My London Christmas!

Christmas started for me as soon as I got off the plane from NY (yep... blog for that will happen soon hopefully). On Sunday 17 December, we had a mince pie and mulled wine party at my place!

So for the first time ever, I got to make mulled wine, with plenty of help from Alix and Michelle as you can see below.

We got to eat super delicious mince pies from Konditor and Cook... highly recommended! We had some left over, so for the rest of the week, Ali, Greg and I were eating mince pies as we got home from work. They were sooooo good.

For those who don't know what a mince pie is, it is not a mince meat pie. It is rather like a small fruit pie (i.e. the fruit is minced together i suppose??)

The Tuesday night before Christmas we had our work Christmas party in Canary Warf. We had lamb for the main which was pretty good (though they were cooking for over 1000 people I think)
Work gave us half a day off on the Friday before Christmas, so I also took the other half as annual leave and therefore had a massive five days off in a row!!!

So Friday was spent at Sainsbury's doing lots of food shopping... then dragging my granny trolley back to the flat and up the three flights of stairs (yep, no dad to give me a lift over here)

The Saturday before Christmas I spent with Brenda and Jean, a couple of ladies from my church, at Royal Albert Hall singing carols and listening to the choir and orchestra, so I was now totally in the Christmas mood.

Sunday I went to a family carols service in the afternoon at church with more carols (and I tell you they sing ones over here I've never heard!), then Michelle and Elisa (Michelle's friend from Sydney who is travelling at the moment) arrived and we went to the midnight service at St Lukes.

This is Schelle and I on Christmas eve...

This is the makeshift emergency Christmas tree I put together on Christmas eve... Present time... Schelle with a book that will explain why the sale assistants in the shops never offer to help (It's called Watching the English)
Elisa, me and Schelle with our presents... I got lots of socks!

Cooking time... Schelle making bread
Getting the roast ready

The roast is done... we even made our own stuffing!

We had an excellent Christmas... clearly ate alot and watched We Can be Heros all the way through... Physics really is Phun DONKEY!!

Lisbon

It is finally almost Christmas!!! One of the benefits of Christmas is I have a few days away from work in a row (5 to be exact). Also, the UK has no forced annual leave between Christmas and new year... very convenient when it is minus two outside!

So I'm catching up on my blog entries... I visited Lisbon at the begining of November for a few days to see Matt and Louise, friends from Sydney who are living in Lisbon now.

It was such a lovely, precious experience to be met at the airport!! Thanks Louise! It is (obviously not something that happens much to me anymore).

Matt and Louise welcomed me into their lives for the few days I was in Lisbon. What I was so amazed by was how well they speak Portugese!

I visited the theological college in Lisbon where they are working on the first night, helped out a bit in the office with Louise and then got to hear a sermon in Portugese which Louise translated for me. The first night we had dinner at the home of some of their Brazilian friends... lots of meat and rice.

I also managed to eat lots of Portugese tarts (custard type tarts), although, perhaps unsurprisingly, they don't call them Portuguese tarts.

Here is Louise and I with the bridge to Spain in the back ground (I may have made that up about the bridge)

The larges Christmas tree in Europe... apparently? Under construction

Matt and I at the Columbus monument in Belem

THE place to eat Portugese tarts... they were warm!!!

Lisbon had the wold expo in 1998. Matt and Louise live near this area in Lisbon (it is quite a new area near the water). It turns out that they decided not to include the Australian flag in the row of flags (there were some countries I had never heard of). This was to do with Australia's position in relation to East Timor at the time

Me and Louise....

Doing this blog and loooking at the photos again.... HOw amazing was the weather while I was there!

Speaking of weather, to put it nicely, things are atmospheric at the moment in London. By that I mean it is totally foggy.... I kind of like it.... I suspect because I haven't really experienced such atmospheric weather before.

However, it has meant alot of flights are being cancelled... not such a great thing to happen 3 days before Christmas!