The Comet

Ah the countryside. After 10 weeks of basically being in cities, followed by 5 days of London city madness, we have escaped to the great outdoors courtesy of our bright orange spaceship, Comet.

 

Meet Comet, our house and wheels.

 

 

London was excellent. We went primarily to see bro-in-law Darian do the London marathon, which he did much to our admiration cos by golly it looked hard. So we got to hang out with him and my big sister Jane for longer than nearly ever. We managed to book rooms not only in the same hotel but three doors apart which was quite incredible, and made for a fun time. And as a bonus we also got to see my friend Katrina who I hadn't seen for years, so it was a good sociable time.

 

Run, Forest, run.

 

We charged through the National gallery but passed up the others, had perfect weather for a river side stroll watching the buskers, went shopping unsuccessfully, wandered St James' park, photographed Westminster and Big Ben, remembered the thrills of rushing along the underground, ate delicious Indian food, Mexican, English breakfasts, bad coffee, expensive and disappointing beer, and generally spent shit loads.

 

No Kews here ha ha ha ha ha

 

Best bit may have been our trip to Kew gardens. Another perfect day of sunshine and warmth (very nearly shorts weather) with spring flowers, green green grass and stupendous glasshouses.

 

Springy

 

 

The we bade farewell to busy, crazy, dirty London Town and hit the road. First stop, the New Forest, with lots of wandering wild ponies, lovely villages and streams, and greenness.

 

Then on to Dartmoor, down through Cornwall to Land's End, and up along the coast to Exmoor forest where we are now.

 

One drawback of being in the Comet (that's the van's official name by the way - it's written on the side) is we are on mobile broadband, not wifi, so blogging will be impacted (hence the ages since the last). The campground we are in now has wifi so that explains this post.

 

And I can't be bothered to type more so I'll put on lots of pictures and let them do the work.

 

Some rocks

 

Wildlife

 

The village of.... Beer! Really!

 

St Ives. Didn't meet anyone.

 

Um, a churchyard on the Cornish coast.

 

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

 

It's gotten a bit chilly, no shorts as yet, but we have each been running so those legs can't be too far from being unleashed on the world.

 

Toodle pip.

 

Peeeeep! Half-time.

Well that's it for continental Europe. Ten and a bit weeks of snow, trains, hotels, food, walking, packing, beer, umpteen languages, a gazillion photos, and lots and lots of churches, galleries and beautiful sights.

 

Tomorrow we bus to London for, well, probably more of the same, except swap snow for spring flowers and languages for regional accents.

 

 

We had another excellent and fun dinner tonight of local treats, and we got to talking about the best we had so far. So;

 

Florence: cheesy gnocchi, vegetable soup, braised rabbit, beef casserole, white wine, Red wine, bread. Super, super, yum. Outside, near a church, in a big square. Sunny, cold wind.

 

 

 

Prague: sausages cooked in dark beer, quite caramelised. Stunningly delicious. A special Easter beer and a seasonal dark beer. Warm indoors, snow outside. Funny waiter who explained that in the Czech Republic women drink dark beer to make their breasts bigger.

 

 

 

Altusreid (Germany): home cooked everything. Quinoa salad, beautiful cheeses, organic beer, an Indian feast, spatzle, pretzels, and even beer champagne. Oh my goodness we ate well.

 

(No photos available. Oops. Too busy eating.)

 

 

So yeah, stuffed ourselves silly really.

 

Actually, speaking of stuffing oneself, the BIGGEST meal, and a near contender for top three, was in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. Look at it:

 

I feel fat just looking at it. Sausage, potato pancakes, spinach and cream, and giant potato pancake filled with goulash. Oh my god it was good. And pilsner Urquell and local dark beer.

 

So thanks mainland, see you in a month or so.

 

Danke Schon

It's been a (long) while...

This has been started and not finished or posted a few times, and now it has to cover the last couple of weeks or more, so it will be a bit sketchy. I'm sure you'll cope.

 

Don't ask me, I'm not German.

After our brief stay in Nuremberg we made our way down to Munich, where the best bit was seeing my cousin Chris for the first time in a million years and meeting Lyma.

Thank you so much for taking us out twice, it was great to see you both. And the kings pancake was delicious.

 

 

Munich has some great buildings and a fantastic food market. And a huge water park!! Over 10 water slides, outdoor heated pool, outdoor spas, sunlamps, massive indoor pool and much, much more. We felt rather cultured out so an afternoon spent on water slides was excellent fun. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed on the super fastest 72 km/hr one due to not being able to remove my necklace. Stupid rules. Might have saved me an injury though...

 

 

 

We also went to the Hunting and Fishing Museum. It had incredible guns (including a 273cm monster), old fly fishing gear, crossbows, bizarre stuffed animals (see above) and lots and lots of antlers. Pretty fun place.

 

Castle-y. *

Then it was off to Kempten in Bavaria for some home comforts thanks to the wonderful Thomas, Gila, Elke and Franz.

 

We drank delicious beer, ate fabulous food, visited a huge lake that borders Germany, Austria and Switzerland, popped across the border and went cross country skiing, visited castles, experienced the pleasures of a German sauna and generally had an excellent time. And we even eventually got to see the seemingly mythical mountains after days and days of cloud.

 

Skiing in Austria, as you do.

 

 

Jo de cologne.

So next it was up and up and up to Dusseldorf, with a side trip to Cologne. It's a super train ride along the Rhine, we wished we could get off and ride bikes along it. Next time.

 

Dusseldorf had some pretty funky buildings, and Cologne had a massive cathedral, but best of all Dusseldorf had Che and Eva. And Altbier.

 

It's a brilliant method for service they have in Dusseldorf, basically the waiters just bring around trays of beer brewed on site and plonk it in front of you unless you say no. They mark your coaster with the number of drinks and eventually you pay the man and leave. No need to get out of your seat or make any decisions at all. Splendid.

 

 

 

 

And now we are just leaving Amsterdam, where we headed after Dusseldorf. Amsterdam is nuts.

 

 

Quite the beer list.

 

Bikes and canals, a heady mix.

Beautiful, free, busy, old, funky, smelly (in a good way), sexy Amsterdam.

 

"Interesting" does not do it justice.

 

So many bikes, so many people, so many great wonky buildings, so many bars, so much marijuana smoke, so many canals, so many sex shops, so many boats, so much life.

 

Tiring though...

 

Next stop, Rotterdam, then on to Antwerp for some Belgian beer fun. Woohoo!

 

And in other good news it's finally decided to be spring. No more long johns, no more hats. Excellent.

 

And thank you again to all our German family and friends.

 

* editors note: this is a photo of a postcard. It was misty when we were there. Sorry.

 

We have a winner!

After an exhaustive search, accounting for some 60 different beers in 9 countries (although Germany is not finished yet, they can join next section of the search) we found beer heaven in the wee town of Loket, in the west of the Czech Republic. The beer is a from the Svatly Florian brewery, and is a special dark smoked beer that they call Speck Beer. And it is truly, truly delicious.

Speck Beer. Golly.

 

 

Now I'm a bit of a smoked beer fan, so they had an unfair advantage in that respect, but there was some stiff competition from a couple of Italian brews, in particular those from the del Borgo brewery and the brewpub Mostodolce's pilsner, also from the Human Fish IPA which hails from Ljubljana.

 

 

The Speck Beer was a malty, gently bitter, liquid version of smoked bacon. And it was divine.

 

 

But I was impressed with Italian craft brewing and also, as a real surprise, how good Pilsner Urquell is. The beer culture is very different too from NZ and Australia. You see women at lunch together drinking beer, old ladies with pints of dark beer, women running brew pubs. The attitude in the Czech Republic was that most bars only had one or two beers available, and many brew pubs only made two - a light and a dark, with no concern to classifying them. Lots only served Pilsner Urquell, but they served it extremely well.

 

Delicious. At Altstadt brew pub, Nuremberg.

 

 

In general we found too many lagers and not enough ales, so im looking forward to good British ales at a more appropriate temperature for actually having flavour.

 

And I can't wait to get brewing again!

 

 

Fast forward

Right, first up, apologies for the tardiness of our recent blog frequency. I blame three things - weak internet, extreme cold and, um, something else. I don't think that Jo's previous post really impressed upon you, the reader, how gosh darned chilly it has been. Budapest was very cold, Vienna was quite cold and Krakow was bloody freezing. Ice everywhere and it didn't get above 0 degrees all week. It snowed a bit most days and gave yours truly a very cold nose.

 

A meeting of minds at The Wall

Anyhoo... We left krakow (which was a super ace place) and trained it up to Warsaw and then across to Berlin. Berlin was also cold, but in a grey sort of way. Not quite as invigorating as Polish cold. So we stayed there for three nights and left. It wasn't as exciting as we'd hoped. Some cool buildings, excellent public transport and a lovely Good Friday procession was about it. And the beer was disappointing too. Although now I think about it the wall was pretty interesting, although they seem quite keen to get rid of it. We nearly made the news again cos they were demolishing it as we walked past. Silly people.

 

 

Now I need to explain the photo below. We were "quite surprised" to see this on the side of an apartment building in Berlin. But here's the story - the editor of Bild magazine, (a massive newspaper that is rather sensationalist, likes having topless girls on the front and, well, you get the idea) evidently had a penis enlargement that was reported on by a rival paper. Well of course he tried to sue them for this that and the other but the judge ruled that basically reporting on other people's private lives was how he made millions so it was fair enough that others could report on him. Case dismissed. So this artist put up this work on an apartment building wall that faces Bild's head office. Sticking it to the man! I'm glad I don't live there though.

Right, move on.

 

 

Stained glass in St Vitus' cathedral

 

Now we're in Prague! And it is as beautiful as they say. And the beer... Pilsner Urquell, fresh as a daisy on tap everywhere, for cheap as. I'd never really taken to it before, considering it just another lager beer. But by golly its a whole different thing here. I love it. And at about $1.75 Australian for half a litre, well, you'd be silly not to drink it. (Speaking of bargain beer, is 30 cents too little to pay for 500ml of some sort of beer in the supermarket? It just might be...)

The aforementioned cathedral

So yeah, we're in Prague and I've eaten more meat in the last three days than I have in a long time, which is a lot considering that's all one eats in Eastern Europe. And it has been delicious.

 

Very nice people, very good food and drink, wonderful streets and buildings and generally just a very beautiful place.

Busy as too.

We explored the Jewish quarter today which was kept intact during the war by the Nazis because Hitler wanted to keep it as an "Exotic Museum to an Extinct Race".

 

Yup.

 

Charles bridge. Chockas.

 

One more day here, then heading into western Czech Republic before heading down to see cousin Chris in Munich which will excellent. As, I'm sure, will be the beer.

 

Krakow, cracking.

We arrived in Krakow on a wet and snowy evening after 10 hours of travelling on three trains and two buses, the last of which was a total fiasco at the bus stop, with far more people wanting to get on than were seats. I don't know how we managed to get the last two seats but we did and we were very thankful. Others not so lucky had to stand in the aisle for an hour. We wandered through the rainy and snowy streets of Krakow for a bit then finally found our home for the next four days. It was magnificent, a seperate kitchen, bathroom and living room and then a bedroom! We have been a bit deprived of spaces that are designated, so this was quite exciting. It was clean and bright and very comfortable. Shopping for dinner was also quite exciting as there were new things to eat such as pierogi, new beers and a ginger ale that will be a favourite of mine for a while. Home with our new found goods to a plate of Russian pierogi, fried of course with sour cream and spring onions and beers YUM!

 

Our apartment is in the Jewish quarter called Kazimierz after the King who allowed the Jewish people to live in this area about the 13 th century but as we found out the people were then all moved out during the Second World War and sent over the river to the Jewish ghetto. It has only been in last twenty years or so that this precinct is being revived. It is now quite arty, and there are lots of cafes and the Jewish people have regained their status again here to some level.

 

Just in case you might not know Krakow is a beautiful little city, it has a lovely old part and a lively new part, with a huge shopping mall in it. It is good to know that shopping malls are the same the world over and just as the doors can open to let you in you can leave just as quickly, they suit their purpose but the old town will always win us to stay. We wandered around the old town and got our travel cards which I would recommend in Krakow because then most of the museums etc and all travel in the city area is free. We went to the Cloth hall which was once one of the biggest trading rooms in Europe, they used to trade fabrics there, hence the name, it now houses a gallery of artworks by Polish artists, many possibly from the Krakow area. Some of the works stood out over others but what we noticed more than anything was the optimism and brightness of these pictures in contrast to pictures else where of the same period. I am not sure if the artists had travelled but the influence of western art was evident or possibly western artists has seen these paintings.

 

We walked around the market square whis is said to be the largest in open square in Europe, maybe it is, it was quite large. Paul bought himself a local favourite food - a huge slab of bread covered in lard - delicious!

 

 

 

 

 

We went to Auchwitz on the Sunday it was cold but sunny. I expected it to be quite gruelling and sad and many more adjectives that I thought I would expeience but I didn't really. Just felt numb and detached and I wanted to get out... Away from all the people taking photo's as if they were at some theme park, away from the stupidity of people, away from the one place that exemplifies the existence of bullies, bigots and all the destruction that can result when you put a bunch of useless people in charge. I went and stood at the bus stop for two hours in the cold- yes Paul had to come as well- and waited for the next bus out. I knew from our last experience that the bus was going to be full and people would push on to get a seat. I was not going to miss this bus. About 10 minutes before it arrived all the people came and started to crowd around I kept our place where I though the door would be. The bus came... The door travelled past... I held my place...5 huge German guys had pushed their way to the door and tried to push me and all the others that had waited for ages out the way. I was not going to pushed aside so I just tucked in and did the best hip and shoulder, I have ever done. They were quite surprised really. I got onto the bus first, to the taunts of the German guys laughing at the 'Oldie' . I Got quite lippy for a bit and sat down to cool off and wait for Paul to untangle himself froml the mess left behind. Auchwitz, arseholes and attitude - that was my day and I was glad to get out of there. Oh! And thanks to all the Italians who trained me in bus warfare.

 

 

We went to the Emalia factory (Oscar Schindler's place) in Krakow the day before going to Auchwitz and it also was quite a gruelling experience. Again quite sanitised which is possibly good . It is hard to say anything about the holocaust sites as it is all just too much, too amazingly terrible to even begin to comprehend and I get too angry thinking about it all. So I will try not to think too much.

 

Paul being quite irreverent on Mount Kosiousko

We walked up mound Kosiosko one day it was a lovely walk through the snow covered streets of Krakow past the hill top cemetery with flower stalls - all the flowers were fake or handmade out of material. Straw or wood shaving flowers - they were quite beautiful. And there were glass lamp jars shaped in different styles, Easter eggs, Christmas trees etc with tea light candles.

The Wawclo Castle was quite a beautiful place, we really only went into the Cathedral though. This was enough. There are a lot of kings, queens and other royalty buried there as were as Thaddeuas Kosiousko. The bell tower is amazing and intersting to see the size of the bells and also the sizes of the huge timbers that were used to create the structure of the tower.

We were meant to be leaving on the Monday but we couldn't work out the best route to get to Berlin - via warsaw? Via Posnan? Or Wracloc? finally after a great deal of time we found a direct train to Berlin that left at 6.30 in the morning YIKES! So we found accommodation closer to the station - note, accommodation near stations is often pretty run down, it served its purpose though. Anyway, while we were researching places I thought to ask my sister, Jacquie, what was the name of our relation who came from these parts. We had learnt about him through a bit of a family history search. As it turned out we actually went past the area that he came from in between Warsaw and Poznan. I don't think it has changed much in that area since he left as a very young man in the mid 18 hundreds. His story is worth a read. If you are interested google 'Solomon Nashelski' there is a NZ connection as well.

Go north about 20 klms from here and there will be Lubranz. It figure it would look mush the same as this.

Krakow had great food in cosy interesting places some of our favourites were hot chocolate so thick you had to eat it with a spoon - it was really hot chocolate pudding in a bowl, with apple shortcake YUM! Cabbage rolls YUM! Pirogi YUM! another local favourite YUM!

Bread with lard. Disgusting.

The very best experience we had in Krakow was on the last day when we went to the salt mine. I can't believe I spent four hours under the ground sometimes as far down as 135 metres gasp, gasp. But it was amazing, unbelievable! It is always so difficult to comprehend the terrible things that mankind can do but then there are the fantastic achievements the beauty and the incredible feats of human indurance. This mine was possibly the best testament to everything mankind could achieve and I am very glad we got to see it. This Cathedral was carved out of the rock salt by three men over 69 years, even the floor is carved rock salt. All of the three were miners not artists or engineers. The chandelier crystals are made out of salt from the crystal caves - we didn't see these caves unfortunately.

 

Of all the caves and tunnels we saw less than 1% and only 4 of a possible 9 floors.

 

 

Just to give you an idea of size . We couldn't see the end of these Pillar and this was only one cavern.

 

Smitten

You may wish to listen to this first, just to add to the experience.

Oh Vienna. How lovely you are. So many grand buildings, all gleaming and glorious. Clean, wide streets and pretty narrow lanes. Delicious sausages, good beer and wonderful cakes. Parks, bike lanes, fantastic public transport and amazing art. A rich history (seriously rich by the looks of the buildings), multi-cultural population and helpful service. Palaces, galleries, more palaces, more parks, more cakes. Wunderbar!

Alley-ey

Lovely

 

Grand-y

 

Happy

 

 

Yup, it's a winner.

And, to top it off, it's the home of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Seriously.

They develop protocols for meeting aliens and stuff, what to say, where to take them etc. Pretty useful stuff. Who knew the UN did that? Have a read here.

Also, the lady in charge of it went to Otago University, just like Ernest Rutherford. Their physics department must be pretty hot.

 

Bruegel-y

Skippy

We only stayed a short time (it's not the cheapest place) but I'd come back for sure. It would be super fun in summer.

We saw some great art, especially Bruegels work. And lots of stupid intricate gold shiny fancy pointless decorative things that rich folks collected back in the 16 and 1700's.

We reckon all the galleries and museums that have work made of ivory should make massive donations to save the elephant organisations, because there were clearly an awful lot of elephants killed just to make pretty things.

 

Easter-y

In general it seems that Vienna is a very good city for living. There were cool Easter markets, lots of events advertised, quite a push for 'green' products, and they say that the public transport system is the second most used per capita in the world. It certainly is efficient. Even out in the suburbs the streets were clean and well kept, and there were lots of cyclists and runners and the such. I'd live there.

.......Oh Vienna.

 

 

p.s. if you did take the time (well spent you'll agree) to listen to Ultravox's great song you would have seen a big cathedral about half way through - that's St Stephens cathedral in the heart of Vienna. We went into the underground crypts there are saw lots and lots and lots of bones. Cool.