Jejune January

Hey Everyone ,

Wow I can't believe 20 days have gone by since we last posted a blog!
Normally in NZ, being summer, and a month filled with holidays, January goes extremely fast and before you know it you are into Feb! However, when it is winter, January is quite a long, depressing month!
So...........to counteract this depression, we have been spending money by booking trips - yay! At long last we will actually be travelling somewhere, notching up a few more stamps in our passports - next Thursday afternoon we head to Paris on the Eurostar(Chunnel) for a longer weekend, so we are really looking forward to that.

We have also just booked a 10-day trip to Egypt with Bevan's cousin and her fiancee (Dee and Mark) for Easter, so that is also very exciting -can't wait.
In the mean time, we have been quite boring lately, saving money for these trips :o) - hence the lack of blog updates!

Last weekend we went to the Borough Markets which were pretty cool - they sell mainly food, from all over the place - and they have lots of yummy cakes and cheese's and more types of mushrooms than I have ever seen in one place. We then went to Canary Wharf (where Bev works - very similar looking to the Viaduct in Auckland) to Yum Cha (Chinese Brunch) with Dee and Mark, and then a free showing of the 80's film The Goonies on a big screen at this cool dome like venue that they are trying to market as a venue to hire for conferences etc (hence the reason why it was free).

This weekend we are going to the theatre to see a show called Avenue Q (with our Kiwi friends) - which is a muppet like show so that should be entertaining, and then on Saturday night, Bev's Polish workmate and his girlfriend are coming around for dinner, and to drink Wodka (polish vodka) because Bev did this guy a favour, and in Poland you pay somebody for a good deed in Wodka - haha should be interesting.......

Otherwise we have just been watching DVD's, Bev's been playing hockey, and we have been fighting with our internet provider to have access to the internet - honestly how hard can it be!

Today I got to travel to Bristol for a meeting for work, so that was quite exciting, and a good chance to get out of the office - however, a little bit disillusioning when all you do is hop on a train, travel for 1hr 40, hop off, go to a meeting, then hop back on the train for 1hr 40 to go home!

Anyway that really is about the extent of the last 20 days of our lives! We are still holding out hope for snow, however, it appears that this is one of the warmest January's London has had on record - although I'm not complaining! We will try and stick some pics up next time of our trip to Paris!

Looking forward to hearing from you
Jam and Bev

Festive goodness

Happy New Year to all!

Christmas was awesome in the Lake District. When we arrived it looked as if it had been snowing, but it was just that everything had iced over from a couple of heavy frosts - we were surprised at how slippery walking on gravel was! We absolutely loved the farming community atmosphere (just like home for both of us) and the large amount of personal space - ie not like London!!! And we loved being able to drive round in a car, and not having to rely on public transport and walking everywhere.

Looks like snow? Just heavy frost

Our flatmates parents place was built in the 1700's and has been modified a few times over the years, so it has a lot of character to it. We were treated to some fantastic 5 star accommodation and food! The Lake District reminded us of Wanaka without the snow on massive mountains. Like Wanaka they make use of slate stones for dividing farms and walls along the road, and every house built has to have slate roofing to comply to regulations, to keep everything looking the same. Christmas day saw us gorging ourselves on a lunch consisting of a starter of salmon and salad, followed by a 5.5Kg Turkey complimented with real homemade cranberry sauce, and roast veges followed by our pavlova for dessert (it turned out well - whew!).

Jam and Mel standing on a thawing frozen lake

Typical Lake District road with slate stone walls either side

5.5 kg Turkey

Christmas feed
Quaint buildings in the small village of Hawkshead

Wray Castle

Different looking British sheep...Baa!

I had to go back to work for a day before the weekend (Friday). This proved rather interesting returning by train (as was also the case travelling up to the lake district) as Virgin trains had engineering works on at the most inconvienient time of year, so there was a mad rush of all those that didn't have a seat allocated to them (us included - damn new players!) However we were extremely lucky to find two seats beside each other the whole way there and back (including a change of train on the way back), but there were heaps of people that had to stand for the whole trip (3 hours on the way there but four on the way back due to railway works), and there was heaps of luggage in the aisles of the train with everyone travelling somewhere for Christmas -crazy stuff! The joys of public transport!

For the weekend we finally went to the Natural History Museum, the coolest museum in the world! We checked out some inspirational wildlife photos - an exhibition called the Shell wildlife photographer of the year and only managed to get through half the museum before running out of stamina...so we left the rest for another day.

For New Years Eve we spent with some Kiwis mates, Monique, Christine and Chris. Our plan was to head in to see the fire works around the London eye, but when we got into London we couldn't go any further than Trafelgar square because of the massive crowd numbers. So we were forced to stay in the square for midnight. We managed to see Big Ben tick over, but the apparently spectacular fireworks were behind some buildings, so we had to watch them from a giant screen. The most excited the crowd at Trafelgar Square was when someone let off their own piddly small sky rocket that people could actually see! We were quite disappointed not to get a chorus of auld langs aye or even a count down from ten seconds to go.

Massive crowd numbers just in Trafelgar Square

Big Ben in the distant background

Our new years day ended up being a sleep in day then it was back to the grind today. Apparently the forecast is for snow tomorrow in London with max temperatures to soar to a super cooking 3 degrees. So should be nice to see some snow finally!....might only be exciting for a minute before freezing my arse off!

Laters,Bev and Jam