Yoga ho

I'm thinking about cheating on my yoga teacher. In fact, I already have, sort of. She's nice and the studio's so cute but the thing is I find her timetable a bit inflexible as she gives virtually no evening classes. So, when I found out about yoga holistico, and saw that the classes were given by a genuine Hindu monk (is that the right word?) and that they cost a mere 7 euros, yes 7 euros, per class I couldn't help but try it out. So, after a phone conversation with Dada, who was far too charming to be a monk, I went along on Monday for a class. He wasn't there but he had a substitute teacher who was very sweet. I have to admit the 'studio' is a bit tired looking, it's much more rough and ready than my other school, but there was something I liked about it - I felt that the attention was a lot more individualised and that they went into the theory of yoga a bit more. And for 60e a month you can actually do yoga every single day as many times as you like - I like the concept. What's more, every day before yoga is an hour's optional meditation class for which you only have to make a 'small donation', they even sell organic produce and if you give them a ring, you can arrange to go an eat lunch with them. Not sure what to do, I think for the moment I'll keep seeing the both of them and try to enjoy the best of both worlds :-)

And just to say, after a few months of doing it, I am really feeling the benefits of yoga (despite still being ridiculously unflexible) - what I thought would be a mildly fashionable way of getting flexible has turned out to have multiple benefits - my sleep problems are all but gone, I feel really positive, and somehow more 'centred'. I have a long way to go before I'm any good at it, but for now, it's living up to the hype.

Quick drop-in

I've been bad, I haven't blogged for over a week. I've just been so busy lately, burning the candle at both ends, work has been incessant and at the same time I've been unwilling to give up my social life, so I've been catching up with old friends quite a bit too. During the week yoga and other actvities have also been eating up my time. I've been taking photos, brunching, doing workout videos (thank goodness I don't have a neighbour below my flat as I sound like a baby elephant when doing the 'bootcamp workout'), attempting to learn French, getting into opera, and watching films I always meant to see - just saw the Virgin Suicides for example - if you haven't yet, you mightn't want to bother! Anyway, I'm going to go now, or this'll just turn into an inane ramble. Buenas noches

Madrid shopfronts continued

I have an odd penchant for retro shopfronts. And in Madrid there are so many little stores that haven't changed their frontage since before the end of the dictatorship. It's not just the fonts that are retro though, the window displays can also be, er, intriguing; the granny lingeries stores with 'floating' underwear suspended on transparent fishing wire so that knickers and nighties seemed to be dancing in front of your very eyes; restaurants that display their seafood on ice in a little 'peepview' window - more recently I have started to suspect that those fish might be fake, as it always seems to be the 'same' cod that stares back at you from behind the glass, even on a Sunday when the place is closed for business); shops that sell only potato chips, and actually fill their window spaces to eye level with unbagged chips that nestle greasily against the glass panes. The signage is often pretty cool too. Above is the front of Cafe Santander, and old-school corner cafe in Alonso Martínez (the barrio where I would kill to live). It's one of those landmark places where you arrange to meet friends outside but never enter, because you are under the age of 60 - inside it's pure 1973; aluminium, neon lights and waist-coated waiters. And it looks like I'm not the only one with a thing for old shops. Check out Store Front: the disappearing face of New York by James T. and Karla L. Murray, the next thing I'm going to order on Amazon.

Health insurance, Hindi and Hold ups – the week I went red

Health insurance
I don’t think I’m actually capable of blushing (something to do with a tanned skintone I think), but if I could, I would have spent most of this week resembling a beetroot. In Spain you don’t really get much in terms of benefits at work – well, that’s a lie, meal tickets and share options are quite common, but other perks are quite rare. So when they offered us health insurance, I obviously jumped at the chance. Now in these medical forms they ask you some quite personal information: weight, dress size etc, which I diligently and honestly gave to them. I sent my forms to our human resources department and thought little else of it. That was, until I got an email from our po-faced human resources manager; ‘Nadya, whilst I’m delighted to know that you’re lucky enough to wear a size 38, what we were actually asking for is your height...’ You see, I didn’t realise the Spanish word talla had a double meaning – dress size and height (The more common expression for height is altura). Embarassing. I’m not sure she knows I’m foreign and she probably thought I was some ‘stupid skinny girl’ who didn’t command the language probably. In any case, I was pleased to find out I wasn’t the only one to commit the same mistake!

Hindi
As some of you may know, I’m off to Bali in the summer and I’m booking myself a place in a Yoga retreat for when I’m out there. I’ve been in email correspondence with the friendly guy called Namaste who runs the courses. And all this while I’ve been like ‘Dear Namaste this, dear Namaste that’, not realising that what I’m in fact saying is ‘Dear greetings/I bow to you, can you please confirm that my room, blablabla...’. It was only when he eventually replied to my upteenth mail, signing off as ‘Namaste, Ari....’ that I put 2 and 2 together.

Hold ups
If you ever have the exciting pleasure of walking into a Spanish education publishing house you might notice that the dress code is pretty casual, people wear jeans (and not just on Fridays) and even directors tend to favour chinos and blazers over suits. I love being able to wear jeans to the office, but occasionally I get the urge to dress up a bit for work. Today was one of those days. I had an Ally McBeal moment and decided a short skirt suit and spiky heels was the way to go. The weather here has suddenly turned cold again, and I’m not a fan of tights for Spring so I fished out a new pair of black hold ups from my drawers. Anyway, I tottered out onto the street and began the 10 minute walk to the bus stop, all the while thinking I looked pretty good. But around 200 metres from my house I realised that either one of my thighs had got drastically thinner or the one of the hold ups had suddenly grown. Yes, one of my hold ups was falling down. And worse still, I live in a neighbourhood where they are doing a lot of building work, so at 8 a.m. the streets are lined with leering builders waiting to start their digging, or rather, waiting for a girl whose stockings are falling down to walk by and make their morning. Try as I did to subtly hoist it up it was impossible – and it seems that as soon as you feel self-conscious, everyone suddenly seems to notice you’re there and stop for a gander. In the end the only way out of it was to just stop, stand as still as possible with my laptop case modestly covering my legs and call a cab to take me back home and change into some sensible tights. When the moody Madrid taxi driver came along he didn’t appreciate a 500 metre fare, so I nervously blurted out ‘mi falda está rota!’ (my skirt’s broken, completely incorrect Spanish of course). Anyway, once I had emerged from my flat and was suitably attired I got him to drive me to my office in the Madrid suburbs (I couldn’t face the builders again). He got his fare and I got my decency, all was ok. Dropping me off, he wished me well, saying he hoped my back would get better soon ‘que te mejore la espalda’. My back?? Turns out he had mistaken my tale of a broken falda (skirt) for a broken espalda (back) – and the way I was hobbling along to try and keep my hosiery up, I can see why he had misunderstood :-)

Bali

For the past couple of weeks I've been thinking seriously about the summer holidays. I wanted something far away and exotic, and as none of my friends are able to do 'far away and exotic' in August, I'm looking at a solo trip. My initial idea was to do do a trip round South Easy Asia; stopping off in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and maybe even Singapore. I wanted to travel by train, to see how the landscape changed as I travelled and avoiding that feeling of 'just landing' somewhere. However, deterred by the Monsoon and advised by a friend who knows the place well, I decided on a much more relaxed type of break in Bali (which is not in Monsoon at that time of the year). Come to think of it, my recent reading of Eat, Pray, Love encouraged me too, though I have no plans to visit a medicine man or come back with some Brazilian guy on my arm ;-)

I'm really excited about every aspect of the trip. I decided to take an airline I liked the sound of (so that the holiday would start as soon as I board), so I chose Singapore Airlines as I'd heard such good things about them. Much more exciting though is the yoga retreat I've booked to do while I'm out there. So much has happened these past months, and I feel this is just the kind of restorative activity I need. Nestled in the verdant countryside outside Ubud, it has just 10 rooms, so it will certainly be peaceful. There will be yoga and meditation morning and evening, good food, visits to scenic rice terraces, yoga by a volcano, bike rides, massages and spa treatments... Plus, something which kind of terrifies me - a 'purification ritual and blessing ceremony'. From the people emersed in water in the photos, it looks a bit like a baptism. I have mixed feelings about this event; I worry it might be a bit cringeful, a load of westerners doing some sacred Balinese ceremony, but hey, if we're doing yoga, what's the difference? But will people start crying? Worst still, will I start crying?! I'll let you know :-) Whatever happens, I guess it's a new experience so I shouldn't complain.

Aside from the yoga, I have around another week to spend on the island. I could esily go further afield (I'd love to see the Orangutangs on Borneo, Komodo dragons on their name-sake island and numerous other things around Indonesia)... but I'm not sure, there seems to be plenty to do on Bali, friends have told me I can climb an active volcano (!), see temples, visit the Gili islands with their unspoilt beaches, learn to dive... Far from boring it would seem, so I'm still unsure what to do with the rest of my time. Can't wait!

Madrid la nuit

Saturday night was a pretty odd one. We started off on C/Pez, eating tapas in the Pontepez place of my last post and the famed cornflake chicken. The food got even more ‘innovative’ this time; a pear and rocket salad with pansies and mozzarella ice-cream, yes pansies and mozzarella ice-cream. Sometimes such odd combinations work, but for some reason this one didn’t work that well – but at only 3 Euros I’m not complaining, besides everything else we ate was delicious (alioli baked baby potatoes, croquetas and cecina – a type of cured beef from León).


Food was followed by meeting more friends closer to my neighbourhood. One of them had been invited to a party in a squat, yes a squat, by some random girl in the street (this really was a weird weekend) – to which I said NO WAY am I going to a squat. That sort of thing might have had its appeal as a grungy teen, but certainly not now! However, I opened up to the idea more when he told me it was in this palacete (little palace) near my house which had been done up but then left empty for as long as I could remember. I figured it was worth us dropping by and taking a 5-minute look just to see the interior of the building for the first and possibly last time. Drop by we did, and boy was it disappointing, we thought there’d be some sort of secret knock to get into this ‘illegal party', but no, it’s doors were thrown open to the public with huge banners inviting passer bys to come in. Once inside, it was obvious they’d made no effort to make things look nice, there was a makeshift bar selling stuff like calimocho, a hideous coca-cola and red wine mix that Spanish teens drink, and some kid attempting to rap - what was I expecting to be honest? All we really wanted to do was go upstairs and check out the palace, but when we couldn’t find any way up we asked the girl serving at the bar where the stairs were, whos reply was ‘today’s our inauguration, you can't go upstairs’. This kind of shocked me, to see someone who had illegally broken into and taken over a building suddenly getting all high and mighty about who could and could not access different parts of it!

Realising we weren’t going to see anything, we quickly left, ending up in Begin the Beguine on c/Moratín. It seems that Saturday was my official ‘seedy day’, as this little bar is possibly even seedier than a squat – though very, very atmospheric. It wouldn’t be my first choice for a night out, but about once a year I like to go there simply because it’s so different. From the outside you’d barely know there was a bar there as its shutters are completely closed and the door is hard to open – once inside, I can only compare it to what I imagine a 19th century opium den must have looked like! Tiny and smoky, brown wood-panelled walls covered in dusty second hand trombones and other wind instruments, everything has this sort of shiny brown patina of age, velvet couches, glass lamps – dominated by a large circular bar in the centre from where they serve huge caipirinhas in flower-vases. To be fair, there’s absolutely no debauchery going on inside, but it feels like at any moment some Matahari type figure is going to appear, donning a negligee and a cigarette holder and do some sort of exotic dance. Madrid nightlife is certainly never boring or predictable.

Chicken nuggets with a twist

This isn't a review, more of a quick mention. The other night I was introduced to Cervecería Pontepez, on Calle Pez in Malasaña. There wasn't time to do much sampling, but I have to give a nod of recognition to the 'Pollo con krispies con salsa de curry y helado de coco' - basically cornflake-breaded chicken goujons with curry sauce (one as deliciously cloying as the Macdonald's sauce, which I love, no joke) served with a ball of coconut ice-cream. Surprisingly, it was pretty delicious. I can't say the same for the hummus, which was ok, but by no means great. In fact I can't remember the last time I had good hummus in Spain, restaurants seem to think if they jusy whizz up a jar of chickpeas and add a bit of cumin that's enough - but it isn't if you grew up on the real thing :-) Anyway, Pontepez is definitely worth returning to, as I'm keen to try out the other innovative stuff they have on their menu.

The other reason I've chosen to post on it is that I'm pretty sure that this is one of the bars I checked out about 5 years ago when I was about to give it all up to start my own cafe and spend all day slaving over a hot stove. Seeing how the former owners had been bankrupted by their business (or maybe the business had been bankrupted by them?) was perhaps a deciding factor in me not going down that route.