Exercise regime for high-rise dwellers

When living in a high-rise, make sure you keep fit.

We are still recovering from hiking down 31 floors of stairs a few days ago when we were woken in the morning by the emergency alarm. A sonorous voice told us that an incident had been detected in the building and that we should leave by the stairs. Great!

We grabbed the laptop and our passports and headed for the exit. Of course we hoped it was a false alarm, but feared it wasn't so we sped down the endless corridors of the staircase. When we arrived - breathless and anxious, but relieved that we hadn't encountered any smoke - at the bottom, we found that the water tank for the sprinklers had drained and had set off the alarm. Phew!

The next day we both felt crippled with muscle pain in two very specific areas of our thighs and calves. For most of the last week getting up or going up or down stairs has been agony. The lesson? Do that Stairmaster!

A posh dinner

We were invited to a barbecue by one of Stuart's colleague's, a casual affair, we were told. Yeah, right.

So we went wearing trainers and baggy shirts only to find tables laden with silver and crystal, covered in white damask cloths in the garden.

Waiters with black bow ties and a chef with a crisp, tall white hat were greeting us with aperitifs and three long tables crammed with delicacies. So much for our expectation of a guy wearing shorts and a silly apron flipping burgers on a smoky grill.

Making Bacon Sarnies

Being such a cosmopolitan city with dozens of nationalities coexisting makes for interesting situations. Take food, for example.

Making a bacon sarnie for lunch is one of the highlights of our weekends. When we decided whether to come here it was a worry that we would not be able to assemble all the ingredients. Nice squishy English white bread, brown sauce, free-range eggs and butter and the most problematic of all: bacon. Obviously we didn't think it was possible to buy pork products here, but we had heard that there are bacon replacements made from beef (a bit like tofu sausages for those veggies who can't live without bangers and mash).

How wrong we were:

Stuart is deciding which kind of bacon to buy from the shelves tucked away into the back of the local supermarket. With an entrance like a porn shop, you are not encouraged to buy there, and being seen to shop here marks one out as a definite unbeliever. If you can live with that, all the treasures from pate to smoky bacon-flavoured crisps are yours.