Cruise ships regularly call into Santa Cruz de La Palma, and I thought people might like suggestions on what to see while they’re here. Of course it might be useful to people staying elsewhere on the island, too. The Tourist Information Office is a distinctive glass building, right outside the entrance to the port, and the staff are very good. But it does tend to attract longish queues when a…
Locked Out
I had my morning all planned out: ten minutes yoga, breakfast, and then down to Santa Cruz to translate at the vet’s for my friends, followed by popping into the Astrotur office to discuss Monday’s group of visitors to the observatory. Then home to get on with the scale model solar system and writing. The yoga went to plan. Then my husband asked for a lift to the next village…
Shaving Uranus
I’m busy making a scale-model solar system, for teaching primary school children. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are marbles, Jupiter and Saturn are kids’ footballs, and Neptune and Uranus are tennis balls. At first I planned to shave the tennis balls before painted them, but then I wondered whether it was really necessary. I changed my mind. Then I went down the local art shop to buy paint, since it’s…
Where’s the village gone?
Tourists sometimes go nuts trying to find the village of Breña Baja, or Fuencaliente. There’s a really simple reason why they can’t find them. They don’t exist. Breña Baja and Fuencaliente are municipalities, and their town halls are in the villages of San Jose and Los Canarios, respectively. It like driving all over the south east of England, looking for the town of Sussex. The map shows the 14 municipalities…
You don’t need to apologise for being you.
I’ve been reading Chris Guillebeau’s blog at The art of Non Conformity for a while, and it’s frequently encouraged me to live a little more authentically. Today’s post is an absolute gem.
Sort of
Well, I did it – sort of. I wrote two blog posts (this is the third) and walked for an hour, but the “marketing” consisted of poking around the Internet trying unsuccessfully to match up unsold stories with potential markets. I didn’t send anything off. Better than nothing, but I’ll never sell anything unless I send stuff out.