Corfu, Greece

July 4 and 5 were a crazy couple of days travelling to Corfu, a Greek island. We drove from Salzburg to Rome all Saturday, took an overnight train to Brindisi in Italy, caught a ferry to Corfu and then a van to Agios Gordios, the town we stayed in on the island. We survived it all, but the train was pretty revolting: stinking hot, dirty, noisy, cramped and artificially lit throughout the night. We got some sleep, but what with the long stops where our compartment heated up, the smoker, the dog, the baby and the French horn player… seriously, Italian trains! Let’s just say we really appreciated a shower and bed when we got to our excellent apartment on Corfu. We spent the next 3 days basically hanging out at the beach – it was beautifully hot! We had all our meals on our patio, and played cards and read there during siesta and into the night. We had lots of fetta cheese, gyros (their name for souvlakis, except with fries inside too – Ari would love them!), huge Greek donuts and lemon juice (yep, as a drink on its own – actually really good!). We speak no Greek, and still don’t even after 3 days there, which is a bit shameful. The worst thing about Greece are the toilet customs – you don’t want to know. Also, despite scrupulously making sure I was in the shade of the umbrella the whole time we were at the beach, one day I got badly sunburnt. Still red and peeling. Would have been great to spend more time chilling out in Greece, especially since we had to repeat the whole huge travelling thing. We took a taxi then a ferry to Italy, spent plenty of waiting time in Brindisi, caught another overnight train, flew from Rome to London, stayed a night in a dodgy London hotel, then took the Eurostar to Paris the next morning. That’s 2½ days travelling. With plenty of time to kill in between each stage. At least, thankfully, we had upgraded the overnight train to 1^st class, which was amazing! We had horizontal beds with doonas, air con, control of light and noise, and complimentary hand towels, water and soap! Sure made a difference.

Salzburg, Austria

On 1 July we drove over the Alps up to Salzburg, where we stayed in the upper storey of a farmhouse just outside the city for 2 days. The apartment was lovely, and also meant that we got to know the family, with whom we had drinks on our first night. They had alcoholic drinks, unlike the beer that Dad managed to buy in a supermarket – who’s ever heard of non-alcoholic beer?! We saw lots of Salzburg in one day, including the beautiful Old Town, the Hohensalzburg fortress, Hellbrun palace with its trick fountains and the Mirabell Gardens with some people doing traditional dancing in old-style costumes. We saw a couple of places used in the Sound of Music: the cemetery where the Von Trapps fled the Nazis and the pavilion where the boy and girl sing ‘I am 16 going on 17’! We made sure we ate savoury and sweet pretzels (the big bread kind, not the small snack kind) and bosna (an Austrian hotdog). The other day we spent just over the border in Bad Reichenhall, Germany, with some friends of friends who we’d never met before. They were amazingly generous: we meant to go just for breakfast, but they ended up showing us around in the arvo and we stayed for dinner. Brekky was amazing – a range of meats, cheeses and patés with pretzels and rye bread. Then lunch was rolls with liver cheese and mustard from a supermarket, pretty standard apparently. Dinner was a delicious home made pasta with Emmental cheese and ham. They showed us some deer right near their house (which we fed), old-style town squares, a beautiful canyon, a couple of huge lakes with snow-capped mountains in the background, Hitler’s house, mountains that make the outline of a sleeping witch, and a bird sanctuary with eagles, a vulture, owls, and a cute marmot. It was great doing some touristy things, and getting some local knowledge, as well as seeing some of Austria as well ass some of Germany. It was kinda unsettling, not knowing any German, except the small amount Em has learnt in high school – and it’s harder to guess what signs are saying when the language is more different to English than Italian. But Dad and I did love the order of Austria compared to the chaos of Italy!

Venice, Italy

After a week, on Saturday 27 June, we left Atrani and drove up to Venice. We spent a few days in the beautiful but unfortunately touristy and crowded city, which was enough for me. We had an ostensibly lovely apartment, fitted out with really nice furniture, some basic food, 2 TVs and some books. But the shower was really annoying – it filled up and wouldn’t drain. I guess that’s Venetian plumbing for you. We managed to see quite a bit in our 3 days, including the Rialto Bridge and markets, Piazza San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, the Correr Museum and the Jewish ghetto. We ate plenty more quality Italian food (and some not so quality – I think basically in Italy you need to pay a fair bit for decent food at restaurants) and found another favourite gelati shop. We discovered cheap peach champagne, huge meringues, cream-filled pastries, lemon flavoured chocolate and nutella snack packs. Katie loved her time here just a year ago, and we found the hostel she stayed in and a wide shopping strip right next to it – packed with Aussies actually! The highlight was undoubtedly turning up to Piazza San Marco at 10pm on our last night, having seen a poster advertising the time and place, but unsure what the event would be. It turned out it was a band playing, with an artist painting Venice-inspired things on a huge canvas behind them and heaps of artistic, changing lighting projected onto the building facades of the piazza around the band. Pretty cool!

Atrani, Italy

The next arvo, June 19, we took a plane from Gatwick to Rome. On arriving at Termini station, we tried to call Farid, the guy with whom we’d organised accommodation. We spent ages trying to work out how to use the public phones (and gained €6 in the process!) or contact him on our mobiles. Eventually we gave up and asked a tourist info guy, who, in true dodgy Italian style, offered us a 3 star hotel for the same price as our original accommodation. I was so suss about the whole thing, to the point that the hotel receptionist started making jokes about it, calling me the chief and the one who calls the shots. Turns out it wasn’t dodgy at all – we didn’t get stuff stolen from our room, or get charged heaps, and they can’t use our credit card details because I insisted we pay cash. Oops, I think I may have offended them. At least they were laughing about it. So once we’d put our luggage away, we went out for a late pizza and gelati dinner by the Trevi Fountain in the balmy summer heat – nice!

The next day, we picked up a hire car and drove down to Atrani, on the Amalfi Coast. We survived driving on the right side of the road, only almost crashing a few times: sometimes from being on the wrong side of the road, but other times because of people changing lanes badly at ridiculously high speeds. We also survived the crazy narrow, windy Amalfi Coast road. Atrani is a beautiful, tiny fishing village of about 1,000 residents that you’d struggle to find on a map. I really enjoyed our week there: a mix of touristing and chilling out while getting to know the place and the locals. I hazily remembered the area from being there 5 years ago when I travelled in Italy, England, Scotland and Hong Kong with a friend Maddi and her family, so it was really cool getting to know it again.

In our time in Atrani, we visited Amalfi a few times, a touristy town next door, for limoncello, pottery and pastries. We took a bus round the crazy roads to Positano, another tourist spot, where we shopped and swam, and caught a ferry back. We took a bus up to Ravello, a town high in the mountains with great views over other Amalfi Coast towns and the Mediterranean. But we also spent plenty of time hanging out at Atrani. We swam at the beach there, and swam round to the neighbouring cove. We walked up to a church that sits high above the town, called Chiesa Santa Maria dei Bandi, and to another that was closer called Santa Maria Maddalena. Katie watched lots of Italian fashion TV and we all read lots – especially Harry Potter 6 in preparation for the movie. We ate dinner at a few of the restaurants in the piazza – some quite bad (but cheap too) and one really good one. We discovered our favourite gelati shop, which we went to most days, and chatted to the guy there. We hung out on the beach at night. We nicknamed one of the café owners ‘sleazy man’, because he watched us 3 girls every time we were in the piazza, sometimes winking and waving. Turns out he wasn’t that sleazy, just friendly – maybe it’s the Italian male way. One night I chatted with a guy called Luca from a nearby town, Minori: similar slightly sleazy thing, but mostly friendly – it was fun chatting actually! One night just after dinner in the piazza, most of the town started gathering and the cafes hung big-screen TVs on their outside doors… for a Confederations Cup soccer match between Italy and Brazil! It was great timing that we were in the piazza and able to share in some of the excitement. The most hilarious part was when an Italian player kicked a goal for Brazil that pretty much sealed the match. Understandably, the crowd cleared immediately after the match.

In that week, we felt like we grew accustomed to the Italian way of life. We ate breakfasts of chocolate-filled croissants or sweet bread with nutella. Lunch was crusty bread with oil, oregano, prosciutto, roma tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and lettuce, later in the day than in Australia. We kept siesta every day, resting or sleeping between 2 and 5pm. Which was great because the Italian beds and pillows are really hard which made sleeping through the night tough, so we appreciated the extra rest. It’d be awesome for Australia to have siesta! Dinner was often pasta or fish. Mum and Dad enjoyed their espressos and us our iced tea and gelati. We picked up a fair amount of basic Italian, from last time Kate and I were there, and from Kate and Em learning it at primary school. There were bells in Atrani that went off every 15mins, which, after we’d worked out how they worked, we didn’t even notice by the end of our time there.

Polruan and Cornwall, England

So it was a bit of a relief (that’s an understatement) to meet up with Mum and Dad on Tuesday June 16 in Cornwall. Us 3 girls caught the train from London to Par, where the parentals met us in a hire car to take us back, via some great narrow country lanes, with hedges that we could reach out and touch on each side, to Polruan. We spent a relaxing couple of days checking out this lovely English fishing village and its surrounding towns. We managed to have lunch (Cornish pasties!), dinner (fish&chips with peas) and pre-dinner drinks (Pimms for me of course!) at a couple of pubs, especially our local, the Russell Inn. We ate lots of Galaxy chocolate bars, English fudge and Fowey rock, which is like Suga lollies. We learnt good and bad things about Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, who lived in and based many of her books on the area. We went for a walk through the forest behind Polruan, climbed over a stile and enjoyed looking at some meadows – real English countryside stuff! (Would have loved to walk through the meadows but it was really wet.) We found a great church in Fowey (rhymes with ‘boy’, believe it or not!), called St Finbarrus. It obviously often receives tourists, and is really well set up for them, with various free booklets about living as a Christian. It even has the Jerusalem Declaration from Gafcon pinned to the noticeboard – we took a photo to show RC so we can do the same at St Judes!

One of the greatest things about Polruan is that it’s built on the side of a hill, which makes it quite picturesque. The house we stayed in was 3 stories, with an amazing view, from the top storey bedroom, of other houses in the town down to the water and across to Fowey on the other side. Another great thing about the town is the streets are really narrow. This was hilariously interesting when we tried to get our small hire car up into our street to pack our suitcases into it, then back down again to get out of the town. It took about half an hour and a ridiculous amount of small manoeuvres by Dad, with directions from Katie and Mum. Em and I just stayed away, contemplating taking photos of it all, but decided that would just make things more stressful. Pretty funny looking back on it now though!

We spent the next few days travelling, but with exciting things in between so it wasn’t too boring. On our drive back to London we stopped at Stonehenge, and took some photos from the side of the road without paying for entrance (!). We also stopped at the beautiful Hilsey College, where Dad went to boarding school at age 5. In London we stayed with some friends Penny and Godfrey in Epsom, right across the road from the Epsom racecourse. Anna and Matt and their twins Kate and Sophie, as well as Anna’s parents Graham and Sue, were there for a huge Aussie dinner – BBQ with heaps of salads and pavlova. We left some of our stuff with Matt and Anna that we wouldn’t need on the continent, which was liberating!

Leaving Melbourne for London

As we left on June 12 I was feeling a mix of emotions: excitement, anxiety, sadness, anticipation. I was constantly being reminded how lucky I am to be able to be in different countries, travelling and studying, for so long. But 6 months still seems like a long time. Katie, Em and I flew with Qantas to London Heathrow via Hong Kong, which was pretty good, all things considered. We only had a quick stopover, which was great in terms of having a fairly short trip. The one downside was that we think it made us more jetlagged: we were pretty exhausted and dizzy for our first few days in London. When we arrived, we had fun navigating the tube and all its stairs with, between the 3 of us, our 2 big suitcases and 3 small carry on bags plus a handbag each. The worst (in hindsight, funniest) part was when Em, on her first tube ride, got left at a station on her own because Katie and I couldn’t get ourselves and our bags off the train in time. It was a combination of having lots of bags, and annoying Brits in our way, who knew we needed to get off, but didn’t help us at all – unlike helpful Aussies, we thought. Em was fine though, thankfully. After working out the tube Oyster card system, we eventually managed to get to the Old Rectory of St Helens Bishopsgate church in Southwark, London, a huge multi-storey house where we had a floor to ourselves!

In our 2½ days in London, we managed to prevail upon the kindness of a few different friends, do lots of shopping, and a little bit of historical stuff. On our first night we called (from a red phone box!) some Aussie friends living there and invited ourselves round for dinner. Excellent to be well fed… and of course see Anna and her twins, Kate and Sophie (who Kate Sugars had nannied last year) and Anna’s parents. We went to St Helens church on Sunday morning with Andy and Kim and their new baby Jonny: British friends who we got to know when they recently spent 2 years in Australia. Was great to see God working through this church on the other side of the world! Also with these 3, after church we had lunch at a nice Italian restaurant on South Bank. We said goodbye to Andy, Kim and Jonny to tube up to Oxford St, to begin our shopping. In those 2 days, we went to Topshop, Primark, Zara, H&M, Harrods, Boots, Tescos… can you feel my excitement? We did have fun trying to pick out fashion trends in London, and came to the conclusion (with the agreement of Kim, whose job used to be to buy clothes for big fashion labels) that London is far more individual and less clone-like than Melbourne. Although Kim added that Melbourne was better than Sydney in terms of individuality, you’ll be pleased to hear. As for the historical/architectural stuff, mostly we saw it from a bus. We bussed down Regent St, through Piccadilly Circus and to Trafalgar Square, where Katie and I had so much trouble climbing up the lions, hilarious! And later we bussed past Big Ben, Westminster, the London Eye and along Park Lane. As Kim and I walked to church, we went over London Bridge, through the Business District and past Leadenhall Market – awesome! Then as we went to lunch we wandered past the Gherkin and the Tower of London, and over the Tower Bridge. We did manage to have lunch in Hyde Park, but that was the best of our historical/cultural education really. It was a crazy few days all up, coping with jetlag and being on our own in a huge, busy place, but we had a good time.