Another website about to go live...

2010-08-17T10:10:00.000+01:00

Another website build is about to go out the door... some long hours when I'm doing a full-time contract during the day, but I'm really enjoying getting to grips with Wordpress, and getting back into doing 'public' facing work, rather than the enterprise-y stuff I do during the day (which nobody outside the NZ Govt will ever know about).

Details of the site are on my commercial portfolio site - go take a look. I'll update this post when it goes live.

Using the MyProduct theme from Elegant Themes, graphics from WebTreats ETC, and stock imagery from iStockphoto.

Lomo-tastic

2010-07-10T00:07:00.001+01:00

Finally got around to getting my films from Russia and China developed.
Shot on the antique Lomo 135M I bought in a flea market in Moscow, and a lot of fun trying to interpret the manual!

Cheated a bit, as we used the DSLR as a light meter to work out exposures, but over time I'm hoping to learn a bit better. The Lomo has funny little icons on the focus, apeture and shutterspeed dials that are supposed to help with guessing the correct settings - which don't make much sense anyway! So it's all rather hit an miss.

One cool feature on the 135M is the winding spring, where you can wind it up for ages, and shoot 8 frames in a row without having to wind again. Most of the close up pics are out of focus, so might have to do some experimenting on those.

I have a suspicion the photo lab might have auto-adjusted the colours, as Lomos usually have quite a green/yellow cast, but they still look great! Looking at the cd versions, most have a slightly wonky top edge, looks kinda cool tho.

Rest of the series are on my flickr account here.

Naked Vet Calendar

2010-06-07T04:09:00.001+01:00

In Feburary this year, I worked my biggest assignment so far (in photography anyway!), shooting an entire calendar for the Massey Uni Vet Students. Shot over a weekend, we had a hilarious time, rounding up animals, dodging cow poo and carefully positioning props!

They do a calendar every year, to raise funds for their 'halfway day', to mark half way through their vet degrees. 10% of funds this year are going to Paw Justice also.

I've put a few images up on my portfolio site. Here's one of my favourites - didn't go in the calendar, but has been used on their website. Calendars are available to order on their website for a short time at NZ$16 each (incl. postage - NZ or international). Publicity has been great also - on TVNZ Breakfast show (Paul Henry was rather mean to one of the models!), The Dominion Post, stuff.co.nz and other NZ newspapers and TV shows.

Yet Another Theme change

2010-06-07T03:54:00.005+01:00

Changed the theme on this blog yet again...
Latest theme is called 'Translucence' and came originally from Webtreats as a Wordpress theme, and was converted to a Blogger template by bloggerstyles.com. Thanks!

One day I will get around to creating my own theme, but when you're working full time, and doing paid work 'after hours', it can get a little hard to find that extra 4-5 hours to design and code up a whole theme.

Brew labels

2010-05-29T23:56:00.000+01:00

Just worked on some labels for our own home brew, which should be ready for 'sampling' (yeah right!) in a week or so.

Fonts - both from 1001freefonts.com: Artistamp Medium and Bleeding Cowboys.

New reading

2010-05-29T00:07:00.002+01:00

Found an interesting new blog to read yesterday from Abakas - a testing company in Boston. Lots of interesting Ruby stuff, and just testing in general. I agree with a lot of it, and a lot is stuff I've been thinking about anyway :)

Alternative Context Images - new site

2010-05-02T01:51:00.001+01:00

I've FINALLY set up a new portfolio site for my photography work - at http://alternativecontext.com.

Go check it out :) Using the lovely ePhoto theme, on a wordpress install. Content is still a little thin, but I'll keep uploading over the next week.

Most images are available for sale, just email me for details on pricing and licensing.

Mac OSX Snow Leopard and SMB mounts... more!

2010-04-05T05:20:00.001+01:00

Yet another post on mounting smb shares on Mac OSX...

Now I have a Snow Leopard machine, I had a little hassle getting reconnected to our network drives, and had totally forgotten how to connect multiple shares from one server with different passwords...

The Mac help doesn't help on this (how ironic!), and a bit of googling for the smbmount commands made me remember how to do it :)

Using 'Connect to Server' in Finder (CMD+K), enter your smb share in the format: smb://username:password@servername/sharename
Repeat for each share you have
To make life easier, set your server up with static IP's and edit the file found in /etc/hosts (or create it if there isn't one)
Go to your hard disk in Finder, and the share will be sitting there - drag it into your devices list
To have the drives mount next time you log in, go add them to your login prefs

Easy peasy once you know how, huh :) Does mean your passwords aren't hidden away in the Keychain - anyone have a better method?

Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies

2010-03-28T07:14:00.003+01:00

As a birthday present, I was given "A Treasury of New Zealand Baking", a fantastic baking book gathering a stack of traditional and not-so-traditional baking recipes from NZ chefs.

I made my first recipe from the book today - "Classic Chocolate-Chip Cookie Sandwich", and my chief taste tester seems to like them :) Will have to drop a few over to my other taste-tester out in Petone in the next few days. I followed the recipe (which is by Al Brown), almost exactly, just substituting cream for cream fraiche when making the chocolate sauce for the 'glue'.

Assembly line in progress.

The finished product (yum!).

Disappointment...

2010-03-22T05:50:00.003Z

Strangely, for all the good things I have to say about Apple computer products, I'm giving Apple service a big thumbs down.

I have an old(ish) MacBook, that I'm preparing to sell, so hoped to get a small crack in the corner of the top case repaired. For the first time ever, after owning three MacBook/MacBook Pros, two iPhones, and various accessories over about four years, I've needed support from Apple, and found it rather lacking.

I've read hundreds of threads online about people waltzing into Apple Stores, and the Genius Bar replacing top cases free of charge, no matter the age. I went into the Regent St store in London mid last year, and they also said they'll replace it free of charge, but they had a 3-4 week repair wait time as they were full up. So I thought no probs, I'll get it sorted once we're in NZ.

But.... I've taken my MacBook into an Authorized Repair Centre, where I've had nothing but bad service. They won't repair the crack, and refused to call Apple Care themselves to confirm. After spending an hour on the phone with Apple Care myself, I finally got a case raised, where they confirm they'll fix the crack. But... only if I have a receipt proving it's under 3 years old.

And of all the hundreds of receipts we have archived, this is the only receipt I can't find.

I'm really disappointed with the fact Genius Bars in stores can repair things at their own discretion, but in NZ we don't have Genius Bars, or even Apple Stores, so we're stuck with whatever the repair center say. And we have to pay for them to do nothing also....

Apple, I'm still an avid fan, and own an awful lot of your products, but I'm giving the huge thumbs down on the support options available for us poor cousins out in NZ.

Some threads where people have confirmed they've got this fix done:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7011672

http://babygotmac.com/a/macbook-case-cracks-on-wristpad/

AppleInsider article about this issue: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/08/apple_addressing_cracks_on_white_macbooks_casings.html

Mac and WEP

2010-03-21T04:48:00.004Z

After a few minutes of frustration, I found out the hard way that Mac devices don't like WEP passwords...

Symptom:

Mac and iPhones will refuse to connect to a Wifi network with WEP encryption enabled, says 'invalid password'

Remedies:

Use a different security scheme (ie WPA2)
Enter the WEP generated key into the password (something long and impossible to remember, usually a random alphanumeric string)
Scream a lot

And don't hassle me for using WEP, we didn't find out that Netgear devices using Wireless Repeating functions only support WEP until after we purchased the first router and tried messing about.... something else to gripe about!.

trading away

2010-02-22T21:58:00.003Z

I've been using Trade Me (NZ's equivalent of eBay) for a whole lot of buying and selling since we've been back - got a lot of furniture from there cheaper than the 2nd hand stores. Being a seasoned eBay'er in the UK, I'm missing a lot of the eBay functionality that I think Trade Me could definitely use...

PayPal integration - in eBay, once your auction is done, all the payments are taken care of in PayPal, and it's all kept linked up with the auction status in eBay, so very easy to see what's going on. Trade Me doesn't allow credit card processing until you've got 50 feedback, which takes a while (see my feedback gripe below), and bank processing is a bit frustrating to work out when there are lots of payments coming in.
Buyers here aren't great at providing feedback - of the 8 auctions I've just finished as a seller, none of the buyers have placed any feedback. Annoyingly, this puts me further and further away from being able to use the credit card payment system... a 'default' feedback of 'good' after say 10 days of the auction closing would be great.
No third party apps for creating and managing auctions - instead everything is lumped into a single 'selling' or 'sold' page on their website. I used GarageSale when trading on eBay to create and manage auctions, which of course integrated with eBay and PayPal so everything moved through a nice workflow and was easy to see what's going on at any time
No HTML or markup in auctions! Again, on eBay I used GarageSale a lot, which had some nice templates for auctions, making it easy to provide lots of info, but in a tidy readable manner, and also host images on other sites.

Apart from those gripes, Trade Me is great for buying and selling. It's driven most of the second hand stores in the Wellington region out of business, but makes for some great bargains for buyers, if you're willing to sit out an auction. I picked up a lovely (slightly infested with borer, but hey!) antique Oak Dresser for a teeny NZ$30 last week, just needed some no-borer spray, and needs a bit of a sand and revarnish.

My tips for sellers:

Photos photos photos! Spend 5 to 10 minutes getting a GOOD photo of your item - move furniture to somewhere uncluttered (against a wall, or outside if there is nowhere else), put small items on a table or on the floor with nothing around them, and get some good light on whatever you are selling, so buyers can actually see it. Get LOTS of photos, and spend the few extra cents to post multiple photos where needed, and a gallery display so the photo shows up in searches. Rotate your images up the right way - I've gotten a sore neck from looking at sideways photos :)
Details... buyers want detail, no matter how boring it is to type in, get as much info as possible in the listing. Has it had borer or treatment for borer? What condition is your item? Links to specifications if you don't want to type 'em in.
Reserves - be realistic on reserves. If you bought it for $1000 new a year ago, it's probably already lost 50% of it's value. Don't moan about what YOU paid for it, as buyers will only pay what it's worth if it's second hand, and not vintage or a premium item.
Answer your email! Be on the computer when your auction ends, and get quickly onto the buyer to finalise payment and delivery/pickup. I've had auctions where it's been DAYS after the scheduled end before a seller emails re pickups etc, and it's almost made me want to cancel the auction. Also answer any questions in a timely manner - it could be the answer that prompts a sale or Buy it Now.

So, happy trading! I'll be posting some more books up over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for my listings :).

Home, home again!

2010-02-22T21:20:00.006Z

Long time no posts... we arrived back in NZ mid December, and have been flat out sorting somewhere to live, jobs, visiting everyone and generally winding down.

Yeah I haven't finished the blog yet - still need to do entries for Shanghai and Hong Kong some time in the future....

Now we've finished travelling, my posts are going to be much more mundane again, back towards tech, internet, photography and general NZ and Wellington based rants. I expect to lose any readers I had previously, so farewell if you choose to go, and welcome if you're planning on putting up with my rambling.

Xian

2009-12-04T09:33:00.008Z

We took a train out to Xian which is close to the Terracotta Army which we planned on visiting. Xian is a big city and has a few sights worth seeing, like the Bell Tower where we saw a traditional Chinese music performance and the Muslim Quarter with lots of markets, street food and the Great Mosque. The pollution was pretty bad the whole time we were here, and really bad on the day we left.

The Great Mosque, a very Chinese looking mosque

A lady doing some cloth spinning

The outside of the Army museum, you can see the pollution drifting around at the back

Kerry at the Terracotta Army

Rach at the Terracotta Army

A clay dude

Inspection time

A General, maybe

Clay horses pulling stuff

More photos here

Next up Shanghai

Beijing

2009-12-04T09:16:00.005Z

20-28th November

Beijing is a cool place, probably one of the best places we visited in the whole time we've been away. There's plenty of stuff to see and just dealing with the cultural differences keeps you busy enough, mostly it's a bit of laugh but it can also be frustrating. We took in most of the big tourist sights and spent some time just messing about. It was actually the longest time we've spent anywhere in the last 5 months.

A couple of shaggy, tired looking tourists in the Forbidden City

Rach at the Temple of Heaven

Self Portrait on the Great Wall, about an hour later the sky was thick with pollution

Getting down at the Temple of Heaven

The Hutong where we were staying, bikes are the main way of getting shit done in China

More photos on Flickr: here

Next up Xian and the Terracotta Warriors!

Mongolia

2009-12-04T08:57:00.007Z

16 - 18 November

After hitting Ulaan Baatar early in the morning we messed about in town for a while and then headed out to a Ger camp for a couple of days.

Buddhist Monastery in Ulaan Baatar

Sükhbaatar Square, Ulaan Baatar

A Lion, eating a chain

The Ger camp was permanent rather than the usual nomadic camps and was about an hours drive from Ulaan Baatar across some dodgy highways and then snowy fields. It was pretty cold and each Ger has a coal burning stove inside that keeps you warm. Rach went horse riding with the nomads who had setup camp about 1 km away and we visited them in the afternoon.

Rach about to ride satan's offspring

The dogs sleep next to the doors where all the heat escapes

They're not all that tall in Mongolia

The train out of Ulaan Baatar at first was snowy plains and then slowly changed into the barren desert of the Gobi. At the border crossing they lift the entire train off the wheels(with everybody on board) and replace them with the wider gauge for the Chinese tracks.

A Ger camp seen from the train

Desert

Here's us looking weird on the train to Beijing

Goodbye Mongolia

More photos here and here

Next up Beijing

Trans Mongolian

2009-12-04T08:47:00.004Z

The next train was between Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia. We had some trouble as we got on this train, some other kindly people had taken our seats so the cabin attendent moved us somewhere else. However the train is jam packed full of locals carrying heaps of shitty stuff to trade on the way and they took offence at us being in their cabin so after lots of yelling and some pushing, shoving, and so on we got moved into the 1st class wagon. The only difference between Kupe and 1st class is that each cabin is 2 beds instead of 4. The wagon is still full of traders and their gear. At Ulaan Ude everybody piles off the train for 30 minutes with their wares and trys to sell as much of their crap as possible. Even the cabin attendants set up a stall selling silks, it's all a bit comical really.

Traders selling their shit in Ulaan Ude

Not much else happened on this train, the border crossing takes about 6 hours but customs and immigration mostly ignored us to concentrate on the traders. After we got into Mongolia and on our way again the carpets in the hallway got pulled up and heaps of gear got pulled out, we assumed this was stuff they didn't want to declare/pay tax on. Everybody must know it goes on but nobody cares.

More photos here

Next up Mongolia

Siberia

2009-12-04T08:20:00.007Z

12 - 14 November

Listvyanka

After arriving in Irkutsk we headed out to Listvyanka which is on the shore of Lake Baikal, the largest body of freshwater and the deepest lake in the world. Apparently it holds 1/5th of the worlds freshwater. It's about 1 hour on icy/snowy roads and was flippin' cold, and snowing. We visited the local musuem and had a bit of a walk around the village before heading for the relative comfort of our heated hotel.

Listvyanka Village

They have 1L beers in Russia. You hear that! 1L!

The next day we talk a walk to see if we could get a better view of the lake, it was somewhat successful.

Lake Baikal

Rach throwing a snowball.

In the afternoon we headed off for some dog sledding. We don't have any photos of that which is a bummer but it was good fun and exteremely effin' cold.

This isn't a sled dog, he seemed to be guarding some bricks.

Irkutsk
We stayed in Irkutsk overnight before catching the train into Mongolia. Irkutsk is quite a big city but doesn't have much going for it tourist wise, we visited a museum of some guy who had been shipped out to Siberia for being involved in a revolution in the 19th century. That's how interesting it gets. It was about -18c as we walked around.

The Angora river, the only outlet of Baikal

More photos on Flickr: here and here

Next up the Trans Mongolian train.

Trans-Siberian Leg 1: Moscow to Irkusk (Siberia)

2009-12-04T07:42:00.006Z

8-12 November

Our train left Moscow late on Sunday night, and it was just starting to rain as we walked up the platform for the train to Irkutsk. We were quite excited and keen to get on the train and get going, but nothing happens without the say of the Provodnitsa (Female carriage attendant), they're defintely in charge.

Don't upset the Provodnitsa!

This train takes 4 nights and 3 days through Russia and across Siberia ending up in Irkutsk. The scenery is basically snowy forest and man did it start getting cold outside. The train stops every few hours and you have time to jump off and grab food/beer etc. It was -20 at some of the stops, and snowing most of the time.

We were travelling in 'Soft Sleeper' (2nd Class), which is a cabin with 4 bunk beds, on the 'Bailkal', a reasonably new and comfortable train. Most of the time we lived on 2 min Noodles, cooked in boiling water (which is available on all trains in Russia/China), and copious cups of tea (black and green), soup, and the odd local snack from a station - dried fish, sausage, salmon and potatoes, and at one stop, a local unpasteurised beer. At some stops, we had enough time to dash outside to see old Communist statues and murals outside the station entrances, tho a lot have disappeared recently.

3 days is a long time on a train, but we got by with a lot of reading, some rather hilarious (painful?!) conversations with our compartment-mate (a Major in the Paratroopers in the Russian Army, who teaches unarmed combat!) and one night of vodka drinking.

Nearing Siberia, we passed into Asia, and started crossing frozen rivers, which was a sign of the cold to come..

Arrived in Irkusk in the early morning, and got picked up and driven out to Lake Bikal, which I'll save for the next blog post.

Russia! St Petersburg and Moscow

2009-12-04T07:24:00.003Z

4 - 8 November

We had originally planned on getting the train through Belarus to St Petersburg (from Warsaw), but it didn't work out with our visas so we ended up flying in instead. This is a great city, unfortunately we only had 1 whole day to see it. It's not really enough, but we managed to get into the Hermitage (huuuuge State Museum inside the Summer Palace) for free and wandered about in there for a few hours. We spent the afternoon walking around the streets and shopping for a Russian fur hat for Rach's dad - found a nice one at an Army Surplus store, so it's the real deal, including the Soviet Star hat pin!

Our train left at 1am for Moscow, so we pretty much slept the whole way until we turned up at 9am. As part of our Trans Siberian train we had a tour guide show us around Moscow for 3 hours, it was a bit much after just getting off the train but ended up being really good.

We visited Food Store #1 which was the first state food store of the Soviet Union, or so we were lead to believe. It was an amazingly opulent place, we picked up some caviar, vodka, and blini (surprisingly cheap, tho the caviar was red not black).

We walked down the main street of Moscow, past the Bolshoi, and ended up outside the Kremlin in Red Square.

In the morning we went out to a flea market to see if we could find a camera for Rach. After some bargaining and failed attempts we were successful and picked up a Russian Lomo 135 M for a pretty good price, which we still don't know if it works properly as nobody in China will process films... maybe in Hong Kong? We're having fun trying to use it - it has both ordinary f-stops and shutter speeds, but no light meter, so you have to guess or use their funny 'calculator' (pictures of weather conditions and scenes you might be shooting) to take a guess at exposures, which is half the fun! This model has a pretty cool 'spring' winder feature, where you can wind it up to take 8 frames in a row, unlike most 35 mm cameras which have to be wound for each frame.

In the evening we went to the Moscow State Circus which was kind of weird. As we walked in somebody had been mauled by one of the tigers that you can have your photo taken with, we skipped that attraction. The whole show is on an ice rink and was quite good, up until the performing seals voided their bowels all over the ice anyway. No photos of that as you weren't allowed cameras in the theatre, probably for the best. One of the best acts was a Jaguar or Panther (big black cat), that was misbehaving, so the handler just ended up ditching the cat and skating around herself in the end!

In the morning we headed down to the Kremlin and visited Lenin's tomb. This was a totally weird experience, you basically have to walk through the mausoleum following a whole bunch of unwritten rules that the guards will enforce if you happen to break one, like putting your hands in your pockets or stopping to take a look for more than 2 seconds. It was all a bit comical really, and Lenin was looking a bit green as well. It turned out the Kremlin was closed, so we didn't get to go inside which was a bummer. We did go to the Armoury though which contains all kinds of state treasures.

More photos on flickr here - St Petersburg, Moscow.

Next up, the Trans-Siberian train!

Poland

2009-12-04T07:16:00.003Z

29 Oct - 3 Nov

We headed off to Krakow (Krakau) in Poland. This is a pretty nice old town, as it wasn't bombed at all during WWII, and we spent a day just wandering about looking at stuff, some cool old buildings and what not. Took a free walking tour around the city and Jewish Quarter, which actually turned out to be totally free, with no hassles for tips or promoting shops etc.

We also went out to Auschwitz and visited the concentration camps there. They were really busy with heaps of people taking photos of incinerators and so forth, talking on phones, and big groups of school kids shouting and pushing, which seems quite odd to us. We're not going to say much about the concentration camps, as it's somewhere you need to visit yourself rather than hear about second hand.

We took the train up to Warsaw which isn't as nice as Krakau since it was almost completely destroyed during WWII. They've rebuilt much of the old town in the same style but it doesn't really capture the feeling that Krakau has. It is quite a cool place though, and we had plenty of fun visiting the funny bars and pubs that were close to where we were staying. Went out with some guys staying at the hostel, and ended up with three slightly mad Polish people, drinking in the funny little shack bars just off Novy Swiat (sp?) across the road from our hostel. Madness ensued, which we escaped around 3AM. Warsaw has heaps of stencil graffiti - a lot of it political, some just funny.

We then had a couple of days before our flight to St. Petersburg so jumped on the train down to Lublin, this is a really boring place so there isn't much to tell. Freeeezing cold there, and it took a while to find a pub that actually looked open - turns out all the bars etc look closed from the outside, but head inside and it's almost as cold and dark as outside, but there is beer. We spent a day getting out to Kazimierz which was mostly trying to find one of the crazy mini buses that they use in Poland to get around in. It was also quite a boring place - pretty old market town, but nothing going on as we were in the off-season.

Back to Warsaw for a night, and then flew to St Petersburg.

More photos on flickr here - Krakow, Warsaw, Lublin, Kazimeriz.

Next stop, St Petersburg (Russia!).

Prague, Czech Republic

2009-12-04T06:58:00.003Z

24-25 October (we know, over a month ago... oops!)

We've been to Prague before, so not sure why we decided to pass through again as it wasn't really on the way. Given we'd seen most of the sites before we decided to head out to a church which has a lot of human bones on display, about an hour out of Prague in the town of Kutna Hora. Very creepy.

In the afternoon we messed about in town, not much to tell really. Wandered over the Charles Bridge (which is being repaved, so a total traffic jam to walk over), had lunch and wandered back again. Had a beer in a bar

More photos on flickr here.

Next stop, Poland.

Budapest - Beers, Baths and Slight madness

2009-10-26T21:31:00.007Z

21 - 24 October

We arrived in Budapest on a Wednesday night, expecting a quiet night in at the hostel, after a quick walk down to the river, and out for dinner. Rach retired early, while Kerry went out for a few 'quiet' beers with a few people from the hostel (Bubble Hostel, best hostel in ages due to the great people! More on that later), only for them to turn up around 2AM, giggling and not able to look each other in the eye... turns out one of the hostel mates divulged a LOT more information about her personal habits than anyone was expecting. Much hilarity ensued, and everyone kept giggling about it for the next few days...

Anyway, the next day we went for a walk up Gelert hill on the 'Buda' side, to get a great panaromic view of Budapest, and for Rach to cough her lungs out. Got an asian tourist to take a pic of us - she looked terrified to hold the SLR, and I thought she was going to drop it, hence the slight grimace on the pic below!

Gelert Hill - worth the hike

DON'T DROP THE CAMERA! (note my pained smile...!)

We then headed back into Pest, and up to the Terror Museum. For a very depressing subject (it housed both Nazi and Communist interrogation and terror squads), it was a well done museum, with lots of loud rock music and information in English. Back to the hostel again for a few more beers, then headed out about 9.30ish for drinks at a 'Ruin bar' in the Jewish quarter called Mamoush (sp?). Great place - basically an abandoned apartment building from the Communist days, which they've opened up a few apartments and the central courtyard, and grabbed furniture from skips/side of the street. We ended up sitting in someone's old lounge room, right by the bar which was in the kitchen.

Next day was October 23rd, which is Republic day in Hungary, celebrating the various uprisings against the Communist government. Sam from the hostel was doing some reading on the 1956 uprising, and found out it started just a few doors down the street from the hostel, and there were tanks firing on protesters on the next street. As a lot of stuff was closed, we headed up to Szechenyi Thermal Baths for a couple of hours of soaking in various temperature mineral baths - the outdoor ones were pretty nice, it was cold out, and boiling hot in the pool (38 deg C), so very refreshing while dashing about to the next pool.

Hummus Bar. Sexy.

The afternoon was spent holed up at the hostel watching movies, internet, cups of tea and beers etc. Funnily, Sam from the hostel was on the shared hostel PC reading some news sites, when a trojan/virus thing decided to activate and kept popping up adult web sites and taking over the antivirus systems. K and I spent a few hours messing about cleaning it off, but we were all kept giggling over some of the sites that came up. Again, beers in the hostel, then out to a club later on with Brownyn (the other girl from the Hostel) to check out some Hungarian music.

Budapest is a huge city, and we only saw a small part, but what we saw was fun. Nightlife is great there - a lot of hostel mates were out all night.

More photos on flickr here.

Next stop, Prague (Czech Republic).

Slovakia

2009-10-26T21:18:00.003Z

19-20 October

After Vienna, we jumped on the train for a short hop to Bratislava in Slovakia (about 60km from Vienna), for a couple of nights. Rach was still struggling with a horrid cold thing, so was pretty grumpy about stomping around. We headed into the Old Town for lunch at the 'Slovak Pub', where they have lots of traditional Slovakian food - we had Garlic soup served in a hollowed out loaf of bread, bean soup, Goulash Soup and Tortellini like dumplings, and local beer and Cola (Kofola - kind of like a anniseeidy flavored Coke).

Tram

The rest of that day and the next were spent cruising the streets of Bratislava - walking the Old Town which is full of small winding streets and lovely squares, and up to the Castle which is closed, but can walk the battlements for a good view.

Kerry getting rather artistic on the camera

A beer or two went down at the hostel bar too, which was in the basement, and themed like the horror movie 'Hostel', which I have a feeling was filmed in Bratislava (anyone know?). There are heaps of quite comical statues placed around the Old Town. Funniest thing we saw was a quite nice looking dog (not a stray), hanging out at a Tram Stop, and then jumping on the tram - everyone was looking around for it's owner, but we think it was hitching a free ride on it's own! Must've had an important meeting.

So that's how it feels on the other side of the lens...

More photos are on flickr here.

Next stop, Budapest in Hungary.

Austria

2009-10-18T20:11:00.011+01:00

We left our brief visit to Germany behind and headed for the alps, Innsbruck. The scenery of this town is worth the visit alone. It is surrounded by mountains which were snow covered and there was a light snow falling for the whole time we were there, none of it was sticking to the ground fortunately though.

Moody, the sky, not the girl

Innsbruck

We did a whole bunch of sightseeing and the usual stuff, climbing up a tower in the centre of town which used to be used to spot fires, visited the city museum, visited Schloss Ambras which has an interesting Curiosities collection(stuffed crocodiles, stuffed sharks, and lots of paintings of people covered with hair, dwarfs and giants etc. etc.). We also went to the ski jump at Bergisel were some young french kids were training so we were able to watch them jumping, it was very impressive and I think you'd need to be brave to do it the first time. Surprisingly, they were jumping on artificial grass, which is how they train all year until the snow comes and covers it in a 30cm layer.

The ski jump

Later on we took the train to Salzburg. In the morning we took off for some sightseeing in light snow. We walked up to the castle, Hohensalzburg Fortress, above the town which gives a good 360 degree panoramic view. We continued walking along the hills above the town before heading back into town for lunch and a visit to the Katacombs. Happily, we managed to avoid all showings of 'The Sound of Music' at the hostel, and didn't even spot any fans around the city. Lucky escape...! It was late afternoon by this time so we went back to the hostel for the happy hour and bumped into a couple from Perth who we'd seen in Innsbruck. It turns out they were taking almost the same route as us between Munich and Krakau, but a day or so behind. We had a few beers and traded stories etc.

A castle on a hill above a town

Maitai river

In the morning Rach woke up with a cold and a fever before we packed up and headed for Vienna. We were going to do some sightseeing and stuff in the afternoon but decided to take a break and rest up instead.

In the morning we went out to Schloss Schönbrunn which is a palace built by the Hapsburgs to rival Versailles. We took a tour around the state rooms and then walked around the gardens. In the afternoon we went back into town and visited the Central Cafe which is a well know coffee shop for some coffee/tea and cakes.

Beaming with enthusiasm over the prospect of more old stuff in rooms

These stick people are everywhere, somebody should tell them they're walking on a footpath not the North Face of the Eiger

A thing you can climb up but not a thing where you can get a cup of tea from the cafe.

Afterwards we took a few wrong turns on the local transport but managed to finally get to the MAK which is a contemporary art gallery/design thing. It's quite a weird museum/gallery and it has lots of exhibits of things which aren't contemporary at all. We did enjoy it though even though Kerry got told off for trying to take photos.

More photos: Innsbruck :: Salzburg :: Vienna

Next up: Bratislava.