Sunday, October 14, 2007

winding down

Back in LA after our west-coast tour, we are pretty much taking things easy with my friends.
Of course, have collected quite a few wines from some interesting California regions, so must dedicate some time to their demise.

The tour was a road trip to Oregon to stay with K's aunt and uncle and their kids.
The first half was a lightning trip through the national parks of CA, the second half took in all the coast from the level of Eugene down to LA.

It's hard to do justice to those parks with a camera.
K's favourite was probably Death Valley with its austere rock and desert, beautiful ochre colours, and space.
Sunrise and sunsets can be very magical in such places, one morning we waited for about 2 cold hours for the former to photograph the rocks and mountains in the early light.
I am, of course, very partial to pine forests -- probably some childhood affinity.
The huge trees in Sequoia, the vistas of Yosemite, and the pure air of the high grounds in these and various state parks are all very intoxicating for me.

In southern Oregon (around Grant's Pass) Rhonda and Steve took us on two great trips: a beyond-steep four-wheel track up to a fire lookout on a local mountain; and the beautiful and well-known Crater Lake.
The latter was in about 3 inches of snow, Kylie's first experience with such.
[This brings to mind an "animal planet" show about elephants' mating -- very impressive of course (watched in Romania hotel with the kids etc on the trip north) -- which Sarah later inadvertently described as her "first experience with elephants" to the amusement of all.]
That gave a still beauty to all the photos, that made up for the lack of blue sky (like the Blue Lake in Mt Gambier, it needs a little help).
S&R also made us very welcome, whilst the kids Katie and Zeke kept us well entertained.

Leaving there we went on a "Jimgrimage" to Eugene -- 2170 Elk Ave where he used to live.
Still borders the National Forest, but the house is much altered -- the basement was vaguely recognisable, but not even the back slope up the hill was visible anymore.
Still, one does these things.
The road to the coast took us to the sea lion cave -- great cave, but the bastards were out fishing. Saw a couple of flippers about 100m out to sea.

The good coastal scenery becomes more accessible further south, and then all down the CA coast to well below San Francisco is spectacular cliffs, craggs, big rocks and blue swell.
SF was a break in three ways: one day in Napa finding there are indeed some reasonable CA wines that are even "affordable" at least at the current exchange (90c, wow!); one day in SF, cable cars and food, surprisingly enjoyable and not at all oppressively peopled; and two nights at Toni and Paul's place in Palo Alto.
Toni is a friend from when she visited with her Dad (Stanley Deser) when I was at Adelaide Uni.
We had a geat stay in their beautiful house -- the guest room was really a luxury penthouse suite!
Paul is working at google, so -- prepare to be jealous! -- we had an hour or two tour of google to see what goes on there.
[Prepare for a rant if I can work up the energy, but -- at least on the surface -- google is a meritocracy that takes the angle that if its employees are happy then they will stay there and work well, and they very actively implement structures to
Pretty trivial, but I can name certain workplaces where this would seem to be considered heresy.
Anyway, a discussion and comparison of the two approaches could prove quite enlightening at some point.]
Toni also took us to a good winery called Ridge in the hills, and they then took us to a wonderful "eclectic modern Indian" restaurant where the food really was exceptionally good.

So, totally spoiled for camping!
We thought to take two nights to get back to LA but just took the one, and here we are.
This has run on enough... I did the "newsy" bit this time, so left out all the silly stuff like: K falling on her bumb on the iced road at Crater Lake; getting lost on bad roads in Death Valley; bears in Yosemite; pulling down the tent in the morning with temperature of 24F.
I'll spare you all the winery descriptions too...

Friday, September 28, 2007

Italy, Romania and some USA

We last left you in Italy, trying desperately to drink all of our wine! We managed to meet up with Sarah and Alex, and so the final total was 15 bottles of wine and a bottle of whiskey. We decided to post four of the bottles back to Australia, huge mistake! The whole process took around 4 hours, and involved 3 different post offices. We ended up having to actually go to the Port to be able to send a parcel by seamail! The remainder of the wine went in Sarah's bag, and our two bags. It actually survived the flights and was enjoyed by all during the Romanian time.

Our time in Romania was wonderful. We arrived about 5 days before the wedding, so we had time to take a short trip to Sinaia to visit a couple of castles that were built in the late 19th centurary. We also visited various Romanian relatives, and were thourougly fed the whole time we were there! The wedding was very enjoyable, and not too long, even for an Orthodox wedding! Naturally, the amound of food was incredible, four full plates of food for each person, and then the option of soup at 4am. Weddings in Romania very rarely finish before 6am, but we didn't last that long and went home around 4am. Ana of course looked stunning and Pete looked great too!

After the wedding us 'young' people travelled up to Suceava to look at the painted monastaries. The monastaries were painted in the late 15th Centurary, as a way of introducing the bible stories to the all of the population. Since Orthodox churches are often very small, not many people could be in the church to listen to the mass, so the outside of these monastaries are painted as well as the inside. The next day Jim and I headed out alone on a bus to go through the Carpathian mountains, while the others went to Bran (Dracula's Castle). Despite warnings that we would be mugged or killed, we found the whole process very straightfoward, and enjoyed ourselves immensly. We spent the night at Lacu Rusu (Red Lake) which you reach by driving through some of the most amazing gorges I have ever seen. The lake was formed after an earthquake caused a damning of the river, so the lake has bits of tree trunks sticking out of it, very interesting! We then got a bus down to Brasov and met up with the rest of the group to return to Bucharest.

We are now in the USA and are heading out from LA in about an hour. We are planning to go through the National Parks between here and Oregon. Death Valley today, then Sequoia and Yosemite. A few days in Oregon, returning to LA via the coast (visiting a couple of Jim's friends on the way), a few more days in LA, and then home!

Of course, the most important part of our upcoming journey is to find somewhere to watch Port win the Grand Final!!

Friday, September 7, 2007

Italy (still)

Well, we are still travelling around Italy. The camping here is very different to France, where we found lots of small camping grounds that were quite cheap. In Italy, however, it is two to three times the price. The grounds are tourist traps - full of swimming pools and tennis courts - all very nice if you like that sort of thing but we only want a shower (which you may have to pay extra for!). The fact that you may have to pay for a shower isn't disclosed in the price schedule - on my birthday we got told a price and then set up the tent, only then were we told about the extra price for showers. The woman was very rude and said that if we didn't like it, we could go somewhere else, so I lost my temper and we went to the next place. Poor Jim was very tired by the time we found the next ground and set the tent up again. Ironically, the second place was more expensive; it was my birthday, and I could cut off my nose to spite my face if I wanted to!

Yep, actually K saved us from having 6 showers each, so was very good choice to move...
OK, back to our lectures on The Real Europe.
Italy, on the other hand, has a very peculiar metric structure that we have discovered by driving.
For example, consider a trip back to Assisi from Gubbio.
At one point we followed the sign to A, 12kms.
Around the corner was the sign to A, 17 kms with another town 7 km away in the same direction.
When we got to that town (which was indeed 7 kms away), we found the sign to A, 16 kms.
Well, surely it all works out, probably we have a very strange choice of local coordinates and are not using an invariant distance...
This experience was far from unusual.
The other amusing thing is the directional dependence.
One can often only find the appropriate sign by approaching the intersection from all possible directions!
One exception is if there is a tree at the intersection -- in that case the sign will certainly be behind the tree if one can see it at all!

OK, better go -- will have to put off my schtick for the next time. We have 21 bottles of wine, and one bottle of whiskey to drink before leaving for Romania in 3 days -- hoping to meet up with Sarah and Alex!!

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Italy

Hi all!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but internet cafes are hard to find in Europe, and they are expensive - sometimes as much as 3 euros for 15 minutes.

We travelled quite extensively around France. We managed to see most of the regions in our turist book. Our routine every morning was to first pack up the tent if we were moving campsite, then sit in the car and decide where we were going for the day. The next task was to find a baker (boulangerie) and a butcher (chacuterie) - fresh bread and cold meats (and cheese when we could find it) for lunch. It is very important to do this early in the morning because everything shuts for lunch from around 12 to around 3 - so if you don't have food you can only eat at an expensivish take away shop. Our routine has been similar in Italy, the only difference being the type of bread, cheese and meat!

We spent the night of Jim's birthday in Torino with his friend Anna (and her husband Ricardo). It was very nice to see Anna again after she visited Australia last year; she was very excited to discover that it was Jim's birthday, she searched for candles and did indeed find the correct number. I think we nearly set the fire alarm off when he blew them out!

My turn to type apparewntly... sorry about the messy typing...
Well, another interesting thing about france is its complicated topology: multiply connected since every town has a point ''centre ville'' inside; and singular as can be deduced by the sign pointing to ''toutes directions''.
This has caused durprisingly few problems.
In fact, getting around F was great, perhaps I felt comfortable after the weeks of cycling.
Even the driving was easyish once you get used to the mm-scale calculations at 50-130 kph.
Italy is a bit more confusing to us so far.
Still, wonderful.
Beautiful little towns, and Amazing biggies like Florence.
Anyway, K's back and we're out of time, next time tell you about my schtick for the wedding speech... oh, and ---- blaarg!

We have a minute left on the machine - so we will email next time! Love you all!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

France

Sorry about the lack of updates - Internet cafes are a little hard to find around here. Jim and I met up easily in Nice; he called me the night before so we both knew about the flight changes. We picked up our car and headed out into the wide world of France.

We have done a lot of travelling in the last week and a half. It takes foverever and a day to get anywhere in France if you are not travelling by the toll roads. The first day we drove down past Cannes to look at the beaches and it took about 3 hours to travel the 20km back to St-Laurent-du-Var. We also drove through the Alpes along some of the routes that Jim cycled - a very very long process since the average speed is about 50km an hour.

The places we have stayed have been very beautiful. We have been trying to stay in little villages instead of the bigger towns - there aren't as many people around as there was earlier in August. We have been very good tourists - we have spent a lot of time walking around Medieval and Roman villages. We have tasted a lot of French wine - I'm not sure that we are super impressed with the wine - Jim prefers the Barossa variety.

French geography has become a bit of a pig's breakfast. Obviously it was rather easier in the 12-14 siecle -- which incidentally is when most of the houses were built. Certainly when most of the plumbing was put in -- before the invention of the toilet! So anyway, in those days it sems France was split between two saints, Les and Des. Lots of places are identified by which body part remains there -- Les Dentelles, eg. Since then obviously a lot of big players have come on the scene: A. Louer and A. Vendre just to name two. Still, we are struggling through.

Indeed, the wine is a little thin compared to what we are used to. Still, it has been fun to try the different regions and to see differences. Cotes du Rhone (post L&D) is very similar to Braossa experience -- tasting is free etc. Wine is in the GSM/9 Popes style: majority grenache and mainly rest shiraz. Bordeaux is rather wanky. You have to pay for tasting typically, and book to go to a Chateau. They only taste a couple of their selection. If you don't like it you have not much to go on. They don't taste their "big" wines. In between these are smaller regions like Cahors and Languedoc. Still, huge amounts of vineyards. These are more fun in the sense that the people are more interesting and typically know more about the wine.

Love to all,

Kylie & Jim

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Frankfurt

The summer school finished yesterday morning and I came to Frankfurt today. The free bus from Marktoberdorf left at 5:45 am this morning - so I had an early start. My flight wasn't scheduled until 5pm, but since everybody I knew was going on the bus, it seemed like a better prospect than spending the day alone in Marktoberdorf and getting a train in the afternoon.

German efficiency won out howeverr, I managed to change my flight to 10am, so no waiting at the airport. I also managed to change my Nice flight tomorrow, I originally was arriving at 5pm, so about 5 hours after Jim (he is picking up the car at the airport). I will now arrive at 10am, so hopefully I will be able to find both the car rental place, and him, since I have no way of letting him know my flight changed (unless he checks our email account, or he gets my ESP messages and calls me).

I wish I had investigated this hostel a little better before making a non-refundable booking. While it is very close to the train station (so $3 euro to get to the airport instead of $25 for a taxi), it is in the middle of the red light district; the main city district is a about a 5 minute walk, so the same proximity between Hinley Street and Rundle Mall. I think Germans must be a lot more accepting about that type of thing than Australians - the ads for the 'services' offered next door are quite explicit. I'm really glad that I'm only staying overnight, and that I won't have the whole day here tomorrow like I had originally planned with the flight. On the plus side, breakfast is free!

Love to all,

Kylie

Edit: Internet access might be more difficult from now on, so don't panic if I don't immediately respond to an email. If you need to contact me urgently, just send an SMS (or call - but SMS would be better).

Friday, August 10, 2007

Marktoberdorf

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but I have been busy at the Marktoberdorf Summer School. As I said, the beer here is quite good, and it is free which is a very good quality to have in a beer.

The food is okay, but is very repetitive. I think the cook has a formula of good food, and he is sticking to it. Every night we have had a watery salty soup with meat in it; it was very nice the first night, but now at night number 10 it isn't so good. On Friday we had individual roast pork - all served with a massive knife poking out. A very original way of serving a roast, I might try it the next time I make one.

The excursion for the School was held yesterday; they went climbing in the Alps. Unfortunately, they didn't have an easy version (it was an 8 hour trek), so I stayed behind and prepared the talk I gave today. Missing out has made me more determined to see the French side of the Alps because the pictures people bought back were lovely.

Thanks for all of the comments and email. It is nice to know that people are reading it, and you are all safe.

4 more sleeps till I see Jim again!

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Today's post bought to you by Jim, it is short due to his hate of French keyboards:

currently in vaison la romaine tourist hell leaving tomorrow
has been eventful but fun so far, some hard work and more to come but glad to be on the road again
mountains very beautiful
came here for cote du rhone: spent yesterdqy wine tasting
similar to barossa
    love to peter and sarah etc

    Thursday, August 2, 2007

    Germany

    Firstly, Jim rang me on Monday, and he is safe. He said he will try and email me later this week to let me know how and where he got his bike, since telling me over the phone would have been very expensive.

    On my last night in Sweden I met up with Wuge, and met his wife and son. The most important piece of news for those of you who know Wuge is that his hair is now normal - no long curly bits - just a normal mans haircut. We didn't chat for long since we were meeting up in the train station at Stockholm before he got his train home - but he is well and his wife is very lovely. Arvid is a very cute little boy who would get along well with Max (a little boy of one our work collegues) because thez both adore trains.

    I am now in Germany at the Marktoberdorf Summer School. As promised by Brendan, there is indeed a lot of German beer, and I have tasted several kinds already. I have also had five hours of lectures today which were all quite interesting. Ironically, the girl I am sharing a room with is from Romania, so we have been chatting about what I should see when we get there. We are staying in a high school boarding house which is a little odd - the beds are in small shelves - I think some of the taller men here are not very comfortable since even I can reach both ends of my shelf at the same time.

    Stay in touch!

    Saturday, July 28, 2007

    Sweden, part 2

    Marie has headed off to the north of Sweden for the weekend, leaving me to explore Stockholm on my own. Stockholm is hosting a tall ships race over the next week or so. As far as I can tell, a tall ship is a sailing ship with very large masts, with about 30 crew each. I had great plans for yesterday, which included heading down to the Quay to watch the 'tall ships' come in for the race starting on Tuesday. Unfortunately, a big storm also came in yesterday, so I decided to stay at home and enjoy watching the rain from Marie's balcony - a pity I wasn't sitting in Australia watching the rain.

    The weather has cleared up today, so I again plan to go and see the tall ships. I think there is an Australian competitor; I was watching the Swedish news last night, and I think the news reader said Australia and I'm pretty sure I saw our flag - however, since the news was in Swedish I only have a vague idea as to what the newsreader said.

    I haven't heard from Jim yet, which was worrying me slightly, until I remembered to check to see if he had used his credit card. Last night he was at a rest stop in Choranche, which is about 230km from Geneva. I assume that he has therefore gotten a bike and is on his way to Nice.