By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Madrid. Not a particularly pretty city, Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon. It’s sometimes as if its grandiose buildings could be anywhere, Buenos Aires, for example. But it’s when one sees that deep blue, high-desert winter sky and the snow dusting the jagged peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama as they loom above the city that one realizes it can’t be anywhere else but Madrid. But things have changed […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer and Photographer) This is part five of a six part El Camino de Santiago Roadtrip. You can read the rest of the chapters here. Hanging around Santiago de Compostela, surrounded by unenthusiastic pilgrims completing their camino by feebly posing for social media posts, was getting me down. So we decided to head out to Cape Fisterra, the end of the earth as the Romans thought. Only later did we learn […]
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The Dark Reality Behind the Spanish Driving Test Industry By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Spain, we need to talk.I know that we expats, particularly those of us from the United States, are often seen as privileged, maybe even entitled. And sure, many of us arrive with advantages. But the truth is that Americans and Northern Europeans who choose to make Spain their home bring a lot into the economy. We spend locally, we pay taxes, […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer) We didn’t do the Camino to find ourselves. We did the Camino de Santiago because the Mediterranean summer tried to kill us. We weren’t looking for God, inner peace, or enlightenment. We did it because in July on the Costa Blanca the air stops moving and the Med becomes a hot lake. Fish soup. The sea is so hot and still that even the Roman garum vats that dot the […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) I’m deep inside the ruins of the Roman Forum in Cartagena, Spain. This was New Carthage (Carthago Nova). The sight of 2000-year-old amphorae, mosaics, and Corinthian columns is mind-blowing. Ancient lewd graffiti on the walls reflect the phallocratic obsessions of the average classical Roman. Two stories above us, in the modern city, a Spanish waiter yells at someone in an even more lewd tone, invoking the same phalluses […]
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