2 years - a blog top ten

It suddenly struck us that it's been more than two years now since we started this blog - the first post was on January 1st 2008 - to document the preparations for our wedding for friends and family. A lot has changed; back then we were living in Bristol, working for the BBC (Kate) and REMIX (Theo). Now, 20 countries and 2 years later here we are, married, living in Madrid, working as English teachers and expecting our first child in a matter of weeks. Wow!

Anyway, we thought we'd be ridiculously self-indulgent and mark our blog's second anniversary with that evergreen journalistic conceit, a list. A top ten of our favourite blog posts, ideal for new and occasional readers, allowing them to skip the filler and get to the standouts. So, in no particular order, here are our top ten blog posts...

1. The Wedding report - pretty self-explanatory. Nothing written could ever really do justice to the emotions we felt and the amount of love our friends and family put in to making our day so special, but Kate's effort comes close.

2. Kate's CELTA blog - summing up our feelings about our CELTA course in Barcelona as we commenced our career as English teachers.

3. Grape-picking - what better way to celebrate your 27th birthday the day after a 12 hour road-trip than to get up at 7 and go grape-picking?

4. Berlin - we had an amazing few days, filled with culture, history, cheap wine, old friends and a DIY near-castration.

5. Arriving in Madrid - 36 hours on the road, tired, cold, grouchy and nervous about having nowhere to stay in a city where we didn't speak the language. Then a guardian angel called Cesar called...

6. Were we romantic or what!? - the first day of our honeymoon. Straight out of a Disney movie. Yeah, maybe one scripted by Judd Apatow...

7. San Isidro celebrations - going native in our new city.

8. The first of many - Kate begins getting to grips with Spanish pre-natal care. Or perhaps it's the other way around...

9. Sunday, Slovakian style - the beautiful villages of rural Slovakia and the... er.... colourful folk who live there...

and finally...

10. The random meetings - any self-respecting end-of-year/best-of list has to have the cop-out entry that includes references to items that didn't quite make it and thus manages to get more than 10 things on the list. This is it. If anything really made out travels special - and this blog worth reading - it was the random people we met. In Seville, Porto, Florence, Rocket, Estepona, Switzerland, Trieste, Nancy and so many other places, often leading us to stumble upon local celebrations and festivities we had no idea were taking place - Bianco Notti, graduation parades, flamenco, free opera and so on. Our trip, and our blog, wouldn't have been half as interesting without them, so this entry is for them.