deneefau
Matt de Neef Joined: December 19th 2007
Logged in: February 13th 2010
Logged in: February 13th 2010
Travel Blog Posts
Hello and welcome to the final installment of Matt & Sharon's travel blog, coming to you from sunny ol' Melbourne town. Indulge us as we describe the last days of our trip and look back on some of the unforgettable experiences. The last time that we spoke Sharon and I were killing time before our flight back home. After finishing up at the internet cafe we wandered across the road for a bite to eat before playing pool for an hour or so. Given the Tube's propensity to be chock-a-block full at all hours of day and night, we decided to head over to Heathrow at around 3:30pm, giving us around six hours before our flight was scheduled to depart. We read newspapers, checked our emails and generally just wasted time before grabbing some dinner at ... read more
Brain test at the Science Museum
With our plane not scheduled to depart until 10pm tonight I figured there was time to sneak another entry in. Please put your hands together for episode sixteen! After dragging ourselves out of the internet cafe at around lunch time on Friday, we played a couple of games of pool before heading down to Kings Cross station. We had a couple of hours to kill before Les Miserables was supposed to start so we caught the Tube across town to South Kensington station to do some Museum-ing. The thing that I can't understand about London is, while on the one hand you have these ridiculously expensive tourist spots like the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, you also have a whole bunch of great museums which cost nothing to get into. We picked the ... read more
Roman Baths and history
In only two days our amazing European adventure will be over. Before that though, let's go to a little place I like to call...episode fifteen! After spending far too long on the internet in Oxford we headed back to the car and told Miss GPS that we wished to travel to Bath. She obliged and directed us out of the venerable university town and along the two hour route to the ancient city famous for its, well, baths. We arrived at our hostel around 7pm having driven around the streets of Bath for a while - Miss GPS knew where she was going but unfortunately the driver didn't - and after dinner at the hostel we planned our movements for the following day and headed to bed. After helping ourselves to yet another buffet breakfast we ... read more
St. Giles Cathedral
Well we certainly have a bit of catching up to do, but hold onto your hats, it's episode fourteen! The day after we last spoke Sharon and I went on another of 'New Europe's Free Walking Tours', this time in Edinburgh. Like the tour in Berlin this one took around three hours and gave us a great perspective of the city's rich history. We visited such sites as Edinburgh castle, the Heart of Midlothian, the Royal Mile, St. Giles Cathedral and many others, all the while being entertained and informed by our young and enthusiastic tour guide. The tour ended with the long but entertaining tale of Scotland's Stone of Destiny, the prophecy attached to it and the way in which the English decided that holding onto it for several hundred years would be a good ... read more
Death strip
I know it's only been two days since the previous installment but we are feeling generous. Buckle your seatbelts people, it's time for episode thirteen! So we did decide to go to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial site after all, finally getting our arses into gear after another sleep-in and breakfast mere minutes before the kitchen closed. Once again we headed down to Landsberger Allee and did the usual two-train-trick. Despite Berlin's well designed train networks it seems that no matter where you need to go, you will be needing to change trains to get there. After around 45 minutes on the trains we alighted at Oranienburg and walked the two kilometres to the memorial site. Unlike our adventure to Dachau the previous week the weather for yesterday's trip to Sachsenhausen was surprisingly pleasant which seemed ... read more
Room with a view
It's episode twelve time. On Thursday morning we headed downstairs to sample Generator Hostel's continental breakfast before trekking through the ice and snow to get to the nearby S-bahn station - about 200 metres away. After changing trains once and about 25 minutes or so we alighted at the Berlin Zoo. We paid our entrance fee and wandered inside the walls only to be met with silence - no birds squaking, no lions growling, no hippopotamuses...making whatever sound it is that they make. After five minutes we were convinced that all the animals must have been in hibernation, except for one furry rodent that scurried between food that it's keepers had thrown into it's icy enclosure and it's burrow. Fortunately after a bit of searching we discovered that the majority of the animals were being kept ... read more
Rathaus with glockenspiel
Hallo, and welcome to episode eleven of Matt & Sharon's travel blog. We come to you this evening from the German capital Berlin which finds itself under a considerable amount of snow. Overnight temperatures of -20° will do that. After spending several hours writing the last entry, we found ourselves wandering the streets after 10pm looking for some dinner. Not for the first time this trip, we wandered into the local kebab shop and shoveled down some delicious and deliciously cheap turkish delights. Not the little pink lollies dusted with icing sugar, which are tasty nonetheless, but plates piled high with meat from the spit, rice, salads, breads, tzatziki and so forth. Before heading back to the hostel we decided to wander over to Freiburg Hauptbahnhof in order to reserve seats on a train to Munich ... read more
Spiderman
Ein gutes neues Jahr! It's hard to believe that 2009 is here already, but it is and it's already three days old. Today's entry comes to you from the town of Freiburg im Breisgau, situated in the far south-western corner of Germany and on the western edge of the famous Schwartzwald. More on that later. Our stay in Köln was for the most part uneventful, except for one spectacular event, New Years Eve. The morning after we last spoke Sharon and I enjoyed a fantastic buffet breakfast, bettered only by the magnificent breakfasts that we indulged in while on the Classical Tour back in Greece. After our stomachs were filled to bursting point we wandered down the street to a shop where we had seen cheap jeans in the window the previous night. We went inside ... read more
More map issues
Herzliche Grüße aus Köln! Which (hopefully) means, 'best wishes from Cologne'. We caught the train here from Amsterdam today in order to save about 200€, but more on that in a second. The last time that we had the pleasure of your company Sharon and I were sitting in an internet cafe in Amsterdam, scared to go out into the -4 degree evening. After eventually getting up the courage, we headed out to the street and after some deliberation decided to visit a local Indian restaurant. The food was quite delicious and it made us laugh thinking that two Australians were in Holland eating Indian food - what a multicultural society we live in. The next morning we pushed our way into the breakfast room at the hotel/hostel where around 50 people were jostling about, trying ... read more
'Err...this is Brussels, right?'
Firstly, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone! I hope your Christmas was as memorable and enjoyable as ours. The last time we spoke we were in Paris, about to head off to the Belgian capital, Brussels. The train trip from Gare du Nord to Brussels-Midi was very relaxing despite having gotten up at 5:30am that morning. As we crossed the border into Belgium we thought about how close everything in mainland Europe really is - in Melbourne a 90 minute train trip will leave you in the middle of nowhere, but in Paris it left us in another country. After catching a train on the Brussels metro we arrived at Madou station and pulled out our hotel reservation print-out - 'We are two minutes walk from the Metro station'. Again, we were a ... read more
