Firsts

I am so slow with this blog, I do apologise dear readers but I wanted to write to you about how the weekend before last we had our first house guest and first party. Both were lovely, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
So it was Dafydd who came to stay with me and Maria for the weekend, a friend from Oxford who does Spanish like us but also Portuguese so is in Portugal, in Coimbra, this term. Follow his blog here.
I don't think Maria and I did too badly, acting as tour guides in a city we actually barely know ourselves. We went to our classic Lateral, also to Tommy Mel's (American diner feel), shopped in Barrio de Salamanca, had a copas (party) to introduce our friends, and wandered around Madrid.

This was a feria of old books that we stumbled upon by Recoletos on the Sunday. It had stalls with novels, comics and even 1920s postcards from different European countries, some of which had been written on and sent, which I was very tempted to buy just to read the stories they told. I ended up buying a second-hand Agatha Christie book in Spanish so as to practise my language without it feeling like work. Haven't got round to that one yet though hmmm....

We went to lunch in the Mercado de San Antón which is a architecturally a simple concrete block of a building. The ground floor is a market which the building looks into as an internal courtyard with your typical breads, hams and cheeses. The first floor is divided into tapas bars, funnily enough we came across one that was completely deserted in spite of the fact that the others were all a tope (packed), so it turns out that one only had vegan and vegetarian food. You shouldn't ever try to take meat away from a Spaniard, even the vegetable dishes are flavoured with jamón. Finally the top floor is a restaurant and terrace which seemed to have a good ambience. We ate at the restaurant and I had a delicious truffle pappardelle, which I would definitely recommend, although the place is a tad pricey.

We then had fro yo at this place around the corner in Chueca. I love these kinds of finds. Check out the eclectic decor.