Wednesday with a vengeance....

Hello all,

Well, it's the end of Wednesday for us here in London. It's been a long l o n g l o n g l o n g day! We woke this morning at about 5am due to the wonders of jet lag. I was starving, and my stomach though that I had missed dinner due to the time change. So, after lurking under the covers for another 30 minutes trying to go back to sleep we got up and got dressed and went for a walk! Roving the streets of London at 5.30am showed a very different side to that which I am used to. The streets were being swept, the air was crisp and clear and the loudest noises to be heard were the birds singing, punctuated by the odd diesel engine in a taxi passing us by. We spent a pleasant hour walking from Euston up to Camden Town and back, just in time for a cafe to open and serve us breakfast! Egg, Bacon, Sausages and toast were the order of the morning, all washed down with a jolly good cup of coffee. After that, a brisk stroll back to the hotel and the day began proper.

I had a project to do - my anthropology paper. Lets just say that I did it and leave it at that, okay? It took me until 1pm, much longer than I had thought or wanted. James had headed off to his conference leaving me in the hotel to work. Once I had the paper completed, I headed off into the outdoors once more. First stop was lunch, a cheese and onion sandwich, bottle of cola, and a bag of chips/crisps from Marks and Spencer. Such bliss! All this was eaten on the move while ducking in and out of shop windows to avoid the odd shower of rain. Oh, and in between all of this I took a bunch of pictures, though nothing very inspiring I may add. I had a picture mission today, and nothing was going to stop me!

I had been thinking about what I wanted to do for my photo project while I was here. After all, I have a show to put up at Starbucks next week, so my deadline was really here. Suffice to say that I started work on the idea that I had. It involves focusing on one particular landmark in London and the plan is/was to spend the next two or three days photographing it. After about 3 hours of work, I think I may have 4 good usable images. But I have to admit, I am not sure how many more things there are at this landmark. So we shall see how it goes tomorrow and in the meantime I will collect images for plan B! James joined me after his presentation at the conference (which went very well) and we had some more walking and sightseeing to do!

We headed down toward the Houses of Parliament, as it just seemed a nice place to be going. The sun was out, it was late afternoon and the light was just lovely. We spent a pleasant 2 hours walking around, covering Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, the South Bank and some of the bridges. I took a bunch more images for Plan B and, surprise surprise, we ended up in the pub around 7pm. It was a welcome pint of beer after all this walking and photographing!

Dinner was a short walk away to a Fish and Chip shop of all things. It was okay, but not wonderful. My tolerance for large amounts of fish and chips has faded as I have become older, and I have to admit that I felt like a beached whale after eating it all. And, truth be told, I still do, 2 hours later.... We walked back to the hotel afterwards, and are now just sitting in the bar chilling with a glass of wine each before heading to bed.

I am sorry that I don't have any images for you all yet, but I haven't had chance to download yet. I'll do them tomorrow morning and maybe work up a few images to post to Flickr. Then it is back to the streets again!

After all, tomorrow is another day!

Big love,

D&J

Day One - Part Two.

Greeting all.....Your friendly BlogMan here!

Well, the first day is at a close. You caught our early adventures in the previous post, and now we are ready for bed. It's 10pm London time here and we are POOPED!

I forgot to mention earlier that we had a super surprise when we arrived at the hotel. The owner of the hotel in the Lake District where we are having our Civil Partnership ceremony next year had delivered a bottle of Champagne to the hotel for us. We had originally planned to meet him for a drink, but he was called away back to the Lakes so he left that instead. I am a sucker for good Champers, and will do anything for a good bottle. So Nick, name your price.....lol. By way of return, you can check out this fabulous mans hotel at http://www.winderhall.co.uk in case you ever need somewhere to stay in the Lakes.

After we left the hotel, today we went and had a sandwich for lunch and carried out a few errands. First order of the day was getting second sim card for James' cellphone so that we were both contactable. So, for those of you who collect phone numbers, here they are:-

David +44 7950 185 421
James +44 7904 614 970

Make a note of those if you want, and you can add them to your phonebooks. We keep our cellphone numbers in both Spain and England alive all the time, so you can always contact us when we are over here/there.

Next stop was to wander over to the Comedy Theatre, just off The Haymarket. We had booked theatre tickets to go and see Sunset Boulevard this coming Saturday. James has always wanted to go to the theatre in London, so we needed to pick our tickets up. Although it's called the Comedy Theatre, Sunset Boulevard is a revival of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical from the 1980's. With a completely re-worked score and staging, it has proved to be a big hit on the London stage second time around. We go this Saturday evening and cannot wait!

After that we headed to Alfred Dunhill, hallowed ground of my favourite clothes designer. Alas, this time we were just looking as the prices are now so far out of reach it isn't funny. We checked out the old store on Jermyn Street, and then trekked over to their new store on Davies Street. For those of you interested in their stuff, which includes luggage, clothes, suits, pens, cuff links, leather, watches and just about everything else, you can see more at http://www.alfreddunhill.com/ Ah to be filthy rich. We have some clothes from them from our previous lives, and it seems that we will never have anymore unless someone adopts both of us and gives us an allowance.

Next up was a leisurely stroll around parts of Mayfair on the way to dinner. By this time we were quite tired, but as it is the first jet lag day, we really needed to keep going until about 10pm tonight to get sleep equalized. We meandered our way around, eventually ending up at Pizza Express on Dean Street, home of London's first Pizza restaurant back in the 1960s and also a jazz club where many luminaries have and still play. Fabulous pizza, great salads and just a super atmosphere. Of course it was also accompanied by a nice bottle of wine. What more can we wish for.

Then we began the walk back to our hotel, where we are now in bed. I hope we sleep well tonight. Tomorrow James has his presentation at the University of London, and I have to tackle the next part of my Anthropology paper in the morning. So it's not all glory! I aim to get the paper done early so I can be out and about working on my pictures. No idea of what yet, but I'll get there!

So that, my fabulous friends and BlogFollowers is your lot for today. We will write more tomorrow!

Sweet dreams and Big Love,

D&J

London Bound

Greetings Blog Pickers,
Well, It’s Tuesday morning (8.55am) and we have just arrived. As I type we are sitting on the Gatwick Express train whizzing our way toward downtown London. The train takes about 30 minutes, so I thought I would take the time to dash off a quick post.

We left Cincinnati bang on time last night at 8pm. The taxi ride was a little alarming as the driver was texting constantly, AND talking on his phone, AND using his two way radio to communicate back to base. Consequently, after whizzing through check-in we headed straight to the bar…where else! After the taxi-ride from hell, a beer was definitely in order. One thing that surprised me was how quiet the airport was. Back in my corporate days, 6.30pm would have been a very busy time with people heading back from meetings etc. I know that when I was travelling around, I would always try to be on the flights that would get me back into CVG at around 6pm or so. Not now though it seems. The airport was a shadow of its former self. Could it be a mixture of the recession and also the fact that people have wised up to the shitty service that the airlines are dishing out? After having been told that if we wanted a once free plastic bag for our checked rucksacs we would have to pay $5 each, it seems that there is no end to the nickel and diming on the skyways. Ah well….bitch bitch bitch.

Finally on board, we settled in for an uneventful flight. The flight attendant sitting opposite me was a dental hygienist by night and a trolley dolly for Delta by day. “In the event of an emergency landing follow the gleaming white teeth to the exit doors please…” After dinner and a drink, I shut my eyes for a sleep. Normally I am not able to sleep for more than 2 hours on airplanes (no idea why that time seems to be my limit), but this time, after waking up after my two, I feel back asleep again for another 3 hours. Quite a record! Arriving at London Gatwick was uneventful, and in full possession of our bags, if not our faculties, we headed out through customs after dashing through immigration. Just think, next time we do this will likely be when James has his marriage visa for when we get hitched in the UK next year. What fun! After a quick stop at the Marks and Spencer “Simply Food” for some water and chocolate biscuits (cookies in American…Chocolate biscuits? ick…..) we headed for the train.

So here we are. James has just leapt out of his skin as a train going the other way passed on the next door track. The dour lady sitting next to me just laughed at him. Perhaps I will smack her in the back of the legs as we get off the train. For those of you who love to know these things, we will be staying at the Hilton Euston, which is on Upper Woburn Place I think. I am sure you can find it online if you must. Once we get to London Victoria on this train, a quick change onto the tube will see us on our merry way. Perhaps a nap and then out into the big city! I’ll write later!

Big love to all!
D&J

PS, we just woke up from our nap, showered and are off to find some lunch. I’ll write soon!

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines.....

Hello to all!

Welcome back to our travel blog for those of you who have been here before. For those of you who haven't been here before, then welcome anyway!

James and I are getting ready to head off on a mini-trip next week. We will be heading to London for a few days, so we figured that it was time to dust off the blog and crank it up again. James will be in a conference at the University of London, while I will be taking the opportunity to explore my home city and hopefully make some amazing images...no pressure there then!

We will be staying at the Hilton in Euston which will be quite a novelty. Other than staying for 2 nights in Claridges back in 2005 (which was the most amazing experience ever, by the way) it will be the first time that I have spent an extended period of time in Central London. I'm looking forward to the photo opportunities that it will bring. While James is in his conference I will be roving the streets! In the evenings I am sure that we will be getting up to all kinds of fun stuff, so we will keep you posted.

I'll be posting images on Flickr as before, and then perhaps using some of those images to kick off a blog post here. If you want to access my Flickr pages, you can do so by heading to :-

http://www.flickr.com/davidnmartin98

When I makes a blog post here, I will also make an update to my Facebook status to let you all know that something is going on here. That way you won't have to check multiple places to see what we are up to! Anonymous commenting is turned on for this blog, so if you want to comment here you can, or you can just use Facebook. So many electronic places to go! For those of you who are new here, then you can also read all the archives from our last big trip, our journey to Spain in 2008.

Exciting stuff! We leave on Monday evening, so get ready to travel with us through this blog as usual!

Cheers!

D&J

Sweeny Todd in Lisbon

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Originally uploaded by davidnmartin98

Greetings all! As promised, here is a new post. I sincerely apoloigise to you all for the lack of postings for the last month. Ever since school finished, I seem to have been busier than ever! I have painted the inside of the apartment, done lots of chores around the place and a bunch of other things. Time seems to have flown now that we are in June! Cna you believe that we are coming back next week? Part of me is looking forward to it and part of me is not. We have had such a great time here, and it has been a super life experience. I am, however, looking forward to having a washing machine again! Six months of having to handwash has been a real challenge, especially with jeans!

A few weeks ago, we too a trip to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. I have never been there before, and neither had James. We found super cheap flights from the island to Barcelona and then a great deal from there to Lisbon. We really didn't think we would be able to make any more trips as we are appoaching being broke now, but the flights just appeared and we found ourselves a really cheap hostel as well. You can see the hostel room on the flickr account. It wasn't bad for only 20 euros a night, though not for the fainthearted! On the first day we just tramped around the city after arriving. Lisbon is quite beautiful, and very different from a lot of the other european capitals I have spent time in. In some ways it almost looks like an eastern european capital, a little run down at times, but with a comfortable, worn feeling to it. It is also unusual in that the capital is very lived in. Usually capital cities are lived in only by very wealthy people (the downtown areas, not the suburbs), but Lisbon has people of all classes living in it which makes it very different. On the Friday we spent a pleasant time walking around and then spent the evening sitting outside a street cafe with a bottle of wine. Imagine that! We had a great experience with Lunch, as we ended up in a restaurant were we had no idea what anything was on the menu at all. In the end, we just ordered things that had interesting names, and waited for them to arrive. We are still not entirely sure what we ate, but it was jolly good anyway!

Saturday morning was to be our big sightseeing day. We headed out early and had our breakfast. At this stage it was also nearly two months since we had last had haircuts, back in Barcelona. James was by now remembering lots of Portuguese (he studied it in university for a number of years and actually speaks it very well...are you surprised?!), so he asked the owner of the hostel were to go for haircuts. After following the directions, we we ended up at this amazing barber shop, which, it turned out, used to be the barbers to the royal family many years ago. We were also informed that you used to have to wear a tie to be able to have your haircut there, but despite the fact that we were only wearing shorts and a tee shirt, they let us in anyway. Not only did they do haricuts, but they also offered wet shaves with a cut-throat razor. I have had one of these before and loved it, but this was to be a new experience for James. So, towelled and sheeted up, he was covered in shaving foam and the baber deftly shaved him. You can see a picture of the finished, newly shaved James and with his great haircut in the Flickr album!

Then we started to roam Lisbon, following a walking tour that was outlined in Lonely Planet Portugal. Lisbon is a very hilly city, and the book recommended that we do ths tour in a certain way to avoid going up hills. So we followed the instructions, took the tram up to the top of one of the hills and started our walk. Our walk took us through some of the old part of the city, and over towards the castle. It was supposed to take us about 3 hours, but because we kept stopping to see the sights, take photos and generally dilly dally around it in fact ended up taking all day! You can see a selection of the photos that were taken on the Flickr account, in a set called Lisbon 2008 (original huh...) It really was quite beaustiful and I would highly recommend it to anyone thinking of a visit. It's also a little cheaper than the rest of Europe for meals and accomodation, so that was a definite onus at this stage of our trip! Saturday evening saw a quiet dinner in a little restaurant which served great food. James had Hare cooked in red wine with haricot beans, while I had Wild Boar in red wine. All of this was washed down with more red wine. A perfect day!

On sunday we decided that we wanted to go the big art museum. We bought train tickets and headed out to the suburbs. The museum was really awesome, with one of the best displated collections of any that I have seen. The Museum really is an undiscovered gem, and best of all, it is free on Sundays! What more could you wish for. We then visited the museum or Modern Art, which, I have to admit was very un-inspiring for me. Maybe one day I will get it. A leisurely lunch of sandwiches in the park and we returned for a nap and the eternal decision of where to have dinner. We settled on a small family cafe, where we had a good meal. We decided that we really wanted to check out the local gay scene as well, so off we set again, heading to another part of Lisbon to find a gay pub. The gay scene in Lisbon is very discrete, and when we arrived there, we found that you had to ring a bell to be let into the pub. Once inside, the venue was small, but friendly and very cheery. We spent a lovely evening having some drinks and just relaxing before heading home.

On monday we had just the morning in Lisbon and just kicked back a little. We spent an hour or two in a small Port cellar, which specialised in hundreds of different ports of all kinds. After a few glasses each, sampling some tawny, ruby and Late Bottle Vintage ports, we grabbed our bags and heading for the airport. A few hours later we were back in Barcelona and then in no time at all it seemed we had arrived back in Menorca and were heading for bed.

Since then, we have been busy in Menorca. As I mentioned earlier, there have been chores to do and we have just generally been hanging out with friends in the evening. This weekend past, it was my birthday and we had a small party in the Reina Isabel, the bar/restaurant in the main square at Salgar. About 16 people came, including my sister, Jane, and her partner Mike, who had flown in for the weekend. They stayed until Monday and then left. This week is the end of the painting and then homeward bound!

So there you have it, an update! I'll try and post something again before we leave. Those of you who like to know such things, we leave next wednesday (11th June) at 7am. We head to Madrid, and then around lunchtime we fly to Chicago, arriving there mid afternoon, early evening US time. Then we fly back down to Cincinnati around 930pm in the evening, arriving around 10.30.

Have a great week, and a super weekend and I'll write again next week!

Big love
DavidM

PS, the spell checker seems to have stopped working on Blogger, so apols for spelling issues!

A trip to Lisbon

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Originally uploaded by davidnmartin98

Well, I promised an update....and here is a very short teaser update! Two weekends ago we made a quick, super cheap dash to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Here is a picture of James looking like a total tourist and holding up his copy of Lonely Planet Portugal. We had a super time, and I will write to tell you all about it shortly! There are a few photos in the Flickr gallery of our trip so far.

See, that was an update wasn't it?

Big love to all....

David

Still alive and kicking!

Hi all!

Yes, you can tell that I finished school, becuase I haven't been going to the library much! This has meant that I have not posted a blog for ages. I will post something in the next few days to update you, I promise!

Hope all are fine and dandy.....

DavidMx