:: @ Choepie’s ::

We are touching 30 degrees once in a while this week. So spring is over and summer is entering. It’s a good thing, but a bit dangerous because the mornings can be chilly in just a T-shirt. A lot of people cached a cold already. Good thing about may is that it starts with 2 holidays… the 1ste is a bit international, but the 2nd is a public holiday only for Madrid. Nice.

So looking forward for a long weekend, wich is an excellent thing to do. Ana is away untill sunday evening. I actually haven’t seen her too much lately as she started working in a bar, since 2 weeks. What started of as a 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, ended up as 7+ hours a day 6 days a week… so that was not the plan, because she had to concentrate on the presentation of her thesis… so she talked to the owner and we changed the setup : now she is into an ‘extra’ pool for friday and saturday, which is just fine ! Now she can go working friday and saturday from 8pm untill 2am and then we can go out ! so an excellent move.

I guess I will take my bike this weekend and check out some nice mountain roads.

Things are improving a lot in Belgium, so I was planning to go back to Madrid soon. Though my idea was to take a flight somewhere by the end of next week, but prices go up to 350euro’s for a single ticket for Madrid.  At the end I found a good ticket for tomorrow (sunday), which I bought. So tomorrow this time, I’m home again as I fly in the morning.

I have about 6 hours now to do what I need to do, a bit condensed but that’s the way it is. At the end, everything is turning out very well and a week more won’t really make the difference anymore.

Things are getting relax in Belgium, the reason I needed to rush over are mine, but it all ended positive and that’s enough to say. I’ll stay aprox 1 more week over here, but I’m looking forward to go back again, my home is in Madrid and if it’s not for a fun reason I prefer to be home. Things are starting to move for Ana as well, which is a good thing though sometimes confusing.

I received a nice note from Gareth as well, he got some friends over from here in Australia and they are moving around for a month or so. I need to consider going there as well to visit him, but finance are low for the moment so these plans will be postphoned to next year or so. I would also like to bring Ana again to ‘De Gentse Feesten’ this year, but same thing happens here, besides the ‘unexpected’ trip to Milan and being right now for the 3rd time in Belgium since new year and the fact we are coming back end of may and I’m going back begin of june. (rock Werchter) it can be too much as well…. we also have a marriage to celebrate in Marseille (France) in August and will combine this with a week (or 2) just on the road between Madrid and Marseille.
Plans enough, missing things are time and money

Well, not to much to share over here… Ana is making good progress on the presentation of her thesis, I could convince her in using StarOffice/OpenOffice instead of MSOffice and she starts to like it Withing a year she’ll ask me to run Linux

Isabel and Lutz are expecting a baby so that is great news. We went out on friday and they’re really looking forward to it… they are discussing names at the moment. Lutz is German while Isabel is Spanish, so opinions vary for the moment. As a good tradition we have in Belgium (at least the group of friends I have over there), I already found a ‘temporary name’… so for the time being, we are all waiting for ‘Heidi’ They don’t like the name at all, but that makes it more interesting.

I joined Natxo for a coffee on a terras on saturday, it was a nice day, a bit windy but sunny enough… Later we met up with Isabel and Ana to see “V of Venganza” (Original title : V for Vendetta”) unfortunately the Spanish dubbed version. I really don’t like it but the movie wasn’t to bad, so not too much lost there… With Natxo I’m planning to go more diving this year. I promissed myself to try to get a dive about once a month.
Latest is that I’ll be in Belgium tomorrow morning for undefined time, probably 1,5 to 2 weeks.

The summer is about to kick in over here.. temperatures rises 20 degrees earlier in the day and it’s plain blue sky and sunshine… This is the reason I stay in Spain. The flipside is that there is lack of water and though it rained pretty well (let’s say, in 2006 we had already about 6 days of rain) the reservoirs in the mountains are way to low to get us comfortably throught the summer. We might even not be able to fill our swimming pool, can you believe that ? Luxury problems.

I’m still very tired, but I guess it’s the change of the weather that’s causing this. I’m still trying to find a nice BMW GS for sale somewhere and besides that I have about everything I need.

Thursdayevening, heading for la playa de Valencia, we have a wedding on fridaynight and weddings are fun over here. Saturday and sunday will be lazy, laying on the beach, hopefully the chiringito is open already… this is some kind of wooden small beachhouse functioning as a bar, were you can sit/hang at night in some comfortable chairs, limited light, nipping from a cuba libre with your bare feet in the sand watching the sea and thinking how great live is. Nothing wrong with that !

My head bangs on my keyboard as I’m falling asleep on my desk… I’m a bit exhaused after a busy weekend. Fridaymorning we got up around 3/3h30 in the morning, to fly to Milan at 6h25, we had to be in the airport 1h30 before the plane toke off and it’s still a reasonable distance from my place to the airport… on top of that there’s no metro running at that hour… so off we went. Ana had an appointment in Inspra around noon, so it was the only possible flight.

In meantime I try to find my way to Monza to visit that city and meet up with Ana in Milan after she had done whatever she had to do. The Malpensa airport is a decent distance for Milan and public transport might be OK, not if you can’t speak Italian and know the rules… it took me 2h30 to get from the airport to Monza, a 40min trainride to milan, a Metro to the border of milan and then a bus to Monza.  So far so good, nothing to worry about, nice weather and I had time to check out for a nice hotel… bought a map of the city and started walking around. Hmmm not too much hotels over here… I toke my second coffee that day on a terras and with 3 words of Italian I knew from the waitress that there was only 1 hotel and that it was expensive… no problem, just ask your friend : the police. It was a nice looking italian policewoman : no english, no spanish but she claimed to know some french, unfortunately it wasn’t the same french as the one I knew, so no luck, but I figured out some more information. The tourist office would open at 4 o’clock, the only hotel was confirmed expensive but she could bring me to a pension… unfortunately fully booked.

I decided to get back to Milan in order to be able to find a reasonable priced hotel before night felt in. I tried to find my way to a bus going from Monza to Milan… I saw one, but it broke down a couple of minutes before I saw it.. the driver was making big efforts to get the damn thing moving, but nothing happened. But more than one road leads to Rome, so walking the big roads in search for a busstop. It toke me to a stop, where the last metrostation of Milan was indicated as the final stop. At least I was back in the metrosytem. So I asked for confirmation on a woman waiting for the same bus… she started talking and of the little I understood, it was the correct bus, but there was another one, around the corner, but this was the fastest but I just missed it, and there was the station, and some thing about her family I guessed etc… it last forever, and I was saved by the bus stopping in front of us, and she indicating it was a good thing to do to enter the bus. In meantime there were another 4 people entering.

5 minutes later, appeartly the bus went into a direction nobody agreed on being the direction of milan, and they asked the driver where he went to :-)… not to Milan, so he had to stop and all of us went of. Absolutely normal, the people just considered it bad luck that they entered a bus, having a big sign on it “MILAN” + the number of the stop, but not going to milan.

The first women considered it as her personal goal to get me in Milan, so she still indicated me to follow her. I made clear that I didn’t had a ticket yet and I saw that the busdriver didn’t had something to sell me one. So she toke me into a station where she asked me a ticket to Milan. The man handed her over one, she looked at it, but didn’t agree (though it printed out milan in big letters)… he had to take it back and out we went, across the street, some stairs, crossing another street and into a hall were a bus was parked (Milan) and a Cassa Automatica… I indicated I would go in to buy a ticket and the woman told me it was no use but I could give it a try anyway. At the end, this was a busterminal, where several busses were waiting for the moment to leave… guess what : a cassa in a bus station, you can buy all kinds of tickets over there except for a fucking busticket for the bus right in front of it !!! Asking the driver didn’t help either.. he just didn’t care. But the woman was so helpfull that she asked everybody in the bus if they had a spare ticket (including the driver) so by the time the bus was about to leave, EVERYBODY including the driver knew I had no ticket and I just decided to play stupid, sat down and started to call with my mobile. The bus started and toke me to the metro, nobody complained nobody said anything, even not when we stopped at the terminal and while leaving the bus, straight in front of the busdriver and about 20 of his colleagues, the woman shouted to me how lucky I was that I made it untill here without a ticket or a controll for one…. Italy…