Chaspotting

I am the eggman, they're the eggman, I am the walrus, goo, goo, goo job...

I am the Walrus - Beatles, Magical Mistery Tour 1967 John Lennon

In my last post I spoke a bit about "Marulos" (Chavs, in the future I'll refer them as "marulos"). That was just to explain in a few words what a chav is. But if we speak about Spain and more especificly about my town Pontevedra I'll have to describe them better 'cause they're different from the UK chavs.

The back of a marulo car

Everybody in certain stages of their lives had been a marulo. When we're teenagers we want to dress as famous music stars (and some TV of course) do. But that maked us look terrible as they looked terrible (specially if we look backwards to the eighties, it's awful). But now we're old, or at least older and when we see them dressing with that huge trainers or boots, small t-shirts that don't cover the bellies, tight trousers or loose trousers (actually it happens it could be both tight and loose at the same time), or showing us their tangas or underwear (boys do the same putting their trousers lower than normal so we can see their underwear), or whatever they dress, we think they look horrible and even that it can be dangerous to our minds. So I migth say, for those teenagers wearing those clothes, stay wearing them, I won't bother you. The problem is when we see a guy (or a bird) of our own age (or older) dressing like them, that's what we call chav (and some of the youth as well).

Anyway, here we have a special kind of them. The marulo dress like I said before but he's more than 20 years old. They want to make as much noise as possible. For that purpose they'll buy either a marulo car or a marulo motorbike (I guess the poorest have motorbikes). If you're a girl you don't need that, you only need to find a boyfriend with it, but you can still shout. It doesn't matter if the moto or the car is good or not, the really important thing is that it makes noise. So, if your motorbike is not really noisy you'll remove the exhaust so it can be noisier. Of course some stickers would help the motorbike to be faster, or at least that's what they believe. Speaking about cars it's almost the same thing but they have more add-ons. You can remove the exhaust as with motos, but you can add neon lights, more stickers (as there's more space on a car to put them), spoilers, and everything you want to make it look like a really bad copy of a 24Hrs Lemans car, of course all those would make the car faster, or at least that's what they believe. I forgot to mention an add-on you can put on a car to make it noisier and perhaps faster, who knows, in a car you can install huge good looking speakers, an amplifier and a stolen car-radio system to play Techno music at the highest volume.

For a marulo is really important to look and sound like the best marulo ever. I live on the first floor in a street where the marulos pass with their motorbikes and cars at nigth. My walls are crap and I don't have double glass windows. So you can imagine what a Sunday nigth is (they go out on sundays as I guess they don't really have a job). And as you would know if you read Colin's blogspot police doesn't really care about such noises, they only care about parking fines. I forgot to tell you that helmets aren't suitable for marulos, and of course the police don't stop them for not wearing one.

I can't wait to see British chavs, I'm so excited...

Manoel.