Ireland, and Home!

Ok, yes I know I'm late. Yes I know I've actually been home for several weeks, but I've been informed that at least a few Ireland photos must be put up, despite the fact that many of you have already sat through the entire slide show (or in Sally's case, about 5 times?). Ok, so here they come. After London, we flew to Belfast. We stayed there for one night, and John just couldn't help himself but have a pint of Guiness in this really nice, old Victorian pub. We just had to take a photo of it, check out the shamrock that they put in the foam!



After spending a day in Belfast, we headed on down to join John's family, which is basically between the two towns of Omagh and Enniskillen. Our first day there we were taken up to see the bog!

There's a photo of it below, that's all the peat that's been dug up, drying.

Here's a shot of the valley that the Milligans live in. The large shed just left of centre of the shot is where the family business (civil engineering) is run out of, and we stayed in the large house just to the right of it, about centre screen.

Here's a shot of John Milligan and our host, also John Milligan! Thanks so much by the way for having us. We had a blast!
















One day we were taken out on a Rally driving course, and John and I are now fully qualified Novice Rally drivers (not sure what that means) It was heaps of fun and I discovered just how easy it is to spin out a rear drive car on a wet gravel track. I just had to take a picture oh John in his pretty blue jumpsuit and helmet we all got to wear, isn't he pretty?







For me, the highlight of Ireland just had to be the Giant's Causeway. Note to everyone; if you ever go the Ireland, do not miss it! Rhonda and Ray were nice enough to drive us all the way up to Londonderry (or Derry depending on your political veiws), which I thought was pretty cool, seeing as the old inner township is still entirely walled. We then went from Londonderry on to the Giant's Causeway.

For those that don't know what it is, it's a natural rock formation jutting out into the see. The name of it comes from the legend as to how it was made, in which two giants built it so that they may cross the stretch of water between Ireland and Scotland (you can see Scotland from it) so that they may fight each other.

Anyways, really only pictures will show you just how amazing the Giant's Causeway is. Here's one of Rhonda and Ray standing on the Giant's Causeway. I also really want to thank you two for showing us all over the place.


And here's a shot of John and myself sitting on a little section of the Causeway known as the Wishing Chair. Yes beleive it or not, those pillars of rock are actually a natural phenomenon. They are often hexagonal in cross section, but we saw some with all different number of sides.

















The pillars of stone are not just restricted to the area known as the Causeway, all of the cliff faces around it seem to be riddled with these pillar structures. Around the point and a few hundred meters walk away is this formation, known as the Giant's Organ. Just to give you an idea of the size of that, look at John's head in the bottom left hand corner. Like I said, it's just an amazing place.




And finally, I thought I'd finish of the photos of Ireland with just a sample of some of the scenery that we saw around the place. This is looking over the Loch that the City of Enniskillen sits on. At various places this lake (and the rivers running out of it and into it) form the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I think we're still in Northern Ireland here, even though we're on the Republic side of the Lock, but I really can't be sure.

Anyways, if you look to the left of the photo, you'll see something of supreme beauty. The right side of the photo is ok, I guess.















Well, there it is, the entire trip, in all it's glory! Now I just thought I'd give a few lovely stats for our trip.
Time Gone: 82 days.
Plane Trips: 9
Train Trips: Enough
Furthest Distance from Home (According to Google Maps): Enniskillen, 17,160km
Distance Covered by the Line at the Top of this Blog: 44,419.5km
Most Comfortable Airport to Sleep in: Kuala Lumpur
Planes Missed: 1 (at Heathrow, of course!)
Wallets Lost (and then regained from the police station, missing nothing!) : 1
Worst Nights Sleep in a Hostel: Belfast (bloody snorer AND a sleep talker!)

Big thanks to everyone who put us up for a while in the Czech Republic, The Netherlands, and Northern Ireland, and a big hi to Team Duamo, for living with us in London!

Cya Guys!
Bob

More London, with some universities and beaches thrown in.

Hello everyone!

Ok, I know it's been a little while since I last posted, but look on the bright side, now you gets lots of photos!
First I thought I'd give you an idea of the place we've living in. It's a one bedroom apartment, and the picture you see here is the living room. It's got 2 sofa beds, as you can see, so 3 of us crash out here. 2 people get to share the bedroom, which is fairly small, but has a good sized bed. Out the door you see there is the very small veranda, from which you get the veiw I've already posted.

The place has a bathroom with a shower-bath, which is an alright size. The crazy thing about the place is the size of the kitchen. Below is a picture, shot through the doorway. The place is insanely small, such that it's really only comfortable for 1 person, 2 people if you're quite friendly, and 3 people only if you have no real desire to breathe. In it somehow fits the oven and cooktop, microwave, sink, fridge and washing machine. No dishwasher or drier. So, there you go.









Our days have been intermingled with day trips out of London, or with meandering around London. One of my highlights was when a couple of us went to the British Museum. This is definately a place to go people!
Easily, for me, the best thing to be seen here was the Rosetta Stone. It was a bit crazy, we just walked into the Egyptian scultpure section, and there was the Rosetta Stone, right there in front of us. Looking at the picture, you can clearly see the 3 different sections of text, where the same thing has been written in 3 different languages. At the top, where the most text is missing, is ancient Egyptian Heiroglyphics. In the middle is another Egyptian language, that which most literate Egpytians could read, and at the bottom is Ancient Greek, the official government language of the time.







Another day a few of us headed off to Cambridge, a short 50 minute train ride. Cambridge was beautiful! It had parks all over the place, and the Colleges were without exception beautiful old buildings. Here you can see the front of Kings College. Many of the Colleges were closed to the public, since it was an exam period, and they all charged entry anyway, so we didn't go into any of them, other than to shoot snaps through the open front gate. Most of them, including Kings, have a large central courtyard, with a perfectly manicured lawn. So most of that front wall you see there just walls of a courtyard, which you could see straight through the windows. Anyways, Cambridge was a lovely town to just meander about, soaking up the ambience and lounging in the park.








Back to another day in London, and we visited, among other things, Westminster Abbey. I was dumbfounded. You walk in, and you literally cannot help but walk over the graves of people. Some of the graves have had the engraving on them worn off by thousands of feet, whereas some are well maintained, and some quite new. Among the notable peoples graves I stepped on were Charles Dickins and Jeffery Chaucer, but for me the big one was the scientists. There they have the graves of Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Faraday and Dirac among others, and you quietly walked over all of them. You couldn't take any photos inside, so here's one of John standing outside it. Shame really, as you could fit in most of the scientists' graves in a single shot, they like to cram all of them together.






And of course, after talking about a day in London, now we have a day out of London. This time all of us (except Sammi) headed off to Brighton, also taking about an hour by train. I know this beach looks pretty, but in fact the entire beach is made of smooth rocks. It is actually remarkably comfortable to sunbathe on, and we agreed that the rocky beach is superior to the sandy beach if you just want to lay about. This is of course what all the English were doing, laying around on the rocks in swimmers, or more commonly just underwear. They also do this in the parks a lot as soon as the sun comes out, so Warren should be sure to include some summer time in London in his next travels.








Ok, now a breif summary of some of the other things we've been up to. John and I went meandering around Harrods for a day, which is enourmous! Among the notable potential purchases was a 114,000 pound watch, a 3,700 pound bottle of wine, a 14,000 pound feature bathroom tile by Versace, and 1,500 pound toy poodles. We didn't buy anything.

John is currently off at a music festival with one of our housemates. The headline act is 30 seconds to Mars, which those two are fans of. Since I've never listened to them, or any of the other bands on the lineup, I decided to stay at home with the others.

Upon arriving back at the apartment this afternoon we discovered this hole in the ceiling over the stair case leading up to our apartment (we're on the third floor). After a bit of thinking we realised that this hole is actually immediately below our bath tub. Apparently John's showers have been taking too long, and the water has leaked out and caused the ceiling to fall in. Once the owners of the place removed the side panel from our bathtub, you could actually see directly into the hallway below, although that has no been thoughtfully covered up by a piece of cardboard. We're not sure exactly when this is going to get fixed, but I think we're all afraid to have a shower now.





And I think that's about it for me then. This Wednesday we are heading over to Belfast, where we will stay a night before moving over to Enniskillen where John's family resides. London has been very cool, and all the day trips we've had; Bath, Cambridge, and Brighton, have been really good, although different from each other.

Despite the poor weather on the first day or two, it's been unseasonably warm here. It maxed out at 26 today, and the suns been shining down on us almost the entire time we've been here, with only a few showers. Most of us came back from Brighton a little sunburnt, and John and I are awefully tempted to buy ourselves a pair of shorts!

Have fun everyone, the next time I post, I'll undoubtably be in Ireland.

Bye!
Bob

Some Baths and some Stones

Ok, well don't you people feel spoilt? I only put up a post a couple of days ago, and here I am doing it again!

For those people that have been following the blog so far, I'm sure you've already looked at the photo to the left and said to yourself "Oh damn, those people are back, AGAIN?!". That's right, Team Duamo has been reformed. I'm sure you already knew that, but now there's photographic evidence, designed to make you all cringe and run away.

Anyways, as I'm pretty sure I mentioned in the last post, we headed off on a bus tour to Bath. Sitting on a coach with this bunch of social misfits had an eery sense of deja vu, the only thing that would have made it more creepy was if we were sitting at the back with a few loud Americans.

On a side note, for the car spotter, England is the place to be! On the trip there and back I spotted 4 Rolls Royce Phantoms, 8 Aston Martin DB9s (or as I like to call them, sex on wheels), about half a dozen Ferraris, 4 or so Lamborginis, perhaps a dozen Maseratis, and maybe 15 Bently Contis. Porsches must be sold under a "Buy 12, get 3 free" policy, and only commoners drive cars like Jags, BMWs, Audis or Mercs. All the Aston Martins, they make me druel.

Anyways, we did actually get to Bath, and so we went for a walk through the baths, which these days is a museum. The baths were built by the Romans, so they're kind of old. Oh, and I'm not really sure if I'd want to go swimming in them, since the water comes out of the natural spring at 46 degrees, green (as you can see) and leaves red iron deposits on the walls of the baths. But they say it's theraputic, and a gift from the gods, so who am I to argue? So the baths were pretty cool, with a nice audio tour to guide us around. Only after three quaters of the way through did we discovered that Sammi had decided to listen to the childrens' guide, because she claims the guides sound cheerier than for the adults.





The township of Bath itself is really pretty, because in the middle basically all the buildings are made out of "Bath Stone", which is this nice honey coloured stone. It gives the town this really nice uniform feeling. I sampled the local Ale, which was good (of course) and we just walked around for a bit, before getting back on the bus to go back home. Here's a shot of the central square of bath to give you an idea of the buildings.









On the way back, the bus made a toilet stop for an hour or so. The place that the bus stopped had all the requirements for a good toilet stop, a cafe, and free toilets. Oh and they also had these rocks sitting on the hill just across the road from them. We figured we may as well go look at the rocks, because lets face it, rocks are cool. We walked around them, decided that they were cooler than usual rocks, and took a few photos of them. It was then time to get on the buss and head home.






(Note: in order to avoid the idea that I found the rocks disappointing, may I just state for the record that I didn't. I found the rocks very very cool)




But that was yesterday. Today we walked around the Camden Town markets. The place was crazy, clearly the place to be on a Sunday, especially I guess on a bank weekend Sunday. The Camden town markets aren't really A market, but rather heaps of small to medium markets, going all over the place, with regular shops all over the place as well. The end result is big, disorientating, and hectic, just what any keen market shopper would love. I'd recommend them for someone coming to London, but be warned, emo's abound!

In response to requests for photos of the apartment, I'll try and remember to take some tonight, and put them up next time. Until then, everyone have fun, I'm off to find the fridge back at the apartment, and more particularly, the beer in it.

Bye, Bob

London

Ok guys, how's it going?

Good news, we've reached the UK, meaning that I finally get to type on good keyboards again! Hooray for typing at a decent speed, rather than taking twice as long as it should to put up a blog post.

So..... when I left you, we were in Antwerp, home of diamonds. Well, simply put, we caught a plane to London city airport, and so now we're in London, home of stupid guard hats, some queen-ish person, and english-speaking people. Let me tell you, it's a bit surreal finally making it to a country where english is the primary language. We haven't been in one of those since Australia, actually, so it's a welcome change.

We're sharing an apartment with Team Duamo (minus Vanessa, who already lives in London) from Italy, so that's fun. Above is a photo of the veiw from out apartment. It's nice and close to an Underground station, so getting into town is nice and simple.

So far we've only really had one day here, and we just spent that strolling around London. The weather was appropriately english, meaning it was cold and raining on and off. As such a lot of my photos didn't come out well due to bad lighting, but I've done my best.

I'm sure the photo below gives you an idea of the lighting we had. Note that this is with flash. Anyways, at least you can kind of see me, and make out the sillouettes of Big Ben, the houses of parliament, and the London Eye in the background.





We walked right under the London Eye, but decided not to go for a ride on it that day. Perhaps another time. The whole thing is so unbalanced it makes me shiver, but it seems to stay upright. I decided to get a bit artistic with the photography, some impressive skies helped.















Walking across the river, the sun revealed itself for long enough for me to shoot this shot off by sticking my arms through a fence, hence no people in it.












The night ended by us heading off to meet up with Michelle, a friend of Angie and Sammie's. She lead us to a nice pub called 'Hornimans on Hayes', which I get the feelig she chose purely for the comical value of the name of the place. But they did have a nice selection of English Ales, of which I tried a pint of one of them. I forget the name, but I remember thinking two things; namely that the beer was pretty damn good, but that this english thing of room temperature beer was not pretty damn good. Admittedly it was cold enough that room temperature was pretty cold, but John reckons it needed to be about 6.5 degrees colder.

The place was just outside London Bridge Underground Station, so I took a quick walk down the warf and snapped this of London Bridge at night time. Now I would like everyone to admire my beautiful use of shutter speed and stabilising handrails, and go 'Ooooooh, Aaaaaah'


Ok, well that basically sums up what we've been up to so far. We've got 2 weeks here, and the internet cafe is close by, so stay tuned for a couple more posts. Tomorrow we're going on a bus tour of Stongehenge and Bath, so that's something you can look forward to. We'll also be heading off to Cambridge, as well as all the obligatory London sites.

Anyways, have fun people, I'll let you know what's happening when I can be bothered :P

Bye all,
Bob (John's vedging in the apartment)

The Netherlands, and Belgium

Hello all people!

Ok everyone, pity me, because I am once again stuck using a french keyboard. My brain now explodes whenever I see one of these. So bear with me, and forgive typos and bad punctuation.

Anyways, when I last left you; we were in Delft right? Staying in an apartment, very generously lent to us by Jess`s family. Well, from there we went on day trips to Amsterdam, and The Hague

Amsterdam was pretty, we went on a river cruise, walked through the red light district, the usual. Sorry boys, no pictures from the red light district, the girls apparently beat you down with bats if you try. I did however, get this nice shot of a canal!

One thing about the Netherlands people, there are kind of a lot of bikes around. Like every train station has a huge carpark full of them. The shot below is a pretty typical site outside any large train station, anywhere in the country we went.






And then onto The Hague. This is the home of the international court, so we thought we´d best try and get a photo of that one. Unfortunately you can´t get very close, but with my superior artistic abilities I snapped this very pretty shot, such that you cant see the giant fence in the way.















Also in the Hague is Madurodam, the Netherlands biggest tiny town, if that makes sense. Its a minature town, full of replicas of buildings from all over the Netherlands. As the photo demonstrates, my inner child was excited.






After a few days in Delft, we headed off to stay with Marita for one night, whilst she showed us the night life of Utrecht, a larger university town. We had a great night, john can attest to that. We were with a very dodgy bunch of people, as you can see by the photo, so that helps.














After Netherlands, we were into Belgium. First stop, Brussels. In quick summary, yes we had Belgian Waffles, yes we had Belgian Beer, no we didnt have Brussel Sprouts. Brussels had this pretty cool central square, good for eating chocolate sauce-covered waffles on.







They also had a mini town, but this one was like the European Union Sampler of mini towns. Anyways, Im not putting a picture up of it. Out the front though is this spiffy building, called atomica, or something vaguely similar to that.
I liked it, and yes you can go up it, but we didn´t because it was expensive.

















Ok, thats the end of the photos, so heres the summary of what else happened:
we took a day trip to Brugges, its a pretty little world heritage listed town, but not much to do in there.
we then went to antwerp, where we are now. The diamond capital of the world, predictably diamond stores are everywhere. Its a little crazy, they have a diamond centre, which is a shopping centre, full of nothing but jewellery stores. About 90% of these stores sell nothing but diamonds, and diamond jewellery. Go outside this centre, and theres more diamond stores lining the streets.

Tomorrow we are off to London, so no more crappy keyboards! YAY!

Take care people,
Bob

Dresdin, and a cameo by Berlin.

Hello people!
How are you all going? Well I know it's been a while since I made a post, so I'll try and catch you guys up on what we got up to.
After prague we caught a 2 hour train ride to Dresdin. Dresding is this city of about half a million people, and it got heavily bombed in WW2. What it does have is a whole pile of beautiful old buildings that got restored, a whole pile of new buildings built to look old, and is generally a pretty spiffy place.
It was also the capital of Saxony, a country back in the days of the Holy Roman Empire. One of Saxony's most successful kings, Augustus the Strong, really liked expensive things, and a lot of his collection has survived. I have never seen anything like it! I guess it could be compared to the Faberge egg collection, but more impressive. Among the highlights was a model ship, well over 2 feet tall, made entirely out of ivory. The sails were ivory, cut so thin it was translucent! Obviously we couldn't take any photos in there, but we'll describe it all in detail when we get back.
Here's a veiw looking over the bridge from newer areas of the town to the old town. A lot of the old town actually sits on the old fortress that went around the town, thats the strip down near the water.







Here's the main square in the old town. Dresdin is building heavily, trying to recover from being under the control of the Soviets, and there are cranes everywhere. The large church has been heavily repaired, and you can tell. Those buildings to the right are actually almost all new when you look close, but they've done a great job, and the overall effect is very pretty. Dresdin is definately a place to visit, and will be even better in a few years time when all the contstruction in the centre of town is done with.









A bit to the left of the picture was a transport museum. We were allowed to take pictures in there, unlike the super impressive museams. Here's me trying out the Penny-Farthing bicycle. Awkward thing, let me tell you!




We went for a few wanders through the city, it was very pretty. Most of the building are built on big blocks, with large courtyards in the middle of the block that you can walk into. I just happened to wander into one particular courtyard, turned around, and saw this attempt at plumbing. I had to take a shot. Incidentally, although a lot of the buildings retain conservative, old town exteriors, going a bit funky with the walls facing onto the courtyard is pretty normal.




We also tried out the Dresdin night life. There's like a dozen clubs within 2 minutes walk from each other, and the place crawls with people during the Friday night we went out. Unfortunately the places we tried out weren't especially inspiring, but were very busy. I think we just got a little unlucky with our choices, so be sure to take a guide when you go out in Dresdin.






After Dresdin, it was off to Delft, in the Netherlands. It's about 10 minutes train ride from the Hague, and 50 minutes to Amsterdam. Getting there, however, was a 2 hour train trip to Berlin, followed by a 7 hour train trip to Amsterdam. It did give us enough time in Berlin to at least prove that we'd been there, however.








And that puts us where we are right now, Delft. Yesterday we got driven around Rotterdam, which is the financial centre of the Netherlands, and is the biggest port in Europe. It was pretty big, to say the least. Amazing! Amsterdam is on the cards tomorrow, we might just wander around Delft today. Delft is the origin of Delft blue, a particular colour for patterns put onto white ceramics, and apparently can only be produced here. The Hague is also on the to do list.

Anyways, you guys have fun, wherever you are. We'll probably post again when we reach London.

Bob

Goodbye CZ.

Ok people,

This is it, the last post from the Czech Republic. Tomorrow morning we hop on a train and head on into Germany. Slight change of plan though, and instead of Munich, we're heading to Dresden.

Anyways, we've been killing a bit of time in Prague, and it's been pretty spiffy. First we walked to the old town square. In there is this awesome clock, called the astronomical clock. God knows I couldn't figure out how to read it, but apparently you can read the date, the phase of the moon, what constellation in the Zodiac the sun's in front of, and a pile of things I've since forgotten.

It's also got this groovy little act going every hour, on the hour, from 9 till 9. John filmed it, so we'll show you when we get back. All the little figures around it move and stuff!

Anyways. John and I then went on a Segway Tour. It was awesome, John and I got the guide, Paul, all to ourselves. We cruised along the sidewalks, at definately not legal speeds (there's a 10km/h speed limit on Segways in Prague) and saw the sites. We saw a house Einstein lived in, and lots of pretty buildings. Paul was really knowledgable, and right about our age, so it was cool. On a side note, it's amazing how much attention you get when you're riding along on these things, I mean it was scary. Like not making it up, everyone was looking! Must really help with the ladies, I should have asked Paul.
Anyways, here's a couple of pics I snapped along the way, one has Prague castle in the background.



After rolling around the town on our two wheeled chick-magnets we met back up with Mum, and climbed up to Prague castle, it's not much of a castle really, as there are no thick walls, parapets, or battlements of any description. It's more a palace. It has this cathedral inside it, and I'd rank it among the most beautiful inside that we've seen. It's immense inside, yet graceful, if that makes sense. This might help explain.





John and I climbed one of the cathedral towers (mum wasn't game) where I snapped this shot, looking over Prague.














After waiting till they let you into the golden lane for free (no way I'm paying 15 bucks to see a street, full of shops) we busted on it. The golden lane is this little back lane, right near the castle, where somehow original cottages have survived for hundreds of years without someone knocking them down and replacing them with the apartment blocks that are everwhere else. It's very cute. Here's proof.





Our next day in Prague doesn't have many pretty pictures, mainly due to the fact it was raining, and we spent most of it shopping. We did duck into the national museum though, and checked out their dinosaur and anthropological exhibits. It was pretty cool. I decided to add this photo, because the dinosaur is cool, and johns face is funny.















After 10 days in the CZ, I would like to summarise with a few of the interesting customs, arranged by the good, the bad, and the weird.
GOOD-
Nobody wears shoes in homes, nobody. Everyone gets around the house wearing slippers. Because of this, every household has to have a large selection of slippers, in a wide range of sizes, such that they can offer any guests that they have over a pair of slippers to wear around the house. I thought it was very cute, all in all.
Beer restaurants. This is not a restaurant with a wide range of beers, oddly enough. In fact the range is usually rather limited to what's pretty local. In beer restaurants, the beer is not brought in in kegs, or bottles. It seems to be stored in massive steel vats. The beer is served sparkling not with carbon dioxide, but air. The difference is you don't belch, don't feel bloated, and somehow the beer tastes better. A definate good custom.

BAD-
Shower curtains. What the hell happened to the shower curtains? Most bathrooms have a bath, with a hand held shower-head coming off the tap. The bad thing is there is not shower curtain! This is even in bathrooms where there's a place to fix the shower head, making it a proper bath-shower. We could not fathom the reason for this, as we inevitably put water everywhere! This deficiency was compounded by the fact that the bathrooms had no central drain, so any water on the ground had nowhere to go. A definite down point, as I semi-regularly got my towel.

WEIRD-
When people serve their guests dinner, they don't dine with them. Instead, they eat their meals at another time (I never saw them eat?!) such that they may fully wait on their guests. Whilst this had a few advantages, namely that any empty beer in front of you was promptly changed for a new one, it did feel kind of weird, eating whilst your hosts sit nearby, not eating.

Ok then, I hope I've enlightened you all. I must pack and get ready for Dresden!

Bye all
Bob (John's reading, but says hi)