Recent Updates

May 10, 2006

A solid week and a half into my 5-week vacation, I'm back in Dublin with a few days off... after a great few days here to start, followed by an amazing week in Southern France visiting my aunt and uncle. I've taken some time to post the best pictures from the last few weeks' adventures... you'll find them in the new Europe 2006 photo gallery. That's all for now, but stay tuned in a few weeks when I get pictures posted from the second half of my trip, including Southern Ireland and a week of R&R on Italy's sandy beaches! Cheers!

March 8, 2006

Just so nobody can say that it took me a year to update my website, I figured I'd slide in under the 11 month bar with a big update - hundreds of new pictures for you to laugh at and enjoy in three new categories... Summer 2005, Fall 2005 and Winter 2006. There you go, now stop complaining... I have better things to do!

     

April 13th, 2005

Engineering student by day, small-time international art thief by night! Pictures are art, after all, and I've stolen a bunch of pictures from friends in Switzerland to bring you three new galleries: Ann's outstanding Lake Geneva Pictures from the fall and her Party Pictures from January and February... also, some awesome Portes Du Soleil ski pictures from Adam and Sacha (not the day I was there, but the alps don't change that much, do they?) A big thanks to the photographers... not having my camera sucked but thankfully others were there, shooting away. Enjoy!

    

April 8th, 2005

So my Waterloo exams started this morning, and we all know what that means... I magiaclly find the time to update the website! I've been back in Waterloo for a month now catching up on the 3 courses that I've had to re-write exams for here. We've managed to squeeze in a few days of fun as well and these March Pics and St. Paddy's Pics are hopefully enough to prove it. It has been a busy end-of-term though and we're all looking forward to some fun in the sun at our new house this summer... we signed the paperwork yesterday and 37 Helene Cres. is ours on May 1st! Partaaaay!!

Funny how old habits die hard, eh? It's safe to say that I'm back into the swing of things here, but "ça va sans dire" that life isn't quite the same. Some newfound habits are proving hard to break and old ones hard to pick up again. I've grown, I've discovered, I've been lost at times and yet I've lived to tell the tale. To all my friends who've stayed behind in Lausanne, I miss you dearly... stop by Toronto sometime!

January 12, 2005

Happy New Year! Well I've finally returned back to Switzerland after a great, long Christmas vacation in Canada. I was all over the place; my car came back to life and hauled me 3800km over three weeks to Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and lots of places in between! There's something to be said for not having to rely on trains, as unbeatable as they are here. It was great to see all my friends and family, something that is at most times lacking on this side of the ocean; that being said, returning to Lausanne's above-freezing temperatures and overall pleasant daily lifestyle was quite welcome as well. Now it's time to do some school work, or as the French would say, c'est le temps de bosser! Two months of falling behind on my homework doesn't bode well for traveling and other leisure activities, so don't expect the same pace of updates as back in 2004... :(

Now that you're sufficiently bored with what I have to say, turn your attention to three new galleries, posted today: The Toronto Reunion (I think just about everyone made it!) Christmas at Home and a little glimpse of my daily life in Lausanne.

Good luck to everyone who's back at school now too. Here's to a great '05 - Cheers!

December 14, 2004

So, in about 14 hours I'll be on my way home! The only thing restraining my overwhelming excitement is the weather forecast for Ottawa, which is about -19 tonight, compared to Lausanne's -2. It's going to seem like a tropical paradise here when I get back in three and a half weeks! The only other reason I haven't already bailed out and gone back to Canada is the occasional reminder that Switzerland is freakin' sweet, such as when a friend comes to visit and you head up to a nice little mountain town like Gruyères for the day. I actually remembered to take a bunch of pictures this time, which is good because it's probably all you're going to get for 2004. Enjoy! On that note, a very Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! See ya in '05!

December 8, 2004

You may or may not be happy to hear that I've spent the last few weeks doing a variety of things completely unrelated to taking pictures or updating this website. I've been doing lots of stuff, including a weekend trip to Glasgow and Lancaster with Suzanne, the Chillon Castle in nearby Montreux with some German, French, Finnish and Belgian friends, the CERN Research facility in Geneva with the Swiss Waterloo crew, and a flying tour of the Netherlands with Gerrit and Steph. You'll notice that I hardly took any pictures at all in any of these places... I guess I'm just getting sick of looking like a tourist. Hell, in Montreux and Geneva, I'm practically a local! To make up for the lack of pictures, there's a bit of a blurb accompanying each gallery... I hope that helps.

The best news of all is that, one week from now, the good people at KLM are going to take me away from all this insanity and bring me back to Ottawa... home sweet home. Christmas is just around the corner, and I can't wait!

November 17, 2004

Well, you'll all be glad to know that the never-ending updates are going to slow down now; in the last 5 days I've managed to use up the remaining 4 days of travel on my European Rail pass; in doing so, I got to visit the breathtaking Italian riviera in Cinque Terre (thanks for the suggestion, mom!) and then head back down to Marseille to visit my grandmother's family (Chantal, Norbert, Marinette and Andre) in St. Mitre Les Ramparts. One would think that after all that I'd try to get studious, but it's about to change from trains to planes as I take advantage of Easy Jet's great deals. Honestly though, I study while I'm in transit!!

November 11, 2004

Well, I wasn't planning on making daily updates to this site but lately it's been pretty much necessary... yesterday I went Hiking in Interlaken, about two hours away from here... as I got there the clouds cleared and we had one of the clearest days I've seen in a while! The top of the mountain was somewhere around 1200m, a tiring 600 m or so vertically above the town below. The view was postcard-perfect and definitely worth every steep step!

P.S. For all you non-Canadians out there, a toque is indeed a hat, beanie, whatever... and it exists in the dictionary! (though I don't entirely like the definition...) We're not crazy.

November 8, 2004

We returned late last night from a crazy-good weekend in Paris, the reigning champion of awesome European cities. Steph and I left Lausanne before sunrise on Saturday morning to meet up with Gerrit and Dave and eventually 4 other Waterloo engineers ( 4 elecs, 3 syssies and one mechie in total) and had a rockin' time.

Oh yeah, and for all of you who miss the NHL, check out what's going on in my little town... read this globe article. Hockey season has begun!

November 4, 2004

In my boredom yesterday, I got to checking out the World Fact Book (published by the CIA), looking at the different stats between Canada and Switzerland. I discovered lots of cool things, including that Canada is 240 times larger. That's hard to imagine, so I downloaded two maps and overlaid them - it just goes to show how ridiculously great the great white north really is... and makes my train trip to Zurich last weekend seem like a bit of a joke!

November 2, 2004

I've spent the last day or two converting the site over to a new look - everything is still pretty much the same, but there's two new photo galleries that might be worth checking out:

Around Lausanne Oct 2004

Around Switzerland Oct 30/31

I'll try to keep up to speed with new pictures as they are taken. Cheers!

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