Click here to see the detailed statistics of today’s cycle. Well I did have a brilliant idea (see the last paragraph of ‘cycling day 1’), although it wasn’t that brilliant. I looked again at the online maps and there was clearly lots of back roads that would take […]
I couldn’t resist coming back for a cycle around the city where I spent all of March… I only left last Friday at dawn but it does seem like a long time ago!
Once this is uploaded I’m off back to the flat to pack (listening to the leaders debate as I do so), have a shower and then hit the sack in preparation for a 6am rise and a coach to Tarifa at 7am. My time in Cádiz is done. […]
A final collection of photos from my last afternoon in the Andalucian city… Watch this space!
The original plan, as noted in last night’s post, was to go kayaking. Alas it was too windy and all such activities had been cancelled. Instead I went with one of my teachers José (with the beard), his girlfriend and my fellow student Glen to the Parque Metropolitano […]
Earlier today I attended my final lesson at the K2 Internacional language school here in Cádiz. The choice was a bit random and based primarily upon the school’s location on what looked like a nice square in the old part of town (and the impressive video on their […]
When I imagined Semana Santa in Cadiz, I thought it would be two or three religious-themed processions on Thursday and Friday of ‘holy week’. I wasn’t expecting thirty or more of them spread throughout the week and in many cases stretching late into the night. Last night the […]
Amazing model from 1779 now housed in the Museo de la Cortes. Hanging above the model is an iconic picture depicting the presentation of the 1812 constitution to the King, I think. Two years later in 1814 the (new?) King ripped it up, if not literally then metaphorically. […]
The sun is beginning to set on my time in Cádiz. Three more days at the language school followed by a day off and then an early morning bus to Tarifa on Friday to meet up with my uncle and eventually, back in Estepona, my bicycle Reggie. All […]
The wonders of mobile blogging… I think I’ve more or less got the whole thing sorted. Here are a few GoPro shots from this morning, transferred wirelessly to my iPhone and beamed up to the Internet via 4G. Hopefully also a couple of videos (but it’s there where […]
You may remember – I’ve certainly mentioned it on here before, and probably elsewhere – that one of the principal reasons for choosing to study Spanish at the K2 language school here in Cádiz was not just its general location in the heart of the old part of […]
The plan is that two weeks today – Thursday 9th April – I will be standing somewhere near the southernmost point of the European mainland looking north and thinking “here we go again…” (or even, “bloody hell, here we go again…”). Between now and then, my time is […]
I promised this a couple of weeks ago so here it is; the post with all the bikes of Cádiz, or at least some of them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the city is up there at the top of the European premier league of […]
…and then perhaps this one:
There’s a a feeling you get when visiting El Puerto de Santa Maria that its glory days are in the distance past. But what glory days they were; Columbus sailed from here on one of his journeys to the Americas and the first map of the Americas was […]
I mentioned The Pillars of Hercules in the previous post and it gave me an idea for a dreary afternoon in Cádiz; see how many of them I could spot in coats of arms dotted around the city. The predominant coat of arms shown below is the one […]
A modest collection of contemporary art on the second floor. It didn’t take me long to stroll around. The three-dimensional cardboard piece was my favourite, the contorted bodies reminding me of some of the religious stuff on the first floor (see earlier post). As for the black metal […]
I arrived here in Cádiz in the early afternoon of Saturday 28th February. (What do you mean you don’t remember?! Weren’t you paying attention?) I’ve now been in the city for three weeks. It was a beautifully sunny day. I perspired slightly as I carried my bags around […]
Thursday is turning out to be the night of indulgence. In previous weeks it has been tapas and this week it has been the turn of beer. That said the indulging was limited and it was more of a late afternoon event than a full-blown evening one but […]
If you bump into Professor Henry Higgins in the near future, would you mind pointing out that currently the rain is Spain seems to be falling mainly on Andalucia and especially the corner where Cádiz is located. However, my mood has lifted somewhat from the mid-Cádiz blues that […]
The title might have persuaded you not to bother reading this but for those of you still here… It’s not been a great day. Nothing bad has happened. I haven’t been thrown onto the streets of Cádiz or expelled from the language school or anything like that. It’s […]
Sometimes images speak more than words. Today is a good case in mind. Thanks to my very enthusiastic (i.e. he seems to be very good at getting stuff done) fellow student of Spanish, Dutch Mike (he’s not called ‘Dutch Mike’, just ‘Mike’), a car was hired and four […]
So, that’s the ‘fine art’ section of the Museo de Cádiz done. Spanning the period from the 16th to the early 20th it’s a modest collection of paintings. The earlier stuff is full of virgins, anguished faces, cherubs, monks looking worried… You get my drift. The 16th and […]
Today wasn’t the greatest day in my ongoing efforts to master the basics of the Spanish language. My small class consists of me, a francophone Canadian and a multilingual Dutchman (who is probably reading this so I had better be careful what I say!). Both are very affable […]
So it’s Monday 9th March and I’m just about to start my second week at the language school here in Cádiz. Perhaps first of all I should apologise to all those people who are desperate for me to start writing about cycling once again. At the moment there […]
On the Sykes/CyclingEurope Luxembourg scale of local museum quality (where the Luxembourg City History Museum scores a straight 10 – more details here), the Museo de Cádiz that I’ve just visited comes out with a high 7. Today’s visit was the first of three that I’m going to […]
Yesterday, following my, err… ‘grate’ morning stroll to the main square in front of the ayuntamiento (or town hall) of the city, I sat down for a few minutes to upload the ‘grate’ pictures [OK, stop with the ‘grate’ jokes now…] to the Internet and to await my […]
Bear with me on this one… Whatever you may think of grates and manholes (or indeed personholes as I suppose we should nowadays refer to them as), they do come in a great (no pun intended) variety of shapes and sizes. Indeed some are very small, others are […]
It’s not the first time I have used the GoPro camera but it is the first time on this trip that I’ve tried to use it for a proper purpose. The results are mixed. I filmed a time-lapse sunset which was OK but the camera seems to compensate […]
But that’s no bad thing. I’m here for a month and can’t do ‘important’ things every day. And it’s not saying that the ‘unimportant’ things that I did do were nevertheless uninteresting; they weren’t. So what were they? Well the lessons this morning of course (we were studying… […]
I’ve been wandering around Cadiz since my arrival last Saturday, so much of what I saw today on my first proper tour with a guide who knew what she was talking about – it was my teacher at the language school Christina – wasn’t new. But the Torre […]
My cunning plan to continue to use my mobile phone and 3G/4G data during my two months in Spain – see the details at length here – is not working quite as well as I thought it might. To avoid the £3 per day charge from Vodafone UK, I […]
The plan for today was – and still is – to spend a few hours reviewing my notes from the Spanish course that I completed during the last three months of 2014 at Reading College. I’m slowly getting a little better at coming up with the important bits […]
Today has been very reminiscent of my first day at university over twenty years ago. It started with goodbyes, handshakes and embraces with members of my family (my uncle and his wife standing in for my parents this time around) followed by a long journey on a bus […]
A few weeks ago I moved away from Reading in Berkshire having lived there for just over fifteen years. I can clearly remember my first visit to the town in Spring 1999 when I was summoned to the university for an interview. It was a horribly wet and windy […]
It’s been a busy few days since relocating back up to Yorkshire but I’m delighted that the whole process is now complete. I first started to plan my return to the county where I was born, brought up and educated over twelve months ago and everything has now […]
