The main feast day for Saint Thomas in the Catholic church falls suspiciously close to the winter solstice, and is celebrated on December 21 with a huge fair in San Sebastian, Spain. In Mondragón, my wife’s home town, Santo Tomás is also an important day. But since San Sebastian is so close and [...]

Today the sun is at it’s lowest arc in the southern sky, something our ancestors have been celebrating for many millennia. We are headed to the in-laws to celebrate the solstice in the typical Spanish way, with food, wine, and merriment.

We’ve got a little tradition forming here. This is the second year in a row that we’ve eaten a turkey pizza for Thanksgiving. I’ve taken some photos during the cooking process to show you.

This is a “viewer generated content” post. I didn’t take one single photo during my wedding.

We’re back from our honeymoon! We’ve got plenty of wedding and honeymoon photos to share, but first we’ve got to get some of the pre-wedding family visit / birthday photos out of the way. My father has written up a much better explanation of events than my blurred memory could give you, so [...]

For years now, I’ve been told what a shame it was that I’ve been missing Maritxu (mar-EE-choo). Maritxu is a huge party in Mondragon held on the first Friday of October. Since moving to Spain 2.5 years ago, I’ve been out of the country for Maritxu in both 2005 (golfing in Scotland) [...]

This past weekend there were annual festivals in two local towns, Santoña and Ampuero. The festival in Ampuero included encierros (running of the bulls) on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. On Saturday morning, we got up and got dressed with the intent of going to see the encierro in Ampuero, but we ended [...]

The town hall of Colindres had planned to prepare free roasted sardines for everyone last Thursday for San Roque, but it rained heavily, leaving them with 500 kg (1100 pounds) of fresh sardines. So it was postponed to Saturday.

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On Monday morning, Juan, Grandpa and I went to a local slaughterhouse to buy a half lamb. We really only wanted a few lamb chops, but they only sold in quantities rounded to the 0.5 lamb. That evening, we had a barbeque out on the patio with the primary objective being [...]

In my Spanish class in England, one of the Spanish teaching assistants told me that, in Spain, before lunch (the big meal of the day), the Spaniards often go out and have a vermouth, a so-called “aperitif”.