I'm soooooooooooo tired

Last night our neighbours had some people over. No idea how many but they were noisy. It was ok as long as we were up and playing the Wii with Alice. It became less nice when we decided to go to bed and the noise was still there.
Of course we debated whether we should go knock on their door. Obviously we don't want to pass for those neighbours who always complain about the noise. So we tried to sleep. Again and again and again. Their noise was louder than the rain on the Velux despite it was heavy rain.
At 5:30am where Wolfram got fed up with it and told them to stop making noise.
At 6am they stopped and we finally fell asleep.

Something tells me we will have a long nap this afternoon.

PS: don't know why but I feel like getting a wood board and a hammer, and make noise for 30 minutes so they can't sleep as well this morning. I believe it's called revenge. Grrrrr!

Experimental cooking

Tonight we had Alice over for dinner and I decided to try the mix of spice I bought in Cairo.
I improvised a marinade with the spice mix where I've put the chicken for several hours. I then cooked it in the pan with almonds and pine nuts. Served it with rice.
And it was very good!
I was a bit stressed because it was total improvisation but luckily it turned out to be very good.
I'll note down the recipe for future re-application.

A new tartine

As you know we're big fan of Le Pain Quotidien. Each month they have the "Tartine of the month" which is a special seasonal tartine.
This month they came up with a very good one: guacamole, roasted chicken and tomatoes. Super simple and super good as usual.
Inspiration for home-made one :)

I had forgotten

Now that we have TV and access to at least a hundred channels (not necessary all worth it, but we have them) I was watching a movie the other night and there it came: advertisement. Every 20-30min there is a break.
I had forgotten what it is to watch a movie with advertisement break killing the momentum...
Maybe next time I just put a DVD in :)

The 24 Laziest Countries

Today Yahoo had an interesting article on its home page, about the laziest countries in the world. Of course I had to take a look and what did I find...
#1 USA (no big surprise there)
#2 Canada
#3 is Belgium!!!
I'm speechless :)
See the full survey here.

NB: France is #8 and Germany #9

Expedit

1 Expedit
2 Expedit
3 Expedit
4 Expedit
5 Expedit
6 Expedit
How many Expedit shelves from Ikea one can have in a single house?
Well since yesterday we have 6! Small one, medium one, large one, I believe we have all the sizes and nearly all the colors :)

Traffic in Moscow

Traffic in Moscow is bad, really bad. When there is no or limited traffic it will take you 30min to get to the office, that becomes 1:30 to 3 hours when there is traffic.
Can you imagine some people spend everyday 2-3 hours in the morning and the same going back home? That's half of your day in the traffic. I could not.
Each evening this week it took us at least 2 hours to get back to the hotel and honestly by the time you get there you're exhausted. It doesn't matter that we were several in the car and could continue our discussion so it's not a complete waste of time. It's just exhausting.
I will now think twice when I complain about traffic in Brussels. Because really, I'm not sure we can call it traffic compare to Moscow (or Beijing).