It’s raining again in Potsdam, which means it’s time to for some reminiscing, holiday-sun-fun style. So let’s rewind a month back, to a magical time when the sun was high in the sky, Andy’s folks were visiting, and we all headed Nor-west to Hamburg. I rode in on the ICE train late Thursday evening, and began my exploration with ‘the Wizza Gang’ (who had been in Hamburg since Wednesday) the next morning. Actually, the Folks decided to head up to Luebeck- the famous home of the Marzipan, while Andy and I got to know the city with another Walking tour. Let’s take a look ’round Hamburg shall we?     I travelled to Hamburg with Lauren and Ashlee back in ’09, but mainly with the purpose of visiting my cousins, and only for a couple of days. I remember walking along the water edge, going to markets, shopping for chocolate, and lots and lots of earmuffed seagulls. But, with the exception of the Nikolai Church, I didn’t remember much about the physical appearance of the city. Let’s …

Once a year Sanssouci opens its gates at night, and, surrounded by musicians, actors, and period costumed extras, visitors can explore the beautifully light palaces and glowing gardens. I saw it as a nice excuse to dress up in a new frock (although it turned out that I was the only one not wearing jeans and practical shoes- I still have some assimilating to go). Andy saw it as an excuse to show off his wonderful new moustache: It was a lovely setting. We arrived just after 7pm, and wandered through the paths, occasionally passing a random flautist or violinist, or stumbling upon a gathering watching some sort of German period drama: This fellow was very ‘Let them eat cake’ (French and Saunders comedy on the french revolution- if you haven’t seen it you very much should. Slightly lowbrow, but excessively hilarious). Of course, you probably shouldn’t go if you’re not into ancient palaces silhouetted against swirling skies, or catching the last drops of sunlight. In addition to the Artists and their art, the gardens …

I was a bit lazy with the photo-taking on my last day in Copenhagen. Please forgive me. This rather stunning spiral building is Vor Freslers Kirke/Our Saviour’s Church. We heard about it a bit on the walking tour, when our guide mentioned that generally, towers like this were designed to have a left handed spiral. This purpose of the ‘chirality’ being to give a right handed castle-dweller an advantage in defence of his home, against other right handed, sword-holding attackers, who might be trying to come up the spiral. Easier to hack at steel and flesh when you’ve got a bit of air for the swinging. The story, as told by our guide, is that the architect built it wrong, and then, as some sort of self-imposed punishment, threw himself from the top. Sound a bit far fetched? It gets outright ridiculous-sounding if you actually make your way to the top of the 90m building: the whole spiral just kind of… peeters out. No doors leading inside, no ledge, no flag post. No nice little …

The horrible realisation hit us on the morning of the third day in Copenhagen: We’d been in Denmark for 40 hours, and not eaten a single danish! Luckily, this was a situation that could be easily rectified: we rushed to our local Lagkagehuset (a bakery chain that produces goods above and beyond what you’d expect for something of its ilk), where I scoffed down a cinnamon pastry, and a truly delicious chocolate rye ball.* *we managed to discover that the rye balls will last several days without any major changes to their composition. So if anyone’s in Denmark and wants to post me a few… Our plans for the day were somewhat grand- we were taking a train to the north, where we would visit Hamlet’s Castle at Helsingor. Then we would ride across the ‘sea’ to Sweden, have a look around, travel back down the Swedish coast and train across the Swedish-Danish bridge. Coming from Australia, where our borders are pretty well defined, I found the whole ‘ferry to another country’ rather amusing. But …

The in-laws humoured me in accompanying me to a Fleamarket on Saturday morning. I miss flea markets and proper opshops! Back home they were my main source of clothing (and jewellery and book and nic-nacs). Apart from the fact that I don’t feel so much like a filthy shallow consumer when buying pretty second hand frilly things, I also enjoy the ‘hunt’: the searching through racks and racks of crap to find something fancy. But, aside from a few fairly poorly outfitted Oxfams, the Potsdam-Berlin area seems to mostly be filled with fancy second hand and vintage ’boutiques’… not at all good for hunting. So I took advantage of the high-wage, high-cost Perth-like society of Copenhagen, and we all took the 9A bus to Frederiksberg where they run a pretty decent sized fleamarkets (every Saturday morning from 8am to 15:00). I shopped my little heart out and came home with a navy dress- decorated with slightly abstract Chinese characters, and a new winter coat- the latter being the equivalent of <6 euros (plus Karen Millen for those …

The parents (Andy’s) spent a week away from us, in Sweden, with plans to then cross the unbelievably narrow sea to Denmark by Friday evening. With that in mind, Andy and I headed to Copenhagen of Thursday evening, to scout the place out before meeting up with his folks. We arrived fairly early in the evening, after a flight which lasted literally 45 minutes and was therefore all take off and landing with no meaty flighty bit. Not that I’m complaining- but coming from Perth, where you can fly for about five hours and still be in Australia, I’m not sure I’m ever going to get used to this continent’s tininess. We walked about ten paces from the main train station (in turn only 12 minutes by train from the airport), through a European summer night filled with trumpet sounds. They had some sort of Jazz festival on in the city, which meant we were also accompanied by trumpets the next morning, and on occasion throughout the following days….so Copenhagen looks like elephants and dragons …

This Monday, Andy’s parents flew in from Perth, so we’ve been meeting up with them after work every evening, to try to show them some of our favourite places. Of course, many of those places happen to serve good food. On Monday we went to the Big Smoke, meeting them at Zoo and then walking along the Ku’damm to a fairly decent French restaurant to tuck into some tasty food. In an unplanned coupling, the ‘girls’ went for truffle linguini with Pfifferlinge, and the ‘boys’ steaked it. Pfifferlinge translates to chantarelle mushrooms, and the people who know much more about these things than myself have noted that they are the first of the mushies to appear as the seasons change. And appear they have!: every restaurant we’ve passed in the last week has had at least two or three Pfifferlinge dishes. You all know how I feel about mushrooms. The Reign of the Spargel seems to be wanning, and the Pfifferlinge (plus the strawberry and its assorted berry friends) are rising: I think I could …

This was by far the poshest port we stayed in. The night before, when we sailed in, we went to have dinner at a small, overpriced restaurant.  On the table behind us were three decked-out middle aged society ladies, plus the hapless husband of one of them- who spent the night flirting with the owners and discussing how their friend’s brother just wasn’t the same ‘type of person’ (of the same snobbery) as his siblings. On the table in front of us was an old, overweight, clearly-wealthy German man. He was eating alone when a tanned bottle blond of 40-50 dressed in 20-30 came in, sat at the table next to him, and turned on her charm. She found out within about two seconds that he was in a relationship ‘good, so you’re not lonely’, but kept the charm on (he seemed to be ok with it), and kept trying to lure him to a second location. At one point she asked him what his ‘thing’ was. Because ‘everyone who comes to Majorca has a …

I think it’s actually impossible that any day featuring more than one dinosaur can be not awesome. It started with dinosaur pasta! As I have probably ranted to you before, I tend to morally object to ‘organic’ food (50 % on the basis of ‘I find it hard to believe that the carbon and whatever else inside your food is ‘inorganic’ and 50 % on ‘I am poor and this is probably a scam). Which is why I haven’t really been into the new Bio store in the Hbf very much. But what a treat! Dinosaur Pasta. And endorsed by T-Rex no less! I will admit that I was a little sad that there were only three types of dinosaurs, imagine the outrage, for example, if alphabet soup came only with the letters X, K and R. But this was mostly due to the absence of my favourite friend- Parasaurolophus. Onwards to the Hauptbahnhof, with the promise of possibly-not-real-but-real-life-sized dinosaurs to actually leave the house and possibly even go to the gym on a Lazy …

How long does it take you to organise your snaps after a successful holiday? Clearly the answer for me is ‘too long’- but that’s because I tend to be over-exuberant with the shutter button. I think most of us agreed that Soller was one of the most beautiful places we visited. It has a decent amount of shops and restaurants around the port, which was filled with blues and whites and shimmering waters just as we’d come to hope and even expect: Around the bay ran a tram line- one of the oldest on the island according to Marta’s travel guide, which took you past some beautiful scenery and up the hill to the main city.  (These two photos are stolen from Marta- Thanks Marta!) As you can tell from my whimsical poses, I’m pretending I’m a lady from….whatever the Majorcan equivalent of ‘colonial times’ works out as. I was glad to be wearing my ‘gown’, and it is very possible that at some stage during the day Marta and I had a discussion about …