Carinvale, Easter in Barcelona, and much much more

Well folks, so much has happened since my last post over 6 weeks ago and I'm struggling where to start to try and fill you in. Perhaps I should give you a bit of background on what's caused me to be so tardy on my blog posts. As sad as it is, I must confess that it's been work that has been keeping me away from tippy tappying away on my keyboard to keep you all filled in on my adventures. I'm going to bit the bullet today and try and give you a synopsis without boring you all to death. Here's a quick overview of what I've done so you can choose to close hit the close button on your browser or keep reading.

1) Carnivale in Cologne, Germany
2) Tour of Windsor Castle
3) Adventures of our broken shower
4) Easter long weekend in Barcelona, Spain

Carnival, Germany

At the beginning of February we were cordially invited by our German friends to enjoy the festivities of Carnivale in Cologne. After some quick research and conversations we discovered that this was no normal festival. It required us to purchase costumes and run through the city braving the cold wind and masses of parades that snake through the city.


Exhibit A -

As you can observe here, there was quite a contingent of us visiting Cologne for this event - albeit some of these peeps were locals, but they were definitely going to show us a good time. The theme for a lot of us there was pilots and stewardesses which definitely proved to be a hit among the locals there.

Windsor Castle

Seeing as myself and my friends had been chumming around the UK for a while and we'd been focusing on traveling to far away countries all the time, we decided that it was perhaps time to hit a local site. Thus, the Windsor Castle comes into play. It happened that the Queen and her entourage generally tend to stay there during the weekend, so we had the pleasure of being in the vicinity of her while we took the tour. We all felt quite regal. What can i say about Windsor Castle.....it's a giant castle....and the Queen lives there. I'd love to have a one for myself but I can't imagine what the heating bill would be for it so I've decided to scratch that off my list of goals to achieve.

Broken Shower

Perhaps the most amusing event that has occurred in the time we've been here is trying to get our shower fixed. As some of you may have seen either in previous posts our boiler has blown which took about 5 weeks to fix after which the water would constantly go from scalding hot to freezing cold. As you can imagine this proved to be an uncomfortable experience after a while. Taking our luck into account, this of course led to the entire shower breaking preventing us to turn it off....what can I say....it's just something i've gotta laugh at to prevent myself from going insane. Just to wrap this whole issue up though, we finally had a plumber come in and replace the whole shower unit and we now officially have a working shower that has a constant temperature.

Barcelona

A group us decided to take a nice long 4 day break in the Spain over the Easter holidays....something we all needed after a stint of working extremely hard to meet the demands of our work commitments. For 4 wonderful days we ate amazing food, saw some wonderful sights and sat around with great company. Considering it was still early in the tourist season we had some great weather for all but one of the days which proved to quite helpful in lifting our spirits. We enjoyed the sun the Cafe con leches at several little bistro's throughout our trip. I must say that Spaniards just know how to relax. We all fell right into the schedule of sleeping in and not eating dinner until 10:30 or 11:00 at night. Never was anyone in a rush to get anywhere or do anything specific which created the perfect environment to recharge before we got back in the fray of the London lifestyle.
We even took the time to catch a Barcelona football game which turned out to be quite a high scoring game. This, we found out after the fact, was due to Barcelona playing the 2nd worse team in the league. I got to see my first penalty kick though which was quite exciting!