"The dog days are over"

My week was off to a good, but busy, start at work. Monday started off with a video conference with the Zurich office in Paris to launch the ‘Customer Week’. The week is very client centered, with lots of meetings and visits to boost relationships and negotiations. This meant lots more marketing based work for me, which I absolutely loved, especially anything to do with preparing for and attending the corporate events. I then rushed home as it was actually a pretty special day, being mine and Steve´s 2 year anniversary. However, because of the awkward no laptop situation wasn’t actually able to talk to Steve until Raul came home a few hours later and kindly let me his laptop for an hour or so. It obviously wasn’t ideal that we couldn’t talk for very long (no gold star for the laptop breaker!), but it was lovely to watch his open his card and present and still felt like a special day J

I arrived into work on Tuesday and was greeted by a rose on my desk, as the 23^rd April is el día de Sant Jordi, the patron saint of Cataluña. It is kind of their take on Valentine´s day, as the men traditionally give the women a rose, but slightly different as the women also give the men a book on this day. Very little is actually known about the Sant Jordi (Saint George in English), but the most popular myth tells of him slaying a dragon to free a princess (what is it with all these George’s and their dragons?!). It seems that roses have been given to the women as far as anyone can remember, but the addition of the books is much more recent. They say that a smart bookseller began to promote the holiday in 1923 as a way to honour the simultaneous deaths of the two greatest men of literature: Spain’s Miguel de Cervantes and Britain’s William Shakespeare, who both died on April 23, 1616. Barcelona, being the publishing capital of the Spanish-speaking world, quickly adopted this double punch of love and literacy, and we now have the tradition of rose and book exchanges.

My rose

At work I was getting down to the nitty gritty of the event preparation and making lots of name badges, which took my right back to Paris last summer where I had to prepare over 200 badges for 2 big nights of ‘Cocktails courtiers’ (Broker cocktails)! After work I headed over to La Rambla, Barcelona’s main and busiest street to really soak in the atmosphere of Sant Jordi. There were absolutely tons of rose and book stalls, book signings, and couples wandering hand in hand around the city. Also, almost all of the roses were sold in wrapping with the colours of the Catalonian flag, rather than Spanish (of course!!). It was the busiest I’ve ever seen it (which is saying something!), so after having a little look at the main stalls I headed back. Later that evening I headed out to meet my ‘Tuesday’ tandem, Thais, as well.

List of all the book signing throughout the day

Busy busy!

It was an early start on Wednesday, as I was helping out with a marketing event in a Zurich office on the other side of the city. It was an event about International Motor Fleets, and we actually had lot more people turn up than had confirmed, so needed to put in an emergency catering order, which luckily arrived before the event ended.

Thursday was back to work as normal. I had now settled into the routine of going for breakfast with the older group, and lunch with the younger Customer Services group. After almost 2 months of near complete immersion, I had definitely started to feel my understanding improve, although my speaking is still a little on the stuttery side. I find it especially hard to communicate with the younger people, as they talk a lot faster, they all talk at once and the topic of conversations change almost every time you take a breath! In short, it´s just a lot quicker than with the older breakfast crew, but I will stick with it and wait for the penny dropping moment… which I hope comes soon… I ended up working late and so went straight to meet my ‘Thursday’ tandem, to get in a bit more speaking practice, which I’m still feeling I really need.

On Friday it was back to the other Zurich office to help out with another event in the morning. When I started the Year Abroad, back in June 2012, I thought that I maybe wanted to go into law, if I could find a way to combine that with languages. However, after my 3 months in marketing in Paris, I was absolutely convinced that this is what I want to do. I found the Marketing and Communication lectures in Austria incredibly interesting. I know that my tasks here are more for an intern, but to be honest I just enjoy the day to day in the department, although the events are by far my favourite!

In the evening Cecilia and I had dinner together and opened a bottle of bubbly before going out. She was a little worried as she knew an ex would be out and about this evening so before we knew it we were onto the second bottle of bubbly and hadn’t even done our make up! Luckily we still managed to make ourselves look presentable and headed out to meet everyone and celebrate Burcu’s (the flatmate from Cyprus) last night in Barcelona. We bar hopped around the gothic, and (you already know it), found ourselves in the shots bar along the way. The groups eventually got split and I ended up going to the club with Cecilia, her boyfriend and her cousin. The club was called Sidecar, and was playing quite rocky music which wasn’t exactly up my street. I had an incredible 3 minutes, though, when Florence and the Machine came on, and Cecilia and I absolutely went for it!

'Run fast for your mother and fast for your father'

The next morning I made myself a proper English breakfast, which went down an absolute treat.

Food envy?

Cecilia and I more or else moved as a wolf pack that weekend, as she was preparing for a job interview coming up, and I had set aside the weekend to finish my Year Abroad Written Task from Austria (yes, very naughty, I know). We watched a Mexican film together on Saturday, about 2 footballers who wanted to become actors, and had a great moment where we found some delicious ice cream in the freezer that neither of us knew was there. 

After a whole weekend of not leaving the apartment I was feeling pretty cabin fevery, and actually quite looking forward to the Monday morning feeling as at least it meant that I could stop writing about Mozart and get out of the house!