Catch up post - part 2

Some more highlights from my missing months of blogging:

• Biking in Cambridge - Joe and I tried to bike from Cambridge to Ely (the neighboring town about 12 miles away).  We made it to a pub on the river about 4 miles down...but it was still fun
• Hanging out with my roomie Frances - we get along really great and are having lots of fun watching Friends, cooking (Frances is an amazing chef), and drinking wine
• Hiring a house keeper - thank you, Margaret!!!
• Our office Christmas party - at the Natural History Museum with tables around the T-Rex, it was amazing
• The many fun office Christmas lunches - from the 10th of December onward, we had 1 a week...2-3 hour lunches complete with 4 courses and wine.  The best was my practice's lunch which extended well into the evening and ended up with dancing & champagne at Buddha Bar

All this was fun - but I still missed home alot in my first few months.  Its tough trying to start fresh in a new place - meeting new friends, working in a new job & adjusting to a different culture (the last part was fun, but the rest were tricky).  I'm still feeling a bit like a fish out of water, but I'm getting better at leaving work earlier and trying to get some other fun activities going (like more theater, dance classes, and city exploration).  Still haven't met any friends outside the office yet, though.  Maybe in the new year?

The catch up post

Given that today is a snow day from work (that's right, my wish from yesterday's post came true and all public transit came to a halt in London, thus preventing all, except the die-hards who walked, from going into the office), I'm going to attempt to catch up this blog by summing up in 1 post what I did from the end of August until February 1 when I started blogging again.  In the interest of brevity, I'm going to do it in chronological list form:

1. Woke up

2. Walked in the rain/drizzle/ocassional grey day to the tube station

3. Took the tube to work

4. Worked

5. Worked

6. Worked

7. Went home via tube & then rain/drizzle walk as described in parts 2 & 3

8. Slept

8. Repeated steps 1-8 daily on weekdays, visit Joe in Cambridge on alternating weekends.

And that's pretty much it.

OK - it wasn't that bad, but it was close.  I seriously came back from my Christmas break (they awesomely close down our office for 1.5 weeks for some free holiday time - another benfit to living in Europe :) and decided I needed to get a freaking life outside the office!  So now I'm blogging about having one...hmmm - does that count?

I'll highlight some of the good stuff here too.  A big one was the surpise trip I planned for Joe's 30th birthday to Isle of Wight.  We took a train down from London, then a ferry over to 

the island.  The landscape was just beautiful - absolutely breath-taking white cliffs, big & long stretches of greens.  We took an all-day class paragliding with High Adventure (hippies!) and by the end of the day, we had each taken solo flights for about 2+ minutes really high above the ground.  It was amazing - I have to go again.  

A few more highlights:

• Our vacation to Eastern Europe - Slovenia (Ljubjana & Bled - both amazing!), Croatia, Italy (we biked the Prosecco Road), Hungary (staying at the beautiful Four Season's Gresham Palace)
• Visits from friends & family - Jessica, Lauren, JJ, Carrie, Marianna, Grandma, Mom, Sean.  Thank you all for coming!
• Lots of shows - I LOVE the Sadler's Wells theater - its exclusively dedicated to dance performances and is just up the up the street and Rambert is my new obsession.
• More TBD

Snow in London!

I was off to a great start keeping this blog up to date when I moved to London back in May, but I let things slide from September onward (we'll blame that one on work).  Its now February, and I've decided to make a come back (everybody loves a come back, right?!).  

So, here we are on Feb-1 and its snowing like crazy in London.   This is an odd thing for London and people are freaking out a bit (see a Telegraph article here), but not quite as much as in Atlanta.  In Atlanta, the whole city shuts down with even a snow flake or temperatures below 32 F (that's 0 C for you Europeans).  I miss that.  Maybe I would've had the day off tomorrow...  I'm going to hold out hope that maybe I still will!