Day Three: In Which Things Can Only Get BetterBy the morning I still wasn’t totally convinced of this whole ‘eating’ concept, but after a few dry things went down and stayed, I soon got back into the swing- and in no time had resumed my normal shoving of large fistfuls of cake into my mouth. In the six hours of horror, we had somehow made our way from Palma (pictured below, above Alvaro’s head), to Sa Rapita (near his stage-right shoulder). (Photo from Marta) I think the map makes the city look larger and more important than it seemed in real life- the town was way less touristy and much less ‘happenin” than most of the others we ended up seeing on the way, and all the people seemed to be Siesta-ing for…. all the hours we were there. Still, it was very nice to get off the boat and walk on non-wobbly land. To be honest, once I was off the boat, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go back on. People kept …

Day 2: I don’t feel so…..I have photographic evidence that the day started off just fine. Here is me, being a poser on the boat…. (This and the one beneath from Marta)  … and looking relatively happy. Some of these photos I even took myself. We sleep in:  then started our day with our new Mediterranean diet- Spanish bread, Jamon, tomatoes, cheese And then our Captain set sail. It was a little bit cold, there were hints of rain.   That’s the last photo I have of the day. The pharmacist told me that I couldn’t take the sea-sickness tablets before I felt sick- that I had to wait. It was too late. I spent the next 6 or so hours vomiting over the side of the boat. Intermittent time spent clinging to the side of the boat with my eyes closed, perched in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. Moving, opening my eyes, lying down, looking at anything, made me vomit. About two hours in I started begging Andy to stop the boat. About three hours …

It’s gonna be slow my friends. There were eight people with DLSRs (or the equivalent) taking, if we go on Marta’s count, something close to 1000 photos each. I’m going to use primarily my own stuff, but I have to say it was nice to have someone else taking some photos and thus be included in some of the shots- so there’s going to be some degree of integration. Sometimes I give my camera to Andy, and sometimes it works, but often the mere fact of him holding it seems to make my nose beaky(er), my hair oilier and all of me much more awkward. So thanks Marta for some pretty shots, and all the awesome group photos! Day 1: They Wanted To Escape The German Grey (Palma) I’m not sure if I told you all yet, but we headed off to Mallorca/Majorca a couple of weeks back. Our friend from work, Marta, came into my office one day and asked if Andy and I felt like sailing around an island for a week. Seeming …

Facebook, in my opinion, has become a little presumptuous with their advertising and recommendation of pages… I’m not entirely sure which of my activities they’ve been tracking that they now find it necessary to promote ‘Whiskers Germany’ and ‘Cat Playhouse’ or something on my page… I’m not THAT obvious about the CrazyCatLady thing right?? But they did well with recommending the Holi festival- which popped up in the sidebar of my newsfeed a few months back. The Holi Festival was started in Berlin only last year, in an imitation of the colour festivals of India. There’s live music- mostly electric- and lots of throwing around of paint powder. The experience is supposed to celebrate not only the coming of spring, but also the colours and joy of life, and, I guess by ‘painting them all green in the sunshine’, eliminate personal differences of wealth, class, colour and so on. (If you want to know more you can read/googletranslate about the history here: http://www.holifestival.com/wie-es-begann/). Andy, my cousin Ashleigh, and I, headed out at about 3 pm, followed …

This is the last one. I promise. Then maybe we can talk about Majorca. And spring. And sunburn. Our last day in Amsterdam was a bit of a half-day. We had to get to the plane by about six, and still wanted to check out NeMo- a sciencey place (being the nerds we are), and the Amsterdam Museum. So PowerWalking was required.  We PowerWalked through check-out of our dreadful hotel. We PowerWalked to the Central Station to drop off our bags. We PowerWalked across the bridge towards NeMo. And then we realised that Andy’s stomach was making increasingly angry sounds, so we slowed it all down and took in a massive and leisurely breakfast. Which included these delights: … and which was undertaken in a suitably hipster location, with seriously cool Alien-esque light fittings  To the NeMo!- the National Centre for Science and Technology on the (R)Oosterdok (I told you it’s a funny language). As you probably guessed, NeMo is like Scitech.But on speed.Squared or to the power of eight or something! I was stunned …

I think this month is going to be crazy. We just got back from a week sailing around Majorca, my cousin has rocked up on our doorstep, we have the festival of colours, it’s the Kreuzberg Culture Carnival, there are a couple of public holidays ripe for the frolicking, there’s an ‘Institute Day’ and Summer Party plus the world is going mad getting it’s Spring On! So let me finish telling you about last month. Back to Amsterdam: Day Three, and Andy and I headed to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s answer to the Tate Modern. They had some pretty amazing stuff there, including a room of ‘Scandinavian Art’ which was pretty much the prototypes of every single item Ikea has ever sold, plus a room just full of awesome and funky chairs- which made us think of Mr J. Russel and his soon-to-be chair fame. They had this, which reminded me a little of Mondrian:  and, low and behold- some actual Mondrians: Did I ever tell you that I’m passionately in love with Mondrian?  Two …

As it turns out, if you want to write about The Holiday have to write about The Holiday during The Holiday, or immediately after The Holiday. Because if not I guess the rest of life starts to happen, and the blogging does not. Two Fridays ago, Andy and I joined a gym.It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while- I’m terrified about my inability to breathe hard enough to even run for the bus, Andy’s terrified of his ol’ bones getting older- and we’re desperate to get into the habit of exercise before, as above, ‘life happens’, and we just don’t. So we’re trying to work out the new routine of work+German lessons+homework that comes with that+ exercise. Plus blogging. Plus sleeping: the sun is getting summery and setting after 8pm, and rising in the unholy hours, and what with our lack of curtains and our confused body clocks, out sleeping patterns are super-disrupted. But on to The Holiday.And the pictures.“Someone” recently complained about the picture to word ratio. I’ll try to get it …

I mean… this is just some sort of confirmation bias right? Right???? We are currently trying to navigate our way around the German genders- male, female, and neutral- which, for those of you playing at home, have to be applied to every single noun. A chair is male, a cat is female, luck is neutral. It is quite painful: lots of rote learning, and even for the situations where there is a rule (e.g. most words starting with ‘Ge’ are neutral), there are, of course, many exceptions. And of course, the four prepositions: der (masc.), die (fem.) das (neutral), or die (plural), (which all mean ‘the’, for those of you still playing), change (although of course not consistently), depending on the case (Nominativ- for subjects, Akkusativ- for objects, Dativ- for the word ‘where’, several verbs etc., and Genetiv- possessive). This Tuesday, we started on Dativ, and learnt to our dismay that ‘die’ (which is the feminine singular if the noun is the subject) becomes ‘der’ (still feminine singular, but now Dativ). Of course, ‘der’ is also …

Having woken up about 4am, reached the airport just after 5 and finally jetted off well past our 7 am scheduling (they had to de-ice the plane, seemingly removing the last 3 months of weather from it), we arrived in Amsterdam after 9.Like every capital city that is not Perth, Amsterdam is pretty simple to get to (from the airport) and around. On arrival, we bustled around the tourist information area near the (very beautiful) Amsterdam Central Station, before committing to buying the ‘I amsterdam’ city card.The card includes travel on public transport, and free access into most of the major museums and art galleries. You also get 25 % off at various restaurants and theatres, and similarly cheaper rates for things like bike and scooter hire. Finally, they throw in a river cruise, and a couple of free giveaways at selected shops (we didn’t bother with this, as we assumed it would be cheap tourist tack, but I guess you could turn the whole thing into a bit of a treasure hunt). http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/deals/i-amsterdam-city-card/benefits-of-the-i-amsterdam-city-card We bought the …

In an attempt to snuffle out that rare and valuable thing in this city: a good Asian restaurant, Jerry from work has been organising for the past couple of years ‘group hits’ on promising-sounding locales. The idea being that if you have 10 or 20 people choosing one or two dishes each, you can cover a large portion of the menu, and thus fairly conclusively decide the value of the place, with a single visit. This time, the group, including two Australians who have been whining non-stop about missing proper Asian food for the last several months, headed to Ming Dynastie, which is rather promisingly situated right next to the Chinese embassy in the centre of Berlin.  Our party consisted of two Chileans (or one Chilean and one Columbian): Plus a French man, a German: Another German and another French lady. Plus our Chinese leader:  Two more Germans, two Japanese, and two Aussies: (I should apologise here about the quality of the photos- the settings were totally off and my autofocus was spazzing, but for the most …