05.04.19 — Journal

Businesswoman in Barcelona

It’s been a while since I last dropped by my blog, and that’s due to a combination of things: since Em left I seem to have had a stubborn cold which is refusing to clear up, and I’ve been busy on a project at work which hasn’t left me much time to do all that much – but work and life in Madrid is fun enough in itself, so here we go with the latest…

Outside of the office I’ve managed to sneak in a few little outings, including a couple of evenings with Bogar. The first night I went to check out how he was progressing with the decoration of his new flat, and enjoyed a decent portion of a delicious Spanish omelette he’d made whilst I was there. We then met at my flat another evening, with me only being able to offer some cheese and olives – when I’m all bunged up I don’t feel like cooking all that much!

An old hairdressers facade.

Wandering around my neighbourhood throws up some lovely spots.

Once I did gather some energy together to partake in a spot of cooking, I decided that there was nothing I fancied more than an Asturias dish known as chorizo a la sidra. This dish just consists of chorizo, which is then boiled in the region’s natural cider, with just a couple of laurel leaves thrown in for good measure.

A bottle of cider with a chorizo.

In the end it turned out rather nicely, although not as nicely as the ones I’ve had whilst up in Oviedo – or indeed the one I tried up in the Basque Country over a year ago! I think that the trick next time will be splashing out a bit more on a proper fresh chorizo – I shall have to report back on how I get on the second time around!

Sometimes it’s worth peeping down some of the side streets of the city.

I have also had the excitement today of a new addition to my kitchen: my oven has finally been delivered! This sounds way more impressive than it actually is, for all it consists of is a small worktop oven which will just about allow me to cook the odd pizza, jacket potato, and, of course, the occasional cake.

Speaking of cake, the topic brings me nicely on to discuss what I can about my current project at work. “How on earth are these two things related?” I hear you ask, and all shall now be revealed…

The project involves a complete rebrand to a company based in Barcelona, and after some research into their office culture by checking out their social media pages, I noticed that they seemed big on parties and celebrating milestones. Whilst working on Photoshopping the logo onto various items to create the presentation for our proposal, I had the idea that we should apply the logo to a cake!

A search online didn’t throw up any templates which we could use to automatically generate a logo on a cake (shockingly), and so I rocked up to work the next day with a 1€ piping bag and a tupperware full of buttercream and then – to the amusement of everyone else in the office – set about piping out the two logos.

The true test of a logo’s effectiveness – will it cake?

After taking photos of the piped patterns, and a bit of Photoshop wizardry, we wound up with two decent-looking cake mockups to present to the client – which once again brings us rather nicely to the next part of the post – my trip to Barcelona to present to the client!

To say it was a visit would be quite the exaggeration as, after an hour delay on the train out from Madrid, we had zero time to see anything other than the inside of two taxis, the client’s office, and a quick five-minute dash around Uniqlo to pick up some t-shirts!

It was, however, a fun trip, and it was refreshing to work directly with clients and be entrusted with the task of pulling an important presentation together – I’m feeling more and more adult every day!

The only sad aspect of work recently has been waving goodbye to Manu, but we were sure to give him a proper send off, and all met in the city centre for a good few drinks and some roaring laughs well into the early hours! Another distressing element to the evening was that, during my walk home, I could not find a single open takeaway or even just a corner shop to grab some chocolate!

All this brings us up to today, and as you can tell, it’s been a rather busy week. This evening, then, I have just turned down the lights, christened my oven by heating up a pizza, popped on some music, and sat down to write this little blog post.

This weekend and next I’ve not got too much planned as my schedule begins to fill up wildly starting around Easter, but I shall attempt to squeeze another post in before I (hopefully) head off somewhere to spend the Easter holidays out of the city. Who knows where I’ll end up?!