Milestone Birthdays

Age is just an abstract number, it has always felt like that to me. But some numbers carry more weight than others, for whatever reason we choose. I have to say that some early (supposedly) "big" milestones didn't particularly click with me in terms of the "woah!" factor. 18 was cool because of the watch my parents gave me (and which I still wear today) hidden in side a huge Simba stuffed animal - puppet. But since I still had a year left of high school there was no "growing up and moving away" feeling attached to it (although I was staying behind in Mexico to live with friends and finish high school while my family moved to Florida - because there was no French school there). 21 might have been a bigger deal had I been living in the US and the whole legal drinking age thing... But being in Spain meant I had been out partying and drinking legally for several years so no big deal! 😛

The first age that came associated with a fun number for me was 25. A quarter century!!! 😎 I was home from Belgium for a month or so, and celebrated my 25th birthday for a full week (minus one day)! I still remember being excited on the Monday to receive a package from the US with a birthday present from my cousin Candice. Then Tuesday night my university gang got together for a double birthday dinner before the other celebrant headed off with his family to Galicia to escape the summer heat. Nothing on the Wednesday. Thursday night I had a small celebration with my girlfriends from the university dorms. Friday night I threw a big party at home, taking advantage that my parents were away and so we wouldn't bother them. I don't remember if we did it up in the apartment itself or down in the gardens / bbq area (probably the latter), but I do remember I had to stop my friend Miguel from adding tequila to the sangría (which already had wine, rum and vodka as befits any Spanish "student" sangría 😛). Saturday - my actual birthday that year - we celebrated en famille at a nice restaurant (parents back and sister still at home). And finally Sunday some family friends came over to have cake and wish me a happy birthday! As you can tell I still have very fond memories of that birthday, even though they get fuzzier with each passing year...

The next big one was 30. Once again, completely unintentionally, it became an extended celebration - this time over a month!!! 🥳 I was still living in Belgium and just went home to Alicante for about a week / ten days. First celebration was shortly after I arrived, with my grandparents in the holiday seniors home they were staying in in the town of Bejís in Castellón. Then of course on the day itself at home with family & friends. And then a lovely dinner at home back in Liège with two of my closest friends when I got back. But for me the special thing I had actually planned was celebrating it a week later in Boston with Julia, my best friend from high school (she was doing her residency there), whose birthday was just 10 days after mine. I still remember us going to a nice restaurant near the Boston Aquarium (which we had just visited), and ordering cocktails to start and laughing when the waitress asked for our IDs and then looked all flummoxed when se saw our ages! 🤣🤣🤣 And then the big surprise!!! When I got back to Belgium my friends had organised a surprise party for me at home! 😍🥳 At it turned out to be just one month after the first celebration so - 30 days celebrating 30!!!

When it came time for 40 I decided this time I need to plan something: 40 days of 40! 😎 But not straightaway like 30, more spread out during my entire 40th year. Basically I turned 40 into an excuse to do a lot of fun (and sometimes expensive) things that year! 🤣 It started right on my birthday in Alicante (finally living back home), with a barbecue down in the gardens (with my dad in charge of the food production) that went late into the night with music, drinks and an evening swim in the pool. 🥳 My "baby" sister surprised me the night before (flew in from England), one of my Belgian friends (and her partner) was in town to celebrate with me, all my close Alicante friends where there... good times!!! And then I took off for a "birthday" road trip around Spain. A week with Valérie & Pietro driving from Alicante to Albarracín to Alcalá de Henares (and spots in between), then dropping them off in Madrid airport and heading into town to pick up Cris "brown" (I'm Cris "red") at the train station and heading off for another week of exploring old Castilla, including La Granja de San Ildefonso, Segovia, Pedraza, Sepúlveda, Rueda and Salamanca. Enjoying the amazing food (cochinillo y cordero lechal al horno!!! 😋) & wine and old ruins in cities and towns and kayaking in the Hoces del Duratón with vultures flying overhead. Was all in all a fabulous 2-week road trip and a great start to the 40 days of 40! But then I kind of got sidetracked and never really fully planned out the remaining celebratory days, just - like I said - using the milestone as an excuse to have some fun that year. Starting with the idea of celebrating my 40th while celebrating Star Trek's 50th!!! My first-ever (and to date only, oops) big convention, Destination Star Trek in Birmingham. It was also special because I finally got to meet in-person my online friend Juliette (of the blog Pop Classics - we "met" in the comments of Billie Doux reviews, then transitioned to commenting on each others' blogs and then connected on Facebook). A fellow Trekkie who lived in Birmingham? We had a wonderful time, including participating in getting the Guiness World Record for the most people dressed in Star Trek garb in one place. 🥳 I’m not really sure I did anything else before the final celebratory outing: a weekend in Amsterdam with a couple of girlfriends for the Joshua Tree 30th anniversary! It felt like the perfect event to finish my 40th year, since the concert was the night before I turned 41. 😎

And now it's time for the next big milestone: HALF A CENTURY! 50 is just a number. But a half century is cool! 😎 And this time I've actually been doing some planning ahead of my birthday instead of leaving things to chance or haphazardly planning it during / after the fact. What's the plan? Well you'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out! My trip down memory lane and birthday musings have gone on far longer than I expected, so it would get kind of lost in here. 

I'll just drop a hint. Tomorrow's post is called "Challenging 50". 😉

Quarantine Movie Marathon results

Many people around me have been talking about fun "quarantine projects" involving books, Netflix series marathons, movies (I've been organizing online Saturday "movie nights" with friends)... And then it came to me! A quarantine-long movie marathon in which the criteria were:

• Has to be a movie I own (some of them haven't been taken off the shelves in a loooong time)
• Whichever movie I watch has to be related somehow to the previous one (with the exception of Saturday Movie Night, since that's a consensus pick among the gang)

I've definitely got enough DVDs to get me through a very long quarantine, the challenge will be linking them together! So far I've seen (extended or director's editions whenever possible):

1. The Hobbit trilogy (dir. Peter Jackson, based on book by Tolkien)
1. An Unexpected Journey
2. The Desolation of Smaug
3. The Battle of the Five Armies
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (dir. Peter Jackson, based on books by Tolkien) 
1. The Fellowship of the Ring
2. The Two Towers
3. The Return of the King
3. A Knight's Tale (dir. Brian Helgeland, starring Heath Ledger)
4. The Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Riddley Scott, starring Orlando Bloom)
5. Pirates of the Caribbean 
1. The Curse of the Black Pearl (dir. Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush)
2. Dead Man's Chest (dir. Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley)
3. At World's End (dir. Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush)
4. On Stranger Tides (dir. Rob Marhsall, starring Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Penelope Cruz)
5. Dead Men Tell no Tales (dir. Joachim Ronning & Espen Sandberg, starring Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Javier Bardem)
6. The Pirate (dir. Vincente Minelli, starring Judy Garland & Gene Kelly)
7. The Goonies (dir. Richard Donner, story by Steven Spielberg, script by Chris Columbus)

No need to explain the relationship between the first two trilogies, pretty self-explanatory. But can you figure out the connections between the ones that follow? I'll admit I had to stretch a bit to link A Knight's Tale to Return of the King since I watched it (and Kingdom of Heaven) before I decided this was how I was going to plan my quarantine movie-watching. But there is a link.

I'm having a hard time deciding what to watch next... Super Eight or ET? Both are linked to the Goonies in the "kids on an adventure in the '80s" and the Spielberg connection, it's more a matter of where I go next... Maybe both then Indiana Jones (Spielberg), Swing Kids (Nazis!). But from there do I segue into Dead Poet Society (actor link) or Empire of the Sun (still WW2)? The former puts me on a Robin Williams track, the latter leads to the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy and '90s Little Women (both with Christian Bale). Of course after the Goonies I could directly segue into Harry Potter since the first two films were written and directed by Chris Columbus who wrote the Goonies' script... I could also go for the last Avengers films since Josh Brolin is in those and is a Goonies! Tough choices!!! No wonder I haven't watched one since the Goonies on Sunday! 😅

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - 100 days

100 days of lockdown. 100 days of gradually evolving from being locked in our homes to slowly being allowed out for exercise, to slowly reopening of closed businesses and restaurants to all these opening further with a greater presence of shoppers or eaters...

The state of alarm ends in Spain tomorrow at midnight. The "new normal" starts on Sunday. We're starting to get instructions to go back to work on a more or less regular schedule (less working from home). Offers for summer camps for kids are published. Airports are opening and foreign and national tourists are expected to start arriving on July 1st.

But we keep hearing about new outbreaks. In China. In Germany. In several points here in Spain. It seems like some people are all "viva la vida" and blanking on the coronavirus and what we've lived through, desperate to get back to "life as usual", while the others seem to be living in a state of anxious paranoia worried that we're opening up too soon, the virus is still here we're told. What if there are outbreaks that can't be traced? In the news yesterday they said about two thirds of Spaniards aren't planning on going anywhere on vacation, and this in a country where it's almost an obligatory tradition to head out for a month to a beach or village or mountain holiday... And those of us who live in holiday destinations are actually worried about people coming here from other parts of the country (Madrid we're looking at you!) and other countries (UK...) and increasing the risk of our being exposed to the virus in our own city... 

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D81 - Fase 2!!!

Two weeks later, on schedule, the province of Alicante has graduate to Phase 2 of the lockdown de-escalation! 🥳 As of today we can meet up in groups of 15 (instead of 10), go to the beach (for other activities than just walking), go for walks / exercise at any time of the day except the hours reserved for the at-risk people (10h-12h & 19h-20h), go to the pool (as long as the maximum number of people is below 30% of regular occupancy). Shops / businesses larger than 400 m2 can now fully open (including the malls, just not their recreational spaces), churches can host weddings, movie theaters can open (although they're all holding out a bit longer, I think they want to wait until the whole country is in Phase 3 so the cinemas can open under the same conditions, and hopefully there are some new movies to entice people to go).

Cities with beaches have been working out how they're going to ensure social distancing and reduce contact... Some (like Benidorm up the coast) have decided to wait a few more weeks before opening so they can better prepare. Alicante's sandy beaches are open as of today.

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D78 - Good times!

Definitely a much more cheerful weekend than last week! YAY for "Fase 1" and restaurants / bars / cafés having opened up their terraces and being able to get together with friends (up to 10) for a drink / snack / meal! 🥳

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D76 - Flags at half mast

The government announced a 10-day period of mourning for the lives lost to Covid-19. It started with a minute of silence at noon and flags in all official buildings and monuments lowered to half mast.

I only heard about it on the news at lunch... but already a couple of weeks ago when I went into town there was a giant black ribbon at City Hall. And a minute of silence while at the supermarket on Saturday.

As we see the light at the end of the Covid-tunnel (this stretch of it at least), as we start breathing a sigh of relief as business reopen, we get to see our friends and families again, it feels right to take a moment to think of those who have succumbed to this virus. So often alone. To their families who couldn't say proper farewells. 

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D75 - Dipping my toes

AT LAST! Finally dipped my toes in the Mediterranean... summer is inching closer and the sea has been looking more and more enticing each time I go out for my evening walk. 

I just hope by the time the days heat up and we're begging to get in the water, that we'll be allowed to get in the water. Supposedly Phase 2 is when full beach access will be allowed around here (and not just for walking or water sports athletes), and if all goes well in Alicante that would start next Monday. They just have to figure out the social distancing recommendations, and how to monitor their implementation.

I'll have to admit though... Once the crowds start, I'm going to miss walking along almost empty beaches.

Playa de San Juan

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D73 - Heartbreak & Nostalgia

The past few days have been really hard. Not because of the lockdown (although that hasn't helped), but because Friday would have been my Dad's birthday (were it not for that bloody Glioblastoma multiforme). A date that wouldn't have passed unremarked, even if Facebook hadn't provided me with photo memories of the past 10 years worth of crazy birthday celebrations...

The whole week leading up to this has been hard, I don't think I went to bed a single night with dry eyes (which continued some mornings as well). Overflowed to the weekend... and we'll see how the next few days go considering the 28th would be my parents' 48th wedding anniversary.

I know it would have helped my mom if we could have gone to the cemetery to take flowers... but he's buried in her hometown 45' north of us, and because of the lockdown it's only open a couple of hours in the mornings, when I have to work. And they've limited the number of people who can be in there at a time, meaning we could drive up all the way up there on a weekend day and not be allowed in. So we have to wait for the next phase of the "desconfinamiento" and hope they increase the access...

One thing that did soothe my soul this evening at least, I decided to take some flowers to my dad's beach on the Cape (2 blocks from their apartment), and spent a long while sitting on the rocks, looking out at sea, listening to Yo Yo Ma give a live concert of Bach's cello concerto's on YouTube...

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D69 - Thankful for Nature

Went for a lovely walk along the Cape this evening... was hoping there would be fewer people out than usual what with the possibility to meet up with friends at cafés or homes (there weren't).

Calm waters. Lovely sunset. Has been wonderful being able to come out for a walk in the evenings since the desconfinamiento started and they've been slowly letting up on the lockdown restrictions.

My happy place!

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D68 - FRIENDS!!!

The absolutely most wonderful thing about progressing to Fase 1 of the de-escalation? Getting to finally meet up with FRIENDS!!! Also family 😉 Basically someone you don't live with! Maximum groups of 10 people (ideally maintaining social distance recommendations). Either in someone's house, or in a restaurant/café terrace (allowed to open now at 50% capacity, indoors waits until next phase).

I didn't head out anywhere yesterday, decided to let the people who were a bit more desperate go out and get it out of their system (we've seen a pattern here, first day in the rule change people tend to go nuts and just ignore the rules!). But tonight was a lovely little dinner party with friends overlooking the Med! 🥳 So nice to be able to just hang out for a few hours... 

Although the whole "keeping our distance" thing lasted all of 2 minutes...

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D66 - Fase 1, hola!

Day 1 of Fase 1 in Alicante. So far no change! But because I decided not to go out and try it... I figure being the first day there would be too many people out and about (has been the pattern so far), and people are still confused about the dos and don'ts. Alicante City Hall has circulated helpful infographics on social media channels (ditto various sports clubs, cultural websites etc.) , and yet the comments in them show people with still lots of very basic questions. And it's not really that complicated!!! *sigh* The main things that have changed (that people care about) is (1) you can go to a small business without having to have made an appointment previously, (2) restaurants/bars/cafés can open up their terraces for sit-down service (take away is also an option), (3) churches can open to 30% occupancy level, (4) gatherings in private homes of up to 10 people are allowed. All that with social distancing recommendations. Oh, and a few more people get to go back to work...

One of my colleagues sent a message to our office WhatsApp group this afternoon. She lives downtown and goes out for a walk with her daughters every day. She said it had a pre-quarantine feel to it. Terraces full of people, with tables too close to each other. A lot more people milling on the streets, man of them taking advantage of the fact that the police can't check up on everyone so they could be out for a walk with friends and just say "oh I was going to the café"...  Hopefully lessons will be learnt, people will follow the guidelines, and we don't get an increase in infections because of rule-breakers.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to hanging out on a friend's balcony tomorrow evening, enjoying a nice glass of wine with some good company while overlooking the sea!

#stayhome, #quedateencasa, #restecheztoi

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D65 - Farewell sunset, Fase 0 adiós!

We did it! Whatever it is we were supposed to do... but the entirety of the province of Alicante will be in "Fase 1" of the lockdown de-escalation tomorrow.  🥳 

To celebrate, I decided to head out for a walk to the Cape and enjoy the sunset...

So privileged to live near such a beautiful spot! 🥰

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D62 - By the sea

Depending on wether you support the government or are in the opposition, the take on this whole 4-step "desconfinamiento" (de-escalation of the lockdown) process has been something between "they're making it up as they go" to "they set out their instructions, then listen to the criticism, and amend it where they think the criticism made sense".

Some of that shifting among the restrictions has been lifted by the national government, but others by regional or local governments. And the changes that have caught the most attention in Alicante are those related to use of the coastline. Namely the beaches. Which makes sense considering we're a beach city and all!

Playa de la Albufereta (our small beach)

Corona-Lockdown Spanish Edition - D60 - Adiós Hogueras

Well that's it... no Hogueras this year! 😢

After postponing the June holiday to September, today the mayor announced that the 2020 edition was canceled. So no giant sculptures will be burnt to a crisp with firecrackers until June 2021. *sob*

I've been expecting this announcement ever since the city of Munich announced the cancelation of Oktoberfest a few weeks ago. I figured if an event that big (with the economic impact it entails), and that was set for a month after the Hogueras new dates, was canceled, then our holiday was heading for the chopping block.

Coronavirus Lockdown Spanish Edition - D57 - Downtown!

My first visit downtown in 2 months... wow! So weird to see empty streets, solitary bus stops, that would otherwise be bustling with Saturday morning shoppers... Well, not completely empty. When I went into town it coincided with the "over-70" exercise time, so there were a few elderly couples out for a stroll. You could tell they weren't used to dealing with traffic anymore, plenty sauntering along in the middle of the street! 😝