First blog, third winter.

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Hola mes patos frios!
Well, I've finally managed to bestir myself to write a blog while my Internet connection is actually up and running and it's too hot to sit outside on the balcony ( hard as this my be to believe by you lot freezing in northern Europe ). I arrived here about a month ago having left the UK on 13th December, thereby avoiding all the snow and ice. We had a run of crappy weather up to Christmas with lots of cloud and intermittent rain but the sun came out on Christmas day in a Camp Granada moment ( you know, " wait a minute, it's stopped hailing " etc ) since when we've only had one shower and that was during the night. I'm back in the flat in Playa de la Arena where I spent my first winter out here so I've got a wireless broadband connection ( most of the time anyway ) and can pick up my emails etc without having to use an Internet cafe. I spent last winter out here as well but in a different flat over in Puerto Santiago where I couldn't pick up the wireless connection and therefore didn't write any blogs. I brought a guitar out with me last year as well but skilfully left the music I meant to bring out behind so never learnt any new stuff last winter. When I came home last year I left the guitar with friends and made sure this time that I did remember my music so that when I got back and retrieved my guitar I could actually do something constructive with it other than endlessly rehashing stuff I knew already.
It's become increasingly quiet ( translation, dead ) here over the last two years and some of the bigger towns like Icod and Puerto de la Cruz are also suffering badly not helped any by flooding ( in Puerto ) and a couple of people killed in Log Gigantes last year when part of the cliff above the beach there collapsed. The beach there is still closed. If I come back next winter I'm going to try to find a flat in or near the big resorts of Playa de las Americas or Los Cristianos. I think the main problems are the credit crunch and the precipitous decline of the value of the pound versus the euro. The infamous car park in Playa de la Arena is no nearer completion than it was when I first came here with the tennis players from Winchester in 2004, it's a real eyesore. I'll leave it at that for the minute, I don't know whether I'll actually get the blog away over my dodgy connection but if it goes OK, I'll do some more before I return to the UK at the end of March hahaha!
Adios,
Tom in Tenerife.

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