Most of the Coyle clan has been on summer vacation in the US for the last few weeks and won't be back in Zurich until Sept. 14th. We will "blog" more upon our return! :)
Hope your summer is going well!
Monday, August 25, 2008
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Our First London Trip
Buckingham Palace
Bill and Brady on a Double Decker Bus
Trafalgar SquareHalf-way through July, Bill had to visit his company's London office for some training. The training was to be held on a Friday, so we decided to make a weekend of it. Brady and I flew out with Bill early on Friday morning and we stayed through Sunday afternoon.
It was a very quick trip and we will be going back again. All in all, after living in Zurich for 4 months, it was crazy to be in such a HUGE city. We actually agreed that you tend to hear more English spoken in Zurich than we heard in London. But we enjoyed the hustle and bustle during our short trip. We seemed to like the food most of all. When we entered Paddington Station after taking the Heathrow Express from the airport, the first thing we saw was a Krispy Kreme!! Bill and I aren't really donut crazy, but after not having had donuts in a long time (and you can't find decent donuts in Zurich), we loved them! We had Mexican food on Friday night - soooooo good. Saturday we had an English pub lunch which was excellent and was followed by dinner out with our old neighbors from NJ who now live in London. It was great catching up with them and meeting their new son (well, new to us at least.)
We basically did the cheesy touristy thing all day Saturday, but had fun walking around London and taking in the sites.
Watching Good Old Fashioned American TV via Slingbox
Well, after a few months of only have like 5 English speaking TV channels (how much of Donald Trump True Hollywood Story and The Kardashians on "E" can one person take?), we decided we needed some major TV overhauls. Plus, although it's only August, our minds have already started thinking about FOOTBALL season. We would definitely not be getting any games on our Swiss cable. So, after some researching, we decided to go the Slingbox route.
Now, if you were like me and have no idea what a Slingbox is, let me give you a little background. Basically, we re-subscribed to our Direct TV service that we had in NJ. We get a Direct TV box complete with a DVR and it gets installed in some server room somewhere in California. (At the company we bought a Slingbox from.) The Slingbox is a piece of equipment that allows us to "sling"what we want to watch (via a slingbox) to the internet. We access our account and can change the channels (like we would with a remote) and can record things like we would have done with our previous Direct TV box. The company that hosts our box is on the west coast, so the local channels (like NBC, etc.) are on CA time. So, if I wanted to watch an 8pm NBC show live…I would have to watch in on my computer at 5Am our time. Instead…we would just “record” the show and watch it the next day on our computer. This slingbox thing lets us watch whatever we want to watch on our Direct TV box on any computer. We usually take our laptop and project this onto our TV so we can see it bigger. It’s pretty neat. It’s just letting us watch our Direct TV on our computer. Eventually, they are developing a “Sling catcher” that we can then plug right into our wireless router and then we can watch directly on our TV. That’s apparently a few months off. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Here’s a website that explains it further and probably better than I’ve attempted to. http://www.a2btv.com/what_how.php
So, we are definitely technologically advanced, but for Football season and the fall TV season, we are all set. I'm very excited, especially since you can't watch TV shows in Switzerland on NBC.com, etc. They disable the shows on their websites for non-US locations.
All in all, though, we definitely watch a lot less TV than we did in the States and I think that is definitely a good thing. :)
Now, if you were like me and have no idea what a Slingbox is, let me give you a little background. Basically, we re-subscribed to our Direct TV service that we had in NJ. We get a Direct TV box complete with a DVR and it gets installed in some server room somewhere in California. (At the company we bought a Slingbox from.) The Slingbox is a piece of equipment that allows us to "sling"what we want to watch (via a slingbox) to the internet. We access our account and can change the channels (like we would with a remote) and can record things like we would have done with our previous Direct TV box. The company that hosts our box is on the west coast, so the local channels (like NBC, etc.) are on CA time. So, if I wanted to watch an 8pm NBC show live…I would have to watch in on my computer at 5Am our time. Instead…we would just “record” the show and watch it the next day on our computer. This slingbox thing lets us watch whatever we want to watch on our Direct TV box on any computer. We usually take our laptop and project this onto our TV so we can see it bigger. It’s pretty neat. It’s just letting us watch our Direct TV on our computer. Eventually, they are developing a “Sling catcher” that we can then plug right into our wireless router and then we can watch directly on our TV. That’s apparently a few months off. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Here’s a website that explains it further and probably better than I’ve attempted to. http://www.a2btv.com/what_how.php
So, we are definitely technologically advanced, but for Football season and the fall TV season, we are all set. I'm very excited, especially since you can't watch TV shows in Switzerland on NBC.com, etc. They disable the shows on their websites for non-US locations.
All in all, though, we definitely watch a lot less TV than we did in the States and I think that is definitely a good thing. :)
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