Tag Archives: europe08
Castle Crawl
You know how when you’re on a train and you see one of those nicely dressed young men in white shirts with name badges come towards you and you think “please don’t sit next to me”? I won’t name the particular brand of religious missionary I’m talking about but you know the ones I mean. [...]
People Of Paris
“Do you understand what she just said?”, the kind middle-aged woman asked me on the metro this afternoon. “Not a word”, I told her. She knew I didn’t speak French, because just moments earlier she’d asked me if I knew what was going on. She told me there’d been an accident on the metro and [...]
Paris Wins
Although a number of friends argued I should have just caught the train between London and Paris, I’m glad I flew. Although the weather was shitty when I left London, things improved pretty quickly, and I was lucky enough to have great views of the White Cliffs of Dover, and then flying into CDG Airport, [...]
Hello Duckie
It’s just a day of travelling for me. I’ve got to catch a flight between London and Paris, and when I arrive I’m being picked up by my friend David. Getting to Luton today has been a bit of an exercise. Paul and I stayed last night at the house of a mate of his [...]
Always Say Yes
I woke this morning with not too many plans for the day, aside from a bit of sight-seeing. Unlike yesterday, the weather’s been fantastic. And although it would have been great fun to have done lots of the regular tourist things I got a better offer. While checking my email, I got a Facebook message [...]
Australian, not Irish
“That’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”. the English bloke guiding the check-in queue at Berlin-Tegel Airport said to me this morning, adding “When was the last time you were in the UK?”. “Nine years ago”, I told him as he looked closely at my passport, adding that I was ninth generation Australian. And then he [...]
Back in Berlin
Twenty five years ago, aged seventeen, I travelled to Germany (well, West Germany as it was then), with a group of school-mates and our teacher. I was in Year 12 and I’d been learning German for a number of years. Sometime a couple of years early, one of us had the idea of fund-raising for [...]
Hello from Berlin
After an early evening nap, I headed back to the Amstel Tavern last night. The same barman from the other night was there again, and after chatting for a while I found out he was actually Scottish. You would never know from his accent he was from Aberdeen. I though he was Dutch who had [...]
The Dutch Train System
I knew the woman at the train station information desk could see the heart-break in my eyes as I approached. I explained to her that, for whatever reason, I’d taken the wrong train, or had failed to get off the right train or something like that, and that’s how I ended up in Leiden (thirty [...]
Lovin’ Amsterdam
“You should join the queues early”, I was advised by both Marco and Peter. And they were right: the museum queues in Amsterdam are extraordinarily long. Once inside the Van Gogh Museum, I was amazed, first of all, at how many people there were. And secondly, I was amazed at how many people weren’t actually [...]
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