Happy New Year!

To you all! Hope you're having great celebrations, bringing in the New Year in style. J and I will be dining at Naan in Bariloche. Hopefully it'll live up to the good recommendations it's had.

See you in 2010 :)

Marie Xx

And we're off!

Tonight J and I fly to Argentina. For a mere 16 hours we will be airbound heading across the Atlantic to a far away land. Hopefully there it'll be warm, sunny, exciting and relaxing.

The e-mails have been very quiet for the last few days and I have enjoyed feeling like I'm relaxing ready to go away. We had a mad dash to get the house in order and all the packing done and now when this is posted we shall (hopefully) be taking off above London. Here's also hoping that Heathrow wasn't too hideous to get through.

Hope everyone has been enjoying their time off and are looking forward to their New Years Eve celebrations! xx

Happy Christmas one and all!

Well here we are on Christmas Eve, and how time has flown. So I shall keep this short and sweet. To start a most lovely Mandarin Duck I found in St James park yesterday. I just love these ducks, so pretty and proud.

And to finish these winter leaves, no snow yesterday but it was cold! And the leaves had that lovely lovely frosting.

Anyhoo, all the best for your Christmas breaks. Enjoy, eat, drink and be merry! Xx

Time marching on

I cannot believe it's almost Christmas already. This time last year I was at home with my parents and sisters and meeting my little nephew for the first time. I was so excited about my impending wedding and concerned about the size of my waist.

This year I am at work until the last possible point. Very excited about our upcoming Argentina trip and still concerned about the size of my expanding waist. Someone said yesterday that apparently it is common to put on 1 stone in your first year of marriage. Something it seems I am giving a good shot at.

However for now I shan't concern myself with such trivial matters!

For the days are now beginning to get longer, there's a new year marching inwards, full of hopes and dreams. And memories of the year just past to store away.

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank you all for reading and following my words and thoughts. It means the world to me to get comments and exchange thoughts with you all. And of course I love reading your blogs too and 'getting to know you'. Hopefully we can continue this too in the new year!

Tweet, tweet - at long last

So I've finally bitten the bullet and decided to join Twitter. It's been a long time coming I know, and I'm not sure why I've resisted so long but I am now going to give it a shot. I can be found at Wifeinthecity if you are interested. But to be honest it'll take me a little while to get used to it so apologies but it is incredibly boring at the moment.

Therefore if you are on Twitter can you either find me and let me know so I can follow you or leave your username in the comments and I will find you so I can follow you. And of course if you'd like to follow me I'd be delighted :)

See you over there!

M x

Why oh why BA

My holiday is on the precipice of being ruined. Our flights are booked with British Airways and yesterday was the overwhelming vote to strike over the holiday period when we're supposed to be flying to Buenos Aires. For sure strike while I'm there, rendering it impossible for me to return. But before I've even got there?!

And here I'm going to be controversial, but I think they're greedy, chancing wotsits who think striking for two weeks will obviously be a good thing for a company which lost £300m in the first half of the year. Eeejits. They already get paid more than any other cabin crew! Grrrr...

Here's hoping Willie Walsh can sort this out and get me to Argentina on time!

And on to the next one...

Last night was fun. The skating was pretty, although not on my behalf, more wobbly there but it's beautiful skating around at Somerset House as the light fades. My only complaint would be that there are a few too many people on the rink but you can't win them all!

Then glammed up we went off to Orso. No photos yet I'm afraid, a colleague was taking them and didn't bring in her camera today. But when I have pictures that are shareable I promise I shall share. Our meal was lovely, Orso is a very good restaurant with great service, good food and lovely wines to choose from. Expensive, but then I wasn't paying this time :) Plus it's quite a cosy restaurant so one I would recommend for an intimate dinner with a loved one.

I left at the right time, drunk but not awfully so, happily drunk shall we put it. Got home on the bus to a very drunk J. This morning neither of us were so pretty!

And tonight we are celebrating Christmas with our friends. It shall be another night of revelry which I'm not sure my body can cope with but we'll see.

Hopefully your Friday has been more productive than mine. Although one final tip, Itsu Detox Zinger is just the best thing when you have a hangover, ginger lime and apple all in a lovely drink. Yummy!

Have lovely wintery weekends. M x

It's party time!

Tonight is our work Xmas do. We're going skating at Somerset House and then off for dinner. I've never done the outside skating in London thing so hopefully it'll be good fun, sure it will. And then for dinner the theme was glam so I have purchased myself a new dress from French Connection. More on that later, hopefully accompanied by pictures!

Let's see how I feel tomorrow...

Kai Mayfair - Review

As a follow up to my last post I thought I should tell you about Kai. We went there because I had won a voucher for it in a raffle and we like to go to nice restaurants to celebrate our anniversary. So this year it worked out as Kai. The restaurant is nicely decorated, somehow it still feels Chinese but obivously upmarket. We had a big table which was kind of separate from the rest, although in some ways that was good.

We figured since we had the voucher that we didn't need to worry too much about how much we spent, so J had soft shelled crab for his starter and I had steamed scallop and king prawn. Our starters were both lovely. They came out at different times but this was fine as we had been warned. And both were dishes you wouldn't cook yourself at home, which always makes the restaurant experience feel more worthwhile.

Then on to our mains, I had beef in a pepper sauce and J lamb. If I'm honest I was not so impressed with our mains. My beef's sauce tasted a little shop bought and wasn't great and J's lamb just wasn't much of anything.

I then figured I would push the boat out and have a pudding. I had the 'not to be missed' pudding which involved pumpkin cream, something I should have been wary of from the start. Again, nice enough but not amazing. Especially for the price.

Which takes me to my next point, this place is expensive, starters start at around £15 and go upwards and upwards. Mains are of course more expensive. Now I don't mind expensive when I feel like it's worth it. And I think our starters were, but for the mains and pudding I felt less happy with the amount it cost. Although I knew the ingredients were of good quality for that much I expected something more amazing.

However the service was superb, very nice staff, nice atmosphere.

So in summary I don't think I'd recommend it, I think it's just a little too expensive for what we had. If you really want to go and spend lots of money then have the starters and avoid the pudding I had and you'll probably have a lovely dinner!

A long long time ago...

J and I met and I didn't like him. And then we met again and we got talking and I thought now here's a nice intelligent kind of chap who likes food and wine. And we got to know each other. On November 1st 2002 we kissed. And on December 4th 2002 we 'officially' became a couple. Yes my dear readers, 7 years ago to the day J and I got together.

It wasn't a fairytale coming together, I was lying on his bed in halls musing to myself that since we were acting like a couple we might just as well be one. And from thenceforce we were M&J.

I originally went into the relationship thinking, why not? I'd never really had a proper boyfriend before and just wanted to know what it was like. And here was someone who strangely enough was willing to be my boyfriend, who I liked. So off we went. I never imagined that seven years down the line we'd be married. I thought it would last a few months, I'd go through my first break-up and move on stronger and ready for the next person. But it didn't work like that. The days passed, they turned into months, then years and we were still together, still happy with each other. Still happy in our relationship. We've never broken up and got back together. We've never really been close to breaking up. And truth be told I'm not sure how we've got this far without big hiccups, little ones of course, but nothing big.

So tonight we shall be dining at Kai, to celebrate this time spent together. And to toast to the next seven years. And I shall be thinking about how we can make the next seven as wonderful as the last seven.

So here's to relationships and love, because today I feel like it. Happy weekend's to you all. M xxx

Kazakhstan Part II

I think I may have promised more on Kazkahstan so here goes. We stayed in the Radisson in Astana, a five star hotel (lucky us) which was huge and lovely. My room was on the 12th floor and the first thing I thought when I walked into it was how huge the bed was. I tried showing in the photo below it's size, truly you could have fitted three people in there, should you want to. You might also notice my travel companion keeping the bed warm. As hotel rooms go it was good, well equipped, underfloor heating in the bathroom, giant shower, good TV, coffee and tea facilities and even an iron and ironing board. So I was fairly impressed. Plus going back to the bed, it was soooo comfortable.

So then I thought I'd share another view from my room, the space in Kazakhstan was one thing which really struck me. It's just on another scale. As the 9th largest country in the world with a population of around 15m the population density is vastly different to the UK. And you can see this in the cities, with huge roads and big buildings. Beyond the city is the steppe. A flat landscape which goes as far as the eye can see, without coming across anything else. Also because the city is relatively much smaller the sky is darker and bigger. You can really see the stars, feel free and look up in wonder.

On a lighter note the hotel had their Christmas decorations up when we arrived. I couldn't help but pose with the life sized bears they had in reception. My mama would hate these bears, papa probably would like them. And me I stroked them whenever I walked past, hello bear!

I have some more city pictures to share. Another post soon hopefully!