We are on the Pyrénées and it rained the night before, so probably made it colder. There were a lot of beautiful wild flowers and vegetable grown inside and outside of Maison Esmeralda. I wish to have a place like this! Growing flowers, have dogs......

Heather told us that we would pass the top of the mountains and there would be a lot of cows on it which were let free during the summer time.

We drove pass the top which was 1249m. It was so beautiful looking down so we made a stop. It was so cold and windy that we couldn't stand there for long. If you could only hear the actual environment. All the cows wore a heavy bell around their neck and when they were chewing grass, the bell rang. So you could imagine all the bells rang at the same time at different paces. Imagine how funny and interesting it was.

We didn't stop for long as it was really cold. We drove further South to Andorra, a tax-free haven.

Andorra is a very small country in the mountain which is very famous for its ski grounds. While we went through it, we saw a lot of resort, resort under construction, ski lifts.. not a place where you would live though. We drove pass the city center. We probably should have found a place to park and shop around but we didn't. We drove pass the last shopping mall not knowing it's the last one and the next minute, we were at the Spain Custom! There was no turning point! The only think we could do was to go through it and went back again! And we did!

We stopped at the shopping mall and some of us had lunch and rest of us shopped! It was really cheap! I bought quite a lot of kitchen ware, especially siliconware. So cheap! Alan bought a lot of wine ware. Everything was cheap! Like crazy huh.... I am still regretting of not buying that ball of Mimolette (cheese). It costed only 45€ for the whole ball! The same ball costs around HK$900 in wholesale in Hong Kong. A lot more than that if you buy it from Citysuper. Damn!

We also needed to shop for the food for tonight and possibily tomorrow BBQ dinner. We were going to stay in a gîtes (holiday home) for 2 nights in Spain which is owned by our of my colleagues who specially rent it to us for 2 nights (usually a gîtes is for weekly rental). We needed to do self-catering.

At the time we wanted to leave, it rained so noisily and heavily outside and we loitered for another half an hour and then left. When we got to our cars, to our surprise, it was not rain, it was hails!

When we finally left for Spain, it was I think around 4pm. We went through the Spain Custom again and drove along all the beautiful mountains and tunnels. All of sudden, it hailed again! The hails hit us very hard on car and everyone of us were so quiet because we were quite afraid. Not knowing what to do. If you would check out the video I made, you would experience the hail as well. Very scary. 1st time in my life to have met a heavy hail like this!

Anyway. we finally got to Villa Serenity. But problem. As it is a gîtes, there is no one there living in the house. My colleague told me that the housekeeper was just living a few blocks down the street but that we were around 30 minutes later than the time I told her, we were waiting for almost 20 minutes before Carmen shown up to let us in. Well luckily just in time to get away from the hail. Yes it hailed again. This time smaller but harder! We had it also captured in our video. What an experience!

Then we started to cook. Before our trip, we said that each of us would cook one dish. Despite that Villa Serenity has got a large kitchen, there were just too many chefs!

I made a pork ribs stew (far right) and angel hair bolognaise (immediate right). And the gang had made ketchup shrimp, chicken wings, lamb steak etc. Of course we had wine. We had a 2 hour dinner and chatted and talked. We didn't need to go anywhere far the next day though, it had been a long day so I slept first even before most of them. Alan of course was busing MSN'ng and downloading radio show again from HK....

Bon nuit!