Spain

It’s soon come around and now is only a little over two weeks away. Belch sent me the address and I think I’ve found it on Multimap - On the coast a couple of km south-west of Fuengirola, about 25km SW of Malaga. I’m assuming that this place has bars nearby that we will venture into?? It’s just that I also have a vision of certain people wanting to stay in and play PES (OK slight exaggeration)...or being ‘too tired to go out'....or will Big Pete be the party animal out till 6am every night?!

Picked up a 2003 copy of the Rough Guide to Andalucia for £3 from a discount book store and there seems a fair bit of things of interest around. A few things that jump out at me are:
Malaga – is supposed to be a nice city with a good old town.
Ronda (recommended by my parents) should be quite easy to get to.
Gibraltar – and I think Big Pete and Markus are also keen on this one.
Cadiz is supposed to be really nice, but it’s a long way and there isn’t really a quick way to get there because of the mountains.
Some time on the beach would be good too but those with lighter skin may not be overly happy with this one.

Anyone else got many ideas?

Drink up!

Thanks to Wikipedia here are some interesting stats regarding which countries are the king of beer-drinking in the world (per-capita). Leading the pack out in front on their own? The Czechs. Followed some distance behind by Ireland and then Germany. Anyone who knows their beers wouldn’t find this a surprise. But then (and it was a surprise for me) come Australia!? I though all they drank was Fosters and XXXX, but they have a large number of breweries over there apparently and Fosters is only produced for the export market. Interesting. Then (another surprise for me) comes Austria and finally in at #6 comes the mighty UK (perhaps slightly disappointing for such a beer-producing heavyweight). The US comes in at #13, Poland #18 and Russia only #23 (but then beer only comprises 11% of all alcohol consumption). Though if it was Alcohol consumption alone, the Ruskies would be leading the pack by some distance. The French snubbed the charts by not even coming in the top 35. Here are the full results if you’re interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ordered_by_per_capita_beer_consumption.


There’s been a bit of talk about ‘safe’ alcohol levels recently. I thought that the world was unified in what was ‘safe’ and what was not. But this is not the case. The weedy yanks think that 14units per week is the max for males, with the hard-living Aussies thinking that it should be 28. The middle-of-the-road Brits and Germans think 21 units is the max.