well, that's socialism for you
...said a local friend here when we got in trouble with city hall for the color of our doors and windows.
as you know, we spent a good portion of these first six months in spain hard at work fixing up this old house, and we wanted to do it in a way that honors the history of the place and doesn’t take away the charm of old architecture. spain has a history of blue doors and windows, so we found this beautiful blue, not bright blue, not loud, no. it was a lovely shade of blue.
and then.
then we got in trouble with City Hall. that sounds scary doesn’t it? so scary i capitalized it! evidently we had broken a law with those blue exterior doors and windows. even though they were a very nice non-crayon blue, thank you very much. they were such an improvement. City Hall’s architect even said he preferred it. but unfortunately, he said, the law doesn’t agree. if your house is in the “antic” section of town, you can only paint your doors and windows on the facade brown, per the town regulations. walls are regulated too: they can’t be white, they have to be a cream/stone color. and here we were, thinking we were painting our french doors in an homage to the traditional blue doors and windows you find all over spain- but, no, here: brown.
i was telling a friend here about it- how we got into trouble for our color choices, and that i understood that they were trying to create a uniformity within the old part of town, but really, brown?
she just laughed and said, well that’s socialism for you.
nothing to be done. so off we went, finding a deep chocolaty brown. it looks good, as it turns out. but we sure did love those blue french doors facing out onto the plaça. socialism, i tell ya. taking care of the community over the individual, right down to making sure the traditional part of town looks good for everyone. blast.
over here, it's about tearing down the entire government as if it were Twitter. I'm glad you just have a door color to fix.