So good to be Home

I'm sitting in the dining area of my parents'-in law place. There are young magpies begging for food in a gum tree about 10m away.


(ours have white backs unlike the northern or western version. Pic taken in the Exhibition Gardens in Melbourne.)

Magpie Dad carols a little, making up for the ugliness of his kids' whining.


There's rainbow lorikeets winging past, screaming their apparent joy to the world. They stop and sit in a tree and start squabbling. (Pic taken at Tooronga station.)

A couple of wattlebirds are disputing territory. Some little whitter birds are whittering. There's gum trees (Eucalypts), sheoaks (Casuarina), wattle trees, hibiscuits (hibiscus) and melaleucas outside the window. I ignore the houses and the sound of traffic from the local major roads. They are peripheral.

My goodness, the sounds make me homesick for the place where I am!

Brienzersee

Two pics, nearly the same, taken from the train near Brienz, of the Brienzersee. Love the difference in colour!

Luzern 22 Sept 2009

A few pics from Luzern (Lucerne), Switzerland. Too far behind to do a travelogue!



Our feetses were very sore after this walk...





and we climbed lots of stairs too...



Not more stairs!

Austria - Salzburg

Last post for the nonce! Lots of photos to go but I've had enough for the moment.

I hopped on a train for a couple of hours yesterday and emerged in Salzburg. It was very interesting. I didn't go to Neuschwanstein as it was raining and what is the point of going to a fairy tale castle if you can't see the flaming thing? (actually if it was flaming, it would probably be visible even in the rain.)


(Excuse the wonkiness - I had walked about 25km in the three days before, this including 12km on Wednesday, and I've had enough of walking.)

I didn't do much running around singing about Maria or the hills being alive or even a little night music. I didn't even see the statue of Mozart. But I did see a fair whack of old Salzburg before it started raining.



Since it was being unpleasant and drizzling on and off, I took off back on the train to Munich. I managed to get lost by using the gopher holes that they use to go under streets and get into the underground railway lines. I popped up one road too late and ended up walking back to where I had tea by mistake!

Germany - Munich

Now that I have found a friendly net cafe that runs linux/Ubuntu boxes, I'm uploading some stuff and writing more blog posts up. I feel much safer using a linux box than a windoze box. I know the net can still have sniffers and things just waiting to steal my password but at least the box itself is unlikely to be infected with anything nasty. And I now have it working with an English keyboard, not a German one. And there's a couple of people with NO accent sitting next to me. We do get around.

So, Munich. Gosh I didn't have a good day the first day we were here. Want to hear the litany of disasters?

I couldn't connect to the internet in our 300 euro a night hotel. They charge a euro per 15 minutes after the first free 15 minutes in their business centre. 300 euros a night and no free wifi! Can't believe it. 60 euro a night places have free wifi. Crikey! This meant no looking up German words for please, thank-you, excuse me, etc etc.



No tea and coffee making facilities in the room either - you have to call room service for that. Now Nathan's work is paying for the room but y'know a 10 euro cup of coffee seems a bit overpriced. I went and bought an electric kettle for 30 euros instead.



A bird pooped on my pants, the lovely new pants that I had put on for the first time that morning.

I only had five hours sleep.



DH forgot to give me any cash. 5 euros does not get you very far when you have to buy some lunch with it.

I had been told that most people speak English, but most of the people I found didn't! Lots of pointing and hand flapping followed.

Oh there were other things but that will do!

I did find yarn in department stores. Nice sock yarn and some souvenirs for people in SJ. I also saw a lot of interesting buildings, which you can see scattered through this post.

I went for a lovely walk in the Englische garden. It was soooo green.


And I found out why some boys were carrying surfboards in the middle of Munich.


(That's surfing on a standing wave at the start of one of the garden's rivers.)

France - Dijon

Dijon was a very different place to Toulouse. OK it is smaller but its centre ville is quite different in feel. I am sure that Toulouse's buildings are not as old as they appear but Dijon has a lot of classical French stuff. It was also about 10C cooler.



There was still columbage (I am probably spelling that wrong), which is what I'd call Tudor



The main street had the flags of local duchies, etc, flying. Sorta odd given that I thought France got rid of all that a couple of hundred years ago. But the effect was great.




We had 24 hours in Dijon. It was very pleasant, though cooler than we had expected (but Toulouse was warmer than expected too). I think I preferred Toulouse, though I didn't have to deal with anything like getting us from A to B in the living sense, getting food, etc, etc. We just walked or rode or took PT to town. In Dijon we were on our own. It was still verra nice!

France - leaving Toulouse

(This post has pics this time around!)

After a very busy but happy few days in Toulouse, we headed off to Dijon. We had to get up before dawn (as did our host) and the train was well on its way by the time the sun got out of bed.



The train was very pleasant and we had the carriage almost to ourselves for the first hour or two of the journey. This is first class.



The train also went super fast between Montpellier and Lyon. Gosh that was fab! 300km/h. Just a bit faster than I've ever been except in a plane of course.

Finally, six hours later, we arrived in Dijon. Cheers!