Belgium

Our Beligian adventure was only meant to include Bruges, but owing to some confusion at a train station in Brussels, we managed to see a fair bit of the country en route. My in-depth observations from an afternoon of meandering: the country is flat, bicycles are prevalent, and it's easy to find your way again if you're prepared to spend some time waiting at a deserted rural train station that smells of blood and bone.

Bruges was full of two groups of people that didn't look much like us: aged pensioners, and school kids with their note books at the ready (back in my day, we did history the hard way - with chalk, illustrated textbooks and anonymous spit-balls).

The sheer quantity of people around made it nearly impossible to see anything touristy without being bumped into by pimply-faced teenagers eating frites or those motorised old-timer mobiles, so I found myself wandering the back streets and parks, such as the above, a fair bit. We took a boat ride down the canals and ate chocolates and drank beer, and put up with the German socks-and-sandles brigade we were sharing the B&B with. It was nice.

London

We hit the wall in London, and decided to cut the trip short by about 6 weeks. So, we'll be back there on the 24th of June to find work and somewhere to live. I might get my camera out of my bag then, because looking through the viewfinder, I can't see that I took any pictures there.

It could be a dangerous place to live. On the Thursday we arrived, there were five gigs I wanted to see. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn't know where any of the venues were, and I got all self-conscious about my "just stepped out of a Kathmandu catalogue" look, which the local hipsters would no doubt see as reason enough to smash a beer glass on my forehead and steal my trainers.

We reunited with one half of our Berlin crew (of two. Thanks Jane) as well as John and Bec and John's mum, with whom we scraped into second place in the local pub's trivia contest, and saw Lucy "Princess Di" McFadden and her man, Andrew, for a roast and several pints. No pictures, only the memories and the memories of hangovers.

And we braved Terminal 5 at Heathrow and...no bags were lost.

France

This is the part of the blog in which I attempt to keep expressions like "cheese/garlic-eating surrender-monkey" to a minimum. It could be hard, but here goes...

We had two weeks in Paris to begin with, in an apartment at the pointy bit of one of those French apartment buildings. I don't have a photo, but you know what I mean, the apartment at the top where the roof starts to angle in. Perfect for little Frenchmen stunted by years of passive smoking from Mum's cigarillos, but occassionally dangerous if you happen to be this side of five foot tall.

We visited the local market early in the piece and stocked the fridge with plenty of cheese and vegetables and other things massively subsidised by the European Union. This was a welcome change to the now customary trip to the supermarket for just enough packet pasta to last until we have to pack our bags again. We also nailed an alarming number of three-course meals in the city's restaurants, largely made possible by the French menu-reading skills of Bron's friend from school, John and his partner, Bec, who paid us a visit from London.

On one particularly frenetic day of tourism, we visited Versaille and the Eiffel Tower with John and Bec. Here are the obligatory snaps:

Actually, before I go on, I should tell you about our little run-in with the gardener-extraordinaire and former male stripper, Jamie Durie. Well there's not too much to it, really - we were walking in the palace grounds and heard some whiney accent, looked up, and there was the tanned midget generously carrying his crew's camera tripod. Can anyone tell me whether they've seen a special episode of "Backyard Blitz" in which Jurie gets the bobcat out and replaces the manicured grandeur of Versaille with a patio and a Japanese water feature?

But I digress...

John and Bec graciously agreed to photograph us several times in front of this hulking brown metail thing, but I think I'll need to spend some time in photoshop adding a bit more light to the sky and erasing a few busloads of fellow tourists.

I manage to offend our temporary neighbours back at the apartment. We had some mail sent to us there - some train tickets and a birthday card for Bron from my Mum and Dad. Well, I was getting a bit eager to see that the goods had arrived, and reached into the locked mail box behind the main entrance door one day. I just assumed that this was fair game. But no, a housekeeper is employed to take mail from this locked box once a day and place it in individual mail boxes nearby, as I later found out. As I was fossicking through the now-retrieved mail, an old lady neighbour started looking concerned at this grave incursion into her private life and wagged her finger in my face, uttering the words "faux pas". I got the meaning of that. Word travelled fast through the apartment, and soon everyone was upbraiding me for this grande faux pas. The bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

My beloved former work colleagues gave Bron and I Paris musuem passes as a going-away present, and we loaded up on Paris culture with these lucrative bits of cardboard. Well, Bron did. I, meanwhile, went for a long bus journey through the suburbs to find the aerospace museum, to look at the Corcorde:


We also went to the ballet for Bron's birthday. It happened to the be the last night for some celebrated dancer, who, despite stacking it during the performance, received an extended round of applause at the end. Which he proceeded to milk for a further twenty-five minutes. Just as the curtain was falling, it rose again, and a further fifteen minutes of applause followed. By this stage, I was trying to find a match to set the smoke alarms off. On he went. It was about midnight by the time we ate that night.

After Paris, we headed down to Aix-en-Provence for a few days of country air. While I could pontificate about the beauty of provincial France, you have "Getaway" for that purpose, so I will instead bore you with the knowledge that I discovered the "macro" setting on my camera and spent a lot of timing taking pictures of flowers, like this:


We took a day trip to Marseille and were suitably impressed with the architecture, such as:


As we prepared to fly from Marseille to London, we got a taste of the long-established Britain-France national insult trading contest. In the departure lounge, the French informed us that our plane was delayed due to "UK air regulations". Okay, no worries, I've got some euros to blow on a stinking cup of Nescafe, I thought. After we eventually boarded the plane, the British crew apologised for the hold-up, citing "today's French air traffic controller's strike". Who to believe? I'm going with the Brits.

Feeding time at the zoo

(l-r: B. Jennings, half of Berlin, E. Anderson, A. Cole. Photo: J. Anderson)

(thanks for hanging out with us, Eliza and Jane!)

Germany

I'm a rail nerd, which is not surprising news to many of you reading this. At uni, I wrote my thesis about trains, and I've spent an alarming amount of my quiet time in recent years thinking of things like: where would you put a monorail in Melbourne? and wouldn't it be cool if there was a high-speed train between Melbourne and Sydney that took 3 hours one-way? You know, that sort of stuff.

European trains haven't helped diminish this affliction. Our first high-speed, highly efficient, highly-catered, highly-comfortable trip was from Zurich to Munich, then after a few days there we went to Berlin, then later, from Berlin to Paris. It all cost a bomb, but as someone who paid to see Bon Jovi from the front row would say, it was worth it.

Our Munich adventure involved a lot of wurst and potatoes done in several ways. The first white asparagus of the season was on sale almost everywhere and I had some of that too, in a soup. And roast pork with potato dumplings. And apple strudel. Oh yes, and beers.

That was all great, but not as great as what we saw when the weather turned sunny on the Sunday afternoon we were there. We thought: nice day, big park, why don't we enjoy these two things? So did much of Munich. Including the middle-aged nudists. One of whom strutted on the gravel walkway for close to an hour making noises with his todger by slapping it against his thighs. I don't have any photos, only painful memories.

There are some visually appealing things in Munich though, like this building that I forget the name of. It was in the complex that King Ludwig's mob called home for a while:


Shortly thereafter, we went to Berlin. On the first day, we took a free tour of the city that went for four hours, was fascinatingly and entertainingly done by a very funny guy from Liverpool or Birmingham or somewhere, and ended up costing us quite a few euros in guilty tips.

We also saw that "cupola" on top of the Bundestag. You are supposed to be able to see down into the chambers of parliament from the top - you know, democracy and transparency and all that. But you can't, which made me think that Norman Foster was being a smart-arse.


Obviously, it's not all fun-filled sight-seeing in Berlin. We went to the holocaust memorial; most people walking through the rooms, looking at the exhibits and listening to the stories, were either in tears or near to it, myself included.

We stayed in the former East Berlin, among many potent built reminders that the book of Communist architectural glory is very thin indeed. Look at this as an example of how to perfectly complement a charming cityscape:


What is that concrete dildo doing in the background?

Switzerland

Our original plans involved flying out of Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong to Paris, via Dubai. Drawing this journey on a map, it starts to look a bit like that infamous "Knowledge Nation" diagram of Kim Beazley's a few years ago (well, a bit). So we canned the idea, smiled at the helpful Emirates sales assistant, changed our flights, handed over some extra dollars and flew to...Switzerland.


Before we got to Switzerland, we spent just under a day in Dubai, mostly in an air-conditioned mall. The highlights of the mall included prayers broadcast over the loud-speaker, which didn't seem to halt the furious commerce taking place, and the most kebab-laden food court I have even seen. Next time, we'll probably spend some time outdoors.

We got to Zurich and wandered the cobble-stone streets for a few days, marvelling at such novelties as cold air and rice-free food. I bought a watch, Bron bought some Swiss Army picnic cups (the "Swiss Army" tag applies to everything from USB sticks to home heating, but the cups would be genuinely useful in a combat situation...one lobbed like a grenade would take down a platoon of French soldiers no troubles).

In Lucerne, we scaled Mt Pilatus with some assistance from two cable cars. There's a stop halfway, some of which is depicted in the photo above. Then, as the serious business of reaching the peak is about to begin, you are led into a heavy-duty steel box with thicker cables and a guide who is dressed like a model from a Kathmandu winter catalogue. At the top, it's spectacular:

Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

There's really not that much to write about for this part of the journey: 11 days of lying around in truly horrible settings such as the above, sipping cocktails and Carlsbergs, and sleeping properly for the first time in God knows how long, aided by the soothing hum of the diesel generator. We ate just about everything on the resort's menu, and read about a million books, all big ones too.

Here's another photo:


And when we left, Bron made friends with some genteel old character at the Kota Bahru airport: