liam getreu

Since I got back from Israel, a lot of people have asked me what my Shnat highlight was? What was the best thing that I did all year?

Well, here’s one of the answers that I give: teaching Bedouin kids Hebrew on Kibbutz Revivim. We taught them the basics. Things like the letters of the aleph bet (the Hebrew alphabet), colours, fruits, body parts, basic things to give them a head start at school.

The most challenging thing was that we had to communicate with the fathers of the kids, who spoke no English at all, only Hebrew and Arabic. Now my Hebrew was alright, but nowhere near good enough to do that. Usually Loni just spoke to him on the phone, but once or twice I had to do it. It was a real challenge because he spoke very quickly, and very unclearly, making understanding, translating and responding in a timely manner difficult.

But that’s why I loved it. It was a challenge. And it was fun. It was Shnat.

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.)

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.

We arrived in Geneva from Tel Aviv having spent all night awake speaking with lots of people we’re not going to see an awful lot of for a while. Some not for a month-or-so until Fed Camp in January, and others who are returning to South Africa. We won’t be seeing them for a while, that’s for sure. It was sad to say goodbye after so long together. As I expected, I didn’t cry, or get over-emotional. I don’t seem to be inclined towards that. But I certainly was having some sad feelings. They were outweighed though by my over-excitement to get to Europe.

After the big shlep on the train to the airport, and having to wait around for so long (damn El Al making you check-in three hours early!), we flew out to Geneva. Flying out was okay. It was tiring because of the time (6am), but I managed.

Getting into Geneva was the real shock – it was so cold! Sure, I was expecting it to be cold, but this was ridiculous! It was three degrees when we arrived, and quite windy, which made for a rude awakening and a definite change of atmosphere from the still warm-ish Tel Aviv. Of course there was the weather, and also the realisation that I couldn’t actually carry my bag, which is hardly a good thing. So instead of walking from train station to hostel with the guys like I’d planned, I’ve now got to take trams everywhere. Great.

So from the train station to the hostel I struggled, but at least the hostel was really nice. The City Hostel was great. Even though we couldn’t check-in for another couple of hours, we could leave our bags free of charge in the lockers downstairs, which was really handy. Once we’d dumped our bags we headed out to see what Geneva could offer us – we would start with museums tomorrow. We walked down towards Lake Geneva, but as we got closer, and it got windier and windier, we decided that we’d give it a rest for the first day. We stopped to get some lunch – bread and cheese – from the local Migros, and ate it in a small square somewhere. Big mistake. It was just too cold.

So we headed back to the hostel to get our room and relax for a bit. Just relax. Not sleep. Relax. Yeah, right. We were all lying in our beds chatting about our plans for that night until the talking stopped. We were all asleep. Each and every one of us.

Dinner ended up being a really good meal. We went down to the supermarket around the corner for home cooked spinach and ricotta tortellini, which were really tasty, and also really cheap. And as stingy as we wanted to be, we decided that we also had to eat decently, and that once a day we’d splurge and experience the culinary delights of that city.

And then we sat back, relaxed and watched the movie that City Hostel put on every night for its visitors. The boys then choofed off for a quiet drink in a Genevan pub, which apparently was quite nice. I needed the early night, tomorrow was going to be a big day of museum going.