It's been a Long December

December was excellent. Donut and I headed to the UK for ten days to see family and catch up with old friends in London. We had such an excellent time seeing Tara & Andrew in the coolest neighbourhood in London (Angel), catching up over pints before stopping for a last pivo at a pub called Prague (with two Italian bartenders where we paid about 5GBP, or a gazillion crowns, for a Staropromen...), and then took in the views from the top of Centre Point and noshed on thai with Gemma & Stof. We did far too much shopping, toured around Oxford, Bath and the Cotswolds, gorged on cheddar and real English bacon and English muffins and scones and drank roughly 18 gallons of tea a day and enjoyed tv where I can actually understand things - it was excellent! There are so many fantastically amazing places to go in Europe that I haven't seen yet, but somehow I still just want to explore every little bit of England, but who can blame me when it's so gosh darn pretty:

When we got back, it was already December 15th and we had to rush rush rush to get ready for Christmas, which probably explains why I didn't really get the holiday spirit this year (or maybe it was the carp bashing?). This also explains why everyone's Christmas cards are sitting in a little pile on my desk, still unsent. You will enjoy them sometime around the end of January. However, we did manage to get our tree up before the big day, and we had a lovely evening on Christmas Eve with Donut's parents, where we feasted on potato salad and carp (I tried it! Not so bad!) and, in my case, chicken schnitzel. On Christmas Day, we had an expat friend over for a more familiar-tasting Christmas dinner and about 8 dozen cookies.

New Year's Eve, and Donut's birthday, were spent with his friends in Kbely, drinking beer and roasting a pig (of course). And now here we are, January 1st. I hope that everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year and are excited about everything that 2014 has to offer!