Got very angry this morning… I came out of my garage with my motorbike, when I saw the trafic light on green a couple of meters further. So I accelerated a bit but spotted a car coming out of a parking space, without noticing me.. I spot him so I braked and waited for him to get out in reverse.

I kept a decent distance because I know how Spanish drivers are… he reversed out, hitting the car on the other side of the road quiet heavy, he with his bumper straight into the door of the other car… after this, he geared forward and ran off, I hooted to make clear that this isn’t a good thing to do, but as a rule of thumb, Spanish do tent to ignore you when they have done something wrong… It made me so angry, that I decided to leave a note on the damaged car with my details as witness and the licence plate of the car.

I managed to get a good night sleep so now focus for the festival of the year : Werchter 2006…. all info on www.rockwerchter.be The weather forecast is important for Belgium (though actually you never now…

The image on the left comes from the Belgian weather website : www.kmi.be, it’s for thursday 29th of June, Day 1 of 4 of the festival… looks like we will stay dry (outside) on day one…good start !

Last weekend we went for diving at Islas Hormigas with Ana, Andy and Espe. Ana and me went for a ‘refresh’ course in Madrid earlier in the week because it was a while since we hit the water for the last time. Unfortunately with distict success… All went fine for me, Ana had more difficulties… her instructor is one of the most professional divers I’ve ever met (I haven’t met soooo much divers though). But he’s really daily busy with it on a professional level, makes underwater documentaries for the Spanish governement on Natural Reserves etc… So his ‘instructor’ job is just something aside he uses to motivate people for diving. Always aimed at : have fun, but dive safe and respect the nature. He has no goal in getting as much people as possible under water. Quality, no quantity.
I’m not into publicity for one organisation or another, but I’m afraid this weekend showed that the course Espe and Ana did, was not sufficient for them. They were only partial prepared and it toke them a lot to stay stable and relax.

Whatever, I did 3 dives of which the first 2 a responsability was put on my shoulders for with I didn’t had the skills nor experience either. At the end I’m only a OWD with 7 dives on my account… I can’t orientate in the water, or control somebody else. We managed to stay alive though and it wasn’t a lost dive at all… At least I learned a lot and one of the main things I learned is that there is a lot more to learn and that I need to be assertive when it comes to situations where I don’t feel 100% comfortable in. This weekend gave me a lot to think about. I did and (I hope) toke the appropriate conclusions as well from it. I need to get more into the water with experienced people to learn from it. Need some more training as well. Ana will need to redo her basics. There are some fundamentals failing in the course they did last year. If it takes 20minutes to figure out how to connect a bottle to a jacket something is wrong. I don’t blame anybody, nor am I angry or sad. But I will use this weekend to learn from and give all that happened a second thought. The easiest thing to do is blame somebody else or the material, can be but it doesn’t need to be like that and it doesn’t help any further anyway… there are +/- 100 people diving with that material each weekend and the divecentre shouldn’t exist too long if their stuff sucked….

The last dive we did was a weekend-saver : Ana nor Esperanza joined, which was their choice but I wasn’t sad about that. Ana lacks preparation so if she is not in the water I don’t have to worry about it. The fact I had to worry before, made me too nervous to realy enjoy my dive. So this last one was one to enjoy : a lot less air consumption, I finnaly saw the fish everybody was talking about : baracuda’s, mureens, … whatever… I’m waiting for Andy to send me some foto’s so I can show some…

The Mahou Meister (see Andy’s blog) returns… we had a final session yesterday, joining with some friends to watch Spain win from Tunis (3-1) in Chill Bill.

Necked down a couple of cold ones in Capitans’

and struggled home around half past 3, when the place closed… we actually had a plan to leave earlier, but Ana left work around 1h30 and we promised we’ll wait for her :-). If I hadn’t been stuck in my garage because of a failing remote controle to open the door, I would even had been on time in the office this morning… it was a close one, but I didn’t felt too bad and my concience doesn’t really agree in calling in sick when having a hangover… whatever, we had a great time, it was nice to have Gareth over for a couple of days, but more days like this wouldn’t have been healthy anymore… I’m not sure which is the worst party to have over. Gareth or Bob with his gang… Last photo’s will be added soon to Gareth’s album)

Works out for some of us already though we were close this weekend…

We had a decent start of the weekend, friday we met up with a couple of friends to have a curry at the Taj… one of the worse Indian restaurants in Madrid if you ask me but incomprehensable Gareth’s favourite one. Whatever, beside Jon’s imitation of a Japanese flag with the aid of a Vindalo all went smooth… after a pack of Mahou/Cobra we head of to Oui bar, one of my favourite spots for having some copas and enjoy the music. I had a hard time on fridayday in the office due to way to many beers on Thursday, so at closing time of the Oui bar (3:30am) I called it a day, while Gareth, Jon, Bea, Ana and Sylvia head of for Pacha !

Saturdaymorning… hmm… let’s say noon, after a good shower, Gareth and I went to Gallego III to enjoy a Coffee and maybe some breakfast… they have a new waiter over there… an asian, doing his best to understand Spanish but failing anytime something other than coffee or beer is asked… (I had in mind the fact he brought in some Creamy pepper sauce after Jon asked for ‘Salt and Pepper’…) . I asked for a coffee and a croissant… very common in Spain. Impossible to understand… first he thought I wanted a pint of beer instead/with the coffee… then he suggested I probably ment ‘Patatas bravas’ (backed patatoes with some spicy ketchup’)… not really fancing this I just dropped it and stayed with only a coffee. Things would change soon…

Excalty 12minutes later we were already ordering a Barro ! That is a clay frozen pot of beer… excellent… and about an hour later we ordered an excellent ‘Solomillo’. We managed to stay on the terras for a couple of hours, knocked down a decent ammount of ice cold Mahou… only to be dragged inside when a storm came up. In the evening we joined some friend in the center, in 2D a bar at a square named ‘2nd of May’ (Dos de mayo)… had again shitloads of dobles, before most of them headed home and Gareth and I decided to go to ‘El Capitan’ FINALY !!!! after 3 days being in Madrid the Captain himself entered the bar…. unfortunately a bit of a dissappointment as it was saturday night and the public is more random than in a weekday, no worries, there’s still Chill Bill, after Chill Bill we went home, to grab just one more beer out of the fridge before going to bed…  quite brutal day if you ask me, but no hangover to be spotted… it’s all in the rythm.

Finally managed to get some pics of Gareths’ parties online ! HERE

Sverige won from Paraguay in about the last minute. It was good for Jon’s mood because everybody was taking the piss out of him the whole game England won 3 hours before and to temper the English and cheer up Jon and seen the poor score in the first game, Sweden just had to win. Gareth met up with his girls he met wednesday on the plane. ‘The lights are on but there’s nobody home’ type of girls, though one quite cute (if she keeps her mouth shut).

An excellent night out again, yesterday, a few pints of Guinness, a shot of Whisky and a shitload of Mahou I staggered into bed to get up 3 hours later to run of for the office… I’m still quite OK though, but I will bang my head on the keyboard later today I’m afraid. Missing a cable to connect Gareths’ camera to a PC is why there’s no pictures posted yet… will come soon !

It was good seeing Gareth again. We chilled out a bit at home with a fridge fresh Mahou before getting Jon out of his sofa to grab some more beers at Plz. Remonta. Andy, Espe and Stephane showed up and we changed to Meson del Cebon for another excellent steak and some more beers. Instead of heading of for Capitan, Chill Bill was the place to be. It’s the same owner as La Galleria, but the later one had to close down… no loss at all, they stopped serving Mahou a couple of months ago and served Heineken instead, no wonder it was closed down by the police. Chill Bill had heineken as well in the beginning so I kind of refused to go unless I knew it would be a ‘copa’ night… lucky for everybody they kicked out heineken and serve San Miguell and Amstel…

We arrived home a bit drunk but not too late, so today wasn’t really a hangover day, though an hour more sleep should have made a big difference… can’t do that today either… some football games and Guinness are sheduled… of we go !

Gareth left Madrid in December 2005, after 2 weeks of ‘goodbye-parties’, if you can’t remember : here are the pictures of those parties. Anyway, he lives in Merlbourne right now and after visiting Wales and England, Madrid is on his planning, 6 days of sun and party, before heading back to uk and moving on to Sweden… talk about a lifestyle !

Ana obtained last friday the title of Doctor in Chemistry (Cum Laude). It’s an amazing achievement and I’m so proud of it ! We had a wonderfull party fridaynight and all of her friends were over to celebrate this moment. After 5 years hard work this wasn’t more than she deserved ! Instead of # of books and whatever other gifts, a collection was made and the gift of all her friends comes to this : 1 month to Edinburgh during this summer, in order to have a hell of a time over there and to get her English a bit leveled up !