Mads

So I finally met Maja's Danish friend Mads last night (pronounced like "motts"). He went to college with Maja in Minnesota, and has kept in touch with her via emails now and then over the years. He's a consultant who works on mergers, and apparently normally keeps hours along the lines of 8:30am to 8:30pm...remind me never to be a consultant! No 12 hour days for me, thank you! We met at Oxford Circus, and he showed me a small little area nearby, near Selfridges in fact, that I hadn't even known existed. If you walk through a very narrow little alley, which is the entrance (and I'm sure I've passed it several times before without giving it a second look), you come out into an area that is full of restaurants, with outdoor tables on the pavement, a fountain, benches for sitting, and no streets! (Because we're tucked away with buildings on all sides, and the streets are beyond the buildings.) So we had a delicious dinner and bottle of wine at an outdoor table and didn't have to breathe in petrol fumes, and deal with the noise of traffic. And as it turned out, though it rained pretty heavily during the day yesterday, it was a gorgeous evening, perfect for dining al fresco, and warm enough for me to wear my new halter top too. We talked nonstop about Maja, about Europeans vs Americans' stereotypes of each other, about jobs and families and travel and who knows what else. And he kept our waiter very amused throughout the night by doing things like asking the waiter for a recommendation for an appetizer, and then to make sure the waiter was being sincere, demanded to know if the waiter would feed what he had recommended to his girlfriend. All in all, a really wonderful night.