Alright, this is sweet! Telefonica has finally installed my line and not a moment too soon. I feel like I have been so disconnected from the world that I was starting to go through Internet withdrawals. What does it mean when you become irrational and get chills at the thought of having to wait longer to get hooked up?

At any rate, it has been a cool past few weeks. As some of you might know, Spain just comes to life in the summer months. I mean, the bullfighting season starts, all kinds of summer festivals are held everywhere, and probably the wildest summer celebration of all takes place: the San Fermines of Pamplona—think about 7 days of drinking, concerts, street competitions, and of course… the running of the bulls in the streets.

I would be a bad lier if I denied that almost two days after arriving in Spain my wife and I took off for Pamplona. No… I didn’t actually run with the bulls… but we did attend the wildest, most interesting, and amusing bullfight at the historic Pamplona Plaza de Toros. How wild? Well, let’s just say that we didn’t only drink the local wine at the stands. By the time it was all over, we were sporting the wine all over our clothes. Between bulls and matadors, the local bands kept us dancing to classic spanish tunes. We had great food, great wine and great conversation with the locals.

I’ve also had the chance to observe the cigar culture here, and I must say it’s quite unique. Of course, smoking in Spain isn’t what it is in the US, or even the rest of Europe. I already paid a visit to my local “estanco”, as they call tobacco shops… as for the prices… well, just about the best there is outside of Cuba.

I only have five minutes left at this internet cafe, so I have to make this short and sweet. Basically, for the past month I’ve been busy relocating to yet another great cigar city: Madrid, Spain.

Well, you can’t expect me to travel around europe and not get the fever to move to another country. At any rate, I am now a resident of Spain and looking forward to exploring the cigar culture in this country.

Now, it takes over four weeks to get a phone line installed in this place, and a few more weeks for internet access. I am hoping to have it all up and running this week and get back into the cigar reviews and talk, which I have sorely missed since I made the perilous voyage.

To all who have kindly emailed humiblog in the past weeks, I appologize for the delay in reponses. Unless the Spanish Telecom company messes up, I hope to be back and answering emails by the end of the week.

Cheers to all and thanks for your encourgements.

Here’s another “Father’s day” special… haha. This one is really too good to pass up. The Cuban Crafters Robusto is one of my top favorite cigars, and this is the cheapest I’ve ever seen it. I thought I’d share this with everyone.

The retail price for this is normaly 112.00 and every now and again frequent visitors (like me!) can get it for 79.99, but 55 bucks is an all time low. Hopefully there’ll be enough to go around…

You can access the Special Price HERE.
Good luck!
Edan

I’ve been wanting to review this cutter for quite some time. Having gone through what seems like hundreds of cutters since I discovered cigars, I often wondered who was designing these things. I’d dish out for a new cutter and then would be irked at the fact that the blades seemed to wiggle prior to a cut. So why did they make them like that? Obviously these people hadn’t cut hundreds of cigars like I had, or so I thought every once and again.

When I got the Palió cutter two weeks ago, it sure put smirk on my face. When I drew the blades and felt them slide tightly past each other I couldn’t help but think, ahhh… these guys know what I’m talking about. The cigar cutter is the result of a lot of thinking by cigar aficionados, not just marketing people. I was impressed with their result.

First, in order to make the blades as sharp as possible, they necessarily must be razor thin. That in itself presents another problem: if they are so thin, they’ll have no structural integrity. The solution is to reinforce the blades with polymer and only leave the razor sharp edge exposed. The smooth sliding action is then achieved by wide tracks in the polymer material; all in all, pretty impressive.

But enough of the technical specs… I’ve used the cutter for two weeks now, and it’s become my cutter of choice. The thing’s like my right hand now. It’s light weight, sharp, precise, and feels great in hand. What else can I say? I love it. To be perfect, it will have to stay sharp, but with surgical steel blades in place, I don’t think I have to worry about that for a long while.

Check out the Palió Cutter at Lighters Direct LLC, they have a few other cool toys too; I’m not going to tell you how much time I spend in there, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty addicting.