It suddenly struck us that it's been more than two years now since we started this blog - the first post was on January 1st 2008 - to document the preparations for our wedding for friends and family. A lot has changed; back then we were living in Bristol, working for the BBC (Kate) and REMIX (Theo). Now, 20 countries and 2 years later here we are, married, living in Madrid, working as English teachers and expecting our first child in a matter of weeks. Wow!
Anyway, we thought we'd be ridiculously self-indulgent and mark our blog's second anniversary with that evergreen journalistic conceit, a list. A top ten of our favourite blog posts, ideal for new and occasional readers, allowing them to skip the filler and get to the standouts. So, in no particular order, here are our top ten blog posts...
1. The Wedding report - pretty self-explanatory. Nothing written could ever really do justice to the emotions we felt and the amount of love our friends and family put in to making our day so special, but Kate's effort comes close.
2. Kate's CELTA blog - summing up our feelings about our CELTA course in Barcelona as we commenced our career as English teachers.
3. Grape-picking - what better way to celebrate your 27th birthday the day after a 12 hour road-trip than to get up at 7 and go grape-picking?
4. Berlin - we had an amazing few days, filled with culture, history, cheap wine, old friends and a DIY near-castration.
5. Arriving in Madrid - 36 hours on the road, tired, cold, grouchy and nervous about having nowhere to stay in a city where we didn't speak the language. Then a guardian angel called Cesar called...
6. Were we romantic or what!? - the first day of our honeymoon. Straight out of a Disney movie. Yeah, maybe one scripted by Judd Apatow...
7. San Isidro celebrations - going native in our new city.
8. The first of many - Kate begins getting to grips with Spanish pre-natal care. Or perhaps it's the other way around...
9. Sunday, Slovakian style - the beautiful villages of rural Slovakia and the... er.... colourful folk who live there...
and finally...
10. The random meetings - any self-respecting end-of-year/best-of list has to have the cop-out entry that includes references to items that didn't quite make it and thus manages to get more than 10 things on the list. This is it. If anything really made out travels special - and this blog worth reading - it was the random people we met. In Seville, Porto, Florence, Rocket, Estepona, Switzerland, Trieste, Nancy and so many other places, often leading us to stumble upon local celebrations and festivities we had no idea were taking place - Bianco Notti, graduation parades, flamenco, free opera and so on. Our trip, and our blog, wouldn't have been half as interesting without them, so this entry is for them.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Friday, 15 May 2009
what's in a name?
We've decided to change the website address (url) of this blog: it is now www.movingtomadrid.blogspot.com (formerly it was www.kateandtheo.blogspot.com).
We've decided to do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a more accurate reflection of the blog's content. "Kate and Theo" was always a kind of default name - originally the blog was about our wedding preparations and then it became about our travels; we didn't know where we were going to end up or what we were going to do, so we picked the original url name for want of a better alternative. We're aware it was rather sickeningly saccharine; now we've got a reasonable alternative we feel we're doing you all a favour!
Secondly, we've had a few enquiries from friends and friends of friends wanting to move to Spain about job opportunities here, Spanish administration, the rental market and life here in general. It struck us that some of the blog entries we've written might be of interest to total strangers wanting to make the move to Spain, or to Madrid. As prospective Madridlenos are unlikely to google "kate and theo" when searching for information about life here, we thought a more search engine friendly name would be oppropriate.
Obviously we're flattering and deceiving ourselves; chances are that whatever we call this blog, the only people reading it are going to be our mothers!!
We've decided to do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a more accurate reflection of the blog's content. "Kate and Theo" was always a kind of default name - originally the blog was about our wedding preparations and then it became about our travels; we didn't know where we were going to end up or what we were going to do, so we picked the original url name for want of a better alternative. We're aware it was rather sickeningly saccharine; now we've got a reasonable alternative we feel we're doing you all a favour!
Secondly, we've had a few enquiries from friends and friends of friends wanting to move to Spain about job opportunities here, Spanish administration, the rental market and life here in general. It struck us that some of the blog entries we've written might be of interest to total strangers wanting to make the move to Spain, or to Madrid. As prospective Madridlenos are unlikely to google "kate and theo" when searching for information about life here, we thought a more search engine friendly name would be oppropriate.
Obviously we're flattering and deceiving ourselves; chances are that whatever we call this blog, the only people reading it are going to be our mothers!!
Friday, 24 April 2009
all quiet on the Spanish front...
We haven't been writing much recently.
This is a plain lie. Actually Kate and I have been writing a lot recently; it's one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet!
A few months ago we were looking through "In Madrid", a monthly English-language newspaper/what's on magazine, when we both came across little advertisements in the classifieds that interested us. For Kate it was the guitarist looking for fellow musicians and song-writers for musical get-togethers; for me it was the advertisement for a Madrid writers' group.
Both organisations were slow to get off the ground - with both of us working evenings, weekend get-togethers are a necessity - but they seem to have really hit their stride recently. As a result much of our creative energy has been devoted to producing material for or during these sessions; Kate with her bluesy paens to Madrid's unattractive canine community and me a film script for an allegorical coming of age film.
It's been great to be doing something creative again; but it hasn't left much time for blogging!
This is a plain lie. Actually Kate and I have been writing a lot recently; it's one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet!
A few months ago we were looking through "In Madrid", a monthly English-language newspaper/what's on magazine, when we both came across little advertisements in the classifieds that interested us. For Kate it was the guitarist looking for fellow musicians and song-writers for musical get-togethers; for me it was the advertisement for a Madrid writers' group.
Both organisations were slow to get off the ground - with both of us working evenings, weekend get-togethers are a necessity - but they seem to have really hit their stride recently. As a result much of our creative energy has been devoted to producing material for or during these sessions; Kate with her bluesy paens to Madrid's unattractive canine community and me a film script for an allegorical coming of age film.
It's been great to be doing something creative again; but it hasn't left much time for blogging!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
