August 2008 Update

ust when we thought we'd caught up, we get behind again.

I'm going to post the next few posts in their correct order even though we're a few months behind.

In July and August Anita started interviewing for jobs again. She ended up going back to her old work (GSK) on a 3 month contract which could be extended to early 2009.

Meanwhile Manu's project with the Edinburgh crowd was coming to a close and he made a few day trips up and back. Quite an arduous journey when you leave first thing in the morning - he's generally up at 4am for a 9am start then has the trip back at the end of the day. Sometimes the flight is delayed making it pretty rough, luckily most of the time he gets to work from home, so he makes up for some of the lack of sleep.

In the middle of August we flew to Geneva, then took a 2 hour train ride to Sion. Matt's folks were houseswapping in a place 20 mins drive above Sion for a couple of weeks and had invited us all to visit for a long weekend. The house was a lovely 1 bedroom mountain chalet. The views were gorgeous, we were so high up in the mountains that we'd see clouds at eye level or below us. We could see snow capped mountains just across the valley.

We took a trip to see the Matterhorn - it took us about 2 hours to get to the base of the matterhorn, then we took a series of gondolas up to a viewing platform which looked out directly to the matterhorn. The temperature dropped to 0C at the viewing platform and in retrospect we don't think we'd go up that far if we went again as you could get a great view of the mountain anywhere around the village at it's base.

The village was just lovely - there were loads of mountain chalets for the ski season and a mass of shops - it was a typical ski field village.

We decided we'd put together an authentic swiss fondeu for dinner, so we went to the local cheese shop to get the proper ingredients. The recipe called for 3 different types of cheeses, a bit of Kirsch (strong cherry flavoured liqueur), some garlic and cornflour. On the first night we dipped bread on the second night we became more adventurous and dipped sausages, bread, apple, carrot etc - basically whatever we thought would go well with cheese. It was a very filling meal.

On our second day we took a walk across the valley to another village, where we had lunch (the beer was very welcome by that time) then wandered back. The walk took us about 4 hours and was a fantastic experience.

It was sad to leave John and Anne - they are such lovely hosts and we always have great adventures with them. Hopefully this time next year, when they're back in Europe we'll have another fun adventure.

A week after our holiday in Switzerland, Manus Uncle & Aunt came to stay with us. They'd been sailing in Croatia and were in London for a week before their trip to the US. We checked out a pub where you roll dice for drinks - but got there too late, however on the way we saw this truck with a bunch of people practicing jamaican drums. Ended up going to Notting Hill festival to see more of the jamaican drums, then having dinner and drinks.

A week after they left, 6 of us took a trip to Leicester outside Rugby and took part in tank paintball. We were split into teams of 3 and each person got to drive the tank twice around a track, fire the paintball pallet and aim the barrel of the gun.

Then we had a paintball war, where we fired 7 pellets at each others tanks and whoever hit the most won.

The girls team - Anita, Ala and Paul - ended up winning after the boys team (Manu, Matt and Pete) conceeded that hitting a cow counted as an extra point for the girls.

And that's about it for July and August.