Sevilla Sevilla

I've just got back from a work trip to Seville. The funny thing is, the last time I went to Seville, about 4 years ago, I came back wearing a diamond ring (long removed from my finger, that girl sure does seem like a stranger I met years ago :P). So despite this time being a flurry of author meetings and unglamourous school visits, for me Seville will always be pretty much the most romantic city in Spain :-) No precious stones this time, but plenty of amazing food and Sevillano warmth. Now, I know if anyone from elsewhere in Spain reads this they will be like 'Sevillano warmth??!!' Of course people accept that Sevillanos are friendly but also agree that said friendliness is Totally Fake. My answer to that would be I Don't Care!! (not sure I believe all those sweeping statements about people from different regions being true anyway) I'm not expecting them to let me in their caseta during the feria, it was just so nice to have people be helpful, smiling and take an interest and for taxi drivers, who are normally the bain of my life, to actually be nice. I can't claim to be an expert on where to eat there, but I can recommend one place I always go to for a plate of very good jamon and red wine: Casa Robles, right in the centre.

Cafe Alma

Ok, so first things first. Yes, I admit it, I am sort of 'back' :-) And as promised there will be restaurant reviews, lusting over design and lots of (positive, ahem) thinking out loud.

So to kick off, this is a tiny little review about the delightful cafe that opened at the top of my road about a year ago, Alma Cafe. Yes, the words delightful and my road in the same sentence. Alma cafe (c/Santa Isabel 42) is a bright white little cafe light years away from the typical Lavapiés bars (dark, moody and just one step too boho to be hygienic). It's somewhere you can go alone (and people frequently do) and read a book or catch up on the press that is provided there, hook up to the wifi, have a nice cup of coffee and a bite to eat. The perfect Sunday-morning-with-the-papers cafe. The decor is pretty, minimal but with a romantic touch and noone in there hassles you. The only thing I wish is that they'd have real loose tea, I might make that suggestion. Anyway, lovely. And a stone's throw from my house :-)

Time out

The past weeks have been a rollercoaster, and as such my posts have reflected that. I've received some really nice messages of support, but at the end of the day I'm just not that comfortable with putting out such personal feelings somewhere like this and I think it gets to the stage where it's not really helpful for me to express these emotions (even though I tried to make my posts more optimistic than fatalistic). So, I've deleted the past few posts and I'm going to take some time out from the blog, to reflect, to gather my stuff and hopefully to return at some point feeling more positive and with posts about great films, new restaurants and exciting projects. xx

Unexpected guests in Lavapies

The title is a bit of a misnomer, no guests (be they roaches or leering drunks) in Lavapies are 'unexpected', even if they are unwelcome. Over the past week I have found a spider in my sugar bowl and just now another in my bed.....aaaarrgghhh... It's bad enough to find spiders, but especially in the stuff you eat and the place you sleep. Worse still, the latter beastie seems to think I am edible. A week ago I woke up with a really swollen and immovable arm that was literally agony to the touch and really hard to move, right in the centre of it was a little bite. This made my memory fleetingly jump back to an unfortunate summer camp incident in Loeches where my fellow camp leader was supposedly bitten by a common spider and rendered completely paralysed for 2 weeks. Anyway, back to my own immovable arm, I dismissed the spider idea, reminding myself that in the UK we have some enormous spiders but had never heard of anyone being bitten by one, I thought it was probably some sort of winter mosquito bite or something despite Spanish people's assurances that it was a spider... Anyway, about 10 minutes ago I changed my bed linen and was greeted by a sizeable arachnid who seemed to be camping out in my bed (I'm sorry to tell you I crushed it with a hairbrush). So, it looks like house spiders do bite, and that you can have quite nasty allergic reactions to them. I wonder how many more of these little nasties are lurking?  Luckily Madrid spidies are no bigger than a 50-pence piece, but still, they're not my ideal flatmates. And don't give me any of that spiders are our friends/they eat flies/they are more afraid of us than we are of them bu"& sh%* - I have a brain that is bigger than a grain of salt, so I'm sure I can feel fear much more astutely than a hairy sesame seed with 8 legs ;-)

Surprising fact abut white tea (and no, it's not the antioxidants)

I've always been a huge fan of tea, whether it's 'builder's brew' (PGtips with milk and a hefty dose of sugar), Arabic mint tea or fancy loose leaf stuff. I tried to get into coffee briefly when all those coffee shops opened in the UK back in the 90s but the coffee was just bad and sitting outside in the rain on a 'continental style' pavement cafe with patio heaters just didn't do it for me. When I moved to Spain, where the coffee is pretty decent, I had another fleeting obsession with the brown beans but unfortunately I seemed to develop some of that curious stomach sensibility that's so common in Spain 'me ha sentado mal' (I could write reams about my Spanish friends and their delicate stomachs :-)) and drinking coffee lost some of its appeal. At some point it occurred to me that coffee simply made me jittery and nervous and gave me 'coffee breath' so I decided to call it a day. That's when I went back to my old friend tea; light, delicate, and according to all the medical and media hype, good for you too. While I was familiar with green and black teas I didn't know much about whites and was curious to try them as they contain more free-radical fighting anti-oxidants than any othe variety (meaning it could play a tiny part in the prevention of cancers and other ageing-related maladies). But white tea is sooo expensive, and to really benefit you need to drink quite a bit of it. However, the cost ceased to be an issue when I found out a little secret that most tea speciality tea shops fail to tell you - you can actually re-use fresh white tea leaves up to 3 times and you even get different flavours with each brew! And the same applies to many other quality loose leaf teas be they green black or Oolong. Needless to say I hastily made my way down to the lovely Tea Shop on c/Fuencarral and bought 100grams of white tea (of course they didn't tell me about the whole rebrewing thing). Will let you know how how I get on and if I suddenly revert to looking 18 again just from drinking white tea ;-)

Shopping - Hakei

After a month of working pretty hard I needed a bit of retail therapy today and found myself in Hakei on C/Arenal (8). Hakei has stores in Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga and the Basque Country but only came to my attention a year or so ago. Think of it as somewhere between Hoss (without the flounces and dramatic edge) and Comptoir des Cotonniers (without the children's range) but around 60% of the price. To be more specific I'd describe Hakei's style as urban, grown up, casual and sexy...but with no flesh on show. Ok, enough with the adjectives, but if we want to think of it in terms of other things I've posted here, think greige , because everything it sells is that colour. One word of warning, a friend who recently bought a top here said it didn't wash that well, but to be honest what really catches my eye in this store are the leather goods; rows and rows of comfortable yet stylish shoes, boots, belts and bags in the softest softest leather, in all shades of buff, grey, taupe and other neutrals which blend well together and with the clothes they sell. In fact I bought a pair of lovely taupe booties there today, so I'll let you know how they wear.

Wellness in the Corte Inglés

This really is starting to sound like 'Nadya's health and happiness blog', I think I need to try and get back to more stuff on restaurants/design/anecdotes soon... but hey, I can do what I want as it's MY blog ;P... This post is a just quickie as I'm fighting some weird cold symptoms (there I go, health again) and I'm thinking of having a nap. Just wanted to say, don't make a special journey for it, but if you happen to be in the Corte Inglés in Callao (central Madrid) then do take a trip up to the 6th floor where they've created a new wellness space. It offers a range of treatment centres; spa, hairdresser's, tanning beds (yuck!) etc but also sells health foods and supplements, 'natural' scents and beauty products as well as every massage device under the sun, including massage chairs, massage eye-masks, foot massagers, neck massagers and a load of other battery operated vibrating machines designed to relieve your, ahem, 'stiff joints'... The space features chilled out muzak and is a welcome relief from the chaos of the rest of the store. It's also completely devoid of customers, maybe because they don't know about it, or more likely because it's so expensive. Still, I like it. Last time I was there I picked up some 'fresh washing' scented burning oil, very nice.