12 Tuesday Jul 2011
I’ve been quite busy this past week or so trying to get the hotel page finished for azahar-sevilla.com, hoping that I would soon be able to generate some income from the nifty new Booking.com affiliate widget I now have on the site.
Then I realised that there are actually quite a few very nice holiday apartments in town that I hadn’t thought of including, and so this past weekend Nog & I went out and did some research, resulting in the new holiday apts page.
Let me know what you think!
29 Wednesday Jun 2011
Remember how I was supposed to go to Vejer and Zahara de los Atunes a couple of weeks ago. Then what with a sick kitteh and other issues, I decided it would be best to stay home. But not this weekend!
Azar has been doing great the past couple of weeks and so I am going to join two of my clients (and friends) for a fabulous food and wine tasting (una cata) with tuna almadraba from La Sal and the amazing wines from Jorge Ordoñez & Co. in Zahara de Los Atunes on the Cádiz coast. Will be going on Saturday and probably coming home again sometime Monday. Agustín says I can stay at their place so it’ll just cost me bus fare and a meal or two. Really really looking forward to it!
16 Thursday Jun 2011
Posted in food & drink, friends, restaurants, spain, summer, tapas, travel, trips, work
So what the heck.
Have been invited to Vejer to participate in a cooking class headed by the fabulous Annie B, and I am to stay over in the “yellow guest suite”, which sounds delightful. The next day Annie is going to drive me down to Zahara de los Atunes where we will have a delicious lunch in the village before she drops me off in Atlanterra so I can get down to work.
Said work involves taking photos and lots of notes about my Seville client’s sister restaurant in Zahara, which I already know well from my visit there two years ago. You may recall the time my friend Agustín asked me to look after their old pup Mini while they were away in Mexico. Not sure if this time I’ll be able to stay over at Agustín’s because he’s having work done on the place, but if not my client Charo says she can put me up. So why not?
And since you’re probably wondering… no, it never occurs to anyone to pay me extra for going out of town or spending days at events with them. At least, not so far. And so far I am more or less okay with that because I am trying to prove myself to them, that I really am a valuable asset. And, it must be said, a lot of the extra work is actually quite fun. But it doesn’t pay the rent.
There will be another trip to Zahara in early July – just overnight again – to make a video of a wine and food pairing evening with two of my clients. Which I think is going to be amazing. Stay tuned…
06 Monday Jun 2011
Tags
azahar-sevilla.com, hotels, restaurants, sevilla, travel, website
Here it is, revamped and updated and all that jazz. Well, almost. But quite a lot of work has been done on my azahar-sevilla.com page and I wanted to ask for some feedback. So many people have told me that I should get people to advertise on Sevilla Tapas, but that is really my own personal project and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m being paid to put tapas bars and restaurants on that blog.
But this information page about Sevilla is open to advertisers simply because it’s got such a variety of information in it that hotels, restaurants and whoever else wants to are welcome to place an ad. At over 500 visits a day I reckon it’s an attractive advertising option for local businesses.
So what do you think? Bear in mind that not all of the pages are finished (those will be obvious to spot) but I’d love to know if there are any glaring omissions or just anything that doesn’t seem to work. If you were coming to Sevilla for a holiday, what would you really want to know about before you arrived?
11 Wednesday May 2011
Posted in food & drink, friends, television, travel, video
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So there I was watching an episode of Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey the other night, and the Sri Lankan curries looked so amazing I just had to tweet about them, which started up a twitter conversation between myself, @WeeRascal and @Seville_Writer, both of whom have met Rick Stein and used words like passionate, honest, charming and genuine to describe him.
I had to admit that I’d never heard of Rick Stein before watching this series, which is a wonderful combination of glorious travelogue images and amazing food porn, along with lots of good information about the local dishes, geography and history.
So imagine my complete surprise yesterday when the doorbell rang and I received an Amazon delivery of Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes, courtesy of that rascally friend of mine. I shall have to find a way of “getting him back” when he next visits (possibly in June) but meanwhile I have just finished watching the first segment of the first episode, which took place in Corsica. Next up … Sardinia. I am totally loving this!
casa azahar 