Well it's been a while since I last blogged due partly to the fact that my server that hosts this site fell over but due mainly to the fact that both work and my social life have been very busy.
Two weekends ago I took some time off and headed off to the Basque Country with a colleague from work who comes from there, Zigor. It turns out actually that my colleague has an interesting past as his family, in particular his father was quite famous in Basque due to being the first military head of ETA so you could say that I got a first hand account of the regions politics. History aside the trip was great fun. Firstly getting to hang out with Zigor and chat about non work related things was a pleasant change and the country itself was just gorgeous. The Basque country sits on the border of southern France and nothern spain and I daresay has the best of both worlds, gorgeous beaches on both sides really and some mountains, in the form of the Pyrenees Mountains. In fact on our last day we climbed up the mountain that marks the start of the Pyrenees which gave me an absolutely beautiful view of most of the French seaside and Spanish mountains. Of course language was an issue, the French don't like to speak english even if they can and the spanish generally just can't and as many readers will know, Basque is famous in linguistic circles for being a unique language which is FIENDISHLY hard to understand at all. Consequently I was pretty reliant on Zigor as, naturally, he speaks every language in the region and a few others just to make us native english speakers feel like idiots, something that most euros seem to excel at in my experience. We ran around most of the Basque country by the end of my 4 days, including the capital of Bilbao, San sebastien for a festival and other random places that I can't remember or won't embarass myself by trying to spell. San sebastien was actually really really good. It turns out that in Summer all of the Basque cities have a festival that lasts a week, and being cunning, instead of having that festival on the same date, it is on a different week for each city, meaning that if you time it right there is a festival going on in ONE city at any point in Summer :) While I was there it was San Sebastiens, which is an absolutely gorgeous city down on the coast with one of those settings that you always assume is fabricated it looks so romantic / nice. Well we turned up, along with some of Zigors friends and family and ran into about a million people all out in the streets going off. Given that the city is normally home to about 200k people the influx of people meant that it was bedlam, though in Spanish style which means it was fun. What does take some getting used to though is the hours they keep, we had dinner early at about 2130 and when we left at 0545 that morning it felt like the party was really just starting to get into FULL swing. So my trip to Basque was great, though sleep was at a premium.
Once I got back I had my first prom, Mahlers 5th which was quite spectacular. It's a favourite symphony of mine and the orchestra played it very well. It was quite amusing for me though as the ticket I had bought was considered a fairly expensive one (I thought 22 pounds was quite reasonable for a ticket) and was in one of the exclusive boxes. Of course the exclusive box was filled with exclusive upper class brits who weren't overly thrilled having a thuggish looking aussie sitting in. The "conversations" between movements was hilarious to say the least.
Last weekend I was off again, this time to up to Manchester for a party and then on to Liverpool for the rest of the long weekend. The party absolute blast and I got to meet a lot of people that I game with, we spent most of the weekend arguing about facets of the game and just generally hanging out and having fun. Keeping up with the "northern monkeys" while drinking was a bit painful, but I think I did my heritage justice, though once again sleep was at a premium.
This weekend I have two more proms including some of the real highlights so I'll write again soon and let you all know how they were.
