HAPPY CHRISTMAS
Hope you have (had) a very happy Christmas and will have a brilliant New Year. The reason for the lack of posts has been because I left Salone for Christmas and have been spending time traveling round the UK seeing friends who I'm not likely to meet up with for some time to come and hence haven't always been near a computer with net connection. Ah well, will try to write more when I get back to Salone again.In summary, have had a brilliant (if sometimes cold) time back in the UK and it has been great seeing people again. Have managed to catch a cold (not fun) and hope that I haven't passed it onto too many people.Labels: Christmas
Winter in Salone
Ok, another newsletter will hopefully soon be winging its way to people, so here’s just a brief update on what’s been happening. Basically life has been really interesting and also really busy, but has involved a lot of conferences and such like, keeping me away from my desk and really quite busy.
The weekends have been spent at the beach, I stood up on a surf board this Saturday, tho’ only very briefly and I’m still not sure if the board had managed to beach itself by the time I stood up- ah well, I can always practice again next time I go to the beach!
We have hit winter here- well, the beginning of the Harmattan (not sure on spelling), which is their idea of winter and means the air is a bit drier and we no longer have sudden deluges of water falling from the sky. It also means that anything that stays still for long enough gets a nice coating of red dust. I’ve been told there it will get dustier and visibility will decrease further (at the moment visibility's still fine) in January. I felt almost cold for the first time on Friday evening- we were sitting on the beach watching the sun go down (gorgeous colours but sunset happens very quickly compared to home) and there was a slight breeze that made you wish it wasn’t blowing, rather than the normal refreshment you feel when there’s movement in the air. Still, having a winter where the lowest temperature is about 23 degrees C is still slightly different to what I normally face in winter!!
We’ve managed to avoid most of the pre-Christmas trappings here- decorations in shops have only just been put up in the past week and I did see a (fake) Christmas tree being carried along the side of the road-ah well, I’ll soon hit the consumerism of the West, with the temperatures to match.
Labels: surfboards, weekend, winter
conferences take over
Obviously I have just managed to hit conference season as am meant to have been at conferences all this week- should be useful, but just mean I can't get to the internet and can't get enough work done! So today took a day off and caught up from the work I needed to finish from last week, which is now done and means I can go and focus on what I need to know from the workshops for the next couple of days rather than thinking about the work I need to get done- ah well, a sad life but nevermind. Am heading home soon- to the cold climes of the north, so will enjoy the weather here while I can and prepare to put on loads of layers when I land!
Labels: CG, conference
End of the week
Have just spent an exhausting couple of days doing the CG (Consultative Group) meeting, so am now trying to sort out and finalise the minutes. It was a good couple of days and provided a lots of useful food for thought and for further work in the future. It was a really useful interesting meeting to be involved with from a personal perspective- you get to hear a lot of different views from different people on the state of the economy and the social side of the country and where people think more work is needed to improve the country in 2007.
The workload was pretty huge leading up to this all and then I and another person had the unenviable job of typing the minutes as the meeting progressed. The good news is that my typing skills were up to it (tho’ I did need to correct quite a few typo’s) and that I kept concentrating for the whole way through the 2 days. The bad news is that I was absolutely exhausted by this (and wasn’t the only one)- because no one else needed to concentrate so much for so long. Anyway, it’s over for another year and hopefully means things will calm down a bit. Having said that, there’s still loads of stuff to be done as follow-up to this, so looks like work will be keeping me out of trouble for sometime to come!
I would’ve posted some pics from Bouray (or it may be Bouré) Town beach that we went to last weekend, where I began to attempt to learn to surf- just about managed a crouch but then fell off. However, my work computer has crashed, the hard board failed (tho’ I don’t think I lost too much work since I’d e-mailed most of the important stuff to other people already) and I’m having to borrow someone else’s computer and net connection for the moment. The upshot being that I’m having to use a slightly older version IE instead of Mozilla (which I was previously using) and blogspot doesn’t allow me to upload photos using this version of IE (and since it’s some else’s computer I don’t want to mess around with it too much!), so you’ll have to wait until I get to an internet café or manage to get a new computer with web connection before I’m able to upload more photos.
Not sure what the plans are for this weekend, but since I’m hoping to come home soon, will probably involved a spot of shopping and being hopelessly ripped off by the market traders-ah well, never mind, I just hope that I don’t get too annoyed by the endless haggling that will probably come my way as they start off the prices at 10 times more than you should expect to pay.
Wow- can't believe it's December already!!! There's none of the Christmasy things you'd expect to get 3 months early at home- tho' I did see someone carrying two fake Christmas trees with a few bedraggled bits of tinsel down the road yesterday. I think the heat also means that it feels like it really can't be coming up to Christmas yet!
Labels: bouray, CG, work
