of more sightseeing in berlin

I decided to do proper sightseeing during the day (plus it was snowing so hard the night before, everything looked so pretty… thought it would look awesome the next day! All white and stuff…) and was surprised that my brother agreed to accompany me on this little jaunt.

Humboldt University was founded in 1810 and is Berlin’s oldest university (thanks Wikipedia! lol). Imagine going to class in such an old place with so much history and so much it’s been through (e.g. Third Reich)… damn…

Whenever I’m in Europe, it never fails to remind me just how young Australia is as a country; in a way, it kind of makes me sad that we don’t have as long or as interesting of a history.

So, we continued our way down Unter den Linden (which is pretty much the main street for tourists as it’s where most of the old buildings are located on or nearby), stopping by the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse)…

The New Guardhouse now symbolises the victims of war and tyranny and I’ll refrain from giving a history lesson, but if you’re interested about its original purpose and who it was built by (*cough* Prussian King *cough*), there’s always Wikipedia ^_^ .

In the face of the ugly side of war, Stormy felt a bit doubt of his Lord’s plans of galaxy dominance and so wanted to clear his head a bit with a walk…

… only to belatedly realise just how deep the snow really was and kind of panicked…

After much struggling to get out of the snow, Stormy felt like he needed a much deserved break and plonked down to enjoy the view (even though he did get into such a mess all by himself lol)…

The river below Stormy was half frozen over and people had been throwing snowballs at the ice. Some broke through, while some just splattered all over the ice – I guess it was much thicker there than it looked hehe.

We thought Stormy had the right idea and followed suit to gawk at the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) and the museum with ancient Egypt stuff next to it (oh man, I feel so bad that I’ve forgotten its name T_T).

[Edit: Bien's helpfully supplied me with the name of the museum: Altes Museum (Old Museum, and yes there is a New Museum as well hehe). Thanks Bien! =D]

Not sure if you can see the two statues that presides so grandly by the entrance steps of the museum, but here’s a close-up of one of them:

I find it absolutely astounding how the artist has wrought metal into something that feels so fluid and emotional and yet so frozen in time. I love how detailed it is: the bunched muscles, straining tendons, the curled tail, and I think the thing that struck me the most, the lioness’s snarling face.

[Edit: I also found that it's called Amazon and Lion Fighter, designed by August Kiss and Albert Wolf.]

I was wondering why my toes felt so cold and literally like blocks of ice, until I looked down…

Hmm, I see! By the end of the day, my socks were pretty wet around the toes and they were so cold that they started to hurt >_< GG. I get now why most Germans wear boots or something similar hehe.

Stormy spied a banister and took it into his head to slide down it...

… and then vowed never to do it again when its covered in snow, as he tried to get all the snow from out of his pants.

We were walking a little bit too much for Stormy’s little legs, and so I suggested that we take a break and for him to have a little sit down…

He was not pleased at my joke. *Sighs* Some stormtroopers have no sense of humour =P

So we visited the Brandenburg Gates one last time (and actually for the third time haha), only because it was on the way to the Holocaust Memorial really…

I was pretty hungry by this time and I remember seeing a currywurst store at one of the end of the memorial. We decided to stop for a bite and then go back through the memorial to the park on the opposite side of the road.

So totally rorted: the currywurst store was permanently closed!! T___T nooooes… Feeling a bit dejected, we headed towards the park.

It was seriously like a winter wonderland. As we walked through the path lined with snow-laden trees, a slight breeze swept gently by and it was enough to dislodge snow balancing precariously on the branches, where it glittered and danced on the tail of the breeze to the ground. Oh it was so magical! We both had stopped in our tracks in awe at the sight.

The photo doesn’t do it any justice and there wasn’t as many airborne snow as when we had arrived. As I pointed the camera up to capture the snow covered branches, my brother yanked at one of the lower branches, which somehow managed to tip snow from the top branches down:

In all the excitement, Stormy somehow lost his helmet! Crap. He was quite upset and determinedly went looking for it…

… I’m a bit worried, because he’s been gone for a while now…

of sightseeing in berlin

So I’ve managed to be a tourist in the Motherland =D Yay!

It all started with Shao-Xi needing to pick up a friend at Hauptbahnhof (the main station now used for incoming international and inter-city trains), who was on his way to Japan (okay, that didn’t quite make sense, but it’s a fairly lengthy story and trust me, it makes perfect sense ^_^).

She wanted to show him around Berlin, so we decided to do the main touristy stuff (i.e. Brandenburg Gates and Reichstag, pretty much a parliament house) plus the dinosaur museum!! Yay dinosaurs!! ^____^ (Its actual name is the Museum of Natural History hehe)

His train was scheduled to arrive at 1.20pm… and it did… only without him on it. Wilhelm had slept in and totally missed it. *sighs* Thankfully, he was on the next (and last) train from The Netherlands, which would arrive 2 hours later.

We pottered around for a bit, trying to kill some time, but we kind of ran out of things to do. Shao-Xi brightened up and suggested that we visit grandfather’s old place.

Back in the day, I did my internship in Berlin (was here for 7 months) and I stayed at grandfather’s apartment, along with Shao-Xi, Mario, and my klepto aunt; grandfather and my aunt moved to Yi-Ji’s place after the renovations were completed. Anywho, we both have lots of great memories of that place, like the saggy-in-the-middle mattress that we slept on (okay, admittedly that doesn’t sound so great, but it was pretty funny waking up and finding out that we had both gravitated towards the middle) and the nightly chats, so I enthusiastically seconded the idea.

My brother just wanted to get out because it was snowing heaps!

Stormy wanted to make a snow angel, but as he laid there, he realised something…

… his arms weren’t made for sideways action… sadly enough. But I assured him that a stormtrooper shape was just as good ^_^

It was a bit silly because when we got to the old apartment, we realised that we had forgotten what floor and unit it was. lol Oh wells. By the time we got back to Hauptbahnhof, we only had to wait for a couple of minutes before Wilhelm’s train pulled up.

We headed for the Museum of Natural History, stored our gear (well, mostly Wilhelm’s backpack and things), and finally got to gawk at some dinosaurs.

Stormy was a bit relieved that the dinosaurs were long gone – his part in the galaxy domination plans would be that little bit harder if they weren’t, he thought.

The fossils fascinated me, especially at how well preserved they were…

I’ve heard about the “Missing Link” before, but always in passing and I never really got to looking up at what it really meant. Shao-Xi explained to me that while scientists knew that some reptiles evolved into birds, there were no evidence of such thing occurring… until some found it…

This “missing link” was found in I think 1932, and the museum boasts that it is the most exquisite specimen discovered… and it is really quite extraordinary.

The museum’s heavily armed with multimedia explanations of the displays and it’s so interactive! There was this circular screen that counted down the distances of things in the galaxy, zooming onto Earth… and it did it in a very special way:

It would start off near the ceiling and as the distance diminished, the screen would lower over the viewers lying down on this reclining couch… it was so cool. Unfortunately, there’s about a 7-9 minute wait for the next session and we didn’t quite have the time or patience to wait that long.

The museum is bigger than it looks, so we opted to cut our visit short (and my brother and I vowed that we would someday come back to finish it ^_^). By the time we got out, the light was rapidly fading and when we got to the Brandenburg gates, it was pretty dark.

We were getting peckish by this stage, so we hurried over to Reichstag, took some photos and then queued to get into the building (they let people in batches and we had to go through security before being taken up in a lift to the actual dome).

Afterwards, we had a hasty dinner at Friedrichstrasse, scoffing down currywurst and doner (that’s kebab to the Australians hehe).

Wonderful way to end the day ^____^

of grandmother’s bday celebrations

The big day has finally arrived… the reason why so many of the Lu family has congregated in to Berlin: grandmother’s 80th birthday.

We kind of slept in and so there was a big rush in getting ready. I’m not sure why we took two cars, but because Shao-Xi had to do a u-turn, we kind of got left behind. Driving from Truc’s place to Yiji’s place (where the first half of the party will be held) takes about 20 minutes… we took a little bit longer because we were semi-lost. lol

When we got there, it was a bit chaotic – people were running around everywhere and trying to get things done, but not really know what needed to be done.

Some of my cousins were in the dining room having breakfast, including our newest member, Ruby:

She’s so cute ^_^ And terribly smart too…

We were a little behind schedule when we started the felicitations and present-giving, but my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. Where the waiting for the rest of us to have a turn got a little bit tiresome, she seemed to be energised by it.

I think we’re a bit nuts on the documenting everything (this from Lisa, the other dslr photographer for the day)…

Afterwards, there were some performances from the kids, including a trio that played Happy Birthday (trio was piano, violin, and flute), and various group photos, one of which was the entire family (plus a couple of cousins):

It took a looooong time….

FINALLY, time for lunch. The “kids” ate first, then the adults. I’m not sure what happened or why it took so long, but Shao-Xi and I ended up in a bed having a girl chat and we somehow fell asleep. Hahah… We were woken up to do the next thing on the schedule: family photos at the Brandenburg Gates.

Again, there was chaos: no one was sure who was taking whom in what car and there lots of “take so-and-so!!” with replies of “aren’t they going with what’s-their-face?”. Somehow my brother and I were left without a car and then when it was organised that we were going to go with one of our aunts, we were bundled into Shao-Xi’s car… what the? lol But we weren’t going to complain because we had transport =P

Sleep clung to me like a limpet on a rock, as we were making our way to the city centre; I fought against it, but sadly succumbed to falling asleep, only waking up when we had to get out.

It was deathly chilly that day and wearing (quite vainly I admit) just stockings, boots, short sleeved dress, and overcoat… oh and a scarf… really doesn’t combat the cold. By the time we got to the Brandenburg Gates, my toes were numb.

Oh man, having so many family members in one spot at the same time is kind of… a sight to see – especially since we had some more joining the already fairly large group…

… and the scary thing was, that wasn’t even all of us! Some went AWOL.

I really like this photo because of the different expressions on my relatives’ faces, but mostly because of Yi-Ji having an awesome yawn in the background hahha ^____^

We finally stopped taking photos and we dispersed. Some of us went to Starbucks (Shao-Xi, Truc, Tuyen, my brother and me!) and others went straight to Samadhi (the family’s Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant). Armed with hot beverages, we trekked to Samadhi, where we were greeted with another chaotic mess – though this time it was a more organised chaos.

Dinner was served and we gobbled down the delicious fare in front of us. I love eating at Samadhi – they make vegetarian food sooooo yummy! Lots of flavours and you almost don’t realise that there’s no meat because the dishes are so complete as they are.

A few of photos during dinner, taken mostly by Shao-Xi:

After dinner was charades and then a presentation on grandmother’s life. Things got really interesting when old photos of our aunts and uncles, fathers or mothers, were shown. My aunt and uncle would throw it out to us, the “kids”, asking, “Who’s your papa or mama?” Hehe, it was pretty cool and funny (especially when one of my cousins got it wrong).

Then we came to the part where some people were waiting for alllll day: the cake cutting!

My aunt Mui and her friend baked it themselves. Half of it was pineapple and other half was coffee.

And then it was the end of a very long day…

…

Actually not quite… afterwards, Truc proposed for us to go clubbing, but after shopping for an air mattress and spending a long time at the billards place (we weren’t even playing, but waiting for his friends to finish up/arrive), his friends ended up going home and we just ate at Aroma.

Didn’t get home til about 3am… but didn’t sleep til about 4ish, perhaps closer to 5, as Shao-Xi, Truc, and I were talking in bed. Well, I’m using the term “talking” quite loosely here – I was super exhausted and you know how when you get like that, you just end up talking crap? We don’t remember anything from the conversation that night (hahah surprise, surprise), but I remember something about feet and saying it so often that it was practically second word. lol… And I remember giving up trying to keep up with the conversation after that lame attempt and fell into a deep sleep.

of celebrating truc’s bday

We haven’t been much of a tourist in Berlin, but I suspect that will (might?) change when my parents get here tomorrow (and when the birthday stuff are all out of the way). So, what have we been doing in Berlin all this time?

It was Truc’s birthday on 6th Feb and we pretty much had like a 3-day party to celebrate. (Disclaimer: we’ve been keeping rather odd hours of the day, so some days seem to have melded – and I most probably have forgotten some bits or even worse, mixed some bits together).

Thursday was pre-birthday drinks – I think we also had dinner at a sushi place (which is run by Vietnamese people) beforehand, but I could be wrong – at Zeitlos, which I thought was a pretty neat place. Zeitlos is a themed bar set in the tropics… furniture and “ceiling”/”walls” were made from bamboo and there was sand on the floor! My brother didn’t want to come out, so it was just me with some of Truc’s close friends.

Friday was to be dinner at his place and then karaoke til whenever. Tim and I tidied up Truc’s apartment for the impending guests during the day and then kind of bludged til people started to trickle in.

Tom was the first the arrive, carrying the cake. I thought it was rather amusing that the person who didn’t eat dessert – or even like dessert (I know!! That’s so weird!!!) – was the person in charge of the birthday cake (happy to report that the cake was a rather yummy chocolate mousse something or other). Truc was actually out with Aysen, buying drinks and all that, so I was a bit petrified in having to play host with my very limited and quite frankly, awful German. Interestingly, his English was very good – his accent tinged with a bit of American (I found out later that he was an international exchange student when he was in 8th grade and he spent about a year in Texas, also he’s spent some time in Manchester a little more recently).

The dinner consisted of a couple of Vietnamese dishes (ban cuon and ban something – it’s the white circular on with minced dried prawns on top), set out buffet-style on the now extended dining table. Oh and also some fried vegetarian wontons.

Although Truc was there, as well as Khanh Ha (his sister) and Lisa (our other cousin), I felt a bit out of place (both of my girl cousins had brought their boyfriends and so I was a bit shy in approaching them to catch up properly) and so relegated myself into Truc’s bedroom – reading.

I was rather surprised when Ky (one of Truc’s closest male friends) actively came over and started chatting with me, but I thought was rather nice of him to do so. Tom introduced me to Sonia and we chatted a bit stiltedly but steadily about work and her studies. I always seem to find myself shamelessly plugging EST and that night was no different. She seemed rather excited about it and I hope she likes our blog! =)

Aysen also came over and chatted with me, we both didn’t really want to go to the karaoke, but she decided to tough it out (knowing it would be a looooong night there)…. whereas I, upon finding out that there perhaps wasn’t any room in Truc’s car, decided to opt out of the karaoke.

Naturally, after making such a decision, I find myself a couple of hours later in Truc’s Volkswagen Golf with 3 other people in the backseat heading to the karaoke place.

Where was my brother all this time? Asleep… on the floor… next to the bed, hidden from view. *Sighs*

So we were at the karaoke place from about 1ish to I think 5.30. Actually, I left at 5.30 – Truc and a couple of his friends stayed for another half an hour or so. Crazies. I actually had fallen asleep twice!!

The room wasn’t very well ventilated and there seemed to be a thousand smokers there. Not only did I come out of there smelling like an ashtray, I got sick the next day because of the smoke plus being out in the cold (even if it was a bit) afterwards.

of sightseeing in prague

Before I go ahead with Day 3, I’d like to post this up:

This is a photo of Terminal 4 at Heathrow airport when we disembarked at about 5.30 in the morning. I don’t think you can see it, but it was snowing then and that should have been an indication of what was to come if I was paying any attention.

I had forgotten that I had taken some photos on the Cybershot because it was easier to pull out at the time. =)

Day 3 started off a little later than we anticipated, though only due to an incorrect time zone adjustment. We had our complimentary breakfast at the hotel (it wasn’t too bad, but the poached eggs looked like they were poached 3 days ago), dumped our luggage in the luggage store room, and headed out to do some touristy stuff.

My brother is not a very good tourist – he’s also not easily impressed either – he doesn’t really want to see anything or go anywhere… It was quite frustrating, but I got all bossy and pretty much went to what I wanted to see/do. I realised something though as I was going through my brother’s photos: he’s not nearly as unimpressed or uninterested as he seemed, which I suppose is a good thing and so I’ll continue to boss him around on where we should go (though I think museums are definitely not his thing).

We caught the train to Mustek and ambled our way to the Charles Bridge via that big square where the Astronomical Clock resides. My brother once again accused me of not knowing where we were going, but this time I did! I just wanted to wander around and take photos of edifices and stuff… like these:

Anywho, we eventually got to the Astronomical Clock and it was as baroque as I remembered it to be…

There was a door next to it that had a very ornately baroque decor, one of the designs really caught my eye:

Then there was that church I remembered from last time, where it just seems to loom over a couple of smaller buildings, seemingly coming up from nowhere…

However, what I had forgotten about were the frescoes (?) on some of the buildings. They were so detailed and painstakingly done, I could only marvel at their elaborate beauty and there was the usual twinge of sadness that modern architecture does not have that same sort of … soul, I guess, like these old buildings.

What I didn’t notice from last time was the benches!

Which I thought was terribly awesome, but my brother thought it was rather lame of me to get excited over something so mundane as a bench. *sigh*

To be honest, we kinda did get lost and had to refer to this map I had bought last time I was here… though in the end, as usual, we managed to get to our destination:

The Charles Bridge.

Parts of the bridge were under renovations unfortunately and so it looked quite… cluttered, but that didn’t detract anything from the view (though something could be said by my horrible photo taking skills haha… if you haven’t already guess, these are straight jpegs from the camera – I haven’t touched any of the photos I’ve uploaded… I miss Lightroom lol):

It was where Stormy decided that the view was quite pleasant and in need of a break from all that walking (the poser haha)…

My brother and I also posed! …For our mum =)

We decided that instead of getting her tacky souvenirs from all these places we were going to go to, we are going to take photos of us two at all the different places we’ve been and then compile them into a nice photo frame. ^_^ Cheap but personal! She’s forever complaining that she doesn’t see any photos of us two together and stuff… so this would be perfect! We’re hoping anyways… hahah

People walking on the bridge are overlooked by a plethora of statues, one of them being a very popular saint or something (correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m going by what was told to me ages ago); you can see where people have touched the plagues for good luck (we also touched them to ward off any more pesky bad luck)…

As we neared the end of the of the bridge, there was a police boat fishing… haha just kidding, at the other end of the line was a diver. My brother thought they were looking for a dead body – I sincerely hope it wasn’t anything that macabre.

On our way to the palace, we popped into a couple of souvenir places and noted the ones we wanted to come back to.

The palace is set on a hill (thankfully not such a big hill), which was high enough to see the city sprawled out beneath us…

I didn’t realise that the city was so tightly packed together, but anywho, you can see the Charles Bridge towers just poking up amidst the higgley piggley houses. While I pondered about how easily one could practise roof top parkour, Stormy pondered other things. I’m not sure what, but there’s a scheming glint in his eye…

While we were taking photos outside the palace gates, there was a change in guard gates. This happened last time too within a couple of minutes of getting to the palace gates… which made me wonder how often they change.

We bought some souvenirs and stopped for lunch, where I ordered the hot chocolate I’ve been craving for since we stepped out of the hotel and potato soup (which was slightly too salty but still rather nice) and my brother had two cappuccinos.

I also was industriously writing out some postcards…

Which I got to post as we wandered back to Mustek metro station and to our hotel.

The map said that the bus station is across the street from Florenc metro station… but it wasn’t. It took us about 15 minutes to find it, losing our map along the way (gah). My brother got frustrated with me because I was doing the whole meandering around thing again to get there, so he went to look at the map posted up… and he came back muttering, “I don’t know where we are on it”. Oh well…

After running out of signs to follow, I wanted to follow people who looked like they were going to the bus station (they were carrying duffel bags or pulling those carry-on sized suitcases), but my brother thought it was an awful idea (to which I got rather cross at).

Being stubborn and rather mulish, I decided to follow them anyway. I was rather smug that I was correct in my assumption of where their destination.

Anywho, here’s a photo of Stormy waiting patiently for the coach to take us to Berlin:

The coach trip back to Berlin was blissfully uneventful and we were picked up by Truc and his parents (who went home). After picking up Aysen, we went to have supper at a chinese restaurant… and then I think I passed out at Truc’s apartment, I can’t remember. lol.

of finally getting to prague

So we ended Day 1 of our trip with us passing out at around 6pm, London time… I woke up at about 3am on Day 2 and try as I might, I couldn’t get back to sleep.

At around 4am, I finally had enough of trying and got out of bed, waking my brother up in the process. We watched BBC2 while we puttered around and got ready (not that there was much to pack or unpack for that matter). Now and again, we would look out of the window – not too sure why but we did. I noticed that the snow was melting. I fervently hoped that our flight would go ahead today and I would be grateful for that.

After maybe the 2nd or 3rd time looking out of the window, I saw this:

Pardon the awful photo, but it was the best I could do… but yeah… we saw a fox roaming around! This totally made me feel David Attenborough-ish haha Thought it was rather cool to see.

Anywho, we headed downstairs at about 5am to catch the first transfer bus to Terminal 5. We weren’t surprised that there were already a small mass of people waiting in the lobby. What I was rather surprised at (though I have no idea why), was the sheer amount of people in Terminal 5. There were queue barriers, but no one seemed to be using them and it didn’t matter which check-in counters you were at, there were at least 20 people in each line… and some lines almost went out of the doors! (okay so I exaggerated a little bit, but they were rather long in comparison to others) The staff did try to check in people whose flight was departing within 1 hour, but the message sometimes didn’t get filtered down to the masses.

I listened to my brother for once and joined a short looking queue. Luckily it was the right one and it took us about an hour to get our boarding passes. The lady kind of muttered that we should have used the machines to check in, but I don’t think it would have scanned our baggage tags, though seeing how frazzled she was, I held my tongue.

During our stint in the queue, we heard from one guy who’s been here for 3 days (he had to come back every day to find out if his flight would be cancelled or not) and another dude who waited in line yesterday for 10 hours, finally got his ticket rebooked but because he was pretty much at the end of the line, they had run out rooms at the hotels. I would have to say that we were pretty lucky to only go through what we did yesterday. Man, poor guys…

We hustled through security (we were getting rather good at loading everything into the trays, taking off our jackets and shoes, then putting everything back on, whilst shouldering our gear) and I checked the departure flight information board. There was a spark of dread and apprehension as I saw that we once again did not have a gate number.

I left my gear with my brother to go to the bathroom and tried to shake off the feeling that stole over me, quickly pricking the joy that threatened to bubble up as we went through security. When I came out, he was hovering at the entrance.

“Gate A10.”

The bubble burst in a very good way. I was so happy that I couldn’t get a grin off my face. The grin however, slowly slid off as we were delay by 15 minutes (we had no crew), then by 45 minutes (we had no cabin crew), and finally 2.5 hours later, we were allowed on to the bus to board our plane on the tarmac.

We had the most lovely pilot ever. He was so polite and apologetic about the whole delay. When we finally were cleared to push back, I thought “finally!”… but then we stopped.

Our polite pilot explained how push back works (one dude in a truck pulling the plane, and another walking along side to make sure everything’s okay) and then went on to tell us (with much chagrin) that the dude walking along side slipped on patch of ice and had to be replaced. I giggled at the silliness of it, though the pilot went on in detail that the dude had hit his head pretty hard on the ground and seemed quite shaken – it would also be, most realistically, 10 minutes before his replacement would arrive. Our pilot also apologised for this, even though it wasn’t his fault! Anywho, I felt it was rather poor form of me to find it funny the guy slipped, seeing how severe the slip was, but I’m quite sure he was okay (the pilot was really and sincerely concerned for the guy) and I’m quite sure he would look back and laugh on it too. =P I hope.

Finally… we are in PRAGUE!

Sooooooo happy that we finally made it, though little did I know all the other stuff that would happen to us later on.

We touched down at about 1.30pm, passport control went off with a minor hitch (she was unsure whether my passport photo was me and so had to ask 2 of her colleagues and even then they were unsure still! Definitely will get a new passport when I get back), and caught the bus to Zlicin metro station with no problems.

Actually, on the way down to the metro station, I lost my brother’s phone – and with it my SIM. I think it was the way I was carrying my suitcase – the movements pushed the phone out of my pocket and onto the stair case. My brother was very annoyed at me because he hadn’t uploaded any of the videos and photos of his going away party T____T eep…

I was keeping in contact with my dad quite regularly, keeping him updated with what was happening, and also my aunts in Berlin were calling me up to check up on what was going on and making contingency plans. So losing the phone meant that I couldn’t reassure them that everything was okay and whether or not we had reached our hotel safely. My brother’s SIM wasn’t activated for global roaming and my Samsung had died (hence my SIM in brother’s phone), so we couldn’t do anything til I could log onto the ‘Net.

Anywho… we were almost at our hotel! We just had to train it to Invalidovna and it would be a short walk to Hotel Olympik Tristar.

The baggage handlers managed to somehow lose one of our big suitcase’s wheel… we did better than them: we managed to lose THREE wheels between Invalidovna metro station to our hotel’s reception desk. Yes, three. Two on the big one (so now we only have one wheel left) and one from the small suitcase. Mind you, the walk itself only took about 5 minutes.

It really didn’t help my brother that he really really really really quite urgently needed to poop.

There was a little issue with our reservation at the hotel (as we arrived a day later than we were suppose to), during which the time it took to get it sorted out, my brother got to relieve himself. (Yes, I’m quite sure no one wants to know about my brother’s bowel movements, but he was complaining so much I had to put it in as part of the experience.. so you have to experience it too =P albeit in a watered down form haha).

Anywho, finally checked in… breathed a sigh of relief and went to find my phone charger… What? Where’s the charger?? ARRRGH… you GOT to be kidding me!

*ahem* So it would seem that I left not only my phone charger at home, but several of the other cables too. Damn… I was sooooo sure I had packed them! I felt rather down-trodden by all the bad luck and my stupidity on top of that… I didn’t even want to go out any more (it was about 3.30pm by this stage).

My lack of enthusiasm was very much echoed by my brother, who strongly desired to stay in the hotel for the rest of the trip and only going out for food. I agreed with the staying in the hotel, but only for the rest of the day – really just felt too drained from the day’s emotional roller coaster ride to be enthusiastic and take photos.

Just when we were about to head out to the supermarket next to the station, my brother looked into his 2nd pair of shoes that I had packed and asked, “Did you put the cables in my shoes?”

What the?! And there he was, pulling out small, labeled zip lock bag after zip lock bag out of his shoes. I had totally forgotten that to save space, I had shoved them into his shoes. Maaaaan… what a relief! I wasn’t so stupid after all (though in a sense, I was kind of discombobulated by my own cleverness hahaha).

… Though that was short-lived as I found out that the two converters I had with me was not made for a 3-prong Australian plug, only 2-prongs…. *SIGH* laaaaame. This meant I couldn’t charge anything via USB, which was quite a lot of devices.

*sighs* Anywho, so all in all, thank goodness for the Internet (5 euro deposit for the ethernet cable). It definitely kept my brother and I sane.

It was another early night – I think we slept at about 5.30 or 6.30. Perhaps it was also the jet lag catching up with us.

My attempt of doing the whole… I don’t know what it’s called… but here’s the Lego Storm Trooper Bien so kindly bought for me (thanks Bien! ^_^), looking pensively out at Prague (or if you will, the suburb of Invalidovna). What’s he contemplating? His poses for tomorrow of course! =D hahaha

of transiting to prague

Our flight to Bangkok was good (besides me accidentally breaking my headphones halfway through the trip and having to buy a new pair) and so was our onward journey to London (though we did sleep through dinner and my English breakfast had button mushrooms that looked like green olives). It was our connection flight to Prague that was an issue.

We had a little over 2 hours to get from Terminal 4 to Terminal 5 at Heathrow. We were lucky to get there early, as we were abruptly stopped by an existing massive crowd just outside Terminal 5 passage way and behind us was a rapidly building massive line. The harried staff tried to get everyone organised and from the pieces of conversations floating about, most of them were waiting to get a boarding pass for their next leg, but couldn’t because their flight was cancelled. A couple of people ducked under the massive screens displaying departure flight details and we followed as we already had our boarding pass (thank goodness for that!).

My relief of finally getting through the mess of people and then security was short lived – our flight didn’t have a gate number! Frettd for a bit, but figuring I couldn’t do much anyways, I tried to settle down til more information was available. Found out not 20 minutes to when our flight was scheduled to leave that it was cancelled due to the bad weather and so we were told to line up to rebook.

The line wasn’t that long – perhaps we were about 10 people from the counter – but it took us 5 hours to get to the front. Five. Hours. Apparently, they were having issues with the system and it kept on going down. Most of the movement up in the line was due to people finding other means of rebooking and leaving the line. When we finally did get to the counter, the dude was like, “I have to shoot off now. My colleague will look after you.” I was rather sad panda… we were left hanging at the counter for about 15 minutes before she served us. There were a lot of disgusted and very annoyed people around us, especially since we had two very long lines that seemed like there was no one to serve them.

We finally managed to rebooked for the same flight the next day and were given free accommodation and transfer tickets to the hotel. Feeling buoyed (and much relieved from being in the line for so friggin long – though I must say, I did get through a huuuuuge chunk of Terry Pratchett’s Nation during that time), we headed to Bus Stand 26 outside Arrivals.

Now, normally when I’m in an new area and headed somewhere, I usually have a map or I kind of hazard a guess at where to go… sometimes by following ill-placed signs (and we all know that Sydney have loads of them hahah) – whatever my means, I get there eventually. I think my brother hasn’t really realised this. He got rather agitated with me because it seemed like I was just wandering around aimlessly and kept accusing me of not knowing where I was going.

I finally stopped trying to assure him (trying being the keyword), turned around to look him the eye and said, “No, I do know where I’m going – I just don’t know how to get there… It’ll be okay… We’ll get there eventually”. It was at that point he looked like he was going to explode from frustration and/or stress. It seemed rather futile to even attempt at any sort of confidence boosting or assurance, so I kept walking.

Naturally, we made it to Bus Stand 26 and managed to get to Park Inn on Bath Road… and had to wait in another line to check in (which thankfully did not take as long). Because British Airways seemed like they were sending everyone to Park Inn, the kitchen couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of people requiring food: as soon as hot food would come out, it was gone within seconds. So our lunch pretty much consisted of cold pasta salad, potato salad, a bread roll, salty and sour tomato soup, fries, and a slim slice of black forest cake. Mmm, very healthy… at least I had some dessert even if the food wasn’t so great. Haha

We lugged our stuff up to our room, where I showered and passed out in bed while watching BBC2. Woke up to the Best of Top Gear from season 12, in time to see Jay Kay do his winning lap time dance, and fell back asleep just before they got started with the 2nd half of the Japan race. I remember thinking, “Must stay awake and have dinner… can’t let free dinner go to waste!!” Hahaha so typically cheap of me.

Oh! Before I forget… this is the view from our window! ^_^ Blustering with falling snow too, but you can’t see it in the photo =T sucky…

of canyoning

So I went canyoning on Saturday (3rd Jan). When I tell people this, they always ask one of two questions: “We have canyons?” and “Canyoning? *puzzled look*” I then tell them that “yes, we do have canyons, mini ones” and rather helpfully say “it’s where you scramble over rocks, wade in streams, and bushwalk for a bit”. Which I thought pretty much sums up what we did.

I woke up to a drab, cold-ish day after a late night (I was processing photos for Joanna’s signing ceremony, fervently hoping that I could get everything done by Sunday) and pondered the possibility of piking. It was an option, but it didn’t seem fair to John and I wasn’t sure when I’d get the opportunity to do something like this again.

We got to Richmond McDonalds a little early, where I took a quick nap and was woken up to meet the rest of the canyon-ers. I was a bit grumpy at being woken up, so unfortunately I wasn’t all that forthcoming with the pleasantries hehe I’m so not a morning person. Anywho, Ram and I carpooled with Ryan and John, which allowed me about an hour to an hour and a half of more nap time. Awesome. That nap really helped me carry through the day, especially when driving home.

When we got there, Ram realised that he needed to drop the kids off. He did this on our last bushwalking trip in November – and we waited for just as long. *sighs* The group of about 16 started a bit ahead of us, but we managed to catch up.

At first, I was thinking “wtf?” as we trampled on a non-existent looking path, pushing past slim branches, stepping over or sometimes clambering over fallen trees (a couple of the logs were massive). It all seemed very standard bushwalking fare – perhaps even easier than what we’ve done last year – until we got to the streams.

It was kind of like a gradual introduction of water. First, we were stepping on stones over a little more than a trickle of water, then we were carefully stepping on stones in a stream, and then we got to the point where we were basically traversing along in the stream.

I was wearing Royals and let me tell you that it absorbs water like no tomorrow and doesn’t drain. By this time, I had started to accumulate quite a nice collection of sand in my shoes.

We got to what I think was the mouth of the canyon and we had two options: jump through a narrow, naturally formed hole in the rocks into water below or kind of slide/climb down a fallen log, where if you’re most agile, able to avoid the water. I naturally chose the harder option because I thought it was the easiest (yeah, the jumping though a narrow hole into water kinda didn’t appeal to me) – hindsight is always 20/20. *Sighs* Scrambling down, I felt rather pleased with myself that I managed to do it, but then I looked down and realised I had scraped my left leg. It didn’t look that bad, so I shrugged it off and kept going.

So there were more tramping around in the stream, then just to mix it up, we had to wade a couple of times. The water was surprisingly not as cold as I thought it would be, but it was still cold to the point where if you stayed in it too long, your feet became numb. John thinks it didn’t seem that bad because we were introduced to it slowly and so got use to the temperature – if we were jump straight into the water, we would have found it positively freezing. Which made a lot of sense.

Ryan, Ram, and I were carrying 600ml water bottles and it was a rather big pain in the butt. We would have to pass/throw (and clumsily from me) our bottles along to other people ahead of us to scramble up or down rocks. In the end, one of the guys kinda got fed up with us passing the bottles around like pass-the-parcel that he grabbed two of them and stuck them into the side pockets of his bag (John took the other one into his bag).

There was a mini waterfall that we had to go down, with the help of a knotted rope (which I later learned was mainly for those going up this bit), and it was a bit scary. Thankfully Neil was there tell us where to put our feet, though some hardy souls simply jumped down (after ensuring that there were no hidden rocks in the murky water). There were some discussion afterwards on how the rope actually hinders one’s progress down rather than help, as with one would overly rely/use it – not letting go – when it’s perfectly safe to do so. I pretty much went to the end of the rope (unnecessarily) before releasing the rope – and that’s how I got drenched.

Because we had to wait so long, I started to get rather chilly. I was glad that we started to get a move on. My gladness was short-lived however, as the water started to get deeper and in some places I had to swim (i.e. doggy paddle) for a bit. Actually, truth to be told, I didn’t mind those bits at all. I kind of like them – it was rather fun.

It was the bit where we had to swim for about 15m that wasn’t that much fun. I know I’m not a strong swimmer (that and I’m not much of one), but I know that I can swim 15m – heck, I’ve done 10 laps in a 25-metre pool (granted I had to rest after 2 laps). I would have been surprised that I didn’t make it across without assistance if I weren’t too busy squelching down my panic (the wussy part of me).

I think it was the coldness of the water and the dead weight of the shoes (which, in water, was as useful as telling a geek what LOL stood for) that sapped my energy. I noticed that my progress across had become a painfully slow crawl and debated whether I should keep this up til I could touch the bottom or call for help. Eyeing the still-too-far shore and the speed of which the rock walls went by, I called for help.

Actually, I gasped for help – I didn’t realise how tired and out of breath I was ’til I tried to speak. Interestingly, when the fact became apparent, my panic increased (though efforts in stomping down on it double as well) and thoughts of how heavy my shoes were, how tired I was, and how far away the shore still seemed to be clamoured for attention – all of which pretty much rendered me to practically treading water and occasionally sinking down to nose-level. I was gratefully arm-dragged by Ram forward for a bit and received a massive push forward by Dale (?) from behind. I was so relieved to feel the sloping incline under my feet.

Coming out of the canyon, we were greeted by a different group of canyon-ers who were swathed in wetsuits and having their lunch. Our last “technical” part of the trip was a climb up a 6-metre rock face and a perhaps equally as high tree with spikes in it.

I was a bit nervous because a couple of the guys were having problems climbing, or something… whatever it was, it took them a long time to do the 2 climbs, at which by this stage, I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering.

“What did I say before about huddling when you’re cold?” John mildly rebuked me.

“Not to huddle and to move around,” I sighed and began to jump on the spot, flapping my arms (yeah, that didn’t help one jot).

Once I cleared the rock face climb (there was a knotted rope handy), I swapped my cold, soaked cotton tee for John’s dry and kinda warm thermal; more jumping and arm flapping ensued (I think the flapping helped a bit this time because the sleeves were so long hehe).

I noticed that some debris falling down after a while and looking up, I saw that one of the guys who had trouble with the rock face climb was lying precariously on two ledges, one had his legs and the other, his head and shoulders – his back was completely hanging out there with no support whatsoever. He had slipped and rolled a bit before coming to a lucky stop on those two ledges. With hearts in our mouths, we watched as Ram tried to calm him enough to help him get back up and holding onto the rope harnessed to the rock above. Everyone was so relieved when the guy managed to get back on his feet and onto more stable ground.

Such drama!!! I most certainly didn’t expect it on this trip, but it definitely made things more interesting. The walk back to the cars was uneventful and totally forgettable in comparison.

Afterwards, one of the guys in the group jumped off this approximately 9-metre cliff into the water and Neil jumped from right at the top, which I think was about 11m. Crazy guys. Then we all headed to eat at the Great Eastern Pines (I think it was called something else, but I’ve forgotten what and its what’s printed on the business card)… well most of us. One of the 4wd had to go back because they had left their shoes by the lake the guys were jumping into. Oopsy.

The next canyoning trip is set to be more challenging and more technical than this one – it also has a longer swimming part. Eep. I think I’ll stay at home for that one.