Since Haydens so much as abandoned our site, I'll take it upon myself to tell you some little highlights of the tour, while I have internet (which is only for one more day!).

6 of us went out for a fabulous spanish/italian meal last night in Valencia city and saw the amazing historical centre all lit up at night. The night was so refreshing and ripped us out of our canteen-food depression. Today I made it to the beach for the first time (it's only 15 minutes walk away!) and topped up on vitamin E, at last.

Tonight we're playing our first concert in Denia, which is an outdoors event, apparently. Should be very interesting acoustics.. Tomorrow we're off to Barcelona then fly from there to Cyprus. So the adventure starts!

Saganaki.. here I come

It's intense, as expected, and to pair things off evenly I managed to get the most drunk I remember being last night after going into town with the gang. Work hard, party hard.. Good thing this only happens twice a year. Not sure I could survive any more.

We hosted our first ever couch surfers last week - Kat and Norm from Virginia. They were great fun to have around, and we had a lovely couple of days together. We showed them around our territory (Greenwich park, Cutty Sark, etc) and enjoyed a great British "pub grub" meal - fish and chips, bangers and mash! They also had a laugh at Haydenon his unicycle.

In other news, my hair is different, again. I had another Tony&Guy Academy trip, and this time said the right thing when asked what I wanted done: something funky and different. They don't need to be told twice! I was put in the advanced group and given a free head of colour, so I'm not complaining, except that my appointment was for 1:45, and I finally left at about quarter to 6.

This comes with a warning: read at your own risk! We take no responsibility if you become blind, fall asleep and slide off your chair or tear all your hair out.

SO, over the long weekend we went to Paris! Firstly, congratulations to the Eurostar on the British side. To get to Waterloo from our house is a single train ride, 15 minutes max. Everything's automagic - tickets checked, through passport control, on the train and gone in 15 minutes! It was a seamless journey, and the best bit was that we arrived at Gare du Nord - 4 minutes walk from our destination, chez Rozenblums. We indulged in some lovely home cooked french food before heading off to our quarters, in the basement of Charles Rozenblum's gallery.

We did an obscene amount of walking on the trip, managing to limit ourselves to approximately 1 metro journey each day. Saturday morning, armed with pain au raisins (we were too late for croissants.. at 9:30am!) we headed to Notre Dame, via the Georges Pompidou Centre. We then got lost (intentionally) and walked through the gorgeous streets of the right bank, finding our way eventually to that big thing called the Eiffel Tower. We decided to spend a good portion of the afternoon just looking at the thing, while savouring the delights of an impromptu picnic - fresh bread, saussison, camembert cheese and of course, red wine. Staggering back along the river, we came accross the Musée D'Orsay, with the intention of going in, but saw the snake queue folded four times over and gave up. With the wine taking effect (on Hayden) we went up to Sacre Coueur, Monmartre where Haydenpromptly fell asleep on the grass. That night we went out to some street festival with the Rozenblums. I asked them what it was about, and their answer amounted to "Nothing. Who needs a reason to party?".

Sunday we went straight to the bakery to make sure we had our fill of croissants. We got some fabulous fresh ones which we ate by the canals, before heading to the Marais, where we went to the Picasso museum. The museum was fantastic, small enough to see everything in an hour (before museum-headache sets in). When we were having coffee in the garden (which Haydenordered.. in french!), a middle-aged Australian couple approached us, apparently having recognised my Australian "rip curl" jacket, and shared an eye-watering flashback of when they were tripping around Europe, going to museums like this one when they were our age. How sweet!

We then went to Rue des Rosiers in the Marais, but not without stopping off at an amazing artisan chocolaterie, which had thin freshly-made sheets of amazingly flavoured chocolate! The ones we walked away with were white chocolate with exciting bits like pistacios and walnuts, dark chocolate laced with orange chocolate, and a thrilling dark chocolate laced with chilli chocolate. Anyway, we strolled through the Jewish pocket of Paris and had an awesome falafel "experience". It felt like being in Israel - people speaking a mix of French and Hebrew, especially with the chaos and noisy atmosphere. It was a good, cheap meal and the homemade lemonade was superb.

We tried to walk it off going to meet Maud at Montpanasse, but got distracted by the famous Bertillon ice cream, opposite Notre Dame. We had a Paris 'moment' with our rich ice creams, listening to a street busker play the pianola. Haydenwas then roped into a street performer's act which was funny, especially the bit where he was asked his age, then ordered to cover his crotch while the artist juggled sickles on top of him. We had a nice afternoon with Maud, and showed her around Paris (strange?). We went to the Luxembourg gardens, which were packed , then relaxed at a cafe near the gallery.

That night we were planning on going to a wonderful restaurant that I had experienced on a previous visit to Paris. As it turned out, it was closed that night, so we wandered around trying to find somewhere to eat. We stumbled upon the "Pop In" which I'd read about as a little slice of Camden in Paris. We went in for a drink and laughed at all the french youth trying to dress like britpop fans. There was free live music - open mic downstairs and it was lots of fun being mistaken for locals (well, it felt like it) listening to French people sing in a very nasally English! It being about 11:30pm when we finally decided to get some dinner, we came across this cute bistro/pub called "Chez Prune", where they served us the last two plates they had for the night - fromage and chacutrie. Needless to say it was fabulous, again paired with gorgeous red wine. Mmm.

Monday morning we visited my cousin Lucy near the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter. We had a good walk around that area, then she took us somewhere where she does some DJ-ing, which was not so pretty. We left her to go to La Defense and see the "Grande Arche", which we were taken by on our last trip to Paris. We also enjoyed spotting some more cows from a Paris-wide cow display which was taking place. There's a great view down Champs Elysee of the Arc de Triophe from La Defense.

Back at Garre du Nord, we easily spotted the British waiting area, because of the enormous and neat queue of people. Citing problems between the French and English passport control, we left Paris 45 minutes late, in typical French style. We brought back a bag full of french chocolate, a V-shaped sunburn (from my rip-curl jacket) and blistery feet - remenants of the wonderfully enjoyable, eye-opening long weekend we spent in Paris!

...thanks Thea and Bruce

I wonder whether any children born today will grow up and be held as prophets of the dark lord. That's right, today's date is 06/06/2006 or 666 if you're creative enough.

It's been a fair while since I posted last, just been fairly busy I suppose. Elisse and I went to Paris last weekend, the trip there and back on the Eurostar was a birthday present from Thea and Bruce. We stayed with friends of Elisse's family, well actually in the basement of their gallery, which is really cool. It was great to see Paris outside of winter, the weather was pretty good, Elisse even managed to get sunburnt.

I've started getting into some programming again recently. I've started again on my Robot Emulator, but this time in Objective-C, which makes a lot more sense to how it works. The last version was in C and was mainly based around the visual element, which was a 3D representation of various robots in OpenGL which could be controlled in either joint-space or on the cartesian plane. With this version I plan to get all the kinematics (and hopefully dynamics) into it's own class and then build the visual element on top of that as a pure representation of data, rather than the base of the program. I brought back my two robotics books from Australia, including one of my favourite technical books; Fundamental of Robotics: Analysis and Control by Robert J. Schilling.

On another note, there was a picture of Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade in the flesh on their post from yesterday, which is really quite weird.

Caitlin gave me a great idea this morning. Since she's probably about to launch into studying population genetics, we're going to team up with Stef (population health) to save the world. Catherine (commerce/arts) will manage our finances, Holly (travel agent) can cart us off to remote locations and I will help raise funds through charity concerts, and music therapy "to alter your genes".

We came up with a few starter ideas for my concerts.
"I can make you thin with Mozart"
"Bad Back? Try Bach!"
"Tchaikowsky tackles chafing"
"Mahler's Malaria cure"

Debussy for a sexy...

Any interested sponsors?

Today I believe in the devil, because I blame him for my uncanny ability to get sick the NIGHT BEFORE any important performance or assessment. It's so common I should really expect to have to perform sick every time. Maybe I should stage my career in a hospital - playing to the staff so they're happier and give me better treatment so I can play to the staff so they're happier..

Oh what to do?

I came down with something yesterday while I was at work, so I was miserable which wasn't nice, and wasn't great last night. Feel much better today though, although not back to 100%.

Also got some belated birthday gifts from people at work on thursday, which was really nice. A couple of great books, a bottle of champagne, some weird art toy and a unicycling DVD, which is really cool. Thanks all.

I'm very excited about performing Mozart's Andante for flute and chamber orchestra this coming Thursday. I will be performing together with Andrew Marriner, principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra, who is playing Mozart's clarinet concerto. On Saturday we then cruise down to Kent, where we'll give another evening concert, with slightly different repertoire. As if that's not enough, there's an exciting College symphony concert sandwiched in between on the Friday evening. I will be playing in Mendelssohn's 'The Fair Melusine' and Szymanowski's Symphony/Piano concerto no. 4. If a classical music hit is what you're after, next week is it!