Our First Michelin Star

I’ve been addicted to watching cooking shows for some time now. In fact, I have been known to sit down for 3 or 4 hours straight watching one TV Chef after another - my favourites being Rick Stein, Hugh Fernley Whittingstall, Raymond Blanc, food scientist Heston Blumenthal and of course that boy from Essex, Jamie Oliver. (I’ve never really been a fan of Gordon Ramsey – he just annoys me for some reason. Where is the love Gordon? And all that swearing in the kitchen can’t result in decent food.) Let’s not forget those reality TV cooking contests which I’m totally obsessed with either – Masterchef and The Restaurant being two of my personal favourites. Anyway, we’ve been traveling the world on a shoestring now for the last 18 months and although I’m addicted to watching these chefs on the box, I’ve only been able to afford to go to one of their restaurants and even that was the cheap trattoria section of Fifteen in London. I’ve heard about Michelin Stars and seen too many potential Masterchefs being thrown into Michelin Star restaurants attempting to replicate their food but never in my wildest dreams had I expected to be awarded that honour!

On our first night in Chalet Angelique, possibly the most annoying mother in the world Suzie, hit the nail on the head when she declared, “Oh, you’ve never cooked in this kitchen before? And this is your first week? It’s like a reality TV show!” Of course having seen so many of these Reality TV cooking shows likely gave us a clear advantage over other would be chalet hosts but what would a reality TV show be without disasters and drama? And in that first week there was plenty of that. Following completely foreign recipes in a 4 star chalet for 10 guests each paying 3000 pounds for the week, was to say the least, mildly intimidating! We managed to keep our head above water ... just ... but I tried to sever my fingers a few times, grab things out of the oven with my bare hands, burn the pastry, make a soup that no-one wanted to eat, overcook the meat ... you name it, the first week with the Riley family was definitely a rocky start. At least they were kind enough to tip – they either felt sorry for us or just liked throwing their money around. Perhaps it was Daddy’s way of answering little Johnny’s question one morning whilst we served breakfast of “What is the difference between a servant and a slave?”

As with every good reality TV cooking show, lows are usually followed by highs and following the first week from hell things had to improve dramatically. The compliments started to flow, I managed to relax, ignore those stupid recipe suggestions made by our employers (clearly they weren’t as well versed in TV cooking prowess as we were), improvise a little and cook things I was more comfortable with. Soon after came the ultimate accolade from the Morris family when they awarded me a Michelin Star for my chicken and mushroom pie. And despite Tilly, their 19 year old gap year/ski-bum daughter (with 3 pairs of skis and 10 ski outfits), who was on a diet of one Danois Big Breakfast a day not eating anything, I think the Morris’s were pretty well credentialed to award this prestigious prize. I mean any parents who don’t mind paying their daughter’s 2500 pound mobile phone bill (wake up to yourselves you morons!) must have graced the inside of at least a couple of Michelin Star restaurants. I’m not sure you’ll find a Michelin Star chicken and mushroom pie anywhere else in Europe, so I’m quite chuffed with this award! Further, they then went on to inform our employers that over 15 years visiting Val ours was the best chalet food they had ever eaten! I’m not sure whether it was just my food or Konrad’s excellent fire making, wine pouring, ski advice and general chit chat (probably a combination of both) but by the end of our 3 week stint, we’d started to find it all rather pleasant and maybe even consider a career change? Chalet Hosting with the Goulaszes! I’m just wondering how we go about selling this concept to the BBC?

With 3 weeks of work complete and ski passes secured, there was even plenty of tip money – except for that last mob of 12 (half vegetarian, half confused, half who ate bacon but no pork and some children who only ate couscous, strawberries and carrots). Their thanks were quite sincere I know but they failed to leave any financial reward behind! Don’t these guys get it, we don’t care for verbal compliments, its all about cold hard cash! I know we should have done it for the love of cooking and great service but financial realities have to be taken into consideration sometimes too. This is likely one of the most expensive places in world and beers don’t come cheap – even when you are best mates with the barmen. Show me the money!!!

Anyway, since we have found solace in the fact that in late March the snow started to fall and hasn’t stopped. It’s now the 20th of April and we’ve had nothing but powder sessions on the mountain! I have skied more off-piste in the last two weeks than in my whole skiing career and I’ve finally started to weight my skis properly in the powder! We won’t mention too much about our near encounter with an avalanche but we are being safe and just playing around in the white stuff while it lasts. There are now only two weeks of the season left and we’re going to try and not let the sore ribs (yes Konrad got on a snowboard a couple of times and has taken a few hits), manky rash on my feet from being in ski boots for too long and other muscle ails from getting in the way of a fantastic end of season here in Val.

We plan to leave here around the 7th of May, before heading up to Scotland to visit John and Emma in Edinburgh and hopefully get in a spot of camping in the Highlands.

I'll leave you with lots of photos of skiing and powder :)

'Til next time ...

Nous et Nos Baggages

So there we were, late in the morning on beautiful bluebird day, it had just snowed, I had just turned 32, we were in Verbier (which is a reasonably worthy contender for the Goulaszes’ Meilleure Station du Monde Award) and we’re having a coffee rather than ripping up the slopes? It takes a lot to break a Goulasz! Even more to dissuade him from skiing on his birthday! And as I sit here writing this post I still can’t believe that I would be admitting that on that 2nd morning in Verbier I was too ill to get up the hill.

Rewind back to the previous Thursday and it’s possible that my body could have been weakened by that Yellow Fever vaccination or the Hep A booster? (Just in case you were wondering, no the Yellow Fever jab wasn’t for Switzerland… sure they all look as if they’re a little disease ridden but I’m advised it’s not a high risk zone :)). Maybe the all night session with Garth et al on the Saturday night prior had taken its toll? Hmmm… there’ll all good possibilities but I still reckon the culprit was that faaarking 47kg ski bag!!

I know what you’re thinking. And sure, you’re right! It’s all our own fault... we have entirely too much ski gear and we really do need to do a big cull. I’ve been telling Nic for weeks that we don’t need more than one pair of undies each – I don’t know why she won’t just turn them inside out? And that pair of skis of hers... honestly it’d really be cheaper for both of us if only I went up anyway :) – kidding sweetie... hmmm I think I may have just become an eligible bachelor again ladies. Anyway, despite not wanting to take too much rubbish away with us (and of course leaving a whole bunch of other stuff back in London in any case) you do end up finding yourself thinking you could do with this and that and given that this 6ft ski bag of ours seems to be comprised of antimatter or something you just find yourself saying “yeah of course it’ll fit... you take that 78th pair of undies sweetie”. I guess then we shouldn’t have been too surprised to find that following the longest tube interchange of my life at Green Park, where we were actually asked who it was that we were dragging away with us on a couple of occasions, when we checked in at Heathrow the ski bag weighted in at 46.8kg. I’m still amazed that they didn’t make a fuss about letting us on the plane.

The next 11 hours of transfer saw all sorts of special privileges being afforded to Mr Ski Bag. I mean not only did he manage to take up at least 4 seats on the multiple trains that we needed to take to Verbier from Geneva but I’m sure I also heard every courtesy being extended to him as he muscled his way past unsuspecting commuters – I’m sure “Attention, degage” is a courtesy... at least that’s how we chose to receive it. Following an exhausting day of cursing our luggage we arrived at “The Bunker”.


Now, I know that we claim to be ‘Traveling the World in Style’ and we’re forever being greeted with “vous etes toujours en vacances” (or ‘you guys are always on holidays’... some of which is true I suppose) but the less glamorous side of seeking to do as much as possible on a shoestring is staying at the most modestly priced accommodation in a place – one that boasts invitation only bars that sell 50 pound mojitos and cater to Russian oligarch’s mistresses’ tastes by offering 5000 pound cocktails. (I’ve no idea why we weren’t invited into this place. Had they not heard that we were coming?) Anyway, to set the scene “When it reeks of Funk, You know you’re in The Bunk” was where we staying in Verbier. And when I come to think of it, although the graffiti warnings inside this remnant of the Cold War (it really is a converted old bomb shelter) referred mostly to mysterious skin diseases, it is possible that there may have been an altogether different bug that I could have contracted here – I think I prefer my ski bag story though.

We spent all of 4 days in Verbier although only managed to get up for one day due to bad weather (which meant we didn’t actually get to see all of the resort either due to lift closures etc) and me picking up that mysterious bug. A rating really shouldn’t be put on Verbier but we’re not sure it’ll be the Meilleure Station du Monde.


Following this we went on the most beautiful train ride in the Swiss Alps from Verbier to Chamonix, France. We had done the drive in the Summer and traveling in the winter by train was no less spectacular, with Chamonix’s peaks and many glaciers making it a unique and extraordinary place to be at any time of the year. More importantly though this is the alleged home of mountaineering, it was one of the first places to host the Winter Games, it is the place that always features on Warren Miller videos not to mention the place we had finally decided against for last season due to its more cumbersome ski accessibility – you’re a good 45min to an hour from getting up the mountain in the morning. To the die hard however this place is awesome – the steeps of Le Grand Montets, Flegere and Brevent, the rock formations, the possibility of absolutely crazy (I can hear Finfin saying “It was like a... a knife edge” in the background) descents, the don’t forget your passport and peanut butter sandwiches free-riding, the extreme rock climbing up sheer rock faces and needles etc do make this a truly exceptional place. Great resorts and if you can remain patient this place has a real and fantastic non pretentious vibe too. It was awesome to hang out with Garth and enjoy the next 10 days there in a Hostel in Les Pelerins.




Of course other than just being an amazing place to hang out and go skiing Chamonix Mont-Blanc is home of the highest lifted point in the world, Aiguille du Midi (though this may have just been overtaken by Kashmir), the highest mountain in Europe and one of the most famous off-piste runs in the world, the Vallee Blanche. The ascent of 2800m from Chamonix to the peak of Aiguille du Midi – the start of the run, was also a great place for Nic to try to conquer her fear of heights. We started the decent from the top with one of our group and our Guide Lillian both wearing crampons and all of us roped together in order not to accidentally slide all the way to the bottom of the valley – I was of course the only one in the group to slip on the icy ridge... not at all helping with Nic’s vertigo. The run itself on top of the glacier with its crevasses and seracs and magnificent scenery is something not to be missed when in the area and we’re stoked to have been able to do it.




From Les Pelerins there was just one last 1km walk to the train station at 6 in the morning with Mr Ski Bag before our final transfer back to our surrogate home in the mountains of Val d’Isere. Greeted by Phil at Bourg St Maurice, we were delighted to arrive back to see friends and the village covered in 1m of snow. A special thanks to Phil and Alex for putting us up at the Hotel for the first couple of days before we could move into our apartment. Speaking of thank-you's, a huge thanks also to Magalie for sorting out our lovely studio apartment. (What a step up from last year –mezzanine bedroom, flat screen TV, washer drier, dishwasher and most importantly right in the centre of town.)



Anyway, between the first days of skiing we also managed to run into Paul and Debbie from Mountain Rooms (while visiting Philippe and Simonetta who we worked for last year) who we found to be desperate for a couple of Chalet Hosts – for their 5 star, 3 storey palatial ‘vieux village’ 10 person Chalet. Knowing full well that there’s no challenge beyond our superhuman abilities, it was the fact that we had trusty, never miss a ski trip (and No, I don’t read your blog!) Garth and Arek and Kasia from Poland on their way for the Easter weekend that had us saying “we’d love to help out but only after the weekend”. Despite this of course, as luck (or perhaps the financial incentive of 2 ski passes to the end of the season for working the Easter weekend) would have it, we found ourselves saying yes to running our own Chalets for a couple of weeks. I mean how hard could it be? ‘Roast red onion, sun dried tomato and pear tart with puy lentil cream; Roasted rack of lamb with gratin and trio of steamed beans served with roast garlic and olive jus, and; Lemon Brulee with poppy seed shortbread’ couldn’t be that hard to pull off? Could it? (With Garth moving into our cool little studio with us it was time to practice, as that’s what we ate on our first night for dinner at Chalet Goulasz).


Having now hosted five amazing dinner parties for high paying guests, while at the same time skiing and partying with our guests Garth, Arek and Kasia (apologies again for having to work over the weekend guys) – not to mention the local crew – we pick up our season passes this afternoon having spent our first day by ourselves in our little Chalet of an apartment on our day off. Setting tea-towels on fire, dropping whole pepper corns into a children’s bolognaise, putting salt instead of sugar into the satay sauce and many burns and cuts to the poor old hands have all just been part of the fun :).


The conditions here are absolutely fantastic, the snow was too deep to ski off-piste just a few days ago, we managed to find a few days of work to help pay for being here and we look forward to an amazing 6 weeks of skiing to the end of the season. Look forward to telling you all about it next time!

Sante!

Why Does Houseshare Always End in Tears?

I moved out of home when I was 18, so you'd think I'd know enough about the world to avoid putting myself into a houseshare arrangement at the age of 30. I know I haven't always been perfect (sorry Tash for the clothes graveyard - I have improved somewhat since then) but the list of crazy flatmates is long and exhaustive - there was Chris the steroid pumped protein shake freak, the ex DJ Sally ‘please make no noise’ Sound, not to mention Zoe the Salsa dancing man-eater just to name a few but I hadn't envisaged adding any more names to the list! With all this worldly knowledge behind me, you'd think I might have worked out that houseshare really isn’t worth the few pennies in savings! However, having come to London with the very clear objective to save money and run, in our blind optimism (it had been a year since we’d been in the real world after all) we figured it was the most viable solution... oh, the fact that no real estate agent would talk to us without jobs or bank accounts may have been a secondary consideration. I will also add that I thought it would benefit Konrad, who had the luxury of being cooked and cleaned for by his mother for 27 years, to have flatties for a few months. How can one go through life without this experience? (In blissful ignorance I suppose).

Firstly, let me say I think Konrad is one of the most anally retentive men I’ve ever come across... sorry sweetie, you know I love you but there is a reason your nickname is sudsy and it’s got everything to do with the exfoliating gloves, the bottle of bleach, those perfectly hung suits and your daily obsession with washing everything in sight! By all accounts you sound like the perfect flatmate however your complete lack of tolerance for anyone who is slightly below par in the cleaning stakes is perhaps something you needed to work on – every cloud has a silver lining! You like to run a clean and highly ordered life! You are used to spending 3 hours vacuuming one room, breaking out in a sweat when cleaning the bathroom, scrubbing the dishes until every last piece of bacteria has been removed! I know you think that's what everyone does and I know you think you're not highly strung but that 'my way or the highway' attitude to shared living perhaps wasn't always the best tack to take.

The signs were there the day we moved in... the 3cms of dust on the picture rails, the 3 month old splash of yoghurt down the back of the fridge, the caked on exploded egg in the microwave, the flatmate that locks her room, wears thongs in the shower to avoid the dirt (that's flip flops not a g-string for those who need an English language translation) and lives on Sainsbury’s Tikka Masala ready meals. We ignored all of these and approached the situation with zest and enthusiasm! This was going to be great! We will do a bit of cleaning to begin with (about 5 hours in the end) and the house will be ours and liveable. We will inspire them to keep it clean by ‘setting the right example’. They will want to keep it that way. We will change ourselves and the world of our housemates forever – never to look back!

I successfully counselled Konrad through the first month, however not long after he burst into the living room to find a pair of jeans being dried on the radiator with the couch in the middle of the room. I wasn’t actually in the room but all I heard was "this is not a Chinese laundry!" being yelled at the top of his lungs. Okay so maybe he was being a bit unreasonable and others did have certain rights in the house too but the next thing we are being told by the righteous one was "this is a democracy" - hadn't she ever heard of 'Konrad the Despot'? And how can we now be denied access to her pots and pans (that were only worth 10 quid 3 years ago) in this democracy? We don't eat ready meals! Nor are we able to use that stanky arse microwave!

Anyway, I could go on to list another 30 odd incidences including taking our wet washing and throwing it on the dirty floor, constantly having to pick up long black hair from the bathroom floor, watching the garbage bin overflow until the bag burst, finding wax strips with body hair stuck to the to the top of the garbage bin and the piece de resistance, putting a dirty dish in a clean dishwasher and re-running it so as to avoid having to unstack it. Yes they're all true! Come to think about it though wearing shoes in the shower to avoid cleaning actually does take the cake.

Houseshare is a democracy though I suppose and we are all allowed to behave however we like as we all pay rent... fair enough... but finally, I snapped. There was this "this is about everybody" line that I was subjected to last week. Sensing the mounting tensions, Santosh decided to approach me for a 'discussion’... wanting to clear her name of all wrong doing before we left. The conversation went something like this "I think it’s unfair that I should do any cleaning, if the other housemate involved does not do his fair share"... I don’t remember much else... all I know is my blood started boiling and I yelled "you are so f*&n lazy.... watching us clean for 6 months is completely fair and democratic then? I love your long black hair... it gives me pleasure to have to pick it out of the shower every morning". Yes I suppose I had finally lost it too! Maybe a little immature of me but that 'all about me' logic had just gone too far - even though the fact that she used to vacuum her room up to her door and happily watch us do the rest of the house had been grating on my nerves for a while. So it’s all gone pear-shaped again - another flatmate relationship to the grave! This one will be remembered as Santosh - The Democratic One... it’s about everybody as long as I don’t have to lift a finger for anybody!

Chatting to my sister on messenger this morning, she did point out that all this will in fact be good practice if we ever decide to have children. She tells me through great experience that it is all about them - you clean the place, they trash it, you clean it, they trash it and then never give anything back... sorry Mum, it must have been awful!

Houseshare rant complete, back onto our travels – this is supposed to be a travel blog after all. The 6 month money run is over – our mission is complete! The work contracts are drawing to a close and we are ready to pack it all in and resume that more glamourous life of skiing, travel and adventure. Most of you reading this probably think – geez guys, you're not living in the real world. Back on the road again? Aren’t the frivolities over yet? Aren't you going to finally realise you have to settle down, progress your career, have a family and lay claim to some assets. Yeah maybe? But not until we’ve skied Verbier and Chamonix, seen NYC and the States, learnt Spanish, scaled the mountains to Machu Pichu and partied in Rio :). Maybe then we'll think about settling down... or maybe we'll just have to start up a business in the Alps :)) Only time will tell.

Let me just finally reflect on our experiences of the last six months for a moment. London to me is like an unsettled relationship... you love it, you hate it, you want to leave but you don’t. It gives you money but restricts your freedoms. It makes you laugh, cry, get angry and all fuzzy inside... and then finally you leave but with some fond memories of all those experiences and emotions and you’re glad that you went there but not sure if you’ll ever go back again. You know what they say, if you make it to 6 months you’ll make it to 2 years, if you make it past 2 years you’ll make it to 5. I guess we’re not going to make it much past 6 months so perhaps it’s been a fairly superficial experience. We do feel like we’ve gotten to know it a little bit, fall in love with it a little bit and despite that we’re now ready to move on.

Thanks to everyone who helped make it an enjoyable time here. Garth in particular who just kept inviting us to those crazy Clapham BBQs. Thanks to you and your lovely friends we managed to develop some sort of social circle whilst we were here and we’re really looking forward to gatecrashing Shazza’s farewell party on Saturday night and calling it our own :). A note to all the visitors as well – Mick and Bel, Nora, Scott, Dany & Clare, Billy, Antho & Amanda and most recently Art. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing you all and it was great that you could share our experience of London with us.

I’ll leave you with some final photo impressions of the UK, including a recent trip in the rain up to the beautiful university town of Cambridge.

Cheers and we’ll look forward to blogging next from the Alps.

Is that the ghost of London? ... Garth in supernatural mode.



Art and the 75,000 Pound Mammoth Tusk in Harrods! Just what you need for your townhouse back home.


Riding the London bus!


Outside Jamie's Restaurant after an excellent meal.


View from St James' Park


St Pauls Cathedral


One of the hundreds of Ferraris driving the city on a daily basis!


First Tripod Shot with NEW camera - a few things to master but we'll get there


Cambridge


Cambridge


Dedicated sightseeing in the rain - Cambridge



PS: And for those that are interested here is a rough itinerary of our plans for the next 6 months:

March 3 – 7: Verbier, Switzerland
March 7 – 16: Chamonix, France
March 16 – May 4: Val d’Isere, France (Will have an apartment so if you're in the area please stop in and stay!)
May 4 – 7: Paris (One last stop in one of my favourite cities)
May 7 – June 3: London, Edinburgh, Scotland, Lakes District, Cornwall
June 4 – July 18: Canada & US
July 18 till the money ends: South America
Sept/Oct: Arrive in Oz

A Quick Vitamin D Hit!

It takes a little while to come to terms with living a pseudo civilized, routine life in Hampstead and although not unhappy it seems that our zest for life recently has been somewhat tempered. So we’re living in a pretty swish part of London – we have the odd 17th century public house (with some fantastic Ales to had), this amazing French creperie (that’s been around for 27 years) on the High Street, a boulangerie or even two for that matter selling pretty decent French breads and patisseries – but it seems like there’s just that something missing. I mean having to suspend yourself like Superman over a crowd of people on the Central line Tube every morning while trying to make it to the office on time (though mildly amusing at first) doesn’t really tell the whole story either. No, to fully appreciate it, you need to feel the gloom descend on the city gradually, observe it engulfing the commuting public, sense the tiring mood in the office and find yourself reading in the Daily Mail that “20% of British children are vitamin D deficient”.


You wonder why really? So the sun only gets out of bed after you’ve had to. You spend the first moments of your day sandwiching yourself into crowds of people so as not to risk having to let every train pass you by. But you’re indoors all day absorbing reasonably healthy doses of ultra-violet radiation from you computer screen – surely your body’s metabolising that somehow? Ok, so by the time you finish the daily grind it’s already been dark for a few hours but hey there’s always 2 or 3 hours of sunlight that you could catch on the occasional sunny weekend… I mean you could get lucky! Then again perhaps you could even spend a couple of hours every week in the solarium to get your daily dose… that said, not wanting to risk potentially becoming some manic depressive statistic we instead headed to the Alps for that very much needed vitamin D hit (see title pic).

It was just in time too I reckon as having been uninspired to write anything for a while chances were that the soap opera of our lives could have been pulled off the air… hmm perhaps not (as I do like the sound of my own voice) but it was really good to be back on the continent, get some sun, spend some time with friends, put a few turns in and contemplate the meaning of life. (The answer by the way we figure isn’t actually 42 it’s more like 44 when you add more ski time into the equation – very important!).

Rewind back to Nic’s last post in late October and though the weekends always seem just that little bit too short we’ve nonetheless managed to keep ourselves manically busy. As mentioned, the day after her post we found ourselves at the London Wine Show and it didn’t take very long at all for us to have tried sufficiently enough wine for me to be tasting all sorts of things in the wine on offer – interestingly most things did in fact have strong overtones of ‘plums’:). It’s worth mentioning how good it was to get such a broad exposure to the product on offer from across the world. Literally every “new” and “old” world region was covered. We sampled from Chile and Argentina to California to some of the best from France – mind you, despite their trying to re-gain market share we had to pay for the 50 pound a bottle ‘premier cru’ from Bourgogne that we tried and just refused to pay 10 pounds a taste for the 150 pound bottle on offer at the same stand. (Don’t these guys get it? It’s supposed to be free… it’s a Wine Show!). Anyway, bang for buck the Goulasz award for ‘best at show’ goes to a 12 pound Malbec from Argentina – fruity, velvety and awesome. As for the Frenchies, the fact that their product is so stupidly overpriced here really isn’t doing them any good – drink French wine only when in France I say! Nor is the fact that Australian wine is very well regarded here also; be prepared to pay through the nose for anything that’s worth drinking – Jacob’s Creek, Hardy’s, Rosemount, etc, aren’t actually worth drinking, nor are they worth the 10 pounds they’re selling for! Guess it’s probably a good thing that English don’t know any better… the half price Spanish Tempranillo from Sainsbury’s is usually the better pick we reckon.


Moving from Wine onto Cars, MPH the following weekend was in fact just as the ad said… Car Heaven! An impressive amount of beautiful toys for me to drool over followed by Jeremy Clarkson (who interestingly is being petitioned to replace Gordon Brown as PM – what would happen to Top Gear if that happened?), Richard Hammond and James May suggesting the introduction of new Olympic sports for 2008 such as; dodge ball played with 3 series convertible BMWs armed with tennis ball canons and; car football played with Suzuki Swifts and one great big soccer ball (sorry I mean foot ball). I wonder if we’ll see them in Beijing?

A couple of weeks hence we found ourselves doing the Friday night after work run out to Heathrow for an all too rushed weekend with Scott in Amsterdam – great to see you again mate. It was all a bit dazed and confused really but we visited a few ‘typical tourist hang-outs’ (mum I didn’t inhale I promise) and somehow managed to avoid getting run over by those crazed “farjars” on their bicycles (ref Goldmember if you’ve never heard the Dutch being referred to as that). While we did also manage to make it into the Rijksmuseum for a brief visit – we’re really not as uncultured as would seem – we mostly wandered the beautiful canals, noted the roaring trade being done in the red-light district on Saturday night, ate these really tasty deep fried pastry balls and took entirely too many average happy snaps. (Damn this flat, hardly existent northern European light!)




Other notable highlights since have been; our visit to Worthing to see Nic’s Aunt Marian, Uncle Colin and cousin Amanda – this was followed by staying a night at the English seaside town of Brighton (inviting isn’t it? – see pic below); paying homage to John Lennon at the Abbey Road studios; strolling down the canals of Little Venice; and finding a recognition of Australian greatness while on a visit back to Brighton to catch up with Mike and Daisy (pretty self explanatory really, though I will add that given that there just aren’t enough Australian trained baristas here we’ve both just switched to drinking tea in any case).






Of course it would be remiss of me not to admit being somewhat taken aback by British greatness too – despite the fact that they can’t do something as simple as make a decent flat white… in fact most of them don’t actually know what one is… and for the record a Gingerbread Latte from Starbucks doesn’t constitute a real coffee!! Its American crap catered to the unsophisticated, jacket potato with beans and cheese eating English palate!! Anyway, back to noting British greatness (could be the only time ever you know), I was particularly awestruck on a visit to Greenwich, where after seeing John Harrison’s first attempts at solving the problem of longitude (he was the inventor of the world’s first marine chronometer – H4 was accurate to 5.1 seconds over a period of 2 months on it’s test sea voyage) and looking down the Prime Meridian of the World from Observatory Hill, you really have to acknowledge the fact that this is the epicenter of Western civilization.


Coming into Christmas its worth noting too how beautiful a festive London is (see pics of Covent Garden below), as is that this year was my first ever traditional English Christmas – being Polish we’ve generally always celebrated on Christmas Eve. It was fantastic to spend Christmas with Anthony, Amanda and Maya (who we were meeting for the first time – congratulations again on a beautiful baby girl guys) and Amanda’s parents Steven and Jenny in their home in Wantage, just outside of Oxford. We really enjoyed spending time with all of you and also feasting on the traditional English Christmas lunch foods of Turkey, Goose, Gammon, roasted vegetables (including parsnip), and of course Christmas pudding with custard and brandy butter.




Starved of sunlight and carrying an additional 5 kilos each following all that Christmas cheer, need I mention how good it was to end the holiday break with an all too short a visit back to Val d’Isere. It was fantastic to be so warmly received by the entire crew (you know who you are – you seem like family to us), to spend an amazing New Year’s Eve with you all and to be back in our surrogate home in the mountains – can’t wait to get back there soon. Also, a brief apology to all those whose lack of physical condition we were so completely oblivious to last season. Gradually working ourselves into the skiing we didn’t even notice how physically demanding a sport it is and the pain felt on day 2 this time around was I guess our comeuppance.



Finally a very Happy New Year to everyone… we wish you all a fantastic 2008 and look forward to reporting on our further adventures as they fall due.