branch of a tree, is pronounced the same as bow which means to bow down e.g. before royalty but also means the front of a ship and, pronounced differently (as bo but still spelled bow), is a curved piece of wood used to shoot arrows and also a pretty knot as in bow tie and a rod with horse hair attached used to play a violin.

¿Que locura?

Many thanks for your help.

I praise any product that I think is good and I think it therefore only fair to criticise any product that is sub-standard.  So what are my current bug-bears?

LED bulbs fromChina with 144 LEDs – should last 10 years and consume hardly any electricity.  Of four that I had couriered to Spain from China, three have already stopped working so I have paid out a year’s worth of ordinary electricity consumption for a product that lasted less than three months.  There are great LED products that come from the UK and can be sent to Spain but don’t buy the cheap ones you find on eBay, you will regret it.

Quality of Spanish tools.  I have a load of tools bought since we came over here but recently an over-enthusiastic gardener broke the handle on a garden fork so I had to buy a new one.  It is rubbish, the blades are made of steel that bends when you dig the ground – how useless is that?  Another product that you would be better off buying in theUK and getting sent to Spain.

Meat and vegetables.  There are wonderful choices of meat in Spain, some are excellent, some terrible, but the best vegetables tend to go to the Spanish export market.  We are lucky that we have enough space to grow our own vegetables and we try to grow as much as possible but if you have to buy in the market or supermarket you normally get rubbish.  You can have plants couriered from the UK to Spain (which we aren’t meant to do and the latest flowers that arrived look fairly sick) but the potatoes and artichokes look great and all the seeds we had sent to Spain this year are fabulous. You just don’t get the choice in Spain that you get in theUK, here we have a choice of “red or white” potatoes, from the UK you can send to Spain 100 different varieties.

Sometimes new customers ask for credit and we have to evaluate the risk / reward factor.  To do this we tend to look at their websites and, if they are professional, we normally agree.  Often, we are just curious and, even if they don’t want credit, we look at a customer’s website to see what they are doing and how we might be able to help them better.

Last year, we had a new customer whose website looked pretty good and they were very efficient and easy to communicate with so I thought I would try their product.  We started with just a few bars of hand-made soap that was so good that we ordered more and sent it as Christmas presents.  Susan, who does all our air waybills, is also a fan.

Recently, they have been sending products abroad from Spain and I have been asking them not to pay!  I would rather have their wonderful soaps, creams, shampoo – all of the highest quality and made with products grown on their own Andalucían estate.  So we have a barter arrangement where we supply their international courier services from Spain and they give us credit on their website.

By the way, they also produce the best olive oil I have ever tasted but you have to be someone special to be allowed to buy it because demand way outstrips supply.  You can find these wonderful products at http://www.lujos.co.uk/ – they will even hand make soap to your own recipe.  I’m not giving you the website for their olive oil because it is so good I want it all for me!

Last weekend, your Spanish Courier took Palm Sunday as a holiday and headed to Almería which is closer than Granada (until the new Motorway opens).

We managed to see three different parades, each involving a statue of Jesus and one of the Virgin Mary being transported around the town.  And these parades continue the whole of Easter week!  Every district competes to produce the best show and they really are splendid.

You can see a short clip of part of a parade here:

Every parade has its own band in uniform. The platforms that support the religious figures have maybe forty young men supporting the platform on their head and walking it through the streets, ladies in their mantilla head-dresses, children in fancy dress, the penitents with their oval headgear (looking like the Klu Klux Klan to an outsider) and the atmosphere is terrific.  All year they must prepare for their single march, but what a march – maybe 10km over four hours or so.

Any foreigners that have not seen a Semana Santa parade need to go now!

I am a great fan of eBay, Amazon (especially the Kindle) and the various secure on-line payment systems that allow me to save time and money.  Many of these have no physical presence other than a help centre although any sale that involves physical delivery (unlike the Kindle) requires storage and either postal or courier facilities.

Now, it is obviously more efficient for a supermarket home-delivery van to deliver to thirty homes in a small area than for thirty people to get into their cars and drive to the local superstore.  And more on-line business means more vans delivering products bought over the internet and that is good for FedEx andUPSwho have both recently shown signs of being interested in acquiringTNT.  And, of course, if is excellent for Citibox!

But there are some pure internet services that require a relatively small staff and can up-scale very quickly.  Think Google, think internet gambling, think iTunes.  I started internet gambling ten years ago by spread-betting on share, currency and commodity prices and can attest to the excitement of a win and the despair of a loss (but you get both these anyway in the real markets or people wouldn’t spend their dinner parties discussing the value of their house).  You need to develop a very strict trading strategy and know when to enter a trade and when to quit.  I also used to pick my Grand National winners on-line and buy Lotto tickets over the internet but these are pure gambling.

For on-line poker, a business that is booming, the skill factor is definitely there.  This is not pure gambling, you are pitting your wits against other players.  The deal of the cards is clearly luck but the better the player the more they will win against the odds meaning that there is a serious chance of winning overall for those with skill and there is a guaranteed weekly $200k prize that http://PartyPoker, offer as well as pots of over $1m for the really serious players.  They have  launched a Spanish language site http://es.partypoker.com/ and, as the Spaniards are inveterate gamblers, this will increase the world

I have just bought a new camera (through eBay) and partly funded that by selling my old camera and video camera (through eBay).  When I tried to download my first photos to my photo processing software I discovered that the new RAW (a type of photo file) was unopenable by my current software.  So I bid (and lost) on eBay for an upgrade and the Adobe Photoshop 10 with Premiere 10 (a video editing software) went for £67 + £3.50 postage, a total of £70.50.  This morning I used “buy it now” to get the same packages plus a free digital camera for under £57 (I had already checked that it worked by downloading a trial copy from Adobe Elements).

Why do people overpay on eBay?  They can’t all be stupid, have they done no research?  I think the answer is that they get carried away by the auction and assume if someone else is bidding that they must know what they are doing.  Anyway the cost of this software, from a registered Adobe dealer, was much less that paying on-line to Adobe direct.  If it was sent Royal Mail to Spain it would have cost an additional £16.99 but delivery to our UK Address in Spain is free and as it weights less than 1kg it will cost me only €5 + €2.50 to have it couriered direct to me from our Marbella office.  Many items on www.ebay.co.uk are not available to addresses outside of the UK and most things on www.ebay.es are not worth having or are too expensive (all 200 Adobe Elements 10 items on the Spanish site come from either Great Britain or Germany).

Google tells me that today is the first day of spring www.google.co.ukhas a pretty picture.  You could have fooled me, only last weekend I thought that summer was with us and I had quite given up on any rain for the garden but last night it poured and we had at least 2″ or as they say here 50 liters per square metre.  The temperature has dropped too but the weather forecast is indicating that it will climb towards the weekend.  This is the first real rain we have had in 2012 and was badly needed, the countryside looks beautiful, green and fresh and all the dust has been cleared out of the atmosphere.

1st Day of spring

Later today is the time to plant potatoes, sweetcorn and other plants that have been nurtured through January and February in warmed rooms to bring them on early.

What, I hear you ask, has this got to do with the courier business in Andalucia?  Well, in general, Andalucia is not really ready for rain but neither is my colleague’s town from where she processes the international courier shipments in Alicante.  Too much rain in a single night and either the electricity goes or the internet stops working which is what has happened today.  So, for today, I shall be sending international parcels to and from Spain all on my own which is quite good for me as it keeps me in practice.

Over the past couple of days I have downloaded maybe 10 video editing progammes in an attempt to find an altenative to the one that came with a 30 day free trial with my new Panasonic Lumix 3G camera.  I have deleted every single one.

In my humble opinion, software should be usable “out of the box”.  Nothing I have downloaded is nearly as easy to use as Windows Live Movie Maker which is free!

So watch this clip and appreciate how good free software can be:  A nice Warm Fire