:: @ Choepie’s ::

Last day of work for this year and I decided to actually spend it in the office. The last 2 weeks I worked from home, where I got a Solaris 11 installed on Vmware on Windows XP pro, all in 64-bit and works fine.

Grabbing a coffee at the corner of the street once in a while makes working from home less boring, but besides that I do have the dicipline of working my 8 or more hours. The heating bill is higher as well…

This week was actually great, I stopped taking those pills, it’s plain shit. Ofcourse the pain went away with those pills…. you could cut off my arm and I would still be smiling, can’t be good, so I stopped and went twice to the gym this week, to get those muscels a bit lose and to softly try to strenghten them in an ultimate attempt to save my snowboardvacation

Pedro brought me a car this morning, so we can leave to … untill the 29th of December. The only appointment we have is Christmasdinner at Ana’s parents place, all the other days are open. But tonight first the traditional office Christmas dinner… it’s a dangerous event, so I’m happy to be off tomorrow. The dinner will have almost a 1.000 people there, and with the good Spanish tradition of not drinking beer but Whisky/Ron/Gin/…. after dinner, it’s a wise idea not to make any plans for the day after….

Off I go, I wish everybody nice parties for the upcoming days ! And of course a lot of luck and pleasure for our 2 worldtravellers Andy and Espe, at this moment they should have a pimped up Rickshaw heading north of India. There are 3 blogs to follow on this.

Andy’s personal blog, Espe’s personal blog in Spanish and their blog limited to the Rickshawrally itself. Read and cry !

First of all, special greetings to that one Greek that is reading my blog and doesn’t hesitate making stupid comments on it . Why don’t you just come over and see what life is ? Although I’m still waiting for an invitation to have a great night out in Prague as well..

Since I practiced some tricks on my skates last thursday, I’m a broken man. I shouldn’t do these things at my age anymore, the result is that I have to take a range of pills ‘to make me better’. Spanish doctors Thos pills have very distinct results. The smallest ones I take in the evening and these are my happy pills : I’m already 5 days in a row as high as a regular Amsterdam tourist, I can’t be bothered what’s on television, all is good, too cold ? too warm ? I really can’t be asked. They are highly addictive and I can clearly see why.

I do have another pill I take in the morning and this makes me feel like an old dog that has been run over by a truck on a German Autobahn on a rainy winter night. I can’t believe that stuff is for sale. I’m accusing this doctor to give me these pills in order to make me say that all is ok now so he can get rid of me. Some problems do lose their importancy as soon as you create a bigger problem on top  of it.
For the moment, I agree to try every pill to get me up and running again within a month for a week snowboarding.

Please checkout Andy & Esperanza’s progress in the Ricksaw Rally they are making through India. I’ve added the link to the right side. Or else click here !

Thursday already… I have 3 days off : Wednesday until Friday and time flies by so fast. Yesterday we had a great evening at Marga & Rubens’ place. It has been a while since we spend some time together and it was great. Marga & Ruben invited us with Noa, Asier, Nathalia & Julio, and Lole & Santi, very nice tapa’s, red wine, cava and good chatting. Afterwards we ended up in Sucursal, a local bar with a pool table, where Ana and Marga beat all of us ! We moved to El Captinan, but the doors were already closed… it was 3 o’clock.

The day before was another mess in the Belgian bar, I haven’t seen the Saint Nicolas, but his helpers were around and there was this Enghien Christmas beer on which I gave my stomach a volume test… Enghien/Edingen is a village in the north of Belgium and to be honest I never had this beer before, but I really liked it. They have a brown and a blond version. I prefer blond.

Went to this relaxing concert yesterday, Nouvelle Vague in Sala Heineken… There are some exceptions for me to enter a place with the name of the most horrible beer in the world and Nouvelle Vague is such an exception. I nipped from Ana’s beer just to try again, but the sweet chemical taste made me turn to copa’s. Not a good idea for a mondayevening though. Anyway, Nouvelle Vague plays covers from the best-sellers of New Wave, they create jazzy/bluezy/funky… versions of Human Fly, A Forest, Dancin with myself and even Blue Monday passed the scene… nice to listen too, and very good arrangements, but when you know the songs, you miss the spirit the song was made for. Put Paul Youngs’ version of Love will tear us apart next to Joy Divisions’ original and you know what I mean.
The set was great though, I enjoyed it and it made me decide I have to get all those all records one way or another on my iPod… it was the time of tapes/vinyl and I have shitloads of those, but that’s to old a medium to just put it into mp3….

Tonight, there is Santa Nicolas in The Belgium bar (Cafeeke) in Madrid, the tradition in Belgium is that this one comes from Spain (!) with his boat and brings gifts for children, although if you were bad, he let his helpers put you in a bag and he takes you away to Spain ! This is some tradition they don’t know in Spain, althought they have a more logic and even more catholic version of it : Los Reyes : the 3 kings that come over from the east to bring gifts to Jesus. Again (as in Belgium for Nicolas) the children have to write a letter to him in order to convince him how well they behaved the last year. Actually, in the region I come from, we don’t do neighter of both, we celebrate the very same thing as Saint Martin, the one who divided his robe to the poor. When the Dutch went over to the America’s they transfered the tradition of Saint Nicolas into Saint Claes, and this became Santa Claus… Though I’ve read another version of this origin :
One of the old German Gods, Wodan, had a big white beard, ran on a white horse throught the sky and had 2 big black birds spying for him on the humans. This has some similarities doesn’t it ? As the Catholic didn’t want to wipe away too strong the ‘unholy’ traditions, opportunists as they were, they just slowely converted this God into their own Saint. I tend to believe this version, at the end the original Saint Nicolas, was a greek and lived where Turkey is right now, I can’t spot any of those traces in the way they present him…

Whatever, I’m sure I haven’t behaved very well, so I’m very curious where the helpers of Saint Nicolas will take me too… as I’m already in Spain !

Mondaymorning and I don’t feel as bad as I thought.We had an event with Madridpatina on sunday : a route of 12km in the beautifull automn colored park of Casa de Campo. It rained in the afternoon and evening of Saturday so the chance was that it would have been canceled. But a sunny sundaymorning made it all right. Just before starting we were briefed on the conditions of the road and advised that if we didn’t feel secure, we should not join… I didn’t get up at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning to not join, and keeping in mind the extremely rainy routes we made in Brussels 2 years ago (when nobody of our group was able to break properly !), this couldn’t be that hard. The day before I rotated my wheels around because they were kind of worn on the inside, that made that I was actually skating on the smallest edge of my wheels for the first kilometers and that in combination with wed roads and slippery leaves on top, it was hard to climb the 5 hills on the track, while the skates slipt away every time you had to push to get up.. It wasn’t a surprice that some fell on the asphalt. But all credits for the organisation of Madridpatina, police escort throughout the whole route and an ambulance following us just in case. Nobody got hurt luckely. I couldn’t smoke for a while as my lungs where wide open from the effort… I should do some more sports if I want to survive the snowboard vacation in 40 days…(*) pictures are from www.madridpatina.com

It’s a bit of a sad feeling. There’s an empty spot behind me in the office where Andy used to sit, he will never sit there again (as he left for a worldtrip)… who am I supposed to have breakfast with ? After my all-time coffee companion Gareth left, there was Ivan to have a coffee with, after Ivan returned with his wife and their new born (Matteo) back to Milano, Andy was there and we had a nice habbit of going everyday for a coffee or tea and una tostada con Aceite y tomate… a simple but delicious breakfast. There will come more moments of these of which I will think : Andy should have been here now. He’s off now (actually his journey officially starts the 9th of December when he and Esperanza fly to India). At this very moment, I assume they are rescheduling the trip back to England. Knowing Andy, the planned leaving hour will not be made. Andy lives in a timezone of his own….  and this might become very handy going around the world.

I went for another class of inlineskating yesterday… it becomes a bit fresh now but I ended up sweating like a pig… very nice class, I needed some movement, after a week of party, restaurants and drinking way to much for Andy’s leaving do, I could use some sports. Upcoming Sunday there is a tour of Madrid. 12 + 6Km… hmmm I’ll think about this.

So now I’m looking forward to see an email of Gareth, telling me the date that’s on his plane ticket - the one way back to Madrid. Between now and 4 months I will have this mail in my inbox….