The Alpujarras are a magical mountain range beyond Granada and the Sierra Nevada… See more photos here… Podcast to follow soon…
Author: Ben
Categories
If a tree falls down in an off-line forest…
…does it matter?
And other questions for the future-now:
Is a blog only a blog if someone reads it? Is a musician only a musician if he has a Myspace (substitute any other social network) page? And here’s the real question: Is a word only a word if it’s indexed by Google?
From: The possibility of unperceived off-line existence.
Points for the most philosophical answer – and I’ve got a philosophy degree you know, so I’ll know if you’re faking it 😉
Pretty, blond, pouting child, next to the word ‘Bimbo’, above the phrase ‘For a more tender world’ – can’t see this ad for Bimbo breads going down too well in the English-speaking world!
More and more of these are springing up across the landscapes of Spain… I think they are rather beautiful when found in small numbers like this (these are near the vilage of Lanjaron, in the Alpujarras). Marina pointed out that they might be seen as being even more beautiful still, if you consider that they are doing a lot to safeguard the environment as they spin slowly round…
Categories
Gone fishing…
…for podcasts, photos, and things!
Back in a couple of days, and in the meantime, we highly recommend you dive into the wonderful Notes from Spain forums!
Photo – fish shop in Lavapies
Categories
Great Madrid Escape 2008!
In April 2007, 30 intrepid Notes from Spain forum members came over to Madrid for a wonderful weekend of great food, drink, and general Spain-loving fun. It was such a success that we decided that we just had to organise another ‘Great Madrid Escape’ in 2008. Are you up for it?
I often think the best way to write a blog post is to imagine that you have an audience of one, or that one day, at least one person will benefit from whatever you are writing. And this piece of advice might make a big difference to someone’s life in Spain one day:
If you are going to set up a business in Spain, get a gestor to do it for you.
Don’t under any circumstances try to go through all the paperwork and different steps involved on your own. We did, for a saving of approximately 500 Euros, and we wish we hadn’t. In fact a large part of my recent burn out was undoubtedly caused by our decision to do most of the work of setting up Notes from Spain S.L. on our own.
Like any other bureaucratic nightmare here (and there are many!), setting up your own business in Spain requires an endless shuffle around different offices of inconvenience (to coin a new, appropriate phrase), interminable waits, and inevitable errors (filling out the wrong form, in the wrong order, and having to jump back two steps to get everything back on track again).
Despite receiving excellent advice and help in filling out the appropriate forms from the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, it still took us around 3 months to cover all the bases, and in the end we still needed a gestor to complete the final steps. I’d estimate we lost at least a week’s work doing things that a gestor could have done for us, removing immense stress in the process.
So what is a gestor and where do you find one?
A gestor is like a glorified acccountant. He or she will charge fixed fees to complete certain jobs, such as setting up your business, getting your driving license renewed, and doing your monthly accounts. If you run a business here then you have to get one eventually anyway, to process and register your yearly balance of accounts for example, so you might as well get them to do all the hard work for you from stage one.
Where do you find a good one? We found ours by asking Ana, the girl who runs the photocopying shop around the corner. She seems nice, trustworthy, discerning, and runs a good business. Sure enough, she put us on to a local gestoria (gestor‘s office) where unbelievably efficient women of a certain age process our monthly receipts with a minimum of fuss. They tell us what we can get away with deducting tax-wise (lunches, fuel, etc), what income we should be paying ourselves every month, and what forms we may have forgotten to fill out (actually they fill them out for us, we just turn up and sign – what joy!)
OK, to recap: if you are going to set up a business here in Spain then make sure you get a gestor to do it – it might cost you around 500 euros more (bringing the total cost of setting up a business in Spain to around 1,000 euros – you have to pay the Notario for some official paperwork as well, for example), but it’s worth every centimo in time and stress savings. To find a good Gestor or Gestoria ask around in respectable local businesses, or ask other ex-pats who are already running their own show.
One final piece of advice, if you are setting up an on-line business in Spain, make sure the Gestor is prepared to learn about this side of the business world as well. Most will never have worked on this side of things before and may have absolutely no clue about what Paypal is, for example. Make sure they are interested in finding out!
There we go, hopefully someone, somewhere, some day, will benefit from this piece of advice!
Categories
Classic South of Watford
Categories
I absolutely forbid…
..myself from starting any more blogs. Punto pelota.
Wandering off topic again (“topic” meaning living, working, culture, traveling in Spain etc), but I had a totally revolutionary past few days, rebooting completely and, who knows, someone might find this list useful one day. So…
Last week I was mentally, physically and inspirationally 100% burnt out. I couldn’t imagine ever managing to come up with another interesting blog post or podcast idea, and the mountain of life/paperwork/un-fun crap that needed sorting out seemed insurmountable. I was wound up as tight as I’d ever been in my life, moody, snappy, obsessive about all sorts of ridiculous things, complaining all day, and generally pissed off.
How did this happen? Well, if you really want to know, I would say it was a combination of: trying to keep on top of far too many projects and streams of information at once, never taking a proper break, and quite a bit of latent emotional stress and mental exhaustion related to the death of my mother earlier this year. (Sorry for the heavy stuff at the end there.)
Then I heard someone mention the word ‘burn out’ on a podcast, and I thought, ‘that’s what I’ve got!’ I googled the phrase just to make sure of course, and yup, all the symptoms fitted. If you’ve got this far and you’re thinking, hmmm, burn out, that sounds about right, then maybe this list might come in useful. This is what I did to reboot, and how around a week later I feel about 100 times better:
Ben’s top 10 12 ways to reboot after total burn out / stress collapse (in no particular order):
1. Take a 90 minute to 2 hour walk every day in the park or countryside with enlightening radio/podcasts in your mp3 player/iPod. I was recently led to/discovered the following podcasts, and they were great, enlightening, inspirational, interesting: Front Row Highlights from the BBC (good solid BBC cultural interviews), NPR’s All Songs Considered (lovely music podcast), WNYC’s Radio Lab (philosophical sciencey stuff). Important: walk very slowly, don’t rush, and for at least 10 minutes of the walk, turn off the iPod and just enjoy looking at those magnificent trees/hills/people/fields…
2. Have at least one long hot bath a day. Have two if you want 🙂
3. Stop living and working according to your conception of other people’s expectations of you. E.g. “I must write 5 blog posts a week, people expect it”… Who cares what people might expect of you, you’re burnt out! Take your own limitations into account for once! There are no rules about what you have to do. Do what you can for a while!
4. Take some exercise. (I didn’t get beyond the slow walks, but even that helped no end). Oh, and stop drinking for a while. You can’t reboot with a hangover, even a tiny one. You need to wake up in the morning feeling GOOD! (Eat lots of really nice, healthy food too!)
5. Remove as much information ‘noise’ as you can from your life. I realised that certain activities lead to that nervous knee-tapping thing that nervy people get on first dates. You know, where your knee starts involuntarily bouncing up and down? I realised that trying to read through the 40 or so RSS feeds I was subscribed to on Google Reader caused this as soon as I opened the page, so I wiped the lot and removed Google Reader from my browser bookmarks. I stopped checking Facebook 5 times a day (by removing that from my browser’s bookmarks too), and only checked email once or twice a day. If you notice a tell-tale sign that something makes you agitated, remove its ass!
6. Destroy your “to do” list! Looking at my to-do list (in a text file on my computer) led to instant melt down, so I wiped the lot. About 100 items deleted in one fell swoop. I’ll remember all the important stuff, the rest is gone, the world goes on, hurray!
7. Get up later whenever you can. Just for a while. You can get up super early again next week, when you feel better.
8. Go to the cinema. I saw the wonderful Death at a Funeral. Laughed so hard I cried!
9. Enjoy music and sofas, at the same time. Or your cat. Or garden. All immensely therapeutic stuff.
10. Work out what burnt you out and what you are going to do about it. Do that thing less or more efficiently. How are you going to make it fun again? Can’t? Make changes, no matter how impossible that might seem, or how big they might have to be. Can’t advise much on this one, only you’ll know what to do.
11. Get others to help out with things that need doing while you reboot. A million thanks to everyone who sent in posts on the worst of Spain last week to keep this blog going.
12. Take up the guitar! OK, that’s what I’m doing, but I bet there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, learn, start. Make time for it. It feels so good to be learning something different and new again, and something off-line! I’ve always wanted to do something musical and at last I am. What about you?
Well, that lot worked for me, I feel pretty energised again. (But cautious to keep applying the above for, well, forever would probably be a good idea…)
Any thoughts?
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 