I bought a dress!

Victorian Maiden has a new series of dress released today - the British Check series.  There's a one piece, a jumperskirt, and a skirt.  I really like all the pieces!  They all come in red, grey, or yellow tartan. I bought the jumperskirt in grey!

The OP is very demure with a nice long skirt.  I'm not that fond of this colourway because it looks so much like Christmas.

I adored this dress as soon as I saw it months ago.  It seems like I'm fond of underbust jumperskirts!  This will be my second.

I really like the skirt, but it seems to me like the hemlines are creeping upwards ever so slowly!  It's still beautiful.

I bought the grey jumperskirt through Gosurori Order today.  They've been aware of my intentions to buy the dress for weeks now, because it was sold out in reserve when I first contacted them.  We've been working together checking the site for updates and finally the dress was released!  And we POUNCED.

I've ordered through Gosurori Order before - that's how I got my VM Adele Bustier dress.  It's a good fast service, and apparently they're good at avoiding customs fees (in Australia that's not a problem).

Because I've been so excited about this dress for so long, I've even started thinking up ways to wear it.  I went on Polyvore and had a play around with coordinates, using pictures of clothes I already have.  These are two I came up with:

(I don't actually have that jacket, but I'm sure I could find something similar)

and

(I have a similar jacket that would work well, but not quite the same.  Mine has little red spots!)

I'm sure I'll think of lots of other interesting ways to wear this dress.  It's being sent to my house in Australia, so it'll be there when I get home in 2 weeks exactly!  That's another thing to welcome me home.  I really don't want to go home!  My new life here is wonderful!

Today I went for a walk on a river.

Today was lovely and sunny so we went for a walk along the river.  And when I say along the river, I really do mean along the river.

Big paths have been cleared on the river for people to skate and walk along.  Maybe cars sometimes drive on the river too.  There were also lots of snow-mobiles driving along the snow that hadn't been cleared away.  Charles took some of these photos too.

There are cracks in the ice, but they only make you realise how thick the ice is - some cracks you could see down a metre at least.  I think there must be no flowing water in all of Sweden.

We packed a picnic lunch not really knowing where we'd eat.  Obviously every picnic table ever is covered in a foot of snow and is inaccessible.  So Charles just sat down on the ice to eat delicious biscuits and drink delicious coffee!  He even stuck his thermos in the snow.  I thought he was super cute.

Later, he lost his beanie.  Aww.

There were lots of people walking their dogs on the river and I saw a Sheltie that had eyes just like Titan.  He came up to me and I patted him.  Then I turned away and cried!  It was weird!  But sort of lovely?

The river wound into town, so we had a chance to go to the big supermarket!  We bought SO MUCH food and then had to carry it 45 minutes home.  I made a delicious pie so everything is right with the world.

Here's another youtube video I took of our adventure!

This is a crazy alien world!

View from outside our window

This is the view from outside our front door in Piteå.  Snow everywhere!  Giant piles of snow!  It's quite pretty, but it's mostly overcast.  I'd been looking forward to seeing the Aurora, but now I don't think it'll happen.  I've been keeping a lookout!

I've been having a nice domestic sort of holiday.  Baking lots of biscuits and cooking lots of soups.  It's hard for us to get around since we don't have a car and there's not easy public transport.  We walk everywhere.  We go to uni daily where Charles works on stuff and I practice.  I have access to practice rooms and instruments!  So I'm working on repertoire for my Honours (I totally got accepted into Honours).  Sometimes we go to friends' houses for dinner which is lovely!

Last week we had a day that was -28 degrees.  That was a day we chose to walk into town!  Oh gosh we nearly died.  Even though we had all our warm clothes on, the air attacks your face and your breath freezes on your cheeks and in your nose.  My gloves are only knitted, so they were practically useless.  My boots, although warm, couldn't stand the cold and my feet turned into blocks of ice.  It was crazy cold!  It's usually only about -12 so it's quite okay.  I'm going to have way different definitions of cold from now on.

We've been taking photos with the Diana Mini and we're going to walk into town (45 minutes ugh) to get them developed tomorrow!  I hope!

I took a video of us walking into uni the other day.  It's not that interesting if you've lived with snow!  But for my Australian friends, it's kind of bizarre.

Recent Adventures: London!

On the evening of the 30th of December, Charles, Lisa, and I took the Eurostar chunnel train to London.  Pretty cool!  We stayed at a youth hostel type place LITERALLY one street away from Buckingham Palace.

London was marred by a bad cold for me.  I bought lots of cold drugs (all super cheap and easy to obtain in London) and soldiered on as well as I could.  Like Paris, in London we went to a bunch of museums - Tate Modern Art Museum, Natural History Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  They were all really huge and we didn't see all of any of them!  I particularly liked the V&A Museum because they had lots of old textiles and lace, as well as theatre costumes.  It was really interesting!  I also liked the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.

While we were in London, Charles and I took a day trip to see my family-in-law who live in Greater London.  It was so good to finally meet them!  My parents haven't even met my sister-in-law's parents.

Shopping in London was fun!  We went to two markets: Portobello Road markets, and Camden Town markets.  We didn't buy anything at Portobello Road, but it was a great market and lots to look at.  All the houses were painted different pastel colours.  Cute!  Camden Town markets were amazing.  Lots and lots of stalls selling dresses that all looked like they were straight out of Modcloth.com.  I bought two dresses there!

Another great shopping area is Oxford street.  We went there on Jan. 3rd, which was the last day before Britain raised the VAT (some GST type tax), and there were New Year's Sales, and as a result the shops were SUPER crowded.  Lisa bought two jackets there.  I was pretty sick that day, but managed to enjoy myself by going to a Vivienne Westwood shop.  It was amazing!  All completely out of my price range.  The clothes were gorgeous creations and the shoes were bizarre and the bags were cute.  Great!  That day I also bought my Irregular Choice shoes.  Awesome.

Food was a bit of a problem since some days the supermarkets were inconveniently closed.  We sometimes struggled to find a good place to eat, and it was especially hard because I was sick - by dinner time I was so tired I just wanted to grab a salad and go home.  Couldn't always do that!  But the best place we found to eat was called Pret a Manger - amazing organic fresh food.  Delicious!

London is quite clean at the moment because they're hosting the Olympics in 2012.  I guess that means they want to tidy up the place for the visitors.  There were lots of policemen about too - making me think of the Bill theme song.  Their hats are tall!

The best thing about London was that I could talk to people in English.

Purchases - Sweden!

Here's all TWO of my Sweden purchases!  First, a top from H&M.  That chain store is all over Europe.  On every single street corner.

Aaaaand this one is from a rad shop called Design Torget (or something) in Stockholm.  It's a shower octopus that holds all your shampoos and stuff!  He has a little face!  We only have three things in it but now I know we could easily buy FIVE MORE SHAMPOOS and house them easily.

Purchases - London!

Here's what I bought in London!

This lovely spotty dress is from Camden Town markets!

And THIS lovely spotty dress is from Camden Town markets!

These lovely shoes are from Irregular Choice, which is an actual shop as well as an awesome online shop!

 

 

 

Purchases - Paris!

In Paris I bought a jumper, two dresses, a little pan and a lot of tights!

This jumper is from UniQlo!  I needed a jumper, and this one is super nice!  Cashmere!

This dress is ALSO from UniQlo.  It's a collaboration between them and the Japanese brand Milk, which I love.  It's a bit of a weird shaped dress, very Japanese.  No shape at all in the bodice, long sleeves, and short skirt.  Cute!

This dress I bought at a little shop as I was passing by.  It's blue lace over a blue slip.  The only problem is that the slip ends quite a bit higher than the lace!  So it's a bit revealing on the legs.  Might have to alter that.

This little pot I bought at Muji.  It's really small!  We bought it for warming Glogg (low alcohol Christmas wine served warm)

And lots of tights!  I love the lacy cream ones - they'll go well with all those dresses!

Recent adventures: Paris

It's been a while since I blogged!  Well, since I blogged here anyway.  I've been writing a travel blog with Charles about all our adventures.  Link here.  It's also the blog we used for both of our Japan trips.

Paris

We did so much stuff in Paris!  All the things you're supposed to do, we did.  Plus lots of other things while we were at it!  Mostly we visited museums: the Pompidou Centre, the Louvre, L'Orangerie, Palais du Tokyo, Arts et Metres, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, and a Dali museum.  That's a lot of museums!  Luckily we had a 3-day museum pass which let us get into lots of places for free!  


Lots of these museums are stupidly huge and contained vast amounts of stuff.  All the stuff is really cool, but it gets a bit tedious to go through the umpteenth hall of contemporary art that doesn't make any sense.  We could easily have spent many more hours at these museums except we got bored of them.  An exception was l'Orangerie, which is only two small rooms, with four paintings in each, of Monet's Waterlillies.  There are benches in the middle of the room so you can relax as you view them.  It's really nice.


We also did lots of cool stuff that wasn't museum-related.  Charles and I went to a morning service at Notre Dame on Christmas Day.  That sounds pretty good doesn't it!  The choir and organ was great, but the rest of the service... well, it was long, and in French.  So it was a bit (boring).  Our Christmas lunch was at ... McDonald's!  It was the only place we could find that was open.  A bit sad.


We went to Baby, The Stars Shine Bright.  I almost bought a dress - the Vampire Forest A-line jumperskirt.  It was really pretty, but also... it had pictures of graves and scary stuff on the print, and I thought "I couldn't wear this to church!" and then I thought "I couldn't wear this anywhere!  It's not really my style!" and then I shook of the Baby-induced crazy and left the shop.  It was fun to visit though!


We also went to a loli-fairy-kei shop called Boddywood, which sold a lot of Milk dresses (which were gorgeous) and Vivienne Westwood stuff (which was gorgeous and expensive) and some 6% Doki Doki stuff (which was super cute).  Angelic Pretty was in the apartment above the shop, and the shop girl from Boddywood had to come with us to visit.  So there we were, me, Lisa, Charles, and this shop girl in a TINY PINK ROOM with HUGE DRESSES.  There was no music.  There was no speaking.  It was the most awkward thing in the universe.


Food in Paris was really good, and reasonably priced.  The most delicious and cheapest way to eat (in my opinion) is to buy a delicious baguette, some camembert cheese, some prosciutto, and some sundried tomatoes and make sandwiches.  They're like normal ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches, except each ingredient has levelled up to make the sandwich super awesome.  Charles and I did this for dinner many times.  But the best thing was breakfast: go into any bakery and order anything and it will be delicious.  We found a place that does toasted ham and cheese croissants, oh my gosh, they sound so NORMAL when I write it like that.  It was ridiculous.


Shopping in Paris wasn't quite as fun as I expected.  The department stores like and Printemps and LaFayette were just really expensive designer brands - a whole floor consisting of ONLY haute couture by big brands - Louis Vuitton, Dior, Prada, Gucci, etc.  It's fun to browse, but then you see someone with eight Dior packages and just KNOW that that person just spent more money than you'd earn in years.  I suppose because they have so many designer shops, Paris is renowned for its fashion.  I didn't notice much crazy or special fashion on the streets, but I guess it's hard to be fashionable when you have to wear one billion layers and a huge coat.


However, Paris (and many countries in Europe) have some cool Japanese shops that we love: Muji, and UniQlo.  Muji sells homewares and clothes, and UniQlo sells pretty basic clothes.  They're relatively cheap compared to other French shopping.  I bought some good things from those shops, which I'll blog about later.  We found these shops by accident walking around the streets.  The best way to explore Paris is by going to a cool-looking place on the metro and just exploring by foot.  Go down side-streets that look interesting!


Weather: super cold oh my gosh.  It's a different cold from Sweden, because it's wet in France.  It gets into your bones.  If you're going in Winter, take waterproof boots and lots of thermals.  When the sun goes down, it gets way colder too, so always take an extra jumper.  I acquired myself a cold in Paris somehow, probably because I was too cold too often.  Be warned!


Crime: Apparently there's lots of theft in Paris!  We witnessed something of the sort in McDonald's on Christmas Day, some youths causing trouble and running away with stuff.  Lisa told me lots of horror stories about her friends getting stuff stolen, and apparently she saw some boys on the train going through a woman's purse that they'd just stolen!  So if you go there, be careful, use a bag you can put over your shoulder and zip up, not a backpack that you can't see.  Small bags are easier to snatch and are more likely to contain a higher density of valuables, so I'd recommend a bigger tote.  That way you can take an extra jumper too.


There are many homeless people on the streets in Paris.  They usually beg.  This upsets me a lot.  Often they have a dog that's just lying there, looking like it's been fed whiskey to make it look more pathetic.  Apparently there's quite a good social support system in France, so I don't know why there's so much poverty.  It was sad.


We took the metro everywhere in Paris.  It's really convenient and quick, and you get to know the stations well.  Some stations are smelly though.  Actually lots of Paris is smelly.  Lots of dog poop.


So Paris: Pretty good, you guys!  I highly recommend it.