Kat, my new flat-mate since March, is from England and is an English teacher here in Barcelona. She rides around on a wicked new bicycle, is a superb cook and a lovely person to share a glass of wine with.

Emer is Irish, I am Indian, and yet when the blender in the house turns yellow at the mouth, we know its the Irishwoman who has been indulging in too much turmeric again. It used to drive my old flatmate wild to see the white gleaming blender she had scrubbed for a half hour turn yellow in a minute of culinary use. Now we have a good laugh about the irony of transferred tastes.

Kat saw the yellow blender and heard us laughing about it and then gave us this little anecdote from her times sharing a house with two other english teachers here in barcelona. One got so very tired of correcting the malapropisms and mis-usage of words while teaching those hapless spanish students, that correcting some of those common mistakes became a reflex reaction. So, when Kat once said aloud that she had dyed the blender, there was an immediate, automatic, tired reaction 'You Killed the blender Kat, not died it' :)

Last weekend, Kat and I took a ride on our bicycles to the beach, which is not ten minutes from home and provides a long, smooth cycling track to ride along blithely enjoying the sun and the sea. It was all blue, bright clear blue, with a hint of a cool breeze, making it the perfect day for a ride. And then to round it off, we had an excellent cup of vegan icecream sitting on the old stone steps along the edge of a open space in the Capella de Santa Àgata, listening to a man in a black coat and high collar improvise on some Spanish tunes on a synthesizer. We were surrounded in the falling dusk by stained glass windows and high turrets, and it was a magical place to be.

T'was my birthday yesterday and the two aforementioned dears between them made it a lovely day. I was treated to some bright flowers, a bag of impossibly heavenly sunflower-seeds-coated-with-chocolate that melt like a dream in one's mouth, a hot-cake-in-cold-chocolate/orange-sauce to finish things up at night and the cherished feeling of friendly companionship in a new world.