Oh our aching heads! Our night drinking with the Irish newly weds in Bled certainly helped us kill a lot of brain cells! When will I ever learn not to mix my drinks - an aching head, eyes that did not want to open and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a budgie cage. If we had not already booked an apartment in Ljubljana then we would have extended our stay in Bled. We packed up and did our best to drive to the Slovenian capital - it was not fun! We found our way to the apartment building and got completely lost in the under ground car park. Slovenian signs can be a bit hard to fathom when your brain is not working! We were so thankful to finally get ourselves in the ... read more

We arrived in Slovenia via train from Graz. While there is no border crossing as both Austria and Slovenia are members of the EU, there was one thing we noticed immediately - the change of language! Suddenly we noticed that we had no idea of what people were saying or what the simplest of signs meant. When we arrived at Maribor railway station I had to give in to a call of nature and found myself standing at two doors, one labeled "Zenski" and the other "Moski" - luckily I could understand the pictures below the names! From that moment on Lorenza and I suddenly invented a whole new language between us, with every word ending in "ski" - for example "do you want a drinkski?" or "do you want to take a walkski" and to ... read more

Air Berlin (Niki Air) took us to Vienna, it was a bargain fare on an airline who has a housefly as it's mascot. At one stage we thought the pilot was going to drive us to Vienna instead of flying, we seemed to spend ages travelling to the runway for take off. we laughed at the vision of being driven via the autobahns to Vienna. Our Viennese taxi driver was as informative as the one in Singapore. I want to have positive experiences with taxi drivers, seeing I was once a taxi driver myself. Plus, on a trip to Bangkok we had a shocker of a taxi experience so we think we deserve a lot of happy experiences from that time on. This guy was originally from Turkey and proudly pointed out to us when we ... read more

Long distance air travel is a necessary evil for Australians wanting to travel anywhere (including parts of our own country). The highlights of our flight to Singapore included ... crying babies (note the plural), a young German girl who fainted before our eyes, and expert treatment for the feinted girl from the cabin crew. Our taxi driver from Changi Airport to the hotel told us, among many other things, that he was a victim of the global financial crisis and had recently lost his job in the finance industry. He did not seem bitter at all, in fact he surprised me how positive he was and seemed to accept the twists and turns of life in a very matter of fact way (perhaps a yogi?). He also knew his stuff about Singapore and gave us a ... read more

“We are fortunate to be born as humans, fortunate again to have come in contact with the teachings of the Buddha and again fortunate to be able to attend this retreat” was part of my recollection of Sayadaw’s Dhamma talk on Friday night. I certainly felt fortunate that I could attend the meditation retreat from Thursday afternoon through to Saturday afternoon. I would have liked to have stayed for the full 5 days, but other things in life also demanded some attention. On Saturday there were more than 50 people in attendance. Meditating with a group of people is so different to practicing solo at home - perhaps the concentration of others helps to magnify your own? The centre has improved so much in the 12 months since it relocated to Smithfield. The female Yogis were ... read more