Cities in a single sentence

So. I’ve been on the road since early June and only now am getting around to blogging about it. There are a couple of reasons for my slackness (other than my general, all-pervading laziness, which is a big factor, to be honest):

1. I haven’t been the sad lonely single female traveler. Yes, I’ve had friends! I do have friends! I promise!
   What this means is that I don’t have to save up all my, ahem, witty observations throughout the day and then unleash them onto the keyboard at night, Instead, I get to unleash them immediately on my poor travel companions. Who get to try and respond to statements like, “if Amsterdam was a song, it would totally be Amsterdam by Coldplay”.
   
   Be thankful for that extra filter the act of writing provides, gentle readers. Be very bloody thankful.



2. I was initially traveling in Western Europe. I have run out of things to say about Western Europe. This is not Western Europe’s fault. It more reflects my limitations as a writer.
   
   Just to seem slightly less like a total Philistine: I really like Western Europe. Stone Churches? Gorgeous! Old Masters’ Masterpieces? Masterful! Turkish food outlets? Delicious!
   
   I just don’t have that much more to say on any of these topics. Except for kebabs. Mmm, kebab.



3. Other people have said fascinating and insightful things about Europe, and I don’t enter competitions I’m not going to win. Seriously, kids. Go read A Room With A View (or watch the movie, it’s adorable). Watch the televisual oeuvre of a certain Mr Clive James. Read the lyrics to Adam Ants’ Young Parisians (They are so French/They talk nothing but French!).
   

However, I’ve recently traveled to places that I do want to write about. At length. But I don’t feel I can write about them until I cover what I’ve left untold in here. So, basically, here’s my experience of nine European cities I visited during June, squashed into one sentence. Meaningful observations abound, obviously.

Amsterdam – Amsterdam would be awesome if the ubiquitous tourist crap didn’t make it seem like Van Gogh had vomited sunflowers over the entire metropolitan district.

Rotterdam – In a city of amazing, revitalising architecture, we stayed on a boat that had been converted into a hotel, because we’re perverse, apparently.

Delft – So pretty.

The Hague – I lost my Rough Guide here, and I suspect it was stolen by the local tourist bureau in an effort to stop us from escaping this, erm, city of enigmatic attractions.

Brussels – A tiny statue of a little boy peeing is a garden water feature, not a tourist attraction.

Barcelona – Fabulous lives lived on streets crowded with Gaudi’s awesomeness – I love it more than shoes.

Granada – The Alhambra gave me the chance to imagine being a Moorish princess, which is all I really want out of life.

Malaga – Loved it, because European beachside resorts give Aussies a rare chance to feel superior and be condescending (You have pebbles! How quaint!).

Madrid – Barcelona’s more serious, but still ridiculously beautiful older sister.

OK, so now we’ve got Western Europe out of the way, you can look forward to future blog posts on topics like traveling with lung disease and Auschwitz. Fun stuff like that.

Munich – A German Tale (with a smattering of Greek)

I went to Munich to visit an old friend from school. I’m going to go with a pseudonym, and call her… Nike… mostly because she probably doesn’t want her business in my blog. And because I’m staring directly at my sneakers right this minute.

Plus, I just finished reading The Secret History, which is all about cover-ups and Greeks, so it seems appropriate.

Also, I just like the word pseudonym.

Anyway, Nike and I studied German together in Years 9 and 10. Frankly, Languages Other Than 4 Unit Maths were never going to be a priority at our school, and the 10 or so of us who kept up German after it was mandatory were allowed to potter away several hours every week watching Derrick and planning German food days.

When I abandoned German for the exciting world of Business Studies, I was a bit like one of my favourite Germans, Sergeant Schultz, in that I knew nothing, nothing.


Me and Sergeant Schultz. Only our mother could tell us apart, etc...

Nike, however, kept going with German, and got quite good at it.

Nike and I also happened to live within about 10 houses from each other, and used to travel home together quite regularly. Because we lived in The Land that Public Transport Forgot, this used to be quite an odyssey (more Greek!), involving buses and walking past a chicken farm. Walking past a chicken farm on a daily basis is the kind of thing that cements a relationship, I feel.

Nike I were good friends, and it’s a shame that we lost touch after high school. However, thanks to the wonderful word/evil-civil-liberty-sucking-vortex of Facebook, we’ve recently been back in touch. Nike has had a very romantic post-high school life, and is now married to a Lovely German Boy, and living in Munich. They were my amazingly generous and accommodating hosts in Germany.

Honestly, I wish more of you would go away and live in faraway places. Visiting people makes for the best times. First with Joe in SP, and now with Nike and Lovely German Boy in Munich. I love seeing a city as someone’s home, rather than as a checklist of tourist attractions that you have to tick off.

Which is not to say that we didn’t hit some tourist attractions. Nike and Lovely German Boy, and, blessedly, their car, took me to see:


*Neuschwanstein. This amazing fairytale castle was an absolute folly built by a crazy king that helped bankrupt the government. Or at least history has labelled him crazy. From my point of view: Primal desire to build + belief that bigger is better + totally unrealistic budgetary expectations = Average visitor to New Homeworld, Kellyville.

*This gorgeous white church kind of between Neuschwanstein and Munich proper. It had this wall of letters and photos and cards and drawings from people who had visited the Church, and subsequently had benefited from a miracle of some description. I spent the entire time wishing we could get customers to write user testimonials like that.

* A monastery with a beer hall attached. The beer hall was fantastic and fascinating. You’re allowed to bring your own food in, and regulars can even store their own beer glasses and tea towels in a locker there. Why, I'm not sure, but it was just cool anyway.

Without Lovely German Boy’s influence, Nike and I had a rather hilariously unsuccessful day of touristing around the Munich inner city. We attempted the following:
*To visit the Pinakotheks. Two closed for the day. One was open, but it was too late to enter by the time we got there.
*To visit a Kandinsky exhibition – Closed for the day.
*To visit a Disney exhibition – Had closed forever 2 days before.
*To have a drink in Munich’s “Australian” pub, as it was Australia Day – THE PUB WAS CLOSED. THE TOKEN "AUSSIE" PUB. ON AUSTRALIA DAY.

Plus, we were bad and ate ice cream sundaes for lunch. And it was a totally great day - Nike and I are both chatters, and she very kindly accommodated my desire to go into any store selling chocolate, clothes or books.

The other nice thing about staying in someone's home (especially Nike and Lovely German Boy's gorgeous flat) is the food. When traveling, I tend to survive on yoghurt, tomatoes and bananas when I'm feeling virtuous, and cake, hot chips and ice cream when I'm not (ie, 99% of the time).

Nike and Lovely German Boy decided to feed me traditional Bavarian cuisine. I ate white sausage and pretzels and cold meats and cheeses and mustard with everything and that was just breakfast. It was like being back in those German Food Days.

I was, I have to confess, a bit heartbroken to learn that most Munich-ites (Munchen-kins?) don't really eat like this anymore. I kind of had hopes of Germany being the last hold-out against the whole Stepford Supermarket thing that's taken over Europe, where everywhere you go you can buy Danone Yoghurt, Haribo Gummy Bears and Lays Crisps.

Or perhaps its just that I seem to find myself buying Danone Yoghurt, Haribo Gummy Bears and Lays Crisps wherever I go. And, come to think of it, I really appreciate being able to get a decent Pad Thai everywhere I go. And watching the Simpsons. And drinking Coke Zero.

So, on second thoughts, as you were, globalisation.

A Bookworm in Budapest

Oh my golly the Bratislava entry was obscenely long. Which is ironic, since I have been applying for web content coordinator roles all week with sentences like, “I understand the importance of using as few words as possible when writing for the web”. Which is a really badly constructed sentence, come to think, and probably why I didn’t get asked for an interview.

In any case, the Budapest entry is going to be a model of well-written web content. Maybe. OK, it’s totally not going to be, but I needed to acknowledge that this blog’s been fairly impenetrable lately. Sorry!

Budapest has long been my I-have-absolutely-no-idea-European-history-geography answer in Trivial Pursuit (I know, most people prefer Helsinki). So I was quite excited to actually learn some stuff about it. Which is why I spent most of my time in Budapest talking to Australians and reading novels. Doh, etc.

First up, Budapest is not at all Eastern Bloc-esque. Unlike Bratislava, it doesn’t have a whiff of the Soviet about it. It’s far more imperial – like a Vienna or Buenos Aires or Paris.

Secondly, because Hungarian is so linguistically obscure, I thought the whole place would feel far more foreign than the rest of Europe. Nope. It’s all castles and gelato and H&M. And turkish baths, I’ll concede.

Thirdly, Budapest is very cool, like (once again) Paris or Buenos Aires is cool. Locals are not impressed or excited by tourists, even tourists from Koala!Country. They are all very well dressed, and have some awesome local designers and really cool stores. You need them more than they need you.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t like Budapest, and wouldn’t go back in a second. It was unspeakably pretty, and, I suspect, extremely liveable. Plus, me and the girlies from my dorm (all Australian. Oops) went to this fab bar one night, in a (I think) falling down office block, and if the tourists can find an awesome bar with actual, like, atmosphere, then goodness knows the awesome-ness of the places that the locals are drinking in.

Because I’m a total geek, the thing I remember most fondly about Budapest is actually Red Bus Books. I really relish the reading opportunities that travel creates. In fact, the efficiency of European rail travel kind of annoys me sometimes, because you don’t get those six hours delays that happen in other parts of the world (Air Canada should totally change its slogan to "We give you enough time to read The Complete Dickens!"). Still, by the time I got to Budapest, I’d already devoured everything I’d brought over with me, as well as a few things I’d gained in crappy one shelf hostel book swaps.

Actually, I’ll pause here and give two quick book recommendations:

A Household Guide to Dying – I bought this because I knew it was set in Sydney, and I’m always interested to see how other people describe my hometown (and whilst I’m digressing, IMO the two best “Sydney” books I’ve read are Playing Beattie Bow and Looking for Alibrandi. Both ostensibly kids (well, young adult) books, but I’ve always loved how familiar LFA’s Sydney is – she works at the Parramatta Road Maccas, for goodness sake – and PBB is The Rocks for me, really). However, it brought to mind a much more specific home than the Bridge and Opera House. It reminded me of my Steel Magnolias/Beaches obsessed family.

My mum and my sister will both absolutely adore this book. My sister, especially. In fact, if there was ever a book written for my sister, this is it. Melodrama and autopsies. But not too melodramatic. Nobody declares "It is my name, and I shall never have another!".

Bit of a Blur – Alex James from Blur’s autobiography. As hedonistic as you’d expect, but also kind and mature and reasoned and neither guilt-ridden nor judgemental. He’s either a genuinely lovely person, or an excellent fiction writer who has created this fabulous persona. Maybe both.

Anyhoo, back to Red Bus Books. It’s a second hand English language bookstore where travellers and expats drop off and pick up books. It has the biggest and most reasonably priced collection of English books I saw in continental Europe, and I left with as many goodies as I could possibly fit in my already over-stuffed bags (The Line of Beauty, which is AMAZING, and even better than the BBC mini-series, and, erm, two of the Gossip Girl novels, which I don’t find nearly as compelling as the TV series, actually. Not enough Chuck.)

What I liked most was seeing the books that people choose to take on holiday with them. There’s A LOT of repetition on those shelves. There’s an entire Harry Potter section, for instance. More Da Vinci Codes than you can point an albino monk at (I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, and still I know about the albino monk. Sigh). 9 St 12 lbs of Bridget Jones. And a much larger than expected self-help section, which made me laugh, because it’s so something I (and Bridget, for that matter) would do – decide that this holiday is going to be a major turning point, where I read up and get ready to return home thinner/more assertive/less single/a better cook. Then get to the holiday destination and decide I’d rather eat cake and go to awesome bars set in falling down office blocks instead.

Bratislava, Slovakia: Giggle City

Bratislava is a funny place. Both funny-strange and funny-haha.

Funny-Strange
According to the Lonely Planet/Rough Guide, “You meet all kinds of people when you stay in hostels.”

This, of course, is a lie. You meet the same kind of people over and over again in hostels. Young, middle class people. You can probably further divide that group into “young middle class people who want to experience every different kind of alcohol available in Europe (AKA Australians and the occasional token Irish)” and “young middle class people who really earnestly want to experience every different kind of culture available in Europe (AKA Canadians and the occasional token Yank)”, but really, it’s a fairly homogenous group.

Except for Bratislava. I felt horrendous when I arrived in Bratislava. I still had the sinus headache of doom. Getting a bus from Vienna to Bratislava (60 km. World’s closest capital cities, for the trivia devotees) was harder than it should have been. Then I couldn’t find a working ATM, and had to walk from the bus station to the hostel because I had no Slovakian currency, then when I got to the hostel I found out that since January 1 2009 Slovakia’s currency has actually been the Euro, of which, of course, I had heaps (well, enough for the tram fare between the bus station and hostel).

So checking into the hostel, I asked for a place in a smaller dorm, making a guess that it would probably be empty, since most people opt for the cheaper, larger dorms. And I was right, and I had one glorious night where I coughed and sneezed and generally recovered to my heart’s content.

And the next day, I got out and had a look at Bratislava, and felt much better and more cheerful. Plus, I bought a massive packet of paracetamol for 40 Euro cents, and of there’s one thing that makes me happy, its cheap drugs.

I arrived back at the hostel about 10pm. And I had a room mate. She was a middle aged woman, and was unpacking her things on the bunk opposite mine. I walked in and said hello. She kind of grunted in return. No problems, I thought, and went about plugging my phone in to recharge, and generally getting ready to shower.

After about 15 minutes of silence, she spoke.

“They tell me you are Australian.” Indiscriminate European accent. Big on piercing, unsettling eye contact.

“Yep! Although, actually, I’ve been staying in England…” My enthusiasm for relating my life story and recent adventures was quickly dampened by her withering look.

“Australia. That is where the English sent their thieves and murderers, is it not?”

“Um… some of them, I guess.”

Really long silence.

“I do not want to have to call the police. But I will, if you make me.”

“Um….” I am genuinely confused at this point.

More silence. Unsettling eye contact.

Finally, I get it.

“Um, I’m not going to steal from you, if that’s what you mean. Is that what you mean?”

“Of course that is what I mean. Do not act dumb.”

I kind of tried to laugh at that, thinking it was some kind of elaborate joke. Yeah, it wasn’t.

First she tried to accuse me of stealing her coat hanger when she went to have a shower. Then she found her coat hanger, and for some really illogical reason, that made her trust me enough to talk at me for 2 long hours. During this monologue, she claimed the following:

*To be Slovakian (actually, she claimed to be Czechoslovakian, and I wasn’t about to argue the Velvet Divorce)
*To be Finnish
*To be Swedish
*To be a high stakes gambler
*To be a casino attendant
*To be a forensic psychologist
*To be a child psychologist
*To be a narcotics officer
*To be unemployed
*To have just moved to Bratislava
*To be very high up in the Bratislava police force
*To not trusting any police force anywhere in the world, as they have all been infiltrated by the mafia
*To be on a book tour promoting her work in child psychology
*That it was impossible that neither of my parents were English (“but you are white!”)
*That the English had caused World War 2
*That no Australians had fought in World War 2
*That there is a conspiracy of extremely wealthy people who run the world
*That the reason they run the world was because no one is made to study philosophy any more (actually, to be far, she could have been any number of opinion writers at that point)

She also kept asking me the time, saying her watch had been STOLEN (meaningful eye contact). I kept checking my phone to tell her the time. Then she unplugged my phone from the room’s only socket, saying I had been using it long enough. I tried to make the best of the situation, and asked why she didn’t use her phone to keep track of the time. She exploded at me, asking what sort of idiot thought phones displayed the time.

It was at this point that I made the decision to sleep with my keys in my hand.

In hindsight, I really should have asked to move rooms, but I was kind of… enthralled? And then it got kind of sad, when she mentioned that she had a son, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with her (I mean, who knows if its true, but it was still sad), and when she showed me a draft of the book she was “promoting”, which was an A4 display book with about 5 pages of pictures of sad looking children printed off the internet. And at that point I would have felt guilty for fleeing, so, I erm, stayed.

Funny Ha-Ha
Because of the exciting mix of delusion and paranoia in my dorm, I made an effort to spend as much time out on the streets, experiencing Bratislava, as humanly possible. And what Bratislava offered was a little bit less development then most European cities (not sold on kerbs and gutters, for instance), but a much better sense of humor (ARE YOU READING THIS, SWITZERLAND???).

For example, it has the most random statues I’ve ever seen. And the ugliest bridge. And the locals will point out the ugly bridge, and say, “isn’t it the ugliest bridge you’ve ever seen?” and not be embarrassed or apologetic but kind of impressed by the hideousness. And I went and saw an exhibition of suggestions for improving Bratislava, and someone had taken massive photos of important landmarks in Bratislava, and just Photoshop-ed in Bret and Jemiane from Flight of the Conchords, and it was strangely BRILLIANT.

Bratislava is also home to the Slovakian National Gallery, which is a bit if a non-event, as far as the art goes. But the curators obviously realize this, and instead just try to make you laugh. So, in the “Slovakian Gothic Art” hall they had all these religious paintings and panels that had been removed from Gothic-era churches, and then had a series of black canvases with little skulls. And you think, well, it looks like it was painted by a Cure fan as part of their Year 10 Visual Arts project, but it certainly is Gothic, and I’ve no doubt its from Slovakia, so, um, yeah, why shouldn’t it be in the Slovakian Gothic Art hall?

And then in the Baroque hall, there was a massive canvas showing St Peter at Heaven’s Gate, with cherubs and clouds bustling around, and next to it, someone had installed an indoor climbing wall, and labelled it “Stairway to Heaven”. And, once again, all I could think was BRILLIANT.

Basically, I think Bratislava may have always suffered from not being Vienna, and not being Prague. And I think that it does what many have decided to do when they’ve suddenly realized they’re not the most beautiful or most intelligent of the group – to be the funny, or quirky instead.
So, basically: Bratislava = Central Europe’s Jan Brady.

Vienna. Very Nice.

Well. The desire to blog escaped me yet again, and I left you all stranded about 4 cities back. That kind of neglectful behaviour is precisely why I plan to never have children.

So, from Zurich, I headed to Vienna.

The coffee in Vienna is excellent. And that, really, is enough to make me love a city, especially after living in the United “We’re really more about tea, here. We’re not totally convinced that coffee isn’t still foreign muck” Kingdom.

I am so renaming this blog Foreign Muck.

Anyway.

Vienna is a grown-up place. Stuff has happened in Vienna. I wandered through the most picturesque flea market on a Saturday morning, and everything that the stalls were selling impressed me, just because of the age and… Europeanosity. There were gas masks that people must have needed during… some war (my European history remains as sharp as ever). There were boxes of black and white photos and postcards and cutlery and crockery and it seemed like it should all be in a museum rather than propped up on rickety table with badly behaved children running around.

Then I went to an actual museum, the fabulous MAK for applied and contemporary art, and it had even better stuff than the flea market. I’m about to give it roughly the highest compliment I can give a museum: it reminded me a lot of one of my favourite places on Earth, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It wasn’t quite that fabulous (didn’t do fashion), but man, I spent hours there. In fact, I stayed till closing time, which meant I didn’t get a chance to go to the Belvedere and see Klimt’s The Kiss (Mum, that's the painting that's repeated all over the furniture in the back bedroom of the Horizon display home. That's how I knew it was classy).

What really hooked me at the MAK was a temporary exhibition on the restoration of artwork and objects stolen by the Nazis to Jewish victims of the Holocaust and their heirs.

Much of the art had been acquired by the state-sponsored museums and galleries. I’m using the verb “acquired” very ambiguously; certainly, the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing, and meticulously catalogued everything they stole. After the war, however, its totally plausible to imagine curators and, in some cases, the public, growing to love the pieces without realizing their origins.

As well as examples of the art, the exhibit included video interviews with the people to whom the pieces had been returned. So many years after the end of the war in Europe, many if the recipients were two generations away from the Holocaust, and they spoke about how the return of these objects had restored their grandparents’ status to people who loved particular, specific and beautiful things, not just people who survived (or didn’t survive) the Holocaust.

So, of course, I stood in the middle of this ornate museum, in a carefully curated exhibition, surrounded by beautifully pulled together Austrians, crying my eyes out, wiping my snotty nose on my coat cuffs. And no, for those of those of you who have asked, I haven’t attracted a boyfriend on my European vacation. You’re shocked, I know.

But all the ideas suggested by that exhibition – about what we owe the past, and how objects and buildings and clothes shape our identities and relationships – are a perfect fit for Vienna, which seems kind of weighed down by this beautiful old town and everything that’s occurred in it.

Vienna had such an impression on me that I even…wait for it…enjoyed the opera. Those of you who have watched me sleep through an entire season of operas in Sydney will express some disbelief.

I really want to enjoy the opera. It seems like something a smart person would like, and I really aspire to being a smart person (almost as much as I aspire to be the sort of person who gets “too stressed out to eat”). But I find it repetitive and strangely disjointed and struggle to suspend my disbelief at some casting choices. And despite what Richard Gere says in Pretty Woman, I haven’t learnt to appreciate it either (that’s not actually the worst lie that Pretty Woman tells its audience, obviously. The whole “being a prostitute is a really good way to snag a billionaire” is probably quite a bit worse).

But I lined up for over an hour to get a standing rooms ticket to Boris Godunov at the Vienna State Opera House, mostly because at 4 Euros, the ticket was cheaper than paying for the official tour of the Opera House. And I loved it. It might have been that it was in Russian, so I could actually understand one word out of every 50 without looking at the surtitles. It might have been because the subject matter was very Macbeth Goes to Russia, and I have a soft spot for Macbeth. It might have been the absolutely splitting sinus headache I had (a result of being outside in temperatures hovering around the -5 mark for several weeks), so I had real empathy for every character and their pain.

So that was Vienna. Coffee pain museum history pretty opera coffee.

Switzerland: So I am not quite a Swiss Miss...

I really try to keep the following quote at the forefront of my mind whenever possible:

...she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring...

No prizes for guessing which of my favourite songs that line also inspired.

Which makes me feel more than a little bit guilty about writing this post. On the bright side, if anyone is sick of the posts when I am all happy-happy-joy-joy-this-is the-most-awesome-place-ever, than this is the update for you.

I was in Switzerland mostly because the trip to Val d`Isere included a free transfer to Geneva Airport. And since I have always found free to be a compelling answer as any to the question why, I just kind of went with it.

So, on to Switzerland. Yeah. Your pulse is racing, I know.

Geneva
Geneva is a major diplomatic and NGO centre. Very important place. An International Canberra, if you will.

In addition to the UN, Red Cross, WHO and other really important...associations... Geneva is crowded with amazing furniture and interior decorating stores. Which should have been my first clue.

Now, I love a good homeware store as much as the next person (Hi Lana!), but I also have a theory about places with too many of these kind of establishments. I think its a pretty reliable indicator that the people who live in that place are more interested in making their private homes fabulous than making their public spaces exciting and vibrant and in any way, shape or form... fun. Which is awesome for them, and I really hope the people of Geneva are rocking out with the SingStar in their living rooms as we speak, but does not make for a great place to visit.

To be fair, I was there on a Sunday and Monday, which are never my most sparkling and witty days, but at least I will make an effort and wear interesting shoes or matching underwear or something, but no such effort from Geneva. On the Sunday, the only thing open was Starbucks. On the Monday, the only things open were Starbucks and the UN.

And the I was so psyched for the UN. I was totally going to see someone famous wandering the halls of power, and they were going to hear me ask the guide a really insightful and non-judgemental question, and I was going to be hired to, like, bring about an end to worldwide bad-stuff, and they were totally going to replace the Talking Dog outside the QVB with me and for generations to come Sydneysiders would meet at the Talking Penny before going out to dinner in the CBD, before realising that there isn`t actually anywhere both nice and affordable in the CBD to eat, and getting a bus to Newtown or Surry Hills or Potts Point or whatever.

I had a dream, man. And instead I went on an hour long tour of meeting halls. Really nice meeting halls, but meeting halls nonetheless.

Bern
The other thing about Switzerland? Really bloody expensive, so it drove me to new levels of backpacker stinginess. I was only in Bern for a few hours because it was about 20 Euros cheaper to buy a train ticket from Geneva to Bern, then a train ticket from Bern to Zurich, rather than buy a ticket straight from Geneva to Zurich.

And Bern, to be fair, was lovely. Very pretty. Lots of bridges. And a river, which explains the bridges.

I think its hard to get disappointed with a place when you`re only there for two hours.

Zurich
Zurich sounds really interesting, doesn`t it? Like, every single Zoe and Zach I know is interesting. And the zoo is interesting. As are zebras.

And Zurich did contain the most gorgeous church I have ever visited (and I`ve toured both Italy and South America, so I have been to some churches, girlfriend). The Fraumünster is really lovely. Massive yet intimate and very feminine. Plus, the Marc Chagall stained glass windows are just amazing and so different and generally awesome.

Aside from that, I got pretty bloody bored in Zurich. Plus, I was suffering from acute paranoia, because one of the girls in my dorm was studying to be a dentist. Our sink was actually in the bedroom part of the dorm, which meant that everyone could see and hear you brushing your teeth, and every time I brushed my teeth I felt as if I was being judged against a very professional criteria to which I could never possibly measure up. Very stressful situation, let me tell you.

It all got to me on the last day. I was wandering around a university campus when I saw a sign advertising some free museums. Great, I thought. Free heating and captions to tell me what to think. I am so there!

One of the museums was being advertised with a man wearing one of those pointy beak-like mask things that doctors used to wear during the Black Death (I think), and its name was prefixed with `Medi` (the rest was in German, which, despite 3 years of German in High School, I do not speak or understand at all. Cheers, NSW education system!). Terrific, I thought. A medieval museum! Maybe there will be knights! Courtly love! Right up my alley!

Erm, so it turned out to be a Medical History Museum. I only caught on to this after viewing the `Obstetrics Instruments Through the Ages` exhibit. After which I needed a whisky. Sitting down. With my legs firmly crossed.

So, to sum up: I would never say don`t go to Switzerland. I would, however, happily say don`t go to Switzerland without a very good book.

Val d'Isere - Because there's a little bit of Eurotrash in everyone.

OK, first up, anything I write about Val d'Isere is going to be tempered by this news story. I almost fell of my chair when I read the story, because I always felt so completely safe in Val d'Isere - once I was off the slopes, the only thing I really feared was my credit card bill after running out of Euros and deciding it was cool to put a round on my MasterCard. I am a very blessed girl who was lucky enough to be travelling with people who always made sure I got home safely every night, basically.

So, three days into 2009 I escaped Oxford under the cover of darkness for a week of skiing in Val d'Isere, a lovely, very posh ski resort in the French Alps.

I'd had the trip planned for ages - before I left Sydney, even. I went with a really old friend from the 'Wood (OK, I'll begrudgingly admit that no one has ever referred to Castlewood Estate - the part of Castle Hill I grew up in - as the 'Wood, but they totally should!), Sam, and her fiancee, who happens to be British, and his brother and a friend of theirs.

My time in Val d'Isere was a time of learning. For instance, I learnt the following:

*I'm a dreadful, no good, very bad skier - this all centres around my fear of going downhill. Its a slightly restrictive fear, I'll admit, but also a totally rational one. Nobody ever hurt themselves climbing up a hill, did they (rhetorical, no comments about Everest mountaineers, thank you very much)?

This all makes for a very slow skier who somehow manages to hunch over (so it hurts less when I fall forward) and lean back (so it hurts less when I fall backwards) concurrently. Imagine Quasimodo refracted through Picasso's cubist period, and you're getting there.

Luckily I have a lifetime's experience of being absolutely terrible at sports (netball, jazz ballet, touch football, squash, kickboxing, er, handwriting), so I was quite content to be really bad at skiing.

Although they did always ask me to be the anchor of the tug-of-war team in primary school. Which really involves:

A) Being heavy
B) Standing still
C) Resisiting momentum

Its a sport designed for me, really.

* 10 shots of Jaegermeister for 15 Euros might seem like an excellent investment now, but probably won't seem as sensible tomorrow morning when you're on the ski life at 9am.

* I could really happily live on French bread and cheese - OMG, the food. The food. THE FOOD! We were staying at a UCPA Lodge (somewhere between a hostel and a school camp venue, except, like, clean), and all meals are included. I was wary of this before we arrived (remembering scullery duties at Year 5 camp after casserole and strawberry mousse... oh, the horror) but I should have trusuted the French. Because the French rock the kitchen kazbah.

Every lunch and dinner there'd be a red meat and chicken/fish option, plus a salad bar and soup and potato dish and a self serve ice cream bar with waffle cones...

And the cheese and the bread. Oh, the cheese and the bread. Breakfast lunch and dinner there was a never-ending table of crusty baguettes and massive circles of different cheeses (blues, bries, 'berts...). And every was great, and fresh, and plentiful...

Does anyone know why we just don't all eat French bread all the time? Since it is so obviously superior to any other kind of bread on earth?

Basically - I'll give the French a pass on the supposed arrogance, since, well, they are better than us. Arrogant away, Frenchies... just keep baking.

* Every nationality on Earth can speak a second language, except those who speak English as their first language - and its embarassing. In Val d'Isere, the ski instructor, the bar staff, even the dish washer at the hotel all spoke perfect English (in addition to their native French). It just makes me feel so dumb and isolationist.

I saw the new Woody Allen movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona (and, oh man, some of the lines about white middle class girls going backpacking and trying to discover what their cultural contribution should be cut very close to the bone... very Stuff White People Like) the other day.

One of the characters, a poet, refuses to learn to speak any language other than Spanish because he is afriad that it will contaminate his relationship with the toold of his work.

Ah, I thought. Maybe that's why native English speakers rarely learn a second language.

Then I reemebered that we're the same liguistic group to give the world such charming phrases such as "wife basher" for a sleeveless t-shirt, and I decided that in fact it could just be pure laziness.

Anyway, I'm now mucking about Europe for a few weeks before trying to tackle the terrible no good UK job market. Wish me luck!

Oxford for Dummies (also known as "professionals")

So this whole thing, you see, happened, where I had a full time job in Oxford that involved me staring at a computer screen typing all day. It made staring at a computer and typing all night seem fairly unappealling. So this blog got a teensy bit abandoned. Oops.

But now my contract has finished, and I've left Oxford (for the time being, at least). Which means I finally feel ready to update here about my first three months in the UK (yes, it really has been that long).

Oxford was fantastic. Social. Busy. Tipsy. The highlights package includes:

* Attending guest dinners in the dining halls of two different colleges (not sure what a college is, or how it relates to the University proper? Me neither! The wiki page is pretty good on the topic).

The locations were pure Harry Potter. The conduct and dress code begins all Oscar Wilde: Collected Works (ooh! We're all terribly sophisticated and knowing and well-dressed! Let us flirt and display our wit and eat rabbit). The conduct and dress code slowly devolves into Oscar Wilde: The Actual Life, meaning there's lots of debauchery and intrigue and behaviour that risks imprisonment. Good times, basically.

* Cheesy Christmas clubbing until the lights were turned back on at closing time. I told Shelley that my Christmas wish was to dance to Wham's Last Christmas as many times as possible. Wish granted.

* Working at an office located about 10 miles out of Oxford in a genuine English village. I walked down a country lane to work every morning, and I used to pretend that I was a Bennet sister walking to Meryton to hear the latest news about the officers of the regiment. Because I'm that cool, obviously. Incidentally, I read Mansfield Park again recently (50 pence at Oxfam). Was Fanny Price always so dull and annoying? And does anyone else wish that Austen had written the novel about Mary Crawford instead?

* Christmas in London and New Year in Coventry. Being away from the people you love over the festive season sucks. What doesn't suck, though, is how the isolation makes you seek out other people stranded on the same cold island. People are better and more interesting and generous than Miranda Devine or Ray Hadley or Today Tonight would have you believe.

Also, Christmas Night in London turned into Boxing Day sales at Selfridges, which turned into a fabulous jacket that Santa bought me for Christmas. Thanks Mummy and Daddy!

* Working weekends at Marks & Spencer. When I quit my last job in a shop, I was all Scarlett O'Hara in the vegetable patch at Tara, swearing that, "With God as my Witness, I'll never work retail again".

But then a greedy desire to earn as many pounds as possible hit, so I applied for a job at M&S, which is a bit of an institution in the UK. And I loved (almost) every second of it. I know its a cliche, but British people really are very polite, and many seem to have a slightly insane amount of respect for M&S and its employees. As such, I was subjected to none of the fun abuse and condescension I've experienced working retail in the past (yes, I'm looking at you, customers of Castle Towers).

Things I didn't love:
* Being the only housemate who felt compelled to clean the (shared) bathroom. House was fine, and housemates were... lovely in most cases and tolerable in others, but, dude, seriously, our shower shouldn't look like a petri dish growing anti-biotics.

And to the members of my family who are amused at the thought of me cleaning, I will send home the pants I ruined with bleach as proof. So there.

* The gym. I really miss C2K. I really miss RPM.I really miss instructors who don't say things at the end of a Body Attack class like, "now I want everyone to point to someone who really inspired them with their efforts tonight". Needless to say, I. Did. Not. Point. I did almost throw up, though.

I was surprised at the dire gym state, though, because the streets of Oxford are riddled with joggers and runners 24 hours a day, no matter what the temperature. I guess its just a town of driven and successful people, and they apply the same ethics to each aspect of their lives. Or maybe they just like to parade around in lycra tights. I know that's why I run.

* Working seven days a week. Felt great for the first month, then I just started to fantasise about sleeping in incessantly. Between Christmas and New Year I spent on average 12 hours a day in bed, just catching up on sleep. Woohoo, the wild life of a twenty something living it up on a working holiday.

I'm travelling again now, which means I will be updating the blog again regularly. At least, that's the plan. We'll see.