Night life

Woo! Exciting day today. Not for these #catsofalmunecar; now that the park is closed to the public, they can sleep anywhere they like without fear of being disturbed. We, dirty stopouts, were coming home after dark.

Our first date was our new advanced Spanish class. We'd had to hurriedly do some really hard grammar exercises that we didn't really understand -- happily at least one of our classmates didn't understand them either. It was definitely challenging, but it was great to be in a class with other students, and Zoom mostly worked pretty well.

S then added to his intellectual load with an hour-long phone call to the French tax office about filling in our tax return online; it had been crashing repeatedly whenever he got to a certain point. Progress ... it isn't crashing any more, but there are still some puzzling elements that need to be resolved. While he was doing that I made lunch, firm favourite espinacas con garbanzos, which we eventually sat down to at about 4 pm.

I then waited for a parcel. And waited, and waited. It hadn't arrived by 7:15 so we gave up on it and walked into town for a drink. We decided to go to the very nice new bar next to the town hall, which had the misfortune to open one week before lockdown; we felt they needed our support. I popped down to the newly opened jewellers (sadly only open in order to have a closing down sale) where I finally got a new battery for my watch, a snip at 3.50 euros.

When I got to the bar, it turned out that S had arrived at exactly the same time as Welsh couple J and S, whom he'd met via one of the local walking groups and whom we'd also briefly seen on a couple of our lockdown walks. So we sat down at adjoining tables and had a really good chat. It felt almost normal! Although a bit daring to be eating tapas. 

As the evening wore on the square got quite busy, and physical distancing was lapsing in some areas; we virtuously headed home after a couple of drinks, but we'd still spent about an hour and a half on that quintessentially Spanish activity of drinking, eating, and chatting. It was really nice, and when we got home (after dark) the evening was so balmy that we opened a bottle of wine and sat on the terrace for another glass and some more tapas. This is the first time it's been warm enough to do this. I also found that neighbour H had taken delivery of the parcel, which was on our patio table; unfortunately it wasn't the exciting parcel I'd been expecting, but hopefully that will show up soon.

Final footnote: while we were walking home we spotted a cat chasing something, and on close inspection found that it was a detached gecko tail.I knew they shed their tails when caught, but didn't realise the tail went on independently twitching for so long to distract the predator; it was performing lively arabesques for well over a minute, by which time the gecko itself was buried deep in the hedge and the cat had gone away.