19Juli to 16 August

Portugal Trip 

At the beginning of August, Deb and I traveled to lovely Portugal to catch some sun and some beach. A beautiful arid country that is not quite finished, but we eagerly anticipate how it ends up when it is:) Click here for more:

Heat wave in London

After our relax in Portugal, I called in to see Nik and his nicely completed flat. I looked forward to sleeping on a nice new sofa bed in his freshly renovated unit, however things weren't quite finished. After helping with some late night renovations we slept on some not so comfy carpet:)

 After our big night/ morning working on the couch it was time to head to the park to take in some of the glorious sun shine. Believe it or not London had some scorching heat! We even had a little bbq, using a dodgy disposable unit. After a couple of hours our sausages were sufficiently black! 

 Like every time in London, Some drinking was in order so we hit the town. 

Nik has been doing a little renovation, and has had some great help from Magic. As you can see magic is a hard worker although he has a relaxed attitude to work attire(top left):)

To deal with the abnormal heat in London we made our way to 'Ibiza' in Brockwell park across the road from Nik's place. It was like walking into a different world, from the usual London atmosphere. Many scantily clad people making the most of the sun.

36 - degrees. Pretty bloody hot!

Deutsche Course 

After stumbling around with very poor German for the last 4 months, I went to an intense Deutsche Course in Munich, which was meant to go for a couple of weeks.

The above photos show some of the many great people I met at the course. They came from all places around the world including France, US, Italy, the UK and Spain. 

Below and above are some photos around Munich. The Beer gardens were a great place to sit back and drink away all those German word's you learnt during the day. 

For my birthday (fortunately know one knew this:) ), a few friends from the German course and I headed down the Salzburg in Austria, whose most famous resident is the long dead "Motzart". It is quite a nice city. It was really great to hear from all those people in Aus who gave me a call/SMS. Thank you!

On the left is a shot of Arrigo, Emily and Laurent at a castle with a great view of Salzburg. In the middle is a picture of Motzart's Gebursthaus (place of birth). And finally, it is good to see that even on the graves over here you can make use of your qualifications. Here is an Engineer who found his final resting place.

In the second week of the Deutsch course I started to have some pretty wild temperatures (hard to tell because of the bloody heat wave) and gained a few unsightly spots. I was a little concerned,  so I went to see a German doctor who informed me most likely I had "Small Pox" and had to stay away from people for the next 7 days! I jumped on the internet to find out more about it and found a number of sites that stated "Small pox - fatal in most cases", "Small pox - killed 36 royal monarchs", "Small pox - could be used as a weapon of mass destruction" and thought maybe the doctor translated it wrong. When I saw the doctor next time he was embarrassed and quite amused, as he had miss translated and had meant to of said chicken pox:)

Fortunately I had great help particularly from Laurent, Emily and Arrigo from the course, otherwise it would of been very difficult to have a speedy recovery. Thank you guys!