Hello My final weeks in Canada were spent, crawling on my hands and knees, hands in the dirt, pulling weeds out of the ground in order to help my sister out with her PhD research. On the plus side - her project was located in the Okanagan valley, a very beautiful part of British Columbia. The landscape is similar to that of Central Otago, NZ (including the numerous vineyards). It's also the fruit basket of western Canada - loads of fruit. The weed we were pulling out was Knapweed (Centaurea diffusa), an agricultural weed in Canada, that probably slipped its way [View Full Entry]

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Hello Flying into St John's, I kept waiting for that moment where you break through the cloud and can see the land below. The wheels went down, and I kept waiting. Then suddenly I saw the wheels of the plane hit the tarmac. Slightly surprised I turned and looked at the guy next to me, who smiled and said "Welcome to Newfoundland, the world's foggiest place!" I've spent nearly four weeks volunteering at the Admirals Adventure B&B , with two Germans (Julia and Simone), a French Canadian (Catherine), and a fellow Kiwi (Dawn). The place is run by a jovial [View Full Entry]

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G'day The first thing I noticed about Belgium, was that it is incredibly flat, the second thing was that were a few strange things about. This started as soon as we landed, after the rather normal straight forward landing, the entire plane burst into applause. But then maybe that was because we were flying Turkish Airlines? Philippe was there to greet us at Brussels airport, and whisked us away in his car to his home, just outside of Antwerp. Philippe had taken the week off work to tour us around Belgium and did a wonderful job of playing tour guide, navigator, [View Full Entry]

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Hello So our Intrepid tour of Eastern Europe started in Budapest, Hungary. Sarah and I arrived in Budapest one day before the tour started in a semi exhausted state after catching the 2am train from Ljubljana. The train went via Croatia, so with the 4 passport checks and 3 ticket checks, neither of us had much sleep. Budapest is made up of three cities, Buda (the old part of the city) and Pest (newer part, but includes the Heroes square). Sarah and I had ample time to explore both before the tour began. Our tour group was a lovely group of [View Full Entry]

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Gidday Its taken a couple of days to get used to being back in the Western world. Primarily just the little things, like cars stopping for you at the pedestrian crossings (and the speed at which the cars travel here!). Breakfast in Frankfurt was a delight, yay for butter, jam, nutella and decent (i.e. nonwhite and not sweet) bread. Oh, and the English Breakfast tea with milk! Anyway, Sarah and I spent one night in Frankfurt before heading down to Stuttgart to spend a night with Sarah's cousin James. James gave us a wonderful tour of Stuttgart township and his village [View Full Entry]

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Hello The night train to Xi'an to Beijing was an interesting experience. Our tour leader, Mark, scared us with stories about the Chinese train boarding skills - as everyone crams on all at once with a lot of pushing and shoving. But the fears were relatively unfounded as we boarded without any dramas. The hard sleeper carriages were divided into six bunk compartments without a door way (so everyone that wanders past stares at the bizarre foriengers). The bunks were narrow and certainly lived up to their hard sleeper status. But other than that the trip was relatively comfortable. Xi'an [View Full Entry]

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Ni Hao So as Sarah and I were semi sleeping on the flight to Beijing - the earthquake hit China. Sarah and I were completely unaware of this major event, until mum sent me an email about it. However switching on the TV (and this is still the case over one week later), over half the 48 TV stations were reporting the earthquake 24/7 - including the one English channel. The coverage itself is interesting as it is clearly government run. Shanghai is a very modern city. Some of the old buildings remain. But the skyline is dominated by sky scrapers [View Full Entry]

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Hello In case you were wondering what the next plan is and to give you all a vague idea of my location(s) for the next four to five months, I thought I'd post another blog. So on the 12th of May Sarah and I will fly to Shanghai, China. We will spend 3 nights in Shanghai before flying to Beijing where we will start an Intrepid journey of the Silk road (). The tour covers 4,000km across the breath of China, from Beijing, to the mountains of Tian Chi, camel riding in the Taklimakan desert and concluding in Kashgar, right on [View Full Entry]

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Hello all As most of you are probably aware, I'm back in the country of normal coloured cheese (and multiple cheddars - I counted 13 different types of cheddar in the supermarket today). For the moment at least. I arrived the day before Elly and Benj's wedding in beautiful sunshine and promptly went for my first (and only) summer sea swim at Balena Bay with Dad - the Wellington Sea is still freezing. Then for the ultimate indulgence, I picked up a big ice cream (hokey pokey of course) at Oriental Parade. Yay for the Wellington summer. For mum and dad, [View Full Entry]

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G'day I hope everyone had a wonderful break, and all the best for 2008. When the snow arrived on the 1st of December, I thought I was guaranteed a white Christmas. The snow continued to pile up until Christmas eve, when it suddenly turned warm (as in above 0) and began to rain. So I sat next to Elisa's awesome Christmas tree and watched out the window as the snow bit by bit disappeared. You can imagine my relief, when we arrived at Elisa's parent's place on Christmas day to discover that the snow had remained there. So I got my [View Full Entry]

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