Scott's professional blog

Scott's been asked to write a monthly blog for the online publication H & V News, and I'm so proud of him that I had to let you all know about it.

Check it out: http://www.hvnplus.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=25/t=m/goSection=21

On another note, it's getting dark here at 4:30 pm and we had our first snowfall last night. Ick. Sue has the right idea and has burried herself beneath blankets on the bed for warmth. I think I may have to go warm up my hands on her, right after I make some hot chocolate...k bye.

Oktoberfest!!

Hello family, friends and fans! Barbara and I have now been back a week after spending a quick night outside London, and a fast weekend in Germany for the opening of Oktoberfest. We flew into Salzburg, Austria (Barb says the Sound of Music was filmed there, it was Mozart's birthplace and she was impressed with the snow capped mountians!) then met up with our friends in Augsburg, Germany. We met up with Brett and Jenny Sterling (from Berlin), Jessica Luhn (from Paris), and Jerod Bradshaw (from Austria). We all attended high school and college together, and we all happened to be living in Europe so we got together for a rare occasion and lots of beer!

The first night we went into Munich and went to an outdoor garden that Brett had been to before. Basically there's a Chinese pagoda, and Umpa band and lots of beer and brats. We each got one litre glass beer mugs which we all ended up keeping. After having a good time there we walked back through the neverending park in the dark. We stocked up on more beer at the station and all ended up back on the train to Augsburg-thankfully! We had a really good time drinking beer on the train (which is acceptable and actually encouraged in Germany). There were plenty of photos to mark this occasion.

We stayed in a youth hostel in Augsburg since there was no room at the inn for us in Munich. This is because Oktoberfest is the largest festival in the world and there were one or two extra people around as a result. 6-6.5 million people have attended the 16 day festival in recent years (this makes Bikes, Blues and Barbeque look like a small get together between friends!). The festival was originally started in 1810 for the future King Ludwig I's wedding reception. The festival has been cancelled 24 times since 1810 due to war, disease and economic emergencies. A staggering 7 million litres of beer are consumed in the 16 day festival! (this is not so surprising when you see these Bavarians drink).

Anyway, enough facts and figures. What was it like? It was awesome! According to our impressions the Germans basically just drink beer and eat a lot of meat, which Brett confirmed is not too far from the truth. We had our taste of sausages and pork knuckles in addition to brew. Oh and don't forget pretzels! They are huge! One of the downsides though was we didn't get a seat in a "tent" (the tents are about the size of Sam's Club, and there are almost 10 of them!). We got to go in to the Paulaner tent and walk around and get pictures but for some reason they've come up with the policy of not serving beer to anyone standing up. Apparently they found out a long time ago that are just too many people at this festival and not enough tents. So you can go into the tent and look around, but since it was opening day and pretty early we knew people weren't about to give up their seats. So we reluctantly left the tent. The area outside of the tents is a huge midway filled with fair rides (I think roller coasters and beer are a cruel mixture personally), food tents, and little shops. I'm really not sure why they don't serve beer outside of the tents seeing as less than half the people I saw actually got into a tent (oh yeah, and by tent I actually mean warehouse). So once we got our fill of snacks, pretzels, and spectacle, we left.

That's it? That was Oktoberfest? Yes, but the spirit of Oktoberfest stayed with our little troop the entire weekend. We weren't about to have the party end, so we went to Hofbrau House downtown. This is world's most famous brewhouse. We thought since everyone was at the festival, the restaurant would be slow right? Wrong. It was full. We got in but we had to sit outside. I'd estimate the temperature that day was around 48-50 degrees F, so it was a bit chilly for eating outside. That didn't bother the three tables of Italians next to us though. They were having a grand old time singing songs we hadn't heard of and toasting each other with their liters of beer every 5 minutes. We had some good food though and some beer.

After we got sick of the cold outside, we left and checked out a nearby gift shop. After that, we made our way back to the Rathaus-Glockenspiel (built in the 1500s) which is a music playing feature of the town hall complete with mechanical life-sized dancing figures. It only comes on at 11am, noon and 5pm so we stuck around for the 5pm one. We went into a coffee shop across the street on the fifth floor and had a nice window view almost at equal height. I'm not sure how much coffee the six of us drank over the course of that weekend, but it definately rivaled our beer consumption. We stayed there and just played cards until they kicked us out around dinner time. In fact, we were pretty good at getting kicked of restaurants and cafes for playing cards. I'm not really sure why seeing as we drank plenty of coffee. Oh well, we're used to finicky shop-keepers, they're all over Europe. We kept playing cards at the train station until it was time for everyone to part ways at about 11:15pm. Brett, Jenny, Jessy and Jerod had to head back to Augsburg for their second night at the hostel while Barb and I had to start a long journey back to England via Salzburg. Our train left the station at 11:30pm. Yuck!

Our itenerary was a nightmare from the beginning of this trip. We had to fly Ryanair because it was the only affordable option. I don't know if anyone knows this, but if you fly Ryanair to or from London it has to be out of Standsted airport. I use the term "London Airport" very loosley because it's a one hour train ride from northern London. Which means it's two hours from Reading. The only flight we could get out of Stansted was at 6:30am and there weren't any trains early enough for us to make it so we were forced to stay in a hotel near the airport the night before. Even still we had to get up at 4am to ensure we cleared security. And it's a good thing we did because Stansted was surprisingly busy at 5:30am. Mostly young people take Ryanair because...well it's not the discount airline for nothing. It's very cramped, your flight times are NOT flexible, they try and sell you stuff over the intercom during your flight, and the service leaves much to be desired. And that was just the one way to Salzburg. For the way back, we were supposed to fly out of Salzburg at 9:30am on Sunday. At the time I really didn't think this was undoable but after we made the journey from Salzburg to Augburg when we arrived, we quickly realized that there was no way we would be able to make it from Augsburg on Sunday morning and still catch our flight. I looked into moving our flight back since I had Monday and Tuesday off work. The pricetag to get a later flight would be £300. That's British Pounds so that's like $600. So we took the course of action that was necessary; we stayed up all night Saturday night and journeyed back to Salzburg early. Barb got some sleep on the train ride back to Salzburg in the middle of the night on Saturday. Once we got to the train station though, my fears were realized: Salzburg has no night life so the public transport wasn't running at 2am. Luckily the cab drivers knew this and were there. I had fully resigned that we might have to walk to the airport across town in the middle of the night. I'm glad we didn't, it's 4.5 miles away.

So we slept for a couple of hours in the darkened airport in the middle of Austria until our flight finally came the next morning. We were exhausted and basically slept for two days when we got home, but it was one of the best trips we've been on! It's was really great seeing our buds.

Salzburg

Hey everyone!

As many of you know, Scott and I are going to Germany for Oktoberfest tomorrow! Woo hoo! We'll be meeting our friends Jessie, Brett and Jenny there too. Jessie is coming in from Paris, and Brett and Jenny are coming in from Berlin.

We're flying out of London on Friday at 6:30am. So we'll be staying at a little Inn, called the Bushel and Sack by the airport in London tonight to make catching our early flight that much easier.

I had a minor heart attack this morning as I was looking over our travel plans. I knew we were flying into Salzburg then taking a train into Munich, but when I Googled "Salzburg, Germany" it showed me Salzburg was really far away in the middle of Germany-not at all down in the SE corner like we'd thought! So I did a bit more research, and it seems that our flight is not landing in Salzburg, Germany at all, but rather Salzburg, Austria!! Hee hee! It's not as bad as it sounds, though. It's exactly where we thought Salzburg was, only it's in Austria, rather than Germany. I guess we need to work on our geography! Ah well, who am I to turn down a few extra stamps in my passport? : )

We'll let you know how everything went when we get back on Sunday.

Love you all.

B

France trip continued

Hello family and friends! It's been a while since our last post and we didn't get to finish telling about our trip to France. Barbara gave us her account of the "poultry incident". She actually didn't tell me about that until we were alone. I kept looking at her at dinner while she was giggling, but nope she wasn't going to talk about it yet. Anyway, I'm here to try to recount the rest of our trip.

On the second day, Phillipe took us on a tour of Provence in his car. We slept in and then went to Aix-en-Provence for lunch. We walked the old part of town where everything looks hundreds of years old. We went into a very old cathedral there which was prettier than any of the ones we've seen in England thus far. They had a huge open air market going that day too. They had booths selling: cheese, bread, sausage, spices, clothing, fruits, vegatables, novelties, fabric, and much more. We ate a nice lunch with Phillipe then headed back to the car. He then drove us all over Provence it seemed. We went far enough to notice a handful of different architectural styles. We got to see three or so examples of Phillipe's favorite villages in the area. One of which is Gordes where we looked upon the town that cascades down the hill (refer to our photo album for some of these beautiful views). I'm afraid the names of these other villages escapes me. We also saw a very old village of homes build out of stone called Bories. Even the roof is built out of un-mortared stones, it seems a bit percarious, but they're still standing. The last place we went to was Roussillon. It is a village up on a hill. The earth of this hill is very colorful in shades of read, pink, yellow and white. It has a sandy texture, but it's different than clay. It's called ochre in French (no not the kind you fry). There are also plenty of pics of this interesting substance. After we got back home from our whirlwind Provence tour, we went out to this pizza place in town that I remember going to when I was there and loving. I remember it as the best pizza I've ever had. France isn't exactly known for their pizza I know, but when you put roquefort, brie, and camembert on it, I'm sold. I'll be sure to try Italian pizza too when we go there for all of you purists out there.

The next day, we slept in a bit too. We then spent time with Hugette who took us to see her house in the neighboring village of Rognes. We didn't get to see much of it this time, but it's very picturesque. She then said that since we were interested in going to the beach that she was going to drop us off there for a while. We didn't argue. She drove us to Cassis, which is down the coast a bit from Marseille to the South and East. We killed about six hours there soaking up some sun (yes I had a thick layer of sunscreen on Mom), wading into the Mediteranean (no Blake I didn't wear my Speedo), pestering baby crabs, hermit crabs and barnacles, eating baguette sandwichs and sipping drinks at a cafe. It was a lot of fun. Eventually Hugette picked us up again and we ate dinner at the Casasola's.

On Saturday it was time for us to head to the second leg of our trip. I had booked two nights at a hotel in Marseille so we weren't intruding on the Casasolas for too long. Our hotel was right downtown and surprisingly spacious (after seeing hotels in England, anything looks spacious). Phillipe and Michele drove us to Marseille but they wanted to take us to lunch one last time to a seafood restaurant I had mentioned. It's out of town a ways but I remember eating there very vividly when I was there last (9 years ago). The restaurant is at the end of a peninsula and overlooks a craggy island off the tip. You have to walk a rocky footpath for a few hundred meters just to get there. We had a very leasurly, enjoyable lunch. When I'm in France, I don't even check my watch. I get the impression that none of the French check their watches either, they always seem to live for the moment!

After lunch, Phillipe and Michele said they were going to go see Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseille before they headed back home because Michele had never seen it. It's Marseille's most famous land mark. It's a basilica on top of a big hill in the middle of the city. It is refered to affectionately as the "good mother" which watches over the city. The architecture is striking, especially the ornate interior. I believe Barb got a few pictures in. Any panoramic pictures you see of the city are from atop this hill. After seeing the Basilica, we had one more drink at a cafe and then parted company with Phillipe and Michele. We were now on our own in a foreign country (England doesn't count because they kind of speak our language).

We saw a couple other neat churchs. One was an Abbey that was built in the fifth century! It was very gothic. We also saw the old Parnier neighborhood and the Vieux Port which is a very famous port packed with sail boats. On our last night there, we decided to take a late night cruise. We took one of the last boats of the night to the Frioul islands. They are not far from port and we saw Chateau D'If (an island prison) as we went by. We were on a big ferry with only two other couples on it. When we got to the island they sent us ashore and proceeded to take off back to the mainland. I had no clue they were dropping us off and leaving so I got worried. It was about sunset at this point, and athough I'm sure there are good little hotels to stay at on this island, we had a hotel and a flight to catch in the morning! Luckily I asked somebody and they said the ferry would be back in two and a half hours. So we went on a walk and injoyed the peace and quiet (downtown Marseille feels almost like New York City with all the people crowded together!). We found a cove without a soul in sight and waded into the water. I looked over about three feet to my right and saw a good sized jelly fish. It kept washing up ashore and wasn't able to get back out to sea. It was about the size of my hand. Thankfully I didn't touch it. After it got dark, we found a restaurant and had some drinks (I had Pastis, the official licorice flavored drink of Marseille) and some ice cream. We then wandered the docks looking at boats and enjoying the sound of the waves. We finally got on our ferry at ten thirty and headed back. It was the end to a wonderful week where every day was warm and sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky.

Our flight back was uneventful (which is about all you can ask for these days when you fly), but our train ride back to Reading took twice as long as it did going out! One of the lines on the Tube apparently flooded from too much rain...welcome back to England I guess. We eventually made it back though and slept like babies. After that it was back to business as usual... well I guess as usual as a couple of crazy Arkansans in England gets. Until next post, ciao!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbarawest/sets/

Provence, France: Day 1

Hello all! Scott and I just got back from an amazing 5 days and nights in the Provence region of France. Provence is in the extreme SE part of France along the Mediterranean coast.

Our trip started off by leaving our home here in Caversham, England at 9am, and taking a series of train rides and Underground trains to get to Stansted airport in extreme north east London. The trains took longer than our flight of 1h40m! I found this amusing. We found that for the airline we were were flying, Ryanair, each individual flight had a seperate counter to check in at. A bit confusing at first since there seemed to be at least 30 Ryanair ticket counters with various size lines at them and only little bitty signs with different flight numbers displayed above them. Crazy. But we figured it out.

As some of you know, the West family has been good friends with the Casasola family for many many years. Hugette's daughter is Michele, and Michele and Phillipe Casasola have 2 children Marie (25) and Jean Baptiste (23). Hugette lives in the nearby village of Rognes. The Casasola family was kind enough to let Scott and I stay in their guest house just outside of Le Pue-Sainte-Reparade, which is near Aix-en-Provence for 3 days and nights. The Casasolas live in the country in a beautiful old 150-200 year old peach colored farmhouse with light blue shutters, spanish tile, and lots of nice flat open land and old trees surrounding their compound. Michelle picked us up from the airport in Marseille and we drove inland for about and hour to get to their house. The roads began to get smaller and smaller as we neared their place, and we started passing vinyards, olive trees, and fields of drying sunflowers just before we turned onto the yet smaller road to get to their house. We entered their estate through a short walled drive which was roofed with old timbers and exposed lichen covered spanish tiles. A set of large iron gates let us into their backyard where we parked the car just outside of their large new garage. (Phillipe is an avid wine collector and it was under this new garage where he had his wine cellar. I think he said he currently has over 500 bottles, and keeps a spreadsheet to keep track of the best dates to drink each bottle!) Their house is decorated in the traditional Provence style with lots of old wood, beautiful brightly colored fabrics, rust colored tile floors, and the occasional basket hanging from the low ceilings. You must stoop through the small timber topped doorways leading from room to room. The ceiling was all exposed wooden beams and the entire place is simply gorgeous! We spent most of our time there chatting and eating outside under a large old tree (with its resident owl) at a wooden table whose metal chairs were all painted different bright colors. There is an saltwater swimming pool just outside the backdoor, and a grill built into the side of the guesthouse nearby. Vines had started to creep across the backside of the new addition to the house from the older part which they had already claimed. There were 2 dogs and le chat (the cat) Max who helped keep our stay entertaining.

The first evening we were there, all 7 of us ate dinner together outside. As I don't speak French, I had an impossible time following the conversation, but strangely enough, by the end of our 5 days in France, I'd found that I was able to understand quite a bit of what was being said and could even tell when the topic of conversation had been changed! I could even speak very simple sentences to Scott in French! Hugette, Michele, Marie, and JB all spoke some English, but most of the time we were with them all French was spoken exclusively. Scott said that he even started dreaming in French the second night we were there! As most of you know, Scott speaks French very well. He's my official translator. I think I'll keep him around for future trips to France. ; )

Anyway, back to dinner the first night. We were eating chicken, and I had observed that everyone else was eating their drumsticks with a knife and fork -continental style. So I thought I would follow suit and do the same. Meanwhile everyone else is engaged in conversation and speaking French and I have no idea what is being said so I'm off in my own little world concentrating trying to cut my chicken from the bone and finding that it's actually a really hard thing to do. When all of a sudden my drumstick flips up into the air and shoots of to the left of me and lands on the ground! I swear it all happened in slow motion. I quickly looked up and NO ONE ELSE SAW IT! But of course, being me, I started laughing uncontrollably and in the split second I was debating whether to leave it there on the ground until I could pick it up quietly at the end of the meal, or draw attention to what I had just done and pick up the chicken leg and set it next to my plate, one of the dogs decided for me and swooped in and grabbed the chicken leg and trotted off into the darkness with it!! By this time I think I had confused everone at the table with my sudden outburst of laughter and was trying not to draw further attention to myself, so I quickly composed myself and said something like "I'm sorry, um, nevermind." since I was too embarassed to admit what had happened and felt I could still save face. Then as if I was being punished for trying to hide my folly, the dog with my chicken leg still in its mouth came trotting back up to within 10 feet of the table and started crunching loudly on it!! It was all I could do to keep a cringe off of my face. Phillipe looked over at the dog for a few seconds and I could tell he was thinking "What has he found?" and I could also tell he was debating whether or not to get up and take whatever the dog had found away from it, or just shoo him off. While I was on the opposite side of the table torn between trying to silently will everyone to just ignore the dog, and running the thought that "dogs shouldn't have chicken bones because they choke on them" through my mind, wondering if I needed to get up and save this stupid dog's life and embarass myself in the process. Finally, in what felt like 5 long miserable hours later of me listening for the dog to start wheezing, the dog stopped its crunching. Whew. I was safe. They never knew... of course now they probably will now. : )

More to come, but I must stop writing for now.

Our Cornish Adventure

Greetings All!
Well it's time for the next installment of Barbie and Scott's adventure! This one is to tell you about our trip to St. Ives in Cornwall. For those unfamiliar with British geography, cornwall is the county in the southwestern most tip of England. We took the train there which was a little over 5 hours each way! To put this in perspective, we used to make the drive from Dallas to Little Rock in about 5 hours, and it was 80 fewer miles. Normally the train rides are not that slow, but this particular trip called at just about every station on the line along the way. However, train rides are not so bad, you don't have to worry about traffic or being sleepy and you can read.

So anyway, we finally got there on Saturday July 26th at about 1pm. The area is gorgeous, as I'm hoping you'll see in our photos. I picked a spot on the north Cornwall coast which is supposed to be more interesting landscape and more waves from the Atlantic. The town actually has to beaches, one on either side of a peninsula. One beach faces a bay and the other the Atlantic. We laid out on some beach towels (after slathering suncreen) on the beach and enjoyed the sand in between our toes. The water wasn't exactly balmy though. As many of you may know, it does not exceed 65 degrees F here during much of the summer so the water is very chilly. My guess is the water temperature is 60 degrees F or lower. So we wading in it up to our ankles and then decided we'd had about enough of that. So just laying on the beach was just fine with us. The weekend's weather turned out to be great, especially on Sunday which was in the 80s! There were tons of Brits turned out for their annual holiday. This tourist spot didn't have very many foreignors at all. Many of the London attractions have more Americans/Asians/Europeans than Brits, but St. Ives was all British. Many people were donning wet suits just to enter the water.

This was our first overnight trip so we stayed at a bed and breakfast that Saturday night. It was very nice and quaint with a view of the bay. We killed time exploring curiosity shops (England is chalk full of them). We ate at a seafood restaurant and had fish and scallops, and went to a craperie for dessert. All in all we had an enjoyable and relaxing weekend.

Bath and the English kittie

Greetings everyone! This is Scott logged in as Barbara by the way. Sorry we haven't posted in a couple of weeks, we will try not to make a habit of that. So what can you tell by the title of this post? Perhaps we've been attempted to bathe English cats? Not quite, these are in fact two completely unrelated topics that have happened since our last post. One, we visited the old roman town of Bath, and two, we successfully navigated the red tape and imported our beloved cat Sue!!! That's right, Sue is with us now and in good spirits. She's sitting in Barb's lap right now trying not to fall asleep. Thank you very much to Barb's folks for taking care of Sue for us the last month and a half. Sue says: "thnx fur feedin adn petting me, kbai".

So Barbara and I saw Bath! You may have heard of it before, it was originally found by the Romans (or at least recorded as being found by the Romans, they had a habit of deciding to start history from scratch sometimes) and is the only hot spring in the British isles. The used this hot water to create a pool and they...worshipped it! They actually built a temple over the area and made sacrifices to the goddess of wisdom and decisions, Sulis Minerva. The crafty little Romans used the hot water from the spring and piped it to surrounding rooms and pools. Bathing was a very important social event for Romans (I can just see the English Victorians cringing) so they really liked it I'm sure when it was steaming hot! So anyway, the baths were neat. Right next door is Bath Abbey which is also very cool. They say it is quite possible that another Roman temple exists in this area and that it most likely lies beneath Bath Abbey. It's another very awesome medieval church just like you see everywhere here. Bath is quite unique, almost all of the rest of its architecture is Georgian (English for neoclassical), and the town is protected so that you can't built anything modern in the city center. We've posted the pictures on Flickr.

On another note, last Sunday Barb and I met up with Fei Song in Reading. Fei went to graduate school with me at the Walton College. She happens to have moved over here a couple months before us to Bracknell which is town very close by. We hung out and talked with Fei for a couple of hours at a pub, it was fun. Another MBA classmate, Jamie Lanius, will be moving to London quite soon also. Hopefully we'll meet up with her sometime soon. Also I'm been in contact with David Deitz, a friend of mine from undergrad, who's been living in Leeds now for a while. He and his wife are moving to London in a couple of months so we plan on seeing them as well. Small world.

Barbara and I just had a very relaxing Saturday. We only left the house to go to the grocery store and pick up picnic items. We then proceeded to ride our bikes to a spot on the Thames and have a picnic. It was a lovely day in the 70s (I'm sure this temperature does not seem fair to those we know in Arkansas and Texas) with lots of sun. We were in a park area outside the oldest church in town. Just to paint a picture for you all, we were sitting there eating a French baguette with blue cheese, French sausage, and watercress and drinking a bottle of red wine while watching the swans swim by. Aaahhh. Suuuch a hard life.

As a side note, Barbara would like to add that she found out a piece of trivia about our home. We live in Caversham which is our nice little suburb of Reading. Barb found out that Caversham is the oldest known permanent settlement in Britain! Wow, I had no idea! Barb also wanted me to say that the bobbies actually do look like the guys on Hot Fuzz! Wow, thanks Barbara! I'm sure everyone was wondering about that. Yarrrp!!!!