Category: notes

While a few Spain bloggers have been kind enough to contribute to our Top 5 series, you lot have come up with some excellent alternatives in our forum competition. The brief was easy, just produce a Top 5 list connected in any way to Spain. And the winner is… Steve W with this excellent list:

Top 5 “only in Spain” moments:

1. Nine people in a hire car, bumping down a track to a beach bar at 4am.
2. Fireworks and marching bands at 8am for 7 days in a row.
3. 72 people injured in a bull running. “Same time tomorrow chaps?”
4. Kalimotxo – red wine and coke.
5. Brandy for breakfast before work.

It sums up all the madness, disregard for health and safety, and general predisposition to having a good time that we love so much about this country. What would you add to this list?

Thanks go to all the other excellent entries, in no particular order (and I hope I have you all!):

Top Five best mistakes made by my Spanish students, by Barca
Top Five strange but true vignettes of Spanish life, by Barca
Top Five best times of the year, by Greytop
Top Five Significant Spaniards, by Marbella
Top Five Things a Spaniard would never say, by Marbella
Top Five Podcasts from Spain, by Valenciason
Top Five Tourist Activities in Spain, by Valenciason

Thanks to all of you. Steve W wins a Notes from Spain T-Shirt… but will have to be patient as they are still in the design phase!

See you in the forum…

We have decided to launch the NFS Newsletter so that you can keep abreast of what’s new at Notes from Spain! We hope to publish this once a month, and include news about the site, highlights from the month gone by and the month ahead, and hopefully there will be a monthly competition in the pipeline!

The first newsletter will be out at the beginning of September, and will include great news about changes to the Notes in Spanish podcast (all good, don’t worry!)

To subscribe, just enter your e-mail address in the form at the bottom of the left-hand column of this page. Your details will be kept totally private, and you can unsubscribe at any time. And if you have any ideas about what you’d like to see in the NFS newsletter, let us know below!

For those of you that remember the India trip I did in February, I have a photo feature on Lonely Planet – it’s on the front page today, but if its gone by the time you see this, then there is also a direct link. Did you ever hear the podcast?

This site is a member of the travel blog network at Blogads, a group of the best independent travel blogs on the web. Check out some of this week’s headlines from other travel blogs in the network:

The Land of King Krak (Travel Blogs)
London: Mad for the Soccer Wives (Shortcut)
Fog City Survival Kit (Womantraveler)

Nadal wins the French Open (pics here), Alonso celebrates another F1 victory at Silverstone… Can they make it a triple on Wednesday?

This is just a quick hello, update kind of a post. First of all, an apology for the slow-down in the rate of podcast output recently. Over the last two months we have been coming back and forth to the UK a lot to visit a member of my family who has been very unwell, and this has made it difficult to record as many podcasts as we would like, as often as we would like. Thanks for sticking around, life is slowly getting back to normal again.

So worry not, all the Notes from Spain podcasts are definitely here to stay! We have a new Notes in Spanish ready to go out as soon as I can finish the transcript (hopefully tomorrow), and we have endless plans for all three podcasts and the website. The forums are going so much better than I first imagined and I want to thank everyone that is involved in keeping them so busy – as I hoped they are turning into a really interesting resource for anyone that wants to know about all aspects of Spain – a perfect complement to the blog and the podcasts.

More tomorrow… ¡Hasta entonces! Ben

We get quite a few e-mails and requests for podcasts about studying in Spain for a year or more, maybe as part of a university course. Derek (roadrunner08), for example, asks in the forums:

“Myself and a few others will be studying in Spain for the 2007-2008 school year and we are beginning our initial preparations. As all of us are cookie-cutter American college kids we really don’t know anything about Spain beside what can be read in travel books. I was hoping that someone could inform us on what locations would be the best to study abroad, maybe strengths and weaknesses of some popular study abroad cities? (i.e. Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Salamanca…)

I would love to hear some personal experiences, i.e. something that frommer’s guide couldn’t tell you about Madrid, Seville, etc.”

If you can help, then do reply to his post in the forums! (You have to register to post of reply, but this is just to keep the spammers away – we will never pass your email address on to anyone else).

‘La Sexta’, the Spanish TV channel with the rights to show the world cup in Spain, has commissioned ‘El Koala’ to rewrite one of his chart-topping songs, to provide a fitting theme. Here it is, “Opa vamos a por el Mundial” (Let’s win the world cup!) (direct link):

And here, in turn, is a (much better) overdub/rewrite, showing the real faith the Spaniards have in the chances of their national team. Presenting, “Opá, no viavé el mundial” (I won’t be watching the World Cup!) (direct link):

I’m surprised the World Cup hasn’t been mentioned in the forums yet, oh well, here goes!