Engaged!

While we were on holiday in Lisbon Nathanael proposed to me on Valentine's day. My answer was yes of course!

Here's a pic of my ring, that Nathanael chose:) It's at the jewellers getting resized at the moment. Apparently Nate's pinky finger is still bigger than my ring finger. haha

We won't be back in Perth till the end of June this year so we're saying May 1st next year as the date. Hopefully I can get everything organised by then as I'm still organising our travels for this year.

And here's a picture of the gorgeous flowers my work mates bought me when they found out the news. They are absolutely stunning and they smell amazing. The entire flat smells like flowers!

Portugal Pt. 2 - Sintra

So there's going to be a whole lot of photos in this post; you have been warned.

Sintra is a picturesque town close enough to Lisbon to be a tourist destination for just about everyone looking for a day trip to do while on holidays. Even the Portuguese visit Sintra. Lord Byron even wrote a poem about it. It's that good.

Below you can see the building that is the icon of Sintra: the Sintra National Palace

But that's not what I loved about Sintra. There's a couple of castles up on the hill and stuff, but they're not what I fell in love with either. The Quinta da Regaleira is an absolutely amazing neo-romantic palace and garden full of absurd follies, astonishing architecture, sinister alchemical allusions, a smattering of Templar and Masonic references and just a hint of eccentricity.
This is the main house as seen from the current tourist entrance:
And this is a view from the inside of the Labyrinthine Grotto, one of the many grottoes and follies in the gardens.

And one from the outside so you can appreciate the artificial lake outside the grotto:The Gate of the Guardians. This is a folly which guards the entrance to an underground tunnel with a mysterious destination that I will reveal later on in the post...


A closer picture of The Guardians.
Opposite the Guardians is the Terrace of Celestial Worlds and reservoir. The Terrace has its own homage to the Moorish ruins on the hill that overlooks Sintra (hiding behind a tree in this pic unfortunately):Now, the other end of the underground tunnel that is guarded by the Guardians. The Initiation Well (Dum-dum-dah!!) a 27 metre inverted tower with 9 levels of spiral staircase, a huge 'Templar/Ordo Christo' cross at the bottom and replete with not 1 but in fact 2 underground tunnels (the one from the guardians meets halfway up, the one from the bottom has two exits...) that were once the home to introduced colonies of bats. Unfortunately the pictures don't do it justice. Oh and did I mention that there is a hidden entrance through a revolving stone door in a dolomen?

I honestly could go on and on about all the iconography that is spattered around the estate (I haven't even posted pictures of the chapel!) but I fear it would get tiresome too quickly. Suffice it to say, that I'm a sucker for the eccentric, the esoteric and am prone to the flights of fancy that the builder of this estate must have also been subject to. The imagination and vision simply takes my breath away. No doubt I'll get around to posting more on the Quinta da Regaleira at another point.

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Portugal Pt. 1 - Lisbon

Impressive, no? This is the 'Padrão dos Descobrimentos' in Belem, an outer suburb of Lisbon. It's a monument to the age of discovery. I thought it'd be a nice way to start a post.

Well as you may, or may not, know Laura and I picked Portugal as our destination for mid-term break. There's a lot of photos, so I thought instead of just picking a few, I'd pick a few from each city/town we stopped at and split it up into a few posts.

Up on the hill you can see S. Jorge castle. It's on one of the high hills around Lisbon and has variously been the sight of settlement by the Iberians, Visigoths, Romans, Moors and Christian Reconquistas. We went up there and there are some great city views to be had, check Laura's Flickr stream for those.

This is the Elevador de Santa Justa, designed by a student of Gustav Eiffel. It's kinda steam-punk with the neo-Gothic arches, and is really more of a tourist attraction than a practical public transport these days. There's a walkway from the top which is hidden in the photo, and some great views too.

This is one of the more practical 'elevadors'; there are three of these funicular railways in Lisbon. I think Laura did a great job with the lighting in this photo. She's quite the budding photographer ;-)

And here she is from a lookout near Bairro Alto, with the castle and city in the background. (linguistic aside/quiz question: bairro is related to the root of our word 'borough', so what's the translation of that part of Lisbon? It's easy I know, I'll try and find something harder for you next post.):

Snow Day!!!

I think this photo pretty much tells the whole story. Apparently London is incapable of doing anything when there's a few inches of snow on the ground. I must say that this photo isn't outside my school, but it's one of the 1000 schools that was closed in London today. In addition to the schools, all the buses were cancelled this morning (though a very limited service has been restored this afternoon), and all but two of the tube lines are closed also. Basically, we stayed at home because we couldn't go anywhere.

Well, we did go out for a walk. Or in Laura's case, a slip ;-)


But here's her after she regained her feet. This is a street around the corner from us.


No snowmen today though: we couldn't quite get the hang of rolling the very light snow into anything like a decent size snowball. I settled for making a snow angel instead.