Berning Down the House!

From Zurich I made my way to Bern. I had intially planned to take the Luzern-Interluken route but since I had already done this the day before, it was just a one hour trip. I arrived in Bern at about midday to find my next host, Regula wandering around the station looking for me just as I was doing for her. Lucky for me that we found each other at that time, as my train was late and she was about to leave.

In an old house near the train staion which usually had a bar, cafe, womens area, theatre and holds frequent parties, a once a month flea market was being held. Here you could by almost everything you could think of from scooters and bikes to console games, candlesticks and tea. I had to hold myself back as I saw so much stuff that I would have liked to buy but unfortunately can’t carry around with me. We spent a few hours looking around the markets and then decided to head back to her place.

Crazy bicycle for sale

Regula lived in a very old house which was situated inside an industrial area in a town about half an hour out of Bern called Oberburg. This industrial area has a building right next to the house which begins some sort of extreme hammering each morning at seven o’clock which shakes the entire house, continuing until five in the evening. Asides from Regula living there, there was also Nicole and Dino, a suitably hippy couple, another girl whoes name I never found out, and one more guy and another couple who were away at the time. For me this was great as I was given my own room which included its own fireplace to keep me toasty warm in the freezing nights. That night Regula, Nicole, Dino and I just hung out, ate some amazing food cooked by Nicole (who should be a chef), and listened to music. I spent half the evening dashing up and down the stairs to keep my little fire going.

The old house

The next day I was to meet up with a girl called Flurina who has contacted me the previous night on CouchSurfing, asking if I’d like to be shown around Bern. So at around midday, I met her in the Bern station and we set out on our mission. The first place to visit was the house where I had been at the flea market the previous day. I had wanted to get a betting picture of  it.

Flea market location

Next we wandered down to one of Bern’s many bridges. Following this we made our way to the highest tower in Bern at the XXXXXXX church. It was many more stairs that I had predicted and after we fought our way up with a number of stops, we found the the view was totally worth it. Unfortunately over half of the tower was closed to it was next to impossible to get a decent view from the other side.

View from tower

After we headed back down, Flurina suggested that next on the agenda should be “bears and fountains”, so we went for a walk towards the Bern bears. For some reason or another, there is a pit in the middle of the city which for numerous years has held a number of bears. It’s a horrible concrete pit and many people oppose it. The bears look so sad in there, just sitting around waiting for food and most probably wishing that the winter would become cold enough to hibernate.

Bern's Bear

Next were the fountains. Not as amazing as many of the other fountains which I have seen on this trip, but pretty cool as a number of them (which run up the middle of the main pedestrian streets) are statues of folktales. The one which is the best and I think every one agrees with is this one of a man eating small (bad mannered) children – a tale parents would often tell to their kids to keep them in line!

Child eater!

A walk down the riverside followed lunch, and when we were about ten minutes down stream (which was 6.66 degrees by the way!) I spotted the zoo on the otherside of the river which Flurina seemed to think was free. So back we headed and over a bridge which we had passed. Then we just walked in! Past some ponies and mules, fluffy rabbits and then… RACOOONS! My god I just keep having child-like exciting moments! So mischevious looking and so cute at the same time.

Racooooooon :)

Onward we walked up the hill to find a pond full of pink flamingos. I find these birds hilarious, especially the way the walk around in the water. They would move around to find the sun in flocks, flapping their wings to gain all the sun they could get.

Flamingos

Our trip to the zoo was our last activity for the day, and as the sun was setting we headed back to the train station where I thanked Flurina for showing me around and then set off back to Oberburg for another evening of music and hanging out.

The following day Nicole had no work and so decided to come with me on a trip to Gruyères to visit the H.R. Giger museum. This is the guy who invented the alien from the film Alien. It was lucky that she came along as it involved 3 trains and a bus, plus numerous amounts of German and French speaking. On arrival we had about an hour to spare so we decided to have a look around Gruyères, a very quaint little medival town set on the edge of the Swiss Alps.

Gruyères

At 1pm the museum opened. This place was crazy, the mind of this man insane. There were so many amazing pictures of creatures that I could never dream of. Very dark and for some reason, also very erotic. They had this little “adults only” section which seemed pretty pointless as almost all of his work had some weird alien sexuality to it. Unfortunately you were not alowed to take photos inside, but this was on the outside:

Babies in a gun

And there was even a bar which he designed, indeed also crazy:

Giger bar

And soon it was time to make the long trek back to Oberburg. We were not back for long when Regula came in from work, covered in snow! “It’s snowing!” she called, and looking out the window, it definitely was. So after another beautiful dinner made by Nicole, she, Dino and I headed outside into the already 4-5″ snow to play around. Snow fights were not an option of choice, and I was amazed to find that you actaully can roll snow into huge balls, resulting in by far the best snowman I have ever built.

Snowman!

This went on for a few hours and by then we were all tired and soaked and ready to sleep, but not after more music and hanging out, though!

I had initially planned to leave the following day, but it took me a while to find a place to stay so I spent one more day in Bern. This day I used for doing nothing. I headed into Bern to get a train ticket and then just spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and watching the snow out the window. A quiet evening and my time in Bern was over, again going so fast!

The next morning I was off to Cannes!

Norweige: Olso

From Gothenburg I was off to Norway. I decided that I definately wanted to make it far north in Norway as I could, so I’d come back to Sweden later when it was too cold to be in the far north.

I boarded a 12:45 train headed for Oslo and found myself sitting with two Canadian brothers from British Columbia; ex paper-mill engineers. Garth and Trace. We talked about all sorts of nothing and they taught me a card game which I had never seen before called Cribbage. This was probably the most fun card game I’ve ever played, if not a little hard. But in saying that, I managed to win the first two games easily, losing the third by only a small amount.

After 5 or so hours, we arrived in Oslo. Off went the Canadians and I made a phone call to my 5th couch surfing arrangement –  Bård. With in ten minutes he had shown up and we were on our way walking to his girlfriends place where I was to stay because he was also staying there. It was me, another CouchSurfer (from Solvenia),  Bård, his girlfriend Matinka (from Solvakia), and 15 other flatmates!

Now I would like to run through all the other flatmates, but I only really remember one. This guy was called Shaun-Thomas, and when I asked him what he did, his response was something along the lines of: “I do some modeling and I work in a clothing shop. I have also trained in cook, waiter and was in the military. Oh… and I’m a RAPPER!” You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought – this guy looked like a male model. He told me that he had been rapping for 10 years and had, at some stage, laid down a track with Wutang.

So he asked me if I wanted to hear a rap, and OF COURSE I DID! It was actually really good! But I was laughing throughout the whole thing, just because the situation  was so ridiculous. That night I had dinner with  Bård and Matinka and then we headed out to a club called Blå which had a free twelve-piece swing/jazz band playing. The music was amazing, the band members were really funny, and everyone was dancing like mad. Although a good time, I didn’t stay too long as I was pretty tired.

The following day I hung out with the other CouchSurfer, the Slovenian girl. We ended up taking one of the longest day’s walking that I’ve had in this entire trip. After heading to the train station to buy tickets, we made out way towards the Royal Palace.

Royal Palace

After we checked out the palace, we decided to take a look at a park which was apparantly full of statues. We walked for miles to get to this place, and all the time I was thinking, “I’ve seen so many damn statues”. But this place turned out to be pretty amazing, there were hundreds and hundreds of statues all made by the same guy – it must have taken him years to complete them all. Some were crazy, many were naked figures in strange poses, and then there was the totem-orgy pole.

A small few of many statues

Totem-Orgy

While we were at this park, I noticed something off in the distance which at first I didn’t understand. But through fancy 6x optical zoom techniques, I found that it was a ski jump! People I talked to were very surprised that we have skiing in New Zealand but do not have a ski jump!

Olso Ski Jump

We decided to try and walk to it. The 6x optical zoom was decieving because after walking for almost an hour and a half, we appeared to be no closer than we previously were. We then gave up and walked for about two hours, all the way back to Matinka’s place, where the rest of the night was relatively relaxed as we watched a few films with a few of the other flatmates.

The next day the weather was crap. I had already decided that I wanted to go down and check out the harbourside so I began to walk. The further I walked, the worse the weather got but I was determined, and soon I made it to the Oslo fort.

Oslo Fort

The harbourside the day prior looked spectacular in the sparkling sun. Today it looked so bad that I’m not even going to post a picture up here. I decided to get out of the rain so headed to the Museum of Contemporary Art. This place was  pretty cool, it was full of (obviously) contemporary Norweigian art and a few international exhibitions, one which I had seen parts of in London’s Tate Modern.

Next I visited the Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art which is currently housing an extensive Andy Warhol exhibition which was absolutely crazy. I never thought that I would see some of these very famous paintings of soup cans! Then back for another night of chilling.

One last day I had, and the weather was just as miserable as it was the previous day. This wasn’t going to stop me. My first place of visitment was the newly completed Opera House.

Opera House

One last stop. The Senersen Museum of Modern Art (yes, another one). And another chilling night as the following morning I was up at 6am to catch an early train to Trondheim!

Oslo, over and out.

(I apologise for the terrible writing within this post, I’ve been walking all day after a night train on which I didn’t sleep at all)

Frank-N-Furter

From Brussels I headed to Frankfurt. This was my first taste of Germany, and to be honest, there isn’t really much there. I spent 4 nights in Frankfurt with not a whole lot to do.

I arrived in Frankfurt via a 6.5 hour bus at about 11pm at night and I then had to make my way to the place I would be staying, my second couch surfing experience, a girl called Stephi. She lived about 2km from the main station where I left the bus but with a heavy bag it wasn’t really ideal to walk this, especially this time at night. With a little bit of trouble and some help from some people who didn’t speak english, I managed to secure myself a tram ticket on the correct line and made it to Stephi’s apartment around 11:30pm. Once I had arrived, I realised that I didn’t know her last name, so I just decided to press all the buttons at the door and see what would happen. Luckily the door buzzed open and I heard my name called from up the stairs, I had arrived.

Stephi took me up to my little attic room and I promptly fell asleep, it had been a long day.

The next morning I decided to explore Frankfurt. I didn’t really find much to do, but it was indeed an interesting experience. The socio-economic mix of buildings was incredibley varied. You can find brand new skyscrapers next to smaller shops next to abandoned apartment buildings. And scattered throughout all these different places were numerous sex shops. There was no zone for them, they were everywhere, in suburbs, in town – crazy! The Germans love their sex it seems.

New Building + The Euro!

Crappy Old Building

That night I just hung out with Stephi while she introduced me to the world of the tea afficianado. We talked about all sorts of crazy things and drank numerous different types of tea which she produced from a large box stacked with flavour upon flavour. We even watched an episode of NCIS in German dub. In Germany all the shows are dubbed from English and the same voice actors are even used for the poppular actors. So Eddie Murphy has his German equivilent, as does Tom Cruise.

The following day I made the 2km hike into town to see if I could find anything interesting. I didn’t have a map so I didn’t want to stray too far, butI managed to find what remains of the older parts of Frankfurt (I guess a lot of it was bombed during WW2). I found the town hall and an open square which they called Roma. I also found an entire street full of museums which I couldn’t afford to view. There must have been at least 20 museums on this street ranging from ceramics to film to architecture. The one place which I did manage to visit was the Gallery of Modern Art which was a very cool architecturally designed building with an awesome exhibition of the works of Burnard Buffet. The walk back saw me find a number of smaller art galleries which all seemed to be closed. Nevermind, I would check them out the next day. That night again I hung out with Stephi, we drank a pot of caramel tea, and I headed off to bed prety early again.

Owl by Burnard Buffet

Roma

It was my last full day in Frankfurt and again, not a whole lot of notable events happened. I went to check out all the small galleries, but they were all closed again with the exception of one which was pretty marginal anyway. I did manage to find a cool group of buskers who played an assortment of Hang drums which was very cool. I would have bought their CD but it was a bit over my budget. I did manage to have a good chat to the drummer though and he just reinforced what I knew about the availability of the instrument, damn! That evening I took Stephi and her flatmate out to dinner at a place called Mr. Pizza as a thank you for letting me stay, and afterward headed into town to try and meet up with Willy who was now in Frankfurt. Unfortunately he was staying in a hotel about 7km out of the city centre and I had just missed the train. It was too late anyway, by the time I had walked back to Stephi’s it was 11:30. Tomorrow was another day of travelling so sleep time it was!

The Art of Fusion Buskers

Hong Kong – Day One

I arrive in Hong Kong’s new airport (which I have just heard is sinking!) after an 11 hour flight from Auckland only to discover that at 10pm, the temperature is still a balmy 29 degrees. If I thought I was going to have to wait until I got to Scandinavia to experience a sauna, then I was wrong. On top of the torrid heat, the humidity must have been the closest to 100 that I had ever experienced… and this was only the beginning.

I was picked up at the airport by Dad’s friend George’s younger sister named Vanessa (and some man who I can only assume was her boyfriend or husband). After an interesting drive along the brightly lit Hong Kong motorway we finally reached Kowloon Peninsula and the neighbourhood of Tsim Sha Tsui where I was to be dropped at the Ramada Hotel. It was nice enough, and the cool air was incredibly refreshing after being outside – I think this is why everyone in Hong Kong is constantly shopping, to keep indoors and stay out of the heat! By the time I got to sleep it was almost 4a.m. NZ time and I was exhausted.

Hotel room view

I woke early to discover that the view from the hotel room was not the prettiest. But that was cool, I wasn’t there to stare out the windows naked. The first thing I did was to explore the local area. I was amazed at the sheer number of both neon signs and indian men chasing me down the street, trying to measure me up for a suit which I ‘could not travel without’.

The day was hot, in fact it was the hottest day that Hong Kong has recorded so far this year. Not only did two people die from heat exhaustion, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it seemed to feel like it was raining. Then I discovered the source. Water all over the ground was puddling up as a result of the constant dripping of apartment air conditioners which were attached high upon the sides of buildings.

I decided it was time to get out of the heat, and after a short walk I found myself at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

 

Hong Kong Museum of Art

I had found my refuge from the inferno outside and was glad to have a seat as well. All that walking (in jandals by the way) was beginning to put a strain on my precious feet. Along side an international exhibition there were galleries showing the history of Chinese calligraphy and also of the importance and evolution of the figure of the horse in Chinese art and culture. Unfortunately I did not not spend much more than 2 hours here as there was much more to be seen and I only had two days.

 

Hong Kong Island

 

My next stop was Hong Kong Island, and to get there I decided to ride the famous Star Ferry across from Kowloon.  After a ten minute sea voyage to rival only Fullers, we were docked at Hong Kong Island Central, Hong Kong’s playground for the rich shopoholic. Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton were all in direct eye view, along with hundred of other shops selling items which I could neither afford nor wanted. None the less, I decided to explore the area and was pleasantly surprised that these super-shops disappeared after a short walk up the hill. Behind this expensive shopping area was the complete opposite, an area full of rich-smelling restaurants and colourful street vendors selling everything from fruit and toys to key cutting and boot polishing services.

 

Street Vendors on Hong Kong Island

Following this hike amoungst the back hills of Hong Kong Central, I decided that I would venture into the subway. I was sweating like something that shouldn’t sweat, so lucky for me the subway stations were air conditioned. With quick decision on the mind, I bought a ticket to Wan Chai, a suburb only a few minutes down the line. May I say here that the Hong Kong subway is the most efficient and easiest public transport system I have ever used (not that I have used many). The main reason for this trip was to visit Golden Buahinia Square and after a short trip and a lot of walking by the means of following signs that did not exist, I was lost. Luckily for me, a woman who worked in property services for a large building was able to direct me in the right direction and in fifteen minutes I had found the square which was built to commemorate the handing over of Hong Kong from the British to the People’s Republic of China. There in the centre stood the Golden Buahinia, and behind it; two red flags, none of which I really took notice of. I think the heat was starting to get to me.

 

Golden Buahinia Square

I had killed enough time now, and it was about time for me to do what I had come to Hong Kong Island for in the first place – to ascend The Peak. The Peak sits high up in the hills behind the bustling city of Hong Kong Island. Home to a small number of serious mountain climbing enthusiasts, The Peak first gained public access in 1888 when some Scottsman by the name of which I can remember decided to run a tramline up to the, well, peak. I decided that there was no better way to experience life as it was than take this tram. The visitor information says that the incline is 27 degrees; it felt to be much more, reminding me of the initial climb of a roller coaster before it launches into madness. Unfortunately for the speed demon inside me, once the tram met the peak, it stopped and everyone got off.

 

The Peak Tram

The next step was to climb to the top of the observation deck. From here you could see what felt like the entirety of Hong Kong city. The view was amazing, and as night fell and I ate an expensive and poorly made Thai red curry, that amazing turned into spectatular – even if I had to purchase a second observation deck ticket.

 

Hong Kong from The Peak

 

Hong Kong from The Peak at Night

I had seen what I had set out for. Hong Kong from above both at day and at night. It was time to call it bedtime for me, and after a short walk to the Central station, followed by a swift subway ride, I was back in Tsim Sha Tsui. Then I was lost. Again. Nevertheless, after almost walking back to the ferry terminal I found my hotel. I was sunburnt, my jandals were as thin as paper and were killing my feet and I was tired as a sloth. The slumber calls.

P.S. If anyone is actually going to read this, don’t expect everything to be that long. I’ve just been killing a day relaxing after being awake an uncountable number of hours. In future I might just pull out the exciting stuff!