Despite the late hour of last night’s turn-in, we were up bright and early the next morning since we knew what awaited us – the arrival of the client editors. While we were tackling all of the core lesson pages of the program, they were writing all of the interleaf, frontmatter and endmatter pages, which were on the same delayed schedule as our part of the project. Since they’d gotten in the previous afternoon, we assumed they’d be raring to go given the rapidly-approaching due date, so we planned our arrival at work for closer to 8:30 than 9, determined to make a good impression.
Unfortunately, we got there so early that there was no work to do for a good half-hour. Fortunately, the other editors didn’t roll in until 10:30, after which they got the same tour we had gotten, and didn’t start work until at least 11:15. By then we were well on our way, killing off one grade each before our 2pm lunch.
As opposed to the two previous days’ lunches, this midday meal was at a place right down the block, so we walked instead of taking a car – much easier when there are ten of us. The Casa del Toño whisked us in to a table that had already been set up for us (according to the manager, they eat there all the time, and he joked that he wished it was a little further away so that he could walk off the 10 kilos he’d put on since it opened two years ago). I got to know our fellow editors over a bowl of pozole – a corn-based soup with chicken and perhaps a little more hot sauce than I should have added. My main course was a quesadilla, but this one had no resemblance to the flour-tortillas-and-cheese combinations you’d get at most Mexican food places in the US. This was a fried corn tortilla stuffed with cheese (hence quesadilla – literally, “little cheesy thing”) and shredded beef. The whole thing was folded over to make a roughly football-shaped thing that I dug into with gusto. Maybe the best lunch of the entire trip. I would say best meal, but the last dinner would prove to take the overall cake. One more michelada and a flan later, we were back in the office. We stayed until 8:30 again, caught the Barcelona-Milan soccer game over another dinner in the hotel bar, and called it a night.
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