A couple of weekends ago, right before we went to stuff our faces with dumplings, we headed to Martin-Gropius Bau in the city to check out the photography of Barbara Klemm. Klemm worked for a large German newspaper for nearly 50 years, and in that time managed to get a wide range of photographs from both Deutschland and the world at large. If you’ve been to Berlin, you’ve probably visited the East Side Gallery, and seen either there, or on one of the thousands of postcards in the tourist shops around the city, this: To be honest, I never knew that that was originally from a photograph, or that that photograph was taken by Klem. *As a very important aside, all the photographs from here on out, and the one at the top, are taken from Barbara Klemm. Obviously, we weren’t allowed to take photos of the photos in the exhibition, so these are from various sources on the interwebs.Among the collection were many photos of famous people (although often the people were famous only in Germany, and even …

Earlier this week I was talking about how spring seemed to have been a little more underway in Dresden than in Potsdam.But something is definitely happening up our way. Last week I planted some seeds- and though I admittedly ‘cheated’ by babying them in the warmth of the apartment, there’s nonetheless some sort of knowing satisfaction that things springing from the ground equal a true beginning to the warmer months. The big ones are sunflowers, but the others are a crazy wild mix of herbs, fruit and veg, and wild flowers. I guess we’ll have to see. But what’s the true German way of knowing that spring has started?? SPARGEL SEASON HAS BEGUN!

Dresden is so ridiculously close, and so ridiculously beautiful, that I can’t believe that we’ve been in Deutschland for nearly 1.5 years and only just made our way down their last weekend. Pau, Asdrubal, Andy and I caught the bus on Friday evening, and arrived in the city a couple of hours later, in time to eat and drink, and then meet up with Mercedes and her man Dirk to sniff out a bar for an hour or two, before returning to the safety of our hostel to crash into bed. Parenthetically, before I get too far in- I should mention that some of the photos are stolen from Pau and Asdru (like the photo of Asdrubal above). In case I forget to mention it for some of them- you can usually tell which ones are not mine because I’m pulling stupid poses in everyone else’s photos (even more so than usually), plus- Pau took all the GRUPPENFOTOs. Some of the pics are also stolen from Andy, but I figure that by common law I …

Can you believe that we managed to find Snow in the middle of Sicily? Following the Siracusa history lesson, we headed to Etna- which to be honest, was my primary sightseeing aim on Sicily. First up (well first after breakfast, packing, leaving Siracusa, very stressful driving and navigating through tiny windy roads and small towns, and arrival into a small town near the mountain), we fuelled up at a slightly odd pub/eatery. Here we ate fairly tasty food, got gifted some very tasty sweets, and were ‘strongly encouraged’ (in a way that only a lady-of-a-certain-age can encourage) to go across the road to the honey shop to buy some special honey for my cough. There we met a young man, who was quite enthused that we came from Australia (he showed us honey with eucalypt), and even more excited when he told us about his cousin who was in a TV show in Australia, and we were actually able to guess with only minimal prompting, that it was Underdog. The honey that was recommended to me tasted a …

Another day on holiday, another day to visit the places of the pagan gods… Syracusa is a nearly-3000 year old city on the south-east of Sicily, famous for being the birthplace of Archimedes, and for maintaining until modern times some rather spectacular ancient architecture. It is also the home to pasta eating cats! I’ve been putting off this post of a while because I’m not sure that the photos we took on the day really do the place justice, and I’m sadly lacking in the knowlege required to augment the story. So, here is a bunch of poorly-captioned photos of the ruins we saw, in chronological order, but also in order of greatness: Archeological Park, The Amphitheatre and The Ear of Dionysius. ‘Ruins’ (From the 3rd century) I call this one: ‘Mother, Inversed Height Relationship’ This one is: ‘An Ode to Lauren W’ ‘There has to be a way into those tunnels’ (we could not find one) ‘Behold’ or ‘My Boyfriend is Much Better At Posing Than My Mother’ ‘Trying To Be Small’  ‘Peekaboo’ ‘Spring …

You should never go to bed craving sushi. Pau learning to make sushi at our ‘movie night’ a couple of weekends ago. Any excuse to sit still for hours on end and stuff our faces with food. Two nights ago I had a dream, featuring one of my most beloved Aussies: Ashlee. She was in Germany, and we took her to an asian restaurant. Andy and I were super excited. We miss asian food like crazy here, especially places which sell good Thai or Vietnamese food. Or Rendang, there are days when I would kill for a good rendang. Many of the aisan-style food places here still sell very westernised cuisine and ‘asian fast food’ – nonspecific noodles with salty sauce and a bit of chicken thrown on top. Many more restaurants, even when selling a higher quality of food (and I’ll admit, some of it is super tasty), still tend to be ‘asian themed’. These places have a generic name, or claim to be ‘Thai’ but somehow still manage to have sushi slipped into …

Our first day in Sicily looked a lot like this: Shall we go in for the close up? We had to wake up ridiculously early to take the boat from Malta to Sicily and suffered for it during the remainder of the day. Maybe you can’t tell from the fine details of his face, but this is sleepy-face, not queasyface (I feel, sadly, that I am at a stage in this blog where I would like to acknowledge the fact that I did not heave up my food on the way over). Possibly there’s some hunger in there too. Of course, at some stage in the morning, someone fed him caffeine, and he spent the rest of the day yo-yoing between super tired and super hyperactive. I’m not pointing any fingers here mother, but I’m pretty sure that someone wasn’t me. I know not to feed the gremlin after midnight. Anyway, we arrived back on Italian soil, and spent 20 minutes discussing with the taxi drivers the fact that it was Sunday. We wanted to take a train from …

One of my plans for this shiny new year is to do more ‘art’ to balance out the science. You know, because sometimes pippetting thousands of samples, and then lather, rinse, repeat unto infinity, just doesn’t feel like it’s fulfilling me in every way possible. The wonders of youtube taught me the most basic of basic stitches (behind, hook, pull through)- and how to stitch in a straight line. So here’s a scarf I made for Andy. Now to learn the stuff that requires actual skill!

The next day in Malta began with the traditional ‘coffee and proof of life photograph’. The coffee, which came with a shot of burnt expresso on top of syrup, was horrible. Perhaps as expected. I really wanted to try the one they had with pistachio syrup because a) odd and b) awesome looking coffee.. but they didn’t have the pistachio, and then I panicked. On the plus side, I was able to pull funny faces and force Andy to drink the rest of it. And here is Andy, proving to his Mother that no, we haven’t drowned or lost him. The morning began with full breakfasts, and-for some of the more decadent of the group- cake. Would you like to see some photos from a day spent wandering, posing, acting like lions and wishing we were Santa Claus? Here goes: Andy is Peacocking, but this Pigeon is doing it much better. Who’s a pretty boy then? This will be our Christmas card next year. Andy thinks I am taking a photo of him. He is …

Here’s why I wanted to go to Gozo. http://images.summitpost.org/original/325684.jpg I mean- seriously! Che Magnifique and all that! This, my friends, is the Azure Window- filled with prettiness and light. This is what we got instead… Man- it’s supposed to be Auzure! I’m pretty sure that Malta sees good weather about 364 days of the year. The day that we went to Gozo clearly coincided with their ‘wet season’. The trip to Gozo itself was fairly horrible if you are pathetically weak sea-dog like myself. The ferry ride from island to island was fairly simple- only about 20 minutes.. doable. But Maltese streets are some sort of windy horror out of the mind of Escher and Dante’s love child, and our bus stopped and started up and down all the little hills and all through the alleyways and… Well, to make a long story short, it was a good thing I didn’t have any breakfast, because not all of my contents made it to the smaller island. I am a delightful travelling companion. We got off …