Próspero año nuevo!! I had two New Year's celebrations this year - at 11am I celebrated New Zealand New Year with (5) people in my office, just because we could. So the champagne was flowing a bit early. We all left work at 2pm and I got ready for the big night. Even put on a bit of makeup! I spent the first half of the evening with Phil and Christine, my kiwi friends from the Europe tour. They are a real laugh! And thank goodness they still had their absynthe from Vienna, because it really made our night. I remember [View Full Entry]

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Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!! I know this is a bit late, but I have had a great week and wanted to share my triumphs and fun with you all. I'm a star! Just call me Alice APACS is a great place to be in December. The last few weeks have been a blur of preparation, anticipation and rehearsal as I learned all my lines for my starring role in the highlight of the Christmas Party: the APACS Pantomime. This year it was Alice in Wonderland, and as you can see from the pictures I made a pretty sexy [View Full Entry]

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Hi all, OK, time to catch you up on developments over the last couple of weeks. I went to stay with Nics for a day as I'd missed her HEAPS over the last couple of months. We've already started our next plans, more on that in a minute. I got my old job back at APACS, so I've got one part of my life that's still familiar. Same workmates, same desk, same routines. Everything else is different. I got a shoebox flat in Elephant and Castle that is cheap-cheap, so my flatmates are new - 2 Turkish girls, a Turkish guy [View Full Entry]

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Sex, drugs and more bicycles than I've ever seen before in my life - Amsterdam has it all. I have to say that my days in Amsterdam were pretty sedate. On arrival we went straight to a cheese and clogs factory and saw how both were done. The cheese tasted good, but unlike Ximena, I did not get the urge to buy my very own pair of clogs. Wooden shoes are just too weird. After a very quick shower and change of clothes, and we were doing a breakneck tour of town ending at a sex show. There were about 3 [View Full Entry]

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I'm sorry for continuing to make references to Eurotrip, but the scene when the German guy is talking about his crime in Berlin always has me in stitches! That is right before he takes them to to Bratislava, and as we all now know, it's not as bad as the movie makes out. We arrived in the afternoon, did a quick bus tour of the city, including the remaining portion of the Berlin Wall and the Reichstag, and got sorted in our hostel rooms. Dinner was at a local pub, where we proceeded to have drinks and karaoke until fairly late. [View Full Entry]

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Exciting!! The prospect of seeing my two ex-flatmates was wonderful, like seeing family!! Peter and Pauline are actually from Lodz, a city about 2 hours from Warsaw, but they drove in for the day to see me, I felt so special! As it turned out, Pauline (polish name Pola) had everything all planned out, so once I met them at the appointed tube station, we started our sightseeing together! Cemetry The oldest cemetry in Warsaw is huge, and very old. Pola and Piotr like talking walks through cemetries, and this one was impressive. There is not much space left, so only [View Full Entry]

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Unlike most of our previous tourist attractions, you don't go to Auschwitz Concentration Camp to be entertained. You go to try and understand the enormity of what happened to so many political prisoners (mostly Jewish) held in concentration camps in Germany and Poland. I still don't understand how people could be part of this kind of industrial-scale murder, but it's not just numbers to me any more. Auschwitz I Not sure what to expect, we passed into the concentration camp past brick fences with barbed-wire and gun towers. Row upon row of large brick buildings set out like a grid were [View Full Entry]

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Not only was it a very long drive with very bad traffic, but I had to wear the yellow 'I did something stupid' hat along with fellow passenger Phillipa due to our party shenanigans in Prague. Totally worth it. When we finally arrived at our accommodation in Krakow it was dark and cold. Luckily we had nice dorm rooms, but the cook tent still had to be set up outside, and once dinner was ready we ate our stir fry and noodles with lots of steam coming off the meal and out of our noses and mouths. I had about 5 [View Full Entry]

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Traffic We could tell we were heading back to civilisation because the traffic into Prague was pretty bad. The bus was at a standstill for a minute or so at a time, and we had fun throwing things at each other. At one point, Benny the bus driver even parked the bus, ran out the door, ran around the bus, got back in and was in plenty of time to put the bus back into drive and move forward. We were all getting a bit cabin-fever-ish after 10 hours in the bus, so this was to our great amusement. The City [View Full Entry]

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Stopped off in BRATISLAVA!! I hope everyone has seen Eurotrip. The scene where they stop off in Bratislava is classic. It's like a desolate, grey 'Eastern European' wasteland, with a man washing himself with a rag on a stick, and a dog eating a mans hand. To tell the truth, that imagery is closer to Romania than the real Bratislava. Bratislava is a thriving little metropolis, with a very cool walled old town and some great restaurants. I wouldn't know, because I was too lazy to be bothered taking out a different currency just for a 2 hour visit, but I [View Full Entry]

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