First weekend in Madrid

Thurs Oct 4
My flight was SF - NY - MAD and it went rather smoothly, if you don´t count the fog on the NY-MAD flight on both the departure and arrival. I got to stay int he plane an extra 2 hours total...1 hour in NYC circling the actual runway and 1 hour in Madrid up in the air circling about. Fun stuff. By the time I passed passport control, got my baggage and passed customs, I was a sweating pig. I only took 2 large suitcases on this trip, so my ¨great thinking¨was to put on 2 sweaters, a tanktop AND a jacket in order to save room in my suitcases for more important things. Good thing I have a smiling boyfriend waiting for me right in my most glorious sweating moment.

Fri Oct 5 and Sat Oct 6
Manu had the day off so we were able to relax, open up my checking account at the bank, unpack more things and talk about how we would fit everything in our apartment. I have to get used to calling it ¨our ¨apartment because I´m so used to it being ¨his¨. In any case, we marked all of the IKEA pages that interested us for further organizing our home and when we went to IKEA (borrowing his dad´s car of course) we actually finished everything within 3 hours. SUCCESS. Two product managers doing this of course means it was well planned out. Sigh...

Friday night I got to meet his parents for the first time. They are both very sweet with distinct personalities. His mom is very cheery and talkative and his dad is a little bit calmer but also loves a good conversation. I think we stayed at their house for a little over 2 hours, talking over wine, tortilla (spanish omelette), Spanish ham (cured ham), and Spanish olives --yum. If they feed me everytime I go there I might have to visit more often!

Sunday Oct 7
In the morning we got up to watch the Formula 1 race that would decide who gets to go to the final F1 championship in Brazil. It was interesting to learn what Manu does for his blog: he watches realtime statistics and the TV at the same time as he writes in his F1 blog. To give you an idea of how popular his blog is, by the end of the race there were more than 100 comments on his blog for that particular race.

Anywhooo - lunch is the biggest meal in Spanish culture and Manuel made us paella for Sunday lunch. Nice thing is he makes paella with more veggies than others do, and I looove veggies!! I´m going to see if I can make it next time and maybe put a California edge to it. Better do this before the masters program begins!!!!