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By John, on August 13th, 2011
I read A Daily Dose of Architecture fairly regularly, but not every day. Which is why I only noticed Ken Lee’s photos of MyZeil this morning. MyZeil is pretty spectacular, and Ken’s images show it in all its glory.
More of Ken’s MyZeil images on Flickr here. They are miles better than my own efforts (which to save my blushes I am not publishing!), and were taken with an iPhone! (No screenshot of the photos as I would need to license them from Getty Images, and Getty Images and I don’t get on together).
By John, on July 27th, 2011
 A pity these hadn't been invented when we were kids!
We have just got back from Valencia (visiting the building plot) again. While we were walking from our hotel to the metro on the second evening we came across this little guy having great fun bouncing on the trampoline, supported by his stretchy ropes!
The latest pictures of progress on the house are, as always, here.
By John, on July 18th, 2011
 Japanese Subway
I think this is something I don’t really need to experience first hand!
By John, on July 14th, 2011
 Good progress with the roof
Antonio sent us around 130 photos this week, showing lots of details of the roofing work. We’ve culled them and added about 20 to our Picasa album. Click on the photo above as usual to go to see them.
By John, on July 10th, 2011
There’s interesting article in Wired about how the source of the E.coli outbreak in Europe, that killed at least 44 people and infected over 3700, has been tracked to a supplier in Egypt. And why the outbreak is likely to reoccur at any time in the next three years.
In a couple of sentences, the original shipment of infected fenugreek seeds was a 15 ton shipment, which has been broken down into many, many thousands of smaller packages (well over 10 000) for resale in various European countries. The seeds have a shelf life of another 3 years, which means that if any of them get sold and used to produce bean sprouts within that time, the infections could restart. It looks it would be a good idea to avoid raw bean sprouts for at least that long.
By John, on July 9th, 2011
We have been to the notary and signed the contract to sell our house. For a time, we were worried it would not happen, as the purchaser’s bank took ages to confirm in writing that they could have a mortgage. The system here is quite different from the system in the UK. When you sell land or property in Germany (and in Spain) both the purchasers and the sellers (and usually the estate agent too – I’ll explain why later) go to a notary. He reads the entire contract out loud (11 pages of A4 in quite complicated legal jargon in our case) and if either party has any questions, they interrupt him when he gets to passage in question. When the entire contract has been read and understood, both parties sign it, and that is it. The contract includes the date that payment for the house is due, which is when it is handed over to the purchaser (the date can be flexible by mutual agreement).
In the UK, the buyers and sellers each have a copy of the contract which they sign independently of each other at their respective solicitors. When the half-signed contracts are exchanged 10% of the price for the property has to be paid, with the rest due on the “completion date”, which is when the remaining 90% of the price is paid and the house is handed over to the other party. If the sale is not completed for any reason the purchaser usually loses the 10% deposit.
Continue reading Verkauft (Sold)
By John, on July 7th, 2011
 The erection of the roof has started this week
(click on the photo to see more pictures)
Antonio has sent this week’s photos of the site in Xàtiva. The roof has been delivered by Siminon in France, who did the prefabrication. We have a Dutch guy recommended by Siminon to do the erection – he thinks he’ll need three weeks to complete everything, including the roof tiles. He’s certainly making good progress so far.
As I have said before, the order that things are done when building a house in Spain are quite different from what we expected – here’s the roof being erected and the floor tiled and the exterior walls aren’t even finished yet! Still, so far everything seems to be working, so everyone appears to know what they are doing!
By John, on June 30th, 2011
 Seen this week in Valencia
Just a quick post – the above slogan caught my eye in Valencia this week when I visited our building site with Antonio. The students are still camping out in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. The poster pretty much ties in with my perception of reality these days. It does seem that capitalism has got more than a little out of control, and that many politicians in the western world do very nicely on handouts and favours from lobbyists.
I need to add the pictures of progress on the house to Picasa, and hope to do that tomorrow, or this weekend. (2011-07-01: I have updated Picasa now.)
By John, on June 21st, 2011
The German and Greek views of each other have become increasingly polarised over the last few months. The Greeks are “lazy spendthrifts who retire at 50 (women) or 55 (men) and make a national sport of not paying their taxes”, according to many Germans; the Germans are “not following the solidarity spirit of the EU and are putting their national and domestic interests first” if you ask the Greeks.
Stephen King, Group Chief Economist of HSBC Bank Plc, has a different take on the problems in Europe and the western world. Namely, that irrespective of the financial crisis, we would have a problem, due to the inversion of the population pyramid. And that the future is neither bright nor orange but, instead, a depressing shade of grey. The financial crisis may have thrown the problem into focus, but it would have been exposed at some point anyway:
While it’s convenient to blame the financial crisis, we need to dig a little deeper. As Western populations age, we end up with an inverted population pyramid: the boomers head off into retirement while the population of those who are working age shrinks.
But if the boomers’ savings are made up of pieces of paper – claims on future economic activity – and the working-age population is shrinking as a share of the total population, it’s hardly surprising that, collectively, these pieces of paper may turn out to be worth less than they originally appeared to be. If future output is lower than the claims made upon it, those claims will have to be reduced.
And that, sadly, is what we’re seeing today. In the eurozone, we’re witnessing a struggle between those who own pieces of paper – most obviously German creditors – and those who issued pieces of paper – Greek debtors. The Germans legally have a claim on future Greek tax revenues. The Greeks, meanwhile, are discovering their economy isn’t quite as strong as it once was and they’d rather use their – limited – tax revenues for domestic purposes rather than repaying the Germans.
Additionally, he argues that the western nations are collectively suffering from too much debt and that the current low interest rates won’t be enough to help their economies to recover the rates of growth that we have historically seen in the West. He could be right; Japan’s economy has not yet recovered from the property boom and subsequent bust in 1990 despite having had negative interest rates for periods since the bust, and it looks increasingly as if the path the western world is following is similar to that of Japan.
King foresees that the the emerging nations – Brazil, India and China – will increasingly be trading with each other in the future, leaving the sclerotic West more and more isolated.
My guess is that the economic pressures on the western nations will force their governments to pursue national interests more vigorously as they weigh up where to invest the limited resources at their disposal, which could lead to a lot more friction between those nations. Not an encouraging thought if you live in the West.
By John, on June 8th, 2011
I was modifying the styles for this web site recently, and after testing the change locally I uploaded the style sheet to the production server.
Afterwards I cast an eye on the site to check everything was updated, and was horrified to see the styling had completely disappeared:
 Where's my CSS styling, dude?
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