26 Thursday Aug 2010
What a week it’s been! I got back from my holiday in Málaga on Sunday evening and was quite looking forward to a tapas tour that had been booked for the next evening. Little did I know that Simon, Clare and Joe were about to become good friends. The tour started off pleasantly and we were all having such a good time by the time it finished that we ended up at my favourite rooftop bar having a few drinks …
16 Monday Aug 2010
Posted in food & drink, holidays, Malaga
Soooo… I got to Málaga yesterday around 2pm. There’s always that bit of excitement getting into the taxi at the train station and knowing that I’m being taken somewhere that feels like home. Once inside the apartment I unpacked, got my stuff organised (and was very happy that I’d decided to cram my iPod speaker deck into my suitcase at the last minute), then went out to do a bit of grocery shopping. Afterwards, well, all I felt like doing was hanging out, watching a dvd whilst drinking some wine and munching on cashews – which was exactly what I did. Later I took a super-long siesta, waking up around 8.30pm and feeling quite peckish. So I went on Twitter and asked where I could go to in my barrio for a nice tapa meal (didn’t feel like venturing into the city centre) and was happily surprised when Victoria – who was away for the weekend – recommended a place near the bullring. And it was great. As you can see, I made friends with everyone there, and also had an amazing meal.
So this collage is a bit of yesterday. The sea view from the apartment terrace, my freshly made bed, the tapas bar including a biznaga seller and later a close-up of a biznaga (jasmine blossoms onna stick) which is a very traditional Málaga thing. After a rather lazy Sunday I am quite looking forward to getting out there and making the most of being here . But I tell ya, waking up after that luxuriously long siesta to the sound of the waves gently crashing on the shore … oh, that’s really all I want. I love it.
Now if only I could find a way of bringing my cats here with me…
25 Sunday Jul 2010
Posted in food & drink, friends, home, sevilla, tapas
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A long time ago (1993) I was living in a charming studio apartment down the street from where I live now. It was my first home in Sevilla, and a very pretty one, with a nice terrace outside the back door – and also heating & air-conditioning! But not only was it tiny, it was also very expensive, and so when I saw a for rent sign go up across the street I hastened to check it out, because I knew I couldn’t live anywhere else in Sevilla than on My Street. Turned out it was a recently renovated 3-bedroom, 1 1/2 bathroom apartment, semi-furnished, and about 1/3 more than I was paying for my little studio, and it also turned out that with a flatmate I could manage to make ends meet and enjoy having a lot more living space … and so that’s how I lived for eight years.
One of my ever-changing flatmates during that time was a lovely woman called Alejandra – a historian who was looking for temporary accommodation while she was doing research at the Archivos de India. That was in 1996. Four years later she was here again visiting with her family and we met again. And that was it, other than occasional emails and, more recently, “friending” each other on Facebook. And then about a month ago Ale told me she was going to be in Madrid doing research this summer and would love to come down to Seville for a week if I still had the apartment next door and a free room. So here she is! And as luck would have it, staying in “our old place” for the last week that I’ll have the second apartment.
And so yesterday Ale got here around 5 o’clock and, as she’d come down from Madrid on the fast train without having had any lunch, we immediately headed out to find a nice tapas bar with an all-day kitchen (most close from 4-8pm) and ended up at Bar Estrella. Afterwards we went to the Corte Inglés so Ale could get a few groceries for the week and on the way home stopped for a cold beer at Picalagartos, where my photographer buddy Antonio Cid works at weekends. And well, it was great. Especially how it felt like Ale had just been gone for about fifteen minute rather than fifteen years. We “connected” again immediately and felt really at home together, and so this should be a very pleasant week indeed.
Just waiting to see if she is up so we can go out for brekky at the Horno San Buenaventura and then think of something fun to do in boring-old-Sevilla on a Sunday. Oh, and you can see yesterday’s late lunch (Ale’s treat) below the links…
24 Saturday Jul 2010
Today’s Photohunt theme is “hanging”.
A typical sight in Spanish bars – the famous Jamón Ibérico.
I’d originally used the rug I bought in Asilah when I went to Morocco last year, which is hanging on my wall. Then when I was writing on tnchick’s blog that I wasn’t featuring either cats or food this week, the jamones immediately came to mind.
22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in cancer, food & drink, friends, health & happiness, hospitals
Pilar & Isabel
2/3 of my fabulous nuclear medicine team
Made personal history yesterday by going to The Hospital for an oncology appointment … ALL BY MYSELF. I’d called all my usual hospital buddies and they were either away on holiday or, like Nog, not able to get away from work because of the very inconvenient appointment time – 1.45. This also meant that I would be at the tail end of the typical morning’s backup and could expect an extra long wait. You can probably imagine how much I was dreading this. But in the end I decided to take the bull with the corns (a wonderful malapropism from an old student of mine) and do something about this instead of feeling scared and helpless. And so…
casa azahar 