christmas presents

please go to Tsunami relief.
or even better, unicef.

gorgeous sunsets

are one of my favourite things, and zurich was extra lucky tonight. there was only saba and me still around in the lab though, so we felt very lucky to be able to sneak out into the snow to enjoy ourselves for a few minutes.

happy christmas!

so i was off to visit shell in portsmouth (not southhampton!) for christmas. it was nice to get out of zurich for a bit - had been a while. and of course great to catch up with shell for at least a long long-weekend.


christmas was pretty fun, but we got out of portsmouth as soon as we could, and headed to brighton for a few days. brighton had quite the party town reputation, being the hometown of fatboy slim and all. and it did actually seem quite cool. certainly much more so than zurich.





although the weather was spectacular for mid-winter...


...the english really do have things to learn about beaches.

micro party!

the annual microbiology christmas party was on monday night, and what a fun occasion it was. the first years at the institute always get to organise things, and since i was the only native english speaker amongst them, i was dumped with being mc for the night, which turned out to be fantastic fun! here are a selection of piccies from the later parts of the evening.

jo's adventures in zurich

jo was nice enough to want to check out zurich on the weekend, and it was lots of fun having some aussie company for a bit. the weather turned out to be not the most fun for us, so we didn't get to go up uetliberg to check out the view over the alps, so spent most of saturday hanging around drinking coffee and enjoying a bit of darren and the cats.



sunday morning greeted us with at least a 10cm dump of snow, and although it was rather quickly melting away, it was very pretty!! we managed to drag ourselves out into the cold and rather damp afternoon for a wander around the lovely honggerberg forest.

EARTHQUAKE IN ZURICH!

that's right, early sunday morning i was shaken from my slumber by a 5.2 richter scale earthquake! most excitement.

francesco was up visiting from milan for the weekend, and we'd just gotten home from the nelsen and were peacefully sleeping when i was woken up by what i thought was a truck rumbling past outside, along with quite a bit of a jolt to the bed. but then it all stopped and i was quite happy to go back snoozing. only today reading 20 minuten did i realize that it was in fact a real live earthquake. they seem to be lots of fun, as long as no buildings collapse.

the rest of the weekend was great fun - cool catching up with francesco about 7 years since i last saw him when he was an exchange student living with us in sunnybank. all sorts of memories and thinking about the future - he's of sciencey bent as well, and working out where to do his phd next year. it's such a good problem to have too many options.