Maryam prepared a very nice CD for me, with Katie Melua's very nice new album and some other goodies, which I didn't listen properly to, but I admit taking instant liking to Patrick Saussois and Pink Martini. I have to delve more into the CD. Thank you very much Maryam, it was a very nice surprise and it managed to brighten up my monday so far! :-)

Another weekend passed us by and I think I owe you a log of what happened ... otherwise my sister might strangle me or just assault me with questions next time :P hehehe.

It was an active weekend, having a spontaneous meeting for drinks on friday with good old friends ... no more meeting new people for now, I'm tired of organising and catering for everyone's needs. I'll indulge in a bit of house keeping for now ... hmm, metaphorically speaking, although literally my house begs for some keeping too. We had a nice friday, drinks, chatting to friends and ending with a stroll with Marco to find a place to eat, but everything was either closed or not really too inviting. We had to go our own ways in the end...

On saturday it was Charles' orkut meeting, in the old Porterhouse. A good nice socialising with good old and new people, although I spent the night talking with people I knew. Again ... not very adventurous these days. There were about 20 people there, which is quite surprising, usually you have to beg people to come out and play. Maybe as winter draws by, people tend to suddenly realise they have less and less options and start to hang out with us :P

Sunday was different. The plan was to visit Ali in East Grinstead, Sussex, in the countryside how we use to joke about it. It's literally in the countryside though, with cows being literal occurrences and not sarcastic urban dwellings. Of course we had to start with a bit of adventure when Alireza was late and we narrowly missed the train. Maybe you think narrowly is used here just for sprinkle the narration with couple of epithets to make it more interesting. But in actual fact ... we were 10 metres from the train and thinking "phew, we made it after all" when it started to move, to our disbelief.
In the end we caught another train and in East Croydon, where we had to change, we did a good run between platforms, helped by the English trains being always late (if this one hadn't been, we wouldn't have caught it).
It wasn't to be the only exercise we would do that day, but it was the most strenuous one. Once in East Grinstead, we did a bit of walking on some countryside trails, talking, singing songs in at least 3 languages and then praying to find the Spanish tapas restaurant, Ali telling us all the time "only 5 more minutes". We were an angry mob at that time, about to lynch him, or even worse ... eat at McDonald's.
Lunch was abundant, a lot of tapas (these are small-medium portions, not full dishes); we were all sharing, different flavours mixing and confusing our taste buds. We had some beers too, maybe too much of it, as, at some point ... the prawns started talking to each other "Eat me! No no, eat me!". All to Maryam's disbelief, being a vegetarian :-)
After dinner, slowly and painfully rolling, we parked in a coffee shop where we had some ice creams, milk shakes and beers. We were so sleepy when we had to leave to catch the connecting bus and then the train to London. But we were happy, it was a good escape and we should do it more often.

Today, Monday, we're meeting with David Borella, the australian guy ... I can't wait to hear his travel stories from Turkey and other places he's been to. Tomorrow he's flying to Australia, so this is a short intermezzo between trips and the only opportunity to see him before next year (well, he says he’ll be back next year, but you never know). He's a funny guy, we should have great fun tonight.