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Wednesday, 12 January 2011 - Happy birthday Kristina (and Zach)!

Kristina turned the big 24 today (as did her twin brother back in Texas), and since it would be a little hard to smuggle in a birthday cake and hide it somewhere in our wee apartment I had to improvise. So I threw together some eggs Benedict for breakfast this morning while she was sleeping, surrounded it with 24 candles, and voila hehe.

For dindins we headed to Favela Chic in Republique, the Brazilian joint I went to a while back with Charlotte and Pip, complete with DJ.

This is a cool spot by the way, but if you order the steak then maybe ask for it to be done à point (medium) or rare moyen (medium rare) rather than saignant (rare, and also translates to 'bleeding' hahaha). I was up at 4am chucking it back up again hehe. Word to the wise :)

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Damn those are nice scarves. I'm not usually much of a scarf man, but I don't know - these are just really cool scarves!

Friday, 14 January 2011 - Who put the penis there?!

This is the state of play in Ipswich at the moment - 30kms west of Brisbane. Meanwhile, " Gympie Pines golf course owner Mike Towler is offering a $1000 reward to anyone who can help catch the person who carved the outline of a huge penis into one of the course's greens while others battled the flood disaster elsewhere." hahaha! Bloody Australians! News article here...

Saturday, 15 January 2011 - RAAAAAR!!!

Time for some French music! Kristina and I went to the Gibus Club tonight, coincidentally right next door to Favela Chic as it turns out, to watch some of a total of eight groups each do a half-hour session as part of a competition that saw four of them through to the next round (whenever / wherever that is) based on audience votes after each set. We arrived in time to see this chick, and next up were this lot.				That is a good-looking Frenchman.

We actually came to see Silvere, my mate from work who is the drummer of the good-looking group above, and here he is getting stuck into it!		And here's the crowd getting stuck into it too, especially the dude on the floor there getting stuck into the metal barriers with his head. Silvere's group are a heavy metal / death metal / scream-into-the-microphone group, and here's a video of just how much the crowd were enjoying themselves.		30 minutes later their set was over. The guitarist had some sort of seizure on the floor, the kids in the crowd left to go to bed, and that was the end of that :)

Monday, 17 January 2011 - Six years!
Six years, and counting! Six years ago today I moved away from home and embarked on this travelling thing. 19 months in Brisbane, 24 in Edinburgh, and almost 2.5 years in London though my time in the United Kingdom is fast approaching its end.

I love reading back what I've written on this day in previous years, and seeing how my plans for the following 12 months actually panned out. This time last year I mentioned Marrakech (tick), a random tubing trip along the Danube River (fail), a trip through Central and Eastern Europe (fail), and maybe a German road trip (big fat tick!). The Central and Eastern Europe idea just never came to fruition, and too many people piked out of the Danube River idea, so that got replaced with the German road trip which to-date is easily the best road trip I've ever done (despite the Katie drama). Between that, along with the week in Egypt with Kristina and the myriad of other wee trips we did together, it's been a pretty good last few months!

All that aside, the major highlight of the last year would definitely be my secondment to Paris! And it couldn't have come at a better time really. Originally I had planned to permanently leave the UK for Canada in August last year (at which point I had been here for four years) but I decided to push it back a year since there was still a lot I wanted to see in Europe, and from a career perspective the extra year would be beneficial. It was a hard decision to make because I really am itching to move on to North America in a big way, and when August came I was pretty ready to leave London. But then came the Paris gig so now I've got the best of both worlds - the extra year to see Europe but still not really be in the UK hehe brilliant! That was also around the time Kristina came on to the scene (major highlight #2 ;) at the start of her 3.5-month stint of travelling around the continent, so I joined her in a few places and she spent a bit of time with me in Paris - good times! She subsequently returned home at the start of December, before deciding she much preferred the snow and ice and sub-zero temperatures of Paris over the sunny and warm climate of Texas, and coming back again in time for New Year's (and I may have been a slight draw as well perhaps :)

So then, my big game plan for the next 12 months or so runs like this...

My stint in Paris is due to last for about another five months. Kristina is here until early May, and we're planning a two-week trip in Scandinavia right before she leaves focusing mainly on Copenhagen and Norway - good stuff! For my (29th) birthday at the start of June I'm looking at spending a bit over a week doing Slovenia, Warsaw (the capital of Poland), and Riga (the capital of Latvia and where my grandfather was from). Some three months thereafter my five-year UK visa will expire on August 26 and I'm outta here! The following six to nine months will be spent travelling on a whim with Kristina and whoever else wants to come along. At this stage the aim is to spend a few months in Southeast Asia (covering Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, etc), a month or so in New Zealand and Australia (aiming to be home for Christmas this year), and then maybe some time in South America before I find a new place to call home (whether that be Canada or otherwise). Exciting stuff!

So here's hoping I can read back on this again a year from now and write that everything panned out exactly as I had planned! We'll see. Watch this space :)

Tuesday, 18 January 2011 - Oh and one more thing...
Forgot to mention above that I'm running in the Paris Marathon this year. One of those things to do before you die apparently, so this year I'm doing it! The big day is April 10th, so I should probably look to start doing a little training. I can cycle 100kms no problem but would be lucky to run 10kms these days. I'm not intending to go out and break any records but rather just to see what sort of time I can do as-is without taking it all too seriously.

Wednesday, 19 January 2011 - MAAAAATE!

MATE! ;)		In other news, I spotted Puss in Boots in Paris today! He may have been in disguise, but it was definitely him ;)

Sunday, 23 January 2011 - Panna cotta!

Panna cotta is an Italian dessert made by simmering together milk, cream, and sugar, mixing it with gelatin, and bunging it in the fridge until it's set. Italian though it may be it is also common in France, and Kristina and I love the stuff so I decided to try making my own!				Sheet gelatin is weird stuff!

It needs a good couple hours to set, so in the meantime we went for a wander around the city to see...		Something resembling a clown...		A street performer with machetes terrorising a young kid...

Idiots trying to drive along pedestrian streets...		And dirty old men pissing in the gutter.		All that only to find I'd used too much gelatin, and you could almost use my panna cotta as the foundation for a small building hehe. Still good though! :)

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Nothing like one of these first-thing in the morning - another protest about absolutely nothing.

Wednesday, 26 January 2011 - My life, it's random

Kristina babysits five nights a week for a French family in the east of Paris. The dad is in San Francisco this week on some training course and mum had to be in London all day today, so I found myself in this random French family's apartment with Kristina, cooking dinner for their seven-year-old daughter while their poor bunny that is doomed to spend its life in this tiny cage looked on hehe.				I tell you what this kid has some cool shit - look at this Lego! Back in my day, Lego consisted of red and yellow bricks only - boring (but we made do :)

Sunday, 30 January 2011 - Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, located 19kms west of Paris out in the suburbs on a loop of the River Seine. It has a population of over 40,000 and it supposedly the wealthiest suburb of Paris.

Despite the temperature being a tropical 1 degree (though far worse in the wind), Kristina and I spent the afternoon meandering around here.		Just missed out on the fruit and veg market - bummer. Based on the lingering stench it must be a good one!		The place was fairly quiet given it's a Sunday. We would have come out yesterday but I had to spend the day running around London to catch up on a few errands.

Parking in Paris: anywhere it (mostly) fits will do.		Spot the bitches in the back.
The suburb is built around this big thing - Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a royal palace with history dating back forever which I can't be bothered to sum up (go read the link :)
Today the château houses the Museum of National Archeology, and overlooks a massive garden and forest which has a pretty good view looking back towards Paris.

The châteaux garden just goes on and on and on, and so we bailed and wandered into the scary-looking forest instead (with old men pissing in the bushes).

Then from the forest into...		...a swimming pool hehe. Kristina spotted this from the road, and being a hardcore competitive swimmer back in her day she was curious to take a look.

Turns out there was some big three-day meet going on, so we walked on in like we owned the joint and checked it out for a while. Swimming, I'm sure some people find it totally riveting ;)				Dirty boy!

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