Rosie Reay of Jesús (Tortosa) shares her hilariously surreal British passport renewal experience. Don’t you just love it every time you need to renew your documents in Spain? This saga has been running (should I say dawdling) along two channels. Since December we have been endeavouring to renew my mother’s passport. Under the EU you [...]
Making a truita de patates (tortilla de patatas / Spanish omelette) is dead easy. You fry the diced potatoes in olive oil till soft. You beat the eggs in a bowl, with salt. You cook the mixture in the frying pan on one side. And then you turn it – and end up with a [...]
And now for something completely different. We are delighted to announce that one of Valerie’s funniest stories, With A Rose Between Her Teeth, was selected for inclusion in the Writers Abroad Short Story Anthology 2010. This is a fictional take on the British in Spain, most definitely in the Garlic spirit, written with Valerie’s hallmark humour [...]
“Cold liquids in the hot dry summers of Spain are necessaries, not luxuries; [...]. At Madrid an agreeable drink is sold in the streets; it is called ‘Michi Michi’, from the Valencian ‘Mitj e Mitj’, ‘half and half’ [...]. It is made of equal portions of barley-water and orgeat of ‘Chufas’, and is highly iced.” [...]
A lot of people from the UK react with shock horror when I say that I am still Valerie Collins. They expect me to have a Spanish married name: some sort of aristocratic double or triple barreled mouthful: at the very least an exotic and probably unpronounceable surname. But many of them don’t realise that [...]
