A holiday from my regular life: Ex-pat parties and altitude training

1^st September 2012

Last night we went out for dinner with a whole bunch of other expats, we must have had the whole community there! Apart from the NZ PRT forces, who aren’t allowed out of their compound except when they are on missions of some kind, I think that I have met all of the foreign community except maybe one or two people!

So we met Angus, Eric, John, Abby, Dave and Fleur again, then there was also a Japanese guy, an American called Tim, and a few other guys who were sitting on the opposite side of our seating area from us so we didn’t get to talk to them. For dinner there was really nice pizza, which was just pizza toppings on top of the naan bread, which seems to work really well as a base and is a good use for leftover naan because it goes pretty hard when it gets cold. We had a roast carrot salad, a pasta salad and a cucumber and feta salad which I tried but thought it was a really odd combination and didn’t really like it. For dessert we had more pizza! Nutella and banana flavour! That turned out to be very, very nice! We also had chilled banana topped with chocolate, sliced and served on toothpicks. I hadn’t had anything sweet in a long time so that was amazing!

I also tried to run up this hill with Tony yesterday, who is built to be a cross country runner. We ran from our house to the hill which was about 700m-1km away and slightly uphill, and I was reduced to walking by the time we got there! Doesn’t help that I’m not that fit at the moment, but the biggest thing was just breathing, we are at 2.600m above sea level here and there is no air! You don’t notice it walking around, but as soon as you start running you start having to really suck air in. I walked back after getting to the first flat bit up the hill, Tony ran over the hill then all the way back home and got back just 5 minutes after me! I’m going to get further up it today though!