Lunch with a friend, a funeral, Amazon.com and preparations for a holiday weekend

Hiya again

This week I met up with an old friend, Ramón Pradera who is actually a TV news presenter now. I knew him when he was just a reporter, so I’m very proud of how well he has done. We met through Nokia when I took him on a trip to London for some new phone launch. We stayed at the famous St. Martin’s in the Lane hotel where one night dear Ramón ordered a cigar which turned out to cost 100 pounds! I fit the bill of course!

We had lunch at a great restaurant which belongs to a friend of his. It’s called “Escauri” and serves some wonderful French Basque food. I highly recommend it. Oh, and Ramón has just got married. So congratulations from these pages to you and your lucky wife. ¡Enhorabuena a los dos!

As some of you know, I am an avid reader – of all sorts of genres. So my passion (and my Father’s) is Amazon.com. It’s just great ordering on internet from the biggest library in the world and then having the stuff delivered to your door within days. So this week there were 2 or 3 lovely parcels awaiting me with dvds such as “How green was my valley”, and “Attic” (the story of the people who hid the Anna Frank family during the war in Amsterdam) and books such as “A mighty heart” about the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl plus a couple on the fate of Middle Eastern women. My father’s book last week was “The battle of Japan” – quite a different genre, of course.

This week brought with it, the funeral for Gerardo González, the father of the Spanish family I lived with when I first came to Madrid as a student. The funeral was emotional but also very beautiful. The church was packed with family and friends and I must say my congratulations go to the priest whose homage to Gerardo was perfect. It was as if Gerardo’s spirit was there with us and there was no sad moment, except at the end, of course, when we all crowded round the family to give our condolences.

The funeral brought a little surprise as I saw a colleague from the telecoms sector who I know quite well. We were both surprised to see each other there away from our “natural” habitat. It turned out that he is Gerardo’s son’s best friend from their school days. What a small world!

The week was also full of preparations for our trip to Montrondo at the weekend. Friday 12th October was a national holiday and like most of the population, we were going to take a short break and go away for the long weekend; that is all 5 of us plus the girls’ oldest friend Copi. This meant a lot of meal planning and taking of food as Montrondo is high up in the mountains and an hour away from the nearest shop. More about that in my post on our weekend in Montrondo.

Cheers for now
Masha