Fun Stuff in Spain Part III

 I know, I know, that was already a trip ago, but I worked and grocery shopped because there was zero food left in the house and took my parents for their flu shots and it was what everyone kept calling "a lovely summer day" but IT'S NOVEMBER, and I wore jeans, which I sorely regretted, and I need an easy post.

The reason I went to Spain was because it was our thirtieth anniversary during the trip, so a couple of months before, Matt said "I'm supposed to be at ECOC in Spain for our thirtieth wedding anniversary. So either I'm not going or you're coming to Spain." And I've always wanted to go to Spain, so I said I would go. 

Our actual anniversary was on Monday the 21st. It's a huge joke in our marriage that we never remember our anniversary - or rather, we know what it is but we always lose track of when it's actually September 21st. This is made both more and less understandable by the fact that for *counts on fingers* a lot of years we had kids that had just started school in September, and my parents' birthdays are the 20th and 23rd (I know, shut up). Once we were at a brunch on Matt's school reunion weekend and I was telling people how we always forget our anniversary and one woman said "what is it?" and I said "September 21st" and then said ".....it's totally September 21st, isn't it?" and she said "I wasn't going to say anything!" I dunno man, we are intelligent people who mostly manage to stumble through life intact, I don't know how.

The marketing manager for Matt's company is a very nice woman named Cheryl who was extremely concerned that Matt was going to screw up the anniversary thing. She arranged for flowers and champagne and heart-shaped pastries to be in the hotel room when I arrived. She had someone book us dinner for Monday night at a really nice restaurant on the Mediterranean. I am not overly concerned with this kind of thing at all, but it was very thoughtful. 

So we spent our anniversary one of my favourite ways - eating tiny colourful food by a big body of water. It was a tasting menu, and it was all very good - only one raw seafood dish, which isn't really my thing but Matt likes it. Unlike in some European countries, a lot of people in Spain don't speak English, which is fine with me - I found it really amusing when one girl in a shop kept yelling to another girl things like "how do you say 'grapefruit' in English?" in Spanish while trying to make my juice. The waiter really wanted to describe every dish in detail, and we got about sixty percent of it. 

It was especially funny when he got to the second last course and said "this one is easy. Mango sorbet. Is mango.... sorbet." 

The very last course was tiramisu, and I was full and the mango sorbet had been a perfect ending, so I told Matt I didn't really want the tiramisu. I had a feeling this might not go over well, since I had been watching other tables, and the chef making the tiramisu table-side was a bit like Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually wrapping Alan Rickman's sleazy gift for his mistress in a box and then a bag, with confetti, then an elaborately-curled ribbon, etc. etc. 

Matt asked if he could just have one tiramisu and the chef said dramatically "is one tiramisu.... two plates!" So I had some tiramisu.