today i got the keys for this place:

which is ace. there will be 5 of us living in 3 rooms. a dutch guy, spanish guy, english girl, englidh guy and myself. there’s a super living area,a nd it even has a washing machine, oooooh the luxury!

we also have a balcony with this view:

i had another interview for a job, which i’d really really like to get, so finger’s crossed.

i skiied again, and they skis felt super different, but after an hour or so, i got used to them and much preferred these ones.

there’s bingo tonight, i hope some people wanna go!!!

harriet in a ski boot box:

ciao for now!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

i’ve been skiing today, demoing skis, and it was great fun, but ssooooo much more tiring than snowboarding.

they were huge 185cm and wide for powder, twin-tips. and different.

i’ll try some different skis another day.

at the weekend we had at least a meter of snow, so things are looking good for the winter.

so tuesday was nicola’s birthday, which was fun.
monday i snuck out and drive to chamonix, which was fun considering they had barely plowed the road, and i couldn’t work out how to fit my chains, but the car works fine in the snow.

driving from verbier to chamonix in the snow

so in the morning we had croissants and champagne. nic went for lunch with her boss in bosses restaurant with the kids she looks after.

in the evening we had a treasure hunt for nic, and when she came back in cold and snowy there was big fondue! so lots of merry fun.

appartment hunting is a little like a rollercoaster. i went to visit the flat with the couple, and the girl said no way she wanted to live there, and they didn’t have the cash up front anyway.
so today i now have the descion over who gets to stay there, as there is lots of interest. it had been a trouble to get half the season’s rent up front for people, but now there are so many people so desperate that there’s no problem.

job wise, i keep getting optimistic responses, but no jobs have yet materialised.

i am ACHEY!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

so ts now super dark, and seems to be most of the day.
it’s supposed to have been snowing a fair amount, yet all we get is drizzle and cloud.

nic and i have our first french lesson today. there was an aussie there too. it’s not a bad price, and the teacher lady is cool.
we’ll probably be taking these twice a week for 20 weeks, so come on the ability to finally chat up a foreign girl!

oh yeh, i went snowboarding sunday!!!! it was ace, and my body is still aching. the lifts are only open at the weekends. the winter has begun!

hot!

i tried a snowboard, and will keep on demoing boards to find one more appropriate to the big mountains.

the job hunt is slow, as is the house hunt.

a photo i took from the bottom of the mountain the other day:

evening

so tomorrow the car is going to the garage to have the block box recorder fitted for the insurance company.
so nic and i can have a good swim and sauna, and maybe food too.

also, i have started copying all of my dvd’s to my hard drives, so that i can carry my dvd collection without a huge cd wallet, it’s taking time, but no rush. when i’m done i will sendf the dvd’s back to teh uk to be stored. the beginning of the end of physical media.

last thing, i made a great paella last night, and everybody even said they loved it, without teh need to threaten them!

me n me baked rice

also i began to use adobe lightroom 2 today. i think it may avoid the necessity to use photoshop so much. the program will allow me to organise photos, make small modifications. i’m liking it so far!! supposedly i can upload my pics directly to the net.

what else, i’m going to try to convert all of my camera’s raw files to .dng, as this will hopefully become de-facto, and wont become out dated as raw is already.

so now i have downgraded from my slr to my compact, and from photoshop to lightroom. easier to use and with plenty of usefulness.

ciao ciao for now.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

so mr mac is repaired, and for no charge. the logic board was broken, and would have cost a lot if i hadn’t the extended warranty, so i’m very glad i forked out the extra £250 for it!

and then:

day 8 in switzerland and i have totally lost the ability to semi touch-type, due to getting used to toto’s french mac.

i have been job hunting in leysin and verbier, and even applied for a job in zermatt. the general response is that it is too early to hire, being that people are waiting for whether people from the previous winter return, and if they don’t then the jobs are open. so i will continue to hand out my CV, and hope.

we’ve gone from 30cm of snow in the town here to 0, but its early yet and the lifts open tomorrow, so the town will begin to get lively.

oh and i need to start looking for a home!

other than that i’ve been getting my car winter ready with winter tyres and snow chains.

i’ve also had loads of trouble trying to replace the car stereo. the audi unit has a cd player and a cassette player. the speakers are great, but i desired something up to date. so i bought a stereo with usb and bluetooth. but…..getting a facia to house a standard stereo has turned out to be a night mare. apparently audi only used the stereo i have for 9 months, and only in this car. the local audi garage suggested i scour scrap heaps. somebody in a car stereo shop in the uk suggested i carve something from a piece of mdf, and he was the most optimistic of all of the people i have spoken to!

i’ve driven from verbier to barcelona to verbier. harriet wanted to kill the sniffer dog entering france. then i visited labenne-ocean to see the sea, and a mate, and sleep in a caravan freezing my nuts off.

i drove to nantes for a reunion of many of the guys we worked with picking strawberries in denmark. it was great to see them all.

my gps is being mental sometimes thinking we’re lost while driving along the highway.

the speedo in my car has given up. i think that its just a loose connection, and not the dash board. so now i must use my gps as a speedometer.

my car is nice and comfortable, and i’m not sick of having driven 3000km this week.

last night was anne’s birthday party, so i’m in london, tireddddddd. having drunk too much last night, and then being woken up by charlie who didn’t know the clocks changed last night.

we’ve been to the metro ski show in kensington. i got a few web addresses for job hunting. and a ski jacket.

and i took my mac to the apple shop. this is because it has ceased to function.
i’m told it may be the logic board, which in normal pc language is the motherboard. so i’m super glad that i payed for the extended warranty. but i will have to wait and take it to the apple stores in geneve next week.

take first class on the eurostar, it’s so worth it, and not too costly!!

so i’m off to lille for a couple of days tomorrow to stay with a guy on couchsurfing.com and be there for the diwali celebration.
then i’m off to paris to meet nic and toto wednesday.

an interesting article by a pro photographer trying out the new canon G10 (i got the G9 recently) comparing it with his £20000 camera.

so bye!

summer is over, and it’s been great, i’ve seen more countries than i can remember.

barbados was ace with izzi. it was the end of the rainy season and we caught the tail end of a tropical storm, so a little wet, but still sunny at times. we rented a little car, mini moke which was great fun to drive, and explore the island, and a great colour!

it was great to be in london for a couple of days, though i will be back there this weekend coming.

i hope to go to the metro snow show at olympia, and the festival at battersea.

so im in spain, and leaving here tomorrow. i think i’ll miss it and marta a bit. but i am hugely looking forward to winter.

i’ll be driving back with harriet to verbier tomorrow, dad is convinced she’ll be sick everywhere, but we’ll have to see. she’s very good, and hasn’t needed sedation at the vets, which is great. she now has her european pet passport, so she can travel around europe easier than many people can!

so off on the next adventure.

as written by jeremy clarkson

“…I can’t help you with petrol prices. I suspect, however, the oil-producing nations will do that when they wake up one day and wonder why their export is being used to prop up Western economies. Nor can I do much about the road pricing, short of designing a stealth car.

However, I can help you with the preposterous road tax, because you see, it’s not just Blue Motions and G-Wizes that are exempt. There’s a third way… you buy a car registered before 1973.

Now, I realise if you are eight years old, 1973 seems like the 13th century. You probably imagine that cars back then were mostly used for ploughing.

Not so. If you buy a car from 1973, you could have a Lambo Countach, or a Ferrari 512 B/B. And back then, Porsche was making something called the 911 which, so far as I can tell, is almost exactly the same as the 911 you can buy today.

What I’d do for sheer perverse pleasure is buy a ‘73 Range Rover. I can think of nothing quite so glorious as pulling up alongside some silly sod in a Toyota Pious, who’s paid £250 for his tax, while I, with my huge 3.5-litre V8, have paid bugger all.

Of course, there are going to be a few problems with cars from back then. A Mk3 Cortina, for example - even the excellent 2000E - did not come with electric seats, satnav, power steering, aircon, electric door mirrors or, come to think ofit any door mirrors at all….”

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

i just saw this on mtv, hahaha:

cheesey.

i had an great time with ben, harry, amy, leona and felix in barbate near cadiz in the south of spain. it was lovely to be by the ocean, rather than the med. to sum it up, 1.65 euro cava from lidl, long blonde beach, chiringito, waves, sun burn, digging holes, and fussy eating.

then i had a pleasant few day in the north of england. i stayed with ben’s family, saw the sunnyest weekend the north had all summer, and had a nice cool weekend.

there were a few short days in mataro including taking the rover to be scrapped.

then i came to switzerland. my goals for this trip were:
- buy a car,
- find a place to live for the winter.

so goal one, i flew to zurich on the friday, and got a rental car, which was great, just 20pounds per day. it was a big renault scenic automatic. i now know i don’t like automatic, but i guess that is my style of driving. i couch surfed for 3 nights with lisa. in the day time i’d drive around and check out cars which i had found to fit my bill on autoscout and stopping at every garage i passed along the way. and by evening i did things, like walk and dine with michelle another couch surfer from brazil, goto the freestyle festival with lisa followed by the after party, go indoor rock climbing. watch a couple of films on the projector.

on the monday i stayed with another girl, kim, but we were exhausted, so just chilled at her flat. so i found 2 cars. one racy Audi S4, and a more conservative Audi A4TDI. I wanted the diesel for economic reasons, but in the end i had no contact from the garage, that and desire lead me to buy the S4:

So i spent a night with one of dad’s friends from uni, which was very nice, so much chatting and cheese.

i dropped the rental car off at the airport and a 2 hour train ride later i was across the country and there to buy my car. I had gone through a bit of stress to get temporary number plates. You get the plates after the car, and only in the region you live in, so i had to get the actual ones later. It was a lovely drive from there to Verbier. Which is where my worries began. They refused to give me plates, my permit for residence being for last winter. I have tried asking for assistance from everybody, but no luck, the car is now parked here, no plates, and un-driveable

The biggest problem is that i can’t drive to spain to get my stuff (clothes, computer, cat) and i have had to fork out for a last minute flight back to barcelona. The rush being that I fly to london on Monday.

Swiss people don’t take risks, and the beaurocracy is absurd compared to what i’m used to, and I thought the UK was bad.

As for finding a place to live for nic+Toto and I is nigh on impossible. It’s possible to find the odd free room, with people who have rented a place bigger than they need, but not a 2 bedroom place. So I tried other resorts. Crans Montana wasn’t to my liking, and no places available, likewise Villars. But in Leysin I not only found lovely people, lovely vibe but also a great place to live.

So now i must decide whether I goto Leysin on my own for the winter, or lump Verbier again. You can tell that Verbier isn’t such a hot place in my opinion. I’ll try to bag the flat, and see what happens later on this month when I return.

This leaves me sat here in Yoan’s flat with his lovely big cats listening to VH1 on his ginormous TV. My plans have not worked out this time. So much for being organised, i’m better at last-minute disorganised.

Oh and its snowing here yay

The trip to england, I promised to spend time with izzi, and after trawling the net for a cheapish place to meet her in the sun I thought gran canaria would have to do. But lo and behold an email from British Airways and they had a sale on holidays, and I chose Barabados as it turns out to be cheaper

So off to the last sun of the year for me, and I can’t wait.

Oh and I can’t express how happy I am to be in the mountains.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

i’m just sticking a bunch of movies on my phone for entertainment.

little update,
harriet is coming along great with her training to walk on the lead. she has never batted an eyelid at the idea of wearing a harness or even the lead. but i’ve now started walking around the flat with her, and she seems to be doing great.
i hope she does so well outdoors, but it could take time. but if it all works out, then walking her around would seriously help with travelling.

so i’m packed and good to go just fannying about wasting time. maybe i goto the beach before i leave. but why bother if i’m going to teh south of spain to sit on a beach?

oh and i’ll be flying with spanair, the airline that had teh crash a couple of weeks ago, so some excitment, i think not!