h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Last weekend, we had our office Christmas do.
No, really; I know it was the end of January, but it got a little postponed...

Y'see, being closely tied up with the travel industry, the company I work for has the habit of taking its jollies a bit further afield than most. The original message from my boss, sometime in December, read "This year's Christmas party is a surprise; meet at Gatwick at 6AM on [date] with your passport and overnight bag. Don't be late."

Unfortunately, there followed a case of trying to be too clever - flights are cheapest booked in advance, but for hotels last minute is best. Thus the flights in question were booked to Madrid long before it was discovered there was a bank holiday there, and all hotels were booked solid!

So we all knew where we were going for this month's postponed version, and miraculously (despite the complete mess half an inch of snow had made of the rail network 2 days prior) we all managed to get there fine. Unfortunately, we did lose one just before boarding the aircraft, when his papers were finally checked, and he was told that with an Indian passport and an expired visa, he'd be allowed out of the country, but not back in! [Apparently, he then went to the embassy in London, managed to get a new visa in a mere 2 hours rather than 2 days, nipped back to the station, and found the trains 20 minutes late; he missed the only other available flight by about 5 minutes! ]

The rest of us, however, proceeded to check into the hotel, and after a while spent finding my room (no, that's not a '1' or a '7', it's a '4'; obviously! ) got into the important business of, well, drinking lager.

Lunch involved getting lost trying to find the restaurant that had been booked, which turned out to be woefully inexperienced at dealing with such large groups, and much confusion reigned over quite what was available ("salmon, chicken, or pork" seemed to turn into 4 separate dishes, including gammon, but also eventually salmon). Nice meaty broth for starter though...

Other highlights in my memory include people falling off chairs, crawling inexplicably through tables, and wandering the streets of Madrid with two drunken Ia[i]ns (we have three altogether). We then proceeded to a 7-storey club, complete with cinema! But it did have an expensive and somewhat confusing system of drinks vouchers; and wouldn't give me any tap water, which 'd me off somewhat...

Next morning, unfortunately, I felt more than a little the worse for wear - a long day of drinking had most definitely taken its toll - I won't go into details here, but suffice to say I couldn't eat anything all morning, and had to move very carefully. Which is a shame, 'cos I'd really have liked to take more advantage of my surroundings, and of the tapas bar we went to, but I really really didn't feel up to it. Not that anybody else seemed to be feeling that much better - and we all had raging colds for the next week...

But I think my overall verdict has to be "random, in a good way"!