What would I do without it...

My dear friends,

The Macpac puffy goose-down jacket you all bought me has been a
saviour. If it wasn't for it I'd be on a plane back to Aus now
(maybe..) It's pretty cold these days, temps get down to 0d Celsius,
but I don't feel the cold because of all the goose feathers I'm
wearing. It's amazing stuff.. I worry about how much I'm going to
wear it, and the laborious washing instructions (hand-wash, no
dryclean, put in the dryer 3 times whilst puffing out the goose down
in between each drying.... something like that..) Nicole my Aussie
colleague says don't bother washing it, just buy a new one. I go
"NOO!!!" this one's way too special - I'm going to wear it till all
the feathers fall out of it! I found quite a few had come out
yesterday onto my cardigan. I wonder how long it'll take before all
the feathers fall out. I'll still wear it even then though - my
Macpac windproof, waterproof, featherless goose-down jacket haha.
Ridiculous.

Needless to say, I haven't been out on the water paddling... I'm lucky
to get myself to the gym and go for a jog once a week.

Barcelona

Went to Barcelona this past weekend with Alex, Mich, Jo and Pedro. Had an awesome time, despite our flight landing late and in the wrong country (Perpignan, south of France due to fog!)! I have to at least thank Ryanair for giving us an interesting story to tell. We were up at 3am on Saturday, and didn't arrive in Barcelona till 3pm.. that's what you get for £1 flights!

So after a disastrous start, we packed in as much as we could into the 3 days we had (more like 2!). One of Barcelona's main attractions is Antoni Gaudi's architecture. The most famous is the Sagrada Familia cathedral, which was started 100 years ago and is still being built, to be finished in 2020! There are parts on the outside of the church which look as if cement has been poured from the top and just left to drip. Other interesting features include offerings of fruit on the tops of spires, and curves and waves throughout the structure. We couldn't enter the main part of the church due to renovations, but we went up to one of the tallest towers and had a great view of the city.

The Park Guell was another major work by Gaudi and it was an amazing park built in the early 1900's to emulate the English gardens. It was huge, and everywhere we turned there was something to surprise us, be it a corridor in the side of a mountain with slanted pillars, or a majestic cross on top of a mound. We wandered around there for about 2 hours, taking lots of pics and enjoying the warm weather.

At night we went to see a flamenco show, it was fantastic! We had a buffet dinner beforehand, stuffed ourselves silly, drank all the sangria we could, then sat down for an awesome show.

On the last day we visited casa Batlo, another Gaudi designed building, with forms and elements taken from nature - spirals of seashells, sand dunes and waveforms..

My pics will be up soon! In the meantime check out these other pics by Alex, Pedro and Jo.