Our First Date Night In 7 Years!

It's been too long!

When we moved from our home country, I surely did not anticipate that having some time together would be a luxury for the next 7 years. Of course, we had time together in the evenings when our daughter was in bed. I mean an evening out without having to take her with us. This has been the reality. For more than seven years, we have not been away in the evening with just the two of us. We have been out separately but one of us always stayed home for our daughter. Sadly, usually, I was this person as my boyfriend had a much bigger social life in Budapest than I had.

Granted, I admit to having a few bigger and more memorable getaways than he had such as the Andrea Bocelli and Bryan Adams concerts. That evens things out a bit, haha. Anyway, it's the reality that we always had to take our daughter with us simply because there was not really someone that I trusted well enough to take care of her, or when I did, these people weren't available much. Add to that that hiring someone would have been too costly in most cases so that was the end of us being able to have a dinner or go clubbing.

Dutch bedtimes vs Spanish bedtimes

One thing that made dealing with this a bit easier is the fact that here in Spain, walking around with a small kid is not that strange even at 10 or 11 pm, while in Holland, this is something people would find very odd and maybe even concerning. Although I fully agree that a child needs a routine, the routine here in Spain is simply getting to bed late and getting up at 8.15/8.30 as school starts at 9 and is just minutes away from our home.

Although Holland nowadays certainly knows the feeling of heatwaves much more than they did decades ago, people would definitely interfere if they see parents out late with their small children during weekdays. This is something we always considered normal and it took me until we moved to Spain the first time to change this slowly. These Dutch bedtimes simply don't work for any of us as the heat is then finally disappearing and we want to get out as then the streets come to life.

No food before 8 PM

It's even so that there are just a few restaurants that open their kitchen before 8 PM. Of course, there is the exception here and there (just a few though) where you can eat the whole day but usually you will find out that the kitchen doesn't open before 8 or even 8.30 pm. A simple calculation will show you that it's more likely that kids end up in bed around 10 or 11 pm when parents are out and having tapas or dinner in a restaurant. At least these late bedtimes allow us to get out together in the evening, instead of sitting stuck at home all night.

Eat at home you could say, of course, that's nice if you have this amazing home where you don't feel locked up with the air conditioner full blowing the cool wind to feel a bit cooler than the outside temperature. The reality is that many homes just won't feel comfortable throughout the day and the last thing you want is to stand in the kitchen, everything heated, and then even have a hotter home after dinner. Add to that our tiny kitchen and I can assure you it's not a great place to be during these next months.

I plan on prepping some nice salads and cold pasta salads every week so that when we eat lunch or something at home in the evening, it's usually cold or a short prepping time for the warm part of our dinner.

Back to date night!

I'd almost forget what I really wanted to share today and that's our first date night in 7 years. We spent most of our day working and cleaning up as I wanted to have the house in order before my boyfriend's holiday starts so that I won't have to spend too much time on that during these 10 days. The girl that has been tutoring our daughter agreed on babysitting, we agreed on 2 moments this week just before she leaves for her family in Italy. One moment was the evening and another one will be tomorrow morning so we can shop without having protests from our daughter. This is a luxury, let me tell you!

We didn't know for sure what we'd do but I figured after all these attempts to find something, we will just have a drink and dinner together and try to end up at a place where we didn't eat yet. We first picked up two packages (lol, what a date!) as we couldn't do so the evening before. Then it was still early so we looked for a parking place at the beach and walked to our regular restaurant for tapas to enjoy a drink as it was quite hot. We had one tapa because we can't resist the gambas there and paid to walk towards the harbor. We could have taken the car but I like the walk on the boulevard and have a child while walking so this was perfect.

Italian restaurant in the Harbor

We always think the harbor has a good ambiance so we figured let's find a restaurant we didn't go to yet for tonight as we know our daughter will not eat anything there. We ended up going to the Italian restaurant which always looks quite fancy and expensive. This time we were early so we could pick a spot to sit. We preferred sitting outside with a beach view but I asked if there were mosquitos and the waiter confirmed there are loads of them. Inside it is!

If you look closely, you see the beach through behind the people sitting on the terrace outside. We sat at the table next to the one you see in the picture, giving us a perfect constant ocean breeze making it impossible for mosquitos to land on us. Perfect!

Italian food vs a steak

Now don't get me wrong, I usually eat Italian when being at an Italian restaurant as I can appreciate a good pasta or pizza but this evening, I didn't feel like eating that. My boyfriend choose the sirloin steak and I decided to join him. We received a cheese dip with Italian bread sticks first and then a pizza bread, which was just like a tiny pizza to be honest.

Nothing special. I missed the homemade garlic butter and plain pizza bread here. Maybe it's not a thing here in Spain at Italian restaurants, though.

Little misunderstanding

Instead of the ordered, "salsa de pimienta" (pepper sauce) which was one of the optional sauces with the steak. The waiter brought us this:

At that time, we thought this was normal for when you order steak, lol. Soon we found out that this was not the case.

Steak!

I won't lie that we were both a bit disappointed seeing our steaks because we didn't think they looked really appealing and my boyfriend instantly reminded us to order Italian in an Italian restaurant, haha. We waited a few minutes before we realized they weren't bringing any pepper sauce to ask the waiter.

He asked "Do you want it?" so we told him, we ordered it so it should have been here. Hoping he'd be fast, we waited a bit longer. After 15 minutes or more, we decided to tell them our food was cold and they took our plates without any issues. An apology for the misunderstanding was added as well.

Even though it's a bummer when this happens, I can understand the miscommunication as it's easy to misunderstand "Salsa de pimienta" for "sal y pimienta" (salt and pepper). On the other hand, if you offer 2 sauces with the steak, you should ask us if we want one, so there's that too. Either way, they solved it without any issues so it worked out fine.

New plates with the sauce

This time the food was still hot and we had our sauce:

I can't lie when I say that my steak looked a bit meh on the left, I was afraid they had now served me a very tough piece of meat but soon I found out that the rest was sublime so I took the tough part on the left happily for granted. It tasted way better than it looked. Compliments to the chef!

The only thing that was a bit disappointing was the plain potatoes with a few pieces of paprika and the lost onion here and there but we ate it all and there was definitely no room for dessert.
When we asked for the bill we got this complementary drink:

As you probably see, it's a limoncello. I took a tiny sip and decided it was not for me. I had this drink for the first time last year somewhere in a restaurant where I really enjoyed the limoncello but it tasted much different than this one. We also bought one bottle ourselves once after that, to discover that one was definitely not as good as the one we got offered the first time after having dinner somewhere else. I guess I only like it if it's the right one, lol. My boyfriend didn't mind having my shot too.

We can get used to this

Having a normal conversation without interference from our daughter and just focussing on us two. It's hard to imagine that we haven't had a night like this in more than 7 years but now that I got a taste of it, I feel we should implement this all summer every single week! Not right away though because our babysitter is now enjoying a two-week holiday herself. We have one morning of babysitting left before she leaves, but no evening dates until she's back.

We're very grateful that she helped us so much last school year, it's safe to say our daughter learned more from her than at school because she knew exactly how to make it fun and easier to understand for our daughter. And now on top of her help with school, we found a trustworthy babysitter so we can also have some us-time is more than I wished for last year.

Cheers to our first date night in 7 years and to many more to come :)