New York of the North

This is Manchester. Post-Madchester, post-rain, postal code M: Manchester. And I think I'm falling head over heels for her. I've had my eye on the city for a while and made my move just over a week ago. Shiiiit! So it's goodbye Valencia, hello new chapter. A colder, greyer, and slightly more expensive new chapter it might turn out to be, but, hey, this is still an incredibly enticing and exciting city that seems well at ease with the elements. Wind and rain may have nudged earth and fire off the top spots but who gives a former cotton mill. This city will never lose its soul. Sure, this joining of southern man and Northern town is still in its early days - a honeymoon period, you might say - and I'm still finding my feet (which has a bit to do with boots of Spanish leather being wholly unaccustomed to wet cobbles and a lot to do with a cutthroat rental market) but I'm an optimist. And I can spy blue sky over yonder and a number of new articles for the making. So let's raise a glass of spicy Rioja to my 'Out Of Office' Valencia blog for three years of tireless PR and internet-based support and then a tapa of your choice to my new one (owainthomas.wordpress.com) that now contains the writes ups on features I publish, other written work I undertake and a few observations about the use of words. Big cheers to Valencia, here's to Manchester!

Bed post

An interesting job this one...

Western wonder

VIP Valencia

This is the view from Vertical, a restaurant inhabiting the 13th floor of the Confortel hotel. It has a Michelin star and overlooks Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences from the east. It was one of a number of exclusive places that I put in a high-end city guide for luxury mobile phone company Vertu. Aimed at the business traveller who wears off the peg Prada on tour, listens to Genesis on a Bang & Olufsen and has a wine celler bigger than my flat, it was an insider's guide to the glitzy overbelly of my adoptive city. Before you laugh, yes, I have inside knowledge of these places. Okay, that might be through speaking to the chef de rang via email or looking through the online gallery for descriptive prompts but you didn't honestly think that I got to go to all the places I mention, did you?

Malaga revisited (and re-edited)

With the blossom-perfumed, finger-clicking, champers-popping trio of Seville, Granada and Marbella just a few miles away, it’s no wonder Malaga has been treated like the dowdy stepsister all these years. Admittedly, the city lacks the picture-box beauty of Seville, Granada's Alhambra and the millionaire magnetism of Marbella, but these things don't make the perfect holiday, they just give you a few things to tick off, don't they? Plaza de España? Check. Flamenco show? Check. Sean Connery and wife? Check. We go to these places to see things we've seen in pictures or heard about from people who've been there. We go there to say we've been there. Not wanting to get all Alain de Botton on you, but what happened to discovery? Sure, you might have an epiphany sitting in a well-recommended tablao or shuffling around the "must sees" with everyone else, but you won't see anything different to what every other punter who's just hopped on a plane with a guide book sees, will you? Go to a part of the world like the Costa de Sol that gets more slagging off in polite conversation than Robert Mugabe, however, and you'll feel like you're on a voyage of discovery. I mean, grilled sardines on the beach, tapas for under €4 a pop and one of the best botanical gardens in Europe - for me it was more like a voyage into paradise. So I tried to convey my enthusiasm for the place in a five-page city guide for the Ryanair Magazine after a brief visit (with this photographer: www.niccologuasti.com), and explain that Malaga's charm lies in all the things that make it different from it's neighbours. But I fear that some of my honest talk of a much-maligned, diamond-in-the-rough, city-on-the-up might have been tamed to make it sound a bit more glowing. Ah well, worth a try. (www.ryanairmag.com)

May day, may day

Slow April, here's for more work in May...

Green living

Bit of a late write up this but... In February I received a commission to 'go green' for the week for the 'Green Issue' of the Vueling inflight magazine, Ling. The idea was simple: to be as eco friendly as possible with regards to recycling, shopping, getting around, eating, etc... and discuss how it affected my everyday. Now, I already consider myself to be a thoughtful if relentlessly hypocritical friend of the earth (like much of the working planet that doesn't live in a tree) so I didn't think this piece would be too much of a challenge. I can't have been thinking straight. My mind must have been busy trying to figure out how wise it was for a magazine promoting a low-cost airline to be running a 'Green Issue'. Anyway, ethics aside and commission underway, the article was certainly a wake-up call to my sleep-walking wastefulness. I fitted timers to boilers, stopped eating meat, lowered my heating tariff, cycled everywhere, wore a few more layers of clothes (Valencian flats are built to keep cool, which is great in 35 degrees but bad news in 5 – the magic number on the thermostat during February's 'eco week') and sorted a 'pre-eco week' shop into literally a dozen bin bags. At the end of the experiment, when I was lugging those dozen bags full of plastics, metals, milk cartons, wine bottles and food waste down my stairs and then to the communal bins at the end of our road, I got thinking. Not just about how much of my money I was needlessly giving away to an energy company, but about the amount of other peoples' shit I'm willing to pay for and then dispose of in my own free time. Bastards! Never again. I resolved that I wouldn't become more eco-friendly because I love the planet, but because I hate getting treated like a mug.

Vote Valencia

I moved to Valencia with my girlfriend in late 2007. While I could probably give you a million reasons why we're still here, I still haven't the foggiest idea what made us decide to relocate to this perennially sunny Mediterranean city, renowned for good food and endless festivals, in the first place. Honestly, we didn't know a thing about all this before we left. Okay, maybe we had an inkling that it would be warmer than Finsbury Park in winter. We just decided that we wanted to try out life in another country, and that Madrid or Barcelona would have been too big for comfort. So you could say that we settled on Spain's third-largest metropolis, well, by default. That's no bad thing, though. In fact, as a travel writer looking for inspiration you can't beat having a brand new city to explore with a blank notebook. Making up for my initial ignorance, I made it my job to find out what makes the city tick and have learned, burned, eaten and partied a lot over the last few years doing it. I've lived it to write it to live another day, basically. My latest guide in the Ryanair magazine is an unabashedly subjective albeit worthy selection of the bars, restaurants, people and cultural quirks that have made my life here pretty bloody marvellous. Hopefully it will provide an appealing slice of Valencia, inspiring those who weren't sure about the city before to pop over when they can and learn a little more. (www.ryanairmag.com)

Powder parties

I hate skiing and snowboarding in equal measure. If you're assuming that there must have been a massive ski-based trauma in my past to make me feel this way, you're wrong. There were two. On the first occasion I had been invited to a friend's birthday party on the picturesque slopes of Hendon, North London. Making up for the climactic shortfall of soft, fluffy snow, the terrain was an unforgiving latticework of the kind of bristles you usually find beside metal grated doormats. You know, the kind built for scraping hard, dry mud/shit off your boots? Well, even the jeans I was wearing at the time couldn't protect my knees and buttocks from the brutal buffing I endured in punishment for screwing up 3% of every 97%-perfect snowplough. I was ten, but the scars still remain. So the next time I was obliged to go skiing, for a work 'away weekend', I chose snowboarding. I used to skateboard a little with my brother and I could bend my knees in all the right places in front of the mirror before I left, so I was confident. Maybe too confident, according to the infuriatingly talented snowboard instructor that hauled me out of a snow dune on my first (and last) run. It further confirmed that me and skis were never meant to be. Which is a shame because the atmosphere on the slope and around the resort was amazing. And the views? Incredible. My piece in the Ryanair February/March issue is guide for reluctant skiers, like myself, who prefer their aprés ski without all the hassle of having to throw themselves down a slope to deserve it. It was a rundown of the biggest and best snow festivals across Europe. (www.ryanairmag.com)

Made in the Mediterranean

Expats in Spain are always getting a bad press. The way they get pigeonholed at home (I'm using the UK as my point of reference but I'm sure they get similar stick in Germany, France and Holland) you would think they were all sunburned alcoholics incapable of a) learning a language or b) holding down a proper job. Admittedly, there are few that fit the a) and b) profile staggering around the place (admits the binge-drinking freelancer who avoids his elderly neighbour because she speaks as fast a jet fighter) but I reckon the worst of them should be seen like bad pop music; louder than everything else and seemingly everywhere, yes, but not always the whole story. Because if you dig a little deeper, beyond the brash and the predictable, you'll discover richer themes bursting with creativity and tenacity that connect the lives of literally thousands of unsung expats. So when I was asked to find a few expat success stories (ie. the silent majority that can drag their arse off a beach to work) across the Balearic Islands for a series of interviews in Ling magazine, the inflight magazine for Vueling, I was thrilled at the chance to re-balance the debate. I found a young web designer and digital entrepreneur in Menorca, a veteran events guru in Mallorca and a husband and wife team serving up contemporary Indian cuisine in Ibiza to help me prove that there is a more industrious and inspirational side to life as an expat. Check them out respectively at: www.aflua.com, www.gloria-events.com and www.cardamomclub.com.