Happy New Year! I know I'm having a very happy new year so far - I'm off to Europe next week! This will be my first trip travelling alone and my first to continental Europe barring 1 week in Paris 7 years ago. I'll be visiting London, Malmö (in Sweden, very briefly), Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels, then coming home by way of Kuala Lumpur where I'll be visiting an old friend for a few days. I can't wait.

I finished booking tickets today and bought myself a digital camera, which has put a bit of a hole in the spending money, but will make the trip a lot more pleasant than lugging about my marvellous but extremely weighty Canon SLR. Hoping I get a chance to make use of "snow mode" :-)

My itinerary really worked out extremely well - I've planned it around free concerts! So next Sunday will be choral evensong at St-Martin-in-the-Fields, Monday a clarinet concert, also at St Martin's. There's a free concert on at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam while I'm there, and a carillon recital the day I'm planning to be in Bruges. My mother gave me a tiny Sony microphone for Christmas to go with my MiniDisc walkman so I can record the sounds of Belgium and church bells and so on. Should be a really interesting way to experience a foreign country and I'm really looking forward to it.

But enough of a rant. I should go & peruse my list of things to do and then start to do some of them!

# posted by minim @ 2:03 PM