Goodbye Barcelona

My final week in Barcelona has ended. I started packing 2 weeks in advance (how much stuff can come out of a cupboard!!!) but sadly caught influenza, making the work pretty hard. Peter also packed up the things from the lab, so I lived in between boxes day and night. Last weekend, Eva Maria and Vanessa prepared a dinner for me at Eva’s flat, a goodbye dinner (so sad!). To them, my name stand equal for Nutella so everything they prepared had choclate in it, amazing!! Due to the influenza which I was still recovering from I did not have much appetite, but choclate I did manage to eat. They bought me the cutest presents and Eva promised me we’d have pipi hours no matter what, sooo sweet! Then we had to toast, but I was taking antibiotics so I told the girls I would not be able to do that sadly. But these clever ladies thought of everything and bought me a bottle of : Champin, the kids version of champagne!!!! I had a great night.
On my very last day in the lab, there was the Christmas activities day of the institute. They made some sort of a contest in which they divided all about 200 people in small groups, competing against eachother in different sports. It went from using bow and arrow to driving go-karts to boating. The simplest but for me most hilarious task was to walk on large wooden ski’s with 4 of your group mates at the same time. If one doesnt lift a foot, the others can’t either. The idea is to walk a certain distance faster than all the other teams, and we won! My team was called “the alleles”. Science above all huh, better this name than the ‘ flow cytometers” or ‘ the mutants”. Including a boating activity means you can be damn sure some are gonna fall into the water. Surprisingly, only two girls did, but we do date December 22nd so no need to explain how cold they looked when they were fished out of there. After all those activities, the director of the institute had this great idea of singing a lullaby in front of the whole institute to raise money for childrens charity. Best idea he ever had as everybody donated all the change they had on them to please make him stop the singing as fast as possible.
The girls in the lab made me a really nice goodbye card: its a collection of pictures of everybody in the lab, with some text on it and with everybody’s signature. Its framed and hanging on the wall in my room! I liked living in Barcelona, and I will miss it, most of all the people from the lab and those two wonderfull city-girls Eva and Vanessa....






PS: A pipi hour is a meeting in the ladies restroom at a predetermined hour when you are supposed to go pee but instead you spend your time with gossip and guy-rating talk. It was as important to us as eating and sleeping, and now we will have to try live without...