I am not a huge fan of New Years Eve to be honest. I have tried to be, but now I am just over it! There is far too much hype about what to do and where to go and what to wear. Then there is the whole crap fest about every bar and restaurant suddenly doubling their prices just so that you can get in the front door when ordinarily you wouldn’t generally be seen dead in the place, then there are the drinks prices. If you have managed to get past all of this and you have done yourself up, paid the equivalent of a month’s rent in the entrance fee and drinks and partied the night away, you then have the total arse ache of trying to get home. Smelly night bus? Crammed metro if it is still running? Ridiculously priced taxi? Go home, momentarily share our story about your evening to your friends and family and then promptly forget all about it until you do it all over again next year? If you don’t do anything, you end up feeling totally boring and you feel embarrassed as well. It sucks royally. I remember all the hoo ha for the new years for 2000, how many people actually remember what they did? I don’t. I think everyone should just relax about it already!
Last year I was pregnant at New Years Eve, so it was a quiet one, maybe more than I expected! Xavi and I were down in the house in Valls and we decided to go and find a little bar and celebrate the New Year together. So off we got in the car (obviously me not drinking took care of the transport issue quite nicely) and off we headed to Tarragona. We headed to the marina area where there were some bars. In Spain, everyone celebrates the 12 chimes of midnight by eating one grape at each chime of the gong, so we very efficiently made sure that we each had our own little tin of deseeded and peeled grapes - very important when you are trying to shove 12 grapes in your mouth, helps with the not chewing and just swallowing aspect. However almost every bar was closed. Another thing in Spain is that they celebrate New Year’s the other way around. Up until midnight it is a time for everyone to be inside with family having dinner etc. to bring in the new years, and then everybody leaves home to go and party until the next day. Or the day after that depending on the party! So yes, we found ourselves in a pickle, most bars were closed. We did manage to find one open . . . it appeared to be a mix of a kebab takeaway place and a bar with the interior furnishing resembling a beachside holiday home. Weird. We were the only people there, xavi with his whisky, me with my alcohol free beer, us whispering as we were alone and talking felt like we were shouting! A drunken group stumbled in, gave us hugs and handshakes, mumbled something and thankfully left rather quickly! Midnight approached rather rapidly and so we go out some napkins, drained our grapes, laid them out on the napkins and ate our grapes according to the chimes on the TV inside the beachside kebab bar place. All alone and feeling like total idiots whilst the foreign bar staff looked at us like we were total losers. I didn’t have a pregnancy bump, so I couldn’t even point to that to say “look we are not total freaks, we are just slightly limited in our plans!” But we didn’t care too much. We were thrilled because that was going to be the year that we had our baby, which was all that mattered.
This year we had our little girl. We would also have Yaincoa with us this year and having children suddenly changes the whole ballgame doesn’t it? We couldn’t really go anywhere as Emmeline is still young and has her bedtime quite early. I cannot drag my little 5 month old around town with me trying to get her to sleep in some corner or some bedroom somewhere! So we decided to stay in the flat. We thought about inviting some friends of ours or one of Yaincoa’s friends to make it a little more interesting for him, however everyone else already had plans and it appeared that there were a few other couples out there having a quiet evening like us. My parents decided to have a quiet one on their boat, so it would just be the 4 of us this year. We decided to send Emmeline to bed a little later than usual so that the house could be louder for a little longer. We set up the Scalextric so that xavi and Yain could play and we decided to have pizza for dinner, an exception in our house! We all chilled out on the sofa together, ate our pizzas, watched the new years programmes with an increasingly tired 8 year old at our side nagging us that the TV we were watching was boring, he wanted to watch a 3 hour 1 star movie on some other channel! We outvoted him! Along came new years and with it a sneaky glass of Cava and our 12 grapes! We all hugged and kissed and xavi and I both agreed that it had been a good year, a year that bought us our little angel Emmeline, and a good year for us. We were exhausted, so about 15 minutes later we were all wrapped up in bed!
I feel grateful for what I have, I feel thankful for who I have, I feel content with the year I have had, and I feel hopeful for the year to come.
New Year’s resolutions? I don’t really make them, but ok then, what do I want for this year?
To sleep more
To lose my pregnancy arse, tummy, hips and everything else
To try to be a good mommy to my girl, always giving her the time and attention and love that she deserves
To try to be a good girlfriend, daughter, sister, friend etc
To get this blog up and running and stick with it
To be more creative
To find a way of bringing in some cash without having to hand out flyers on street corners
To finish studying graphic design
To study more, maybe web design or photography
To make a real effort to wax my legs and underarms more frequently and generally try to be more feminine.
So to all of you, Happy New Year!
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