Back from Guernsey, Channel Islands

Hello there,

Just got back from a week long work trip to Guernsey. Guernsey is the second largest Channel Island, about 14 miles north of France. St Peter Port is the capital, and has a beautiful harbour. I was there for work for the week, and then Scott was able to join me for the weekend. The Channel Islands were populated by the Normans and are part of Great Britain, but not the UK or EU. Guernsey is adorable, I love it. Its like a little sea side resort, half english and half french...and great food. Spent a relaxing weekend eating and taking pics. I cant wait to return! Unfortunately they restrict who can buy property there, and lets just say Scott and I dont make enough to qualify...so we will have to look elsewhere for a cottage by the sea...ha.

Scott's Dublin Pictures

Jamie wrote a fairly extensive trip report for our Dublin trip, not much I can add - plus I'm off work sick today and not feeling particularly motivated.

Here are my pictures from the trip:

Arsenal - LIVE!

For my birthday this year, John, Ken and Christie got me a ticket to last night's Arsenal match against the Blackburn Rovers - there's a waiting list to buy a club membership which allows you to buy tickets, so for a non-club member to get to go to a game is pretty cool.

The match itself wasn't really Arsenal's finest to be honest - an early goal by Senderos was excellent, but the Gunners spent most of the rest of the first half giving the ball away and making sloppy plays. Most frustrating was their inability to actually take a damn shot when they had the chance - they seemed more interested in making pretty passes than scoring another goal. The second half was a bit better bit a lot more pressure on what turned out to be a pretty solid Rovers defence. Final goal was scored by Adebayor in injury time after a few good chances had been missed.

Dublin, this time as a tourist!

We returned to Dublin this weekend for a trip as a tourist. Scott wanted to see where I was working, and I also wanted to see the sights.

We caught a 10am flight on Sat from Gatwick. We got a terrific (wow, havent used that word in a while) deal on flights from Ryanair...36 GBP total for 2! I really hate how they dont assign seats though, so at the gate its chaos as everyone tries to get on first to get a good seat. I fail to see how this makes things faster or cheaper. Anyways, we arrived and headed straight to our hotel on O'Connell street to drop off our bags.

O'Connell Street is the main shopping street on the North side of the River Liffey. We walked down the street and headed down the river pathway towards the Irish Sea. I pointed out my office building then we hit a pub for some lunch. After that we jumped on a Hop On Hop Off bus to get a tour of the city. Yes they are cheesy, but we love them and its a good way to see what the city is all about. The tour around took 1.5 hours, but we got the lay of the land and had a really funny guide. Did you know that the lion at the beginning of MGM movies (his name is Rory) was born and raised at the Dublin Zoo?? Who knew!

After that we decided we were thirsty so we went to Temple Bar (an area of Dublin, not a bar) and found that every pub we went into was FULL due to the Ireland vs France 6 Nations Rugby Tournament. We finally got a seat at a bar and had a Guinness (first of many). We then wandered around and ended up having dinner at Fire. It was a nice restaurant, but the food wasnt as great as we expected. Of course after dinner we were thirsty, so we went across the street to a really cool bar called Cafe en Seine and enjoyed a bottle of wine. An fine end to a good day.

The next morning, being Sunday and all, we decided it was time to go to a spiritual place. We hoped on the bus, past Christchurch Cathedral, past St Patrick's Cathedral and got off the bus with everyone else at the Guinness Storehouse! Its actually really well done, although a bit pricey. We spent about 2 hours going through, taking pics and drinking Guinness (they have a really cool bar made all of glass so you can see all of Dublin from the 7th floor).

After that we jumped back on and headed to Jameson's Distillery. We didnt like this one as much because 1. I dont like whiskey 2. It wasnt the original, it had a bunch of miniature things to represent what it would have looked like, and 3. only 6 people got to do the full tasting, the rest just got 1 whiskey. Scott, thank goodness, knew to volunteer and pretty much jumped out of his seat to volunteer for the full tasting. He got to try 3 Irish whiskies, 1 scotch and 1 American whiskey. Then the group of 6 said which one they liked the best, 5 of them said Jamesons (the obvious right answer) while Scott proclaimed his love of scotch. Nice one, honey!

After that we walked back to city centre and back to the hotel to get our bags. Back to the airport where we enjoyed another beverage or two before the flight home.

My pics are below, Scott will add his later because tonight he is at his very first football match...a birthday present from Ken, John and Christie! He actually gets to watch Arsenal LIVE!! So he will have to post his stuff later.

The New Flat (Part II)

We headed back to the Royal Arsenal today to take another look 'round our new flat and neighbourhood. The second look confirmed that we love it out there - it's a really nice little community, as long as you don't go too far out of the development.

We took a whole bunch of pictures of our building as it's going up, as well as the model of the development.



On both, ours is the top left corner of the right building, if that makes sense...

Hampton Court

Hello there and welcome to Feb! Wow, how time flies, especially when one loves their job!

I've spend the last 1.5 weeks working out of our Dublin office. Dublin is a great city...much more modern than I thought...and some FANTASTIC food. My coworker is also a foodie, so we went out way too much and I must say my attempts to stay with a good diet was set aside! Its so great to travel for work, its spoiling me for personal travel. I was staying at the Westin downtown, which is a stone's through from Trinity College, and 10 mins walk to work. Totally spoiled. I wont say too much about Dublin because Scott and I are going there next weekend (Feb 9-10) and I saved all the sightseeing for that!

Today we headed out for some more sightseeing. Sat have become our sightseeing day, and Sundays are for cleaning, laundry, meeting up with friends for drinks etc. So today we headed out again with London Walks. This time we headed for something close to home, Hampton Court - the home of Henry VIII (yes the one with 6 wives) and William III and Queen Mary.

We arrived at Waterloo station to meet our guide around 9:30. We were thrilled to find out there would only be 4 of us, plus the guide, on our tour. The guide was Hilary, who also did the Peak District and St Albans tour. She is fantastic. So the 5 of us headed out on the trains to Hampton Court. Interestingly, the reason the train goes out to Hampton Court is due to Queen Victoria seeing the monetary value of having Hampton Court as a tourist attraction. Its about 30 mins from Waterloo.

We spent the day with Hilary, going through the Tudor palace that Henry and his many wives inhabited, the lovely gardens (which would be fantastic during spring/summer) and the Baroque palace of King William III and Queen Mary. To Scott's delight they had a special demonstration today...the Tudor kitchens were filled with people making real Tudor foods. This included a guy hand stuffing pig intestine's with beef...making sausages. Yuck. They also roasted venison in one of the HUGE fireplaces.

We both agreed that we loved the Tudor side, and while the other parts were beautiful, we like the older styles better. But all round it was fantastic. Hilary spent so much time with us, she was great. We would both highly recommend this day trip if anyone is interested in this part of England's history. You can check out some pics below.

Tomorrow we plan to head back out to Greenwich to take some pics of our new place and the surrounding area...so stay tuned!