Northern Irish cows

Claremorris

We left doolin unfortunately after only one night. It's such a nice place with live music every night. We had toforget about the cliffs of moher again because of the thick fog. So we drove around the burren area for a bit in the fog. It was actually kind of nice driving in the fog. It was safe fog. You could see where you were going but it was thinck enough to create a real eeriness. Daytime fog is not a normal experience for me. Neither is night time fog. We stopped at a 5000 year old burial tomb which was interesting and the landscape is all limestone so something different too.
Then we headed to Cong and stopped and looked around at the old monastery ruins and saw the the ashford castle across the river. It's a really green leafy town with lots of parkland which is rare. We are getting frustrated with ireland's lack of places to stop and eat your picnic lunch. We keep ending up in the car in some bizarre town parking area to eat as picnic areas just do not exist like they do in every single town in Australia. Ireland has plenty of paddocks but they are all fenced off for cows and sheeps so you can't really have a picnic. It keeps raining anyway.
We got to our b&b in claremorris where we stayed for 2 nights. My bed had ten pillows on it.
The next day we drove part of the Connemara ring out to clifden. The mountains around there in the Connemara national park are beautiful. We saw kylemore abbey from a distance. It's really nice but you have to pay to go in so we continued on. This area you need to stay a while in so you can go for walks and explore properly.
One of the nearby towns called ballinrobe, that we had to drive through three times, has the dumbest intersection EVER. It gave us grief each time and I even ended up driving the wrong way down a one way street. I can now tick that one off the list of things you never want to do.

Some Irish green hills

Live traditional Irish music

Doolin county Clare Ireland

Doolin

Today is Sunday and we headed up to county Clare to see the cliffs of moher but the fog was too thick to bother. Our b&b is in a nearby town called doolin, famous for traditional live music. We wandered around and ended up in the pub for an early jam session and dinner. It's really cool. The musos sit around a table in the pub and different people come and join in while others leave.

Killarney

We left cork and headed to the blarney castle where the blarney stone is. I was happy just to look and not lie on my back and lean backwards over a big gap way up in the air and kiss a stone that hundreds of others have kissed. The castle was nice as well as the Druid gardens.
Then we headed toward Killarney and ended up on the wrong road but realized before too long. We got to kilarney around lunch time and discovered the self service salad bar in the department store and took our salads to eat on the grass next to Ross castle. Then went to muckross abbey which is an old ruin of a friary. Killarney is a nice town but way too much traffic for a little town. Our b&b called salmon leap is about 15 km out of town. Really nice rocky mountain views and very quiet.
The next day we drove the ring of Kerry. We took the skellig ring detour which was great because we found an old ruin of a castle to climb on. It was great because it was unattended and just standing in a cow paddock. We could easily have fallen off it and hurt ourselves but didn't. Then we found an old fort to climb on. That was fun too. Unfortunately the views weren't great because of the fog. But still a really nice drive. We stayed in the same b&b two nights just outside Killarney.

Cork

After Wexford we headed down towards cork. The only real stop we made was just before cork in cobh which is a port town and where the titanic left from. It was a little eerie walking along the dock. We arrived in cork and decided we didn't really like it. It's an old grimey depressing looking place. We walked around the town centre and struggled to find a nice inviting looking pub. Eventually we found one and then wandered around trying to find a cheap feed and discovered that doesn't exist. Our guesthouse was very nice which was lucky. It was nice to leave cork the next day.

Wexford

We picked up our hire car and headed south and stopped at he town of a avoca where ballykissangel was filmed. It's a really picturesque town with a hand weaving factory which was interesting. We arrived at our b&b and were greeted by some really friendly people. We told them how our grandmother was born in the nearby Glebe house which they knew well. We were escorted by one of the b&b family members to the house and also to the grave of several of our relatives in the yard of the church where our great great grandfather was the rector. After dinner we ended up in the kitchen at the b&b for some fun conversation.

Dublin

The next leg of my trip is in Ireland. My sister kg and I arrived in Dublin and booked into our hotel and then went for a wander and had dinner and Guinness in temple bar. I really enjoyed the Guinness. I haven't liked it before but now I do. Our hotel was pretty close to the centre of town.
The next day we went for wander to trinity college then the national gallery then the Dublin castle then St Patricks cathedral and back to hotel for dinner. And Guinness.

Walking in the Swiss alps

Swiss mountains

Switzerland

I've spent a week in the Swiss alps. It has been very relaxing. The view here is amazing. You look across the valley to snowy mountains. And the mountains are really steep. I've loved the walks. We went up a cable car to the top of one of the ski slopes and walked down. It was hard walking down because it was so steep and gravelly so very easy to slip over. Another day we went walking up in the cow pastures. All cows have bells so you can always hear them even if you can't see them. We did see them on the way back. They were right near the path and came over to say hello. I was glad because I wanted some cow photos. Twice this week we have eaten fondue for dinner. Melted cheese with bread dipped in. If you don't want tummy ache you have to not drink any cold water until the next day. You have to just drink wine and hot tea.
I went down to montreux for a day for the jazz festival. Unfortunately not much happens during the day. But I did see a uni band play and there are markets all along the edge of the lake. Montreux is on a steep hill overlooking lake Geneva so I walked up the hill a bit and explored the town. Switzerland is so cool because everything is so old.

Switzerland

Switzerland

I'm now in Switzerland at my sister's place up in the alps.  We are having beautiful weather up high here because of the heat wave - the temperatures here are around the mid 20s. On Sunday I got on a train to Basel and spent the night there.  The big thing you notice about Switzerland is how clean and tidy it is.  I thought Frankfurt was quite clean and tidy but compared to Basel it looked really grotty.  I wandered around The town centre in Basel on sunday afternoon.  All the shops were shut so not many people were around.  But heaps of people were floating down the river.  They don't swim, they just float downstream.

Sorry I can't post any photos right now.  I don't have the technology here to do it. 

So then on monday I got a train down to Lausanne and then caught another one to Aigle where my sister picked me up.  I really loved the train journeys.  I'd love to do more.  It's a great way to see the countryside and all the little towns.  Switzerland is full of little traditional looking towns with their old style house, very ornate a lot of time, and with a village church up on the hill.

I've been lazing around, going for walks and eating cheese.  It's great.

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Some Frankfurt observations

There is a park that circles the main city area with bike paths. Actually there are bike paths throughout the whole city. There are rabbits everywhere in the park and rabbit holes and rabbit poo so you don't sit on the grass. Tonight is the world cup playoff for third place between Germany and Uruguay. Every place has big tvs out for it even the ice-cream shops. No world cup no business. The city is not very congested. There are high rises but not heaps and they are interesting to look at and quite striking because they often stand alone amongst low rise buildings. Everyone smokes and there are lots of little beer joints that only serve alcohol and no food.

More frankfurt

More Frankfurt

More Frankfurt

Pretzel

I could pass as a german person today walking around in my Birkenstocks with my pretzel. I've manage to come to Europe on the middle of a heat wave. Heat wave for them. Normal Sydney hot summer for me. Except the sun is still shining at 10 pm.

Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Lunch

Frankfurt

So this is my first stop. The plane flight was typically long any uncomfortable. I got a frisk search done on me in Sydney. I guesss that's what you get for wearing baggy cargo pants. I got into Frankfurt at 6am and of course couldn't check into my hotel that early so I spent several hours walking around the city without a map. I managed to find my way back to where I started. It took a while to get train from the airport because you could only get a ticket from a machine and there was no English instructions. All the machines were being poked by non German speakers trying to work out what to do. I kept pushing things that weren't actually buttons and eventually a German man pushed the buttons for me. Not a very tourist friendly place. There is no English anywhere. Makes life fun though.
I couldn't find any coffee because at 8 in the morning no one is out. The place got going by about lunchtime and the coffee shops opened up. But what about morning coffee? There are pretzel shops everywhere like the Chinese cake shops in Chinatown. And heaps of kebab joints. Today I got on a bus that loops the city and you can get on and off as much as you like all day. Lunch was frankfurts, sauerkraut and beer.

blogging from email

I'm going to blog a bit from hotmail while I'm on holidays.  Sorry about the advertising and rubbish messages at the bottom.  Can't be helped - it's hotmail.

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Leave

I'm on long non-service leave at the moment. That's what you give yourself when you've spent most of your working career freelancing so have never accumulated long service leave. So after 15 years of working I'm finally having a big break.


I'm taking a combination of annual leave and leave without pay to have nearly 3 months off. Yay.



Here in Australia we get long service leave after 10 years. I've only been a permanent employee in my job for 6 years, so another 4 to go. I couldn't wait that long. Some European countries get it after 7 years. That would be nice.



Anyway, I've been bumming around at home, recovering from working really hard, catching up with friends, and getting ready to go overseas. This is a kind of big thing for me to do because last time I went overseas five years ago, I got really sick and ended up with chronic fatigue. I've never mentioned this before because I wanted this blog to be about the joys of life, not about the despairs of life. But there you have it. I've had a really rotten five years with bad health and other things going wrong, so it's just really nice that my health has improved enough that I feel up to trying travelling again and actually having a go at living life again after being shut up indoors for most of my life for 5 years, and going to work and not doing much else.



I'm confident I will stay healthy this time as I have my plethora of things I take which I'm pretty sure are doing me good. I'm hoping to blog regularly while I'm away. Hmm, we'll see how that goes, knowing my record at being a regular blogger...

Paintings

Here's another belated post - Back in April I went for a day trip to Canberra with fray and nag (not their real names) to see the masterpieces from Paris exhibition. It was a collection of post impressionist works from the Musee D'orsay.


It was pretty special to be able to see this collection as it never usually leaves Paris, but it came to Canberra, and I saw it.

The artists included Van Gogh, Gaugin, Cezanne, Degas, Monet and Serusier. I was interested to go and see them, but I was not expecting to be as blown away as It was great to see these famous paintings, many of which you would recognise from pictures in books etc. This was because seeing the paintings in real life is so much better than seeing a photograph in a book. The colours are so much more alive and you really get so much more of a sense of depth and illusion of light with the real thing. I had so much more of an appreciation of the talent and genius involved in these paintings after seeing them for real which I didn't have before.



A good example of this is Van Gogh's bedroom painting. The real one has such a better perspective of depth that just doesn't come across in a little photo.

I also really liked Albert Besnard's portrait of Madame Roger Jordain for the way the illusion was achieved in making the fabric of the dress look shimmery and three dimensional. Again not an effect you see in the photo, but if you stood back and looked at this painting from a distance the effect was really extraordinary.

See it by clicking here.




I think my favourite painting of the day was Beach at Heist by Georges Lemmen. Again, a little unimpressive in the photo, especially because the colours don't reproduce very well. But this is an example of pointillism, used by many artists painting with little dots and creating new colours by the combinations of dots rather than mixing the colours on a palette. It was fascinating looking form a distance to see the finished product and then looking really close to see how they had created the image with a series of different coloured dots working together.

Click here to see it.



Canberra is about 3 1/2 hours drive from Sydney, so we spent most of the day in the car and only about 2 hours in Canberra. It was good.