Apptitude test

Taking my first trip south of the equator tomorrow, so for the last few weeks I’ve been busy preparing for that and trying to wrap certain things up at work. Unfortunately when you’ve got a holiday coming up you just switch off and work becomes impossible. This lead to playing with my phone a lot last week, then writing down some comments for a few of the “popular” games that have been around for a while as further procrastination. Hopefully this will also steer this away from becoming just a half-assed food and travel blog.

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I’m still here! (…sort of)

I’ve been neglecting this once again due to an incredible busy start to the year. My regular reader(s) might remember the same thing happened last year. I’m writing this now because I’ve been “forced” to take a day off work due to restrictions on the number of hours I can work per week. That will become a little clearer later, but I will first give you a quick recap of some interesting visits in one swift Jan/Feb review…

Preamble: Hopefully the slideshows are working. Copying and pasting html code is all I know and is a bit hit and miss. Click on an image set to get a closer look, or even right click and view the image during the slideshow to get right up close and personal.

Chartres: Home to one of the prettiest cathedrals in the world. Also prices half of those found in Paris.

Milan: Another magnificent cathedral, and some very good food, but I assume good food can be found anywhere in Italy. Otherwise I didn’t really like it. Too focused on fashion and the associated shopping.

Reykjavik: The amount of open space and raw natural power was amazing, and so were some of the things on the menu. I can recommend smoked puffin breast, simply because it tastes like smoked salmon with a more solid texture.
Only saw a flicker of the northern lights, so will have to try head somewhere north again next year.

London: Was back home with the family briefly and we cracked open some champagne that I had bought from Epernay last year for a special occasion. My father, a champagne fiend, loved it, therefore it must be good. I might have to return there with an empty truck.

Agen: A small pretty town, not far from Bordeaux, therefore there were some good wines to be had. I only tried one, since I was there for a meeting the next day! I felt it was more of a summer visit place.

Cattenom: Getting on a train there tonight. I’ll be observing a shutdown of a nuclear reactor then trying not to get upstaged by an inanimate carbon rod for the following week or so. There are some long night shifts to begin with over this weekend, which brings me back to why I’m not at work today.

Right, I’m off to finish packing for my power plant visit. Donuts, check. Hammock, check…

Happy new year!

2011 was a fabulous year and 2012 will hopefully be even better, excluding any apocalyptic events foretold by those upstart Mayans. The work-hard-play-hard attitude has worked well for me so I will continue in this fashion until I get a spanking from my doctor. The pages at the beginning of my 2012 agenda provided by my work sum it up nicely - helpful conversions and equations for everyday use are positioned directly opposite a vintage wine guide… for everyday use. Have a good one!

I wander… (2011)

In an effort to better trace and plan my travels, I wrote this post last year. In it I described my wishes for 2011 and all of them came true without much effort on my part. I furthered my European conquests with a trip to the Ukraine, explored more of France with trips to Reims, Lille and the south coast, and I expanded my previous international boundary to the west with a trip to the US. So now my map looks like this:

Still only 7% despite adding two new countries!? At least, next year’s travel planning is already well under way, with possible trips to FOUR new countries (Iceland, South Africa, Netherlands, Belgium), return trips to some others (Italy, USA, India) and hopefully some trips around the country I actually live in with the 12 month rail pass I recently acquired. I was going to keep the long international trips to a minimum in favour of shorter European weekends away next year, but it hasn’t really been up to me and now I’m doing both. I’m grateful I’m getting to see the world… before I squish it with my carbon footprint.

Christmas Marketing

I’ve been on various tours since arriving in Paris back in 2009. There was a generic sightseeing tour of course, bakeries why not, English/Irish pubs by accident, hidden passageways for something different and Christmas markets aplenty. I recently revisited some of those Christmas markets, and added a few more, so I thought I’d write a bit of a review for any other mulled wine fanatics out there who find themselves bored in Paris in December… in need of innovative inebriation. I’ve also tacked on some other markets in France at the end for funsies.

A caveat first of all - some of these reviews are based on vague fuzzy mulled memories from two years ago. I haven’t covered ALL the markets either, since a lot aren’t particularly well advertised and appear randomly in location and the times/dates are tricky too. Also, I’ve been spoilt by German Christmas markets, so sorry if occasionally I sound a bit underwhelmed. Can’t compare really.

Finally, German glühwein > British mulled wine > French vin chaud. They are different in subtle ways, but sometimes are just labelled the same out of ignorance. SHAMEFUL.

NOTE: 26/12/11 - updated a few sections!

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Epilogue

And so concludes my east coast adventure. After that I immediately returned to UK soil for a sort of reunion with university friends and much Pimms. I EVENTUALLY returned to work to find that everyone else had gone on holiday, so August was spent doing little work and much lazing around Paris, finishing up with Reading festival (quick review - it was good).

In September I went to the south of France to visit Marseille and Nice while staying in the small town of Tourves. I also returned to the UK again for a week of antics that took several weeks to recover from. I’ve had a pretty decadent few months from the end of May to the end of September, but its been back to long hard days at work since then which partly explains my absence. I have to get SOME done before my next set of adventures, which I have already started planning…