Author: Karethe

  Can you teach English? Carlos the city electrician was on the phone. Me…, I asked Yes. You do speak English, don’t you, he continued, in Spanish of course. Yes, that was the case. But… I was not able to complete my argument before he rambled on. The centre where his daughter took classes was…

Ever since our first day of living in Ronda, Andalucía I was in awe of the street sweeper’s brooms. I would follow the cleaning crews around with my camera surreptitiously behind my back, trying to snatch photos of their perfectly setup: A couple of sturdy hand-made long shafted brooms standing upside down in plastic garbage…

I don’t care what El Traam, as they call the American president here in Andalucía, says. Global Warming is a scary fact. Anyone who isn’t living inside an air-conditioned bubble of denial knows so. And this is just the beginning. When I was a child, I used to love the sun. We all did. Having…

At noon on Monday Ronda went into three days of official mourning. A deafening silence descended upon the town hall square where friends and family of the diseased gathered to show their respect while listening to the toll of the church bells – a deep goooong expiring into silence, followed by a slightly more baritone…

“Are you going into that? Now?” My Mexican-born husband looked at me in disbelief as I headed for the fjord on the very first morning of our holiday.  To him, swimming in the North Sea, a slightly southern neighbour to the Arctic Ocean, certainly when one like me went straight from bed to the water, was…

A couple of weeks back, a foreign resident in Ronda was found dead in his flat. Rather like a TV thriller plot, his body had been lying undiscovered for over two weeks in the Andalucian pre-summer heat before the police finally was alerted, probably by a neighbour who had noticed the smell. Dying is a…

After my son’s frog died, I promised myself that we would never have another pet. I was too afraid that they would die, as sadly even pets must do. You see, I was inadvertently the cause of his untimely passing. Before you judge me as a heartless pet killer, I need to say a few…

These days, with global media focused on the environment, I though it was fitting to make a few reflections on the medioambiente from the point of view of a foreigner living in rural Andalucía. Just beside Ronda’s first organic community garden in our Barrio de San Francisco neighbourhood there is a paddock with two beautiful…

Living in Andalucía does not always mean sunny skies. Actually, this past winter was pretty tough, particularly on our scarecrow Gonzales. He was often left alone for weeks on end, standing up to rain, sleet, hailstorms, and even two weeks of snow and below freezing temperatures. By the time spring came, he was all skin…

Last fall, I wrote about our from-the-bottom-and-up Andalucían home restoration project, describing it as a new edition of the Extreme Home Makeover TV programs. Though I am yet to take the show on the air, since our casita is completed, (though I am designing a glass and metal sofa table for it as we speak)…