liam getreu

I blog this to you from somewhat sunny London LHR, having had quite an interesting few days to say the least. Without boring you — my extensively large e-audience, I know you’re all out there! — with gruesome details, it involved me shlepping from next to Berlin’s Tegel airport, where my hotel was, to Berlin’s Schoenefeld on the other side of the city one day, then back again the next to try and sort out the problem without success. Back to Tegel then to fly to Heathrow where, even though El Al insisted that QANTAS would re-issue my ticket, they refused, and so did El Al. I was told that I needed to go into El Al’s main London office on Oxford St to do it. But with my flight to Melbourne in only a few hours, it was an impossibility to get there, and make my flight.

So what did El Al have me do? They left me with no choice but to spend a night in London and wake up early to find the El Al office. Luckily I got a hotel, the Grange Fitzrovia at a very discounted rate, and eventually managed to find it. What a disaster! And then today: I had a great free breakie at the hotel, all I could eat (Prednisolone makes it a lot!) English breakfast, and then struggled to find the Oxford St office that’s not really on Oxford St. Finally, with everything sorted by 1pm, and hours of running all over London, I got a chance to see some sights. I’d seen Oxford St having walked up and down trying to find El Al, and then went on to play Monopoly — I saw Oxford Circus, Piccadilly St, Bond St, Regent St, and other amazing landmarks. I also went into Fortnum & Mason, the Queen’s groceries supplier for a peek — pretty nice me thinks.

Decided then that the airport was the way to go — I was buggered and just wanted to rest. I came, I checked-in (fingers crossed I’ll get my luggage), tried to scam myself into the lounge and failed, and now I’m using the wonderful Internet facilities at the 18 pounds a pop Holideck at Heathrow, where I’ve got all the trimmings of a normal lounge, but with the hit to the hip-pocket. Well worth it though, the last hour has given me time to discover some very interesting things: some new Firefox gadgets, the new CMS I’ll upgrade to when I get the time to ditch Wordpress, and also a couple of new Gmail features.

My flight boards in about an hour, and I think I’ve been online for long enough. Hopefully this is the end of my sagas, and I’ll arrive smoothly into Melbourne on Saturday morning. Hopefully.

Europe Trip 2005 — over. I lasted two weeks, and I guess in hindsight that was a pretty good effort, yeah? Here’s what happened: we got to Berlin and after a couple of days of touring around (got to see the Jewish Museum, Checkpoint Charlie and the Allied Museums — all brilliant, but lots of reading) I noticed that my feet were particuarly swollen. Uh oh. “That can’t be good,” I thought. It wasn’t, as it turned out.

So after shlepping to the Allied Museum, we shlepped all the way to Charite university hospital in Berlin Mitte. They said that I couldn’t stay there because I wasn’t 18, and I had to go to the Kinderklinik on the other side of town, but that they would transfer me. So they did, and eventually, after a lot of fussing and bothering, and to-ing and fro-ing, I was diagnosed with a severe lack of Vitamin K and protein in my body caused by a major flare-up of my Crohn’s. Uh oh.

So I’m now back on the steroids (fun, fun, fun!), declared un-fit to travel, and on my way home — half-way through my first real venture into Europe — via London and Singapore. At least I’ve learnt some valuable lessons for future trips: take a rucksack, travel during summer, and don’t bother with a Eurail pass (as handy as it was to just rock-up to the train and find a seat, sometimes it was hard to find a seat; it would have been better to buy each ticket individually and pay an extra €3 to reserve a seat at the same time).

(I get home to Weet-Bix and Nutri-Grain on Friday morning, and I’ll endeavour to digitise my travel diary onto my website within the first week-or-so.)