Sunday, April 5, 2015

Finding antiques and making chocolate

Sorry, been a couple weeks since my last post. Admittedly, I'm finding myself more and more of a "local", so it's getting harder and harder to realise stand-out things to mention. In just a few days I will lived in the UK for exactly one year, I do have a post planned to mention "highlights of the year".

Two activities jump out over the past few weeks. Before even mentioning those, I have to say we just got home from a friends and family Easter dinner. This dinner was extra special because it was the same friend that invited me over last year. Last year I was alone, and had only been here a few days. This year, I had my family with me and a year full of experiences. We brought lots of food and wine, and had such a great time. Can't thank you enough, my good friend :)

One of the food items we brought was chocolate. It wasn't chocolate that we bought, it was chocolate that we made from scratch. I've decided to take up chocolatiering, if that's a word. It's not as easy as it looks. It takes quite some research, and the ingredients are expensive and hard to find (and even slightly controversial!) Long story short, it took 5 batches before I had edible chocolate. I'm probably about 100 batches away from something special :)

One of the topics at dinner was antiques. We've been recently looking for antique furniture. We figure it's quite an opportunity to look for historic furniture in such an historic area. Sure enough, there are entire villages known for antiquing. You can google all you want, but "knowing the people/places" seems to be the experience needed in antiquing. That's fun. I do enjoy negotiating prices on pieces we love.

What a fun day, and 4 day weekend. It's hard to find the words to describe how much we're learning and how much we appreciate it. It also helps to have software like Skype to not only talk to family in the states, but see them in live video too!


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