Ok, January’s not over yet, so I can still talk about Christmas. I’ve not been in the US for the past three Christmas’, so I try to find something interesting to do each time. The first time, I ‘chose’ to have a horrible flu and spend the holiday in a feverish bundle on Dina and Adrian’s couch. Not something I would recommend. The following year, Carolyn had made the move over and we decided to rent a place for a long weekend in Paris and do the whole market-shopping, homemade Christmas meal in a foreign country. It was such fun, we thought we’d try it again. However, in order to make sure it wasn’t the same-old-same-old, we added a couple of changes. We went to Madrid this time and Carolyn’s parents made the trip across the Atlantic.

Before I start showing pictures, let me say that one of the reasons we love doing this is we basically drop into town and try to figure out how to shop for some sort of epic kind of meal, without ever having been in that neighbourhood before. The internet truly helps with this, but so much of it is hit-or-miss. For example, we learned that grocery stores in Madrid are horrible. They literally sell the worst of the food you can think of. The bread is like wonderbread, they didn’t have butter (I’m not making this up).

So how does one eat in Spain? The markets. In Paris and London, you tend to go to the markets if you want produce, meat, dairy and bread. This can also be picked up at the grocery stores, but it is possible to do much of the shopping at a market if you choose so. You have options but the basics you might go to a grocery store. In Spain, at least in Fuencarral (where we were staying), they had the Barcelo Market. It’d had recently been moved into a modern space which consisted of 3 or 4 kind of pods with stalls in each. Thanks to this market, we managed to pick up just about everything we needed. Which was good because we arrived on Christmas Eve and we had about 1 hour to find everything before the city shut for festivities.

Anyway, after writing this, I realize I’m making generalities about a city that I don’t know that well. So allow me to call this an observation about a slice of Madrid. I did not go into any of the Corte Ingles (a large department store) that dot the city and Carolyn says that they do groceries as well.

So, after dropping into Madrid and performing a surgical strike on the market, it was time to settle in for the holiday. Jim and Linda were scheduled to arrive in the late morning on Christmas Day. We decided to have a variation on the Spanish Tortilla as our Christmas Eve meal.

After dinner, we wandered around Madrid. We learned the hard way last year not to expect a whole lot of life or open restaurants at any point over Christmas (we had Chinese food last year for Christmas Eve dinner because Paris was dead). As we walked the almost deserted streets of Madrid, we would run into other tourists asking if the Metro was running of if we knew of open places for food. It was all quite eerie — Madrid is a bustling city, but on Christmas eve, it was absolutely dead. Observe the Plaza Mayor at about 10:30pm:

Beautiful lights and only like 10 other people around. Loved it!

After a wander around Madrid, we tucked in for the night so we could prepare to cook a feast to welcome Linda and Jim to Spain. The menu consisted of homemade ravioli (with a ricotta and spinach filling), roast rack of lamb, some vegetables and homemade strawberry shortcake. Here’s the prep for it:

Of course, there was wine too . Now cooking in a place you’d never seen before until the night before can always be tricky (this place had no measuring cups which is never happy when making a cake), but it turned out nicely:

(The sauce was store-bought and wasn’t the best. But everything else was tasty goodness). Overall, it was a lovely time. Good food, good company, the apartment was beautiful. I’ll leave this post with a the happy family eating and our Christmas “Tree” surrounded with presents:

So the theme for this winter seems to be, shockingly enough, snow. As I mentioned before Christmas, we had one small dumping of snow that created havoc in London (but didn’t stop our lovely trips to Madrid for Xmas and Somerset for New Years — more on that later).  Well, just when we thought that would be our winter storm for the season, Wednesday arrived with most of the rest of England snowed in and snow coming to London. Unlike some other parts of the country, we only got a couple of inches, but it’s stuck and is still here. So we’ve had our own little wintry wonderland.

Today, Carolyn and I braved the sub 0 (celsius) temperatures to check out Hampstead Heath, a lovely piece of semi-rural feeling parkland in North London. Here’s what we came across:

A view of all of London - but with snow!

Carolyn atop Kite Hill

Parliament Hill is a picturesque spot where you can take in a lot of London. It’s obviously a lovely spot where people fly kites and folks enjoy the wild beauty of Hampstead Heath. Behold what happens to it when some snow falls. People go “sledging” (aka. sledding) until the hill is completely bare

So on this, the shortest day of the year, Mother Nature has decided to mess with us fine Londoners by snowing a bit. I know you folks in the US have seen a bit of snow, so I’m not complaining, just observing. Just like earlier this year, the city doesn’t quite handle things when it snows. This morning, there was some remnants of ice and at lunch, we had some rain. Just another nasty winter day in London, with the darkness coming before 3pm since it was overcast. Then, in the course of an hour, the big flakes started coming down and we got a whopping 2 inches of snow. A sense of panic came over the office, with the head of the UK office saying we should all leave early to beat the misery. I hung around and the snow ended. But then the fun began. The buses, which normally show up every minute or two, were taking 10 minutes to appear and were packed. The bus stop was full and people had been waiting for 30 minutes for a bus.

After waiting 15 minutes for the first bus to show up full and pass us all by, I decided it might be a good idea to walk. So I start trekking through the icy pavement. And, lo and behold, it was a good idea. I suspect I beat the bus by 30 minutes because every main road was moving at glacier pace. The Brits do *not* know what to do with a little snow. I passed a virtual graveyard of buses that seemed to just have given up and gone out of service. I made a smart choice walking home, the city is in chaos of sorts. Here’s hoping the wet stuff melts and doesn’t freeze.
Anyway, I’ve been writing on this thing for almost 3 years now, so consider this an attempt to break the silence that’s been on here for a few months. Let’s start by filling in the gaps of the autumn that are here and not just post links to pictures.

Festivals are a part of British summer culture. There large numbers of them every weekend. They run the range of the arts, but the best known ones are music festivals (Glastonbury, with 200,000 people, being the biggest and best known). Carolyn and I decided that we needed to experience one, so we went to the End of the Road Festival, a smaller “boutique” festival of about 5,000 people. It was a wonderful 3 days in the country, camping and listening to music. Here’s a lot of photos we took while we were there:

End of the Road Festival Photo Dump

Enjoy!

The last Bank holiday of the year Carolyn and I went to Belgium (See writeups about the sites and the food and drink). Now that we’ve written about them, here are a lot of pictures of our trip for you to enjoy

Belgium Photo Dump

It’s been a busy month. We’ve just finished up another long weekend of travel, this time along the Welsh border. We rented a canal boat with our friends Ben, Gerry and Dan and travelled at a leisurely pace along the one of the many canals of England. These used to be the power house that allowed the Industrial Revolution to get their goods smoothly from the North down to London and then onto the rest of the world. They were made obselete by the railroads, trucking and cheap Asian labor, but now they exist as a way to enjoy the English countryside. Here are the photos I took from that trip (our friends took many more, but I think this covers it pretty well):

Canal boat trip photos

Since Carolyn did such an admirable job summing up our visual fun in Belgium, it’s my turn to sum up what we consumed whilst we were there. Belgium is known for good eats and an amazing array of beers. For a country of its size, they have hundreds of beers made there. Ignoring the swill that comes out of Inbev (yes, a Belgian company that managed to buy Anheuser-Busch), they have some very good beers and all of them have their own special glass to drink out of. I’ll just sum up a few of the more interesting ones we had (we managed to sample over 20 different beers in our weekend there, so I won’t bore you with the details).

Der Garre is a small, old bar in the center of Bruges. They have contracted out with a brewer to make their house beer. Bruges is touristy, and this place had plenty of them, but they claim the locals come just for this beer. I can understand why. It is high in alcohol (12%), but the alcohol doesn’t overwhelm it. So it has a refreshing taste as well. And it’s nice to have a little cheese with it as well. The bar was friendly and bustling both times we went.

This is Carolyn in the bar of the De Halve Maan Brewery, the last remaining brewery in Bruges. Right after WWII, there were over 30 of them. We’ve been on a few brewery tours and each one tries to make it a little interesting. As this place had been brewing beer for 150 years, the process has been modernized and requires less space. So, while they have a big building for brewing, they only really need part of it to brew the beer. As a result, they’ve kept the old bits around as a view into the past of brewing and show you around it. It was very interesting to see the way things have changed. People need not crawl around closed fermenters cleaning beer out of it while getting drunk on beer fumes. De Halve Maan make three beers, Brugse Zot blond and brown and Straffe Hendrick. We had all three at one point and they were all lovely. We liked the glasses so much, we bought two to bring home.

In Belgium, there’s a beer store called brewmania where you can buy a beer and drink it on site. The owner was a friendly, knowlegable and chatty guy who was happy to help find recommendations for us. This happens to be his house beer. The glass is an interesting combo of a typical Belgian beer glass but the stem is a handle, to keep the beer from getting warm by you touching it with your hand.

There are 7 monasteries in Belgium that still make beer. They’re trappist ales. Among them, Westvleren is the hardest to find. They only make exactly the amount they need support themselves for the year and avoid labels and other marketing. As a result, their beer is a bit rare and not cheap. It doesn’t help that they make very good beer that has won awards. Beermania had some, so I had to splurge and have a bottle. It lived up to expectations.

Now onto food. Belgium is a lovely place to eat. It’s even better if you like meat and fries. There are fries everywhere. We ate more than our share of them. The dish above is a local dish called Waterzooi which is a stew of chicken, veg and a cream-based sauce. It was delicious. I also ate way too much steak while I was here. Carolyn avoided that for more fish based dishes. We definitely ate well overall, although there was the occasional meal that wasn’t perfect. The lunch in the picture above was excellent.

The last weekend in August is August Bank Holiday in England (and much of Europe, I think).  It marks the end of the 6 week school summer vacation and is the last public holiday until Christmas.  We decided to take advantage of the three day weekend to hop the Eurostar under the Channel and head to Belgium.  The Eurostar terminal is at St. Pancreas station - just a 15 minute bus ride from our flat.

We took the 7 am train from London and arrived in Brussels at 10 am (even with a one hour time change).  Our plan for the weekend was to head to Brugge, the capital of West Flanders and a canal based UNESCO World Heritage site, and enjoy some Belgium chocolate, frites and beer.  We stayed at the Bauhaus Hostel just outside the main city centre and after dropping off our bags headed out to explore.

Here is the belfry in the city centre, we climbed all 366 steps to the top:

Here is a view from the top:

We explored through lots of cobblestone streets, toured a brewery and an old beguinage and enjoyed some good fish stew, steak, frites and belgium waffles.  We even rented bikes and journeyed a few kilometers out of town to Damme.

On Monday we got up early to catch the bus to DeHaan, a town on the coast of the North Sea.  We got to town about 9 am so the beach was pretty quiet.  We had it to ourselves for a little bit and then the crowds started to come out.  So we headed back to Brussels where we would spend our last night before catching the 7 am train back to London - just in time to get to work for 9 on Tuesday.

Here is a picture from the beach:

We only had one evening to explore Brussels but it seems like an exciting city with tons of amazing architecture - old and new.  Like this Art Nouveau building:

I’ll leave it to Matt to fill you in a bit more on the food and beer we enjoyed in Belgium.

Back in June, I made a trip to the east coast for my cousin’s graduation from high school.  It was a great week where I got a chance to catch up with family in Connecticut and New Hampshire and spend the weekend in Boston with friends.  I was even able to make it to my friend Naomi’s wedding (she was nice enough to schedule it for the weekend after the graduation).  All in all it was a great trip home.  Matt was even able to join us for the weekend in Connecticut to see all the family and celebrate the graduation.

Here is Tony getting ready for the big event.  Note the coordination of family clothing.

I had the chance to see my little cousin Carmen starting to crawl as well.  No photos to share but here she is celebrating with me and Tony.

Naomi’s wedding was at the Elm Bank Horticultural Center in Wellesley, MA.  It was a beautiful setting and ceremony and a great party.  Here is Haley and I with the bride:

And the balloon bride and groom:

While visiting Matt’s family in Tuscon, we had a chance to venture over to Bowie, Arizona to visit the straw bale house my friend is building in the desert.  Unfortunately, she was out of town (in Michigan) for a few weeks so we didn’t get a chance to see her.  Ground breaking on the house was back in April and at this stage the foundation has been poured, the walls are up and the roof is on.  We had a chance to poke around the site and check out the views.  I was really happy to get to see the house in progress and can’t wait to come back to see it all finished.  I am so impressed with what Nicole has accomplished - she created the drawings, has learned tons about construction and with the help of family and friends, has been building her home herself.

Here’s Matt outside the house.

While in the area we had the chance to explore some other beautiful places as well.  First we visited Katchner Caverns, an amazing limestone cave, which was only “discovered” in 1974 and open to the public only after efforts were made to ensure its preservation in the 1990s.  No photos allowed inside.

Afterwards, we went for a lovely walk in Chiricahua National Monument, a maze of rock spires.  Although we left Matt’s parents at 5:30 am, by the time we went to the airport, had breakfast, went to the caves and drove the couple hours over to the Bowie area, we didn’t arrive at the monument until about noon.  So we set off for our 2 hour walk in the heat of the day, not great timing for us wimps used to England temperatures.  It was well worth it though to see such amazing scenery.  It must be wonderful to see this place in all seasons.  An example of the views:

After this action packed day, we headed back to Tucson and finally got to experience a southwestern rainstorm complete with thunder and lightning.

By popular demand, I would like present a photo dump of our trip to Denver and Arizona. ‘Twas a lovely time and a good start to what looking like a busy couple of months of travel and visitors (hurray!).

A typical scene in my life this week:

After our celebrations in Denver, we all travelled down to Arizona to enjoy my parents beautiful home with its spectacular setting and views. Here would be me sitting enjoying a well earned beer before meeting all the nice people my parents have met since moving to AZ. A very relaxing week so far. Alas, we’ve got less than 3 days before we begin our journey back to the UK.

Just a quick note to present to my world Dr. Lisa Badanes. She officially got her PhD in developmental psychology. Carolyn and I are in Denver to celebrate her great achievement. Congratulations Lisa!!

For those of you unaware, the birth of Carolyn is on 15 July. And it happens every year! Happy Birthday to her!

This year, we went for a bit of culture. In Regent’s Park, one of those wonderfully manicured English green spaces, there’s a summer outdoor theatre. Now, this could be seen as not the best idea in the world since England usually has a bit of rain now and then . Regardless, we wanted to see some acting in a nice green setting, so we planned to have a picnic in the park followed by some Oscar Wilde. We packed a nice meal and wine and trekked to the West London. The day had been grey and raining on and off all day, but the weather forecast (which is NEVER accurate here), claimed it would let up by the evening. We stepped off the tube and, the moment we stepped into the park, the skies opened up. Oops! We took shelter under some trees until it let up and wandered in search of a good spot to set up. Since it was raining, a little covering would be nice and we found it under a gazebo:

We planted ourselves in the spot that seemed to be most likely to hold back the rains which it did marvellously for about 30 minutes. Then the winds came. The rain kept creeping closer and more sideways so we put up our umbrella to act as a wall against the rain and just enjoyed the lovely setting, food and company. We managed to stay about 70% dry as the rains let up:

A wet, but contented, birthday girl (note how wet the floor got even with a roof over our heads). Even with the rain, we were both in quite good spirits. With the meal over, we realized that, with about 20 minutes until the play, the skies were blue and the rain was gone. A rainy picnic was fine since we had a gazebo to protect us. A rainy outdoor performance might have been less fun, so we thanked our good luck and made our way to the theatre:

Those are all cut roses to make a garden for the second act. It was a performance of the Importance of Being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde. Neither of us knew it very well but we found it quite funny and well acted. I can’t put a finger on it, but I felt like a lot of the humo(u)r, after 2.5 years as a resident of the country it takes place in wasn’t quite as lost on me as it might have been had I not been living in England. Maybe it’s just me being an ass (”oh, look at me! I know England now that I’ve spent some time here”), but I felt a little closer to the whole thing than I have when I’ve seen other British theatre.

Anyway, the rain did nothing to diminish the celebrations and we got to see some wonderful acting and culture to boot. The celebrations continued through the weekend with a nice pub crawl. All in all, a successful birthday with many more to come.

So, I think it’s been made abundantly clear that Chewy has gotten a bit fat. Anna not eating meant he had plenty of food to munch on. For the past year, he’s been on a diet which means we keep cutting back on the amount of fancy diet food he can eat since he’s not losing weight. Add to this that he misses his friend Anna, and you have a whiny cat.

We try to compensate by being his exercise companions. As luck would have it, we found out that the garden in back of our building is communal. We figured that Chewy would love to have a little outdoor play time. However, we’ve now learned that Chewy is, for lack of a better word, agoraphobic. Yes, we have a cat that is afraid of the outdoors. When we bring him outside, he gets so scared he pissed on me as I carried him down. Regardless, here are some photos of a cute cat that shows that he has in fact gone outside:

Here’s a scared little kitty hanging out on a bench in the garden.

If we bring him down in his crate, he is far more willing to just hang out. Inevitably, he will look for anything that gives him a roof of sorts, though.

Never fear, there’re some indoor stairs he does like to chill out on in the common part of the building, so we just run him around on those and give him lots of loving. Hopefully, his diet can end soon so he can stop being hungry.

Just a quick note to say hello and, for those of you reading, that I’m still alive. This evening, I’ll be doing a bit of the jetset lifestyle by spending 72 hours in the US. I arrive tonight in Boston around 10pm and then go to CT for Carolyn’s cousin’s graduation (congrats Tony!) and then up to New Hampshire before hopping a plane back to London. It’s been a year since I set foot in the US so I’m looking forward to what’s going to be a fun, but too short trip!

Well, it’s been a bit of a blog drought. I’ve got plenty to write about, but I need to get off my lazy ass and write. Alas, this entry won’t be much more lively. This past weekend, we took a road trip up to Scotland with our main destination being Edinburgh. It was a lovely weekend and a great way to see the country. It’ll be added to the list of things that require a proper write-up. In the meantime, I’m taking the boring photo dump route. Here be a link to all our photos from our trip to Edinburgh:

Well, in an attempt to not lose the blogging momentum, I’ve been back from Greece for less than 24 hours and here I am writing! This will just be a photo dump with a few select photos. In a nutshell, Greece was amazing. Relaxing, beautiful and fun. That sums it up nicely. I’ll have to post multiple things to get it all in since we spent time on 4 islands and Athens. Busy busy. Anyhoo, you can now see all our unedited Greek photos.

The lovely town of Mykonos. In the summer, this place is a mob-scene, but show up a couple weeks early and it’s quite wonderful.

The Caldera, volcanic center and town of Santorini. Yes, the white on the tops of those cliffs is a town and the houses all mostly white and blue. Love this photo. Much more on Santorini to come.

The Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. Not as big as it’s neighbour, the Parthanon that sits atop the acropolis, but it’s more intact. It was a joy to come upon this in the Ancient Greek Market (aka. the Agora).