I spent July and parts of August and September 2024 bouncing around Spain: Madrid x3, Valencia, Barcelona x2, Ibiza, León. Summer in Europe is exhausting! Madrid Valencia Alicante Barcelona Ibiza Leon
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I have heard it said that you either like Barcelona or Madrid, never both. Each city has its own charms, culture, personality, food and history but are uniquely distinct — so distinct that if you like the style of either, it probably means you won’t be into the other. I have found this to be true of other country’s cities too; e.g., Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, Los Angeles and New York, USA, Munich and Berlin, Germany, Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. Well I really like Madrid. Unfortunately, it’s so freaking expensive to find housing there that I can’t spend as much time as I’d like (months!). This year though I was able to find a week there before heading back to North America. I was again working too much, so my routine consisted of working from the hotel lobby where I was stationed in front of a big window where I watched passersby while pounding on my computer. The highlights of my trip were meeting with my friend Richard and his family who hosted me for a dinner in their house in the suburbs for a night. I met the family while I was living in the Maldives in 2020. Every […]
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I have wanted to explore the north of Spain for a few years, since it has been one of the many places that is still a blank slate to me. I was looking for a place that was off the beaten path a bit, not so touristy and famous and hopefully a little smaller. Well I when a friend recommended I consider Léon — I took a look and liked what I saw after doing some research on accommodations and my initial impressions of the town. It’s very historic with a lot of old buildings and monuments to famous knights that gives it a romantic quality. Ancient walls and this famous cathedral sit at the heart of its city center which is so small that it’s quite charming. Only 130,000 people live in Leon and I have no idea why it isn’t a larger city. It was founded in 74 AD by the Romans – making it nearly 2,000 years old. Since that time its culture and personality have changed through each of the time periods that succeeded. Even though the city is small and historic there is an artsy feel to it, a sort of creativity that you can […]
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My niece was spending a semester studying University in Barcelona, Spain and so of course I wanted to go visit her while she was there. I visited Barcelona just once before, in 2017, but just for a few days so I was excited to return again and hopefully see more and do more around that city that increasingly seems to be one of the most popular places to live in Spain, and Europe. Well unfortunately, my job didn’t accommodate my intentions as much as I had hoped. I ended up working from the hotel lobby for my entire duration in Barcelona; well most of it. I took a Thursday off since my niece had the day off from school, and I rented a car so that we could drive an hour and half east to check out the beaches around Girona, which were on her list of places to see. We collected beach glass from the sand which happened to be more fun than it had any right to be. But the most fun was spending a day with my niece, just the two of us. In the evening we met my friend, Silvia, for dinner in El Poblenou, the […]
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I first visited Madrid in February 2017 for just a couple of days. I remember enjoying the food, culture, and architecture -- it was the first time I had visited Spain; my instinct told me Madrid is a city that matches my style. It seems that the universe also desired that I return to Madrid. While living in the Maldives last year, I met many friendly Spanish vacationers who passed through the resort I was living on. Surprising to me, the Maldives is a popular destination for tourists living in Madrid and Barcelona owing to travel promotions from their international airlines.
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I’ve been terrible at Spanish for an entire year now, starting back in Buenos Aires. Since then I’ve lived in other Spanish-speaking countries: Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador — each with distinct dialects, idioms, accents and slang. In an attempt to describe the style of Spanish I speak currently — imagine a three-year-old child speaking broken English utilizing a haphazard, incongruous assortment of accents: Scottish, southern, Boston, and cockney. The child can tell you what he wants or needs and ask simple questions effectively but if asked a question containing a word he hasn’t learned yet (his vocabulary is around 100) he’ll just look at you with cow-eyes and a blank stare of confusion. That’s pretty much where I’m at. While in Spain I added a new verbal weapon with which to assault native Spanish speakers — the fabled Spanish “lisp”. In Barcelona (and apparently much of Spain to my surprise) some consonants, such as “c” are softly pronounced as a “th” turning “gracias” into an audible “grathias”. Let me tell you right now that depending on your level of aggravation, it could drive you nuts. It drove me nuts. Madrid impressed me on account of what I would refer to as its […]
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