HAPPY NEW YEAR Most Excellent Blog Fans!!!

I hope everyone had an absolutely smashing NYE rugged up warm (London) or hot and deliciously sweaty (Australia) with good music, good food, good wine and most importantly, good friends :)

To start the new blogging year, I thought that over the next few weeks I'd go "around the grounds" and give y'all a peek of the travel I was lucky enough to do in 2008. Given London's rather bleak and cold weather at the moment, going over old photos and thinking about all the experiences (getting zapped by an electric fence twice in the Dordogne, France; successfully completely "Operation Fiddler"* in Zakopane, Poland spring to mind!) I had taking photos in 2008 cheers me no end and spurs me on to do more of the same in 09.

To kick off, I'll start with Warsaw, Poland, April 2008.

*more on this in a later post

In mid April, we went with our good friends Mark and Eva to Poland and Austria (Vienna and Salzburg). Eva is of Polish heritage (she has Polish parents but grew up in the West Indies, UK and Australia) and has visited Poland many times. Visiting Warsaw, Zakopane and Krakow with Eva and Mark was marvellous as it was like having our own personal tour guides...but for free and a lot more fun (and without the ubiquitous umbrella-led tour group!)

I took the photo of this young hipster (below) and his beautiful friend (above) in the New Town Square, Warsaw, when we were sitting having afternoon drinks

Rooftops of Warsaw's Old Town (below) which was effectively razed to the ground by the Germans in 1944. It has been meticulously reconstructed and is now on the UNESCO World Heritage List:

Church of Saint Casimir in the New Town, Warsaw (below)

The next three photos were taken in Lazienki Park, Warsaw- the home of Chopin's monument, the stunning Palace on the Water and the cutest little red squirrels:

I sneaked a photo of this gentleman while he wasn't looking (naughty!)

p.s. forgot to say that I took these photos the day after I got my Nikon D200. I was a bit nervous of THE BEAST (after using my teeny Fuji F410 ), used "auto everything" and shot exclusively JPEG (RAW was waaaaaaay too scary back then!)