It was very cold for most of the two weeks we were in Germany. No one warned us that it could snow in March. March should be the start of spring and last year, there were record high temperatures. I guess the Germans were taken by surprise as much as we were!
Coming into the St Pancras Eurostar terminal yesterday, London felt balmy in comparison. It was sunny, almost warm, as I went about the neighbourhood today to restock my bare pantry cupboard.
Tomorrow, I’m back at work. Two weeks ago, I left team mates with three big reports to finish off. I hope there weren’t any hitches!
I feel newly inspired to improve myself. I think that being on holiday gave me time to think about what I have achieved so far, and what I want to do next. I haven’t made a formal resolutions list or wish list. I just have a vague notion of wanting to be ‘better’. Perhaps I will start by slowing down so that I can think more before speaking or making a decision.
Damjan and I are Aussie battlers, tough as nails. We eat ice-cream even when it’s snowing. This photo shows me eating delicious mango and macadamia ice-cream from a European gourmet food chain called ‘Australian Homemade‘. Weird, eh?
I’m in Berlin now. Mo and Ulli are hosting us. I met Mo in a delightfully random way at Cambridge and am reaping the rewards of my willingness to talk to strangers on a whim.
I will be travelling around Germany by train for the next two weeks. I will post photos and stories eventually. I already have one — Damjan and I got on an overnight train in Brussels and nearly had to leave because I had bought tickets for the wrong date! I was horrified. It could have been a disaster. I’ll let you know how it turned out in a future blog entry.
When mum and dad flew to Europe to visit me this year, they flew with Vietnam Airlines.
‘I was worried,’ mum said, ‘because people told us that Vietnam Airlines always overbooks its flights. I kept thinking, “What if we get to the airport and there is no space for us?”‘
Dad said, ‘You didn’t need to worry!’
‘I know…’ mum agreed.
‘Because if there aren’t any spaces, they have to put us in business class or first class! We kept hoping that it would happen. Upgrade! Upgrade! Upgrade!’
‘But you didn’t get one,’ I said.
‘No, we did!’ mum and dad chimed.
‘What? You didn’t tell me!’
‘We didn’t know we were going to business class. They gave us the boarding pass and we went in the airplane and when we found our seats, it was before we went through the curtain, you know, the one between business class and economy. “Eh? We’re in business class?”‘
Mum waved her arms about. ‘Oh, there was so much space. You could lie all the way down.’
‘You know who gave us the upgrade?’ Dad said to me. ‘You were there!’
After four daysin Paris, my parents and I split up at Charles de Gaulle airport. I flew back to London Stansted, and mum and dad went back to Melbourne via Hanoi.
‘Oh! The short man. The dwarf!’ I remembered the check-in person. Dad nodded. I cocked my head to the left, thinking. ‘Maybe he was sneaky and happy that he could give you this surprise present… This reminds me of a few weeks ago. I went to a shop and asked the lady for five little cookies. When I opened the bag, there were six cookies!’
I flew from UK to Australia via Hong Kong. As I said before, I was overcome by a terrible cold and spent much of that 12 hours hiding under a blanket. As we landed in Hong Kong, I made a plan to find a pharmacy as quickly as possible so I could buy cold and flu tablets.
‘Drugs! Give me drugs!’ I thought.
Three red-suited Hong Kong airport staff members welcomed passengers walking off the departure ramp, while another two staff members stood behind some equipment. As people walked by a video camera, I saw multi-coloured human shapes cross a TV monitor. It was a body temperature monitor, designed to detect people with fevers. Fever is one of the first signs of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. As I watched people go up to the camera, most of the body temperature maps were in cool blue, green and yellow colours.
With trepidation, I watched my own thermal image show up on the screen. There it was — my head was definitely bright red. Surely someone would soon tackle me and take me to quarantine?
However, the two attendants were talking to each other, and barely glanced at the screen. I was safe.
Last weekend, Damjan and I went to Brighton, England’s most famous seaside town. We had a great time. More than any city I’ve visited in the UK, Brighton feels like Melbourne — full of young people, relaxed, and multicultural. We arrived in time for Brighton’s food festival. So not only did we enjoy the tourist guide attractions of the beach, tacky seaside pier and King George IV’s extravagant Royal Pavilion, but we also got to eat ate lots of the best kind of ethical (free range, organic, international and local) food.
Brighton’s beaches are a poor substitute for Australian beaches. Instead of sand, there are pebbles. The good thing about pebbles are that they don’t get into your shoes and clothes like sand does. They can be painful to walk on. The English Channel also makes for cold swims. I only waded in up to my legs.
Walking out of the street of our hostel, directly in front was the wreck of Brighton’s WestPier.
A lady from the Brighton West Pier Trust told us that it was in perfect condition in 1975. Here it is intact, with its concert hall and pavilion on the walkway to the big bit at the end (whatever it is).
Its private owner wanted to turn the pier into a casino but the local council refused permission. Having no other plans for the pier, the owner offered it to the council for £1 but the council declined because it couldn’t afford the upkeep. The pier was left to decay. The West Pier Trust was set up to raise money for its restoration. They finally managed to secure funding from the Government and private funding (£15mil each) but in 2003, there were two fires. The pier was already falling apart so fire was the final straw and the structure was completely gutted. Also gutted was the funding from the government (bye bye, £15mil). The Trust now says they’re going to build a massive needle tower type thing in front of the pier that will somehow save the whole project. Erm. Right.
When we walked by the beach each morning, we saw this fellow with the metal detector. We once saw him stretching and flexing. He looked funny.
The Royal Pavilion was unlike any castle I had visited in England. King George IV was a party dude. He liked clothes, food, women, food, music and food. Over about 35 years, he turned his Brighton holiday farm house into this ‘fantasy palace’. They tried to make it look Indian on the outside and Chinese on the inside. I giggled at some of the attempts at ‘Chinoise’ styling by people who had never been to China.
We didn’t know that the food festival was going on when we planned our trip. We had stepped out of the Royal Pavilion and suddenly saw tents in the garden. At the first tent, someone offered me a strawberry and banana smoothie. All I had to do was blend it by riding this bike. I was delighted that someone had also thought of harnessing the energy of stationery bikes. Imagine if we could have blenders on our normal bikes. We’d all have smoothies by the time we got to work.
At the food festival, there was a table full of sage plants. I never knew there was such a variety. Pineapple sage?
On the left are giant turnips. On the right are tiny pumpkins.
I do lots of fun things. Two weeks ago, I went to the Lake District (my second visit) to look around the town of Ambleside. The next batch of scholars are coming to Cambridge in September and will spend four days kayaking, hiking, and building giant newspaper towers at the Lake District.
Rachel, Tristan, Danielle and I hired a car and made the five hour trip north. We wandered the town, scoping out any pubs that could handle a hundred post-graduate students, visited the home of the ‘best gingerbread in the world’, put together a treasure hunt, and toured a countryside mansion. We spent the night at Ambleside YHA, which will be hosting the camp in September.
Here is the view ten metres from the front door of the YHA.
This weekend, I went stayed at a seaside town called Sheringham, about two hours north-east of Cambridge. I went with 34 fellow scholarship holders and their friends. We played kickball on the beach, had a hog roast feast (delicious, although perhaps not politically correct), and played Scrabble until one in the morning.
Beach houses, which people can buy to store their bathing gear, deck chairs, and surfboards. Such houses can be very expensive.
It was very, very foggy. You can’t see it from this photo (I adjusted the contrast). It was funny to see someone pushing a stroller a foggy beach.
Sand anti-buckets.
The beach was very pebbly in places. Friends delighted in how smooth and beautifully patterened the rocks were. As I understand, the smoother the rock, the older it is because it has had time to erode away.
Lunch! They fed us roast pork and pork crackling (yum…), stuffing, roast potato and chicken, green salad, potato salad, mustard, apple sauce, and chives in Crème fraîche. Dessert was fruit salad, strawberry cheesecake and some sort of chocolate caramel cake.
There were a lot of big rocks. They had furrows on the surface, showing where they had been drilled out of a larger monolith. I think someone told me that the rocks were transported to Sheringham from Scotland. Maybe it was Wales.
For Cambridge students, I thought we were pretty bad at spelling and vocabulary, actually. Ian and Rebecca put down ‘sinned’, then ‘atoned’. That’s spiffy.
It says, ‘Probably the Largest Cone in the World’.
Fish and chips at the LakeDistrict. The observant of you will have noticed that there is actually a photo of chicken and chips. That was mum’s dinner. I had cod. See also the evil look on my face just before the packages of piping hot yumminess are opened. That is the look of ‘I love fish and chips and I don’t have to feel guilty about it at all because junk food on holidays doesn’t count because it’s unavoidable and now officially sanctioned by mum and dad.’
Here is Joan, paparazzo, in front of Buckingham Palace.
While we were there, there was a changing of the guard. It was a bit of an unexpected treat because the next one wasn’t due until tomorrow at 11:30 AM.
A guardsman appeared in the doorway at the left of the photo and started moving towards the on-duty guardsman stationed in the alcove. He marched very slowly and deliberately.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
Stomp.
It went on like this for the three minutes it took for him to get from A to B.
I suppose the unscheduled changeover was finally explained when the travelling guardsman reached the on-duty guardsman and said, ‘Your mother’s on the phone.’
The train platform in Dresden.
Travelling from Leipzig to Nuremburg.
Someone who must be quite cold in Bonn.
Damjan and I are Aussie battlers, tough as nails. We eat ice-cream even when it’s snowing. This photo shows me eating delicious mango and macadamia ice-cream from a European gourmet food chain called ‘Australian Homemade‘. Weird, eh?
