Someone recently suggested in our Spain forum that this picture is worrying on several levels. Primarily, what the hell is going on with Mickey and the spangley yellow jacket?! Whether Mickey is there or not, I strongly suggest avoiding Sol and all adjacent shopping streets on Saturday afternoons… unless you particularly enjoy being hustled around [...]
While some people are still heating their flats with individual bottles of Butane gas, most of the buildings in our barrio have central heating – meaning that one big old boiler in the basement pumps hot water around the radiators in the whole building. The upside is pretty powerful heating, the downside is that you [...]
There’s nothing like finding a view over the roofs of Madrid… This one is from a roof terrace high up in the Barrio of Noviciado. The owner of the flat attached to the view told me that before they lived there it had been inhabited by quite an interesting group, consisting of a trampy old [...]
…and I thought that these days it was only country folk that ordered their gas by the bottle. Apparently not, as the Butanero can still be seen driving his lorry around Madrid. These men are herculean super-machos, capable of hoisting two full gas bottles onto their shoulders and climbing six flights of stairs (I imagine [...]
Madripedia launched this week, joining the ever increasing ranks of wikis out there on the net. This should be interesting to watch, especially if it enjoys the success of Cordobapedia, which now has nearly 4,000 articles on board!
The more Madrid blogs the better far as I am concerned. I’ll get onto the English lot soon, but in the mean time, how about practicing a bit of Spanish while you keep up to date on the city? Es Madrid no Madriz has a good selection of what’s on, food and drink, and general [...]
I’ve noticed an increasing amount of graffiti all over the capital recently. I don’t even know if the tags scrawled all over every bare surface can be dignified with the term ‘graffiti’ – there certainly isn’t any art to most of it. The worse cases are found in the barrio of Malasaña (as in the [...]
Never has a street been better named. Calle del Desengaño – “Eye-Opening Street”, or “Disappointment Street” (map). Just ten steps back from Gran Via, the city’s biggest shopping strip, some might say it has has come a long way in the last few years – at least the junkies have gone. In their place are [...]
