I’d sign up for a residency spot at Cortijada Los Gázquez’s Joya program:

“The studio at Los Gazquez is beautiful. The atmosphere changes with the weather. Sitting in the space, viewing the low clouds floating through the mountains, or birds of prey circling high over-head, is an absorbing experience.” – Rebecca Fortnum, who was there in June.

Cortijada Los Gázquez: High on my list of places to get to soon…

Edit: I just said in an email to Simon, that what they are doing in Los Gázquez corresponds to a long-standing dream of mine, to run a creative retreat in Spain. That’s why I keep recommending them even though I’ve never been there or met these guys – you can just tell that they are doing it right, and with the right spirit and energies, and I can’t wait to get there one day to enjoy the reality myself.

The poster, for those that aren’t yet amazing at Spanish, reads, “Stop The Crisis, Start A Company”!

Just the ticket I’d say… the country is in economic ruin, you’ve just lost your job, things are looking pretty bleak… I know, why not start a company! After all, that’s easy in Spain – hardly any paperwork involved, and you only need €3,000 in cash or usable assets lying around to get going!

This should solve the country’s economic gloom in no time

We were meant to be in Asturias today, checking out places that we might want to live one day, but energies dictated otherwise, and we’ve had to put it off for now. But we’ll get there in the end, to that quiet mountainous province in the north, where the landscapes are so beautiful they just make you want to dance…

(Click pics to enlarge, a bit)

To celebrate a change in the blog decor here at NotesinSpanish.com (and the fact that I can now display much bigger photos!), here’s an old favourite from the archives, does anyone know where it is, and what this town is famous for? Hit the comments link above!

Happy Friday! It turns out that once we ignore the external pressures of image-makers and lifestyle marketers, we are all a lot more successful than we thought we were… “make sure our ideas of success are our own” – Quite right!

Have a great weekend, feel free to comment as ever, how successful are you feeling these days?

Casa Mingo, Madrid - click to enlarge

If only all restaurants in Spain were like this! It is classic (hasn’t changed in decades – neither have the waiters, who, by the way, are friendly!), opens at 11 am, and is non-smoking!

What this means it that we can go there with our baby and eat with him before 1pm! Seeing as he has a siesta at 2pm, there is practically no other restaurant in Spain we can eat lunch at these days – oh, and all the others are mostly smoky too, so 100 more points to Asturian Cider House Extraordinaire Casa Mingo for keeping the nicotine out as well.

(Meanwhile, here’s an amusing article in El Mundo where bar and restaurant owners weep for their certain future of economic ruin if the Health Minister continues with her evil plans to remove smoking from every bar and restaurant in Spain: ‘Nos arruinan a todos’. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think every bar and restaurant in the UK, France, Italy etc went to the wall when smoking was banned there!)

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be another anti-smoking post, just a message from a parent thankful to have a clean atmosphere to take his son out to an early lunch in – “Ole por Casa Mingo!”

(How to get there etc: links)

P.S. Oh, and this photo of the best Asturian Chorizo in Madrid is for Jose/Valenciason – I think Gary would like it too:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[Download MP3]

Ben and Marina record a new podcast about the battle for our baby’s language skills, why we want to leave Madrid, the trouble with summer in Madrid, and baby timetables in Spain.

Comments welcome!

A few months ago I was interviewed by a terribly nice bloke called Graham who lives and works as an estate agent in Valencia (you may know him too from his many useful comments on this blog).

Well, Graham interviewed me and a handful of other expats who have managed to make something of a success of this whole ‘new life in Spain’ business, and after 5 months hard work, he has come up with a really interesting audio book that I would like to heartily recommend (and I don’t get any kind of commission for doing so – I just think this is great stuff!)

The thing is, all the people he interviews are so nice and friendly! And their Spain stories are so interesting, that it’s just a pleasure to listen to – the stories are inspiring too, as these are mostly people who came here with nothing, and ended up making a damn good life for themselves.

Get hold of the audiobook here (and get inspired!)

Marina, my Madrileña wife, has a theory: that there is less OCD in Spain than the UK.

She bases this idea on the fact that she knows quite a lot of people connected to my circle in the UK who complain openly about having OCD, or knowing people that have had OCD, and, in all honesty, her husband (me) has been through some slightly more obsessive-compulsive periods of life than is strictly useful, helpful or necessary.

But she really can’t think of more than about one of our circle of acquaintances in Spain that falls into the OCD typology. Same socio-economic group, over a similar range of ages (teens to old age), yet only one OCD case here compared to, well, muchos in the UK.

My theory is that this just isn’t true, that it’s just a) more fashionable to admit to having OCD in the UK (as insane as that might sound, and as insulting as it might seem to anyone that has been through the hell of it… like me), and b) that the Brits are just less bothered about admitting such things when they do happen.

(And when I say fashionable, clearly I don’t mean it’s cool, but it’s like ADD – no-one every really mentioned either of these afflictions until a few years ago, and now everyone is happy enough to be labeled with them – in Spain I don’t think OCD has entered the lingual currency enough to be had by enough people yet… am I making any sense?!)

Certainly there are enough people with mental problems in Spain, our psychiatrist friend who works for the social services here and deals with a huge number of schizophrenics, chronic depresessives and drug psychosis cases constantly contests to that.

But is it possible that Marina is right, that the Spanish are less obsessive? That they are just more… well… chilled out in general, and as such less prone to obsessive compulsive tendencies? Or am I right in thinking that OCD, like ADD, just isn’t a recognised part of the mental health landscape here, yet bubbles away under the surface to the same degree that it does out in the open in the UK

Thoughts welcome, about Spain, the UK, or where you come from too…

I recently received an email with an article that you may find interesting. From investorsinsight.com comes this, “Spain: The Hole In Europe’s Balance Sheet “. It makes for a depressing read, but much of it makes very good sense:

“We believe that Spain is a disaster waiting to happen [and] is set for a long, painful deflation that will manifest itself via a very high unemployment level for an industrialized economy, a real estate collapse and general banking insolvencies… Spain had the mother of all housing bubbles. To put things in perspective, Spain now has as many unsold homes as the US, even though the US is about six times bigger. Spain is roughly 10% of the EU GDP, yet it accounted for 30% of all new homes built since 2000 in the EU. Most of the new homes were financed with capital from abroad, so Spain’s housing crisis is closely tied in with a financing crisis… Spanish banks, in our view, are now facing a very bleak outlook. Spain’s unemployment rate reached over 17%; there are now four million unemployed Spaniards and over one million families with not a single person employed in the family. “

Read the full article here, and let me know what you think…