Madrid

I've just come back from a conference in Madrid - on new ways of helping people learn. For a change, it was a really interesting event and I learnt lots and came away with lots of brilliant ideas - all stolen from other people. (This makes a change from last week's conference in Liverpool where the highlight was a fire in the control room on the first day. (No-one was hurt).

I was in Madrid to talk about a piece of work I've been doing in my spare time which is to set up a public health diploma course, to be delivered over t'interweb, using free resources, for public health practitioners working in the Developing World.

Anyway, I had two free evenings in Madrid which is somewhere I've never been. It's a beautiful city and I was surprised by how green it is, much more so than Barcelona or Murcia. There are lots of lovely parks and gardens - most of which I saw from an open-top bus ride around the city (in the rain - I swear it was wetter than Manchester).

The food was great too. I found a little cantina where I had beef skewers with chips (proper English style, taties, chopped and fried in oil - none of this French Fries rubbish). The waitress recommended a side-salad of tomatoes. Side-salad. What arrived was a huge plate of fresh tomatoes, chopped into quarters doused in beautiful honey dressing. They were beautiful - really fresh and tasty.



On my second evening, I took myself off to the Museo del Prado which is a fantastic gallery of Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch paintings. I know nothing about Spanish art, so it was a good education for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed swanning around Madrid by myself.