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.

Christmas Phd-ing

I didn't enjoy my time at university all that much. After a great first year it became a bit humdrum to be honest. I enjoyed the course, though. I just wish it had been squeezed into one year so I could have avoided the bad hair, boredom and debt. The degree was run by the chalk and cheese pairing of the humanities and science faculties at Bristol UWE and called Science, Society and the Media. It was an often confusing mish mash of media studies and practical science experiments one week, followed by a way out pairing of classical scientific philosophy and cosmology the next. I actually think it was cancelled a year after I left. Anyway, out of all the confusion I ended up with a pretty respectable degree and began thinking about the world in a completely different way. I suddenly had the confidence to approach the 'Big Ideas' with a bit of logic and rational thought, a bit like Einstein, and wasn't scared shitless by physics anymore. Even so, when Paul St George, a multi-media artist, sculptor and Principal Lecturer in Computer Animation at the London Metropolitan University, asked me to proofread his 40,000-word PhD thesis and root out the mistakes I trembled a little under the weight of his big ideas. Along with an interesting foray into the pioneering works of nineteenth-century filmmakers, such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and their influence on contemporary visual artists, his masterpiece was essentially about how space and time is represented and constructed by both the artist and the observer, I think, and how this throws up new questions about a multi-dimensional universe, I think. What I do know for sure is that there were a few typos, grammatical wobbles and formatting issues that needed my expert eye. www.paulstgeorge.com

Innovation frustration

This morning I was looking at myself in the mirror, quietly confident I had the best a man could get, when I suddenly realised – with a little discomfort – that I didn’t. What had happened to my razor of champions; a blade that was supposed to handle the demanding contours of my face, as well as a bit of her unorthodox against-the-grain leg shaving? Well, it had gone blunt as a spoon after a week and I happened to feel like a loser: a stubbly one. But us freelancers are well accustomed to that. No, what really pissed me off was returning to purchase the same brand of blades and discovering what kind of ‘innovation technology’ they had been investing in. It would appear that battery-operated vibration and vitamin e-secreting neon-strip ‘upgrades’ had drained the budget out of making decent razor blades forever. Aren’t they missing the point there slightly? Do they care? I fear not. In fact, I’m beginning to see a rather ugly pattern emerging, and it’s not just the one on my chin. Pointless innovations, updates and applications that do little or no service to the original piece of machinery – sounds like a good rant piece for the Vueling inflight magazine, Ling...

In other words

There are three types of foreigner in Spain: those who have lived here a few years and speak less than 10 words of Spanish (it must be true; I read it in a Giles Tremlett book); those who have lived here a few years, speak very good Spanish yet still assume they sound terrible; and those who have lived here a few years and think their spoken Spanish is pretty good when it's actually bloody awful. I fall into the third category. Locksmiths, receptionists and the old lady next door will testify to this. And though it has improved steadily since I arrived (positively skyrocketing once I realised fluency wouldn't come by watching gameshows or eavesdropping in bars, but by study) I still find it incredibly frustrating that I can't be as articulate in Spanish as I can, on a good day, in English. What I can do very well, however, is understand the written word. So when my girlfriend, a qualified translator, asked me to do the donkey work on a 28,000-word translation last week, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to repay a small chunk of the linguistic debt to her I incurred when we arrived. Picture the scene two years ago: Her: "Babe, can you get the door phone while I'm putting on my make-up?" Me: "No, I'm scared." I wasn't easy to live with. Anyway, back to the translation: it was vast. But we persevered and completed it on deadline (within five days!). And apart from a liiiiittle bit of stress, I found the whole experience very gratifying. As well as the obvious act of translating one language into another, the whole process involved a hefty amount of editing, sub editing, proofreading and hundreds of "how would we say that in English?" questions. Basically, a few things I have a geekish fascination with already. Woe betide anyone who thinks translation is just replacing words with equivalent words; you've got to find the cultural and linguistic equivalence! We did. And I helped. Only 95% of the debt left to pay then...

Eternal youth

Rome, the Eternal City, will always inhabit a sentimental albeit pokey little corner of my heart. It was the destination of my first romantic getaway. It was also deserted and rained solid for the entire three days. We spent most of our time hopping from closed pizzerias to bad exhibitions to bed (and repeat), but we somehow managed to find the bright side, and the handful of Romans that hadn't left the city to spend Christmas with with their nans. My own experience was no doubt lightened a shade or two by the woman I was with (and still am) and also the little boy I overheard by the Trevi Fountain during a particularly brutal thunderstorm. And I quote: "This place is rubbish! Everything's broken and there's cat shit everywhere." Poor sod. He was right, though. The ruins don't always appeal to everyone and the cats – along with a gaggle of particularly prickish waiters – did saunter about like they owned the place. At the time, however, I did feel better that I wasn't having as much of a crappy time as him. I later felt guilty. This month, I have decided to dedicate my 'Roam Rome with the kids' piece in the Wizz inflight magazine to him. Bless. (www.wizzmagazine.com)

Special branch

E-e-e-e-eeewoks!

Blog role

This is me sitting outside the Docamar bar in Madrid. Owner Raúl kindly caught me in mid munch as I worked my way through his famous patatas bravas. Okay, he didn't invent the tapas staple but you won't find many places in Madrid, or elsewhere for that matter, that serve it dripping in the tastiest hotdamn salsa you'll ever come across. I included his excellent bar and an account of his dedication to potato dressing in a blog-style city guide to Madrid. I basically ran around town asking various people to recommend me their favourite bars, restaurants, sights etc. I then went and did exactly what they recommended. I started off at funky t-shirt shop La Tipo and let the domino effect of recommendations lead me into a seedy cabaret club at about 2 in the morning. I met some great people along the way and hopefully the article will inspire a few people to ditch the guide book occasionally and rely on the vast (and better informed) resource of people that actually live and breath Madrid to suggest a few good places to burn euros. You'll find my on-the-hoof account in the Wizz Magazine this August. (www.wizzmagazine.com)

Alicante revisited

"The only people who ever have a bad word to say about Alicante are the very same people who have never been there. Situated on the Spain’s eastern coast, bordering Murcia on the south and Valencia on the north, Alicante is, in reality, one of the country’s most attractive and cosmopolitan cities with an irresistible all-year-round buzz. Add that to rich cultural and culinary traditions, demonstrated by a wide selection of award-winning museums, world-class restaurants and deep-rooted festivities, and you might to ask yourself why you haven’t been to see the true Alicante for yourself yet." Okay, there's a sniff of hyperbole in the introduction to my online Alicante guide for YeahBaby (web coming) but I'm no liar. Admittedly, summer might not be the best time to sample the full spectrum of what's on offer – as it normally turns into a bit of a wild party town – but you might be surprised at what you can find during the rest of the year with a good guide. Architecture, gastronomy, artesanal sweet shops, swish beach clubs, picturesque day escapes... it's all there if you start looking in the right place and, of course, stop listening to the naysayers.

Happy birthday to zoo

There aren’t many cities on the planet that can boast an 11km park running through the centre of town. Fewer still that can boast a 100,000-square-metre replica of African and Madagascan landscapes - plus animals - living at the end of one. But Valencia is one of the lucky few. The city's one-year old Bioparc represents one of the world’s latest "immersion zoos" - zoos that meticulously recreate animal habits for their continued wellbeing without obvious bars or cages. By effectively recreating natural habitats with the same ecosystem, immersion zoos allow their animals to behave and mix as they would in the wild: washing, grazing, playing and, hopefully, breeding. I took my lady to the zoo for her birthday (as you do) and we were thrilled to see every one of these activities undertaken by a mixed bag of animals, without an obvious care in the world. Like them or loathe them, you'd have to admit after closer inspection that zoos don't get more comfortable than this. Just look at this happy fella above. A photographer friend Juergen Horn (www.jhfoto.de) was taking full advantage of the giraffe-eyeview platform when he captured this proud beauty. Have a look at the write up here (www.wizzmagazine.com).

The magnificent seven

Never underestimate the little places. That was the uncomplicated message behind my seven-city rundown for the easyJet magazine. After looking through the budget flyer's destination list on the search for inspiration (I do that occasionally) I came across a few destinations that I had never seen mentioned in the magazine – despite being some of their most popular summer destinations. I just wanted to give them their 15 minutes of fame (three million people read the mag every month, doncha know?) and highlight a few unknown facts, names and places. Now most people could probably tell you where to find La Sagrada Familia, St Marks Cathedral or Big Ben without blinking, but would they know where Napoleon was born, where in Italy they'd find a White City (pictured) or get a portion of tasty ful medames? I gave them a helping hand with small feature highlighting a few of the unknown gems to be found in Hurghada, Bastia, Ajaccio, Catania, Lamezia Terme, Dalaman and Brindisi (www.ink-live.com/easyjet/2009/mar)

Memory jogging

This is me nearing the end of a 9km 'sightjog' through the streets of Barcelona. That guy next to me is the reason why. His name is Arnd Krüger and besides being a very fit and very friendly chap, he is the brains and brawn behind an ingenious little company called Sightjogging. Offering to take you on eight different runs of upto 15km around the city sights, Sightjogging also offers a refreshing alternative to dull sight slogging with the crowds. You'll notice from the picture that it's just the two of us. That was pretty much how it was for the entire run. Apart from Jody taking the photos, the places normally overrun with people – La Rambla, El Call and Port Vell – were completely deserted. Why? It was 7am. It was a great chance to take in some of Arnd's many historical anecdotes and uncover a side of the city you rarely see. My breathless account will feature in the May/June issue in of the Ryanair inflight magazine. (ryanairmag.com)