Sophie & Ollie´s Travels

Possibly not the Final Entry

sophieollie — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 07:25:00 GMT

New Zealand.

Hey everyone,

Well, after 8 months and 27 days we are back in New Zealand. Back to sunshine, thankfully, beaches, cicadas (oh how surprisingly much I have missed cicadas), friends and family. I have been learning to drive again, attended a Hen’s Night, and seen my bridesmaids dress. Ollie has enjoyed driving again, turned down a job and been getting bored of Auckland already.

Before we flew back, we spent three days in London staying with Ollie’s cousin Silus and his girlfriend Melissa. We caught the three hour train from Devon to London and then had to carry about 60kgs of luggage (I know how much as they weighed our bags at the airport) across London, on the underground, during the end of rush hour - not fun.

We did enjoy ourselves in London though. We all visited the Natural History Museum and saw the dinosaur bones and an animatronic T-Rex. Afterwards, we ate a dodgy Turkish kebab with miscellaneous ‘meat’ and salad. That night we met up with Ollie’s other cousin, Chloe, and we all went out drinking in a London pub, called something like the Rose and Crown.

The next day we visited Camden markets, recently in the news for a big fire that destroyed some stores. We only saw damage to about three or four stores. The markets looked fantastic with clothing, jewellery, art, and lots of different food stalls selling items from goat curry to gluten-free kebabs. We enjoyed ourselves people watching as well, with lots of proper English punks hanging around.

The next day we cheated for the first time on our trip, splashed out and got a taxi straight to Heathrow. We could not face another trek with 60kgs in the underground. I enjoyed our Air New Zealand flight to LA, no one sat in the seat next to me, we watched four or five movies consecutively, and I watched Absolutely Fabulous and America’s Next Top Model. We also ate some rather nice plane food, in particular a New Zealand lamb curry that tasted delicious.

We had to leave the plane at LA. Luckily, we sat near the front of the plane, therefore, we joined the queue for the transit lounge near the beginning. The whole flight had to be fingerprinted and eye scanned before we could enter the sitting area. It took us about 20 minutes to get through, and the last person about an hour and 20 minutes. Surprisingly, they provided crisps, biscuits, coffee, tea, apples and newspapers for us.

The second half of the fight was full. We took 40 minutes to take off, without any air-conditioning (as this would come on when we took off), and we roasted. I managed to sleep for four hours on this flight but it was more cramped, more boring and they over-fed us and provided disgusting American bottled water. When we landed the bridge to the airport was not in line to the plane, and the machine to move it broke. So, it took another 40 minutes to get off. However, the host of the Amazing Race, Phil Keoghan, and Trinny and Susannah also had to suffer through this; Leon saw them come through customs just before us.

We are enjoying being back Downunder, but we will miss travelling in Europe. We will miss seeing everyone in England and Austria, and Geraldine and Christopher in Spain. We will miss proper Greek Salads, Spanish tortillas, German White Beer, and English pub meals. We will miss seeing new things all the time and staying in different places with different people, especially the flash, cheap places in Greece but not so much the dingy hostels rooms in northern Europe.

I will not miss trying to write this blog on the tiny PDA keypad or on foreign computers, which all have different versions of the keyboard. I will not miss all the Aussies in Europe, because they live down this way anyway. We will also not miss the stupidity of airport security checks, where you can and cannot have water, boots, any shoes, cameras, make up, belts, coats checked or not checked, go through customs or not, be bomb wanded, swabbed etc. with no pattern at all, but maybe that’s the point.

However, we do not seem to have stopped travelling yet, as we will be going to Australia next month, and I still have 60-something days left on my World Journal so this may not be my last entry. I have saved everyone’s email address though and you can always contact Ollie on ostrong01@gmail.com and me on soqhie@gmail.com.

From

Sophie and Ollie.

City of Lights

sophieollie — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Paris, France.

From Amsterdam we travelled to Paris and had an excellent four nights being tourists and visiting the big sights.

We did not enjoy the coach trip much again. The driver made me feel car sick, took a 45 minute coffee break at 2am during which he opened all the doors and we froze, and the coach was full so we couldn’t have two seats each. Unfortunately, the hotel in France had a 3pm check in so we could not even nap when we arrived at 7am.

The hotel we stayed in was situated in the Montmartre area and looked nicer than the one in Amsterdam. We got a private bathroom, which we didn’t pay for, and free breakfast with French baguettes. The hotel receptionist behaved appropriately and stereotypically French. He pretended to not understand anyone if they spoke English, even though his English sounded perfect, he got grumpy when people bothered him to ask for their key, and yelled at an Korean girl when she did not speak loudly enough for him.

We could not check in, so instead we decided to do the Paris free walking tour despite the rain. Our Melbourne tour guide - nearly every tourist in Europe is Australian - walked us around the centre of Paris. We started off at the St Michel Fountain in the Latin Quarter, we walked past Notre Dame Cathedral and over Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge still crossing the Seine. We walked past the Louvre and the glass pyramid entrance and avoided the 17-year old looking guards with massive machine guns wandering around the building. We saw the café where the French Revolutionaries met before beginning the Revolution and walked down the second most expensive street in the world after Fifth Avenue. We walked through the Jardin des Tuileries to the Egyptian Obelisk, saw the Eiffel Tower in the distance and walked up part of the Champs Elysee.

We finished up soaked, exhausted and in desperate need of lying horizontally for the first time in over 36 hours. We had a very, early night that night and a good sleep. The next day started out sunny so we headed to the Sacre Coeur Basilica, a five minute walk from our hotel. The white stone Basilica sits on Montmartre hill, the highest point in Paris and we enjoyed it first thing in the morning with few tourists around. From the Basilica we caught the tube to the centre of Paris and had our first French Nutella crepe, mmm mmm. We had a look inside Notre Dame Cathedral, along with the rest of the tourists, and Ollie posed as the hunchback of Notre Dame with the camera case inside his jacket.

We then did a long walk across the centre city to the Champs-Élysées and along to the Arc d’Triomphe. We took the underpass to the centre, deciding not to cross the many lanes of traffic on the roundabout, which insurance companies will not insure you for if you drive on it. The Arc d’Triomphe commemorates French soldiers, including an eternal flame to the Unknown Soldier. Though, the eternal flame has been extinguished once by a drunken Englishman who peed on it.

From the Arc d’Triomphe we walked to the touristiest (that is a real word, Microsoft found it for me) of sites, the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is the most visited and most recognised monument in the world, making a profit of €49 million annually, and giving away a car to every millionth visitor. We queued to walk up to the first and second levels, instead of joining the twice as long queue for the lift. After 668 steps we made it to the second level, and then caught the lift to the top. We found the New Zealand flag and saw that we were 18,542 kms away from Auckland. The view, as you would expect, looked amazing and you can pick out all the monuments of Paris. It helps that the centre city has few skyscrapers blocking the view. We headed back down as night fell and stood on the steps when the light show started. Every night for 10 minutes on the hour the Tower is lit up with thousands of bright, white lights that flash randomly, you feel like Britney Spears leaving home as it looks just like paparazzi camera flashes.

The next day we visited the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the most visited cemetery in the world. We saw Jim Morrison’s grave and Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Pissarro, Chopin and many other famous people have been buried here. Afterwards, we had another delicious crepe then visited the Musee d’Orsay, next to the Seine River. This museum had the best collection of Impressionist works we have seen. Many works by Van Gogh’s, Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Seurat and more made it my favourite gallery we saw on the trip.

That night we did an evening tour of the Montmartre district which we enjoyed. We started in the Red Light District of Pigalle and saw the Moulin Rouge, though not the show because that costs €89 per person, saw the Brasserie from the movie Amelie, Van Gogh’s apartment where in sucked the lead paint off his paint brushes before he, naturally, went crazy. We visited Picasso’s studio and his favourite restaurant where he used to pay with paintings and the owner ended up with no tips but many original Picasso paintings. We also saw Paris’s only vineyard and last windmill.

On our last day we visited the Louvre. Visiting these sites in January was the best idea. We had sunshine three out of four days and queued for never more than 30 minutes. We got into the Louvre without queuing whatsoever. Inside we had a good look round. We did see the Mona Lisa and took a picture, just to show we visited, along with the hundreds of other camera-wielding tourists and a security guard who looked like he could not be bothered to care that photos are banned.

After a few hours we headed back because I felt terrible, which I blame on the Paris metro. The metro in Paris is ancient, with no escalators and millions of stairs, and is filthy. I think I caught a cold from the disgusting air down there. Also Paris has a homeless men problem like no other European city we visited, so it stunk of wee and alcohol in the metro.

We had a great time in Paris and a good place to finish before we flew back to England to visit our relatives again before coming home.

From

Ollie and Sophie

XXX – Sex, Drugs and Tulips

sophieollie — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 01:29:00 GMT

Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

From Berlin, we caught a coach to Amsterdam. A coach will never be our first choice for transportation but, as no airline flew this route and the train cost about a €100 each, at only €91 for the both of us a coach is what we could best afford. However, we did not enjoy ourselves; from 7.30pm until 5.30am, we slept about three hours total. We arrived outside Amsterdam and had to organise how to get to our hotel. After waiting 45 minutes, catching a tube, and walking in the dark, in the rain for 500m in the wrong direction before turning around and walking a 1km in the right direction, we finally arrived. The receptionist, who was not a polite German, then informed us we would not be able to check in until 1pm. It was 7am.

We left our bags and went for a walk into the city centre. Amsterdam is an unusual place. The city is beautiful with original 17^th Century-ish, very narrow, brick houses – the Government use to tax people on how much street frontage their house took up – and winding, cobblestone roads, all built around a series of canals. Amsterdam really is a city of a million bicycles, all padlocked with massive chains to stop the junkies stealing them.

After seeing the beauty of the architecture, you then notice the sex, drugs and tulips. Sex is in the Red Light District, obviously, but sex-themed anything is everywhere. Amsterdam has its ‘Coffee Shops’ where café owners sell ‘special cakes’ and marijuana. Though, again, marijuana-themed products are everywhere from t-shirts to lollypops in all the tourist shops. Then you get the tulips, real ones in the flower markets, and wood ones to take home and plastic ones disguised as umbrellas in the tourist shops.

The sex, drugs and tulips seem to be for the British. Amongst the sex shops, coffee shops, flower markets and the tourist shops is an English sports pub on every corner and a yobbo nearby to inhabit it. The Lonely Planet says almost half of all ‘users’ of the Red Light District are British men. Amsterdam is close to England and everybody speaks English – we heard so little of other languages I sometimes forgot we were not in an English speaking country.

The other main feature of Amsterdam we noticed is spit. The people of Amsterdam have covered their pavements in globs of slimy, green, bubbly spit and it looks disgusting. Amsterdam has an annual city vote on the ‘Minor Annoyances in Amsterdam’. Usually dog poo wins, previously though, ‘wild pissing’ has won. On this occasion, they installed ‘pee deflectors’ outside buildings, metal sheets angled to spray back at the perpetrator. They also introduced an electrified bit of steel that when peed on electrocutes the person peeing; these have since been banned. However, my vote would be for the spit, which is everywhere.

On our second day in Amsterdam, we did another free walking tour; I will not link the picture because it did not work in my last entry. On the tour, we visited the Red Light District, stood on Amsterdam’s highest point, a whopping 1.5m above sea level. We saw Amsterdam’s narrowest house, 1.8m wide, with the current owner being taller than this, therefore, he cannot lie down width ways in his own house. We saw the coffee shop George Clooney and Brad Pitt visited in Ocean’s Twelve. Someone also, finally, explained why Amsterdam is covered in XXX. XXX represents three St Andrew’s Crosses and appears on the Coat of Arms of the Netherlands as well as city property including some phallic-looking street barriers - http://journals.worldnomads.com/sophieollie/gallery/8339/225217.aspx. Apparently, no one can prove or disprove whether the XXX of the pornography world originated in Amsterdam or not.

While in Amsterdam, we also visited Anne Frank’s house. The museum has kept the house as true to its original state as possible. You walk through the bookshelf hiding the secret annex of the house, the wallpaper is original with the posters Anne stuck to it still up. Her original diary is also on display. Film footage of interviews tell her story and how, after being taken from the house by the Gestapo, she ends up at Bergen-Belsen and dies of illness just before the camp’s liberation. It was a sad museum visit.

We also visited the Rijskmuseum, which has a number of Rembrandt paintings including his most famous, Night Watch, and a number of works by his pupils. Amsterdam, though, is one of the worst cities for museum prices with most entrance fees set at €10 per person and ‘No Student Discount’ plastered everywhere in giant text. Therefore, we did not visit too many of the museums and, unfortunately, there is not much else to in Amsterdam in the rain.

We spent much of the rest of the time looking round the shops and trying to avoid the rain. Amsterdam had good markets selling second hand clothing and shoes, and many pornographic DVDs. After three nights we felt ready to move on from Amsterdam and its rain to catch another uncomfortable, overnight coach to Paris…

From Ollie and Sophie

(who have now bought tickets home and will be arriving back in NZ on the 27^th of February.)

Gallery: Paris

sophieollie — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:30:00 GMT

Gallery: Amsterdam

sophieollie — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:19:00 GMT

Gallery: Germany

sophieollie — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:02:00 GMT

Nearly Arrested

sophieollie — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:52:00 GMT

Gotzis, Austria, Zurich, Switzerland, Munich, and Berlin, Germany.

Hey everyone,

Hope you are all well, sorry for the delay in updating you all. I managed to write a draft version of our trip up until Germany while away that I have now finished. You will have to wait for Amsterdam and Paris, but we did have a very good time and are now back in England. I watched Police 10/7 and Motorway Patrol this morning on Sky and enjoyed the Kiwi accents.

Previously though, on our last day in Gotzis, Sigrid offered to take us to meet Winfried's sister, Heidi, in Zurich. We drove the 5-minute distance from their house to the Swiss border and headed to Zurich, with a short drive through Liechtenstein. We met Heidi, who is very nice, much like Winfried, and she forced much Swiss chocolate on us. Lindt chocolate is produced at a factory at the end of her road and the Lindt Chocolate Balls she insisted we took tasted good. Heidi also took us out for a night walk round Zurich for an hour. Zurich is incredibly clean; the river that runs right through the CBD is actually swimmable in summer. The city consists of narrow, cobblestone lanes winding through the centre and old, lopsided houses in amongst massive civic architecture.

The next morning we sadly said goodbye to Sigrid, Jessie, Robin and Kevin before beginning our trip into Germany. We had to catch a train to Bregenz, Austria and swap for another train to Munich. While we waited at the station these two dodgy-looking men started standing too close and looking at our luggage. The tall one with the especially dodgy-looking 70s moustache suddenly asked Ollie:

'May I see your passport'.

Ollie replied with a 'huh?'

Moustache flicks open a wallet with an unrecognizable gold medallion 'I am police I need your passport'.

Ollie ‘huh?’

Moustache shows what looks like my school ID with Polizei written on it 'hand over your passport'.

Man without moustache whips out a laptop and scanner.

Now we have read the advice on never handing over your passport, never trusting people who say they are police but aren’t in uniform etc etc plus they just did not act very formal like you expect policemen to act so I asked the Austrian woman next to me:

'Are these men really police'?

Austrian woman 'I have no idea'. She then argues with the two men in German and is still not sure if they are police.

Therefore, Ollie says 'we would like to go to the police station before we hand over our passports because you are not in uniform and we don't know what Austrian police IDs should look like'

Moustache then gets all mad about us not believing his ID and threatens to arrest us for refusing to show our passports. Anyway, longer story shortened, we went to the police station, they were police, moustache threatens to have us arrested a couple more times but he disappears and man without moustache lets us go after scanning our passports. The best thing was I did not even cry until after we left the police station without being arrested. Also, luckily, Austrian train tickets are valid for all trains any time so we just caught the next available train.

Two hours later, we arrived in Munich, managing four countries in 24 hours and avoiding being arrested by a grumpy, moustached Austrian policeman. After a 200m walk from the train station, we reached our hotel, opposite the Candy Bar - the kind of bar with a curtained doorway and red neon lights flashing. Munich’s city centre features a number of posh and not-so-posh hotels, cheap Asian stores, strip clubs, casinos and Turkish takeaways all in one compact area. The city looks pretty though with a river running through it and old buildings everywhere. We went to Munich to drink beer, as Munich is supposedly the beer capital of the world. It has Oktoberfest in September and beer gardens for the rest of the year.

We had some 500ml glasses of Weissbier, white beer made from wheat, which is about the only beer I have ever really liked the taste. When in Berlin, our guide informed us that no British beer, and most probably everything you get in New Zealand, cannot be sold in Germany under the title beer, as it has so many preservatives and extra crap that the government will not allow it to be called beer. Even I could taste the difference and Ol prefers the German stuff too. We also ate frankfurter sausages and giant pretzels with mustard, the specialties of a beer garden. Afterwards, we wobbled a bit round the massive park the garden is in and saw some more of the city.

The next morning we had to be up bright and early, well before the crack of dawn, at 4.45 to get to the airport and fly to Berlin. Munich was the first airport where we have not had a liquids check to ensure no more then 100ml of liquid goes on the plane. Instead, Ollie had to take out his camera bag, show the camera and prove it really was a camera. The most sensible security check yet because if I was a terrorist I would rather disguise my bomb as a camera than hide it in my drink bottle.

We arrived in Berlin at 9.40am, got our luggage within 5 minutes, left the airport, caught a bus immediately, then a tube immediately and walked straight to the hotel. The easiest arrival of our trip so far, with Berliners being the most helpful so far.

We enjoyed ourselves greatly in Berlin and it is my favourite city. I am a history nerd so that is partly why I loved it. We did a free walking tour of the city, you can see the photo here: http://www.newberlintours.com/nbt/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,7/lang,en/. The tour is free but you can choose to tip what you like at the end of it if you thought the tour guide did a good job, the tours are aimed at backpackers with little money to spare. We had a British tour guide who had lived in Berlin since before the Berlin Wall came down and he was excellent.

We saw the Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving gate from the Medieval city, which is now covered in a patchwork of marble to fill in bullet holes and shrapnel dents from World War Two. In newer history, opposite the gate sits the Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson infamously hung his baby out the window.

We saw the Reichtag, German parliament building where Hitler took advantage of a fire in the building to blame the Communists and get the government to agree to his enabling act, which allowed him to begin arresting all his political opponents and then seize power. We later on went into the Reichtag, which is free but takes a while to queue for as you go through sets of closing doors and an x-ray machine before you get in. On top of the building is a glass dome/beehive shape that you can go up to look down on the members of parliament. The architect built the glass dome to remind those in parliament that, as a democratic government they are answerable to the people, unlike under Hitler’s dictatorship.

Our tour took us to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aka the Holocaust Memorial. As our guide pointed out it is rare for a country to create a memorial remembering people they themselves caused the deaths of. The memorial is on a large bit of land right in the centre of Berlin, and consists of concrete grey stones, apparently the same grey of burnt bones, of the same width and length but varying height - some millimetres from the ground, others over two metres high all placed on an undulating ground surface in a grid pattern. The meaning is open to interpretation but they resemble graves, a cityscape, or a bar chart to most. Underneath the memorial a museum exhibits the stories of some of the murdered victims.

The tour then moved on to Hitler's bunker where the place has only recently been officially marked when the Government placed a sign showing the bunker’s design. Our guide actually contributed to the content of the sign and his name is on it. Other than the sign, the area consists of only a carpark and will soon have an apartment block built on it. As our guide described ‘Hitler's bunker is historically unimportant, even if historically interesting’ and for obvious other reasons the Government is therefore reluctant to remember it.

We then moved on to the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall consisted of two walls, one on the east of Berlin and one on the West - the zone in between known as the killing zone. The Communists secretly constructed the Wall, initially fencing and barbwire, in one night to keep East Berliners, those under Communist Russia from leaving for the West and its democracy and capitalism. No one could visit the West anymore even if their mother, wife etc was on the other side. Those who tried to cross were shot in the killing zone or escaped hidden in anything from car boots to cow suits. In 1989, the wall came down when the East German Minister of Propaganda misread a memo he had not bothered to read beforehand, announcing that people could now freely cross the border. People immediately demanded the access he spoke of and Berliners tore much of the Wall down. We visited the Eastside Gallery after the tour, where 1.3km of the original wall and its graffiti survives.

We visited Checkpoint C aka Checkpoint Charlie that linked the American sector to the East, where many of the escape attempts took place. We saw Berlin’s pink military building, the memorial for Hitler's book burning, a glass window in the ground at the site of the burning with empty bookshelves below. We visited the area where a protest against the Berlin Wall took place and soldiers shot thousands of people who tried to escape but still stuck to the paths through the ornamental gardens. This apparently prompted Lenin to say you cannot have a Revolution in a place where people obey the keep off the grass signs.

On one of our days in Berlin we paid for a tour with the same company to go to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, just outside Berlin. The camp was the first of its kind to be built and set up initially to house the ever-growing group arrested by Hitler as political opponents. They were followed by petty criminals, homeless, homosexuals, disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses (because they refused to join the army) and Jews. A concentration camp, I learnt, is different to a death camp (all death camps were in Poland) as its primary function is as a forced labour camp. However, many people died from this forced labour and, as Sachsenhausen was the main model for all camps, they still had to do some mass extermination.

The camp was interesting to visit, in some ways it made it even harder to realise the reality of Hitler's world. It is so hard imaging 500 men sleeping in the one room you stood in, or standing outside in cotton pajamas for 16-hour days in the freezing cold, grassy patch you in a million layers are freezing in. Or imagining men being shot in the room you can see and going into the ovens in front of you. However, at least 100,000 men did die doing so in this one camp.

Berlin was fantastic to visit because I am a history nerd but also because it is by far the cheapest city in Europe and has interesting shops, bars and culture. We finally could eat some great food, American burgers, Turkish kebabs, Asian noodles and drink some excellent beer, mainly Weiss beer. The next stop on our visit was Amsterdam…

From Sophie and Ollie.

Frohe Weihnachten and a Happy Silvester

sophieollie — Sun, 6 Jan 2008 18:44:00 GMT

Graz, Fusenfeld, Gotzis and Innsbruck, Austria.

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas to you all and we hope you all had good New Years. We have just spent the last seven weeks in Austria including the last two weeks in Gotzis with Renate's daughter, Sigrid, and her family. Our time in Austria ends tomorrow but we have been busy since I last wrote.

While still in Graz we travelled with Renate to Fusenfeld to see Isolde and stay the night with her. Isolde took us to some thermal hot pools called Bad Blumau. The pools and adjoining hotel had been designed by Mr Hundertwasser again and looked great with coloured tiles and curving shapes everywhere – much better than Waiwera Hot Pools, but also four times the price. When we swam in the 35 degree Celsius outdoor pool it began to snow on us. It is weird to run, yes run, from one pool to another in your bikini while it is snowing on you.

The night before we left Graz, Hedwig and Gudrun took us out in the evening to have drinks at one of the punsch stands at the Christmas market. I had a strange drink of white hot chocolate, coconut and rum which will not become my new favourite drink. Then we visited Rudolph’s a restaurant/bar with a giant red nose painted on the front and had some beer and smoked a pack of cigarettes each, second hand smoke of course.

The following morning we caught the train to Gotzis, on the far west of Austria. We spent 8 hours straight looking out on snowy landscapes and mountain ranges and travelled almost the whole way across the middle of Austria. It had not snowed in Gotzis, and has done so only once since we have been here, about 1cm of snow. However, it only takes about 20 minutes to drive to mountains covered in snow.

In Gotzis we have been staying with Sigrid, her husband Jessie, and their two sons Robin, 12 and Kevin, 9. Robin and Kevin look a bit like the two younger members of Hanson with their long blonde hair and have been great fun to hang around with. Robin’s English is a million times better than my French ever was (after three years of French lessons) even though he has only been learning it for two years, and Kevin’s English is about as good as my French was and he hasn’t even begun learning it.

We had a proper traditional Austrian Christmas with Sigrid’s family. The Christmas tree was an actual Christmas tree, not the same as the pine tree we get at home. We went and bought it on the 24^th and decorated it that day. Unlike at home the tree does not get decorated until the night of the 24^th. Then we opened our presents on Christmas Eve, after lighting all the candles on the tree - a little fire hazard.

Unfortunately, we did not have a snowy Christmas but it certainly was freezing outside so, on Christmas day, we visited a frozen river. We had fun smashing our way through the layers of ice, jumping in a group of six in a circle on the ice. Every time we smashed through poor Kevin would end up on his back lying in the smashed up ice, though he did not seem to mind. However, the river had frozen so that all the water underneath had washed away and we did not end up standing in puddles of very cold water. If you looked under the ice you could see the river bed about 10cm below the ice layer. We also had sliding competitions and fell over a number of times.

We celebrated New Years with Sigrid’s family, but instead of calling it New Years it is called Silvester here, as the 31^st is Saint Silvester’s day. People give each other good luck charms for Silvester and the supermarkets sell lucky pigs, toadstools, chimney sweeps (?!), four leaf clover plants and horseshoes. On the night we had some bock beer, extra strong winter beer, and red wine to drink and we played with fireworks in the garden with the boys at midnight.

We have also been tobogganing, and if you thought tobogganing was simply a matter of sitting on a wooden sled and pointing it down the hill and going down on a slide of snow, you, like me, were sorely mistaken. Tobogganing is hard. The first time we went, we walked for about half an hour up a winding track of snow. Then we had to come down it. In places, on one side of the track is a massive pile of snow and on the other a massive drop and massive pines trees to slam into if you can’t take the corner right. In stretches of the track you are going about 50km/hr with no brakes (you are suppose to brake using your shoes but I was wearing boots with NO grip, I couldn’t even walk down the track I fell over so much from slipping) and to corner you need to put your feet down on one side, but do it too much and the toboggan starts drifting in the snow or just rolls over. Generally we tried to stop by slamming into the nearest pile of snow. Ollie often managed to crash and slide metres down the hill on top of Robin.

Next time we went tobogganing we had some proper snow boots with proper grip and we went to a kid’s snow slide where you do just go straight down a hill. We enjoyed this very much. However , the next, next time we went, we visited a ski field with a 3.5km toboggan track. We caught the ski lift up and then came down a track with some pretty steep hills, sharp corners and scary drops on the other side. Ol and I finally came off on one of these drops and it was not as bad as I feared. We just went straight over the edge, fell off the toboggan and slid about 10 metres down the side on our stomachs. And this was by no means the only time we fell off or crashed in the 3.5kms. The next day I felt pretty sore and bruised. However, when you’re flying down a hill, snow smashing up into your face, hair blocking your sight while trying to look out into the mountains and the 90 degree corner coming up just before you crash, it is lots of fun.

We have almost seen enough snow to last us a lifetime though. Snow is cold and we have to wear two pairs of socks, pants under our jeans and waterproof pants over our jeans, three tops, a jumper and a ski jacket, gloves, hats and scarf and it is still cold. However, once you have walked in knee-deep snow for a bit and then begun tobogganing you boil in your layers, especially with a Jager (hunter’s) Tea with rum and tea, in you.

Yesterday, we took a two hour drive to Innsbruck to see their massive ski jump used in ski jumping competitions. I now understand the sport of ski jumping a bit better from watching it on TV and know I will never ever try it. The slope they land on is practically vertical – you can’t even walk up it. We also visited the Swarovski Head Office where they exhibit art installations using crystals and have a huge shop. We saw the world’s biggest crystal and the smallest.

Staying at Sigrid’s has also given us time to catch up on some important cultural things such as seeing the Simpson’s movie and the new Harry Potter movie, amongst a number of other films, and I have finally read the final Harry Potter book which Sigrid happened to have in English. Ollie has been learning to play Beethoven on the piano and playing on Jessie’s drum kit. These things can be blamed for why I have taken so much time to write to you all again.

Tomorrow though we are moving on from Austria, we will travel to Munich, then to Berlin, then to Amsterdam and Paris and finally to London. We will be back in the sunny Isles of Britain on 22^nd of January to revisit our families before flying back to New Zealand at the end of February (hopefully as we do not have tickets yet). We will be back before we run out of money to get jobs, see the sun and feel warm again, see our families and so that I can be a bridesmaid at my friend Haylee’s wedding. But I will update you all during stages of the trip when I can.

From Ollie and Sophie.

Hungry in Hungary

sophieollie — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:27:00 GMT

Graz, greater Styria, Hungary and Slovenia.

Hey everyone,

We returned to Graz last weekend and have been staying with Renate again. This Friday we will catch an eight-hour day train to the region of Voralburg to stay with Renate's daughter, Sigrid, and spend Christmas with her family.

We came back to Graz with Wolfgang who drove us back for a family lunch last Saturday in Graz. He organised the lunch so that the extended family could get together to meet us, instead of, as he said, always meeting for a funeral. We met about 20 people related to Ollie and had a five-hour lunch with them in an Austrian ‘Gasthaus’. We enjoyed meeting so many people at once and everyone speaks at least a little English that they learnt at school to communicate with us, which is good because my German is shocking and Ol’s only a little bit better.

In the following week a number of Ollie’s family took us out to see parts of Austria and elsewehere. Erwin took us on three drives in greater Styria, the region Graz is in. Erwin use to be a history professor so he took us to a number of old churches in the region. Most of the churches are designed in a Baroque style with a ridiculous amount of gold detailing but very beautiful. A few of the churches had completely painted ceilings like the Sistine Chapel but with only the three of us there, not 200,000 as in Rome.

Our favourite church is built in an old fortress on top of a hill. The church is designed with six chapels positioned around the fortress. Each chapel has been designed as a kind of set in a play of Jesus’ life. One chapel has been designed as a nativity scene, another as a prison cell, one on the hill Jesus was crucified on and so on. In the prison cell chapel you actually go to close the cell door with its big door handle and then realise the door is only painted.

We visited the world's largest monastery library in Admont. A church in Barnbach designed by the Austrian Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the same guy who designed the tiled toilets in Kawakawa, New Zealand. A glass museum where we saw glass being blown and a lot of snowy Styrian scenery.

On one of the drives we drove through part of a national park with huge mountians and freezing streams. We saw a whole lot of snow, including a pile Ol fell into when he thought the snow looked hard but was actually powder soft. He then spent some time complaining about his cold feet in wet socks, wuss, the temperature only reached -5. We watched the start of a proper husky dogs sled race and were actually snowed upon for the first time. The snowfall has increased heaps, and it even snowed outside our bedroom window for more then 24 hours a few days ago.

Lukas took us to Stübing, an open air museum showcasing about 100 original old Austrian houses. They had people making candles, Christmas decorations, schnapps, music and more with traditional techniques in the houses, in rooms chocked with smoke from original fireplaces and a severe lack of enough chimneys. Lukas' mother, Franka, worked there carving wood sculptures. In Stübing we had some more maroni, roasted chestnuts, which they sell at roadside stands throughout Austria during winter. We tried sausage and freshly grated horseradish, baked apples with custard and cranberries and Ol tried some chestnut schnapps.

Winfried took us out on the town in Graz one night for drinks. We went to a bar and a pool hall, unfotunately though, smoking inside is not banned in Austria so we had to put up with a smoky atmosphere. Even worse though you have to wear a coat, scarf, jumper etc out at night so they all stink the next day of cigarette smoke. Ol was not impressed.

Yesterday, Gernot and his son, Hedwig, took us out for the day. We went to see an old Austrian castle where they sold handmade Christmas decorations. Then, appropriately enough, we went for lunch in Hungary, and I did feel hungry, *cough*, lame. The border to Hungary is only half an hour from Gernot's house. Currently, you need your passport to cross the border even though Hungary is an EU country but next week it will no longer be required. The border men hardly glanced at our passports though when we drove through. On the way back they didn’t even bother to glance and watched TV instead.

Despite driving less than 15 minutes into Hungary, the country looked very different to Austria. Only 20 years ago the Soviets had completely fenced the border and guarded it with gunmen on the Hungarian side. In 1989 they opened their border with Austria. The buildings and houses have a communist drab style of architecture painted in sludge-tinged colours, people drove cute box-like Soviet designed cars and the restaurant had brown wool knit net curtains and not much heating. The lunch tasted great though and we had Hungarian beef gulash of course.

After Hungary we drove back to Austria, then in under 30 minutes drove through the border control into Slovenia. The area of Slovenia we went to looks much like Austria and use to be part of the Austrian Styria region. We had coffees at a little pub where 5 drinks cost 5 Euros. No chance of paying that little in Western Europe even just over the border in Austria.

We then had dinner in Austria next door to a Guiness Book of World Records' fire station built in the shape of a giant fire truck. For dinner we had spare ribs, Austrian red wine and plum schnapps. Personally, I don’t know why they bother flavouring schnapps, they all taste like burning to me.

So far though we have been having an excellent time and it is really nice to be shown a country by the locals. We have seen so much more than in most other countries, and tried new foods and learnt new things.

Interesting things that I bet you would not have guessed orginated in Austria; Swarovski Crystals, Red Bull, Schindler (who went on to make his list) and the ones you would have guessed, Arnie S and Mozart.

From Ollie and Sophie.

Krampus

sophieollie — Wed, 5 Dec 2007 05:12:00 GMT

Klagenfurt, Austria.

Hey Everyone,

We hope you are all well. It has only been a few days since my last couple of updates but since it gets dark, and very cold, here from 4.30 pm I have some free time to spend on the computer and so will write to you.

Last week we travelled from Graz to Klagenfurt with Ollie’s Grandma’s cousin, Isolde - we have begun to understand the family connections to Ollie. Isolde drove us to her brother’s place in Klagenfurt so that we could stay with Wolfgang and Annemarie for a while. On the two hour (ish) drive here we reached a point in the mountains 1200m high and we saw snow, real snow. The villages up there looked cute, but cold, with their snow covered lawns and pitched roofs and fir trees blanketed in white snow. I wanted to stop and get out and play but we were on the autobahn (motorway) and therefore, we could not stop and play.

In Klagenfurt, we met Wolfgang and Annemarie who live in a typical Austrian house - two storeys, wooden walls and floor, and warm on the inside - with a small river at the end of their garden and fir tree covered mountains in the background. Klagenfurt is a quieter place in winter because its main attraction is Austria’s biggest lake, the Worthesee. This lake rarely completely freezes but still no one wants to swim in it at this time of year.

We cycled around part of the lake the first day. The Worthesee looks big and still and pretty, reflecting back the images of the fir trees and wooden houses around it. However, it felt good to get back inside after riding into icy wind that streams through all the gaps in your clothing despite the scarf, gloves, hat and many layers one wears.

The main town of Klagenfurt is medium-sized and being renovated for the UEFA Cup (European football) in 2008 in which three games will be played at the new 64 million Euro stadium. Klagenfurt has good shops, lots of coffee houses, a farmers market and currently another Christmas market so there is much to do.

It is the cold, though, that has captured our attention the most, and, apparently, it is not even that cold yet. Around Klagenfurt all the lakes except the Worthesee freeze and, once the ice is 10cm thick, people go ice skating on them. Now, it is just the puddles that freeze, the edge of the lakes and rivers and my handwashed jumper when I put it outside to drip dry for a bit before hanging it inside. I brought is back in stiff and frozen and full of more water then when it went out.

We took a walk to one of the lakes nearby in a fir tree forest and saw our first frozen lake. The ice was only about 2cm thick but Ollie could barely break it with a pine cone. We also heard for the first time the noise of objects on frozen ice. The noise is a kind of high-pitched frequency that emits as long as the object hurled skids across the ice. Ol felt brave enough to put his hand in and gets some ice to throw on the ice which made a beautiful noise as it shattered.

Wolfgang took us for a drive up into the mountians near the Slovenian border to see snow. Unfortunately, no snow had fallen for about three weeks but we saw a half frozen field with ice sitting on the grass and went for a short walk in the 0°C temperature. However, the God of snow favoured us with a random field of snow machine-made snow part way down the mountain. I had been informed that this snow is as much real as real snow.

So now I have played in snow. Our footprints were the first to grace the top of the beautiful, white with a tinge of blue, snow hill. Ollie covered me in snow; the proof is in the pictures. However, when we arrived home, about 30 minutes later, Ol discovered a golf ball-sized lump of ice inside his t-shirt and a soaking wet t-shirt, so I had my revenge.

We also took a drive into the centre of Austria and into the Alps to see real, real snow. We drove past a couple of ski resorts and past some villages covered in snow. We stood in some 20cm deep snow and froze our toes even though they our toes were in shoes.

Staying with Ollie’s relatives, who are actually Austrian, has allowed us to try heaps of new foods that we wouldn’t have ordered ourselves. At Wolfgang’s we have had saurkraut, literally sour cabbage, a type of sausage meat in a big ball with different herbs and barley in it which is a speciality of the region, Carinthia, goulash, which is actually a Hungarian meat stew with a half ton of paprika in it, and my personal favourite, roasted chestnuts. Today, we will try potato sausage.

Roasted chestnuts as we know them from Christmas songs are warm, soft, and taste a bit like unpopped popcorn kernals do when you reach the bottom of the popcorn container. Ollie does not like them. Ollie also does not like the coffee houses so popular in Austria and with Wolfgang. His local provides us with an espresso coffee, tiny milk chocolate to melt in it, and hot frothy milk; this is quite nice.

On the first of December, the first day of Advent and an important day here, we went to see an evening parade of Krampus. Krampus are a companion of Saint Nicholas (Santa) and as wikipedia describes them: ‘Krampus are variously depicted as horned, shaggy, bestial, or demonic. They whip everyone that comes on their path.’ Basically, that is exactly what they do. The suits they wear are amazing, they look like the ugly things in Lord of the Rings, carrying axes, scythes, sticks and whips and one with paraffin that blew out smelly black smoke over everyone.

The parade started with loud bangings of bells and drum beats, then the lights lit up their way and the Krampus began to walk by ‘attacking’ the people at the front of the barriers. I was glad we were not at the front; they are really scary and grab people as they pass and don’t let them go. The next day I saw the beginnings of another parade and saw all the 16 year old boys getting ready to put their masks on and realised why it was mainly teenage girls getting attacked the day before. Some little kids get so scared when they see the Krampus that they burst into tears.

We have also taken a day trip out of Austria into Italy. It took us about 40 minutes to drive to the Italian border from Wolfgang’s house. Two and half hours later, we arrrived in Treviso and tried to park. If you ever want proof there are too many people in the world try parking in Italian towns. We finally found a park after half an hour of driving round and had a look around this medieval town. We then had lunch in a pizzaria before going to Marostica.

Marostica is another medieval town surrounded by a large wall to keep the baddies out. We saw a skating rink in the town centre but did not want to embarrass ourselves in front of the many ten year olds on ice. We had hot chocolates, because I could not stomach another Italian espresso, made from actual melted chocolate and then tried not to throw up because we drank a whole cup of melted chocolate.

The next stop was Bassano Del Grappo and we had a Grappa, the famous spirit from the town that tasted like brandy. We saw its bridge and the World War Two gun shot wounds in the building next to it. Finally, we went on to a town in the hills called Asolo and had tea at the café frequented by Ernest Hemingway.

Then we drove the three hours back and got whiplash from braking for the crazy and erratic Italian drivers. We also drove through thick fog in the Alps which provided us with two second visiabilty, i.e. a light came into view up ahead and two second later we passed it. On arrival back in Klagenfurt we drove over newly salted roads as ice had formed on them. So the drive back was a dangerous adventure for us to see.

From

Ollie and Sophie.

Gallery: Austria

sophieollie — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:46:00 GMT

Gruss Gott from Graz

sophieollie — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:22:00 GMT

Greetings from Graz. We have been in Graz for four days now but will move on to Klagenfurt tomorrow before we return to Graz later on so I will let you know what we have been up to before I forget.

Graz is a beautiful city. It has a population of 250,000 and is surrounded by hills with woods on them and church spires poking up out of the bare trees and cute A-frame wooden houses sitting at the base of the hill looking exactly like an Austrian hillside should.

We have been staying with a relative of Ollie's called Renate in the suburbs of Graz. She has been taking us to see the sights and has been looking after us very well.

On our first day in Graz, Renate took us into the city to the Farmer's Market. Here the farmers sell fruit and vegetables, tons of Christmas stuff such as candle holders, door wreaths, baubles, candles etc, and weird blocks of something from which mushrooms grow.

We walked around the Old Town with its Medieval buildings built around cobblestone courtyards, a great stone double staircase which intertwines two sets of stairs together built in 1500ish. We visited a ridiculously Baroque church with gold everything, different coloured dark woods, different coloured marbles and paintings.

We also walked to a field where a shallow pool has been built that will freeze and become an outdoor skating rink. A slope has also been constructed and snow brought in for people to go down on sitting on inflatable sleds. Very 'cool', lame, but we need to wait until it is even colder before we can use these.

Renate took us to see one of the city's main attractions, the Schlossberg. The Schlossberg is a medieval fortress on top of a hill right in the middle of Graz. A bell tower and a clock tower are its main features now. The clock tower it a giant T-shape with what looks like a Swiss chalet at its top complete with windows and pitched roof.

To get up to the fortress you must climb 260 steps but you can look over the red-tiled pitched roofs which have UNESCO heritage protection and the River Mur that runs through the city. Thankfully, you can take the lift through the middle of the hill back down.

In the evening Renate took us to see the house where Ollie's grandma now living in Australia grew up. Everything here has so much obvious history and Renate has lived here her whole life so she tells us interesting stories about the area as it was before.

On Sunday we had a lazy day inside but went out to a Chinese buffet restaurant in the afternoon. It is good to have decent Asian food again, especially sushi which you can't get anywhere so far, not even much in England. I miss New Zealand's Asian food, it is so cheap and good compared to Europe's offerings.

In the evening we went to meet Renate's two sisters and brother at one of their houses. We drank nice Austrian red wine, unlike the vinegar we had in Greece, with Lukas, who Ollie has met before. Everyone speaks at least a bit of English, usually much more than they say, and we tried out some of our very basic German so we had a nice evening talking to them all.

The next day Renate took us to an old mansion/palace which again looked very Austrian. Hills with brown trees and fallen leaves sit at the back of the house, the grassy park had sculptures, trees and peacocks scattered about and the house was a huge, four-storey symmetrical block painted in yellows and white with shuttered windows. In the centre of the building is a big courtyard which you can look down into from the many corridors inside the palace. It looked like a Romeo and Juliet set.

For lunch we tried a Styrian cuisine, Styria is a region of Austria that Graz is in. We had a kind of corn mash with bacon fat, Ol did not like it but I thought the corn mash on its own was ok. We also tried apple punsch this time - much nicer than orange punsch - it tasted like hot apple cider.

In the afternoon we saw Graz's famous armoury. The museum has a huge collection of Medieval weaponry and armour. It is a bit of a boy thing and Ollie enjoyed it but as we were the only ones on the English tour I felt forced to listen to the guide and actually found it quite interesting. We saw bullet damaged armour, tried on a proper knight's helmet, saw the damage from a morning star on a definitely dead guy's helmet. We saw a 15 million Euro full horse armour set and one of only four surviving knight's boxes. The Austrian Queen Maria Theresa thought it too rude the knights exaggerating their manhood with their box so ordered them all destroyed. The things you can learn in Austrian armourys.

On our last day in Graz, for the time being, we had a look in a mall and a tour round Ikea before taking a walk in the woods. We walked for an hour on an ocean of fallen autumn leaves among bare trees overlooking the city.

Our next stop is Klagenfurt, near the Slovenian and Italian border, to stay with another of Ollie's relatives Wolfgang.

From
Ollie and Sophie.

P.s. Graz is not as cold as Vienna but apparently it gets much colder here...

Snow

sophieollie — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:13:00 GMT

Vienna, Austria. Last week we left Chania, feeling sad about leaving our home for the month. We arrived at the ferry port to go to Athens at 9pm and had to wait till 10.30 for the ferry to arrive. Unfortunately, the wind began to pick up and by 10.30 the wind and sea were too strong for the ferry to reverse into the port. So we waited. Then the Greeks started smoking and the old ladies grumbling and then it poured and a thunder and lightning storm began all while we stood under something not much more substantial than a bus shelter. By 12.45 we finally ran in the rain onto the ferry. We slept nearly the whole way despite the seats being similar to airplane seats with fluroscent lights overhead and Greek TV blarring away. Cabins are much better than the cheap seats but, luckily, hardly anyone travelled on the ship that night. We arrived in Athens at 8am the next day and caught the metro to our hotel for the night. We didn't like Athens that much this time either. It is a real 'city' city filled with thousands of ugly highrise apartments and not much else except the Acropolis. We stayed in a cheaper area of town this time with the 'drug dealers, pickpocketers and prostitutes' (according to the Lonely Planet) though we only noticed the prostitutes working on a sunday morning. The following morning, in our keeness to get to Austria, we managed to be first in our check-in queue. Athens airport looked very nice and we looked round for two hours before we took our SkyEurope flight to Vienna. As the plane landed, we followed everyone else's example and put on our coats, scarves and gloves before getting off the plane. We could see our breath as soon as we stepped off the plane onto the gangway. Ollie's cousin (third cousin?) Winfried met us at the airport and drove us into the city, saving us from public transport with our backpacks. We had booked ourselves three nights in a hotel outside the centre of the city. Before taking us to our hotel, Winfried took us on a tour of Vienna at night. The main centre of Vienna is enclosed by the Ring Road, a circular road with the Parliament building, Burg Theatre, Town Hall, other government buildings and the expensive hotels all around it. The buildings look hugely impressive all created in a grand-style architecture like Classical and Baroque with sculptures and columns and gold features. Barely a plain or ugly building sits on the kilometres long ring. We also saw piles of snow beside the road that had fallen a few days before. The night tour looked fantastic as they have brought out their Christmas lights in Vienna. The Town Hall has an advent calendar on its windows counting down the days to Christmas with a Christmas market in front of it lit up in lights. The park next to the Market has trees filled with Christmas-themed laterns. One 16-or-so storey building on the Ring has a massive Christmas tree created in lights on it and the hotels have lit up their facades with Christmas lights. The city looked very Christmassy and exciting especially with the small piles of snow.After our tour, Winfried took us to the pub for a huge meal of turkey Schintzel and chips. It was cold in Vienna. We wore two pairs of socks, with track pants/leggings under our trousers, a singlet, t-shirt, jumper, thick jacket, gloves, scarves and beanies everytime we went out and the air was still cold. However, everywhere inside, including our hotel, most importantly, are kept warm, sometimes too hot. We have enjoyed exploring the city though tucked up in our winter gear. On our first day we caught the metro into the city and decided to walk round some of the Ring Road. We walked past the Parliament building with its marble and gold statues, visited the Christmas Market and saw the Christmas decorations for sale, food stalls and winter hats, gloves and scarves. We bought a few Austrian-style lunches there including bratwurst hotdogs, baked potatoes with chilli-con-carne, some 'healthy' sausages wrapped in dough then deep-fried and smothered in garlic oil, chocolate-covered apples, ice-cream cones filled with ridiculously sweet marshmellow and covered in chocolate, and apple strudel. We also tried the Christmas Austrian drink, punsch which comes in different flavours - orange, apple, beer, tequila, red bull etc - we had the orange and it tasted like orange concentrate, boiling water and rum, not great to taste but nice to hold in the freezing wind. We went for a walk in the city park, saw more snow, freezing ducks, and a branch of the Danube River. We went walking down the main shopping street, pretty with the Christmas decorations, went to the main cathedral, St Stephen's church, and froze inside the stone walls. That night we went out to dinner with Winfried to a Hungarian restaurant and had goulash with Hungarian pasta. After dinner we had planned to get a drink in one of Vienna's famous coffee houses but even Winfried thought the weather far too cold to bother, and, as the zip on my cheap Greek coat couldn't take the cold anymore, we decided to go back. The next day I bought a lovely new coat from H&M - warmer and with a metal zip this time. We took a tram around the Ring Road and saw the sights out of the wind. I feel much more sorry for the homeless here than in Greece, its just so cold. Vienna has hundreds of museums and art galleries but they are not free like in London and you can get sick of going to them pretty fast. The city has a whole area designated to museums called, surprise, surprise, the Museums Quartier. We went to the Quartier but not into anything. We did however, go to an art gallery called the Albertina, with an exhibition called Monet to Picasso and, because it is an old palace, we saw the ornate interior and furnishings. We also visited the Haus de Musick another day. This museum exhibits the history of Vienna's muscians and music on 5 floors of interactive displays. The museum looked great with dark rooms, music playing, headphones attached to touch screen computers to follow interactive hearing games and more. We visited the outside of the Belvedere Palace where Klimt's Kiss is kept but didn't bother going inside. Same with the Hofburg Palace, which looked impressive enough from the outside especially when a high-powered projector was used at night to 'paint' the architecture different colours and in different designs. We decided to stay one night with Winfried when our hotel accommodation ran out. We all went to the pub to celebrate Ol's birthday on the 23rd and talked to a Russian barman who didn't want to travel to NZ in case the government threw him out because his BMI was too high. He gave us a free shot of a terrible Czech spirit. On Ol's birthday we went to see the famous Prater Wheel, like the London Eye but over a hundred years old and made famous in The Third Man, one of Austria's claims to fame and better than the Sound of Music. On Fridays Winfried drives home to Graz and we went along to go and stay with Winfried's aunt, Renate. From her place we will get to explore Austria's second largest city and Arnold Schwarzenaggers home town. Will update soon with any news of snow falling and how cold it is in Graz. From Sophie and Ollie.

Gallery: Greece

sophieollie — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:42:00 GMT

Crete News & Life

sophieollie — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:09:00 GMT

Chania, Crete.

Hey everyone,

Hope you are all well? At the moment we are still in our apartment in Chania that we booked for a month. We have enjoyed our month so far but only have three days to go.

Our first two weeks of sitting on the beach came to an abrupt end, the day after I finally bought a beach mat, when all the beach umbrellas and loungers were taken off the beach and two days later a mini-tropical storm hit. After that the weather has been colder, windy and very changable and the beach covered in seaweed and plastic bottles.

So we found other things to do. We took an hour long bus trip to the next big town Rethymno. We visited its old Venetian fortress on top of the hill in the harbour. The fortress was very Greek in its upkeep and safety - there wasn't any. All the castellation gaps in the top open straight out onto the cliff below, all the paths are built of loose rock, and Ol leaned on the one bit of fencing surrounding a deep drain and almost fell in as it gave way.

We wandered around Rethymno's Old Town, another pretty Venetian area with a million tourist shops, had cheese pies for lunch, and got harrassed to eat and drink at every restaurant.

Another day we took a trip out on the glass-bottom boat in Chania. Our captain, Captain Nick, minus two-fingers, takes groups out to a little island where you jump off with a snorkel and mask and have a swim around. We saw lots of little fish and we got to see a live Octopus, as opposed to the dead ones drying outside restaurants in the sun, and I gave him a stroke - he felt surprisingly silky. I reckon Captain Nick hides him so that he has something to show us tourists and so that fisherman don't come and take him for dinner.

On Tuesday, we decided to take a big three hour bus trip to the capital of Crete, Heraklion. We went to go and see Knossos, the ruins of the Minoan capital. Knossos is famous as the place that inspired the myth of the Minotaur - whereby King Minos angered Posidon by not sacrificing a bull, Posidon made the Queen fall in love with the bull, and 9 months later a baby half-man - half-bull was born. The Minotaur, as the myth knows him, lived in a labyrinth under the King's palace and was fed female virgins to keep him happy.

An archeologist, Arthur Evans, excavated the site in 1900 and decided to recreate parts of it as he wished with concrete rebuilds, painting of frescos and architecture. The result is that the ruins look more interesting than other plain old ruins even if it isn't accurate. Knossos was especially interesting as few other people visited that day and no one blocked your view, or took 10 minutes to take one photo, or shoved you out of the way like everywhere else. Afterwards, we took the three hour bus ride back on the less enjoyable windy, mountainous roads of Crete.

Chania has become a bit boring for us, with the weather turning worse and a lot of the touristy stuff stopping for the winter, but its been nice being bored somewhere different and not having to repack our backpacks every few days. We have also enjoyed having some home-cooked food, particularly the Uncle Ben's curry-in-a-jar we found at the supermarket which Ol has been very happy with.

Luckily, though, Chania has many English-language books floating around and at 9pm every night, except Wednesdays, there is an English-language movie on, otherwise we may have been very bored.

We can even watch English-language news. Crete News and Life has a good news section but the 'Life' section looks like something made in a school journalism class and is shockingly unwatchable. They showed cooking Thai curry with an London-born, pierced and tattooed, 60 year-old ex-gangster who could barely put a sentence together, a thrilling half hour on farm machine fixing, and a crazy cat lady doing a marathon for the cats of Chania. We have been depressed though, since our 1 euro internet place closed down and now we have to go into town and sit amongst all the indoor smokers and nerdy gamers.

However, we will not be bored much longer as this Saturday we have a 10-hour ferry trip to Athens. I am hoping the weather and sea is not as rough as it has been for that. Then one night in Athens before we fly to Austria to hopefully see the snow. Our first stop is Vienna but we will travel round and meet some of Ol's family who live there.

We will miss Chania, our home for a month. We will miss Greek Salads, baklava, seeing the wild cats and kittens in the most unlikely places, the street clocks that never tell the right time, being woken by vans with loud-speakers selling carpets, and temperatures that don't sit below zero but it is exciting to move on again.

Will update again soon from Austria.

From

Sophie and Ollie.

P.s. I have added some photos to the link above if you would like to see them.

Living in Chania

sophieollie — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:17:00 GMT

Hey Everyone,

We have been in our new apartment for over a week now and are getting a bit more of a taste of Cretan life. And yes, people from Crete are known as Cretans. We know the hangouts of some of the stray (or semi-homed) cats and dogs, including the fattest pregnant dog I've ever seen. We now know that Cretans drive terribly and that when they drive with their hazard lights on, as they often do, it means watch out I am about to do something really stupid. No one wears helmets on scooters or motorbikes, and the coolest thing to do is wheelies in front of the girls.

It is nice here though. Greece allegedly has Europe's lowest crime rate and it seems pretty true. There is hardly any vandalism, for example the country is covered in phone boxes, literally covered, and all the Greeks use them, and not one phone has been pulled apart or wrecked or had gum put in the card slot. Also, at our apartment, the owner leaves a fully stocked bar unattended, without alarms or cameras every day and night in reception, along with a flat screen TV and other stuff without feeling the need to lock it all up.

The apartment we booked for the month is great and is saving us quite a bit of money on accommodation and food. It is one big room with a kitchenette, including fridge, sink and electric hobs, a dining table, beds, TV, cupboards and balcony with a seaview and an ensuite. It is not a clear seaview as we have a couple of buildings in the way but it takes us under 60 seconds to walk there, to Chania's main beach, Nea Chora.

The weather has been sunny 2/3s of the time so we have been on the beach lots. The beach is a sand beach with very clear, mainly calm water - great for fish-spotting with our googles on, which we do most days. We have been getting nice tans in the not-to-fierce sun as well.

We have been looking in the shops in the touristy Old Town. Both the Venetians and Turkish invaded at different times so the town has a Turkish Temple and Venetian buildings surrounded by a Venetian wall. The Old Town is where the tourist shops and restaurants are, where you get hassled to sit down and eat 'very nice food here', and can buy the handmade leather products, oil paintings and jewellery. We have also explored the new town, with its shops Greeks actually use, which is often busier than the tourist area.

Now that we have a kitchenette we can also go supermarket shopping and try and match Greek language products to the correct price. Then we go home and try and figure out how to cook them. Its also fun when the already annoyed checkout girls try and give you orders in Greek and you stare blankly back at them.

We have taught ourselves a bit of Greek, including the sounds of the alphabet and basic greetings so we are getting by. Nearly everyone speaks excellent English though. Sometimes when you're reading all the signs in English, such as 'NO PARKING', and all magazine names are in English and everyone speaks to you in English, you tend to forget you're in Greece.

We have also been occupying ourselves using the 1 Euro an hour internet, the cheapest yet, reading the free English-language books in reception, going to the local food and clothing markets to buy the ingredients for my version of Greek salads and going out to buy baklava from the cake shops with ridiculously nice sweet things.

We also went out to watch the rugby final, where a few people had managed to talk a bar owner into actually putting the game on. Greeks have absolutely no interest whatsoever in rugby. Luckily, two TV channels play English-language movies every night and we can watch Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Married with Children, The Simpsons and America's Funniest Home Videos originals with a very young Bob Saget.

So we have another three weeks of being lazy in Chania and hopefully the weather will stay nice enough for it and then we will be off to somewhere we don't know yet...

Hope everyone is good and well,
Take care,

From
Sophie and Ollie

Island Hopping, as they call it...

sophieollie — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:16:00 GMT

From Athens we caught the tube from the sparkling clean, almost brand new tube stations to the port. I now love cities with metro systems. No matter what the language, how far away or how weird a place you want to go to, the tube is cheaper than any bus (except in London) and really, really easy.

We hopped on our ferry to Paros at 3pm. We choose the cheapest ferry so, after six hours of boredom watching the ferry chug out black smoke and island-spotting, we finally arrived at 9pm.

We had prebooked our cheapest accommodation yet, 13 Euros each a night, and got picked up off the ferry by the owner. When we first got off the ferry I didn't know what was going on as people all come rushing forward waving signs and shouting at you. Then I remembered reading in the Lonely Planet that this is what the hotel owners do at any time of night to get customers.

Paros is a beautiful island with heaps of sandy beaches, two main towns and lots of white-washed buildings and pavements painted white, like any good Greek island should be. The summer season has now ended in Europe so everywhere is much quieter and the restaurants empty. Lots of places even close until the next summer season. Its still busy though so it must be packed in summer.

We spent three days on Paros and had a really good time. We hired a 50cc scooter for two days and did the 65km circumference of the island, saw different beaches and villages. We swam at a very nice beach the locals use called Krios with its white sand, clear blue sea and surprisingly unlittered beach. On our second time Ol spent half an hour helping this funny Greek lady push her car out of the sand.

Our apartment, in a block of 5 other empty apartments, had a kitchenette, double bed, air-con, TV, private bathroom and balcony. It was great. We liked Paros so much that we even tried to look for work, but for an island of only 10,000 or so, at the end of their summer season, few people offered jobs. I did find some work as an English teacher but we could find little else so we decided to head off and see Santorini.

The Lonely Planet called Santorini the most beautiful of the Greek Islands, which it would be if it didn't have so many tourists on it. We got to take advantage of the mad hordes of hotel owners screaming at you when exiting the ferry and choose a pretty nice, cheap place to stay. The system is great because you get off the ferry, hardly move, choose your accommodation and then get driven straight there with very little hassle and no extra cost.

Santorini is built on a volcano, once round, it is now crescent-shaped with the rest of it under the sea. One side of the island is a sheer, stepped cliff exposing the layers of different coloured rock. Fira, the capital, is built on, and over, the edge of this cliff, over 200m from sea-level. The most beautiful and touristy area is literally built on the stepped cliff. Many precarious stairways lead down to hotels and restaurants built on platforms overhanging the caldera. In 1956 a huge earthquake destroyed most of Fira and much of it has been rebuilt in what seems like 'Greek' buildings that tourists want to see.

The main problem with Santorini, or Shit-orini as Ol called it, is that the Island is full of tourists. I would hate to see it in the actual high season. The Island seems especially popular with Americans, particularly older Americans who can hardly make their way up the multitude of narrow, steep staircases and sometimes you just want to shove one of them to see them fall like dominos.

We enjoyed ourselves though, seeing the painted-blue domed churches, all the stray cats and the white-washed buildings with blue detailing. We went to a black sand beach, which had tiny black pebbles instead of sand. The tiny pebbles felt great to dig your toes into and to swim on. We sat on some of the beach loungers for hire, without getting kicked off or paying - much better than sitting in all the cigarettes and bottle caps

Mediterrean beaches have generally been filthy, filled with cigarette butts and rubbish. In fact the whole of the Mediterrean is filled with people who chain smoke everywhere, including under no smoking signs quite often, and who litter anywhere.

After two nights in Santorini we decided to head to Crete. Unfortunately, our only option there was the fast expensive ferry that takes half the time but costs double the amount, has no deck to sit on, no restaurants or anything to explore and crap windows that make you feel seasick.

We arrived at Crete's capital, Heraklio, at night and had to walk 15 minutes to our hostel. Heraklio is a Big city, with 165,000 people, 8 Vodafones within a 5 minute walking radius and the cheapest crepes yet. I had honey on our first morning and then lemon and sugar the next and they tasted fantastic. We also had some excellent souvlaki (meat on a stick kebabs) and Greek salads.

The restaurant staff in Greece drive you crazy though. They hassle everyone who walks past and you must speed read menus as you move. God-forbid if you stop and turn a menu page because that’s when they attack and before you realise it, you're eating terrible, microwaved food that you didn't want and that costs heaps.

From Heraklio we headed to Chania, said Hahn-yah, on the North-East of Crete. Chania is a very nice place. It has an old town, a modern, busy new town with a Dominos Pizza place and a Body Shop, with the sea on one side of the town and the mountains behind. We got our accommodation at the bus station from a Greek-Canadian guy fishing for customers and for 12.50 Euros each a night we got another air-con, kitchenette and balcony apartment, no TV though.

After 4 nights at this place and exploring some of Chania, we have decided to spend a month here to see a bit of the place and maybe find some work....which we have just started looking for now.

From
Sophie and Ollie.
(In the Southern most part of Europe hoping the sun doesn’t go away.)

Greece, The Mainland.

sophieollie — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:15:00 GMT

After our train trip across the width of Italy, we arrived at Brindisi. We managed our first kilometre with backpacks on. Finally managed to find an open ticket office and bought two tickets for a cabin on the ferry. The tickets cost half price because of our rail pass, otherwise we would have been stuck on deck accordingly to the ticket guy. In reality, the ferry had about 30 people on it and we could have sat or slept anywhere, so the ticket guy lied to us but at least we got beds with his lie.

We caught the free shuttle to the port, and went to pay the port tax with VISA but there was no VISA, nor any cash machines. We ended up having to borrow money from a kiwi couple who caught the ferry as well. We enjoyed the ferry ride - the boat had two bars, a restaurant, a large deck area and some shops. A group of 8 of us from Australia and NZ sat about and learnt some Greek together.

We arrived in Patra at 1pm the next day and headed off with the kiwi couple to find an ATM to pay them back and to look for accommodation. After another km with backpacks on we found a nice place to stay.

One problem with Greece is you can't put toilet paper down the toilet, you have to put it in the bin. This is because the Greeks used smaller plumbing when installing toilets than the rest of the world, to save money. Therefore, shared bathrooms are a bit more gross in Greece than anywhere else.

Patra is not a tourist town, despite being the main port of Greece. It has few hotels, fewer tourists shops and even fewer tourists. It is a really nice place though. We went out to lunch and dinner with the kiwi couple, had really nice, cheap food (now i have had way too many pork pita pockets) in local Greek places and walked around in a proper Greek city.

Unlike Olympia, which is a town built for tourism. After our night in Patra, we caught a train, the nicest train so far in Europe, down the Peloponnese to Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games. We arrived at the train station, ready to look for accommodation, to be met by the owner of Pension Poseidon, the one recommended by Lonely Planet and did the 4 minute walk from one end of town to the other to stay at his place.

Olympia is full of tourist shops, 'Traditional Greek Restaurants', and hotels, with marble-paved roads and pavement. The place is nearly empty at this time of year except for the day-trippers to the ruin site. We saw the old running track, ruined temples, sculptures, prizes and such like from different times BC. Though we are both a bit over ruins at the moment.

We also saw the fire damage around Olympia. The fires Greece just dealt with seemed to be finally contained just around Olympia. Some people's back gardens in Olympia were charred and in the distances around the city the hills are filled with black olive trees and charred ground. They had begun to fell all the dead trees when we visited.

From Olympia we caught a coach to Tripoli, in the centre of the Peloponnese. The coach also functioned as the local bus, filled with 90 year old men and school kids. The drive took us through tiny villages, with all the donkeys tied up in the front yard, and up mountains, with sheer drops and broken barriers on one side of the narrow, windy road. We went through one town built on the side of a mountain with cafe areas balanced on platforms hanging over the edge.

After 3 hours we arrived in Tripoli to catch a bus to Nafplio. What they seem to like to do in Greece though, is send you to the nearest place to where you want to go, but not to the actual place and they don't tell you this. So we ended up in Argos and had to catch another bus to Nafplio.

The reason we wanted to go to Nafplio is because the Lonely Planet said Nafplio is one of the prettiest towns in Greece. However, as we have come to realise the Lonely Planet is usually only half right. Nafplio has a nice old town area revamped for tourists with lots of tourist shops, tourist restaurants and overpriced hotels but not that special. We stayed in the new town because we are not rich, and the new town is not special at all. Our early morning wake up call from a taxi driver banging repeatedly on all the doors at 6am was not appreciated by myself either.

From Nafplio we headed to Loutraki and, as the buses do, got dumped about 20 minutes away to figure out how to get to the actual town. Loutraki is where I use to live before in Greece. We stayed in a nice, guide-book recommended hotel (guide-book recommended is definitely the way to go), swam at the clear, blue beach 3 times, found my old house, looking much the same, and relaxed for 3 days in quite a nice tourist town next to the Corinth Canal.

And then we went to Athens. Full of tourists and expensive hotels. We stayed at a non-guide book recommended hotel where someone had duct-taped the wallpaper back together, the floor had sticky patches and the bathroom had holes in it. I got to have a go at the miserable old man owner when he tried to kick us out at 11.30 before the 12pm checkout, standard across Greece. Old Greek men are the most surly, miserable bunch I have ever met, other Greeks though are very nice.

In Athens we saw the Acropolis, wandered the tourist-filled streets with hardly a Greek in sight, got harassed to eat at every place we passed and had a good Greek Salad, Mousaka and ice-cream set menu.

After Athens we headed off to the port to catch our ferry to the Paros to enjoy some island life.

From Sophie and Ollie.

Our sightseeing tour of Italia

sophieollie — Thu, 4 Oct 2007 02:14:00 GMT

Hey everyone,

Sorry it has been a while since an update but we have been pretty busy and internet cafes are really annoying! Hope everyone is good?

We have just completed 12 days travelling around Italy. We joined the throngs of tourists at all the big sites. We saw the gypsy girls begging everywhere, the African and Indian sellers with their sheets full of fake handbags and sunglasses constantly ready to run from the police, and the Italians ALL dressed in jeans and driving like maniacs. We did our tour by train as we bought a 123 Euro Italian train pass for 6 days of travel in one month. We are now over trains and sick of sitting in 6 people compartments staring at guys who look like the baddies in Home Alone. The train stations were pretty gross as the toilets empty straight onto the track and, unlike in Vietnam, the toilets were used in the stations. Italy also seems to have a pickpocketing problem with the train stations being the worst place.

Venezia
After leaving Nice, we caught a train to Venice, passing through yacht-filled Monaco, Genoa, Romeo and Juliet's Verona, and Milan. We then struggled to find our accommodation, having to catch a bus, then walk through shady underpasses etc. The times when I most wish to just be home are when arriving in a new city, totally lost, needing to get from A to B with few clues and a backpack that gets heavier by the minute. We eventually found our campground in Venice and moved into our ready-built, lino-floored cabin with ensuite for a cheap 16 Euros per person, per night.

The following day we caught the campsite's shuttle bus into Venice at 9.30 am and had a full day sightseeing until we could catch the earliest shuttle out, at 8 pm. So we walked and saw the canals and the gondolas and the rich Asian tourists who can afford them. We saw many shops selling Venetian masks and gondola statues. We walked to San Marco Square and viewed its famous buildings and pigeons in amongst all the tourists. We ate terrible microwaved lasagne and walked along the back streets where people actually lived, seeing them hang their washing out between two windows over the canal. We walked for hours and got completely lost a number of times. Venice looked even better than I imagined, living up to all the stereotypes of gondolas on canals, water-taxis, front doors opening onto water but its also prettier and cleaner than I thought.

Firenze
After Venice we traveled down to Florence and stayed in another campground. The campground is situated in an olive grove 5 minutes from the centre of town and just down from the Piazza Michelangelo where a bronze copy of Michelanglo's statue of David stands. The site is protected so instead of a cabin we had to get a tent but with beds and a lino-floor though it went fridge-cold at night.

In Florence we saw Brunelleschi's Duomo and climbed its never-ending 463 steps to the top to look out over the city. We visited the Uffizi Gallery where we stood in a queue of 100s which let only 20 people in every 30 minutes. We visited the outdoor marble copy of David and didn't bother queuing for the real version, we walked across Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge with jewellery shops on it and drank some terrible, cheap Tuscan wine.

We also took a day trip by train to Pisa. The train station is a one end of town and the tower at the other so we walked through the town which seemed the most Italian of all the places we went. They had a food market selling pasta, tomatoes, olives and salami, believe it or not. The Leaning Tower of Pisa looked impressive. It sits amongst a number of buildings all done in an ornate style, in marble but the Tower leans on an extreme angle. We took the obligatory photos from a distance of us trying to hold it up and bought the keyring.

In Florence I had my only good Italian meal, handmade ravioli in a nut sauce. Everything else we ate in Italy was overpriced, uninspired and tiny.

Roma
We again stayed in another of the camping chains campsites outside Rome, in a dodgy, grafitti-filled area but a nice campsite with cabins, swimming pools, bars and a restaurant.

In Rome we splashed out and bought a 16 Euro each, all day pass to catch the open top, sightseeing, tourist bus they have in every European city because we had done enough walking. We got the running commentry on the big sites, churches and ruins in the city. We got off to see the Trevi Fountain which I thought unexpectedly small and, nicely, not covered in over the top decoration. I couldn't get to it to throw a coin in even if I wanted to as annoying other tourists filled the small space. We went to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, both huge ruins right in the centre of the city that do live up to all the hype. We went to the packed but free Pantheon temple/church before missioning it back by metro and bus to the campsite.

The following day we went to the Vatican Museum, saw the 600 metre queue and kept going to St Peter's Church, where we joined a queue and passed through a metal detector. From inside the square we waited and got to see the Pope arrive and start mass on the steps of the church. While everyone was preoccupied we joined the now 500 metre queue for the Vatican Museum which actually moved very fast. The museum is huge and we did not have a proper look instead, accidentally, entering the Sistine Chapel through the exit we saw Michelangelo's impressive ceiling and left.

Sorrento
After 3 nights in Rome we headed to Sorrento, just south of Naples for our last Italian campground. Sorrento looked beautiful, at the start of Italy's Amalfi Coast with its coastline of sheer cliff stretching all along the shore with mountains just behind. The campsite felt a bit rustic but had amazing views and sat in another olive grove.

We went to Sorrento so that we would be able to visit Pompeii. Pompeii is the town covered by ash in the 79AD eruption of Mt Versuvius and is now an archelogical site. It is fantastic. You walk down the original roads, go into the original houses, walking on the floor mosaics made then. You are able to touch almost everything and can climb up the ampitheatre and see the plastercasts of the dead bodies suffocated in the ash. Its very eerie at times except for when 3 tour groups all enter one room and yabber on incessantly.

From Sorrento we caught a train to Naples and then one to Taranto and a final one to Brindisi to catch the ferry over to Greece...and I will update you on Greece next time.

From Ollie and Sophie.

P.s I hope everyone is good, its great to get emails from everyone and we are able to get on the internet sometimes to reply.

Gallery: Italy

sophieollie — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:10:00 GMT

Barcelona to Nice, with fun on the trains.

sophieollie — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:12:00 GMT

Two days later we actually made it to Barcelona. On our first attempt at getting there the train was full for two days. So we went back to Geraldine's, reserved two tickets on the phone, and hung around for two more nights. We had a few vino tintos in the bar next door and got to see my other aunt and uncle who flew in for a holiday from England.

On the Wednesday we headed back to the train station to use our reservation number for the train. However, what the lady on the phone hadn't informed Geraldine was that we had to pay 24 hours previous. The train was full again. Then the ticket man offered us first class before cruelly taking the offer away. Eventually, we caught one train to Alicante and another to Barcelona. For 37 Euros extra we made it.

The train journey lasted over seven hours and we saw some big mountains, the ocean, high-rises everywhere, resort hotels, farm land, lots of graffiti and the outskirts of Valencia. We arrived and successfully traversed the foreign-language metro system, walked down the city's main street, and up three alleyways reaching our hostel at 10pm, knackered.

Our hostel, New York Hostel, is in the Barri Gotic area, right in the centre of the city. The area looks a bit rough with lots of grafitti, urine-soaked streets and homeless people but its full of tourists looking in the arty/alternative shops and bars.

The hostel was also 5 minutes from the sea and 5 minutes from La Rambla, the main Barcelona street. The newspaper here informs me that La Rambla won 4th place in Europe's most disappointing sights competition. I thought La Rambla quite good though with street performers, including many human statues - an Indian, a fruit stand, Edward Scissorhands etc, clowns, breakdancers, smelly, homeless men etc. It also contains lots of tourist shops, every fast food chain and, apparently, many pick-pocketers.

On our first morning we headed out to see Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. The Sagrada Familia is a massive church currently being constructed, and has been since 1882, right in the centre of Barcelona. The façade has largely been completed and contains many huge, detailed relief sculptures from the life of Christ. It also has 4 massive towers which look like candles sticking up with a melted wax-like effect carved into the stone below. Inside you can take a lift up one of the towers and get an impressive view of the city, and feel very dizzy coming down the steeply, spiral staircase. We also visited Gaudi's Casa Batllo and La Pedrera but just to look at their fronts and the Casa Batllo's roof-top dragon. On our last day we visited his Park Guell, a public park with sculptured walk ways and tiled fountains and buildings. Barcelona is full of Gaudi and it all looked great.

We visited the Montjuic Park, the base of the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. The park now centres around an art gallery that looks down upon the Font Montjuic. We waited there until dark and the fountain starts up and gets lit up in reds, yellows, oranges, pinks and greens. (we have lots of photos for you Christopher when I can get them to send). The water is shot out in jets and mists to make patterns all to the sound of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. The show looked impressive, especially with the odd-3000 people watching as well.

We also visited the Picasso Museum, an old city mansion where Picasso donated many of his works before he died. It is located in an area with all these horribly expensive but delicious looking chocolate shops that we couldn't afford to buy from. We went to the packed city beach 5 minutes walk from the city centre, went looking in the tourist shops, had some Spanish tortilla and got to see a fair bit of Barcelona in 4 days.

We had pre-bought train tickets for Barcelona to Nice the second day we were in Barcelona. When we got back to our hostel we noticed that it went from Cebere (right inside the French border) to Nice but no mention of Barcelona to Cebere. So the next day we returned to the train station and checked with two people that it did indeed include getting from Barcelona to Cebere. One of the helpers also informed me that half the people at the train station were thieves and I needed to watch my handbag better.

When we left the next day to catch the train from Barcelona to Cebere and a night train onto Nice the ticket guy informed us our ticket did not include the trip from Barcelona to Cebere. He did suggest we wave our ticket at the guy at the gate and not let him read it, which we did and it worked. Once at the platforms, however, we could not find a train to Cebere as on Sunday 16/09 the train stopped at the station before, Portbou, still in Spain. Anyway, long story short we, about 15 other backpackers and some Spanish speaking women from Chile who yelled at the poor train station attendant managed to get a sleeper train headed for Zurich to stop for us and drop us over the French border in Cebere so that we could all get to Nice.

We arrived in Nice exhausted having not slept much in our seats on the freezing overnight train, next to an open can of sardines someone had decided to leave behind. We had decided not to book accommodation beforehand so we went searching. Luckily Nice is quite compact with the train station 2 minutes from the hotels, which sit 7 minutes from the beach. We found a lovely one star hotel, with a broken shower, rotting ceiling and a construction site outside the window for a cheap 42 Euros a night. Actually the room was pretty good, with a big window and bed and we slept well.

Ol and I had colds in Nice so we slept most of the first day going out only for a quick swim. The sea is obviously the Mediterranean and is bright blue, clear and great to swim in but the pebbles a bit sore to sunbathe on. Also obviously Mediterranean were the topless grannys, frying in the sun, with their designer labels and platinum blonde hair.

Both nights in Nice we went out to dinner with a Canadian backpacker we met while hitching the ride to Cebere. We went down to the waterfront and saw some impressive in-line skating around some cups and looked at the lights lining the Nice strip and its hotels and casinos.

On our second day we both woke up feeling unwell from our colds so lay in a bit then went for another very nice swim.

Nice the town though is not very nice. Everyone there looks miserable, the streets again STINK like wee and are smeared with dog poo and the restaurants, including Le Moari with tiki designs which doesn't sell hungi, are very pricey. The beach, however, makes up for all that.

We also sorted out a rail ticket to Venice, and accommodation at a campsite just outside the city. As I write this I am hoping nothing more goes wrong with the trains...

from
Sophie and Ollie.

Hola

sophieollie — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:18:00 GMT

El Contador, Almeria, Spain.

Welcome to a world of sunshine, where the almond trees grow, the sky is always blue and the English are invading.

We arrived in Spain almost two weeks ago on our Ryan Air flight. After a mad crush to get on the plane (everyone wants to be first as you choose your seats), we sat for three hours with whining teenagers and crying babies. To give you some idea of their annoying-level, when we got off the plane an English girl whined that ´its too hot mummy, I want to go home`. Luckily our baggage arrived – apparently 20% of all baggage on English flights does not – and we meet my aunt, Geraldine, and uncle, Christopher outside. After a two-hour drive from Almeria we arrived in El Contador.

Geraldine and Christopher have lived in Spain for two and half years now and have renovated their own house in a little village in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. El Contador is a proper Spanish village with an approximate population of 240, only 12 of which are English. The village is 1200 metres above sea level, in a basin in the mountains, and the weather is fantastic. We have endured one cloudy morning in two weeks and the rest of the time the sun has shined. El Contador has two bars, one shop and lots of dogs and cats roaming the streets. The houses look exactly like they should, with white walls, terracotta roofs, flat terraces and vine leaves growing up the sides.

Most evenings my aunt and I have taken her dog, Dexter, for a walk round the village. She speaks to all the old men who sit around outside their houses waiting for their wives to finish doing all the work. Dexter chases the cats and smells all the dogs who roam freely around the village. These dogs tend to be of the small, yappy type, my personal favourite being a little white and brown spotted thing called Manolo. We have visited the bar a couple of times and had beers and tapas. Anyway, it is very nice in El Contador.

We have explored the local areas. We swam amongst the wasps in freezing pool water, visited the fruit and clothing market, and had coffee in the cafes in Chirivel. I experienced a nerve-wracking hair colour in Velez Rubio. The nerve-wracking part resulted from the hairdresser not speaking English and me not speaking Spanish. Geraldine explained what I wanted in Spanish though and I ended up with a good colour and fringe thicker than one I have ever had before. Christopher took us out into the Sierra Nevada National Park in a 4-wheel-drive where we saw all the almond trees growing and went up into the mountains and back down again. We visited an old Spanish castle/fortress in Velez Blanco and stopped at a monastery-cum-expensive retreat hotel in the mountains.

Geraldine and Christopher have also taken us shopping in Albox. Albox has a population one-fifth English, where people migrate to so that they can hold car boot sales in the sun and speak slowly and loudly to Spanish shop assistants in English. Not that Ollie and I can talk, our Spanish is still pretty limited to ‘lo siento, no hablo espanol’, ‘I’m sorry, I do not speak Spanish’. However, we have had help from Geraldine who is fluent and are making some progress. Ollie managed to order our entire dinner in Spanish the other night with some help from the Spanish-English menu.

One of the best days involved a drive out into the mountains, up and down some very steep and windy roads to Mini Hollywood, now named Oasys we discovered after much confusion in finding the place. Mini Hollywood is a kind of themed place set up in Europe’s only desert, Tabernas Desert, where they use to film the old Spaghetti Westerns. Directors filmed parts of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Magnificent Seven and A Fist Full of Dollars here, and more recently parts from the new Indiana Jones film. The setting is amazing. I managed to upload a few photos to our new photo site and the background you see in the photos is not drawn on a massive piece of cardboard but actually exists. We saw a live cowboy show, stuck our heads in a wanted poster and stocks, went round the zoo and had some lunch in the middle of a mountainous desert.

Two days ago Ollie and I decided to take a trip out to Granada to see the Alhambra. We booked some accommodation and headed off by bus. Three hours later, having driven past solar panel fields, wind farms and houses literally built into the sides of mountains, we arrived in Granada. We managed to figure out the local Spanish buses into the centre of the city. However, we did not manage to figure out when to get off the bus and ended up backtracking for an hour, luckily only with our small backpacks, until we found the second bus we needed to catch. We made it to our hotel eventually and got to sit down in our shoebox room.

Later we explored the shopping area of the city and got some dinner in a Spanish courtyard where the Spanish ate. We sat outdoors and every once in a while the overhead sprinkler system would shoot out a spray of mist to cool the diners down but you could barely see the table next to you when it happened and the water was freezing so it seemed a bit strange. The food here has not been that great. Usually, you can choose between some type of meat, chips and reheated frozen vegetables, my stomach has been somewhat disappointed with the offerings. However, I did try gazpacho soup and, surprisingly, liked it quite a lot.

The next day I got up early to go and queue for tickets to the Alhambra. Luckily, we choose our hotel because it faced the entrance to the Alhambra, as I ended up leaving at 7.45 am and joining a queue of approximately 200 people. By the time the tickets sales opened at 8.30 the queue behind me stretched as far behind again. The Alhambra stands above Granada on a hill site, completely walled in, and contains the ruins of an 11^th Century Fortress, a 14^th Century Palace and some elaborate gardens. The design of the gardens include fountains, tunnels of trees and flowers to walk under, ponds and elaborately decorated garden buildings with amazing views over the city. The Fortress is the most ruined area of the Alhambra but most of it is still standing and you get to climb up to its different levels. The Palace is renowned for how well it’s extremely decorative rooms with elaborate floor tiling, Arabic decorated walls and intricate ceilings have survived. Have a look at the pictures here if you want some idea of its design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra. We left Granada that afternoon after the Alhambra on the bus to come back to Geraldine’s.

Tomorrow, we take the 8-hour train up to Barcelona to begin proper backpacking, without relatives to stay with - it is daunting but exciting.

From Ollie and Sophie.

Gallery: Spain

sophieollie — Sun, 9 Sep 2007 17:58:00 GMT

Two weeks in Suffolk and another weekend in London

sophieollie — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:57:00 GMT

For the past two weeks we have been staying with Ol’s aunt and uncle in Suffolk. Staying with three, then two, cats, as, unfortunately, one of them had a mishap on the road, 11 chickens, then 10, as one passed on due to natural causes (we did not eat her), two horses, and a puppy called Thomas who looks like an English Sheepdog, but is in fact a Bearded Collie. We have entered the true English countryside; the area can hardly even be described as a village. There are lots of wild Trevors bouncing around, I have been blackberry picking and eating, Ol helped build a new ‘apartment block’ for the hens, and we have been on the odd country walk. Ol’s uncle is a potter so we got to have a go on the potter’s wheel and create our own clay masterpieces. Actually, they were not as terrible as we imagined – not as bad as they usually turn out on the Generation Game.

Ol’s aunt and uncle have taken us out to Lavenham, a 300 year old village where all the houses have exposed wood beams and lean on odd angles as if they are about to collapse. We went to the beach at Felixstowe, though we have not been swimming as the weather in this country is terrible. The dark brown water and pebbly beach did not add to its appeal.

Then Ol’s cousin took us out to Framlingham Castle. A ruined castle where you can walk along the top, which we did. We also walked around the castle’s moat, but because it does not stop raining in England, it became a bit of an adventure course. There is a certain adrenaline rush you get from carefully wading through and around mud pools, hoping not to fall in, while also avoiding stinging nettles (which bloody hurt) and blackberry brambles. We had a lovely picnic but it POURED with rain halfway through my sandwich.

We went to Dunwich, another pebbly-beached, brown-watered wind trap. Apparently, Dunwich was once a thriving town but has since been swallowed by the sea and on a lucky day one can find human bones washed up from what was once the church’s graveyard. Then we moved onto Southwold, one of England’s thriving seaside towns, where we saw yet another brown, pebbly beach. This time the English, who were having a summer holiday whether the sun joined them or not, swam and built sandcastles in the freezing wind and rain. We half joined them in their pretend summer and went paddle boating around a pond full of ducks and a swan. I enjoyed myself until water began to dribble through the paddle holes in the side of the boat and then I let Ol paddle himself on his own.

Ol and I also took ourselves out to Norwich for the day by train. We visited the largely intact, massive Norwich Castle, went shopping, avoided the Hell and Damnation-focused preachers on the high street, saw the Helmans Mustard Museum and walked down an Art Nouveau arcade.

Between mud and preacher dodging, human bone spotting and the paddle boats we have been having an exciting time in Suffolk - it has been lots of fun.

Last weekend I bravely took myself down to London on my own to catch the underground tubes on my own and had a good time. I stayed with my mum’s school friend, Judy, in Highgate, a richer area where Razorlight’s lead man went to school, and near where Michael Palin, the Twelve Monkeys/Monty Python director and Kate Moss live. I got the guided tour. Judy took me to Hyde Park where I saw the Princess Diana memorial, Prince Albert’s memorial and went to the Victoria and Albert Decorative Arts museum, where Judy had one of her and her sister’s t-shirts on display in the 20th Century exhibit. We also visited Harrods where we saw Sphinxes in the Egyptian room all with Muhammad Al Fayed’s face, a well-endowed Egyptian belly-dancer dancing and flicking her hair in the seafood section and a normal-sized, organic chicken for £19.36, approx $NZ48.40.

The next day I met Monica (my flight attendant friend who flew in for the day from Dubai) at lunchtime and we visited Trafalgar Square, Soho, 10 Downing Street, Big Ben and saw the London Eye. That evening I went out with Judy, her husband and daughter for a very nice Japanese dinner, Pistachio ice cream and Goth-spotting in Camden. And I successfully caught a number of tubes in the underground all on my own across London.

Today is our last day in England as we fly out at 5pm to Spain. Woohoo sunshine here we come. Good-bye terrible weather and cold, hopefully, good-bye CCTV everywhere, good-bye poo-brown beaches.

From Sophie and Ollie.

A Weekend in London

sophieollie — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 03:56:00 GMT

The Trip
As part of my birthday present, for yesterday, Ol and I spent a weekend in London to see some of the sights. We went down by train from Suffolk, where are staying with Ol's aunty, to London to stay with Ol's cousin Chloe from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. Chloe lives in a flat in Clapton, Hackney, which is in East London. From Chloe's we traveled round on bus and tube to the sights we had decided to see.

The Sights
We arrived Friday lunchtime into Liverpool Station and caught the tube to the Tate Modern art gallery. We passed the London Church of Scientology, no sightings of Tom Cruise however, past St Paul's Cathedral, over the Millennium Bridge and Thames, looked at London Bridge up river, to get to the Tate Modern.

The Tate Modern has 5 stories of Modern largely free to the public. The only exhibition you had to pay for was a Dali exhibit and there is more than enough to see without going to it. There are literally hundreds of famous art works from the beginning of the 20th Century up to today. I saw Picasso's The Three Dancers, his and Braque's early cubist paintings, Brancusi's sculpture, Monet's Waterlillies and the sculpture of the guy who uses bubble machines. There is a huge collection of Surrealist art, some of the best being Max Ernst paintings.

The next day we headed out to see the Covent Garden Markets. The sellers weren't that great - lots of overpriced jewellery, London themed stuff, and stuff with your name written/etched/sewn on it. The shops there are good, like the Mooks shop, Guess, the Doc Martens store, Miss Sixty etc. Performers stage shows around Covent Garden and we saw an unicyclist, juggler, obnoxious magician who kept asking for 'any speakers of English' and some human statues.

After Covent Garden we walked down to Trafalgar Square, which really didn't have that many pigeons, and to the National Gallery. The National Gallery is also free to enter and again has hundreds and hundreds of works in its collection. We saw Leonardo Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks, another one of Monet's Waterlilles, which really do stand out, Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, and all the old Byzantine Art. The wooden altarpieces of the Byzantine period always looked so boring in slides but not in person with all the gold leaf and Lapis Lazuli blue paint. We saw heaps more but the two galleries house far too much to take in and really see.

Then on Sunday we went shopping on Oxford Street. I got new sandals for Spain, certainly not for this freezing country, and some sunglasses, also, probably, only to be used when I get to Spain, for my birthday present from Topshop. In the afternoon we went to the British Museum, once again a free attraction. We did the museum quickly but we got a look at Egyptian artifacts, some terribly boring Greek Vases, they are even boring to be seen in person not just Classics Class, the Elgin Marbles, and some Maori carved greenstone. We saw it quick but it was impressive.

The People
While seeing the sights we had to contest with the other people in London. London is SO busy. In the mornings it is ok. There are people everywhere but you all manage to fit comfortably enough within London. By the afternoon it seems as if its whole 9 million inhabitants are outside. I needed the toilet one day but in the museum the ladies queue was out the door, in MacDonalds it was the same and I wanted to cry in Borders when there was another 8 person queue out the door. The buses and tubes fill up completely in the afternoons. We queued to join a queue to join a queue to get on the tube in one place in the Underground.

Then you get the crazy ones. I think some of them act crazy on purpose just to get some much needed personal space in London. The best was a guy on the bus conversing and swearing to his mate on his phone. Then, when he did not pause between sentences, I realized he was not on the phone. He talked for 15 minutes non-stop at the top of his voice to himself as if he was having a proper conversation. He looked so normal as well.

You don't feel like you stick out in London though as a tourist or foreigner because everyone looks like a tourist or a foreigner. Everyone is trying to work out where they are in their A-Z of London, and taking photos of everything English...

...And that was our weekend in London. From Sophie and Ollie.