Any Christmas and New Year's news?

James and I finally returned from our trip. We had a great time. As soon as we get a phone and internet connection in our new place, we’ll have a family call to tell you how our trip was.

So, what did everyone get for Christmas? And what did everyone do for New Years?

For Christmas, James and I caught a very early train to Pisa to see the leaning tower. It was definitely leaning. It was so strange how quiet it was out on the streets. But the minute you got to the leaning tower and the Field of Miracles (where the tower is alongside the cathedral), it was filled with tourists.

We then caught a train to Florence. We looked around a few of the churches that were open and then went searching for anything that was open for dinner. We ended up at a Turkish food place. For being my first time eating Turkish food, it was pretty good.

In the evening in the big plaza, the statues were lit up, people were walking about, and a street performer was playing fantastic classical music on a violin. Further down the road on the famous old bridge, a small group of men were playing a nice acoustical guitar mix. It was really fun.

For New Years, we caught an afternoon flight from Venice to London. We took a bus into London and walked around to see some of the sights lit up (The Tower of London and the London Tower Bridge).

We got some food at Subway and then waited with the huge crowd of people for fireworks over the London Eye (large ferris wheel). We waited on a bridge where we thought we would get a good view, but it was so crowded, we couldn’t see the river down below and the air was so wet that the smoke covered up a lot of the fireworks. It was still fun to be in London (neither of us had really been in London yet). We rushed to catch a train back to Cambridge and arrived at a youth hostel at 3am.

I guess most of our Christmas ‘present’ was just our travels, but we have purchased a few things for each other and we’ll open them on Saturday and have a big Christmas dinner. We’ll show pictures later on…