Dover I had a quiet weekend, spending Saturday strolling around Regent’s Park and the canals. On Sunday I caught the train down to Dover (actually went one more stop to Sandwich just to say I’d been there). I explored the castle on the top of the hill including some of the underground tunnels. From the lookout I could see all the way to France. You can’t really see the white cliffs of Dover while you’re standing on them so I took a short cruise on the harbour before I headed back to London. When I got back I caught up with [View Full Entry]

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Rambling and rockin’ in the New Forest I took advantage of the May long weekend and caught the train down to Brockenhurst in Hampshire to meet up with Fiona, my old flattie from the Isa. She and the others got stuck in some mammoth traffic but eventually made it and we headed to our cottage in Lyndhurst. We had a stroll around the town which was packed to the hilt with cars, tourists and rented bikes. After gorging on way too many nibbles and some champagne we went for a stroll through the countryside before having a few brews in the [View Full Entry]

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This has been a while coming unfortunately but here's a quick update. I arrived in London on the 6th April and, after a long wait at terminal 5 (at least my bag did finally arrive unlike so many others), made it in to town and to a very welcome bed. I awoke the next morning to discover it was snowing which was completely amazing and unexpected. I spent my first week in a hostel that was a little more like a half-way house but had a great location in Notting Hill and included breakfast and dinner in the very reasonable price. [View Full Entry]

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Top 3 misconceptions I had about Japan: 1. Japanese people speak English - somehow I thought that since heaps of people I know have taught English in Japan that everyone would just be chatting away… not so (at least they had English signs). 2. All of Tokyo is a giant glowing neon lightshow - Ok, Shinjuku is crazy, but other parts were really quiet, peaceful and had heaps of open space. 3. You can buy anything from a vending machine - I think this must be changing as mostly I saw (a lot of) machines selling drinks and cigarettes. It was [View Full Entry]

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This is a bit late! Sorry but we got caught up in the excitement of being home! London We arrived off the Eurostar at the new St Pancreas International station in King's Cross and after a quick detour to an internet cafe made our way out to Ciemon and Michael's place where they were kind enough to put us up for a couple of days. We had a good catch up that night over a couple of beers. The next morning we headed into town to check out Westminster Abbey with it's hundreds of years of history. It was smaller inside [View Full Entry]

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Well this blog is a little late as we got a bit distracted in the excitement of heading home! Paris is the final stop on our European adventure and one that we've been really looking forward to, especially Karen who has had a love affair with all things French and Parisian since primary school. We arrived on day one and found our hostel which had the strange name of 'Peace & Love'. The first night was pretty quiet having some beers in the cool bar downstairs and preparing our next 5 days in Paris. We found the metro system is very [View Full Entry]

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We only had one night to spare for Luxembourg so it’s pretty lucky that it’s another of the ridiculously tiny countries of Europe. It’s about 2500 km2 stuck in the middle of France, Belgium and Germany that’s been fought over for centuries but is now the only independent Grand Duchy in the world. We caught the train from Brussels and arrived in a mysterious fog that made the capital seem like a fairytale kingdom which in some ways it is. Luxembourg City is perched on top of a hill with stone fortresses surrounding it and beautiful turreted buildings that look like [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Brussels to discover that the accommodation that we had booked was a ‘proper’ hotel, complete with cable TV and an ensuite with a bath! These were luxuries compared to the hostels we’ve been staying in so the first night we chilled out, Karen had a bath and Mick enjoyed the TV. The next day we caught the train to Bruges which is a very pretty town set up for tourists. The town looks like it has a lot of history behind it but its all just a ruse to lure tourists and it’s working. We knew this before [View Full Entry]

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We had a very 'romantic' Valentine's day... catching 3 trains in 6 hours to arrive in Amsterdam. We caught a tram from the train station to our hostel which is very trippy. It has 3 mirror balls, some weird lights and a funny looking pig picture. We were pretty exhausted so we just popped across the road to a coffee shop. To cap a wonderful Valentine's day, we ended up grabbing some McDonalds for dinner. Classy. The next morning we visited the Van Gogh museum which has the largest collection of his paintings in the world (you'd hope so since they [View Full Entry]

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Hamburg is the most northerly city that we will visit on our trip and we're pretty happy about that as it was starting to get very cold. After finding our hostel, which had the worst signage ever, we walked along the Elbmeile where they have put fake beaches along the shores of the river. From here we could see the busy port which has made Hamburg rich and we also walked past the famous St Pauli Fishmarket which is held every Sunday. It's apparently huge and has been running for 200 years but we won't get to tell you as we'll [View Full Entry]

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