'Twas the night before February

Welcome to February! May it be more sensible and less stressful than January.

After limited sleep I headed off to the airport yesterday as Magda has finally arrived in Madrid. It was good to see an old friend again. I showed her around parts of Madrid, managed to break her phone only 10 minutes after she got a new phone number, had coffee, had small bocadillos and marvelled at the smokers in restaurants. She also did the usual foreigners-who-don't-quite-speak-the-language-fluently gaff while on the intercom trying to be buzzed up into her apartment for the first time. I was the same. We all prepare ourselves for the first bit of information: "hello my name . . ." and then things get a little chaotic after that when someone inevitably says: "and?" or "what?" My line was: "I think I live here now," while Magda's was "I need to live here please." Of course, thirty seconds later we all realise what we should've said and hope that no one ever blogs about it where it becomes public domain. Haha. She was supposed to come out to Miriam's party later last night, but since she had to travel 3 hours from her home in Poland to Berlin to get a flight to here, she was wrecked.

I picked up two cheap books which is good, gives me something to read in the coming days, and then Miriam's party was a lot of fun. There are 5 flatmates there, all from different countries, so they all know a tonne of people and whenever there's a party it's usually a big thing, with the English in the kitchen fighting with the French, the Italians being the social butterflies, the Germans bearing the brunt of the jokes and Spanish being envied that they can actually speak the local language rather well. I met some new cool people, drank with some old cool people, had suffered a complete collapse of English abilities and had to revert to Spanish which for a while last night was my dominant language (odd, since I was speaking to an American). Miriam leaves on Thursday, so she was quite sad, and after a day of eating almost nothing I was sure that a single glass of sangría would knock me out. Luckily, no.

Getting home was, as usual, a pain. I found a shorter way to walk to Atocha, which is probably now null and void since the starting point is very close to Miriam's house, and I may not be there again. But the bus that should come every 15 minutes didn't, instead I was waiting in the freezing rain at 5am (how many times have I said that doing that will be the last time?) and finally got onto the warm and dry bus. Another 20 minutes at the train system would have started up.

I woke up many hours later to find that my little electric heater has completely died. The first of it's two heat bulbs burnt out a month ago, and now the last one went this morning. One more month of winter. Can I survive?