i am having a lazy day today, as my legs are achey, i feel like a grandad. i put it down to dancing and snowboarding and walking all day every day, so i’m suffering a liuttle for my enjoyment.

i have been lazy about writing you, because i’ve been soopa busy.

friday i went to the gym, and it was great. i like doing exercise, and without tennis courts it’s great. i feel like a plonker doing outdoor activities indoors, but i feel great for the exercise.

yesterday’s snowboarding was great, with the sun, and lots of fresh snow and off pisting to be done, and olly and i ended the day with a nice drink in a swank terrace bar watching the sun set.

last night i went to coco club. a place that i thought i would never ever ever visit, but nicky, nicola’s boss said she had a spare guest list space, and invited me. it’s crazy that to book a table, you have to spend so many 1000 deposit ensuring that you spend a lot. it’s crazy that they have a man carve a chalet out of a block of ice fill it with drink and sell it for £5000! they place gave me the impression of being in the playboy mansion with girls walking around in stilettos and corsets, and thers just in thongs and bras. so all in all an eye opener, and the dances were entertaining, but i would NEVER pay to go in there. we all went off to cas bah for some free fun, was ace!!!

i have made an amazon wish list clicky!

update, the lifts are closed, so i’m not missing much!

this was friday:

it was snowy and cloudy in town, but oh so beautiful above it!

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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.

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i’ve spent a whole lot of time wasting time on the net. mainly reading, about tech, about mountains, about photography. cramming more information in there. harriet thinks my laptop is the ideal bed, but only when i am trying to use it!

but i have also been a little active. no visits to the beach, i think i will do enough of that in cadiz next week.

on tuesday i cooked a lasagne from scratch, and it was delicious, and super cheesey, my belly shows growth!

but on wednesday marta went to work. she’s not too happy about it, but who would be after a 5 month holiday?

so i went to montserrat not the Caribbean island but the monastery/mountain slightly inland from barcelona. i was a fool and not only left the gps at home, but didn’t even think to look at the map. i drove past the mountain on the way to andorra, and thought i could find my way there unaided. so i ended up with a tour of central barcelona, and many traffic lights!

the mountain is very interesting, and the reason i went was to walk, not so much to visit the monastery. i’m told that excavations centuries ago unearthed a statue of the virgin mary and the monks build their refuge there. i was going to walk from the base of the mountain, but since there was no information online, i couldn’t find a route to start from so rove to the monastery. very touristy! but i made for the summits (there are funicular railways but that takes the joy out of it) and went to the further higher peak. very nice warm day, but it was hazy, so no great views. i made my way to the other side of the mountain, where the lift goes. i made my way down. i had a quick look around the new monastery. there are even hotels built up there! but i missed out the main attraction, the caves built into the mountain by the monks, purposely. i will make another trip back there and walk the entire mountain from the base to the caves. it’s the only large mountain so easily accessible.

to find other routes, i will have to enlist marta to search the net, or invest in some books, or wait until i get to the alps.

yesterday i walked from badalona to barcelona, about 20km and took some photos. i ended the evening in a bar with a transsexual and a couple of others. so it was nice to socialise, and made me feel like i was in london in a way.

i feel i’ve missed much socialising this summer, but i think it is relative, because i have done a lot, even though it isn’t like london. it’s great to have new experiences and do new things.

i’m thinking about buying a kite, so that i can learn to kite surf!

some flickr pics of mine:

i’m off to seville to meet ben, harry and amy on monday and stay in cadiz for a few days, so more sun sun sun!!

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so leaving verbier, nic and i went to Chateau Chillon(may 1st), and then Vevey for lunch, was nice to see other parts of swissland. i took her to the airport and she was off back to england.

i stayed at Lillianne’s which was a nice place over the lake in Lutry. she has some very nice wine, with her name on the bottle!

then i set off on the friday morning for Florence, got a flat tyre before i left Switzerland, with all shops closed for the holiday weekend!

so it was the first time for me to stay in a hostel. called Bigallo al Spedale it was out of town, a village called Bagno a Ripoli in the olive groves on a hill over looking the city located in a 13th century hospice/pilgrimage place. the guy wrking on the desk seemed surprised that i didn’t want to go out partying, but i had just driven about 800km.

i went to sit outside and read my book, and a girl offered me wine, turns out she worked there as the night shift and had her school friends down for the weekend from Milan and Rome, so we drank wine, she cooked pasta, and we had a great night chatting.

so saturday i spent in florence. which is very pretty, wonderful architecture, and lots of scooters, and art(at least a 4 hour queue for the museum di Uffizi(Office Museum) which needs to be booked 3-4 months in advance to avoid the queues). but it is woo touristy, there is little escape from the hoards. i spent the morning walking around viewing the sights. then had a lunch, some lovely food. by the time that was done it was too hot to be in the sun. unfortunately i was changing lenses on my camera and one slipped and the fitting got bent, which is sad. so i went to Palazzo Putti, due to reading that it was the place to go for modern art. their idea of modern art being at least 500 years old! but at the back is the Bobolino gardens which was a nice place to walk around and relax after walking the city to extensively. what was great is that it was half price as i am under 26!

i wondered some more, and waited until the sun was setting to photograph the bridge with the sunset behind it, and got some great photos, but that will have to wait to be shown until i have time.

i ended up walking back to the hostel, being picked up by a nice old couple staying there, 2km from the hostel. there was a bit of a party going on, and many more people staying there that night, so bbq, and wine outside was great, along with chatting to other travellers.

in the morning an american girl (23) was fretting so much about her camera not working, i tried to help her find a disposable, but being sunday nowhere is open, and we ended up rushing everywhere for an hour before she gave up and i could get on my way to paris.

yet again i was lucked with the busiest traffic due to the end of the holiday weekend, and found the auto strada barely moving at times, but i did see the Mediterranean which made me feel like i need to go and be by the sea. it was the longest distance i have ever driven 1200km, and took 12 hours, with a stop in Chamonix for pizza.

it’s got to that time of year that i have to stop to clean the bugs off the wind screen more often than i stop for fuel.

oh and it’s practically impossible to park in central Paris, there are no spaces!

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