It has been a while...

Sorry for all of you that have been awaiting updates... we have had some busy weeks!

Three weekends ago, our friend Steven came from Belgium to spend the weekend with us. It was a lot of fun. Saturday we went to Oxford to visit one of his friends. Oxford is beautiful (eventhough we spend the first 2 hours in a pub waiting for the rain to stop..) So, a couple a pints and cider later... we went out to explore the beautiful university city. There are something like 100 different colleges that make up Oxford, some of them dating back hundreds of years. We walked by the famous oxford library. But the real hit with the tourists was the Christchurch College (see picture). This is where some of the Harry Potter movies were filmed and there were big crowds of tourists to prove it!

The city was overwhelmed with police officers, which was due to an animal rights group demonstration that was expected. There is a big animal testing lab in Oxford; surprisingly even with all the police and crowds demonstrating about the lab, there was no problem walking around the lab. We shot this picture when we walked to the back of the lab; the police were photographing the grafiti... Here in England the animal activists have made a fool of themselves and have no sympathy of the general public!


On sunday we went to Greenwich park.. to see the 0 degree longitude mark which divides east from west. Very touristy at the Royal Observatory!! We also saw the official GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) clock... But the worst was the attempt we made to ease out mexican food withdrawl and ended up at a restaurant that left all of us sick....

The weekend after Annelies' brother (coming from Brazil) and sister (coming from belgium) came to spend the weekend! We had a lot of fun! We went to the London Dungeon.. not sure if it worth the £15 for another visit put the farmer's market nearby was very interesting (the London dungeon was pretty touristy and at least entertaining...). We wanderd around in London (it's great to be a tourist when we have family or friends in town) and went to see the Pirates of the Carribean 2 (also not sure if it was worth the £10, but kept us entertained...)

And last weekend we went to the Cotswolds (hills) and Wales (in the Western part of the island). Annelies had to attend a dog show (pretty much just to handover a trophy...) and as a benefit we got a rental car and hotel for the weekend! What fun that was to drive on the wrong side of the road for the first time! We're both happy to say that we tried it and didn't cause any accidents :)

That part of the country was beautiful and it truly was lovely driving around some of the smaller roads and towns throughout western England and eastern Wales. We stopped at a number of ruinous, 1000 year old castles which were pretty interesting to check out. You could imagine the medieval times: catapults, knights, kings, fare maidens, horses, wagons and all!

This weekend we're taking it pretty easy around London and relaxing. In a few weeks we're going to take a trip to Venice which should be very nice and romantic! We hope everyone is well and are happy to report that planes are now currently flying overhead (and on their way to land at Heathrow). Be safe. Lots of love,

-Jason & Annelies