My birthday

I spend my birthday in Nice, France. Sound very posh, isn't it?
On our way back from Italy and at my dad's suggestion, we stayed a couple of days with our cousin Michelle who lives there with her son Pierre Alain.
This is my dad's side of the family. My grandfather left France to emigrate to Argentina at the beginning of the XIX century and he left his sister there, to which he was very closed. She married and had children, her children had children and so on, but the family keep in touch as my grandad took my dad and his brother to France several times. As far as I know my grandad even helped them economically during the war when everybody had a bad time there but life was easier in Argentina.
Whatever this is actual true or family lore, the fact remains that we're still in touch after a whole century, half a world of distance and two different languages. My granddad and his sister would have been happy about this, I think.

Michelle is really lovely but she's terribly deaf and sort of lip read people. That's a big problem for me as my French is basically crap, so although I'm able to understand her (most of the time)but between my nonexistent grammar and terrible accent, she cannot understand me at all. Luckily for us, her son speaks a little English and that helped because he could then "translate" what we said to her.

For my birthday we took everybody to a very nice restaurant at the Promende des Anglaise (see picture here, from left to right: Pierre Alain, "the husband", Michelle, me, P. and my dad) and then they had a great chocolate cake with a singing candle waiting for me at home! I even got some presents, such a Zara voucher from my dad and a perfume form L'Occitane from the very dear "husband". This finally proves that he does listen to me occasionally as I love their lemon perfume and it's impossible to buy it here in Spain. Do check their UK site, click on the name of the shop, as you can buy their things there.

P. kept on saying that he had some very special present waiting for me at home in Sabadell and he said that it was something that I was pinning for for years and that it was going to be the best present ever.

Then, a couple of days after we arrived back from holidays I came home after work and found P. and "the husband" extremelly exited and in the living room there was the most gorgeous little Beagle I've seen!!!
P. called him Darwin ("get it? ...." - he said - "he's a Beagle and Charles Darwin actually travelled around South America in a ship called The Beagle"). Isn't he totally adorable?
P's right, of course, Darwin is the best present ever, even though I know it's going to be hard work to keep him happy living in a flat.