Tapas and gig

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of my mum, the missus parents and a friend visiting.

We decided to go out for a tapas and to see a gig for a local band, Not to Fall.

Teaching my mum how to be photographed without blinking

I can do the non-blinking perfect. The missus not as good

And then on to the bar. La Playazo, despite having really good live music nights, suffers from being on the furthest side of town. Even when you think you’ve reached the edge of Nerja, this place is even more further down the beach.

At least the walk along the beach before and afterwards is nice.

The band, Not to Fall, setting up

Things started off a bit quiet.

Keep it down guys

Then things started to pick up

“This song goes ‘Ooooooh,oh-ohhhhhhhh lalalalalalalaaaaah eeeeeeeeeeeee’”

‘Ooooooh,oh-ohhhhhhhh lalalalalalalaaaaah eeeeeeeeeeeee’

Nice dancing face man

Then things got really out of hand when. First there was the unison crowd wave

Wave everyone, wave

And I started some pop and lock/robot dance mash up

Bam. There it is

So a good night was had by all

Thanks to these guys, “Not to Fall”

Flickr set | tapas and gig

San Isidro 09

Last month I went to my second San Isidro festival. Incidentally this was the first festival I went to last year when I first moved out to Spain.

San Isidro means quite a few things to old locals, to me and many yoofs it means a piss up, parade, party and the start of the summer.

Here’s some photos from this year.

As always there were many animals

Of all shapes

And sizes

Plenty of well dressed people

 

Of all sizes

Some people cheated and got the Party Truck to the main fiesta area

While others danced

It was very thirsty work

Although for some it was much harder to not sit and watch but instead join in with the parade. Good work A.

Where’s yer horse?

As always the whole slideshow. [Source My Flickr]

 

Opera 10

I’m a big fan of Opera 10. Opera if you don’t know is a fast, safe, standard compliant, innovative and featured packed internet browser.

Personally I could give many reasons why you should try out Opera but you’re the best judge (although this page here that Opera uses to show of some of its HTML code does quote Brass Eye’s Drugs episode with one of its news stories, which is quite amusing and top marks. CAKE is a made up drug. Don’t do it.)

And they’ve just released their beta of Opera 10.

So I thought I’d show it some love.

Go download it and try it out.

Woosh zoom

I’ve mentioned on here before that there are some strange flying vehicles that I see around here. Yesterday I heard a very strange helicopter propeller noise.

I had a quick look outside and saw this

What appears to be a mini helicopter 

It hovered around for a bit and I got a better shot and on closer inspection it looks like a go-kart-esque helicpter

Idea for the next Mario Kart perhaps? 

It looks like the helicopter forgot it’s roof. You can even see the pilots and passengers heads.

So a little while later I heard an even louder helicopter noise. I need to check if it was “Dia de Costa Helicopter” or something?

This time when I looked I saw this monster

Looks a bit like Airwolf! 

Things then got a little heated and there was a helicopter stand off. Or chopper off. Or propeller off.

“Get outta my airspace Big Guy!”

I really wish that I had tracked and zoomed on that last photo a bit better.

Soon after that both ‘copters disappeared and I went back to making a den for Liz Lemon.

Aprendiendo Espaňol es muy dificil

My Spanish is not going as well as it should be. The classes I was taking last year have stopped. Christmas kind of broke things up, the class took a break anyway and I was in England for a while. When I returned my work picked up quite a bit which meant it left me with little free time. And work will always have to come before anything else at the moment.

I’ve tried various ways of being able to study from home. I subscribe to a podcast that I was listening to regularly, until my headphones broke and I had to wait to get new ones. Now I’m just waiting for this period of visitors to die down so I have some free time.

I’ve found twitter handy for learning. I follow a few Spanish people and have tweetdeck set up to show their tweets. That way I can learn and read actually Spanish like how they would speak it.
Another little way I’ve been learning Spanish is by having a module on my igoogle home page. One that displays a Word of the Day.
Not only does this module give you the word, its pronunciation and obviously it’s meaning, it also puts it in to a sentence.
I find these help me with my word structure a lot.

There is one problem though with Spanish. Any word you learn and think you know off by heart can change so much within a sentence. A lot of Spanish is about how the sentences are implied rather then literal said.
The one I can never get is siento. It can mean either saying you’re sorry or sit down. What if you wanted to say just sorry and not sit? Or sit and not sorry? What if you wanted to tell someone to sit down so you can say sorry? And if you said it would they think you were telling them you were sorry they were sitting?

Another example was from my igoogle module yesterday. Here it is.

Es claro, verdad?

Claro here can mean light, pale or fair. (Claro can also mean about 25 other things according to google and used to me “understood” as in “that’s clear” in sentences in the same sense you or I might say “that’s clear” when given instructions)

But anyway, the sentence given says “she has black hair and CLARO eyes.” But as you can see they’ve changed the meaning of claro, which they only just explained mean light/pale/fair they now say means blue/gray/green eyes. They didn’t say that before.

GAH!

The one thing that annoys me more then all of this word sex-change type of business is the fact that I can’t use my Spanish here.
Every time I go to a bar, restaurant or shop and try to speak in Spanish the person will always reply in English.
I understand that this town is a town built on tourism and such and it’s good that businesses employ bilingual employees for times when people might not speak Spanish but I just wish that if someone was putting in effort trying to speak your language that you would help them out and first try speaking back to them in your that language.

Score

Last weekend I was doing something that Cristiano Ronaldo was wanting to do. Playing football in Spain.

It’s well known that Ronaldo wants to move to Real Madrid to play football in the Spanish Sun. But I have a few words of warning for him.

Nice tan

I now support, not only a t-shirt tan line from the same day but also I have sun burn around my knees. Slightly embarrassing.

Time to start topping up that tan me thinks.

So Cristiano Ronaldo, if you’re reading, wear sunscreen
(link to video as I knew you were thinking of that.)

Grilling time

I was back in the UK recently and amongst many things, meal, meeting friends, drinking, I did something I haven’t done in a long time. Something which has prepared me in some way for my up coming BBQ.

I grilled some toast. 

And I don't mean just sticking some cheese on top of toast and grilling that. I mean taking bread and turning it to toast with a grill, not a toaster. How 1990's.*

Motherhubbard toast in a Monday to Friday grill

As you can see this was in early stages of toast cooking.

And I hope this won’t put off people eating BBQ’s at mine but I did burn one piece of toast.

Fingers crossed that the BBQ goes a little better.

*My family weren't very Tech Savvy when I was a kid and we were late adaptors to toasters.