Last night La Palma officially got its certificates as the world’s first Starlight reserve and the world’s first Starlight Tourist Destination from the Starlight Foundation. Briefly, a Starlight Reserve is a place with excellent night skies, and a commitment to keep them that way. And a Starlight Destination is a place with excellent night skies and quality activities on offer for tourists. This is rather like “appellation d’origine contrôlée”…
2nd Printing
Yippee! The second printing has left the printers in Seville. This is excellent, because I’m down to about 6 copies at home (although there’s another 35 out on sale or return).
Cold Turkey
I’ve been very busy with translating the book. So busy that I only intermittently surface and decide that I ought to do something about something, like sending out Christmas cards. This morning I realised that Christmas Day is coming up like the ground at the end of a parachute jump. I’ve invited the friends-with-a-tiny-oven to come and eat turkey on Christmas day, so it seemed like a good idea to…
Christmas displays
Christmas trees are a newish thing here, although probably most houses have one now. The main traditional decoration is nativity scenes. Some just show the stable, but some public ones are so elaborate that they include the whole village, and it’s always a Canarian village. Obviously that’s historically inaccurate, but no more so than all the English nativity scenes where Mary and Jesus are blond. The best one on the…
A Night of Stars
Tonight is the big shopping night in Santa Cruz de La Palma. Shops will have special offers and stay open late, and there’s all sorts of activities on offer. The town hall have organized a special temporary car park on the sea front. (Traffic will circulate through the car park only from south to north. Presumably to go north to south you have to go along the bypass.) Nova Foto…
Lotteries
Lotteries are big business in Spain. And I’m happy to say that people do win – this week 70 people in Breña Alta shared 7 million €. Good luck to them. The two big lotteries over Christmas are particularly popular, “El Gordo” (the fat one) on December 22nd and “EL Niño” (the child) on January 6th have extra large prizes, but your extra unlikely to win because they sell so…