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Published: December 13th 2010
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Drew here, writing from muggy Sydney what will sadly be our final blog.
The final few legs of our journey have been full of contrast, starting with the east/west shades of Germany we saw in Munich and Berlin.
Munich seemed quite a wealthy city, not crammed with historical sites, but well presented and amiable. We visited the Dachau concentration camp, which is just outside of Munich. It's hard to say how I felt about Dachau, I spent a lot of our time there trying to decide. The actual camp is quite bleak, but wasn't as harrowing as I'd expected. Bereft of inhabitants, it looked like an abandoned summer camp or school. The roads were plain, cracked concrete, the buildings plain, wooden and surrounded by fields. The roads were paved with winter-thin, emaciated trees, branches hanging like the atrophied limbs we saw in the photos hanging about the camp. That's where the feeling came from, not the camp as a monument, but as a museum. We learned that one of the buildings was converted into a brothel where women from a nearby prison camp were forced to have sex with prisoners at Dachau, rather grim.
So, after a downer
Dachau day at Dachau and a visit to a particularly dry museum, we decided to wet our tongues with a few steins at a biergarten. We went to the most touristy biergarten we could find and enjoyed an afternoon of leiderhosen, hoftbrau and pretzels.
In Munich we'd stayed at a sterile, up-scale hostel with a reception desk and bright, matching foyer furniture. In Berlin we arrived at Paula's Comfy Corner, braved an elevator hung perhaps by some old horse hair, and entered what was clearly someone's apartment. While we were being given our introductory lecture we were introduced to the eponymous proprietor, a lovely old tranny who'd skipped the ditch from the UK to make a better life in Berlin. She showed us several routes around Berlin, pointing around the map with her calloused, chipped gold-painted fingers, before offering us a Martini and a free meal.
This sums Berlin up pretty well; much poorer than Munich, but jammed to the (unexpected) tits with culture and history. By day we enjoyed countless sites and monuments left by or detailing the Reich, and the following occupation/split of the city, by night the smattering of cheap, quality restaurants and the incredible kebabs
Dachau (Zwai kebap bitte being by far the phrase I was most confident with).
By this stage Europe was definitely descending into Winter; Berlin rained on us every day, and we the sun was buggering off at about 4, so sight-seeing was becoming slightly more difficult. But we left Germany happy, having enjoyed two wonderful cities.
A joke:
A: Have you heard the joke about No Me Neither?
B: No.
A: Me Neither
So we left the continent for the final time and headed up to Edinburgh. We weren't really expecting anything from Edinburgh as we were mainly going to visit my friend Josh. As is often the case, the city we expected little from delivered a lot, as Edinburgh's brown, brick buildings enchanted us (especially Jo, who will hurt me if I don't mention that the city was like a 'fairy-tale'). The city is dominated by a crag-top castle even more picturesque than Salzburg's and paved with a grid of wide streets.
By this stage things had started to get cold, and our shoulders permanently throbbed from hunching our chins into our jackets. It got even colder, unexpectedly, when we headed south to visit my
Dachau aunt and were visited in turn by a sprinkling of snow. While staying with my aunt we enjoyed some hearty meals and the lovely sights of western England, a highlight being the birthplace of Shakespeare (even though our hostel host in Naples had sworn that Shakespeare was really Italian).
We had a final few days with Nic in London and then family friends in Southampton, where Jack Frost really got stuck in and we got about seven inches of snow. We went for a walk in the Forest and recklessly jumped on all the frigid puddles. Jo thought she saw a kangaroo holding a white sign, but we asked around and it was probably a deer.
The snow didn't stop us from flying, but it did encourage us to take an earlier coach and enjoy an 8 hour wait at the airport. If there's one skill we've really matured during this trip, it's our ability to pass time efficiently and patiently; a few movies on the notebook, endless games of 20 questions and some good old walking in circles helped shove the time along.
Our flight sucked hard. We were surrounded by a large family, the matriach
Munich of which was sitting directly infront of us, seemingly a kind of god-mother who would routinely take audience with nervous family-members. She also attempted to inspire the plane by singing and clapping to the in-flight music. Behind us was a woman with some sort of severe respitory problem who sounded like Darth Vader snoring when she breathed normally, her snoring like a lion gargling a sack of change. So we didn't sleep too much, but the food was really good.
So, we've been relaxing in Sydney or the last five nights and it's been lovely. Sydney was instantly familiar, a good old new-world city, hot, verdant and full of water. The harbour view is a caricature of what I expected, dominated by the bridge and opera house, both of which are larger and closer than I had expected. The weather's been lovely too, -4 last week, 31 this. Understandably, we're both getting a bit sick.
We leave Sydney tonight and will arrive back in Auckland just before midnight, which is rather surreal. Jo is staying with me until Auckland until Christmas, when she heads back to Masterton until late Jan, when she will return and start working again.
Munich I have a week off, then I'll start work again on Dec 20, so I've got a week during which I plan to do absolutely nothing.
I don't need to write that we've enjoyed our trip, you've read the blogs so it'd be a bit redundant. We are sad to finish our trip, but the sadness is dominated by excitement, as we're both looking-forward to seeing our friends and family, enjoying summer, and, most importantly, UNpacking.
I want to thank everyone who we've met during our travels, you did a lot to make our trip that much better. I especially want to thank the people who've let us stay with them, I was genuinely amazed at how welcoming everyone has been, and it's been lovely discovering the wonderful extended family that I sometimes forget I have. To everyone back in NZ- we look forward to seeing you soon.
Throughout our trip, when discovering something we've missed, or saying farewell to people we've met, we always said “ah, we'll be back anyway”, and I'm sure we will. However, when Jo recently suggested several places we could travel, my instinctive reply was “Ok, but we don't have to do
Stoked with our giant beers at the Hofbrauhaus, Munich another bloody blog do we?”. Thanks for reading our blogs!
Ciao
Drew & Jo
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