With my last post focussing firmly on the inside of my flat, this post looks to my time out in the streets and hidden corners of Madrid. This is something that I’ve had to make the most of seeing as the looming prospect of a second lockdown has since become a reality. This new lockdown is – mercifully – less restrictive than the last, as it mainly concerns travel in and out of Madrid, and doesn’t leave us cooped up in our houses.
Without further ado, however, let’s delve into the past week’s worth of antics, which began with a bike ride which took me from the northernmost point of my local metro line, all the way down the eastern corridor of the city, and then back home. Starting in Moncloa, I sped off downhill through the Parque del Oeste, taking a little diversion which led me to discover a lovely bike trail along a less developed section of the Manzanares River.
I never knew about this hidden little cycling path and lovely patch of greenery.
From there I had to double back on myself before I ended up out too far away from home, and then proceeded to cycle my usual route along the river, past the Matadero, and back up the hill to my apartment. I was a little dubious as to whether I should have been following some of that paths that I did, as I did wonder if they encroached on some of the neighbourhoods of Madrid that have been in selective lockdown for a week or so now, but nobody stopped me so off I went!
Another evening was spent at a colleague’s house, when I headed up to her lovely flat in the centre to pick up some packaging samples for a new project at work. Upon arrival I was delighted to be invited to stay for tea (dinner, in standard English), and soon found myself plied with tortilla de patatas (Spanish omelette), jamón (cured ham), and a delicious homemade cream of pumpkin and carrot soup, amongst other goodies.
After chatting the evening away with her family, I returned home full of food and tipsy on cider – as every evening should end!
The next evening I headed out with Jhosef to celebrate his job offer at a company here in Madrid, where we headed up to a rooftop terrace for some drinks and pinchos, small dishes of food from the Basque Country. The evening was short but enjoyable, but I didn’t have long to wait for my next reunion, however, as I’d arranged to meet up with Sara who has moved to Madrid from Gijón in my beloved northern region of Asturias!
I last saw Sara two over two years ago now when I was last up in Oviedo just before Kevin left for the US, and so you can imagine my excitement when she messaged me to let me know she was now in Madrid! The two of us arranged to meet bang in the centre of Madrid, at the Puerta del Sol, below the iconic statue of Madrid’s infamous symbol: el oso y el madroño, “the bear and the strawberry tree”.
From there, we walked and chatted away non-stop for a good few hours, passing by the city’s cathedral, which looked absolutely resplendent in the evening sunlight. Along the way, we stopped for a caña (small beer) and some tapas atop an upturned barrel in the street along the way, where we caught up on each other’s news and gossip from the past couple of years.
The area around the palace and cathedral always looks dreamy at this time of day.
I’ve always been a fan of the pink sunsets that Madrid enjoys.
From the centre, we descended through Lavapiés and down to my neighbourhood, where we gorged on two of my favourite plates from my favourite local bar: chopitos (fried squids) and huevos rotos (chips with fried eggs and cured ham). We then stopped off at my flat, where we enjoyed a vermouth to end the night whilst messing around with the coloured lights.
A few days later, I took myself out for a trip through the city, which involved cycling up to the Chueca neighbourhood (the gay centre of the city, where I stayed the very first time I visited this city) and then passing through Malasaña. After passing through the streets of this kooky neighbourhood for a while, I stopped off for a fully loaded pitta at a lovely little spot my friend had recommended.
After this delicious lunch – which reminded me of the many evenings spent in Belgrave Music Hall in Leeds, where we’d often hang out and eat delicious food and sip on ciders as students – I went in search of some of Madrid’s most delicious vegan donuts. I was saddened to learn upon arrival at the shop that they’d all sold out, but I wasn’t particularly mad, as I’d enjoyed a lovely saunter around a neighbourhood of the city that’s not a typical haunt of mine.
To end a busy week of work and escapades in the city centre, I paid a visit to the British shop to pick up some Vimto, which I’ve since got Jhosef hooked on to also. I enjoy these little evenings out to the north of the city, where I take the opportunity to do a spot of reading on the bus, before cycling back through the city centre and back home.
This brings to a close my updates from the last couple of weeks here in Madrid, where we’re back on alert as we’ve been put back into an estado de alarma (state of alarm) due to the rising coronavirus cases. I’ll be heading out to visit some friends over this long weekend, but we’ll be wearing masks and socially distancing and keeping the numbers of people down to a bare minimum – we’ve all to do our bit!
This year, most of us have spent a lot of time at home. With the strict lockdown which came into force in Madrid earlier this year, I have seen much more of my inside of my flat than ever before, and so have strived to make the place as welcoming and comfortable as possible.
If you’ve followed my blog in the past, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of lights – be it to illuminate a castle created by my dad, holding a karaoke disco in our car, or to decorate my university room with LED strips aplenty. Whenever I move into a space, I always adjust the lighting somewhat, as I find that I can’t relax without having the space properly lit.
This led me to install my current system of home lighting. For a while now, most of the lamps and other light fittings – oven hood included – have been connected to my phone via a combination of an IKEA Hub and Apple’s HomeKit, meaning I can adjust the brightness of most of the lights in my home at will, setting different “scenes” depending on the time of day and my mood.
Naturally, though, I couldn’t stop there, and so bought myself some coloured LED strips from IKEA to accompany a few that I brought over from England and which had once been installed in my university room. During quarantine, I set about designing and installing a comprehensive setup with these lights, such that the entire colour of my house can be changed with just a tap on my phone.
An important aspect of said setup, however, was that they should be completely invisible when not activated. I love the idea of being able to activate a host of coloured lighting to create different moods in my flat, but I didn’t want the inclusion of such a system to in any way compromise the clean and minimal look I have strived to create.
I thus designed a system which is completely inconspicuous when not activated, with the series of hidden LED strips providing full coverage throughout my house. Whether installed behind furniture, mounted along crevices in the architecture, or even inserted to blend in with the stalks of a plant, the activation of the coloured lights is as shockingly unexpected as it is aesthetically pleasing.
This all leads me to the series of photos below, which document some of my favourite corners of the flat as they are bathed in shades of red, pink, purple, and blue. Of course the colours can be changed, and I’ll definitely take more photos at some point exploring this, but for now do enjoy some snaps of this palette that I’ve been using so often as of recent…
Now it’s time to see if I add any more, as I’m currently setting up a new desk and computer setup in my living room now that remote working is becoming a bit part of the new normal. For that, and to see the place lit up in various other colours, be sure to stay tuned!
It’s been a while since I posted about my day-to-day life, with exactly a month now gone since I last brought updates from Madrid. Of course I’ve been meeting up with friends, cycling around in the dark, and cooking up a few bits and bobs at home (today’s bake has been a huge batch of cookies), but there’s not been much that’s worth sharing on my blog – especially seeing as I’ve been a bit off my game recently in terms of taking photos along the way!
No fear, though, as I’m here today to right this wrong. We kick things off at a lovely brunch prepared by my colleague Blanca, who whipped up a delicious meal as I swung by her new flat to check out the new place. After some beers and a good serving of food (including an excellent poached egg, I have nothing on her skills), we chatted the afternoon away and I wound up giving her daughter an impromptu calligraphy lesson!
The next day I decided to spend a day out in my own company, and so headed up to Madrid’s version of Poundland, which is run by the same company, and so which offers a decent range of British goodies! Making good use of a 3€ discount voucher and scoring myself the deal of the century in the form of an official Apple iPad case for just 6€, I hauled my bag full of Vimeo and Cadbury’s chocolate into the basket of one of the city bikes, and took in the gorgeous evening views of the city as I cycled home.
The emblematic Puerta de Alcalá is pretty but a nightmare to cycle around.
During the working week I’ve been rather busy, but there’s always time for a wander with Jhosef down by the river or a quick run around the city on a bike – I’ve to make the most of the freedom whilst I still can. With certain areas of Madrid already in partial lockdown, I’ve a suspicion that a city-wide series of restrictions might be announced any day soon, and so any excuse to get out and about is very welcome!
This weekend I’ve been back out and about once again, wandering round the city centre at just the right time such as to catch the gorgeous streets of Lavapiés and the city centre in the golden hour just before the setting of the sun. I also walked past a newly refurbished hotel, which is a gorgeous building that’s been under wraps and in renovation since the very first time I visited Madrid five years ago, and was happy to see that they’d covered the facade in a gorgeous series of ornamental lamps.
My evening wander ended with a lovely evening meal at Ramen Shifu, where my friend Hugo was working the evening. Whilst catching up in bursts as he attended other tables, I tucked in to a gorgeous beef ramen, all followed by some mochi and a lovely Japanese beer.
The atmosphere and the food at Ramen Shifu were rather splendid.
Just last night I met up with Jhosef again and the two of us headed down to the Matadero, and to a lovely outdoor terrace and bar that’s been set up to make the most of the post-lockdown summer nights. Stopping for a tinto de verano (a mix of red wine and lemon Fanta), the two of us talked the evening away whilst being serenaded by a live band who had created their own Spanish version of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”. Once we’d tired of these new lyrics, which spoke mostly of “energía solar” (solar energy), the two of us headed back to my flat and spent the evening watching Salt, a film which I’d never seen before and which had me hooked with it’s wild plot twists!
This quick update pretty much sums up my past few weeks of little escapes and explorations of the city, but I’m sure there’ll be more to come as we head into a rather sudden autumn – I say sudden because the onset was shockingly quick, with a few days of storms and a temperature drop of almost 10°C taking us all by surprise and with no time to adjust!
And so here I leave you, as I prepare to change out my summer wardrobe for my winter one – prepare to see the return of the yellow coat in the coming posts!
In a rather late follow-up to a post published almost a year ago in which I shared some 35mm film photos, today I bring a few more photos from my summer 2019 visit to Caudete de las Fuentes, the hometown of friend Roberto’s family in rural Valencia. I had forgotten that these extra few shots even existed, and so it was a lovely surprise to find them bundled in with my photos of Tenerife after dropping off a roll of film to be developed.
These photos document some of the scenes from their old family home, and were taken on an old Samsung in between explorations of the small town and time spent mounting a lightbulb spectacular in their back patio. The warmth and imperfection of the film shots combined with the frozen-in-time nature of the location make for quite a special set of photos, one which looks like it could come from another century.
As ever, I haven’t edited any of these photos, as I’m a fan of leaving such intimate and mysterious 35mm film shots as they come. This second half concludes the series of photos from this tiny rural Valencian town, and represents a contradiction that I took away with me from my trip: there was an eerie melancholy air to a town in decline and suffering from severe depopulation, but my time there with Roberto was a whole lot of fun and relaxation with someone who’s also a fan of lights like me.
For the last installation of my trio of weeklong escapes out of Madrid I managed to bag myself an absolute bargain in the shape of a 48€ return flight to Manchester, which can only mean one thing: it was time to visit the motherland. For the first time since Christmas last year I was visiting England, and it all began rather too early for my liking with a taxi at 5:30am up to Madrid airport.
The novelty of flying during the pandemic was now gone after my flight to Tenerife a few weeks back, and I found myself once again infuriated by the lack of open restaurants in the airport. After flying through the security check, there wasn’t even a duty free open to bag myself a bottle of water for the journey, and so I spent the next hour or so sitting on the floor by my gate.
The flight over was half-full and rather uneventful, and after a few episodes of Modern Family I found myself disembarking the plane and waiting to see what these new, super stringent coronavirus checks would look like. As I’d had to fill out a rather extensive form and save a QR code to be scanned upon arrival, I was expecting to have to go through the steps of a rather thorough protocol upon arrival, however said protocol involved the following: a man asked if I’d completed the form, I responded that I had and flashed the document on my phone, and the man said I was alright to carry on through passport control.
Seriously, England? Is that it? That’s your primary line of defence? He didn’t even inspect the form that I showed him, much less scan the QR code – I could have flashed him a McDonalds receipt and he’d have been none the wiser. With such strict self-quarantine rules in place, one would think that they’d at least try to make people feel obliged to do it, but I found myself outside of the airport and wandering down the road in a matter of minutes.
Bewildered by the apparent lack of care, I was soon picked up by my dad, who then whisked me off to Burnley. Back in the family home, I soon found myself alone, as my mum was sleeping after her night shift, my sister was out in Leeds with her friends, and my dad had to nip out to do a spot of shopping.
After a relaxing afternoon spent unpacking, talking to my mum once she’d woken up, and generally kicking back, I was finally reunited with my sister when me and my dad went to pick her up from the train station upon her return. The two of us then stayed up late, eating pizza and chatting away into the early hours.
The next morning Ellie insisted that we get up and do something, and so I found myself being ushered up one of the dirt tracks in the village that leads to the top of a hill, and which then descends down past a reservoir and through a forest. Our little walk served to allow us to catch up even more, and we even wandered past a new open-air wedding venue that had been installed in one of the fields – a great idea for these strange times.
The rest of the day was then spent at home, much like the next day, which I spent cleaning out more of the few things that I’d left behind in my parents’ house and preparing a few things to bring back to Madrid with me. Not wanting to feel too cooped up, however, I borrowed my dad’s bike for the evening (like many an evening in Madrid) and went for a little cycle along some of the other little lanes of the village.
I even made a few friends along the way.
Along the way, as you can see, I stopped to take a good few photos, a few of which I sent to some friends and colleagues back in Madrid. Upon seeing the sheep, they wondered aloud why I had ever left, and it is true that I often miss the fresh air and greenery of Worsthorne.
The next day primarily involved, yet again, time spent cleaning out my childhood bedroom and other organisation and admin that I’d to get done whilst back in the UK. I did, however, nip over to visit my neighbour, and we talked for a good while about the global situation and life in Spain, as she was flying out to Gibraltar on the day I was set to leave England.
After this, and once my dad had returned home from work, the four of us headed out for the only proper outing as a family, which took the form of a simple walk around another reservoir. With my dad sporting a dodgy ankle after a fall from a tree a month or two ago, I wound up hanging back with him, and we talked about the past and the future and a bit of everything in between.
Upon arrival back home it was time for a Guinness in the garden. I then headed out for a quick trip to the huge Tesco shop in Burnley, where I sent my colleagues a video of the whole aisle which is dedicated to different flavours and brands of baked beans. Sometimes I swear that England is a parody of itself!
That night had to be an early one, however, as the day after was the day I had most been waiting for: my chance to see Abi and Danni! We’d planned and booked a trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, where the three of us have spent many a day enjoying the rides and the fresh doughnuts over the many years that we’ve known each other.
An early start saw Abi swoop by to pick me up in her car, and before I’d properly woken up, the three of us were arriving in the dodgy back streets of Blackpool. We stopped at a Spoons pub for some breakfast before the park opened, where I was left in awe by the speed of the 10-minute food promise, and then headed to the gates just before 11am in order to make the most of the six hours that we had in the park.
Once inside, we headed straight to the Ice Blast, which was a great rush to start the day and which offered some lovely views over the coast. We then headed to what might of been the most terrifying ride of the day, a huge old carousel, who’s violent rocking, wild speed, and creepy organ music had me screaming the whole way around. We then headed over to the Grand National, which had just opened, where we were lucky enough to find ourselves at the front of the line and under the care of a friendly ride operator who let us split over two cars so that we could race each other!
We then made the most of a short queue for Icon, their latest rollercoaster that I rode when I last visited with Ellie and Johann, and quickly managed to jump on the Big One, the Ice Blast, and a wealth of other coasters in quick succession. On the Big One, Danni told me to raise my hands as we sped into the photo spot as she had a plan, one once I saw the result I simply had to buy the photo!
Once we’d worked up an appetite we stopped for some lunch, which took the form of some delicious fried chicken near where the old Wild Mouse used to stand – may it rest in peace! Such a heavy lunch may have been a slightly bad decision, however, as we then headed straight on to a few more rides, two of which throw you upside down multiple times. I was soon feeling rather sick and somewhat dizzy, but I refused to let a bit of old age and chicken get the better of me, and so we soldiered on!
We then took a ride on a few more gentle attractions as the day slowly drew to a close, including the Wallace and Gromit Ride, the Ghost Train, the River Cruise, and the Flying Machine. This final ride signalled the end of our day in the Pleasure Beach, but it wouldn’t be a day there without some fresh doughnuts, and so we grabbed some on our way out before heading back to the Wetherspoons for some tea.
After a cheeky drink and a huge burger at the pub, we headed back towards the car, taking one last look at the Pleasure Beach for what I assume will be a decent amount of time to come. I was dropped back off at home half asleep once again after such a busy day, but we’d arranged for another trip out the day after, so it wasn’t all over just yet.
The low evening sun over the Pleasure Beach is actually rather beautiful.
The next morning, the three of us were reunited in Abi’s car once more and on our way to the Trafford Centre in Manchester for a spot of shopping. There, I treated myself to some fancy chocolates, some salted caramel vodka, and some pretzel bites smothered in chocolate sauce. We then stopped for some lunch before heading back to Burnley, where I had a mere hour to relax and refresh ready for another trip out.
This trip was to gorgeous town of Hebden Bridge with my parents, where my mum needed to pick up a necklace that she’d bought for my sister. With that little errand done, the three of us had a wander round, and I bought a few bits to bring back to Spain with me.
No trip back to England is complete without a wander around Hebden Bridge.
A spot I wanted to visit was the canal, which looked radiant in the evening sunlight. As we approached the canal, we ran into a family who had hired a canal boat and who were navigating it through one of the locks, and I suddenly found myself being drafted in to help with the operation of the lock. Another little thing ticked off my bucket list – operate a lock!
After a spot of drama in which we noticed that a boat had sprung free of its docking and had been blown by the wind in such a way that it was perpendicular to the edge of the canal and thus blocking the entire thing, we headed back into the centre of Hebden Bridge.
The other main aim of this little trip was for me to bag myself a fish and chips – a British classic for my last tea in the UK – but I’d yet to work up an appetite, and so the three of us sat ourself down in a beer garden and enjoyed a wine whilst we watched the world go by. The ensuing chippy tea was, of course, divine, but it was alas marred by the knowledge that I’d yet to pack and that the next morning would see me wave goodbye to my family and head back to the realities of working life.
After packing took me less time than expected, however, I did have just enough time to whip up a Victoria sponge cake, complete with some artisan raspberry jam and fresh cream to boot! With some cake and a cup of tea for supper, I then headed to bed ready for my morning’s flight, and was back in the Spanish capital before lunchtime on that Saturday morning.
Upon arrival, I was shocked to find that the Spanish were much better organised that the British, as I’d to navigate temperature checks, have my coronavirus form thoroughly reviewed, and pass through a much more stringent passport control than ever before. Kudos to them for having everything in place, but I guess some hard lessons were learned during Madrid’s unprecedented outbreak and lockdown.
Suffice to say that I had a lovely, relaxing time in England, and was thrilled to be able to see my family and friends again, even if it was only for a short while. I’ve been really lucky to be able to visit Tenerife, Murcia, and England this summer, something I really didn’t think I’d ever be able to do, but I do stand by the words of Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand and one of my favourite people at the moment, when she said:
