Healthy eating and exercise

After a week hanging out in France in this big Château with lots of friends, in the Langedoc-Roussillon region of France. Consuming copious amounts of cheese, wine, pastries and butter. It's now time to get back to reality. See my diagram / pattern below to demonstrate!

the Château - table set for dinner before the big party

Lisbon antics!

We came back from Lisbon a few weeks ago and I haven't managed to record it down in my blog due to a mountain of work I came back too (not such a bad thing!)

Anyhow... we found it a great break away from London, very chilled for a city and a half hour train ride to beaches. You can could walk to pretty much all the tourist attactions and get lost in the narrow, quiet, steep streets long enough (we walked for miles!) to earn yourself a beer or two in front of one of the many incredible views the city has to offer.

There are are plenty of bars, we visited Clube Ferroviario which had a huge roof terrace where you can admire the river view whilst sitting on comfy old train seats. We also visited the club Lux, which seems to get all the big named DJ's play there.

Bairro Alto, the area we were staying in comes alive in the evening. The bars are all tiny, you can probably only fit about 30 in at a time so people hang out in the small lanes, sitting on the pavements drinking huge sugary Caprioskas.

There is not much in the way of fashion in Lisbon, we got some funny looks when we both wore bold print shirts one night! It was a refreshing change from London, where what you wear is kind of a big deal. Dreadlocks seemed to be a big look in Lisbon!

Food wise, you get a lot of simple grilled fish, with dull boiled potatoes, and they love their salt. It's worth doing your research before you go or getting a good guide book, because if you know where to look then great food can be found.

This is a great site if you want to do your research before you go. 

Happy Easter

Watch out for the bunnies! All images found on this amazing Pinterest board.

Cappadocia cave hotel

Did you see this hotel in the latest Elle magazine? Yunak Evleri in Turkey, it looks incredible!

Painting the favelas red...

and green, blue, yellow...

This is a project 'Favela Painting' that Dutch artist duo Haas&Hahn began to create back in 2006. Finding parts of Rio that locals found scary and intimidating and filling them with bold and bright colour. Alongside Haas&Hahn, local youth were employed to paint, and learned the craft at the same time.

Post Berlin Blues

So the plan was, a group of us head off to Berlin for a weekend of sightseeing, shopping, and one night of partying.

Woops, didn't quite happy like that. I came home empty handed (no shopping) and feeling very rough! But it was worth it!

Night one, I was desperate to try KaterHolzig, and I wasn't disappointed. We were worried, as with most of the good clubs in Berlin that we wouldn't get in, but we made it through the selection process.

You're not allowed to take pictures in the clubs, I guess to maintain an air of mystery about the places and to keep certain peoples integrity intact! The selection process is very annoying but they seem to be able to do that as the clubs will always be popular and they like to keep a good mixture of people in the places.

This was Katerholzig:

from Bonny and Kleid site

from The Vines site

There were loads of little dancefloors and bars to discover throughout the place. You can also go and chill by the river where they have a bonfire and crazy people go swimming.

I got the impression that Glastonbury had got quite a lot of ideas for last years Shangri la from here.

A sneaky, bleary eyed pic of us at Katerholzig:

jim & laura enjoying the views

The next night we tried our luck at Berghain. We queued for ages and eventually got in at about 3.
So how do you describe Berghain? this site UBerlin does it quite well. Suffice to say it is absolutely mental and everyone should go check it out unless easily offended.

Us girls came out saying that it was amazing, but that we would never ever go back there again, only to return the next day after much peer pressure. Once you have your stamp on the Friday, you can get in all weekend, it doesn't shut, it just closes the blinds and keeps on banging the techno.

PS: if you hate Techno, don't bother with Berlin. It's everywhere!

Berghain from Wikipedia

Oh and another place we went to that was quite cool was Club der Visionaire which is where we were subjected to the peer pressure on the Sunday night. It was grubby cool, with lots of party goers that obviously hadn't slept all weekend, trying to feed the nice homemade pizza into their gurning faces. Ha.

picture and more info from here ubspace

Instagram - Ibiza

So I made it back from another Hen do in one piece.

I really liked Ibiza, it seemed like there was something for everyone and that you could ignore the party side of it really easily (if you wanted to) Club wise, we went to Space and Pacha. Pacha I wouldn't recommend unless you are around 10 years younger than me. Although having dry ice sprayed at you at 100 miles an hour is quite an experience. It causes Maggie Thatcher style hair dos, false eye lashes to fly off, and no doubt a lot of unwanted groping!

Escape to the country

Happy cows enjoying freaky October weather, my folks 'summer house' with non edible grapes, followed by a lovely dinner on interesting plates and a pomegranate cocktail of some sort. Perfect pre-party weekend.

 

France!

Some pics from my recent holiday to France. It already feels like autumn approaching now that I am back. Hopefully some more summery evenings left though....

serious amounts of wine

slightly Stephen Gill accident with frogs and lights on porch