Blogmas 2016: week 1

 

Happy December, everyone! ❄️

I am still amazed by the fact it is the last month of the year already. However, I am very glad Christmas is here, as it is my favourite festive season, so far. This year, I have less spare time than last December, and although I can´t make a daily post, I don´t want to stop enjoying Blogmas. So my solution is to post at least once a week this month, with a little sum-up of the main events, and holiday activities. 

These were some of the highlights of our first Christmas week. I hope you enjoy the reading!

Tales of the Peculiar

Autumn arrived in the beginning of October, and since then it´s been awfully cold.

In my world that means only one thing: it is time to fill my already stuffed tea cupboard, take the soft blankets out of the wardrobe and curl up with a good book. I love books all year long, but somehow the cold months are my favourites for endless reading sessions. 

Consequently, this might be the period when I buy the most of my paper editions (the rest of the year I tend to download on my ebook, but when Winter comes I prefer the company of a good old paper specimen), as I take advantage from all the seasonal releases. One of the titles on my last book haul was Tales of the Peculiar by Ranssom Riggs.

Budapest in October

Hello everyone! 

 

As you probably know if you´re following me via Twitter or Instagram, I am not dead.

However, it´s been a couple, of crazy months during which The Gentle One and I managed to move to another city, find a brand new apartment and job positions, all in a row.  Those periods are quite usual in our lives, due to our professional choices and careers, and although they can be very exciting, they can also drag all the energy out of us. In my case, that usually means a drastic reduction of my spare time, and most consequently, less time for blogging. But fortunately, I am starting to get used to my new routine, so blogging can be finally back for good! 

Now, in October we had a short city break in Hungary, as my husband had some professional affairs to attend in there.  

 

Bellu

This week it´s been so hot we hardly managed to leave the house. However, as weekend approached, temperature started slowly descending. We know Summer is definitely not over yet, so we decided to take this opportunity window and make the best of it. On Saturday afternoon we headed to Bellu Park, a nineteenth century cemetery famous due to its upstanding mourning art.

 

 

My top five vamp lip products.

 

In the last year or so I´ve been falling into the habit of shopping less, but better quality makeup.  So now and then when I make a purchase, I try to give a chance to both medium and high-end brands in an attempt to make my own opinion. I´ve always felt a bit intimidated by the huge quantity of makeup reviews out there (am I the only one who wants to hide in a corner and cry when you receive all those contradictory reviews on blogs/youtube and so on?), and I would happily cut my right hand rather than just sitting there for HOURS trying to figure out what internet gurú is right, because well, most probably they all have a point as long as a product does not work the same for everybody. 

Queen you shall be

For a time, I did really well on my purpose of stopping impulse buying.   

And then my little sister came to visit us and next thing I remember is leaving the house to get some cake (gluttony runs in the family, you can be sure), and coming back with aforementioned cake, and an elfic/Tyrell-style tiara. YES, a bloody tiara. Because... well, because I stumbled upon it at a random high street store, it was on sale, and it was stunningly beautiful, and... you never know if you´ll be invited to have tea with the queen, right? Right...? And yes, in case you were wondering, I have absolutely no justification for it, other than the very reasonable discount price and its alleged beauty. 

 

Cities in dust

There is something undeniably ghostly about cities in Summer. They always acquire a certain desolated look, due to the vast space left empty by people absence. However, that´s am scenario I love, as my vivid imagination tends to portray a post-apocalyptic landscape (the image of a metropolis after vampire consumption, or maybe once the zombie plague is over. The tons of lovely movie scenes you could set in here...)

Summer reads

At the beginning of the week I tried to organize my spare time a little bit, as I had no chance at all recently. I thought  sorting out my Summer reads could be a nice start, as this task seems to have lived in my to-do list like FOREVER. So last Monday I patiently sat on the bedroom, and started separating the unfinished books in a group that I called the "pile of shame"  almost immediately (as a philologist and a general bookworm it is quite rare to leave any unfinished stories to me. However, most of them happened to be short stories compendiums, which I tend not to read in strict chapter order. As a result, there´s always some story forgotten and left behind).  

 

Life update.

Lately, life has been kind of a whirlpool. 

In the scarce past two months events happened with an awesome quickness, leaving me with hardly any energy to do anything else than mechanic survival activities: feeding, sleeping, breathing. Other than that, time was a luxury I couldn´t afford. But all things come to an end (even the worst ones, for as popular wisdom reminds us, there´s always sunshine after the storm). So here I am again, ready for some changes, a new adventure, and a little life update to share.

Is that you, June?

This was supposed to be the first (summery) June week, a long-time awaited period of warm sunny days I expected to be full with pleasant walks, picnics and some delightful swimming. But of course June had its own plans.If you thought this post was about all of those beautiful things, I am sorry to disappoint you – please, feel free to blame that son of a biscuit. 

Fandom alert post: Slytherin pride.

Every year around May Bucharest celebrates the East-European Comic Con which, as the name implies, it is the most important fan event in this side of the continent. I´ve been regularly attending for three years, as I do enjoy a good dose of video games, graphic novels, role games, and fantasy/horror/sci-fi movie screening. For a long time now, I´ve felt fascinated about cosplay too and I attend the official contest to admire all those wonderful cosplayers every single time. However, as I am quite a shy person, I never had the balls to go as any of my favourite characters to the event itself. I always start planning things, but one way or another I always find an excuse to procratinate on the dress making process, and eventually I always give up...

MAC Diva review.

By now you probably know I rarely post any spontaneous beauty reviews. However, when I find a product I truly like, I can make an exception and talk a little about it. As you certainly guess, this is totally one of those unusual occasions.

During our little Vienna holiday two weeks ago (more on that coming later), I accidentally stumbled upon a MAC Cosmetics store and decided to stop and have a look. I should explain that, although we do have a shop in Bucharest, it is quite a small one and unfortunately its stock is normally quite modest for a number of reasons. Nevertheless, its Austrian counterpart was reasonably interesting in terms of supplies, so I took the chance for a quick look.

Naughty week.

It is an universally known truth that once in a while all that may go wrong will do. 

Now, before you all get worried about it and start kindly asking me if I am OK and so on, I am totally fine. I am just referring to that type of week when every single little thing seems to delay or twist, causing not serious but annoying trouble. It is just like we all enjoy our own dose of Murphy´s Law now and then, and this time it was my turn.

It is a bit too complicated to explain it here, but long story short: I spent half of the week trying to sort a bureaucratic process without any result, lost a delivery parcel because of being home absent, and had a couple of little irritating domestic accidents due to anxiety making me even more clumsy than usual. Well, c´est la vie, I suppose! 

A day of my life in pictures: March, the 19th.

Hi there, everyone and happy Easter!

I hope you are all having a lovely holiday. This month has been kind of busy for me, as I am looking for a new job and some friends from Spain were visiting. Well, I am not going to talk about all those real life boring work details here. As for friends, we had an interesting but exhausting week together, I carefully documented in pictures, but those are kind of personal, so I need to see how many of them I am able to share here.

However, I thought I could take the chance to document last Saturday, as it has been some time since my last "a day in pictures" sort of post. 

I hope you enjoy my March, the 19th! 

 

Sugar Factory: My favourite tea room in Madrid.

Hello, everyone! 

Where have I been this February? Have I been abducted by aliens? You wish!

No, actually, I am back home after our holiday in Spain to see friends and family. This was a truly special trip, as my sister and brother-in-law came all their way from Japan to visit us and surprise my parents, but that´s a different story I might tell you later. 

For now I am going to let you know The Gentle One and I took the chance to stay in Madrid for a couple of nights. We like to spend some time there once in a while, and generally we use that extra spare time visiting museums, eating good food or simply having a walk through our favourite places.

The wedding chronicles

As I repeatedly  said before, it is time to stop procrastinating and finally to share some of the memories from our big day. It took us some time to collect all the pictures, as our photography studio was a small one and they struggled a bit during the end of the weddings season to edit and deliver both photos and albums. However, we are truly happy about the results (and will probably hire them again for our first anniversary). Also, we have been very busy with studies and work, and that never helps, does it? But the thing is I am able to post our memories now.

I truly hope you enjoy my Wedding Chronicles.

 

Chocolate Bar palette review.

As I mentioned on my Wishlist post last month, I had been craving for the Too Faced Chocolate Bar palette for some time.

 

Since it caught my eye in December, I was thinking about purchasing, but the price restrained me from getting ahold of it immediately.  

However, Christmas holiday arrived, and The Gentle One can be really sharp when it comes to presents, so together with many other beautiful things, I finally got it! I gave it a first try on Christmas Day just to discover I liked it even more than I expected, and I thought it could be nice to share a little review with you. This is my honest opinion on Too Faced Chocolate Bar, I hope you enjoy it.

Our Gothic & Victorian wedding portraits.

Yesterday, we celebrated our four month wedding anniversary with awe.

It was not a particularly special date, of course, but we are amazed how quickly time goes by. So, I decided this week was a good moment to share with you a few pictures from our big day professional photoshoot. They were taken after the ceremony, on the 20th of September. As our scenario, we chose a recently restored Victorian house in Bucharest. The reason to select this particular manor house was we felt it perfectly fitted the Gothic and Victorian theme of the wedding.

First portrait of 2016.

Ok, Winter: you made your point. Could you please stop it now and go away? Thank you!

This was meant to be a "what I wore this week" kind of post. However, weather made it hard to the point it was no longer possible. At least, for now. I mean, the week started pretty good regarding to temperature. That´s when these pictures were taken: as you can see, on Monday it was totally OK to wear lace blouses to be around the house, and then I could leave it by adding just a little wool cardigan and a light coat. 10°C is totally alright to dress up and go for a coffee with a friend. 

And then IT happened.

The Paris Diaries: a majestic pantheon, and the most expensive tea ever.

Last September we visited Paris for a total of five days, although the last one was spent packing, making last minute souvenir shopping, and having a terrible lunch at the airport. Consequently, this post is the last of my documented Paris diaries. It contains a detailed relation of our adventures that day, including an early visit to the French Pantheon, another to Napoleon Bonaparte´s intimidating tomb, a very expensive tea and some obligatory goofing around the Eiffel Tower among other events. We had a lovely day, so I hope you enjoy by reading this post.

The Paris Diaries, day 4.

The Paris Diaries: This is Versailles!

Last night I was checking my blog archives when I suddenly realized there were two Paris posts left on my drafts file! For some reason (and most likely due to the big agitation my life was wrap on last Autumn) I totally forgot to hit the publish button at some point. So for today I thought it could be nice to share those with you, as I suppose nobody gets too annoyed about a travel review full of beautiful pictures. 

To sum up, the next chapter of my Paris diaries was written during our third day in France, back in the end of  September. We wouldn´t spend it in the city, but we traveled to Versailles instead. It was a memorable day for us both, as this had been one of our dream destinations for... well, FOREVER. We´re both truly interested on history since our high school days: The Gentle One is specifically fascinated about the Golden Age period all over Europe (this is his PHD topic, actually), so he craved for visiting the place where Louis XIV started the French empire. As for me, I am very fond of the French monarchy decadence and the country revolutionary process all through the XVIII and XIX centuries.

We´re such a couple of boring and pedant people, right?

I know, sorry about that.

Whatever, this is the little tale we wrote about our trip.

I hope you like it!

The Paris Diaries, day 3.