I came, I saw, I drooled.

This evening I discovered that my landlady wasn't fibbing about the firemen. After nearly a week here, I finally took a walk to the local park for an evening stroll in the sun. Halfway down the road from the flat, I was met with the sight of about 15 rather sweaty, very fit firemen jogging towards me. At least half of them had decided that clothing on their top half was simply unnecessary. What a shame!

I tried to look cool and unimpressed, I really did. But I'm almost certain I failed!

The park was lovely though - a combination of paths for walking, sports facilities (yes, more young Spanish men running around being athletic), benches, open spaces, shady glades and the obligatory million small dogs.

I'm promising myself an hour's walk every day there. That, combined with the damned stairs in this building, might just help me walk off the vast quantities of beer, bread, cheese and potatoes that seem to make up my staple diet.

I heard from Mirjana this afternoon, having completed her first morning of Vaughan teacher training. She sounded just a little stressed! There are only 3 trainees on this course so I'll be intrigued to see if the normal dropout/kicking-off rate of 50-75% holds true. I certainly wish her all the best with it.

As for me, I received an email from Dade (thank you ;-) ) this morning, with a contact in Madrid who is looking for one-to-one conversation teachers. Sounds ideal. I've emailed the woman in question and am keeping my fingers crossed on a response. I'm hoping Begona decides to go ahead with the classes she asked me about. As Eve said, maybe students will be like buses - I've waited for ages and hopefully now they'll all come at once!

Broccoli and beer are calling (well, OK, one of them is calling louder than the other!) so that'll do for today!

Pain and paracetamol!

Not expecting any sympathy for my spectacular Sunday hangover - entirely deserved. A quick drink with Hannah at 6 last night ended with me stumbling up the 4 flights to my flat at 3am, desperately trying not to wake Eve. As tends to happen, one beer became 2, then a different bar for 5 Desperados and 2 very large neat Amarettos. With no food. You'd think I'd have learnt by now, but apparently not.

So sunny Sunday has so far consisted of me gingerly crawling out of bed at 12, to an empty flat as the ever-energetic Eve has gone hashing (no, not the illegal kind, the running kind) with a weekly group. Good for her! As for me, I barely made it to the kitchen for hangover-helping bread and tea before I had to sit down again! Pathetic, quite honestly.

As anyone who's on Facebook will have seen, all I've managed since then is hours of FB rubbish, finding my vampire name etc etc. How old am I?!

I'm desperately trying to work out if the Monte Carlo tennis final is on a TV channel I can actually get here. Watching the live scores on the net just isn't the same as watching a sweaty Nadal massacre Djokovic. Match starts in 15 minutes so fingers crossed one of the main channels will have the sense to show it.

There was a very unexpected and unlikely group of British guys in the bar we started in last night. For the life of us, we couldn't work out what they were doing in such an odd part of Madrid. There were 6 or 7 of them, loud, drunk (OK, so I can't really talk!) and generally resembled the worst examples of British football hooligans! I'd spotted them sitting outside a little earlier and could tell they were Brits from about 500 yards away - never a good sign! They wouldn't have warranted a second glance in a bar in the centre of town, but up here in the sticks, they stuck out like the proverbial. They made me feel Spanish!!!

So, it's back to the orange juice, pain killers and hopefully some tennis. I need to recover for later cos I'm meeting up with Mirjana somewhere in town at about 10pm. She arrives this evening and starts the Vaughan teacher training tomorrow! I sincerely hope she takes to it better than I did!