Remember, remember the 5th of November

The week went well and by Thursday I'd received four birthday cards! :-)

As I didn't have to work on Friday I started the birthday celebrations off on Thursday in my favourite bar with our friendly barman. Annalisa and I enjoyed a few glasses of red wine in true tradition and got talking about putting the world right with bull fighting, amongst other things. We were the only two in the bar and the two chefs and the barman were sat playing a board game. We invited ourselves over to their table and just enjoyed a nice night talking about Melilla, Spanish culture, etc. We were joined by two of Annalisa's housemates a little later. It was a really mellow evening.
We'd been in there for a few hours and at midnight the waiter shut off all the lights. I felt terrible and thought we were going to get kicked out as they wanted to go home, but he brought out a little cake with 24 on it and candles and they all sang to me! :-) Then he dumped what appeared to be a bottle of champers on the table. It only bloody turned out to be cider, didn't it?! So now, this guy has become my absolute hero! He certainly knows how to get the punters back in there!!! We stayed in there for a few more hours chatting away in a very civilised fashion, went to the port for one drink and then headed home.
I opened up all of my four birthday cards at about 2am on Skype with Bean and hit the sack at about 2.30am.

On my actual birthday I woke up and had a cup of tea with Christopher and my lovely, big brother played me Happy Birthday through Skype. It was a lovely morning just lazing about, being distracted by my boys from the fact that I was alone. At midday after my birthday shower (I'm overcompensating from the lack of detail of the other days - you really don't need to know all of this!) a man knocked at the door with a humongous bunch of flowers. Bean rocked my birthday socks off by sending flowers from London to Melilla!

I spent most of my afternoon taking pictures of my lovely flowers... I don't suppose you care to see them but it might make the blog entry a little bit more interesting?!....

 

OK. That's enough of that...!

In the afternoon I went out for a coffee with a friend and ran a few errands before heading back to my flat to get ready for the evening. It was another friend's birthday on 1st November and he'd demanded that I go along to the 'botellon' so he could introduce his friends to me (hence the ever growing social circle as I mentioned before). This botellon basically consists of having a drink together with lots and lots of friends by some pretty fountains near the beach before all going to the port. We'd bought alcohol in the afternoon (and I'd found Magners - what a great birthday treat!) and I headed back home to eat before birthday celebrations. I had a lovely little chat with Ellie in the evening and went out at midnight for birthday fun.

 

As you can see I'm not too lonely out here and managed to have a good birthday night out despite being away from all you lovelies!

Thanks to all of your for my birthday texts, cards and Facebook posts/messages. Very much appreciated and sorry I haven't had time to reply individually. Forgive me?!