an update...
it has been some time since i last wrote so i'll attempt to bring you up to speed although it's slow going on this "intuitive" french keyboard...
i believe we last left you in ireland, after which we travelled to london and i got to play tourist while marts did her whirlwind post-doc tour...
spent much of my time in london catching up with expats (who showed true aussie hospitality ;-) birthdays, dress up parties, shisha, best vego food in london...) and wandering the streets seeking parks (they do those well) - i even made it up to the kensington rooftop garden to check out the pink flamingos and the aftermath of a london fashion week party.
loved the old operating theatre, complete with the old tools of the trade including the physician's stick, rather like a leather bound walking stick which was used in pre anaesthetic times, not to belt the patient unconscious (which i imagine would be preferable), but as a gag... teeth marks still evident. oh, and we can't neglect to mention the bladder stones, ahem the size of a sml kiwi fruit, removed through the urethra with a 30cm hooked metal probe... ok, i think i'm done with that topic now!
tate modern another highlight as was the tower bridge (corny i know but i liked it!)... even cornier is the fact that i went on that double decker tourist bus with the audio, alone, yeah!
the v&a museum had been recommended to me as there was a couture exhib there worth seeing. not quite sure how this happened but when i went to purchase my ticket i bought entry to something else; a lee miller photography exhibition which i was so annoyed about. however, it turned out to be amazing - she was a model turned photographer turned photo journalist and war correspondant for british vogue... with pics of hitler's aptmt to boot... she was even here where i'm sitting now, in st malo, france, when the germans occupied the walled-city... needless to say, i was able to get over my disappointment fairly quickly...
next stop was crazy amsterdam with alana and erin (high school friends). ez had booked us an awesome hostel (the 10 bed factor had me concerned but fears allayed when we saw room - huge loft with low ceiling and massive wooden beams running thru centre (that doesn't even sound nice so you're just going to have to trust me). we found ourselves in a bar around the corner from our place which had the lowest mj haze and proceeded to add some apple flavour to it with our shisha. somehow i managed to win the affections of the middle eastern owner who kept requesting photos and telling me in his very broken english that our love could endure despite the fact that i live in aus... we managed to avoid that cafe for the rest of the weekend, nice try hassan! we enjoyed wandering the confusing streets the next day and would have been thoroughly lost if it weren't for erin's expert navigation skills. we picked up some dutch produce from a deli and made our way to vondel park that arvo and observed the most bizarre scene (still yet to be trumped), which we coined "crabbing". the offender looked remarkably like hassan's brother or cousin and he made his way over to the lake we were sitting beside and sat between us and 2 teenage girls who were drinking wine from the bottle. over the course of a couple of hours, the offender slid (or crabbed) his way closer and closer toward the girls until he was literally less than 1m from them. he then lay down on his side and continued to stare. we cut our picnic short (as did the other girls) to escape the creepy crabber... i did manage to capture the scene on camera so when i finally work out how to download my pics i'll be posting the evidence.
right, well it appears that the internet café is closing in 5 mins at 12 pm (ahh the french) so i have to wrap a'dam up - there with the crabber but i think it paints a good pic of our experience...
until next time folks...xox
