With it being winter time of course Greg and I are hitting the slopes.  We made it on our second ski trip of the season to Lenggries.  A very easy day trip from Munich, its only a 1.5 hour train ride with a combo ski lift included in the roundtrip.  It wasn’t great conditions but sunny and beautiful.  Greg has lots of pictures on his site, here are a couple below.

 

What better way to spend your first Christmas in Europe than in the romantic city of Venice.  Greg suprised me with a trip to Venice.  It was beautiful and of course we enjoyed a gondola ride through the canals.  There are over 150 canals, 450 gondola drivers and 2300 lion statutes in the city of Venice.  We took part in Midnight Christmas Mass at St. Mark’s.  After Mass we headed to a local bar for a little night cap and ran into a group of locals who became our new best friends and told us all about life in Venice.  Picture below of Sam, Yohan and team-they plan to head to Berlin shortly.  It was a lovely 4 days.  We even had our Cafe Latte and Cappuccino at Cafe Florian in the square each 8.20 EUROs-that is one expensive cup of coffee especially when everywhere else they are only 1.20 EUROs.  We even had time to take in a show on the history of Venice.  Here are a couple of my favorite pictures.  For more pictures visit Greg’s space at: http://cid-00ff01d44a3debf0.spaces.live.com/

 

So I am a little behind in my blogging.  So after Solden I headed off to visit the Microsoft offices in Latvia and Czech Republic.  These two countries are amazing and so beautiful.  Latvia is a very small country where majority of the population is in the Capitol City of Riga over a million.  Prague is amazing, so pretty, clean and great beer and wine!  The teams are doing an amazing job, I am so suprised how much is accomplished with such small teams compared to the size of operations in the USA.  Here are a couple pictures from the two trips and the teams.