Archive for April, 2005
Our last day we spent with Pete and Kate we did the all important visit to Ikea – yep it is pretty much the same as at home, but a lot more of the products make sense in the Swedish environment – especially the meat balls that they sell in the cafeteria. We caught the speed train the Ryan Air airport about 100km from Stockholm (and didn’t get a chance to see Stockholm this time, we’ll just have to go back to visit it). Ryan air is about as budget as you can get – the chairs are primarily made from hard plastic! We arrived in Luton (near London) exhausted and made it to our guesthouse, what an adventure that turned out to be!
The guesthouse owner had overbooked the accommodation, so he offered us his room, which we took – as my recruitment agency had prepaid for three nights and it seemed like a waste of money paying to go elsewhere. We were directed out to the back bungalow, which was a real bachelor pad. This bachelor however had a thing for purchasing clothes, and, other than the bed, you could not see any of the furniture as it was all covered in clothes. We found about 1 meter square to put all our bags, we were almost too scared that our belongings would merge into the chaos that surrounded them. To top off the clutter situation, there was about an inch of dust over everything. After viewing the bathroom, we decided that we were in England now and we only needed to bathe once a week! The owner was such a top bloke though, we felt as though we couldn’t really complain.
We spent the next few days visiting medical centres (trying to get Matt seen as he had a really bad ear ache), checking out the real estate and hassling my job agency. We finally made it to London on the Friday and did the monopoly board tour, while trying to open a bank account. So we have had our highs and lows this week. It looks like I have a job, which is great – cannot believe how easy it is, and we were homeless for a little while and shelling out the dollars (which don’t convert to pounds to well) waiting for temporary accommodation to be sorted out. I also caught up with the uni crew that are over here – there are about eight of my peers here, we had a baby shower for Kerri (for those that know her).
Looks like our home is going to be Bedford for a while. And tomorrow we are going to move into our new place, which is fully furnished, with a big screen TV (I think that was the selling point for Mat).
We have uploaded heaps of photos from Hong Kong and Europe for those that are interested in using the internet inappropriately at work.
Love yall and looking forward to your correspondence. And yes… I’m soon going to get tuff on you guys who have promised e-mails and haven’t delivered yet!
We flew into Copenhagen feeling a little groggy after our 6am start (which was necessary because we couldn’t be bothered packing the night before). We didn’t pass through any customs, I am still feeling a little confused about how all this EU stuff works – who’s in it and who isn’t, who uses the euros and who doesn’t?
We walked straight to the train ticket booth (how great are these airports that have train systems that connect to the airport), and abruptly asked the ticket man the details of our journey – turns out they are a bit more helpful in Denmark. Felling a little bad after this interaction I adjusted my interpersonal style to match this new environment. We caught a train that crossed directly to Sweden and travelled north to a town called Alvesta where Pete (Matt’s school mate) and Olivia (his 2 year old daughter) picked us up. How great was it to see them (and then Kate – Pete’s wife, later), it was one of those weird feelings knowing that a lot has changed over the three years since we have seen them, but so much was still the same.
So this week we have been up to a lot of catching up, relaxing, eating, walking through the woods, fishing in the lakes, visiting bakeries and tea houses, golfing, watching Hong Kong movies, meeting Kate’s family, playing cards (yep Pete’s influence), dancing to the wiggles and walking Poppis (the dog). Matt and I think that they put something in the water over here, because Poppis seems to be the most gifted amazing little dog that we have ever met. He understands only Swedish (which makes it a bit difficult for us to interact with him), but when told he does just about everything – he can discern between his different finger puppy toys (duck, bear, lion, froggy etc). Matt has been trying to communicate with Poppis by talking like the Swedish chef from the Muppets.
Oliver, Pete and Kate’s two and a half year old daughter speaks both English and Swedish (this kid is smarter than us and she is 2 and a half). She is such a little cutie, but she suddenly hit the terrible twos while we were there ☺ But she is still sooooo cute!
Pete, Kate and Olivia say “Hej-Hej” (G’day).
Sweden is exactly what you expect, the air is clean, everything is designed smartly (triple glazed windows on houses), they actually eat meat balls, they’re all blond and giant (well not the recent immigrants), dairy seems to be a staple over here – milk with everything, everyone bludges off social security and there is an Ikea on just about every corner. Disappointingly we haven’t seen any mousses (elks) yet, but we have seen lots of cute road signs with schematic diagrams warning of their proximity.
There were some crazy storms here in Smalland in January where five years of logging produce was destroyed in one day. Even now some houses haven’t had power restored. Trees are down everywhere and it is only now that the major clean up is commencing (after the snow has melted). There are high piles of logs beside the road every 100m. Entire forests have been flattened and some minor roads are still yet to be cleared. Peoples retirement plans are in chaos as they were relying on harvesting the wood slowly to give them a steady income.
We’re off to England in a couple of days – time to face the real world again ☺ Thanks for all the emails and sorry that these blogs have been so long coming.
Turns out I don’t have SARS (thanks for all the well wishes), just a bad head cold which has finally cleared up.
It was really sad saying goodbye to Hong Kong and our new friends. We had a really good time and felt at home in Honkers! I have a feeling that we may end up there for an extended stay sometime in the future (but don’t tell Philippa).
We woke up early in the morning to finish packing our bags and hurriedly ran downstairs to catch the shuttle bus (after a Macca’s breakfast of course) – after sitting around, complaining that the bus wasn’t getting ready, we soon learnt that the bus wasn’t running due to a public holiday. The hotel concierge quickly realised we where upset (as we had a flight to catch); he grabbed our bags and threw us into a taxi… which was nice of him!
We arrived at the train station 5 minutes later, checked our bags and boarded the train to the airport (how good is THAT… you can check in AT the train station!!!). 20 minutes later we arrived at the airport, boarding passes in hand with time to kill. After ummming an ahhhhhing for weeks, we finally decided to buy a few expensive electronic gadgets (figuring that duty free at the airport would be the way to go) – unfortunately the airport was a good AU$50.00 more expensive than the shops in Hong Kong city, so we decided to wait until we arrived in Holland – assuming you could purchase duty free goods there for a reasonable price (oh boy, where we wrong… more on that later).
Somehow we managed to be late for boarding; when we arrived at the gate, people where ready to usher us straight to our seats. Quite an experience, kind of felt like being a Munckton for a few minutes!
After the looooong flight over China and Russia (lucky we didn’t catch the train as first planned), we finally arrived in Amsterdam. What a grumpy bunch of buggers. Seriously,.. not a single welcome, hello or did you have a pleasant flight – all we got was “Passport”. We decided to get some food (yes Tommy… at Macca’s) – the staff there where just as unpleasant, not even “would you like fries with that”! Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy…, we guessed it’s because it is so bloody cold and they never see the sun! Give me Thailand any day!!
After Dinner (or was it breakfast??) we went to the duty free store at the airport to pick up our gadgets (after our mis-adventure in Hong Kong) only to learn that duty free once you arrive in the EU doesn’t exist (even though we hadn’t passed through customs)! The inc. tax price on the items we where looking at where over AU$200.00 more expensive than in Hong Kong. We decided we didn’t need an iPod after all. Note to anyone travelling to Europe – “The inflated prices at the airport in Hong Kong (or Singapore, or Bangkok) are CHEAPER than the cheap stores in Europe!”).
After exiting customs (no problems with the first use of my Dutch passport – except everyone spoke to me in Dutch), we caught the next train into town. Again, the staff at the information desk where less than helpful and it took us over an hour to work out which train to catch.
From our train stop, it was a short taxi ride to our Bed and Breakfast. We were on the third floor of a traditional Amsterdam flat and the room was lovely. Our host Anna Lynne was the first nice person in Holland we met; she gave us a quick run-down on what we could do and where the closest place for dinner was. We had a little snooze and than headed down to the local kebab shop! Mmmmm, Kebabs – just like at home.
Breakfast the following day was enormous; we couldn’t work out if it was for our entire five day stay in the B and B or just that morning. We found out the following morning that Anna Lynne expected us to eat two small loafs of bread, a block of cheese, a packet of ham, yoghurt, cake, hot cross buns etc every single day!
After recovering from breakfast, we made our way into town by foot. We passed the Anne Frank house, which was a real eye opener. It was a really odd feeling being in the same room (complete with her posters and stickers still on the walls) in which she wrote her diary. Unfortunately I couldn’t help comparing the Holocaust, which Anne endured with the atrocities that happened more recently in my lifetime in Cambodia.
As we were a little down about life after the Anne Frank house museum, we figured we should do something a little light hearted – so,… we went to the Sex Museum (we heard that as far the “sights” of Amsterdam went – this was the safest). Turns out it was quite interesting – the museum started with all sorts of antiques (lots of old master paintings and snuff boxes). Look if you want more details Tommy you can talk to me directly ☺ Afterwards we went to the tourist information, where not surprisingly they were very unhelpful. We passed up the 17 euro, two hour walking tour through the red light district as we figured that it was something that we could do ourselves. The rain started and we jumped on the number 17 tram home.
On route to the Van Gogh museum the next day, we passed a Cash Converters…it is exactly the same as at home…but so much cheaper, they know the true price of second hand goods over here. We had to elbow our way through the millions of school kids lining up to see the Van Gogh museum. It was good and all, but bah…I’ve seen and heard it all before – Cashies was the real highlight of the morning.
We walked around Amsterdam that afternoon and found more entertainment that this liberal society affords, an entire strip of Casinos. We were getting to the point where we were thinking “Is anything illegal in this town?”. The unhelpful, grumpy assistant at the “Cheapest internet café in Amsterdam” (which is false advertising by the way) would not give me change to buy a ticket “No change” he grunted, I had had enough of poor customer service by then so I grunted back at him “No Use!”.
So not to bore you too much more we also visited: Rebrandt’s house, hung out in Coffee Shops, went to the movies and had lots of croquets.
We went for a day trip the Hague before we left because Phil really wanted to see the World Court (geek). We were a little disappointed because we were wisked around on a bus (we felt like Japanese tourists), but in a way we didn’t mind because it was freezing outside, I don’t think that it got above eight degrees that day! We visited a huge model of Holland on the way home, which would have been a lot more fun if we didn’t loose circulation to our fingers, toes, nose…but it was really quite cool, they had working models of cannels, showing how 49% of Holland manages to stay dry, while below sea level. The airport in Holland is called Schipol which is literally Ships Hell, because when they were “reclaiming” the land (draining the land) they found many ship recks in this area. We went past a new housing estate on the way back to Amsterdam that they were building on recently “reclaimed land”, better watch out the Dutch might be knocking at our door soon ☺
We had wine and a long philosophical discussion with our lovely host Anna Lynne on the Saturday night before we boarded the plane to Copenhagen.
We left you on the bustling streets of Hanoi. We we’re able to cram all our stuff into the four bags that we are now travelling with. The alarm went off at 6am and we lingered out of bed and ended up rushing to get our taxi who was waiting for us outside. We arrived at the airport and checked in to Southern China air (the most budget airline that we could find – as this flight was not in our original itinerary). We high fived (well metaphorically) when our bags weighed in at 18.5kg and at 22.6kg…it was our hand luggage that ended up being an issue. Matt and I consciensciously asked the lady if our hand luggage was okay, unfortunately it weighed in about 8kg over (both bags combined), the remedy was we were sent to the bag stall to purchase another bag which had to be checked along with our big bags. So yes dear friends Matt and I stooped to new lows and purchased a “candy bag” – like middle aged ladies on a crazed shopping tour! Dad we revoke any slide remarks that we have made about all of you luggage :) The lady very nicely checked our 8kg excess bagage for no cost. Nothing runs smoothly in Vietnam so after a gate change and about 30 minutes after our scheduled departure time we boarded the plane.
We had a 6 hour stop over in the middle of China that we had to pass through imigration for, we could have gone out and explored the city – but instead Matt and I decided to spend the time exploring the terminal (which is the biggest and most modern airport that we had both ever seen)! The information lady laughed at us when we asked where the McDonalds was (Matt was keen to get back into it after spending a month in countries that hadn’t quite reached that stage in development). Instead we spent $37 on a very average lunch – we spent some time trying to work out the exchange rate and got caught out! The part of china that we saw was very expensive, Au$5 for a coke!
We arrived in Hong Kong and cruised through imigration to baggage collection where the very polite customer service officer informed us that our baggage was probably not going to arrive that evening! I was so impressed with the customer service that I wasn’t too put out that our bags hadn’t arrived. And of course there was McDonalds. We jumped in a taxi…and as we watched the meter tick over on the highway to our hotel, we got a very serious reality check about the cost of living in Hong Kong. Our Au$60 cab fair reminded us of the real cost of living in the Western world.
We checked into our lovely hotel (which Matt’s mum spoiled us with) and got a good night sleep, after checking out all the cable TV chanels. HONKERS – what a big bustling city it is! You can spend a lot of money very quickly in this place, but you can also get some great bargins. We are loving the food here – hmmmm…BBQ pork! We spent the first few days crusing up and down Hong Kong island on the double decker trams and checking out all the big (generally expensive) shopping spots. Mattie purchased some Hong Kong cinema (which we are very excited about watching when we pick up his lap top and we’ll prolly bore Pete and Kate with) and we have been comparing price on iPods and having the “Do we really need this” conversations. We caught up with a girl that we met in Hanoi who lives in Hong Kong. She sings at a hotel here, so we went and saw her perform (eating out Au$20 hamburgers and drinking our Au$7 coffees). Natalie is a Melbourne girl who is pursuing her music career in Hong Kong. We invited ourselves to her church the next day and got to hang out with a heap of expats, which was loads of fun, we did really normal things like go to McDonalds for ice cream and then hang out playing sherades at the harbour. Matt and I almost felt as though we could stop here for a while. I met another OT…dunno what is happening to the world!
Tonight we went up to the peake of the island on a cable car (actually that is where I am sitting at the moment enjoying free internet access. The reason you are hearing from me again (and not Matt) is that he is a little under the weather – he is hoping that it is not SARS.
Tomorrow we jump on a jetplane and head off to Amsterdam. If you have been wondering why you haven’t got a post card lately it is because I haven’t posted any since Cambodia. So chances are you will receive one from Vietnam with a Netherlands postmark on it…sorry just having too much fun at the moment :)
The holiday is almost over and the reality of upcoming work is beginning to set in! What a great time we have had though and what wonderful people we have met along the way! Thanks for all the new from home…hopefully Matt is all better for the next post!