Jan 7th - Jan 12th

AHHHH finally back to Madrid.

(Looks like this is going to be a short post, not much happened and it was not a full week since I last posted)

The rest of the stay in Lisbon was very nice. Unfortunately, I came back from Prague with a bit of a cold, so I spent as much time as I could sleeping and trying to recover before exams. I never ended up getting more than about a half an hour of studying in while in Lisbon, but I was kind of expecting that; I thought that it was a better use of my time to hang with family than hit the books!

I am really drawing some blanks on the exact order that things happened, so I am going to tell you of the memorable things in the last week.

1. Battle for my European Health Card - Went into the office that deals with the card and battled it out with under educated people who hate their jobs...result = Success (Thanks in part to having a AWESOME Aunt who helped me all along the way with paper work and formalities...Thanks a MILLION Tia Nicha!)

2. Lunch with Paula and her kids, a long time friend of my mom's, we had a nice meal in a restaurant by her house and I think mom had a great time catching up with her. She was really nice, and the kids were fun too.

3. Picking Maria up from school. On Friday, Tia Nicha and mom had gone out and were not going to be home in time to pick up Maria (my 9 year old cousin) up from school so I went and picked her up, then we met up with David and went to have a snack at this awesome coffee place that has killer croissants.

4. Lunch with Tia Bia and Tia Pepa, mom's aunts. Avo, mom and I met up to have lunch with them right around the corner from Avo's house. I would not call it the most exciting lunch I ever had, but it always nice to see the family.

5. Sporting Portugal...On Saturday evening I went to a soccer game with Domingos and Miguel Bruschy, we watched Sporting Portugal win 1-0 in a game that should have been much more lop-sided.

6. After the game...Saturday after the game I met up with Teresa and went to one of her friends 18th birthday party in downtown Lisbon, we had a great time dancing all night to jams put on by her DJ boyfriend Francisco! (you would never guess he was a DJ if you ran into him!)

7. Lunch at Tio Ita and Tia Po's. Sunday was yet another family lunch, here is a list of the people there: Tio Ita, Tia Po, Domingos, Francisco, Mom, Avo, Tia Nicha, Maria, Tio Joao, Marta, Mariana, and me (mostly so I can try to remember in 30 years when I look over this again!) Tio Ita made a nice shrimp curry and mom got to see there new apartment.

8. Packing, BORING..BORING...BORING

9. Dinner with Tia Sofia. This dinner was supposed to have a total of ten people there, but within minutes we received news that a couple different groups of people couldn't come and just like that we were down to 4!!! It was a blast, she is really really nice (my mom's first cousin, if anyone was wondering how she is related, again mostly for me 30 years down the line!)

10. Delays, thanks to snow all day on Sunday and the Madrid airport not having the ability to deal with large amounts of snow efficiently my 1:30 flight ended up leaving a 5:45. The good news is, I saw online that this was going to be the case so we were able to squeeze one last lunch in with Avo and Tia Nicha across the river Tejo. Yet another good meal of fresh fish.

11. Arrived at Marc's...Ahh to have good friends, I am still looking for an apartment so Marc's family has been nice enough to take me in while I do so. On top of that, because of the snow, they picked me up at the airport so I wouldn't have to battle public transportation to their house (well, that worked out mostly thanks to my extremely delayed flight, but all the same I was VERY grateful).

Well, those are the past events in my life in a nut shell. Had a Marketing final today that went ok considering I forgot my English/Spanish dictionary at home and there were some words I didn't know off the top of my head. Time to start studying for the next round of them.

That's all for now Folks, much love as always from Madrid and until next time.

Phil