Tom in Spain First Week Begins

------------------------Tuesday 13 January 2026 ------------------------------------------------- Still working on photos. My tech capable offspring are my hope (and yours, dear reader). Walked through the old town for two and a half hours on Sunday and learned that it's where I want to live while I'm here...good catch. Hopefully the new long-term apartment there will come together this week. Yesterday morning my interim studio apartment flooded from a leaky shower door. Yikes!! Several What's App messages back and forth with the landlord agency and after wet towels galore, with water leaking out to the common hallway, and then a respite for me at Mercado, they moved me to a new unit, and it's a huge improvement - one bedroom, not a studio, couch and table, not island and two (count 'em) televisions. Speaking of television, I started watching CNN but soon tired of the Spanish language version (I mean I haven't even started classes yet), and stumbled on Al Jazeera TV, the only English language programming I could find. What a re-discovery! I knew of the channel years ago and thought of it as a very slightly left of center news source that had some really good reporting, and especially some terrific long form (magazine style) reporting - it frankly puts MSNBC (now MSNOW) to shame. (I had a board member back in Atlanta who called the Atlanta Journal Constitution - a very centrist newpaper seen by some Southerners as deep blue - the "Al Jazeera Constitution"!) Well, Al Jazeera has kept doing what it does, many years later now and good on it. Really, really good international news television, with nary a hint of bias left, bias right or bias any direction, in my opinion. Which I think is saying something, as they apparently are funded by the govrnment of Qatar. I'll leave that one alone for now and speak solely to the end product - its content. They are exquisite at international news, natch...some thing we don't enjoy in depth back in the States. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Good news! The long term apartment seems to have come through and with luck I move Thursday. Keep your fingers crossed, as will I.

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