Monthly Archive for December, 2004

Jet setters

Published
by
Simon
on 23/12/2004
in Holiday
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Thursday, 23 December, 2004, 8:12 AM Dad just got a new job at the Royal London Hospital (apparently not as glamorous as it sounds), Mum & Nathan are spending a couple of days in Amsterdam and Laura and I just got back (to London) from Paris.

It’s only one day until Christmas – can’t wait. The rest is explained in the latest installment by Laura.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!

This is a good way to check if any of you actually open your emails…

Simon and Laura are engaged!

Think Avenue Champs Elysees on Wednesday night. Think Christmas lights. Simon on bended knee with a beautiful ring. Think dozens of Parisians who had a very interesting story to tell last night.

It’s wonderfully easy to get caught up in the beauty and romance of Paris and everyone there seems to feel the same way. Paris is just gorgeous and Wednesday night was just gorgeous. It was absolutely lovely and made for a magical end to what has been a magical trip to Paris.

This is not the way we would have intended to inform the many loved ones in our lives of our engagement! If we could, we would telephone each and every one of you, but, hey, we have a wedding to pay for! Wish you could all be here to share in our happiness, but will see you in a couple of weeks. Kudos to Laura’s mum and dad who have kept the secret for four weeks and to Browny et al and Aidan (and apparently Aidan’s entire family) for remaining tight-lipped for months.

Apart from getting engaged, we also did the following things in wonderful Paris: visited the Eiffel Tower (you cannot help but be overwhelmed), Musee du Louvre (bigger than you could ever imagine), Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur (stunning views), Montmarte, Moulin Rouge, Arc de Triomphe, Musee D’Orsay (fantastic), Jardin du Tulieres, Galleries Lafayette for awesome shopping, and numerous amazing patisserie right across the city. You cannot go to Paris and eat lettuce. It must be croissants, baguette, chocolate, wine, cheese and some chocolate croissants for breakfast.

Paris also gets our vote as a very close second to Tokyo for the friendliest people. Although many speak English, we were told to make the effort with the French language (which is certainly not as hard to read or say as Japanese), which we did. However, they could immediately tell that we were foreigners and so usually began this weird situation where they were too polite to use French and we were too polite to speak English. So the waiter is using English and we are ordering who-knows-what in very broken French and confusing everyone. The city was fabulous though, and one of the best experiences of the whole trip.

The other highlight (there were many obviously) was that is snowed on Tuesday morning for about an hour. We stepped out of our hotel room into the lobby and saw through the doors this gentle falling of snow. We were simply stunned and couldn’t move for a second. It was magical. Across the road at the markets it was still snowing and no-one else seemed to find this in anyway glorious, but we couldn’t wipe the smiles from our faces. It doesn’t seem like England will deliver, but we feel very satisfied with our little snippet of snow in Paris.

So love to all and Happy Christmas. We miss everyone and wish you a lovely, fun day on Saturday. Everyone must eat half a watermelon and a kilo of prawns on our behalf and think of us.

Merry Christmas!

Simon and Laura.

Only 2 1/2 countries left

Published
by
Simon
on 16/12/2004
in Holiday
. 0 Comments

We have made it back to Chesham Bois where we are staying most of the time from our trip to Scotland. I’ll try to get a picutre of the house up next time I make an entry. It’s very impressive.

Meanwhile here are a couple of pictures to whet your appetite for the forth coming looooooong slide show you will all be subjected to. We are currently sitting on a few more than 1600 photos.

Laura and I in front of Big Ben. The beautiful Welsh country side. (Click for larger image)

Reproduction of the latest email:

Hello again to all! Thanks for the many emails we have received. We hope you are all keeping well and settling into a nice pre-Christmas holiday routine.

Simon and I are now four countries down, with two to go, having tackled Scotland and Wales during the previous week. We arrived back at Simon’s aunty and uncle’s house in Chesham Bois yesterday after eight days of travelling around the greater United Kingdom. Our basic route was from to here to Cambridge, to York, to Edinburgh, to Ambleside, to Liverpool, to Chester, to Llandudno, to Holyhead, through Snowdonia National Park and back home into England.

It was a lot of travelling, a few inept navigational directions on my part, but a truly beautiful trip. It gave us the chance to see a bit of wilderness after all our pavement-pounding up until this point. And on wilderness and beauty, my goodness do Scotland and Wales deliver! They are just stunning countries with fog, cliffs, mountains, quaint villages and the most sheep I have ever seen.

Highlights for us were: 1. The gorgeous town that is York: lots of really cute shops for Christmas and the remains of the stone wall that used to run the circumference of the whole town. We met two Australian women at the youth hostel there and we exchanged numerous stupid tourist stories. By coincidence, one of them is catching the exact plane trip home that we are (I felt very Dowrick.) 2. Edinburgh: a stunning city that had the absolute best Christmas lights. If you are walking in the modern, vibrant main shopping strip, you can simply look up to see ancient Edinburgh Castle on an enormous rock right in the middle of the city. That was amazing. We also went on the very cool – decommissioned – Royal Britannia Yacht. 3. Ambleside is a breathtaking town in the famous Lake District of northern England. We stayed in a youth hostel right on the Ullswater Lake, so it felt very ‘Kellermans’ (watch Dirty Dancing.) It’s an incredibly popular summer destination, but even in the very cold, the surrounding mountains and views were just spectacular. 4. Liverpool: we didn’t see anything really fabulous about the city, but if famous for nothing else, it’s famous for The Beatles, so of course we went to the ‘The Beatles Story Tour’ museum which was fascinating. 5. Llandudno along the coast of northern Wales was my favourite town from the whole trip. Not simply because it’s home to ‘Down the Rabbit Hole: The Alice in Wonderland Centre’ (Jill, I took photos), but it’s a ‘Victorian seaside town’ where you can just imagine people in knee-length togs running from their grand old hotels down to the water.

So many, many photos later, we are back home recovering for a couple of days before we fly to Paris on Sunday. This is obviously a great cause for excitement, especially since we have both just read The Da Vinci Code (I think I missed a few towns along our trip because I couldn’t put it down for forty-eight hours.) So as well as some more happy snaps, we may just come home with the Holy Grail. Fingers crossed. Love to all, Laura

Part Two

Published
by
Simon
on 5/12/2004
in Holiday
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Life goes on as usual at home. I hope the Christmas Shin Dig goes well in my absence. How did everyone go with the uni results? My GPA went down - but I’m not all that disappointed - 5,6,6,6.

This is just to give you some idea of what Tokyo is like:

This goes on as far as the eye can see in every direction.

And this is on EVERY street corner.

Here is part two of the adventure for anyone who didn’t get it in the email. You will note the PUNCTUATION in Laura’s writing this time.

G’day all! Thanks to all for sending us some replies to remind us of what’s happening at home. They fail to compare, but it’s nice that you try. We hope all your pre-Christmas fun and preparations are well under-way and that the weather is treating you warmly. Yay to Jiselle and Geoff who finish school this week and Lona who completes her internship.

This previous week had Simon and me staying at a cute Youth Hostel in the centre of London near the gorgeous St Paul’s Cathedral. Armed with a backpack and our increasingly well-worn camera, we pounded the pavements every day. Remnants of jetlag or something-or-other would start to set in early each evening, but we still managed to fit in about eight hours of sightseeing per day.

Simon’s aim for London is to capture on camera every one of the Monopoly addresses. Originally – and probably during – a source of boredom for me, they are obviously part of the board game for very good reason and take you all over the city to some beautiful streets and gorgeous buildings. He only has a few to go and is approaching the exercise with much dedication.

In addition to the board game thing, we’ve done the gallery thing, the Buckingham thing, the Kensington thing, parks, gardens, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Tower of London, Warwick Castle, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and most certainly the shopping thing. Shopping here is awesome, although when people tell you London is expensive, they are not lying. So we went to Hamleys, a toy store with seven floors, and played with everything for free. It was an amazing place, especially at this time of year. Tony, you would just die.

Everything is just stunning and old and lit-up for Christmas. I have also just seen three Royal Shakespeare Company plays in thirty-six hours (Simon piked and only saw two.) We watched an understudy performance of Hamlet in London on Friday, hightailed it out to Stratford-Upon-Avon with the Elverys to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona on Friday night, and then stood to watch Julius Caesar on Saturday night (for mine, Hamlet with its understudies was just the best.) We saw all the Shakespeare houses on Saturday (there are a total of five connected with him, albeit in a kind of sister’s-uncle’s-real estate agent’s-godson sort of way.)

Thanks again for keeping in touch. We are having the time of our lives and can’t wait to see everyone and tell you all about it (and parade all of our photos – I am putting the final estimate at two thousand.) We are off to Scotland and Wales for a week on Tuesday, so I am guessing that there may be a few picturesque sights along the way.

Lots of love, Laura and Simon.