I think it was Saint Seiya: knight's of the zodiac when I was visiting Spain (Lanzarote Isle) with my parents, I got to choose what to watch on hotel's tv and accidentally ended up watching this, actually couple times. I didn't really know how the story went as it wasn't in my natural language.
It took few years from that -- probably in 2007's when I realized what I had watched earlier. As I visited one of my friends on her birthday party, I saw manga/anime collection and asked what was these about, not sure how, but I ended up loaning manga: Ranma 1/2 and decided to let anime question go into dust bin. As most of them were in foreign language and I was pretty poor with English.
At high school I picked up Spice & Wolf, Saint Seiya again and Dbz, it was dull experience and I dropped them after watching few parts. Nowaday I've been watching different anime (mostly movies and less series), but usually those with less than 10 parts. Not sure if I would recommend anything, since I'm not too much into these.
I do read manga & light novels, in rate of 4:1 (manga to anime) that's my chart basically.