Travel Diary, Episode 9: Vienna rocks

It's official:  I love Vienna.  I've only been here for a couple of days, and I never want to leave. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage it, but I'm going to find an excuse to live here for a couple of years.  Or, at the very least, come back for another holiday that spends some serious time just exploring Austria.

Travel Diary, Episode 8: Italians stand too close

So, if anyone can remember my vague threats about deciding I like it in Italy and staying there...  you can set your mind at ease.  I have to say Italy is not high on my list of places I want to revisit, let alone remain.

Most of the country side was pretty, but a heck of a lot of it reminded me of Queensland.  I found La Spezia in particular may as well have been Innisfail or Ingham.  The plants were similar, the buildings were similar, the pavement design in the parks was similar, the clusters of old Italian men were similar...  I can see why the Italians settled in Queensland in droves - it was just like home, only more humid.

That said, Italy was pretty darn humid.  And hot.  So very hot.  Italy in August was not quite as hot as North Queensland in January, but definitely hotter than Townsville in February.  I was told by my tour guide that the weather had been unseasonably warm for the past week, and was likely to get better by the weekend after I left.

Here's an observation about Europeans:  Estonians like a lot of personal space, and like to leave comfortable gaps between people in queues (which the Russians have a tendency to try to fill).  Germans do not respect the queue, and will cut in whenever they can.  Italians will reluctantly queue if they can't push in, but they stand very close.  Too close.  Close enough to make you continually check to make sure your wallet is still there.  Heck, the Italians seem to stand too close even if you aren't queuing.

My Italian tour wasn't quite as good as my Switzerland tour.  Sure, it was nice to be based in a hotel and tour out from there, but I felt the included excursions in the Switzerland tour were better, and also the group I was with in Switzerland was a bit more fun.  In Switzerland I had a cluster of people my age, and most of the "older" set were cheerful.  We were all there to have a good time, and even though it was stressful changing hotels every night (and usually sleeping in pretty rubbish hotels), we all seemed to be having a great time of it.

The Italian group was a slightly different demographic, and the overall mood was more jaded.  Not that they were unpleasant, just that they seemed to find the negatives a bit more often than the positives.  That sort of thing is catching, and I tend to do it myself if I'm around people like that.

One comment I will make about Cosmos Tours - their choice of hotels is pretty sucky.  I'm sure they are running on some criteria that is not based on what people actually want in a hotel.  I've just spend 14 nights at the mercy of the Cosmos planners, and that involved about 10 hotels.  Of those, about three were comfortable, only a couple were located in a practical position (and, sadly, they weren't the comfortable ones), and one was so bad that I'm going to write negative reviews about it in on Google maps.

Heck, I'll probably dedicate an entire blog post just to elaborating on how bad it was.

On the whole, I found Italy to be a bit disappointing.  It's just so full of people.  So many, many people - and that's not even counting the tourists.  Mostly, every place where tourists *might* gather, you will find droves and droves and droves of people selling the exact same souvenirs.  Sure, in Rome they all have "I (heart) Rome" while in Pisa they have "I (heart) Pisa", but apart from that they are identical.  And you just know that half the stuff they are selling is probably some cheap knock-off made in Taiwan, or something.

I started feeling like Italy was eating its tourists - like we were cows that were to be milked until we could give nothing more, and then slaughtered for the meat.  Yes, that's an ugly analogy, but that's what it felt like.

My highlights in Italy would have to be the public gardens in Rome, visiting a castle where they filmed part of Much Ado About Nothing and seeing the most awesome dedication to a saint ever - the monument to St Barbara at Montecatini was just a random collection of artillery, fire-fighting equipment and assorted other things to do with explosives, mining and mountaineering.  It turns out that St Barbara is the patron saint of anything that involves explosives or adventuring.

I managed to get trapped behind a parade of beauty queens in Montecatini.  I'll tell you about it later.

The lowlights would be the droves and droves of tourists (and tourist markets) and the overwhelming feeling that Catholicism was still just big business in Italy (particularly in Rome and Assisi).  Who needs actual faith when you can buy and sell stuff, right?  As for Christianity, well it just doesn't cut it - not when you can focus obsessively on things that were added later because the Bible clearly wasn't interesting enough.  I found myself drifting out of the basilica in Assisi really wishing I could find a church.  Not some shrine to a saint who would probably be horrified to see what they were doing to honour him, but a place where people come to worship God.

So, I'm not planning on going back to Italy for a while.  And I have picked up a tendency to think anyone standing too close in a queue is probably Italian.  Strangely, so far I've been right...

Tavel Diary, Episode 7 - Switzerland is Overpriced

So, here's the wash-down from my "leisurely" Eight Day Grand Tour of Switzerland:

Switzerland (Die Schweiz, Helvetica, Helvetsi, whatever you want to call it) is not in Europe.  It is Europe, to an extent, but it is not in Europe.  You know how I was saying that food in Europe is incredibly cheap compared to Australia?  That doesn't apply to Switzerland.  Pretty much anything I've previously said about Europe doesn't apply to Switzerland.

I can't quite work out how a country in the middle of Europe manages to be so different to everywhere else.  It's completely different to Germany, even though there are German speaking bits.  It's completely different to Italy, even though there are Italian speaking bits.  I can't compare it with France, but a member of my group who lives in Paris says it was different to France as well - even though there are French speaking bits.

It's like it stole parts of the neighbouring countries' languages and cultures, and then shouted "sucked in, losers!" and did its own thing.

It's keeping itself out of the Eurozone, too.  I wonder how long it will take before we can stop calling the currency "Swiss Francs" and just call it "Francs".  It's not like anyone else is using Francs in Europe at present.

At the moment, the CH Franc is roughly on par to the Australian dollar, but things that would cost $15 in Australia cost something like 22CHF in Switzerland.  I spent one night wandering around Lugano aimlessly searching for something to eat that I thought would be worth the price they were asking.  Several times I walked into the Burger King, determined to eat something relatively cheap, and then walked out again, determined to not eat "Hungry Jacks" in Switzerland.  That's just wrong.  I ended up paying just under 20 bucks for a slice of pizza, a piece of cake and a bottle of water - and I didn't even want to eat pizza that night.

It was certainly a contrast to the meal I bought in Tallinn one night that was a huge club sandwich, a bottle of juice and a bottle of water (for later) for just over 5 Euro - and I couldn't even finish the sandwich.

It's beautiful, though.  The country is breath-takingly gorgeous.  We had a few "comfort stops" at alpine passes that are popular amongst hikers, and I managed to follow a couple of trails for a few short walks.  Absolutely stunning.  I've resolved to come back and walk large parts of the country at some point.  I'm also thinking seriously about a walking tour of the Pyrenees I saw while researching the two tours I'm doing this year.  If the Pyrenees are anywhere near as pretty as the Alps, it will be worth it.

As for the tour?  Exhausting.  It was leisurely in that we weren't travelling horrendous distances every day, but because we were in different hotels every night and only stopping for half-hour stretches along the way, it often felt as if we were constantly being bundled back into the coach.  I did enjoy it - although we hardly saw any of Liechtenstein (which was one of the main reasons I took this tour).

The people were great.  I really enjoyed meeting the other members of the group, and it was nice to have some new friends to share the experience with - it was also nice to be taken places I wouldn't have thought of going to myself.  It was one of the things I enjoyed most about the bike tour I did in 2009...

But the bus was taxing.  By the end of every afternoon I was dying to get off the bus and go for a walk or a run.  I wouldn't want to do a longer tour, and I wouldn't want to do one of those tours that hit multiple countries in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and I have to admit I finally did a "proper" girlie thing.  On a whim I spent $200 and bought a pretty dress in Switzerland.  Switzerland seems to be completely over run with shops selling designer labels, and after days walking past Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and all those other shops, I finally saw a dress I just couldn't walk past.  I had to try it on, and once I tried it on I just had to buy it:

One word:  awesome.

Would it be too dorky to point out that it has pockets?

Travel Diary, Episode 6: Playing in the Sun

I've been having great difficulty doing my homework lately, due to the fact that the time of night I usually set aside for homework doing has been taken up with playing outside in the sun.

This whole northern European summer thing is doing my head in a little. At 7pm when, under normal circumstances, I'd be starting to make dinner, I think: "My goodness it's a lovely afternoon for a bike ride - what am I doing inside?" And, without hesitation, I've changed into my exercise gear and pointed the bike towards the river or the 'leisure park'.

Tartu has a 'leisure park'. It's a big outdoor thingy with a flat track for inline-skating (and, I assume, bikes - at least, no one has shouted at me to get off it when I ride around on my bike), a BMX track, an outdoor gym with all sorts of constraptions like chin up bars and parallel bars, a cross-country skiing what-not and an eight kilometer track for running and nordic walking (which can be shortened to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 kilometers, depending on where you turn - but sadly the turns aren't signposted, so you have no idea which shortcut you might be taking).

I found it on my second day here but didn't really get to play with it until Sunday. I wanted to go back on Monday, but my legs were busy whingeing about going for a 5km bike ride the day after a 13+km walk, so I thought I'd better listen to them and take a day off. Yesterday I rode down and hit the running trail before spending some time playing with the gym thingies. I probably would have gone back today if I hadn't promised myself at least one afternoon spent looking at museums and gardens.

Even then, at 7pm - when I was heading home - I had to remind myself that I had things to do tonight and shouldn't immediately go out and play. I probably shouldn't go to the park tomorrow, seeing as I have a lot of errands to do before I leave on Friday, but I secretly hope I'll be reckless enough to go there anyway.

I get to this point when I'm on holidays where I lapse into a bit of a funk. A sort of a "what's the point of all this anyway? Why am I wasting my life? What am I 'here' for anyway?" kind of thing that tends to plague me about two weeks into any given adventure. I think it's because I'm not exactly satisfied with my "normal" life, so part of me is always looking to see if this place or that place could be an alternative.

I was born and raised in Townsville, and I've lived there for the vast majority of my life, but I've never really wanted to grow old and die there. I want to be somewhere else for a while. And then, maybe, somewhere else again for a while after that. Then I hope to eventually find the place where I do want to grow old and die. When I think about Townsville, I think: "This place is okay for a holding pattern, but it's not really where I want to be." And yet, I suspect that I'll probably maintain my holding pattern for a few decades if I'm not careful.

So, when I'm travelling, a part of me is scoping the place out - asking "is this the place I want to be?" The answer is usually "no", which leads to a bit of self loathing. If I don't want to be where I am, and I don't want to be here either, then what the Heck do I want and why am I so gorram hard to please?

I think Tartu might be hitting a bit of a "maybe" point with me, though. Or, at least, I find that going outside to play in the sun is chasing the funk away. Part of me is saying: "Yes, fine, but what will you do here? You can't afford to be an unemployed student, and you love being a librarian but wouldn't have good enough language skills to hold a similar position here..." The rest of me is saying: "Hey! Park!"

I'm sure it's just a summer thing. I expect if I was still here when it was dark between 4pm and 10am and cold and miserable for the few hours of daylight, I'd rethink basing my optimism for a town on its outdoor persuits. They do have an indoor pool, though, and an ice-skating rink, so maybe in winter I could keep chasing away the blues with physical activities. Plus, there's a fencing club here, so I'd be able to keep that up...

Meanwhile, I brought along the chapter of my textbook that I was supposed to have been working on for the past few weeks, and I have so far failed to devote more than a couple of hours to it. I've managed to write a few blog posts, though, which just goes to prove that I am a bad student.

Travel Diary, Episode 5: Come Back Again

Three years ago, when I first visited Tallinn, I was absolutely fascinated by the Old Town - the historic buildings and streets in the city center. It just seemed full of interesting buildings, interesting shops, interesting restaurants and interesting people trying to sell you interesting things.

This year I found it incredibly tedious. Sure, the buildings were still interesting, but a bit "old hat". The shops were all full of the same trash, the restaurants were all overpriced and the people were cashing in on the throngs of tourists who were everywhere. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I was over tourists, and being a tourist. All I know is that the place did not re-acquaint well. Have you ever bumped into someone you used to like, only to realise you can't work out what you saw in them? It was like that.

Tartu was always someplace I meant to revisit, just to see some of the museums I missed on the first time. Oddly, since coming here I haven't visited any museums apart from the ones on my class excursions. I suppose I'll have to work on it quickly, as I'm only here for a few more days. I've just been spending my afternoons riding around the river on my bicycle or shopping for CDs I can't listen to and DVDs I can't watch (my apartment doesn't have a DVD player, and my computer doesn't have a disc drive).

And books. I have bought far too many books - but I console myself with the fact that they are all cool. Well, one of them is just practical, but the others are cool. I have Estonian versions of Tarzan novels, Pippi Longstockings, Mary Poppins and The Hunger Games. Yes, they are all translations of books in English, but that's the point - I'll be able to use the English books to have a fighting chance of reading the Estonian. It worked really well for The Reader (which was in German, but I'm hoping the principle will hold).

The find of the century, though, was a beautiful hard-cover side-by-side Estonian translation of The Hunting of the Snark. Have you ever wondered how the last stanza of the Snark would sound in Estonian? Of course you have. Well, here it is:

Ta vaevu üht sõna seal ütlema hakkas
kesk naeru ja täis meelehead,
kui pehmelt ja äkitselt olemast lakkas--
Snark oligi Kõmak, kas tead.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Oh, by the way, I bought a bicycle. It was a second hand thing I bought from a bike shop aways up the road from the university. My primary reason for buying the bike was that it was the cheapest one with a hand-operated break for the rear wheel (all of the others had back-pedal breaks, which I'm sure, in this hilly city, would lead to my certain death), and I'm absolutely in love with it. It's such a neat little bike, and it has no problems with handling a wide variety of roads and footpaths - and dirt tracks and even sand. I have no idea what it is, because there's nothing written on the bike except for the number 73 (I suspect it used to be a rental), and a badge I haven't been able to identify yet. I haven't given up, though. I'm a librarian. I have powers.

I said that to one of my classmates today, and he decided to challenge me by asking me what it means if his ring finger aches. A quick check on PubMed suggested referred pain from lung or breast cancer. He didn't seem convinced with either option. I told him that's what you get from asking a librarian a medical question. I went to Viljandi on the weekend. It was high on my list of things to revisit, and it was close enough to manage. Viljandi is where I suspect I want to put my maze complex when I'm rich and eccentric, so I wanted to see if it still felt like somewhere I could live for a few years.

I quite like Viljandi. Tartu seems like a place where people work, Viljandi seems like a place where people live. It has a larger proportion of people who smile when they pass you in the street. They never seem to smile at the cash registers of the supermarkets, though. Check-out chicks always seem to regard you with a look of mistrust. It's like they've been told there will be a test today, and you could very well be the person testing them.

The last time I was in Viljandi I heard you could run around the lake, so I thought I'd try walking the track on the weekend. If you are ever thinking of walking the track around Lake Viljandi, I recommend that you do take insect repellent, and you don't take your camera. You see the lake about three times in the walk. It's about 13 kilometers long, and for most of it you're just staring at trees, weeds or highway. Seriously, you spend more time in view of the highways in and our of Viljandi than you do in sight of the lake. It was exhausting, and not pretty enough to warrant that kind of effort. I was feeling a bit annoyed with Viljandi, to be frank.

But... but later that evening, just to stretch my legs, I went for a walk to a park down the end of the street where I was staying, and discovered another lake and a winding little valley that had a dam designed to be used as a swimming pool. A beautiful valley I wasn't expecting to see, with a swimming pool in the middle of it. That's Viljandi for you.

I had intended to try someplace over the other side of town this time, but in the end I went back to Hotel Endla. I stayed there the last time I was in Viljandi because it was conveniently close to the bus station and I had misread the price schedule for Estonian guesthouses. I thought I was getting a hotel that was one step down from the most expensive, but I was actually getting one that was one step up from the least expensive.

It worked out quite well, though, because the cafe was cheap, the room was comfortable, the bus station was conveniently close and the neighbourhood was a pretty place for a stroll. It was also really easy to walk to the major sights of the town. I settled on going back there this year for those reasons - and, you know what? The cafe was still cheap, the room was still reasonably comfortable, the bus station was still conveniently close and the neighbourhood seemed a bit more fixed-up than last time, so that worked out well.

I didn't have to share the hotel with a bus load of Finish Mormon missionaries this time, which was a bit of a plus. Missionaries are okay in small doses, but on mass they become quite cumbersome.

I did have to share the town with a rock festival, though. Just my luck, I missed out on the folk festival by a couple of weeks and arrived just in time to have the streets flooded with drunken hooligans. Actually, drunken hooligans are kind of normal in Estonia, but this was a concentration of drunken hooligans with lots of tattoos and the kind of gormless anger that only heavy rock can soothe...

I wouldn't have minded so much if they hadn't taken over the castle ruins for the festival. The bridge and the ruins were things I wanted to take some photos of, this trip, and they were both roped off with yellow hazard tape. Stupid "Rockramp". Why couldn't they have their acts in pubs, like proper rock?

For that matter, why can't Estonian men drink in pubs, like normal drunkards? I'm a bit over the amount of men you see rolling around the streets with open containers of alcohol at ten o'clock in the morning. Civilised people don't do this, Estonia. Just because you can buy alcohol at any given shop and at any time of the day doesn't mean you should, and it certainly doesn't mean you should start drinking it straight away. People keep telling me Estonia has more in common with Sweden and Germany than Russia, and shouldn't be thought of as a Post-Soviet country... but, you know what? If you want to stop being seen as a Post-Soviet country, you should stop drinking like one.

Travel dairy, Episode 4: Cheap as Chips

So, this exists:

It's a single, large pickled cucumber in a can. It was in the minibar in my hotel in Berlin.

Well, it claims it's a large pickled cucumber in a can. I wasn't going to open it to find out, because then I'd have to figure out what to do with a large pickled cucumber I didn't feel like eating (plus, I'd have to buy it).

It was actually quite reasonably priced for a large pickled cucumber in a hotel minibar. Mind you, I've never seen a canned pickled cucumber on offer in a minibar before, so I can't really compare prices on that one. The rest of the stuff seemed reasonably priced, though, and the cucumber did not seem outrageously expensive...

I was expecting the contents of the minibar to be pretty expensive, as minibars usually are, but the various snacks (mostly nuts and chocolate, no other pickled things) seemed cheap to me. Then I saw what the prices were like in the shops, and I realised the minibar was still a rip-off, just not compared to the price of food in Australia.

My word, the food here is cheap. Most meals I buy cost less than half of what I'd pay back home. The other day I bought a sandwich, a cake and a drink - and I got change from a five Euro note. I think it all cost about the equivalent of $4.50 Australian. I found a bakery (well, more of a patisserie) in Tartu today that sells coffee for 40c a cup. Sure, it's just filtered coffee that you pour into a paper cup, but it's actually better than any of the other sources of coffee I've found in this town. For about the equivalent of $1.50 Australian I bought a danish and a coffee, and both were good.

I hear the wages here are pretty terrible and the cost of things like shoes is ridiculous, but I eating here is incredibly affordable. It's not just the stuff that people make in bakeries and cafes, either - I bought a packet of eight Snickers bars for less than a Euro in a shop in Binz. They were only snack-sized Snickers, but that's usually all I can eat in a chocolate bar, anyway, and it still cost less than one full-sized chocolate bar would cost back home.

I've figured out that if I could manage to get paid my normal wage in my country and live here it would be pretty sweet.

Literally, I expect. The cakes are good, cheap and convenient, and I'm definitely not sticking to my "low gluten" diet.

I'm also not eating red meat, for some reason. I go into a restaurant thinking "a nice juicy steak would be nice" and end up ordering fish, or something. I don't know why. I haven't noticed any discernible difference as a result, but something tells me I probably won't notice any difference in what I am and am not eating as long as a major component of my diet is cake...