Category: notes

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:

Ashland Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival (Amateur Traveler Podcast)
So Close, Yet So Far: Let Me Pass Through CDG, S’il Vous Plait (Travel Blogs)
The Burma Road (TravelBlogger.net)
Amsterdam: Happy Birthday Rembrandt (Shortcut)
Cuisine from Spain – Garlic Prawns (Notes from Spain)
Nevada Petroglyph Tours (Triptock)
From a Remote Location of the Southern Hemisphere (Jet Set Lara)
The 1906 San Francisco Quake, Virtually (Womantraveler)
Yankee Stadium primer (NewYorkology)

Well, a trip to the local supermarket soon showed us just what you guys are up against when it comes to quick tapas fixes over here in the UK. ‘Microwave Chorizo Balls’? They didn’t look too appealing. Over three pounds sterling for a few stuffed olives? Well, at least they threw in a tiny earthenware dish for free.

Unperturbed we decided to buy a fish, sea bass, to recreate Marina’s recent podcast for my family. Trying to explain how to open it out, so that we could cook it on its back, drew a look of baffled bewilderment from the lady at the fish counter. ‘Just gut it’, we said. Then she lopped off the head, sacrilege in a Spanish supermarket, but understandable in squeamish Britain I suppose.

Still, for an ex-pat back home for a few days, there are wonderous things to be found in the local Waitrose. Thai green curry, Indian korma, good old British sausages. The Spanish selection may not have been up to much, but you can’t beat a British supermarket when it comes to oven-ready world cuisine.

Notes from Spain 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…

New Orleans to Host French Quarter Festival (TripTock)
Chocoholics by the Bay (Woman Traveler)
Episode 36 – Egypt (Amateur Traveler Podcast)
Bergamo, a City of Surprises (Travel Blogs)
Copenhagen: Madonna plays where? (Shortcut)
The view from historic Olana in Hudson River Valley (NewYorkology)

We have decided to merge Cuisine from Spain, Notes in Spanish and Books on Spain back into Notesfromspain.com. Both the Cuisine and the Spanish podcasts will carry on as before, with their own podcast feeds, but all posts, comments etc for these two shows will now be posted here along with the Notes from Spain podcasts.

I know that it was only recently that we seperated these off into their own sites, but we decided that having three or four different sites running was too confusing, and a lot of hard work. It makes much more sense to centralise everything here, into one big wonderful site about Spain, with three different podcasts and loads of exciting news, food and views from Spain.

This ties in with a new look for Notesfromspain.com, designed to liven the site up and make all the different sections more accessible. We hope you like it!

The Flickr pool is coming along really well, thanks to all who have posted. I promised that we’d try to pick a favourite at the end of the month, but it’s kind of hard, there are some really great pics on there! Any favourites you’d like to recommend?

Technorati Tags: spain, Flickr

Check this out on Google Video…

Last night, lying in bed wondering how I had managed to spend so much of the weekend in front of the computer again, I made a new rule. This machine shall not be turned on for at least one hour after getting up every morning, and that hour shall be used to make a lap of the Retiro park.

And I did it! A brisk 40 minute walk before tuning into the pc/net has made all the difference to the day already. I feel like I have walked to work, yet here I am back at home not ten metres from where I got out of bed.

The other rule was that I shall turn it off by 9.00 every night… let’s see how that goes. This working from home business is a real learning curve… learning how to actually work, not procrastinate the day away. There are whole websites out there dedicated to this kind of thing – anyone else out there working from home?

Technorati Tags: working, home

I know the forum has been running for just a week, but we have already upgraded it to even better software. It’s now much easier to do things like upload photos and add links, plus the user options are vastly improved. You’ll need to update your bookmarks too as the URL has changed slightly (the addition of an ‘s’), to:

http://www.notesfromspain.com/forums

Users who had already registered before today will have to re-configure their password and their profiles (sorry!), we have emailed all of you with instructions. Any problems just contact us through the usual channels. Thanks and see you in there!

In a response to a question on how to post photos in our new forum, I have set up a Flickr group for Notes from Spain. This is a place to share your images of Spain with us and the rest of the web, so do please join in and add some images to the group. I’ll post the best picture (in my humble opinion -or maybe I’ll work out a way we can all vote) at the end of every month here on the blog, perhaps we can even get a competition for the best ever going later on in the year.

You will need a flickr account, which is free and easy to sign up for.

This also provides a great way of adding photos to your posts in the ‘Your Notes from Spain‘ section of the forum, that we really hope you’ll use to tell us about your experiences of Spain.

P.S. Resident ex-pats welcome too!