:: @ Choepie’s ::

Above is an extract of a song in some kind of flemish there isn’t any better title than this possible… with Ana I was in Belgium last week to celebrate the 1st communion of Fien. A family party organised in my sisters’ home was great and Fien was happy as usual with such a private attention of everybody. An air castle was rented and the Gods were with us.. it was raining cats and dogs almost every day of the week except when the time was there to get exhausted on the castle ! A bit cloudy though but dry. A great day.

Friday though I ended up with a foodpoisening from eating salmon in a restaurant in Diegem (near Brussels)… it got me into bed very soon on fridayevening and I spend most of saturday in bed… But Cliff brought in some magic and in a couple of hours I felt strong enough to eat again and even tried a Duvel !!!! He’s the greatest !!!!

The above title actually counts for saturday… It was my birthday and though I had already a decent hint from Lieve a couple of weeks before about a party, my friends surely did their best to put me on the wrong track all of the time. ‘I’m not around upcomming saturday’, ‘Shall we go for a beer saturday’ etc.. at the end I just stopped looking for clues and just let happen whatever had to happen. My actual idea was that I was going to have dinner with my sister and my brother in law and then go to my local bar to grab some beers and sure they would be some of the all-time friends around… what happened is that we entered the restaurant and all of my all-time friends where there !!! Great surprise. Then Remko called and I got confused again, with no so much words he let me know he was around somewhere, while he lives in Brussels…hmmm, in meantime all my friends were discussing on what to do after dinner…and ‘Disco Bowling’ kind of had the general agreement… at this time I didn’t really care… I was among my friends and anything would be great fun… having that call from Remko in mind, I thought they were looking for something to do to fill up a gap of a couple of hours… that’s where the disco bowling fitted in perfectly.
So of we went in a couple of cars towards the nearest city for the bowling… halfway the road Lieve made a turn and a few phonecalls later we knew she forgot my gift at home (later I found out why ALL the cars made that same turn….) so instead of the discobowling, we parked at my local bar….

Shocking that’s one of the words that crossed my mind…. the bar had some ‘orange’ flags hanging out… there was a poster on every outside window with a Dutch crown and 4 times my drunken face on it, showing a fucking Heineken in my hand… (please believe me, that’s where photoshop kicked in !!! there is no whitness of such a thing… never) once inside the -rather small - bar was full of old friends of mine, about 20/30 more than the ones we went for dinner with…(more will come in later… at the end it was only 9pm and the party would last untill 5am…) all dressed up in Hup Holland Hup- style.. funny orange hats, orange football tshirts, flags,… and dutch songs out of the speakers… whoever knows me, knows about my feelings for Holland. All following can’t be said in words… we had a great party, had lots of beers and I had the time of my life… (without a hangover in the morning)… I’m collecting my pictures to get them posted here….

Back in Madrid I had to give it some thoughts…. I am such a luck bastard with such an amount of friends around…. I reallize that that’s someting unique and I want them to know that I love every single one of them !!!!

if any of you have more pics of this party : please send them to me !!! Thanks

Once in a while a nice cleanup can help… you might notice that choepie is somethimes different… I’m in the middle of studying css stylesheets so I’m rebuilding this css files from scratch… you still have everything, but the menus might appear elsewhere, for example at the very bottom of the page…

I arrived in the office this morning. That wouldn’t have been a headlight unless you know that we stripped my motorbike yesterday. Haynes manual at hand. It all started with a slacky chain, which is a straightforward thing to arrange on my previous motorbike, a Bandit 600, but it’s slightly different on a VFR800i because of the swingarm. While my bandit had a straight forward fork with 2 adjustment bolds, on the VFR you need to rotate an axial eccentric to adjust the tension, there’s a C-spanner in the toolbox, which slipped of the eccentric a couple of times, and made some damage on my hand… while doing this, we thought we might as well take a look around, so we got rid of the fairings, toke a look under the tank and adjusted the rear suspension. I always let any kind of maintenance be done by a proper dealer, but I guess I can start fixing things myself… Just get some proper tools and it should go smooth… I guess. At the end it was good fun.

Last friday went to a concert with Nico. He had some tickets for farrah , File under : UK Powerpop. Sounds as Weezer and in worst case Cranberries. It wasn’t bad, but a bit already heard. A bit the same feeling when you find yourself looking at the pyramids in Egypt… oh yeah, great, but not so impressed. Anyway Nico was in love with Michelle Margherita, the bass player of Farrah and in meantime the leadsinger of the Bad Machines. I had to disagree on him, well she’s nice, but average compared to the average Margherita in Spain. After we got probably drunk by probably the best beer in the world (cfr Daan :-)) we went over for an aftermatch at the bar where Ana works… I guess we both lost. My hangover last untill sundaymorning.

I tried my best to get up and running for a good night out on Saturday, but the odds where against me. I had some beers with Jon and his brand new girlfriend, but taking into account it toke me about an hour for each beer, it wasn’t too much fun, though I managed to get home around 3:30 in the morning.

I’m still smoking while I shouldn’t, but I found it way to hard to quit now… so I tried it the hard way and started running again. With Jon. It wasn’t clear who had the worst condition but we did manage to run for about 20 minutes straight. Not too bad anyway and the fact that this was the first time gives it a lot of room to improve. That’s the most positive way of looking at this. I should give it an attempt to go again today, but Jon already came up with some excuse.

Being lazy can be a blessing, but not if it’s for too long… I finally managed to get some pictures posted of our trip to Milan earlier in March, and from the weekend after in Valencia.

This weekend was an extra long one. They do celebrate the 1st of May in Spain, so we were off on monday. On top of that we were of on tuesday (today) as well as it is the ‘day of the Madrid community’ whatever that means. Ana was of to Valencia from fridaymorning untill sunday afternoon. Friday after work I did a nice siesta to be ready for good evening out.. I started of with Andy and Jon for a decent steak in Gallego III. Andy left and Gema came and since she came back from England, she drinks Guiness… so of we went to the Irish Rover for some proper Guinness. Gema left us at the entrance of Ocho y Media, a ‘electro/new wave’ club in the center of Madrid, but the music wasn’t so good, so we left after a drink, to end up in Low… it’s been a while since I had such a good night out. Music was excellent : Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Pixies, Franz Ferdinand… we ended up by closing the club around 6h30 in the morning and cached the first metro home. Having a good breakfast before going to bed, makes the difference between a saturday in pain or not. So the churros entered with a cup of coffee and around 7h30 I jumped into bed.

I got up around 1pm for another breakfast at a local terras, preparing my trip for the afternoon with the bike… I head for ‘El atazar’ a lake at 30minutes North from Madrid to continue to a more difficult road to ‘Pueblo de la Sierra’. Excellent ride, nobody on the road, my iPod on shuffle and 260km later I returned to Madrid around 10 in the evening. Too tired to go out but a very relaxing and satisfying day. I had to clear my head for a long time and this day helped a lot. Sunday Ana was to return round 3pm, and I had the choice to join Andy for a day in Toledo, or pickup Ana from the busstation. I chosed the later option, using the time before to clean my bike. Ana went to her bar to work in the evening and I went out on my inline-skates to give it a try after 2 years of not using them… I still can’t brake, but besides that all went fine.
Monday I wanted to show Ana the scenary I had in front of me on Saturday, so we went back to El Atazar and moved on to one of the villages of my guide : Pueblos de España : La Hiruela. Afterwards we were about to meet up with Lutz and Isabel in the OUI bar, but again, we were exhausted from a day on the motorbike so we spend the evening home in front of the TV…

Pictures of the Motorbike trip to El Atazar : here