Merry Christmas Everyone!

To all of you:

source

This has been such a blessed year for us and making the journey with all of you has been even more special. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones! Wishing you love, laughter, and health!

Chocolate Lover + Mr. Milk

xxx

Updates

Hello lovelies! I know I have been in and out of the loop the last few months, but that's mostly because I have been waiting for our pro pics to arrive. There has been a lot going on around here, but I wanted to finish off all the wedding related stuff first, before continuing with everything else. 

As you might notice from my updated profile pic, our photos are ready! They are in the mail as we speak heading to us. We were able to see our over 1000(!!!) pics and slideshow on our photogs website, but I figure putting the password and link up on the blog for everyone to see might not be such a great idea. So a little more patience is in order and all will be revealed! I cannot express how over the moon I am about our photos! They are everything I wanted and so much more. Not only did Petros take beautiful photos, he and his wife are sweethearts! We had a fantastic time with both of them, especially on our location shoot! And just to keep you interested, here are a couple of pics I saved using screen shot:

All photos courtesy of Petros Sordinas | Photographer

In other news, Mr. Milk and I will be heading to Rome on Wednesday! We will be meeting one of our groomsmen and his gf there. We've had this trip booked for a couple of months now and we are so excited to be spending Christmas in Rome! We will be taking plenty of pics to share with you all, and I am almost certain a fair share of them will be of food! 

I hope all of you have fantastic holidays with your loved ones! And come January, the recaps of our wedding will be in full swing! 

Honeymoon Recaps: Male

We spent one day of our honeymoon not lazying around like bums, and actually doing something! We took a day trip to the capital of the Maldives, Male, which is of course an entire island, and we even had a private tour guide arranged by the hotel. It was fun to see the history of this span of islands, that only became known in the 70's.

I forget what the building in the background is. Some type of government building I think. But the flag of the Maldives was huge.

Here we are outside the President's Office. It faces the water and there are a fleet of navy vessels "parked" outside.

Male was packed with scooters. There were very few cars mostly because one would have to pay 100% tax on a car brought to the Maldives!

This is an ancient cemetery for royalty. The large, pointy stones are for men, the rounded ones for women, and the small one for kids.

And this is the Presidential Palace. There was a newer one built a few years ago on an island a few minutes away, but the current president has chosen to live here we were told.

This is their museum in Sultan Park. It was built with China Aid and hence the building reminds you a little of Chinese culture.

This is their largest mosque and one of the only ones that can be visited by tourists inside. 

My favorite part is visiting the markets. In this particular one, locals were only allowed to sell local products. The dynamite looking packages are a mixture of crushed coconut and brown sugar. Really yum!

Lots and lots of bananas! Makes you think about the gigantic things we buy at the store!

Betel leaves. Good for aiding digestion apparently. 

Betel nut. 

Local fishermen in their boats.

More boats. 

Beautiful tuna from the fish market

And finally a souvenir shop. We got some beautiful pieces from in here. 

We spent about 4 hours on the island and I feel like there was a lot more to see. If we had the time I would have gladly gone back and just walked around on our own. 

So thats it for the honeymoon ladies! We had a great time and would love to go back to the Maldives again at some point. Next time I post will be about the wedding! Should be getting our pro pics any day now and I can't wait! 

Honeymoon Recaps - The Wildlife

I don't think I have ever been to a place that had as much free-running wildlife as the Maldives! There were birds and reptiles and of course water creatures. So I thought it only fitting to give them some attention here, since both Mr. Milk and I gave them a ton of attention while we were there (what can I say, we are both animal lovers). 

This grey heron really got around! We saw him everywhere. And every evening he would fly off, not sure where he was heading, but sure enough the next day he was back on the beach.

I fell in love with these little guys! They were just so adorable shuffling around in the sand, ducking their heads in their shell whenever you would walk past.

Now these ghost crabs were amazing. They would come out at dusk and spend the entire night digging holes in the sand in search for food. 

It took a whole lot of patience and standing still in order to get some pics. 

We were even able to capture some video of them but Mr. Milk accidentally deleted it :(

Stingrays were everywhere.

As you can see, this little guys (it was a baby stingray) was right along the shore. His eyes are even popping out of the water here. 

Here's a bigger one, further into the water.

What you can see hanging onto the tree is a fruit bat! Those things are huge! It looks like a medium sized bird with bat-wings. 

Here you can see it in mid-flight. 

And these guys were by far my favorite. I small family of birds that hung around our villa every day. We felt like we had adopted them.

I love this photo. The mommy bird is feeding the chicks some coconut. 

There was a bunch more underwater wildlife that we saw while we were snorkeling, but unfortunately we didn't have an underwater camera to capture it all. But as one of the hotel staff said, you could see the entire cast of Finding Nemo in there!

Honeymoon Recaps - My 30th Birthday

One of the other reasons we decided to splurge on our honeymoon with a trip to the Maldives was that it was a double celebration. While on our trip, I would be turning 30. Some very good friends of us have a "tradition" of doing something big on big birthdays, and we really liked this idea and decided to steal it :). For Mr. Milk's 30th we took a week long trip to Kauai, and it was one of the best vacations we had. 

So my day started off with a surprise from my hubby: he had arranged for a private breakfast on our patio. 

While we were still sleeping, the lovely hotel staff started to set up our breakfast table outside

By the time we got up and ready, our food was out there waiting for us. We had fruit, waffles, pancakes, omelets, hashbrowns, toast, croissants and other pastries, juice, and coffee. It was delicious!

Mr. Milk had asked the staff at the hotel for some flowers, and since there is no store on the island, they arranged to have a bouquet brought over from Male (the capital) the evening before. 

We spent the day by the beach and then after lunch we went for a couples treatment at the spa. We had our own over-water bungalow treatment room and both got scrubs and massages. It was so relaxing. Unfortunately we didn't take a camera so I have no pics of that :(

For dinner we went to the teppanyaki restaurant that was also over the water.

We ordered sushi to start off with...

...and then some veggies, rice, shrimp, and lobster! Our chef was great and the food was amazing!

I love how vivid these pics are! 

And of course no birthday is complete without birthday cake! Mr. Milk was able to arrange to have a small chocolate cake made just for me. As you can see, I turned 2 ;)

Again, we were having such a great time with the food that we forgot to get a picture of ourselves that day! Oh well... 

Honeymoon Recaps - Around the Island

Like I said, our island was tiny. Mr. Milk and I spent most of our days in the Maldives being lazy! And that is exactly what we wanted! Our days therefore looked very similar (with a few exceptions): we would wake up in the morning, go down to the restaurant to have breakfast, come back to our room, change into our swimwear, grab a book and other beach necessities, and head over to our beach loungers. At some point before lunch, someone would pass by with cold towels and skewers of fresh fruit rolled in coconut, yum! Since we were staying on a half-board basis, we would grab some snacks and a drink around 2-3pm and then would have dinner at around 8pm. In the meantime we read, swam, snorkeled, walked around the island, and just spent time with each other. 

So here is a selection of photos from our trip. We took about 1500 and I managed to narrow it down to about 50 for this post, and I still think some of them are repetitive! The scenery was just so stunning that we kept taking photos of it over and over and over again!

Near the bar and pool area

Towards the spa

More over-water bungalows. We thought about upgrading to one of these but loved our beach villa so much that we decided to stay put. 

Dinner our first night there.

Mr. Milk's sand-art

My sand-art - our wedding date

The newlyweds :)

Waiting to watch the sunset

One of the many gorgeous sunsets we saw

Fresh coconuts right of the tree! It's great being at the right at the right time!

Mr. Milk lookin tough :)

None of these are photoshopped by the way! Just taken with a good camera.

Mr. Milk took a scuba lesson and loved it!

Another gorgeous sunset

I love how the sun looks like its melting into the ocean

On the last day I get a little photo nuts, snapping everything in site in an attempt to take a small piece of the Maldives back home with us.

Hubby

The Chill bar

The island resort opposite ours

Doesn't this look like a postcard!?

The teppanyaki restaurant we ate at a few times

What we would walk through every single day!