80% and rising

It doesn’t half take it out of you, being ill. I’m way past the worst of it but still have a slightly green tinge to my complexion and all the abdominal muscles I used recreating scenes from The Exorcist on Saturday night are aching like buggery right now. Still that’s one more strain of gastroenteritis to which I’m now immune, and one more torta ahogada vendor to strike off my list of suppliers… I made it to work this morning and got a fair bit done but when the internet disappeared I came home to carry on working.
Anyway I’ll try to stay clear of the subject just in case you’re eating, or thinking of eating.

Friday night we went out to Polibio again with an increasingly drunken band of folks. Had the same dish as last time and t’was delicious. Saturday was spend on web designery and paying bills in TelMex and Oxxo. TelMex have a handy machine that puts your balance on the screen and then you feed it bank notes/bills until you’ve covered your debt and then it spits out a receipt. If you’d like to collect Mexican swearwords, hang out in that area for half an hour with a notebook and you’ll hear more variations on chingar than in your average cantina, as everyone from business types to little old ladies try to get the machine to accept their money… Jose came round early evening for a photo trip to El Retiro and other barrios. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to be here without seeing this really old part of town. Definitely worth a visit. The light wasn’t perfect for the photos but there’s a few nice shots I’ll publish to flickr presently. Then we had a swift pint in La Fuente, then the aforementioned torta ahogada and tostada de lomo in La Alemana. We headed back and Sita had made cookies. I’d complained to Jose that there are no bars in Santa Teresita (the barrio next to where we live) nor El Retiro so he set out to prove us wrong by taking us to a bar called El Oso not far from our house. There was a football play-off going on there and one of the clients at the bar’s son/nephew/summink was the goal keeper and the atmosphere was grand. Unfortunately at this point I started to feel ill, and after demanding to go home things got worse. We watched the Eurovision Song Contest on telly on the Spanish Channel, TVE, I already knew who was going to win because of Flash’s blog, but Sita didn’t so there was some tension. It’s not the same without Wogan prattling on, but the fact a Finnish glam/death/metal group walked away with the prize was fantastic. Ireland’s entry “Every song is a cry for love” coincided with my first bout of gastric unpleasantness though. Coincidence?