After three days of constant unreturned phonecalls to our agent..

elisse: finally.. we get to speak
agent: yeah, i've been trying to get in touch with you guys for ages
e: ... uh, i think we've all been trying to get hold of each other. Anyway, what's the deal?
a: what's the deal with what?
e: what's going on? don't you need some money a few days before we move in? And don't we need to sign contracts and stuff?
a: oh yeah, well that's what's supposed to happen, but it doesn't really matter. You're moving in tomorrow, aren't you?

So, just like that, after a week in the dark we're "moving in tomorrow". I have a whole house to pack into boxes today, among other things.

So the photos are up there.
As you can see there's not many photos that have anything to do with music.. The collection includes:

-Beer with the woodwinds
-A particularly cool night out in Picassent
-Our fantastic Italian meal in Valencia followed by our 'bold and the beautiful' promo shot (it just turned out that way, honest)
-Dressed up for the first concert in Denia
-More Valencia: mueseum of Belles Artes, Marijana spilling chocolate ice cream all over her white dress
-Barcelona: at Park Guell, the Greek theatre we played in (after 70 years and the threat of rain..), Barri Gothic, the port and view from our hotel pool
-Fantastic woodwinds!
-Cyprus: fiesta siesta, dinner in the tavern, breakfast in our cute hotel, military helicopters on top of us at the beach, St Lazarus and the view from where we played that night: outside the Virgin club
-Greek amphitheatre and the crazy airport in Cyprus, full of refugees
-Fun at Galileo followed by some pics from Segovia with the cool Aqueducts and the 'smile' dance
-Post final concert in Sagunt with the vegetarians, crazy mates and Principal Conductor Josep Vicent
-Sunrise of the parting day, Valencia beach

It's pissing it down in London.

We arrived yesterday afternoon and already the mouldy cold-misery rot of being in this sodding place has returned. I plan to spend my days sorting out photos from the tour, packing up the house (moving next weekend), detoxing my poor neglected body and generally getting my life in order.
Jonathan has departed with the TV, so this should be a fairly productive week. Either that or I'll be climbing the walls shortly.

It's not all bad. I'll be back in Spain in less than 5 months.

Emil just reminded me of this.

I am going to run 3km. Without stopping.

I swear this place is more familiar than my old halls in London now. We returned back to our dorms in Valencia from Cyprus, which validates this place as another home away from home. Leaving Cyprus was interesting - we shared the airport with refugees from Lebanon and surrounding areas, all massing around queues for "all flights". We were delayed and close to missing our connecting flight because of it.

We just watched a documentary of the tour in China one year ago, which has made many of the new members think twice about complaining about our current conditions. I'm enjoying myself and I feel like everything, especially the admnistration feels more relaxed this time round, so it will be nice to have a break from the English's favourite passtime which seems to be catching on around here.

Although, having said that, it's back to Galileo's f***ing paella again for the next week!

Dan and I went to see Banlieue 13 (District 13) last night. A french action film set in the near future in a walled in ghetto in Paris. Great action film.

It just goes to show, a plot idea that would have turned out cheesy as a Hollywood film was thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining as a french film.

I'm sitting at home on this warm (well slighly warmer than warm) Saturday morning. The only problem is it rained last night and it's really humid. Not much going on, finally got the VPNs set up I was talking about. Otherwise another busy week at the office.

On that note, if anyone reading this has had any experience organising Kerberos on OS X Server (Tiger), please let me know, it's causing me an absolute headache, to the point that I'm thinking of ditching it and going with Crypt passwords instead. I just can't make it work at all.

Something I meant to put up here ages ago is a link to a commercial that Evan did based on green bags over at YouTube. Of course the problem with YouTube is, it's taken me half an hour to write the last paragraph because I got distracted by some billiant spoofs of the new Mac adverts.

Cyprus seems like a ghost island - like everyone decided to build stuff here a few years ago and just left it all part done. It's very unusual.

It's amazingly warm and the first night we were put in a "room" which had two matresses with grainy sheets, a filthy carpet, water that ran brown when you first turned it on (i've only ever seen that in movies..) and NO AIRCONDIONING. For that reason I was not refreshed and prepared for the concert that evening, which didn't go so well for me, especially when someone's phone went off during the first woodwind solo. Anyway, the unlucky few of us have been relocated to a lovely quaint traditional sort of place, and last night we had a good time - Jill slept over so we had three in the bed! We also had a lovely breakfast (so much watermellon here! HaydenI'm thinking of you).

Today we went on an excursion to the beach in Lanarca, and spent ALL DAY there! A few of us walked for an hour and a half into the "town centre" to see St Lazarus church, which was pretty lavish, but the town didn't consist of very much. The beach was great - the water was so warm and it was nice to get some sun, but it was a bit creepy being right next to the airport and seeing all these military planes and helicopters coming and going, and some menacing looking navy ships out at sea. I felt like such an innocent tourist.

Tomorrow we're off to Limassol, where we play a concert outdoors in Hero's Square, then have ANOTHER free day to get a feel for the place! Before we came, we had an incredible 2 days in Barcelona where Jordi (my flute-partner/tourguide) gave us some amazing whirlwind tours. I can't wait to spend a week there - there seems like so much to explore.

So, all in all I'm very happy because we're being given time to get a feel for the place we're in, and we're also bonding really well because of it. I can't even imagine going back to "normal life" in England at the moment...

I'm sitting in a Starbucks, I've been sorting out VPN stuff all day, so my work today has been done at home and sitting around the place with my laptop. Yay!