You can explore Parc Güell, Notre Dame, and also create your own albums (no signup required).

Just amazing, give it a go.

One of the great things about Barcelona is that you are never far away from the great outdoors. Catalunya is a spectacular part of the world, and while the area is more famous for its combination of both spectacular cities and beautiful beaches, come wintertime it adds another feather to it’s cap, thanks to the snow!

The Serra de Cadí are a mountain range just south of the main Pyrannees, and are home to a variety of small ski resorts. While it is possible to reach the main Pyrannees (in the form of Andorra) within a three hour drive from Barcelona, the Serra de Cadí are close enough to be day-trippable; they are only 90 minutes from the city outskirts.

A couple of weekends ago Djanira, Jan, Mip and I jumped in the car (at an eye-watering 6am) and made the trip up to Masella. It is quite a small resort but it is excellent, with the vast majority of its pistes facing dead north and weaving their way through the forests; this has two advantages in that it prevents the snow from melting, and ensures an interesting day’s skiing as you weave your way through the avenues of trees - carefully of course!

Its sister resort is the slightly larger (and better known) La Molina, but I prefer Masella. It is more accessible and, well, fun, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than it is - an excellent day-trip bolt-hole for Barcelona dwellers seeking a bit of skiing (or snowboarding) action!

What? Burned onions?

Yes indeed, and very tasty they are too!

The Calçot, wikipedia tells us, is a type of Scallion, a long green onion similar to a spring onion but with a leeky texture that is cooked on a barbecue. Here’s how you can enjoy them too…

Step 1: The Set Up

Go down to your local market or veg shop and get a huge bunch of calçots tied up with string. They are moreish and you end up throwing most of the onion away, so you can easily budget 10 - 12 onions per person—more if they are small.

Step 2: Burn Baby Burn

Chuck them on the barbecue. That’s it! Shove ‘em on. Make sure there are no flames, just embers. The calçots don’t drip fat so they shouldn’t make any flames appear. Keep turning them but leave them on until they are well and truly black and toasted.

Step 3: Gift Wrap

Once the calçots are nice and charred, let them finish off cooking in their own steam by wrapping in newspaper.

Step 4: Peel

Hold the top of the calçot in one hand and wrap the other hand around the charred husk , pulling the outer layers downward to reveal the inside: a sliver of soft, oniony goodness. Prepare to get dirty. In restaurants they often give you a special bib to wear and extra hand-towels. My brother-in-law somehow manages to remove the entire burned portion by pinching the end of the onion with two fingers, and avoiding any mess—mind, you, he has many years of expecience on his side.

Step 5: Dunk

Now dip the calçot in a special sauce known as Salvitxada, which is similar to Romesco sauce, and contains tarlic, tomato, almonds, hazelnuts, olive oil and ñoras, a type of red bell pepper from murcia.

Step 6: Down the hatch

Knife and fork? How bourgeois! Tip back you head and chomp it down.

You like? Go to step 4!

Credit: “Calçots” by Txapulin

The site Living Barcelona has been renamed Barcelonafied and placed on it’s own domain — barcelonafied.com.  Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

We also welcome two new authors who are going to contribute to the blog: Donderwolkje, the hog-blogging belgian, and Alun, the go-getting welshman and lover of the great outdoors.

In 2004 i was in belgium during the general elections. I saw on tv the bombings on the 11th of March. Well, no that’s not really true. I saw Angel Acebes (PP) declare that the attack were carried out by ETA. this was at 13h (the attacks happend at 8h in the morning). Not that they were maybe thinking that it could have been them. No, the PP government told the country it was ETA. After 5 hours of confusion and chaos, they knew! it was ETA.

Now, off course they would have wanted it to be ETA. They have been really tough against this terrorist organization. It’s one of their prime directives. The PP is after all Franco’s legacy. So those attacks would have been a gift from the gods for the PP if it would have been an ETA attack. (Opposed to being an AlQaida or anything else attack). It would a been the “rally around the flag effect” at it’s most purest form. When Bismarck declared war on France it was to unite all the german kingdoms into one. Here it would have only 200 dead, for the PP to become absolute leadersof spain once more. But whishing that something is true, doesn’t make it so.

This is something i do not understand. Anyone with just half a brain cell would realize that this would backfire, right? These elections were in 2004 not 1904. Mass media, bloggers, indymedia,… they were nothing new. Text messaging spiked on the days between the attentados an the elections How did they think they could pull this off? Well they almost did.

Contrary to Popular belief the 2004 elections were not a glorious victory over evil the lying bastards of the PP. the PSOE (Spain’s mainstream socialist party) got only 5% more votes then the PP. 43% against 38%. When you look at the elections results you’ll see that the Madrid and it’s surrounding communidades voted PP. That’s were the bombings happened. I don’t really believe there is much reason to party there. After the country found out that PP was shamlessy trying those 200 dead to slingshot themselves into another term in power close to 10 million went out and voted for them. how can that be?

I am sorry i have no answer for that, it just makes me curious about these elections with debates that look like the’ve temporarily replaced the whole salsa rosa press.

Who do you think is gonna win this beauty contest?

Infact, I’ve been up to my neck in university stuff, so have spent many a cold lonly night up at all hours listening to the radio.

Which is how I come across Radio Evolució. It’s a really great music station which sets itself apart from the rest with an eclectic mix of electronic, jazz and reggae. Go check it out on 90.1 FM in and around Barcelona (or listen online via link above).

P.S. we moved to a new web host a few months ago; any problems, let me know.

The thing about staying indoors at the weekend is that you notice something that isn’t quite so bad during weekdey evenings: street noise.

While eating lunch and listening to a CD, I found myself straining to hear the music. Perhaps I have become so accustomed to general background noise that at first it did not occur to me why I could not make out the song lyrics. But it soon dawned on me the source of the interruption was a repeated clang! clang! clang! from street level.

I wandered over to the balcony window and saw swarms of men trollying round large bottles of butano bottled gas. For non-locals I should point out that many people don’t have natural gas installed in their flats, and so they buy large bottles (as indeed I do) from sellers in the street. To alert people to their presence in the area, the sellers walk round banging a bottle with a spanner.

Eventually the clanging got fainter and fainter as the butano men dispersed into neighbouring streets. But still, they left something behind. With my immune system laid low by some kind of virus, my natrual defences to ambient noise had also been stripped away.

I sat down to watch the film while being increasingly aware of an entirely different sountrack: the chainsaw buzz of mopeds, the drone of traffic, the mechanical moaning of BCNeta cleaning and collecting rubbish, the occasional blair of a horn. I was getting more and more annoyed; not so much by the noise, but by my sudden inability to ignore it.

After a few hours I fell alseep, but was soon woken by a particularly incessant honking from right outside my window. It continued for around 15 minutes. Eventually I got up and went over to the window and saw what I expected: somebody blocked in by a double-parked van.

I feel sorry for people who get blocked in like this. It has happened to me, and you can do nothing but wait for the other driver to return. So I can understand the need to give the horn a blast or two to try and get the other guy to come back. But I can’t see the need to keep honking ad nausium: they can’t hear you but all the neighbours bloody well can!

So there’s a group of people standing around outside, leaning on the horn avaery 30 seconds and even shouting “hola?!”, “hola?!”… Soon, another car comes along trying to fit into a tiny gap, effectively triple parking. More cars now, turning the corner find their path blocked and traffic soons piles up: the inevitable happens. Now I have a whole wind section outside my window; loud, offbeat and offkey. My blood begins to boil.

I go out onto the balcony with the intention of simply raising awareness of us, hapless residents: “oye!” (”listen”) I want to shout, “keep it down, alright?”

Unfortunately what came out closer resembled the battle cry from Braveheart.

«Calleu!!»

Shut up!

Terrified by the force of my own voice, I scampered back insidoors and tremble in the bathroom; “hysterico!” someone shouts behind me.

So if you were one of the unfortunate people on the receiving end of this, I appologise. But it did make me feel a whole lot better, and my immunity has been resored. For now.

Barcelona is celebrated as one of Europe’s finest cultural treasures, but until recently we knew little about its heritage. Robert Hughes on how a group of architects - in particular Gaudí - created a uniquely Catalan city that combined the myths of a glorious past with progress and innovation.

Read on …

¡Newsflash!

Want to work in tech support? Speak English plus other european languages? Contact us now. (See Craigslist Ad).

Part 1. Where to look?

First stop: Infojobs.

Infojobs is probably the most visited job site and every day has hundreds of new listings. Over three million people have posted their CVs which is why recruiters are willing to pay good money for their ads to appear.

When searching the listings, you can often find jobs advertised in english, by searching with a english-language keyword (such as “you”). Try it:

Beware that many advertisers ‘cross-post’ from different regions, so the results are ofter mixed up with offers from the UK / Netherlands etc. InfoJobs also has a nice list of example CV’s you can copy in their advice folder (more about CV’s later).

Where else you can look

• Barcelona Craigslist has a list of jobs.
• iAgora has but most are only available to premium subscribers. (duh! Hello? Infojobs is better and free!)
• Expartiates.com has a steady flow of job listings.
• Loquo (a bit like a spanish version of Craigslist) has a whole bunch of job ads.
• And worth a mention: Monster

Later in part 2: how to make your CV spiffing and more jobs hunting tips.