Almost Famous

BF and I headed to the Aviva Stadium after work yesterday for a soccer football match. It was a friendly between Ireland and Uruguay. We got really cheap tickets and since I had never been to the stadium, we decide why not (even though it was a Tuesday night and would finish past our bedtime).

 View of the stadium from our seats 

Since the seats were cheap, they were pretty crappy. We sat right behind the goal so spent the whole match straining to see what else was going on down the field. Also, there were FIVE goals during the match and only one happened at our end :( boo...The plus side, since we were right behind goal, we assumed we might be on TV if there was a goal. We had recorded the match and rushed home to see if we made it on TV. After 15 minutes of rewinding and fast forwarding (and a couple times thinking that we were two little kids in the front row), we found ourselves!  I wish I could show you, but you would have to squint really hard :)

So close! 

London Town

BF and I had a mini getaway this weekend to London to visit friends who just bought a fab new apartment.

We arrived on Friday evening and had a quiet enough night, just dinner and some drinks at their house. The new apartment is in Greenwich, and so on Saturday, BF and I walked over to the Old Royal Navy College and the Naval Museum and had a picnic breakfast because the weather was so lovely. (I know it doesn't look lovely in this picture, but trust me, it was!)

BF tip-toeing through the daffodils (I made him).

Entrance to the Navel Museum  

The museum was quite small to be honest, but since it was free admission, there were no complaints from me! We then headed up to the royal observatory. I was DELIGHTED to find out that this is where you can find the Greenwich Meridian, and this is where Greenwich mean time started. (I know I should have put two and two together, but I didn't) Plus, the fact that we were here during daylight savings weekend? A Geeky BONUS! 

 24 Hour Greenwich clock 

After the brief exploration of Greenwich, BF and I headed into town. I was going to meet up with a friend who was living in London and BF decided to skip out on all the wedding talk and meet up with us later. The last time I saw my friend, she and I were screaming the lyrics to Shakira on the roof deck of a bar in India on New Year's Eve two years ago so it was amazing to catch up! We had agreed to meet in Hammersmith since it was on the route of the Oxford Cambridge boat/crew race. Woop! It was actually really good fun. Great atmosphere and relatively warm. I think it helped that Nelle and I had consumed tons of Pimm's and one (maybe two) bottles of pink champagne :) To be 100% honest, we never turned around from the spot that you see below so we actually never even saw any boats!

After the race, we headed into town to meet up with BF's friends for dinner. We went to this AMAZING Malaysian restaurant (even though I wanted to Vietnamese). Did you hear about the riots in London this weekend? We were watching it on the news in the pub that we were at and decided to head down to Trafalgar Square to check it out. By the time we got there, it had died down quite a bit so not much to see to be honest. However, there were still TONS of police around. The picture isn't great, but here they are in their shiny jackets.

Silver Service

My week in France wasn't focused only on training and work, we got to play a little bit too! We were there for a couple of nights and we got to go go-cart racing. Have you done this before? It was ok fun. I didn't feel the need for speed therefore causing my team to end up in last place, but I did look amazingly HOT doing it.

We had a special St. Patrick's day as well. We were taken to this amazing chateau with a MOAT! I had never seen a moat before and it made me feel super fancy :)

The Moat! It's amazing, isn't it? 

Special wine tasting with champagne and amuse bouche. Fancy name for appetizers, but I love the translation of this- Amuse mouth! Yes, please I'll have another. 

Yum! 

Fancy restaurant with Shamrock ears. You can't take me anywhere.  

Patriotic dessert from the French restaurant. CUTE!  

New hair

I figured since there is about 6 months to go to the wedding, I should probably test out any new hairstyles  now in case I hate it and need to change it back to my original style. I wanted to do something fun. Want to see? Of course you do.

Ta-Da!

Just kidding!!! I would never change my hair color (and rarely even change my hair style)...tee hee hee... Happy St. Patrick's day! 

Doh!

I got home from Brussels early Sunday afternoon and was soooo looking forward to seeing BF, my couch and strangely enough a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Snuggled on the couch, I figured I should probably check my flight time to Paris for work in the morning... I check my phone and see that I'm booked in for Tuesday...er... humm... maybe it's cause my eyes are still sore from the disgusting cigarette smoke in Brussels or maybe it's because my phone screen is small....SURELY, I didn't book my flight wrong.

I ran up the stairs to check on our big computer, my heart racing at the potential mistake.  I did indeed book the wrong flight!!!AHHHHHHH... all this time traveling and this is the first time I've done this :( 

Thankfully, I booked with Aer Lingus and the process to change flights was simple (albeit expensive)!

No mussels in Brussels

I left last Friday for Brussels and came home on Sunday and even though it's Tuesday, I'm STILL exhausted from the weekend. To be fair, I had to travel to Paris for work on Monday (and I'm still here), but I think I might be getting too old for these food and drink fueled shannigans!

We had a fab time in Brussels and managed to sample all things Belgian (Beer, chocolate, waffles, frites) except for Mussels :(  I'll let some of my favorite pictures do the talking!

Chocolate Belgian babies 

Drinking Kriek Belgian Cherry beer in the Grand Palace 

Brussels is famous for this little peeing boy statue also known as the Mannequin Pis (You can find real pictures of him online, but I much prefer these colorful chocolate ones!) 

Swings in a bar

Huge selection of waffles... I loved every fat, calorific bite. It was SO amazing! 

Fritesland- The name says it all... like a theme park for french fries (not really, but that's what it felt like when we stumbled upon it. It was overwhelming with all the different frites choices!) 

Obligatory Group Shot! 

The wedding fairy

I arrived at my desk this morning and found this

But I don't know who it's from.... no one I know in the office is getting married any time soon so I assume it's from the wedding fairy! It's perfect timing since I'm heading out a bit early from work today to head to Brussels with the gal pals and didn't have magazine to read. Woop! 

Honeymoon!!!

It's booked!

Since I was the project manager for the wedding planning :), BF was in charge of the honeymoon. I've always wanted to go to Southern Africa especially since I studied a lot of it in school (biological and cultural anthropology) AND Africa by Toto is my favorite song, so I asked BF to look into Africa for our trip. After a couple weeks of research, he delivered!

We'll be heading to Kenya through the Masai heartlands. We'll be able to see the Masai Mara, Lake Victoria and the Ngorongoro Crater among other cool sites. This portion of the honeymoon is 15 days long, and we'll be er...camping... ie cold showers if they even have showers. We figured if we can rough it camping in the Serengeti and avoid getting eaten by lions (plus avoid fighting with each other!!), we'll survive anything that is thrown our way for our marriage. Bring on the dry shampoo and baby wipes!

Below is the route we'll be taking... It's heart shaped- perfect for a honeymoon!

Source

After our tour through Kenya, we'll be spending a couple of clean (!!!) days in Tanzania in a small beach resort. Finally, we'll head home through Qatar and since we'll be there for the stopover, we'll take about 2 days to explore that country quickly as well.

Less then 200 days (and counting!)

Springtime

The flowers we planted in October are blooming! This is MAJOR news as we have been killing all our house plants :-(

We still need to figure out what's a flower and what's a weed so that we can clean the garden up a bit more.

BF's Birthday

We had a relaxing day yesterday for BF's birthday. He didn't want to do anything crazy and since we had been going out so much, I was happy to relax the day away.

I had booked a couples massage for me him as a little treat. It was lovely and included some champagne. Yum!

After our relaxing massages, we wandered around town for a spot of shopping. I also had an appointment with Bobbi Brown to learn how to put on makeup (I know....after 30 years, it was my first lesson!). It was really fun though I don't know if it's something I would do all the time.

We ended the day with a visit to the local TGIFriday's. It's BF's favorite restaurant, and perhaps one of the contributing factors in buying our house, but we actually don't go out to dinner that much so this was the first time we were there. I'm not going to lie, it was awesome inside. It use to be a massive pub, and I'm sad that it changed into a TGIFriday's. I can totally imagine hanging out there on a Friday night when we're too lazy to go into town for a night out.

I didn't get a great picture, cause BF was embarrassed that I brought the camera out, but check out the centerpiece of the restaurant. How awesome is that?

Happy Birthday...

To my favorite pal! He's really excited to be over 30 :-)

The Office

We had been slacking on updating the house since work for both of us has been so crazy. However, since we had the use of a car this weekend, we were able to head to Ikea to pick up some home stuff.

We have a third bedroom and for awhile didn't know what we wanted to do with it. We finally settled on making it an office even though we normally just take our laptops downstairs and work in the living room. No design thought has been put into the room whatsoever since we moved in. About a month ago, we managed to get a desk and the room looked like this:

Boring! We didn't even have that lamp there (we just bought it this weekend). On top of that, BF rushed me into picking out the room color, and while yellow is my favorite, this is my least favorite paint color in the house :(

This is what it was updated to on Sunday morning:

Ta-da!

I know the picture angles are different which makes the color look drastically different, but the real life color is closer to the bottom picture. We put up some shelves (although we still have to figure out what to put ON the shelves). We also updated the space with a lovely and large picture frame. I'm very adverse to committing to pictures in a picture frame so for the time being we have extra fabric from our chair makeovers in the frame.

What do you think?!