Halloween

Hola todos! I am starting this blog with a holiday that is not really celebrated in the Netherlands, namely: Halloween. In Madrid, it is very common to totally dress up and have lots of fun during that day. We even got a day from university; I was surprised by that fact, but hey I could not complain. So Kelly and I decided to go to 100 Montaditos, our favourite place to have lunch. Cheap small sandwiches and half a litre beer for 1 euro, what else does a guy want? And also that day was the ‘last’ day with nice weather: the sun was shining, temperatures were 22+ degrees. Still lovely this time of year (November!).

That evening we went out to eat a bocadillo con calamaris, a very famous Madrilenian food, with our Spanish and Russian friends. You can get them everywhere, but our Spanish friends told us that the ones near Plaza Mayor are the best. So we went there and we found out that these were quite cheap, only 2,70 per bocadillo. A drink was compared to that really expensive, so we went to some chino (Chinese shop) to get cheap drinks. Vive los chinos! Afterwards, we went to our place to enjoy the rest of the evening. Some other Spanish friends came and we had vodka with lemon, a nice combination. One of our friends even invited us to his parents’ house in Benidorm, so we might go there later. Will be a lot of fun for sure!

The next day was again a day off. The first of November is All Saints Day here in Spain; they remember their dearly departed and bring flowers to the graves of their loved ones. So again a day when all shops are closed. You really have to take these holidays into account: you have to do your shopping also for such a day and sometimes we forget that. Quite annoying, but a day off is never bad.

Later that week, Kelly, me, and our 2 other Dutch friends had decided that we would give a Dutch Party: This means that we get a lot of Dutch foods and let them taste to our non-Dutch friends. To prepare for this day, we went to the house of our friend after our classes to prepare for that night. We had decided that we would bake pancakes as a snack, so we first had to go to the supermarket to buy food and drinks. Then we started baking the pancakes, at 2 p.m. We had a nice schedule: we were with 3 persons and everyone had to bake 2 pancakes in a row. After that somebody else would take over and you could ‘relax’. Not really relax of course, but watch the great Dutch TV-show ‘Joling en Gordon over de vloer’. We had a lot of fun that afternoon; we finished baking at 5 p.m. Our parents had brought other Dutch foods like liquorish, pepernoten, cheese, so the Dutch evening could start!

In total there were 12 people, such a big group! Thank god everybody liked our pancakes, because we spent a whole afternoon baking them. Also the other treats were liked very much. Our Swedish and German friends told us that they have something that tastes similar to pepernoten. Funny to hear that the taste is not so typical Dutch after all! We also played the game ‘kingsen’, a game where every card of the deck has a meaning. Some assignments are really funny! One was that you could not say the word drink, really hard in this game. So everybody had to drink quite a lot; luckily we had no hard liquors. Afterwards, we decided to go out in Madrid and we had to take the train of 23.30, because our friend lives in Getafe, a town close to Madrid and the town where our university is situated. But we were so tired from getting up a 7 in the morning, so we decided to go home and have a good night sleep.

Friday is our usual day off. It may seem to you readers that I have more days of than days of college. On the one hand that is not totally untrue: Spain has a lot of holidays, so those days are university free. On the other hand, we also have to go to the university 4 days a week.

That day I started working on our project for Organizational Economics. This is a case where you have to analyse a problem by using the stuff learned in class. We were assigned to segment 3: Incentives. So I came up with the problem of the incentive system at Goldman Sachs, a bank suffering from the economic crisis. Our professor thought it was a good subject so our group started searching for information. Finally a project from which the subject is not that boring, hoorah!

Next time I will be talking about something nicer: a weekend trip to Seville!

Ciao ciao bacalao!