In the pool in April

Today is a gloriously sunny and hot day. We sat in the garden this morning starting to break out into a sweat (nice!) staring at the pool, which was beginning to look more and more inviting.

I couldn't take any more and decided that even if it is only April I had to get in the pool, cool of, swim some lenghts and try to lose this beer gut (nice!).

I thought it was going to be freezing but it really wasn't, and considering it was only 11 in the morning it should have been. Wonderful! Ok, I only managed a couple of lengths before getting out of breath but it felt great.

Then the kids jumped in! They loved it. What a great way to spend a Saturday morning.

Do I think Spain was a good choice for the kids? For sure!

Boxing in Manilva

The town hall's department for youth (yes I still feel young) and sport put on a boxing even in Manilva last night. I belive it's the first time it's been done. So I went with Andrew and Shaman from Hamilton Homes after a couple of beers and some tapas, that is, after I managed to drag them out of their office (they work too hard!).

The event start a little slow, I think they were some of the younger ones demonstrating full contact boxing, but then it really started picking up when the "serious" boys came on.

It's the first time I've ever watched any boxing live but although I enjoyed it it felt a bit odd jeeing on people to beat eachother up! It was like being in a school playground again.

Mind you, I think most of the lads there were more interested in the Go Go Girls than the actual boxing ;)

It's really good that the town hall has someone decent overlooking that department, they really are doing a lot to promote sport in the area and put on events for "young" people....yes, I'm still young too...honest!

Roll on the next fight. I think we should do an Eye on Spain sponsered event where we get different developers in the ring.....now there's an idea!

Spanish propety market crash....hmmmmm

It's been difficult to miss all the bad press this week about Spanish developers and real estate companies losing value on the stock markets. This has led to people predicting a house price crash in the Spanish property market.

How we got anything to panic about yet?? In my opinion, bad press makes good press and that's always what's going to make the headlines. Panice then? I don't think so, unless you have shares in one of those real estate companies!

We've been inundated this week with emails from concerned property buyers and owners wondering if they are about to lose thousands of Euros on their properties.

In my opinion (for what it's worth) all we are seeing is an acceptance that the market has changed and all the thousands of properties bought by speculative investors over the past few years sit empty and earning no money. We've all known that this was what was happening and it's time for people to be more realistic regarding the true value of their properties. This will hopefully bring back some much needed stability to the market.

At the end of the day this is Spain and it's still thousands of people's dreams to have a house here or move here. That will always be the case but people will just be a lot more careful and fussy when buying a propety here.

Anyway, I'm going to wrtie more about this for our newsletter next week.

n the meantime...DON'T PANIC!!

Not a lot to moan about apart from....

the weather of course. What is going on?? We've had nearly 3 weeks of rain with the odd and rare appearance here and there of the big yellow circle in the sky. But it's not just been raining, it's actually been quite cold too. We've been going around with our thick winter jackets on...AND IT'S APRIL!

Then I see on the news that the UK has stolen all our sunshine and heat. This can't be right. Are we seeing the effects of global warming coming into play now? Are all us expats here going to be heading back to the UK now where it's warmer and drier?

It's all very confusing. Then, when I moan to the Spanish they look at me as is I'm mad...this is normal for April they tell me. Really? Where was I last April, I don't remember this.

Anyway, shouldn't go on really. In true British fashion I'll soon be complaining that it's far too hot here....

Newsletter caffuffle

I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks and there's a good reason for it really (and I'm not just making excuses here). We had some friends stay with us for 10 days over the Easter break. It was great to see them but we wanted to spend some time with them and so ended up going here, there and everywhere every day and not really getting much work done, although I'm not complaining.

At the same time though I was trying to sort out the new newsletter emailing facility which has been a huge headache. We're now using a system called Aweber which is very good. The problem is it meant that through Aweber we had to email all 16,000 subscribers to make sure they still wanted to receive the newsletter. It's not been as easy as it sounds although we're just about there now.

By the way, if you never received the email asking you to confirm your subscription then please do so at www.eyeonspain.com/newsletter.aspx.

Next week we're launching our new look newsletter. We hope to make it more and more interactive and more fun really. We've got lots of ideas about things that we're going to feature in it this year and we're really looking forward to kicking them off very soon.

We're always happy to consider other people's suggestions too. If you have any ideas or suggestions of things that you like us to feature in the newsletter then leave a comment here on the blog for all to see and discuss. Just click the comments link below.

To those of you who will be receiving our newsletter I hope you continue to enjoy it as we really enjoying putting it together each week.

Thunder and lightning

It's half twelve at night and I've just been outside in the covered part of the terrace smoking a cigar watching the most amazing thunder and lightning. I haven't seen lightning bolts like that for a long time. So impressive.

I was thinking about some friends of ours that have come out this week for the Easter holiday hoping for some sun, I really don't think they were expecting this. Having checked the weather forecast it looks like it's not going to last past Monday so they should get some sun in whilst they're over here.

The weather is definitely changing here, it's not like it used to be. We're certainly getting a lot more rain these days. I wonder if the weather in Spain become like the UK if brits will still buy in Spain??