1/18/89 Wednesday - Ercosa

1/18/89 Wednesday. My second full day at Ercosa. I am working to implement the computer system that was imported from Chemetco. Almost nobody outside of IT spoke English except Sola (office worker) and Luc Van Herpe, a young Belgium man who was a temporary worker. In the computer room everyone spoke at least a little English. I worked with Ria Martins (a young Belgium lady) and Eduardo Rubio. Later we hired Mercedes and Santi (he spoke only a little English). Adolfo Gago was in charge of IT when I came in. 

I never felt comfortable writing about work, so most of my notes are about food. The worker's cafeteria is a large room in the basement with tables and chairs and a kitchen area with a counter/bar area. People ate in 2 shifts, and the office workers usually did not eat with the foundry workers, except for Rita and I. When we sat down, the cook came out and asked which of the 2 dishes-of-the-day we wanted, and when it was ready, he brought it out to us. Rita, who has worked here awhile, said it was a good idea to order a dish-of-the-day because they were usually better than the menu items. The dish-of-the-day came with a salad, red wine, a dessert of fruit or yogurt cups and coffee or hot tea. There was a small charge but Rita and I had tickets for free lunches; we paid for coffee or tea and the tip. The daily special today was called "Rice a la Cuba", and it was really quite good. It's rice with a tomato-like sauce and over-easy eggs on top. The fried pork patty, however, was not very good. 

More work throughout the afternoon, followed by another private Spanish class in the evening. It's an immersion class - Berlitz - so the teacher only speaks Spanish. So far I'm not doing too well. After class we went out to dinner to celebrate Rita’s birthday. Rita and I arrived at the restaurant about 10 pm, which is the standard time to eat dinner in Spain. We had paella, which is a rice dish with saffron, clams, mussels, squid, jumbo shrimp and red peppers. A lot of that was new to me, but even I knew it was pretty good. We had wine with supper, then tea. For dessert we ordered whiskey cake, which was just OK.