I like traveling, and Spain is one of my favourite countries.

I went to Spain with my friends two years ago; before going to there, we found a young lady as our tour guide, she used to be an under-graduate student in China learning Chinese Culture, which should be pretty hard for her to get the degree I suppose. She once work as a part-time Spanish-Chinese translator in China when she was a student, so I was pretty sure that she knew exactly what we needed. After a little hard bargaining she accepted our offer, Bingo!!!

There are two things that I wouldn’t miss: food and music, sorry to disappoint you that I will not talk about bullfighting.

We had heard so much about the Spanish seafood, so Delora (our tour guide) took us to one of the popular restaurants in Madrid. Delora told us that she had bumped into several celebrities at this restaurant, I was wondering if they would be Raul or Enrique Iglesias, it’s amazing. We were charged 25 Euros each for the restaurant’s most popular seafood, including drinks; well, a litle bit expensive to me, but you just can’t say no to such gorgeous things after one day of walking with a big camera hanging around your neck.

When the food was presented, I found it worth it: one big lobster, some shrimps, chicken breasts, ham with little things that looked like broccoli. It reminded me of an old Chinese saying:夫复何求 (drop me an email if you don’t know what it means :p ).

We spent two hours at our first Spanish seafood meal, and we found Delora just beyond awesome. She was a Spanish – Chinese translator in China, and after she returned to Spain she ran a tourism consultancy company in Madrid, offering a wide range of services including: Spanish translations, Chinese Simplified translation, Chinese Traditional translations, hotel bookings and guided tours. We were surprised that we hired a boss as our tour guide, and we were even more surprised when she told us that she run my company by herself!

After two days of sight seeing and a lot of wonderful food, there was one more last thing to make our trip perfect, regardless of that big camera, and that was flamenco dancing. I had heard the famous flamenco music “CANON” so many times and just couldn’t wait to see a flamenco dance.

Spain’s most exciting and famous folk songs and dancing is flamenco, it’s the pride of the Spaniards, and is known as one of the two major national essences besides bullfighting. It’s one of the wonderful things you shouldn’t miss when you visit Spain. Flamenco originated from the ancient Arabian felagmengu, which means “wandering farmer.”

Flamenco combines music, singing and dancing. With the influence of Arab and Gypsy music, the flamenco melody has an oriental charm. It sounds sad, fading, hoarse and deep, the singer’s tune changes from whispers to powerful high pitch, it’s so amazing. The audience can be touched deeply by those sad tunes If the flamenco dance performance is good enough, jazz genius Miles Davis once said:

“Sometimes I hear flamenco music, I could not help getting on my knees.” There are 60 types of flamenco dance in Spain. Flamenco dancing is passion, bold, gorgeous and energetic, it brings you the physical beauty of Spanish women and the vigorous and unrestrained characters of Spanish knights.

Seems it’s good to be a tourism consultant in Madrid, you can make a living by doing Spanish translation or get an offer as an assistant, and all of your work involves getting in touch with all the wonderful things.

Marvelous, Gorgeous, isn’t it?