Last night, I headed out for one last catch up with Bel and Dan before they return to Australia and reality. (Andrew is sick with a chest cold. He went to bed at 4pm yesterday and slept for 15 hours straight! Poor boy.)

Bel had organised drinks at The Castle, a lovely gastro pub in Islington. Happily, farewell drinks also coincided with the pub's quiz night. We signed up, thinking that as a team of Australians, with a token Brit or two, we wouldn't do that well.

Surprise, surprise, we came first! We weren't even trying that hard. Just chilling out, chatting away, keeping an ear out for the questions. Obviously we had some trivia experts at the table. It was nice to take part in a trivia evening. I miss our weekly sessions with The Badgers.

Some of the challenging questions were:

1. What is a fox's tail called?
   
   
2. The Bolivar is the currency of what country?
   
   
3. "Beyond the horizon lies the secret to a new beginning" is the tagline. Name the movie.
   
   
4. Acts passed in Parliament in 1729, 1736 and 1750 were designed to limit the consumption of what? (Kat and I knew this one. With all our touristing we've become authorities on English history.)
   
   
5. Cats meow, horses neigh and bulls what?
   
   
6. Which country and western singer recently surpassed Elvis as the best selling solo-artist of all time? (John had the right answer to this but we over-ruled him. Oops!)

Feel free to leave your answers to the questions in the comments. No using Google to cheat though!

Be allowed to stay in the UK.

I mentioned in my last post that Andrew and I organised a last minute trip to Scotland on the August bank holiday weekend. The purpose of which was not entirely recreational. The main reason we had to go to Scotland was to renew my visa.

My visa was due to expire on September 1^st and needed to be renewed before then. In mid-August I started researching renewal options. It was then that we realised that if I had applied by post it could have take up to 14 weeks for the application to be processed. Since you have to send your passport in with your application, you're without passport for this time. Not usually a problem but we had a pre-booked trip to Slovakia for the last weekend in August. We'd be flying back into London on the 2nd of September, the day after my visa expired.

You kinda need a passport and/or visa to get back into the country, so applying by post was out. Obviously I had to apply in person. After a quick call to the visa hotline to make an appointment, we discovered that Croydon (the office which is closest to London) was totally booked out. The only availability was at Sheffield (2 hours north), Liverpool (4 hours north-west) and Glasgow (in Scotland). We decided to book an appointment for the Friday before the bank holiday in Glasgow and then turn it into a mini-break.




So in the end, it was a great weekend. The visa application process went very smoothly and only took an hour. There were no queues, I just went from window to window. Submitting the application, making the payment and then receiving the visa. It made me giggle when they weren't interested in my financial situation at all. They were only interested in Andrew's financial records. As it's a spousal visa and I'm dependant on him, he has to show that he can keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. Obviously he can, as we got the stamp of approval.




We managed to see Stirling Castle, Loch Ness, Inverness, Highland Games, more castles, more lochs and some of the beautiful Scottish Highlands. And we made it back to London on Monday afternoon in time to see some of the Carnival.




I'm a little bit ashamed because I'm usually quite organised about these kind of things. But we certainly made the best of a bad situation. You can't complain about a chance to see more of Scotland.

Every year, the Notting Hill Carnival is held on the August bank holiday weekend. It is a Caribbean flavoured festival and is the second biggest street festival in the world (after Rio). The parade route goes right past our front door and we had a fantastic view from our living room window.

Well, we had a fantastic view once we arrived home. We tried to cram it in all in to our bank holiday weekend. We organised a last minute a trip to Scotland (the purposes of which were not entirely recreational... more to come) and when booking our flights home we decided to try and catch the tail end of carnival Monday.

Getting home mid-carnival was a bit of a challenge. Ladbroke Grove, our closest tube station was closed and thousands of people were using Notting Hill Gate tube station. We decided to tube it to Holland Park, which is a little further afield and hoof it. Walking down the hill from Holland Park to our house we had a fantastic view of the carnival in full swing. All you could see was a sea of people bobbing up and down to a Caribbean beat.

This view was a little stressing to us as we knew we had to wade through that crowd to get home. Poor Andrew was dragging our rollie luggage which was not an easy feat. We got a few strange looks and I'm sure most people were wondering what kind of idiot brings luggage to a street party. Eventually we made it to our front door, stepped over the pile of rubbish that had accumulated on our door step and retreated to sanity.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out our window watching the parade go by and bopping to the music. Parade is a very loose term as there wasn't a steady stream of floats. There also weren't any barriers preventing the crowd from getting up close and personal. Floats would go by every now and then with a mobile crowd attached. It seemed that carnival goers would pick a float they liked and follow the parade route with the float.


Sea of people is the right metaphor to describe the crowd, as there were definitely waves of people. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to see the road outside because of the number of people and sometimes there'd only be 50 or so revellers outside. I think it was a great way to do the parade. It gave people an escape route from the madness. I don't think the Grove's narrow streets would deal with a traditional parade.


Seven o'clock arrived, the official finishing time, and floats were still going by our house. An hour later, floats were still going past and a line down the road showed that there were several more to come. I think they were doing laps of the route. Sadly, at around 9:30pm, the happy, dancing crowd turned in to an angry, bottle-throwing mob. A group of young boys started throwing bottles at the police and all hell broke loose. It was a sad end to a really fun day.

The police response was aggressive. Large groups of police officers raced up our street and formed human barriers. They created several lines across Ladbroke Grove, some lines pushed the crowd north and others pushed the crowd south. Effectively, they squeezed the crowd out of Notting Hill. There were hundreds of police officers dressed in fluorescent yellow parkas outside our house.


Andrew and I watched the police operation from our window while we ate our dinner. It was dinner and a show! A group of kids loitered around 40m away from the police line. Every now and again a boy would dart out from the safety of the group and pelt a bottle at the police line. The police weren't wearing any protective clothing apart from parkas and bobby hats. I'm surprised that more of them weren't injured by flying glass. (The papers say that only one officer was injured.)


We watched until stray missiles started to crash on our window ledge. We then drew our blinds and turned off our living room lights. Every now and again I'd peek out to see what was going on. I saw the arrival of the riot police but not the action. At around 11:30pm, Andrew and I went to bed to the sounds of helicopters and police sirens. Luckily, our sound-proofing is quite good so it was no more than a distant buzz.

This morning I woke up expecting to see the after-math and was greeted with clean streets. Gone was the carpet of rubbish and all the shattered glass. Shops that had wisely boarded up their windows for the carnival had taken down the coverings and were now open for business. The organisers/council had done a very impressive job on the clean up.

More photos on Flickr...

In March, while we were back home in Australia, we spent an afternoon with Mum, planning our trip around Spain and Portugal. Of course, we all had cities that were already on our personal agendas. Barcelona, Madrid, Cordoba, Granada, Seville were all instantly placed on the itinerary. To plan the rest of the route, we skimmed the guidebooks and looked at the places in between the must-dos. That's how Évora made the cut.

Below is the paragraph that tempted us to Évora:

"What draws the crowds though is the Capela dos Ossos, a mesmerising memento mori (reminder of death). A small room behind the altar has walls and columns lined with the bones and skulls of some 5000 people. ... There's a black humour to the way the bones and skulls have been carefully arranged in patterns, and the whole effect is strangely beautiful."

Chapel decorated with Bones! Gross!

The chapel was definitely an eerie place. Bones cover the walls and thousands of skulls feature in the decorating. This means a lot of empty eye sockets are staring at you as you walk through.

The monks who created the church thought that the chapel would be an ideal place to think about the fleeting nature of life and to help one reduce the focus on material possessions. Death is certainly something that is on your mind in a room full of bones. This message is emphasised by the greeting that welcomes you to the chapel... "We bones in here wait for yours to join us."



More photos on Flickr...

Maybe I'm not too far off the mark with the whole "Jess is 12!" declaration. Especially if you look at some of the presents I received this year for my birthday.

Stormtrooper Mighty Mugg



Sakura Momiji Doll



Wolverine Mighty Mugg



To balance out all these toys I gifted myself with a beautiful new handbag. It's an Ollie and Nic Dolci chocolate tote. I love it! It has that beautiful new bag smell and it's huge (it fits 2 books!). It was on sale and I couldn't resist.

Ollie&Nic bag