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.)

We decided to get a decent breakfast while we were in Zurich. It is, after all, the home of the rich. So after a while we settled on porridge. It was so cheap and plentiful. Between that and some milk and loads of honey, we managed to get it for the same price as a McDonald’s breakie would have cost for just one of us, so it was a good option.

Breakfast shlepped on, and then some of us went back to bed because the weather wasn’t too flash outside. It wasn’t terrible weather, it was just drizzling a bit, and it wouldn’t have made for nice walking around. But after it subsided we went walking into the centre of town looking for what we really wanted to see – Swiss bank vaults on Bahnofstrasse.

And, thanks to yours truly, we found one. While we were walking down Bahnofstrasse we saw some great things: funny signs, lots of Bratwurst, and of course lots of rich Swiss banks. We decided to go inside one of the banks just to see what it looked like. I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?

Once we were inside, and not very impressed, we were about to leave when I spotted an elevator. I thought to myself, ‘it couldn’t hurt, right?’ and we were straight for it. Down, down, down we went into the deep underground of Zurich. (Okay, maybe it was only a two second journey, and when I say “deep underground” I mean a bit below street level.)

Luckily, the lady in the bank was really nice. I went up to her, explained that we were backpackers from Australia and wanted to see what the famed Swiss bank vaults were like. As expected, she spoke perfect English, and was happy to oblige, explaining the various methods of banking, the types of vaults they had, and even gave us some Lindt chocolate balls for the road. Ain’t Swiss people the best? (As long as it doesn’t involve giving back Jewish money stolen from them during the Holocaust. They didn’t seem to be too good at that.)

After wandering down from one end of Bahnofstrasse to the other, tasting local culinary delights along the way, we eventually ended up the world’s largest indoor Christmas markets, which were inside Zurich’s train station. Again, we wondered around getting free stuff. There were some nice stalls of cheeses and meats, as well as some small crisp-like chips that even though weren’t very tasty, were free, so we weren’t going to complain.

For dinner we went to the local kebab shop and got chips, kebabs, burgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, pretty much everything. It was an expensive dinner, but was quite tasty, and we seemed to get an authentic Zurich take-away dining experience, so we weren’t complaining.

That night we went out to celebrate how cool the Swiss were by going to a coffee bar and talking to locals. It was late-ish, and I was tired, so I walked home in the snow (how amazing!), and the boys went out to find a bar and came back not long after.

As much fun as Zurich appeared to be, we decided we were going to leave the next day. It wasn’t such an exciting, albeit beautiful place, so we were bailing.

This morning we had a sleep in – last night was late for the boys who went out to the local, and as usual I was exhausted. After the sleep in and regulation cheese-and-bread for breakfast it was off to the local Migros for supplies, and then a bit of a rush to the train station to make our way to Zurich. About four hours later we made it into the Bahnhof (translation: train station – you see how I’ve picked up the local lingo?) in Zurich.

We went straight to the tourist bureau that I remembered was in the train station from when I was in Zurich in June, and asked if there was anything to do tonight. Specifically, what I wanted to do was go up to the Uetliberg – Zurich’s local mountain. Because we had used our Eurail pass that morning, we had free trips for the rest of the day, so it was the perfect time to see the mountain.

We unpacked quickly at the hostel (which was up a ridiculously large amount of stairs, but in a great location, so we’re not complaining), and then went back to the train station. Once we got there, dear Franky realised he didn’t have his ticket. So while he ran back to the hostel (it’s a good ten minute quick walk), we went looking for bargains. We found some really cheap energy drink, milk chocolate and M&Ms, so we bought lots of them for the train and once Franky got back we were on our way.

Mum had already climbed Uetliberg, so I had a reasonable idea of what it was going to be like, but in the cold (which seems to be a recurring theme), nothing could have prepared me for the hike (okay, five minute up-hill walk) from the train station to the peak.

Once I arrived at the peak, a few minutes behind the boys, they were already doing more climbing. They were at the top of a large tower (maybe a mobile phone tower?) that you can climb up to get an even better view. I was freezing cold, so I went into the restaurant/function centre at the top to warm up a bit. That was where I found heaven: a bar, a restaurant and the greatest public lavatories I’ve ever seen in my life.

After stealing some bar nuts and glasses of water from the bar, and washed my hands a few time in the delightfully warm tap water, I went to wait outside for the boys. And there it got even better: there was a function at the restaurant tonight, and the nibbles had already been set up. I’m talking nachos and soft drinks nibbles. So, naturally, I helped myself to some of them, before finding Franky, Prokel and Nat and heading for warmth and a quick glass of water before taking the train back into Zurich.

The exciting night didn’t end there, though. When we got back to the hostel, there was a market at the bottom of our street. So we checked it out for a bit, and there was one stall selling my favourite food in the world – cheese! So, again, naturally, I had to get some. We sampled a few of the culinary delights, and then bought lots of nice cheese back for random snacks. It was, without doubt, the highlight of the trip thus far.

Our first museum of the day was the very nice International Red Cross Museum, about a fifteen-twenty minute walk, or about half that by tram; I took the tram.

The museum was great – it had a temporary exhibition displaying photos relating to September 11, Afghanistan and Iraq. There were some truly brilliant photos of US soldiers, the New York Fire Department, the struggling locals in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to get on with their lives after the deposition of their respective regimes. It was very touching to see and read about the accounts of these people, as well as accounts of the photojournalists that took the photographs.

The museum’s permanent exhibitions were also very interesting. One detailed the history of the organisation, including its work with landmines and smoking. Others looked at the modern wars of the twentieth century and how they so adversely affected the whole world.

Because we were all so intrigued by the museum, we finished far later than we expected and had to have lunch in the café. Well, that was a mistake we wouldn’t make again. Franky decided not to eat, but Nat, Prokel and I all paid the huge price of Sfr3.20 for a “salad petite.” Lucky it was do-it-yourself salad, and we all piled on the salad onto our plates. We would never, ever make that mistake again.

Across the road was the Palais des Nations – the United Nations – so we trotted on over in the cold. We had to wait about ten minutes until our tour would start, so we had a good look at the gift store which featured some pretty cool pieces, including rain coats and polar fleece jumpers. I considered buying one; I thought I would be quite popular back home. Then I remembered that I was an idiot.

The tour was interesting – full of gifts from countries, and also lots of parkland outside that thankfully, because of the weather, we weren’t allowed to explore. Interestingly, there used to be flamingos in the gardens until a few years ago a couple of foxes raided UN territory and, well, the rest is, lunch, I guess.

That night for dinner we decided to go out, to coincide with our new ‘eating well and sampling local tucker is a good way to travel and have memories’ theme. So we had a mixture of Panini from the local French patisserie, and Genevan McDonald’s. It was expensive, but healthy compared to bread-and-cheese, so it was a good dinner.

We toured around the Old City in Geneva for a bit, as well as running into a chocolate store in a moment of panic both because of the unbearable cold outside, and a chance to sample Swiss chocolate. On both counts it proved a success.