canterbury

For Tami's birthday we decided to get away from London for the first time and do some quality tourist stuff. Canterbury is not to far away and everybody we spoke to told us it would be great place to visit, and it was. We took a train cross country on Saturday morning and pulled into the hostel, which was, as most hostels are, not great! Perhaps to much time at the 19th Hole has spoilt us both.
Canterbury is an awesome town with nearly the entire town centre only for pedestrians. The town still has a large section of the old city wall that use to surround the village, and is also home to the very impressive Canterbury Cathedral.


The cathedral visit was awesome, my first time inside a cathedral. There was a formal choir practice with the organ playing at full blast - pretty impressive.
The town was awesome and shopped till we couldn't any more. Just about all the shops that you'll find in central London are here, but they are so much more accessible.



This photo is of a freezing Tami on her birthday, in her first semi-winter outfit. We refer to this photo as "die winter-meisie". We missioned into town with the mistake of thinking the sun shining means warm weather. She is wearing a couple layer of tops and my 'puffer'bodywarmer.
On the Sunday we went to Dover to visit Dover Castle and do the War Time tunnels tour. It was freezing! The wind was pretty strong and let me tell you, on top of that hill there was more than a slight breeze. It drove the cold air straight through our best fleece's form K-Way and Cape Storm and chilled us properly. Here's a photo of Tami in front of the main gate of the castle and one of us on the top. Don't let the sunshine in this photo fool you, it only lasted for about 3 minutes!

tami and john-fluffy's birthday

Tami and John decided to have a joint b-day bash in a local pub called The Boathouse on the Friday night. A whole lot of people came, but unfortunately we only took photos of the same bunch as always. We sort of actually 'forgot' to take photos and by the time we realized we did, every body either had moved on or we couldn't care!

Tami's birthday was actually only on Monday the 12th, so we went down to the Waitrose to purchase some cupcakes. Not exactly a birthday cake, but they were very tasty!

cousin's visit

Kim, on a visit to her brother in Germany, decided to pop into London for a short time. She arrived on the Friday, and basically only stayed for the weekend, leaving again on the Tuesday. It was great to see her again and her visit gave us an excuse to undergo the trek and madness of a day in Camden Town.
This was my first Camden experience and I must be honest, I quite enjoyed it. We didn't buy to much but it was the experience that was cool. We didn't see loads of punks, but some of the stores where these freaks obviously do their shopping, where very interesting, especially the shoes!

After Camden we took Kim to a Virgin Megastore to purchase some DVD's for herself and to shorten her Christmas gifts-to-buy list. When we arrived in Picadilly Square I thought the shop would obviously be closed, seeing as it is pitch dark already. I stopped off and attempted to take some photos of the Piccadilly sign boards, but they didn't come out as well as I'd hoped.

This photo, to my absolute shock was taken at 17:03...and it was as black as night! Not cool! After the girls did some shopping we wondered the streets, OK we got lost, towards the correct bus stop. To out disgust we found this coat hanging in a shop window. Now, this photo didn't come out that clear because I was trying to zoom through the shop window and couldn't use the flash, but it's obvious what it is! If you were wondering who killed Winnie the Pooh, we have an idea, and they made a nice fur coat out of him!

RWC Final - southfields

We can not explain to anyone how grateful we were that the boys in green and gold managed to pull through on this one! Endless amounts of abuse from English colleagues and children were, without a doubt, in our future if the Poms had won...but, they didn't!
We chose to watch the game at a friends house in Southfields with a whole bunch of Saffa's. Our first choice was Zulu's Bar in Fullham, but when people started queuing outside at two o'clock in the afternoon, game being at eight, we gave it a skip.
Fun was had by all and the cry of "bokke" echoed through the Southfields streets.
On our way home, Putney high street was all Saffa, as hundreds of drunken supporters, most of them dressed in green and gold, roamed the street from pub to pub cheering.
Is was a great day to be in London! On Sunday morning just about every newspaper had an article claiming the "most controversial try" was in fact the turning point in the game....Blah, blah, blah!

new branches on the family tree

This post is actually a bit overdue...sorry! None the less, this is just to confirm the two latest additions to the Stofberg and McFarlane families. First came Isabel Stofberg, then a couple of weeks later, all the way across the world in Germany, Max McFarlane. Welcome to the family little people!

Max

Isabel

"sandles" in Putney

Auntie Sandy came for a quick visit right at the beginning of September. Although her visit was short, it was packed with activities. Tami managed to get a couple days off work to do the whole mother daughter thing. Thankfully the whole mother-spoiling-daughter thing also fell into place, and we both reaped the benefits of having a "mommy" around. Tamara took the old lady shopping and she got a full experience of London on foot, walking up and down high street after high street looking at shops and things to buy the rest of the litter back home. Tami's 70% discount at Accesorize and Monsoon also came in handy.
On the Sunday afternoon we took her to the German restaurant previously featured on this blog, Steins, in Richmond. This time however, we did did not attempt the 'grosse'wors platter, but instead opted for the smaller version and a cheese platter which we shared. The weather wasn't that nice as you can see by our clothing, but with a couple of beers and a nice meal you tend to forget the bad weather.

On Sandy's last night on Mud Island, she took the whole digs out to the GBK - Gourmet Burger Kitchen - to say thanks for letting her stay in our house. GBK is a legendary restaurant and is always a big hit, especially when it comes to burger lovers, should I dare say "connoisseurs", like ourselves. This place has truly magnificent burgers, both in taste and size. All patties are home made and everything is just great. GBK was the perfect way to finish off a 5 day visit to the UK. Be sure that if anyone comes and visits us in Putney, we'll be stopping by GBK for a meal.



The photos are of Auntie "Sandles"; Kobus and Allison; Felicity, Tamara and James.
One housemate, Simon, was working late and couldn't join us...he got GBK takeout though. John also joined us, but a decent photo of John doesn't exist, so I didn't post one!

richmond park

Tami and I both had a Saturday to spare and we decided to finally visit Richmond Park. The weather finally played along and the weatherman dealt us one of the best weather-cards we've had in a while.
We took quite a while to get there, stopped off at a propper English pub for a drink in Sheen, and then entered the park. The park is beautiful, and huge! We took a walk and settled under a tree for a picnic, with one of the many herds of wild deer grazing right next to us. Very cool!
We chilled for a while, had a nice lunch, and lay under the tree reading our books. I was so relaxed, I actually fell asleep.

fitness

I decided to finally bite the bullet and join digs mate, Simon, for a fitness session in Hyde Park with British Military Fitness. I thought I was going to die! Simon convinced me to join the intermediate group and not the beginners - Mistake! It's proper team fitness with a good all round mix of running, pliometrics, strength training and all round torture.
Tami and are not up to much this weekend, so don't expect any big blogging to happen this week!

german waitress

We took this sneaky photo of one of the waitresses at Steins, the German place in Richmond. Caught John in the act of enjoying the view......

man of the year award

We came across this in Richmond. The guy is sitting very comfortably on the back seat, while the lovely, obviously quite capable, lady is rowing upstream!
WHAT A GUY!

german sausage fest in richmond

On Sunday we accompanied a couple of house mates to Richmond. Richmond is a beautiful area on the banks of the Thames and quite a hot spot for a Sunday outing. We went to this German restaurant called Steins. The waiter told us in his best English that we might want to consider ordering the "grosse" meat and sausage platter. According to him it's enough for six people. We fell for his sales pitch and this was what we got! It was unbelievable! Virtually the whole restaurant looked at us when they carried in the meter long platter filled with mash, worsies, potato slices, meatloaf and "sauerkraut".

When we left this place there was still plenty of food on the platter and we all felt a little sick! Another great aspect of this restaurant was their litre beer mugs....Here's John loving his Sunday out.

windsor

On the 07/07/2007 we celebrated our 7 year anniversary. Pretty special don't you think? We decided to act a bit more like the tourists we are and went off to Windsor. This is a beautiful town which is of course the location for Windsor Castle - the Queens weekend pozzy! We went to Windsor castle and did the whole tour. It's quite a walk and I can see why some reckon the queen hasn't even seen every room. I was quite amazed to learn that some 180 people still ive in the castle every day....pretty cool. I must say the property can't be worth much - every 5 minutes there's a boeing coming over pretty low!

We also walked around the town a bit. It's really beautiful there and we had lunch at a nice restaurant on the river bank, followed by a long walk along the river.

Look closely at this building. The entire building is "leaning" to one side. I should've taken a photo straight from the front so you can line up with the buildings next to it.

sewage trouble

So being in stinky London and sharing a house with 6 other stinky people has it's draw-backs. One of which is the incredible amount of stuff that has the potential to get stuck in the drain. We woke up on a Sunday morning to find the kitchen sink making a funny "gargling" noise and having the occasional spit-up. This was the result of a blocked water drain outside the house. With my best efforts of trying to save us some money, I had my hand firmly down the drain pipe which at this stage was filled with about 5 peoples shower water....at least it was warm. I cursed everybody that pees in the shower and dug deep!

Despite my best efforts and risking fierce infections, we had to get a plumber in. In took the "pro" all but 5 seconds to fix and he had to bill us for the hour - cheap at only £110!

the tourists

We took the day off a while ago to go do some of the "touristy" things around London. Tamara has of course done all of it before, but we had to do it again. We took one of the open bus tours, which included a bus trip and a river cruise from the London Eye to Tower Bridge. It was all quite interesting and now I've seen all that I needed to see. We gave the London Eye a skip, for financial reasons and the fact that there was about a million people in the que.
The photo is us at Princess Di's memorial fountain.

photos around town

This is Putney Bridge on the Thames. I took this photo on the way back from a local pub. I used the long shutter and the photo came out ok, complete with four swans.

This little Smart Car is covered in astro turf. It belongs to a company called Easigrass...guess what they specialize in? We see this little car driving around every once in a while, but came across it parked in Putney. We took the photo with Tami's mobile.

These Mini's are from the London Mini Centre.
They restore old Mini's to look like these, just like the ones from Italian Job. They look pretty cool, but carry a price tag from £6500 - £8500. Crazy!

bodiam castle

I left Tamara alone at home for the weekend, so she decided to do some sightseeing of her own. Good friends Duncan and Ret took Tami into the English countryside. They visited this medieval moated castle known as Bodiam Castle.

Bodiam castle is a moated, curtain-walled castle which was built in 1385 to either reiterate the status & wealth of this ambitious knight of the realm or, as protection against French raids. It was dismantled in 1643. There is a ton of history attached to this castle, but I'm not going to go into it.

The photos Tami took here were, amazingly enough, taken with her cellphone, a Nokia 6300. We were both astonished at the quality of these photos.

If you feel like finding out more about this castle...www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-bodiamcastle.htm

3 peaks challenge with bmf and tenovus

This past weekend I worked for a fitness and events company called British Military Fitness. Go check out there website: www.britmilfit.com and see what they're all about. BMF was managing the safety for a charity event organised by Tenovus, www.tenovus.com, for cancer patients and research. This event is called the 3 Peaks challenge and comprises doing 3 of the highest peaks in the UK in 24 hours.
It was the highest peaks in Wales, Snowdon mountain, in England, Scafell Pike, and in Scotland, Ben Nevis. The object was to climb all three peaks, including transport between the peaks, in 24 hours. It's quite a mean challenge, but I'm thinking about trying to take part myself.
My role in all of this was merely as a driver. The best thing about this was that in one weekend I got to see the Wales, England and Scottish countrysides. First we went to Llanberis in Wales, a small town situated in the Snowdonia mountains. Here competitors climbed Snowdon, the easiest walk of the three on Saturday morning. Then the competitors where off to Scafell Pike in the Lake Districts of England. Unfortunately I did not get to go here because I had to take the long drive up to the Scottish Highlands and a small town called Fort William to go to Ben Nevis. The drive itself was fun, mainly because I got to drive the latest Range Rover with all the extras like DVD, Satellite Guidance, TV, etc. This vehicle is an absolute pleasure to drive and made the 10 hours back to London feel a little shorter.
Unfortunately we always seemed to be in a rush, so stopping to take photos was out of the question. All the photos I took was literally taken in the drive out of the window.
I posted some photos here of Wales and Scotland, not great I know, but it's all I could do!

scotland

wales