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 …

This post has to be dedicated to my father. He’s always been fascinated with nature, and is a big part of why my sister and I spent a lot of our childhood gazing and poking at things (or if you’re me, trying to pet things, like bees, that should not necessarily be petted). He’s also always been what society would generally describe as ‘maternal’- very good with children and ga-ga over babies. I’m not trying to put a gender swing on him, but I think the connotations we’ve developed for the word ‘paternal’ involve things like scotch and driving lessons and golf and threatening of boyfriends or something… A couple of years ago my parents finally graduated from having a single, 30 cm TV in the house, to having a full fancy-pants with-bells-on Plasma or LCD thingame. This coincided fairly well with the introduction of 5-10 new TV channels in Perth, after years of us only having a few, and thus the need for new and exciting programming to fill the many hours. It also …

We spent a good part of the morning roaming around the German-crazy town of Cala Ratjada. In the early morning (by Spanish if not German standards), we headed to a cafe overlooking the sea…. and I stuffed in slightly disappointing pancakes while Andy, clearly missing his adopted home, attempted to eat his body weight in Brot. Being ‘little Germany’, the cafe of course came ‘with dog’ (I’m sure you’ve already read out guest-writer’s thrilling and daring expose on this matter: http://fishwithwhiskey.blogspot.de/2012/12/expose-into-seedy-underbelly-of.html). … but as there was a nice number of cats to balance it all out, I was pretty happy. Plus, it came complete with this Dapper fellow: I’m pretty sure he had mustard coloured pants on. Seriously rockin’ the look! But seriously. This couldn’t be more Germany if it tried (although I would also argue that perhaps it’s trying too hard and is therefore almost ‘more’ Germany than Germany and thus less.. if you get what I mean). Speaking of weird imitations, does this writing look familiar to anyone? Anyway, I think Ratjada is pretty- …

Cala D’Or was a rather beautiful port. Although some of my bias may have stemmed from the fresh feeling of un-seasickness, another part came from wonderful deliverance of Spain of that which it offers: Bright blue skies…. acting as a perfect backdrop for pure white buildings…. And sticky, Mediterranean trees, that smell like home: Andy, Martin and I headed out for breakfast, at a time that was more appropriate for brunch, but seemed to the Spanish to be ungodly as an hour for the service of food. We sat down at a cafe brimming with life, most of it Dutch (a crowd of orange-clad people had come to see the crowning of the new king), but were told that it was just too early for any food, so had to move across to the next cafe for some breaky. It was quite a nice feeling to just sit in the sun, and stock up on some vitamin D after the long, long, long, long winter. But sooner or later we had to head back to …

As part of their promotion of the OM-D E-M5, Olympus held a ‘Photography Playground’ in the centre of Berlin. One quiet Friday, Andy and I headed with Mercedes, and her lovely friend Babs, to what can only be described as a very hipster looking warehouse, in order to get our play on. The general concept is that they give you one of their shiny new cameras to play with for a couple of hours as you make your way through the floors filled with a mixture of art and play equipment. You look, you photograph, you get occasional instructions for use, and you fall in love. At the end, you hand over the rights to any photos you took, and they give you the SD card on which you took all the shots for free. When we arrived, despite bunking off work quite early, there was a massive queue, and only a couple of cameras left, so instead of waiting we decided to frolick on our own. Luckily I already had my (brand appropriate) camera …

While my cousin was here, we made an attempt to throw as many loud and colourful things at her as possible. The first weekend: Holi Festival of Colours, the second: Karneval der Kulturen in Kreuzberg. The day started off with forced labour: I made our houseguest cook everyone breakfast. I’m fairly certain that we don’t have this in Australia- my certainty in this case stems from the belief that my sister and I would be all over it if we did. In Germany, they have these little ‘authentic french’ croissants, and right next to them, also in tubes, Sonntag Brötchen (Sunday Bread Rolls). I’m assuming these are ‘a thing’, because in Germany, the concept of going a single day without fresh bread is akin to a violation of human rights (I’m pretty sure the ‘right to awesome fresh bread’ is on the German Constitution), and the supermarkets are closed on Sundays. Although the bakeries and the flowershops seem to be the two things that are perpetually open, so maybe it’s just emergency bread to keep …