A mixed week of work and fun. At the office, we hosted so-called working group meetings, basically specialised gatherings of stakeholders who are interested in particular areas, such as Economics & Statistics (I chair that one), Awareness, Enforcement etc. We used the occasion to mark the upcoming retirement of the director of our department (my boss), since this was going to be his last meeting with the complete set of stakeholders before he leaves at the end of May. There were of course some social activities as well. Besides that, it was a normal week of cycling, paella, a walkabout in Alicante and such.
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I started the week with a long ride in the mountains on Sunday morning. The sky looked ominous, but in the end it stayed dry:
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I came home from the ride to find Esteemed Wife busy with a paella. Some of the ingredients:
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Work in progress:
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Ready to eat:
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Now back to work. On Tuesday during the lunch break, the annual charity run was held at the office. Called Run4Life, it is a fundraising event for the Spanish cancer society and a local breast cancer association here in the Valencia region. The route is short, just over 5 km, so many people beyond the usual sporty types are able to participate. I do not run; instead, I was there with my camera, first at the start:
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And a bit later at the finish, “hunting” for people whom I know well, like Juan in this image:
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Or Claire, with whom I worked between 2009 and 2011:
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On my way home, I stopped at Malatesta. Not too many people in the bar on a Tuesday afternoon:
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Tuesday evening I was having dinner with a colleague and a visitor from the OECD at a beach restaurant. Suddenly I spotted one of my co-workers, out on an evening walk with his wife while doing a video call with a family member:
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On Wednesday, we had the “common session” of the working groups, bringing everyone together. My director Paul presides over this event for the last time (we have these meetings twice a year, in the spring and in the autumn):
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Afterwards, we all gathered for a cocktail to honour Paul. The head of our office also came and gave a little speech:
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A couple more speeches followed, and of course some presents. Here Paul poses with one of the old “friends of the house”, Ann-Charlotte, an IP lawyer from Sweden. The book he is holding is one of the presents, which I produced together with a couple of colleagues. It is a book of testimonials from stakeholders and people with whom Paul has dealt in the past, with pictures to accompany them, either contributed by the people themselves, or from my (very extensive) files. We got more than 50 contributions, so Paul got a nice Blurb book of more than 100 pages (since each contribution occupied two pages, with the message on the right hand page and the photo on the left hand page):
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Stephanie was my main partner in crime in producing the book. She did all the tracking down of people to ask for contribution, while I actually put the book together:
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We continued with the meetings on Thursday. Like most important meetings in these post-Covid times, it was a hybrid event, with some people participating online:
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Thursday was the last day of the meetings, and in the evening I went out with my friend Linda from Latvia and a colleague from here. We started at Malatesta, which was quite a bit more crowded than it had been two days earlier:
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We then continued on to a Japanese-Spanish fusion restaurant called Katana, Linda’s absolute favourite here in Alicante. I took this informal portrait of her while we waited for our food:
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The food at Katana is a feast for both the palate and the eyes:
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When I sent this photo to Linda a couple of days later, my comment was that this was an expression of true love, and she did not disagree:
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I started Saturday with an 82 km ride south of Alicante. The weather was lovely, and I stopped for a brief rest at the Urbanova beach:
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The southernmost point on my route was Santa Pola, where the fishing boats were back in the harbour and the fishermen were taking care of their equipment:
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On Saturday afternoon I went to see a Magnum photo exhibition in Alicante. It is not often that we get art of this calibre here. The exhibition was by 12 female photographers, and it was called Close Enough in Alicante. The venue was, until a few weeks ago, the main post office of Alicante, but now it has become an excellent exhibition space, right in the centre. This is the first exhibition held there, and it will remain until early July. Among the photographers whose works were exhibited was Susan Meiselas:
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More powerful imagery:
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Even more powerful imagery, by German-Russian photographer Nanna Heitmann, brave enough to document the effects of the war in Russia despite living in Moscow:
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After seeing the exhibition, I walked around the centre for a while. I have always liked this wall at the end of a small dead-end street:
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Calle San Francisco is a pedestrian street with lots of bars and restaurants, and a bunch of large mushroom structures (for that reason, everyone calls it Mushroom Street, Calle de las Setas):
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Playing peekaboo:
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Waiting 1:
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Waiting 2:
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As darkness fell, I drove home, stopping for a beer at Playa San Juan, a couple of km from my house:
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My seaside watering hole:
