Antequera: el año nuevo.

I may not have spent New Year's Eve with old friends, reminiscing about the good old days in accordance with Auld Lang Syne, but I really didn't mind - I was in warm, beautiful Spain, I was doing good things for my body, and new friends are nice, too. [Dear old friends - I still miss you, though, don't think I don't!]

We first considered going out for dinner at another hotel or a restaurant in town, but we soon found out that we should've reserved a long time ago, and besides, it was all very expensive. So we stayed at our hotel for the special New Year's Eve menu there, keeping open the possibility of going out to the bars in town after midnight, which is the earliest the party would be starting, anyway [oh, Spain...you know how I know you're not Wisconsin?]. It was all very exciting, sitting in the same dining room as always, and yet eating things besides grilled vegetables and salmon - and drinking wine! It was like the gods' sweet nectar on the parched [well...wine-parched - we were drinking plenty of water there] deserts of our tongues.

We had each gotten a little tin foil package of twelve grapes with our dinner, so we then carried them over to the TV, where the Spanish equivalent of the Times Square ball was about to go down - grape counting! Once the clock strikes midnight, you have to eat one grape each second for the first twelve seconds - one for each month, I guess. I'm not really sure where/how this tradition started, but we're pretty sure the grape industry had something to do with it.

The idea of one grape per second sounds somewhat doable at first, but if you haven't had a lifetime of practice and there are seeds in the grapes...it's not that doable! By the time I had the first six in - not necessarily entirely swallowed - the twelfth second was fast approaching - so I just stuffed the last six into my mouth all at the same time. I had no other choice - I need that year of good luck! At least I did better than another member of our group, who also stuffed them all in her mouth at once but afterwards spit them all back out in a grape-y mess. We'll see how her year goes!

After the grape excitement, we had a couple more glasses of wine, hung out a little bit with some hotel guests from the Netherlands, and headed to bed around 2 a.m. - not the craziest New Year's Eve of my life, but crazy isn't really necessary for me anymore [oh man, I'm old and boring].

Our group - two Irish women, two English guys, and the stray US American - under the omnipresent hocks of Iberian ham.


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On January 1st, our usual schedule was eased up a bit [no yoga at 7:30 a.m., whew!] - we went for a reeeeeeally leisurely hike in a beautiful, foggy, forested area before going to a tapas bar in Antequera owned by the brother of one of our Spanish guides. Delicious tapas, desserts, moscatel...absolutely perfect way to spend the first day of the new year.

The nationwide smoking ban claimed its latest victim, Spain, on January 2nd, so we all made sure to appropriately celebrate the last day smoking was allowed in restaurants and bars. And don't worry, I was only posing - although I think I look ultra-classy holding a cigarette [because that's the point, right?], I still prefer healthy lungs to chic-yet-tarred ones.