mucho bueno

oct 30 was a decent day. i woke up sneezing like mad and i figured that i would be 'blessed' with a cold the day i leave for madrid...but i decided no way jose, i'm gunna have a rocking weekend. so i armed myself with antihistamines.

but before i could get to victoria station i had a stop to make...in fact, a lunch date at langan's brassierie in mayfair. who was my date? well lucky me got some family loving! my cousin tony was in town for business and i was able to meet up with him for lunch before he returned to calgary and i took off for madrid. it was so great! we got caught up on his family and mine, and perhaps hatched a plan to get everyone together when i'm home for christmas. i can't believe how close christmas is...so excited!

so, after a great lunch i made my way to gatwick to meet up with hannah and caroline, where we caught the gatwick express and planned to meet up with dee at the gate. when we finally got together, we felt a touch peckish so hannah and caroline left for the golden arches, and while waiting, i see dee stop mid sentence...and say 'ohmygod...it's jonny wilkinson' and i turn around and saw a big bulky tanned and quasi cute bloke...well tanned, saw an 02 bag and thought...who? so sad it was lost on me as caroline would have loved to see him. big guy...wow. for those of you not clicking on the link, he's one of the most famous rugby players in the UK...the david beckham you could say.


anyhoo, we finally get to madrid and i'm not sure what it is with me, but we get into a cab with a psycho driver. mind you, this one didn't attempt to kill us, but he did dance like a demon while driving, smoked a cigarette and then spritzed himself with lemon spritzer. i just about died. it seemed like a long way to get to madrid, and stupid me thought we could trust this guy (he took us around the city and earned an extra 25 euros from us - f*cker). clearly, we didn't discover the blunder until the way home, but i digress.


we ended up at our hotel, the reina victoria, sitting in the middle of the plaza de santa ana...a very popular square for visiting diners. like most european cities there are a few buskers, massage therapists and 'designer bags' for sale...where all the 'sellers' ran like mad when the policemen came by. but we ended up at a tapas place called turf, right off the square and it was a great introduction to spanish tapas cuisine. we loaded up on some great rioja wine (10 euros per bottle, sweet) and dug into some great tapas...pate with seranno ham, cream cheese with salmon, pork with carmelized onion and spanish tortilla. we had some great laughs at dinner and i tried to teach the girls to shimmie shimmie - aka, shake what your mamma gave ya. dee's shimmie was classic...i almost cried it was so amazing.


during dinner i told the girls about my trip findings (each trip has a mascot, a song and a phrase) as well as using fake names for the club later that night. we decided with my stampede staples...daisy, trixie, lola and isabel (that was dee's choice). we also decided that every guy would be named troy....why? don't bother asking. but we had our mascot!

so...boozed up we went to the penthouse at our hotel - one of madrid's hot spots. here's the thing about this place...there is a spend minimum, but lucky for us, as residents of the hotel, we can use a back entrance using our room keys and its a freebie. yay us. it turned out to be a good thing because we ordered 2 martinis and 2 mojitos (oh my god so good) and it came to 48 euros. WTF!


there were some beautiful people on that terrace (aside from us of course) and the gals saw one guy in particular they thought was hot and incidentally, he was English. so i grabbed a cigarette, walked up to him and asked for a light which segued into a convo with us girls. his name was will, used to play for the wasps. quite frankly, he played for the wasps as much as my name was daisy. whatever. but his rich spaniard friend proved to be useful as he gave us some great places to visit when in madrid.

we decided to dance a bit - how can we pass up the opportunity to practice our shimmies, and in dee's case, the one leg hop. i seriously don't know how i don't die laughing with these girls.

we also met a guy who tried to pass himself off as the real madrid keeper...ya, he was in his late 40s and sounded austrian (he ended up being danish) and i called him out...i said i may sound american but i love football. turns out he was in town on a conference (clearly could be yet another ploy) but had a great time chatting with him. but, by 2:30-ish we were exhausted, inebraited (wine and beer are significantly cheaper by the way) and head for our rooms.


and can i say, our rooms were lovely? plush beds, amazing pillows, duvets and a mirror that called us pretty things (not too far from the truth indeed). we also had some incredible lighting...one setting called you sexy thing fills the room in ambiant pink light...which the girls thought made their skin look fantastic. ha ha. so that's the secret!


so we had our mascot with troy, and in screaming out shimmie shimmie, we had our saying. we just had to find out song...luckily we had 2 more days to find it