New Year in Berlin

After a very pleasant Family Christmas in Lincoln I flew to Berlin to spend New Year in the big bad city. F was ill when I first arrived but luckily soon recovered (the thought of the doctor was obviously enough to cure him).

In the last few days we have been to the Pergamon museum (full of ancient artifacts and the old city gates of Babylon), we cycled about 30 km of the 155 km long Berlin Wall route, we hiked a good section of the Grunewald, we took a trip to the Baltic sea coast and finally today we visited the aquarium. Life has also been busy with family visits - both sets of parents, one set of grandparents and the siblings. Finally I seem to have met all of the Berlin crowd, although evidently there are more in Rostock.


So this is a unicorn from the gates of the old city of Babylon... Dug up in 1907(?) and transported in full to Berlin and re-built. Just amazing.


Rest stop along the old Berlin Wall route. I had the privilege of riding the heavier bike, with heavy saddle bags and a too-low-saddle. However the saddle on F's bike is definitely made for men only, being knife-sharp and rock hard. So no option there then.


Warnemuende, on the Baltic sea coast. The feel of the place reminded me a lot of similar coastal villages in Holland.


I didn't go for a swim!! D, I need your encouragement - F is crap!!


A lovely jellyfish in the aquarium....


An inquisitive lizard at the aquarium. He caught my attention!

So, 4.5 hours to go before 2008 so I thought I would post this quick update on my activities... There are rockets and firecrackers going off everywhere and we thought we might try to catch the fireworks at the Brandenburger Tor at midnight. Along with a million other people. We'll see!!
Happy New Year to all!

Fog

It's been quite foggy here the last couple of days. Most odd though - it smells of coal smoke rather than the sea!

England's Green and Pleasant Land

Felix was over last weekend, yay! Having decided that we had seen enough of Oxford town itself, we got out to discover a little bit of the Oxfordshire countryside.

On Saturday we went to explore the White Horse at Uffington, literally a horse figure cut into the chalk hillside. It is associated with the outline of what once was an Iron Age fort, and is found about half way along the Ridgeway, Britain's oldest road. There was hardly anyone there, and it was nice to get out and stretch the legs again. Unfortunately we both forgot our cameras, so you'll have to do without images for this bit of the story.

On Sunday we walked up a stretch of the Oxford Canal, again a bit muddy in places but nothing too extreme. We saw some canal boats and some long suffering fishermen (who looked like they were catching nothing but cold).







We heard reports that Eastern Canada was experiencing the thickest snow of 63 years at this time of year, meanwhile we "enjoyed" a relatively balmy, near freezing, not particularly sunny couple of days.

3 more days of work, then Christmas, then off to Berlin. Watch this space!

1 week on

So... One week ago I was going absolutely raving mad trying to get the last few things finished. What a day!
My list of achievements this week include:

• Not crashing the car on crazily busy roads
• Not hitting my head tumble turning in the shallow end of the world's shallowest public swimming pool
• Gaining a new geo-geek identity (thanks D!)
• Deciding that orange rubber gloves suit me better than yellow ones
• Arriving at work 4 days in a row an hour before sunrise (I don't think I have EVER before been at work at 7am 4 days in a row. Not even during the good old PhD writing-up days)
• Buying a new digital camera
• Having to pay an outrageous sum of money to transfer my Canadian savings across to here. Next time - buy the bankers draft in UK pounds, not in C$. HSBC charged me 20 pounds to cash my cheque AND gave me a shockingly bad exchange rate. Bah humbug.
  

All in all a pretty good week. This weekend I am going to take my bike for a spin and maybe even go on an adventurous hike in England's green and pleasant lands.

Reverse culture shock part 1

British traffic: AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH.
British tea: Much better than the Canadian equivalent (even the stuff from Tim's).
British windows: Great. I have 2 AND they open.
British accents: Evidently I sound slightly Canadian. Nooooo. I tried so hard.
British weather: Not too bad today.
British daylight: Rubbish. Light at 8, dark again at 3.30.

Canadian friends: Irreplaceable (even after your earlier rude comments, J)

Farewell to Nova Scotia

Well it's been fun, and a hectic 28 months. But all good things come to an end, and here I am in the Maple Leaf lounge at Halifax airport waiting to board my flight back to the UK. I am absolutely shattered and recovering from a particularly foggy hangover. I was sent off in style.

So to all my co-adventurers, thanks for the fun, the laughs and the icy swims. Watch this space for more from Milton Keynes, although life can't possibly be as exciting there. My accent will no longer be special, for a start.

Windsor Pumpkin Festival

The weekend before last a group of us went to the Pumpkin Festival in Windsor - evidently pumpkins are such big business that they can fill 10 days worth of pumpkin-related activities every year. We went on the very last day - race day!!!

The pumpkin weigh-off takes place the week before. Proud pumpkin growers bring their gigantic pumpkins in to town to be weighed and exclaimed over. The pumpkins then get sold off to another mad bunch: those who want to make boats out of them and paddle them across the lake.

Here's one being taken down to the start line on a fork-lift:


Here are a whole pile waiting for the fork-lift treatment. Note "Theodore Tug-Kin" in the background. Made me laugh anyway.

Just look at the size of these things: you could lose a small child in one!

This is the guy who eventually won: He's been winning for 5 years now. He paddles slowly and steadily, and he makes sure he can sit comfortably in his pumpkin. Plus there is only the shell left, and he uses a liberal quantity of insulating foam to increase buoyancy.

The calm before the start, and pre-downpour. All the rest of my photos show water marks on the lense! Note the camera crew: this was a BIG event for Windsor.