Yo soy happy

So, Madrid. What a lovely city. I wouldn't call it beautiful in the conventional sense - there are quite a few fading tacky remnants of the 1970s dotted around the city still - but it does have a quirky kind of vivacity to it and there are some gorgeous buildings in the old part of the city. We spent our four days there wandering round the various plazas near Sol and Santa Ana, taking in the city's galleries, riding a cable car through the main city park, eating plateful after plateful of tapas and paella and drinking some really great rioja. The Madrileans do seem a slightly strange bunch in some respects, though, and we encountered some rather unusual things along the way:

- Facial piercings. So, so many facial piercings. Nostrils, lips, labrets, eyebrows - every second person we encountered on the street had some kind of metal in their head.
- Chirpy street crossings. I don't mean disco lights instead of the flashing green man, I mean actual chirping - every street crossing made a starlinglike 'cheep cheep cheep' sound so realistic I wasn't sure where to look at first.
- Lots of hanging around in public. Oran (who's seen more of Spain than I have) tells me this is a generic Spanish habit but I found it amusing all the same. The idea seems to be that one suggests a meeting place (in Madrid's case, the overwhelmingly popular choice is the bear and strawberry tree statue on Puerta del Sol) and then proceeds to loiter in said place's general circumference for at least an hour or so with one's friends, engaging in animated discussion and possibly quaffing a can or two of beer in the process. Oran said he's visited one tiny village in Catalonia where, on pretty much any given night of the week, the entire population decamps to the fountain in the village square, drinks in hand, for chat and craic. Brilliant.

The best thing about Madrid, though, has to be how unbelievably cheap it is. Unless you were to go looking for every Michelin-starred place in town, it is nigh impossible to spend a fortune on food and drink. Even our last (decadent and unbelievably filling) meal on Friday came to way less per person than we would pay in either Amsterdam or Dublin, and we spent most of the preceding nights in various tapas bars where dinner cost less than a tenner each. We also did pretty well on the hotel and shopping fronts - although I maintain I would have spent much more in the shops had the shoe selection not been quite so tacky and PVC/patent leather-ridden. Definitely a place to visit in the next couple of years before it reaches Barcelonaesque popularity and price.

(Photos on Flickr soon, I promise!)

Post Paddy's day pleasantry

Well, after the utter washout that was Paddy's day, it was lovely to get to Paradiso this evening for a decent dose of Irish music, thanks to the lovely Bell X1, who played out of their skins for an hour and a half in the kleine zaal. If the rumours are true and they have been dropped by their record label I'll be truly appalled - they're possibly the best Irish band on the go at the moment, with more stage presence than Snow Patrol and better songs than The Frames. Hopefully some A&R tosser somewhere will see sense and give them a new record deal - they deserve to be huge.

I'll certainly be listening to them tomorrow on my two hour plane journey to Madrid - don't think I'll be fit for much else at 9 in the morning (definitely not work, ha). Matt was kind enough to recommend The Incredible Adam Spark to me but sadly it seems that our local Waterstone's doesn't stretch to quality Scottish fiction so I went for Starter For Ten instead. Should keep me going until Oran arrives tomorrow evening!

Updates and photos next Sunday when I'm back in the country.

And, we lost

Today is probably the closest Ireland have come to winning the SIx Nations in my rugby watching life... but, we still lost. Just about. A combination of rubbish Irish team decisions and an unbelievably controversial French finish means that we've lost on points difference and I am inconsolable. I'm currently attempting to cheer myself up with chocolate mini eggs and Bridget Jones's Diary 2, but I've still got a killer headache and am supposed to be heading out again in less than two hours and would really rather stay in and wallow and finish the mini eggs. Who knew rugby could make a girl so moody?

Hello there

Here are some things I have been doing lately instead of blogging:

- yelling at the cable company until they finally reconnected our cable
- working
- working some more
- not writing up the interview and gig reviews I've got to submit before the 29th
- reading lots
- learning how to lindyhop... in Dutch
- watching six nations rugby
- planning a trip to Madrid (six days to go)
- attempting to wean myself off chocolate

And still on my to-do list:

- deciding whether I should bite the bullet and go back to the gym or bin my membership, save the money and go running instead
- getting four days' worth of work done in the next three days so I can go to Madrid and not worry about people calling me on my non-work pay-as-you-go phone while I'm in the middle of the Prado
- buying some new books (recommendations, anyone?)
- blogging, now that I don't have to be sneaky about it at work