Prague

We hit Prague for the weekend – to see Mr and Mrs P, our friends from Sheen who have recently moved out there to start new lives.

It’s pretty easy to get to – ~2 hours flying time – and although we’d both been there before, me 13 years ago and S, 5 years – it had changed a lot.

These days it’s a thoroughly modern city – with an Austrian baroque feel to it – and thoroughly stylish too. It’s relatively expensive – or seems so – but still cheaper than some Western European cities, especially at today’s Euro rates.

Anyway, as a destination city to work in, it seems like Mr and Mrs P have landed on their feet. The city is open to foreigners, english is widely spoken well, and the Czechs seem friendly and progressive. The tax rate is pretty low and the economy seems to be on the up. Another great thing is that accessing Europe is easy from here – Vienna two hours away by train, Dresden three, Leipzig, Berlin, Germany, Poland, Austria all fairly easy to get to by train or car for weekends or holidays.

I guess the inaccessbility of the language (it’s based on Russian) and the generally cold winters are the main drawbacks, but it seems like one can enjoy a pretty decent and interesting lifestyle exploring this city.

Here’s a few photos from the weekend

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And here are the photos:

Halloween is big in GG – there must have been 30 or 40 kids who descended on us over the course of the evening – all dressed up proper. And they were polite this year too. We cooked chestnuts and marshmallows on the chiminea and met our new neighbours. Was great.

Oh and we made good pumpkins.

As promised a few photos from our fab holiday in Italy – doing a photography course in Orvieto and a cookery one in Perugia

You can see them best on Flickr, but a few below too:

 

Few favourites:

More from the course itself, coming later…

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For those who didn’t see this elsewhere:

Our weekends are frequently put under strain by S’s work schedule but this week We took a rare weekend off and “did what normal people do”. Well, maybe not everyone. We went to the Ragged Cot, a recently renovated pub/restaurant/inn in the small Cotswold town of Minchinhampton – I can highly recommend it. One of those places where you just know the experience is going to be great – chic, modern rooms, very clean, nice smell (important), little details, friendly staff.
On the Saturday morning we got up at 5.30am (again, maybe not particularly normal) and headed off for a hot air balloon ride across the Cotswold villages. We were incredibly lucky, ours was the only flight in seven days (due to inclement weather) and there were people with us who’d been waiting more than 12 months to actually fly and had nearly concluded that the company was just an elaborate scam to hold their money.
The weather was beautiful though and the flight – especially the inflation and the landing, was a great experience. Few nice photos below.




































































We followed the experience (after a nap) with a trip to Woodchester Mansion – the most incredible building I think I’ve ever seen… built (or rather not quite finished) in the mid 1800s by one William Leigh, it was designed to be a family home (on a grand scale) mixed with a Catholic commune. It is elaborately gothic (see the pictures below), still a building site and quite eerily spooky. The fact that the builders departed swiftly (when William ran out of cash) means that unlike most gothic buildings, you can see how they built it – with the most incredible stone engineering and what the Victoria/Georgian’s thought was most important in such a building – “clean air” was a priority, for example. But there was a shower room with overhead gargoyle spout as well as a deep bath, carved out of limestone (and intended to be lined with lead) with gargoyle taps.
The place is really a very elaborate folly – it is estimated it will cost £6-7million just to “restore to it’s original condition” the chapel (just one part of the building). And donations and grants are relied upon just to keep the water out. It will never be finished and thus is destined to be an expensive and eccentric oddity as long as it still stands.
It was a wonderful diversion for an afternoon though and if I had the money, I’d want to buy it and turn it into the most fantastic (if crazy) house.
Few photos:

We had a fun family weekend a couple of weeks ago – everyone came down, including Great Aunty Judy – 85 years old  and still dandy.

Few piccies:

We didn’t expect it, but the responsibility of owning 5 chickens hit hard this week.
We got back from Austin to find Twizzle – our beautiful “most ugly” hen with the twisted beak – was under the weather and had a lump on her tummy. She didn’t seem to be in pain, and they sometimes go like that if they’ve got an “egg stuck” so we left her under observation for a few days.
When it wasn’t better by Wednesday, S took Twizzle to the vet (what’s the chances of this: the only Avian-specialist vet in the whole of London is 5 minutes away near our house?!). He thought it was likely a “feather cyst” which are quite common but when he took an x-ray he found something different… Twizzle had somehow managed to swallow a nail.
Maybe it was buried in the garden or maybe it came from our fencing – whatever, she ate the nail and over the course of a week it slowly moved destructively through her insides, finally reaching her bowels and causing peritonitis as it tried to escape through her body cavity.
Twizzle was sadly unrescuable and so reluctantly we had to have the vet put her down.
She was the most curious, inquisitive, cheeky, ugly-but-beautiful, clever, character-ful little girl we’ve ever had and laid beautiful big eggs. She will not be forgotten.

And if that wasn’t enough, on Wednesday evening putting the chooks to bed we found their house was crawling with “red mite”. It’s a common pest of wild birds – 1mm long red bugs that feed on the chickens’ blood. We’d checked the cube at the weekend and there was nothing wrong at all – so the infestion had come from nothing to “intense” within a few short days. There must have been tens of thousands of the bugs all over the chickens and their house.
Cue a full 24 hour project to powder the chickens, persuade them to sleep outside away from the “biters”, a full strip down clean of the cage and disinfect with Jayes fluid and Ant powder and the purchase of a number of remedy and barrier products to ensure they can’t get reinfected in the future.
We need you to appreciate those eggs – a lot of love it takes.