Woke up this morning to a text message, “Want to go for a ride?” Looked out the window and while there were some clouds on the horizon, it was going to be a beautiful, sunny day. In just minutes from my Almohad refuge I can be rolling through olive groves and before you know it,…
The music has died down and faded away, the stage has been packed up, the tourists have gone home and the artists are playing somewhere else. WOMAD 2009 has come and gone, but something hasn’t left…and it’s here to stay for awhile…a LONG while. On Saturday night alone as people danced to the likes of…
May here in Caceres is curious…2 rather big events happen that couldn’t be more dissimilar. The first is the adoration of the local virgin which is carried down from its mountain refuge in late April and then is visited everyday by a certain sector of the population to see the what colour dress it is…
My Almohad refuge has been busy of late. Every year around this time the locals take their beloved virgin down from its mountain hideaway to great pagan-like fanfare. Tears are shed, songs are sung and flowers cut…but less wine that one would expect, gotta travel further south for that I suppose. She’s then placed on…
lovely flowers outside the academy where I work Invariably when people think of Spain they think of sunshine, beaches, warm weather, siestas, sangria… But the truth of the matter is that this country is extremely varied and with that variety comes extremely variable weather. The lush, green rain-fed coasts of Galicia have more in common…
Springtime in Extremadura and the festival season is in full swing. Right on the heels of Semana Santa celebrations and the parading of the local virgin comes the celebration of the city’s patron saint, San Jorge, better known to English speakers as Saint George. A curious mix of fire, tradition and what some might call…
There’s a saying in Spain that goes along the lines of, “When you move the Saints, the sky opens up.” Well holy week this year in Spain seems to have been like that all over the peninsula, except here in Extremadura. While the temperatures did plunge more than 10 degrees from the week before, only…
I’ve been writing a series of articles for the Canadian travel magazine, Verge. This series of articles are basically focused on teaching English around the world while traveling (or vice versa depending on how you look at it!) They’ve introduced a new aspect to their website where you can read some of their pieces online,…
Bus trips returning home sometimes seem like the longest on earth. 37 hour South American odysseys pass by in the blink of an eye when you compare them with a milk run that turns your 300km return home journey into a 5 hour trial. There is something anticlimactic about coming home, the route is familiar…
A view of a Platskart wagon While I’m a huge train fan, I am certainly no fan of the supposedly ‘national’ train company here in Spain, RENFE. I’ve always wondered why the prices for train travel here in Spain were so much more expensive than bus travel, but it was the Barcelona-Madrid High-Speed link that…