:: @ Choepie’s ::

A long time since my last post over here… well a lot of stuff is happening… first, I’m hardly working from home anymore, development is done so I’m part in the office, part in the office of a partnercompany to give mentoring. The most important change is that Ana is at the end of her thesis, means both some extra stress but also : the end of a period of 4 years with up and downs. Things will become more clear now, it’s a milestone and things will change very much now, which is a good thing. So we started already celebrating this at the most unusual moments of the day… friday we started of around 18h for some cañas with some collegues of her, it was a cool night out, but the last bar (as always) was a bit too much… 1Liter glasses of mochito’s will even get an experienced drinker on his/her knees… so at the end, because of the early start, we were early at home. Which wasn’t a bad idea because saturday was fully booked : a party in ‘Conde de Duque’ (which is a museum in the center) at midday, a steak with Nico for his birthday, a party at Merche’s (?) place around midnight and then joining with everybody around to continue…. well at least that was the plan.

It ended up that we went to have ‘breakfast’ with some friends, (breakfast as in tostada mixto and beer) and went to a mini festival in the patio of Conde de Duque… the weather was bad, cold and rainy. The party was partly in a huge tent (could contain about 5000 people) and party outside. All Dj’s and pretty good music, only way to less people in the afternoon to have a decent party…. so we drank way to much and dances way to less… around 19o’clock we decided to head home to warm up a bit and get ready for the steak with Nico. There I saw the message he send me earlier… to meet up in the center…well at that point my mood was already to ‘relax’ and I couldn’t be bothered to go back in the cold,  search around for an hour to get a place to eat etc… so we decided to stay home, get ourselves a movie and do nothing anymore that day.

I finally have my iPod as well. Grace to a surprisingly good service of VIPS !!! It’s a nice black 60Gb Video one and it is great ! It will take me months to get my music organised on it, but I’m working hard on it.. I’m preparing a nice set for a party I’ll have to join in for the music… will be great, I did some final shopping yesterday for missing records and that together with my iPod… nothing can go wrong there… ! I was a bit surprices about the output level of an iPod… it’s way below the output of a CD player… have to be carefull there when switching live from one source to another…. I’ll get some pictures here form the party last saturday as well from the snow in Madrid, but they are on my phone and that makes transfering things a bit more complicated…

Back from a weekend snowboarding in Formigal (Pyrenees)… I agree I’m spoiled with years of snowboarding in the Alpes, but most of the annoying things have nothing to do with the mountains….

I had the opportunity to rent the worst snowboard I’ve ever seen in my life, checkout on the right a detail of the snowboard I was able to ride… sharp as a … eh… hmm…

How to make your own snowboard : the Formigal way

• - steal your grandmothers dinnertable
• - get rid of the poles
• - split the table into 2 (best is to use your knee)
• - round the ends of it
• - paint it with whatever leftovers you find
• - put some plastic cover over it, be sure it doesn’t stick all over the board, have some lose parts, it’s modern
• - find a dog to chew a bit on the edges in order to make them sharp
• - don’t believe people if they tell you, that you should have a metal stripe all over the edges of the board : use a strap of 30cm cut it in pieces and divide it randomly around the board, more than enough, at the end it’s all extra weight
• - be sure to ask at lease 51euros rent for 2 days
• - pratice an honesty surpriced look when people start complaining about it

I actually told them if I could join the moment they were ‘ritually’ burn the damn thing… that’s where the ‘honestly surpriced look’ jumps in.

Just to name some more : 3 hour queueing for renting some gear, no bars on the slopes (well a few awfull self services where you could grab a hotdog and a can of beer…), a collection of the most rude people in the world, there are no rules on the spanish slopes… it’s like in trafic : you have to fight your way down, if you hit somebody you better run…
The house we rented was ok, but again, no party, all a bit too serious, very basic, but no fun… at the end of a day of skiing, you should expect to have a good time with a group of friends, around a fireplace, beer in the hand and talking about the past day… well, not too much. If it wasn’t for Jon and me who decided to grab some drinks, it was plain water.
But, neverthless the complains, I still had a very good time, we went down some slopes, (very carefully because they were crowded and a general lack of any form of eductation over there), I enjoyed with Jon a few beers on a terras on the slopes and we decided not to stress too much about the annoyences around. We managed it pretty well I must agree… wanna see some pictures ? here they are !

Thank god it’s friday (I hope nobody will burn the Belgian embassy for me writing god without capital !
In a few hours we are heading for the pyrenees with Noa, Marga, Ruben, Jon and some more people for a weekend of snow ! Most of them are skiing and I’m afraid I’m the only snowboarder in the group, but I had that before and survived it as well. Most of them claim to be very good… I say let’s see about that. In a group there are always people faster than others, and I don’t really care as long as we don’t need to wait to long. So off we go… around 4 o’clock, for a good 550km ride north. This is where we are heading for. I’m looking forward to it. A bit a shame that Ana isn’t joining, it would have been a good second introduction in the world of skiing.

Before Gareth toke the plane from Wales to Australia, he send me an official Rugby Shirt of the Wales national team. That together with some messages about the time and place, made me go to Kitty o’Sheans in the centre of Madrid to watch with Ana, Nico, Andy and Espe the 1st match of England against Wales of the 6 Nations. Starting of a 4 o’clock with some propre Guinness wasn’t a bright idea, though the alternative was that shitty Dutch beer, I won’t spoil my blog with the name of it… (just think about that somebody does a search on google and ends up here…). Gareth kept us updated out of a bar in Sydney at the same time, but with some advantage in German beer, I guess he was pretty pissed at the time the game started though. Me wearing that shirt made me an ‘expert’ of the team and people started asking questions… I got away with it pretty fast, but half of the bar was English, so against me.. and the other half were the Irish leftovers from the previous game. Irish, Welsh and Scottish supporters have one thing in common : they support their team and everybody who plays against England… so that saved my neck. Wales lost.
Ana had a restaurant booked to surprice me… the intention was to go just the 2 of us, but we ended up with a little group in the Italian Restaurant I failed so often to get a table reserved… food was excellent, but I was still in a bad mood, so not up for some more partying afterwards.
I should do something about this mood of mine…. can’t continue like that.

the schaldming pictures are uploading now… as they came from different cameras I renamed them using the data in the file itself : I used the timestamp when the picture was taken. I couldn’t really figure out where this was when the picture was taken with a mobil phone though. Anyway, all pictures are at 1024 format, and in a couple of months I’ll shrink them 50% to save some serverspace… enjoy them here

Processing all the pictures now… got around 400 to review, rotate, resize etc… will take some time to upload as well, (as I’m working from home so I’ll narrow the bandwith used for this…