2010 Reflection
Since the clock has struck midnight and it is now officially New Year's Eve, I am inspired to reflect on this year's excitement. I might do it on a month by month basis, because it's nice to remember what it was I got up to for the year, and this year was a really emotional and dramatic one in some ways! I'll also add a photo for each month! So here goes.
January
In January I was still in Belgium. I was busy at work organising a large event for the university & an organisation my then-boss is a member of. There were also lots of other deadlines, so I didn't really get much of a break, and was extremely stressed out for most of the month. I did, however, seem to have time to discuss the differences in creaminess factor of UK and Australian Cadbury chocolate, which I still find quite impressive, though I can't really say I care as much as I did back then. Except for the lack of Roast Almond chocolate here -- get on that, Cadbury! I distinctly remember a fabulous New Year's party up with Chris and his friends in St Anne's though, so I will leave you with a photo of that.
February
In February I bought a bicycle. This meant I was really up for cycling around! I did a particularly nice trip down the Meuse River in Namur. I have this bicycle still here in London, but shamefully I haven't ridden it. I really wish it was a bit safer to ride to work, because I would totally do that. Perhaps I will try in spring anyway! :) At work I was busy writing a very large deliverable for one of my projects, so this bike trip seems to have been the major event of the month. This month's photo is of Namur, the town I was living in, from the bike track along the canal south toward Dinant. Namur is a beautiful town, and has a lot of delightful points about it, but a few infuriating ones too (particularly when it came to food shopping and smoking in bars). I loved its medievalness and the castle on the hill, which you can see in the photo.
March
In March my friend Sasha came to visit me, which was awesome! He had a car so we went to a bunch of places: Ghent and Antwerp in the north, and then Han-sur-Lesse in the south. Ghent was beautiful, a very Flemish town but with a lot of French influence! We saw everything from a torture museum to weapons collections, beautiful buildings, and almost froze to death from the very cold winds that whipped through the town! Antwerp was also very impressive. It was extremely busy in the shopping areas, but we found some cool shops in the sidestreets and walked along the waterways. At Han-sur-Lesse there is a cave with lots of formations in it! We had a lovely guide who took us through as a big group, and were treated to a light and sound concert in a natural underground ampitheatre, which was very cool. Also in March was the big festival for the university, and I got to play on a Segway, and others went on giant flying foxes and "drunk driving" simulators. For the photo, sadly the stalagtite/mite photos I took aren't as awesome as they are in real life, so I'll leave you with a photo from Ghent.
April
In April, I went back to the UK for Easter, and spent some more time with Chris and his family! We ended up playing an epic Warhammer 40k game, which was a great deal of fun! After that I was almost tempted to go start my own army for future games but I haven't quite succumbed just yet. Besides, Chris has a lot of armies I can borrow, as long as I don't, uh, drop them again. :)
On the work side of things, it was ETHICOMP time again! ETHICOMP is a big conference for computer ethics, and is really awesome because lots of amazing people go and I get to hang out with them. Some of them I count as dear friends as well as colleagues, which is just wonderful. I really look forward to the next ETHICOMP in fact, and it will be in the UK (Sheffield) so hopefully I'll be able to go (well, hopefully, if I have a job here in 2012! :) Tarragona, Spain, played host to ETHICOMP this year, and it was quite the venue! Outside my hotel room was a Roman colliseum, and on the hill was a medieval fortress, and all around the city there were ancient architectural marvels.
Annoyingly, a volcano decided to blow up and even though I had left half-way through my talk in order to make my bus to the airport, I ended up getting stuck at the airport and ultimately embarked on a super epic bus trip that went from Barcelona all the way to Brussels. We started at 9am, went through the Pyranees, past Carcassonne, and through the French night until we arrived in Belgium at about 2am. Then I had an extraordinarily expensive taxi fare home (paid for by the university, thankfully) and managed probably the best conversation I'd ever had in French with the taxi driver while half asleep. I was sad that I hadn't been able to stay at ETHICOMP for the whole week, and not only because I had been stuck in Barcelona for an extra 2 nights due to the volcano - I will definitely endeavour to stay the distance next time, because it's so worth it!
I'll leave you with a photo from Tarragona - the view from my hotel balcony!
May
In May, Nicholas had moved to the UK! Or perhaps it was a little earlier, but I just had to pop over to visit him! The UK general elections were still being sorted out, and as we did some of the touristy parts through Whitehall there was a huge gaggle of journalists and photographers (and police) hanging outside the place where Nick Clegg & David Cameron were having a chat about the future of the country. Sadly I was only there for a short time, but we did have a lovely weekend pottering about and watching the guards outside Buckingham Palace doing their hilarious march.
My sister and brother-in-law also came to visit, but very briefly! They too had gotten caught up in the volcanic mess and had to fix up their trip massively due to the silly airlines. So they managed to pop up from Paris for the day and partake in some Belgian activities, which was nice!
In Namur, May is Spring! And that means it was time for the festivals to start up again. The big one for May is "Namur en Mai", a carnival festival with lots of circusy type acts, lots of magic and mystery and jugglers and stilt walkers! I hung out with some couchsurfy people and saw a play (in French, but it was well acted and sort of aimed at children, so not difficult to understand!). Then Yvan and Kathleen came to visit and we went on a bike ride to Dinant! It was amazing... massive rock escarpments, beautiful houses and the most amazing green colour in the trees along the river! Had a delicious lunch at Profondeville and went onward to Dinant, afterwhich we caught the train back to Namur. I was very exhausted after that! :) Another highlight of their visit was the dinner at Les Tanneries, which was a degustation menu that was amazingly good. And extremely filling! I have a secret love for degustation menus! I love the artistry that is put into the food and the flavour combinations and the random sorts of things I would never pick from a menu :D
Later in May I went back to the UK to visit Nicholas again. We went to the British Museum! It was fantastic. I still haven't been back since I moved here, but I want to rectify that soon!
The photo I leave you with here is from the trip south to Dinant. It was such a spectacular ride!
June
In June I had a few more visitors, Jamie and Lisa came to see me, and I think June was also when I met up with Zhenya and Jess in Brussels! We did the usual: beer drinking, citadelle visiting, waffle eating, all the good things :D I had a great time, actually.
June was the start of a massive life-changing thing for me: I quit my job in Belgium. Probably the less I say about that the better, but it was definitely a big shake-up! I had to give 3 months notice, so it meant that I would still be working there until the end of August. It was a really really big thing for me, especially since I didn't have a job lined up when I quit, but I'm still to this day extremely glad that I did it, because I am far happier here! :)
Finally in June was the "World Wide Knit in Public" day, and I went along to the Marche aux Legumes and sat in the chilly weather and knitted with some lovely ladies, including the lovely Mouchon, the sheep of which I now have some beautiful wool sitting in my cupboard that I would like to make into a jumper! This month's photo will be of that, because I don't seem to have taken any other pictures that month ;D
July
In July, Nicholas came to visit again, and we went to Luxembourg! It was awesome. Such a compact little city, with a huge number of languages being thrown around -- the lady at McDonalds served the people 2 in front of us in French, the people in front of us in German, and then us in English! It was awesome! I wrote a long entry about this trip, so I won't re-summarise it, but it was awesome.
Another epicly long and awesome trip I did in July was back to the UK where Chris and I went to the Formula 1! It was fantastic. I really had such an amazing time - everything from getting up early in the morning and driving down to Silverstone seeing Bugatti Veyrons on the way through to Mark Webber winning the race... it was such a fantastic experience and I really want to go again. Sadly it won't be happening this coming year, but perhaps next year it'll be on the cards again! :D
I popped down to Liege one hot day, after there had been some massive storms which had destroyed a lot of houses and downed a lot of trees! I wanted to find this mysterious set of stairs that I had heard a lot about. After a lot of getting lost and not finding the right steps and then finding other steps but still not the right ones, I found the real steps and climbed every single one of them! It was extremely hot and I have distinct memories of feeling very sorry for the people who lived halfway up the stairs. But it was worth it at the top - an amazing view across Liege and a very large sense of accomplishment. The stairs are famous for being particularly steep (373 steps) but are also part of some local legend to do with a battle in the 1400s. They're still pretty impressive now! ;-)
Also, Nicholas and I had an epic house hunt... we hired a car, which almost broke down, went to see a bunch of houses, most of which stood us up, then saw one house, liked it, applied for it, and got it. So it was both epic fail and epic win at the same time. Still loving the house now, as I'm sitting in it! Though I think next time we'll take a bit longer looking and try for something around Islington area. Although this area is lovely, it's a bit on the suburban side and is missing a few things (mostly a good pub in stumbling distance imo - Nicholas would probably add a Waitrose and a Pret to that list! And I'd agree with him! hehe).
I was going to post a photo from the F1 but those are just down the page a bit so you can go look there. Instead I will post a photo of the Liege staircase, because that's something you're less likely to see. ;-)
August
One of the main things, apart from wrapping up work and then moving to London, which I will devote a paragraph to, was going to the IFIP Summer School in Helsingborg, Sweden. There I had a fantastic time with a bunch of really quite awesome people, many of whom were students but plenty of whom were full academics newly infected with the enthusiasm for the subject from the students. There were some amazing talks and people doing wonderful things with technology, and I met a few new people and hung out with my new boss and some others, which was also great.
Then I moved to London! On my birthday! It was a great birthday present, though I was utterly exhausted by the end of it. I packed and cleaned my apartment, lugged all my suitcases over and onto the Eurostar, said farewell to Belgium, and started my new life in London! Moved into our new apartment and started setting things up - Nicholas was in India getting food poisoning at that point, poor thing - and spoke English to people! It was amazing! You really don't honestly know how much I missed just randomly talking to people - taxi drivers, people in the supermarket... I couldn't do that back in Belgium, because of my lack of French, but I could here! So of course I rambled at everyone as often as I could! It was great, I felt so much at home! Happy birthday, me! :D
The photo I'm putting here is the last photo I took in Belgium - the geese down at the duck pond in the park near my old house. Those geese were awesome. Noone messed with them.
September
I started a new job, at Middlesex University. Nicholas and I explored our new home! :D We did a lot of fun things: London Open House day, rock climbing at the Castle, visiting Camden, buying an iPhone, visiting galleries and exploring the local pubs! So much going on... probably more in one month than I had done in the entire year! It was fantastic. We had a friend come to visit (with her little one! so cute!!), I started weaving with a new hand loom my siblings gave me for my birthday, and we moved into our house properly and set everything up. Also we took some fabulous walks on the Heath, which was just beautiful in the summer weather!
Here's the first thing I ever weaved, with a view out my study window over the courtyard :D
October
October was some more beautiful weather, but more autumnal... beautiful temperatures and sunlight filtering through the trees here and in the Heath nearby! I also went up to Lancaster to meet some more of the team for the project we're working on, which was quite lovely in several ways - nice to meet the other team members and nice to see some other parts of the country!
I also went to the annual Halloween party that Chris's friends put on up north, which, as usual, was lots of fun. Everyone does such a great job with costumes!
I love this photo of London from Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath. It really was one of the last amazingly beautiful days before winter started to peek in!
November
In November, Nicholas took me on a trip for my birthday. We were originally going to hire a car and drive somewhere in the UK but instead we decided that the weather might be better south so booked a trip down to Barcelona in Spain. It was fantastic! We did a lot of walking around and enjoyed ourselves greatly - eating tapas, drinking sangria, finding out of the way vegetarian places and being surprised by the presence of Maoz! We saw Gaudi and cathedrals and fortresses and went on a cable car and a funicular! We climbed up hills and roofs and explored markets and coffee shops. We waited for shops to open (in vain), queues to subside, and had a failed trip to the Picasso museum (closed Mondays). But despite that we had a very fun time exploring a colourful and interesting city.
We also started going to the Lates series - the last week of the month most museums and galleries have a late night special offering! This month the Science museum had a thing on games and gaming (including a talk on game theory, a silent disco, and cocktails!), but mostly it was fun walkign around the museum without a million screaming kids -- and actually getting to play with the hands on exhibits! :) We also went to the one at the V&A museum, which was a talk on the RepRap 3-D printing device, which is so awesome, we want to make one. It was great hearing the inventor of it talk about it and show off some of the things it could print!
On the 30th of November, it snowed! This was very exciting! Of course it snowed a lot more later on, but that's a tale for next month. Instead I leave you with a slightly warmer photo from Barcelona. It's a view from the roof of the Barcelona cathedral across the city.
December
Well, in December it really did snow. I was supposed to go back to Australia for Christmas, but there was so much snow that they decided enough was enough and cancelled all my flights, even the re-booked one for a couple of days later. This caused a stupid amount of stress and anxiety to the point where, with my family's blessing, we decided to leave it until the new year, when the weather would hopefully be better. I'm hoping to go within the next week or so, any later and I will probably have to wait til easter with our current workload! :) And I have lots of Christmas presents I need to take with me!
Despite that, Christmas was lovely. Dinner at a friend's place involved a "dupheasant" which was mightily tasty. It also involved playing with balloons, which was hilarious. My offering was "Gingerbread Carnage" - a not-so-traditional feast of bloody gingerbread corpses and dismembered parts. It was deliciously awful :D Everyone loved it.
In other culinary attempts I have started on my quest to make a great macaron. I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa this year and received a book on how to make macarons, which was fabulous! I then went out and got the bits I'd need and set about making them. I still need to refine my technique but I think I'm off to a good start, which is great :D More experimentation needed in the new year! :)
This photo shows the snow buildup in our street, which is pretty awesome. It was so beautiful but so frustrating after a while... walking back on Christmas Day was an exercise in a sore butt from the icy path!
I realise I probably haven't included everything, but it's getting rather late and I ought to be in bed. I'm off to visit Yvan and Kathleen for NYE, which will be fabulous, I'm sure. I will write something about the new year in the new year :)
Happy New Year everyone! I want to thank you all who have been extremely supportive of me this year. I've certainly needed it and it hasn't gone unappreciated. I have a lot of awesome things to look forward to in 2011! Much love to you all, and best wishes to you in the coming year.
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