ToDo: Invent Brilliant Title

Posted by: ilanasmith | August 14, 2007

Norge

Figuring that summer is the only acceptable time to head north from here, I lined myself up a trip to Oslo.

I arrived Friday night, and Oslo did not blow my mind. I hear there’s some interesting museums and such, but it just seemed clean and pleasant and quietly pretty. So basically, Copenhagen. With trams.

On Saturday, I set out on The Mother Of All Daytrips. First, I caught the train from Oslo to Myrdal on the Bergen railway. It passes through a range of different scenery, from Cascade-like, to alpine. In the distance at one point, I could see the Hardangerjøkulen Glacier. Or I would have, if it hadn’t been pissing down the entire time I was in Norway.

From Myrdal, I caught the Flåm Railway down to….yep, Flåm. This is a 20km trip that takes about an hour as it slows down to let everyone gawp at waterfalls and mountains and stuff. Very pretty. I sat next to a cool older German couple and we spent most of the trip giggling immoderately about the snoring Russians next to us. That’s the way to see Norway.

From Flåm, I caught a boat for some fjordy-goodness to Gudvangen. These fjords (Aurlandsfjord and Nærøyfjord) are big and/or narrow and/or something notable. Anyway, they’re World Heritage listed and fairly impressive, but perhaps would have been more pleasant if it hadn’t been pissing down the entire time I was in Norway.

From Gudvangen, I caught a bus up "the steepest stretch of road in Northern Europe". Steep, and close to the edge. The bus slid backwards at one point. That was fun.

The bus went to Voss, home of just about the poshest water in the world. The one LiLo poses with to prove she’s off the sauce. From Voss, I jumped back on the railway and hit Bergen a bit after 8pm.

I overnighted in Bergen. I’d carefully booked ahead, ’cause it was high season in western Norway. Of course, they had a competence failing and lost my booking. From there, it was a bit of a Bethlehem situation. I ended up sleeping on the couch of a bald guy with a leopard print eye-patch. We talked about yoga and community consciousness.

The next day, before flying home again, I did Bergen. The absolute highlight (possibly of this entire European adventure) was the Leprosy Museum. The rest of Bergen was pretty and quaint, but it would have been nicer if it hadn’t been, you know, pissing down the entire fucking time I was in Norway.

And yes, I did cut and paste every Norwegian word in this post.

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Posted by: ilanasmith | August 8, 2007

You Know You’re In Denmark When…

Your phone book only has 19 Smiths, but it has five and a half pages of Jensens.
Crown Princess Mary shows up on magazine covers even more regularly than in Australia.
That weird sound? They’re testing the air raid sirens.
A nice summer afternoon is the same temperature as a Brisbane winter midnight.
Danish pastries are called Vienna bread.
Your movie ticket comes with seat assignment.
The water leaves more crap on your dishes than the food did.
Most of the shops on your street are shut for six weeks in summer. Even the ‘convenience’ store.
The first four items on a menu are herring.
Hills? Oh, yeah, I remember hills.
Your address doesn’t include a state, and your phone number doesn’t include an area code.
"Shobnhown" (from Swedes and Norwegians) and "CopenHARgen" (from anyone else) kind of annoys you.
You sometimes go into the ladies’ at work to find the seat up.

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Posted in Denmark

Posted by: ilanasmith | August 6, 2007

Londinium

Yammy had a last minute trip to London to do bad proprietry DRMy stuff with the BBC, and as I hadn’t left Denmark in three whole weeks, I toddled over to hang out.

An early flight meant I had to do the midnight thing to ensure I would be reading HP on the plane. Too few people wearing costumes or casting spells, though the guy who planted himself near the line, opened up his new book and read "Chapter 37…" was mildly amusing.

Yammy had never been to London before, so we wandered around most of the big sites. Then while he worked, I went off to the Tate Modern and the British Library. The former was really all about the Rothkos. The latter was incredible. In one little room off to one side, they have such a collection. Austen letters, Shakespeare’s first folio, drafts of "Yesterday" and "Penny Lane’, the Codex Arundel, Mozart scribbles, Captain Cook’s journal, two copies each of the Magna Carta and the Gutenburg Bible and a dozen more things that would leave you gobsmacked in any regular collection, but get lost in the noisy treasures of this one.

I also got to catch up with Rohan and Neil, Dean, and the guys from "Avenue Q". Who seriously rocked.

(Thanks for the pics, Yammy)

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Posted by: ilanasmith | July 18, 2007

Firenze e Roma

After the Cinque Terra, things got hot. Unpleasantly so. Florence and Rome are both fascinating cities, with amazing things to see, but my impressions are tempered by an overall sweaty feeling.

We did all the big sights. Medici business and the Duomo in Florence; Pantheon, Vatican, Forum in Rome. Through both luck and good management we waltzed past the lines for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Colliseum in Rome, and resisted Yammy’s suggestion that we go back to point and laugh at the other poor suckers.

Some highlights included the couple of great little restaurants we found near our B&B in Rome (including one that seemed to be a locals’ only place and our ordering needed to be single words and big gestures).

It turns out the discovery that your country’s Vatican embassy is the closest one to St Peter’s comes with a rather dashing song and dance number entitled “Who Does the Pope Love?”. I have burst video. I’d post it, but that would recklessly squander the blackmail opportunity.

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Posted by: ilanasmith | July 18, 2007

Tam FTW!

Atherton disability champion honoured at state awards

Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service’s Tamara Vallance has been honoured for improving the quality of life for people with a disability at a prestigious awards ceremony in Brisbane today.

Disability Services Minister Warren Pitt today presented Tamara with the Minister’s Award for Innovation in Service Delivery at Queensland’s 2007 Disability Action Week Awards.

Mr Pitt said the awards recognised individuals and organisations whose initiatives were making a real difference for Queenslanders with a disability, their families and carers.

“Tamara and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service are leading by example — putting ability first in Queensland,” he said. “The Minister’s Award for Innovation in Service Delivery recognises those who have combined ingenuity and technology to enhance services for people with a disability.

“Tamara has introduced a bushwalking initiative at the Wongabel State Forest, near Atherton, where valuable up-to-date information is supplied to vision-impaired visitors through formats such as audio cassettes and Braille maps.

“Accessible walking paths have also been created and further education about vision impairment is available to the general public through a new educational resource.”

Mr Pitt said 14 winners were presented in 11 award categories at the Brisbane ceremony today.

“Today we applaud people who are actively working towards making our society fair, equitable and accessible for all Queenslanders,” he said.

My sister is better than your sister.

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Posted in News and politics

Posted by: ilanasmith | July 13, 2007

Five Lands

From Pisa, we jumped a train to the Cinque Terra, five towns perched rather precariously on the Ligurian coast. We stayed in Riomaggiore, inconveniently close to its station and the wonderfully regular and loud trains.

The towns are linked by the aforementioned train and a coastal walking track, so the towns were filled with very vital and energetic looking visitors. In the on-going ‘represent’ competition, Cin would have beaten me, but I thumped Yammy. In fact, through all of Italy, I thumped Yammy – he only came close in the Vatican City. Very Catholic, those Croatinians.

On our second day, Yammy and I set off to try the track. We did the really easy bit between Riomaggiore and Manorola, and the moderately easy bit between Manorola and the Corniglia train station. At the station, we looked up at the 400-odd steps to the town, and elected to take the train all the way to Monterosso for lunch.

The Cinque Terra area is the home of pesto, and also makes some rather pleasant wines, so we indulged in both. We never did get to see the fourth town Vernazza, despite a number of attempts to reach it, one of which ended up with us stranded in La Spezia for an hour around midnight, hanging out at a bar with about 10 other people who also weren’t very good with a train timetable.

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Posted by: ilanasmith | July 13, 2007

It’s All About Perspective

I was playing around with Live Earth and Google Maps (mostly to figure out just how far Yammy and I walked in Pisa – see previous post). I found my current house, my sister’s house, my first primary school, my boarding school, my last house in Brisbane and my new love, Dubrovnik. (Both Mum’s place and the family farm in Yanco didn’t have the resolution.) All nice places that look a bit ordinary in satellite pics.

Obversely, my childhood town of Karumba actually looks pretty lovely, as long as you stay far enough away. Somewhat apt, actually.

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Posted in Computers and Internet

Posted by: ilanasmith | July 11, 2007

Yammy Broke the Tower!

From Dubrovnik, Yammy and I flew to Pisa. Our stopover in Rome ended up being rather longer than anticipated, and we arrived in Pisa fairly late on a Saturday night. We’d intended to catch the train into the city, but we arrived after it stopped running, and joined the end of a rather long cab line.

Thirty minutes later, line haven’t not budged an inch, Yammy squirreled off to inflict his high school Italian (very convenient that. Came in quite useful.) on the general populace. He arrived back at the line with the story that there was a festival on, and that the cabs couldn’t get over the bridge…but that we could walk.

This seemed a little far-fetched, but we were game, so off we set on what we were sure was going to be a bit of a walk. We reasoned that maybe we’d find a cab somewhere else.

It turns out that Pisa airport to Pisa central is entirely walkable. Pisa downtown pretty much starts at the airport fence. Our hotel was only a couple of hundred meters from a certain notable tower and yet our walk was an easy 3km or so. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been for the thousands of people on the street in our way. We’d arrived on the night of Luminara, Pisa’s biggest party.

The next morning we got to gawk at a tower and a cathedral and a baptistery, but it could hardly compare.

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Posted by: ilanasmith | July 10, 2007

From the Queen of the Adriatic to the Pearl of the Adriatic

The day we traveled to Venice, Cin and I calculated that we caught 7 different instances of public transport, covering 5 different types. Strangely, it didn’t seem like that big a day.

Yammy had been at home in Croatlandia, so he drove on over and met us at the airport and we bused and vaporetto’d our way to our hotel near the Rialto. My train and metro commute home from the Copenhagen airport may have impressed Mark but it doesn’t really compare with one that involves boating down the Grand Canal.

I didn’t really expect to like Venice – an old description of “smelly and overpriced” had stuck with me, but I found it rather charming. We wandered and boated our way around, and only once accidentally ended up on a three-hour tour that took us nowhere.

The next evening, we picked up Mrs Yammy’s car from the airport, and via Slo-V, ended up in the heart of Yammy-town in Rijeka, Croatvillonia. We camped out at YammySis Nats’ place in Opatija for a couple of days while being giving the Yammy Tour of the area. From there, Dr Yammy was kind enough to give us a lift to Zagreb, where all three of us caught a plane down to Dubrovnik.

I’m in love with Dubrovnik. The town is amazing (though all that marble is a bit slippy), the Adriatic is gorgeous, the day trips are fun, the food is wonderfully Italian, the booze is wonderfully Croatian. In fact, the only disappointing thing is that for a town in Dalmatia, there was a distinct lack of spotty dogs.

We walked the walls, we splashed in the sea, we drank the grappa. We made our resident Croatoan speak Croatish to all the other Croatvillians. I nominated a least-favourite saint. (Saint Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik. Patron saint of a town that got destroyed by an earthquake in the 1600s and had the shit bombed out of it for no good military reason during the Balkan War. Slack-arse motherfucker.) We were haunted by church bells.

On our last evening, Cin had to leave us to go back to the US and work, so Yammy and I consoled ourselves by brownbagging to an outdoor cinema to see “Ocean’s 13”. The fact that we brownbagged prosecco only makes this slightly less ghetto.

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Posted by: ilanasmith | July 6, 2007

I Look Like a Monkey and I Smell Like One Too

I don’t really drink wine. If it ends up in a glass in front of me, then I drink it and usually enjoy it, but like how music is just pretty sounds in my ears, I can’t really appreciate it. Charles shared a bottle of ’89 Grange Hermitage with me last year and I enjoyed it immensely, but it was probably wasted on me.

I’m similarly ambivalent about food. My blood-sugar roller-coaster means I have to think about it far more than I care to, which, really, is at all. Bring on the food-cube. I’d find it very convenient for Vegemite on toast to fill all my dietary requirements. Vegemite is tasty.

I suppose this means that my recent birthday present to myself was a strange choice then. Cin and Nick came to visit and we did all sorts of fun things on the big day. Perhaps not enough to top Kb’s big weekend, but we had great coffee, great baked goods, great fun staring at the hippies, a great visit to the Museum of Erotica (which did, as expected, run the gamut from slightly seedy to incredibly gross. Also, the Paris Hilton video? Snore.), gigantic great glasses of beer in a sunny square watching a very pretty passing parade. And then we went to dinner.

Copenhagen has a restaurant. It’s called Noma. It does ‘Nordic cuisine’. It’s the only Danish restaurant with two Michelin stars. It was recently named the 15th best restaurant in the world. So that’s where we went. After all, I only plan to turn 31 four or five more times in my life.

We had the seven course meal with accompanying wine, though it really ended up being about 8 or 9 of each. And it was fucking incredible.

Weird ingredients, bizarre combinations of flavours, strange textures. And it worked. It’s like every other meal I’d eaten was a tiny static-y black and white TV and suddenly I was watching high-def plasma. It was almost religious.

And the next day, I flew off to Venice. So my birthday didn’t suck.