Our first guests!!

We've got our first guests for lunch in Barcelona today. Finally some sort of social life as I used to know it.

"The husband" invited a couple of friends of his for lunch. It was a big deal for him because they were an enormous source of support while he was all by himself those few months. So he wanted to say thank you and sort of return the favour (although it seems that "the husband" used to invite himself to their house almost every weekend he had, so if we really had to return the favour I'll be cooking for them every Sunday for the rest of the year!).

They're Deby and Max. "The husband" knows Deby since they were in college (she's an architect) so they're old friends. Max, her husband (also an Argentinean) is a total dear, a teddy-bear of a guy and we soon got on like the proverbial house on fire and we had a lively lunch and were talking all afternoon. Even P. (my son) was quickly won over by Max and after lunch and to his utter delight (my dad was all too happy to join too) all the guys played "truco" (a South American card game) while I took the opportunity to grill Deby with questions about "where to"and "how to" in Barcelona, and she seems to know loads as they've been living here for 4 years.

(They're part of that wave of Argentinean migration that happened at the end of 2002, when Argentina's government collapsed spectacularly, the money all but disappeared and the country soon went into default. Young professionals were left facing the option of almost starvation or flee the country in search for jobs and opportunities denied in their own. I'm in total awe of people like them as I don't know what would I've done if I'd had been there then.
To their credit, Deby and Max made it here and they've a comfortable life and they even manage to bring most of their family to leave near them.
I can't help but feel that is such a miss oportunit for Argentina to lose people like them. It's very sad for my country that the most ambitious and capable people had to leave.)

Of course, things runt far from smoothly. I planed to cook rabbit casserole, fresh salad and ice cream and fresh fruit for dessert. However, when I went to the shops for my ingredients everything was closed and then I realized that everything closes on Sunday in Spain, there's actually a law stating that shops must be closed most Sundays. (For all I know there may even have a law about keeping siesta time... It most certainly seems so, at least in Sabadell which is a smaller town than Barcelona).

Panic followed and I had to improvise lunch for 6 in the new kitchen without my pots and pans or anything. To my credit and the never ending admiration of my family (I wish!), I managed to make a really good pasta-alla-improvisette (pasta with tomato sauce and chicken legs on it) but I swear it was tasty enough and they cleaned their plates and asked for more. For dessert I served some turron that my dad bought to take to my sister in Argentina (I replace it soon!) and coffee and after a while we all went to have icecream to a nearby shop. Apparently the law here does make an exception for ice creams parlours and cafes which is very civilized indeed.

Anyway, we were lucky that our guests brought their own wine. (they've got one called "vino de aguja" that translated something as "needle wine", a fresh and sparkling wine like cava or champagne. Really good, I'll try to remember this for future needs).

At the end of the day, "the (happy) husband" took our son to the beach to build a sand castle. They were back at 8:30pm, all happy and saying that there wew people at the beach even that late. P. said that the castle was quite good and that maybe passerbys will think it was built by professionals.

They're already loving it here.