Success!!!

Found all the stuff I need for tomorrow's bake-o-rama in Valencia - well, I had to improvise a tad 'cause there was no vanilla sugar, but I found vanilla husks, so I could make it myself :-) Oh, and there were only whole hazelnuts, so I put them in a pot stamping them with a wine bottle to get them semi kinda grinded. Sounds boring, now that I'm writing about it, but I'm so excited that I get to bake this year after missing out of it last year in Shanghai.

Holy cow, part 2

In an earlier post I told you about my boss intending to send me to India, which in the end didn't happen. Well, now it will. Everything is agreed with the local construction site manager and the project management, so the blank spot between Spain, holiday and France has been filled with a 4-5 weeks stay near Akhakhol, 30km east of Surat. I'll be heading off on the 2nd of January and think about squeezing in a short holiday on the Maledives afterwards, seeing that they are rather close. And I really think that I'll need some holiday after that!
The construction site is rather colse to a big city, but with the traffic a trip into town takes about 90 minutes, so they built a camp for the employees to live in. Will be nice to get to see how that kind of site will suit me and will probably make me appreciate my own site in France with my own flat and the freedom to move around.
However, the India trip is faaaaar away, almost 4 weeks, so let's have a look to the closer future. This weekend I'll try to get in some Christmas mood, despite sun and warmth: I'll bake cookies :-) I don't have an oven in my appartment hotel, so I get to use a colleague's kitchen - will have to pay him off with some of the results, but that's only fair ;-) Still not sure what I can bake 'cause as it seems the Spanish aren't into baking - if they want a cake they just buy one. Hence it's quite hard to find the required ingredients, but going to Valencia should do the trick. I'll keep you updated on the results.

Autopilot

Back from my not-even-24-hours-trip to Germany. The contract for my project has been signed on Thursday, few minutes before midnight, so there's no turning back: I'll be moving to France end of February! Seeing the first 3D-models of the power plant and pictures of the surrounding of the construction site took a great bit of the uncertainty away - only to be replaced by panic! When I get there I'll have to arrange so many things - negotiating contracts with real estate agencies, car-rental companies, catering... and set up the whole administration. AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!
Will HAVE TO start to work on my french, seeing that it will be a one-woman-show for the first few weeks, so there's nobody to help me out with that :-( But enough about work.

I made my first ryanair experience. Since all the airlines have been cutting down on their service level, there was no big difference. Something that was different though, compared to my other Spain-Germany trips, were the weather conditions. It was one hell of a bumpy ride and finally the recommendation of having your seat belt fastened during the whole flight made sense to me. The best part was the captain announcing that the weather-conditions at Frankfurt-Hahn were too bad to proceed with a manual landing procedure (clouds only 40 meters above ground - didn't know that was possible - and fog with 20m visibility max) and therefore flight security regulations instruct an autopilot landing. WTF??? He explained quite a bit about which parts of the landing would be regulated by the autopilot, but I didn't bother listening. In general I like to have as much information as possible to decide myself which parts are significant and which are a waste of brain capacity, but when it comes to flying I couldn't care less! I get on the plane, I get off the plane. You guys do the rest. Period! Ignorance is bliss, especially in this case. As you can conclude from me making a post, I survived ...even though I had my doubts every now and then ;-)

The 2nd autopilot experience of the day was picking up the rental car - the airport is appr. 130km from Offenbach, so I needed a ride. I developed a strategy for getting a nice car from Sixt - you just book a navigation system as additional feature. Seems like they don't have any for the economy class, which equals a VW Golf, so once again I was hooked up with a BMW 320i :-) WRRROOOMMMMM!!!! However, the navigation still has its flaws, seeing it led me into 3! dead end roads before I decided to switch it off, get near a highway and then switch it on again.
The flight back was shit as well, but it held a nice surprise in store: I met a couple of Frenchies that were not too bad ...actually quite nice! Must be the first time I met French guys that seemed likable. Could it be that there's hope after all?!? Maybe there's a light at the end of this tunnel that isn't a train.