Saturday, February 17, 2007

My 50th birthday, otherwise known as the Indian Wedding


The belly dancer

Eladio and I at the Arab restaurant

Amanda and I in the kitchen when they arrived.


The food

Me and the magician Nelo

Walking in Boadilla on Sunday morning

Amanda and me at the tapas bar "El Bierzo" in Boadilla

The younger generation at the Txitxarrería where Andy and Amanda took us for dinner on the last night.

And the older generation at the same dinner.

Susi and Oli, my beautiful girls at La Txitxarreria.
Hi again

It was actually on the 8th February and I haven’t updated my blog since the 7th as I haven’t had a quiet moment to myself since then.

The 8th was the family celebration with a lunch at home and a Mallorca bought birthday cake. It was just the 5 of us, Eladio, Susi and Oli, my Father and me. They had bought me a hilarious singing birthday card with a lady showing her legs! I got some lovely presents from all the family.

In the evening Eladio and I went to the Medina Mayrit Arab Baths (http://www.medinamayrit.com/template.php?l=en&m=2&s=1) for a Turkish bath, massage, dinner and show – belly dancer. It was certainly an experience and a place I had wanted to go to for a long time.

On Friday my dear friends Andy and Amanda came to join us for the celebrations. They hadn’t seen our new house so that was something new for them. We spent the afternoon catching up on our news and then took them to dinner to our favourite place, La Alpargatería.

Saturday was a full day of preparations, cooking and getting ready for the party. My catch phrase all day long, was “there are 45 people coming, so do you think this is enough?”. Eladio took Andy and Amanda out in the morning to buy Andy a Spanish classical guitar and they came back with a beauty of an instrument.

People arrived from 21h onwards and we welcomed them all warmly. We ate and drank to our heart’s content and dear Copi (Susi’s bosom friend) was making Mojitos in the kitchen – yummy. We had a mixture of people, family and friends from my Motorola and Nokia times as well as the girls’ boyfriends and closest friends. We were quite a multicultural lot and my Father had a great time talking to the Finns, my friend Gustavo of Canadian origin and Monica’s husband who is German. So did Amanda I think. I got lots of great presents – thanks everyone – the most original of all being an original copy of the Times printed the day I was born, from Susana and Gustavo. Amazing!

The evening ended with a magician’s show which actually lasted nearly an hour and a half but had us mesmerized b y the most incredible tricks Nelo (that was his name) made.

When nearly everyone left, Andy, Amanda, Eladio, the kids, the boyfriends, Copi and Carolina sat around eating up the birthday cake and having a final drink. It was then that I got out my old school reports and started reading out some of the comments which were hilarious. You might not know but Amanda and I were at school together (St. Joseph’s College, a convent school in Bradford). There were some priceless remarks like: “she rarely swims”, “lacks PE equipment”, “would do better if she concentrated” and some even worse! It’s actually quite surprising to think that out of my whole class, I probably did better professionally than most in the end but I must admit, I was an awful school pupil!

Sunday was a quiet day when we took 3 walks to work off the food and alcohol of Saturday but then the walks were actually made so we could get in some tapas at Boadilla in the morning and go out to dinner to La Txitxarreria in Pozuelo in the evening.

It was great having Olivia, Andy and Amanda over for my birthday which was one of the best, despite it being my 50th.

On Monday we all woke up early because Andy, Amanda and Oli were returning to the UK and Susi and I were off to Barcelona. You can read all about our trip to Barcelona in my next post.

Cheers
Masha

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