My lovely flowers!

These are the beautiful bunch of flowers that you sent to me girls!! You made me the envy of all the teachers in the staff room! Thank you all for such a lovely gift which didn't make me feel so alone on my birthday. Miss you all!!!

My Birthday Celebrations - the weekend

Some of you may already know, but Lizzie had organised a surprise for me on Saturday night. With no clue of what was going on, I got dressed up and we headed into Central London. My first surprise was dinner (no surprise really, we all know how much I like my food and how much trouble Liz would be in if there was no food involved!) however Liz had reserved us a table at 3 different restaurants and I got to pick what I wanted. Out of Thai, Indian and a Mediterranean Grill place, I chose the Grill (Indian & Thai aren't that good here). It was sooo good! I had Sprinkbuck steak, was so delicious! Then my next surprise was.....tickets to the musical The Sound of Music! I was so excited that it was probably lucky we were in a public place as I think I would have screamed! And as you can imagine, I thought it was brilliant - I almost cried I was so excited to be there. This is me outside the Palladim and you can just see the Sound of Music sign behind me. This place sure shits all over the Lyric Theatre!

On Sunday we had organised with Liz's sister, Katie, to go to a picnic in Hyde Park (permitting it didn't rain) which it didn't! Hooray! So we headed off to Harrods to buy our food in their Food Hall - we went nuts. We bought olives, salami's, cheeses,sun dried tomatoes and then we stepped into the bakery....breads, danishes and cookies went into our basket. And yes, we could had fed a small army with the amount we paid for it all! But, you only turn 25 once in London right?!

This is my two croonies who helped pick out all our delicious food!!

Me and my delicious birthday cup cakes!

We ended the afternoon by heading to our local pub for some pints...ahh perfect!

Stonehenge & Bath

Well, we finally went on another adventure, although this time is was only a day trip. We jumped on a tour bus at 7.30 in the morning with the sun shining and thought this is going to be a lovely day! The first stop was Stonehenge, and even though it is only an hour and a half out of London it had already started raining! Good old English weather. We had an audio tour organised so we were able to learn about the history of the stones and all of the theories behind why they are there and for what purpose they served all those years ago. I was a little disappointed at the size of them, no where near as big/tall as I thought they would be, but beside that was an interesting place.

After and hour at Stonehenge we were back on the bus and heading to Bath. Bath was really pretty, reminded me alot of Bristol which is no surprise as they are only about half an hour apart from each other! Here we went into the Roman Baths. Oh my goodness this would have been such a cool place to hang out in the Roman times! You can feel the heat as soon as you walk into the main bathing area, but the coolest thing is just walking around picturing the Romans chilling out. The water looked really nice but it was actually quite gross with heaps of algae and other things floating in it. People actually put their hands in it. YUK!

After the baths we were allowed to roam around Bath for a bit. Our first stop was The Fudge Kitchen. We test tasted and then bought the most delicious chocolate fudge I think I've ever tasted..yes that's right, even better than Fudge Heaven! Then we just had lunch in a pub, which was pretty uneventful except for the wedding reception which was taking place there. That's right, someone was having their days of days in a pub. And to make it more hilarious for us, the Bride was not even in her reception but outside having a smoke with her alcoholic beverage (which looked like bourban & coke). What an unromantical picture is that!!

Both places were really pretty and it was again nice to get out of London and into some fresh air in the country!

Happy Birthday Katie & Liz!

To celebrate the girls birthday we decided to head into Harrods and have one of their declicious ice-cream sundaes. And oh my goodness they were awesome! None of us could actually finish them they were so big!

Snow glorious snow!!

I saw my first bit of snow this morning!! I was so excited! So I got on all my clothes and went outside to feel it. It was so lovely, falling softly onto my face and hands. However, it was quite light snow so as soon as it touched the ground, it melted away. So unfortunately I could not make snow angels or snowmen. That will have to wait for winter. Now you may actually have to zoom in on the picture to see the snow properly but it really is there! Just tiny white flakes falling. Oh it was just so cool!

Update: it started snowing some more tonight so I took another photo - and it didn't melt straight away so Liz and I got our jackets on and went outside. I made and threw my first snowball!!!

Easter Weekend in Bristol

For our Easter long weekend we headed off to Bristol which is about 2.5hours North-West of London. We left Good Friday and returned late Easter Sunday. We originally thought that there was loads to do in Bristol and there is. If you drive. So unless we wanted to fork out a fortune in taxis' to get to castles etc then our only option was to explore this little town. It was such a lovely place to relax actually. Not really too much to do except wander, eat and drink. Which we did for most of the time spent there! As far as sight seeing went, we saw the Bristol Cathedral, Cabot Tower, the Bristol Museum & Gallery and St Nicholas Markets. We also discovered their ice-skating rink and decided to have a go. So much fun with it's cheesy 80's music to skate around too even if slightly depressing that 7 year old boys were zipping past us while we carefully made our way around the rink! i'd like to say however, that we did not fall over once! As there is a University in the town, alot of the bars offered cheap cocktails so this found us sipping on Mojitos during our night adventures and nursing slight headaches the next morning. Overall, such a nice place to get away from the fast pace of London.

Europe here we come!

We've booked our first trip! We're so excited! Plus it actually gives us a reason to work and save. We've decided to do a Busabout Tour which is a bus (obviously) that goes around Europe and you hop on and off the buss at each stop and depending on how much you like the place you can stay as long as you want and when your ready to move on you just jump back on the bus again. We have bought 2 loops which take us through Northern and Southern Euorpe. The plan is to start just before the La Tomatina Festival in Spain (we have to get there by ourselves) and then from there jump on the bus in either in Nice, France or make our way to Munich and start our tour! (the black dots are where we will be going!)

Not too much else to report. Liz has gotten a job, working for a university doing admin work but hopefully the agency will find her something more exciting but she is happy with this as it is at least some work!! I am still waiting to recieve some teaching work, I did a day last friday, but nothing today. I have another interview with a different agency on Wednesday, so hopefully between 2 agencies I can keep busy as it is totally boring doing nothing all day.