19 Friday Nov 2021
Posted in gastronomy, spain
Sanlúcar de Barrameda will officially become the Gastronomic Capital of Spain in 2022. The city of Manzanilla was awarded this title by the Hospitality Industry Federation of Spain and the Federation of Writers and Tourism Journalists, which will also commemorate the V Centenary of the First Around the World Voyage of Magallanes and Elcano. I’m quite excited about this and hope to spend a good part of next year enjoying the Cádiz coast. Stay tuned…
16 Tuesday Nov 2021
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On 16 November 2010 Flamenco was designated a World Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Oleee! 💃🏾🎶👏
25 Monday Oct 2021
Posted in food & drink, gastronomy, sevilla, spain
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Last Monday it was the special wine tasting event with Bodegas Mustigullo and this Monday it was an invitation to try the Mediterranean tasting menu at the new Saona Restaurant in Triana with other invited INFLUENCERS. Gotta admit I’ve never warmed to this idea and still think of myself as an accidental influencer, but in the end it was a fun afternoon. Very good food paired with wonderful wines from Valencia, and also fun meeting up with a few friends I hadn’t seen in ages.
22 Friday Oct 2021
The deed is done. Or undone. WHATEVS. The most important thing is that I never have to think about this ever again. It was exactly two weeks ago when I went to the Registro Mercantil with my recently stamped and paid for deed from the notary, dissolving once and for all the never-needed limited company that I set up in 2005. You’d think that after having forked out 200€ to the notary he would have told me that my deed was useless unless I had the all important MODULO 600, but no. And thus commenced a rather unpleasant week-long email war with this fucker. Apparently he hadn’t given me a Modulo 600 because I hadn’t asked for one (don’t.get.me.started) and then said it could be done as an extra service for 50€. Well fuck that shit.
I got back in touch with my lovely “gestora” Sandra, who has looked after my taxes and other bits and bobs for the past few years, and she sent me a link to the one-page Modulo 600 which could be filled out online in about ten minutes if you knew what you were doing. Me? No. I just looked at it and my brain went numb and I wanted to cry. So Sandra said, not to worry, she would do it for me. Bless her. She’s been helping me out with a few things since lockdown. Obviously no real accounting since there has been no work, but just taking care of some things such as filing year end forms saying there was nothing to declare, including with the stupid limited company. While she was preparing the Modulo 600 she informed me that I had to pay a 30€ tax, but so as to not hold things up she had paid it herself. Oh, and it turned out I only had 30 days from the day the Dissolution Deed was signed to present the papers to the Registro Mercantil. Did my shitbag notary tell me that? Did he fuck. It was Sandra who filled me in on everything I needed to know. So when she gave me her bank account number so I could pay back the 30€ tax (whenever you can Shawn) I added on the 50€ that the slapdash notary would have charged me. And she was so happy, saying she wasn’t going to charge me, and so we both felt good about that.
I walked into the Registro Mercantil with copies of EVERYTHING and handed over the documents. Five minutes (and another 200 euros!) later, I walked away a free woman. Apparently I will receive an email in a week or so confirming that this is indeed all behind me. And so to celebrate… well of course, we went out for pisco sours!
20 Wednesday Oct 2021
If there’s one thing the latest holiday long weekend (October 8-12) has shown it’s that nobody gives a fuck about so-called sustainable tourism. What l saw in the bars and in the streets was total greed in action and it was not pretty. Visitors desperate for an “experience” and a tourism/hospitality industry that only cares about massive profit. All backed by the government that miraculously discovered the Covid data it needed to justify the elimination of all restrictions just in time for the biggest national holiday between summer and Christmas. Coincidence?
Most people appeared to have thrown caution to the wind in terms of Covid (no masks or social distancing AT ALL) while hotels were crowing about having a 90% occupation rate, and many bars were allowing way too many people inside… back to normal! What short memories we have. And how stupid we are to blindly believe that we are safe at “Level 0” when just a few days previously we were not. I get it, sort of. People are tired of being locked down, shut in, etc. Except most people haven’t been. They just haven’t been able to go on holiday abroad without testing or pack themselves into tapas bars. Boo fucking hoo.
I truly see this sudden return to “normal” in Sevilla with cheap flights, hordes of mindless (and maskless) tourists milling about everywhere, streets clogged, bars and restaurants overflowing, as not only a special kind of hell, but also a reaffirmation that people, at heart, are basically selfish assholes.
I mean, have we not learned anything during these past almost 20 months?? Have we not learned to re-evaluate what is truly valuable to us? Have we not given one thought to the idea that our past NORMAL was in part what caused this most recent global catastrophe? Apparently not. And even though there has been a lot of press about the concept of sustainable tourism, it looks like that is just so much lip service. No such thing exists at the moment.
casa azahar 