I was fortunate enough to have two weeks of over Christmas (mostly because I’d accumulated so much overtime throughout the rest of the year) and it was really lovely, both to have so much time without auditing and to have chance to celebrate Christmas with Tim for the first time in our own home The days before Christmas Day itself went by in a flurry of last minute present buying (once we’d got them under the tree, it looked like Tim had bought me twice as many as I’d bought him, so I had to go out on a last minute spending spree!), as well as a burst of last minute food buying, which resulted in us venturing as far as the hell that is Coventry in order to stock up on last minute food. On Christmas Eve we went to tea at my parents’ house and pretended to be continental by opening all our presents to each other on the spot. (more…)

I still feel absolutely exhausted today after a rather crazy weekend. It seemed like such a good idea to book it, back in May, when I hadn’t even started looking at houses never mind decided to buy one in Nuneaton, and when I was blissfully unaware that I would be spending the following week working away from home in Oswestry.

It seemed like less of a good idea at 3.45am on Saturday, when my alarm went off Well, strictly speaking it was Tim’s alarm, because in a moment of madness, Tim had volunteered to get up and drive me to Birmingham airport. I had no idea how long this would take from Nuneaton, and there’s always the potential for us to get lost when I’m in charge of the navigating, so in all honesty we could probably have had an extra half hour in bed and I would still have got to the airport for 5.30 as required.

I feel rather guilty for having abandoned Tim for the entire weekend in order to go on holiday without him… especially because it was the weekend before his birthday… and in particular because today is his birthday and I’m not at home because of work He claimed he didn’t mind though, and he would have been thoroughly miserable if I’d brought him with me, because I was going to visit the Christmas markets in Nuremberg, and Tim is not exactly a big Christmas market fan!

We flew from Birmingham to Munich with Lufthansa, which would have been quite a pleasant experience were it not for the fact that Lufthansa have switched from hard cheese to soft cheese in their regulation cheese sandwich, and soft cheese is a rather revolting thing to try and eat at 7am in the morning. Especially when it’s a Saturday morning, because the best sort of Saturdays are those which don’t start until midday (more…)

On Saturday evening Babel and I finally arrived home after a week of Esperanto-craziness at the IS. It was an unusual week, albeit in an enjoyable sort of way, and I hardly know where to start with describing it. I actually suspect I won’t get very far with describing it at all, because I’m off to the land of no internet in Oswestry for the rest of the week, but if I shall begin at the beginning and see how far we get (more…)

Sunday morning we got up bright and early because we had decided to head to the beautiful city of Regensburg in Eastern Bavaria. I don’t have any photos of it so you should definitely click on that wiki link to see some, because I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s beautiful. A UNESCO world heritage site, the town is situated on the river Danube and largely escaped bombing during the second world war, so has a virtually intact medieval centre which is well worth a visit. It’s quite a surreal place; almost every building in the town centre would warrant being a museum piece in another location, yet people do actually have to live normal lives here and so you have medieval churches with a discreet sign outside indicating that they now serve a wide range of spaghetti (more…)

Despite the fact that we successfully checked in online for our flight to Munich, we still had to get up at 4am 4am on a Saturday morning in December is not a pleasant sort of time, all the more so because it was literally tipping it down with rain. The world’s most talkative taxi driver refused to drop us right outside the terminal building, so we had to walk quite a distance in it and ended up very wet indeed Feeling rather tired after a week at work I was desperate for a coffee, and as soon as we got through security, the plan was to head to Costas. Security was unfortunately rather a nightmare on account of it being a Saturday, and by the time we made it to the departure lounge there were only twenty minutes until boarding. That ought to have been long enough to get a drink, but sadly the queue in Costa was so long and the staff so inefficient that my sister and I were literally just in the process of paying for our lattes when my mother arrived to tell us the flight had been called As you can imagine, I wasn’t a happy bunny and it’s made me question the whole value of ever checking in online. (more…)

With the cancellation of my flight, my weekend got off to a bit of a rocky start. I’d had to get up at four in order to get to the airport on time, and was a little annoyed that my taxi had set me back a whopping twenty five quid Admittedly my mother had warned me about this, explaining that a new change in legislation meant taxis were charging substantially more for fares at antisocial hours, but even so I felt faintly outraged. Nowhere near as outraged, of course, as I felt when I got to check in and became aware of the debacle with my flight. Despite the fact that it wasn’t quite six am, I was so frustrated that I had to go to Costa’s for an iced latte (any excuse), and spent the rest of the time wandering around the poor selection of shops in Birmingham airport’s grubby little terminal two. I was tempted to buy my boyfriend a handheld fan which squirts water on the grounds that he constantly experiences menopausal hot flushes, but in the end I didn’t because I figured he was probably too macho to want to use it in public (more…)

I have read two incredibly good books within the last week or so. I read them simultaneously, but the first one I got to the end of was ‘The Odessa File’ by Frederick Forsyth. My boyfriend lent it to me, having himself read it from cover to cover in a very short period of time, and so I was intrigued to see what it was like given that he was singing its praises despite not normally being fiction’s biggest fan. (more…)

Since I was accompanied by my parents, this second weekend in Tuebingen was always going to be rather more sedate and rather less fun. We were all travelling out there together to celebrate my sister’s 21st birthday, and this time my mother had booked the flights, which were via Stuttgart and thus far less stressful. Stuttgart seems to be a small and quiet little airport, at least before 10am on a Friday morning. Quite why my mother had booked the flights for so early in the morning was something of a mystery. The weather in Britain had been so stormy during the preceding couple of days that a strong tail wind allowed our flight to arrive thirty minutes ahead of schedule and so it was that we found ourselves disembarking from the train in Tuebingen shortly after 11am. (more…)

Getting a flight at 7am on a Saturday morning for a quick weekend away in Germany always seems like such a good idea, until the alarm goes off at four. Having not had more than five hours sleep all week, it was somewhat of a struggle to drag myself out of a nice warm bed into the freezing cold and darkness of the house, with the result that I was hardly ready when my taxi banged on the door. The taxi driver seemed friendly enough, apologising profusely for the fact that the temperature in his taxi was sub-zero, but he then proceeded to drive me to the airport via a route which, in my long experience of taking taxis to the airport, no other taxi driver had ever taken me before. I felt a trifle disconcerted. I have a strange phobia that taxi drivers will either wilfully abduct me or misunderstand me and take me somewhere entirely different to where I wanted to go. The former has happily not yet occurred. The latter unfortunately has on at least one occasion. (more…)