Melbourne!!

In about 48 hours I should touch down in Melbs. Fingers crossed I won't have a 60 hour delay like last time. I cannot wait to catch up with my dear friends, spend Christmas in my mate's pub, spend a few days in the G and drink loads of fantastic coffee. Oh, and sun. Sun is good. Woohoo!

London baby

Last weekend was my last weekend in London for 2011. And what a nice weekend it was. The city is so lovely when it's all Christmassy. I stayed with Melburnian friends in Notting Hill, which is an area I've only ever visited as a tourist or to go shopping. Staying there, and being out and about on Portobello Road when the shop owners are preparing for the crowds gave a whole different view of the area. I also finally made it to Primrose Hill, and enjoyed my Saturday morning walk there.

Other than endless walking I caught up with loads of work friends which made me realise once again how blessed I am with the people who have crossed my path in my three years there!

Gail's in Portobello Road before the tourists get there

Christmas music in Peter Jones on Sloane Square

My granola fix and some chocolate

A weekend in Toulouse



French autumn leaves

As I hadn't seen my cousin and his wonderful family in ages, I decided to visit them in Toulouse mid November. My Dutch cousin and his German wife and their three kids moved there last year from Hamburg. A recipe for linguistical confusion and for a relaxed weekend.

The fact that it was 18-20 degrees was just a bonus, 'cause even in rain and thunder I'd have had a blast. I totally fell in love with my little cousins, aged 3ish, 5ish and almost eight. They were so much fun, and it's so cool to see my cousin in them. The oldest turned out to be a great interpreter (and peace keeper for that matter) which was very useful as my German is rubbish and the wee one doesn't speak Dutch yet. Over the weekend I navigated between Dutch, broken German and even more broken French. 

So Toulouse....the biggest ancient city centre in Europe if I remember well. A massive cathedral. Loads of cool shops that I didn't visit. And quite some tea shops, so I had to sample a caffé gourmet in one of them. It's a good thing I don't often have time to eat properly during the week as the goodies that were the 'gourmet' probably counted for a full day's calories. Delicious.  

On Saturday we made a day trip to Auch, in the mid Pyrenees. A cute cobble stoned town, where the little one did a Marilyn Monroe on a wind machine for about ten minutes, much to the entertainment of other tourists.  And of course my trips abroad aren't complete without a visit to the local supermarket and markets. The Tournefeuille Carrefour and Sunday market saw to that.

And that was it in terms of 2011 weekend trips. The next trip is a biggie: to Melbourne in four weeks!



My two little helpers





Best place ever for a tea break



Food, fooder, foodiest

As my job can be pretty hard core, I tend to spend my weekday nights in the gym or on the couch with a book. This week though, I went out for dinner three times (and tomorrow will be number four).  On Monday my friend Deb was over from London with her boyfriend. We went to my local Szechuan restaurant and stuffed ourselves with some wonderful dishes. Tuesday the client and our team celibrated the succesful delivery of a project. Luckily I got to pick the restaurant and a place not too far from me happened to be convenient for everyone. Nice Frenchish food and a little bit too much wine. On a Tuesday, not a great idea... Yesterday I had my farewell dinner from my old team. Again, on walking distance from my place. It was nothing formal, I just asked the people I'd been closest too to join me for a farewell dinner. Magazzino serves great Italian food, overlooking the river. And I had more wine. I must be getting old but I can't really do drinking on two school nights in a row anymore. Tomorrow wil be dinner with three of my deariest friends in the Dam, Irish, English and French, at a restaurant that's meant to be really really good. It's called Anna, and it's in the red light district, which is an interesting choice of location for a resto like that. It will be a great way to start my weekend (and my diet!).

A weekend of healthy Alpine air

After a work trip to London on Wednesday (damn I do miss the place), I was back at Schiphol two days later for a trip to Zurich. A workfriend is doing a project in Zurich and opted for an apartment where she can stay the weekends rather than hotelling it Mon-Fri and flying home every weekend. When she suggested I'd come and visit, I didn't need to think long.


I'd been to Zurich once before, but only to our offices and some restaurant in town. So on this trip, I wanted to get to know the city. And I did! The forecast was cloudy and rather blegh but both Saturday and Sunday turned into wonderfully sunny days. We ate nice food (tapas and local fare), walked miles along the lake (with swans that don't belong to a queen), had a look around town (pretty), had a coffee at an old fashioned tea house that is apparently a pick up place for 70+ cougars (Sprüngli), and watched the All Blacks beat France (but only just...my heartrate went through the roof). We also stumbled upon a lovely coffee place, Babu's, where we had brekkie on Sunday morning, pre-match. A nice find. Great coffee, super friendly staff, and delicious bread. Also pretty affordable, for Zurich standards anyway. All in all a lovely weekend, and I came back completely recharged!

And of course we ate like a local too. This was Sunday lunch.

Books

Amsterdam just doesn't give me the energy levels London did so rather than being out and about a lot, I prefer to stay in most nights. A glass of red, a hot bath, Spotify and a book are perfect companions on those occasions. So despite no longer commuting by public transport, book or Kindle in hand, I still finish one book after another. And recently I read a couple I really enjoyed.

The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the sixties, and is told from the perspective of two maids and a daughter of a cotton farmer. Skeeter, the cotton farmer's daughter, mourns the loss of the maid who was with her family for most of her life and is struggling to accept the racial views of her peers. Aibileen loves the child in her care more than the mother does, and Minny often gets in trouble for speaking her mind. Their stories come together when Skeeter decides to write a book with stories of the Jackson maids and asks Aibileen, her friend's maid, to help her. It's a wonderfully written book, painful to read at times, even more so when you realise how recent this history is, and how for some it's not even quite history yet (think KKK). It's touching and funny and I just loved reading it.

When I visited Washington DC last May I made sure to spend some time in Kramer's, one of my fav book stores. One of the titles I picked up was The Imperfectionists. It is basically a series of portraits of employees of an English language newspaper in Rome. The characters are so well defined, and the stories often so funny, it's hard to put the book away. It's an amazing debut by Tom Rachman. In several of the stories, the last few sentences completely change the picture you'd been painting in your mind. Very clever and charming.

Ian McEwan is very much hit and miss for me. I've loved some of his books yet almost hated others. A few reviews I read made me buy Solar. And I enjoyed this story of a womanizing scientist whose life went downhill after he won the Nobel Prize for his research. He sometimes made me cringe, in the way that David Brent from The Office does. But just like I would keep watching The Office, I kept reading Solar. There's a certain charm in the dodgy scientist, and the way McEwan portrays him troughout the book is brilliant.

Finally, having read a fair bit about the flick, I picked up One Day at a recent visit to Waterstone. A guy I follow on Twitter said he'd found it touching and I can see what he means. It tells the life of two friends on 15 July of every year from their graduation date onwards. A drunken snog then turns into a friendship where he becomes a womanising tv-personality while she dates an unsuccesful comedian, slaving away in a Mexican theme restaurant for years. It's a very easy read, and great company on grey autumn days.

Four positive reviews. Have I read any crap books recently? Not really, I think. Next is the Fry Chronicles, and I have high expectations of that one too!

New job

It's been a hectic month. Shortly after Barcelona I went to Frankfurt for work, wrapped up a project, and organised a client seminar at our offices. And I changed jobs. Pfew. Having had doubts about my old business unit since March or so, I still thought I should give it a go. But three months into it I realised it wasn't going to happen. So I graciously accepted the offer one of our actuarial partners made me earlier this year, and I joined the actuaries. As a non quant, I constantly feel like the least clever person around, but love the focus my work now has, and kinda feel at home in geek town. A week and a half into it, it's a bit early to say for sure, but I think it's been the right move. Everyone's more serious but super friendly. And it's amazing how much work you get done in the office if you're not mucking about half the time!