Never knew...

...getting married in Spain was so complicated! When I finally work out how to actually tie the knot I'll do a post on it as finding clear information online in almost impossible :-)

HAPPY New Year - and some resolutions

A little late - but surely it's never too late for a little well-wishing? This year instead of my hugely ambitious and bucket-list like list of promises to self and others my resolutions are quite simple and practical - which will hopefully make them more achievable :-) Ever the future-planner I wrote this list back in November and here they are below and an honest review of whether I'm actually sticking to them or not;

• Do yoga at least once a week and stretches at home - I've started yoga again this week so maybe I will achieve this one!
• Run twice a week - err have had a cold for the past two weeks so haven't being going out with D. But with my new running shoes from Laister (the place to gor for any Madrileños thinking of taking up running - they'll do a biometric test to see what shoes you need) and super-discounted Nike leggings from Privalia at least I'll look the part when I get back in the swing of things ;P
• Do a facial once a week - not doing this but thanks to a new daily beauty routine suggested by Cosmetic's Cop Paula Begoun my skin has improved noticeably. While I haven't bought any of her own products I highly recommend her scientifically-based reviews and her advice for different skin types found here. Clinque's Turnaround Concentrate is working for me despite the mixed reviews here.
• Get a gynae check once a year - sorry to discuss this in a mixed forum, but this is important, enough said.
• Bake once a month - haven't. baked. one. measly. cake :-(
• Cook a healthy 'green'/eastern recipe once a week - have fared better on this one. D and I went to the Eastern supermarket in Principe Pio a couple of weeks back and stocked up on dumplings, spring-roll wrappers, lemon grass, fish sauce and more. The prices are great. Made my own spring rolls the other week with a bit of help from Youtube (green and eastern but deep frying isn't exactly healthy!)
• Take lunch to work twice a week - managing to do this thanks to cooking up big batches of one-pot meals at the weekend. Lentils and cocido (Madrileño chickpea stew) have been in my lunchbox recently.
• Cook at least one thing at the weekend that can be eaten for dinner during the week - ditto packed lunches.
• Always have healthy work snacks on the go - sorry to obsess about what I eat at work but I'm there for so many hours that I think it's worth it! Hmmm, not doing so well on this one. Am taking in wholegrain bread to make toast drizzled with olive oil for a second breakfast but not doing any vegetable crudites, nuts etc for the afternoon. On a more positive note am managing to drink more water and making huge mugs of delicous organic Yogi Tea Green Chai. This company have an excellent selection of herbal teas - the best in my humble opinion.
• Make my own cleaning products - err I don't remember how I got so obsessed with this! Probably after reading about how toxic and nastly regular cleaning products are. Anyhow after much research about how to do this I came unstuck when trying to get the necessary 'raw ingredients' in Spanish droguerieas. Bicarb, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide etc have all been easy to come by, but liquid Castile soap - a Spanish invention I would imagine from the name - has proved to be completely elusive!! Plenty of places sell Castile floor wash, clothes deterget etc but no-one seems to stock just plain old Castile soap in liquid format... So please, if anyone knows of a stockist let me know!
• Do something creative; sew/draw up house plans, etc - We have been on the lookout for a sewing machine for some time but have found it hard to find good brands and specialist shops (El Corte Inglés do not have a good selection). There is a specialist shop in Embajadores but really don't recommed it; the owner was pushy, rude, wouldn't even let us take notes about the models, and will tell you the only good machines are his particular brand. Anyway, the sewing-machine hunting has been put aside and my time has been taken up with another creative project - wedding planning! My lovely David proposed at Christmas and we're tying the knot this summer :-) Will post more on this later but I can say now that we're going to have a small civil ceremony (about 25 people) in the countryside. We don't have much time to plan so it's going to be an intense few months! Will be posting more on this soon - needless to say I'm very excited :-)

Well, hope you had a Happy New Year, and thanks for reading my resolutions despite them being an unashamed rouse for announcing my wedding!

This summer

I've finally got round to writing about our trip to Panama this summer, so here goes!
We started out in Panama City – and it was nothing like I expected: towering skyscrapers, fancy cars and malls bigger than anything I've seen in the UK. This contrasted sharply with the poverty and tumble-down houses seen in less-priviledged parts of the city. The most interesting part of the capital for me was the ‘casco ‘viejo’ or the old part of town which is being done up and experiencing something of a cultural revival, with a mix of little boutiques, European-style cafes and prettily painted and flower decked colonial houses.

From PC we made a trip to ‘La Chorerra’ where D’s grandparents live – it was so nice to see him reunited with them and to see that they were so lively and in such good shape. Than, we drove across Panama (an-oh-so-slightly terrifying experience!), stopping off with D’s uncle on the way before settling in the highlands of Boquete for a few days. Here we relaxed in the gorgeous Rancho de Caldera, went on coffee tours and cloud-forest safaris and saw a Quetzal (apparently the 2nd rarest bird in the world - no idea what the 1st is?!). Here's the view from our 'rancho'...

Next stop – the Caribbean! What surprised me about Bocas de Toro wasn’t so much the pristine palm fringed beaches, but the sheer amount of wildlife, which I just wasn’t expecting. Dolphins, sloths, colourful frogs, toucans, parrots, starfish, monkeys and more surrounded us. And perhaps the most memorable part of our days in Bocas was when we got to see giant sea turtles laying their eggs one night and then help recently-hatched baby sea turtles make their way to sea. The next photo is of the secluded beach just steps from our room.

From Bocas we drove back east through Panama and bid farewel to los abuelos. 2 weeks really wasn't enough to sample all that Panama has to offer - but here is my list of 5 unmissable things to do in Panama:

1. Eat, eat, eat: sancocho - a traditional type of chicken soup is delicious as are the fried plantains - patacones, ceviche made with Panama's national fish 'corvina' is yummy too. Also try the raspados from a roadside trolley - watch the seller grate fresh ice into your cup and top it off with a tropical juice of your choice – Passion fruit was a favourite of mine.

 Lobster on the Amador peninsula near Panama City (Los Bucaneros restaurant)

Ceviche at Amador

Raspados in the Casco Viejo

2. Buy a Mola - an indigenous indian embroidered panel that can be used as a wall hanging or sewn into a cushions, bag etc.

Source

3. Climb Mount Baru and see both the Pacific and the Caribbean sea from the same vantage point. I'm sorry to say we didn't do this due to the poor visibility at this time of the year, but I'm told it's well worth the climb (which can be done partially in car).

4. Get up close and personal with the wildlife

Red frog (the hand is mine)

5. The Panama Canal - lunch at the Miraflores Lock Visitor Centre while you watch the boats go  by is an unforgettable experience - the huge ships look like whole apartment blocks floating by and the food is excellent.

As we're saving these days I don't think I'll be going on any exotic trips for a while, but I have a weekend in Merida coming up and another in Galicia so I can't complain :-)

Panama preview

The reason I haven’t written in so long is that we’ve been in Panama on holiday! We had a wonderful time – the scenery, nature, food and people were just lovely. It’s my first day at work today so I haven’t managed to post as yet but will write about the trip and post photos at the weekend. In the meantime here’s a preview snap and hope you had a lovely summer :-)

Panama City Skyline

30+ Warning a mega-post

This morning, and with my 34th birthday just 2 days away I finally got round to writing this post – one that I’ve been meaning to do since I turned 30 but that somehow I never found the right words for.

Let me start off by saying that my 30th birthday in itself was a wonderful experience – I spent it in Florence with close friends – I was in a very, shall we say, ‘busy’ place emotionally but at the same time was having the time of my life – having being recently liberated from the constraints of an unhappy relationship and an unfulfilling job. Life felt full of opportunities, I felt like a child again. In a way I was going through such a turbulent time (in both good ways and bad) that celebrating (or bemoaning) having lived 30 years wasn’t really a big deal. For me, that is. A far cry from my nonchalance, I felt those around me (not my close friends, I must add) wanted to make a big deal of this landmark – 30? (insert frown) Oooh. How do you feel? Hmmm, I remember turning 30 that’s a tough one… The big 3-0 (insert raising of eyebrows). I just didn’t get it – for me it didn’t seem tough. If my concern was meant to be about looking older I didn’t understand as grey hairs or lines hadn’t creeped in. If it was about child-bearing, I had several family members with successful births in their early 40s. About being ‘closer’ to death? People of all ages get run over by buses. I couldn’t really work out what they were getting at.

But then over the next couple of years it dawned on me. Here are some excerpts from conversations I was witness to soon after my 30th birthday – sex of person in (brackets):

‘Women are really past their best over 30 (M)/After 30 the tables turn, instead of men chasing women, the women start doing the chasing – of course by then they’re desperate (M)/Women over 30 shouldn’t wear mini skirts (F)…’ I could go on here, but I don’t think it’s productive! It seemed regardless of my physical, biological and psychological state people were only concerned with the number.

This was usually followed by a polite ‘of course, that doesn’t apply to you because… [add appropriate excuse here]’

It was almost as if you were meant to feel bad about was, after all, just another birthday. It was as if 30 was a sort of cut-off point where all things good ended and you were supposed to mourn that fact. At the other extreme were the deniers (nothing to do with tights, and don’t even know if I’ve spelt it right) – ‘People think my daughter and me are sisters - which I don’t think is a healthy attitude either as it’s simply not realistic and just sets you up for a fall.

So having gone through this experience, here are a few humble words of advice for those who are temerous at the prospect of turning 30. Of course, I admit I’m not qualified to comment on turning 40, or, 50 or 60, and I’m sure my comments will come across as naïve to those who have. But still, I hope that some of these thoughts are also applicable to future milestone birthdays. I also apologize in advance for my somewhat female-slanted view on this matter.

• Every year is a gift. To start off on a morbid note, we all know people who have tragically died too young, and while we may not embrace the passing of years and the physical effects of this, if we enjoy living we need to be grateful for every year we get through relatively unscathed. We are the lucky ones. There, I said it.

You’re a long time old(er). We ALL get older, and it’s important not to place too much value on a period of life (youth) that is so short. We spend most of our lives at an age we don’t really want to be at – up until about 16 most of us want to be older and then from about 27(!!) we start to want to be younger – if the ‘interesting’ bit of our life were just 10 years long then it really wouldn’t be worth living (which is obviously not the case). Try to embrace the joys of every stage of life.

Contrary to popular belief you can look better as you get older. Ok, I’m not stupid enough to think I’m going to look better at 80 than at 20, but 40 vs. 20, why not? I know living non-famous examples as evidence. So many times I hear people bemoaning the fact that they don’t have the same butt they had when they were a teenager, and I feel like asking them to get out those old photos, and having taken in that 80’s perm, bad clothes and blotchy skin, ask themselves ‘did I really look that good?’. Chances are, you now have a much better idea about what clothes, hair and colours suit you, and yes it might take a bit more effort, but I firmly believe that every lady can look fabulous at any age if she is a bit clever with her styling.

Don’t make comparisons. I say this, but know how damn hard it is to do. Half of the discontent we associate with clocking up the years is to do with not having ‘reached a certain place’ by that age. We have to remember ‘we’ are not ‘them’, people get married, divorced, have babies, get great jobs, lose great jobs all the time. If on my 30th birthday someone had told me my life would be a million times worse at 32, then a million times better at 34, no way would I have believed them, but it happens. Luck comes into play, but effort is also a huge factor.

Move to a country that isn’t age-obsessed. Ok, this is totally tongue in cheek but there is a note of truth here. My visits to the UK confirm that society seems to try to condemn 30-plus women to a life of emptyness and the press is rampant with stories of 29 year olds emplying the services of sperm banks because they left it 'too late'. Bridget Jones exists there, and is almost forced to exist, as if she has to in order to make everyone else feel good about themselves. Living in Spain – as well as trips to France and Italy and conversations with women of all ages– has made me see that while youth has great allure you don’t suddenly become invisible at 30, 35, 40, 45…and so on. The type and number of ‘suitors’ (for want of a better word) may vary, but you don’t stop being a woman. And here I move onto the somewhat Mediterranean phenomenon of the señora. Far from being invisible, in Spain it’s easy to find groups of formidable, loudly chattering 50+ señoras, dressed up to the nines in almost any corner of the city. I think we would do well to learn from these ladies (apart from their queue-jumping skills that is :P)

Related to the above, Single? ¿Y que..? I have come to the (perhaps quite obvious) realisation that not all ‘older’ single women want or need to be in a relationship and that there are many different types of relationship model. The strong women around me have shown me that one woman’s husband+semi-detached+kids, is another’s single who loves to spend their disposable income on travel, is another’s trendy 40-something couple who don’t want kids or choose to adopt. There is no ‘right’ way.

What really matters? I think even the most superficial of us, knows deep down that for the majority of us what really matters in life are the quality of your relationships with those that are close to you and being good - to both yourself and others. Treat yourself like a beloved child; lots of understanding, occasional splurges, a good education (and I don't mean in the academic sense). Find out what really matters to you (and let's hope that isn't being 21 forever) and work towards it, do things you love. This is a timeless quality.

And to finish off, here is one age-related anecdote. Before D and I were living together, one day he picked me up after work and I happened to have gone extra casual in jeans and a puffer jacket. His first comment was ‘you take about six years off with those clothes, sometimes your work clothes make you look older than you are!!’ Bless him, he was just speaking his mind, and when I was younger I may have been foolishly tempted to gradually adapt my dress-style based on this throw-away utterance. But what I instead said is that I want to dress like a 30-something woman, I’ve earnt the posh handbags and other ‘finery’ and don’t want to look like a student again, no matter how many years that takes of me and the fact that you think I can ‘get away with it. All this may sound a bit defensive but of course, what I was really saying was not that I had earnt expensive frocks, but that at 33, I had finally earnt a good dose of self-respect.

P.s. now he loves my suits or at least wouldn't dare say otherwise :p

House hunting in Madrid

Hello! Is anybody still in Madrid this far into summer? I am, though you wouldn’t know it from my lack of posting (after summer resolution: to post more). All is very well indeed with me - busy, but in a good way :-) Have just come back from a week of work meetings in Coruña, where we were stuffed with empanada (a type of Galician savoury pasty), yummy scallops, octopus and plenty of chilled Albariño to wash it all down with. All of this made a somewhat tense week of meetings much more bearable! And was such a relief to get away from the heat of Madrid in summer.

And now that the worst of the working year is over for both David and I, we’re busy house hunting. Tired of our cute but short term place in the sticks of ‘Glamabanchel’, we are looking for somewhere more central, and what we’re finding is frankly horrible. So here’s my tongue in cheek guide to would-be Madrileño sellers on what NOT to do if you really want to sell that house online.

• Please tidy up. Just a little bit. Or at least, do not take a photo of the mess and upload it on Idealista.

• Do not call something a ‘loft’ (in the New York sense) when what you want to say is a freezing-in-winter-boiling-in-summer, attic-cum-laundry-room with a corrugated tin roof and a ceiling so low you can’t even stand up in it.

• A flat with a built-in adult bunk-bed in the living room is not a ‘duplex’ – and you can’t consider the square metre-age of said bunk-bed an addition to that of the apartment. E.g. 65m flat+4m of bunk beddage=69m. NO!

• If you are referring to your flat as ‘designer’ it probably isn’t, and no you can’t add a 10k premium to your pad just because you have an imitation Eames chair (that you are taking with you in any case). Meeeeowww.

• Do not try to throw in your granny’s brown 3x3m formica mueble as part of the deal – we don’t want it. Take it to the junk yard, or leave it on the street the assigned day of the month for the local council to pick it up.

• Do take wide-angle photos of the rooms and NOT close-ups of clusters of your porcelain miniatures or your bathroom shelf toiletries. The idea is to sell your house and not tell us what good taste in pottery you have!

In Madrid, with none of those annoying but enjoyable programmes like House Doctor, people seemed not to have cottoned on to all the usual tricks of making your home more saleable – painting in neutral colours, taking photos during the day, de-cluttering, freshly brewed coffee (ok, you can’t really show that in a photo). On the other hand, I am a sucker for taking on awful spaces and trying to make them habitable – and when yesterday we finally found a beautifully designed centrally located home at almost the right price, I turned up my nose, saying ‘but I want to make it pretty, I don’t want to buy it pretty’. There’s no pleasing some people.

Laziness vs the urge to nest

I have to admit, I haven't been the most social of creatures lately. Work, moving away from the city centre, and being (please feel free to cringe) loved up have all kept me away from that place known as 'outside' for several months now. I keep promising to go out more, but come the weekend I'm so tired and life is so messy that often I just want to stay in and nest (aka tidy up). Trouble is, we don't stay in and nest, we stay in and watch films, take siestas, organize trips, make pancakes, drink wine, read, look at silly videos on Youtube and all other kinds of pretty unproductive but enjoyable pastimes.

Yet I fantasize about nesting, about all those homely, domestic-goddess type tasks that I promise I'll get round to as soon as we finish the next episode of Game of Thrones. I'm just reading over what I've written here and see, that without realising it I've become a Dinky 'Double Income No Kids' - not quite sure if I'm meant to be pleased about that, but I admit that for the moment, and for the first time, it does give me the 'luxury' of time-rich weekends but without all the strapped-for-cash issues of my 20s (and erm, a year ago). I must clarify that I didn't suddenly get rich or find a sugar daddy, just that money is thankfully no longer a big problem.

So here goes, my nesting projects for summer-autumn 2011 (I promise to stop using the N word from here on and while I’m at it I promise that I will never refer to myself as a yummy mummy no matter how smug and earth-motherly I become):

• Making home-made cleaning products. But you HATE cleaning! Yes, but I also hate the idea of using toxic nasties. I did a trawl of the various sites offering tips on ‘natural’ cleaning products and the verdict is that it’s better for the environment, better for health and better for my pocket. Just need to see if they work. As ever, I have trouble getting the right ingredients here - the recipes called for ingredients like white vinegar, castile soap and borax which you can get - but not from my local droguería who were aghast at the fact I wanted to buy food (vinegar) from a drug store. I figure out that for the moment Marseille soap and apple vinegar will have to do. Here are some recipe pages, one in Spanish and one in English – will let you know how I get on scrubbing the bath with half a lemon filled with bicarb!

• Cook something from one of my recipe books once a week. I don’t know when I stopped buying recipe books and just searched for recipes on the internet instead? But over the past few years, what was a bi-yearly shopping spree on Amazon has dwindled to nothing. However, I still have my shelves groaning with Nigellas, Nigels and Jamies waiting to be made proper use of. Surely even I can manage to delve into them once a week and try something new? I love this project an American couple set up to make use of their bulging food magazine collection.

• Buy a sewing machine and make stuff. I have always loved to sew and am not bad at it – it suits my quick-fix nature much better than knitting which I love the idea of but find painfully slow to get good at. I have this book by Amy Butler with loads of easy projects that can be speedily stitched and I love the fact that you can rustle up cloth napkin rings, cushion covers, and whatnot in less than an hour and avoid the neo-chintz ugliness that is the El Corte Inglés home department. And with Christmas 6 months away, do I have time to stingily but lovingly make all my presents?

• A meditation corner (or any peaceful little corner to call my own). I know you can meditate anywhere, but this is just a little luxury I’d love to have, space permitting. I don’t even meditate properly, but since last summer in Bali dedicating little bits of time to myself in the form of quiet contemplation or ‘just being’ have become quite important to me. Our home is a quite colourful due to the fact that we have the sum of 2 lives in one place, but this corner would be white, with my little white Buddha as a centerpiece – I imagine lots of whites and off-whites but different textures – velvet cushions, a plaster-framed mirror, a rag rug, scented candles, a notebook and pen, orchids… completely whimsical I know. I have a couple of examples that I’ve seen online (below) but none of them really capture what I have in mind - I'll have to do a post on furniture and accessories for a meditation corner.

Happy N******!