LONDON III

i just came back from another weekend in London!

sneaky photo of the stage

love never dies!

t'was great. the first time was on my first night in England, just after leaving my sister in Nice and just before going to Norwich to start my exchange (which has been swell so far.. though i realise i should do a blog about it as well). In London, I was with my best friend Kerry and she took me to see 'Love Never Dies' (sequel to the phantom of the opera). A must see for all phantom fans, it stands well on its own, but i'm not sure it compares to the original. There are some borrowed notes/melodies, but overall it was like Andrew Lloyd Webber meets Tim Burton. Kind of cool! I was listening to the sound track for a while....

with Ramin Karimloo, the first phantom of 'Love Never Dies'

scampering around london by night!

i love the reflection!

The second time (last week) I went to London to see my cousin Pauline, who was holidaying there before starting uni in Canberra (congrats!) Saw 'Chicago'. Fantastic, despite the fact that the set consisted of chairs and well placed lights and the fact that the very interactive conductor looked like Kevin Rudd. I was surprised at how well it complemented the film (which I had seen first). Some of the lighting effects were fantastic and the dancing was superbly racy as expected (lots of splits and fish net stockings). During one of Velma's solos, someone in the audience fainted (or somehow warranted the person next to them calling out for help, we weren't sure), and people in the audience were getting out of their seats so that the front of house could come in and carry them out.  It was a pretty big deal, and all through this 'Velma' just kept singing and dancing along and giving it her all. talk about the show must go on!

we went to Portobello Road in Notting Hill, which turns into the famous antiques market on Saturdays. Lots of cool, different things, ranging from leather bags and canvas paintings, to antique tea sets to 1940s wartime gas masks. 

the colourful buildings of portobello rd

cool shop with sewing machines everywhere!

and outrageous shoes...

Then a quick dash through the Kensington Palace (home of Princess Diana) side of Hyde Park. Unfortunately the palace is undergoing renovations until 2012, so not much to see there. We had an English sausage bap (bap = english word for roll) while spotting squirrels through the park (as well as a man who we saw trying to pee behind a tree).  

then the Science museum (free!) which was in a very impressive stately sort of building with a large dinosaur fossil dominating the central hall. Lots of different exhibition halls there that we didn't get to see (it was several stories) but the jungle ant colony kind of freaked me out. It was a bit like Questacon (in Canberra) if anyone's ever been there, but for adults as well. some cool optical illusions such as 'the inverted face', where your brain decides that it can't actually be inverted/hollow and decides to show you something different --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObNHHwB8OQg

Then to Chinatown because i was/am seriously craving chinese food (I normally never eat out chinese/vietnamese/thai due to the fact that that's all we eat at home with the family when we go out..so it's funny now that I'm craving it. I even cook rice in a saucepan with water, LOL in other words 'sans rice cooker'. oh how my life is different haha)

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This weekend I went with some international uni friends (about 8 of us). Friday night, bought a discounted ticket to see 'Dirty Dancing'. It made me laugh a lot, and was pretty much a renactement of the movie. I somehow was expecting it to be a musical because it was at West End, but the main characters didn't sing at all and there was hardly any orchestra (3 instruments!). The costumes were really fun though (1950s) and there was evidently a big emphasis on dancing. What really made the night was the excitement of the scores of middle aged women who squealed, screamed and swooned throughout the show, esp when Mr Muscle says the iconic lines 'nobody puts baby in the corner'. you could smell the oestrogen, hello! Baby was pretty much cast perfectly (she was so cute when she was dancing across the bridge and up the stairs, just like in the movie), but 'Johnny' (the main guy) was so old (~ 40, perfect for all the middle aged women there). 

row E!

yesterday I went to Borough Markets (where the nation's independent food suppliers/farms sell their stuff). I really wished I could have bought more food, but seeing as I was only going home on Sunday most things would have gone off. Lots of brownies, turkish delight, tarts, strudels.. any viennoiserie you name it! gourmet sweet toothes will die and be reborn here. Also a lot of olives, leavened breads, cheeses, charcuterie meats, jams, pâtés, falafel, fresh fruit/seafood/game meats, wine... 

Then to Camden markets which is known as the 'alternative' punk sort of place. lots of clothes, food and jewelery there as well, but lots of tattooed or goth people about too (so very newtown). When I told my flatmates that it wasn't that alternative, they asked if i'd seen some glow in the dark rave/fettish shop that was there. I def missed that one. 

the can't-be-good-for-your-arteries donut shop

alternative...

 then on to a 'Flash Bang lightning' tour of London, which included a boat ride on the Thames. I highly recommend the boat ride, because the crew do a free guided tour of the sights of the Thames that had the boat in stitches. lots of happy snaps here, and then through to the main sights really (Tower Bridge, London Eye, Westminister Abbey/Parliament/Big Ben, Royal Parks and Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square). Spent some time in the National Gallery (i love how almost all the museums are free) where they hold a great collection of paintings from Da Vinci to Monet.

preening pelican the royal park

chinatown again :-)

Today, I went to Brick Lane as well, which used to be the Jewish part of London but now is well known for its Bangladeshi community and curry houses. Lots of cool, cheap ethnic food there, I was really surprised by the value. A flea market (weird vintage stuff there, including a pair of platform stilletos that were attached to a pair of stockings), and brick lane bagels - a famous 24hr bagel shop recommended to me by Affly, my flatmate. Seriously fresh (still warm!) bagels and bread ("sorry we can't slice the bread for you because it's too hot!"). Spitalfields markets and church nearby, before heading back to Norwich to be greeted by my lovely housemates :) 

crazy shoes (the stockings are above my head

mmm! but they spell Bagel funny..

over and out!

i really should do a norwich one as well (see pictures on facebook), but i just had some random epiphany despite being super tired from the trip to write about what I had done today. which led me to the other london days.

happy valentines
caroline

Munich Dachau

hey everyone just a post about my time in munich so far

We arrived two days ago, and spent most of the afternoon sleeping which isn't a great idea considering how freaking cold it gets here! unbelieveably cold. but yes I guess constant travelling kind of got to us.

anyway we got to see some of the christmas markets at the Oktoberfest field sites, which was pretty fun. while most things were a bit expensive, they did have heaps of stuff ranging from raclette (traditional meal of grilled cheese, pickled onions and gherkins on potatoes.. seriously lack this back home) to extreme makeover hair dramatists (you could call them that..) dressed in alien lady-gaga-esque costumes and turning people's hair into cacti pretty much (lots of teasing of the hair and hair spray)

our room mates were pretty 'lekker'! they were 2 guys from from south africa and taught us some of their 'lingo'. lekker = awesome, china = dude (seriously haha), so you could say 'hey china, that's so lekker'. hilarious.

that night we finally met up with my sister and her group (of 3 other guys) (they've come to Europe from a hospital elective in Mumbai) and had dinner at a famous German beer house, 'Hofbräuhaus' . it's actually a 500 yr old restaurant that is known to be the 'birth place of the Nazi's', where Hitler and co shall we say would come and congregate and have beers in the early days. The ceiling of the bottom floor used to be adorned with Swastikas that have since been artfully painted over with Bavarian flags, though you can still see the quadrants that made up the Swastikas. pretty scary. On a funnier note, before women were allowed into the beer house, it used to have slanted tiled floors and strategicallz placed drains so that men would be able to pee on the floor and continue drinking without losing their seats. NASTY! apparently to prevent potential brawls over who-peed-on-who, each guy was given a spiral walking stick (screw like) and you would pee on those, so that your pee  didn touch anyone else, just the floor. NASTY! ERGH GROSS GROSS.

yesterday we all paid a visit to Dachau, the first concentration camp of WWII. It is actually beyond words - how does one describe the feeling of standing in what was previously a gas chamber? there were fake shower heads on the top of the ceilings (no piping underneath) so that the prisoners would believe that they were going to take a routine shower and would not resist walking in to meet their ends. They were even made to fold their clothes before they went it, to make them think that they were going to come back out and wear their clothes. Every detail/effort was preplanned. you could see the vents where the poisonodus gas was mixed with the hot air, the crematorium was there... it's nearly impossible to describe. I dont think I will try, though i will say that it was well conserved and factually/objectively presented.They've done a commendable job in respecting such an historic site.


Last night we ended up having dinner with 2 other aussies (we're everywhere!) One had spent 2.5 months walking through France and Spain with her dad (literally, no public transport). She ended up on the coast of Spain (the very edge of her journey) on her 28th birthday. The other girl was doing ajoint phd project in Spain on frogs' sperm. Being knowledgeable on animal reproduction, she told me that there is a particular type of rat whose males only live for one generation. In the one breeding season of the year, they mate until they die of starvation and exhaustion, leaving only the females to raise the babies and to start the next generation.What the...! The dessert at the restaurant was divine, I would thoroughly suggest anybody going to Munich to try the caramel crepes at Opatija's, a few blocks from the city station (Marienplatz) Hochbrückenstraße 3,  80331 München, http://www.opatija-restaurant.com/ So delicious! the perfect mixture of sweet crepes, the creaminess of the cheese curd, the sourness of the berries and the crunch of the toffeed caramel. won't get over that one for a while!

Today we visited the famous castle at Neuschwanstein, which is what the disney castle is based on. It's not very old, only was built at the end of the 19th century, though the interior decor (from furniture to tapestries to door hinges) where quite viking-inspired (what would you expect from a German-Bavarian castle..)   the picture here is just from google, although we saw it covered in snow so it wasn't surrounded by green trees either. I can't currently upload my photos bc the comp i'm using sucks a bit.

that's it for now!

Love
Caroline

first post

hey guys!

So I know I've been pretty bad with keeping you guys up to date and informed about what I've been up to, so here's my best attempt at 12.35am whilst in my hostel in Rome. 

Start:

leave sydney, plane to Darwin with some amazing views of clouds and some interesting stories from a Dutch 60+ widowed midwife who specialises in home deliveries. She could tell just by touching a mother's stomach/uterus area how old the baby was (until 20weeks or something, since all babies are the same size up to 20 weeks) and this was verified time and time again via ultrasound.

Darwin to Singapore trip - amazing views of the sunset - see some of my photos on my  web album (made so that my non-facebook mum could also view it)

Singapore for 3 days with Ben and his mum.
impressions: it's quite developed (most people live in 10+ level apartments, though there are houses) and the shopping centres and hotels can be unbelievably decadent. the marina bay sands hotel has a 150m pool that is 200m high in the sky (on the roof top, available only to guests unfortunately), and most of the surfaces within the 3 building/tower hotel complex are marble and shiny and stationed by perfect concierge staff. it's also super humid, but bearable. people stare at me because they know I'm a foreigner (though it is a bit of a change to visit a country where everyone is Asian-looking I must admit) because of my accent/the way I dress. Ben taught me that I (Australians) pronounce 'here' as 'hee-ah', which I never realised.

They also have a LOT of durian despite it not being the season. (Y)! you can just buy it and then sit on one of the plastic tables near the durian stall and eat it. The durian suburb area is called 'geylang', which is also the red light district of Singapore. We (Ben's family and I) therefore went scouting for prostitutes as I had never seen them before. Apparently they used to be a lot more common (according to Ben's dad, who used to be a civilian police officer) , and streets were divided by the race of the girls you'd find there. Since prostitution is effectively illegal (you can't even chew gum in Singapore..), the girls that are still on the streets have an inside in place to signal a warning bell whenever there are cops around so that they can scatter. This person was an innocent enough old-ish man on the corner of the road selling icecream to visitors/tourists/foreigners. Interesting system. the prostitutes pretty much looked like they could fit in any nightclub back at home (ie bum skimming skirt/dress and lots of cleavage). It was a pretty interesting night haha.

went to Kota Kinabalu with Fiona, another university friend. KK, as it is also called, is the tropical capital of the West Malaysian island of Sabah. She goes back every year for a month or so to visit her grandpa. He's pretty cool. Still a super active grandpa.

KK in some instances reminded me of Vietnam when I went as a child, where not every house has a flushing toilet and a lot of the city is still developing. However, i thoroughly enjoyed my time here - this was the first time I saw a sunset on water (since in Sydney we pretty much only see the sun rising from the water because we're facing the east) I went to see orang utans - we had to walk into this jungle sanctuary for 5min, and within that time we were swamped by mosquitoes (more than i had ever seen in one place, ever.) ended up with 15+ mosquito bites despite constantly spraying myself with insect repellent. seriously scary! however, we did get to see an orang utan about 1m away from us which was pretty unbelieveable (one of the tourists tried to bribe it with a bit of coconut despite being warned not to in an incredibly long introduction video that i mostly slept through). Also went parasailing, which was pretty cool.  I think the best thing about KK was seeing Fiona and her family, and how simple and pleasant life is there. No internet, just hanging on the porch and talking. pretty sweet.

despite the fact that I'm currently in Rome,  I"ll have to start my posts about Dubai and Rome another time. need to sleep!

Ciao!