After six years on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, I can safely identify two additions to Sports Competitions I Follow. The English Premier League … which is a subdivision of the ultra elite European Champions League. This is where the world’s most famous sports teams come to play because, really, we must concede […]

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Altea is amazing. Benidorm is appalling. Altea is a few blocks of 19th-century charm crowned by a 115-year-old church atop a hill. Benidorm is miles of urban sprawl built around “the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world”. And the amazing thing about this … is that these two cities are about five miles […]

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One of those random things that happen when traveling: An unpredictable intersection of simpatico people. In this case, nine Americans meeting at a mojito bar early in the evening in the Old City of a small Spanish seaside town in the autonomous region of Valencia. When the whole of the city of Altea may not, […]

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Seems like the older a town is, the more likely it is to have been founded on a hill. Such is the case for Altea, a city of 25,000 between Valencia and Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca. People have been living here for 2,000 years or more, and eventually they gravitated to the hill near […]

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How many consecutive days of eating plates of tapas (Spanish for snack) for dinner would a person need before he or she became tired of it? A week of it? A month of it? Ten years of it? We have had tapas on consecutive nights here in the Valencia region of Spain, buying seven or […]

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So, some time off, and we wanted to go to Europe and be somewhere with a bit of light and sun, and here we are on the coast of Spain. It may not be the smartest choice, this time of year, given that the UAE finally is cooling off. But everyone in Abu Dhabi knows […]

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