I'm spending the last holiday of my company's financial year - basically taking off whatever was left of my holiday allocation since Sept '06.

 

I travelled to Prague last Friday through the Gatwick airport and this time the chosen carrier was EasyJet. The flight itself would have been ok if it wasn't for an hour of delay that EasyJet never made up for! My parents then picked me up in Prague and took me home to Ceska Lipa, which is our home town in the north of the country.

 

On Saturday my parents left in the morning to see a Country music festival in the south of the Czech Rep. I'm not too keen on this music, so I was quick to come up with an alternative, which was to join some people in Prague and go - what else - clubbing. My friend Michal just found himself a new girlfriend, who's originally Canadian and she brought a couple of more friends with her - Australian and American a piece - so I spent most of the night speaking English rather than my native tongue - Czech ... After some pre-party beers we strolled off towards the place on the bank of the river Vltava - Prague's main river ... the venue was nice, but posh and somehow Russian could possible top up Czech as the most spoken language ... anyway, women were hot as expected, but obviously after money (as expected as well), so I didn't bother developing any friendships around there ...

 

The peak of the night in fact came absolutely unexpected! This guy from Dominican Republic showed up on the stage and started singing Raeggeton and he sang it sooo well, that I couldn't claim this night to be a failure even if everything else sucked, which it didn't ... this block of maybe 20mins was sooo much worth it ... The guy even sang Daddy Yankee's Rompe, which I find to be one of the best party songs out there ...

 

We returned back to Mike's appartment in the northern part of Prague around 4am. I crashed on his sofa and by 11am was on my way back home to Ceska Lipa where my mother already had two or three food options prepared for lunch - and believe me, one cannot go wrong with either! I chose my favourite - typical Czech - a duck & dumplings & sou-kraut - mmmm ...

 

My father needed some help on his farm (as he calls it), so my mom and myself followed to give him a hand to spread tree-bark around the garden. He claims that where the bark is spread weeds never appear. Well, I wasn't there to second-guess the masterplan. but rather try to help, so I simply rolled up my sleeve and started moving one 60l bags of tree-bark from one side of the property to another. My mother was meanwhile spreading the non-sense around ... My father was happy apparently, and so we were sort of cool with that. This complex job was followed by a beautiful walk around Macha Lake, some 14km from my town, which is the place I always ask my parents to take me to every time I return home ... it's incredibly beautiful out there, believe me ...

 

Today I spent some more time helping my father by having his car serviced. I kind'a owe him the favour due to his willingness to let me use it while I'm here on holiday. I already cleaned it, vacuum cleaned it and ran it through a car wash on Saturday. Today one of the parking lights needed to be exchanged, so I took it to the dealer to get done with it ... the expense was 30p and time spent on it was 5mins. The dealer found the repair so basic that charging us for the work looked way too silly ... and I probably looked silly all along  . To make me look even worse, my father asked me to enquire on the car's computer to be fixed, which I obediently did ... in fact there was nothing broken with it. Someone (my father) just pressed one button and changed the display, which showed different information that he wanted, so the dealer showed me which button to press, I blushed and we were through this ...

 

In the afternoon I managed to get my ass back to Macha Lake, this time alone and ready to do some sporty activity, and so I did ... I ran 14.5km in the forest all around the lake and it made me feel just great. It feels sooo refreshing running in the woods ... basically all so different experience to running in downtown London ...

 

My holiday just started while everyone in London returns to work tomorrow. so I'll czech back in when I get a chance!

Last weekend was marked by a birthday celebration of my friend Clarence. I was certainly up for it although the week was quite rough due to excessive amount of socializing in Leicester with my mates from the project. I returned back to London from Leicester later on on Friday afternoon, quickly unpacked and went out to join Clarence and the b-day celebrating gang at London bridge where we visited a local Nando's restaurant. We all seemed to be quite keen on Nando's, but still this one was special. The London Bridge Nando's offers some great views of river Thames! It's really beautiful at night ...

 

From Nando's we walked over to Waterloo where we parked for a while at a latin bar called La Iguana for a pint and Clarence ordered all of us a Tequilla, which was cool with me ;o)) ... From there we headed towards Covent Garden and on the way decided that we would visit the Brazilian bar called Guanabara. Last time we had had a great time there, so the expectations were high, and unfortunately as high as they were, as disappointing the place turned out to be. Gone were the Brazilian rhythms and the place was packed with guys, which I didn't find appealing. So we quickly moved on and lead our way to another club called Gardening Club right at Covent Garden. We got there around 1am and I could feel my insufficient sleep that week was catching up with me. We danced quite a bit at the club, but everyone was apparently getting tired, so at 3am we called it a night and took a cab back to Canary Wharf.

 

On Saturday I pulled out a 9 hour sleep and felt so well that I finally managed to run a 10km track on a treadmill at 12km/h average - finished in 50mins. I'd been making attempts to achieve this throughout the week, but always failed. Saturday was the day though ...

 

I also went to see a Eagles vs. Sharks movie on Saturday. It's an obvious low budget flick from New Zealand, but highly recommendable. The type of humour is certainly not mainstream, so prepare yourself for a bit of black-humour if you're up to seeing it. I really recommend you do that ... I wanted to do a Bourne Ultimatum on Sunday, but the cinema was closed, which means I can see it in 3 weeks earliest ... buuuuu .... buuu ....

Last week was marked by Wednesday to Friday events starting with a project sponsored Paella (Spanish) party on Wednesday, then a Cypriot dinner on Thursday and Czech birthday celebration in a Czech restaurant at West Hamstead in London on Friday.

 

The Wednesday event was my first opportunity to get to know a wider group of my colleagues in Leicester. I eventually did meet a few Spanish folks there and also got to joust a few ladies as well as lads (ladies were more fun though) in this blown up bouncy castle. The whole night was very well organized, Spanish sangria was served through-out the night, Belgium and Dutch beers were available too, Spanish cheeses and chorizos (salami) and ham were for grabs too and it all peaked with 3 kinds of paella served later in the night ... unexpectedly there were ice-creams available too, which literally came out of nowhere ... so this was fun!!!

 

On Thursday I joined this small group of guys to have dinner in a Cypriot restaurant here in Leicester. As it seems there are actually no differences between Greek food and Greek Cypriot food. We've ordered this meal where the food gets served until the guests call it off finally ... we didn't manage to make a call in time and ate ridiculous amount of food, which filled me up well until late Friday as well I'd say ;o)) ...

 

Friday was the birthday party celebration of Martina, who was until then the only Czech friend I kept in touch with - the others have either left the UK, moved out of London or otherwise disappeared ;o)) ... It was a good event where I met many new and interesting people as well as people I had met before. I took the opportunity and exchanged Facebook contacts immediately, so that I can keep closer in touch from now on :o)) ...

 

It was a good week - now as it seems there are 2 birthday celebrations planned for next week, so hopefully we will manage to arrange them in a way that will allow me to attend both!

I have set myself a new record today, which is a 19.12km run in about a 30 C heat outside, or probably even more as most of the time I spent running in direct sun. The time I needed to complete the track was 1hr 41mins and my average speed was 5:18min/km. You're probably thinking why I haven't put in an extra bit of an effort and didn't run less than a kilometer extra to make it 20K, but really, no matter how silly it sounds, I just couldn't go on ... it wasn't the lack of stamina for which I had to finish, but rather the dehydration, which I was going through ... I did feel like a prune the last 10K ;o)) ...

 

So just for the interest of it, the track I ran today started at my place at Millennium Harbor, then lead along the Thames path towards Greenwich, then crossed the Greenwich tunnel and proceeded alongside the Thames path on the other side of the river, where I routinely got lost in dead-end paths, which was very discouraging giving my outstanding energy left for the rest of the run! I have then run through Bermoundsy and reached Tower Bridge, which I crossed and then ran back in the direction of Canary Wharf through Wapping area - this time trying to stay in the shade as the heat was eating me alive ...

 

It's all good now. I've eaten about a half kilo of grapes and drank lots of milk ... so now it's time for bed though the time only shows 4pm ... who cares ....