Tag Archives: summer

Travel

Luxembourg

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Luxembourg was a fun weekend where we didn’t have much planned. It was not a long weekend, so it was a pretty tight weekend trip, but it’s such a small town that there’s not so much to see anyway.

We had also just found out about Kay’s acceptance to INSEAD and we were riding the short wave of joyful anticipation before his planning stress set in.Something about city trips always makes me feel extra romantic, especially during these last months with Kay. I want to soak up this time in a bottle and remember it later when we are alone and down.I planned the Luxembourg trip ages back because I wanted to go somewhere for my birthday weekend and Luxembourg happened to have some affordable tickets then.

It did happen to be one of the hottest weekends, if not the hottest weekend in Switzerland/Europe of the whole year. It was 37ºC/99ºF and unlike Switzerland, Luxembourg does not have an abundance of open bathing opportunities like Switzerland. We nearly melted!

I asked the hotel staff where they go to cool down and they pointed us in the direction of two indoor swimming pools. Other than that, all the rivers/ponds/bodies of water outdoor were not for swimming. We figured it wasn’t worth going inside, so we just enjoyed the radiating heat after all our cold weather and accepted that we would be pretty sweaty by the end of the trip.

Luxembourg was small enough that we ended up going to the same tourist destinations as the other couples visiting the city. We ran into the same folks quite a few times at historical sites, museums, and even pub cafes.

It was great on Saturday to have a bit of “us” relaxation time in the park in the shade. Time like that is important to relish!

I was also into photographing almost all the nature.

Down below there was a couple getting married on Saturday. The bride had a traditional white gown on and I can only imagine how much she was sweating in her dress. It was killer heat.

I thought the city was pretty charming for a weekend trip. It had a fair amount of hills to walk up and down and a strange mix of old and new architecture.

Here I am doing my favorite thing… ruining Kay’s shot. I learned from the best himself. 😉

We stayed at a Radisson Park Inn because I wanted to splurge a little for my birthday. The hotel was alright, but it was not in the best area of town and I was a little disappointed in the quality for price factor for the hotel.  We had a couple times at night where we were nervous getting back to the hotel because it was a rough area.

Below we visited Bock Casemates, the fortification around the old city.It was a little cooler out of the sun at least. 🙂

Sunday afternoon we went through a small brewery district in search of restaurants open for early dinner before our flight back.

All I really wanted to do at this point was sit down and enjoy a cold drink.

It’s always about a thousand times nicer to visit a city with great weather. It leaves such an impression on your opinion of the place.At the end of our trip we were tired, hot, and sweaty. We had thoroughly enjoyed the heat even without a nice dip in water.

As the first city trip after Helsinki where we lost Kay’s mother, it was nice to have a successful trip, even if things are very, very different these days.

 

Brazil, Travel

Tough Life of Holiday Planning

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Kay and I have some extreme first world problems: it’s almost impossible to plan our five weeks holiday this year due to his school, army, and work schedule.

Yep. Just let that sink in and then feel free to smack me silly for complaining, but bear with me.

Since it is our last 5 months together, I really want to maximize our holiday and time together traveling. I also really wanted to cross something big off of our “must see” list before we are broke from school and later broke from kids.

All that in mind, once we finally found out about his school, we realized looking at our calendar that our Christmas holiday to Brazil will be cut a week short due to INSEAD’s pre-course in December, which Kay is not missing, and classes starting in January. Then he has the army in September for three weeks and any time we were looking to fit a two or even just one week holiday in, the week was ruined with mandatory work days for Kay. Booo.

And all of the other weeks that are semi-free during the week, we already have non-canceable plans on the weekend, making it hard to maximize a week of holiday when we can only leave on Sunday instead of Friday evening. Womp womp. None of you are feeling sorry for me, are you? 🙂

All of this meant that suddenly we needed to plan a cramped week holiday with non-flexible dates in three weeks time in August, high season in Europe. That limits our options quite a bit. Where are we going for the rest of the year, besides our Porto weekend trip?

Montenegro:

(Image from Trish Hartmann on Flickr)

I tried to convince Kay that we should use our one week holiday to go on a safari, but without two weekends book-ending our trip, it would be a little short for that. I also tried to convince him to go to Egypt for diving, but aside from tickets being really expensive, they just had another bombing in Cairo and Kay doesn’t want to risk it.

Montenegro was not anywhere on my list of places to go, but it was one of the only places we found tickets under 300 for when we were searching in high season. Three weeks is a very short time to plan during tourist season and some of the flats I was looking at got booked up as I was searching. I’m still not sure how the holiday will go, but I’m looking forward to a week off soon and seeing if the diving is at all worthwhile around here.

 Machu Picchu:

(Image from Ken Bosma on Flickr)

Since our week holiday is kind of a cop out and not really marking anything off our “list” and we will go to Brazil at Christmas, I really wanted to go somewhere that we’ve always talked about. Machu Picchu has been on my travel list for years now, probably at least a decade, and we are finally doing it. I wanted to go last year at Christmas, but we chose Australia instead when we learned that autumn is a better time to go to Peru.

I hope we don’t push the rainy season too much, but we’ve got two weeks. Again, planning was tricky because we are in Paris the weekend we leave for Kay’s welcome weekend at school (spouses welcome!) so we actually have to fly out of Paris and then back to Zurich. We still aren’t sure if we are going to bring our business casual attire with us to Peru or not… TBC.

Rio de Janeiro:

(Image from Higor de Padua Vieira Neto on Flickr)

Brazil, Brazil. It’s been five years since I’ve been, and while Kay has been on work trips and had the luck to visit his family, we’ve talked about going for Christmas for a long time. In fact, we wanted to go this year with my MIL and FIL together, but they booked a cruise instead! We were just asking ourselves if we should still go before Kay’s school or try and do another year later when my MIL was retired, but once she passed away, Kay felt a very strong urge to be with his mother’s family at Christmas and show me the family farm before it is too late.

Last time we went to Brazil, we visited Curitiba, Iguassu Falls, São Luís, Barreirinhas, Caburé, Manaus, and the Amazon. I complained to Kay that we didn’t even get to Rio or a proper Brazilian beach, so several months ago he booked a hotel for NYE in Rio on the beach. Let’s hope the booking went through because it can be very expensive to have such a hotel!

Planning tickets to Brazil is also pretty tricky because Kay’s pre-course starts in December and then classes are in January right after new year. Somewhere in there, he needs time to move to France, so I convinced him that it is a better idea to move to France for his pre-course already and then fly out of France.

The question is whether we will manage to fly together, because I will still be working in Switzerland while he starts school. This makes for a lot of complicated plane ticket purchasing!

So…. his MBA is already complicating things quite a bit, but so has his recent job where he has several days a month required to be in the office. Those random chunks of military time don’t help either. 😉

If you had five weeks holiday, how would you break it up and where would you go?

Switzerland

Enjoying all things summer

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In some ways, this summer feels like the last summer because next year Kay will be in a different country. Ever since the temperatures peaked to HOT, we’ve been spending night after night outside enjoying fresh air and everything gorgeous Switzerland has to offer in the summer, from swimming in the lakes and rivers to climbing in the mountains.

(Walking past the Sihl river on a warm night.)

Every day it’s warm enough at lunch, I also head to the lake for a quick dip and swim in the lake. It’s really heaven on Earth.Now that Kay is “in” his school, the stress of applications is over and we are really trying to maximize our time together.

(Bürkliplatz, on the way to Bade Enge for my birthday)

For instance, after we took our second climbing course in June, we decided to order a set of express (quick draws) and some carabiners. Now with our other gear, we have everything we need to head to the mountains and climb all on our own for the rest of the summer. 🙂My cute boy on my birthday. We probably won’t see each other on either of our birthdays next year.Evening sun.Below we were swimming at Obere Letten, a public swimming bath at the Limmat river in Zurich where you can jump into the river, take a float or swim, and then pop out. We stopped by shortly on my birthday before dinner and movies. It was glorious.

Sushi in the park near Limmatplatz. Everyone was playing in the park and enjoying themselves. With the warm weather, there’s really a lively feel about the city.

I’m also obsessed with all these flowers planted around many towns around Zurich and in the city. I didn’t notice them last year, so they must be new, but they are beautiful.

Between all the swimming, weekend activities, socializing, and planning for the future, life is very, very busy at the moment!

Are you enjoying summer in your city to the fullest?

Home

Breaking our brand new retractable awnings

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During our first days back at work after the move, Kay noticed that from the hours of 6-8pm (you know, when we get home from work) the retractable awnings were doing close to nothing to shade us while we tried to eat on our balcony.

The sun was setting and covering the already sun-baked tiles in a blaze of fiery light. And that perturbed Kay as he tried to eat his dinners and lay in his hammock.

It bothered him so much that in our first full work week in the flat, he brought home tools from work to try and turn the awnings at a lower angle so that they would block out more sun. This involved a lot of lifting (on my part) and cursing on Kay’s part.

It was easy to lower the first side, but he was having trouble making the awnings lay straight. They were lopsided. Kay went to fix the awning on the right and he could not for the life of him get the awning to lower. And this all happened to be during the sunniest time on the balcony.

Meanwhile, my arms were getting incredibly sore and I was increasingly frustrated that we were spending time messing with the awnings and possibly, very expensively, breaking them instead of spending time organizing our very messy new home. We were both really worried that Kay had somehow broken them.

We left them lopsided for the evening and went to bed defeated.

Below you can actually see that the flats above us have awnings that come out and then flip down to really block the sun coming in. They didn’t do them like this on the big terrace level because we obviously have a lot more walking area, but we were a little envious of our smaller-balcony neighbors enjoying a shady dinner.

After a few days and some more calls to the awning business that told Kay this was an “easy fix” he figured out how it worked to fix the awnings. We got one side down as low as we wanted, but by then it was too dark to see if the shade was worth the cost of not being able to walk under the awning anymore.

We waited another day until I took these pictures and you could see that the shade below is a lot more than it was before, where it was almost non-existent. But to Kay, it still wasn’t enough shade and having to duck under the awning in the middle of the balcony was a huge waste of terrace real estate.

So you know what we did? We got back out there and put the awnings back up to their original spots. (Ugh, more lifting… I’m such a weenie!)

I stood there holding the awnings, my arms burning… wondering why we did anything in the first place, but some things you don’t figure out until you try them out.

It took awhile, but we got both awnings level with each other again. They are still great during the daytime, but it’s clear that with our “sunny balcony” we will have to invest in some other sun blocking solution elsewhere on the balcony so that we can enjoy some shadier dinners. And thankfully we didn’t really break the awnings. I don’t want to imagine how much they would have cost to repair or replace.

And you won’t find me complaining about how sunny it is… I’m glad for it! And I’m sure we will appreciate the sun more when the temperatures dip down lower towards the autumn. It will make the balcony more useable during the year than otherwise.

Did you ever have any big “Why did we do that??” moments with house projects?

Switzerland

Summer in Switz

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A couple weeks ago, temperatures reached 90ºF/30ºC and summer finally hit Switzerland, so for the past couple weekends I hit the lake for grilling and went swimming at lunch every day at work. It was glorious!

China garden exploded with people coming out to enjoy the sun and I even found myself with a moderate tan after a week!

Is there any better place to enjoy your lunch? It was like going on vacation every day at noon.


Sadly Kay was in Mexico during most of the nice weather and when he came back we were starting to experience lots of summer thunderstorms. But we still spent several days last week going to the local Badi after work to swim and lounge in the sun.

In typical Swiss fashion, thunderstorms rolled in for the weekend, clouded up our weekend in Paris and when we came back the temperature had dropped to a meek 53ºF/12ºC. Ouch!

So… that was summer. Maybe it will make a return, but I’m not holding my breath. What’s worse is that I burned my shoulders slightly and it’s already peeling off. There goes my summer glow!

How’s the summer weather where you are?