London take two

Lissa, me and Philippa at the bridge

Last year working as an advisor at Victoria University I had two coworkers, Lissa and Philippa. Lissa has spent the last six months living in Germany (I visited her in Erlangen in July) and Philippa has been in London all year (I visited her there in May). We'd talked about the three of us meeting up for awhile, and finally one weekend in November we did.

Poppy wreath outside Westminster Abbey

Lissa and I both flew from Frankfurt Hahn, my absolute favourite airport (or not, its a former army base in the middle of no where, turned into a trashy airport for low-budget airlines, I've flown in and out a couple of times). In theory it should have been an easy trip, as there's a direct bus there from Luxembourg and only a quick flight from Germany to London, but I'm amazed that I made it there! After a morning of all the errands I had to do here in Luxembourg going wrong, I left the house late and missed the bus I needed to take to catch the airport bus, got there by taxi with only seconds to spare, and then our bus to the airport got stuck in roadworks and Friday evening traffic and I barely made it through check-in!

Lissa outside Philippa's place

The next hurdle was getting in and out of the UK itself. Last time I was there I was placed on an alert list due to all of the fun and games I was having with my spanish visa, so I was scared that they wouldn't let me in this time, given all I have to prove that I have a visa is a laminated ID card. A surly looking German man studied this for a while, and then let me through and onto the plane. After we landed in London Stansted, we waited in the 'Non-European' queue watching two immigration officials rigorously interrogate everyone. Finally our turn came, and after several minutes spent swearing that I was studying Politics in Madrid on exchange and explaining who we were visiting, what job she did, and what her life plans and star sign and childhood pet's name were, we were in!

oldtimer band at the local pub

We managed to bus from the airport to Mile End station, and Philippa met us there and took us back to her flat. She's moved since the last time I was there, and is now living in a very Coronation-St-type two story, three bedroom place inhabited by five-and-a-half kiwis and with another on the couch - nine New Zealanders sleeping in a three-bedroom, one bathroom place in central London, true OE style! This house had once been inhabited by the Horror Handyman from Hell (fancy your light switches inside kitchen cupboards, anyone?) and the toilet had decided to stop working this weekend too, fun times. By this point, it was around 11pm UK time, so midnight our time, and we were quite shattered, but we did make it out for some food and a drink at their local, a crazy old-timer looking place with an amazing band made up of elderly men with what little grey hair they had left at a rock-star long length (check out the bassist in the photo).

our Yeoman tour guide

On Saturday morning Philippa and her fiance James took us out for breakfast and coffee at a wee cafe in a park somewhere near their place. The weather wasn't bad at all, after it being 3-8degrees most of the previous week in Luxembourg, having 18 degrees in London felt like heaven, and having a real Latte made by a kiwi barista was amazing! We then went to the Tower of London and did the tour inside. These tours are run by the Yeomen Warders, who, I was surprized to learn, actually live with their families inside the Tower. Imagine being the teenage son or daughter of a Yeoman Warder and asking a taxi to take you home there after a night on the town! The one who did our tour was absolutely hilarious, and earned extra respect from us for referring to Australia as 'one of the islands in the New Zealand group'.

the 'White Tower' of the Tower of London

I learnt a few things that I didn't know about the place. The Tower has a reputation for being a prison, but was actually designed as a royal residence and usually only had high-profile prisoners kept there for very short periods of time, and actually the first prisoner ever held there escaped. It was built in 1078, but there was no purpose built prisoner accomodation until 1687. The Tower was last used to hold prisoners during WWII, with Hitler's deputy the final one. The Tower of London also has seven capitive ravens living in the grounds, legend has if the 'six ravens' are lost or fly away, the Tower and the Crown will fall. The seventh bird is the reserve. There is even a 'Ravenmaster' Yeoman that looks after them and feeds them meat every day.

Spanish food at Borough Market

So, we did the tour, looked at the Crown Jewels, saw some old armour (that King Henry VIII had some serious allusions about the size of his own crown jewels!) and then wandered down to the Tower Bridge, where James left us. We went to the Borough Market for lunch, that place is amazing! It has foods from all around the world, both cooked meals and things like specialist cheeses and bread to buy. As much as I love markets here in continental Europe, its cool to have fifty different types of food in one place, rather than just fifty stands selling the same cheese and olives. Lissa and I had paella and Philippa chowed down on some German sausage.

View from the London Eye with Westminster in the bottom right

We went up the London Eye, something I'd wanted to do since the last time I visited. It's like a giant slow-moving ferris wheel, you go into a pod with about 15 other people and it does a thirty-minute circuit up and down again. It was quite cloudy but still very cool, and a nice change from walking up the windy stairs to reach the top of church bell towers! We walked over past Big Ben and Westminster, where they had war Remembrance Day memorials going on, and took a quick look at Buckingham before going back to the river bank for the Lord Mayor's Parade fireworks. They were quite cool fireworks, but from where we were sitting the Eye completely dwarfed them, and made it all kinda underwhelming.

Fireworks beside the London Eye

We met up with James again, and their former Aussie flatmates, and went for a drink and then to Brick Lane for curry. Brick Lane is full of curry shops, and the waiters stand outside the doors and make deals with you like free wine and 20% off if you come to their place. We went to what these guys consider to be the best, and it was really good (I tucked into some especially spicy stuff!) but what made the place was the decor - the walls were covered in huge paintings of erotic mythological scenes, apart from one wall that had a big painting of Diana instead. Weird. We left this place extremely full and not feeling capable of heading out, so we went back to the flat and hung out there with some flatmates and some of their friends for a bit.

Xmas lights on Oxford Street

Sunday was shopping day! We had coffee at another kiwi-barista place and then took the bus through town to Oxford Street, the road that almost bankrupted me last time I visited London. This time I was a bit more savvy, and didn't buy anything until we got to Primark, where I splashed out as one only can in a place where pants cost no more than five quid. A couple of hours later we managed to free ourselves from the grasp of Primani goodness and stumbled out to find darkness had fallen and the street full of Christmas lights. We headed up to Piccadilly to take a quick look, and then spent our final evening in London having an amazing chicken roast with all of the trimmings thanks to Philippa's awesome cooking. It felt quite weird to be sitting around with so many kiwis, eating something so kiwi, with english-speaking TV playing in the background after over ten months here in Europe!

Roast chicken dinner

Monday morning we flew back to Frankfurt. Thanks to Lissa's much more sound planning skills we managed to get a bus out to the airport without being stressed when we got stuck in early-morning traffic, but most on the bus didn't seem to be in the same boat and one man got really aggressive. I was looking forward to landing back in the immigration-slack EU, and sure enough I had no problems walking in with my flimsy Spanish ID card, but Lissa got held up a bit - her German visa was granted on the basis of her husband being here for work, and the woman demanded to know where he was (at work...can't a girl take a trip without her man to hold her hand?) and then we were back in the 2degree cold of Europe, and I was back to Luxembourg and small children once again.

More photos of London in November are here.

Goodbye Antwerp!

I'm back to being homeless and unemployed (temporarily)! The kids left for Thailand yesterday, finishing off a difficult week here, so now my bags are packing and I am hitting the road again. The last week has been tough, while I am really going to miss the kids, I have also been counting down the days. We've all been sick, but while everyone else camped out in bed for a few days until they were over it, I kept getting up in the mornings and looking after the kids, so I'm still struggling to get rid of this cold. Feeling really terrible and still working 14 hour days while Koi got ready to go to Thailand hasn't been fun.

Simon

I had Friday off, I went into Antwerp and met up with Simon again, a former AFS student that I've met up with before here. We spent the afternoon looking in different shops, turns out July is a month of huge sales, just like back in January when the 'Rebajas' in Spain turned my budget inside out! We checked out a lot of designer shops though, not high-end labels but the mid-range, one-off kind of stuff. Antwerp is getting a reputation for fashion that is pretty well deserved, the shops were really cool and expensive enough that I managed not to waste a whole lot of money like I would have if we'd visited cheaper stores during sale time! Then we just sat in a bar nursing a couple of beers and talking for the rest of the night. About 11pm I got a phone call from Jan asking whether or not I was coming home that evening, and when I said I was, he said it would probably be better if I didn't because the builders were coming at 6.45am. Apparently, they didn't need my room that early, but they would be making a lot of noise.

Getting advised about this so late really ticked me off, because when the builders come I really have to move all of my stuff onto my bed and cover it with plastic to protect it from the dust, so even if I had somewhere else to stay I would have had to go home to sort things out. By the time I did take the bus home and then sort everything out in my room (I was in the middle of packing so there were half-finished piles everywhere) it was 2am, and I was still so tired that I feel back asleep after the builders came in at 6.45.

Antwerp

An hour later, they knocked on my door and kicked me out of my room. I guess it's not the builders' fault that I was so badly warned about all of this, but I really didn't take it to well and stomped off to catch the bus back into Antwerp. This time, I did allow myself a little retail therapy but I swear I really needed what I got! I think my clothing choices have changed quite a lot here actually, in New Zealand I always wore skirts and dresses, and usually clothes that I could wear to the office, but now I actually own a pair of pants and wear shorts all the time. I nearly bought a pair of denim shorts, but then the thought of being only one step away from my first pair of jeans in four years freaked me out a little to much! I also walked around the city for ages, to find a cheap suitcase and head through a poorer area to take photos of stuff I normally see from the bus.

I got home at 3, hoping that the builders would be done in my room so that I could nap. No such luck! I was still in quite a bad mood, so I hid on the balcony of my room for the rest of the afternoon, until finally they finished up around 7.30pm. This time, even covering my stuff in plastic wasn't enough and everything I own was covered in dust. I looked around me at the dust over all of the floor, furniture and my possessions for about the sixth time in three months and just wanted to cry, it takes me hours everytime I clean and I am just over it and really couldn't face it again when I was sick and so tired. I was tempted to just push everything into a huge dust-covered pile on the floor and crawl into bed, but then I put on my big-girl panties and just got stuck into it. My stuff will never be the same again, I'll be finding dust inside things for years to come, and I even threw some stuff away because even after cleaning it wouldn't look the same. Hauke will be happy to know that a particular hat that he despises ended up in the bin!

Antwerp - propping up the gap between two houses

I really think that it was unfair of Jan not to warn me that I would be living in these kind of conditions here. For three months I've been packing up and then unpacking again, putting up with builders at all hours of the day and night, and living with all of my stuff in piles on the floor while the furniture and closet was being worked on. I'm a pretty flexible person that doesn't get too hung-up about that kind of thing, but at the same time I feel like it would have been common courtesy to warn me about it before I came and then apologize a couple of times along the way. This Saturday really pissed me off, because there was no reason why he couldn't have warned me about it earlier, and I had planned on spending the day in bed trying to get rid of this cold. I refused to get up and work early on Sunday morning, because I just really needed to sleep. This really made them mad at me in return, because they had guests coming that afternoon and didn't want to get up early and watch the kids and prepare at the same time, but I'd reached the stage where I really wanted to put myself first and say no when they were demanding too much of me, especially where my health is concerned.

Alice in the middle of lunch, at Quick

Even sleeping most of Sunday didn't shake this cold I have, its really weird, I've been sick for well over a week now. I think I'm seriously run down. Monday went pretty quickly, I took both of them for a walk to the supermarket and then to Quick so Arin could play on the playground. I think this trip really proved how much I've learnt in three months, going from someone who had never changed I diaper before to someone who could take both kids out for hours and manage feeding and changing them and dragging the stroller and Arin's scooter around and not losing anything or forgetting anyone or forgetting hats-incase-its-sunny, jackets-incase-its-cold or anything else from the massive list of what you need to take when carrying a baby around. I guess it doesn't sound like it's too difficult, but to anyone who hasn't taken a baby and a small boy with behavioral issues out alone for the afternoon before, you should try!

And then it was Tuesday and the kids and Koi were leaving for Thailand. I got up early when Arin excitedly prodded me in bed, telling me we had to get ready 'quick fast' to catch their (7pm!) plane, and spent the morning feeding, bathing and clothing the kids, washing their bedding and cleaning their rooms ready for their return, keeping them entertained and packing their stuff, and toys and snacks as carry-on, because Koi had told me that she would be too busy getting herself ready. She got up around midday, went for a swim, got dressed, loaded the car and managed to leave Alice's food behind. So I really wonder how she coped with both kids alone on the international flight, and how she will manage the next six weeks by herself with them. Jan really surprised me, I had thought that as he wouldn't see the kids for six weeks he would have made an effort to spend the morning with them, but he didn't even touch Alice once, it was really sad to see. Goodbyes were quite awkward, Arin doesn't really understand and never displays affection anyway, Koi barely said goodbye at all, and I had given myself a lot of last-cuddles with Alice throughout the day, she is the one I will miss the most.

Random building, Antwerp

So suddenly I was alone in an empty house! I walked into the village to go to the supermarket and tried to bake muffins to take to Luxembourg and Gent, adapting a chocolate muffin recipe I already had to include speculoos and finding an apple-speculoos one on the internet. Neither were a real success, I threw out as many muffins as I ended up with, but in the end I think it's actually the oven that's the problem, it seems to cook only or more from the top, so that the tops are overcooked and the bottoms undercooked. I will try both types again in a different oven before I post the recipes on here. I finished up my packing, in the end I seem to have a lot less stuff than I thought, just one huge suitcase and a backpack to drop off in Luxembourg, and my huge backpack and a smaller bag to take with me for July. Packing this bag for summer backpacking was much more fun that packing for backpacking during winter was, I keep looking at my piles of clothing wondering why it seems like not enough! I also celebrated the beginning of my time off working with kids by painting my nails, straightening my hair and putting on a dress, I feel like a different person!

Houses in Antwerp

Wednesday I headed to Luxembourg, to drop things off at my new house and meet the family I was going to live with. I got an awkward ride to the station with Jan, trained into Brussels and then realized that I had forgotten my passport, it just doesn't seem like I'm visiting another country when I just jump on a train for a day trip. I'm not sure if my spanish ID card would be enough if I get checked somewhere, but luckily nothing happened. It took another three hours from Brussels to Luxembourg, not a very fun trip because its now summer holidays here and heaps of scouts were on the train on the way to their different camps. I'm not sure I've written about scouts in Europe too much before, its a phenomenon that I don't really understand, but scouts are cool here. Like everyone in Belgium does scouts, and its pretty big in the other european countries too. They do normal scout stuff like camping and skiing, but also weird stuff like running all over the city wearing weird clothes. I don't get it, scouts in NZ are really small and really geeky. These scouts were really annoying, some boys had water guns and I kept getting splashed with water, so I was too scared to take out my laptop to make the trip go faster! It was also a difficult trip because I had the world's largest suitcase with me, and it weighed so much that it was off my (40kg max) travel scale. Both times the escalator to the train platform was broken and I had to drag the damn thing up the stairs, after the one I got in London I don't have much faith in cheap suitcases and I'm surprised it lasted the trip.

Antwerp

The family are lovely (and I'm not just saying that because they read my blog!), like a real family rather than a bunch of people living in the same house but never doing anything together like in Antwerp, and the openess and honesty from Rogier and Jacqueline is really relieving. I also think that their Dutch sense of humor is really similar to kiwi humor, its nice to be around people who laugh for a change! It's also a completely different feeling going there and meeting them three weeks before I move there and after having talked to so many families and thought about it so much, to when I made a quick decision and just jumped on a plane to go to Antwerp, and I'm sure it will work out differently. The kids are really cute, Pepijn is about 3 1/2 and Olivier is 1 1/2. You can really notice the difference between then and Arin and Alice in how they interact, Alice hates strangers and cries when anyone is even in the same room as her, and Arin would never just start to play and chat with someone new. It will take me a little while to get adjusted to Pepijn's way of speaking and accent, just as it took me some time to work out what Arin was trying to say, but they both seem pretty good at making you understand what they want! The house is in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Luxembourg, so you look out the living room windows onto paddocks with cows, its great, like being back in NZ. And of course, amazing to be in a house that is clean and has no dust, plastic or building supplies anywhere! So I'm happy!

Antwerp

The train ride home was much more straightforward without any luggage. Summer means that it now stays really light well into the evening, and leaving Brussels North station at 7.30pm I noticed for the first time the row of buildings with underwear-clad girls in the window. I've been in and out of that station half a dozen times in the evening and never noticed that before! I also noticed that the people who clean the train stations and empty the trash wear white, kinda stupid right?

Tomorrow I'm off to Gent, here in Belgium, to stay with Anais for a couple of days, she was an AFS student in Christchurch and stayed with me when she visited Wellington. I've heard good things about Gent so it will be cool to visit. I'll post a mini-itinerary for July on here, so mum and grandma you can keep track of where I am!

Photos are here.

Madrid Again - The Visa Saga Hath Endth

The holy grail...a Spanish ID card

So last time I was in Madrid, back in March, before I quit and returned to civilized lands, I was finally given a temporary NIE and told that to get a proper ID card that permitted me to remain and Spain (and therefore in the whole Schengen Area because there are no border controls) I had to return in 40-45 days, hence the return journey. I ablogrrived at midnight on the Wednesday, no problems at all with border control here, and just managed to get the metro to Annabella and Jose Angel's place before it closed at 1.30am. We pretty much went straight to bed.

View from my spot in retiro

We got up the next morning and had breakfast and then lunch before I made a move, with the office reopening at 4pm after siesta. The address was a bit strange, they list no street number, just the street itself, meaning you gotta pick a direction and just walk until you get there, although I asked the security guard at the metro stop and found it pretty quick. All the foreign-looking people walking that way with papers in their hands was a good giveaway. Turns out it is actually a detention centre for illegal immigrants, a huge prison-like building with big walls and stuff. Pretty scary looking.

I walked through security into the office. Normally, when I go to Foreign Offices, there is a line at the front desk (and sometimes I line outside waiting to be let in to get to the front desk even!) waiting to check in and get a number to wait in another yet another queue to see someone at another desk, but this time there was no line at all for the front desk. Surely I wasn't at the right place then. A Foreign Office with no line?

My spot in Retiro

I went up and asked the girl if I was in the right place to get my NIE ID card, and she replied that I was and asked for my temporary one and passport. She took them, checked my name, opened a filing drawer, took out a card, and handed it to me. Just like that. I stood there a bit stunned and asked her if that really was all I needed to do, and she nodded, and I still stood there a bit stunned. Was this really the same government that had spent so long insisting my type visa didn't even exist, now giving me an ID card so easily? I later decided that the lack of line at the final Foreign Office is due to a lengthy, ridiculously difficult and expensive process - most people were either still stuck back in the lines at the first offices or had given up all together!

So now I have a Spanish ID card permitting me to stay until the end of March. The Visa Saga hath endth. Although its the ID card of an exchange student, meaning if I want to actually work in Spain there are further chapters to the drama, as I would then have to take any contracts to another office and go through a currently-undefined process to get permission to actually accept them. Mmmmm. At least having an ID card that says 'Estudiante' means I can try to get student discounts here in Belgium.

view from my spot in Retiro

That outa the way, I brought a heap of beer and food and headed back to Annabella and Jose Angel's to celebrate with them. I made curry for dinner, I thought it wasn't spicy but it nearly killed the two of them, and then we spent the rest of the day just drinking and talking. I didn't do much on Friday either, I got up late and went for a haircut after lunch, a cheap place down the road with some lady that cut it in about ten minutes and didn't try to make conversation at all, not even to ask where I'm from. Then I headed off to Retiro, back to the spot I've claimed to read and lie in the sun some more. Finally, I went back to Olga's aunt's place, to meet Olga and grab the big bag I'd left behind and say hi to her aunt, and then I had a late dinner, tried to repack everything into a bag and suitcase of 15kg each and only 10kg carry-on, and then it was off to bed.

It was my tenth trip out to Madrid airport, and my eight flight in and out of Madrid on Saturday in four months, I'm a pro at it now. I just scrapped through with my luggage, luckily they didn't weigh my carry-on, and then it was back to Belgium!

My first couple of nights in Switzerland

eating in Bern

After a really long day, with an early morning start to go skiing in Mulhouse in France, I headed into Switzerland to visit Corine, another AFS 2009-2010 exchange student. Its quite a bizarre day really, just casually going skiing in France and then taking the train to Switzerland, its how normal days like these are here that make me love Europe!

I had a funny experience on the train from Mulhouse in France to Basel in Switzerland, 20 minutes away; I got border controlled. Since German customs stamped my passport back in December, I haven't had had any further encounters with customs, when flying between Schengen agreement countries the airline has just glanced at my passport to make sure I am who I say I am, and I've never been checked travelling between countries on the trains, so it was quite strange! A couple of French customs guys got on the train, and I guess because I had my huge bag with me, I was the one they picked to interrogate in that carriage. Interrogation was as follows:


French customs: Can I see your passport please?
French customs: This visa is for Spain
Me: Yes, I am doing a working holiday there
French customs: Do you need a visa for France?
Me: No...
French customs: Do you need a visa for Switzerland?
Me: No...
French customs: Ok, then enjoy your trip

Wow. Pretty sure it should have been that guy's job to know whether or not I needed visas. All of a sudden I have no sympathy for the French complaining about their illegal immigration problems, they should stop hiring muppets to patrol their borders.

Burger King tray in different languages, Basel

I had a little under a hour in Switzerland, so I left my bags in a luggage locker and walked out of the train station only to realise that I couldn't really go that far in the time that I had, and so I just ate Burger King and people watched, there were some really cool old trams stopping in from of the station, the oldest I think I've seen since Christchurch. Have to note though, that just getting a burger, not even a combo was 6.50. I can see what everyone in NZ is thinking, 6.50, that's a little steep, you'd probably be able to get a whole combo for 6.50 in NZ, but no, I'm not talking in NZ dollars, I'm talking in Swiss Francs. That burger really cost a little over 9 NZ dollars. Nine. For just a normal burger. Switzerland is not a cheap country, needless to say I did not enter any more food outlets during my time there, nor did I stay within what I thought was a generous budget for the week. It is cool that the Burger King cups and trays and everything has their mottos written in all three of the official languages, German, French and Italian, you can feel here that the linguistic regions of Switzerland are much more united than Belgium was.

Clock in Basel (urinal on side)

But anyway, several hours later and after what had been a really really long day I arrived to the train station in a town called Romanshorn, right up in the German-speaking north-east corner of Switzerland on the edge of Lake Constance. Corine was at a job interview, so all I knew was that her mum was going to pick me up. I stood and waited for awhile, and then a car pulled up and three people got out and started taking photos of me. I thought that even with all of my bags and stuff I couldn't have been that much of a spectacle for strangers to be taking photos of me, so that must have been Corine's family! Her mum, dad and younger sister were very happy to meet me, and we headed out to a pizza resturant. They were quite impressed by the little bit of German I could remember from my time there (somehow I am really good with food names and not too much else, probably from the old Food is one of the two Pillars of our Family Holiday thing, spending so much time in Austrian resturants!) but I was really struggling after such a long day and really wasn't as switched on and conversational as I normally would have been. Corine arrived after a succesful job interview, it was great to see her after so long, and then after she ate too we headed home, with Corine driving me. I have to admit, after Camille's driving Corine seemed like a pro (sorry Camille!), but she has had her license a lot longer. Corine lives in Egnach, the next village along from Romanshorn with a population of around 4500. After a quick tour of her place and introductions to the world's hugest cat and Switzerland's most hyperactive sausage dog puppy, I collapsed into bed.

Cellar-shops in Bern

Thursday we were up relatively early and off to see Switzerland! Her mum had very generously spent some time before I came tracing down one of a limited number of all-day train tickets, so we could visit the cities without paying hundreds of swiss francs, so we headed to the capital of Bern first. I really liked Bern, after Brussels and Paris it felt more like Wellington, a capital that is calm and tranquil and not too big, but still pretty cool. Bern has a river running through it, and a lot of the buildings are built on slopes.We checked out the government buildings walked around for a bit, one of the first things you notice about Switzerland is how many fountains they have! They're everywhere, water is definitely not a hot comodity here! The second thing you notice is the clocks, they're also everywhere, huge ones on the buildings. I also like how in the main street there are all these cellars with big wooden doors on the street and steps leading down to them, like those hurricane shelters you see out in the feilds in american movies, and they have little shops down them, quite cool. And they have a mens urinal on the side of a really nice building with some of those huge clocks on it. I find it quite weird that they just condone peeing on the side of a building like that, with only a half screen up for privacy, but I also find it really unfair that men can pee for free and women can't. Sexist Switzerland, not only did they not let all women vote until 1971, they make women pay to pee but provide free places for men, not cool.

Kindlifresserbrunnen

We saw the capitve bears, the motto of Bern, like many other cities here in Europe, but that was actually a little sad, their enclosure in the centre of Bern is a long way from old Orana Park. In the middle of Bern is a famous fountain, called the Kindlifresserbrunnen, or Child-eater-fountain. This fountain shows a ogre stuffing a naked kid into his mouth, holding a bag of other children at his side. Pretty gruesome really, apparently its an old carnival figure they use to frighten children. We had some Swiss beer and meals, sausage and potatoes, and then jumped on a train to Zurich.

Zurich

Zurich is much bigger than Bern, you can just feel it, maybe not quite as friendly or something - I guess its like the difference in ambience between Wellington and Auckland. We checked out the Paradeplatz, where all of the huge banks are, and walked around for a bit doing some shopping and heading through the alleyways in the old town. Despite the prices, I'd actually given myself permission to buy at least one thing in Switzerland, but typically when we both had money to buy stuff we couldn't find anything we wanted, the only thing I picked up was some penis-shaped pasta that someone back in NZ had told me existed over here. I didn't believe here then, but it really does! Europe really amazes me sometimes!

Zurich

That evening we headed to an AFS meeting, where Corine underwent training to become a support coordinator for a Chilean boy. It was really bizarre to sit there and listen to the training in German, but using the same resources that we had in NZ. I had to laugh when they were showing how to file reports on global link, how you have to select a rating for the students, its a funny thing to see getting shown to a student that you used to rate! It is really amazing though and it makes me so proud, to see a student who came to NZ as a 16 year old and grew up and changed so much, became so mature, who is now an adult driving and working and taking responsibility for an exchange student herself. About half of the students I used to look after are now volunteering themselves, it's great. It was also really great to see that everyone in the room was a youngish returnee, I am a big believer in using young people as volunteers.

the postbox in the bar

After the meeting finished we grabbed a late dinner in a really nice (and ridiculously expensive) asian resturant, and then headed out to a club called Hive that Corine's friend had recommended. Even though it was a Thursday, it turned out to be a huge night, the place was packed and had DJs doing live remixes, the music was cool. The drinks were not cheap at all, about 20NZD for a simple vodka and orange, like you'd pay between 4-8NZD for in NZ, which when I think about it probably turned out to be a blessing early the next morning, but I still drunk enough to be buzzing all night. The weird thing was, in NZ you'd pay about twice as much to switch the orange to redbull, whereas here there was barely a difference. As I rarely allow myself to splash out on redbull in NZ, I thought why not here, seeing as it was barely more expensive, but I think it meant I drunk many, many cans of redbull, which is probably not healthy and made me feel very funny the next morning! They had a postbox in the women's bathroom, with free postcards that you could write on and put in the box and the bar would pay the postage for you, quite a novel idea but perhaps not that smart for anyone to actually do considering the level of sobriety most people in the club had. We wrote some ourselves, one to Corine's mum apologising for being out so late on a school night (she wasn't really that happy about it) and one to Hauke in Germany, which have both since arrived, and one to myself in NZ that hasn't.

Me in Zurich

The other funny thing was how friendly everyone was, it was great to be back in a country where being able to speak conversational english is the norm, not the exception, and word seemed to quickly get around that there was a NZer in the club, because everyone seemed to come up to me to meet me, and I got quite a few interesting propositions from various men (and a woman!). We did met a half-German, half-kiwi guy that normally lives in Wanaka, that was quite cool, the only time I've met a pretty-much kiwi over in Europe, and then at the end of the night one of the DJs came up and introduced himself and we had a huge chat about NZ music, I wrote down a lot of artist for him to check out and he invited us to stay for their after-hours staff party and put me on the guestlist for a concert that weekend. We hung around after the place closed for a bit, and then we were off to catch the 5.30am train back to Romanshorn.

Corine with her plans!

I really had to laugh at Corine, turns out Swiss-Germans are closely related to those from Germany when it comes to intense organisation, the whole day she'd been carrying around printouts of maps and all of the train timetables, including our early-morning train back home! This trip was pretty much on par with my memorable journey from Mainz to Wurzburg, thankfully minus the puking, and I was very glad Corine was the one responsible with getting us from A to B. Its a really bizarre position to be in, relying on people who you used to look after, and also letting them see you drunk for the first time! We arrived back at about 7.30am, trying to dodge all of Corine's schoolmates and teachers so that they wouldn't catch her pulling a sickie, and collapsed into bed, although we wouldn't stay there for too long...

Switzerland photo album on Facebook is here, I might even have a good enough link this time that you don't even need facebook to look at them! Try it.

Mulhouse - french food, german buildings, and bloody annoying children

Mulhouse

Mulhouse is a city of about 115 000 people in eastern France, close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland. Brett, a friend from NZ is living here while he works as a english teaching assistant in a local high school. Just incase you thought I'd finally found someone to visit who has no AFS association, think again! Brett went to Switzerland a few years ago and was host brother to Tim from Belgium and Corine from Switzerland, so I first met him through AFS too. Mulhouse is in the Alsace region, which has an interesting history. Being formerly a part of both Switzerland and Germany, the culture is a real mixture of the different countries.



Mulhouse

 I got to Mulhouse around lunchtime and armed with very vague instructions from Brett, set about catching a couple of trams to the house of his friend Julia so I could drop off my stuff. I think my ability to arrive in a new city in a different language and still be able to navigate their public transport system shows how far I've come from arriving in Germany in December and being totally lost and dependant on Hauke to look after me all of the time. Then I headed back into town to look for food and something to do. Unfortunately in France, almost everything is closed on Mondays until either pm, or all day (and all day Sunday), so the city was dead. I grabbed a kebab from a kiosk, I think that now I have eaten so many european kebabs that I am no longer so wowed by how amazing they are compared to those in NZ, and I found this one pretty bad.

Mulhouse town hall

I found my way to the tourist centre, located in the old town hall, a beautiful old building that has been decoratively painted like many buildings I saw in Germany. The Mulhouse museum is in the same building so I wandered around it, directed by a very forceful man who keep insisting I follow the arrows and walk around the exhibits in the right order, even though everything was in German and French and I didn't understand a thing anyway. Heaps of cool old stuff there, I quite liked these really old lock mechanisms they had, they were so huge and complicated. Then I just wandered around aimlessly for ages, there is a big church in the square, as in every other European city, but I felt like I was back in Germany again, as the buildings are more their style than French. Mulhouse has some famous museums, namely the biggest car and train museums in France, and some dedicated to weird things like wallpaper and household electrical items. There was only one museum that I thought wouldn't be torturous and it's closed on Mondays, so I just stuck to my wandering.

pre-bed beers

After Brett finished work and we lugged my stuff over to his studio in the university residence, we headed out for dinner with Julia and her french flatmate, Orea (probably not right spelling!) at a restuarant that serves Alsacian food. As I said, I've really been feeling the lack of vegetables in my diet, so I had a massive chicken salad, but I tried Bretts meal, some kind of Alsacian pizza-that-is-not-a-pizza and people get angry if you try to compare the two. The food and wine was good, dessert wasn't, but the waitress undercharged us so I won't complain! We got home quite late and had both gotten into bed and said goodnight at 12.30, commenting on how Brett had to be up at 6.30am to go to work, before he asked "Claire, do you want a beer?", so we just got up again and sat around in our pijamas drinking alsacian beer and eventually going to bed rather late.

European Parliament

I let myself sleep in the next morning, and then headed to Strasbourg, the main city of the region, but I kept missing the trams by just a few minutes. I would have been in time to catch the train in five minutes, but the stupid machines in the French stations to buy tickets don't accept cash or international credit cards, and so I had to wait in line for ages, so I got there quite a bit later than I had wanted. I went first to the European Quarter to check out the European Parliament building and some of the UN buildings, its pretty awesome to see buildings that I saw in pictures for four years of study! Then I headed back to the old quarter of town. Mulhouse isn't a very pretty town, but Strasbourg is really nice, the old quarter is huge and had the first free public toilet I've seen in Europe! Amazing! There is a section seperated from the rest by rivers, its like a little park where people were playing petanque and table tennis in the sun. I was very happy to find both a Bretzel to eat and a shop selling German Christmas-tree decorations, I'd wanted some since we decorated Hauke's tree in Harste. The church here is also huge, a big gothic one like in Cologne.



Strasbourg

 I got back to Brett's place after he had already returned from work, and we went out to try and find a supermarket that was still open, most in France close around 7 or 8. We didn't have much luck, we kept arriving at each just after it had closed, so eventually we decided to just buy takeaways, which turned into us going to an Indian resturant dressed like we'd just left the house to go to the supermarket and carrying nothing but our wallets and shopping bags. But the food was great, I am really missing curries here. We were both shattered and had to get up early the next morning for skiing so we ignored the impulse to spend another night sitting around drinking and just went to sleep.

Strasbourg - Petanque

Skiing was a last minute plan! Brett's school was heading up for the afternoon and it was his day off, so he'd offered to go and help out, so we then decided to go up in the morning too, with me returning at lunchtime to catch the train to Switzerland. We had to get up ridiculously early, and I got dressed in a bizarre asortment of clothes that didn't really resemble real skiing gear, but nevermind! The skifield, Markstein, is only 20 or 30 minutes drive away, but it was a really long journey for us! We took two trams to get to the train station, then a weird tram-train (like a couple of tram carriages running along the train tracks because there isn't enough passangers for a real train) out to the end of line line, a town called Kruth, where we got a bus up to the skifield.

skiing at Markstein

This skifield is really tiny, and it was one of the last days of the season so the snow wasn't great, but the easier slopes meant I could handle the black run here. I felt like something just clicked and suddenly I was skiing properly, so its annoying I now have to wait until the next winter, either in NZ or here, before going again. The other bad thing about the place was the number of kids, and they are all little so-and-sos who have learnt the french tradition of pushing in front of anyone you can in a line. So annoying because they are small and could just duck under the rail and then pop back up in front of me in the lines for the lifts, and I can't speak french so can't tell them off about it. I was amazed that even their teachers didn't seem to care that their kids were pushing in and throwing snow around, they all needed Peggy Burrows to give them a lesson or two about representing your school's image! Alternatively, I kept thinking that a few whacks from my ski-pole might teach a few lessons about manners too, but no.

Skiing

Finally around lunchtime I headed back via all of the trams, went back to Julia's house to pick up my stuff and then headed back to the station again to take a train over the border. The train from Mulhouse to Basel only takes about 20 minutes, and when I was on it I got passport-controlled for the first time by two customs officials who opened my passport and then asked me if I needed a visa to go to France, or Switzerland. I resisted the urge to reply with a sarcastic "shouldn't you be telling me that", although I reckon if these are the guys charged with protecting France's borders I no longer have much sympathy for France's illegal immigrant problems!

Photo album on facebook is here.