There are not many things I love more than walking next to the surf in a nice temperature with a cool breeze surrounding me. How lucky we are to be able to do this frequently. This beach, Playa de Nares, is just a 10-minute car-drive from our house. Like most beaches over here, it has … Read more
This is a sailing vessel. The rectangular hole you see at the waterline, almost at the rear of the ship, can contain a big-sized lorry from left to right, or vice versa. The boat belongs to the Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko. It was built on the shipyard Nobiskrug in Germany and designed by Philippe Starck. … Read more
When I was a child in the sixties of the 20th century I loved to watch the TV series Pipo de Clown. Together with his wife Mamaloe and daughter Petra they traveled through the world and experienced all kinds of adventures. A donkey called Nononono pulled their gypsy cart. Although Pipo was a clown, he … Read more
This weekend was La Isla Fun Fest on the beach of Puerto de Mazarrón. We’re not the partying types, but as part of getting to know the area, we had to join of course. Yesterday evening we watched the fuegos artificiales. In the Netherlands, there are fireworks on December 31 which are done by the … Read more
What is a better way to get to know a specific area – and pick up a few words in Spanish and socialize with the locals – but through a gifted guide. This is Jose Maria, a historian who studied at the University of Murcia. Today, during a two-hour excursion, he explained (in Spanish) the … Read more
Right before we left for the south of Spain after spending 3 weeks at our son’s house we managed to get a Spanish bank account. What I didn’t anticipate is they would send cards by mail. Both debit cards and credit cards. And no good to us in Leganés while we are here of course. … Read more
We use a Brita filter for our tap water. Those filters can be bought almost everywhere: at the supermarkets that are big enough to have a non-food department, at the Mediamarkt, at some household stores. But you can’t recycle them in the store where you buy those filters. I gave up on asking in the … Read more
One of the toilets keeps running some water all the time. The pot has been out of its place when the whole system was blocked, so I thought both events were connected. The fontanero explained to me one had absolutely nothing to do with the other. The plumber was here to fix it today. He … Read more
For the last couple of years, I used to organize colleges for city council clerks at the university in Amsterdam. During one of the colleges, the ‘age of speciation’ of humans came up: ‘roughly 300.000 years ago.’ One of the clerks countered this. According to his belief, it could only have been between 5.000 to … Read more
Until today every early morning and every early evening clouds are hanging either on top of the mountains or above our heads. Today was the exact opposite. An impeccable blue sky this morning and the moment I am writing this post. And clouds in the middle of the day. Everybody keeps warning us it’s going … Read more