Once again, the images on this blog have out paced the descriptions. This is because it is easier to take photos than write words. Since a picture is also allegedly worth a thousand words,I guess sometimes Kyle and I think it is superfluous to write words when we have so many pictures. Anyways...we have had some trips since we last wrote. I will recount these for all our loyal readers, and then they can match this newly gained knowledge with the photos they have already seen.

Ok, enough drivel.

Pitlochry- Kate and Jono have been in Edinburgh for almost a year and a half. They are going home very very soon, which is sad, because they are our braai and biltong people. The ones who understand that it isn't just salted meat, it is a form of goodness that transcends time and space. So we decided to do a mini road trip to the charming town of Pitlochry- allegedly one of the (many, many, according to visitscotland.com's website)gateways to the highlands. It was a crispy autumn day and the leaves were supposed to be beautiful up there in Big Tree Country (they really call it that), so off we went. Because it was nearly sort of a bit like Halloween, we wore hats. If you see any photos of a witch, a Cuban and a Russian Czarina in fluffy boots, that's us at Pitlochry. It was really, really breathtaking. The leaves were a brilliant red and yellow against the evergreen hills, and the countryside was a riot of colour. We went for a walk in the forest near Birnam Wood (Of Macbeth fame) to a place called the Hermitage, a tiny building looking over a beautiful waterfall. There is also a delightful stone bridge crossing over a gully. It just begs for tiny hobbits on a voyage. We were not what it begged for, but we were charmed nonetheless.

Autumn in a the woods of Scotland is absolutely spectacular, and it is definitely something that I am looking forward to experiencing again next year. It is impossible to explain a world where the only thing that breaks the rich russet of the leaves is clear water and black rocks- and occasionally, a witches hat.

We left the Hermitage reluctantly, and went on to braai in Pitlochry. Now, when I mentioned to the Scots at work that we wanted to braai (or rather, barbeque) outside in November, they laughed. We laughed at their laughter, knowing that they had no idea of the all-round goodness of the braai. After three hours outside with no gloves on, we realised why the Scots tend not to have a rich outdoor culture in Autumn. It has some adverse affects, like the loss of feelings in one's limbs. The meat was good though. The drive home, although good, did not have the fragile beauty that the drive to Pitlochry had had. this is probably because it got suddenly, assertively dark, and at a certain point once country road (or road in one country) begins to look very like another.

Week Trip to London- I went to London on training. It was very hard and fun and rewarding and mostly hard. If you live in London and are reading this and did not get a call while I was in London- don't feel bad. Absolutely no one in the whole of London got a call while I was there. This was deliberate for a few reasons:
1. I was there for a very expensive course that I needed to concentrate on, as there were exams involved.
2. Said course involved doing insane things like getting up at 5am to study for exams, so I had 0 energy left to socialise.
3. I was staying in Kensington, which is not Wimbledon, which is thus fairly far removed and a bit of a trek to ask people to undertake to come and visit me.
4. I didn't know how much time I would have, and I didn't end up actually having very much at the end of the day, so was glad to not have made plans.
Anyways, I went to London, did a hard course, was a big girl and officially had my first business trip. It was a milestone.

Geneva and Annecy- I arrived back from the business trip at 11:30 on Wednesday night, and at 6:00 on Thursday morning we woke up to head off to Geneva for our monthly Seeing Somewhere trip. We rented a car (there will be a whole other post on that, energy permitting, in future, since the renting of the car was our undoing a little bit)and drove to Geneva. Geneva is a picturesque city right on the lake. It is beautiful, with lots of well proportioned multi-level buildings and it just has a definite air of wealth about it. It makes you feel wealthy just being there- until you order something off a menu and calculate how much it is costing you, and then you feel poor again. We had a very good lasagne in an italian restaurant near the river. Just outside was a magical square. The floor of the square was covered with tiny blue lit squares interspersed in between the bricks, each with a particular message in a different language. It was really lovely. We walked alongside the river and admired the beautiful lights and the racing water (seriously, I have seldom seen a river not in flood move as quickly as that one did). We then ducked into a pub for a pint of blond beer. It tasted funny but ok. The pub smelled like cheese though, so we headed back to the hostel, which was, incidentally, really really good.

We awoke the next morning and prepared to cross the Swiss border into France, then drive to Annecy. We wouldn't have prepared so hard if we had known what was coming. The Swiss border is in two parts. The first part is two signs pointing opposite directions. The one says 'France' and the other one says 'Geneva'. After you have made this difficult choice, you are faced with a menacing row of *traffic cones*. If you keep your nerve about you and manage to drive past the cones, you are in France. The Swiss, being practical people, seem to have asked themselves the following question:' Why have border control when everyone knows that immigrants hate traffic cones? We'll just let the traffic cones do the work for us!' And so they did.

Once through the harrowing crossing, we dropped down into the picture postcard town of Anncey, again alongside a beautiful lake, with towering alps all above it. Our hotel was cheap, clean and nice and my French, though appalling, seemed to be understood. Annecy was winning.

In and around Annecy, we did several delightful things: eat surprisingly good pizza in a tiny restaurant in the Old City, visit the museum on the hill that overlooks the whole city, ate crepes and hot chocolate, watched TV dubbed into French, watched CNN when we could no longer stand it (and then switched back to the dubbed stuff when we could no longer stand CNN), saw llamas, went to Kyle's all time favourite place (Intermarche- the French supermarket chain. Go Figure) and went snow hunting.

For those of you who are beginners, snow hunting is easy to do. What you need: fluffy boots; puffy hat; person unafriad to drive in snow; person afraid to be driven in snow; one car, some Alps. It helps if your Alps go really high, like ours did. After only half an hour of driving, we had found snow deep enough to frolic in, and so this we did. It was cold and crispy and wind swept and fabulous, complete with wide mountain vistas and windy little wrong side of the mountain French roads, just like Bagnere (where we went at the beginning of the year). It felt great to be back.

Annecy marked our last international trip this year, barring the return journey to South Africa. It was absolutely lovely, and once again, it will be added to the list of places we want to go back to.

This past week saw us celebrating Kyle's 'One year older, one year better looking' day (known to us mortals as a 'Birthday'). On Saturday night, we had a hat party. It was good, and we had a house filled with animators and Aussies, all wearing hats. There was frolicking to Girls Aloud's Top 100 pop songs of all time by the Aussies. *cough*. There was some drawing by the animators (yes really). We finally swept the last of them out of the house at 3am.

It's going to be a long week.