Wandering Walnuts

GALIPOLI: Doing the Australian Pilgrimage

2008-06-11T15:53:00.000+08:00

Because our hotel was on top of the hill in Istanbul, and in a really difficult place to get to, we had instructions on our transfer voucher to go down to the St Sophia Church at some ridiculous hour in the morning. Of course, our hotel wasn't open for breakfast, so it was a cold, hungry start to the day.

Here I am, trying to wake up in front of the largest mosque of the city, just across from St Sophia.

To make matters worse, it transpired that the tour company weren't even aware of our booking, so after a few frantic phone calls, we finally arranged a pickup by the tourist coach.

After a couple of hours of criss-crossing the old part of Istanbul to pick all and sundry up from various hotels, we were finally on our way.

We stopped at a little Turkish road house along the way for a bite to eat and a toilet stop. The burgers were very basic, and the range of food available for extremely limited. Just as well Pringles are available in Turkey.

After more driving we stopped for lunch at a great little restaurant for lunch. We had a traditional meal, and a few pints of beer before jumping back on the tourist coach for our afternoon tour of Galipoli.

Galipoli is an amazing, awe inspiring, and sad place. The number of stuff ups by the army high command and sheer ignorance of the conditions on the ground resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of young men from both the Allies and Turkish armies.

Sadly Turkey were dragged into the war by Britain reneging on warship orders paid for by the Turks, and a double cross by the German navy who fired upon Russia from two warships under Turkish flags apparently given to the Turkish army by the Germans.

Such stories like reinforcements sipping tea on the beaches for a day long rest when minutes were of the utmost importance in a tightly scheduled allied push for the ultimate goal of securing the high ground, and pulling out of early pushes towards the goal in the first hours of the invasion meant the war dragged on for many horrible months.

Now days evidence of the war is still abundant with the trenches still in the hills, and many memorials for soldiers needlessly killed on both sides.

Some of the photos of Galipoli are below.

Some of the original cannons at the war museum (that was closed for renovations).

A relief map showing the Galipoli Peninsula that was so important to allowing shipping traffic from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Examples of the shells fired during the war.

Am example of the cliffs that greeted the allied forces as the landed at the wrong beach. The Australian forces managed to proceed a long way in land in the first couple of hours. Carrying full packs and provisions, they made it further in 2 hours than most people can walk unencumbered in 6 hours. Quite an effort.

This is the type of terrain and beaches where the Allied forces landed.

The first of too many cemetery's for the day. This is where many Australians are buried.

This is one of the pathways we were led along by the reckless guides. Needless to say, Jode's stayed well away from the sheer drop.

Glad to see that the signs are obeyed...

Here's Jode's at ANZAC Cove, where the annual ANZAC Day ceremony is held. ANZAC day is a pretty big deal for the Turks as well, and they are particularly respectful of the Australian's and New Zealanders who make the trip.

This place will be packed in 2015, on the hundredth anniversary. We're kind of glad we came at a time other than ANZAC day, because the maddening crowds would detract from the place somewhat, though the ceremony on the day would be very moving.

This is the famous speech by Attiturk in 1934 to the families of the soldiers killed in Turkey.

Here's Jodie on the beach where the Australians Landed.

And here I am too.

Here's the largest Australian cemetery at Galipoli, Lone Pine. The tree on the left is the Lone Pine, with the memorial behind it. Tens of thousands of people died in the small plot of land (about the size of a football field) seen in this shot. It's frightening how much death this place saw in those few days.

Here's the remains of some of the Australian trenches.

And one of the communications trenches, which occasionally flooded, drowning soldiers inside.

It's important to remember that Australians and New Zealanders weren't the only ones affected by the war. Tens of thousands of Turks were killed defending their homeland as well, and they were in much worse condition than the Allied troops, with scarce supplies and 3 bullets each per day. There was something like 10 Turks killed for every Australian killed in Galipoli. It was a truly bloody war.

Here's some more of the many remaining trenches.

This is the notorious Nek, featured in the movie Galipoli. This is where the notoriously disastrous charges took place, and where rumour has it, one of the Turkish soldiers came over to the Australian trenches begging them to stop being slaughtered.

This hill was the objective of the entire operation. From here you can see both the Dardenelles and the Aegean. The allies got to within about 1km of it, but never took this ground despite a year of bitter fighting. They made 95% of the progress in the first few hours of the battle. They barely made any more progress in the remainder of the war.

After our tour of Galipoli, we caught a ferry across the straights to stay in our hotel for the evening.

I caught up with an old friend for dinner, and we were up early the next morning for our trip out to Troy.

Leaving Izmir

2008-06-09T12:26:00.000+08:00

The last 2 days in Izmir were spent relaxing in our new hotel. We bought some DVD's from a shop along the way, and lazed around in bed.

Jason went on the occasional errand to find some kebabs and drinks, and we enjoyed our much earned rest.

We flew out to Istanbul this morning and were met by Chingis our cheery transfer driver. He took us through the choking Istanbul traffic to our hotel, where, despite having confirmed our booking three times with our agent, they did not have our reservation.

Chingis went above and beyond the call of duty and after about 2 hours of intense negotiating, they eventually gave us a small basic room. The Grand Oztinak hotel was very basic, though liveable.

We took the opportunity to book a couple of tours while we were in Instanbul, for our return from the Gallipoli tour. The first is a city tour, and the last is a traditional Turkish dinner. Lot's to fit into one day, but I'm sure it will be great fun.

We Miss Our Puppy!

2008-06-08T22:43:00.001+08:00

IZMIR: Ancients and Rugs

2008-06-07T23:57:00.000+08:00

We had an early start to our day of exploring some of the history of Izmir. Izmir was once called Smyrna and has had a very extensive history with many different groups controlling the area.

Our tour guide, for our private tour, met us at our hotel at 8:30 in the morning with a driver in a modern, air conditioned van. We drove out of the city for approximately an hour before we arrived at the top end of Ephesus.

This is the small theatre near the entrance of Ephesus.

Ephesus features architecture and influences from Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Byzantine empires. It was the 4th largest city of the ancient world and was rebuilt four times.

The first city was abandoned due to a malaria epidemic from the silted up river delta. The second was destroyed by an earthquake. This city is the third attempt and was founded around 1000 BC. Even though the entrance to the city is a little underwhelming, when you get over the crest of the hill you see the really impressive part.

This water pipe forms part of the extensive plumbing system of the city. These pipes are stone and are held together with tempera (from eggs). The water flowed through the whole city from several springs that filled large tanks on the hill to maintain water pressure.

Many of the apartments for the ancient well to do even had running hot water and central underfloor heating using water.

As we walked down the first main street we were surrounded by columns, carvings and lots of ruins. This exquisite carving caught our eyes, and even though it's not on the original columns, it did allow us to get up close to examine the detail of the carvings.

This relief sculpture is of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. The tour guides like to use this sculpture to claim credit for the Nike trademark used on modern sports equipment, and maybe there's something to it, or maybe it's just coincidence that they have a similar shape.

This photo shows the main street of Ephesus. Each of the columns is made of a different marble from the surrounding quarries. The street is paved with marble and is pretty impressive.

This ancient backgammon board shows that even in 1000BC gambling and gaming was popular. There are many of these boards around the ruins.

Here is one of the many examples of Greek writing carved into stone. There is writing absolutely everywhere.

Here is a photo of the 4 room bath house. There was a change room, a sauna, a massage room and a bath house. Apparently bathing was a social experience.

Here's Jodie with her brand new floppy hat. It's the last time I take her hat shopping, if she needs to go to Turkey to find the perfect hat!

Here I am doing my Popeye impersonation. Last time I buy a hat without checking it in the mirror first.

There are still a lot of the original mosaics still on the ground. This is in front of the wealthy apartments, near where Antony and Cleopatra once stayed.

This is one of the three most impressive structures standing at Ephesus. It's a small temple to Artemis, a fertility goddess.

This is the ancient library and features on the 20 Turkish Lira note.

Here's some ancient toilets. The toilets featured running water underneath and also along the gutter in front of the toilets that was used, in conjunction with a sea sponge, for keeping your tush clean.

Here we are, getting ready to visit the library...

This is a close up of a part of the library.

We couldn't find any books in the library so we left and walked down the second main street, past the local brothel and towards the bottom section of the town.

Here's a bit of graffiti pointing the way to the local brothel.

Here's some more ancient Greek writing.

Here I am hanging out at the large theatre waiting for the gladiatorial games to begin.

Here's the "Kodak" moment that all the tour guides take their groups to. It's about the only place you can actually photograph the theatre from.

This was the end of our Ephesus tour, with just the escape through the throngs of souvenir sellers and purveyors of "genuine fake watches". We nearly escaped, but Jode's got caught by a pashmina merchant and 60 YTL lighter I rescued her...

Next up was lunch at a great little traditional spot. They had these great little couches on the ground where we ate. We had filled pancakes, some lamb shish kebabs and Turkish tea.

Here's another view of the little restaurant, from my nice comfy corner, that I reluctantly left when it was time for the next attraction.

Next up was a porcelain factory were all of the porcelain is hand painted. Here's some of the artists painting new works. Just as well we didn't have much cash available on the visa card, because Jode's could quite easily have brought back a couple of sea containers of porcelain. I'm just glad we emerged with just a vase, and nothing from the masterpiece room...

Next up was the archeological museum that featured many of the original pieces from Ephesus. This is an ancient statue from Ephesus.

It seems that even the ancient's were pre-occupied with basic primal instincts. I'm not sure if this is a bloke who tried to do a self-portrait with a guys sense of proportion, or some form of early women's magazine. In any case, maybe there is something "unbalanced" about this sculpture...

Here are some ancient coins that have been excavated from Ephesus.

Here I am checking the time...

Some ancient carnival glass for Mum Martin...

Here's one of the impressive Artemis statues. This statue is about 2m tall, and literally larger than life.

Oh oh... Me thinks Jason is about to get a stern talking to from the Caesar...

Last stop was a rug factory. Dad Fewings would have loved this place and likely done some serious damage to his credit card.

This lady is weaving a 10 by 10 silk rug. All of the weavers are trained at this centre as part of a government program and return to the villages to earn a good living. The government is serious about retaining this traditional artform in Turkey as it was starting to die out, as villages moved to the cities.

This is where they produce the silk threads. A single thread is made from about 40 cocoons and 15 single threads are used to make the carpet weft. It's a pretty amazing process.

The silkworm larvae are killed before they hatch, as an emerging butterfly damages the cocoon, though they retain 60% of the larvae for the next generation of silkworms.

Here's a nice little 20x20 double knots per cm silk rug for Dad Fewings. It's not very big but it is extremely intricate and worth many thousands of dollars. We were told this rug took three and a half years to make!

On that note our tour started to wind up, and we returned to our hotel room for another sweaty night's sleep. It was the third and final night at our original hotel, and we packed up and moved across the road to the lovely air conditioning for the remainder of our stay, and plenty of relaxing and lazing about.

IZMIR: Exploring and Catching Up

2008-06-06T04:40:00.000+08:00

We've spent three days in Izmir now, though the first day was pretty much written off as we slept through most of it after our red-eye flight from Berlin.

We did however manage to rouse ourselves from our slumber for a quick bite to eat down at the Kordon, which is a great park looking out on the Aegean Ocean with a long row of restaurants and bars.

Here we are relaxing and waiting for our dinner.

We took a romantic walk down the Kordon back to our hotel and snapped a few night shots on the way.

After a long sweaty night in our Izmir Hotel, which also had no air conditioning (despite them proudly advertising that every room has Air Conditioning), we had a reasonably lazy day.

We took a walk down to the old Bazaar where Jodie bought a few lengths of material and we had a brief look around at some of the market stalls, but the constant hard sell and so many people wanting us to follow them to their store got old pretty quick, and after nearly getting lost in the maze of streets and stalls, we found our way out of the craze of the markets and snapped a couple of shots of one of the squares.

We also made contact with a couple of the people that I worked with in Izmir in 2005, and met up for dinner later that night at a fish restaurant on the Kordon. I'm not usually one for fish, but it was delicious. Jode's really enjoyed the prawns on offer.

From left to right, Ozgur, Jodie, Ozgur's wife, Bulent's Girlfriend and Bulent.

It was great catching up with Ozgur and Bulent and hearing all of the latest from Caldag. Bulent was kind enough to organize a private tour of Ephesus for us for the next day.

At the end of dinner we again took a lovely walk down the Kordon and couldn't resist a few more night shots. Unfortunately we again forgot the tripod, but we'll try to remember it next time for a few late night shots.

This is a great night shot of the Kordon.

BERLIN: Sweat and Cinemas

2008-06-04T20:01:00.000+08:00

We arrived in Berlin on a rather hot summers day, mid 30's, which our taxi driver told us happens a few weeks in the year in Berlin.

We checked into our hotel room at the Hotel California, which was supposed to be a four star hotel. We were quite unimpressed to say the least to discover that our tiny hotel room wasn't air conditioned and was extremely hot. When we rang reception to ask if they had another room that was air conditioned we were informed that none of the rooms were air-conditioned.

Frankly this surprised us. I mean this is supposed to be a four star hotel. One more star and this should be the equivalent of the best Intercontinental or Hyatt hotels, and no air conditioning. What's with the star rating system in Germany?

Even a 5 star hotel does not have to provide cooling in the room. On the other hand, a three star hotel must provide a shoe polishing machine on every floor and a shoe polishing kit in every room, and it's mandatory. That means that the highest rating possible if you don't supply a tissue in the wardrobe for wiping dust off your shoes is two stars, though even a five star hotel can let you melt and wither with stifling heat and horrendous humidity. Where's the priorities.

For my rating system it goes like this.

To get one star you must provide a bed (yes we had one hotel room without a bed). It should be mandatory. If it's a double room it must have a double bed, or larger.

To get 3 stars or higher, you must provide heating and cooling to the room.

To get 4 stars you must provide 24 hour room service. 3 stars you must provide a mini bar.

All rooms must be clean and hygienic.

3 stars must provide a TV with at least 1 channel in English.

4 stars must provide at least one English channel that isn't news (this should go for other common languages in the country as well)

3 stars must have Internet available in the hotel

4 stars must have Internet available in each room.

Suffice to say we were not impressed with the Hotel California in Berlin on a hot summers day. Fortunately we found a solution to sweating away our nights in our hotel room. After a long slow late lunch at a great little local cafe, we found an English speaking cinema into which we retreated in the afternoon and evening.

That night we arrived we got back to our hotel room at about 1am by which time the air outside was quite cool, and we could open up the windows to finally get a little sleep. Unfortunately other inmates of the hotel, didn't have the same inclination to sleep and preferred to share German documentaries complete with full volume bomb blasts and machine gun fire with the rest of the hotel complex.

We escaped the hotel room early the next morning and got on the hop-on hop-off bus for a tour around Berlin.

Here's a few of the sights that we enjoyed in this otherwise interesting city.

This church was bombed during WW2 and the government has preserved it in it's damaged state (made safe) as a reminder to the destruction of the war. This was just down the road from the Hotel Cali-sauna.

Here is what is left of the Berlin Wall. This part was no where near as impressive as the pictures we saw on the TV when the wall came down. It has been pretty extensively damaged by tourists insisting on lugging a little concrete nugget back home for their rock gardens. Berliners call such tourists wood-peckers for good reason. The remainder of the Berlin Wall is now protected.

Here is Checkpoint Charlie. The other side of the sign is a lot more interesting, talking about guns and weapons and stuff. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to snap the other side as we went past.

Some of the more beautiful historic buildings of Berlin. Some are original, some are rebuilt and some are renovated.

Here I am enjoying the breeze through my hair in my brief flight of freedom from the Hotel Cali-sauna.

This building is the German Parliament. The public can walk up through the front entrance and up the large dome in the centre. It looked like much too much hard work for a warm summers day, so we just enjoyed the view form outside.

This is the very impressive Berlin Haupt bahnhoff (central train station). It's an enormous train station that connects the many different train services of Berlin together. This is where we arrived in Berlin.

This was the US entry to an architecture competition. Apparently a section of the roof on the left fell on and killed a journalist a few years back, but it has since been fixed.

Here's one of the Royal Palaces in Berlin

and another...

After our trip around Berlin we went back to the cafe where we enjoyed a lovely lunch the day before, and had an even better lunch on our second day. A few beers and wines later, we retreated to the cinema to wile away another six hours before returning to the sauna to pack our bags and catch a cab to the airport.

For those travelling to Berlin, be warned that the Shoenfeld Airport is a 40+ Euro taxi trip from central Berlin. It's about 50km out of the city, a quarter of the distance to Dresden. Currently all of the budget airlines fly out of there, though apparently it's going to be the major airport for Berlin in the coming years.

While we were booked on a Turkish Airlines flight (not a budget airline), they had a codeshare with Sunexpress, so we ended up on this other airline. Jodie, not being a good flier at the best of times, was pretty distraught at having to travel with an airline that she'd never heard of before, especially when it shares a booth with Aeroflot and a couple of other Russian airlines.

If it hadn't been for the fact she'd passed through security and passport control, and that her suitcase was already on the plane she would still be in Berlin. To say she was not a happy puppy is a serious understatement. She has taken it upon herself to personally book all of our overseas flights in the future, to avoid any unnecessary surprises.

The flight itself was OK, with a simple meal provided, though Jode's remained on the edge of her seat the entire way and wasn't happy until we were in Izmir Airport.

For those travelling to Turkey, you need to buy a Visa upon arrival. We had to wake up the young lady at the counter to get ours at 6am and she must have still been bleary eyed, because she stuck them into our passports upside down. It didn't cause a problem with the passport control however, and we were admitted to Turkey.

The trip was nearly shortlived with me nearly being run down by a psycho taxi driver who wanted to push into the queue while our taxi driver and I were loading the suitcases into the boot of the taxi. Lot's of "manyacing" (maniac) and Turkish swearing by our taxi driver to the taxi-psycho and we were out of there...

Posting Comments

2008-06-04T19:05:00.000+08:00

Just a quick note to everyone, if you want to post a comment (and we'd love to hear from you), click the word "0 Comments". Clicking the little picture will send us an email (which is also cool, if that's what you want to do), but we've had quite a few emails that should have been comments. If we get a chance we'll post your comments back to the blog.

Thanks everyone for staying in touch. Our trip is winding down. We've made it to Izmir, and have a bit of catching up to do, but we're working on it.

Prague to Dresden: Pastel Central

2008-06-02T20:54:00.001+08:00

We had a nice long sleep in this morning before our driver picked us up in Prague from the Hotel. Things have gone a lot smoother with hotels and drivers for this second stage of the tour and by and large the hotels have been reasonably good.

Prague was a great city, and we probably didn't make the most of it that we could have, but it was good to get a few days rest as well. This is meant to be a holiday, after all.

Our train trip to Dresden was uneventful, but scenic. Dresden on the other hand was beautiful, and without a doubt, our favourite place in Europe. We wish we'd spent more time here than we did.

Because we were only there for the one night, we decided to upgrade our hotel room to their deluxe suite, and what an amazing hotel room it was. We had a wide range of accommodation standards in Europe, from the well wallpapered hotel room at Heidelberg to our little piece of Bourgeois decadence in Paris, but the Hotel in Dresden exceeded our expectations.

This final one is the view from our window.

After we'd finished exploring our hotel room we decided to take a quick walk into Dresden itself, by crossing the river. On our way we passed a few lovely sights.

The fountain outside of our window...

A view across the river to the old part of Dresden

This one is a very interesting photo. Next to the walking path they have a big red picture frame and it shows the view of the city of Dresden with a small information panel that shows a famous painting of Dresden made from that very spot.

Once we had crossed the bridge above, we had to decide what to go and see. We had a lot of choice...

The closest was a church, though we are nearly all churched out, we decided we'd visit just one more. We were very lucky because as we entered the bells started tolling to summon mass, so we quickly took a few photo's and left before we got incorporated into catholic mass.

It's hard to believe that Dresden was bombed and nearly totally destroyed in 1944 near the end of WW2. The city has been rebuilt since then to restore it's former glory, and they have done an amazing job.

After we left the church we wondered towards the old royal palace and found some ancient ruins that were in the middle of an archaeological dig. It looks as though the ruins were covered up and built upon. It reminds us of just how much history Europe has, that the historic buildings are built on top of some truly ancient signs of civilization.

We walked past a gallery and thought we'd pop in for a look. Out of chance we asked if they had any pastel paintings, and it's a good thing we did. While the gallery we stopped at didn't, the young lady at the desk was kind enough to direct us to another gallery just around the corner that had "one or two". Off we went.

As we turned the corner we walked past the opera house, and couldn't resist a quick photo of this impressive building.

We finally found the gallery, and this is a photo from near the entrance.

Here I am psycing myself up for the pastel search...

As it turned out, the one or two pastels they referred to must have meant one or two rooms, because as we discovered when we got a map, there were a serious volume of pastel work in this gallery.

Jodie proceeded to fill our 4GB memory card (after she bought a photo licence) and started on the second card. I'm not going to upload them all here, but here's a few of the highlights.

Jodie loved the lace work on this one.

This is the famous "Chocolate Girl" and we both agree that this is the most amazing piece of pastel art we have seen. We disagree on the order of second and third (Jodie like Madame Pompodour from the Lourve and Jason likes the old man pictured below).

Jason's second place award, Jodie gives it 3rd.

This one is pretty amazing too...

After spending an hour or so in this gallery, snapping too many photo's to mention, Jodie bought a few more art books. She was particularly happy with this collection because two of the most amazing artists were both women.

We meandered back to the hotel, via the ice cream wagon (because we thought we'd earned one.

Jodie also thought she'd earned a bubble bath...

Jason has hereby banned Jodie from Bvlgari bubble bath lest she gets completely eaten by the bubble monster...

PRAGUE - Royal Palace

2008-06-01T05:50:00.000+08:00

Our last full day in Prague was spent up in the old Royal Palace on top of the hill. This palace is the main landmark of the old part of the city and we just had to get up there to see if for ourselves.

We used our second public transport pass from our Prague Passports (the public transport tickets are the best part of these, and are probably cheaper to buy when you get there - though the passport does have a very good map of the city and the public transport routes in it, which we used extensively.) As we discovered the passport does not get discounts into most of the museums around Prague. There is another Prague Card that does, but we didn't bother trying to find it.

Anyway after a couple of short tram rides we arrived outside the top entrance to the castle. As we were feeling a bit peckish , we decided to have lunch at a magnificent cafe near the entrance to the castle. It was pretty expensive, but the food was delicious.

Having filled our belly's we sauntered off towards the castle, only to be distracted by some falcons and other birds of prey.

Here's a few of the big birds. Check out the eye brows on the last one...

Unfortunately the birds didn't do much except stand on the perches, looking quite grumpy at being tied up, which was a pity, because it would have been amazing to see the birds in flight. After lingering at this garden for a few more minutes it was time to take on the castle.

After discovering that our Prague Card did not offer any discounts to the castle entry, we bought the full pass plus a photo ticket (that lets you take photo's inside the buildings, we entered the courtyard to be greeted by the impressive St Vitus Cathedral.

This is a mighty gothic cathedral that looks simply amazing no matter where you view it from.

The main feature window looks impressive from outside, but even more so from inside. Unfortunately it is very difficult to photograph from inside, because it lets so much light through that all the colours get washed out, but it really does look spectacular.

Jodie snapped this amazing postcard shot from inside the cathedral looking down the length of the cathedral from the entrance. Unlike the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, this cathedral is very light and bright thanks to the clear windows at the top. It lets a lot of light in, and makes this the most impressive church we saw in Europe.

While we couldn't snap the main window, we did get some amazing photos of a lot of the other stained glass windows. One of the amazing things about the stained glass here is that there are so many different styles of stained glass that have been used.

Here I am in front of the main window. As you can see the light has washed out the colours of the glass in the photograph, but it is stunning.

Here's one of the pipe organs in the church.

And just one of the many statues that adorn the walls. This is one depicting Lucifer being struck down (by Gabriel, I think).

Some more of the amazing windows. This picture doesn't really give you an idea of size, but these windows must be nearly 20m high.

There are many crypts and sarcophagus' in the church. Unfortunately this one was damaged (the knights head chopped off) during one of the times the church was ransacked over the years.

This is the silver coffin of one of the saints buried here. I can't remember off hand who it was, but this coffin, the statues and the setting of this coffin is breathtaking.

Here's a little altar off to the side of the main altar, and the crypt to the right is where King Wencleses is buried (the one from the Christmas Carol). This crypt has remained in the same place even though the church has been modified and added to over the years. This crypt has stayed in it's original position and everything built around it. The Czec's hold Wencleses is very high regard.

Right across from this altar is the entrance to a tower that you can climb. It's about 300 steps up a huge spiral staircase. Jodie was very brave and made it about half way up before her fear of heights got the better of her, and she returned to the bottom. One of the things that made climbing difficult is that people were coming down the stairs at the same time, and the staircase is quite narrow.

I soldiered on and was rewarded of some amazing views of the city from the top.

In this final picture you can see the mini Eiffel tower that I climbed a few days earlier (just to the right of centre).

After the long climb back down the stairs there were a few more stained glass windows before we got out of the cathedral.

This photo shows the light from the main window colouring the marble floor of the cathedral.

And the light had changed by the time we emerged, so we snapped a few other photos from outside.

Of course, St Vitus Cathedral is only a small part of the castle complex. Our next stop was the largest gothic vaulted space in Europe, part of the first royal palace.

Jodie takes some time out on the balcony to enjoy the view.

Some of the amazing ceilings in another part of the complex, with coats of arms of many of the families that joined together to oppose the expansion of the Hapsbergs.

This is an amazing example of gothic ceilings in the exit from the royal palace.

Jason is recovering from all the walking and stairs and desperately in need of an ice-cream.

We entered an amazing museum after the royal palace, that we weren't allowed to photograph in, but it showed a lot of the history of Prague Castle, including some tombs and burial sites, as well as a large display of burial gowns for people of all different walks of life, from villains (who were bound and weighed down by rocks, so that they couldn't return from the dead) to royalty and religious hierarchy. It was an amazing museum and well worth a visit.

Next up was St Georges Basilica. This is a much smaller (and older) church near St Vitus Cathedral.

This is pretty morbid - some old bones on display to the world, in one of the crypts in St Georges Bascillica.

The ticket we had allowed us to enter the art galleries in the castle. We spent 15 minutes seeing the entire display here, and the most interesting thing was this sculpture in the garden. I think we're all masterpieced out after the numerous galleries we've visited here in Europe.

Next up is a really old little street called the Golden Street (or something like that). The most memorable part about this is that I finally got my ice-cream (oh and the houses and shops are pretty funky as well).

Emerging from this street we stumbled upon this sculpture (actually you can't really miss it, it's at the bottom of the stairs.

We also found the entrance to another dungeon, but unfortunately we missed the opening time and couldn't see it. After about 6 hours on our feet we were pretty tired and caught out tram back to the hotel. We chatted to an ex-pat American who now makes his home in Prague and he warned us to be wary of pick-pockets on the number 32 and 33 tram (the main tourist routes), so we were extra careful of our wallets and purses on our way back to the hotel, and the comfort of our bed.

A Huge Happy Birthday to Mum for the 31st!

2008-05-31T05:12:00.000+08:00

Hope you have a wonderful day and please remember to

take some time out for yourself :)

Love you Big Mobs!

Jodie & Jase

XOXOXOX

PRAGUE - KFC and Churches...

2008-05-31T04:41:00.001+08:00

Today we had a lazy day to recover from our day of castles, stairs and mountain climbing. I tried to be as lazy as possible, with brief interruptions from my husband, which usually coincided with mealtimes, I have since noticed...

We had a late breakfast, a snoozle, and then ventured out into the big bold world for some lunch. And guess what we found in Prague, one of the world's centres of history and architecture?! Kentucky Fried Chicken! After weeks of food requiring translation, I thought this was fantastic and definitely what the doctor ordered!

After our KFC meal, we walked across the road to check out this gorgeous gothic cathedral (the name of which escapes us right now):

I even felt perky enough to strike a pose!

It was very beautiful to look at...

And we were sure there would be more impressive windows and stained glass inside...

... but once we were inside, we discovered there was actually a church service going on!! Not to mention, signs stating that no photography was allowed (as is so often the case in this section of Europe, we have found...)

Of course, we ignored this rule and this last photo was taken through a window while the choir sang their hearts out in protest... I was actually surprised that no Camera Nazi came running out asking for 50 Czech Crowns to cover the photo surcharge...

After our brief sojourn we returned to our hotel - which, thankfully, was downhill with no steps...

PRAGUE - Castles & What Ya Gotta Go Through To See 'Em...

2008-05-30T04:42:00.000+08:00

The day began with a very rude awakening by my husband at 6:30am... We had a tour pickup at our hotel scheduled for 8am, and we had to be showered and breakfasted before then. Why our tour company insisted on picking us up at 8am we'll never know, because we stood around for over an hour after the quick 10 minute journey to the depot...

It was there that we saw the first sign that perhaps we should have picked a different tour company... The driver was so bad, he had busted his rear tyre with a fist-sized hole on the side wall simply with his reverse parallel parking... As we stood there and observed his second run, still with the busted tyre, we witnessed him bending the rim when he again misjudged his reversing with the next load of passengers...

We were finally herded onto our bus, where we spent the next hour weaving perilously in and out of traffic on our way to the first of our two castles.

Jason relaxed and read his book... While Jodie gripped the handles in front of her seat in fear!!

We arrived at Castle Konopiste, where we were dropped off near a skungy pond at the base of a hill, and then directed to walk up to the castle. Bearing in mind that there was a road that went right to the entrance, this was a bit annoying for us - but it was also quite painful for two of the couples in our group, with one lady who had hip problems and a man with a plate in his leg who moved with quite a level of difficulty...

As we rounded the bend, the castle was revealed to us!

Once inside, we stood around in the courtyard for roughly 45 minutes waiting for another tour guide to unlock the doors and give us access to the interior of the castle. Finally, he arrived - and we stood around for another few minutes while our guide and this new guide argued over tickets and language guides for the two Italians in our group...

After they provided a couple of bits of paper to the Italians, we proceeded on the (was it really?)English Tour... We weren't told this, but our tour was only a partial one. We were first taken through the hunting trophy hall, which - for those of you who are animal lovers - is filled with mounted animal heads, feathers, teeth, skins etc. of just some of the 300,000 creatures that former resident Franz Ferdinand killed during his time at the Castle... We think it is safe to say, there is most likely nothing left living in the forests surrounding the castle! Franz Ferdinand was later assassinated, perhaps the RSPCA got wind of his rather morbid collection...

Onwards through the Castle, and we were taken through room after room of mouldy wallpaper, large chandeliers and old furniture. Our guide was very good at brands - that of the furniture and porcelain - but there wasn't much else we could decipher from his heavily accented commentary. What we did discover, however, was that we were not going to see any of the upstairs or left wing of the Castle - which is where all of the interesting stuff was! All of the original gothic architecture, weaponry, armoury, shooting range, and basically anything that wasn't heavily influenced by the Baroque period... He suggested that we might like to come back and pay for another tour... Jodie thought of a few choice suggestions for him, but was too polite to say...

We were not allowed to take any photographs at all. When we reached a balcony, the guide was kind enough to advise us that here, we could use our cameras to take a picture of the surrounding landscape! It was very pretty, and perhaps on this side of the castle at least, the best views really were free...

After our rapid walkthrough, we stood around in the courtyard again for another 30 minutes before we returned down the hill to our bus. It was at this stage where it has to be pointed out, that there would have been plenty of time to do the complete tour of the Castle had it been properly organised. We would have preferred this to all of the standing around we had to do!! Our bus tour guide gave very vague instructions and directions, he seemed to spend more time talking to himself (and yes, I mean literally talking to himself!) than advising us where we should actually meet and when to continue the tour!

Next up on our trip, or so we thought, was lunch followed by the second Castle tour... Sadly, this was not to be for at least another couple of hours! After a mad rush along the motorway at 40km above the posted speed limits, we (surprise, surprise) broke down... and spent the next hour standing around outside our bus with no explanation about what the f#$% was going on... No food, no drinks, no toilets, no apologies...! Eventually, another bus arrived - driven by the bloke who busted the tyre during our transfer that morning - and we were ushered on board and continued our journey for another 30 minutes.

Jodie was about to throttle said driver by the time we arrived. He drove like an absolute idiot on the narrow winding roads, and twice we narrowly avoided collisions with oncoming traffic and once with a truck... It was reminiscent of driving in China!

As a third wave of nausea threatened Jodie, we finally arrived at our destination. Here, we had a very late lunch that admittedly was delicious - the beer was good, though we had to pay for beverages ourselves, and the toilets thankfully were free! We finished our meals, sat around for another half hour while the driver (!) and tour guide filled up on beers, and then walked up the road instead of getting on the bus...

15 minutes later, we saw the castle!

Those less able-bodied members of our group became concerned when they saw the ladder going up the wall... Have to admit, at this point nothing would have surprised us!!

As it turned out, the ladder probably would have been easier than the steep incline up the mountain that we endured for 30 minutes. We emerged panting and sweating, some of us with nettle barbs in our arms from the plants along the path... The man with the plate in his leg and the lady with the dodgy hip were both in a lot of pain, but that was nothing compared to the looks on their faces when we realised that the road came all the way up to the gate!

It is at this stage, that we would like to point out those members of our group had asked the tour company - Premiant City Tours - if there was much walking, and they were advised that no, there wasn't.... This had been after their city tour the day before - where they were dropped off at the top of the largest hill in Prague, guided for 3 and a half hours on foot back to the city centre, and then left to find their own way back to their hotels... Same tour company!! We strongly advise against using Premiant City Tours - unless, of course, you really enjoy confusion, dodgy little tour buses with even dodgier drivers, long (mainly uphill) walks, and even longer waits in between any of these occurrences!

Anyways...

Once we arrived at the Karlstejn Castle, we (surprise, surprise) stood around for another 45 minutes without being told by our guide what was happening. We entertained ourselves, by taking photos and speculating as to when we would actually go into the castle...

The main door to the castle was fairly impressive!

It appears to have withstood a few decent knocks from axes, arrows and battering rams...

Jason standing in front of one of the towers - he had a lot of practice at this throughout the day, as you can see he is getting quite good at standing around!

The view down the mountain was quite lovely...

Eventually, we were collected - along with every other poor bastard in the courtyard - and marched up some steep steps to the first tower.

This is the building where our guided tour of the castle began - you can see the stairs we went up in the bottom right hand corner!

We had a short little blonde tour guide, with a very big voice - which was a good thing, because there were several Italian men in the large group (not from ours, thankfully) who would not shut up! This was probably because no translators were allowed, the tour was only in English, and she had a very bad accent that was difficult for English-speaking people to comprehend...

Anyone naughty enough to take a photo was promptly reprimanded by the little Castle Nazi, and each time we left a room the door was locked behind us with a large skeleton key... So if you're claustrophobic or like to have a handy escape route for whatever reason, perhaps this particular castle is not for you...

The history of the castle itself was fascinating, and the rooms we were able to view were interesting - although we didn't get to see the most interesting and well preserved sections of the castle... Apparently, this was due to the "weather" (which was warm and clear!) - but in any case, it was very interesting and worthwhile even just to look at (which is just as well, because in such large groups with confused Italians and screaming children, you don't get to hear much...)

Upon exiting the castle, Jason was rapt to discover he could cross over his own little drawbridge!

We took one last photo of the castle, before heading back down our steep mountain path to where the tour bus was parked - cracking jokes along the way that perhaps our bus might not be there when we arrive... Upon our arrival - lo! and behold! There was a Premiant City Tours bus parked in the lot, and half our our group climbed on board... Only to find out that it was not our bus, so we kept walking - some members of our group asked our guide where our bus was, but he just grunted and started talking to himself in Czech again... We are convinced he either had some form of mental disorder, or did not speak any English aside from the formal tour dialogue when on the bus, and this muttering was him rehearsing...

Eventually, we came to our bus - complete with the crazy bus driver from before, probably loaded up with a few more beers to "improve" his driving... And before we knew it we were barreling along the road again back to Prague.

Once we arrived in Prague, we were unceremoniously dumped at the tour depot, and not returned to our hotels (from where we had been collected!) with just a brusque goodbye. Still without an apology for any of the myriad stuff ups - and 10 hours after the ordeal began - we found ourselves walking the half hour trip back to our hotel, thinking over the collective worthwhile 2 hours of our day where we actually saw some of the castles... We were both exhausted by the time we arrived back at the Hotel Ametyst (which, by the way, is proving to be a fantastic hotel and one of the best features of Prague!)

Lesson Of The Day: to all visitors to Prague, our advice would be - do not book a tour with Premiant City Tours!

PRAGUE: Posting Parcels - How Hard Can It Be?

2008-05-29T00:00:00.001+08:00

Today we had a day off. Long sleep in, lazy breakfast and then lazing around for a bit, updating the blog, surfing the web and phoning the folks.

We took a lazy wander down the street to do some laundry, but we got there when they were having lunch, so we did the same, and grabbed a yummy pizza and vanilla shake (with real vanilla bean)!

Spent an hour doing our laundry and it was a damn site cheaper than doing it through the hotel.

My last (and I thought easiest) task for the day was to post some stuff back home. Easier said than done.

I left the hotel at 3:30 pm for the post office, fully loaded with books and nick-nacks that we don't need to haul around Europe. Mostly Jodie's growing collection of big and heavy art books.

Five minutes later I'm at the post office and quickly discover that post offices in Prague aren't quite the same as Australia Post Shops. I needed 2 boxes big enough for the books, and a wine carton to send a bottle of wine back to Australia. Unfortunately the lady didn't speak English. I got 1 box big enough for the small books, which needed about 4 doors to be unlocked so that it could be passed to me (it wouldn't fit through the window).

I filled it up and went back to ask for a bigger box. She gave me the same one, so I took it back again and finally got a bigger one. Not quite big enough, but I managed to fit everything in snuggly. I didn't even want to try for a wine pack, so I decided I'll haul our bottle of wine around the rest of Europe.

Next up, I had to address everything. Unfortunately it's all in Czeck and none of the staff could speak English. A lady who could speak some reasonable language helped me fill in the required forms. I took it to the window to pay for postage, and discovered that they wouldn't accept Maestro, Visa, Mastercard or Euro's, only Czeck Crowns, and I didn't have the 1400 Crowns required to send the boxes back to Australia.

OK - walk back to the hotel to change some money. The concierge helped me finalize the forms, and tape the boxes and changed my money.

Finally after a second walk to the post office hauling 11kg of art books I managed to get them sent off. I got back to the hotel room about 5:50.

What a nightmare...

PRAGUE - Towers and Trams (and more bloody steps)

2008-05-28T05:26:00.000+08:00

We spent nearly all of yesterday on a train from Budapest to Prague (about 7 hours by train), and we got in at 8pm, just in time for a yummy dinner at the hotel.

We slept well and awoke quite refreshed this morning, all ready to take on Prague.

After a late breakfast we embarked on our quest to get our Prague Card and Prague Passport. A good 30 minute walk and we finally found the little currency exchange booth inside a travel agent where we could get our Prague Card.

We then found a little cafe nearby where we could find out what we could do with the passport. It's actually pretty damn complex to understand, with different information presented on each of the different booklets, and some of the numbers don't match up on the map. Furthermore, many of the best attractions aren't even in Prague. There are a couple of 24 hour public transport tickets though, and the tram system in Prague is pretty extensive.

We picked the mirror maze as our first destination for the day and jumped on a tram to get us there. There is a funicular railway to the top of the hill, which is covered by the public transport voucher. Unfortunately it appeared as though every school in Prague had chosen today to also go up the funicular railway, and we had to withstand hundreds of noisy school children.

Anyway, we finally made it to the top, and waited to see where the school children went, and avoided that direction.

It's very pretty at the top of the hill and we took quite a few photo's as we wondered around.

At the top of the hill - sans school children

Jason relieved to have escaped...

Jodie thinks she's spotted an escaped child!

People in Prague are always saying how they are just like Paris (or Vienna). They've even got an Eiffel Tower look alike (which Jason later climbed).

We found this cute little building up the top of the hill

And this one as well.

Here we are, lost in the mirror maze. This is no-where near as impressive as the mirror maze in Lucerne, but fun nonetheless.

Here's a painting inside the mirror maze of a battle in Prague. The floor is covered in coins. What is it about wells, grates and small areas that compel people to throw money?! I'm seriously going to put a wishing well in my front yard and invite American Tourists...

Here's Jason pretending to be an Oompa Loompa!

We think all the walking and stairs is starting to have an effect on our waistlines...

Here's Jason being silly in front of more mirrors.

After we escaped the mirror maze (glad we didn't pay full price for it), we took a lovely walk down the hill, in search of the art gallery we had seen signs for. We got some wonderful views of the city.

Here's a photo of the Funicular Railway, as we walked across a bridge.

Jason enjoying the walk

Jodie enjoying the shade on this warm, sunny day.

And yay... - no schoolies....

We finally found the Magic Cave Gallery. It was the highlight of our trip up the hill. It's amazing inside, spreads over 3 levels and is a good place to have a drink and a relax on one of the old tatty couches. Jodes got some ideas for the design of her studio...

Jason really liked this picture.

After looking through the Magic Cave, we got back on to the middle stop of the Funicular and went back up to the top where Jason braved the mini Eiffel Tower (and all those steps). The view from the top is amazing (if you can see out from between all the tourists, and don't mind the swaying of the tower).

Needless to say... Jodie wasn't interested in this view.

We finally made our way back down the mountain and found a little antique bookshop where Jodie bought a few really old art books on Durer, Rembrandt and Degas! We were originally going to track down the astronomical clock, but we were pretty tired by now, and caught the tram back to the hotel room.

Unfortunately the map doesn't show elevation, and the stop we picked out required a walk up nearly 200 steps to get back to our hotel room. We were certainly tired after that. We learnt a valuable lesson from that - get off at another stop at the top of the hill.

Tomorrow is a rest day, when we'll post some stuff back home and wash our clothes at a nearby laundromat.

BUDAPEST - Exploring The City By Day!

2008-05-26T23:15:00.000+08:00

By day, Budapest isn't quite as spectacular as it was with all of the play or light and shadow of night... Tourism promoters in Budapest liken the city to Paris. I can see the similarities in architecture and the river flowing through, except that Paris isn't crumbling and is quite a bit cleaner! Personally, Budapest didn't make a huge impression on me, and the combination of a poorer populace and the disintegration of the grand buildings made me feel a combination of guilt and unease when wandering the streets...

Our hotel wasn't situated in the best position for the tours that we had planned. We actually had to catch a taxi to another hotel, the Intercontinental, to get to our "hop-on, hop-off" tour departure point. I would suggest that the Intercontinental is perhaps one of the more ideally located hotels in Budapest - both for proximity to the Eurama tour office and departure points, and for the beauty of the riverside surroundings... There, you have the choice of the bus loops or taking a river tour!

As it was, we finally caught our bus and sat on it for the full 2-hour loop to get a sense of the city and what we wanted most to see. There were lots of beautiful statues and carvings on the buildings...

The statues and carvings are holding up remarkably well, considering... For the most part, the buildings of Budapest are disintegrating at a remarkable pace when you consider that the entire city has twice been rebuilt. Once from scratch, in the 1700's (we forget the precise years) - and also following WWII, it was rebuilt with the assistance of the Russian occupiers...

During the ride, there was live commentary on the history of the city. Interestingly, we learned that Budapest is actually comprised of two cities - Buda and Pest, with Buda situated on the hilly side of the Danube and Pest on the "flat" side of the river.

We returned to the Citadel for another view of the city by daylight...

By the time we had completed our tour bus circuit, it was actually quite late in the day again (partially our fault, we had a sleep-in that morning - and then had to go to all that trouble to actually locate the bus...) Anyways, we only had time to visit one of the museums or galleries of Budapest. We chose the "Museum of Terror", mainly because of the intriguing name. Jase had visions of medieval torture devices in his head, and I had terrorism in mine...

It turned out that we were both wrong. The "Museum of Terror" is actually a museum dedicated to the terrible history of Budapest, touching on the Nazi's and focusing on the Soviet occupation. Have to say, this museum is very well put together, it's very modern and completely engrossing! I never realised how the Soviet occupation was practically an extension of Nazi oppression, it had the same effects over the populace. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, tortured, and died, both in Budapest - in the very building the "Museum of Terror" is now situated - and in Russian "gulags", which were scarily similar to the Nazi concentration camps! Frighteningly, the last Russian occupiers left Budapest only in the early 1990's - which is amazing when you think about it!!

We weren't allowed to take photos, but if you are in Budapest and get the chance, definitely include the "Museum of Terror" into your schedule!

On the way back to our hotel, I took some photos of reflections of old buildings in some of the new, modern building's reflective windows. It was interesting to see the juxtaposition of the old and the new...

Tomorrow, we leave for Prague!

BUDAPEST - By Night

2008-05-25T14:16:00.000+08:00

We arrived in Budapest reasonably late in the afternoon, checked into our hotel and had a bit of a snooze before being collected at 6:30pm for our evening "Folk" tour. Basically, what this tour consisted of was a bus drive to the winery region on the outskirts of Budapest (with ongoing commentary from our guide during) and then a traditional dinner.

The restaurant was very nicely decorated, and located in what must have originally been a wine cellar. They even had huge wine barrels that had been converted into private dining booths!

Unfortunately, we didn't dine in one of these. We were on one of the longer tables at the end of the cellar, in front of the stage where Gypsy musicians played live folk music for the entire duration of our meal. Occasionally, Gypsy folk dancers came through the aisle between the tables to the stage and performed traditional dance - one two occasions, they actually enticed members of the audience to join them onstage and take up challenges (fortunately they didn't ask us, as we were down the farthest end from the stage!)

We were at this restaurant for roughly two and a half hours, the service between courses for our 3-course meal was very slow but to their credit the restaurant did have 5 other tables our size and they would have been flat out. It was very noisy, very busy, and out of a group of 10 there were 8 ladies from Denmark (coincidence, they weren't all together) and ourselves. So basically there was a whole lot of Danish and not very much English spoken at our table... One other thing to point out is that they smoke everywhere in Europe. Including in crowded cellars filled with diners. We reeked of cigarette smoke by the end of the night, and my almost-recovered lungs took a battering...

The meal itself consisted of a nice soup, goulash, and we were supposed to have apple strudel for dessert but due to a mixup we had a mixture of this chocolate dish and apple strudel at our table. I was fortunate enough to score the chocolate dish, and Jase the apple strudel so we effectively shared both :)

After dinner, we bought a bottle of red wine with a souvenir photo of the two of us having dinner on the label, and then went on a short tour of Budapest by night.

We went right up a hill to the Citadel and looked out over the city lights, which was beautiful...

... after many attempts sans tripod I managed to snap this stunning shot of the Royal Palace by night, before we hopped back on the bus and were returned to our hotel :)

VIENNA - The Last Day

2008-05-25T11:18:00.000+08:00

On our last day in Vienna we visited the Belvedere Palace.

The main Palace building now serves as an art gallery, but in days now past it was the residence of "someone important" (we can't remember right at this moment).

The Palace itself is set at the top of a gently sloped rise, and it overlooks a few carefully manicured hedges and very symmetrical walkways down to another palatial building at the bottom end. At the time we visited, much of this long sparsely vegetated "garden" was covered in fences and barriers preventing you from actually walking throughout. The overall effect was not enticing enough to interest us in trekking downhill to the other building - in fact it was quite bare and ugly - so we started with the main Palace and gallery...

Inside the main Palace were some beautiful white sculptures designed to "support" the many arches. The effect was quite soft and refreshingly free of gold!

Even the ornate staircase - if you overlook the elaborate mouldings - was quite refreshingly simple and light!

However, the good times were not to last - the main hall of the Belvedere is a monument to the Baroque period...

You can see how large this hall was - Jason is positively dwarfed by the height of the ceiling!

He seemed to find my horror at the discovery of gold and marble quite amusing...

The Belvedere Palace was very worthwhile going to visit. The building itself was beautiful (even with the over-the-top main hall...) and the art in the gallery was wonderful! There was quite a bit of work that appeared to have been created in local kindergartens, but the art from the romantic period was wonderful as was the focus on portraiture. The Belvedere also contains "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt, as well as some other well known works of his. Klimt is something of a national icon in Vienna, being one of their most famous exports. I'm not a fan, but I can say that seeing some of his most well-known pieces in person was a big improvement from seeing them in text books - they are much more beautiful and lively up close!

During the course of meandering through this multi-level gallery, Jase lost our tickets... which meant we almost were kicked out when attempting to get to the Cafe from the gallery shop, and also meant we were unable to access the second building at the base of the gardens. We weren't really that keen to be honest, from the pictures it appeared to be a former residence with an overwhelming amount of gold and Baroque stylings... So we gave it a miss and instead returned to the main Gallery and Museum square close to our hotel.

We visited the Kunst-"something" Museum (shown in the photo above - see Jason's earlier post for the correct name). Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photographs of the exhibits, but were permitted to take some photos of the interior of the building...

There are some gorgeous statues, as well as marble pillars, frescoes and arches...

The main staircase really was quite something! Although there are many levels, and we wound up using the lifts... I tell you what, I wish I had bought a pedometer to record the number of stairs we have climbed during our time in Europe!!

Inside this museum was a large collection of art - I found a couple of Duhrer paintings but unfortunately none of his drawings - and I wish we had more time to go through more carefully. As it was, we did a rush through and stopped by the gallery store on our way out - I bought some fantastic books featuring colour photographs of the gallery collections, which was great! There was also a special exhibition on, found on the top floor tucked away in a corner - quite hidden away, to be honest! - and the artwork in that was quite worth checking out. I forget the artist's name...

Following this gallery visit (which had been purely a spur of the moment thing) we went back to the Natural History Museum for a second visit, where I took some photos for my painting reference image collection.

Check out the plumage on this bird!!

This is actually a real bird, no missing this one in a crowd...

We also saw lots of creatures from the animal kingdom again including some very big frogs... Eww!

And we found a very famous Venus statue, that I'm sure most of you would recognise! It is actually only about 10cm high, quite small... Apparently it's the oldest Venus statue in Europe, possibly the world!

On our way back to the hotel, we paid homage to Mozart while trying to dodge the Grass Nazi's (they don't like you to walk or sit on grass anywhere in Vienna, we have noticed...)

And Jase developed an obsession with this sign. He thought it must have meant no robot dogs allowed, and thought the word "Hundeverbot" was pretty cool. He thought it must have been put up by the Grass Nazi's.

VIENNA: Exhausting Wind up to Vienna

2008-05-24T05:49:00.001+08:00

It was another huge day today, after a relatively laid back yesterday. It started off pretty early with a hearty breakfast before we braved Vienna's trams to make our way out to the Belvedere Palace. To get there, get on Tram D, right across from the entrance to the Opera house. Get on the tram that heads to the right, looking at the Opera House. You'll need to catch it from the island in the middle of the road.

After a false start where we got on the right tram going the wrong way, and a tram that prematurely terminated, we arrived and cashed in our voucher for tickets to the Belvedere.

We toured the art gallery (which they call a museum) and finally found some real art in Vienna. Unfortunately we lost our ticket somewhere on our tour around, but we didn't really feel like the idea of the big walk down to the lower Belvedere, and there wasn't really anything we were particularly interested in seeing anyway. The gardens were in a state of construction and not particularly conducive to a pleasant stroll.

We decided to head back to the Natural History Museum and the Kunsthistor Museum. The latter (which we actually visited first) had a pretty good art collection, and a couple of temporary exhibitions that we really enjoyed. The last one was hidden away on the top floor, so don't forget to check up there if you go. It was probably the highlight of the gallery for us, even though it was small.

We went back to the Natural History Museum with a fully charged camera and got heaps of photos. Neither of the art museums that we visited today allowed photo's (or back packs, or jackets, and charge you to book them into a cloak room, and charge for a map).

After finally exhausting ourselves, we grabbed a quick Burger King meal as a lunch/dinner before heading back to the hotel for a quick shower before we headed off to the Mozart Concert.

The musicians were brilliant tonight, but we felt they deserved a bit more from the audience they had to endure. Hundreds of flash photos (despite signs asking for none), and a generally denim clad disrespectful audience, who like to chat and, where we were sitting, to get up off their seats and cram in around the people who had spent good money for the good seats at the front.

Anyway, apart from these few let downs, the musicians were brilliant. Not quite the romantic evening evening of classy decadence we were expecting, but we were treated to some amazing music played by some astoundingly good musicians.

We have an early start tomorrow and so need to pack things tonight, so we haven't had a chance to upload photo's. We'll try to get something sorted in the next few days. We're off to Budapest tomorrow, and have a tour tomorrow evening, so it might be a few days before you get to catch up with us.

VIENNA - Danube Valley Tour

2008-05-23T05:26:00.001+08:00

Today, we had to get up early. It's my personal belief that a person should never have to do this while on holiday, however my husband and travel agent had other ideas :-P

I had no idea where we were going, and what we were going to see - and nor did my husband... All we knew, thanks to his faulty memory and our tour exchange voucher, was that it was going to be a long day... 8 hours long...

We were met at our hotel in the morning, by a tall Austrian man with a hat. Our transfer service consisted of this tall man, with his odd hat, and our own two feet... Not that we minded, it wasn't far to walk, but we must have looked odd - something akin to the Pied Piper minus flute - as our group grew the closer we came to the bus stop... We suggested perhaps a flute was in order to the tall bloke, but he said he didn't need a flute - as he was a tall bloke with a hat!

Anyways, we piled on to the bus and were driven to another location, where we got off the bus, were sorted into tour and language groups... And piled onto another bus! Where we spent the next hour, looking at the vibrant scenery of the autobahn - which, for those of you who haven't been on it, is mainly a huge wall and/or mound of dirt. We're not sure if it's designed to keep us in, or keep something else out - but I did see a sign warning of deer so perhaps roadkill is considered undesirable in Austria...

An hour later, and we were at a small winery town where we caught our boat for our cruise up the Danube...

We spent our time on the boat quaffing wine and eating...

This is the Austrian version of a hotdog... They give you the ingredients, and you put it together yourself - a roll, some shaved cheese, a sausage and some exceedingly hot mustard that I wouldn't recommend even to my worst enemy...

On the way, we saw lots of castles...

This castle, according to the voice on the loudspeaker, was built by some robber barons who were partial to throwing their prisoners off the cliff to their death... It also serves as Evidence that there are blue skies in Austria...

This is Schonbuhel Castle, originally 12th century and rebuilt 1819-21

And this is Jodie after too much red wine!!

We arrived at Melk for our Monastery tour. For the record, anyone who has asthma, hayfever or similar allergies should avoid going here - at least at this time of the year. It's difficult to see from this photo, but the water and the air is thick with white fluff - it's so bad, it is reminiscent of snow coming down in some places!

Now... the Benedictine Monastery of Melk was founded in the 11th century and extended between 1702 and 1747 in the Baroque style that was the fashion at the time. It's still active, with 40-50 monks living there. We noticed some modern looking frescoes outside, and lots of scaffolding - looks like the renovations are still going...

Inside, there are the elaborate arches and features of the period including some gorgeous statues... BUT this monastery has a very modern museum within its walls that - if you're interested in the history of the Benedictine order, religion, or this building itself - is very worthwhile visiting!

Each room is lit in a different colour...

This book is actually handwritten, it's very old and it is a copy of the original rules for the Benedictine order. This book was used by the Abbott of Melk for many years.

This box was one of a few that were in the green room. It's very old and all hand carved...

There were lots of very over the top religious relics...

And a room dedicated to the Abbott who directed the Baroque remodelling of the Monastery. Some of the outfits would have done Barbie proud!!

This is a re-usable coffin that was introduced in funeral practices for a while following the Baroque period in history, when the Abbott decided that he had to scale down excess. Apparently, giving a person their own permanent coffin was considered excessive, and so a re-usable coffin was devised complete with trap door underneath... Nice...

To show just how modern the museum was, here's something we weren't expecting to see in an active Benedictine monastery - a modern lightshow installation complete with sculptures tearing themselves out of the walls...

The first big hall we were shown to was the "Marble Hall".

This hall had some gorgeous frescoes on the ceilings, and they were cleverly painted to give the illusion of additional height and a dome overhead...

We thought it was amusing that the "Marble Hall" actually wasn't all made of marble - they used fake marble. Ironically, this fake marble was more expensive than real marble, but the reason they used it was because it could be heated without cracking...

A view outside the the Monastery on a balcony that joins the Marble Hall with the Library...

This is a view of the township of Melk from the Monastery's balcony.

Next stop was the Library...

There are literally thousands of books from bygone eras in the Monastery's library - many volumes are handwritten and these weren't on display but were kept in temperature controlled rooms for preservation. Jason is having a look at the few examples out on display...

Here is an example of one of the old handwritten texts. This volume is another incomplete set of Benedictine rules and writings used by the church in times now past...

We went down a very elaborate spiral staircase that went up forever... And also gave the appearance of going down forever, because they have cleverly placed a round mirror at the centre of the base, so that the top spirals are reflected on to infinity if you look down the staircase... Quite amazing!

What monastery would be complete without a formal place of worship? Last stop was the Monastery Church, built 1702 - 1736.

There are glorious frescoes all over the curved and domed ceilings of the church, depicting the Glorification of St Benedict...

There really is an excess of gold used in anything Baroque...

We were glad to get outside to some plainer arches (and the toilets!!)

All in all, our day was well spent - we left and took our tour bus back to Vienna where we were dropped a hop skip and jump from our hotel where we now rest with full bellies and prepare for another day!

VIENNA: The Worthwhile, The Wonderful, & The Wanky...

2008-05-21T17:45:00.000+08:00

Today, we explored Vienna on foot. First, we went to the Albertina - which is an art gallery a few steps from our hotel. It has some old Staterooms in it upstairs, and in those staterooms there is a collection of art that was part of the collection belonging to the Austrian royal family.

Amongst these artworks, Jodie was absolutely rapt to discover several original Albrecht Duhrer works!!

This photo is blurry, but at least it shows the world for all posterity that Jodie was once there and saw Duhrer in the flesh! We also bought some fantastic books on the art of Duhrer - and in English!

The rest of the actual gallery downstairs and in the special exhibition rooms, isn't really worth mentioning... Only the presence of Duhrer, some Michaelangelo drawings, and the beautiful Staterooms made this gallery worthwhile!

We wandered off down the street, and discovered a Butterfly museum! We couldn't pass it by, and a butterfly magnet and 4.5 Euros each later, we were in a steamy tropical sauna out of the cold and surrounded by hundreds of different butterflies!

We even found some of our token Ulysses butterflies, but most of them were too fast and came up as a blue blur in the photos...

But it was a nice diversion for an hour or so! We soon got too hot and sweaty and left the magical Butterfly museum to go to the Museum of Natural History.

Jason got cheeky with the guards of the museum...

VERY IMPORTANT - if you are ever in Vienna, do not miss the opportunity to visit this museum!! It is one of the best I have ever been to, and it is extremely well laid out. You will need at least half of the day, perhaps more, to go through this museum. It goes over several floors and you can get totally absorbed in the different areas of study... Naturally, our first port of call was the Minerals Collection...

Jason is standing in front of a "giant thunder egg", which - to those of us who don't "do" rocks - is a hollow in the ground in which crystals are formed...

I'm sure you all know what this is... And it's right up my alley too!!

I think this nugget might be a little large to go around my neck on a chain, but I'm sure I could find some heavy duty rigging rope that would hold it... Please, Jase? Pleeeease...?

Jason got carried away with technical speak and obscure minerals, and I took lots of photos of the pretty crystals...

... and the pretty colours! The minerals came in every colour under the sun, from vibrant blue...

... to bright green...

... to fluorescent yellow...

... Jason, still absorbed in his rocks...

... while Jodie found some enormous quartz crystals - this would look spectacular in my garden!!

... We also made a really interesting discovery - Quartz can also come in bright blue!!!

We also found an ENORMOUS meteorite in the meteorite section, that actually originates from Australia! This meteorite weighs close to a tonne!! I bet it left one hell of a dent!!

After the Minerals Collection, we went to the Paleontology Collection where we saw Tyrannosaurus Rex and other dinosaur skeletons...

This is actually an ENORMOUS prehistoric turtle skeleton!! Jason is standing a little bit forward from it and doesn't do the scale of the creature justice - it really was massive!!

We also saw lots of fossilised creatures like this strange looking fish thing...

Even the fossilised plants were spectacular!

This enormous head actually belonged to a prehistoric fish - it is huge and vicious looking, something tells me it wasn't a vegetarian!!

There was a fantastic section on the evolution of man and ancient man...

And of course, bugs...

... Lots of BIG bugs - these were cockroaches!!! And they were bigger than the palm of my hand!! Eww!

Our trademark Ulysses butterfly...

This is Jason in front of some pretty large centipedes... From here, we went on into snakes and reptiles, birds, sharks and fish, and other creatures from all over the world - a massive collection and absolutely fascinating, but unfortunately the camera battery went flat - must have been that hour trying to photograph the butterflies earlier...

We had some food in the cafe at the museum, before heading onwards to the last stop of the day which was the Leopold Musem. This is basically an art gallery, and it is the WANKY part of our day.

Simply put, 99% of the Leopold Museum consists of art for men in business suits or berets. To call it art is a stretch, Jason reckons preschoolers could do a better job. He doesn't understand how these artists became so popular, and I am just depressed... because I don't see how my art will ever become famous or a national treasure, as I will never allow it to be BAD enough to become widely acceptable or popular, according to the standards of this gallery...

If you're not into WANKY types standing in front of poorly executed paintings endlessly intellectualising the meanings of such Modern Art, then this gallery is perhaps not for you...

VIENNA - Orientation Day!

2008-05-21T05:20:00.000+08:00

We arrived in Vienna, checked into our hotel - which, by the way, is located smack-bang in the centre of everything worth being close to -and received an upgrade to an Executive Suite (sooo spoiled, and loving it!!) If you're ever in Vienna, the Hotel Europa is definitely situated well and the hotel itself is wonderful :)

That afternoon, we took a "Short & Juicy" tour of the city. During this bus tour, we saw many interesting sites, were dumped at an unusual building for 15 minutes in the rain, and saw some pretty nifty bus driving in the form of a u-turn at the lights, and reverse parallel parking!!

As in the rest of Europe thus far, we saw lots of beautiful old architecture and water fountains...

... and sculptures dotted the landscape...

In some places (although thankfully not as many as in Paris) there was plenty of gold to catch the eye...

... with more sculptures (I'm not sure what he's doing to that poor pony but it looks like he's about to get some back...)

We think this building is the Opera house, but we're not too sure as we saw so many buildings in our quick tour...

We were amused that one of the sights pointed out to tourists, is the OPEC building - where once a month, the oil production is determined for the next month, and this affects all of the world's oil prices... So for those of you who are feeling the bite, this is where to address your hate mail :-P

This is that unusual building we mentioned, where we were dropped off for 15 minutes so we could walk over and take a photo... The painter needs a ruler and some more Dulux...

So, for 15 minutes I stood by a nicely-tiled pole, shivering...

... and Jason struck a pose in the rain, in front of a fountain. We're not sure why this building is a tour bus hotspot, but we saw several other buses and dozens of other tourists get dumped and left in the rain at the same spot, so it must be something famous and we took some photos to show "been there, done that..." Maybe one day, when we're at a home renovations & tiling expo, someone might be envious?!

By the end of it, Jason was under his blue umbrella looking a little cranky at the bus stop...

The canals and bridges in Vienna aren't as nice as those in Paris...

They have churches and cathedrals in Vienna too...

And there is also an enormous ferris wheel near the river, that I would love to go on - apparently a circuit takes 15 minutes (Perth Royal Show, eat your heart out!!) and the view is spectacular!

The weather today was wet and bloody cold with a maximum of 13 degrees celsius - hopefully, it will improve by tomorrow - because tomorrow, we're off to get Cultured at the Museum and some art galleries!

Jodie's Obsession With Nazi Guard Posts...

2008-05-21T05:00:00.000+08:00

On the trains in Germany and now in Austria, I keep spotting these little huts. They appear to be following the train lines, and are relatively evenly spaced on the countryside. I have come to the conclusion that they are remnants of the second world war, and that once upon a time each little hut had several Nazi soldiers in regular rotation.

The people who own the fields and properties these huts stand in, for the most part have let them stand as they are. The most interesting use of these huts that I have seen while in Austria, has ranged from conversion to a chicken coop, and once I even saw one in the yard of what appeared to be a childcare centre - incorporated into the play equipment, complete with bright yellow slide!!

If you look carefully in this picture, there are three of these huts! Sometimes, they are difficult to spot because if there is a tree or some bushes in the middle of the field, the hut has been built into or under them - sort of like they have attempted to camouflage them...

I have found myself wondering on more than one occasion, if I were to go and explore these huts more closely, would I find some interesting WWII-era graffiti - initials, swastika's etc. - done by the German soldiers to while away their hours of duty? You can't help but think it must have been incredibly boring to have been one of the occupants. They aren't particularly spacious, but at least they were close enough to the neighbouring huts for the soldiers to be able to humbug one another, I suppose...

SALZBURG - Catching The Train To Vienna!

2008-05-20T17:15:00.000+08:00

Just thought I'd pop these pictures in for Mum and Dave's benefit - apparently fuel over here is getting so expensive it's cheaper to pop your truck on a train for the long haul!! Food for thought?

PS. Jase doesn't want me to tell anyone, but a little while ago he chipped his front tooth on a fork because he was a little bit keen on his meal - I've been calling him "Chip" and in retaliation he's been calling me "Froggy" on account of my (now no longer) croaky voice! I've been threatening to get out the Macro lens and take a photo to post on the blog! :)

SALZBURG - Sound of Music, Torture and Mozart

2008-05-20T05:40:00.000+08:00

We had a big day in Salzburg today. It started early. We'd like to have said bright and early, but unfortunately it was overcast and raining.

We had booked a Sound of Music tour which we though would be a bit of a tour around some of the locations featured in the movie. What we didn't bet on was the energetic guide (Trudi) who despite her best efforts couldn't get the bus into a Sound of Music sing along. Nonetheless, it was a fun day and we did get out to the lakes district of Salzburg.

Here's a few photos of our morning.

Here's the glass pavilion from the Sound of Music. It has been moved from the original location due to noise complaints from neighbours, bought about by late night singing and dancing of energetic tourists.

Here's Jodie about to skip off down the lane, just like Maria did when she arrived at the Von Trapps.

Here's the Monastery where Maria's story began. It's still in use with about 30 Benedictine Nuns currently living in the Monastery. There is no doorbell at the front gate like there was in the movie however.

Not a location used in the Sound of Music, but some remarkable scenery nonetheless. As an aside, the Von Trapps escaped over the mountains in the movie into Switzerland. In reality, if they had climbed over the mountains, they would have ended up in the German Fatherland. Just what they were trying to escape.

Again, not from Sound of Music, but being the middle of may, a lot of the Maypoles are still standing from May Day.

Definitely not from the Sound of Music, this is the headquarters of Red Bull. It's nearly all made of glass, and sits over an artificial lake.

Here we are overlooking one of the scenic lakes, in the lakes district.

Another wonderful scene of the lakes, as we are rocketing along in the bus. The clouds surround the peaks of the nearby mountains.

This is the church in which Maria and Mr Von Trapp were married, in the movie. It's not the same church that the real Maria was married in.

And another shot from inside, showing the aisle between the pews. This church is currently undergoing restoration and it looks amazing inside.

Jason found a toy, but Jodie wouldn't let him take it home for the studio...

Waiting to get back onto our buss after a coffee and some yummy cakes. Unfortunately the cafe had run out of apple strudel, and after our guide gave it such a rave review!

We saw many other sites and took far too many photos to put up here. The tour ended just after lunch and we headed down to the Mozart Museum at the Mozart family house.

Here's the entrance to the museum. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photographs inside, but we saw some of Mozart's original manuscripts, the pianoforte's and harpsichord that Mozart learnt and composed on as well as an amazing pastel painting that Jodie studied for quite a while.

They had a pile of books representing all of Mozart's works. It stood about 3m tall. An amazing achievement for a man who died at 35.

Next up was the fortress...

From the ground...

After we'd made the arduous climb. (Actually we cheated and caught the cablecar to the top, but even so, there was lots of uphill walking inside the castle.)

One impressive looking gate.

And the view from the top was amazing. Even Jodie was brave and went to the edge to have a look at the stunning view. The house in the middle of this photo was the hangman's cottage. No-one wanted him as a neighbour, so they built a little house out in the middle of the paddock, surrounded by trees. Must have been a great party house back in the 12th Century.

Here's a view of one of the walls of the fortress. This fortress was never taken by force (though it was surrendered to Napoleon). The little room protruding from the wall was the royal toilette (more photo's later)...

Here's a view from within the fortress walls...

Here I am taking on the legendary cow of Salzburg. Legend goes that during a siege on the castle, things were getting a little bit desperate. They had only one cow left to eat. What they decided to do was to parade the cow along the battlements. The next day they painted the cow white and paraded it again. Apparently the siege had been going on so long that the invading army was also getting low on food and demoralized and to see that the castle still had so many cows left that they could wander along the battlements was the final straw, so they packed up camp and left.

Here I am looking a bit nervous in the torture chamber. Jodie snapped this shot just before she left the room and tried to lock me in. Fortunately the door was old and creaky, so I got to live another day. The dungeon was a little cage under the torture chamber, which wasn't very nice. Apparently this chamber was only used to store the torture devices in it, as no confession under duress was permitted unless it was performed in the royal court.

They had some particularly nasty execution styles, the worst of which was a wheel that they dropped on you to break all of your bones. Then they tied your mangled body to it and hoisted you up a pole to die.

Here's a stunning view from the top of the highest point of the fortress.

And another

And another...

And one more overlooking the fortress wall.

Even in an ancient fortress they had sequencers. Granted it's a royal pain to re-program (requiring lots of little wires to be precisely measured and bashed into a log of wood), and it could only play one song, but it's a major step up from the original horns that played an F minor chord every day. The original horn was reminiscent of a cow mooing apparently.

Here's Jodie descending the long spiral staircase.

Back from the guided tour, here's another view of one of the many courtyards within the fortress.

Look-out - Jodie's found a mighty big boom-stick, and she looks like she mean's business. Jodie wanted to bring this one home to enforce a bit of discipline at home. Jason said no!

Next up was another museum inside the fortress, that had a wide variety of exhibit's from furniture, to crockery, to WW2 memorabilia and lot's more.

This is a weird looking musical instrument. If anyone know's what it's called, please leave a comment. It looks cool.

This is a particularly nasty piece of furniture, from the torture devices collection. The little barbs are seriously sharp.

I thought that chastity belts were were things only of legend. Apparently not. Ouch!!!

Here's a few mighty big bullets. Not sure what fires them, but they are left over from WW2.

Here's some more WW2 leftovers.

Finally I found the royal toilet. You can't actually go in, but if you look in the photo near the top of the little royal room, you'll see that it doesn't have a floor. The business end of the toilet hangs out over a very long drop. It must make for a particularly chilly wake up in the Austrian winter!

Here's a 14th Century kitchen.

And finally, at the end of the museum, here's part of the original wall of the fortress. The fortress was expanded and built upon over about 1000 years starting in about 740 AD as weaponry developed. This is the top of the original fortress wall.

Jodie and I got separated while in the museum and we couldn't find each other. Unfortunately I had the cable car tickets, the mobile phones, my wallet and Jodie's purse, and all of the water bottles in my backpack.

After about 20 minutes Jodie stormed out of the fortress in a snoot and walked down the steep roadway and back to the hotel. Jason meanwhile was getting worn out looking for Jodie and getting grumpy because he couldn't find her. Eventually Jodie made it back to the hotel and got a call through to Jason. Another hour later and Jason made it back to the hotel, completely exhausted.

After such a long day we were pretty bushed. We had dinner at the sister hotel to the Carlton where we were staying and had a great Austrian red wine and a lovely dinner. Jason finally got his apple strudel, and Jodie had an ice cream and hot chocolate fudge overdose.

SALZBURG, Austria

2008-05-19T04:48:00.001+08:00

Salzburg in Austria is famous for a couple of reasons, the most widely known being that it is the birthplace of Mozart, and the place where they filmed "The Sound of Music"!

We arrived by train, and were met by our transfer (*insert happy little jig here*) and taken to our hotel. We are staying at NH Hotels' Carlton - and it appears we have somehow managed to score an upgrade to our room! We are in a really spacious suite!

When we walk in we come to a little entry way and then we walk into this lounge room (this photo shows the room looking back towards the entry, with the hallway through the doorway on the right).

Also in the lounge room is a little alcove with a desk, where I am sitting right now as I write this (the photo shows Jason, but don't be alarmed - I haven't suddenly grown a beard!)

Turn left, and down another little hallway is the bathroom on your left...

... And a bedroom at the end. We're so rapt with the upgrade, we're not even going to point out that bizarre, recurring European habit of thinking two single beds pushed together somehow equals one Queen sized bed...

There is also a large balcony that can be accessed either through the bedroom, or a door near the office alcove! I'm thinking, room service one morning so we can have breakfast on the balcony!

The only odd thing about this hotel is that there isn't any restaurant or standard room service. They serve breakfast on the ground floor, and that's it - although you can opt to have it delivered to your room (*yay*). If you want to have dinner, you can either walk elsewhere or they have a restaurant at a sister hotel and will give you taxi vouchers for the return trip if you decide to eat there... Strange, but at least there is that option!

We were collected at the hotel at 4pm for a short orientation tour with 3 other couples from France, the US and India. This tour consisted of a quick run around the town in a minivan, with lengthy stops where we sat there as the guide translated into French for the benefit of the couple in the front... We probably spent just as much time in translation stops as we did actually getting orientated, but hey...

A key point of interest we hope to visit tomorrow afternoon, following our "Sound of Music" tour, is the Festung Hohensalzburg fortress (you can barely see...) in the photo above. There are two ways to access it - you can either go up a lift that ascends the cliff face, or you can go up a cable car. We're thinking, cable car...

Salzburg is situated in a valley, and divided into the Old and the New by the Salzach river. Something really interesting about the old section, is that the buildings lining the river and backed by the cliffs, actually are built into the cliffs themselves!! So they look like very 'short' buildings, but are in fact quite deep. There are even 3 opera houses, seating a total of 5,000 people collectively, but apparently security is high and it's very exclusive - unless you book 6 months or more in advance, or are famous/royal, it's impossible to get a ticket...

We had a look at the house from the movie "The Sound of Music" (this all means very little to me, by the way, because I haven't actually seen the bloody film!!)

But it was a very pretty building... and I'm sure those of you who have seen the movie, are thrilled to bits by these photos...

The locals were very busy and very important...

And we stopped by an Austrian palace, Hellbrunn where I took a moment to pat a very cute fellow and miss my puppy :-S Key points in Austria are that they like mustard yellow, and paint all palaces this colour (heaven help us...)

... and the garden had lots of water features. There are supposed to be some very special "trick" fountains, but we didn't have time to find them...

... and we saw some enormous fish ...

... that looked like a cross between a goldfish and a dragon!!

Apparently, they are called "sturgeon" fish and you get caviar from them... I knew there was a good reason I hadn't tried caviar!

Here, as in France, they like flat gardens and clipped hedges...

... and murky, shallow ponds. But at least these ones had fish to keep things interesting!

After our tour, we were abruptly dumped in the centre of town, and we decided to have dinner in one of the many restaurants in Old Salzburg. We walked past the house where Mozart was born, rounded the corner, and boom - we had found our restaurant! We had a wonderful meal on the top floor, at a table by the window where we were overlooking the river - beautiful! We even had a bottle of Margaret River red with our meal!

A word to the wise - don't drink too much if you're having dinner on the top floor and have to go back down several flights of a winding staircase made out of ancient, unevenly worn stone...

MUNICH - A Day At Dachau Concentration Camp

2008-05-18T03:17:00.001+08:00

What else do you do when in the birthplace of Nazism? We figured it was time for some sightseeing of a more serious nature, and time for some deeper reflection.

Getting to Dachau wasn't difficult. Our hotel is almost opposite the central train station, so we caught the train out to Dachau by ourselves instead of opting to join a guided tour (which would just take us on the train at a higher charge, and most likely rush us through the Camp...) The most difficult part of this was getting through the queue at the train station to purchase our tickets - for some reason, the two people ahead of us in the line decided today was the day to level all of their complaints on the poor girl at the window... Each took 15 minutes or more!!

Once we arrived at Dachau train station, we tagged along with a quartet of American tourists courtesy of Florida, who succeeded in getting us on the wrong bus - so we had a brief tour of the town of Dachau, before we arrived back at the Dachau train station ready to get on the right bus...

For a place with such a dramatic history, Dachau Concentration Camp is quite an unremarkable stop, with very little to herald its presence. If it wasn't for the number of people getting on and off, you would be excused for missing it! Entry to the Camp is free, but there is a small visitor's centre from which you can hire hand-held audio guides for 3 Euros and a deposit (in the form of your ID card or similar). It looks like they're building a new visitor's centre which is going to be quite impressive once completed... One point we found interesting is that Dachau Concentration Camp isn't out in the middle of nowhere, and nor is it isolated - it is literally in the centre of the town, which is very scary when you think about it...

A short walk from this sign, and you come to the main entrance to Dachau...

... which consists of an imposing guard tower, or Jourhaus. This building was also the administrative centre of the Camp. The upper storey consisted of offices for the protective custody camp leaders, as well as the Gestapo, while the bottom floor housed the registration officer, the block leader, and the chief guard. The prisoners of Dachau regarded this building as the centre of SS authority in the Camp.

The entrance to the Camp itself features a dramatic wrought iron gate that you can't help but imagine was kept closed for most of the time! All new prisoners entered through this gate, after being processed by the administrators of the Jourhaus.

The words on the gate translate to "work brings freedom"...

Inside to the right, there is a museum and a 20 minute video that screens in English 3 times daily, at 11:30am, 2:00pm and 3:30pm. To the left, are the prisoner accommodations and the crematorium. We decided to start with the museum.

It is difficult to see in the smaller image, but this is a map of Germany and surrounding countries featuring Dachau and other Concentration Camps during the peak of Nazi Germany. You can just make out Auschwitz on the far right, vertically centred...

This map shows the important subsidiary camps in the region.

The museum consists of a series of rooms that used to be used to process new prisoners, but now contain information boards about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the history of Dachau Concentration Camp from conception to liberation...

In some places, you can find original signage from when these rooms were used to strip, shower, interrogate and sometimes torture the prisoners of Dachau. This sign translates to "No Smoking" and was found in the first "welcome room" where the prisoners were processed before being sent to the showers...

Surprisingly, the prisoners of Dachau were from all over the world and were imprisoned for all different reasons. Their crimes included religious (Jewish, Jehovah's Witnesses etc.) political, personal (homosexuals, those of Gypsy or Roma backgrounds) and criminal (repeat re-offenders, war prisoners etc.) This map shows numbers and geographical origins of the prisoners of Dachau over its active years...

Some of the original shaving utensils used by a prisoner barber. In the corridor opposite the shower area, prisoners had all body hair removed before being "disinfected" in the showers.

This room is where the showers used to be. Some sections contain floor boards that recreate the original flooring...

This is an original whipping trestle with bullwhip. Enough said.

This is a copy of a real "death mask".

This tile was found when an oven was torn down in the Schlossau housing area in 1980. It reads: "Oven built by the political Dachau prisoner Joh. Prechtl Potter from Laaber (Opf.) by Hemau. Born 30.XII.96 in Regensburg Heidenheim Dec. 16th, 1941 In captivity since Nov. 28th, 1936 For how long only the devil knows"

Jason standing outside of the area known as "The Bunker". This was where problematic and political prisoners were kept, and once they entered often they were never seen again...

Looking down the long hallway of "The Bunker"...

One of the cells

This cell at one stage in Dachau's history housed the political prisoner Georg Elser, who famously almost assassinated Adolf Hitler with a bomb - very nearly preventing that which eventually killed him. He was transferred to Dachau in 1945, and was murdered in the crematorium on 9th April of that same year.

One of the cell doors in "The Bunker"...

Outside again and we stopped for a moment of silence in front of this large memorial to the victims of the Nazis.

Also outside, in front of the museum we found this impressive memorial.

A closer look at the memorial...

The original accommodation blocks that housed the prisoners of Dachau have been destroyed, but their original foundations remain and are numbered. They look almost like enormous graves with numbered headstones... Behind them you can see one of the two buildings that were rebuilt. Originally, the first 3 blocks on each side were the Infirmary where medical experiments were conducted.

We made our way to the end of the the accommodation blocks, to the crematorium. It is actually outside of the perimeter fence, over a babbling brook and surrounded by beautiful gardens. It felt quite eerie to be in such a place of beauty, knowing that so many people lost their lives in that very spot, and that there were two mass graves located nearby...

At Dachau there are actually two crematoriums. This is the original crematorium, built in the summer of 1940. Just a year later, it was working beyond capacity and a larger crematorium was built. The original crematorium was in operation until about April 1943. During this period, approximately 11,000 prisoners were cremated here.

The new crematorium included a number of disinfecting chambers, used to disinfect clothing using prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B).

Dachau's new crematorium also had one of the infamous "shower block" gas chambers, equipped with fake shower heads. For some reason, this gas chamber was never put to mass use but they suspect it may have been used for medical experiments...

The new crematorium contained 4 furnaces, each equipped with little stretchers...

The crematorium was also used as an execution site. Most hangings were carried out here, directly in front of the burning ovens.

On our way back to the Dachau gate, we stopped in to have a look at the prisoner blocks... Here, Jason is standing next to the prisoner's beds...

Here are the wash rooms...

And the toilets...

It's a bit difficult to see here, but later as the Camp became more and more populated the style of beds changed to the point where there was no individual spaces and everyone was crammed into flat box-like structures like sardines - ultimately, there would have been 2000 prisoners to a room, which - having walked around in one - is unimaginable!

On our way out, I took this photo of the original barbed wire around the top of the perimeter fence - there are two different types, and when Dachau Concentration Camp was active some sections were electrified...

Our lasting impressions from this visit, are of profound sadness at what hate and ignorance can be capable of...

HEIDELBERG - Hotels

2008-05-17T23:22:00.001+08:00

We thought our hotel in Heidelberg was bad. At least we weren't staying here...

HEIDELBERG - Travelling Back In Time...

2008-05-17T02:59:00.003+08:00

Jason has already filled you in on the accommodations in Heidelberg, so it goes without saying that those are somewhat behind the times... The location and the breakfast are the only things they've got going for them!!

For our free day in Heidelberg we decided to go up the mountain and back in time, to the Heidelberg castle ruins. Thankfully, they have a cable car (or two) to get up there - I was in no fit state to be wheezing my bronchial lungs up a few thousand stairs! The cable car cost 8 Euros each, and it was well worth it :)

It was a long, slow trawl up the hill in the cable car - here you can see the half way point, where we are going to pass the other car on its way down the mountain. We decided to go right to the top, and work our way down.

Here we are at the very top of the mountain. You can see Heidelberg in the background!

You can see the three bridges across the river that flows through the centre of the town. Our hotel room is somewhere along the edge of this river!

There are some beautiful forest walks going all over the mountain, some of them are quite long and look like they would take more than one day to complete! Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time (or energy) to follow the path too far, but it was lovely to briefly explore... There is also a falcon display at the top level twice a day, but sadly we weren't there at at 11:30am and didn't want to hang around until 3:30pm for the next show...

We found this odd looking little fellow...

And Jodie found time to play with the fairies :)

Before we caught the cable car back down to the second level, to explore the castle...

This spectacular column overlooking Heidelberg is on the edge of the castle - it is actually part of a broken turret, and you can go right up to the edge and look down from a dizzying height...

Jason thought this was pretty cool...

Jodie thought it was best to hold onto the rail and not look down!!

On the same viewing platform, looking back up the mountain with the spectacular forest behind!

We're not sure why this castle is so badly destroyed, Jason liked to imagine dramatic canon blasts from the river below!

The ruins really are a spectacular backdrop!

They don't actually allow visitors to wander down below or explore these sections of the castle - you need to pay to get into the centre court of these crumbling structures, another 3 Euros each - but it is worth the extra cost...

You get to go through an original medieval castle entrance, complete with spiked wooden portcullis (that's those spikes overhead on the arch - they come down and block the entrance!)

In the enormous, thick wooden gates there is a tiny wooden door - probably for when they are too lazy to open the gates... Can't say we blame them, those gates look heavy!

Once inside, there's more of the same - perhaps this castle was damaged during the wars? Sadly, you can't wander freely about the ruins or get down to some of the lower levels. There is also a chapel inside the castle walls, but yet again you have to pay for access and the sign said only those who had paid extra for a guided tour could get in... You get a lot of this exclusivity in Europe, we have found - and there are attempts at every hotspot to extract more Euros... We have found it is easier to guide ourselves, and give some things a miss if it isn't a "do or die" situation...

There's also some tacky Baroque looking facades that definitely don't look like part of the original castle... I don't think I like them, and perhaps the poor taste in renovations is what led to this castle being bombed?!

Inside one section of the castle is an extensive museum all about Pharmacy practice through the history of Heidelberg...

How they thought giving sick people Arsenic, Belladonna and other poisonous chemicals was going to heal them, we just don't know...

But all of the unusual, hand blown glass distillers and containers were beautiful to look at!

After having our fill of Pharmacy history, we went to another lookout section of the castle...

Where we got to see more of Heidelberg... Nobody can accuse us of not having had a good look at the city for the day we were here!

We went and had a very expensive wine tasting (bleh - Aussie wines are so much better, and they didn't have any cheese!!) and we were impressed by the enormous scale of this wine barrel... We had heard tales of a wondrous sized barrel and thought we had finally found it...

... Until we rounded a corner and stumbled upon this monstrosity!!!

Jason demonstrates how to tap into this vast treasure - all 220,000 litres of it!!!

That tiny white speck on top of the wine barrel is my husband! I thought I would never be able to drag him away...

We stumbled back outside to daylight...

And found this spectacular looking crumbled turret!

But by then we were plum tuckered out, and we caught the cable car back down the mountain to Heidelberg - where we went off in search of good food and good beer (and found both!)

BRUSSELS to Heidelberg - Castles, Here We Come

2008-05-17T02:50:00.001+08:00

We departed Brussels this morning after a dramatic morning. Not particularly impressed with the Thon Hotel's early morning cleaning service and method of waking up their guests, and we let the management know all about it.

We left Brussels wishing we'd had more time to look around and enjoy it. We navigated the enormous MIDI train station (it looks like my MIDI patchbay in my studio, and that's scary) and managed to get on a train to Koln, before getting on the train to Heidelberg. The Heidelberg train was late and to make up time they decided to skip the Heidelberg station, though at least they let us know and we got a local connection for the final part of our journey.

The photo's below are of some of the German countryside between Koln and Heidelberg.

An old fortress on a hill. Pity about the power lines.

Some more old buildings in the Forest.

Another lovely old building on a hill.

Yet another castle. These castles are everywhere over here.

An old church

This is an amazing old castle perched on edge of a mountain.

A fairly typical view of a German town along the railway line.

And another...

We eventually arrived in Heidelberg after our longest train trip yet. We spent nearly 6 hours on trains before we got to Heidelberg. We booked into the hotel, and, well, it's not quite as they describe it in the brochure...

Let me show you.

Text from the brochures, pictures and comments in brackets, courtesy of the Walnuts....

The Nekar-Hotel is a modern hotel

overlooking the Nekar River

with a magnificent view of the Odenwald forest

A hotel with high standards (that's my mobile phone next to the TV as a comparison)

comfortable, and with a convenient downtown location.

There are 60 bedrooms with private bath or shower.

Elevator, telephone

and a private parking lot are available. (note the bee-hive)

Heidelberg's famous pedestrian shopping area is within walking distance (and I'm sure it is because the nice young man who greeted us told us so) and the romantic castle of Heidelberg with its wonderful views over the city is always worth a visit (again we were told all about the castle when we checked in).

Now the hotel room is OK. We've got a balcony, and the room is clean and comfortable, but we think that they've... ahem... been a little liberal with their descriptions.

The room IS modern... compared to the castle. Think 1970's wood veneer furniture and upholstery that my Nanna would recognize from her childhood.

The fact that they mention that the hotel actually has a lift says a lot about the range of facilities available in the rooms. We have a phone and a Nokia TV (I never knew they made them, though given it's size, Nokia's knack for miniaturization is quite apparent), and that's it. No air conditioning, no internet, no safe (actually there is one, but it's been busted open), no desk, no robes, or room service, no mini bar, no cups or glasses, no coffee, tea or even a kettle or hotel guide. We do however have the ubiquitous Gideon's bible, so at least we know we are in a hotel.

The guy at the desk is really nice and friendly though, and location is actually pretty good as a launching pad for exploring the old part of Heidelberg.

We couldn't help noticing the Ibis hotel right next door to the train station as we arrived, and for simplicities sake, we'd probably pick that hotel for our next visit (Jodie says it's coz there's a McDonalds downstairs).

We are having a quiet evening tonight. Jode's is having a snoozle as she's still feeling a bit under the weather, and we'll head out to the old part of town to grab some dinner a little later.

Tomorrow we intend to find the castle and do a bit of exploring, though it should be a pretty laid back day.

BRUSSELS, with Lurve

2008-05-14T02:55:00.001+08:00

Well, after 3 train changes and navigating the enormous MIDI train station we've finally arrived in Brussels. With the gift of hindsight, we probably would have skipped Calais and spent an extra day in Brussels to save all the extra travel, but it is what it is. Calais was pretty laid back, and the Holiday Inn was pretty relaxing, and they did a good breakfast. An extra thumbs up mark for the hot chocolate sachets in the room. They were delicious.

Jodie's still feeling a bit under the weather, but did perk up a bit when I found her some pseudoephidrine to clear her head. We had a running McDonalds lunch at Lille Flandres train station, much to Jodie's delight (she's had McDonalds on the brain ever since she got sick. I'm going to call it Mad McDonald Virus).

Jode's had a sleep this afternoon while I wandered around Brussels in search of Belgian chocolate and Hoegaarden.

I found both, and some wonderful architecture. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera with me, not expecting to find much on the way to the chocolate shop, and only remembered I had my mobile with me when I found the biggest Hoegaarden ever. It must have had a litre of beer in it. Yay!

My giant Hoegaarden. It's even better on tap, especially in a dimly lit bar in the middle of Brussels.

I bought some Godiva and Galler chocolates to cheer up Jodie, and she was pretty grateful. One of the boxes is of natural chocolate with no preservatives which we have to finish within a month. Unfortunately for all of you, that is the date we get on the plane back to Perth, so y'all miss out :-P

The Thon Hotel, City Centre, is great and the people are really nice. It's in a great location, and while the room is a little on the small side, it's comfortable and well serviced. We'll probably have dinner at the hotel, or next door at the grill.

We've got another early morning tomorrow as we head off to Heidelberg for a couple of days. We are going castle hunting when we arrive, so that should be fun.

Back from our dramatic dinner. We went next door to the grill, where they served some fantastic meat. Very tender and cooked to perfection. Just as Jodie and I were settling into our chicken kebab entree, a major domestic broke out in the middle of the restaurant. The girl ran behind the bar to escape and the bloke jumped the bar with wine and beer glasses showering down around him.

An army of blokes surrounded the guy and escorted him out. The girl carried on for a bit swearing and cursing in French and generally making a racket. Eventually the local constabulary turned up, but the bloke was long gone. Needless to say, the dinner service was somewhat interupted, but delicious nonetheless.

Goodbye Paris, Hello Calais

2008-05-13T05:17:00.001+08:00

It was finally time to wave goodbye to Paris and get on the train again. We've probably had our fill of Paris to be honest and are looking forward to Calais which will be a bit quieter. Our transfer driver turned up on time, though it did take a lot of phone calls by our hotel to get it sorted out. I think if we did this trip again, we'd probably avoid the transfers for Paris, and just use taxi's. They are efficient and quick.

The Paris Nord Eurail station was pretty easy to navigate, though the lady that served us coffee was a crabby old cow. We had to wait an hour and a half before we could find out which platform our train left from.

The first train to Lille Flandres was a great train, quite comfortable. The second train however was pretty much just a suburban train with no first class carriages, but plenty of graffiti. A bit rough but it got us to Calais OK.

We had a 15 minute wait before a taxi passed by the train station, though the taxi driver was great and drove us out of Callais to the Holiday Inn.

Here's our hotel.

This hotel is pretty good for honeymooners. The rooms are clean and comfortable, and it's out of the way in a quiet area. If you want to be close to what action there is in Calais, then there are probably a few other hotels in the city itself that would suit better, but we're pretty happy with it.

Jodie's come down with a bit of a cold, so she had a sleep in the afternoon while I went for a walk down to the ocean. I was on a mission to meet the mighty Atlantic. The locals told me it was a 10-20 minute walk down the ocean.

Note to any other crazy Australians who want to take on the mission of walking to the ocean from the Calais Holiday Inn - it's probably a good 20 minute drive. It took me over an hour to walk there, and another hour to get back, and you need to be prepared for a bit of bush bashing. I did make it though.

Here's a few snaps from the walk (in chronological order)

Calais is at the French end of the Channel Tunnel, and they are pretty proud of the fact. Here's one of the drills used to make one of the service tunnels.

Coquelles is where the Holiday Inn is located. It's a bit out of Calais itself.

Here's a really old little house. It's hard to see from the photo, but the doorway closest to the camera is about chest high. The entrance way is down a couple of narrow steps a little further up.

Another big drill bit. This one's bigger, and further down the road. Right near McDonalds.

I bet this place has better burgers though!

I took a wrong turn and found this old fort. It's huge. I don't know what it was used for, but it would have been hard work storming this fort with swords and arrows.

Finally reached the top of the hill to get down to the damn Atlantic Ocean. The hotel is a little dot on the horizon dead centre of the photo. It's right above the beige building and is a little white dot. It's a long 20 minutes, let me tell you!

Yay - me in the Atlantic. Just as well the boots are waterproof!

To prove I made it. Me and the Atlantic.

And THEN I found the bus stop. It's always the way... Unfortunately it had stopped running for the day, so I had another hour long walk back to the hotel.

On the way back I saw this little swimming critter in one of the many waterways. I don't know if it was an otter or a ruddy big rat.

Just had to see for myself if Pulp Fiction was right and the Quarter Pounder is called a Royale - and it is! Who would have thunk it?

One of the many beautiful houses here in Calais. If I had to live in France, this would be the place for me. Nice big blocks, good sized city and not too busy.

Anyway, I'm pretty tired, and it's getting late. We've got an early start tomorrow to get a train to Belgium. Jode's is drugged up to the gills on cold and flu drops, and a sounding a bit croaky, but she's soldiering on. Hopefully she'll be back to herself soon, and hopefully she finds someone other than me to give it to!

PARIS - Versailles

2008-05-12T04:47:00.012+08:00

On our last day in Paris, we made our way to Versailles in the afternoon. We went for cake, we found... a queue! Word of warning - do not visit Versailles on French public holidays or on Sundays. Sadly for us, on the day we chose to visit Versailles it was both!! They seem to have an unusually high number of public holidays in France, there have been several in the week we have been here. You seem to see a lot of French people laying around on the grass, on the river side, and basically anywhere there is decent shade - they like to lay around a lot. They almost seem to be having a better holiday than the holidaymakers who flock to their capital...

In this photo, you can see some (not all) of the queue for entry to Versailles. This photo actually shows the half way point for us, as it snaked back around on the left as well as curving up and around to the front door - you can see approximately half of the queue. This was the queue to enter once you had your ticket. Luckily for us, we already had ours as part of the self guided tour we had prearranged, and we avoided the 1 hour queue to buy said tickets. As it was, we still had to line up for some 45 minutes in the full sun with a thousand other pissed off tourists... We had a choice of a few days we could have visited, so why the people at Cityrama couldn't have forewarned us about the public holiday is completely beyond us, but we will be sure to ASK on all future occasions...!!

This is the royal chapel inside Versailles, at ground level where the court attended mass. The royal family didn't deign to descend to ground level even when at prayer, and preferred to remain on the upper storey...

The staircase winding its way up to the second storey.

This is a view down one of the many corridors with its beautiful arches...

The view out of one of the second storey windows across the gardens - we didn't have time to wander the gardens since we wasted so much time in the queue to actually get in, and on top of that they had fenced it all off and you need to pay extra for the privilege of entering the gardens surrounding the palace... Bit rude, we thought, so we gave it a miss - besides, the gardens all look pretty much the same with a few gaudy fountains and murky ponds scattered in between some well manicured hedges...

This is a view of the chapel from the royal balcony - a much nicer view of the painted dome ceiling! Perhaps they thought they were closer to god - we think perhaps they just had further to fall...

Along the corridors of Versailles, there are a number of linked rooms each in a different colour and - if it is possible - each gaudier than the one preceding it... Every available surface features gold leaf, murals, chandeliers, marble...

The longest hall in Versailles is an unbroken length of room known as the "Hall Of Mirrors", for quite obvious reasons - it is a spectacular expanse of mirrors, chandeliers, and arching windows letting in the light that is reflected around the room. Filled with the play of light and reflections, it is perhaps one of the best features of Versailles! This photo shows the entrance to the hall...

The ceilings of the "Hall Of Mirrors" are still covered in murals and gold leaf, but it really is the mirrors and chandeliers that catch your eye...

Jodie in the "Hall Of Mirrors"!

Jason strikes a pose!

The chandeliers reflected back in the mirrors...

We just want to know where they managed to find gold statuettes complete with mini-chandeliers to match the rest of the decor... Somehow we don't think they stock them at Myers...

The theme of chandeliers and mirrors continues in subsequent rooms... This room came complete with a tacky daybed where the Queen of France was required to publicly give birth to ensure the heir to the throne went unchallenged... We don't know what's scarier, the public bit or the expanse of gold in here!!

Another large hall we found in Versailles was a war room, the sole purpose of which was to show off about all of France's past victories...

In the middle of the lengthy hall are a series of marble pillars and flashy gold domes...

The large scale paintings on each side of the hall show past kings and battles, and are quite beautiful to look at...

Elsewhere in Versailles, there is also a long hall that honours the great minds and creators of France with superb stone likenesses. Some well known names can be found here, including Voltaire, Rousseau and Laplace among others...

In a special section all to himself, Jason even found Napoleon 1st!

The whole tour of Versailles (interior) took us around two hours, give or take - but we were moving quite rapidly from room to room because frankly, it was packed with people and that kind of killed the experience for us (as well as increased the temperature somewhat...) The photos don't really show the crowds, mainly due to some fairly tricky photography techniques and the tendency to angle towards the ceiling... Once outside, instead of visiting one of the two toilet queues - which rivalled those of our entry a few hours prior - we decided to be a bit sneaky and exit the pavilion entirely and head to a nearby coffee shop. Where Jodie joined another (somewhat shorter) queue...

Along our way, we snapped a few last photos of the outside of Versailles...

All in all, Versailles was very beautiful, completely over the top, and we understand why the common people got a little miffed with the royal family and stormed the place - perhaps they did not have the patience to queue?

PARIS: Stuff we can't believe we forgot to mention

2008-05-11T17:17:00.001+08:00

Coming home from the Louvre the other day we got swept up in a terrorist scare, at the Batobus Eiffel Tower stop. Some poor soul had left their suitcase in the queue at the Batobus so the whole stop had been cordoned off by the police while we did bog laps in the Batobus.

The French police then shot the suitcase before unpacking it, before we were allowed to land.

I can imagine some hysterical man or lady panicking on the Batobus because they've just accidentally left their luggage behind, only to come back an hour and a half later (that is the Batobus round trip) to find that their suitcase has been murdered and their undies on display to the world!

I guess you can't take any chances, and being such a popular tourist destination the security is high, but really, what did that poor suitcase ever do to anyone?

Oh, and another thing - laundry is criminally expensive here. Seriously! Collectively we've probably spent close to $500 getting our clothes laundered. We would have gone to a laundromat if we could have found one. We can't complain about the quality, our clothes have probably never been so clean and well pressed, but we're unsure if denim jeans and skirts really need the full dry clean press, wrapped in plastic and hung on a hanger service!

Finally, finding hair conditioner has proved to be a bit on an enigma. Fifty million different shampoos on the supermarket shelf and not one conditioner. Does every French man and woman walk around with wiry knotty hair or something?

Anyway, it's our last day in Paris today. We are heading off to Versailles today to view the palace where Marie Antoinette started the French Revolution. We plan to eat cake, dammit!

A Day of Relaxation and Marine Museum

2008-05-11T04:38:00.001+08:00

Because of our efficient tour of the Louvre, we felt we had earned a day off. It was Saturday after all, and we had nothing planned today, so we had a nice long sleep in.

After we finally arose, Jason went down the street to fetch some croissants and jam for a midday breakfast.

We decided to explore some of the nearby museums and a cemetery that we had seen right near our hotel, in Trocadero.

Some of the crypts and graves in this cemetery are amazing. Unfortunately a lot of the limestone crypts have suffered extensive damage from acid rain, but they are awe inspiring in any case.

It's not just old graves here, but some very modern monuments and some quite recent burials in the old family plots.

There are quite a few famous people buried here, including Claude DeBussy, Manet and others.

There is a lot of stained glass all throughout the crypts here. It's like the church builders had a bit of a side line in making these crypts. They are almost like miniature churches.

This place is amazing, but we had to leave eventually, and head over to the Marine Museum. We tried to use our museum pass to get into the Museum of Mankind, but you still need to pay to get in, so we decided to give it a miss. The promise of shrunken heads just wasn't strong enough to part us from our Euro's.

A couple of the many cannons in the Marine Museum.

All of this decoration from the back of this ship is built from wood. It's pretty amazing that they put so much work into the butt of a boat and then they coated the entire thing in gold leaf.

This is a statue of Charlemagne that used to adorn the bow of a ship. It's carved out of a solid chunk of wood!

This one is even bigger!

There are dozens of these model ships all through the museum. They are stunning, and a huge amount of craftsmanship has gone into building them. The rigging on some of the ships alone would have taken thousands of man hours. Incredible stuff!

More boomsticks!

This is from the more modern part of the museum and is one of the rounds that is fired from the guns on a modern warship. It stands about knee high and would do some serious damage. The boomsticks have come a long way!

Some more modern ship models.

This is an old diving suit. It's life size and looks like it weighs about 5 tonnes. It would be incredibly difficult to move in, but would be good for pretty serious depths. The glass in the helmet is about an inch thick. We are glad we didn't have to do our diving tickets in these things!

After the marine museum we went in search of the Musee du Vin (the Museum of Wine) complete with wine tasting, but it appears to have moved from the address in the brochure. As a consolation prize we found a lovely little brasserie (The Frankl'in Cafe). The waiter was great, and had a great sense of humour and it was probably the best meal we've had since we've arrived in France (though Jodie still has the cheese right up there at number 1).

Tonight we're going to have a moonlit cheesenic in the Trocadero gardens overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

Life is hard!

PARIS - The Louvre!

2008-05-11T03:19:00.006+08:00

We had set aside several days to explore the Louvre, but managed to see all that we wanted to view in just one day! The security on entry to the Louvre was intimidating, with metal detectors and security scanners etc. If you bring a bag that is too large, be warned you may be asked to check it in to the cloakroom - we didn't have to, which was surprising but you don't have to check in camera bags anyway and our large backpack was primarily a camera bag so we have been lucky in that sense. First port of call was to the Information desk to get a map, then we sat down at the first cafe we came across to have a coffee and plan our attack...

We concentrated on the Dutch, Flemish and Germanic section, the Italian and Spanish section, one of the Egyptian collections and of course any of the print and drawing sections in hopes of finding pastel paintings... Sadly for Jodie, most of the pastel paintings had been put away in storage, possibly because the museum staff knew she was coming! Needless to say, she was very sad to have missed the opportunity to view a room full of famed original pastel paintings, but fortunately we did find some Degas works and - fortune shone on Jodie - a small collection of Delatour's paintings! We were able to view some of her all time favourite art works, and it was awe inspiring to get an accurate idea of the grand scale of Delatour's work - he really did work almost to life scale, and in the style to which Jodie aspires!

A view of the Louvre from outside on our way to the entrance...

Looking down on one of the courtyards in the Louvre, from the upper storeys...

Some of the enormous paintings to be found in the Louvre - we think Jodie's framer might be horrified if she were to paint at this scale!!

Jodie in front of an original Degas pastel painting - yay!

Jodie in front of an original Delatour pastel painting - "La Marquise de Pompadour" - absolutely stunned to have found one of her favourite pieces on display!!

Looking at the Mona Lisa - one of the world's most overrated paintings... Now we can officially say: "been there, done that!"

PARIS - Eiffel Tower Dinner & River Cruise!

2008-05-11T02:44:00.010+08:00

After an afternoon snooze following our visit to the Musee d'Orsay, we went to our Eiffel Tower dinner and river cruise. For this, we caught a taxi into the Cityrama depot which was near the Louvre. It would have been easier if we could have met the tour at the Eiffel Tower, since that was on our doorstep, but as it were, we wound up on the lower level of a double decker bus - with an entire load of West Aussies!! It really is a small world, when you go on a dinner cruise deal and wind up with a bunch of familiar accents :)

We went up the Eiffel Tower via a lift, that goes diagonally up one of the legs of the tower - it's a strange feeling, to be moving at an angle at a rapid pace like that! Once we were up on the 1st level, where our Restaurant was (it was called Altitude 95) we had 10 minutes to look around and take some photos. Jodie was very brave and walked to the edge and even got close enough to take some photos of the city views - but it didn't last very long!!

Jodie on the Eiffel Tower before dinner - being brave in front of the ledge!

The view across Paris from the first level of the Eiffel Tower!

The dinner itself wasn't amazing, we didn't get to sit at a table by ourselves so it wasn't exactly the romantic dining experience we had hoped for... We sat at a table with four other people, one couple from Perth formerly of South Australia, and two ladies from Perth who were happily spending the money of one's wealthy husband while he worked in India... We had a very sweet aperitif (which Jodie described as a cross between Ribena and cough syrup...) and cold soup, followed by a yummy chicken dish, bottle of red, and a tiramisu-like coffee cake for dessert. The courses came and went quickly, and before we knew it we had to make our way down the Eiffel Tower to catch our boat - we opted for the lift again, but some took the stairs and actually beat us to the bottom!

For the boat cruise, we were literally queued in fenced lines very similary to those used on cattle for exporting... Jason actually chose this time to "Moo" at some of the unfortunate souls we met on the bus!! I'm not sure if they "got" it or not... Perhaps they left at the end of the evening wondering what was up with the strange man who went "moo" in the queue?

I am glad that I did not wear my really nice Opera dress for this occasion, as it was not the classy, romantic experience we had expected - and the cruise was jammed with all sorts, at all stages of their day. Those of us who were a little more dressed up looked plain silly crammed in with the sweaty thongs & t-shirt clad tourists... If we ever return to Paris, I will book a table for two at the 2nd level of the Eiffel Tower, apparently this restaurant is more expensive and exclusive - requiring a booking 3 months or more in advance - but I am sure it would also result in a more romantic evening... And I could dress up without feeling silly!

Watching the sun go down from the boat, cruising down the River Seine!

Reflections on the water as we go under one of the bridges...

The boat cruise took roughly an hour, and we are glad we did it because the view of Paris by night is stunning - there are lights aimed on all of the landmark buildings and bridges, and the reflections on the water are magical! It would have been a little nicer had the boat gone at a more leisurely pace, and there not been quite so many people crammed on all at once, but nontheless it was still beautiful to take it all in!

As we walked up the hill back to our hotel, we took this photo looking back towards the Eiffel Tower!

Jason took this interesting photo of a Carousel going 'round...

PARIS - Musee d'Orsay

2008-05-11T02:31:00.005+08:00

Jason on the Batobus, on the way to the Musee d'Orsay!

Jodie on the Batobus on her quest to find pastel paintings at the Musee d'Orsay!

The view inside the Musee d'Orsay, which is a gallery inside an old train station!

Yay! Jodie standing in front of an original Degas pastel painting!

Jason at the Batobus pier, waiting to go back to the hotel - sadly, our visit was cut short by the Grumps and the queues to the toilet! All courtesy of Jodie :-P

PARIS By Bus & Exploring Notre Dame!

2008-05-11T01:16:00.025+08:00

For the first few days in Paris, we used the bus circuits to make our way to a couple of key places. It was nice to just sit on the open upper deck and watch the buildings go by, and be thankful that we didn't have to worry about driving in Paris traffic... As Jason mentioned in an earlier post, we had issues with getting on initially because the drivers didn't recognise our exchange voucher, and we so we wasted 2 - 3 hours of our first day just trying to get to the head depot so we could exchange it there. Understandably, I was fairly... peeved... at the time wastage, and it's more than a little confusing trying to navigate the underground rat warren that is the French train system because there is no English signage or instructions over the loudspeakers. We had to catch two connecting trains to get to the depot, and halfway along our trip we had to get off the train and the two following because "someone had been hurt" as a kind passerby advised us... Either someone fell off the platform or jumped, we never found out anything further but there was a fairly lengthy wait so it was messy whatever happened... Needless to say, I am not keen to attempt the metro system again while we are here!

To anyone planning on spending a day on the top deck of the Parisian tourist circuit buses, something really important to remember - pack sunscreen, and wear it! We didn't, and I have some fairly unusual tan lines to show for it... At this time of year, it is actually quite warm and you will get burnt! Hats and sunglasses are also a necessity for travel in Europe at this time of year, I have to say. I am also thankful to my ever practical husband for buying me a serious pair of shoes for the serious amount of walking we have been doing - ladies, if you don't take practical shoes, be prepared for some fairly impractical injuries which could vary from twisted ankles on the cobblestones through to blisters...

A view of Paris from the top level of the circuit bus...

An Egyptian obelisk, a gift to Paris from the country of its origins and brought to France by a boat that had to be built around it!

A closer look at some of the elaborate carvings on one of the grand buildings we passed by...

The Arc de Triumphe, which is a monument that Napoleon built to honour France's military victories!

Many grand buildings and statues featured striking gold accents, such as this dome we passed on our bus circuit...

One of the impressive pillars on Alexander's Bridge - this bridge is reputed to be one of Paris' most beautiful, and it was built to commemorate the relationship between France and Russia. It's actually a pale blue in colour, and personally I think it looks tacky... Jason likes it, but that could be because it has cool statues on each corner :) This bridge is unique in that it is also the first bridge to cross the River Seine with a single span (ie. there are no supporting pillars in the water)

A close view of one of the key buildings we passed on our bus circuit (but the name of which we can't recall right now...)

Notre Dame

Notre Dame is every bit as imposing and gothic as we thought it would be - you don't need the museum pass to get into the cathedral itself, as we found out, but only to gain access to the towers. You still need to queue with everyone else though, as we saw on the afternoon when we were there. Unfortunately, we didn't get to go up the towers because - since half our day had been wasted already trying to get on the buses - by the time we went to the tower access point, it was already after 5pm and we had last buses to consider catching... The queue even at this time of day was quite lengthy to go up the towers, so if you plan on doing this make sure you go to Notre Dame in the morning and not the afternoon! We never found out if there were lifts or you had to go all the way up using the stairs...

Jodie outside Notre Dame!

Notre Dame inside, was absolutely breathtaking! It is difficult to believe that it was built in times when they did not have the technologies that we use in construction today, because the scale of what has been created is simply daunting! The enormous stained glass windows, gothic arches and massive paintings etc. make for an impressive circuit, but unfortunately there are a large number of people who all want to share this walk with you so if you are hoping for an enduring memory of peace and being brought closer to god, sadly you won't find it here... In most museums and galleries in Paris, there are rules concerning the use of flash photography - which is DON'T - unfortunately, most tourists are idiots and ignore this and if you have epilepsy it's best to avoid all tourist hot spots such as this... The reason for not using flash photography, is that all forms of art are photo-sensitive to some degree, and usually more so with the passage of time. In laymans terms, the more harsh light they are exposed to, the more likely and rapidly they will fade and deteriorate. So please don't use your flashes! Believe it or not, you will actually get better and less washed out photos by going sans flash...

Jason inside Notre Dame!

PARIS By Night

2008-05-11T01:10:00.006+08:00

As promised here's some photos from the last few days.

Here's the Eiffel Tower by night, taken from the Trocadero.

And another at the turn of the hour when the flashing lights start.

The famous pyramid entrance of the Louvre.

The French Parliament

PARIS - Looking Around!

2008-05-08T23:17:00.002+08:00

We've spent the last couple of days exploring Paris and overdosing on cheese. Everyone talks about how expensive Paris is, and I guess it's a little on the pricey side, but it's not criminally expensive. It's a bit like eating at good quality restaurants in Perth.

We got some great photos of the Eiffel Tower at midnight and Paris is vibrant and alive at the late hours of the night.

We survived the Paris underground and successfully navigated the maze of poorly signposted tunnels to validate our hop on-hop off bus passes. It would have been much easier just to buy them here, than to have to go into the main office to get the exchange voucher accepted. The drivers are supposed to exchange them, but apparently not all of them know that.

In any case, the Batobus (the river bus) is a much easier way to get around most of the tourist sites in Paris.

We visited an art museum today and Jodie got some great pictures of pastel art, but the public conveniences at the gallery left a lot to be desired. Two toilets between six levels of art gallery equals frustratingly long lines. Our recommendation if you are visiting the Musee D'Orsay, is to go, before you go...

We'll post lots of photos soon. Sooooo much to see. so much cheap cheese to eat, so little time.

PARIS - The Eiffel Tower!

2008-05-07T01:42:00.016+08:00

After settling into our hotel room, we decided to spend the morning exploring - and since a view of the Eiffel Tower was literally metres away, we naturally gravitated in that direction... We were actually really surprised by how close we were to the Maritime Museum and the grand walk down the Champ de Mars towards the tower itself. A word to the wise - there are literally dozens of souvenir salesmen scattered from the top of the hill to the tower itself, trying to sell miniature towers, prints, postcards etc. but don't feel intimidated to buy :)

Jason thought he had filled his quota of stairs for the month...

Getting closer...

You can see some of the gardens behind Jason...

The stairs Jason had to walk up and down, just to give his already burning muscles something else to complain about... (He's feeling a bit sore and sorry for himself after all our stairs and mountaineering in Switzerland!!)

Looking back up the hill over the Champ de Mars - beautiful!

Getting closer...

The Eiffel Tower is literally enormous, both of us were surprised by the scale of this structure - we knew it was big, but didn't think it was this big!!

Jodie was a little paranoid that some Chinese tourist might decide to spit from one of the balconies overhead...

Jason feared neither Chinese tourist nor overfed pigeon...

The postcard shot!

Just to prove we were really here!

At the opposite end of the Eiffel Tower is a large monument created by a French artist promoting peace... We were both hugely disappointed to find that one of the enormous etched glass plates on the right had been smashed...

We had lunch at a little brasserie at the bottom end of the Champ de Mars in a little side street. Jason ordered a meat pie for entree and steak for mains (how original...) and wound up with a meat pate and the very Aussie steak and chips. He washed it all down with a French beer whose name we forget, but apparently it was pretty good!! I had the roast special (if it had been any rarer it would have moo'd and sauntered out the door...) and a small cheese plate for dessert with a glass of French red. The cheese was the high point of my day, those of you who know me well understand my obsession with blue cheese and I was not disappointed!!

We headed back up the Champ de Mars to our hotel, with a brief stopover on the way to inspect Parisian public toilets (no stainless steel squats at the base of the Eiffel Tower, everybody! Officially safe to go, and you don't have to pay the people at the counter before you do - they are there to sell you softer loo paper... Go figure...) My darling hubby bought me an icecream and by the time we reached our hotel it was snoozing time...

Right now, we are sprawled on the bed with the window open and CNN news (the only English speaking channel... *sigh*) some very nice French red and plans to do it all again as soon as it gets dark!!

PARIS - Our Little Bourgeoisie Hotel :)

2008-05-07T01:27:00.010+08:00

After a bit of a false start in Paris, where we had a bit of a mix up with the hotel room, we are now nestled in a cozy little boutique hotel, complete with gold gilt trimmings, antique furniture, marble bathroom and impressionist prints. It's all very over the top, but we're really loving it.

We're right next to the maritime museum and some lovely gardens, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. We're a lazy 10 minute walk from the Eiffel tower which is awesome.

Two big thumbs up to Tammy from Escape Travel for sorting out the mix up with the old hotel. Everything worked out perfectly in the end.

We got out and about around town a bit today and had a nice lovely nanna nap this afternoon. We'll post seperately about our little wander through Paris.

To Paris By Train!

2008-05-06T14:12:00.005+08:00

It's getting easier and easier to make our way using the train systems in Europe, the signage is good and there are always people who speak passable English and are very willing to point you in the right direction! Have to say, the Swiss are very friendly and helpful people and we would highly recommend Switzerland as a wonderful country to visit!

The train station at Lucerne - the train on the right is the one we caught to Lausanne before transferring to the train that took us to Paris :)

Jason - looking keen as mustard to get into his First Class seat and have a coffee!

Excited about Paris!!

Jason - reading up!!

Swiss countryside...

The view of the countryside as we slowed down just outside of Lausanne - if you look carefully, you can see a hazy view of mountains across the water!! What a spectacular place to live!!

You can just see a cruise ship steaming along off the coast...

I didn't take any photos on the Lausanne to Paris train trip, the First Class seats were a little bit smaller so I stowed my backpack elsewhere - but I feel it must be said, I was shocked to discover that the public toilets at Lausanne were very reminiscent of Chinese sqauts!! I opted to wait until I was back on the train, because when I walked into the ladies I was met by stainless steel pans in the floor, and let me tell you, they were far from stainless...!!! *lol*

Leaving Lucerne

2008-05-05T05:00:00.001+08:00

It's been a couple of action packed days as you would have seen by Jodie's posts and wide array of photos. My thighs are burning after spending a day climbing and decending staircases all through Lucerne.

Lucerne is a beautiful city, though it has a large vertical component to it, when you are walking around.

It's a fairly easy city to find your way around, and most of the locals speak English very well, and are very friendly and eager to help. The public transport system is easy to use, with all of the favourite tourist stops spoken in English on the train or busses PA system.

Our hotel was great and very close to the train station and a good basis for exploring Lucerne. A short walk to the old part of the city, and right near the main bus stop. The hotel staff were very helpful, even helping us try to sort our some dramas with hotel transfers in Paris. Will have to wait and see till we arrive tomorrow to see if we've been successful. Two thumbs up for the Waldstätterhof Hotel. Only downside is the restaurant doesn't serve alcohol, but that was probably a good thing really.

We had an unexpected bonus in getting up to the snow today. The fare to the top of the mountain was pretty high (about 40 Euros), but well worth it for Jodie to see snow for the first time. I'm glad I spent the money on a good set of boots, and I'm sure Jodie appreciated the "sensible shoes" that we bought, even if they have got some browny yellowy bits on them.

We've got an early start tomorrow as we head off towards France. Camera's are charged and I'm sure we'll get some great photo's of the scenery as we steam through eastern France.

Time to hit the sack.