Goodbye, summer! See you in a year!

My summer is ending. I think in a month or so I'll look back on today as the last real day of summer - not because of the date, but because I'm off to V Festival today, last of the summer festivals (or first of the Easter ones, depending on how you look at it).

I guess I can't really complain, given that I've essentially had summer weather since about June last year, with just a few cooler days in Chicago in early October and in Canberra in November (the day we had snow there was kind of weird). But before that I had wintry weather (with just the start of the Australian summer) from May 2005, and now I'm going to go back into a similarly long cold (or cool) period, although with hopefully a short reprieve just before I go back to the UK in October this year.

This hemisphere-hopping really alters your season-perception.

Anyway, I thought I'd say goodbye to summer with some pictures from Planten un Blomen in Hamburg. I spent less than 24 hours in Hamburg on my way up to Denmark and Norway, which is a shame, because it's a city I really like. I had originally intended to spend more time there on the way back, but as it turned out, I was in a hurry to get to my next destination (Leeuwarden) and only had an hour at the station.

I had spent 2 1/2 weeks in Hamburg in the summer of 2003 for a uni course. I'd had an absolute ball - staying in the Schanzenviertel (a grungy Newtown-equivalent, but cooler) and wandering all over the city. This trip, I headed back to the Schanzenviertel for my overnight stay, intending to do quite a bit of wandering before I had to catch my train. As it turned out, when I woke up in the morning I realised I absolutely had to visit a doctor, and it might be better to do this in Germany (where at least I spoke a bit of the language) than Denmark. By the time I got myself sorted out, I only had a couple of hours, so I decided just to head to the Planten un Blomen, which are Hamburg's botanic gardens. My mum is now very loudly not saying anything...

Of course, my camera batteries ran out and I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked, but I did get some. It was really nice to just hang out in such a lusciously-vegetated place, even for just a short time, especially when I knew I was getting on a train a couple of hours later.

I've got a thing for waterlilies...


Random sculpture near one of the gates


The colours!


The water!


Above it all, the Heinrich Hertz Tower

Cows, cows and more cows

Leeuwarden is a town in the northern part of the Netherlands. M., a friend of mine, (who happens to be German but who I met when she spent some time working in Australia as an au pair) had been studying there for five years or so, and I visited her about three weeks before she packed up to leave.

It is quite different from Amsterdam, which shouldn't be all that surprising. It's in Friesland, which is sort of the Quebec of the Netherlands (or perhaps more like Western Australia, as I don't think there's ever any really serious talk of secession). They have a statue of a cow, Us Mem (there are meant to be some accents and stuff in that name but I don't know where they go - sorry!):



Us Mem is a Friesian cow. Friesland is still the dairy centre of the Netherlands - in fact, its wealth (and it is clearly a wealthy area) is based on the dairy industry. "Us Mem" means "our mother". Makes sense.

We basically wandered around so M. could show me all the tourist sights, including the distillery for the local spirit. The town also has some beautiful gardens:



Plus an idyllic riverside:



A bridge over the river which opens to let the boats through:


And a lovely little old-style tea-house (complete with biscuits and confectionery in jars):


To complete the picture, it even has a leaning tower (Oldehove):

Fresh seafood

I'm sitting here at my friend C.'s computer, and it seems to make sense to write about our mutual friend A., the guy I stayed with in Norway. So this post is about the Komle Fjord, near Kristiansand, where A.'s family has a little cabin:



We went out to the fjord the day I got to Kristiansand and spent about 24 hours there. The first night, A., his brother-in-law and I went fishing for crabs. We caught quite a few, and had them for lunch the next day:



We also took a boat out on the fjord. There's not a lot of point in adding many words to them, so I'll essentially let them speak for themselves:

Cabins on the fjord

Seeing a theme yet?

These are the rocks where we caught the crabs the night before

The "boys"(A. and his nephews) did a bit of line fishing as well, with tiny little rods

And yes, fish were caught

A rest in Trieste

Sorry for the break - I've now moved into a place with no ADSL connection, and I can't upload anything at work, so updating is going to have to happen when I get myself to somewhere where there's a free wifi connection. Or something.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post about Trieste for a while now, but kept getting side-tracked. Trieste is where I had my first couchsurfing experience. I stayed with D. and his "family" - aka his flatmates and the random people who hung out at their flat.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon with only D.'s address. Well, I had his phone number, too, but that's beside the point... D. hadn't given me any real directions to his place from the station (on the basis that once you found his street, it was remarkably easy to find his place, and he said that everyone would know where his street was), and I hadn't had a problem with this when we'd been exchanging emails, on the basis that I'm usually pretty good at finding my way somewhere using a map.

In my experience, I'd always been able to find free maps at the train stations.

You can guess what's coming, right? Yep, no free maps at Trieste train station.

So I asked a few people if they knew where D.'s street was. In my very bad Italian, which I've described before.

Turned out I had the pronunciation of D.'s street wrong (although that doesn't excuse the guy for whom I wrote it down). This was something that I encountered again and again throughout Europe. If you don't speak the language of the country you're in, it's often easier not to bother trying to say anything in that language at all, because people seem not to be used to hearing non-speakers of their language try. As a result, they're not used to hearing weird pronunciations or oddly substituted words. I think that in English-speaking countries (especially in tourist cities), we're more used to trying to figure out what someone might be looking for. Then again, a street name might be more obscure than a tourist attraction, so maybe that's all it was.

I spent a while looking for the tourist information office. However, every time I followed the signs towards it, I'd lose the signs. I gave up. I finally found it the next day; it would have been closed by the time I arrived anyway.

Eventually I followed some signs to a three-star hotel, on the basis that they would most likely have (1) maps and (2) someone who spoke (at least enough) English. I was right on both counts. Happily, the hotel was closer to where I wanted to go than the station. I had at least chosen the right direction!

D.'s "family" were very warm and welcoming, and I was adopted as a temporary sister. Which meant I spent the weekend being Looked After by a group of Italian men.

(For those of you who know how I would normally react to this: you'll be pleased to know that I accepted it in the spirit it was offered. Besides, it's kind of nice once in a while when you're travelling by yourself. But I couldn't live like that!)

And I was very pleased to find out that Italian men cook (well, the ones I met did - and very well, at that! - and they told me that this is standard behaviour).

We walked around the town that Friday night, bought gelato at the best gelato place in town, and I learnt a lot about the history of the town and the area. The discussions of linguistics that we started that night continued throughout the whole weekend. I don't remember all the details that the guys told me about the town, but I remember enough that I could bore you if I wasn't careful, so I'll just say this: Trieste was part of the last bit of what we now know as Italy to be joined to Italy - after WWI. Before that, it was part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary - and a major sea port for the Empire. Many government buildings were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a lot of these survive (indeed, a lot of them are still used for government purposes). They give the town a very Viennese flavour.

An interesting linguistic note: the local dialect is more closely related to Slovenian than to Italian.

So, some photos. I have quite a few from Trieste that I like, but I'll just put a few up now. They were all taken on the Saturday, the day after I arrived. I re-visited the places we had walked the night before.

Fountain in the Piazza dell'Unità d'Italia


Random photo of the Theatre


A very old church which is quite close to ...


The Duomo


And Mum, before you ask - yes, I did see the statue of Joyce, but I didn't take a photo.

Idyll in the German countryside

Friends of mine live in Nienburg, near Hanover, in Germany. I was there twice during my two months in Europe, once near the beginning, the second near the end. Nienburg is a small city, and we spent quite a bit of time walking and cycling around the fields and meadows, often with the dogs. I thought I'd post some of the photos from there.

T. with the dogs - Mecki and Sträuchi, who is the one who thinks he's picking up the stick


A tower near the town - just another random building that's older than the written history of my country


The Weser


The interior of the restaurant my friends own in Verden, a town near Nienburg

Couchsurfing in Cologne: fresh mint tea and honey gummi bears

Apart from the cool couchsurfing stories, there's a direct connection between my experiences in Berlin and Cologne this time around - honey gummi bears.

I'll explain. In my post about Berlin I mentioned Bärenland, a rather cool shop on Schönhauser Allee devoted to all things gummi.

I had discovered honey gummi bears when I was in Germany doing the tourist-at-the-Weinachtsmarkt thing just before Christmas, and spending time with friends in various cities. I've got to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of normal gummi bears (although sour gummi fruits are pretty good). But honey gummi bears? These seriously rock my world. And apart from one packet from Munich, by the time I got to Berlin, it'd been 9 or 10 months since I'd had my last honey gummi bear hit. So when I found Bärenland I had to buy a couple of packets.

I hadn't finished the first when I got to Cologne, and I quickly discovered that S. was also a fan. It wasn't the only taste we shared.

But first, let me tell you how cool S. is even disregarding our common tastes.

S. plays guitar and sings and often goes busking. Or occasionally, she'll join one of her busking friends for a quick round of "In the jungle" (believe it or not, I joined in after taking this photo):



I had also been fairly indecisive about whether I would visit Cologne at all, and if so, exactly which one. First of all, S. was willing to accept me as a potential guest even though my profile was not as comprehensive as it could have been (eg I didn't have a photo). I did have quite a few references by that stage, so I guess that probably helped - it also helped that I had written TO S. rather than a general spam-type email AT her.

Once S. had established that she was willing for me to stay, she was also happy to put up with my flip-flopping as to which day I was arriving. And once we had the day sorted out, she was extremely patient with my one run-in with late trains. And then she even met me at the S-bahn stop.

Other shared tastes? The fantastic fresh mint (very spicy) from her garden, with which we made tea. Walking, especially randomly and especially at twilight - if you look very hard, you will see S. in this photo:



You can read a little more about our adventures on our melon tour in an earlier post. I'll just add that when in Cologne's CBD, I saw a shop selling Ben&Jerry's ice cream. I love Ben&Jerry's, particularly their cookie dough ice cream, so I bought a small carton of that. S. had never tried it before, and we discovered another shared taste.

So there wasn't anything extremely crazy; no stories I had to live up to about having spent three months in the Yucatan or anything like that. It was just a great day or so, hanging out with someone I really clicked with, someone I never would have met if it wasn't for couchsurfing.

When I was there, S. was talking about coming to Australia on a working holiday visa. I'm hoping she'll be in Melbourne when I am, so we can maybe take more melon tours, find a whole lot more shared tastes, perhaps find some more buskers to sing with, and generally have a lot of fun.