Come, blow your horn

I'm in Melbourne at the moment, for a conference, and the hotel in which I'm staying is located above one of those trendy Lane way cafés they always talk about. 

And a construction site. 

And just a few steps away from a police station. 

And near a tram stop. 

You could call it "central". 

I call it "not particularly quiet". 

Anyway, as I write this, there is jazz and trumpets (actually, I think it's just one trumpet) which would be kind of cool if it was live, but I think it's just a recording. I didn't see any space in the lane where one could fit a piano. 

I've been thinking about trumpets lately. Well, not trumpets, specifically, but brass. 

Regular readers will know I briefly joined a brass band for the cheap lessons and free instrument hire a few years ago, but it didn't stick. I found the timing of both the lessons and the band practice awkward, and I never stick with awkward things for long. 

A decade or so ago, I wanted to learn the French Horn. I have no idea why. It's not like I was a huge fan of horn music. I still can't tell you the name of any great horn pieces. Or composers. Or players. I enjoyed listening to it when I heard it, and I liked the look of it. 

Hardly a consuming passion, in other words. 

Over the years I acquired a third-hand cornet and a cheap pocket trumpet, because that's just what I do, but I'm no more up to date with the cornet than I am with the French Horn. At least I do know some famous trumpet players. I don't really play either of those instruments anyway. 

I still want to learn how to play the French Horn, and for some years now I've wanted to play the euphonium (because it's beautiful, that's why), but I've never mustered up the wherewithal to do something about it. It's not like I have a great love of concert or brass bands (although I do love a good old fashioned dance band), I just want to play with those toys. 

I've been listening to Emma Eyres read her autobiography, Cadence, and she talks about how much she loved playing the viola, and how much she always wanted to play the cello. How she used to listen to cello music, and how she had cello playing heroes, and how she used to get cello sheet music and play it on the viola, but wish she could pluck up the courage to play the cello for real (without worrying about losing her skill with the viola). 

I have a lot of musical instruments - mostly because I'm a musical bower bird, not because I passionately love any of them. I can honestly say I hardly touch most of them. I can't think of any instrument that I've bought because I loved it so much I had to make it a deep and abiding part of my life. 

I really wanted the concertina, but I hardly ever play it. Same with the banjo. I used to play the recorders quite a bit back in the day, but I haven't played those for a while, either. 

The instrument I play most often is the ukulele, and I didn't even buy that on purpose. I wondered into a music shop one day, being someone who had no interest in the uke (and, to be honest, little respect for it) and walked out with a ukulele and a chord book. I never intended to become a ukulele player. It just sort of happened. 

I still wouldn't really regard myself as a ukulele player, anyway. Just a dabbler. In spite of all the instruments and all of the years I've been playing around with music, I don't really regard myself as a musician. Just a dabbler. 

Take the euphonium, for example. I'd like to own and play a euphonium, but I don't have a vision of myself as someone who is going to practice for a few hours every day, and play in a band, orchestra or quintet. I don't see myself as a euphoniumist, in other words. Heck, I don't even know if that* is* the right word. 

I don't rightly know if this bothers me or not. When I was studying piano back in the last century I think I always expected to become a "real" musician at some point, even if I never thought the piano was going to be my eventual instrument of choice. Since then I've enjoyed dabbling, and acquiring random instruments. 

I wouldn't want to be so hung up on playing well that I'd stop mucking about for fun. But, still, it would be kind of nice to have an instrument that I had that kind of passion for. To think of myself as a real musician, like a violinist or a flautist. 

I wonder if I will ever be that passionate about anything. 

2013/2014 Pt3: Keeping myself amused

Theoretically I suppose I could have included reflection on language learning in the post on studies, but since this is what I do for fun, I figured it deserved to be in a post about things I do for fun.

My Estonian and German studies both suffered a little last year.  After having a cracker of a year in 2012 - which had a great virtuous circle relationship with a trip to Europe in which I spent two weeks in Estonia and two-and-a-bit weeks in German speaking countries (plus a week and a bit in Italian speaking countries, but I'm not learning Italian, so that doesn't count), 2013 was a but of a bust.

I kept my hand in with Estonian by having a lesson once a month (which is not as useful as having one once a week), but for various reasons I couldn't take any German language subjects in my studies, so it was up to me to keep studying things like grammar and such... without an external reminder... while being busy with other subjects...

And, well, good intentions do not always translate to actually doing useful things.  I spent the whole year totally going to do some German studies this week.  Occasionally I actually started a module, which I was totally going to finish by the end of the week...

And then it was 2014.

It's been one of those years.  One minute it's April, and there's something I want to do tomorrow, the next minute it's October, and I can't quite tell you what I did with the days in the middle.

What I did do, and found that helped me keep me slightly in the loop with my German, was start learning Esperanto.

In German.

Just in case you've missed it the last few times I mentioned it: I've been learning Esperanto in German.

I have German books on Esperanto, and I've been using a couple of programmes like Kurso and Lernu, which I've set to German.  I haven't been doing as much with these resources as I'd need to in order to actually have a useful knowledge of the language (considering I've been doing this for a few months, and I should totally be able to go to a congress or something by now), but it's been getting me to use German to achieve some goal or purpose, which is supposed to be good for your language learning.

Plus, as an added bonus, I'm learning Esperanto.  Why?  Well, that's a topic for a later post.

My goals for 2014 are to brush up on my German enough to pass my course (going back to the studies bit), but to also try to find a way to have more useful German based stuff.  I haven't worked out the details of this plan, so I suspect it will fail.

I'm going to endeavour to gain more "contact time" with Estonian.  I actually have a plan for this one:  I'm going to read something involving Estonian words every night (if possible) and watch at least one eesti keeles TV programme or Movie a month.

Actually, I suspect the same plan could probably work for German.

And I'm going to learn Esperanto well enough to feel I wouldn't be wasting my time if I went to a congress or tagged along to a meet up group.

Once again, the overall goal is to be a bit better.

And - on a completely different note - I'm going to try to get away more this year.  To put some of my annual leave towards things like camping and such.  I was too much here last year.  This year I'm going to spend some time elsewhere.

Things to do *In* Ingham...

...are apparently light on the ground.

Having just come back from a 6 week holiday, I'm planning to go to Ingham for a weekend to "take a break".  Actually, it's for my mother, who doesn't go for short breaks on her own, but wouldn't mind getting out of town for a bit during her holidays.

I like the Ingham region, and have often visited for one reason or another, but I've never actually stayed in the town itself.  I usually end up staying in one of the satellite communities, like Lucinda, Forest Beach or Taylors Beach.  This time we thought it would be interesting to stay in Ingham itself, and see the town "properly" for a change.

Only problem is, no one is willing to admit there's anything in the town worth seeing.  You look for any list of attractions for Ingham, and they'll all list the beaches and national parks that are located nearby.

What can you do in Ingham?  You can drive half-an-hour south to a waterfall.  You can travel twenty minutes west to a national park campsite.  You can travel fifteen minutes east to a beach.  The town itself is, apparently, only worth visiting during one of the two festivals they run each year - and even then most sites don't mention the second festival...

Oddly, the Tyto wetlands doesn't even get a mention on most websites, even though it is, by rights, a "must see" for any bird watchers who might be travelling through the area - and it happens to be in town.  The mausoleums at the cemeteries get mentioned more often than the Tyto park complex.

But... surely there are things in the town itself?  People live there, and I expect they do stuff.  Parks, gardens, bowls clubs, golf clubs... these things are all located *in* the town proper.  There's a cinema, there's a gallery (of sorts) - I think they still have cafes and shops...

Surely someone can come up with a list of things to do and see in the town itself?  Sure, it might not be the kind of thing that will rock your world, but why not plug the butcher who makes traditional Sicilian sausages (my uncle insists we buy him some every time we drive through the town)?  Why not promote the craft guild thingy?  Or the winery that makes booze out of tropical fruits* (although I must admit I don't know if they still have a shop in Ingham)?

Heck, you could easily put together a "picnic" list of things to buy from local shops, and then recommend places to go barbecue them.  That would be a fun thing to do, and it wouldn't take too much imagination.

Why not find a cafe that sells the best lemon meringue pie or a bakery which makes the best neenish tarts and say "while visiting Ingham, make sure you stop in at the such-and-such bakery to try the award winning neenish tarts"?

It's a town of just under 5000 people, and the nearest "big town" for nearby communities like Halifax and Abergowrie.  Surely people in the region come into Ingham occasionally to do stuff, rather than everybody going out of town to get their kicks.

So, my challenge to the good folk of Ingham is this:  tell us what we can do in your town.  It can't be that hard.



*They had a "snake bite" wine made from lime juice and chilli.  I bought some for my grandmother and she hated it.  Mind you, she tried to drink it like regular wine, even though I warned her it might be a bad idea.

muzeoj

I arrived in Vienna on a Monday afternoon, overdue for lunch and simply over Catholic churches and galleries full of Graeco-Roman art and "Old Masters".  I thought I'd like to see something different for a change, so I somehow managed to find myself in a Catholic church that very afternoon and a museum full of Graeco-Roman art and paintings by "Old Masters" the next day.  These things happen.

The Church was calling me, actually.  There I was, wondering around the streets thinking, "Hey!  I'm in Vienna!  I wonder if I'll recognise anything from Inspector Rex?" when I saw a domed roof in a gap between the buildings.  I was sure I had seen that roof before, so I went to find it.  Karlskirche.  It might have been that dome I'd seen before or another (Vienna was full of interesting roofs), but I was tired and looking for something to do that wouldn't take me too far away from my hotel...

I was a bit dubious about paying for entrance to a church, but I've done it before (I know the fee can help to maintain the building, and if they're going to have thousands of people traipse through the door for non-church-attendance reasons, they may as well get something out of it).  I always wonder how anyone joins a congregation in a church that charges entrance fees.  What happens if you're new in town and just want to come along to the mass?  I was willing to pay my dues as a tourist, though... at least, until I noticed that the church was under construction.

"What a rip-off!"  I thought, "Charging full price when there's a whopping big scaffold blocking the interior view of the dome!"  Then I noticed the church actually wasn't under construction after all - the whopping big scaffold was a semi-impermanent feature.  It was supporting a lift that could take people up to the platform that was blocking the view of the dome from the ground.

My first reaction was to be cranky about it (the scaffold was ugly, and I didn't like the fact that you couldn't see the dome at all if you happened to be afraid of heights).  Then I remembered that I'm not afraid of heights myself, so I went up the lift to look at the dome.  It was quite an experience to get that close to the roof, actually.  It's a close-up and personal view of something that is normally seen from very far away.  I still think the scaffold was ugly, though...

The next day, determined to see something different, I caught the U-Bahn to Museumsquartier and made my way to the Natural History Museum... Only to find out it didn't open on Tuesdays.  That'll teach me to read opening hours on brochures (maybe).  I hadn't intended to visit the Art History Museum.  I was trying to take a break from such things.  However, it was located conveniently close to the museum I couldn't see that day...

In the end I spent just over five hours in the Art History Museum.  Then I noticed my ticket also gave me entrance to another campus of the museum that contained historical weapons and musical instruments.  Fortunately, the woman in the information desk told me I could go there tomorrow, so I happily went back to look at the Egyptian section a second time.  Afterwards I wandered down a street and found myself in the centre of town, just in time to spend the evening window shopping.

The next day I hit the second part of the museum first thing in the morning (well, 10am - it turns out nothing really opens at 9am, so turning up then was a bit of a misjudgement).  I thought I'd be more interested in the instruments, but the rooms full of armour and weapons were quite a highlight.  I may or may not have attempted a substitutiary locomotion spell.  It didn't work (while I was there, at any rate).

Then it was on to the National Library... which was a huge disappointment.  I had seen pictures of the hall - one of the most famous library interiors in the world - and had been particularly looking to seeing it.  They had a temporary display mounted on particularly obnoxious white boards, which ruined every single view of the hall.  There was no where you could look without seeing the display instead of the hall.  I was so infuriated that I actually asked for the opportunity to write a complaint (and someone else patiently waited for me to finish so they could write one, too).

I stormed off to see the Esperanto Museum with anger burning in my heart.  Fortunately, the Esperanto Museum made me feel better... although I realised afterwards that I would have been disappointed with it if I hadn't been so annoyed by the library hall.  It was actually a pretty low-impact affair.  I could think of a number of changes that could make it more information rich (and object rich) than it was.  I left the museum with quite a number of questions and a strong desire to buy a basic "here's what Esperanto looks like" book - but the museum was such a small affair that it didn't have a giftshop attached.

The Esperanto Museum was located in the same building as the Globe Museum, which seemed odd at first, but after reading the information in the EM I realised there was a bit of a "global" theme happening.  I was quite addicted to maps when I was younger (I still love them), and it was interesting to see how the globe has changed over the years.  I thought the two museums in the same building could have supported a small giftshop.  It wouldn't be too difficult to have a few globes and a couple of reprint Esperanto posters for sale...

I must admit that, by then, I was a bit museumed out.  So I took a tram to the end of the line (I like a bit of random trammage) and found myself at a large park.  All in all, not a bad couple of days.

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...

Travel Diary, Episode 3: Follow the Sun

I seem to have sent the sun ahead of me. Everywhere I go people have been saying: "It was really cold and rainy for the last few days, but the weather has been great since yesterday. They say it will get bad again in a couple of days, so you're really here at the right time..."

It's probably churlish of me to complain about sunny, warm weather wherever I go, but I had been told to expect it would be unseasonably cold and I had prepared accordingly. I have plenty of clothes for cold weather, not so much for hot weather. I've been carting this stupid jacket around with me from pillar to post, and it has been an average of 32 degrees wherever I go.

It was stinking hot on Rügen, and my "luxury" hotel room had two big windows facing the afternoon sun, no airconditioning, no fans, and nothing on the bed apart from duvets. I cannot understand Europeans. Duvets are not a year-round bedding option if you don't have airconditioning. That's why God invented sheets and light bedspreads.

Okay, maybe they actually evolved over several generations of textile production, but I'm pretty sure God inspired their evolution.

So far, I have not slept in a single bed that had anything to offer apart from a bottom sheet and a duvet (and some really uncomfortable pillows). Even if, for some unfathomable reason, the people in this continent were unable to understand that you could put two sheets on the bed, rather than just one, surely they have some awareness of the fact that duvet covers could be used separately from the duvets, and things would be much cooler that way...

Speaking of God, hotels and Rügen, I have to have to dedicate a "thank God!" moment in this episode.

I was under the impression that my hotel was in Sellinn, so the plan was to take the train into Bergen auf Rügen, then catch a couple of busses into Sellinn and try to find my hotel from that point. As the train was going through Rügen it ran beside a few roads for a while, and the thought occurred to me that, if I was ever going to try driving in Europe, this would be a good place to do it. Country roads, and all that...

So, in Bergen auf Rügen I made some enquiries about hiring a car and was directed to the Europcar in the town. The kind man behind the counter didn't have any cars available, but managed to find one for me anyway.

I had a brief moment of freaking out on the way to Sellinn. I had turned up a sidestreet I wasn't sure about, I was driving a manual for the first time in years, I was on the "wrong" side of the road in a place that turned out to be quite busy after all and I hadn't eaten anything for several hours. Oh, and it's been so long since I had driven a manual that I didn't know you push the gearstick down to get into reverse in modern cars.

Thankfully, another nice man (a passing Belgian) stopped and helped me figure it out. He also gave me an apple, for which I was incredibly grateful. It's a lesson I seem to keep learning over and over again - if you have the choice to "eat now" or "eat later", you should eat now. Later always ends up being much later that you expected.

When I got to Sellinn, I couldn't find the street I was after on the map. That's because my hotel wasn't in Sellinn. It was in Göhren. A nice lady gave me a map to take with me and showed me how to get to the town where my hotel was actually located...

Except the booking was wrong. When I got there, it turned out that my travel agent had managed to book me in for the three nights previous, and now the hotel was completely booked up and I had no where to go. The nice man behind the counter phoned around a few places and, on his fifth try, managed to get me into the last available room in another hotel. That would be the "luxury" suite, which was considerably more expensive than I had hoped.

This actually worked out quite well, though, because I decided to only book in for two nights and spend my third night at a hotel back in Bergen on Rügen, in a place near the train station. This meant that I had a car to get to all of the places I particularly wanted to see (and could take my time without worrying about bus or train timetables), and I could get the car back the afternoon before I left, rather than trying to negotiate my way through the town at some ungodly hour of the morning.

So thank God for looking out for me on this one. Between a spur of the moment decision to hire a car and a bunch of really nice people, I managed to have a good time instead of a series of disasters.

It turns out I didn't miss much by not staying in Sellinn. I saw everything I wanted to see in a morning. Göhren had even less to offer. I have no idea why there were so many people there. I didn't even take a good look at Binz, although I've been told it was one of the more popular sea-side resort towns. Considering how many people were in Sellin and Göhren, I can't fathom what Binz would have been like.

Sassnitz, on the other hand, was fantastic. I spent most of one day there, and probably could have stayed a little longer. It had a rather crappy beach, but you could walk straight from the town into the national park, and the parts of town I saw where so very... "porty". It's like what you imagine a European fishing port/sea-side holiday village might be. And there was this really funky pedestrain suspension bridge connecting the town proper with the harbour. Very cool.

And the national park was fantastic. I could definitely spend more time there, but I had to visit Hitler's holiday camp before heading back to my stinking hot hotel.

Prora was interesting. I don't really know what's there apart from one of the ugliest non-Soviet buildings I've ever seen and a really nice beach with a brick wall inexplicably in the middle of it... It was fairly late when I got there, and I particularly wanted to see the building. The Hitler connection didn't interest me so much as the sheer magnitude of the thing. I had seen pictures of this massive structure, and found the concept of such a huge, ugly "holiday village" incredibly fascinating. In the end, though, it was just another ugly building.

The beach was really nice (much nicer than the one at Sassnitz), but it was clothing optional, and I felt I would be out of place if I stayed around for too long without at least taking off my shoes. I like to opt for clothing, myself - everything I take off is just something I have to put somewhere or carry around with me, and then I just have to put it on again later... Much more convenient to just stay fully clothed in the first place - but it does make you look a tad over dressed when everyone else is either wearing a skimpy pair of togs or nothing at all, while you are wearing long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and shoes and socks...

Would I visit Rügen again? Maybe, but probably not at this time of year. There are just so many people, and it's quite warm, really. Too warm. Well, hot. It's hot.

Travel Diary, Episode 2 - There's a Bear in There...

I can see why members of my family have a habit of moving to Berlin "for a few months" and staying there for the next four or five years. It seems like a very livable city. Funky, yet sophisticated. On one side of the massive park you have the hippies, on the other side you have the yuppies. Somewhere around there you also have normal people, and they all seem to be mixing quite happily.

I love a town that can be easily navigated by rail, and between the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn I managed to get to nearly everywhere I had a mind to go. I wasn't there for long, though. Next time I'll have to actually visit Berlin, rather that just stop over for a few days.

But, fortunately, some good little holiday fairy wispered the words "bike tour" in my ear, and I managed to see most of the big sights in my first day.

I can thoroughly recommend Fat Tire Bike Tours as having a nice mix of toodling around the city and getting a bit of a history lesson (plus, they take you to a beer garden in the middle of the park for lunch - so very German).

My tourguide was a Kiwi, and I quite enjoyed his sense of humour. His face wasn't bad, either. My heart will always belong to Peter-From-NYCe-Wheels, but Francis from Fat Tire Bike Tours can turn my head whenever he likes.

There are a lot of bears in Berlin. Fibreglass ones. They mass produced them at some point and every other business seems to have a luridly painted fibreglass bear out the front. This, in spite of the fact that I couldn't find a European bear in the zoo. Asiatic bears and polar bears, yes, but your typical this-may-kill-you-if-you-get-lost-in-these-woods bear? No. Maybe it was there somewhere and I just missed it.

For some reason, zoos and gardens are always on my list of must-see places when I visit somewhere. I'll also try to see a museum or a gallery if I have time, but if I don't, then it's the gardens at the top of my list and zoos somewhere around second. I don't know why, because I'm actually a little bored with zoos.

"Oh, yeah. It's a lemur. Again. And, look - there's another elephant..."

I was a little weirded out by the way the Berlin zoo put animals from different parts of the world in the same enclosures. I can understand putting ostriches in with African ungulates, but emus? And why were there kangaroos right next to capybaras? There didn't seem to be much logic to the layout - which is probably why I couldn't find any European bears.

However, it must be said that the park next to the zoo - the massive park in the middle of town - totally rocks. The Tiergarten is massive, and so very woodsy and parksy. I didn't see any animals (apart from a dead mouse) in the "animal garden", though, which seemed a bit of a shame. It did have naked people in it, but that's Germany for you. For some reason, if you give them a patch of grass or sand and some sun, they feel compelled to expose as much skin as possible. Between sun exposure and smoking, it's a wonder Germany isn't a cancer factory.

Fortunately there seems to be some sort of pattern to this and you won't see naked people at every park or beach. You will probably see boobs, though. Mostly on the women, but no guarantees...

Travel Diary, Episode 1 - Off to a Flying Start

So, I really hate flying. This is something I know, and have known for some time - yet unfortunately travelling to Europe kind of involves a couple of rather long flights. Seven hours from Australia to Singapore, and twelve hours from Singapore to Helsinki (then two hours to Berlin, but more on that later).

Both flights involve rather large planes, which I hate especially. I actually don't mind flying in the small planes (like Dash 8s), but the big ones just make me feel stiff, sore, headachey and nauseated.

I managed to survive the flight to Singapore without too much incident. It was a day-time thing and I was sitting somewhere where I could easily get up and stretch every half-hour or so. It all started to head down-hill after I hit Singapore.

I had a four-hour wait for my next flight, hanging around the airport trying to keep myself conscious. This was made somewhat difficult by the soothing music they were piping through the airport. Some kind of tinkling piano thing that seemed far too soporific for the occasion. I ended up pacing back and forth through the airport and climbing up and down the stairs several times while humming ABBA's On And On And On in my head in order to keep myself awake.

I'm reasonably certain the security personnel thought I was nuts.

Then the next flight came into action, and whatever was stopping me from getting travel sick on the first flight completely wore off. You know what the trouble is with throwing up two hours into a twelve hour flight? You still have to stay on the plane for the next ten hours.

Oh, and I actually threw up twice. The first time it was whatever I'd eaten during the day (most recently, and least digested: rice), the second time it was the water I had taken to settle my stomache and rinse out my mouth after the first time. That lead to about eight hours of not eating or drinking anything at all until I thought it was safe to try a small bit of water again.

Suffice to say I was feeling seriously dehydrated by the time I got to Helsinki...

About that. I had a six hour stop over in Helsinki because I was booked on a Finnair Flight that must route through Henlsinki come hell or high water, but when I was getting off the plane in Singapore (after my first flight), I noticed a shorter flight direct to Frankfurt was leaving in a couple of hours. Why, oh why couldn't my travel agent get me onto that one? Especially since I'd asked for the most direct flight with the least amount of time involved?

I did get to spend four hours trying to find bland food and water in Helsinki (and saw a few sights and a market while I was at it)... aber, Mensch! Es war sehr ermüdend.

And, of course, it was at this point that I realised I had booked myself on a series of bus tours. The one thing that makes me more nauseated than flying is travelling in the back of a bus. This could be a huge exercise in "my goodness, Sharon is an idiot".

Trippin'

"So, I expect you'll have some stories to tell."
"Not really, I'm going to be too busy getting from one place to the next to do anything too interesting."
"Yeah, but you're the kind of person who would find something."
"What?"
"I can see you deciding to say 'Oh, what's down this path?' and go off the beaten track, or something."
"Oh.  Okay..."

I'm never quite sure how to take it when someone points out I have a reputation for being, well, chaotic.  I don't think I deserve it.

Okay, sure, there was that one time when I accidentally went for a two-hour bushwalk in a national park near a town I wasn't even intending to visit, and as a result I missed a party where I was supposed to be reciting "To A Haggis" to a haggis*...  But in my defence I had mixed up my dates, and the craft fair I went to see wasn't on that weekend, so I had to do something to make up for the fact that I had driven halfway across the state for nothing.

And, well, yes, maybe I have (on more than one occasion) climbed up some mountain just because I drove past a sign saying "Mountain Such-And-Such Turn off in 500m".  They were always little mountains and I always stayed on the well marked tracks.  And maybe I once decided to buy a $1000 print and have it shipped back home just because I visited a gallery on a runners' high**.  These things happen to everybody.

Or, at least, they should.  I don't regard myself as being particularly reckless or unpredictable.  I just see interesting things and go for a closer look.  What do other people do?  See interesting things and sit quietly?  What's the point of that?

I think I'm one step above boring.  I keep myself amused, that's all.  And yet, every now and then someone makes a comment that makes me think everyone must see me as the town eccentric, or something.  Like that time when someone introduced me to a visitor as "our local eccentric".

Anyway, I'm leaving the country this weekend.  My big European holiday is upon me, and I'll be spending a couple of Saturdays on a plane (travelling from Australia to Europe is weird, time wise),  and hitting Helsinki and Germany for a bit before taking a language course in Estonia.  Then there are a couple of bus tours through Switzerland and Italia before chilling out in The Eastern Empire*** for a few days.

Far too much movement to get into too much trouble.


*It's traditional to recite Burns' poem "To A Haggis" whenever serving haggis at parties.  I wonder if there are other foodstuffs that also require poetry.

**Yeah... don't do that.  Sure, I still love looking at the print ("Jam I" by Karen Wood), but I still regret spending that much money on something I wouldn't have bought if I'd gone to the gallery before going up the mountain rather than after.

***Austria.  The "real" name of the country is Österreich, which means "Eastern Empire" - which sounds totally cool, so I'm going to call it that from now on.

Sharon on Sydney's

No, no, don't go around trying to figure out the end of that sentence.  It's not an English sentence missing a verb and a thing to be "on".  I've just written "Sharon is in Sydney" in Estonian.  Although, Sharon was on Sydney's monorail about twenty minutes ago.  That was pretty neat, actually.  You got to see the best part of the city center - the bits above the first floor.

Sydney has some awesome buildings in the city center, but you never get a good look at them from the street.  The shop fronts of Sydney are so...  "shopfronty".  You have to look up to get a good look at the architecture of the place.

I can tell you, walking around the streets of Sydney looking up at the buildings is not an effecient way to a) travel, or b) find the shop you were looking for.

So it was nice to take a ride on a form of transport that was right on eye-level with some of the best features of Sydney's buildings.

It's a shame the monorail is going, but I can completely understand why.  As a tourist attraction it's okay, but not earth-shattering.  As a form of public transport it's a bit daft.

The thing goes one way on a loop around a small section of the city proper.  If you (like me) get on at central station and want to get to Paddy's Markets (two stops down from central, but in the wrong direction), you have to pay $5 and take a tour of Sydney before you can get to where you're going.

I thought I'd be saving time by taking a "vehicle" but you'd get there faster (and cheaper) on foot.

Still, I'm glad I managed to go on it before it was removed.  Sydney won't seem the same without a monorail buzzing over the streets.

Lesson to anyone thinking of putting a monorail in their city as a form of public transport:  Work out how to make it go in two directions.  That may require two monorails, but it's a heck of a lot more convenient than doing a round trip every time you want to go somewhere "upstream".

PS.  I'm in the UTS library, using eduroam to get onto the interwebs.  Today was the first time in my life I've used the phrase "thank you, eduroam".  Sometimes wireless is actually useful.