And more days pass

Sunday again and I just finished studying for tomorrows exam of my spanish evening class. I took half a day off tomorrow afternoon, so I will have enough time to revise everything and be fully prepared for my first exam since about a year and a half. Really weird to have to study again, but if Iam honest there is no comparison to the courses I ever took at university, so I am quite confident that I will do quite well. ;o) I'll post my result here in a week, that is if it is acceptable (read: very good). :P

The past weeks have been slightly different at work as I was made team leader last week. I've only just started and so far it's been pretty busy sorting out what I should take care of and so on. Anyway, it's kind of a new challenge and I do need those from time to time to not get bored. ;o)

Seems I am off now, we have a certain english guest here these days and a movie is scheduled for tonight. Later more about Grant, exams, films and perhaps some holidays. :P

Euro Disney

Two weeks past due, but here it is, my Disneyland report. :P As I mentioned in my last post our digital camera broke down upon arrival, so we were forced to either not take any pics during the weekend, or to buy a disposable camera. Of course we chose the latter so we had the joy to rediscover how much fun it is to make pictures without the use of a zoom or the possibility to check on a screen what the picture looks like. We have become quite spoiled over the past years with those digital ones I can now say... Anyway, the results are ok I think.

The reason for our trip had been the 30 year anniversary of our parents and we as the children were ofcourse allowed to come too. It really became a super fun weekend, all four of us were absolutely enthousiastic about everything and everybody dared to go in every roller coaster available. The older generation mentioned each time after on that had made loopings that it would have been the last one for them, but that is of less concern. :P The way the park is constructed is just so beautiful and real, that you really feel away from all concerns for a while and I love that. Other amusement parks might be cheaper, but I have yet to find one that is more pretty and grand. The weather cooperated, it was reasonably cold but dry and we even had sme sunshine during a couple of minutes. It was raining in Belgium at the same time, so the comparison is what makes our weather good. ;)

Pulling out the swrd in the stone in 1993 and 2007

It was the weekend before Halloween so orange pumpkin scarecrows were to be found everywhere as they had taken over all of Disneyland. Luckily for us not too many people had decided to visit the parks those days, sothe queues were still managable and we were able to go on every ride we wanted. Even the food was good, something one wouldn't necessarily expect in an americanised amusement park. Especially our candle lit dinner in the Blue Lagoon restaurant was great, a total carribian style place with tasty fish dishes and burning creme brulee (crema catalan).

Day two was also spent in the main Park, as well as in the new Disney Studios park right next to it. This was still under construction, so apart from some shows and rides, there wasn't much too it yet. So we ended the trip buying some souvenirs, going into some rides for the second time and crawling back to the train station with a completely destroyed back, at least from my side.

A taste of victory

Due to some technical issues (this including a broken camera ;) ) my post about my Disneyland trip will have to wait a little while longer, so I tought I could already write about last Tuesday evening. I was invited to Sofies house for a Catan night, together with 5 (ex) colleagues of hers. What us awaited there was a table filled with tasty stuff, cookies, candies, loads of tea and the master piece, a big and incredibly good chocolate cake... The cake was partly meant for the night itself and partly for the upcoming birthday of one of her colleagues, but most of all it was just very tasty. ;)

Regarding the game, four of us already knew it so I teamed up with An Sofie from Sweden who would throw the dice whilst I thought about our strategy. :P And of course, my endless online Catan games with Pablo brought the result I longed for, we won. :P I really enjoyed the night, not only due to my victory of course. Now duty calls, I have to go and help bake three cakes for tomorrow at work. Yep, Kat is getting old, 24 in just a couple of hours....

Wii night

Hardly recovered from last weekends horse back riding, last friday another sporty event was scheduled, my Wii-night. We met up at the flat of one colleague where I attached my Wii player to his TV and whilst eating lots of crisps and spring roll's we started battling each other. My boxing and tennis performances were not exactly of a high standard, but playing it is loads of fun. There should exist a video of me now, hopefully it will not be spread around the office...

Me, Koen, Radka, Ricardo, Tuur, (my sister, father and mother) and Sanjaka.

Making the Mii characters was the first step of the evening of course. There was some urge to create one ofour boss to use in certain sport events, but we withheld ourselves from this, being the good employees that we are. :P
I really enjoyed the night anyway, I could win the large majority (if not all...) of the games which you needed some skills at playing Wii for and the company and food was good. ^^ My arms did hurt a lot afterwards, as did my mouth muscles from laughing when seeing the others play and yell at the TV.

Tuur and Sanjaka boxing, Ricardo and Koen playing tennis,
followed by Radka and I also doing the latter

Bumpy ride

When a colleague asked me on Friday how sporty I was and if I had plans for the next day, part of lazy me was looking for an excuse. When hearing the being sporty part was actually referring to a three hour horse back riding trip, immediately all doubt dissapeared. :P With blazing sun and not a single cloud in the sky, a group of about 10 co-workers left to a region about 50 km from Antwerp, where fields and forests are more common than the streets and buildings you have here. All of us were assigned to an easy going horse and off we went on our trip. Most of us had never sat on a horse before, so some nerves were certainly there, including for me as it had been ten years since I rode myself.

Me on my horse for the day "Kira" and the others on theirs

During the entire ride only happy faces were to be seen, everyone enjoyed themselves incredibly much and all kept saying what a great idea it had been to come. After a while the group started trying to go into trotting and most of us managed quite well, though it again was proven that women seem to be more talented horse riders. :P During the ride I tried to gallop as well, but that only succeeded for a very short time as my horse didn't seem to understand what I wanted her to do and just kept doing what she preferred as a faster walk...

Half way we stopped for some drinks in the forest and already then people started to realise how bad we were going to feel the next day. My butt was sore and as was everyone elses. :P Not to mention other muscles we didn't knew we had so I think Monday will be a funny day in the office for some. :P When we arrived back at the stables, all of the women were walking like men and the men themselves were all stumbling as well. We managed to reach the cars again and drove of to a nearby restaurant, where some tried out the speciality of the region "Steppegrass". This basically is a huge pile of very fine sliced fries and somewhere underneath a steak should be found. Quite an impressive dish but I chose pasta...

Anniversary

If a person searched hard enough, I am sure he could find something to celebrate an anniversary of every day of the year. Today however is the one year anniversary of me working at the place where I work and I think that means something. ;) Especially regarding my past feelings about work in general and my expectations and so on. So here I go, happy anniversary to me! :P

It's scary how fast time goes, I can perfectly rememeber the day I entered the office and how clumsy I was with the first tasks appointed to me. Many people I met there have left by now and many new ones have come, let's wait and see where I will be in one year from now. :)

I hope to be in Finland again in about two months from now anyway. If I can arrange it it would be around the same time as when I was there last winter, which also still seems so recent to me. By then I should have started a new function at work as well, so it seems I have nice things to look forward to. ^^ Concerning free days I will have to wait untill Charlotte arrives back from Spain to spend a shopping-gossip-sauna day with and our english visitor. ;)

The time seemed also ripe to me to somewhat change the description of my blog. I am still trying to go to many places, but regarding the "where" as in "where is Kat in her professional life", that seems answered at least for now.

Sueña

I am definitely in favour of dreaming away, but Sueña is also the title of my Spanish course book which I bought last week. Yep, Kat has started evening classes! :P About exactly one year ago, I purchased a self learning course, but somehowI didn't get very far with in. I blame work, but I kind of think it's more the lack of discipline. So now I decided to enroll for a year course of Spanish, three hours every monday evening. I chose a school which offered a course that took place only once rather than twice a week and which was located very close to where I live. Otherwise I might loose some motivation during the dark, cold and especially wet winter nights that are coming. ;) So far so good, I could start in the second year after taking a test (full marks, jeje :P) and I do have the feeling this level is correct for me. The other students are quite ok as well, with the few lesser aspects older adult class mates included. Older people tend to want to show of what they know rather than taking thngs relaxed. ;)

I have two classes behind me now, almost no homework to do so I am still a happy student. ^^One year ago I wouldn't have thought a full three hoursof classes could be fun after having finished university. :P Maybe I am growing up as well... ;)

Time for parties?

The lousy summer Belgium has had is coming to an end and suddenly people want to have parties every week, preferably outside. :P Personally I think they should have started with this like a month ago (not earlier otherwise I would have missed them :P), but that obviously was not the case. Colleagues have planned get togethers in the coming two weeks, I just had a street party this weekend and last Thursday we had another goodbye party at te river side in Antwerp. A very windy spot, so I was pretty chilled in the middle of the night when going home.

I was the only with a camera and it showed once more how keen slightly drunk people are on getting their pictures taken, if possible with each and ever single person they know (or don't) at parties. The result was showing the next day at work, with an overy tired office and me spending the first part of the day showing the colleagues all the pictures and making fun of all the funny faces. The next parties will be on friday nights and I do agree that that will be a better idea. ;) So here are some pics of some people I spend most of my days with lately. :P

About two weeks ago I went to a very different party, this being the wedding of my friend Ellen with her girlfriend Griet. Not a very traditional wedding, but I thought it was absolutely beautiful and I was really happy to go. For the occasion Enrique had flown over from Spain so that of course even added to the fun. It was great being in Ghent again as well, enjoying the nice weather then still and running around as punctuality is not one of Enrique's best assets. ;) We made it all in time though and we spent a great evening at the wedding, meeting Ellen and Griet, eating good food and dancing untill all night. I was completely exhausted after the weekend, but it was definitely worth it. My pictures from the wedding are less great though, as my camera did not like the smoke machine during the party...

My new workout

Even though my Visa and phone bill from my time in Mexico just arrived, I still felt like splurging again a little bit on some fun stuff. Having seen avertisements of it on the internet and pictures of friends playing on it I decided a Wii would be a great game console for me. :P The games on it aren't too advanced and you don't need to remember too many buttons like in these big computer games, so this could be it. I have to admit that the installation part took me quite a while already, but when it eventually did function, I could not wait to create my very own Mii. ^^ Together with my sister I actually created the entire family and apart from myself I think the resemblance is striking! It seems that my head is too weird or complicated to rebuild with a game. ;P

I didn't buy that many games yet as there aren't so many available yet and I needed to first find out what I liked most. The console itself came with a set of sports games, so my arms have alredy suffered on my boxing and baseball attempts. I could of course have posted pictures of that, but we could all imagine how silly it looks like to be hitting air with a small remote in my hands. ;) Then I also got a Wii games CD to practise the moves of the remote with and then my sister contributed by buying Zelda, the already legendary Wii adventure game. We can already ride our horse in it, now I have to find out if I can kill monsters and fight with a sword...

Dreaming away

While being back at work, I am already dreaming of next holidays. Not that working is that bad, honestly, but being out is so much better in any case. :) I sill have ten days to take up this year and my perfect idea would be to spend them all in a very fun way. This means by not spending them just at home. ;) I already requested two days around Christmas as I am expecting a great guest all the way from Venezuela, so 8 more days to fill up. :P

Until then I will have to do with watching some holiday pictures from what I now should refer to as the past and I thought it would be nice to add them to the online albums which I created for the Mexico trip. So now pictures from my trip to Spain this year, to Oslo from March and to Northern Norway of last summer are all available. ;)

To the pictures!

Day 14-17: Mexico City and Teotihuacan

After another 6 hours in the bus, we reached Mexico's capital around midnight. When coming close to the city at night, an immense amount of lights as far as the eye can see welcomes you. It gives a very good impression actually of how large this city really is... maybe you could almost compare it to Coruscant minus the high tech stuff and flying space ships. :P Our hostel was located right in the middle of the old centre and we booked a trip for the next day right away.

Together with our guide and 5 other tourists of our age, we left the next morning for a tour to two special sights and Teotihuacan, probably THE most important sight of all Mexico. We first stopped at Tlatelolco, an Aztek site in the middle of Mexico City which the Spaniards sort of totally destroyed when finding it. Then we drove onwards to the Shrine of Guadeloupe, or actually the two shrines. Mexico City is built on an old drained lake and almost all of the old buildings are sinking away. The old Shrine is already quite deep down, so due to the importance of it, they decided to build a more modern church right next to it. Guadeloupe is the most important religious figure in Mexico, having appeared four times to an indigenous inhabitant during the Spanish era and thus convincing the Mexicans to join Christianity without much further struggles.

Around lunch time we continued towards Teotihuacan where we first visited a cactus and obsidian farm where we actually had cactus for lunch and had the possibility to buy some souvenirs made of obsidian. They had symbols for everything, a figure for health, one for the rain, one for luck and also some for love... I am sure you can distinguish these last ones somewhere on the picture...

Then we entered the site of Teotihuacan. This is the most important Aztek site in Mexico, definitely when it comes down to tourism. The pyramids are not all as nice anymore, as some very clever archaeologists tried excavating them with help of dynamite... The two biggest temples are the ones of the Sun and Moon, which you can both (partly) climb onto. We first did a guided tour and then we were free to start climbing! Mexico City is already at a height of 2000 meters, so it's not so hot anymore, but the air is significantly thinner, making exercise even more tiring. Still, we reached the top in quite a good condition and were able to enjoy the great view and the fact that we were standing on such a cool structure. ;)

Pyramid of the Moon and Sun, us in front of the Sun one and me on top of the Moon one

The following we headed into town to see the main sights in the city itself. We started at the big market square, where the cathedral is and some important and beautiful government buildings, all around the biggest flag I have ever seen. Then we headed towards the fifth highest tower of Mexico City to see the city around us. Joke overcame her fear of being in a tower and elevator in a city where big earthquakes take place every now and then and all the way up we indeed had a good view. If the smog would have been less present we might even have been able to see the volcanoes that lie close to the city, such a safe place to live. :)

Before heading to the metro we visited Tenochtitlan, the first city on the place where Mexico City is now. The remaining ruins are located just next to the Cathedral and obviously also underneath it. Much isn't there anymore, but some very nice features are still there to be seen, like some turtle and eagle carvings. For more animals which we hardly get to see in Belgium, we then took the metro (incredibly cheap and quite an event in itself ;) ) towards Mexico's free zoo. The Mexicans themselves are already awed by a pair of geese, but we were just there to see a few species our own zoo does not have. First of all the panda bears, followed by an Anaconda and some huge Condors. Very nice all of it and a welcome rest from the busy city centre.

Finally we went to the Museum of Anthropology, where we could see the civilisations which we hadn't visited sites from on our way through Mexico and see artifacts from places where we did go to. It's really a great museum, not too big or detailed and the overview you get is really clear. We didn't have time though to take it all in, so next time we come back, we will have to indulge ourselves more into contemporary Mexico, instead of the ancient history. And as you can see below, those old Mexicans made some weird stuff back then... :P

And then it was time to head home again. After two incredible weeks it felt like the right time though, as at least my stomach was yearning for some more regular food again and Joke's feet needed some well deserved rest and care. Mexico truly is an amazing country and I have to say that this is one of the best trips if not the best I have made so far. If I repeat it one day I would want more time to enjoy some sights better, because it sure is all worth it.

Day 11-13: Oaxaca

The southern tip of Mexico supposedly has some very nice beaches, but as we did not have that much time to spare anymore, we had decided to go straight to Oaxaca, our last stop before Mexico City. This caused one big disadvantage, being the 12 to 16 hour bus ride between from San Cristobal to bring us there... We definitely did not make it there in 12 hours as we had a breakdown of about 2 hours in the middle of the night. Towards the morning we found out how wrong our thoughts had been about this region, as it turned out to be quite more mountainous. Mexicans have yet to discover the craft of tunnel building, so the combination of 10 curves on the road per 10 minutes with a huge lack of sleep and decent food made my stomach even more desire to arrive to our destination.

When we finally made it to Oaxaca, all we really wanted was a nice room with private bath to really relax and the thought of saving money for a sleeping place was far away banned. After some phone calls we found a very pretty hotel close to the city centre where a great shower and big beds awaited us.
We had intented on going to visit the widest tree in the world which happened to be close to Oaxaca, but this plan changed during our search for the correct bus. We found ourselves in a maze of streets packed with people and traffic, something which didn't comply to our idea of a quiet afternoon trip. Therefore we decided to keep the tree for the next day and go and explore the centre instead. Apart from the commemoration of some big riots the previous year, the city made a good impression on us. Many nice buildings, pedestrian zones, shopping facilities and especially great food. A speciality of the region were fried grasshoppers, but my stomach denied such delicacies, unfortunately. ;)

The next day we went on a tour to visit three important tourist places in the region. First El Tule, where the earlier mentioned huge tree can be found. It's not that high or old, but the circumference is about 58 meters. Which makes this a very big tree. :P
Next we went to a carpet weavery, where we were explained how the carpets which this region is famous for are all still produced by hand. There were some very beautiful ones indeed, but the time it took to weave a carpet also reflected itself in the price, so we ended up buying a small cloth instead. ;)
We hadn't seen any temple's or ruins that day, so the last destination of the day was Mitla, an ancient Zapotec place. It wasn't a grand as any of the other temple complexes we had seen before, but here the structures of the buildings were very different and most of all the special decorations.

Our last day in Oaxaca was actually supposed to be a travel day to Mexico City, but as we hadn't had time yet to see Monte Alban, Oaxaca's main tourist attraction, we decided to stay a few hours longer. A van took us up the hill which is in the centre of three valleys, giving you a perfect view when reaching the top. Monte Alban was the capital of the Zapotecs and apart from the temples, especially some rock pallets with carved out figures draw the attention here. They are called "The Dancers", but nowadays scientists are not so sure anymore. Apparently they think some of the figures might be women giving birth in standing positions...