Almost home

Date April 26th, 2007 23:05 Comments 0 Comments

Almost home. Sitting in nice hotel in Taipei now. Final (8.5. hour) plane goes tomorrow night for bright and early arrival in Brisbane Sunday morning… can’t wait to be home.

I’m feeling grumpy right now, and rather ill. All italians (and Germans and Swiss, to a *slightly* lesser extent) eat is PASTRY and PASTA. My system cannot handle such stuff. Where are the vegetables? People say italian food is so great becuase the veggies are mixed in there with the pasta, but I beg to differ. The proportion of veg to pasta is very, very, small. And heaven forbid you should actually want to find a decent fresh salad.

Excuse my bad temper, but I have barley slept in over a day, my stomach twists and grumbles within me, I feel flabby and squashy and bottom-heavy, and my skin is breaking out as if I were 15 again.

It must be the bread products. I can’t think of anything else.

Consequently, I have made many resolutions while on this trip, the greatest of which is to seriously re-assess my eating habits as soon as I get home. I was feeling pretty good my last year in Boston, but since coming to Oz my state of well-being has gone rather downhill, despite being outdoors a lot more and exercising as much (or, I should say, exercising no less) than I had previously. I can only think that it is the food, since it is rather more difficult to find quality eats here and my eating habits have thus deteriorated to some degree.

Wheat has got to go. I refuse to continue being 15 and ugly and I am certainly dead sick of feeling queasy all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I should go have a battery of food-allergy tests done. But it’s so frigging expensive.

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Anyway, on a brighter note, Zaubi bought me an original Steiff stuffed horse in Munich. (Yes, I still like stuffed animals!) I have named him Mercurio. He’s cute.

Whirlwind tour

Date April 22nd, 2007 22:18 Comments 0 Comments

I think this is the first time in my long relationship (almost 5 years now!!) with LJ that I have only posted once in an entire month – well the month isn’t over yet, so I have a few days to redeem myself! But I do have a good excuse. In the past 2 weeks we have been in Taipei, Rome, ancient Pompei, Munich, Stuttgart and literally all over Switzerland. We have already driven 1600km in our tiny, filthy (there seem to be a lot of bugs on the highways) Italian rental car and we still have to make it back to Rome.

I write on our last night in Switzerland from a rather swank hotel in Saanen which we got for a super discounted price. Tomorrow we are heading to Milan where we will spend a day, and then back to Rome to spend another day walking the Appia Antica before heading to Ostia for the night and then back to Taipei for a day and a half before finally making it home to Brisbane. (Maybe this time we’ll hit the night market. Or the super fast go-kart track.)

While the trip has been a bit stressful (after all, the most of it has been Zaubi’s business trip; thus the frantic driving from city to city giving presentations as well as my having to spend an awful lot of time wandering around alone; moreover, there have been a couple unlucky albeit unserious mishaps), there have been a lot of highlights.

Of course, there are the oodles of ancient ruins (POMPEI!) seen and yet to see which make me, an ex-Ancient History Masters student delirious with joy, there is the fact that after a ridiculous comedy of errors, my sister made it from Paris to Rome to spend a couple of days with me, and then I got to see a friend I haven’t seen in 4 years and her new baby, likewise we got to spend some time with Zaubi’s cousin and his wife and their not-so-new baby, we got to buy lots of German books (I need practice!) and other hard to come buy German favorites, to walk all over the lovely, serene, green and flower-studded Swiss meadows, and finally, today to take a cable car up to the top of the Les Diablerets glacier and it was just so stunningly gorgeous.

And so, we will all-too-shortly stagger reluctantly back toward Brisbane with our little under-20 kilo (well, maybe not anymore) duffel bags stuff chock full of dirty laundry, chocolate, limoncello and honey wine, Ricola Kräutertee, and German books.

Man,I’m tired. I hope they open the sauna tomorrow morning before we leave…

Travels

Date April 7th, 2007 22:39 Comments 1 Comment

It’s been a while.

mrtee has come and gone. Indeed, he is probably still in transit – we got him to the airport bright and early at 4AM this morning – wrong terminal though!

These past two weeks have been simultaneously super quick and supremely slow. Last week was frustrating because mrtee was here but I was working so got to spend very little time with him, but this week was better, though we didn’t get to go outdoors nearly as much as I’d hoped. We hung out, and tried to fix up Clyde (we at least, after several hours, figured out where the massive power steering leak is coming from), and installed a new toilet, and rode the public transit catamaran, and walked around the city, and went bushwalking (very briefly: the trail ended up being closed), and ate far too much fudge, and went to Steve Irwin’s zoo and the koala sanctuary and did other stuff. And mrtee did some more of his entertaining pyromanic chemistry demos on our back patio.

Still, I would have liked to get outside more. Do some proper hiking.

Anyway, yesterday, his last day, we went off roading, that is, bush driving up in the Glass House mountains.