From Tie-dye to Black Leather – Saturday Night in Tenerife

It’s a weird thing about Los Silos. Venture there during the day and you’ll find a sleepy, picturesque village with an Art Nouveau bandstand, a church that looks like it’s constructed out of icing sugar and egg whites; and beautifully restored traditional architecture. But go there for one of its fiestas and you’ll find yourself [...]

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Tenerife Fiestas – Straight from the Heart in Tejina

Getting anywhere for midday on a Sunday seems for some reason to be a tall order in our house and yesterday was no exception. A late night followed by a late morning and a leisurely Sunday breakfast and before I knew it the clock was scraping towards the eleven hand and Jack was standing at [...]

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Tenerife Dreams

“Sweet dreams are made of this.
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the World and the seven seas;
Everybody’s looking for something.”

If you’re thinking of moving to Tenerife, ask yourself this; “What am I looking for?”
We were invited to a barbeque last weekend, in an exquisite contemporary villa in the south of the island. It was a sumptuous [...]

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The Sardinada-or Life on Mars with Sardines

To queue or not to queue, that is the question.
It was around the hour of 9pm and a few dozen bodies had already begun to form a line from the ticket man at the top of the steps on San Telmo to the long bar backed by rows of red hot barbecues laden with smoking [...]

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Rod Stewart in Tenerife

I wonder if, like me, Rod Stewart ever looks in the mirror of a morning and a line from the immortal ‘Maggie May’ pops into his head:
“The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age.”?
May 18th 2009 is the date set for that raspy-throated icon of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rod Stewart to [...]

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Where there’s muck, there’s madness.

It’s a perfect day for standing ankle deep in ox manure watching small wooden galleons and rice and grain decorated carts trundle past while being plied with free wine and popcorn and trying not to lose an eye to a flying hard boiled egg.
Although I’m certain that Freudian analysts could dine out on such a [...]

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Alternative Tenerife

It never ceases to amaze me how effectively the Tinerfeños manage to safeguard their culture and identity.
Despite 500 years of being at the crossroads between Europe and the Americas and 50 years at the heart of mass tourism, very little of northern European or North American culture has left its mark on this society.
But what’s [...]

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MUECA 2009

Everything about the town felt different.
For one thing it was 10 pm on Saturday night and there wasn’t a space to be found in the vast open-air harbour car park where a thousand cars can comfortably fit. I’d never seen it like this before.
And everywhere I looked there were neo-hippies; handsome bearded men with dreads [...]

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Tenerife Beach Time

You may imagine that living on a tropical island I must spend a great deal of my time lying on a beach topping up an all-year tan. You’d be mistaken.
For one thing, I’m desperately trying to make a living which is proving particularly difficult in these times of ‘economic crisis’ and for another, my standards [...]

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Carnaval Outfits

It’s 11pm and I’ve spent the past five hours scanning Google images for inspiration, cutting up old curtains and duvet covers, glueing material to pieces of cardboard, my fingers and the dining table and I still look more like someone wearing an old net curtain than Cleopatra.
Jack, on the other hand, has taken half an [...]

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