kellycrull.com - expat life in Spain

Last night I was clicking through old files on my laptop from the Spring semester of 2000 when I was a study-abroad student in Amsterdam–my first taste of life in Europe.

I dug up this essay about a lesser-known painting of Vincent Van Gogh called The Cottage. I thought it had some interesting things to say, so here it is. Enjoy!

I haven’t been living in Amsterdam for very long, only a month or so of the three I’ll be studying here, but already one thing is obvious, the Dutch want you to know Vincent Van Gogh is one of their own. He was born on Dutch soil.

The metro line I take downtown passes several shops dedicated entirely to Van Gogh. Tourists are buying Van Gogh sweatshirts and pencil sharpeners and interactive CD-ROMs with Starry Night mouse pads to complement. April and I often joke about these tourists, saying the most obvious sign someone is visiting the Netherlands for the first time is if they are carrying a poster box with Vincent Van Gogh splashed on the side.

I don’t blame the Dutch for holding on so tightly to Van Gogh. Everyone knows something about him. Whether a person has had a calendar of his paintings hanging in the kitchen, or she can tell you the story of how he sliced off a corner of his own ear to please a close friend, everyone knows Vincent Van Gogh. He’s still making his mark today. In 1990 his The Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82,500,000, giving the painting the title “most expensive painting ever sold.”

Needless to say, one of the biggest attractions in Amsterdam is the Van Gogh Museum, the only museum in the entire country devoted to one person. Within only five months of re-opening after an expansion project in 1999, over 700,000 people visited the museum, making it the most visited museum in the Netherlands.

I visited the museum one Thursday afternoon not intending to buy a mouse pad or a Van Gogh writing pen, but curious to learn more about the man, the one crouching in the shadows of his own name.

I knew a few things about Van Gogh already. One of my college roommates had recently read a book about Van Gogh, and in our late night conversations, I picked up a few stories about Vincent’s disturbing childhood. But as I logged onto one of the computers in the museum library and scrolled through pages of his biography, I found there was still more to this man.

I cringed as I read about one rejection after another. Vincent was rejected by the Church–refused by a theological school in Amsterdam and later dismissed as a preacher from his church in Borniage, Belgium. Vincent relied on his brother Theo for support, both financially and emotionally. The rest of his family called him a failure, and rightly so. Vincent only sold one painting in his entire lifetime, and for a measly four hundred francs at that.

Vincent was plagued by psychotic fits that drove him to seek medical treatment a number of times throughout his life. In fact, he never seemed content with himself. He wrote in a letter to his brother, “I wish to remain shut up as much for my own peace of mind as for other people’s.”

On July 27, 1890 Vincent took his own life, walking to a wheat field with a shot gun in his hand and shooting himself in the chest. He died in his bed with his brother at his side.

Leaving the electronic facts on the screen, I leaned back in my chair, trying to comprehend why this man, a man who considered himself a failure, is still a hero to so many today.

I decided to take a walk through the gallery. The place was packed. Thankfully there was space with some elbow room in the corner of one of the main exhibition halls. A painting called The Cottage hung there on the wall. The painting wasn’t a familiar one, and consider the number of visitors simply passing it by, it wasn’t a popular one either.

I took a few moments to look at the piece. What caught my eye initially was not the cottage itself, which stood at the center of the painting, but rather the time of day the painting suggested. The sun had recently slipped over the horizon and now darkness was settling in–the hour of day when everything drains of color. The fruit trees growing to the left of the cottage were shaded gray and black, yet visibly ripe and full of sweetness. The thatch roof which would have shown brilliantly only hours before now lay draped over the cottage in a sheet of dull brown. The cottage with shutters and doors wide open to meet the afternoon heat sat in the shadows, each one a covering of thick, black paint.

I wanted to see the cottage differently. I wanted Vincent to paint a new one, one with all the wonderful colors the cottage deserved, the colors I had seen in The Starry Night and in Sunflowers. I wanted the sun in the sky, illuminating the cottage and its surroundings, molding the landscape, and giving it crisply defined contours.

The stories from Vincent’s life played again through my head as I looked at the painting, and then…there it was–the cottage, dimly lit: an image of Vincent’s life. Unmistakable. This was the story of Vincent Van Gogh’s life.

Each stroke of dull brown and gray and black told me a little more about who Vincent was. It was as if Vincent himself had wanted to dip his paint brush into a vibrant red and give life to those pieces of fruit, making them juicy and eatable, so tangible they would have made my mouth water. He too wanted to know the limits of his own painted horizon. But this painting was not a painting of what could have been, but of his reality.

Vincent saw this cottage in the dim light of a broken life.

“What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter, and then the painting.”
–Vincent Van Gogh

The Community of Madrid offers Spanish classes free of charge at many of the Centers for Adult Education in the area. Here is a rough guide to enrolling yourself in one of these classes.

A few pointers before we begin:
• First, the reason I’m writing this guide is because enrolling in these classes can be both overwhelming and confusing. I’ll try to simply the process, but believe me, you’ll probably run into a snag or two along the way. Unfortunately, it’s the nature of dealing with government-run programs in Spain.
• Speaking of which, a particular point of frustration that I should mention right off the bat is that you probably will not know your class schedule until you’re well into the process of enrolling for a class. I’d suggest having a Plan B from the start in case these classes don’t work out. There are a number of low-cost Spanish classes available in Madrid (C.E.E., IH, and others).

STEP 1: Get a list of schools and the classes they offer
You can get a list of the Centers for Adult Education (Centros de Educación de Personas Adultas or C.E.P.A. in Spanish) in one of two ways.

Visit the Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad de Madrid
c/ Alcalá, 32
28014 Madrid
Tel.: 91 720 00 00
Fax: 91 720 02 04

Download this document (3.6mb)
In most cases, downloading this guide will be the easier of the two methods, but it doesn’t give you the benefit of having someone available in case you have questions, and the document is from 2003-2004, so it’s a little out of date. A newer guide hasn’t been released, so it’s the best we have available on the internet to date. If nothing else, it can at least give you a good idea of what’s available.

STEP 2: Choose a school
Flip through the guide and look for a school that suits your needs. Location was a priority for me, so I looked first at the Center for Adult Education in the Moncloa area because I live near Plaza de España.

Next, I checked to see if this school offered Spanish classes for Immigrants (Español para inmigrantes), which it did. The guide said the school offered Spanish classes at Levels 1 and 2 (nivel I y II). I’ve discovered, however, that these levels don’t mean much. After completing Level 2 at the school at Moncloa, I switched to another school the next semester to take Level 3. The teachers at the new school told me that I would actually be in Level 4, not level 3, because the levels differ from school to school.

STEP 3: Call or visit the school
The next step is to call or visit the school to find out what documents you will need to apply for the classes and to take a placement test. This registration process (or matrícula in Spanish) happens twice a year: in September and in late January to early February. Classes start in early October and mid-February.

Both times I’ve enrolled in classes, I’ve needed a form of identification (either my passport or my residency card) and 2 passport photos. At one of the schools they gave me a piece of paper that I had to take to my bank to pay registration fees (something like 1,25€) into a government bank account. Unfortunately, paying government fees in cash is not allowed. I’ve heard this is to prevent corruption.

STEP 4: Check back when the classes are posted
Once the testing period is finished, the schools post a list of students in each class. The class schedules should be posted at this time as well.

STEP 5: Enjoy your free Spanish classes!

Many of us have been following the news about the tsunami disaster in Asia. If you’ve been wondering how you can help, here’s an article from the BBC with all the information you need, including an informative list of organizations who are already at work giving relief to the victims in Asia.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4131881.stm

A photo from a friend of mine. I found it amusing.

I’m a sucker for Cheesy Christmas songs. That’s right. Give me Bing Crosby. Give me Mahalia Jackson. Tune in to my apartment in December and you’ll find my place is the sappiest around even before we sticky our fingers trying to get the Christmas tree through the front door.

A favorite of mine is Peggy Lee’s “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”. Can you hear the crackling of the record player, the strings swelling, and then Peggy’s voice, comfortable, nostalgic, the combined effect enough to make us all want to link arms and sing those familiar words . . .

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos
Everybody knows
A turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight

They know that Santa’s on his way
He’s loaded lots of toys and goodies
On his sleigh
And ev’ry mother’s child
Is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly

And so, I’m offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it’s been said many times
Many ways
“Merry Christmas to you”

“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” was written by well-known American jazz singer Mel Tormé. History has it that Tormé composed this song at his piano on a hot, summer day, longing for that Christmas feeling. Apparently the heat got to him because the funny thing is chestnuts have very little to do with Christmas for most Americans. In my neck of the woods, chestnuts are about as American as Spanish tortilla. Most Americans don’t even know what chestnuts look like, that is, unless they’ve been in Europe.

Here in Madrid chestnuts are everywhere. Go to the market at this time of year, and you can buy a kilo of chestnuts, or castañas, for around 2 euros. Just down the street from where we live near the metro entrance there’s a chestnut stand. “Castañas Asadas” is painted over the stand in red, capital letters.

The first time I had chestnuts was years ago. It was my first visit to Europe, at a time in my life when I actually thought that no one on the continent spoke English because, of course, French people speak French, German people speak German, Spanish people speak Spanish, and so on. I should have known, being American, that English isn’t only for English people.

I was actually in Paris and had just finished a marathon day in the Louvre Museum, one of those museums that done properly could last a person a good week or two, but in practicality, is most often “accomplished”, dare I use the word, in an afternoon, leaving a person, me, haggard and damp. I’d have worn jogging pants that day if I had been smart.

Anyway, I surfaced after a few hours in the museum, and there must have been a park nearby, at least that’s what my memory tells me, because I was walking through this park area, and there was the chestnut stand. An open grill. The guy was poking around at his rack-full of chestnuts, each like a knob of wood sanded smooth, stained a deep brown, and glossed with vanish.

There must have been a sign up or something over the grill in English that said “Roasted Chestnuts” because I knew right away that they were chestnuts, even though I had never seen them before. Or maybe the guy was yelling, with a French accent of course, “Chestnuts, chestnuts,” which, come to think of it, would actually make a better story given how things turned out.

The point was my mind was made up. I had to have roasted chestnuts. We were, after all, only in Paris for the weekend. What if Paris was the only place in the world where they roasted chestnuts? What if this was my only chance? What would people think of me back home if they knew I had had the chance to eat roasted chestnuts, to solve the riddle, to break the code, to once and for all experience first-hand the words of that favored Christmas carol, but had simply puttered by instead? How would I ever sing that Christmas song again and mean it?

My decision was final. I would have my own paper funnel piled with chestnuts.

But, I didn’t speak French.

All I had was this piece of paper. A friend of mine who is Canadian and who had studied French all through primary and secondary school had scribbled down a few phrases in French for me with the English translations underneath each phrase. This piece of paper was my life preserver. My Rosetta Stone. I fished through my backpack for the folded-up piece of paper and found the phrase I needed.

I wasn’t about to pronounce the words. I don’t know much about French, but I do know it’s not a language you’d want to pronounce impromptu. Someone could probably make a business of starting up comedy clubs in France where they ship in people from outside the country who don’t speak French, put them in front of a microphone, and have them read French phrases off a piece of paper. People would go hysterical. It would be funny. Those poor people without a clue how to speak through your nose, without even the slightest clue which syllables are to be pronounced and which are to be left silent.

No, I had a plan. I would use the pointing method. I’d show the guy behind the grill my piece of paper. I’d point at the appropriate phrase. He’d read the phrase, then offer a look of recognition. Maybe he’d point at the chestnuts and I’d nod my head in agreement or something. But in the end, there would be a transaction. The money. The chestnuts. Business as usual.

Well, as all stories go involving travels in another country, it didn’t turn out quite the way I had planned. But, everything did end in my favor. The man at the grill looked at my piece of paper, then looked at me, then at the paper again. His forehead wrinkled up like he was trying to fill in a crossword puzzle. Then he shook his head back and forth, a gesture anyone on the planet knows means bad news, before what seemed like his last-ditch effort when he said in English, French accent, “I don’t read French, but I speak English. Do you speak English?”

Who knows in this increasingly Englishized world we live in. Maybe this December in Madrid I’ll hear “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” playing on the loudspeaker in Plaza Mayor as the vendors in the square sell their furry Santa Claus caps and plastic Christmas trees.
THE RECIPE:
For those of you who would like to make chestnuts, castañas, at home as I hear some families do here in Madrid at this time of year, you can pick up a kilo at your nearest market. Here’s how you prepare them.

Rinse chestnuts and cut a small X on the flat side of each nut, being sure to cut through the skin. The intent is to allow steam to escape gently instead of by explosion, which can be very messy and sometimes painful!

If you want to insure that your chestnuts will be cooked evenly, boil them first for about 20 minutes before you roast them.

Now, let’s get to the roasting. There are three methods of roasting chestnuts: by oven, by open fire, and by microwave.

To roast chestnuts in the oven, spread them out evenly on a pan with the X cut in each chestnut facing up. Bake for about 20 minutes at 190ªC (or 375ªF).

To roast chestnuts street-vendor style, roast them over an open fire. Test as you go for desired softness.

To roast chestnuts in the microwave, make very sure that every nut has been scored, as mentioned above. Arrange nuts on a microwave-safe dish and cook for about 2 minutes on high.

Once the chestnuts are roasted, serve them hot. Hot chestnuts peel easier than cold ones, so when you remove them from the heat, immediately dump them into a towel and keep them covered as you remove one at a time to peel. Or serve them individually in a newspaper cone and make each person peel their own.

Serve with salt if desired.

Recipe adapted from this recipe by Steve and Marilyn Kerman at fatfree.com.

Alex Selim is our guest essayist. He’s a close friend of mine, and a friend of the Internaitonal community here in Madrid. Alex recently relocated to San Franscico, but apparently that isn’t keeping him from writing about Madrid. He had one more article up his sleeve, and here we have it! Enjoy.

Bring up the topic of food with many Spaniards and you are likely to be bombarded with superlatives extolling the superiority of Spanish cuisine and the benefits of the Mediterranean diet faster than you can say “Jamon Serrano.”

But even if you appreciate the local gastronomy, you may at times find yourself longing for food with a little more kick to it. Fortunately, as Madrid’s population has become more diverse, so have its cuisines. Besides a vast number of international restaurants, a wide variety of specialty foods stores ranging from East and South Asian to Middle Eastern and Latin American are available throughout the city for those who are adventurous enough to prepare it on their own and want to save a few euros in the meantime . . . that is, of course, if they know where to find them.

My personal culinary expedition through Madrid began when I happened to discover a Little Chinatown, located, of all places, literally right underneath Plaza de España.

Feeling particularly brave one day, I decided to find out what exactly that stairway leads to on the northeast corner of the plaza near the metro entrance. I found a Chinese travel agency, a cheap little Chinese restaurant that serves excellent dumplings, and finally at the end of the hall just before the entrance to the parking garage, I found a grocery store.

Once inside Dong Fang Extremo Oriente, as the grocery store is called, I found a large selection of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean and Indian essentials. They even have a large selection of Chinese language books . . . if you happen to be looking for them.

Dong Fang stocks a large selection of instant noodles as well as frozen dumplings and egg rolls. They have seaweed rolls for making sushi and a large selection of Thai food, which happens to be my specialty. You can find many of the essentials for Thai food like fish sauce, oyster sauce, coconut milk, red, yellow and green curry and sweet chili sauce. For a shortcut there is canned yellow curry and sour seafood soup.

Unfortunately, either my Spanish takes a turn for the worse every time I go in or the staff doesn’t speak very much Spanish. So if you are looking for something specific, don’t count on getting much help. However, the shelves are well-stocked and well-organized.

Though Dong Fang does carry Patak’s Indian curry mixes for 5.75€, for your South Asian cooking needs, I would recommend going to Calle Miguel Servet between the Lavapiés and Embajadores Metro Stations. Walking past Nasima Store Alimentación, you could easily mistake it for any other run-of-the-mill alimentacion, but take a look inside and you’ll find a veritable treasure trove of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi spices, rice and tea.

At Nasima Store, I talked to Mohammed Chaton who runs the store for his father—a native of Bangladesh. Mr. Chaton speaks English well and was very helpful. The aforementioned Patak’s curry mixes cost a mere 3.30€, while Laziza Spice Mixes which combines the necessary spices for dishes like Chicken Masala cost 1.95€. However, if you are brave enough to want to cook from scratch, Nasima also sells individual spices like Madras Curry Powder. Fortunately the Natco company prints recipes on their packages.

From Nasima, if you walk toward Embajadores and turn left onto Calle Amparo you will find Foodland Alimentación Oriental, a small shop that stocks Indian, Middle Eastern and African food. If, instead, you walk the opposite direction from Nasima and turn left onto Calle Lavapiés, you will run into Autoservicio Hiperlavapies where you can buy pita bread and occasionally find some Middle Eastern staples like Hummus, a chickpea dip, or Baba Ghanoush, an eggplant dip.

However, if you are really serious about Middle Eastern food, then there is no better place to go than the neighborhood surrounding the Mosque, near Metro Parque de Avenidas. From the metro, walk toward Plaza Venezia (where bus 74 stops) and turn right, then cross the bridge. From there, make another right as the street curves onto Calle de Salvador de Madariaga. You will then find yourself across the street from the mosque. There are a number of Arabic grocery stores near there, but a Canadian friend of Egyptian background took me to Alimentación Al-Nur on the corner of Antonio Calvo. Standing in front of the mosque, the store is hidden by trees, but once you get past them you will see its sign written in large yellow letters with a blue background.

At Al-Nur you can buy mint tea, baklava, a type of stringy cheese called sharf and two of my personal favorites za’atar and molukhaya. Za’atar is a Lebanese spice mix (called tomillo in Spanish because it consists of thyme, sesame seed and sumac) that you combine with olive oil and use as a salad dressing or a dip for pita bread. Molukhaya is a traditional Egyptian soup cooked in chicken broth with fried garlic. It can be found in the freezer.

Finally, considering Spain’s historic relationship with Mexico, you would think that it would be easier to find a Mexican alimentación in Madrid, but it took a tip off by a friend from Mexico City for me to find Canasta Mexicana, a Mexican alimentación in La Latina.

Decorated with bright blue walls and piñatas hanging from the ceiling, its shelves are stocked with a variety of Mexican salsas, (Mexican) tortillas, frijoles and other essential ingredients for Californians like myself, to find the essential ingredients for Mexican cooking.

It’s owner, Rita Sanchez, hails from Guadalajara, Mexico and also runs Taquería del Alamillo around the corner. As a result, the store, which has been open for just over a year, also sells takeout food, including tamales and gorditas.

The woman working at the counter was very friendly and spoke English well as she showed me around the store.

So if you’re starving for a break from the comida típica, take advantage of Madrid’s diversity and check out one of these ethnic grocery stores. ?¡Buen provecho!

Dong Fang Extremo Alimentos de Extremo Oriente
Galería (Subterráneo) Parking
Plaza de España, s/n (Metro: Plaza de España)
91 542 14 64
Every Day: 10:00 - 14:00 and 16:30 - 20:30

Nasima Store Alimentación
Calle Miguel Servet, 6 (Metro: Lavapiés/Embajadores)
91 468 3817
Every Day: 11:00 - 23:00

Foodland Alimentación Oriental
Calle Amparo, 88 Local (Metro: Embajadores)
91 467 28 80
M-F: 10:00 - 14:00 and 17:00 - 20:30
Sat: 10:00 - 14:00
Sun and Holidays: 12:00 - 14:00

Autoservicio Hiperlavapiés
Calle Lavapies, 48 (Metro: Lavapies)
91 528 29 46
Every day: 10:30 - 23:00

Alimentación Al-Nur
Calle Antonio Calvo, 11 (Metro: Parque de Avenidas)
91 326 09 01
Every day: 10:00 - 22:00

Canasta Mexicana
Calle Segovia, 15 (Metro: La Latina)
91 366 5794
www.canastamexicana.com
info@canastamexicana.com
M-F: 11:00 - 14:00 and 16:30 - 21:00
Sat: 12:00 - 14:30

Heather, age 6, is on the floor scooting plastic horses around the living room.

“Do do-do do do do doo” she sings, then tilts her purple horse back onto its hind legs and whinnies in her well-practiced horse voice.

She sings again, the same thing, “Do do-do do do do doo,” and this time the tune is familiar, one I’ve heard before…somewhere. What is that song?

“Heather, what are you singing?” I ask.

“Huh?” she says, looking up from the horses she has lying on their sides on the floor.

“What song were you singing?”

“It’s the song from our favorite show,” she says, hopping to to the couch where I’m sitting, wrinkling her nose at me, and snatching the silver dollar from the couch cushion next to me. She gave the silver dollar to me a few minutes ago to look at.

“Sometimes I take a bath, and I hear the song from our favorite show.” She sings the tune once more. “I get out of the bath really really fast, and I dry myself off with a towel.” She jumps to her feet and dances around, pretending to dry herself off with an imaginary towel. “I put on my clothes, and I run to the TV.” She runs around the room and stops in front to the TV.

The TV is perched in a wooden armoire with two tall doors in front. Heather tugs at one of the doors with both hands until it opens. She reaches inside for something then peaks at me from behind the door, giggling, before running across the room and jumping on the couch next to me.

“See,” she says, “our favorite show.”

She’s holding a DVD case. The cover says, “M*A*S*H. Season Two Collector’s Edition.”

M*A*S*H is an old TV show. It ran from the early 70’s to the early 80’s in the U.S. The show was a comedy about the staff of an army hospital during the Korean War who found laughter to be the best medicine.

I remember watching re-runs of the show when I was a kid. The theme song plays in my head, the soundtrack to our conversation. (Listen to mash.mp3)

Heather pages through the booklet she has carefully removed from the inside cover of the DVD case. She giggles and points at a photo of a man wearing a pink dress and a towel around his head. “That crazy Klinger,” she says, “He thinks he’s a girl.”

Heather and her three older brothers and her mom and dad love M*A*S*H. It’s a family favorite. They got hooked after borrowing season one on DVD from friends. Now they own season two and three. Jesse, the oldest brother, says he’s seen part of season 6, the last series that’s been released on DVD to date. Jesse’s a family hero. He even rigged his mom’s mobile phone so that when she gets a call, the phone plays the M*A*S*H theme song as its ring tone.

As for me, I remember M*A*S*H was on everyday after The Simpsons for a few years during high school. I’d be sitting on the couch, and as soon as I would heard that song (Do do-do do do do doo) and would see the army helicopter flying across the TV screen, I’d scrounge around for the remote and change the channel to Seinfeld. I never cared much for M*A*S*H.

But tonight, I’m in the mood. It’s not the show I’m interested in. It’s everything that comes with watching the show in this house. I want to be a part of it all.

This week is my vacation. I came here to visit Heather and her family so I could get away, be a little selfish, do the things I want to do.

The funny thing is I’m finding that what I want is actually the opposite. What I’ve enjoyed most about this week is that I haven’t had to think about myself and what I want at all. I’ve been too busy letting the kids drag me around the house, doing kids stuff, getting all excited about putting stickers of football players in a collector’s book, watching The Little Mermaid and singing all the songs whether I know them or not, playing catch with the dogs in the yard, oohing and aahing over a random assortment of animal remains (including a glazed pile of elephant dung) and, of course, playing with fire.

I have no plans of starting a baby-sitting business or anything like that. Let’s make that clear. I don’t want any of you getting ideas.

It’s just nice being here and not having to think about myself all the time. I’m 25, no kids, living in the center of a major city, and my life is full of grocery-cart relationships. I walk down the aisle, I find the brand of cereal I like or the frozen pizza on-sale, and I throw it in the cart. I go to my favorite pub or to my writing group, I meet someone with similar interests, someone who reads the same books I do, so I get their email address, I throw them in the cart. My relationships are my choice. They’re good for me. My friends make sense.

Welcome to Kelly’s universe.

I just think it’s ironic that so many of us fight like pit-bulls to do life our way. We think happiness, enlightenment, nirvana, whatever you want to call it is a blank check with our name on it. Life is a target, and we’re the bull’s eye. But in the end, what we really need, is a vacation from ourselves. And maybe, just maybe, the best medicine is family, those clingy, high-maintenance, rag-tag people that won’t let us get away with being the poster child for Me magazine.

So I’ve decided not to take the bus to the beach today. I just don’t want to go. I know, I know, I’m on vacation.

But if it’s not to much to ask, I thought maybe when Heather gets out of the bath tub, we could call the boys down from the attic, get comfortable on the couch, and watch an episode of M*A*S*H.

What is a blog?
Here’s one person’s opinion.

Can you have your own blog?
Yes! They’re free. Go here.

What inspired kellycrull.com from the beginning was the experience of moving to a new city as an outsider, an extranjero. I remember April and I had just arrived, and before we got busy with our new jobs, we wanted to get a feel for the city.The last thing we wanted was another guide book to tell us what to do. We wanted to know what real people thought about the city, just someone who could show us around and give us opinions about anything and everything.

One thing blogs do is give opinions about things, anything and everything, unedited, unsolicited, loosely held together, but passionate and from the gut. Even now after living in Madrid for nearly two years, I’m still on the lookout for a new blog. Like the diaries we had as kids and hid under our beds, blogs beg us to be ourselves. There’s something about sitting in front of the computer and translating our thoughts into words that unearths who we are under the surface. We find ourselves writing about things we never meant to keep to ourselves, but haven’t shared with anyone. I’m surprised by how much I’ve learned from the blogs of my closest friends here in Madrid, even though we spend lots of time together.

All this to say, here are a few Madrid blogs in English to get you started:

Mad About Madrid - Alun John
www.madaboutmadrid.com

Ambivalence - Uma
www.ambivalente.com

The Universal Truth - James Trevor
universaltruth.blogspot.com

Puerta del Sol Blog - Jonathan Holland
www.puertadelsolblog.com

Sue Burke - Sue Burke
sue.burke.name

Robyn’s Blog - Robyn Bowles
robyn.bowles.es

Samuel.Bowles.es - Samuel Bowles
samuel.bowles.es

An Englishman Abroad - Matt Vaughan
mattvaughan.blogspot.com

Southern Watch - V-man
southernwatch.blogspot.com

T(r)oy Marbles - Troy Cady
troy.mountainview-church.com

Heather in Madrid - Heather Cady
heatherinmadrid.blogspot.com

The External Processor - Kelly Wills
web.mac.com/kellyinmadrid

Merodeando - Julio Alonso
merodeando.com/en

Spain Dad, a baby blog - Kelly Crull (my other blog)
spaindad.com

If you know of other Madrid blogs in English, feel free to leave a comment with the web address. Enjoy!