jay | First weekend...

I've made it to the end of my first week here in Spain on the MARTE project... before I head to a conference in Munich , I thought I'd use my Saturday morning downtime to finally post some photos and narrative.

Thursday night before I left,

patgreene cooked my favorite food (fried prawns or shrimp) and sent me off with a large family dinner:

Despite the issues around

hopeforyou's illness on the plane, one silver lining was that I was awake to see the sun rise over the mid-Atlantic.

On the first day (Saturday, a week ago) I unpacked, then set out with

hopeforyou to Acala de Henares for dinner and wandering around during the Cervantes festival. The next day, we all went into Madrid for a huge open-air market... selling trinkets to antique books to used car parts to new clothing to knives (I bought a leatherman). And all I could think of was how much

dawnd would have enjoyed it, a year ago. :) And trying to get the cell phones to work correctly, so we could find each other in the crowds. Afterward, we sat down for lunch at a nearby cafe:

And then wandered around central Madrid:

taking in images such as this meta-photo of

hopeforyou with the green bag ladies...

Ending up visiting tapas bars, like Casa di Abuelo here. KB (on the left) had never had shrimp before, ever. Jen handed him one and so we joked that she had taken his shrimp-virginity... (chuckle).