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Well… It’s been a while… So trying now to recall past events… Right.. Oh yeah, our corporative Xmas party. In the middle of December. I must admit I love my company. I think the best two things about it is the atmosphere and people themselves. There are so many people to fall in love with :) So party time is the best time to get closer, to enjoy yourself and a nice people around.

And it was great, hugely enjoyable. The dress code was evening dresses for ladies and tuxedos for guys. Well… in my company no one wears suit and/or tie at work. Including directors. Only if they are visiting some huge client and wanna impress :) So all you see every day around are computer geeks in jeans and t-shirts and designers-rebels wearing some freaky stuff. Sometimes not that freaky. Anyway, it is very informal. All the time. So when you see all those people looking smart, I mean very smart, you think : “Wow! That’s something.” And you also realize that that’s probably the one and only time you’ll see the guys with a bow-tie. And then it all was champagne drinking, festive eating and socializing. The party was definitely a success.

One of the evening’s highlights was Oscar-style awards ceremony. We even had a red carpet for arriving guests. Not so many funs though… Anyway, we had six nominations voted by everyone in the company: Best Dressed Male, Best Dressed Female, Biggest Drama of 2006, Biggest Chancer of 2006, Best Comedy Moment of 2006 and Most Profitable Person of 2006. I really fancied the idea of winning one, I thought it would be a very good memory and then I could tell some stories to my grand kids about how cool I was when I was young :) (Not that I’m not gonna be cool when I am older ;) And considering all the possibilities I realized I had quite good chances of winning a Best Dressed Male award. And as you can guess from the title I did it! :) In spite of rather strong competition, I must say. So I was excited to win it. My man Aidan, company’s golden boy, won the Most Profitable Person award. Well-deserved. I voted for him :) And it felt like everyone was happy for all the winners, everyone was shouting, cheering and applauding. It felt great.

Actually I was not wearing a suit that night… Well, I tend to wear quite formal outfit at work lately (surprisingly enjoy wearing a tie :), so decided to do something different: to wear a kilt. Well it was not complete Scottish outfit, rather eclectic mix of clothes, but then I thought : “Is there any better occasion for it, since all my kilt does is gathers dust on a shelf?..” But looks like it worked well. So well that David told me that night: “Oleg, I should have voted for you”. :)

I guess the funniest thing is that this year’s I hate Xmas sales. Overcrowded shops with people running around hoping for some bargain. It gets on my nerves. I try staying away from sales this Xmass. Just one day gave myself a break. And what a waist of time it was! Did not buy anything. Actually, did not like anything… Probably just tired of all that. There are times when I hate fashion. I guess it’s one of them.

It was supposed to be a standard routine Thursday evening. But then Veronika called me and said she received her first cheque at her new job, so we decided to turn this evening into something a bit more special and instead cooking our dinner at home to eat out. We live in a very nice London area with our King road full of restaurants of all sort of cuisine from Iranian to Italian, so it was just a matter of short time to find the one for us, and so literally within 10 minutes of browsing we found ourself in the place called ‘Robin Hood Zoro‘ - a quite weird combination of names but then it sounds reasonable when you learn it’s an English - Mexican eating house.

Robin Hood Zoro is a quite small restaurant opened just a few weeks ago with a good choice of traditional food and gorgeous romantic interior. It feels very cozy and relaxed in dim-lit rooms of and old pub and with painted walls decorated with guns and sombreros and it is definitely more about Zorro then the English king of thieves. Latino-American music on the background and friendly personnel. It was not crowded that night so we had a choice of where to sit and opted to place by the window next to the fireplace.

The choice of food was really good including quite long drinks list. I went for vegetable soup and a traditional Mexican pork with pineapple and Veronika’s choice was garlic mushrooms for the starter and lasagna for the main. We were also entitled to a free bottle of French wine which was very nice and sweet. Everything was absolutely delicious. The main course was served with our choice of wedged potatoes which turned out to be the best wedges I ever had :) crispy and well done outside and soft and melting mush inside. As main course was served we realized that probably we should had passed the starters cause portions were big and we already felt like we were going to be full very soon. And we were :) Actually so full that we even asked to take half of a lasagna away with us, cause Veronika could not have any more of it, but it would be an ultimate crime to throw it away :)

So it was a lovely eating out. Out of regular night meals. Out of routine and boredom. I would definitely recommend that place to anyone. They also seem to be playing live music on Wednesday nights. And hurry up till they have they free bottle of wine with any two main promotion running ! :) Though prices are very reasonable there anyway. Check their website www.robinhoodzorro.com (I know I know it’s a sort of school boy made, but you can still find full menu as well as the location there).

PS. Pictures were taken with my gorgeous Nokia n73 :)