16 Weeks To Go

16 weeks until what???

16 weeks until we line up for our first marathon ever, that's right we made a pretty quick and sudden decision that we needed an event to train for and this is it. We miss competing and Ben's worried about joining the hundy club (and so he should be because there won't be a beach wedding next year if he's in the prestigious club!). So we picked our date (30th September) and then searched for a marathon on this day (marathons are huge on this side of the world, you could find one in Europe on any weekend you wanted).

We've entered the Budapest marathon as conveniently this is somewhere on our must travel list and its a bigun with an expected 4,500 marathoners taking part!

Normally you'd want around 20-24 weeks of dedicated running training but we wanted to race the 30th September so we can go and enjoy ourselves at Oktoberfest in Munich the following weekend! Smart logic, we know.

We did our first long run yesterday of 90 mins and are expecting to build that up to about 3 hrs over the coming months, as long as we don't fall apart before then which knowing us, is a real possibility so go on, start making bets on how many weeks we last! Ben already has a sore knee from yesterday and we have to look after ourselves since chiropractors cost around 60 quid a session...

We'll keep you posted on our training and smaller races we do before the big day.

The Home of Football

So another week passes, just another Friday night - maybe just a couple of beers at the pub then a kebab. That was one option, the other was to head to the new Wembley and check out a couple of teams, i think they were called En-ger-land and Brazil or something.

Anyhow, its takes all of 5 seconds to appreciate the stadia when you get off the tube. Wembley is truely EXCEPTIONAL. In summary 90,000 people and not a single queue to get in, for beer or to access the 2500+ toliets.... (The no queue didn't extend to getting home where we had to line up for 90 mins to catch the tube.... a chance to sober up, but seriously the line was 1500 meters long.)

The game itself was fairly avg, Brazil looked tired and Kaka and Rabbit Teeth didn't seem to want to play. Beckham was by far the best player on the pitch, his vision is something else, Gerrard was magic as usual.

A burger costs you 4.50 or you combo for 7.50!!!!!!! - stay away... thats what we said until we got hungry and ended up getting piece of pizza bread for 4.50 apop....Beer on the other hand is not 2 bad for a stadium only 3 pound. You have to drink before kick off tho, as they stop selling and you are not allowed to take beer to your seat (obvious reasons).

90,000 people can make alot of noise and when Franky nudged the ball in the back of the old onion bag the crowd went nuts, just outdoing the national anthem and beckham chant.

Typically England lost it in the last 5 seconds.. a suitable finish to a historical occasion.

Belgium

When you think of Belgium, 3 things usually come to mind: Beer, chocolate and waffles. 3 days in Belgium and all is true. We had to get up at 4.30 am to catch a 6.55 flight (Thank god for the heathrow express train, home to Heathrow in 15 minutes!) We landed in Brussells and got straight on a train and headed to Bruges. Bruges is a cool kids destination at present, it was voted the European Culture capital in 2002. It is a small medievil town that looks straight out of the 1800's with all the modern touches - Amazing architecture and best of all not a starbucks or McD's in sight. You can walk the entire city in 45 minutes.

Points of Note

- There are 1000 bikes to every car or there abouts (go the cyclist)

- There are just as many horse and carriages as there are cars (seriously)

We hit up the Brewery tour on the first day and learnt all about how they make beer, we also got to taste the 'unfiltered stuff' that they drink in the brewery before the chemicals get added and shipped to pubs and shops. This was the first of the 17 different Belgium beers we tried, some fantastic and some so bad that they are not worth a mention.. look out for our ratings in a future post. We also hit up the diamond museum where i bought Kat some diamonds (the fact they came from a robot called BORIS, cost 4 Euro and look like sand is not the point.

Next was the chocolate factory, believe it or not i got through it without tasting a single piece, it was more fun looking than eating. After all this it was time for more beer.

The best cure of the next day blues had to be a fresh waffle... truly unbelieveable and a benchmark that will probably be impossible to beat outside Belguim.

We spent the last day in Brussels looking around, nothing special - although again fantastic waffles.

Fantastic weekend and we may just have to visit Bruges again sometime.

Everyday life ...

so, its been a while since the last post, nothing unusal there... Not really much to report since we got back from Paris.

Katherine threw in her old job with MorningStar and got a new one with ea, yep that ea as in easports and eagames. Perhaps the most important aspect of her contract is that she is entitled to 12 free games a year........ 'its in the game'




We have both been busy with work. Katherine went to St Tropez for 3 days 2 weeks ago for a 'work conference' aka lets get drunk silly (a week into the new job) (refer to photo) and then i travelled all the way outside London to the mighty Chesnut for a 3 day course where i proceeded to sufer my way through the 3 days after drinking too much on the each of the nights.
I also proceeded to learn a valuable lesson last week. Drinking 5 Hoegarden 'white' pints in the space of 3 hours leads to big big trouble. I am still yet to learn that a pint is not a 330 ml bottle or 300 ml glass like in Nz. use your imagination and times it by 10. It was a six star hangover on a school day.. not good. We also sucessfully had our first house guest .... kudos to Mel for coping with our cosy space.


So if you hadn't guessed we are working hard and drinking more and more as the need arises, this leads in nicely to the next post which is about our weekend in Bruges and Brussells.

Je ne comprends pas, parlez-vous anglais?, Now this can go 2 ways . Oui, can i please have the ham and cheese sandwich. or Non, then Je voudrais un sandwich au jambon et fromage.

Just as well the ham and cheese baguettes are magnifique as that was the limit of my french. Just as well Kat could bust out the odd french sentence!!!

So... Pari, well we hopped on the Eurostar and got to Pari on Saturday morning, we managed to find our hotel from the metro on the crazy double decker subway trains, lets just say the paris metro is a whole lot more reliable than the tube. We met up with Tim and Emma who had just arrived from Nouvelle-Zélande and headed to the Tower d'Eiffel. It took a while to warm to the mass of metal but after standing on it and seeing it at night it slowly grew on us.

The highlight tourist trap was the Louvre where the holy Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo reside, the whole place is truly amazing. We also managed to check out Champs Elysées and Arc de Triomphe which is truly post card paris. We also managed to check out a number of the local drinking and eating establishments. On the food front the highlights were the local boulangerie and fresh baguettes and pain au chocolat , unbelievably good.

On the drinking front the leffe and Hoegarden beers the size of our heads were interesting as was the popcorn they brought us .. maybe they thought we had had enough. After spending a large amount of euro on beer, we had some good luck , coming across a local pub with 2.50 euro pints during their happy hour... (As context a pint was costing 6 /7 euro), even better news was that happy hour went from 4 -9. We got there at 5 and left at 9 but not before partaking in the local quiz. The crazy French MC had great delight referring to us as Team aoteorea from Nouvelle-Zélande ..

So Paris is an interesting city that outside the central district is very very different with some good and dodge areas (just ask Tim & Em about the portaits they were schemed into spending lots of euros on), a very segmented city with different areas having very different feels and local vibe.