Dublin, Ireland

Well, the plan for Dublin was to spend a couple of days at the end of August on my own exploring, having said goodbye to Mum and Dad in Bristol, before I headed to Lyon at the start of September. I got to my hostel Thursday night and slept the night there, but in the morning, totally out of the blue, I had a seizure and was taken to hospital in an ambulance. I spent the next week there (seeing a different side of Ireland!) as they ran lots of tests. It was alright actually! The hospital food was pretty good (potatoes with every lunch and dinner of course, and so much white tea!), and the nurses and doctors took good care of me. There were some great, generous people in the ward with me: I ended up with a bottle of 7Up, lollies, chocolates, fruit, books to read and even a mobile top-up voucher from various people! I loved that the Irish really do say things like ‘grand’, ‘cheers’ and ‘thanks a million’ all the time, and are quite like Aussies! I was able to get in touch with Mum and Dad, who were in Israel, and Katie and Em and Paul back home, and let Meg and Jonathan and my Lyon uni know I’d be getting there late. Even though I didn’t have anyone I knew in Dublin, the friendly nurses and other patients, as well as regular calls from home, meant I didn’t get too lonely or bored. My first hospital stay was actually quite fun!

Mum flew back from Israel since they wouldn’t discharge me without someone to look after me. At the end of the week, the neurologists diagnosed me with epilepsy – which sounds way worse than it actually is! I’ll be on medication for the next while, and need to be a bit careful in looking after myself, but the main advice they gave me was to keep living my life. So that’s what I’m doing. After a couple of days of decision-making as to whether I should return to Oz or continue to Lyon as planned, with a night back at the youth hostel and another at a nice-ish hotel, Mum and I left Dublin on Sunday. We flew to Lyon to stay with Meg and Jonathan and begin my process of settling in Lyon.

Wick, England

We spent a couple of days staying at a B&B in Wick, near Bristol and Bath, seeing that area before we split up. We spent an arvo wandering around Bath, seeing its Abbey, river and baths (haha). We drove into Wales for a day: saw the amazing ruins of Tintern Abbey, and crazy place names like LLandogo – where else but Wales?! And had dinner with some old friends of Mum and Dad’s in Bristol. Then Mum and Dad headed back to London to fly to Israel, and I killed time in Bristol for a day before flying to Dublin Thursday night.

Bicester, England

The next two and a bit weeks, almost til the end of August, were even more relaxing, staying in a great, big house with a beautiful garden, in a small town just out of Oxford. We spent lots of time reading, and I organised lots of stuff for France. We went into Oxford a few times, to see Wendy, a Melburnian studying theology at Wycliffe Hall. We had lunch with her at The Eagle and Child – where The Inklings, including CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien used to hang out weekly, and where I had the best Pimms ever. Still trying to work out what the guy put in it. She took us around some of the colleges and parts of the University and into churches, including the places used as the Great Hall and infirmery in Harry Potter! We went for drives through the nearby Cotswolds, and went to numerous pubs, including some that were used in the Morse TV show. We saw Blenheim Palace, the home of the Dukes of Marlborough, and went shopping at the Bicester Village outlet (a top and pair of jeans for £10/$20 each!). We started watching season one of West Wing, and now understand why everyone is hooked on it! I signed up to the local library and read the third Twilight book, borrowed some of The Kooks, a Brit band, and a Brit teenage movie called Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – appropriate since we were in England, I thought. Good times all round!

Raynes Park, London

The next two and a half weeks we spent seeing some more of London and chilling out some more, at Matt and Anna’s place, as they were in North America. We saw the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library. We explored the law area of Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn and the Royal Courts of Justice – stumbling upon a free chamber concert and an interesting bail application for suspected terrorists. Richmond Park is in the suburbs of London, but is huge, with deer and woods that feel totally disconnected from the city nearby. Kensington Rooftop Gardens were amazing: beautiful designs, as well as grass, trees, water and flamingos seven storeys up! We saw Les Misérables in the West End, and wandered down to Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square afterwards at midnight. We checked out Borough Market, and I went to the alternative Camden Market.

One of my favourite places in London is Speakers Corner, where anyone can literally get up on a stand and speak about whatever they like. It’s particularly alive on Sunday afternoons, and I went a couple of times. There are always a couple of Muslims and multiple Christians, as well as some Socialists, angry people and weirdos. Interesting melting pot of ideas! Another favourite thing of mine was seeing Scott, from Swing Patrol in Melbourne, up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, as part of an art installation. Each hour for two months a different person was put up on the plinth, to do whatever they liked. Scott advertised Swing Patrol in London, with music blaring and him dancing on the plinth, and London Swing Patrol on the ground below him, dancing away too. Awesome!

We visited All Souls and Holy Trinity Brompton churches (very different from each other!) and St Lukes Wimbledon Park with Matt and Anna. And of course, we tapped in to their DVD collection too: The Bourne Identity, Rage in Placid Lake and Bonhoeffer. We went a few times to the BIGGEST Tescos supermarket ever – it went on forever and even had an upstairs and a café inside. We were so overwhelmed that we just found what we needed and got out of there! We enjoyed English strawberries, which are so much tastier than Aussie ones. We had lunch out with Andy, Kim and Jonny, and dinner at our place with Sally, a Melbourne girl living in London from Mum and Dad’s CU days. Dad celebrated his birthday with a crazy day of picking Manna and the twins up from the airport, racing to pick up the hire car before they closed and minding the girls for the arvo while Matt and Anna recovered from jetlag.

We spent a few days in our last week travelling down to Kent and Surrey, south of London, to see places there. Hever Castle was owned by the Boleyns, Chartwell House was Winston Churchill’s home for most of his adult life, Leeds Castle has been inhabited by various aristocratic families through the last centuries, Knole is a house with huge grounds, right in the middle of Sevenoaks and Sissinghurst has a beautiful garden created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband. We stayed with Gillian and Humphrey, friends of Mum’s parents, for a night in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Lewisham, London

For the next week, July 16-23, Mum, Dad and I stayed in the flat of our English friends, Andy and Kim, as they holidayed in Spain. Once we’d put Katie and Em on the plane, straight away we kicked off with a tour of Parliament House by Matt, an Aussie friend living in London, then collapsed of exhaustion after a crazy five weeks. We spent the week seeing some of London, but we realised we could walk more slowly, which was exciting! We’d all already seen a fair bit of London, so there was less pressure to do everything. We explored Little Venice (London’s own canal system), Regents Park and nearby Greenwich, including the Meridian line. We had lunch in Chinatown and walked through Soho, and happened to have lunch at a pub near Lords as the Third Ashes Test was ending – the one Australia lost. We visited St Helens again, this time chatting to William Taylor and Dick Lucas. We spent plenty of time watching some of Andy and Kim’s extensive DVD collection, including Amelie, Elizabethtown, Closer, Kate & Leopold, Spooks, Gladiator and Ricky Gervais. Who needs to see London anyway?!

Paris, France

We stayed in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, in the house of the Mullins’, missios from NSW. We covered lots of ground in our five days, including Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysées. Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter are my favourite parts of Paris from last time I was there. But I also thoroughly enjoyed whiling away a sunny Sunday afternoon with Katie and Dad in laidback chairs in the Tuileries garden, and the Musée de l’Orangerie. Riding bikes around the Grand Canal at Chateau de Versailles was a highlight for all of us, as were the Bastille Day fireworks around the Tour Eiffel. Katie and Mum’s birthdays happened to fall on our last day in Paris, so we had a huge day celebrating. It included the Musée d’Orsay, shopping, lunch at a pub in St Germain, seeing the newly released Harry Potter 6 movie, and climbing the Tour Eiffel at night – awesome! We made sure we savoured plenty of baguettes and brie/camembert, and yummy patisseries. I enjoyed getting a chance to practice my French before starting uni there, but it sure made me realise how tiring it will be operating in French all the time, particularly for the first couple of weeks. At the end of our Paris time, we headed back to London, and put Katie and Em on the plane home, ending our five weeks travelling as a family. Was sad to see them go, but a huge relief to slow down after a fairly fast pace through Europe.