life at lochaline street

So, aleisha arrived on tuesday morning which meant I had to get up at 4.30am! It was aleisha's first ever plane flight so I was a bit concerned when she didn't appear for an hour after landing. But then she came out smiling and said that not only did she have a good flight, but that she loved it!!!!??? who loves flying long trips??? crazy girl. She even slept for the first 8 hours of her second leg and woke up to find there was only 4 hours left.... if only we could all be so flight-friendly. Anyway, my new work let me have the day off, so after getting leish settled & freshened up, we headed out to see the sights.

It was a fantastic day - the previous day and week had been overcast and rainy, but tuesday was blue skies and plenty of sun :) I took leish to the tower bridge, followed by the houses of parliament and westminster abbey. Then we had lunch and I took leish to Primark (which she loved!), and then after a quick rest at home we walked up to Holland Park to see some squirrels... which we did :) We had dinner at home and then watched the Champions league final between Liverpool and AC Milan, which AC Milan won. All in all, she's loving it over here and left this morning for Germany to meet with Fran and drive down to Italy until next wednesday.

We were delighted to hear that the Maroons came back from half-time to win the first state of origin which I proudly stated to the 3 other aussies at work - all from Sydney.. however they didn't really care :( Work is going well - this is my second week now. Nice bunch of people and great to work somewhere where the majority of people are actually British and not all aussies and kiwis!! I'm working on a project at a company owned by Sky. Sky have a speak/see/surf offering, and our company does the Sky Talk part of it, so I'm learning all about provisioning of phone services etc. There's 6 Java developers, 1 PL/SQL developer and the system is a mix of Java/Spring MVC/Hibernate and Oracle PL/SQL components, so needless to say us Java devs are pushing to rewrite the PL/SQL components into Java...especially since they're using TDD and it's hard to unit test the non-Java components.

Today Morgan went to the Microsoft UK headquarters to do a presentation in front of all these Microsoft & other companys' technical architects! He was a bit nervous since he's only been using Sharepoint all of 3 months and had to present his issues & solutions with trying to integrate it, but I hear it went well, so I'm proud :) Anyways enough with the technical talk...

That's probably about it for the moment. We've got a long weekend this weekend, so hopefully we'll get up to something fun then :)

Cinque Terre = Fantastico!

Hi there everyone, Morgano here with another update. Last weekend was a long one and we (Alun, Anecia, Esther and I) decided to make the most of it by taking a trip to Italy, in particular to Pisa and the Cinque Terre.
For those of you who haven't heard of the Cinque Terre it is 5 small coastal villages built on steep picturesque cliffs on the north west coast of Italy; from the most northern - (1)Monterosso el Mare, (2)Vernazza, (3)Corniglia, (4)Manarola and (5)Riomaggiore. We flew out of Stansted on Friday evening and arrived in Pisa at around 11pm local time, but still hungry for some Italian cuisine, we found a place in the back streets which was open and were treated to some great Italian food and hospitality - the guy serving us was a champion, he even gave us a garlic pizza on the house.

Next morning it was time to try and figure out the train system in another country. We jumped on a few trains and instead of arriving at our intended village of Manarola(4), the ticket inspector informed us the train wasn't stopping at Manarola and so we found ourselves at the most northern village of Monterosso el Mare (with ticket fine in hand!). We checked out the scenery on the beach side of the village and then caught the train to Manarola. A very very lovely spot. We arrived and our accommodation which was right at the top of the hill, was closed, so we had some lunch and then ascended the mountain again to check in. We stayed in a nice 2 storey villa with a great view of from the top of the village and the coastline. That afternoon we walked along the famous Via del'Amore (lover's walk) to Riomaggiore(5). We checked this place out, had some evening drinks overlooking the coastline whilst the sun set (which is quite late.. about 8pm) and then had some nice Italian fish at La Lanterna, a highly recommended seafood restaurant, and then we walked back along the path in the dark.. tough life!

Next morning we had breakfast at the place we were staying and because our ferry port was shut had to quickly walk again to Riomaggiore to catch the ferry from there. There are lots of pet cats around the villages - we saw one that had just been given a fish from a fisherman - talk about satisfied cats! However because of the rough weather conditions, they had cancelled the next ferry so we instead caught the train to Monterosso(1) and checked out the medieval side of this village. We wandered around until we found ourselves at an amazing spot called the Cuppucino Convent at the top of the village. It was so peaceful and beautiful as we wandered around this clifftop catholic cemetery, a very memorable experience. That is one thing that really amazed me about the Cinque Terre, it was very quiet and surprisingly not a particularly tourist driven region although it apparently gets extremely crowded with tourists later in the year, so we were fortunate! There were some tourists (mostly Italian), but it was still quiet. Next caught a ferry to Vernazza(2), during which it decided to start drizzle, and then fueled by some more Gelato we embarked on our longest trek to Corniglia(3), a really scenic coastal walk which is broken up by a visit to a remote bar at the top of the mountain with more of these amazing views. Halfway along the hike, we came across some cats along with a sign saying "Please feed the cats" and a small hut of tinned cat food that they expected hikers to open for the cats - how strange! We strolled around Corniglia which was nice but nothing particularly unique from the other villages except that this was the only one not accessible from the sea. We then made our way to the train station where we found we first had to descend a ridiculously huge staircase (33 flights, 337 steps apparently). We caught a train back to our home village and had dinner at a traditional Italian restaurant.

On Monday we walked again to Riomaggiore(5) with breakfast in hand and caught a 30 minute boat ride south to Porto Venere. It was a hot day and I got some decent sunburn, which annoyed my workmates in London as it rained through most of Europe over the long weekend! The boat ride was very scenic and Porto Venere is an amazing spot, set high over the coast and a huge bay with historic ruins and a castle. We wondered around and had lunch here, then caught the boat back to Manarola(4) where we walked to a spot to get some nice photos looking back on the village (see the photos), checked out of our little Villa and caught the hour long train back to Pisa. It was about 6pm by then, but there was still plenty of light to check out the leaning tower etc. I quite liked the tower, it leans a lot more than I expected, a very bizzare picture, I found it actually quite hard to photograph because I kept rotating the camera to make it look straight..weird. We then had dinner at a decent pub, followed by our last dose of Gelati, which I proceeded to get all over my face.

Woke up on Tuesday at 3:30am London time in Pisa to catch our plane back to London hopefully in time for me to get to work.. Well, it didn't quite work out, we were delayed for quite a while in immigration and I didn't get into work until about 10:15, but with such a fantastic holiday it was well worth it. Pfew, well I'm tired of writing this, so I'd best be off. Stay tuned for our next travel installment in a few weeks where we will travel to the city of luuurve (Paris). 'Till next time, Morgano! PHOTOS here!

Esther: The Cinque Terre region is famous for it's Basil Pesto Genevose and Cinque Terre white wine. We tried 2 of the wines, not bad at all :) and got a small jar of pesto to use at home. Also in Porto Venere we actually found a 24hr basil pesto vending machine! The food was sooo good - I am really missing Italian food! I am not, however, missing climbing all those steps since all the villages are built from the sea up the cliffs, and there are just stairs everywhere! On another note, thanks to all for your prayers - they have been answered! as I have now got a job and start work on Monday!)

a revelation about tube doors

as I sit here contemplating the amount of physical exercise we will be doing this weekend trekking between the five villages (Cinque Terre) in Italy near Pisa, the muscles in my body are already aching. Admittedly they're a bit sore from going to the gym the other day, but more so because I have discovered something about getting caught between tube doors - it hurts! The doors on the trains here are vastly unlike those back home in australia - the ones back home actually sort of stop and perhaps reopen if you get stuck inbetween them.. not so here. Once the doors start closing, they continue closing, meaning idiots like me who decide to make a runner (cos I couldn't be bothered to wait 2 or so minutes for the next tube) get rammed between them and get squashed. No wonder I'm so sore... :(

a place to call our own..

so what have we been up to? well after we came back from our easter break we spend the next week & weekend desperately trying to find a place to stay as steve & larissa were going to be kicked out of their place on tuesday 17th. We originally had a place to move into, but just before we went away for easter, the real estate agent decided to renew the current tenants lease leaving us with nothing.. and unfortunately there had been no contract/changing of monies yet (many lessons learnt!). Anyway, the saturday before that tuesday, we managed to find a place and moved in on the wednesday. So here we are celebrating our first night with chop-chop (delicious asian take away for only 3.30 pounds!)

next mission was to find a cheap TV. I was told it had to be at least 28 inches. Morgan managed to find one on gumtree for 50 pounds - a Sony Trinitron 28''widescreen. So we made our way over to the pickup spot in Brockley which was about an hour away by tube/train to pick up this huge TV and stand. What a mission! We got so many weird looks... walking around the streets with morgan & steve carrying a massive TV and larissa and I following with the stand.. haha. And then we got on the train. and then we had to carry it through the tube station where the guy wouldn't let us through - he called his manager on his radio saying "there's some people here with a whacking big TV". Fortunately he said we were allowed to go on... silly really cos there was hardly anyone on the tube then anyway!

And then we had to get off at the other end and try and get onto a bus. We only had 2 stops to go.... at the first stop the bus driver (who was driving extremely jerkily - people flying everywhere) stopped the bus and walked down to where larissa and I were - in front of the exit door with our huge stand there (the boys had the TV on 2 seats). Walks down, has a look and goes "what is this?" we said we were getting off at the next stop and and then exclaims "This isn't a removalist service" with a big sigh. Then this other guy standing near us yells out "Yeh, well this isn't a bloody racing car either" hahaha. very funny. except then the bus driver turned around and stared at stephen and says something about how he's been driving this bus for 15 years and he knows what he's doing. and then walks back down the front and then yells out "before this I drove bigger things in the army" to which everyone at the back of the bus just cracks up laughing and going "what has that got to do with driving a bus". ahhh funny stuff!! but then we got off and finally got it up into our lounge room :) needless to say, we were all pretty exhausted afterwards, but mission accomplished! The boys are pretty excited also cos we got Sky installed yesterday so we'll be watching ManU vs AC Milan on Sky tonight.

In other news, we have started going to 'the bible talks' aka TBT church services on sunday nights. Heaps of people around our age group and big focus on evangelism. One girl, Amanda, invited us to an ANZAC day BBQ they were having last weekend. So we made the hour long trip up to around Cockfosters area to the Oak Hill Theological College which is where they are living. It was a beautiful day and we had a great time meeting new people, eating australian foods and playing cricket!

After that morgan and I went and found an IKEA to get a mattress topper as our new beds were terrible - you could feel all the springs sticking out.... we have slept soundly since - it's so great to be in a normal bed after 3 months! And the landlord brought around some new IKEA couches on sunday, so now our home is complete :)

That's about it for now - morgan and I are off to Pisa to visit the Cinque Terre (see here) with Alun & Nec this long weekend. Can't wait! - esther :)