Portland

Last weekend Hubby and I set out for a photographic weekend in Dorset. The plan was to get up really early and get some shots of sea and the rising sun. Hubby had done his research and found an island called Portland which sounded ideal for our mission. It had a lighthouse and some interestingly shaped cliffs that seemed to be a promising backdrop for our photos.

When we arrived to the hotel it was all dark, windy and cold. The prospect of getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning was not very appealing! But said and done, at 6:45 am we were back in the car heading down to Portland Bill. It was still dark as we 5 minutes later arrived by the lighthouse. Heavily laden with tripod, camera and all its gear, wearing multiple jumpers, hats and gloves we stumbled our way down to the shore. And what a sight greeted us!

Portland is mainly known for its stone, so the island is more or less one giant quarry. For hundreds of years we have been hacking away the rocks from the Portland cliffs, leaving a half man-made and half natural eroded shoreline. This morning the sea was happily crushing itself against the shore whilst the occasional cloud scampered across the dark blue sky waiting to get lit up by the sun. Well worth getting up for :-)

Two and a half hours later we rolled back to the hotel for a well deserved breakfast, before heading back out again for a stroll around the island. 

Check out my flickr to see more photos from the weekend.

Sailing weekend in Solent

As a birthday surprise Ian took me out for a sailing weekend. He had arranged for us to hook up with Geert (ex-colleague to Ian) who just happens to be about to start his own skipper business. As Geert haven't got his own boat just yet he had rented a nice 12 meter racing yacht called Blue Juice. The rest of the crew was made up by Geert's wife Jane, Jelte, Lorin, Alex and Shaun.

I was completely unaware of Ian's plans and was told first on Friday at 15:30 that I was to go on my first proper sailing trip ever. All very exciting and very unexpected! There I had been packing my passport and the hiking shoes. Was I disappointed you may ask. Not at all! The whole experience turned out to be very pleasant indeed. So good I could easily be tempted to go again. (As long as I can go with Geert and First reef.)

Our first outing was to take us from Southampton and up the river Beaulieu to find us a nice spot to moor for the night. It all took us a little bit longer then planned (mainly due to shopping) so we missed our pub dinner. Oops!

Luckily we had food for cooking, thanks to the shopping team. This was when we realised a few things were as they were supposed to be. Trivial things like a working fridge, temperamental gas stove (kept switching itself off), lack of sauce pans and other vital kitchen supplies. Makes cooking so much more interesting. Well, well, Alex and Jane managed to cook us a feast anyway, in batches! But it did mean we were gunning for the pubs for the rest of the weekend.

Both Saturday and Sunday turned out to be beautiful days. Sunny and blue sky! Water lapping! All very chilled and relax. Plenty of opportunities for water photographing. I was definitely liking it. The guys were however mumbling a bit that there wasn't an awful lot of wind. Good enough for me though.

As Geert is planning to teach sailing in his new business adventure he rather quickly got me involved with the whole steering business. Properly called being at the helm I think.

First time around was under motor so it wasn't that hard. Just needed to calm down and accept that your turning will happen 5 minutes after you turned the wheel.

Second time around was under sail. At this point I was still a bit confused as to what was going on so I spent most of the time photographing the water instead. But you can only do that for so long so Geert spotted me idle after awhile.
I had just got the whole groove thing explained when it was time for tacking. Oh my God! I could barely see the difference my steering did to the sails.Anyway I did a very nice and controlled tack (according to the experts), straight back into the groove again.

I was happy cruising along starting to get a tiny bit of feel for it. Geert was debating if now was a good time for man-over-board drill when our navigator of the day came up on deck. Very calmly he said that now wasn't a good time as we are about to run into a sandbank and we should tack instead. Me struggling with the terminology managed the first part "ready?" and failed to remember the second part. All that sprang to mind was "lederhosen", don't ask me why. Anyway, managed another controlled tack and just as we came out of it the backend hit the sandbank and all of a sudden we were very still.

Not to worry, we managed to get off the bank in just a few minutes. However, I thought that probably was about as much damage I was willing
to inflict on the others. I stayed well clear of the "making the boat go forward" business and reported for kitchen duty instead.

In the end we managed to sail to Lymington for our second night. Third night was spent in Cowes on Isle of Wight. And in between we saw the Needles, some very big container ships and a huge cruise ship. I managed to take loads of photographs, I'll know what I'll be doing this week. On our last day we sailed to Portsmouth. We had some lunch and spent some time seriously tacking our way out of the harbour.

Little horses

On Sunday L and I continued our healthy weekend with a walk to Eashing. Didn't find to much on the way capturing our photographic senses so we ended up mostly chatting and enjoying being out in the fresh air. As always you get hungry after a while so a lunch stop at the Stag was called for.

When we asked for the menu we were told that the waiting time would be 1 1/2 hour. No time to lose, we quickly got our orders in and the waiting time had miracules dropped to 1h 10 min. We called R&I to tell them it was time to finish painting their banisters and come and join us instead.

To our surprise after having waited for 25 minutes our food arrived. It was all very jummy so we were all very happy. Just as we were about to finish R&I showed up. A quick drink and we were off again.



As always when you are out and about the countryside you have to walk through some animal fields. This time we walked through a horse field. Three little horses were waiting for us close to the exit stile. All very curiuos and determined not to let us out until we had said hello. We were all racing to reach the stile first. We won but not until the horses managed to get a sneak cuddle first.




Safely on the other side we felt more at home to give them more cuddles. And it proved a good time for some close-up shots of pretty horses.

Gigantic cake

Today L and I have been out wandering the Surrey paths. It was blue sky, warm and generally very pleasant so a nice walk with the cameras sounded like a brilliant idea.

We headed out around one o'clock (hey it is Saturday and you don't have to get up early then). The target was to get to Watts tea house.

So we happily wandered along. Took lots of photos. Met some scary looking, but very sweet, highland cows. Took a couple of wrong turns and finally found the tea house.

Lyckily it was open, at this time we were getting rather hungry. Being a tea house we obviously had to get a cream tea (tea, scones, cream and jam) and a chocolate cake. The cake arrived immediately and both L and I got a big shock.


The size of the cake; it was enormous! It was enough to feed a whole family. It was in fact a quarter of the whole cake. And we got one piece each.

Every customer who came in commented on our cakes' size. Even the other waitresses did too. We became the big talking point.

After getting over the initial shock we started to photograph them. We needed proof. No one would believe us otherwise.

We had our cream tea and a little bit of the cake. But in the end we had to admit defeat. We just couldn't take it anymore. We both had a massive sugar rush and walked back home in high speed. Both craving for some salt to neutralise our taste buds.

I think we need to go for another walk tomorrow to get rid of all the calories and sugar.

Culture in Cardiff

The Plants invited us to join them for their annual cultural weekend in Cardiff, Wales. Having attended it last year it was an easy choice to tag along. In splendid Plants fashion the weekend was spent with much laughter, sillyness and good wine & food.

We had left the logistics to Rob which ended up with us taking the train. Believe it or not but he was so organised that we travelled back in first class. Obviously we had to keep up the appearance and when the white wine ran out we naturally had to continue with the champagne. Credit crunch, what do you mean? ;-)

The actual "excuse"g for the gathering was to go to
the opera. This year the Welsh opera house was giving a brilliant production of Mozart's the Marriage of Figaro. We all thoroughly enjoyed it. Not sure it had anything to do with the Mojitos and Caipirinhas we had before though...

Sunday was saint David's day so the Welsh were all out. Leeks, daffodils and red dragons where ever you turned. Some off us piled onto the tourist boat and went for a turn around Cardiff bay. Ian spent most of the time chatting up old ladies while Laurie and Andrea enjoyed the diesel fume at the back of the boat.

After some milling around the Docks, trying to get a coffee, it was time to leave Cardiff. Once back home we went to R&I to have pizza and to admire their blue-ray player. Unfortunately the only film they had to demonstrate with was National treasure II. When R started to rewind because he missed a scene we couldn't stand the badness anymore and went home.

More photos can be found on my flickr...

Saturday walk

On Valentine's day I had the luxury of being served breakfast in bed! You can't really complain :-)


We had nothing planned which is rather rare for us. So we got up and realized we could do whatever we wanted! Being such a sunny day the obvious choice was to go for a walk.


So we went down to river Wey and walked all the way to Guildford. Once in Guildford we found a cool pub, the star, which has a stage for local bands to play. Better check that out more properly.

After some shopping we took the train home and I got cooked for again.

A very pleasant Valentine's indeed :-)

Comedy cooking with friends

Back home again after a fab time in Japan we thought we share our experiences with our friends. So on Saturday we invited Rob & Is for a Japanese dinner. The plan was to cook okonomiyaki and drink our specially imported sake. Okonomiyaki was one of the many Japanese
dishes we tried in Japan and is best described as a pancake with cabbage, meat or fish.

After some googling I came up with two recipes. We decided to go for Hiroshima-style which means that noodles are added to the mix. After spending some time working out what needed to be done I called the gang into the kitchen and started the delegation.

Ian became in charge of frying noodles (and yes some of them did catch fire...), Is was sorting out the gyoza and Rob and I were frying two cabbage pancakes with thinly sliced pork on top.





Here starts the comedy: once the pancakes had fried on one side for awhile we had to flip it over! In true team spirit two of us equipped with a total of three spatulas managed to flip both of them over without incident. Stage one completed! Next we transferred the pancake and pork (which at this stage is at the bottom) on top of the fried noodles. First one was a bit tricky and needed a little bit of rescuing. By the second, we had got the hang of it.

Third step involved a fried egg which the noodles and pancake were placed on top of. So far so good!

Now all we needed to do was to flip the whole thing over onto a plate. Ian was a hero and flipped them both without either dropping them on the floor or burning his fingers.









By just adding some Worcester sauce and mayo our two okonomiyakis were ready to be served! And delicious they were!






Good work team! The sake was well deserved after these difficult maneuvers...!








Sunday we closed the kitchen and went to Putney to see Jelte and Linda's new flat and have a pub lunch. Which due to Jelte's brilliant planning ended up to be dinner instead. The table hadn't been booked until 18:00... Oooops!

Weekend in Sweden

Ian and I spent the weekend in Sweden celebrating Mom's 65th birthday. On Saturday we had a very nice birthday party with lots and lots of cakes. (Mom have been very busy over the past weeks!) My aunt and my cousin Anna-Karin (with family) also came to the party which was very nice since I don't get to meet them very often. Obviously Per and Siri was there too as was Per's new girlfriend Carin.

I can't believe how tall Siri is now. And she is definitely coming to that age when I can take her out for a proper shopping spree, can't wait!!!

We finally got to meet Mom and Dad's new dog Sissi too. She was such an adorable dog, I almost brought her back with me. She is a Danish-Swedish farm dog and about 9 months old. She definitely fell for Ian, constantly begging for his attention or curling up in his lap.

She was also very fond of jumping up and down, sniffing through your hair, licking or sticking her nose in your ear. What can I say, completely adorable!

Time to get to work...Only two and a half days to go before HOLIDAY!!!!

Rob at his best!

The weekend was spent with our lovely friends Rob and Is. They invited us over for dinner on Saturday night. Ian and I stumbled home after savoring some fantastic chicken cakes with coriander and lime sauce, followed by pork belly with mango chutney and finished with a "simple" trifle. And it goes with out saying, lots of red wine...


Sunday morning, they enthusiastically picked us up for a country-side walk with Is' friends Rachel and Abigail. Luckily they were as hung-over as the rest of us...! Four miles later (or so) and only half-way through the walk, we ended up in the Drummonds Arms hotel & pub for a proper Sunday lunch. We had a very vague intention to continue the walk after lunch. But when you have a full blown Sunday pub lunch, it is just not possible...

Once home I decided to attempt making a flower arrangement. Never really done any like this before so I'm rather pleased with it, even though it is a bit wonky.