A looong overdue update...

By now I'm sure most of you have stopped reading this fabulous blog due to its lack of entries since January 14th. For those of you who haven't, here is a quick update of what we are doing and where we have been:

Currently we are in Rome, exploring crazy historical buildings and eating as much pizza and gelato as possible. Before Rome, we visited Venice, which was incredible. We happened to be there during carnevale, so we were able to see some amazing (and some weird) costumes, and experience Venice at one of its busiest times of the year. The city is so beautiful and interesting and we wandered around for hours (getting lost multiple times). Before Venice, came Milan, which was, in a word: boring. Just a big city with nothing exciting to see or do.

We spent the week before we came to Italy in the Swiss Alps, in a small village called Ollon, right next to the town of Aigle. We stayed there with Alec's old friend Rajis, and his family, and had a wonderful time. We tried every authentic Swiss dish (every one involving cheese or some sort of double cream, so we left Switzerland 2 pounds heavier and with clogged arteries...), trekked the alps on snow shoes, took a ski lift to the top of a mountain and used sleds to slide the 6 winding miles to the bottom, and visited some amazing Swiss spa baths (the water comes from natural hot springs in the mountains, and we went on one of the coldest, snowiest days we were there, so it was incredible).

Switzerland was preceded by France, where we visited Veronique and her family (longtime friends of Alec's family) and had a very relaxing week sitting by her fire and exploring old chateaus. Veronique lives in Malesherbes, which is one hour south of Paris, with nothing around but French countryside, so we had a great time watching the snow fall all around us in the forest.

We also spent a few days in Paris and a few days in London where we did all the usual tourist activities, despite the bitter cold. And finally, we arrived in London from Hong Kong, where we spent 5 days enjoying the constant bustling city life.

So, that's what we've been up to for the past few weeks. In less than 2 weeks we will be back in the U.S., first in D.C., and then slowly making our way back across the country to California. Yay!