A short video of Prague to get a feel of what the place is like in motion, set to some classic Czech style music, I think -

Or download a higher quality WMV (17meg) of the video for a crisper experience.

On our second day in Prague we hit the tourist walk which took us to all the major sites of the city. It is actually quite a small place so only takes a day to walk around, we even got to go inside a castle!

We headed out of a great hotel and walk alongside the Vltava River and headed fo for the biggest castle complex in Europe -

Prague Castle

First off we walked through a park with a giant swinging pendalum in it. The park was covered in graffiti which spoiled it a little bit but when we got to the castle it was a different story. After walking around the castle and having an apple strudel and macchiato at an overpriced cafe we walked this stair way back down towards the city centre and over the Charles Bridge, famous in recent times for being the film location for Linkin Parks ‘Numb’, INXS ‘Never tear us apart’ and Kanye West’s ‘Diamonds are forever’.

Amy and stairs from Prague Castle

After hitting the Charles Bridge we walked past the ‘Astronomical Clock’ which was pretty amazing, we actually saw it the day before but didn’t realise what it was as we weren’t as clued up on the historical sites of Prague at that time -

Astronomical Clock in Prague

That night we headed out for dinner at a nice restaurant which had live music playing, Amy had traditional Czech food “Shoulder of Pork with Dumplings and Cabbage” where I went for the even more traditional Czech dish of Spaghetti Bolognaise.

Czech Repulic Favourite Car

We went back to the airport the next day in even colder temperatures with snow falling all around us (in a luxury Skoda). Prague is a great city and really nice to go at Christmas time as it appears the drunken louts don’t come at this time of year!

Sorry for the strange aspect ratio on the pictures but this is the way it will be until we can get a new pocket camera!

UK airport security has reached “ridiculous” on the threat level stages, you are only allowed to take on board one bag and anything you have that has 125ml of liquid must go into a plastic bag and if your hand luggage weighs more than 10kg then back to the check in desk for you! A guy in front of us had his bag weighed and it was 12kg so he wasn’t allowed through security. When you finally think you’ve got through the metal detectors and the bag x-ray you get to another security checkpoint where you have to take your shoes off and they go through an x-ray machine. Then when you think your finally into the shopping area of the terminal you go through another security checkpoint where your greeted by police which semi-automatic machine guns and the spanish inquisition.

On the flight over to Prague you can see the fields from the plane going from a nice green colour to an icy white colour. The temperature in Prague is mild to say the least, the first thing we did after arriving in the country was to buy some mulled wine from a little market stall, here’s Amy buying some with the temp. gauge at a freezing minus six degrees -

Amy, Mulled Wine and -6 degrees

We had a walk around with our mulled wine and checked out the square near the Powder Tower which is one of the sights in Prague, here is me outside one of the buildings in the square wrapped up for the cold -

Cold with Mulled Wine

We walked on a little more and looked for a restaurant to get dinner from, there is a lot of choice and some amazing architecture in the city, this is another square we came across that was selling all sorts of food and drink. It had a stage with a choir singing Christmas songs which was very nice.

Nice Square

We eventually found a pizza place which was off of the main square down another little side street. It had some amazing decor, here is Amy and me enjoying some lovely authentic Prague Pizza?

Prague Pizza

We went into a mall to look for some drinks and came across another C&A Shanghai style. We tried to take a photo outside of it but then the camera tumbled out of our hands and onto the floor from which point it has ceased to work

Looking forward to tomorrow day time to get out and see the sights of Prague and maybe some even see some snow!

A little winter trip was much needed to get away from the London coldness blues, so we hit Sardinia, which is an island just off of Italy (you can see it here). It was a beautiful little trip and very cheap costing only £80. Although it was out of season so no sun batheing was taking place and we almost got kicked out of the hotel by setting off the fire alarm (I had one of my epic showers that caused such a heat build up that when I opened the bathroom door it triggered the temperature increase detector to set off the alarm - the hotel staff didn’t know it was possible).

In fact it rained a little bit so we got a hire car which was named ‘bug’, because of its quriky characteristics, such as the strange sounds it made when you indicated (sounded like a game of pong on acid).

Bug

I really enjoyed driving on the right hand side of the road, I’m definetly going to try and get the UK to change to left hand drive cars it just feels right!

Oh yeah and guess what Sardinia has….

Med Waves

Lots of rocks though and no surf board so didn’t bother checking out any of the spots, it was a bit windy anyway so they were probably all blown out. We went to a little place called Neptune’s Grotto which is a really magical place that is right at the bottom of a cliff face with 642 steps -

A long way down

Once at sea level the swell from the ocean was hitting the entrace to the cave and we had to wait for the guide to tell us it was safe to cross the entrance, as the water comes over the path and into the grotto. The ocean was pretty rough and you could hear it crashing against the side of the rocks. However, once in the grotto it was very very quiet and a little bit surreal -

Grotto

The lines on the far wall show where the ocean once lapped against the walls of the grotto during the penultimate interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when the oceans where four metres higher than they are today and people lived on hills.

A nice little trip to Italy where I tasted my first Italian pizza (taste just like they do at Pizza Express) and my first Italian cappuccino (tastes just like they do at Starbucks).

Rock on next mainland Europe trip!!!!!!!!!!

If there’s one thing I’ll learn from the couple of days spent in Germany, that is that there’s no such thing as the Nürnberg Ring, a fantasy location that I had wanted to visit on my trip over. Apparently the Nürburgring is some 400km away. The reason for going to Nürnberg was for work and so I was invited to go over with Mark and Dave for the trip.

Here are Mark, Dave and myself enjoying some fish food (which I was sure wasn’t good to eat pre flying) at Stansted airport before taking off -

Cheshire Cat

We flew Air Berlin who are probably the worst airline I’ve ever flown. They wouldn’t let you take a bag as hand luggage even if it was the right size if it weighed more than 6kg!! We boarded the half empty plane and flew over to Nurnberg. The next morning, early and before the working day had started we took a very short tour of Nurnberg and visited the towns best attraction; the castle. Here is Dave and Mark outside the castle -

The Castle

I can’t talk about the work stuff really because that’s all corporate corporation stuff, but here is a shot of my German collegues having a fast paced game of that game where you have to smash the puck towards each other. This was in a rock bar somewhere in Nurnberg on my last night there which was great fun -

Disco Lights

The flight back with Air Berlin was pretty funny. I got told by the overstressed checkin desk lady that the flight was to make an unscheduled stop in Leipzig (North East of Nurnberg) before continuing for London. I asked the sales desk if there was any compensation for such a diversion and landing 2 hours behind schedule, however, I was told “no”. I fell asleep for most of the flight anyway so it wasn’t too bad. However, on approach to London I noticed that it was a fairly foggy evening. I was concerned that the pilot was suffering from ‘get-there-itus’ and really became concerned after seeing the plane make some last minute adjustments as I could see the lights of the airport not too far away. The plane hit the ground hard and some people gave a little shriek, the plane then hit the ground again and came to a normal stop which everyone was happy about. Some child on the plane shouted to his mate sitting a few rows back “I think that was a crash landing!”. I was more nervous about the landing after recently watching this video of an MD-11 crash landing in a typhoon at Kai Tak, Hong Kong 1993 (do not watch if you are even remotely scared of flying).

Over and out.

A great weekend spent at an undisclosed location in the world (not Ireland) where I drank some beer in small glasses -

Undisclosed Beer Drinking Location

On another note met Matt (here/here/here and here) at Gloucester Road tube station for a quick beer on the way back from the airport as he was in town for the weekend. Which seems strange because Matt lives on Maroubra Beach in Sydney, Australia!? Well the good news is Matt took his piloting skills to the next level and now works for an international airline doing short little trips from Sydney - Singapore - London. So it was good to see my Australia surfing buddy in foggy London town for a couple of hours on a Monday night!! Made me miss Australia a lot, especially when he told me he was going to Seal Rocks with Rach and Mike next Saturday morning.. four days away!!! -

Matt Bass in Foggy London

Ahh memories… until the next time!!!!!

I was at an undisclosed location this weekend. Can you guess where it is?

More later……

An excuse to leave the country! Not like I need one, but this was special trip for the marriage of Karine and Mark who were nice enough to stop by when I was in ’stralia. The party was in a location called Nice which isn’t pronounced ‘nice’ but more like niece, just in case you didn’t know and it is in the South East of France on the Mediterranean.

I was a bit late on hotel booking so when I arrived at 22h00 my hotel was located a good 1km away from the beach. I walked into town and met up with Mark and some of his buddies for a quick drink in an Irish bar. I headed straight home after two pints as I had nothing to drink or eat since the flight and felt drunk already. Ed was supposed to be sharing the hotel room with me but his passport had expired and he didn’t realise!! So he did not make it which sucks!! The next day I woke up and had a walk around Nice, I walked to the top of a hill and took this photo looking down at Nice -

Blue Skies, Blue Water and Hot Weather

I actually felt a little bit down when I first looked at the sea. From a distance when you can see the sea on the horizon it would seem crazy that waves would not exist, but as you can see, surfing is not going to happen here -

Good for swimming though

I sat on the beach for a long time and did a lot of swimming as well as met up with a few of Karine and Mark’s relatives and then some people from work. I then walked the 1km back to my hotel got my stuff and the laptop that was to play the photography video of Karine and Mark’s holidays that they had asked me to do based on some of the videos they had watched at this very website. I got changed into my suit at a hotel near Le Castel, the location of the wedding because wearing it in the 28 degree heat and carrying a bag 1km was not going to happen!!!

Security at the reception was tight, there was security guards on the entrance, a man on the beach with a big black dog and two men in a fishing boat pretending to fish (they were definetly secret service).

A work colleague/boss seemed to have somehow got dragged into sorting out the A/V for the wedding so it was funny to see Simon walking around holding phono/av leads, here he is checking the rig (not sure how much he was getting per hour for this) -

Work/Holiday Intertwined

The reception was beautiful and the weather was fantastic, the best man’s speech by Kenji was excellent and very funny -

Best man’s speech with Nice backdrop

After Kenji and Arnould (Karine’s brother) speeches Karine and Mark exchanged rings and kissed to an applause and onlookers from above -

Bravo!!

For dinner we all had to sit at tables that were named after locations of significance to Karine and Mark. The main tables were London, Sydney and Singapore and the other tables had different names. I was on table Exeter but some other tables were named Katoomba and Clovelly from Mark and Karine’s trip to Australia which was nice to see!! I was the only English person on my table so I had to hot up on my lingo fast. I only found this out at 16h00 the same day so time was not on my side. Fortunetly they all spoke English so I got to have some conversation with them!!

My french friends on the Exeter table

Later that night Karine and Mark cut their cake, which was the biggest wedding cake I’ve ever seen -

Big Cake!!!

And so as the sun went down in Nice on Karine and Mark’s first day of marriage, I also headed back the 1km walk to my hotel and spent the next two days just laying in the sun and swimming in the waveless, ripless sea…..

The day comes to an end

The end.

At last, a video! All of this footage was filmed in SW France, including all of the waves that weekend (not necessarily filmed by me), which gives you an idea of the size they get down there!!! It requires sound as per usual and is best downloaded first.

Right Click..Save Target As (Requires Sound)

Stay tuned for the bank holiday entry that will include, skim boarding, skateboarding, Henry Tate and Charles Babbage’s brain. TBC…

I told everyone at work I’d see them next Tuesday and headed out of the office on Thursday afternoon to pack for the big trip to the South West coast of France for some serious holiday fun and surfing.

Friday morning came and I headed off in the car over the Docklands and out up the M11 towards Stansted Airport. It was pooring with rain and I was quite looking forward to getting out of Britain and into the warm French weather. I parked in the Pink Elephant parking area and flukely managed to park the car about 5 down from Andy, Gin and Kim, who had arrived from Birmingham only 10 minutes before! The rain was hitting it down hard and I ran over to Kim’s car. I saw Andy for the first time in 18 months and the first thing he said to me was “look at this rain, how are we going to get to the airport” - this moaning is what I expected and was to be a centre point to the holiday. We got absolutely soaked getting to the bus stop carrying the tents and sleeping bags. When we arrived at the airport we checked our belongings in then hit the bar where I had a coffee and Andy had asked for a triple whiskey (which they wouldn’t give to him) so he settled for a double. He then had his placebo drugs that loosen the nerves at the same time (as he doesn’t like flying). Meanwhile Kim was out buying a big packet of fruit sweets with every single E number under the sun in and then not eating them and just forcing me to eat then for him.

We boarded the Ryanair plane and scrambled for a good seat (Ryanair don’t allocate seats) and off we went! The flight was pretty good and you could see the weather picking up as we got closer to Biarittz. Andy did not start freaking out on the plane ‘like the guy in se7en tied to the bed’ as Kim thought he would.

My surfboard was still intact when we went to collect the hire car. The vehicle was supposed to be a ‘Peugeot 206 or similar’ Andy’s face here reflects the mood he was in when we got given this heap of Italian junk (no offence Gin) -

Going from bad to worse for Andy

The car was practically air tight by the time we had all got in with our loads! I was very nervous about driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road but after a few rides into the kerb I was enjoying it. I actually thought it made more sense to drive on the right than the left by the end of the weekend.

We did not have a campsite booked so we had to find one quick before it got dark, there was no time for fluffing around; we drove North up the A63 away from Biarrtiz and up towards Hossegor. We got off at a town called Ondres and went into the ‘Office de Tourisme’ in the town. They gave us a map of the local camp sites and we headed to the nearest one ‘Camp du Lac’. A campsite next to a lake. They had room for us and we were in. We put up the tents right away in the boiling heat and put our shorts on. I wanted to go checkout the ocean so we drove down to the beach and the waves were massive, overhead for sure, I did not want to go out in that on my own.

After setting up the tents and looking at the raging ocean we jumped back in the car and headed for Carrefour shopping mall that we passed. The quality and diversity of food on offer in French supermarches are 100 times better than any other country I’ve ever been to. We bought some lovely bread, some camembert, more cheese, some dips, crisps, lemonade, water, wine, pernod and some beer that Kim choosed called ‘Panache’. We then visited McDonalds (because Gin is a huge fan) and had some burgers. We cracked open the Pernod “that’s the most disgusting drink I’ve ever tasted” - Kim. We went for a little walk to the ‘du lac’ and had this group picture (where although I am 5′11 look about 5′2) -

Kim, Andy, Gin and Me

We came back to the campsite and Gin, Andy and Kim wondered off to the toilet. Andy and Gin came back and Kim was taking a little bit more time than usual. Gin and Andy mentioned that the toilets were ‘hole in the floor’ style and had no toilet paper. Kim came back looking very distressed about what he had just had to do. Andy being some kind of hole in floor toilet master gave an impromptu demonstration of how to use the a french toilet -

French Toilet Demonstration in Progress

We headed off to the camp site bar and tried drinking the ‘FAXE’ larger, which was absolutely disgusting. So instead we had cocktails which were pretty nice. It wasn’t really ‘going off’ at the campsite bar but we held it out to the bitter end and decided on a plan of action of where we could find an English style toilet. We got shouted at by the campsite owner (who looked like Freddy Mercury) on the way back to our tents (French Accent) “TWENTY FOUR PLEASE BE QUIET” - at first we did not know what it meant but we guessed it meant you had to be quiet past midnight!!

I was sharing a tent with Kim and as you might have seen on the holiday section of the site, he is a bit of a loose cannon. I woke up in the middle of the night to a massive downpour to see the Kim was nowhere to be seen. At first this seemed a bit unusual but then when I realised who it was I was dealing with maybe it wasn’t. The next morning I woke up to find Kim sleeping in the foyer of the tent, which is not protected from the rain very well. His sleeping bag was soaked by his feet. We managed to persaude him that he should have slept in the tent (after making up some reason it was because of my disturbing sleep talking that made him move).

So the ground was wet but the weather was holding out, although it was no day for sitting on the beach. We went to the town of Hossegor where the Rip Curl Pro was taking place, we did not see much of the event in action, but it did not really kick off until we left (just the grom search was on). We had some coffees and croissants in Hossegor -

Kim, Andy and Gin munching on some French Breakfast

As the clouds started to arrive we walked down to the beach to see what the surf was like. A heavy onshore wind and overhead waves were making it unlikely I was going to be going out anytime soon. The £34 for flying my board out was starting to begin to look like a waste of money. Here are the waves at Hossegor on the Saturday morning. If you look closely you can see a little figure riding the wave breaking closest to shore, it was insane -

Big Waves, Onshore winds, Rainclouds looming

The rains started to come in so we went to a little bar by the beach in Hossegor. I asked the waiter for ‘un stylo’ and he seemed furious at me using it to write postcards with!!!! After the rain had stopped we drove to Biarritz, the anger in the car was building to raging point between Kim and Andy, with Andy being “the hardest guy I know” - Kim we were all a little scared. We arrived in Biarritz and walked around it for ages and got Andy to calm down. For dinner we hit a place called ‘Le Cotton’ and had a pretty poor dinner although it was only €15 each (and a bottle of rose that was not for us but we drank anyway). The rain seemed to have it in for us. Not only had we recieved a soaking on the way to the airport when we were walking back to the car it started to rain a bit. We were only about 100m away from the carpark when we thought it would be a good idea to run as it was just spitting. Somehow in that time the spitting rain turned into a power shower of sideways rain that soaked us completely within about 5 seconds -

Drenched

We headed back to our campsite for a night of Rose wine drinking and the ‘Panache’ larger that we got on discount at Carrefour. We deceided that because of our bad luck with the weather and the heavy rain and the crazy surf conditions that we would get really drunk that night. We got back to the campsite, got changed out of our wet clothes and cracked open the Panache larger…..mmmmm, that tastes a bit fruity…..how much alcohol is in this…..

Inferior Alcohol

So we had twenty four bottles of Alc. Inferieur a 1% Vol to knock back. This clearly wasn’t going to happen, so after a lot of shouting at Kim and a lot of head scratching as to why you would put 1% alcohol in between Stella and 1664 we headed back to the campsite bar. We made some friends with some English girls and they took this picture -

Nice Time Great Guys

Our new English friends and us played a game of cards where you had to get four of the same and then put your fingers on your nose and the last person to copy the person that put their fingers on their nose lost. You would have thought you could have developed that into a drinking game but obviously our brains were not in gear and we just kept playing that for ages, with the person of lost just being the loser. When ‘twenty four please be quiet’ time came we got invited by the girls to the woods (yes we were nervous) to meet some French guys who were also on the campsite. Gin was almost blind drunk and must have forgotten that the Panache was inferior alcohol and started to bring it to the woods.

Middle of the woods with the French Men and a couple of English girls

I played a bit of Jack Johnson on the guitar and we all tried to score some of the French guys beer (as Gin had dumped the Panache on the side of the road towards the forest). Eventually the English girls managed to score some beer for us which Kim downed. Gin started to fall over and get out of control, we were also getting some bad vibes from the French crew because the English girls seemed to just want to talk to us so Kim, Andy and myself made our escape from the woods, not before Andy got wild with a stick in the woods and chased us like a crazy man -

Andy with a stick in the woods

I woke up the next day to Kim climbing out of the tent, I asked him what time it was and he said it was half nine and that he was going for a shower. Twenty minutes later he came back and fell asleep again, I woke up about three hours later at the real half nine, another tick on the madness test for Kim.

At last the sun had come out and we went down to the beach, the waves were still crashing out the back but surf had to be done, so I paid €8 to hire a mal for the day. I went out for about 20 minutes and then came in feeling like I was going to be sick (too much rose/cocktails/panache the night before). As we were putting on suntan lotion we noticed Kim was using it very sparingly. He told us his reasoning was that after the burn goes down he will be a ‘bronze beauty’. As you can see from this picture he is in the early stages of serious sunburn that would affect him for that night and the next day and many days to come -

On the Beach at last!!

As the sun started to get a little bit too much and we were a little bit bored of sitting on the beach, we drove back to Biarritz to attempt to find a better place to eat than the night before. We tried to find a ‘locals’ place by walking what we thought was off the beaten track. I got a nice photo of Biarritz on our track -

Biarritz

When driving around in the sun in the South West of France with their open roads and not many people it reminded me very much of the trip to the Sunshine Coast with Andy in February, which disproved my theory that Australia was the only place in the world which this could be done (SW, France is a lot cheaper to get to than QLD, Australia from England).

We had a drink in a bar looking over the crazy surf of Biarritz, which was playing Mexican music that seemed to get faster and slower with the size of waves that were coming in. We then went to a really nice place to eat and ate Mussels, Ham, Pasta and Steak. Yum.

We headed back for our last night in the campsite and found ourselves sitting in the Fiat Panda drinking rose wine (after being kicked out of the camp site bar for the last time). The next morning and Kim and myself headed down to the beach at about 09h00. I had a bit of a hangover but was determined, if the waves were a little calmer, to get out their on my board. The waves had calmed down enough to make it viable for me to paddle out. It was the most tiring paddle of all time but I was out there and managed two (poor) rides before having to come in and admit that having a wine hangover and trying to surf medium sized waves was never going to work.

I am now back in England and have a cold from the immune system hit this weekend (hangover surfing + heavy rain = illness), but it was well worth it and a great time with the lads, even if sometimes the conversations are just so far out there they cannot even be mentioned on here, on in the public domain at all!!!

Gin, Andy (with triple whiskey), Kim and myself at Biarritz airport waiting for the return flight

A great weekend break, I wish we did it more often, actually the good thing is there’s no reason why we can’t!! Here’s a link to the Rip Curl Pro that we didn’t see much of! Peace out…. and France again next weekend!