fiziskandarZ

Winter Holiday 2011 @ Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany [ entry 4 of 5 ]

2012-01-29T22:42:00.000Z

event :: Winter Holiday 2011 @ Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany
date :: 16 - 22 December 2011
locatio :: Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany
theme :: red.

[1] The Berchtesgaden National Park has been on the list of places we want to go since I planned our Hohe Tauern National Park Austria trip last year. But because the route we chose then were limited to Austrian border, that was probably why we missed it. Plus the lack of time too, since it was just a three days trip.

[2] The Berchtesgaden National Park is situated at the border of Germany and Austria. From Rothenburg, it took about 5 hours drive. Going from Munich-Rothenburg-Berchtesgaden was not a very cost-friendly way to plan your route. This is because from Rothenburg, we were in fact heading back into Munich before we can reach Berchtesgaden. The correct route would have been Berchtesgaden-Munich-Rothenburg. But because we started out from Munich, there wasn't much we could do ;)

[3] Somehow the 5 hour drive didnt felt that long then. It was probably because hubbykun was driving super fast! I have never seen him drove this fast all my life! He was going at 140km/h on average, when we were running at the middle lane. Sometimes when he was at the fastest lane, he was going at 180km/h. And that was nothing to be proud of, because quite a number of people are going at 200 km/h without a care in the world. Hubbykun told me that some parts of the German autobahn (motorway) has no speed limit. How cool is that? huhu. My sis-in-law (Arlung) would have loved driving in Germany ;)

[4] We made a stop at the petrol pump to fill up the petrol and do our Zohor/Asar prayers. The WC is quite high tech: when u press the flush, the toilet seat will spin while it was being cleaned. Although it is not on the same par, it reminded me of Japan's toilet bowls which are state-of-the-art! They're equipped with many options buttons such as air blower, water that was be sprayed different directions, and even heater on the seat :P had fun when I was playing around with one when we were staying at Nadiah Hanim's. It was a girls trip back during my single days with my Zafzulk and Nozie. That was a really fun trip! ;)

[5] We also made another stop to the petrol pump when we started seeing signs saying we are heading into Salzburg. Hubbykun asked the petrol pump personnel whether we need to purchase the border ticket. I read online that you need to purchase some display sticker which only cost a couple Euros if you're going into Austria. If you dont, there'll be a huge fine. He told us that we don't need to because we won't be going into Austria, but just to be careful not to miss the turn or we'll be in trouble :P The sticker can be purchased or a duration of 1 week, 1 month etc. Since we'll only be in Berchtesgaden for 2 days and we are not interested to go into Austria, we didn't buy one.

[6] Apparently, the exit that we are heading to was just the next exit after the petrol pump. As soon as we left the motorway into the national park, it started snowing rather heavily. Hubbykun needed some time to adjust the speed he was going before. I was reciting prayers the whole time because the road was really slippery and the car skidded a few times too. We went at a really low speed. Alhamdulillah we arrived at the guesthouse safe and sound.

[7] After checking in, it was only about 7pm. Since the night was still early, we asked Alfred (the guesthouse owner) how we can get to the city centre and if there were any xmas markets around. Alfred explained to us the direction but I was finding it hard keeping track with the explanation :P So before we headed out, i asked him to give the address so I can key it in the GPS. He said he don't know how to use the GPS even though he owned one. aiyark!

[8] I then browse through the nearby POIs with him and he pointed out that the Schlossplatz is the location of the xmas market. He asked us to park the car near the Rathaus (city hall) which was free during weekends and after 6pm. He also told us to avoid underground car park because they have an expensive hourly rate.

[9] The Schlossplatz was just about 10 min drive (~2.4miles) from the guesthouse and pretty easy to find too because the xmas market was brightly lit. Even from the road, you can see the huge xmas tree at the square ;) We arrived at the Schlossplatz at 7.15pm. On normal days, there should be another 1 hour to go before the xmas market supposed closing time. However, because it was snowing rather heavily and the xmas market was quite deserted, a number of stalls had already closed for business. Only a couple of teenagers can be seen around throwing snowballs at each other and targetting the market signage too.

[10] We enjoyed the fact that there wasn't many people around. This made taking photos so much easier. There was a small covered stage at the side of the Schlossplatz Square that was being used for a restaurant I reckon. We used this as the shade to get away from the snow while hubbykun took some photos and video. Taking photos while it was snowing heavily can be quite a challenge. This because the snowflakes would keep going onto the lens, so hubbykun had to clear them quite often. Therefore, keeping to the shaded-area can be a huge time-saving. Don't want to go spending so much time in the cold weather right? :P

[11] We headed back to the guesthouse at 9pm. The first thing we did when reaching our room was took a shower because Alfred told us to not take a shower after 10pm for fear of disturbing the other guests. I must say the guesthouse has quite strict rules eh? :P After that, we had dinner which was leftover fried rice i made in the morning in Rothenburg. Even though the guest house have a kitchen, it didnt allow guests to cook. Eating in the room was not permitted too because Alfred said they do not want the room to smell of food. Since they have a nice and huge dining area, we do not mind much. A table in the corner has also been reserved for us for any meals. hot water and dinnerware are also provided. Luckily they allowed us to use the kettle for making hot tea and stuff. This was perfect since we have plenty of leftover instant noodles as dinner menu for the next night. Right after dinner, we went straight to bed. We had a very fitful sleep probably because we were tired from the long drive. The next day, we reserved the whole day to explore the Konigssee area.

[12] On Monday 19th December morning, we woke up very early ~5am because it was the day we checked out and I only started packing all our stuff that morning. However, there weren't that much to pack either because we were wearing almost all the clothing items we brought as insulation to the cold weather :P I think I was wearing 5 layers of clothes hehe. Didn't want to go through the same pain as we did when we went to Niagara Falls, NY :P

[13] Hubbykun also said that he wanted to check out early as he had plenty of plans and sightseeing left to do. We finished getting ready at 7am and there was 30 minutes left to breakfast time. I spent the time working on recording travelogue of our trip and synching new music on our ipod. Meanwhile, hubbykun my man did the heavy-lifting i.e. transferring our luggage to the car ;)

[14] Before having breakfast, we paid the room rent and asked permission to left one of luggage at the reception as it contained valuables such as laptops that we didnt want to leave in the car when we were in town. We also asked that he loaned us the guesthouse card until the time when we collect our luggage. He reminded us almost 5 times to make sure to rememeber returning the card :P Turned out we didn't even use it at all huhu.

[15] The plan of the day was to spend about 2-3hours in Berchtesgaden Town and then head to Konigssee again. Also, I don't know why but the car park ticketing automatically issue ticket with the first coin you put in. Luckily it was a €2 coin that I put in :P We had the car park until 12 noon and we thought that was sufficient as we plan to head to Konigssee next.

[16] We first headed to the tourist information that has been closed over the weekend to get some English brochures and advice on recommended walk. She receptionist gave us the town map with 12 recommended checkpoints (4 of which are marked as view points). The first checkpoint was the cemetery and the 2nd checkpoint was a small church right next to it. The cemetery was especially beautiful because it was located on the hills, with a steep descend next to it, so you can see the mountains view straight ahead. The white snow makes the cemetery looked especially peaceful too. I noticed some graves were from during the WWII time and some were even older that then.

[17] After that we came across the National Park Centre, which was marked as the next checkpoint. We went inside partly due to the fact that it was snowing heavily again and hubbykun had to clean his lens. While we were there, we saw some nice postcards and decided to buy some. Saw some nice brochures too, so I picked up a few interesting ones that caught my eyes.

[18] We also took the chance to ask the National Park staff on some recommended walks besides the town centre if we have around 4-5 hours. He said due to snow everywhere, it won't be that much enjoyable to walk. Since we've been to Konigssee, he recommended Hintersee. Hubbykun changed his mind then to go to Hintersee instead of Konigssee. I remembered thinking to myself then that the plan seemed rather ambitious :P

[19] Just then, the snow stopped and we quickly continued out walk to the next checkpoint, which was a footpath at the side of the hills where you can see the valley of houses and the river below, as well as the mountains. The view was breathtaking! Turned out that this was the 1st of the viewpoint marked in the map. We ended up taking so many pictures here and spending more than 1 hour here alone!

[20] Hubykun also wanted to spend some time to take his favourite panoramic shots here. But as soon as he started doing this, it suddenly heavy snow and the visibility was so bad that you can't see the mountains at all. Hubbykun changed his mind to take macro shots of the snowflakes, but right after that the snow suddenly stopped! Hahaha! By then, we noticed that the parking ticket was almost exceeded. We went back to the car park and added another 2 hours to continue the town centre walk.

[21] The walk was actually a ring route. This time around, we went in the other direction that the one we did in the morning. Somehow I think we took a slightly wrong route that we missed 2 checkpoints. The road we took was rather suspicious and didn't look like a tourist attraction either because it was going through residential houses. We saw a small shop that was opened and I decided it was time to ask for directions. He told us that we were now on the right route and if we continue straight ahead towards a junction on the right, we will find the next checkpoint.

[22] The next checkpoint at the junction was an old hospital, but the building didn't look like one. So I tried to read the signboard posted there, but since it was all in German, it didn't get me anywhere :P While I was figuring this out, hubbykun decided to explore the area surrounding that and he came came across a very beautiful open field that was covered in snow that was marked as a viewpoint.

[23] So I guess the building at the junction was indeed the old hospital, but we didn't take any picture of since it didn't look particularly interesting. We also found out that we were on a rather high altitude, and the walking path at the back of the building was heading to the mountains covered with pine trees. Alhamdulillah, suddenly the sun came out too that made the view extremely breathtaking here!

[24] Hubbykun said that he might as well cancelled the Konigsee or Hintersee plan because this was exactly the kind of view he was looking for. We never imagined that we can get this kind of view just a brief walk away from the town centre!

[25] While waiting for hubbykun to be done, it was actually lunch time. Luckily I brought our packed lunch with me, so there was something to keep our stomachs happy. Else, we would need to spend some time looking for food and we didn't want this, because we had very limited time left to spend until 3pm (the time we promised to pick up our luggage at the guesthouse).

[26] It snowed lightly every now and then but that didn't hinder us from spending another hour here alone ;) Hubbykun tried to take some macro shots of the snowflakes again, but he wasn't successful at that either. We were very thankful that we decided to complete this route! We would have loved to stay here a bit longer.

[27] We walked further along the recommended route and the view from here on was beautiful all the way. There was a small restaurant at the top of hill that offered a breathtaking view of Berchtesgaden that was marked as optional (probably because it was extremely hilly? :P). I would have loved to do the climb but we were running extremely low on time and quite a bit of walk left to do before we reached the city centre again. So, we decided to forego the climb and just took a zoomed picture from below :(

[28] The next check point was a panorama of city from a high altitude as seen in the postcard. I was wondering how the postcard that we bought managed to get that view and now we know from where it was. It was on a hilly road next to the main road that we usually took to get to the town centre, heading towards the Rathaus. A short walk from here, we reached back at the car park.

[29] The next recommended checkpoints were around the Marktplatz and Schlossplatz which thankfully we have covered the day/night before, so we don't need to spend so much time here. We then went to the last viewpoint which was Park Luipold. But we found that the park next to the tourist information centre was much beautiful that Park Liupold. We took photos at this park instead.

[30] We then went to the WC for ablution. By then it was 2.45pm, and we decided we better hurry back to the guesthouse and will do our prayers right after that. I wore my gloves just to be sure that I won't lose my wudu' should in case Alfred offered to shake my hands. I miscalculated when Alfred instead wanted to kiss my cheek! I felt bad because I acted rather rude and I gave him the side of my head so he kissed my scarf instead, very awkward! :P We then did our prayers and head to our next destination.

[31] finally the video during our trip, [ checkout the white trees while we were driving! ]

next on our final entry of this trip; the making of snowman + snowangel!

Winter Holiday 2011 @ Königssee, Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany [ entry 3 of 5 ]

2012-01-23T21:34:00.000Z

event :: Winter Holiday 2011 @ Königssee, Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany
date :: 16 - 22 December 2011
locatio :: Konigssee, Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany
theme :: red.

[1] On Saturday 17th December, our initial plan was to leave Rothenburg at 12pm and head to Berchtesgaden National Park but because the weather was sunny in the morning, we decided to leave Rothenburg at 1pm. This was a perfect decision because right after we left the sky turned cloudy. According to the GPS, it should take about 4 hours driving, but it took us almost 5 hours due to the heavy snow. Right after we left the motorway and entering the national park area, the road condition was icy probably because the snow were not cleared as often and less vehicles driving in the area.

[2] Because we know we were going at a very low speed, I decided to call the owner of the guest house : Haus Jennerblick in Schönau am Königssee that we were staying to inform him that we will be 1 hour late. Alfred (the owner) assured us not to worry and to drive carefully. We arrived at the guest house at 6.20pm. We were given the option whether we want the room facing the mountain (also facing the main street) or the one facing other guesthouses but quieter. He 'had' us at facing the mountains :P We were also given a short tour of the guesthouse.

[3] That Sunday morning, we planned to woke up early, but we overslept until almost 7am (late by our definition probably). It was probably because we were quite tired from the previous day's adventures. The first thing we did when we woke up was to check out the balcony. We found that the sky was extremely clear with no clouds and the surrounding houses were covered with snow! After we finished getting ready, hubbykun wanted to head immediately for breakfast. But i insisted that hubbykun took some photos and video of the scenery because it was simply too beautiful too ignore! This photo shows the view from our room (so am I right or am I right?? ;))

[4] The room came with free breakfast that was served between 7.30-9am. We came down at 8am and found that we were the first ones to be up :P The owner was amazed at how early we woke up (if only he knew that we sometimes go out as early as 5.30am especially during spring/summer holiday, he would have been more shocked I guess :P). Since we told him that we do not take meat the night we checked-in, he prepared two medium boiled eggs for each of us together with 4 different types of bread and 3 different types of cheese. Hehe. The bread was also served with honey, raspberry jam and butter. We also served with some hot green tea and fresh orange. Since it was a Sunday and we were aware that most shops would be closed and finding vegetarian-friendly food might be tricky (hubbykun said Bavarian food are very meat-based and not much seafood option either) especially in the sparsely populated national park, we packed the leftover bread as lunch.

[5] We finished breakfast at 8.20am and set out to explore the national park. We thought we could immediately leave, but found that the car was covered with snow till the point that the rear door can't even be opened due to ice sticking the door shut. So we had to scrap the snow and turned on the heater at full power. The scenery around guest houses in snow, added with the help of its location at a valley of the surrounding mountains was really beautiful. So we ended spending more than an hour taking photos and videos here.

[6] After that, we were undecided whether to spend some time in Berschtesgaden town centre that we went the night before or to head down straight to Konigssee. The pro of going to town is since it was a Sunday morning, there would be no crowd and parking will be easy to find + free too. Also we would have the opportunity to visit the tourist information centre to get some maps/travel recommendations. However, since it was already almost 10am, we decided to head to Konigssee to enjoy a more countryside view while the day was sunny and bright.

[7] Thankfully with the GPS, we can make do without maps. I just searched for the list of point of interests (POIs) in the direction of Konigssee. We found that the King's Lake is located around 4km from the guest house. Since the map view looked about right, we chose to head there. Upon reaching the marked POI, we were unsure where to park and were driving around to look for one. Then, we accidentally came across the cable car station (Jenner-bahn) and asked the lady at the counter on where to park.

[8] She pointed to a huge carpark just 100m away (how silly we didn't noticed it ourselves when we were driving around there). We also asked for a map of the area. While we were driving around, we saw a few men operating a snow blower. Hubbykun guessed that this was usually used by ski resorts and true enough shortly after, we saw people wearing ski-gear walking and heading towards the cable car. It was exciting seeing them walking around in the skiing blade (or whatever people call it). I'm so jealous!

[9] From the carpark, you'd need to cross the road and walk about 100m to get to this large square where a boat station was located. We received a 50% discount at the parking meter (a day ticket was supposed to be €4, but we paid €2 only) because we have the guesthouse card that we received from Alfred the morning before we left. We looked around to find the popular red-dome church landmark that we saw on almost every brochure on Konigssee/Berchtesgaden. But we couldn't find it anywhere. Then, we saw a lot of people queueing at the boat ticketing kiosk and we also headed there to ask for directions.

[10] Somehow, rather than asking question, we ended up buying the return boat ride ticket, which cost €13/person. There was already a boat docked at the pier, scheduled to leave at 10.40am. While waiting for the boat to depart, only then did we started reading the brochures. We found out that the boat trip will take 30 minutes. Hubbykun was a bit concerned that we will just be sitting 1 hour in the boat enjoying the view, which meant very limited picture opportunity. Also, it would mean a waste of the nice weather outside. By now, he was regretting on our rash decision to take the boat ride :(

[11] Upon closer inspection of the brochure, we found out that the red dome church is known as St. Bartolomew. Also, it can only be reached by boat or through a long hike across the surrounding mountain, which meant no car access. This was what the lady at the cable car was trying to tell us then, but we were too dense to understand then :P. Therefore, in fact our impulse decision to take the boat ride was the right one ;) Hubbykun went back to happy-mode then ;)

[12] By the time the boat departed, it was full to capacity making it impossible to move in the boat. So we ended up just taking picture of the panorama from the window. Although the windows were 'smokey' from the boat heater, luckily they can be opened. People do not seem to mind either that the windows were open letting in the chilly air. Unfortunately, the tour guide in the boat only speak German, so we couldn't understand a single word while others were laughing animatedly at his jokes.

[13] At one point of the lake known as 'Echowand', the driver stopped the boat and stand at the boat entrance to play a trumpet ('flugelhorn'). Because of the surrounding mountain valleys, the song echoed once after each verse. According to the brochure, with good weather it can sometimes even echo twice. Also, in the old days, instead of flugelhorn, the driver usually shot hand cannons filled with black powder 7 times. Everyone enjoyed the cool show and clapped loudly after he finished the song. He then went around the boat for some tip collection before continuing on to the church. Check out our video at the end of this entry for the footage of the echo.

[14] I was informed that the Konigssee lake is famous for its clear waters and advertised as the cleanest lake in Germany. Since 1909, thanks to Prince Regent Luitpold desire to protect nature, electric (battery powered) boats are inaugurated to preserve the cleanliness and the silence of the lake. For this reason only electric-driven, pedal, or row boats are allowed on the lake since 1909. The lake is 8km long, 1.25km wide and 602m above sea level (just for comparison: Munich is 500m and Berlin is 35m above sea level). The average depth of the lake is 150m and the deepest is 200m. This is the sign board at St Bartolomew boat station displaying the return trip timetable.

[15] During the boat ride, we also passed the Eagle's Nest (Kehlsteinhaus), which I would have loved to check out this landmark. This site can be reached by bus in 20min or by foot in 2 hrs when weather permitting. But I do not think it is accessible during this time of the year due to the high volume snow blocking the road paths. We couldn't see the site from the boat due to its position 1843 m high atop a mountain. In case you are not familiar with the WWII history or have never watched 'Valkyrie' movie (starring Tom Cruise) before, this used to be Hitler's diplomatic house given to him as a 50th birthday present. It is now used as a restaurant, which attracts a lot of visitor due to its beautiful panaroma.

[16] As soon as we landed at the dock, hubbykun straight away took photos non-stop. The light mist around the lake made the scenery especially beautiful. According to Wiki, the St. Bartholomä is a Catholic pilgrimage church, named after Saint Bartholomew the Apostle patron of alpine farmers and dairymen, and it is located at the western shore of the Königssee lake.

[17] A first chapel at the lake was built in 1134 by the Provosts of Berchtesgaden. From 1697 onwards it has been rebuilt in a Baroque style with a floor plan modelled on Salzburg Cathedral, two onion domes and a red domed roof. Near the chapel lies the old hunting lodge of the same name. The lodge, which was first erected in the 12th century with the church, has been rebuilt multiple times. Until 1803, it was a private residence of the Berchtesgaden Prince-provosts

[18] At first, we were only taking just along the lake. But after having our fill of poses here, we began to noticed that a number of people were referring to pedestrian sign boards and headed into the woods direction. We saw that the nearest walk was a 15 minutes walk to Am Eisbach. The next nearest one is Eiskapelle ('ice cave') which required 1.5 hours walking time. We have no idea what these attractions were, but we decided to copy others and explore the woods too ;)

[19] Even though the walk was supposed to be 15 minutes, knowing hubbykun with his obsession on taking photos every 5 seconds, we ended up spending >1hour for the walk. Hubbykun came up with so many ideas for poses to do such as the ones he saw in magazine, brochures, on paintings, on calendar as well as he wanted to try some horizontal AND vertical panorama shots. Finally, I had to put a stop because we were running out of time (we haven't done our Zohor/Asar prayers and I was planning to catch a boat back to do that).

[20] Since we haven't found any attractions by even though we started hurrying up after that, we find that there is no way we can make it for the 3.05pm boat , I told hubbykun that we have to pray somewhere here (either look for a WC or use the snow for ablution huhi :P), we will catch the last boat (I think), which was scheduled at 3.45pm instead. (I saw in the schedule another time at 4.30pm but it doesn't say if this service are available during winter months, better not take our chances. It is also understandably that they stopped the service earlier because it will be dark by 4pm). We continued walking until we saw this small chapel. There was also a foot bridge that was covered with snow, making it extremely slippery here. We quickly take photos then follow pace of the 'uncle' in front of us (he has much longer legs, so I find I have to walk super fast!) to catch the next boat.

[21] Luckily, we found out that the restaurant near the boat station has a public WC (fuh! No need ice water thank God!). In our hurry to get to the WC and our ignorance (not bothering to ask people of find out in advance that damen=women, herren=gents), we accidentally went into the wrong gender toilets! Aiyark! Luckily I quickly ran out as fast as I could, so no unwanted incident happened :S We then performed our prayers, just a few minutes before the boat supposed arrival time. Turned out the boat was about 10 minutes late. While waiting, we continued to take photos at the jetty.

[22] After reaching the starting point of the boat ride, we decided to take some photos around the square. I saw that we have some leftover bread from breakfast that morning (it was a high fiber bread that we are both not a fan of too :P), so I started feeding the ducks. At first I was wary if we are realy allowed to feed the animals and perhaps dirty the lake. But hubbykun said that it is usually encourage to feed them especially during the winter season because food are more rare at this time of year. And seeing the way they fight for the bread , it looked like they were really starving. I wished I had more food with me. I tried to be fair by throwing the bread to different directions, but some ducks preferred to wait near my feet instead. Hehe so cute. It was a lot of fun watching them race for it. I told hubbykun that I wanted to this again ;)

[23] After that, we headed back to Berchtesgaden town and find that it was crowded and much livelier compared to the the day before. Probably because it was no longer snowing. We didn't take any pictures though because we have taken plenty the day before and satisfied with the day's numerous photos at Konigssee. We also found that the tourist info office was closed but luckily they do left some brochures outside. However, there were rather limited that were in English, so we decided to ask again the next day when the office will be opened. Our socks and shoes were soaked wet from all those venturing into the snow, it felt like my feet were frozen and it was very painful too. We found the trick to get over the pain was to costantly walk (probably for better blood circulation). At 6pm we head back to the guest house, tired to the bones. Even though we decided to take an early night rest, it was almost 10pm by the time we slept after having instant noodles for dinner, showering, and figuring out the next day's plan.

[24] Finally the video during our visit to Konigsee. We also would like to take this opportunity to wish Happy Chinese New Year for those who celebrate and happy holiday to everyone :D

up on our next entry, the white town.

Winter Holiday 2011 @ Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany [ entry 2 of 5 ]

2012-01-17T00:20:00.002Z

event :: Wonderful Xmas Town @ Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany.
date :: 16 - 22 December 2011
locatio :: Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria, Germany.
theme :: red.

[1] The day we checked out from our hotel in Munich, we were supposed to have breakfast at the hotel restaurant. But because we had so much of food leftover from all the shopping hubby and I did before, we ended up having some scallop, and mix of other seadfood with instant noodles for breakfast (yup pretty weird combination for breakfast). By the time we checked out from hotel, it was 7.30am.

[2] We took the S8 bahn from Hauptbanhof to the airport, which took around 45 minutes. Hubby brought me a long detour at the Hauptbahnof because we were looking for escalator down due to our heavy luggage. You seriously can get loss around the this central train station (I did the first day I was there). It's huge & the underground heading to the rail tracks are like a small shopping mall in itself!

[3] When we reached the airport, we headed straight to the car rental kiosks just in time to the counter opening time at 9am. Hubbykun called a day before asking on the possibility to pick up the car earlier but we were informed that if we do this, we might have some problem with the insurance coverage. Considering the winter seasons, we decided not to take our chances. We were given Ford Focus 1.6TCDI Combi in black. In actual, hubbykun only booked a smaller car, but somehow or rather we were given free upgrade (part of their xmas/winter time promotion.) We made sure to request winterisation package when making the booking (i.e. winter tires).

[4] This time around, we came equipped with Western Europe GPS of our own. Got a real good deal on the GPS because Amazon was having the 'Cyber Monday' xmas promotion (also bought some other items for myself :P). We calculated that if we rent GPS at the car rental (like what we did during the last Hohe Tauern Austria trip), the cost is almost the same as buying the GPS on sale. So hubbykun ordered online and Alhamdulillah it arrived just 1 day before I went to Munich.

[5] Hubbykun said that he was thankful that we got the free car upgrade because it is more heavy/stable. Regardless, hubbykun is not used to driving on the right side of the road. So that required some getting used to in the beginning. Luckily he had some prior experiences such as when we were in Niagara Falls NY, Hohe Tauern Austria and in Crete Greece (I used to gloat in Malaysia that I'm the better driver, but having not properly driven a car for years I think I have to forego the title to hubbykun now :S).

[6] The journey from Munich to Rothenburg took around 3 hrs (we departed at 9am and reached there at around 12noon). Of course the first thing we did was to check in at the guest house. The landlady that we met was really sweet and friendly. We were ushered into a really huge apartment, with a double bedroom, a kitchen, living area and toilet all for our private use. The room is much bigger than our room in Bristol! :P and better yet, we got the room for just €18.50/person per night.

[7] What I really love about the apartment it not only because it was super-clean, but the it has the perfect location right behind the St James's church and within the old city area (inside the city walls). It only took 2 minutes to walk from the apartment to the rathaus (city hall) and main square. Hubbykun was all praises when he left reviews in their guest book ;) we highly recommend this place if you're interested for a sleepover to visit Rothenburg. We didn't took any photos of this church below, but while enjoying the shops display, we saw this cute miniature of the St. James's Church. There were also miniatures of other buildings in Rothenburg that can be bought by pieces.

[8] During the drive from Munich-Rothenburg, it was raining all the way. The weather didn't turn out any better when we arrived either. Therefore, we decided that we had to spend time indoors. We first checked out the indoor christmas market near the main square. There, we met and chatted with a seller from Iraqi. He said he really wanted to visit Malaysia especially Kuala Lumpur and has a number of friends that has been Malaysian residents for some time now. I suggested he visited during winter so he can run away from the cold weather. Hehe. It's nice to hear when people are interested to visit your mother country right? ;)

[9] This was at the Marketplatz (town square) which was surrounded by the beautiful half-timbered buildings. Hubbykun and I loved seeing them. It reminded me strongly of Romer square in Frankfurt, except this is at a much larger scale, it almost looked like a whole town are filled with them.

[10] The Christmas market wasn't so lively, I guess probably because people would rather stay in the warmth of their homes :P We just spent a bit of time here, and decided to grab a quick lunch (trying to enjoy the town a bit more before it gets dark). Also because the cold weather made you really hungry all the time :P We found a halal kebab restaurant near the main square. A hot meal always tasted great ;)

[11] The travel books that hubbykun borrowed from the library and his office (since so many has been on business trip, the book is left at the office for anyone to borrow) said that Rothenburg is the best preserved medieval town in Germany! it was not affected by the World War either, so the streets were all cobble stones. Hubbykun has actually came for a day trip here with his office friends a few weeks before (I wasn't around then) - checkout the video below. But I insisted that this is a town I definitely wanna visit. So of course my sweet hubbykun relented to my selfish request and brought me here ;)

[12] He was quite the expert in the town layout too (which is a rarity since I'm always the map reader) right down to the fact that there is a Chinese restaurant near here that we wanted to try out but they were closed due to the festive season ;) Turned out Rothenburg is actually quite small in size. So everything is within walking distance from the the main square (located at the center of the old city). We didn't refer to the map at all during our stay here. I also found out that Rothenburg is part of the recommended 'Romantic Road'. There are also a few recommended Germany driving routes such as the 'Castle Road' and 'Panoramic Road'. I would have loved to try all of them, but all the routes are pretty far each. Since we were short of time, this is one of the place that we picked from.

[13] This is at the Käthe Wohlfahrt Christmas Village. Even though it is actually a shopping store, it is definitely one of an attraction that you need to check out in Rothenburg. The interior of the store was beautifully decorated. This is the main display of the store, the view when we were standing on the stairs staring down this huge xmas tree was simply amazing. Noticed that the display shelves were decorated such that they look like a sqaure of half-timbred buildings. Photography were actually not allowed in here, but we steal a few shots :P Some tourists were not even trying to conceal the fact that they were taking/posing for photos ;)

[14] Throughout the store, the ceilings were lighted with pine leaves and colourful mentols. I first saw this in some video shots hubbykun shared during his first trip. The video doesn't do justice, the view there was simply magical! We spent quite a bit of time here even though we didn't buy anything. The store in itself is a few stories high. You can find almost any decorations you wish for here. Even though it is to cater mostly for Xmas deco, the store is open throughout the year. Hubbykun's friend said it will probably be quite weird thinking that you enter here in the July summer. We kinda agree :P

[15] There are actually a few Käthe Wohlfahrt branches around Germany. I found out that about this when I checked out the brochures that they place in the store. We also found out that they have a second store right across the street! Guess the huge first store didn't offer enough space after all?? :P I felt like taking photos of about everything! even their deco lorry looked so cute ;)

[16] By the time we left Käthe Wohlfahrt, it has gotten dark outside. Even though it was still early, quite a number of xmas market stalls have already closed for business. Suddenly, we hear people singing outside, turned out there was a xmas carol at the town hall. There was an authentic huge xmas tree outside the town hall too. Not surprising because Rotenburg is surrounded by the Bavarian alps.

[17] Because of the sleet/rain, the temperature was extremely cold outside. Even though I had my umbrella, my shoes were soaking wet. We decided to warm up by taking a quick hot chocolate break at the first restaurant we came across near the town square. In the beginning, I really wanted to try out the Schneeballen ('snow balls'), a famous delicacy in Germany. Hubbykun told me he has tried it when he visited Mittenwald with some friends, but he didn't particularly liked it. I thought it was more like a muffin, but apparently they fried it before dipping it into chocolates. Since I don't particularly enjoy fried stuff these days, I didn't try it myself.

[18] After a bit more walking around and enjoying the xmas window displays, we had dinner at a restaurant near here too. We both had a fish meal, some salad, more hot chocolates and even an apple pudding topped with ice cream. Yummy! :P After dinner, we wanted to walk around town a bit more, but when the rain started getting heavier, we decided it was time to take the night cap.

[19] Since we went to bed quite early the night before, we had an early start the next day. Woke up at 5am, then had instant noodle for breakfast (more leftover food from Munich :P). We were supposed to check out that morning. Since we had use of the kitchen and will be on a rather long drive after that, I cooked some fried rice for the journey. Since it was too early for check out, we decided to have a walk frrst. The first thing we did that morning was to take photos/videos at the Plönlein fork, a famous landmark and one of the most taken pictures of Rothenburg ob der Tauber found in travel books or postcards.

[20] Hubbykun was counting on snow, but there were only some ice frost on the car and house rooftops that practically melted as soon as the sun came out. But it did started snowing a few hours after that. We also went to the medieval criminal museum. I first thought that this is use for beheading criminals, but hubbykun told me it is just a punishment to humiliate the criminals.

[21] After that, we went back to apartment at around 10am to check out. The lovely landlady thanked hubbykun for the nice comments/drawings on the guest book ;) After that, we did the Town Hall (Rathaus) clock tower climb. Hubbykun told me that "Rothenburg ob der Tauber" literally means "Red fortress above the Tauber river". It is referring to the red colour of the roofs of the houses which overlook the river. You can get this superb aerial view from the top of the clock tower. You'd need to pay €2/pax right before the final climb to the huge clock. Only a total of 20 people are allowed to be at the top of the clock tower at a time, seeing that the standing area at the top is quite small.

[22] Unfortunately, there wasn't any lift getting up. So some manual labour was required. The climb started off easy enough, wide and beautiful spiral stairs like this. But I soon found out that this tower is actually not really designed for tourists. The last hurdle getting to the clock tower was a rather thrilling steep step ladder :P It was quite interesting just observing the different climbing styles and the types of footwear people attempt it with haha.

[23] Rothenburg is surrounded by town walls that form a ring around the old city. I'm guessing it us used to protect the city in the medieval times. Surprisngly the city walls are accessible for pedestrians free-of-charge. So cool! I remember when we went to Segovia, I really wanted to walk around the Roman aquaduct which surrounds the city but it was close for maintenance at that time (so dissappointing!).

[24] Glad we managed to do it here. From the city walls, you will get great views over the city and the Tauber valley. We took a lot of video shots while walking along the city walls. During our first day here, we only did half of the walk and we continued the other half the next day.

[25] At some points around the city walls, there are also tower gates. While I was on the clock tower, I counted about 7 towers, I could be mistaken about the real number. All of the towers looked pretty well-in-tact. Checked online and some of the popular tower gates are the Siebers Tower and Klingen tower at the north of the city.

[26] However, my favourite and one I particularly liked is this Burg (Castle) gate located at the west of the city. Probably because of its beautiful curve tower shape. The Castle Gate heads towards to the large and beautiful Castle Garden. The medieval castle that used to be here is no longer around because it was destroyed in an eartquake long since. We didn't spend a lot of time here, because it was almost 1pm and we were supposed to head out to our next destination.

[27] Video during hubbykun's visit with his colleagues.

[28] And video during our visit! :)

Coming up next, the white lake.

Autumn + Winter trip @ Munich, Germany [ entry 1 of 5 ]

2012-01-09T00:42:00.001Z

event :: Autumn + Winter trip @ Munich, Germany 2011
date :: October - December 2011
locatio :: Munich / München, Germany.
theme :: red.

[1] During the few months that hubbykun was away in Munich, I was working like hell to finish up my datelines. So I really welcomed this much needed break. On Friday, of 9 December, I took early an morning flight from the London City Airport. This was the first time I took a flight at this airport, never knew about its existence until then. It is the only London airport which is in the London city (Zone 3). To get here by tube, you need to take the Jubilee line from Victoria to Canning Town, and then the DLR to London City Aiport stop. The tube ride took almost 40minutes tube ride and it just cost £4. At first I lined up to get the tube ticket, because I wasn't sure if airports require different ticket. But even though it was midnight, there was a long queue that was moving extremely slow. I decided then to try the ticket kiosk instead. Turned out it was a piece of cake ;)

[2] I reached Munich airport at 11am and then took the S8 bahn to get to the city centre. The train ticket cost €10.80. I had to wait for 30minutes for hubbykun to come meet me at the central train station (Hauptbanhof). While waiting, I watched 'Rio' on my ipod. It was about a blue parrot who can't fly, a really funny, colourful and enjoyable animation (would highly recommend it!). After that, we headed to the apartment hubbykun was staying at (we were staying at Vi Vadi Hotel which was just 200m from the Hauptbanhof). We had instant noodles for lunch. I then accompanied hubbykun to pick up his laundry. We went separate ways after that: hubbykun went back to the office, while I went back to the apartment to catch some sleep. I slept like the dead that afternoon (not because of jetlag :P since its just 1 hour difference from the UK), but rather because I didn't sleep very well the night before. We were supposed to check out the German Christmas market that night. but hubbykun had some urgent work and had to work late. Meanwhile, I was starving at home (just kidding, actually hubbykun asked me to buy dinner first but i was just really lazy to go to the restaurant alone) :P hubbykun colleague said 'your wife must be crazy now' :P

[3] Because we have wasted the previous day not sightseeing, we decided to sightsee with a vengence during the weekend. We woke up as early as 5.30am on Saturday and had an Italian breakfast at the hotel's restaurant. We then went to post office to change some cash (because some of the notes that we brought were too big). Unfortunately, the post office only opens at 9am, but at that time it was only 8.30am. So had 30 minutes of time to kill. Hubbykun spent the time to show me around the Hauptbanhof area and the recommended places where I can do some shopping and recommended some places to eat.

[4] It started snowing that Saturday morning. Since the months hubbykun has been here, this was the first snow he experienced in Munich! Hmm just a few hours after I stepped foot in Munich, I'm beginning to think cold weather follow me wherever I go :P Because of the snow, we decided to spend the day with indoor activity. The first thing in mind was of course the BMW museum that I've heard so many recommendations from. The museum is located near Olympia Zentrum. Hubbykun has been here with his friends a few weeks before. He told me that they have a scrambler motorshow daily.

[5] We asked a BMW staff at the show room there and he confirmed that the 11am show will be going on as schedule. They also have another show at 2pm. I really enjoyed watching the motor show (check-out our video, at the end of this entry). The bike did free-wheely and even climbed 3 flights of stairs! so cool! Besides the motor show, there was also a lot of other activities you can try such as games and you can even get inside some of the cars and pose like you own them! I think I stand out too much skipping around for hubbykun's video shots and what not, that the BMW staff that we talked to before came up to me and gave us some sweets when he passed us next. errr perhaps he thought we were happy lost children? :P

[6] Hubbykun newly made Malaysian friends (who are currently staying in Munich. BTW, thank you on behalf of hubbykun for being so nice and keeping him company while I was not there) posted in their group that Tom Cruise came to the BMW museum just the day before because BMW sponsor the car that is being used for the new upcoming movie titled Mission Impossible: Phantom Protokoll (this is how its spelled in German). I looked it up and the movie is called Ghost Protocol in English. I'm so frustrated to think that I missed having to see the handsome actor face-to-face by a single day! Guess we are not fated for each other :P Not sure the name of the model car on display here. There was an even cooler car where the doors open vertically (known as winged-door) and the convertible roof are automatically stored inside the car boot. A show girl was showing how to operate it at a couple and we were staring awestruck at it. Unfortunately, this car was not available for me to play around with. Would have loved to try pressing some of them cool buttons! hahaha

[7] There were also some BMW cars being displayed outside. This Santa Claus car is not a real one though. I thought the snow on the car was really suitable for the Christmas spirit ;) some car has snow on them. After we had our fill at the museum, it was time for lunch. We planned to have lunch at Vapiano, an Italian restaurant that hubbykun went with his friend before. He said their pizzas and pastas are really authentic. But hubbykun didn't remember the exact location of the restaurant, all he remembered was that it was near Marienplatz. we even asked some people we passed, but we somehow asked all the wrong people who were not locals.

[8] After walking in circles 2-3 times, we gave up and ended up having halal KFC near Marienplatz instead. I tried the coney fries at KFC and the hot + spicy chicken just like what we have in Malaysia, it was yummylicious! How come they don't have all this stuff in UK? :( We came to the BMW museum at night too. The museum building will change colors from green to red. We were lucky we were here just before 10pm, because they started shutting off some of the pathway lighting after that.

[9] After lunch, we went back to the apartment for prayers. Hubbykun took the opportunity to look up the address of Vapiano. He found our that it is located at Theatinerstrasse 15 and that we were going the wrong direction (trust me : hubbykun to get this kinda thing mixed up) :P Even though our earlier plan was to spend time indoor, we changed our mind because hubbykun wanted to photograph Munich during snow shots. And what better way to do this than at a garden.

[10] We went to the English Garden (the nearest train stop to get here is Universtat i.e. the LMU=Ludwig Munich Universitat). The canal running around the garden was really beautiful.hubbykun went here a few months before during autumn and he said the view was even more amazing. Because it was snowing, the wooden Chinese pagoda roofs were covered with some snow, a little bit like the photos we saw in the travel book (although there was much more snow in the book). There was even a charming small Christmas market and festive horse carriages which carry passengers at the garden.

[11] Hubbykun told me that lions represent the symbol of Munich. That night went to the Tollwood christmas market at Theresienwiese (just 1 s-bahn stop away from Hauptbahnof where our hotel is located). It was perhaps the biggest xmas market in Munich with a number of huge tents selling goods such as christmas decorations, personalised trinkets, bazaar even a tent only for international food hall), each filled to capacity making it hard to move because it was a Saturday. Hubbykun went there with some Malaysians a week before during a working day, and according to him it wasn't as busy. So he was really surprised as well.

[12] After that, we went to Vapiano for dinner (now that we knew the exact address. Hehe). True enough the pasta was divine! On the way heading to Vapiano, we even went inside the Mercedes show room and took more photos. The staffs were smiling by the time we left huhu (I must have been acting extremely 'jakun'. nothing new there :P). I was suddenly approached by 2 german gentlemen who asked me: 'Are you Msians?'. He was in a very excited manner that I was a little taken aback myself. He said he immediately guessed when he saw me (because of the way I wear my head scarf). They are currently working in Malaysia and just come back to Germany to spend the holidays with friends and family here. He seemed very excited to have found us. Hehe.

[13] After dinner, we headed back to the hotel. Our shoes were soaked because the rain/snow/sleet did't let up since morning.Thankfully the room heater managed to dry up the shoes and socks. We went to bed at around 9pm that night, we were both exhausted but honestly we dunno why :P Hubbykun's friends said this year's winter was actually unseasonably warm. Last year, it was much colder since October and by December it was snowing almost everyday. In our case, almost all the snow melted by the next morning. Hubbykun was rather sad because of this :(

[14] We woke up at 7am, which meant we slept for 10 hours straight! I couldn't believe we overslept even though i have set the alarm. Somehow we both didn't hear anything! After taking our morning shower, we went to breakfast at the hotel restaurant again. This was at Konigsplatz, a square near our hotel too. It's just walking distance from hauptbahnof too. you can take u-bahn too, but we decided we needed the exercise ;) there was 2 museums and a 'arch de triump'-like architecture at this square. hubbykun told me all the archs are in celebration of defeating napolean bonaparte (didn't know this :P)

[15] Today, our main plan was to do the 'royal munich' recommended walk, which starts from Odeonsplatz and ended in Marienplatz. Hubbykun particularly save this walk to do it with me (isn't he the sweetest? ;) ). We saw that there were a stack of some pine/christmas trees at Residentplatz. At first I thought that they were planning to checkout more christmas decorations at the square, so I was really excited to come check out this spot again come night time. But turned out that the xmas trees were for selling. We also found a small xmas market inside Residentplatz, but since it was early morning, not many of the stalls were opened yet. When we checked out this place again at night, the area was jammed packed that it was near impossible to get through the gate to the market. We ended up not spending much time there.

[16] We also went to check out hubbykun's work place this past months. Hubbykun took some extra photos to show to officemates back in Bristol Just in case, I warned him not to put the one where i was happily skipping away :P While we were fooling around, a security car passed by and was giving us a puzzled look :P After that, we headed back to the hotel to grab a quick lunch and perform our prayers.

[17] Because it was rather cold walking outside for long hours, we took a short break at the Starbucks Coffee here. Found out that over here, you'd need a code in order to enter the starbucks's WC. The code is printed in your receipt. After that, we went to Hard Rock Cafe located at Platz to take photo of Rock Shop interior. Hubbykun has already bought the HRC fridge magnet. There were 3 different designs (1) guitar-shaped, 2) HRC logo and 3) odd-shaped specific to munich (octoberfest, archbishop palace, etc)). he took the guitar-shaped, i.e. classic HRC fridge magnet. we prefer the guitar-shaped because we have quite a few of this design. this time we were there, that particular magnet has been sold out. Glad he purchased it beforehand.

[18] The xmas light at Theatinerstrasse (a pedestrian shopping street) was especially beautiful. We also went to the Maffeihof shopping mall, a rather impressive mall with beautiful xmas lights & trees. The decorations here reminded me of our New York trip last December. There were not many people because apparently no stores are open on Sundays, not even supermarkets (so be sure not to plan doing your grocery shopping on Sunday. I had stocked my fill of snacks and junk food the day before ehehe.). Only restaurants are open for business. Since the mall was deserted, it was nice taking photo here. At the junction connecting Theatinerstrasse to Maffeihof, there was a tram track. Pretty convenient if you're lazy to walk when doing your shopping I guess ;)

[19] After that went to Hofgarten. I mistaken the green house in the map as the EU building that we found by accident the day before when we were aimlessly looking for Vapiano. The building looked rather new and not labelled as a tourist landmark but the architecture was very beautiful. It is located along Maximilien strasse, that are filled with expensive boutiques (salvatore, gucci, escada, etc.). We walked all the way towards the bridge crossing the river heading towards the Bavarian Landtag (state parliament) that sits atop a hill (but we didn't actually climb the hill, just took photos from the bridge).

[20] There was a tram stop near here called 'Maxmonument' (tram no. 18). I wanted to try taking a ride on a Munich tram. Hubbykun who has been here for few also hasn't been on one, and so far only took u-bahn and s-bahn and the bus. The tram passed through Isartor, saw beautiful tower gate with what looked like xmas market. We passed the stop before noticing the beautiful backdrop. So we took the tram stop at karlsplatz and then backtrack by s-bahn to Isartor. However, it turned out that we were wrong. It was not an xmas market that we saw, but rather it was just a huge outdoor bar with xmas deco :P

[21] We actually wanted to go to Nymphenburg Palace, that hubbykun has been to before. He said that the walking route there was really beautiful. Unfortunately, Schloss Nymphenburg was too far and there was no direct tram or train getting there from where we were (require some changing of transport at the Hauptbanhof. the nearest public transport to the schloss was by tram no. 17). We didn't have much time because it was almost night time so we decided to spend the time enjoying the xmas lights at Marienplatz instead. The xmas market at Marienplatz goes all the way to Rathaus, and Karlsplatz. It looked like a neverending xmas market street. Bristol xmas market is nowhere near as big as the ones found here! And the xmas decorations at the stalls were really authentic too! There use real alpine trees, so the market smelled like fresh pine wherever you go, I loved it! ;)

[22] Because Marienplatz is perhaps the most well-known landmark in Munich, we find the place is forever crowded with people. It was part of the 'royal Munich' route recommended by the travel book. There was a huge difference on the view when the xmas lights were all lighted up at night compared to when we explore it in the morning. While walking from Marienplatz to Karlsplatz german market, we also made a slight detour when we saw this xmas lighted street that ended at Pettenbergstrasse, with another small market. There was an old synagogue structure near here. We decided to take a break to eat some popcorns and macademian nuts here. The place ambience was really lovely. There was a big fountain at this square, but they covered it with wooden plates, I'm guessing to protect it from freezing.

[23] Hubbykun showed me an xmas window full like moving teddy bears, gorillas, bunnies, etc sponsored by Steiff. This is a very well-known soft toy manufacturer in Germany, and their toys are extremely expensive too! The window was always surrounded by viewers too. I hereby declare it the most interesting xmas windows we saw in Munich. There was a little boy who came with his father while we were here. He was literally glued to the glass window and didn't wanna move away from the window. He was so extremely cute!

[24] We then continue back to our walk to Karlsplatz. The ice skating rink at karlsplatz was also extremely busy due to the weekend night. So we decided to check it out another time during the weekdays. We then took the S-bahn back to Hauptbahnof. We bought dinner from a Chinese restaurant. I also wanted to try the bubble tea (the tea has boba/a jelly that pops in your mouth) but the shop has closed 1 hour early the their usual time. I decided to try my luck some other time. After dinner, we went straight to bed.

[25] On Monday, hubbykun was busy that he had to bail out from our plan to check out the xmas market in Marienplatz. We did managed to go out on Tuesday night after hubbykun got off work, but by the time we were there, most of the stalls were closing down because they closed at 8pm. I spent Wednesday night at the hotel alone too, because hubbykun was again busy :( I did went to the laundrymat in the morning though and reward myself to the bubble tea I was dying to give a try ehehee. We finally managed to spend some quality time at Marienplatz xmas market on Thursday night. I really liked the tin soldier being sold here, really cute and reminded me of the sad children story about the tin soldier with a missing leg that fell in love with a ballerina miniature. Not sure if they were handmade, but they sure looked high quality! Hubbykun didn't allow me to have one though :P

[26] This is another xmas stall that we especially like. The roof has a miniature archbishop church installed on it. And the stall is located right next to the real archbishop church. Hubbykun told me that there was a tower that you can climb with a €1.50 fee with a nice view of the Munich town, but he wasn't sure if this was the one. We didn't try that out due to lack of time. We also went to Saturn, a huge gadget store that sells almost everything. Hubbykun got a new tripod here, because his current one was acting up and also a AUX cable because I forgot to bring the one we have. We will be needing this for the long drive to our next destination, and let's face it we can't really enjoy German radio due to language barrier :( We then spent time watching ice skating rink at Karlplatz. There wasn't as many people as during the weekend. There was skating aid in the shape of polar bear for use of beginners. There were some funny moments people-watching here. The skills (or rather lack of skill?) on some really determined people here can be pretty amazing. I felt bad about laughing at one particularly funny skating style guy, but there was also a group of people laughing really loudly near us (I guess I wasn't being mean, but it really was funny). After that, we headed back to the hotel and it was time to pack our luggage for the next destination tomorrow.

[27] A week later, when we were driving back to Munich airport (to heading back to Bristol), we made a stop at Arena, the Munich Bayern football stadium, shaped like a tire. When we were driving past the A99 motorway the color was blue. It was snowing lightly, not enough to set on the motorway, but at the car park there was a thin layer of white snow. When we parked and ready to take a pix, the stadium color turned to white. We tried taking some photos but the shots were too bright and lost the details. We then went back to car and while waiting we browsed through and laughed at the videos from past days. We waited almost 15 minutes (it was very cold wait because of soaking socks and having spent a few hours in the warmth of the car heater), then the color changed to red, which was more beautiful than blue. We quickly ran to take photos then.

[28] Finally, this is my favourite photo, which was taken at an u-bahn station. Hubbykun tried many times to get this shot at multiple tube station of a cute leg photo and finally satisfied with this.

[29] Video during the famous Octoberfest event at Theresienwiese Munich

[30] Video during walking trip at Mittenwald, southern Bavaria.

[31] And our video in Munich :)

up next on our 2nd destination, the xmas town :)

Magnificent Autumn Colors @ Batsford Arboretum 2011

2012-01-02T23:34:00.000Z

event :: Spectacular Autumn Colors @ Batsford Arboretum 2011
date :: 24 september 2011
venue :: batsford arboretum, moreton-in-marsh, uk.
theme :: purple.

[1] It was the final week of this year's Syawal 1432H. Not surprisingly, there was another open house that weekend but we decided we had enough 'rendang' (spicy beef) this month and didn't go to the open house.

[2] We decided to see more colors of autumn instead. Since we have been to Westonbirt Arboretum plenty of times and really liked the autumn at an arboretum, hubbykun decided to try another one this year.

[3] Coincidetally, we found out that with the 'Friends of Westonbirt' cards, we also have free passes to the Batsford Arboretum located 67 miles (1hr+) away from our place. It is also the closest one to Bristol, just a bit further North after Westonbirt. The ticket price for adult to the arboretum during autumn is £6.60. More details here.

[4] In total, there are among 20 gardens that you could visit for free with the card. So, if you enjoy walking in the park, be sure to get one of this great value for money membership.

[5] We have been to Kew Gardens twice during this year's spring using the membership. Once was together with Kak Keen's family and the second time was when we were in between flying to Greece. However, this is our first time visiting the Batsford Arboretum. According to google, autumn is the best time to visit the batsford arboretum.

[6] We had a bit of trouble figuring out the entrance/car park of the Batsford Arboretum. Somehow, the postcode that we got from the website pointed to the rear gate and there were no suitable parkings there. Surprisingly, the rear gate was not closed and we manged to locate a couple passing by to ask how to get to the main entrance.

[7] To enter the arboretum from the main entrance, you would have to go through the garden shop, where you can purchase the entrance ticket and get some souvenirs as well as gardening tools ;) We purchased some postcards for my scrapbook collection, and asked for the arboretum map before starting our walk.

[8] The Badsford arboretum overall size is smaller compared to Westonbirt (also added with the fact that Westonbirt has the Silk Wood on the other side of the arboretum).

[9] Alhamdulillah the weather was rather sunny interval that weekend. We noticed that there were less autumn rains this year which made planning for weekend outing much easier.

[10] We are especially thankful of the good weather too because autumn and dead leaves are hubbykun's favourite time of the year (or maybe a close second favourite after heavy snow.. erk! I have less tolerance to cold weather, I don't know when hubbykun banished his Malaysian skin :P).

[11] Because autumn arrived early this year, quite a number of their japanese maple already turn red/yellow despite it being still September. In fact, there were a number of other types of trees with colorful leaves on them. I'm ashamed to say that I'm not sure the exact names of the other plants. Nevertheless, it was such joy to look at them.

[12] In the beginning, we estimated that we only have a short time to spend here because Abg Zahar&Kak Keen have organized the 'rumah purple' post-event gathering dinner for all the co-hosts.

[13] We received a last-minute call from Kak Keen that she had some guests over that day. We were rather glad with the cancellation because that meant we had more time to spend here. We only arrived to the arboretum around noon.

[14] In fact, we were among the last ones to leave the park! According to the signage at the shop, the park closes at 5pm, so we were really rushing to complete the autumn recommended trail. About 10 minutes to 5pm, we saw people still calmly strolling without a care. When we asked a visitor, he said he wasn't sure of the closing time. Anyway we left around 15 minutes past 5pm and alhought the garden store has already closed, there was a small side gate that you can exit from left unlocked (not sure if this side gate will be open the whole time. so please do not take a risk and I guess I'd best ask the arboretum staff in the future).

[15] This was the path leading to the rear entrance (that we discovered by mistake when we were figuring out the main entrance). Hubbykun parked the car at the side of the road and we spent quite a bit of time taking photos and video here. He did so many retakes of the video of me running towards the car, I'm sure I lost some weigth right there and them :P

[16] We saw a newborn white pony & its mother inside the fence next to the road when we were passing by the first time during the time when we were lost. But we were here the second time to take a picture with it, the pony was nowhere in sight!

[17] I was devastated because I swear the pony looked really fluffy when I saw it from the car's window. huwaaaaaaaa.. (ok, i had to get this out: it's so fluffy, I'm gonna die!!! my favourite line of Agnes from 'Dispicable me' hehe)

[18] There was also a small charming church and some old houses next to the rear gate. You can see the church from inside the arboretum. There was also a beautiful huge old mansion with its own private garden here, known as The Croft. But it was not open to the public.

[19] on the way home, we passed by the batsford town. It was a very charming small English town.

[20] But we didn't get a chance to visit because it was almost dark by then.

[21] Finally the video of our day at the arboretum.

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dr Azwan's Birthday + Farewell Party 2011

2011-12-31T21:57:00.000Z

event :: dr Azwan birthday + farewell party
date :: 1 october 2011
location :: knowle, bristol, UK
theme :: green.

[1] On the same day that we went to Westonbirt Arboretum together with Kak Keen's clan (Azwan included), that night also happened to be Azwan's birthday and farewell party. In actual, he wouldn't be leaving until a week after, but we took it as farewell too because hubbykun will be away for a long business trip 2 days after.

[2] The colour theme of the party was green, but we were wearing blue in Westonbirt. So after Westonbirt, everyone headed home to have a change of clothes before heading to the birthday party that was held at Kak Wan's + Abg Sabri's beautiful home.

[3] I also took the time at home to prepare 'kerabu epal' (apple salad). We first learnt of this recipe when we received iftar invitation at Khairi/Unic's during the Ramadhan. It is a modification to the more common 'kerabu mangga' (mango salad) in Malaysia.

[4] I googled the recipe online and it seemed easy enough to pull off. Especially if you're using a food processor (yup, I'm aware I sound like a broken record on how much I adore this little technology :P) Hubbykun received the cooking apple from his colleague who have some apple trees in his backyard (thanks Jon!).

[5] The main menu for the party was seafood steamboat. Kak Wan did most of the preparation for this. When I arrived, the sauces were all in readiness. What's left was just to boil the seafood and vegetable ingredients. Two main sauces were prepared: Tom Yam and the black yong tau fu sauce. reminded me of the ones in 'pasar malam' (night bazaar) back in Malaysia. the black sauce looked plenty tricky to prepare :P

[6] The first thing we did when we reached Kak Wan's + Abg Sabri's was help with the party preparation. This mainly involved blowing and hanging green balloons on the ceiling. I had trouble with the blowing part (signs of old age? can imagine Kak Nurul's irritated look if I say this hahaha). Hubbykun was skilled in blowing the balloons, so I did the tying of the balloons. The kids were a big help with this too.

[7] After the cake cutting ceremony, we took a picture of Kak Wan spoon-feeding the cake to Azwan. It took so many tries to finally get this right! I think Kak Wan should practise more with Abg Sabri hehe ;)

[8] During the party, I had so much fun playing spin-top (gasing). It was a competition between Ayiq and Sofea. During the first round, I won the competition and the reward was that Ayiq need to get a slice of birthday cake for me. He retaliated by cutting me a huge portion of the cake! (sabotaging Auntie Fizee to grow fatter? aiyark!). Hubbykun told me to pick someone my own size, so I didn't play the second round, which Sofea won. Ayiq, you probably need more practise ;)

[9] After that, everyone took turns to give birthday present. We gave a picture frame that was personalised by hubbykun as the birthday present. Hope that Azwan liked the present.

[10] As an end note, we would like to wish all our readers a very happy new year 2012. Hope this year will be better than the last.

[11] Finally, a short video of the party!

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Spectacular Autumn Colors @ Westonbirt Arboretum 2011

2011-12-25T00:38:00.000Z

event :: Autumn @ Westonbirt Arboretum
date :: 1st + 2nd October 2011
venue :: westonbirt arboretum, tetbury, uk.
theme :: blue + red

[1] We personally think it's not an overstatement to say that Westonbirt is the most popular autumn color watch in UK. We first came here during last year's autumn. It was so beautiful so we planned to go there again this year. We took a pose similar to this (but at a different spot) last year and it got selected by the Westonbirt staff to promote in their website during summer.

[2] They asked permission few pictures that hubbykun posted on our blog. Since some photos have pictures of kids, we asked permission from the parents too. Because of this, they also offer a year free membership for the both of us.

[3] The normal rate for the entrance differs according to season. In winter, an adult entrance fee is £6, for spring and summer it is £8, and in autumn it is £9. this basically gave an idea that Westonbirt offers the best view during autumn.

[4] A photography magazine once mentioned this place is really beautiful during autumn some photographer made this place as their annual prilgrimmage during autumn.

[5] The brochure said that during autumn this year, the Westonbirt team went to Japan to take new seeds.

[6] Last year, we went in a big group of more than 20 people from MCB. This year, Kak Keen & family together with few other MCB would like to join as well to enjoy the color of autumn here.

[7] We initially planned to visit during late October during peak time just like how we did last year, but hubbykun was going to work trip in the next 2 days. So we have to go in early October instead.

[8] We were also lucky because autumn arrived earlier than usual this year. Our personal favourite was the Japanese maple collection in Westonbirt.

[9] Even though we were a few weeks early, some of the trees already started changing colors, but it's not as vibrant as the one we saw last year. Some tree were still in green.

[10] When we reached Westonbirt on Saturday, the entrance gate was not yet opened. we were the second visitor that day (another visitor beat us to the chase and was queueing at the gate). We were there around 7.45am after picking up Hanis and Min from Kak Keen's house at 7.30am.

[11] The earlier plan was to have Ayiq and Min. But I guess 7.30am was a little too early for Ayiq's schedule :P

[12] Kak Keen's family (including Hanif, Azwan and Omar) arrived about an hour later. Because last year, we went to the Silk Wood only together with MCB, this year we planned to spend time with them at the Old Arboretum.

[13] Before that, we were having quite a fill photographing and videographing at the Silk Wood section. Min and Hanis were such a good sport.

[14] Because we were early, there were not many people in the park, so it was easy for hubbykun to take pictures and bully us to do many weird poses for the video shots :P

[15] There was a lot of people walking their dogs in the Silk Road. Having been bitten by a dog when I was five and chased by them on a number of occasions, I'm not very keen to be near one.

[16] Some of the leaf are changing colors. Cool eh!

[17] Min and Hanis was collecting different types of colored leaves for their Art project too. I was helping to to point out a few I found particularly interesting.

[18] Hubbykun's told us that his favourites are the ones where a leave has many colours on it i.e. in between the changing the colors.

[19] Kak Keen requested hubbykun to edit one of the Westonbirt picture a little earlier as her birthday gift to Abg Zahar.

[20] Loved all their couple photo shots, so romantic! ;)

[21] It was so much fun having a bigger group (then our usual couple's trip). Made the day merrier and of course we were able to explore different photo poses.

[22] One such example was this one which hubbykun said reminded him of Grey's Anatomy advertisement cover :P I particularly liked this shot best too ;)

[23] Last year, we didn't do any video shoot. So this year, hubbykun took the advantage to take more video shots (scroll down to the end of this entry for the video).

[24] I think one of the funniest one were the one where we did the mexican wave. With this, we have a complete video collection of Westonbirt on all seasons.

[25] Azwan who was here for some extended work specifically requested some video and photo shots to show to his students in Malaysia.

[26] He even specifically requested one shot that the kids were sitting one atop each other with his at the bottom most. Hubbykun and I was a bit concerned on back pain, so the plan was changed that only Ayiq and Shafiq were the only ones on top. Min and Hanis were at the sides.

[27] We took a short picnic break after that. Kak Keen brought fried rice that Azwan cooked for breakfast that day. We forgot the sandwiches, wedges and chocolate milk we brought in the car. We only had it for lunch with Min and Hanis

[28] Kak keen stayed on only until 2pm, they later went to another Eid open house event.

[29] We kidnapped Hanis and Min to stay on with us to take more pictures. We later went to carboot sale, but it has almost ended.

[30] We ourselves came here again the next day just the two of us to take more photos as yesterday's session was too short (for hubbykun's definition at least :P).

[31] I slept late the night before because I was packing the luggage for hubbykun's few months trip. Due to lack of sleep, I was not my usual energetic self ('perasan') during the second trip.

[32] I was so sleepy that while hubbykun was trying on different sceneries and macro shots, I was sleeping at the bench nearby. hahaha.

[33] Hubbykun couldnt do this last year, because at the time he hasn't owned a macro lens yet. We bought then when were in New York. I'm glad he did because it was a really good investment.

[34] We were extremely lucky that the weather was sunny during both days. I remembered last year, when we came as a group, it rained a bit after lunch and most of the gang left right after. we stayed on of course, and alhamdulillah the sky cleared right after that.

[35] Farah/Imran, Khairi/Unic and Abg Jamal/Kak Odah came here 2 wks after we did. Farah called to inform me that there were huge posters of her and myself to promote the Westonbirt Enchanted Christmas (the Westonbirt team invited us for a photoshoot with their professional photographer last year). Kak Odah told me that they even have in at the men's toilet :P I felt like a real celebrity because apparently the posters were even displayed in Birmingham train station! Quite a number of the photos hubbykun sent were also used in the Westonbirt website.

[36] I really wanted to go to the Enchanted Xmas display this year as we were busy with the photoshoot last year. We only had a short time to explore the display by ourselves after that. But since hubbykun was away, we didn't get to.

[37] Finally the video of the trip! We also would like to wish this opportunity to wish Happy Holiday + Happy New Year to everyone + Merry Xmas for those who celebrate :)

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Exmoor National Park + Haystack field 2011

2011-12-04T18:34:00.000Z

event :: Exmoor National Park + Haystack Field 2011
date :: 25th September 2011
location :: Exmoor National Park, UK
theme :: Red + White

[1] The 3rd weekend after Eid, hubbkun hired the car for us to explore the famous parts of Exmoor National Park. The park itself is a huge area and its almost impossible to cover the whole area during a day trip. So we came here on both Saturday and Sunday.

[2] On Saturday, the weather wasn't too good. It was cloudy and drizzling every now and then which made taking photos especially the panoramic shots hubbykun loved so much a real hassle. The wind was really strong too, so we didn't dare to use the tripod that much either. So hubbykun mostly photos of me or video (scroll to the end of this entry) instead.

[3] What made it worst was that we forgot to bring along our coats. We were too used to the warm summer and was just wearing a thin layer of shirt. Absolutely insufficient with the weather that day. huhu. So on Sunday, we made sure not to forget our coats.

[4] While exploring the national park on Saturday, we came across a huge haystack field. Surprisingly, the haystack were not not covered. We find that nowadays, the newer haystack machines usually came ready wrapped in plastic afterword. Also, sometimes they came in the shape of cubes that has been stacked one after another leaving not much room for creative angle.

[5] Having found this, we decided to make a stop and took some pictures. However, because it was not the main destination in mind, we only spend a short time here and made our way. Hubbkun asked me to marked the coordinates as favourites in our GPS in case we decided to make another visit.

[6] In fact, in the beginning I wasn't to keen to make a stop at the haystack field. I reminded hubbykun that we have taken some photos of haystack during our trip to Somerset Lavender when the weather was sunnier too. But hubbykun said that the Somerset Lavender haystack is nowhere near as big as this one (camtu plak! :P).

[7] Also, hubbykun said there are some photo angle he is dying to try out after seeing others shared photos in flickr. Since photography is hubbykun sole interest in life, I resolved to make him happy and joined him in trespassing the haystack field (nevermind to the freezing temperature :P)

[8] We came here on 2 separate occasions that weekend. On Sunday, we spend more time here having had our fill of shots at Porlock Hill. And mostly also because the weather in Porlock Hill was worst than here (probably due to the higher altitude & it's location next to the sea cliffs).

[9] So on the way back to Bristol on Sunday, we made a stop here again the second time. Thank goodness for keeping the coordinates in GPS or else it would have made finding this place a second time a challenging one.

[10] Despite the dark clouds at Porlock Hill, it was really sunny at the haystack field. Hubbykun was really happy that he got better shots of the haystack field compared to the day before.

[11] And I'm thankful that he was finally satisfied as well, else we have to go out surveying for more haystack fields :P This is our favourite shinobi running pose :D

[11] This place is called Porlock Hill, which was quite a thrilling car ride when climbing the steep hill towards it. Being the automated car driver myself for ages, I'm really wary when driving a manual car at hilly area. Especially if there was a traffic jam involved. huhu. But hubbykun managed the car really well & alhamdulillah there was not much traffic either that weekend.

[12] Hubbykun visited this place back in 2007 (before we were married) and told me how beautiful hills will looked with purple wild flowers during the summer. Purple being my favourite colour, I told hubbykun he absolutely must bring me here. Alas, only until our third summer here that hubbykun managed to bring me during this wonderful color watch. It was really hard to get this colour. We went here the 1st time in summer June 2009 with hubby's cousin. But it was all green with a little bit of yellow flowers. Still beautiful, but not exactly what I wanted ;)

[14] Since hubbykun has made a promised to bring me here and this will probably be our last chance of finding it, he has been monitoring the uploaded photos in flickr the whole summer. When he finally saw the view that we were waiting for online, it was during the third week of Ramadhan. So we decided to postpone it until after Eid.

[15] Fortunately, when we were here the purple view was still aplenty. Though we can see that some the flowers have started to dry up/dying. If we were even a week late, the whole purple color would have been gone :(

[16] I even told hubbykun that perhaps we should have come a bit sooner. I foresee that we would try our best to come here again in early September next year since both of us were counting on a better view.

[17] After that we continued the journey to Valley of the rocks in Lynton. This is our 2nd time here too. We have recommended this place to Leen-chan/Adee-kun and they went here last year. After seeing their marvelous photo angle, hubbykun has been wanting to come here again too.

[18] I never knew when exactly it started (perhaps it comes with aging? aiyark), but nowadays I'm quite wary with heights. The valley of rocks location right next to the cliffs, just a dead dive away from the sea waters were not helping either. Of course, the strong wind decided to add to the unwanted 'excitement'.

[19] The parking space was located about 5-10 minutes walk away. There are 2 main rocky hills on both sides of the grassy entrance. we chose to explore the right hill only because we were running a little short on time and we only had about an hour to spend here.

[20] Nevertheless, we still managed to gaze awestruck at the group of wedding photography that arrived there about the same time as us. They took the left hill which is not well paved either. The bride and bridesmaid were steadily climbing the rocks while wearing their stiletto heels! amazing!! I've been living with trainers this 3 years, I'm daunting the idea of getting used to high heels again when I return to Malaysia. Oh well, beauty comes with pain :P

[21] There was an elder couple in front of us (that we overtake ever so often). I must say the wife received my highest respect for her determination. Even though she was going at a much slower pace than us, she did finished until the end of the paved route. I know this, because we made so many stops taking pictures along the way. Hubbykun was running back and forth from where he stationed his tripod to where I was standing that we received quite a lot of laughs from other passersby :P

[22] All in all, despite the temperamental weather, we had a really fun weekend. We even got a view of a half-circle rainbow on the way back. I would have loved to make a stop at the roadsides to take proper photos, but hubbykun was driving on the M5 (motorway) at that time & making a stop would probably be too dangerous, so we didn't. I just took some photos & videos from inside the car.

[23] finally, a video of the places we went that weekend is located here. Hubbykun dedicated it to me during my birthday. awwwwwwww u're so sweet!! thank u hunnykun dearest! i luv u, muahsssss!! If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Sunflower Field @ Malt Kiln Farm 2011

2011-11-28T19:34:00.001Z

event : birthday celebration @ sunflower field 2011
date : 4th september 2011
location : malt kiln farm, rugby, uk
theme : blue.

[1] It was during the 1st week of Eid when we made a visit to this Malt Kiln farm. Even though we were rather exhausted from the Rumah Purple open house just the day before and the fact that we have just moved to our new flat, this was the only free time that suit both our schedule. Since we also had a hired car at hand for the weekend, we decided better utilise it for sightseeing too.

[2] In the morning, we started off by finishing a number of gorillas located outside Bristol town. We planned on going to more, but decided to stop when it was noon as we were worried that we wouldn't have much time for sunflowers if we didn't made a move. We also made this decision because also knew that the gorillas will be exhibited at the Bristol Zoo in the near future, so I'll have a chance to finish all my 61 gorillas then.

[3] Malt Kiln Farm. We were first here last year. Hubbykun was the one who made the research. Even though the farm itself is quite far (more than 3 hours drive from Bristol) located near Coventry, hubbykun and I both really like this farm and have decided to made a return trip this year.

[4] Last year, there were a lot more sunflowers and much bigger in sizes too if I recalled correctly. Either we were late this year or because of the temperamental weather, half of the sunflower field has started to wilt. There were two separate areas, luckily the second area was still fine. My guess is they probably sowed it at a different time. We considered ourselves really lucky because there were still plenty to see.

[5] we actually planned to visit on the day after we visited the maize maze, but Imran and Farah who went here that weekend told us there's not many sunflower yet that time. Hence, we decided to wait until after that fasting month was over.

[6] Coindidentally, we also went on hubbykun's birthday. But the one receiving flowers was me? :P Btw, this is how I dreamt hubby should have proposed when he asked me to marry him, but that wish did't come true ;)

[7] We pick 6 sunflowers (well more like I did the pointing and hubbykun did the hard work of going inside the field and cutting the flowers, check out the video below :P). I reserved 3 stems for home and and 3 for school. Each stem is sold at bargain 40p = RM2 each. I learnt my lesson from last year not to pick the giant ones such as this because they tend to die and wilt faster, probably due to the excessive weight of the flower huhi.

[8] This time around we came more prepared too. We brought our swiss knife (with engravings of our names, which we bought as souvenir during our Swiss holiday) since hubbykun had quite a tough time picking the flowers last year. With the knife, it was so much easier thank God!

[9] Also I learnt how to make flower food from the internet. The ingredient involve sugar and vinegar. But somehow it made the flowers die faster than last year when I didn't feed them anything. aiyark! hubbykun blamed me, he said I overfed the flowers :P

[10] Since we arrived here qute late, we only have around 1.5 hours to spend. So we didn't get a chance to do any fruit picking. Since I already did plenty of strawberry and cherry picking this year, I didn't mind too much either.

[11] the farm also offers plenty to shop. The pumpkins looked really cute. remind me of Halloween. I've never really cooked anything that involved pumpkin and I'm not too adventurous when it comes to food either. Would have loved to buy just for decoration, but I'm pretty sure hubby won't allow that. I remembered eating pumpkin when I was smaller (as a vege dish) and didn't particularly liked it either. But tasted Dr Azwan's pumpkin pudding during Ramadhan and they actually tasted really good. Perhaps I should learn how to make one. of course, I'm kinda a dessert person too ;)

[12] Finally, we would like to wish all muslim a very Happy New Year 1433H.

[13] A video of the farm!

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Rumah Purple Eid Open House 2011

2011-11-20T21:42:00.003Z

event :: Rumah Purple Sekawan Eid Open House 2011.
date :: 3rd September 2011.
venue :: Filton, Bristol, UK.
theme :: Purple.

Assalamualaikum wbt.

Dengan rasa rendah diri saya sekeluarga, Abdullah & Dr Fariza, Iskandar & Fizee serta Dr Azwan ingin menjemput semua sahabat untuk menghadiri rumah terbuka kami seperti berikut:

Tarikh: 3hb September 2011.
Hari: Sabtu.
Masa: 2.00pm - malam.....
Tempat: 10, Sandown Rd, BS347HY.

Kehadiran para sahabat adalah sangat dihargai.

Nasi dagang menjadi penyeri,
Laksa dan kuih berwarna warni,
Selamat menyambut Aidil Fitri,
Bersama kami lagi sabtu ini.

Wassalam.-ZAHAR-

[1] Aidilfitri came on the 30th August 2011, after quite a tough fasting month this year :P As usual it is customary here that Aidilfitri open house events are hosted over the weekend. The weather was very windy and gloomy that day, but as long as it didn't rain we consider that as good news ;)

[2] Since everything related to cooking will need to be prepared yourself when you're abroad (unlike in Malaysia where you can cater almost anything!), it is also a tradition here that open house is co-hosted by a number of families. Last year, last year we joined Abg zahar + family to co-host an Aidilfitri open house event with Red as the color theme. This year, they invited us to co-host to aidilfitri with them again and we decided purple as theme. I admit I kinda influenced the color theme because I wanted to wear my wedding kebaya :P

[4] Kak Za even managed to buy a new purple set for the whole family at the outlet in Filton in the morning of the the open house! Super mom, super cook, super efficient!

[5] Most of last year's co-hosts are now in Malaysia to celebrate Eid with their family back home or have their family visiting here (due to new born baby). So this year we have a different co-hostes line-up. The hosts of the events were: Abg Zahar/Kak Kin +family, Abg Lah/Kak Za +family, Dr Azwan and ourselves. We also got huge help from Hanif, Zamir and Fathul.

[6] All the hosts came after school on Friday for the open house preparations. This year's main menu were: Penang Laksa, Nasi Kerabu, Nasi Dagang, Nasi impit+peanut sauce+chicken rendang, chicken BBQ, and even pudding (recipe specially prepared by Zamir).

[7] Zamir, Hanif and Fathul were the main people manning the BBQ set. They were such a great help. Must be quite stuffy standing so near to the heat and the smoke all day long :(

[8] The little angels, helping with cleaning the bean sprouts. Lucky mothers such have such wonderful helpers even though they are boys ;)

[9] We had a bit more time to prepare this year, probably because there were a number of skilled chefs around (for the record, hubby & I are off the list :P). So, Min and Kak Kin suggested making homemade Eid cookies too! The selection that day was: cornflakes, 'suji' and 'semperit' cookies.

[10] Min were in charge of semperit, I was in charge of Suji, while Hubbykun & Hanif were in charge of cornflakes cookies. Kak Kin was doing all the baking, but talented Min were the one in-charge of over all. She and friends even ventured into cookie entrepreneur during the fasting month. Hubbykun went a bit overboard with the ingredient scaling so cornflakes cookies were more than the other. I had to make second mix of Suji because the first one it was too little :P

[11] Coincidentally, 1st September (the day after) is also the Kak Keen's birthday. Abg Lah's birthday and hubbykun's is also in the early month of September. So it was a double celebratin! Kak Keen's received a birthday cake from her former labmate! Yummy!

[12] I baked walnut brownies for hubbykun (because it is the only cake I can pull off) , while Min also prepared cheesecake for birthday! Since hubbykun's was among the one blowing the candles, I was the one capturing the video/pix (which explains the bad quality video + no pix selection on cake blowing here hehehe).

[13] Hubbykun made a picture frame for Kak Keen. Since there were a number of pictures arranged in colage, need to put more attention into looking at the frame it seems ;)

[14] The ladies who love to pose! With hubbykun who likes to take candid photo, I now learnt to always be in readiness and put on a cute face whenever possible :P

[15] The guys who are a bit more reluctant when it comes to being photographed, but decided to keep their wives happy anyway. huhi

[16] The last guests of the night were Abg Shahril/Kak Anis family and Abg Sabri/Kak Wan family because they were in London that day. Abg Shahril's sister from Malaysia was also around having spent a couple of weeks vacationing here.

[17] Abg Zahar & Fauzan have a love-hate relationship. Fauzan enjoys the attention Abg Zahar gives him but because Abg Zahar likes to tickle him, Fauzan usually ended up crying too :P

[18] We didn't have time to take a proper hosts photo during the open house because everyone was busy with the guest. By the time everyone left, it was quite dark and it was hard to take. So Kak Keen invited for another 'makan-makan' session just for the co-hosts.

[19] We had a great time that day. Great food, great company and it was nice meeting everyone. Thanks for inviting us to be co-hosts. Muahs!

[20] Finally a video of the event!! If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Bristol Wow Gorillas + Zoo Gardens 2011

2011-11-13T21:00:00.000Z

event :: Bristol Wow Gorillas + Bristol Zoo Gardens 2011
date :: 13th August - 27th September 2011
location :: bristol, uk

[1] As a celebration of the 175th anniversary of Bristol Zoo this year, an exhibition of 61 gorillas statues was held throughout Bristol city centre and the greater area. Each of the statues have unique colorful designs (each of them were design by Bristol local artists) on them and the fact that they were placed on different location made finding them like a big treasure hunt event ;) This one is called Bradisson, located at the Radisson BLU Hotel.

[2] There were a total of 61 gorilla statues on public display. Most of them being located at the Bristol city centre. We went to 53 locations & missed 8 due to some of them being located quite further away from Bristol city. The furthest was 'Guerilla Tourist' located at Birmingham Coach Station. This one is called 'Banana shirt', located at Victoria Rooms near the Triangle and also close to where my University is.

[3] Among the first gorilla that we took our picture with was this 'Gorisambard' gorilla located at Clifton Suspension Bridge. We came upon this gorilla when we were walking to/back from the Bristol Hot Air Balloon Fiesta launch in Ashton Court. I asked hubbykun to take a picture of me with it, but we never planned on tracking the rest of the gorillas because it was during the fasting month.

[4] The gorilla statues were actually on display for almost 2 months but we were busy with other activities before that. Then Ramadhan comes before we found out that they would be taken away after. Among the first people that we heard were doing the gorilla hunting were Farah/Imran. In the time when we were staying at their place while they were away, we didn't have much to do. Plus hubbykun looked at other people's albums and somehow managed to coerce me into doing the hunt with him over the weekend. (Note: This is 'Little fluffy clouds' at St Mary's Redcliffe).

[5] We also chatted with Kak Wan & family during our maize maze visit together and she told us that Sofea was making it her project too to track down the gorillas. On the way back from the maize maze, we headed to the Flowers of Hatch, but they went to Cribbs Causeway shopping mall instead. We didn't join them because but we weren't interested then. There were two gorillas in Cribbs Causeway area: 'Sunny' near John Lewis and 'Telula' inside the Curry's superstore. (Note: gorilla 52 and 53 in video).

[6] The map on location of the gorillas were available on the Internet and hubbykun printed a copy of it to help us track them down. But we found a better map at the from Temple Meads train station. The gorilla here was named: 'Goram'. It was funny that the gorilla was placed in a very compact corner, right next to where the ticket check counters were. So I had to walk really slow in the video :P

[7] We took a total of 4 days to complete the whole hunting: 1 day on foot at central city centre area, 1 day by bus at location further away, 1 day the weekend after the first day of the hunt by car because we were renting car to go someplace else too, and finally 1 day at Bristol Zoo Gardens to cover the gorillas we missed. This was at Narrow Quay/Anolfini and the gorilla was named the 'S Express', fashioned like a train head ;)

[8] We managed to track down 37 gorillas on the first day of our feat. Mostly beause the gorillas were near each other. A very fruitful but tiring day! I remembered we were so tired and we decided to skip cooking and just eat out. The day was sunny which made my throat really parched. I didn't eat much though because so I drank loads of water after the breaking fast time. (Note: 'Grievesy' gorilla at College Green).

[9] Of course I was the ever reliable map reader and planner on which locations to attack first. It was a good thing that we did the tracking, because the gorillas at placed at attractive landmarks that we never knew before. One such example was this charming old church that is no longer in used. It was located at the Temple Church Garden. Loved the open-air concept, where the windows and roofs of the church were removed. The gorilla here was named: 'Tensor' and there were colorful electronics components like diodes/transistors printed on it (electronics is not really my favourite subject, but even I must know this much right? hehe)

[10] The walkway of church garden were really beautiful. Can imagine that it'll look magical with snow ;) I'm ashamed that we never knew this place existed, because we always walk along Victoria Street heading to Temple Meads train station or Hertz car rental. I guess we were so busy getting to our destination that we never bothered to enjoy the view/explore the surrounding area more. Admittedly, even though the church is next to main street, the view to it is slightly blocked by trees. I walked near here alone recently and I was admiring the view and smiling in remembrance of our fun gorilla hunt experience ;)

[11] This is 'Mondo' by Evening Post. The body was a collage of makeshift newspaper cutting. In actual, this trip was video-centric. much more interesting compared to pictures I think ;) hubbykun and I both agree that this is officially our personal favourite video thus far.

[12] Pirate gorilla at a super-busy pub. It was a bit embarassing posing for a photo and video shot here. The gorilla was placed right smack in the centre of the pub outdoor seating area. Because of the sunny weather, there were so many people enjoying drinks outside!

[13] These are new statues at Watershed on 3 adults pingu + 1 kid pingu. So cute! reminded me of 'Happy Feet' animation, one of hubbykun's favourite. (Ramos, the mexican pingu was really funny & cute. i want one!). coincidentally, there was also an Arsenal FC truck near here that day. Some games were available for try outs and counters were open to become the FC member. We were both not football enthusiasts, so we didn't join in the funtivity.

[14] This is the Bristol City FC gorilla. The gorilla was placed inside the stadium compound. We came here on a Sunday and the stadium was closed! I was devastated thinking that we had to come another day. But while we were comtemplating what to do, a van suddenly stopped by and open the gate. I think it was probably a maintenance engineer. We asked if we could come inside for a quick shot with the gorilla and he kindly allowed us to! yay! when we were about to leave, a boy arrived with his father to take a photo with a gorilla too. he was even wearing a full Bristol City FC uniform. How cute was that? ;)

[15] I came across two purple gorillas at Watershed when I went to the Department boat ride (as part of teambuilding activity within the research teams). At this time I wasnt aware that the gorillas were a special event placed by the Bristol Zoo. I thought it was because of the near launch of 'Planet of the Apes' movie.. akakaka very wrong assumption that is!

[16] Because it was the school holidays season, there were many people also doing the gorilla hunt. I remembered that we had to wait quite a but to capture this gorilla at the Colston Hall. Kids came not just to photograph the gorilla, but seemed rather taken with climbing on top of it :P

[17] The ski gorilla at St Nicholas Market. This area is very touristy, with local stores selling decorations and trinkets. Although items sold here could be a tad expensive. My friends introduced a charming little Moroccon restaurant near here recently. The food was good, but we were all saying that we wished it can spicier :P

[18] Besides the big gorilla statues, there were also around 33 mini gorillas on display. This miniature gorilla with colorful buttons pasted on it it at the Coach Station and the only one that we found by accident. The map didn't point where the mini gorilla locations were. We didn't plan to track them too, seeing that we had our hands full tracking even the 61 large ones.

[19] After the time duration when the public gorilla display was over, they were placed inside the zoo temporarily for 4 days before they were auctioned away. Hubbykun told me that on Thursday after 4pm, the Zoo offer a cheap £5 entrance where you can view the gorillas while also enjoy the zoo itself. We took this opportunity to cover the gorillas that we missed. At the front of the zoo, the gorilla that used to be placed in Birmingham was put on public display. hubbykun left early from work that day. There was a huge queue at the zoo entrance.

[20] Even though it is our 3rd year here, the first time that we went to the Zoo. I heard that Bristol Zoo is quite popular (probably because it is quite old?). Anyways, I've only been to another zoo in the UK i.e. the Edinburgh Zoo back during my MSc days/when I was still young & single :P In my opinion the zoo there is much bigger in size and have much more animal varieties.

[21] My favourite section of Bristol Zoo was the penguin & seal coasts. I especially enjoyed watching the seal.. We spent a long time here and even came here twice after we finished exploring the other parts of the zoo. There was a baby seal that decided to fall asleep while it was in water. So it was floating around, while other seals were making a racket zooming in and out of the water. It was sleeping peacefully away (check out our video). Everyone that passed by were commenting on how cute it was. I also liked when the seal jump out of water and slide inside the room. So cool! Before this, i always enjoyed penguins more because I think they are super cute. but after my real experience gazing at seals, I find that seals are definitely much more enjoyable to watch!

[22] The zoo also has a gorilla park, but it wasn't open to the public that day because one of the gorilla mom was giving birth :( There is a kangaroo statue, but none of live ones in sight? :P Besides that, there is also an adventure park inside for children, where you need to pay an additional £4. it looked super interesting and challenging. you are tied to a rope and walk through many obstacles high above ground.

[23] According to Farah, this 'Doris' gorilla on 'The Matthew' ship was especially hard to capture. It is placed on at the head of the ship and because the ship is moving around carrying passengers, she needed to wait a while to capture it. We went to the harbourside, but the Matthew wasn't around and since we were limited on time, we decided to leave & catch it at the Zoo instead. All the gorillas has now been auctioned off and the money will be used for vital gorilla conservation work and for local Bristol charity. Hubbykun told me the most expensive was the gorilla at Clifton Bridge, auctioned for ard £19k. All for a good cause ;)

[24] finally our video! enjoy! ;) If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Aidilfitri Celebration 2011 / Syawal 1432H

2011-11-06T10:22:00.000Z

event :: Aidilfitri Celebration 2011
date :: 30th August - 26th September 2011
Venue :: bristol, uk
theme :: white + blue

Assalamualaikum wbt.
Alhamdulilah, kita sudah berjaya menjalankan ibadah puasa selama sebulan. Saya sebagai penyimpan mohor kecil di Bristol setelah diperkenankan oleh Duta Malaysia di London dengan ini diumumkan bahawa kita akan menyambut Hari Raya Aidil Fitri esok 30hb Ogos 2011. Kita masyarakat Malaysia di Bristol akan bersembahyang hari raya di Redcatch, Knowle pada pukul 8.30am. Semua sahabat dijemput hadir di Redcatch untuk bersama-sama meraikannya. Seperti biasa konsep kita adalah pot luck. InsyaAllah, marilah kita bersama-sama meraikannya esok.

Di sini saya mewakili keluarga Sabri/Wan, keluarga Alias/Rosmani, keluarga Sarafiz/Cik Da, keluarga Seffry/Salwa, Fahmi/Johanna dan Dr Azwani Shah juga menjemput semua ahli MCB ke majlis sambutan Aidil Fitri anjuran kami semua yang akan juga diadakan di dewan Redcatch selepas Solat Aidil Fitri dari jam 11.00 pagi hingga 1.00 tengahari. Di kesempatan ini kami semua ingin mengucapkan Selamat Hari Raya Aidil Fitri serta Maaf Zahir dan Batin kepada semua ahli MCB dan warga Malaysia yang berada di Bristol.

Sekian, terima kasih.

[1] This year's Aidilfitri falls on a weekday. So both hubbykun and I took a day off work/school to celebrate the event. The MCB held Aidilfitri prayer at Knowle, but hubbykun decided to pray at the Bristol Grammar School in city centre seeing that Knowle is quite far and we do not want to miss the morning prayer. Since we were staying at Farah/Imran's place due to the process of moving home (which is near the University), we decided to took from photo here first.

[2] After that, we headed then took the bus #54 (the stop is just at the Triangle in front of Wills Memorial Building, where we were taking photo before) to Redcatch Community Centre in Knowle. Upon reaching there, we saw that everyone had started with the Aidilfitri feast.

[3] The Eid celebration were hosted by these families: Kak Wan/Abg Sabri family, Kak Ros/Alias family, Joanna/Fahmi, Salwa/Sefry family, Kak Kin/Abg Zahar family, Dr Azwan. They were very kind to sponsor the main courses of the day. The guests brought some wonderful side dishes and Eid cookies. Feels like celebrating in Malaysia ;)

[4] We earlier thought that the Eid celebration was at one of the host home. But luckily hubbykun met a Malaysian during his Eid prayer in the morning that told us otherwise ;)

[5] While enjoying the food, we also took time for a group photo. Quite a large group eh? ;)

[6] Another group photo, but only with the MCB kids of all ages. Loved the fact that everyone was wearing Malaysian traditional clothing. There all looked so cute!

[7] A memorabilia of me & the adorable Hawa. Khairi only came with Hawa because Unic was still in confinement from delivering their newborn.

[8] After the Eid celebration in Knowle was over, Ery/Wan Zu kindly invited us for a ride back home. After freshening up, we then joined them for another Eid celebration at Azah/Shahril's lovely home in Bradley Stoke.

[9] This is our first time meeting them. Azah/Shahril also recently have a new family member, a newborn girl. So it was a celebration of Eid open house + visiting the baby too. The girl is their second child. Their first born Adam was super cute. He loved takng photo just like his daddy and has a real camera of his own ;)

[10] Shahril's parents were here too to celebrate this year's Eid. It seemed that back in Malaysia, Ery worked in the same department as Shahril's mom. What a small world ;) While we were about to leave the Eid celebration at Azah/Shahril's, Kak Fariza/Abg Lah family have only just arrived.

[11] The first day of Eid celebration didn't just stopped there. Next we went to Hyda/Taufeek as there were having a small Eid celebration too. They invited us while we were at Knowle that morning. At first I thought she was joking, but she mentioned the invitation a number of times. Then only did I found out it was a real invitation (Duh me! :P)

[12] The food were all delicious. Hyda's mom were here to help take care of the grand-daughter Thuraya. Hubbykun and I were admiring the food serving tray which they got in carboot at a very good deal ;) Found out that Taufeek is from Negeri Sembilan, no wonder most of the food were super-spicy! Psstt... we ate eat with their brand new (barely few days old) Portmeirion plates. Apparently there were some great during that time.

[13] Ery and Taufeek actually are working at the same place. Among other things that was the main conversation that day was on photography and when/what are the good deals for shopping. Found out that Zamir & Taufeek are experts at the best shopping deals news. hehe. Taufeek also showed us the photos he took from an English wedding recently.

[14] A group photo of the guests at Taufeek/Hyda. That wrapped out the first day of Eid celebration for us. A pretty happening & busy day all in all ;)

[15] The Fiday before the coming weekend, we went to another Eid celebration open house. This time at Khairi/Unic's. Coincidentally, hubbykun have a rented car that day because we were planning to move to our new room that weekend. Khairi & Unic mom were the ones preparing the dishes as Unic was busy with baby Aqeel. Found out that Unic also bought the Portmeirion plates which were on sale. hehe

[16] The next day, we were invited to Faz/Nadzri home for another Eid feast. They made super yummy curry noodle! The invitation was actually at 5pm, but we arrived rather late around 9pm becayse we were busy transfering our stuff from the storage to the new room. So sorry Faz/Nadzri for the wait :( And yup, the delicious food were also served on Portmeirion plates :)

[17] This was actually just a small celebration, mainly because Abg Sarafiz who was visiting Che Da (his wife and kids) for a week, were leaving back to Malaysia the next day. It must be very hard being apart from your loved ones for so long :(

[18] The next weekend, hubbykun and I decided to have our own mini open house celebration too at our the new humble studio we just moved into. This was also sort of a get-together because hubbykun were leaving for a few months work assignment in Germany on the weekend. We also invited Zureen, a new Malaysian who have just arrived here a few days before. She was actually a year my senior back in high school. Her kids have all went to bed already from jet lagged.

[19] The only entertainment we to shared that evening was some music and photo scrap books from our travels since coming here. This one on Ayik looking at the photo albums ;)

[20] I made nasi impit, sambal kacang, lontong and grilled tandoori chicken (which basically took almost a whole day of grilling btw because our oven is rather small :P). Kak Kin and Unic brouhgt some jelly and Kak Odah brought some fruits. A group picture of all the party invite. I am amazed that somehpow can squeeze everyone in the picture.. hehe

[21] The last guests to arrive that night was Imran/farah. In fact, they came rather late when all the others had just left. Farah/Imran had just arrived back from Malaysia that noon after. When I called her to ask whether she was coming, she just woke up from sleep. must be the time-zone difference. But thanks so much for still making it and thanks for giving us a stay during the time we were homeless ;)

[22] So that ends the EidulFitri celebration of 2011. Lastly, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone 'Selamat hari raya Aidiladha', mohon maaf zahir batin!

[23] Finally, a video of the Eid celebration month!! If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Bristol International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta 2011

2011-10-27T22:11:00.000+01:00

event :: Bristol International Balloon Fiesta 2011
date :: 11th - 14th August 2011
Venue :: ashton court, bristol, uk
theme :: yellow + red.

[1] In the UK, Bristol city is best known for its hot air balloon fiesta. This is our third time visiting the event. Of course we try not to miss this yearly event. The first year, we enjoyed the view of the balloons from the park near Clifton Suspension Bridge. The second year, we tried both at Ashton Court and at the bridge. But this year, hubbykun decided to enjoy the view just at the Ashton Court.

[2] The balloon mass launch is held twice daily from Friday-Sunday: one at 6am and the other at 6pm. Again, similar to last year, the festival occurred during the month of Ramadhan. On Thursday and Saturday were the time when there are also night glow where the balloons are light up according to the beat of the music played. This year's night glow was sponsored by Marriott Hotel while ast year it was HSBC. We went to the night glow last year. I would have loved to go again this year, but between the 18 hours of fasting during summer and hubbykun saying that he couldn't get high quality shots because it was rather dark, we decided to pass.

[3] You can reach Ashton Court by bus or on-foot. If you start from the city centre, journey by bus takes around 10 minutes while walking may take around 1 hour. Special bus services with ~10 minutes time interval between them were available throughout the event. Unfortunately the bus service only starts at 10am, which means that there are no bus if you're planning to go to Ashton court for the 6am mass launch.

[4] So far, we've discovered two walking route to Ashton Court. One is following the harbourside, rather flat path but slightly longer distance. The other is through Clifton Bridge, quite a hilly walk but shorter route. Since Clifton bridge is closed to the public on night glows and on evening mass balloon launch, you'd have to take the first route during this time. For the morning balloon launch, we took the Clifton bridge route and started walking at the early hour of 4.30am to be there in time.

[5] When we reached Ashton Court, the gate was not yet opened maybe because we were a little early (it was about 5.30am). there were a number of early risers like us too. We saw them climbing the walls to get inside and just followed suit. Luckily the walls were not too high, just about waist-height. just when we reached inside, the gates were open. cait! That day, I forgot to bring my sunglasses too! The super early wake up time and the lack of sleep explains the swollen eyes huhu..

[6] For the mass balloons launch, there were as many as 96 balloons being launch one after another. It was a really an amazing sight! We overheard a conversation from someone around. he was saying something in the line of "not that many places in the world can have a view quite like this". that is so very true. reminded us of how very fortunate for us to be here :)

[7] There were also some nice odd shapes balloons that were launched. Some of which I remembered are square, dog, motorbike, dragon and cyclindrical battery-shaped balloons. Neat!

[8] This one is a chicken head balloon! haha.

[9] Besides the real-life size balloons, there were also some miniature size ones that was on display. There were really cute ones like a teddy bear and a bumble bee.

[10] I was looking for the University of Bristol (UoB) balloon but the balloon pumping location was a bit far to the place where we were viewing. The uni has a balloon society and according to a friend of mine who joined this club, you'd get a discount for a ride in the UoB balloon if you're a member. Farah told me that to enjoy a ride on a balloon during the fiesta's mass launch would cost around £180 (err a bit off our budget). Not sure how much the UoB balloon club would cost though. I asked hubbykun to zoom a picture of the balloon. He did captur it on video link below, but the picture quality wasn't too good though.

[11] Among the few pix of hubbykun taken by yours truly hehe. isn't my darling so adorable? ;) he spent quite a bit of time for time lapse video this time around as shown in the video. because the video was made into fast forward, the balloons ascending to the air and myself looked really funny there.

[12] we went on Friday where there were not too many people. This made taking pictures much easier according to hubbykun. I can also run around left and right to pose for pictures. Last year we went on a Sunday, and because it was the last day of the event, there were so many people! Hubbykun also said that the pictures quality turned out much nicer this year compared to the last because he can move freely to get a good composition ;)

[13] I went home early from school and hubbykun get off early from work so that we can meeet at city center and take bus together. Hubbykun got on the bus in front of Primark while I took the one near harbourside. The ticket cost £2/person each way.

[14] On Satuday, we decided not to go because there'll be a huge crowd at the evening mass launch. These are people who would also be waiting for the night glow event. While we were staying at home, we saw balloons from our room window during the mass launch hour. It was very beautiful but this is not the usual route they would take though (it could be because of the wind blow to a different direction). We didn't see this last year.

[15] Hubbykun read online that the fact that the winds were blowing towards the direction of the city centre making the ballons crossing the Clifton bridge was really special. The it happened was ~20 years ago? We saw some photos from people who were viewing the balloons at Clifton bridge and the pictures were amazing! The balloons appeared really big next to the bridge. Hubbykun was complaining to me that he wished he was there too! aiyark!

[16] The weather was a bit cloudy this year. But I think compared to last year, it seemed like the coordinators were trying very hard to still launch the balloons. Hubbykun said that he guessed that the balloon launch probably depend more on the wind conditions. For example. on Sunday afternoon though, even though the weather was considerably sunny and it was clear blue sky, we were informed through the speakers that the balloons couldnt ascend due to the strong wind, oh no!

[17] Even though we have seen the launch in the morning the day before, we were still hugely dissappointed. Farah told me that she was there too and in fact was at the Heaven Hill side (same as us), but we didn't come across them because of the huge crowd during that day. Because the weather was sunny, people still had fun staying out and enjoying the rest of the festival.

[18] There was a huge selection of funfair games to picked from. Although I have to admit most of them looked like the main objective is to give people a severe headache? :P

[19] There were also plenty of booths selling all kinds of beverages and food. In fact there was a small factory outlet booth too. So you can spend your frustration of not seeing balloon with shopping instead. We even bought a picnic mat here, but never get a chance to use them because we only came across it on the last day and when we were about to head home already hahaha.

[20] Saw a Yakult booth there too! We bought 4 packs of 7 bottles, of which mostly I was the one who finished them :P There were some free or cheap goodie bags too that you can get hold on :D

[21] We saw that there was also a nice launch and picnic area sponsored by the Bristol heart FM 96.3. There were some bubble-blowing fan near a the Heart FM promo car and I wanted to take a photo while the bubbles were surrounding me. But there was 2 happy kids having much fun catching the bubbles. No luck to pose there then ;)

[22] We spent a bit of gazing at the deers in the Ashton Court deer park (check out the video). There were a few varieties of them actually. Some white ones and red deers too. The deers antlers were really beautiful. It looked like those in santa's sledding. We visited krakow back in winter 2010 and hubby wanted to try some dog sledding after watching some clips on the internet. Unfortunately, due to time constraint and the location of the sledding which was quite far from the city, we didnt get a chance to try that.

[23] There was also a red arrow (royal air force aerobatic team) performance on Sunday right before the supposed balloon launch. It seemed like flying in synchronised and so close together between the flights really take a lot of skill and training. Among the red arrow team, we were informed that one of the pilot is a woman. Coolness ;)

[24] Our view was slightly blocked by a tree, but we managed to get some good shots too and managed to join in many 'ooh' 'aah' together with the crowd. We read in the news that one of the red arrow pilot had an accident in Brighton during of their performance. The flight was flying too low in the horizon and crashed. The pilot passed away and it was mere days from the show we saw here. Very very sad to hear about this :(

[25] During the walk back home, we made a number of stops near clifton bridge and university area for photo sessions. People passing by must have thought that we were tourists, when in fact we've been here for 3 years now :P

[26] finally, a video of the event. If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Ramadhan Breakfasting 2011

2011-10-20T21:15:00.000+01:00

event :: Iftar 2011
date :: 1st - 28th August 2011
location :: Bristol, UK

[1] This year, Ramadhan fell on the 1st of August, which is in the middle of summer. Due to this, the fasting duration is about 18 hours long! I must say that this was the longest I have fast in my lifetime and it was no mean feat. During the 1st day itself, we received iftar invitation at Khairi/Unic's lovely home.

[2] The special menu for the night was Khairi's specially made 'kari mamak'. I understand that this is a popular dish in Northern Malaysian and it was really yummy ;) Kak Odah made murtabak, I made green bean desert and brought some freshly picked cherries, Mimah brought the layered cake and buttered prawns while Farah brought some desert assortments.

[3] Yaya and Hawa who loves playing cooks together, so 'kawaiii!'/cute!. Unic's parents were here on a visit, and waiting for Unic delivery due date. Auntie gave us a copy of the sahur and iftar time schedule pamphlet that was released by Bristol's mosque. It was really helpful. thank you! ;)

[4] We received another iftar invitation that weekend. This time it was at Kak Kin's/Abg Zahar's home. By now we were slightly getting used to the long fasting hours. Alhamdulillah.

[5] The menu for iftar were quite a variety too. Kak Kin made rice with steamed salmon, Dr Awan made pumpkin pudding (my 1st time trying and it was delicious!), Unic brought noodles, Farah brought chicken, while I tried my first attempt at making murtabak. Got the recipe from Kak Odah and it wasn't too difficult at all. I was a bit proud of this achievement regardless of the fact that I over-fried them a bit :P

[6] Abg Zahar was cutting the watermelons. Watermelon was hubby's favourite drink back in Malaysian. Whenever we eat out in Malaysia, hubbykun always drink this fruit juice. I myself prefer apple juice instead. It is not very common to find watermelon in Bristol. Only chinese/pakistani supermarkets will have them.

[7] Me and Farah taking a photo with Hawa. The cute dress that Hawa wore was the birthday present from Farah. Even though Hawa didn't smile in this picture, she looked super adorable! Kids don't have to try hard at all eh? :P

[8] Kak odah and baby wazif. Oh soon it will be brother Wazif ;) I found out that night that Kak Odah was pregnant with their 2nd child! Kak Odah, praying that you stay healthy and will have an easy delivery. Can't wait to meet the new baby! Hugs!

[9] A picture of the ladies. yes yes our favourite past time is posing for pictures. Noticed the energetic faces after breaking fast? ekekeke

[10] After 9 months of waiting, baby aqeel (Unic/Khairi's 2nd child) was born on the 2nd week of Ramadhan. 4 days after the delivery, we came to visit baby aqeel. Btw, I was admiring the moses cradle ;)

[11] Unic's moments of delivery was quite suspenseful. She told us that she started having contraction/labour pains when she at the mall shopping with her mom. But when heading home to get ready to get to the hospital, there was traffic jam and Unic's mom was really in a panic.

[12] Khairi + Unic's family portrait. Auntie even gave us some 'bubur pulut hitam'/black glutinous rice dessert to bring back home. She made this during our last iftar visit, but it was in a huge demand so she made some again this time. So sweet ;) Thanks again to everyone for the kind invite and the treasured company. We had great fun.

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Giant Maize Maze + Cherry & Fruit Picking 2011

2011-10-14T06:20:00.001+01:00

event :: Maize Maze + Cherry Picking 2011
date :: 30th + 31st July 2011
venue :: Ansty PYO Farm Salisbury + Court Farm and Leisure, Tillington, UK
theme :: blue + pink

[1] We went to Ansty PYO last year during our sunflower trip hunting with Adee+Leen, Kak Mahani+family, Kak Keen+family, but we were a little too late (they're close at 4pm on Sundays). So this time around, we made a morning visit instead. In fact, we were here during the first weekend the maize maze is open. kiasu eh? It was also just 2 days before Ramadhan. The target of the maze is to reach this 'Circle' point at the centre of the maze.

[2] We were the first one to arrived. Followed closely by Farah/Imran. Kak Wan+family joined next, but Kak Keen+family arrived rather late because Abg Zahar were working that night, and sadly they didn't have time to explore the maize maze. while waiting for the others to arrive, i did a bit of strawberry picking. even though they said that there were not many strawberries left, still managed to pick some large and sweet ones ;)

[3] The entrance fee to the maize maze is £4/pax. We were given puzzles handout and instructions on playing (so you can enjoy the maze to its fullest) by the maize maze designer herself! the maze wasn't just a simple maze. they're many checkpoints you have to look for inside the maze that will help you find clues and solve the puzzles. if you complete, you'll get a lollipop! hehe. The puzzles to be completed were around 3 pages worth! we decided to teamwork with sofea seeing that the were too many to solve. hehe.

[4] for some puzzles, we even got help from the rest of the gang during lunch. trust me, there were quite a number of tough ones, probably the toughest one is the part where you need to name a game starting with each letter of the ABC. alhamdulillah, we managed to get it all sorted. i remembered that farah was cheating and doing a lot of copying (oops the secret is out :P) because she was busy taking photo in the maze rather than finding the clues/puzzles. we were supposed to only get 1 lollipod for each submission, but they gave all the kids (plus a few adults like myself and farah..hehe) a lollipop each instead! yay!

[5] The maize maze is not just some random design. Instead, the maze is shaped into a number of objects such as bicycle, pencil, guitar, waffle, etc. hubbykun showed me Lady gaga's song video 'You and I'. the place where she was playing the piano is in a maize maze! cool! Hubbykun said, the maze also remind him of M. Night Syhamalan's 'The Sign' movie :) (I have never watched this movie because I hate too much ghost/thriller movies.. why do people enjoy this unheatlhy hobby? can take years of your life, I tell you :P)

[6] What's the name of the game? (automatically my head is singing this Abba song that was my favourite song during our recent trip. i like! although hubbykun was making fun of me when I was singing this because he said my voice is super high pitched especially at this line :P). Oh back to the story-telling: this game is called 'splat the rat!'. basically 2 persons are required to play. 1 is standing at the higher end of the pipe, and will drop down mini-coconut down the pipe. While the person at the end has a bat and were suppose to hit to coconut. Sofea was manning the coconut, while I was manning the bat. No wonder nobody has tried me on for baseball. have no skill whatsoever in this department. barely managed to hit 1 coconut out of ~10 sofea dropped :P the sound of the coconut rolling down the pipe was really weird. when the checkpoint wasn't visible yet, when I heard it, I first thought that it was this tribe-like big-pipe musical instrument (not sure what its call). Oh also, I heard people talking in Malay while we were taking pictures inside the maze near here. I think we must have made the maze very lively with all our loud talking and laughing that day ;)

[7] Playing jenga. My first time playing such a huge model ;) be aware that in the picture a lot of side actors who weren't playing though. It was really fun + challenging to be playing this when you have more players. We even came here a 2nd time after lunch with Min + Sofea because we wanna play a second round. hubbykun was the time keeper, and only allowed us 10 minutes to play (party pooper!). The reason was because we were heading to another destination after that.

[8] Argh i can't seem to remember this word puzzle game. You're given 9 letters drawn in squares and you need to find as many words possible with it within 5 minutes. But an additional rule is the letters chosen for the word must be connected to each other in the square. Kak Wan was an expert in this game. When Farah and I were playing, we simply chose any words without caring about this (we weren't cheating ok, it's because we both don't know the rule of the game. wasn't stated on the board).

[9] We were amazed that the final target i.e. 'The Circle' wasn't merely a checkpoint, but equipped with a number of games such as jenga, football (must target ball inside the holes), tic tac toe, etc. We spent a bit of time trying out all the games. There were also this happy kids + puzzleman photo booth area ;)

[10] we missed a number of checkpoints (need to locate all to find the puzzle clues), so we had to try a different routes to locate them. by the time we finished finding all the clues, it was just in time for lunch! our picnic menu that day: nasi lemak (kak kin), mac & cheese (kak wan), fried keow teow (farah), err believe it or not i cant remember what i brought! i think it was fried noodle (rather insignificant seeing that it was inferior to the rest of the dishes others brought :P our limited cooking skills are legendary keke)

[11] kak keen + family posing at the strawberry picking area. so sorry that you guys didn't have time to try to maize maze. but on the bright side, they didn't get their pants + shoes dirty either. it was raining in the morning, so the maze track were rather muddy. thank god for washing machine.

[12] No trip is complete without a group picture of the gang of course. We had a lot of fun here, kudos to all Ansty PYO staff. After the photo session, farah+imran left to head to their weekend getaway destination in Birmingham. The rest of us then headed to next destination, a castle + gardens that kak keen recommended.

[13] We journeyed only half way to the castle, but cancelled the trip when we find out that by the time we reached there will be after 5.30pm i.e. the place will be closed. Kak Keen mislooked, thought that it will take 30 minutes away from Ansty, but according to the GPS it was 1 hour journey. so we stopped the car at the side of the road and discussed what to do.

[14] Kak Keen + family invited all of us to come over to their home for dinner that night. Kak Wan helped to buy some ingradients, while Dr Azwan was the special chef for the day ;) Since it was still early, we kidnapped Min and Anis to go to the 'Flowers of Hatch' (flowers PYO) for a quick visit, before meeting the rest back at kak keen's home.

[15] again the sunflower maze wasn't ready (the same situation as last year). we were told by the owner that they had problem with pigeon and had to resow them, about a month time from the day we visit. since that will fall in the month Ramadhan/ busy times during Eid celebration, we never got a chance to visit this either. i wonder why sunflowers seemed to not be doing very well at a lot of places this year. there were some flowers that cant be picked. we saw the owner, who does this more of a hobby rather than business. told us that the flower farm/garden has been a rather busy for a couple of weeks due to wedding bookings.

[16] dinner at kak keen's. The first course was grilled chicken, mashed potato + gravy, yorkshire pudding, sweet corn (remind me of kenny roger's meal). We didn't know until we were full with the 1st course that abg zahar/Dr Azwan also were waiting for the steamed fish to be ready! hubbykun was teasing that Abg Zahar was busy serving others the first course because he wanted to enjoy the steamed fish all by himself :P Also, it happened that today was also Kak Wan's birthday eve! so the dinner session was like an unplanned birthday celebration too ;) Happy belated birthday Kak Wan!

[17] The next day (Sunday), we went to Courts Farm in Tillington, located about 1.5 hrs away from Bristol. We found out about this farm from other Malaysians who have been here a few weeks back for cherry picking. We have never tried cherry picking before, so I was really looking forward to it.

[18] When we first arrived, I saw a few pretty white goats in their pen near the car park. You are allowed to pet them. The goats were very friendly and loved the attention. A water pipe is prepared nearby to wash your hands. [In this picture: giant croquette].

[19] We were amazed of the sheer size of this farm. Hubbykun and I were in unison that this is perhaps the best PYO farm we have been to since. There were a variety of fruits and vegetables for you to try picking on your own. The carrot PYO was really cute, there was a tiny shovel prepared. We didn't try it though. I think it was not very popular too, seeing that carrots are very commmon and cheap here. [In this picture: broad beans plant]

[20] If you don't like walking, the farm even prepared a passenger tractor to transfer you to parts of the farm. One of the tractor stop was right next to the cherry picking area. On the tractor, we met a group Malaysian families from Birmingham. [Picture: apple tree!]

[21] The farm also have its own maize maze, although it doesn't compare with the maize maze we played the day before, since it was a normal maze and it was free for te public too. the end point of the maze is where the British flag is. I admit that we were cheating though because was rather lazy to play properly :P Took what looked like illegal shortcuts taken by previous people.

[22] Rows and rows of strawberries to be picked. liked the idea that they are planted on the higher shelf. that way, you do not have to keep on bending and standing up to do the picking. I didn't do any strawberry picking today because have been doing that in the past week (at Snowshill) and the day before too (at Ansty PYO).

[23] The farm has a lively picnic area with its own playground. Our lunch that day was a simple chicken wrap, some leftover brownies that I baked for hubbykun's colleagues and the freshly picked cherries! yummy!! Btw, the playground area was separated from the picnic tables by tall hedge, so you need not worry of balls accidentally flying into your plates ;) actually, our earlier plan was to head to the sunflower field, but seeing that the sky was really cloudy and we do not have much time due to other plans for the night, we decided to continue picking MORE cherries! hahaha.

[24] The best cherries were the dark red ones. Very sweet and tasty. We first tried cherries when we were spending out honeymoon trip in Switzerland back in 2009, but they weren't as sweet as these. Even in supermarkets here, you can never find such sweet ones. I think if it is picked this late, then the fruits will probably be spoiled very fast, so that's why supermarkets usually sell the not so ripe ones. Hubbykun declared that cherries are officially his favourite fruit now (has been mine for much longer though ;) ).

[25] I'm not exactly sure what plant this is. So I did a bit of research earlier (courtesy to Google Image), and it looked very much like the asparagus plant. There were many more fruits and vege variety available for picking at Courts Farm should in case you wanted to try them out. To name a few I havent mentioned before: sweet corns, pears, plums, blueberries, onions, beetroot, rhubarb, pumpkins, etc. For a more complete list, do refer their official link here.

[26] finally, a video of the happy happy happy weekend! If you can't see the video, click right here.

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MCB Family Day 2011

2011-10-08T07:52:00.000+01:00

event :: event :: MCB Family Day 2011
date :: 23rd July 2011
venue :: Blaise Castle, Bristol, UK
time :: 10am - 5pm
theme :: national costume + bright colors.

[1] The Malaysian Community of Bristol (MCB) held our annual family day event the weekend right before the Ramadhan started. A lot of effort were placed for planning the whole event, thanks to the hardworking coordinators. The chosen venue is Blaise Catle, a beautiful park located a mere 20 minutes away from Bristol. Farah and Imran kindly gave us a ride to the venue. According to hubbykun, you could also take bus #41 to get here.

[2] The event started with a photo shoot that was sent for the Salam Aidilfitri for Utusan Malaysia newspaper, courtesy to Riezal who has a friend working here. For this purpose, most of us first came dressed up in their Malaysian traditional clothing before changing into more sport/outdoor appropriate attire. Next was a speech from our MCB President ('Penghulu') i.e. the honorable Abg Zahar.

[3] As usual with any Malaysian event, you're guaranteed serious food galore! as usual the menu was based on potluck-basis. I can't recall all the menus, among them are: nasi impit, kuah kacang, bbq chicken/lamb/sausages, all kinds of noodles, rojak buah (apple donated by kak za's backyard).

[4] Before we started up devouring all the wonderful dishes, there was a birthday celebration for all the July and August babies. A number of sinful birthday cakes were prepared especially for this.

[5] Notice that the colorful face-painting on the kids. I asked and was told their faces were painted by some of the elder kids. So talented! There were a number of little tigers, butterflies and flowers that day.

[6] Pakcik canteen Dr Sam also joined in the event. He was actually here because he came for short visit for his convocation ceremony. He prepared a special fruit punch and superb bandung juice for us to enjoy. Since it was a sunny day, Uncle Sam canteen was very popular that day ;)

[7] While enjoying the wonderful food, the games coordinators started preparing the games site. Kak Wan was the Head Judge. there were actually around 12 games prepared, but due to time limitation we only had time for 6 games that day.

[8] Game 1: 'This is my treat!' for kids age 6 and below collect sweets on the designated area. some kids were too young to know that they were supposed to collect the sweets, so needed some interference from the parent. except that some parents tend to get a little carried away, one such example was Riezal :P he collected so much sweets that not only were sweets inside the plastic bag, but in all of his kid pants pockets hahaha

[9] Game 2: 'mummy says slowly does it' mimah+wandy glued the ball to yaya's soon. in the video, you can see Yaya running carefree and making a super-fast u-turn :P

Game 3: 'The way forward' or also known as the 3-legged race, for kids 7 years and above. i remembered that one of rifqi's son didn't want to play and was crying because he was scared. But somehow his mom managed to sweet talked him into playing and he ended up having a great time ;)

[10] Game 4: 'crabs do it this way' where a child and an adult need to carry the ball from one end to the other without using hands. it was supposedly a father-child partnership, but since a number of fathers were busy eating and gossiping away, so instant foster parent system had to be invented :P Hubbykun partnered up with Kak Za's/Abg Lah's son, Farhan. We found Farhan crying before the game because he lost in the 3-legged race game. Kak Za told us that he is very competitive and hated losing. So hubbykun promised him victory for this game. The game was divided into 2 groups: the girls team and the boys team. The girls won though, so hubbykun kinda broke his promise. Luckily everybody won some prizes :)

Game 5: 'catch me if you can'. the game where couples were required to throw a raw egg without breaking it. the distance between the couple kept getting further as the game proceed. couple who drop/break the egg are ousted. this was a game from last year's family day too, but that time i didnt get to play cause hubbykun was taking a prayer break. this year i made sure not to missed it. me & hubbykun even managed to get third place. I think its safe to claim though that i am a better thrower and catcher ;)

[11] Game 6: 'I want to be like gok', where 3 kids chose were supposed to dress up an adult with any materials they can find around them. the title is according to a Brit TV show, so I was told (have never watched this show though, since we dont own a telly :P). somehow i got picked up by Min/Nurul/Anis to be their model. they did a great job and we won the 3rd place! yay!

[12] the rest of the models and their talented stylists. Aida's team won the 1st place and Yus's team won the 2nd place.

[13] Next were a string of golf competition according to categories. First was the golf for men. Abg Zahar was one of the winners, not surprising since they always practised playing golf together with the other golf enthisiasts. Ayiq wanted to join in the picture though. Kak Keen must be pleased to see that Ayiq was smiling really sincerely in this picture

[14] Next was golf for women. i sucked at gold btw. it wasn't even a near miss! i remembered that the golfer's wives such as Kak Wan, Kak Sarina were really outstanding.

[15] i was surprised that a number of kids were really good at golfing too. At first I thought that kids wouldn't be interested in golf, but to my amazement they were all queueing up to have their turns!

[16] Finally it was time for the prize-giving ceremony. Farah was the coordinator for all gift-related. she was very organised, even printed/labelled all the prizes according to games. Since I was keeping tabs on all the games results, so I was sharing a bit of her limelight.. hehe

[17] besides games prepare, there was also football games and playground to keep the little ones occupied, to the point where parents were missing their children? :P all in all, it was a very successful event. thank you to all for letting us be apart of this happy happy happy day!

[18] finally a video of the event! some really funny moments that had me grinning by myself ;) If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Lavender + Flax fields, Strawberry picking, Hay Stack & Hartland Quay cliffs

2011-09-19T23:56:00.000+01:00

event :: Lavender field, flax field, strawberry picking, hay stacks and Hartland Quay
date :: 2nd + 3rd July 2011
location :: Snowshill, Somerset, Hailes Abbey, Hartland, UK
theme :: red + blue.

[1] This is our 2nd year (and 3rd time!) of lavender field photo shoot. Even though we had our fill of photos here last year (1st time here and 2nd time here), but we weren’t in a bit satisfied. Tbh, we would have loved to make it a yearly routine. The seemingly endless bright purple field was simply breathtaking! (plus hubbykun wanted to take some video, we didn't make one on our last visit). hubbykun and i kept saying that it was a waste that we missed all these flower fields during our first year here. We weren’t aware about these kinda attractions before and mostly do city sightseeing. English town are certainly charming, but somehow countryside has a more special place to us ;)

[2] Kidnapping the super-cute Hawa to pose with us on the planet lavender! While we were waiting for hubbykun to complete his tripod setting, I shared my ipod speaker with Hawa. I’m not sure if this was the first time she had a speaker in ear, but she seemed really enthralled with the music and insisted on having both of the earpiece. hehe.

[3] According to the official website, they started harvesting the field on 14th July and it took about a week to complete harvesting. Due to the short time window, be sure to properly mark your calendar. Hubbykun even emailed them in advance just to be sure. Unfortunately, there were no sunflowers this year like what they had last year. They said that the summer this year is a bit dry so sunflower seeds didn't make it :( that gave us more time to try out different poses on the lavender field though. One of our favourite one is the piggyback ride!

[4] A portrait picture of kak kin and family. I think this would be the first time they have been to Snowshill lavender, although this was not their first lavender trip. Last year, we met Kak Kin/Leen/Kak Wan/Kak Faezah/Kak Mahani/Rozi & their respective families by accident when were at Somerset lavender. Coincidentally, it was Kak Wan’s birthday that day that we ended up crashing at the birthday party they planned for her in Chew Valley Lake :P

[5] This time around, the crowd was smaller than last year and Kak Kin was the only one from the same party seeing that the rest of them have gone back to Malaysia. wah so jealous! In the beginning we didn’t really plan that this trip will be a coordinated one, it was kinda a last minute plan. Kak Anis + family also decided to join us. Despite the small crowd, we have a great fun because everyone was such a sport and do not mind following Director hubbykun’s instructions proven by this free-style running pose ;)

[6] Besides that, hubbykun also ask the girls (from all range of ages? :P) to do this pose. Not really sure what to call it, so I’m naming it crooked airplane pose? :P We asked Ayiq to join us but he didn’t want to cause he was very wary of the teeny bees buzzing around the flowers.

[7] Luckily Suffian, Kak Anis’s youngest who is the same age of Ayiq (I think) was there too. Upon getting some assurance and motivational words from Suffian, Ayiq was willing to come a little closer to the lavender albeit a lot reluctantly hehe.

[8] Actually, the first ones to arrive at Snowshill was us and Farah/Imran who were bandwagon with us on the car we hired. Because the rest of the gang haven’t arrived yet, hubbykun drive around a little bit to check out the wheat field that we saw somewhere near the lavender field last year.

[9] We were very surprised to find that this year, the area was planted with flax field (linseed oil) instead. The flax field looked much more in bloom than the one we came across during our poppy fields hunting back in May. Because of this, the light blue carpet looked much more beautiful and we were sighing in amazement!

[10] The next to arrive a few minutes later than us was the ever punctual Khairi/Unic/Hawa + Pn. Maznah. Believe it or not we left the house at 7.30 am in the morning and arrived in Snowhill at around 9.15 am. The lavender farm would only opened at 10am so we have plenty of time to kill photographing here instead.

[11] Really love this back hooray shot of unic/khairi/hawa. So cute. Must remember to have one shot like this in the future too!

[12] A solo shot of Unic, the pregnant mother who has born a beautiful baby boy recently in Ramadhan. Doesn’t she looked glowing with happiness? ;)

[13] Another favourite photoshop trick that hubbykun REALLY adores, the ‘little earth’. Perhaps due to the lack of the creative bone in me that I simply do not know how to appreciate it though :P

[14] Kak Kin arrived the last because Abg Zahar was catching up on some sleep due to his late night shift work. While waiting for them to arrive, everyone has had enough of lavender and decided to hang out the the lavender cafe. While waiting for them to arrive, we started walloping Kak Odah’s yummylicious mini pizza bread. wow I’m forever amazed with the culinary skills of the ladies here!

[15] From Snowshill Lavender, we made our way to the PYO (pick your own) Hayles fruit farm just a few miles from here. In our earlier plan, we wanted to check out the Primrose Vale farm. But on the night before we left home, hubbykun checked out their website and there was an announcement that they were low on strawberry due to the heavy visitors coming from London for Wimbledon games. Hubbykun went through the list of other PYOs in South West and picked this one which was closest to Snowshill.

[16] Just to be safe, we called the farm before going to check out if there were strawberries for picking and was relieved to be informed that there were plenty available. True to its claim, the strawberries here are indeed ripe and huge in size!

[17] Everyone had their fill of self-picked strawberries. It cost around £3/kg, which was around the same price as what you would get at supermarkets, but of course we were here for the experience and the fun of picking.

[18] Unfortunately, our trip here was marred by the fact that the one of the farm’s employee manning the cash register extremely rude attitude. We read online here that there was a picnic area available and decided to have picnic here rather than at the picnic tables available at Somerset lavender. Our packed lunch that day consisted of some grilled popia made by us, kak anis + farah + unic who coincidentally all brought fried noodles, kak kin’s mac & cheese, and kak odah’s ‘nasi lemak’. After picking, the kids got a treat of ice cream from generous Uncle Shahril ;)

[19] The area where we had our ‘controversial picnic’. The employee told us very rudely, saying snide remarks and in a loud voice that picnic is not allowed here, to the point of some people inside the tea room came outside to see what was going on. We were very upset about this and it really ruined the day. Hubbykun emailed them a complaint, but they never got a reply from them. Remind us not to come here EVER again... huhu

[20] On Sunday, hubbykun and I spent some together time just the two of us on a bit more of lavender viewing. We went to Somerset Lavender, which is closer to Bristol. We find that the lavender bloom here is better than the one in Snowshill plus the weather is much better than the day before.

[21] You would need to pay £2 for photography permit. There used to have some pet bunnies at the compound of the store shop but we didn’t check out this time around due to time limitation. I did have some time to check out the tiny lavender plants on sale. I was amazed by the many different types of lavender plants out there. There were quite cheap too, < £10 per vase if I’m not mistaken. Was tempted to purchase one, but I’m not really the green finger kind :P

[22] Last year, the same time lavender was in bloom, so was the sunflower. However, this year this was not the case. Just 2-3 tiny sunflowers in sight. So dissappointing :(

[23] I’m not sure what flower this was, perhaps orange chrysanthemun? (or did I just made this one up huhu). We saw one of the farm worker ruthlessly trimming unwanted weed/plants with a super-cool portable battery-operated lawn mower. It look very efficient while at the same time very lightweight. When we saw this, we feel tempted about getting one for our dads.

[24] Me flying in the air! While we were busy jumping around, hubbykun phone went flying too. I forgot my phone in the car and had to head back to the car park to retrieve my phone in order to look for the amiss phone. Thank god for ring tone or we would have needed to spend some valuable time looking for it!

[25] We saw that there was also hay stack fields at both sides of the lavender field and decided to quickly take some photos here before heading out to our next destination.

[26] Hubbykun offering some futile help to my effort at pushing the hay stack? :P Usually hay stack comes from the remains of wheat or barley field after harvesting, but this one didn’t look like it used to be any of those.

[27] I told hubbykun I wanted to do something a little different than flower hunting as the next activity such as an enjoyable scenic walk. So, my forever kind hubbykun did a bit of research on recommended walks. I think I’ve mentioned before that among the best scenery could be found in South West of Britain especially beautiful cliffs and countryside. I felt very lucky that we are living in the South West area, while at the same still time being close enough to London (~2 hours away).

[28] Based on the website description, there are 2 recommended walk trail in Hartland area (Hartland Point & Hartland Quay). Both of the routes were categorised as easy. How convenient eh? also with this I’m well prepared of what I was getting into? :P The walk was very flat and not too long either. Hubbykun came across this page while googling. The website offers plenty of options for highly recommended, and even categorize the walk according to level of difficulties easy/medium/hard/suitable for disabled etc.

[29] In actual, we have chosen to go to Hartland Point because it sounded much more interesting. But, we accidentally went to the Hartland Quay walk first. The glacier formation due to the sea waves were simply stunning! It was super hot + sunny day. Luckily, I have my umbrella with me. Although I’m pretty sure I received some funny looks because the locals simply love basking in the sunlight. Being a typical asian (not sure if this is a fair generalisation :P), I really hate getting sun tanned. Hubbykun was commenting during our trip in Budapest recently, that he wished he knew the trick all along. It would have made his life easier i.e. to convince & make me happy/willing to to walk in the hot weather during our previous trips :P

[30] The only establishment in Hartland Quay was a local pub. But there were plenty of benches and picnic area available. I also saw some talented painters at work. We didn’t spend much time here, because we wanted to check out the Hartland Point walk too.

[31] I must say though that Hartland Quay was much nicer in comparison. The highlight of Hartland Point walk is this old light house that somehow is not accessible to the public, what a shame. I think it has been privatised or reserved for some purpose. Anyway, the route looked like not many people has explored it for some time. Tall weeds have begun to cover the path, making us a little unsure about where the path goes.

[32] This is a radar tower that we thought in the beginning was the light house. We thought the old light house has been replaced into a more futuristic design. We were commenting that the website picture must have not been updated, seeing how dissimilarity the image was. Turned out we were in the wrong :P

[33] finally, a video on the eventful weekend! If you can't see the video, click right here.

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Summer bbq @ abg Shahril + kak Anis's house 2011

2011-09-12T21:00:00.000+01:00

event :: Summer bbq @ aShahril + kAnis's home
date :: 10th July 2011
location :: Brislington, Bristol, UK
theme :: chequered blue.

[1] the same weekend that we went for Mimah's BBQ (Saturday), Kak Anis (my labmate and lunch kakis for ~2.5 years) invited us to their BBQ event on Sunday. It was like a food festival weekend!

[2] since the boys PC was at the living area, the boys prefer to hang out here. a.jamal/k.odah/wazif posing at the bright red leather sofa that i can't help but admire. am considering similar sofa for our home later? ;)

[3] As per usual here, since everything needs to be prepared yourself, the BBQ was based on potluck concept. This was main menu table placed outdoors: bbq chicken/lamb/octopus, nasi hujan panas, potato salad kak wan, black pepper gravy super-pedas hyda, sambal super-pedas & fresh fruits. poor hubbykun was crying and sweating while enjoying his meal ;)

[4] kak anis rearrange the house's furniture so that it was more spacious and open the sliding doors wide so we can access the food outdoors easier!

[5] Meanwhile, the desert table was placed indoors (closer to the ladies? :P). the assortments of desert are: bingka cheese by khairi + uniq, kuih bakar made by phin, we baked the slightly overcooked brownies and mimah made the red velvet cake.. all were super yummy!!

[6] all the pretty ladies ;) i don't own any max dress, but after seeing how great unic & farah looked in them, am considering if I should get myself some too? :P

[7] the host, abg shahril manning their brand new BBQ set... perhaps planning more BBQ event in Malaysia? ;)

[8] yaya eanjoying his ice cream and cuddling with his dearest daddy..

[9] abg jamal came a little late because wazif wasn't feeling well that day due to fever. poor baby :(

[10] besides gossiping, we did spend some quality time to help Kak Wan and Farah brainstorm and plan the activities for the upcoming MCB event

[11] abg nazemi trying our brownie :P i'm glad that even though the brownies were a little overcooked, everyone seemed to liked it (well at least that was what they told anyways..hehe). probably because of the abundance of nuts we threw in. hehe

[12] thuraya really adored hawa and keep on wanting to hug her, so cute! that left me only a little room to steal hawa's affections.. huhi

[13] khairi serious in thoughts.. perhaps thinking of his cool brand new car? hehe

[14] i'm not sure what was going on, but farah seemed to be in ultraman's defense-pose against kak anis's attack :P but why did I look like I was enjoying their bickering a little too much?

[15] hubbykun (our photographer/director) favourite pose i.e. superheroes pose. whenever this pose is taken, it never ceased to look super cheerful!

[16] finally, after spending hours of eating those sinful food, it was time to head back (and plan some diet regime!). hawa and yaya was having so much time that they were pouting when we said that its time to go. thanks so much to Kak Anis + Abg Shahril + family for hosting this wonderful event, and thanks all for the great company.

[17] as usual, a video of the day's highlights. if u can't see it, do click right here.

Summer bbq @ Yaya's 2011

2011-09-07T22:49:00.001+01:00

event :: Summer bbq @ yaya's
date :: 9th july 2011
venue :: knowle, bristol, uk
theme :: chequered blue

[1] Before the Ramadhan month started, Mimah & Wandy invited us to their crib for a BBQ session. Actually the plan was supposed to be a few weeks before that but she got sick and it was postponed to this time instead.

[2] of course the tough guys were the ones manning the BBQ sets (thus letting us ladies to have enjoy our gossiping session to the fullest). Thank you so much for the hard work! ;)

[3] Besides BBQed chicken/lamb/octopus, Mimah also prepared Nasi Lemak and 3 trays of sinful cakes (as expected of our personal Bristol's cake expert). She made 2 cheesecakes and a chocolate cakes. Being the desert person, I tried all 3 types.

[4] Btw, we were all admiring her shining Kitchen Aid cake mixer! I've never used one before and I'm not really the baking type. The only one I know to make is walnut chocolate brownie and I simply use my humble food processor :P

[5] If you haven't got one (food processor), you really should.. hehe promote promote!. I also used it for cutting vegetables and grating cheese. can't recommend this little devil enough! it'll only take seconds to do what used to take so much longer, especially is you are cooking for larger quantity.

[6] we kill some time by taking turns playing a car racing game. it was really funny. I thought I suck, but hubbykun was even worst. He kept getting the last place. Myself and Farah managed to get 2nd last spot (not much improvement either! :P). Min was really good, she scored the highest ranking amonst us all. I found out that day that Min was very competitive in everything that she does.. hehe

[7] The men preferred to stay outdoors to enjoy their meal. The weather was really nice that day. Being UK summer, it rains very frequently. So it was very lucky for us indeed.

[8] There were many talented chefs that day. Hawa and Yaya really loved playing cook. Perhaps from always seeing their gifted mommies in the kitchen. We were really amazed by the level of details that kids can mimicked, right down on pretenting to use the water taps, cleaning, etc.

[9] Me teaching Yaya the Hard Rock Cafe motto. Such a cheerful kid, really enjoyed listening to him talk away. Although sometimes its hard to understand because of the kid's accent (not sure what's the English work for 'pelat').

[10] The favourite posing spot of the day was at the comfortable sofa of course.

[11] Abg Jamal/Kak Odah and Phin arrived a little later to make the event merrier! yay!

[12] Min and Sofea with the masquerade mask! Mimah told us that they got this in Rome, since its a very popular item there. I love seeing this do ever since I watched 'The Phantom of the Opera' in cinema.

[13] Saw Mimah's collection of novels, mostly English but there were a few Malay ones that she bring along. If you enjoy collecting books, the carboot is the best place to do so. I got my Jeff Archer's collection for a mere 20p-50p when I was back in Manchester. So cool. Of course now we do not have time for leisure reading, but its nice to have them for future free time (hopefully after finishing our studies ;P ).

[14] yaya's with his adorable spectacles! hehe. oh did I mentioned that Yaya have a beautiful large pirate ship? Toys here comes at such great deal, it was fun seeing his collection ;)

[15] OK, this toy robot is really cool, even I enjoyed playing with it!! The remote allows you to make it walk forward/backwards and even dance! How come we dont have such cool toys when we were growing up? :P Lucky Yaya he has 3 of them!

[16] future yuna in the making :)

[17] Yaya and Sabrina, his best friends back when they were staying in Birmingham. Btw, I forgot to mentioned that the Birmingham gang prepared around 250+ satay sticks! thanks so much to their hard word, to Mimah/Wandy for their kind invitation and to everyone for making this such a fun event!

[18] A video to capture the day! Lastly, we would like to wish everyone Salam Aidilfitri and Maad Zahir Batin. XOXO! If you can't see the video, click right here.

>

Happy 2nd Birthday Hawa Hanum

2011-08-27T23:44:00.002+01:00

event :: Hawa Hanum second birthday bash
date :: 26th June 2011
location :: Filton, Bristol, UK
theme :: black + white.

[1] Khairi and Unic kindly invited us to their lovely home to celebrate Hawa's 2nd birthday!! Notice the colorful balloon on the ceiling? Since getting helium was gonna be a hassle, they used tapes instead, very creative indeed! must remember this trick ;)

[2] the menu of the day: chicken rice with grilled chicken and kerabu mangga as the main dish prepared by the host, mimah brought chocolate cake, we prepared roti jala n chicken curry, farah made nachos, faz brought some freshly picked cherries from the farm they went the day before, and kak odah brought homemade jelly + another meal i can't recall (oops sorry).

[3] merry crowd posing in front of Hawa's birthday gifts.
what hubbykun called as 'superheroes' pose

[4] Hawa's birthday cake came in the shape of Disney's beauty! While Hawa didn't like the cake icing, Yaya loved them! talk about complete different taste...

[5] The candle blowing ceremony was hilarious! as soon as we finished singing the song, Aqilah automatically blowed the candle. Khairi lighted the candle a second time to give Hawa and the other kids a chance to blow the cake, but none of them were successful. So in the end, Aqilah the expert candle-blower were asked to help them out. hehe. Hawa must practise more for the next year's birthday ok? ;)

[6] this was the present from Uncle Isk and Auntie Fizee. Because we went with Khairi/Unic/Hawa on a number of outings together and loved to kidnap Hawa to pose with us, we have an abundance of Hawa's pictures to select from. hehe

[7] the men of the day (hubbykun not in the picture as usual, since he was the one taking the photo). wondered why he didn't ask for my help to take this one. maybe i was too busy gossiping with the girls?

[8] Khairi/Unic friends from Brunei who sponsored some cupcakes to add to the celebration variety.

[9] Yaya was the cook of the day. bear in mind that the meals you ordered must be limited to 'eggs' and 'soup' only. tried to order some order stuff like fried chicken, but that never turned up :P

[10] this is how it's done if you'd like a close shot of your nose maybe? so cute!

[11] the chef has been upgraded to the professional level of having a mini apron. but at this time, he was a bit occupied with chasing after balloons i think ;)

[12] since the theme of the day was black and white + farah and myself both have this same dress, we decided to become Hawa's 'dayang-dayang' for the day. In fact Unic has once too, but she was heavily carrying at that time ;)

[13] and one for the girls. aqilah was playing with some color that got somehow didn't just end up on the paper but on her palms as well hehe.

[14] hawa enjoying for pony ride, cowgirl style! yeaaaahaaaaaaaa!

[15] thank you so much to Khairi and Unic for the invitation. we had a really lovely time and we hope Hawa had the day of her life too. don't grow up too fast OK baby Hawa! xoxo!

[16] here's the video of the highlight of the event :) if you can't see the video, click right here.

Weston-super-Mare Sand Sculpture Festival 2011

2011-08-15T00:23:00.000+01:00

event :: Sand Sculpture Festival 2011
date :: 11th June 2011
location :: Weston-super-mare, UK
theme :: black + white.

[1] Weston-super-Mare organised a sand-sculpture exhibition on a yearly-basis during the summer seasons. We found out about this event from photos shared by Bristolian friends that have been here before.

[2] Weston-super-Mare is a township located very close to Bristol, around 23 miles i.e. 45 minutes drive away. Even though we have always wanted to visit the event, we have never managed to do so until recently after being in Bristol for ~2.5 years.

[3] Perhaps we took it for granted because of the close proximity to our place :P Or it could also be because our Spring and Summer weekends have always been busy ones. We took advantage of the beautiful sights and nice weather and of course the long daylight factor.

[4] We were just considering to go as soon as the event started. As usual, hubbykun was doing survey on the local newspaper for sand sculpture event because the event is usually covered as one of the article.

[5] Our earlier plan was to take the #41 bus that has quite regular services from Bristol. However, Farah beat us to the chase. She invited us to join them with the rest of the robotic lab gang. Thanks so much guys, truly appreciate the thought! ;)

[6] This year, the exhibition duration is from 11th June until 4th September. Believe it or not, the day we visited was the first day the exhibition started. hehe.

[7] The entrance fee to the exhibition is £2.50 for adults, £2 for students such as muself and £1.50 for children. There are plenty of parking spaces nearby. We decided 4 hours was more than enough to explore the area. The parking ticket cost £5.

[8] The theme of this year's sand sculpture was 'Jungle'. When I saw koala bears sculpture, I was reminded of my best mate, Zaf who is obsessed with this animal :P

[9] Besides that, there were also sculpture linked to the 'native tribe' concept. At first I thought it was some some of 'Oriental' style because I saw sculpture similar to Pagoda.

[10] But after seeing the 'Mayan' and 'Red Indian' sculptures in this picture, I figured it was a wider theme ;)

[11] There were actually information boards placed at the sculpture, but I was busy running around to bother reading until much later :P

[12] Ad: If you're looking for a personalised gift for the coming blessed Aidilfitri, my SIL is offering a number of Kudap-kudapan Aidilfitri options to meet your every need.

[13] Because we were here the first day of the exhibition, we noticed that there were people still working on putting in some sound effects to the sculpture. One instance was a frog being placed at the frogs sculpture.

[14] There was also a couple of maintenace guys that sprayed some sorta glue substance on the sculptures. This is to keep the sculpture in tact and robust against the rain and the wind. In fact, I saw that some sculptures have started having cracks, I hope they repaired it before it got worse.

[15] Alhamdulillah the weather was lovely that day, bright and sunny. Hubbykun was esctatic because this would make his pictures turned out better.

[16] However, the wind was blowing rather fiercely to the point that the sands were getting into our eyes. thank God for sunglasses!

[17] I admired the thoughfulness of the management. They placed tools for kids to play sand castles for free. Which was why Hawa was bringing the tools everywhere and was more interested about this than posing for pictures :P In fact, before we left, Hawa and Wazif each got a free sand castle tool because some earlier visitor has forgotten/left theirs behind.

[18] There were also plenty of colorful benches around the play area. Enough to cater all of us posing in this picture ;) We didn't planned in advance that the theme of the day was white. But somehow, coindidentally most of us were wearing white that day!

[19] I chose white and try to avoid dark colors, to avoid being too hot on the beach. I guess everyone was probably thinking along the same line. We finished covering the exhibition quite fast. To be honest, I was expecting more and much bigger sculptures to be on displayed (yes, I am hard to please :P)

[20] There was also a merry-go-round ride that you can try out to have a wider view of the area. Most of the gang have been on the ride before, but decided to save this for some other time. We next headed to the Grand Pier, an amusement park just walking distance away from the sand sculpture.

[21] Hawa was so cute, she was so excited and wanted to try all sorts of transportation rides be it cars, trains, etc. She wasn't attracted at all with the girlish games such as shooting for teddy bears. Btw, in this picture Unic was quite heavily pregnant with their second child. She has recently given birth to a healthy baby boy and in fact we have just visited them yesterday to welcome the new little one. We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate them both ;)

[22] A final short at the Pier after Hawa has finished her rides. hehe. Thank you all for a fun day out. Hope to do this again in the near future!

[23] Finally a video of our day in Weston-super-Mare. If u have problem viewing this, please try the link here instead.

Congratulations Dr Rozida Khalid! :D

2011-08-10T23:25:00.001+01:00

event :: Dr Rozida Khalid PhD celebration party.
date :: 18th June 2011
location :: Filton, Bristol, UK
theme :: black + white.

[1] This entry is dedicated to Kak Rozi to commemorate the completion of her PhD. Many congratulations to you and family! We're all so proud of u and this definitely inpire me to work harder :) By the way, many apologies for the late entry. This was because hubbykun had too many backlogs on his photos.

[2] There were actually two separate events. An open event was organised by the MCB ladies during lunch at school. I wasn't able to join this because I had a meeting with my supervisor that day. Kak Kin held a smaller celebration for her the next day at dinner time and we were invited to join in the festivities.

[3] As per usual, the MCB ladies made a collection so we can get a much better/memorable gift. In this picture, Kak Rozi was showing me the lovely Fossil watch that she received during the celebration the previous day because I haven't had a look at it yet.

[4] We usually set a color theme for any events with Kak Kin. But since the party was planned a bit late, by the time I emailed that the color theme was black and white, only Farah/Imran and ourselves were following the theme. Hence, we were selected for the model to pose with the 'Dr Rozi' chocolate cake. Also because the cake was specially baked by Farah ;)

[5] The main dish prepared by Kak Kin was 'Laksa Johor'. well I think it was Johor :P, not sure if this belong to other state. Laksa Kelantan/Terengganu was much easier to differentiate because of the different noodle and gravy color.. how I missed having that.. huwaaa! My late grandma used to make this whenever we 'balik kampung' for the holidays.

[6] Hubbykun and I made 'roti jala'. Well, I only prepared the mixture, but hubbykun was the one doing the 'tebar'/frying it on the pan. This was because I'm really bad at this. I remembered I tried it the first time a couple of years back at Ezan's (my sister-in-law's house). I tried a few times this time around, but they turned out really messed up, so hubbykun had to take over.

[7] Besides eating the delicious food, we were also entertained by the talented Aida (Kak Wan's eldest) by a number of tunes at the piano.

[8] Nana was showing us some cool youtube vlogger. This one was on a real pretty girl in the States that cover popular songs from Selena Gomez, Bruno Mars and such. Wah I felt so 'updated' and 'hip' keeping up to these. ekekeke. By the way, we were debating whether she or her other lead singer friend have looks closest to Reese Witherspoon.

[9] we were trying out different poses after the cake-cutting ceremony. there wasn't enough space on the ground to cater everyone in the photo, so a few of us had to climb on the chairs instead hehe. happy happy happy mode!

[10] Somehow, one of the main discussion that night was a collection of Malay dramas that are currently hot in Malaysia. To be honest, I'm not really a fan, so I have no idea on the shows they were discussing about. But the funny thing was how everyone was saying that in this drama called 'Nora Elena', that Kak Anis very much reminded them of the main protaganist i.e. a lady named Yvonne.

[11] Kak Rozi impressing us with her ipad and showing us Yvonne video. We were in agreement that Yvonne's facial expression and hand gestures very much resembled Kak Anis's! hahaha. Ipad is a really 'in' and cool tool to own eh? ;) Would love to have one, but I think I need a small netbook more than ipad though.

[12] Coincidentally, by 12 midnight it was also Father's Day. The little ones organised a surprise Father's Day celebration. And the party turned into a double celebration!

[13] Sofea giving Abg Sabri a loving father's day hug. awwwww ;) The party went on well into the night, by the time we reached home it was around 2am! hehe. Thanks so much Abg Zahar + Kak Kin for having us! Despite the small crowd, the party was a smashed! ;)

[14] Finally, this is a video highlights of the celebration. If u can't see the youtube window in this page, please try this link instead.

Poppy fields, Flax Field & Wiltshire White Horse

2011-08-04T01:01:00.000+01:00

event :: Poppy Fields + Flax Fields + Wiltshire White Horse UK 2011
date :: 4 + 5 June 2011
location :: Bewdley, Great Coxwell Barn, Wall Heath Dudley, Leighterton, Cherhill, Wiltshire, Salisbury, UK
theme :: yellow + purple.

[1] Ever since coming here, we have been on a number of flower hunting trips. However, this was the first time we went looking for poppy fields. Hubbykun came upon poppy field pictures in the photography magazine sometime July last year.

[2] But we were too late then, because by this time, the poppy season was over. Since then, we have waiting almost a year to see this. The wait was more than worth it of course. The red sea of flower will take your breath away!

[3] I've been pestering hubbykun (who read the local newspaper on a daily-basis, to be sure not to miss the poppy season this year around. He has been diligently checking out the newspapers seen early April. After 2 months, his effort was paid off ;) The paper showed that poppy field has emerged somewhere near Ipswich (3 hrs 36 mins from Bristol).

[4] Of course, this was a bit too far, so hubbykun did some search on the Internet for other locations near Bristol. Thanks to online forums and resourceful flickr members, we managed to narrow down a number of locations where poppy was sighted in the past years and recently.

[5] We shortlisted around 8 poppy fields possibilities. 5 of them were closer together and we aimed either of those on Saturday, while the rest were in our Sunday plan. Saturday was spent poppy hunting with our usual partner-in-crime, Farah/Imran duo and Kak Kin/Abg Zahar's clan. While on Sunday, we reserved for a romantic day out, just the two of us ;)

[6] We thought that the 5 options we have for Saturday was more than sufficient. But we discovered during the trip, that finding poppy fields can be a very challenging feat. The first poppy destination we chose was the one located in Amesbury.

[7] As usual hubbykun hired a car and we invited Farah/Imran to join us our car for easy coordination. We head out as early as 7.30am morning. Kak Kin and family had to joined a little later because Abg Zahar was working the night before and had to catch up on a bit of rest.

[9] On the way to Amesbury, we accidentally came across a beautiful blue flax field and ended up spending more than an hour posing here. After some reading when preparing this travelogue did only I discover that the seeds of Flax are used to produce Linseed Oil. Meanwhile, other parts of the plant have been used to make fabric, dye, paper, medicines, fishing nets, hair gels, and soap.

[10] After flax field, we continued on our journey to the Amesbury poppy field. We saw a huge red poppy field in the distance from the motorway, but finding it turned out to be extremely difficult! We spent almost 2 hours looking for it, but until the end we never found it. We also try to find a white poppy field as shown in local newspaper the year before but still no luck.

[11] We tried many different routes and turns, one of which was a rather bumpy and suspicious tank road hahaha. Hubbykun even asked quite a number of local people surrounding the area, each gave us different directions hahaha. Finally, we admitted defeat, decided to give up on it and moved on to a new destination. Hubbykun was so hung up about this, that he googled the information when we reached home. Apparently quite a number of people had the same problem as us to located the poppy field.

[12] Hubbykun also found out that there was a photography course held by the famous Antony Spencer at the Amesbury poppy field on the same day we were looking for it. They did share the coordinates of the field, but by the time we discovered this info we have completed our poppy field hunt. While doing the poppy field hunting, we came across this great website to convert grid reference/postcode /longitude, latitude to coordinate we can actually use on GPS. Cool huh!

Amesbury Poppy
OS X (Eastings) 412734
OS Y (Northings) 141981
Nearest Post Code SP4 7DE
Lat (WGS84) N51:10:37 (51.176925)
Long (WGS84) W1:49:09 (-1.819217)
LR SU127419
mX -202514
mY 6619339

[13] Kak Kin gave us a call to inform us that they were on their way to meet us up when we were almost at the point of giving up looking for the Amesbury poppy. We quickly changed the meeting point to the 2nd poppy field in our list, in Southend. However, when we reached the destination, we did not see any poppy in sight. We saw a local walking her dog and inquired if we got the right location. She told us that we did and she was used to walk her dog there in the past years. Unfortunately, this year the poppy didn't bloom at the field here. Because poppy fields are not grown i.e. they grow wildly, the same location with poppy field last year may not be the case this year.

[14] We next head to the 3rd poppy field list located in Marlborough, not too far away. Somehow the coordinates details we were given below pointed us to a residential area. So we scrapped that as another unsuccessful attempt again.. sigh.

[15] Advert: These are some of the fabulous interior design work by my sister-in-law. If you are an art and design enthusiast, be sure to check more of her work here.

[16] Having had these 3 setbacks, we decided it was time for lunch break. We made some prawn sushi, Farah made fried noodle and Kak Kin made 'nasi lemak'. The funny thing was that, Kak Kin brought the many side dishes of 'nasi lemak' but forgot to bring the rice that she has cooked! Oh no! :P

[17] Hubbykun made a stop at the Marlborough town center and we got some bread in the hope to replace the rice? :P we also bought some pastries and doughnuts especially for the kids. We were lazy to look for a picnic spot. So Abg Zahar's van was converted into our picnic table ;) We had our lunch at the by-way of the Cherhill Down white horse site.

[18] In actual, there are a number of white horse sites in the UK. 13 of such white horses are known to have existed in Wiltshire.This one in Cherhill is the 3rd oldest in the UK.

[19] Kak Kin was the one who suggested this attraction. I was never aware that we have such attractions here before. I'm not really well-versed on the reason and origin behind these figures. It seemed that it is also a mystery to the general public ;)

[20] From what little I found out through wiki, the white horse figure was created by cutting/stripping away the turf to expose the chalk hillside beneath. This one in Cherhill was first cut in the 18th century having an original size of 50m x 67m.

[21] Abg Zahar climb up the hill to get a close-up look at the white horse figure. I and the rest of the gang were too lazy though, and decided to stay on the lowlands and enjoy posing for the picture instead.. hehe

[22] We tried many different silly pose. Everybody was a great sport that made it so much fun! These Uzumaki Naruto shinobi run is definitely my favourite shot ;)

[23] By the time we wrapped up Cherhill white horse, it was almost 4pm. We were a little concerned that we have not a single shot of poppies, which was our main objective of this trip.. huhu. By the time, the kids were getting tird too. But we decided to give one last shot at the last poppy field located in Great Coxwell.

[24] We came across a poppy fields that we saw on both sides of the road, very near to the GPS coordinates that we have. Hubbykun was rather surprised because he said he saw in the photo that there was supposed to be many more flowers and a big barn in plain sight of the poppies, that that he saw in the flickr photo posted by someone who has been here. Nevertheless, this was the most we saw that day so far, so we decided to spend some time here anyway. While walking the path from where we parked our car to the field, Ayiq who was wearing a 3/4 pants accidentally stepped on posion ivy and he was very upset about it and lost all interest in taking photos after that.. poor dear :(

[25] Because of this, Kak Kin and family left earlier while we spend a bit more time here. A short while after, she gave a called saying they came across a much bigger/nicer poppy field just a junction turn away and suspected that this was the one hubbykun was looking for. Finally, our 5th/final poppy field of the day turned out as what we expected! The poppy field details:

Great Coxwell Barn
OS X (Eastings) 425701
OS Y (Northings) 193544
Nearest Post Code SN6 7PU
Lat (WGS84) N51:38:24 (51.640117)
Long (WGS84) W1:37:48 (-1.630004)
LR SU257935
mX -181451
mY 6701787

[26] On Sunday, hubbykun and I continued our poppy field hunt because we were rather unsatisfied with the results from the previous day :P Unfortunately, the weather was rather crappy that day. Throughout the whole day we had scattered showers. Despite the weather, we were lucky because all 3 poppy fields that were in our list was much easier to find than the previous day with plenty of poppies about.

[27] The first that we checked out was this one in Bewdley. However, because it was raining we ended up sleeping in the car while waiting for the rain to let up :P Compared to the other poppy fields we went to, this was the only one which was planted (i.e. not wild).

Bewdley
OS X (Eastings) 380165
OS Y (Northings) 274013
Nearest Post Code DY12 1PZ
Lat (WGS84) N52:21:50 (52.363807)
Long (WGS84) W2:17:34 (-2.292710)
LR SO801740
mX -255223
mY 6832315

[28] The second field we checked out was in Dudley. Both these fields are located near one another and very near Birmingham. This second field was gated though and looked off-the-beaten track. Hubbykun accidentally grazed some poison ivy here too. He said it was very painful and he can totally understand how Ayiq was feeling the day before. We were determined though. Because we didn't have much time, we took the photos while it was still raining :P

Wall Heath, Dudley
OS X (Eastings) 387620
OS Y (Northings) 288830
Nearest Post Code DY6 9DB
Lat (WGS84) N52:29:50 (52.497233)
Long (WGS84) W2:11:02 (-2.183785)
LR SO876888
mX -243097
mY 6856614

[29] The fnal poppy field we checked out was this one located at A46 heading towards Stroud, Gloucestershire and near a farm called the Sandalwood Farm. It was pretty easy to find because it was right next to the road, but the easiest way to find it using the farm address: Saddlewood Manor Farm, Leighterton, Tetbury, Gloucestershire, GL8 8UQ.

[30] This poppy field was distincted by the yellow rapeseed oil field that seemed like it was connected to the poppy field.

[31] Finally, a video of our adventures! If you can't see the video, click right here.

summer holiday 2011 - Hohe Tauern National Park, Austria [ entry 3 of 3 ]

2011-07-27T00:16:00.001+01:00

event :: summer holiday 2011 - hohe tauern national park, austria
date :: 14-23rd may 2011
location :: Liechtensteinklamm & Hohe Tauern national park, austria.
theme :: black + white, red chequered.

[1] This is the final entry of our summer break vacation covering the rest of attractions within and near the Hohe Tauern National Park. In the earlier blog entry, I've covered in quite a lot of details of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, our favourite destination during this vacation. This picture shows the sight that greeted us right before the toll booth at Ferleiten, at the northern tip of Grossglockner.

[2] The end point at the south of the Grossglockner road, just after exiting the toll booth is a charming town known as Heiligenblut. By the way, as long as you keep your toll ticket, you can enter and leave the toll road anytime during the same day. Having spent most of the day exploring Grossglockner, we didn't have much time to spend in Heiligenblut because it was almost the 8pm where the toll road will be closed. We only have time to snap some photos and drive around the town center. Heiligenblut is most popular for its striking of needle-thin spire pilgrimage church.

[3] There weren't many budget options if you're looking for an accomodation near the Hohe Tauern National Park (well, at least not that I awared of anyway). The hotel we stayed at was in the area of Zell am See, a mere 19km away from the Ferleiten point of Grossglockner. It has a great location with lawn that is directly accessible to the Zell am See lake, for you to enjoy a swim. There were abundance of outdoor facilities available for use/rent too, for example a BBQ, kayaking and yatching facility. In fact, just across the other end of the lake, there is a kayaking and yatch academy/centre. We saw a number of people standing on a white plates in the lake and I was wondering what there were doing. We were told by the hotel staff that because there was no wind on the first day we were here, the people playing yatch here can't set their sail and end up just paddling it :P A group of school children with their teachers were there during our stay, so the place was always very lively. I'm not sure whether was it because it was a weekend or if they were having a summer camp.

[4] We wanted to leave early around 6am the first morning but found that the entrance door was locked probably because of curfew for the school kids having their summer camp there? We walked around trying to look for a way out, but because the place is surrounded by the lake, there wasn't really much option to explore. There was nobody at the reception to help us out, that we ended up having to climb the gates! I felt like a delinquent escaping from boarding school! Haha. As soon as we got back to the accomodation that evening, we asked the reception about it and were told that the room key can also be used at the entrance door! We laughed really hard because of the unnecessary adventure we had in the morning :P We told the reception that we were checking out early the next morning and he even gave us packed lunch meals. How kind!

[5] Having spent 1.5 days in Grossglockner road, we also decided to check out the another scenic road that was also part of the Hohe Tauern National Park, recommended in the travel forum. To get here from Zell am See, head toward Mittersil and then take a left turn heading into Felbertal. Along this roote, there was a long tunnel cutting through the side the mountain, so the side facing the clift was open-air. The access the tunnel you'd need to pay a toll charge of €10.

[6] Believe it or not, there are 53 walking destinations to choose from inside the Hohe Tauern National park. That pretty much gave us a rough idea of how vast the national park area is. You can get the details of each route a specific national park brochure for walks. There are plentiful of tourist information centres within the national park area, with abundance of brochures on attractions to suit all types of interests. The images in the brochures all looked so tempting. However, since we only have 3 days to explore the area, we have to be very selective on the places that we wanted to spend time walking. I think it is safe to say that the national park is one of the main attractions of Austria.

[7] We narrowed down our selection to a number of places to suit our schedule. The first hike we did was the Gletscherweg Innerschloss. It is said to be one of the most beautiful hikes in the Venediger area. To get here, you need to exit at the junction right after the open-air tunnel. We missed the exit and had to make a u-turn though. After the exit, you drive along a narrow road at the valley of the mountain until you reach the parking spaces at the Matreier Tauernhaus, a tavern/restaurant. There was a tourist information board here, but unfortunately everything was written in German, so we couldn't understand a single word :P We tried looking some people to ask around, but the village appear deserted. Even the tavern was closed. We were wondering if this was because it was a weekend, but that explanation didn't seem logical somehow :P

[8] From the tavern, one can go by foot, by alpine taxi or horse drawn carriage towards the alpine village of Ausser and the mountain chapel (Innergschloss). The were some confusion on the length of the walk. The brochure says that the duration is 6 hours, but the walking sign we followed at the beginning of the path said that it was a 2 hour walk. We thought that the brochure was mistaken. Turned out that the 2 hour walk was only up to the mountain chapel (Innergschloss). Another 4 hours is required to do a circular mountain hiking reaching to a high point of 2240m (at the Augu Gottes slope), glacier-edge Schlatenkees and Alte Prager Hut at 2489m height. This picture on the mountain chapel looked like is was actually carved out from a cave at the mountain rocks.

[9] I really enjoyed looking at the wooden summer houses heading to mountain chapel. Reminded us a lot of the Zermatt village in Switzerland. We saw a number of land owners working outdoors. Some of the houses have beautiful garden compound decorated with mini ponds from water running from the mountains. The pond was even decorated with miniature windmill, and small boats. The wild flowers in many shades of colors were at the sides of the walking path. Since I really hated getting tanned, I decided to put my umbrella to use ;)

[10] There was no washroom facility, as expected seeing that we were in the middle of a national park. We took ablution from the river stream here. Hubbykun told me back during his mountain climbing glory days, this was quite common practise. Although the slight difference was the fact that the water was pale blue in color and it was freezing cold because the stream was actually coming from the mountain melted snow! This was probably the most scenic backdrop I've ever performed my prayers ;) It had become our habit to always bring compass and prayer mat wherever we go, even for grocery shopping back home because I always use the treasured Deuter backbag hubbykun bought me before we came to UK after my good old Man U backpack was torn.. hehe.

[11] We were running short on time, but we decided to still try to cover as much ground as possible for the mountain hiking at least until the Augu Gottes slope. Hubbykun wanted to get on higher ground so he can capture the glacier and snow-covered mountain more clearly. When we started the climb it was around 6pm, and we agree that we have only around 2-3 hours to spare before it gets dark and too dangerous to climb. However, we ony managed to do around 45 minutes of hiking and cannot complete the climb, because the walking path were blocked by snow that hasn't melted! We decided to wrapped it out for the first day and head back to the accomodation for check-in. While we were walking back, a kind landowner offered us a lift back to the tavern. He informed us that the reason the village were rather deserted was because it was not yet tourist season. Only in a couple more weeks, when the snow will completely melt and you can see many hikers at the mountain. There were also tougher mountain climbing route. He also informed us that the colorless running water from the hills is safe for drinking. When we passed through the mountain chapel, he told us that her daughter was baptistm here a couple of years ago.

[12] We spend the 2nd day and the morning of the 3rd day exploring the Grossglockner road. I asked hubbykun to quickly wrapped up the Grossglockner road because I wanted to explore the Liechtensteinklamm Gorge located at the Sankt Johann Pongau. This was marked as one of the 10 top scenic destinations in the Austria travel books. Ever since exploring the Imbros Gorge in Crete, Greece I must admit I was very intrigued to check this gorge out.

By the way, if you are interested in painting, Please visit this website, we bet you will like it as much as we do!

[13] It is said that during the ice age, glaciers as high as 3000m towered over the valleys and mountains. When the climate changed, the primeval force of these glaciers carved out the main valleys in its continuous downward expansion. The torrent dealt with this drop in elevation by fighting against the hard rock, cutting, crushing, eroding and carrying it along. A number of 'Pongauer' developed the highly romantic gorge in 1875. However, the development fell short of money. With the help of Prince Johann II von und zu Liechtenstein donation of 600 guildes work, the gorge was completed in 1876 and named the gorge after him: the Liechtensteinklamm Gorge.

[14] The Liechtensteinklamm gorge route follows the raging waters flanked by vertical 300m high cliffs of white granite. The view was amazing, but somehow a little hard to capture on pictures because of the limited space availability of the walkways and the tunnel was poorly-lit. This is very different to our experience exploring the Imbros gorge where we had free reins to explore the route. Of course this was due to the fact that there were no water running through the route.

[15] The entrance fee for the Liechtensteinklamm gorge is €4/pax. The major part of the entrance fees are used for maintenance of the iron and steel thick beams, and wooden pillars. The walkway on wooden planks and also going into a short tunnel. It was an easy walk, with a length of ~2mile only. We saw a number of older people managed to complete the route without any haste. There were also couple with baby strollers, although they probably had to carry the stroller up when climbing the wooden stairs.

[16] At the end of the walkway, there was a picnic area with a spectacular view of a 50m waterfalls. We took a break at the picnic area to eat the lunch pack that the hotel prepared for us ;) Personally we were a little disappointed because the route was a rather short one. You can complete it in around 30-45 minutes ;) We considered exploring the Krimml waterfalls, a famous 3-tier waterfalls with height of ~380m but because we have already viewed the waterfalls here, we decided to try other attractions instead. After finishing our lunch, we quickly head to our next destination.

[17] We next head towards the road known as Rauriserstrasse to check out the natural landslide forest with 80 swamp pools, known as the Rauriser Urwald. When driving here, we passed through a number of small towns. A particular town that sticked to my mind was the town near Taxenbach, where they were having a special cultural event. The townspeople can be seen at the sides of the road wearing traditional Austrian dresses with long aprons, wooden handbags and flowery hats. Such a fetching sight! Wished we could have made a stop and joined in the festivities, but we were afraid we would be imposing on a local event. Also there was no parking available, all the sides of the road were completely taken.

[18] When we reached the Bodenhaus Mautstrasse parking area to access the Rauriser Urwald, we saw that a 17km walk is required to reach the swamp. We checked out some of the pictures at the information booth and somehow the long walk didn't sound so tempting anymore :P It also started raining quite heavily when we were here, so we cancelled our plan to do the walk.

[19] We decided instead to explore the beautiful landscapes we saw along the way here, located at Worth and Rauris area. We saw a barn right at the side of the road, and made a stop to take photos with the horses here. They were very friendly and started running towards me. They looked a little hungry that I was a little hesitant to pet them for fearing that my hands will be bitten off :P

[20] Before it got dark, we decided to visit another attraction, which is the Kaprun Alpine Reservoirs where you can enjoy magnificent views of turquoise reservoirs water and white peaks of the glaciers. The largest open furnicular in Europe, which is 820m long and ascends an incline of 431m serviced transportation to reach the reservoir. However,we were unable to try this out because the furnicular wasn't operating yet for the season. Finally, we headed back to Salzburg town, where it will be more lively at night. There was quite heavy fog/mist from the cold mountain air, and I kept reminding hubbykun to be careful when driving.

[21] Since we have covered Salzburg town to some length during our last trip, we weren't to keen to explore the town so much. Our flight back to London was not until 11am and we didn't have to return the rented car until 9am, we still have a couple of hours the next morning to spare exploring the areas around Salzburg. We decided to drive partway into the route we took to Zell am See because of the beautiful scenery here. I was looking out to capture some video shots of the red train I saw on a number of occasions passing through, but never seem to find one while I was looking for it. It reminded us of Harry Potter movie somehow ;)

[22] We drove around the valley at St Martin and Weisbach where there was a camping site, castle/schloss, and needle-spike church that seemed to be the norm here. The weather was quite misty and the clouds looked like it was almost reaching the ground. We even saw a big sign of McArthur Glen factory outlet! It seems that they have a new outlet here in Salzburg. Pictures opportunity was rather limited that morning though due to scattered shower.

[23] We also made a final quick stop at Thumsee lake, where the blue water was truly clear that we can see fish swimming at the lakesides wooden planks. There was a lonely duck that seemed to be very enthusiastic about our presence there. We returned back the car at the Salzburg airport after that. We were amazed that rapeseed oil field and some vegetables were being planted at the airport compound and can't resist to pose here too albeit the heavy luggage at ur hands :P

[24] The plane was right on schedule. I was extremely exhausted to the point that as soon as the flight lifted off, I straight away went to Dreamland. When I woke up, the first thing I asked hubbykun if we have almost arrived because I can see the buildings/ground. We were puzzled because it was too much ahead of schedule or were we confused with the 1 hour time zone difference. Turned out that the ryanair fly really low that day. Found out from the news when we reached home that this was due to the Iceland volcanic ash again. A lot of flight cancelled and people stranded at the airport. We were very thankful that this wasn't the case for us. After our New York experience still fresh in our minds, we do not want to live through it again so soon!

[25] This is a map of the places we visited. The total mileage of distance that we covered during this break is 4712 km, which can be further broken down into mode of transportations below. Not bad huh for a 3-day trip? ;)

Car: around Salzburg, Grossglockner and Hohe Tauern National Park: 815km.
Bus: Bristol-London: 380km
Flight: London-Budapest: 1712km, + Salzburg-Gatwick 1260km
Train Budapest-Salzburg: 545km

[26] Finally a video, summarizing all the places we visited during this trip. If you can't see the video, click right here.

summer holiday 2011 - Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Austria [ entry 2 of 3 ]

2011-07-22T00:05:00.000+01:00

event :: summer holiday 2011 - grossglockner high alpine road, austria
date :: 14-23rd may 2011
location :: grossglockner high alpine road, austria.
theme :: red.

[1] After spending 1 day on our fast track tour of Budapest, we made our way to our next destination. In the beginning, my earlier plan was for us to rent a car and enjoy the Hungarian countryside. I took a bit of time before going to Budapest to do some earnest ‘research’ on recommended scenic driving route. While going through a number of travel forums, the name Grossglockner road keep popping up.

[2] This scenic road is part of the Hohe Tauern National Park in Austria. I was a little reluctant in the beginning because we have been to two cities in the Austria, i.e. Vienna (in 2008) and Salzburg (in 2009). I was hoping to visit some exotic-sounding places like Bulgaria and Romania :P

[3] However, my curiosity of peaked from all the glowing praises of Grossglockner road. I surfed their official website here and within a few seconds of browsing through the the images, I was hooked! Right there and then, all my doubts were cleared. In fact, personally I ranked it the highest highlight of this visit.

[4] The nearest city to Hohe Tauern is either Salzburg and we have been here back in 2008. From Budapest, we took a night train to Salzburg. From the train station in the city centre (Hauptbahnof), we went to Salzburg airport to pick up our rented car. I was relieved with the fact that they have GPS available for rent too. The €15/day was worth every penny because we have a number of places which we wanted to see besides this scenic route and neither of us are German experts either. Reading the places names is like a tongue-twister itself :P

[5] In the Budapest-Salzburg night train lasted around 5 hours. The seats are contained in a cabin-like room, with 6 seats in each. We were sharing the cabin with 2 German businessmen. It was fun chatting with them. They are heavy travelers because of the nature of their jobs, and shared many funny stories with us. He called that the taxi drivers in Prague as mafias as you chances of getting ripped off is very high. He also said that he was particularly annoyed when he was recommended chicken schnitzel as the specialty food of Austria, since that was obviously a German dish :P Food seemed to be the popular topic in the conversation. Since Malaysia has so many different popular dishes in every states not to mention because of our multi-racial society, we find it a bit were a bit hard to pick only a general one. We recommended ‘nasi lemak’ :P

[6] We arrived in Salzburg hauptbahnof (train station) at around 3.30am. There were no bus services that early in the morning, so we lied down on the benches to catch 2 hours rest before catching the first no.2 bus (at 5.30am) to the airport to collect our rented car. Even with our thick winter coats, it was freezing cold!

[7] We received a Peugeot 306 by the car rental company. We’ve never been in one and when we saw the size of the car at the parking lot. It looked like a family of 6 car :P we immediately decided to request for a smaller car. Unfortunately, that was the smallest car they have. When I was tried to operate the GPS before we left the car park, the device power cable connection was faulty. Again, we had to make another trip to the rental office. All in all, we spent a bit of time in the car park just getting ourselves sorted for the journey :P

[8] It took approximately 1.5 hours to get from Salzburg to the High Alpine Road (~80km). It felt like a really short distance because the surrounding views were simply amazing. We passes through mountain valleys, clear blue lakes, tall alpine trees and lush green field decorated with colorful wild flowers with cute summer wooden house. It reminded us a lot of the enjoyable train rides we took in Switzerland.

[9] There were also waterfalls cascading down from the mountain that reminded me of Lauterbrunnen and a number of open-air road tunnels like the one we walked through in Andermatt. Even though, we were really tempted to stop the car and shot the scenery, we had to keep reminding ourselves that we have a schedule to follow and focus with the targeted destination in mind.. hehe

[10] The Grossglockner High Alpine panaromic road is a toll road. A day-ticket cost €29, but you can purchase the next day ticket for only €6 (they called it the surcharge ticket). Just be sure to keep the ticket of your first drive and present it to the toll booth at booths Ferleiten, i.e. the entrance point of to the Alpine Road. It might sound a little expensive, but in our opinions it was more than worth it!

[11] It cuts through tall mountains to connect the state of Salzburg to state of Carinthia. If you take this toll road, the journey will last less than an hour to get to the Heiligenblut town. We checked the GPS and if you were to avoid the toll road, you need more than double the time.

[12] But the attraction of this road is not due to the amout of time-saving, but rather the jaw-dropping views and the technological feat it achieved at a time when automobiles were considered scarce. It can be said that the road was built as a desperate attempt to bring tourism to the impoverished Austria, after having lost in the WW I and the NYSE market slump in 1929.

[13] During this economic downturn, the unemployment reached the rate of 26%! In the earlier plan, the road width was planned as a modest 3m width, but the government revived the plan to a 6m width project that offered around 3,200 jobs (from an average of 520,000 jobless). Sounded like a really tough time and how devastating the effect of war can be. Made us really thankful for the peace we enjoyed now, didn't we?

[14] The road took 4 years to build, and a official drive by provincial head of government Franz Rehrl, and the technician Franz Wallack was recorded as the first alpine crossing in an automobile on a graded road. It opened to the public within 1 year after that.

[15] The toll road is 48 kilometres in length with 36 hairpin bends, and an altitude ascent up to 2,504 metres. The road takes you into the heart of the Hohe Tauern National Park to the highest mountain in Austria, the Grossglockner, standing at a height of 3,798m and its glacier, the Pasterze.

[16] Because the sky was cloudy the first day we were there, we decided to might as well take the opportunity of the surcharge ticket for a second visit the next day. Luckily the weather was on our side throughout the whole time we were here. It only started to rain when we were driving back to our accomodation.

[17] There are 11 checkpoints or visitor facilities along the 4 stretch alpine road (of course we have to stop at all of them for pictures :P). Each has plenty of car parks, and toilet facilies. Some even have small restaurant or accomodation services. Each stop offer a magnificent view of the Alps.

[18] There was also an Alpine nature museum at checkpoint #3, located at 2260m above sea level. We made a quick tour of the museum. There was some crystals and colorful rock from the mountains on display. A few preserved marmot (somehting like otter) and Ibek (looks like mountain goat) were also exhibited. Another checkpoint even have a big playground for the kids. Very thoughtful eh? ;)

[19] A particular favourite of mine is the EdelweissSpitze (checkpoint #4), which is the highest vantage point with a panoramic view of more than thirty 3000m peaks, called as Bikers' Point. Never experienced this kind of view before. We were speechless! To road leading the point is a rather steep and narrow one. Motorists and bikers can access it, but coaches have to park at the parking spaces just a little before the steep climb. Not many people attempted the 2 miles climb though :P Some snow hasn't even melted at the sides of the road. There is a bit of space along the steep climb, so we were able to made a few stops when descending.

[20] While at EdelweissSpitze, there was a Mercedes Benz covertible club convoy or something that made a stop there. What a cool place to push your car to the limits and enjoy the curves.. hehe. There is a small accommodation establishment here, but I would imagine they cost a bomb though! When we were here as early at 7am, we saw some tourists having their morning coffee outdoors while enjoying the view of the Alps!

[21] From the information boards at the bikers' point, I learned that the mountain rocks are 600 millions old consisting of clay, sand, granite and volcanic rocks ;) Love these kind of reading materials, as it kept my time occupied while I was waiting for the hubbykun who was engrossed with his photography.

[22] We saw a number of cyclist furiously pushing their pedals while we were here. Believe it or not, they were from different age groups/gender, from as teenagers to some that looked like they're are my mom's age! I'm really amazed by their stamina! I don't know if they really finish the 48km route. I did saw a number of cars passing by with bike stand on the outside. It sounded more realistic to me if perhaps the cyclists only did half the distance and took the car ride when they were worn out? Whatever it is, I can pretty much guarantee that I will never attempt this. I'm not even sure if I can do a 48km of flat road huhi.

[23] We did two hikes while we were at the last checkpoint (#11) known as the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Hohe. The first we did was the Gletscherweg Pasterze Trail. The Pasterze itself is one of the longest glacier, but we were only able to access a bit of the trail. You'd need proper foot gears to attempt more, as we were told by the kind gentlemen at the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs tourist information center after he gave a look at our footwears for the briefest of moment. Hahaha. The second hike was a shorter one to the Wilhelm-Swarovski Museum. In actual, we wanted to enjoy the 'treasure tunnel' trail known as the Gamsgrube Trail that exhibits on the subject of glacier water, gold and crystal. However, because the snow hasn't melted yet, the tunnel was closed at the moment. There were many live marmots here. A kind couple even lent us their binoculars for us to see some further away ones.

[24] I forgot to mentioned that this road is not accessible all year round due to bad weather, and heavy winter snows at the high altitude. The opening times of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road is:

(1) Beginning of May until 15 June: 6 am - 8 pm,
(2) 16 June until 15 September: 5 am - 9.30 pm
(3) 16 September until beginning of November: 6 am - 7.30 pm.

When there was lack of technology, 350 men were required to shovel ~250,000 cubic-meter of snow yearly to clear at least 1 lane of road, allowing only 132 days access in 1937. With the help of rotary ploughs and other technology advances, the road is accessible 276 days in 1963. Now, the opening times are based more on economic considerations though ;)

Coming up on our final entry for this trip, pine trees, longest ravine and national park.

summer holiday 2011 - Budapest, Hungary [ entry 1 of 3 ]

2011-07-18T01:18:00.000+01:00

event :: summer holiday 2011 - budapest, hungary
date :: 14-23rd may 2011
location :: budapest, hungary
theme :: pink.

[1] It was barely 2 weeks since we got back from Greece for our Easter vacation, before I had to fly to Budapest for the VTC-Spring conference. Felt as if my body hasn’t recuperated enough, but work is work ;) I went ahead of hubbykun this time, and he joined me the last day on the last day of the conference for sightseeing. In actual, we have visited Budapest as one of our destination during our second anniversary honeymoon back in 2008. This beautiful city leaves us wanting more as I’ve said to hubbykun many times before. Alhamdulillah our wish was granted ;) The view of Pest side at dusk alone is jaw-dropping!

[2] Since this conference was sponsored, in the beginning I wanted to take a flight from Bristol to Budapest. But having checked all the available flights from Bristol, it seemed that there were no direct flights. The only available route is if you’re willing to transit in Schipol, Amsterdam with hours of waiting time. So in the end, I opted to take a non-stop British Airways flight from Heathrow to Budapest instead. On the other hand, hubbykun took the more economical Easyjet instead (only a third of BA rate!), and this was also a direct flight ;) Luckily too, National Express offers a non-stop bus services from Bristol to Heathrow, that took an approximate of 2 hours, although it was much more expensive than the Funfair (£5.50) or Megabus (£1) busses though :P

[3] Even though it was a merely 2 hour flight, BA did serve meal like sandwiches and drinks. The default meal was ham sandwiches, but I asked the steward for a vegetarian meal instead and luckily they have it. In the flight itself, I saw a number of people holding cylindrical-like cases. I’m pretty sure these were conference posters just like the one I was carrying myself. There are two VTC conferences held every year, the VTC-Spring in May and VTC-Fall in September. Because of the spring season, flowers were blooming everywhere, for example this colourful tiny bed of flowers can be found in front of Museum of Fine Arts.

[4] The airplane was quite a small one and there was quite a bit of air turbulence. Not only did I have a major headache from it, I eyes decided to act up again during this trip. I don’t know if this is hereditary or something, but I always have this pressure problem when the plane is descending. My eyes felt like someone pricked it with a needle, and like its coming off its socket! Painful to the point that my eyes would tear up, really really hate it! I spoke to my siblings about it and bith my twin brother and eldest brother had experienced this too. But usually when they’re not feeling well, for example from blocked nose. But I was fine that day, and from experience mine to have a random distribution and occur whenever it felt like it :P (Note: the building in this picture is Museum of Fine Arts).

[5] Once we landed and while waiting for the baggage claim, I saw Lajos Hanzo (the main TPC chair that emailed all participants on paper acceptance, conference details, etc) and a number of his students from University of Southampton, so cool! I was told by my newly met friend that Hanzo is actually Hungarian. Ah! Could that be one of the reason he was very active for this conference?

[6] Even though I’m no Hungary-expert, lemme just share a bit on general knowledge on Budapest. It is a city divided by the Danube river, one side of the bank is known as Buda and the other side is Pest. The Buda is most popular with the Castle Hill (as seen in picture #5), Matthias Church (in this picture) and the Fisherman’s Bastian (next picture).

[7] I ranked Fisherman’s Bastian as my personal favourite attraction of Budapest. The white-washed turrets looked like it came out from fairy tale! I read that a number of people first thought that it is a fortress tower and wondered that how can it be such a beautiful structure. It is actually never built as a fortress. Since the beginning it was built in a neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque style to complement the St Mathias Church. In fact, it has plenty of stairs and spacious walking paths for visitors enjoy the viewing terraces (with a small fee but after 9pm it is free). Coincidentally, the Bastion name is in honour of the guild of fishermen that was responsible for defending this stretch of the city walls in the Middle Ages.

[8] Meanwhile, on the Pest side major attractions are lined up along the Andrassy Avenue such as St Istvan Basilica, Hungarian State Opera House, Szechenyi baths and Heroes’ Square. The two sides are connected by a number of bridges, but the oldest one is this Chain bridge. I was informed by a newfound made friend (Kak Witud), a Malaysian who is also attending this conference, that this bridge is featured in Katy Perry’s ‘Fireworks’ music video. When I came back to Bristol, I quickly checked this out. True enough, a number of Budapest attractions were in the music video! The firework display shots were also taken from the Buda castle.

[9] Another major attraction at Pest side is this House of parliament building. This building single-handedly hooked our interest 2 years ago to visit Budapest. Hubbykun and I was awestruck by the beauty of this structure when we saw it in the Amazing Race Asia (not surprisingly one of our favourite TV shows because we both LOVE travelling hehe).

[10] Metro line 1 (yellow), running along Andrassy utca is also known as Millennium Underground Railway is also an attraction by itself. Being the second oldest in the world, each stop decorations are traditional and special. As usual, hubbykun is obsessed with capturing moving objects for photography interest purposes. It’s no trouble to do so, because the frequency of the metro 1 line is exactly 2 minutes apart, as verified by the timer display at each stop ;)

[11] There are two more metro lines, line #2 (red) and line #3 (blue). The red line even goes underwater Danube to cross the Pest and Buda side. The escalator ride down is a very long one and very windy. Hubbykun put going through this route as our compulsory to-do list. But the ride was nothing eventful just like any normal underground metro ride. I think he was expecting some deep sea water aquarium experience or something :P

[12] Heroes’ Square or also known as Millennium Monument or Millenary Monument, is decorated with an obelisk and statues of the leaders of the 7 tribes that founded Hungary in the 9th century and other outstanding figures of Hungarian history. It also marked the end of the line #1 metro and Andrassy Avenue. The square is located at the centre of a very large roundabout, with plenty of bus parking at the sides.

[13] Another jewels of Andrassy utca is the Hungarian State Opera House. We checked out the show tickets were very affordable. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to catch one due to time limitation and because there was no dance/musical shows on the one night we have there. Our options were rather limited due to the language barrier of course ;) Nevertheless, the level of detail placed on the interior (this picture) and exterior (next picture #14) decorations of the opera house worth a special attention.

[14] Budapest in itself is a very large city, so to properly enjoy it, it is advisable that you purchase the day travel pass. It only cost HUF1550 per pax (approximately £5.50). However, the airport itself is rather small that there was quite a long queue at the immigration. I suspected that the volume of the people were there for the conference. Not only that, the queue to get a taxi was impossibly long too! In the end, I decided to take a shuttle bus instead which cost around HUF3000, which offered door-to-door service to your hotel. I was the last one boarding the shuttle, but somehow I was the first one dropped possibly because the accommodation I stayed at was the closest in the route maybe? The taxi service would cost you double that, but the most economical option (albeit a slight inconvenience) is by taking a bus #200 service and hopping on the underground metro to the city centre area.

[15] There were actually 4 of us from Bristol attending the conference. Besides my supervisor, there were also 2 other students besides me. My supervisor was there to help present some of her students which has completed their study or couldn’t attend. I only found out that other were attending too after I have purchased my plane ticket. So not surprisingly, we all arrived at different flight times albeit the same day. Didn’t know that there are so many flight routes to Amsterdam :P By the way, I was informed by my sv that the even though she took a midnight flight, the flight was full! And as a result, the taxi queue was impossibly long too!

[16] Marriot Hotel Budapest was the hotel venue where the conference was held. It is located on the Pest side of Budapest town, directly facing the Danube river and very close to the chain bridge. With this, you can enjoy a wonderful sight of the Buda castle, on the opposite side of the river. Due to budget limitation, I couldn’t afford to stay at this 5 star hotel, as the rest of my colleagues who were attending didn’t stay here either. I found out from Kak Witud that the room rate was around €200/night (and that was without breakfast! OMG!). Besides that, halal food or seafood is rather limited in choices. Even at the conference, during the reception banquet in Marriott, there was only 1 menu of vegetarian food and no seafood option at all, that I went back in hunger huhi. Luckily, Hend (another newly made friend from UAE) and Kak Witud suggested this Nordsee restaurant, located only 2 minutes walk from Marriott. I brought hubbykun here and we were amazed by the many mouth-watering options of seafood meals available.. They have a branch in the UK but I didn’t know this before. Btw, we recommended the prawn wok-fried noodle, truly heaven-sent ;)

[17] Even though I didn’t stay at Marriott, I love the accommodation that I picked! Mainly because it is less than 5 minutes walk (~800m) to Marriott. So I didn’t have to get up too early to get to the conference venue. Unlike my supervisor, who stayed on the Buda side, she had to walk ~30 minutes and crossed the chain bridge every day. But since Budapest is very flat and she is used to walking in hilly Bristol, is was a piece of cake for her ;) The beautiful view helped too. The closest attractions to my accommodation are the St Gellert Hill and Gellert thermal baths. Once occupied by the Turks, Budapest is known for a number of thermal baths. But the most popular and largest one is be this Szechenyi Bath, that in itself looked like a water theme park ;) The Szechenyi Bath was featured in the Mini-Europe park in Brussels, Belgium.

[18] Even with my 5 minutes walk, I really enjoyed it. The traffic was never bad, and the walking paths are spacious and looked brand new too! I don’t remember them being like these 2 years ago. If I’m not mistaken, I read somewhere that the year 2011 is the ‘Visit Hungary’ year. Perhaps these were some of the upgrades performed for this purpose. Besides the beautiful view, the thought that the walk contributed to burning the calories from all the divine desert I helped myself to, keep me motivated. hehe. (Note: picture = St Istvan basilica)

[19] Also great is the fact the accommodation is right next to the Vaci utca, the forever lively pedestrian shopping and gourmet street, so I wasn’t scared walking alone at night when the conference ended late. The streets are lined up with Hungarian souvenirs such as traditional Hungarian dresses and hand-embroided table cloths. It is also very near to the Central Market Hall.

[20] I found out though that the prices of souvenirs at Vaci utca are quite expensive, sometimes almost double to what you see at the Great market hall. This is probably because it is a major tourist attraction, rather than the Great market hall, which catered the locals mostly. The market hall has 2 floors: the lower floor = food goods (fruits like watermelon looked really tempting during the sunny weather, and paprika products seemed a very popular local item) and the upper floor = textiles products (lace and embroidered decorations. Got the tea towel for Kak Nurul, an item she collects here too).

[21] We saw in postcards an attraction known as the ‘tree of life’, a man-made silver color tree and was wondering where it is located. Asked around and found out that it is within the compound of the Great Synagogue located at Dohány Street.

[22] Other interesting monuments are the ‘Shoes on the Danube Promenade’ and ‘Little Princess’ statue at the riverbank of the Pest side. Not sure on the historical importance of the Little Princess statue, but the shoes statue is a WW2 memorial for the war victims’ shoes that are left behind on the bank when they fell into the river after being shot. The shoe memorial is 300m south of Parliament building, while the Little Princess statue is located near Intercontinental Hotel, a few hundred meters south of Chain Bridge.

[23] I was lucky to have had the opportunity to see the Hungarian horsemanship traditions at the Lazar equestrian park, about 1hr bus ride away from the city of Budapest. The horse show consisted of fast chariot ride, skill to use an extremely long whip, the skill to shoot arrow to target while standing with the horse moving really fast, riding a horse while standing, and even ladies side saddle ride too ;) Some participants were invited to try out the whip and hitting a bottle from a distance. A lady and a gentlemen tried it and was successful at the first/second attempt. They received a bottle of wine each. Besides that, there were also some live music and Bavarian dancing while we were enjoying our meal in the outdoors. A pity that hubbykun couldn’t experience it because it was a conference dinner event. Finally, this House of Parliament view is the same spot as the one we sent for ‘Salam Aidilfitri’ back in 2009.

Coming up on our next entry, the snowcap Alps.

Bluebells, Rapeseed Oil Fields & Forest of Dean

2011-07-10T04:31:00.001+01:00

event :: Bluebells woods + Rapeseed Oil fields 2011
date :: 8th + 9th May 2011
location :: West Woods, Lockeridge + Forest Of Dean, Glouchestershire, UK
theme :: Black + white & pink.

[1] It felt like it has been a while since I last updated this blog of ours. Full blame goes to hubbykun’s desktop that decided to crash on us after having diligently serving for over 4 years. I guess it has maximised it’s lifetime :P Hubbykun bought this desktop back in Malaysia and we shipped it here. We thought it will last for the duration we are here, but I guess that plan was too optimistic. So hubbykun had to buy a new laptop. He took quite a bit of time setting that up. Not to mention, having a 64-bit OS, turned out quite challenging to his patience level as some of the 32bit software didn't work as it should.

[2] Anyway, here comes our bluebells collection. I’m trusting hubbykun’s information when he said that bluebells marked the starting of spring. Back during the first year we were here, the Malaysian community here did organised a visit to the bluebells field. But hubbykun’s interest on flower field hasn’t been triggered back then. The love for flower fields actually started for Farah/Imran invited us to the lavender field in Snowshill. In the case of my dearest hubbykun, it was like a sleeping lion has been woken up. Since then, I think hubbykun had been borderline obsessed with flower fields photography :P

[3] Since Malaysia is summer all year, I found it interesting that the flowers bloom seasonally here in the UK. For example, snowdrop marked the end of winter, daffodils as start of spring, bluebells the start of summer, and followed by the other peak of summer flowers that somehow come one after another. It started with poppies, then lavender and finally sunflower. These flower hunting trips pretty much occupied all of our summer weekends :P

[4] This is the first year that we went bluebells hunting. It started right before we went to Greece for our Easter break when we did made a visit to Kew Gardens. Bluebells had started blooming there although they were still small in size and not at their peak yet. Bluebells have rather short time span, less than a month I think. We were afraid that they’ll be gone by the time we returned from Greece. Therefore, the weekend right after we got back, we continued our bluebells hunting, even though we were weary to the bones! All for the love of flowers :P

[5] There are a number of popular spots for natural bluebells fields. Thanks to power of the Net and hubbykun for doing the research. To help you get started, the list of some of Britain’s best bluebells fields can be found here. Hubbykun was really hyped too when he saw the bluebells pictures in the local newspaper when he was riding the bus on the way to the office.

[6] The first bluebells field that we went to was at West Woods, Lockeridge. The postcode that hubbykun got was slightly off to the entrance of West Woods. We had to ask some help from local people there. Luckily there were some hardworking people even though it was an early weekend morning and amidst the light rain. The West Woods primarily consist of tall Beech trees. I’m guessing this shade with minimal sunlight is optimum for bluebells to grow. Once the sun penetrates too much, ferns will take over though.

[7] There were actually a number of entrances for you to access the West Woods. The wood in itself totalled to a huge 800 acres in size! I kept reminding hubbykun not to get too excited walking in the woods for fear of getting lost and not finding our way back to the carpark. But everything turned out well Alhamdulillah. I was told by the Malaysians that have been here 2 years back that they were able to drive around the woods area (this was not the case when we were here). We read online and found out that there are two Sundays each year, which allows vehicles in the designated wider path routes inside the wood to give the elderly and the disabled an opportunity to visit this wondrous spectacle too. Very thoughtful huh? ;)

[8] There were no toilet facilities that can be found at the West Woods, so we went to the nearest town, known as Marlborough to look for one. Haha. I must say that the high street looked like an ancient town -suitable for movie set ;) There were flea market selling local goodies at the smack of the parking area. I had an enjoyable time choosing the £1 baskets of fruits and vegetables. The cherry tomatoes were extremely juicy and yummy!

[9] We then returned to the West Woods area and had our lunch before continuing on with the photography session. By this time, quite a number of people were there too. Probably also because the weather had improved considerably, bright and shiny ;) We came upon some nice thatched roof houses when we were lost looking for the West Woods, and came back here to get some pictures after we had our fill with the bluebells. The thatched roof houses were privately owned. Must be quite costly to maintain the house :P

[10] Near here too, we found this swing at the green patch between the road junctions. Because the swing looked quite sturdy, we even took some video shots here of us playing on the swing. The beautiful wild daisies and the surrounding thatched roof houses made me feel like in a fairy tale of sorts hahaha

[11] We also saw fields of lambs, cows and horses. I wanted to try petting the young baby lambs but they were not accessible, so had to content myself taking this older sheep instead. Although there were some ferocious looking ones with horns, so I didn’t dare get too near. Which remind me, we saw two wild deer chasing each other while we were in West Woods bluebells. Hubbykun got a little excited/loud when pointing them to me, that they quickly disappeared right after. Nooooooo!!!! :(

[12] We spent both of Saturday and Sunday for bluebells hunting since hubbykun has rented a car for the whole weekend anyway. We were given the Volkswagen Polo, which is voted as the 2010 best car of the year. Hubbykun was full of praises of how smooth the driving experience was and marvelled on the many sensors functions. We struggled on how to switch off the lights while driving though, and never figure it out until the very end..haha. Perhaps the car is too intelligent? :P

[13] On the second day, we invited Farah and Imran to join us for the bluebells trip. It was by pure accident that we ended all wearing pink on that day. The bluebells places that were in our list this second day were the ones in the areas of Forest of Dean. It turned out however that finding the wild bluebells flowers were rather challenging here. The first we tried was the bluebells scenic drive route, but there were very limited bluebells in sight :P

[14] We also had a lot of trouble looking for this popular spot of bluebells woods in Forest of Dean, known as Soudley. Mostly because we were depending on nearby postcodes. Postcode search in city areas work amazing, but if you’re in the woods with no postcodes assigned, it was tricky. Farah thought us how to use coordinates or latitude/longitude on the GPS instead. This was the first time using it (yup, tell me about it. We are a little backwards when it come to gadgets :P). Thanks to the 3G coverage and Farah’s iphone help, it made looking for the exact locations we wanted to get to, so much easier.

[15] But when reaching there, we saw that the bluebells were nearly dying. We met a man in Soudley who was walking his dog. He told us that we were 3 weeks late and that the bluebells here had passed the season. If we came at the same time last year, it would have been an amazing sight of bluebells carpet of blue, but because of sunny weather spring came a little early this year. He wished us luck to try again next year :P He also warned us to be careful of wild boar as he was chased last week when walking his dog around the area. Huhu oh boy did that bit certainly got our attention ;)

[16] We also went to the Forest of Dean tourist information centre, to get a more detailed map. There is a beautiful lake surrounded by woods near here, so of course we ended up spending some time for photo session here. A number of people come and go, as it is another popular spot for walking the dog. Some of the dogs got pretty excited and can be found taking a dip in the lake or chasing after the birds and ducks :P

[17] Since we weren’t too successful at locating bluebells, we content ourselves with other activities instead. One such activity was sheep-gazing? :P but the sheep poo didn’t really offer a great aroma, so we try our best not to hang out here too long :P kidding kidding.. Well, actually this is located right next to the rapeseed oil field that we made a stop while looking for the Symonds Yat Rock valley to have our picnic lunch.

[18] On the way from London when we got back from Greece, we saw a lot of rapeseed oil fields at sides of the motorway. The bright yellow fields were a marvellous sight to behold indeed. I wonder why we never noticed this before.

[19] We ended up driving up in circle when locating the Symonds Yat picnic area. Partly because we weren’t sure that the place is called Symonds Yat ‘Rock’. We were just following the postcode in the beginning. In the process of looking, we found the Symonds Yat leisure park (something like a recreational park for sports and games), as well as going into the motorway and having to drive quite a bit to look for a junction to u-turn :P

[20] So, just look for the ‘Symonds Yat Rock’ signboard, that can be found aplenty and marked in brown which meant that it is a place in interest. Upon reaching here, we were all starving and decided to have a picnic first before exploring the area. Luckily, there are ample of picnic tables at the Symonds Yat Rock area, surrounding the car park space so it was really convenient.

[21] Picnic lunch consisted of our modified curry puffs, and Farah’s tasty fried noodles and fish crackers (keropok)! So mouth-watering it was that hubbykun ended up finishing the noodles :P There was an extremely friendly dog from the table next to ours that decided to gave us a visit. Probably from all that wonderful food scent ;) We all ended up climbing on the chairs and picnic tables (Farah and I had done much earlier and the men were trying to brave it out at first) to avoid the dog before the owner took notice.. huhu it was a really funny sight.

[22] Having filled out tummies to our hearts content, we had a look the walking available walking route. The signage posted three routes, labelled by different colors (red, green and yellow). All the routes were pretty short though, so we decided to try all of them. We went to the red route first.

[23] Although the walk itself was fun to enjoy nature, but it wasn’t too good for photography. This is because of the rather thick trees. Upon reaching the viewpoint too, the fences were a little too high, so hubbykun could only take some panorama shots. Therefore not much picture here. We did found this green caterpillar and hubbykun took the opportunity to play with his macro lens. The green and yellow route are pretty close together, so we did that last.

[24] The breathtaking view of Symonds Yat Rock in the Wye Valley. It is also stated that this is a popular spot for bird watching. There is a wooden bridge connecting the hill from one side to the other, that is also disable-friendly. This observatory fort used to be the vantage point by Iron age inhabitants some 2000 years ago and now marked as an Ancient Monument. A nice coffee short can be found nearby.

[25] We wrapped up our day with a final bluebell hunting at Mitcheldean. We asked a number of locals for direction, but none seemed to know. We came across a lady driving here and she excitedly asked us to follow us to the bluebells near her house. Turned out that there were not so much bluebells, not to our expectation at least :P Nevertheless, it was an extremely kind gesture on her part and we were really grateful for the help ;)

[26] We also manage record some of the highlight of the trip on a video. Enjoy!