Finishing one is a bit like eating the top off a large apple pie. Perhaps this is why apple pie is popular the world over, and Schneeballen is not.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Schneeballen
Just as Salzburg has its chocolate marzipan Mozart balls, Rothenburg has a signatory pastry: Schneeballen. It's a sort of shortbread pastry folded over and over onto itself into the size of a cricket ball, then traditionally rolled in cinnamon and sugar. Other coatings on offer include yoghourt, coconut, and chocolate and nuts.
Finishing one is a bit like eating the top off a large apple pie. Perhaps this is why apple pie is popular the world over, and Schneeballen is not.
Finishing one is a bit like eating the top off a large apple pie. Perhaps this is why apple pie is popular the world over, and Schneeballen is not.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Rothenburg is a colourful medieval walled town about three hours by train from Frankfurt and 80 metres above the Tauber river valley. The half-timbered buildings on the cobblestoned streets are pink, green or yellow with red-tiled gabled roofs. It's pretty, and a popular tourist destination, but it strikes me as slightly kitsch. Maybe this is because I've been to Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic, of which it reminds me. Though Cesky Krumlov must certainly bear the charge of being kitsch, it is validated by its charm.
When I arrived at the guesthouse in Rothenburg, I asked the proprietor for a recommendation of where to eat. He told me to go to Hell. "Zur Höll" is a little restaurant on a back street away from the expensive tourist traps in the Marktplatz, housed in an old stone building with cramped ceilings and wooden stairs. One trapezoid-shaped table seating nine is actually an old bellows, the spout still attached to the narrow end.
When I arrived at the guesthouse in Rothenburg, I asked the proprietor for a recommendation of where to eat. He told me to go to Hell. "Zur Höll" is a little restaurant on a back street away from the expensive tourist traps in the Marktplatz, housed in an old stone building with cramped ceilings and wooden stairs. One trapezoid-shaped table seating nine is actually an old bellows, the spout still attached to the narrow end.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Sydney to Singapore
Somehow, on an almost full flight from Sydney to Singapore, I managed to get three seats all to myself. It was a daytime flight, but I almost went to sleep just to take rare advantage of the space. For the planespotters reading this (hello, Jay), it was a Boeing 777-300ER. The leg room in economy was ample, and I'm six feet tall.
By the time I reached Singapore at midnight local time, I really was tired. My back was aching, not because of the flight, but because of the mysterious jab the Travel Doctor gave me before leaving Sydney. "It's free for those born between 1968 and 1981." So I shrugged my shoulders and rolled up my sleeve, as you do when someone offers to stick a needle in you for free. I wonder what was in it.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Singapore is really nice and, attached to the terminal as it is, very convenient for overnight stopovers. It's new and modern, and a very nice architectural design using lots of curved lines, open-air corridors and tasteful colours. I loved the ceiling showerhead in my hotel room.
So now, fully rested and refreshed, I'm boarding my flight to Frankfurt.
By the time I reached Singapore at midnight local time, I really was tired. My back was aching, not because of the flight, but because of the mysterious jab the Travel Doctor gave me before leaving Sydney. "It's free for those born between 1968 and 1981." So I shrugged my shoulders and rolled up my sleeve, as you do when someone offers to stick a needle in you for free. I wonder what was in it.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Singapore is really nice and, attached to the terminal as it is, very convenient for overnight stopovers. It's new and modern, and a very nice architectural design using lots of curved lines, open-air corridors and tasteful colours. I loved the ceiling showerhead in my hotel room.
So now, fully rested and refreshed, I'm boarding my flight to Frankfurt.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Europe Reprise
On August 21st, I'm returning to Europe. They've been notified.
After surrendering your soul for ten years, you get three months of long service leave because time is money. I'll be spending that time in Portugal, Croatia, and France via Venice, Bruges, Montenegro, the castles on the German Rhine, and the rusto-majestic home of flamenco, Andalucía. To the right, you'll find a link to a map of my travels.
You'll be either well-informed by this blog or bored by the egoistic conceit of the idea. This blog is all about me. And things that happen to me. I find that fascinating.
As well as trying to keep this blog regular, I'll be writing travel articles freelance and shooting pictures for my next book. I'll try to post a few here.
I've been planning this trip for six months. Planning is part of the trip. It's practical daydreaming. Having attended writing workshops, photography workshops, and language classes, it might also be said that I have a small obsession with being prepared.
Next: the real thing.
After surrendering your soul for ten years, you get three months of long service leave because time is money. I'll be spending that time in Portugal, Croatia, and France via Venice, Bruges, Montenegro, the castles on the German Rhine, and the rusto-majestic home of flamenco, Andalucía. To the right, you'll find a link to a map of my travels.
You'll be either well-informed by this blog or bored by the egoistic conceit of the idea. This blog is all about me. And things that happen to me. I find that fascinating.
As well as trying to keep this blog regular, I'll be writing travel articles freelance and shooting pictures for my next book. I'll try to post a few here.
I've been planning this trip for six months. Planning is part of the trip. It's practical daydreaming. Having attended writing workshops, photography workshops, and language classes, it might also be said that I have a small obsession with being prepared.
Next: the real thing.
Friday, May 15, 2009
For Sale: One Soul
I am delighted to learn that Google's Blogger, the site you are now visiting, has introduced a facility to "monetize" one's blogs. By allowing Google's AdSense engine to display ads in the sidebar of my blog, I earn a portion of revenue for every thousand "impressions"—the times an ad appears on my site—and each time it only costs me a tiny portion of my soul. The more I attract people to my site, the richer I will get. I can become my own commercial network and, provided it doesn't get in the way of making more money, I can publish whatever I want! Hail Satan!
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Photos: Czech Republic
There are more photos to come, but for now, here is the Czech Republic. Click on the thumbnails.
 |
| Prague |
 |
| Kutna Hora |
 |
| Cesky Krumlov |
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Cambodia
This is a late update. We returned to Sydney over two weeks ago and I'm only now getting a chance to update the blog with the last leg of the trip.
After visiting Mai Li's family in Malaysia, we took a five-day trip to Cambodia with four others in Li's family -- her sister and her sister's husband, visiting from England, her cousin and her aunt.
Angkor, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries, is one of the ancient sites in the world I most wanted to see (the others at the top of my list being Machu Picchu in Peru and Teotihuacán in Mexico). Discovered submerged in the rainforest by the French in the late 19th century, it underwent a decades-long programme of restoration which is still ongoing, having resumed in 1993 after a 23-year interruption by the Cambodian civil war. The site has been open to tourism since about 1999. A friend went there in 2002 and said it was the most spectacular of the ancient sites he had seen (which included Machu Picchu and Teotihuacán). "Go now," he said, "before it is destroyed by tourism." Unfortunately, we weren't timely in taking his advice, and now it is common to be mobbed outside the temples by locals, many children, wielding counterfeit guide books so numerous and of such high quality they could only have been supplied by an organised syndicate. They don't take no for an answer when you don't want to buy one, not the first time and not the tenth time, and so you develop an unpleasant strategy of completely ignoring them until, after fifty metres of hounding you, they drift back to the next tourists.
And there are a lot of tourists. There is a massive influx of tourism dollars into Siem Reap and the Angkor temple complex, and corruption is rife (Cambodia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International). The corruption is not readily apparent (except when our tour guide had to bribe a police officer), but the cost of a ramshackle boat tooling through a "floating village" on Tonle Sap lake, paid to some mysterious office miles from the village, was US$90 for six of us for an hour. That might be a usual price for somewhere like Australia, but not in a third world country. One wonders where the exhorbitant profits go, because it sure isn't to the barefoot teenaged boat pilot. I also saw on ABC'S Four Corners (an investigative current affairs programme, for any non-Australians reading this) that the money paid to enter the Angkor temple complex (US$40 per person for three days) ends up in the hands of one man, a politican, and there is no accounting.
But all of this aside, it is worth going. The Cambodian people are friendly and we felt very safe, and though the distasteful aspects are here to stay, including the volume of tourists, Angkor is an incredible place. At over a thousand square kilometres, it was the largest pre-industrial city in the world. The main temples are enormous, and each has its unique characteristics. The most famous, Angkor Wat, has walls a kilometre long on each side and is surrounded by an outer wall which is itself circumscribed by a wide moat. The name actually means "the temple [which became a] city." My favourite temple, the Bayon, features more than thirty towers adorned with ten-foot tall faces, typically on four sides. Inside it is something of a compact maze, due to the number of times successive rulers and conquerers added to it, and outside is a host of well-preserved bas reliefs. The French chose to preserve another temple, Ta Prohm, in its "natural" state as an example of how most of Angkor looked when it was discovered. Overgrown with massive tree roots, it looks straight off an Indiana Jones set. Indeed, it was used as a location in the film Tomb Raider.
This is the last entry for the trip, but check back in a little while for links to the photos as I get them uploaded.
After visiting Mai Li's family in Malaysia, we took a five-day trip to Cambodia with four others in Li's family -- her sister and her sister's husband, visiting from England, her cousin and her aunt.
Angkor, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries, is one of the ancient sites in the world I most wanted to see (the others at the top of my list being Machu Picchu in Peru and Teotihuacán in Mexico). Discovered submerged in the rainforest by the French in the late 19th century, it underwent a decades-long programme of restoration which is still ongoing, having resumed in 1993 after a 23-year interruption by the Cambodian civil war. The site has been open to tourism since about 1999. A friend went there in 2002 and said it was the most spectacular of the ancient sites he had seen (which included Machu Picchu and Teotihuacán). "Go now," he said, "before it is destroyed by tourism." Unfortunately, we weren't timely in taking his advice, and now it is common to be mobbed outside the temples by locals, many children, wielding counterfeit guide books so numerous and of such high quality they could only have been supplied by an organised syndicate. They don't take no for an answer when you don't want to buy one, not the first time and not the tenth time, and so you develop an unpleasant strategy of completely ignoring them until, after fifty metres of hounding you, they drift back to the next tourists.
And there are a lot of tourists. There is a massive influx of tourism dollars into Siem Reap and the Angkor temple complex, and corruption is rife (Cambodia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International). The corruption is not readily apparent (except when our tour guide had to bribe a police officer), but the cost of a ramshackle boat tooling through a "floating village" on Tonle Sap lake, paid to some mysterious office miles from the village, was US$90 for six of us for an hour. That might be a usual price for somewhere like Australia, but not in a third world country. One wonders where the exhorbitant profits go, because it sure isn't to the barefoot teenaged boat pilot. I also saw on ABC'S Four Corners (an investigative current affairs programme, for any non-Australians reading this) that the money paid to enter the Angkor temple complex (US$40 per person for three days) ends up in the hands of one man, a politican, and there is no accounting.
But all of this aside, it is worth going. The Cambodian people are friendly and we felt very safe, and though the distasteful aspects are here to stay, including the volume of tourists, Angkor is an incredible place. At over a thousand square kilometres, it was the largest pre-industrial city in the world. The main temples are enormous, and each has its unique characteristics. The most famous, Angkor Wat, has walls a kilometre long on each side and is surrounded by an outer wall which is itself circumscribed by a wide moat. The name actually means "the temple [which became a] city." My favourite temple, the Bayon, features more than thirty towers adorned with ten-foot tall faces, typically on four sides. Inside it is something of a compact maze, due to the number of times successive rulers and conquerers added to it, and outside is a host of well-preserved bas reliefs. The French chose to preserve another temple, Ta Prohm, in its "natural" state as an example of how most of Angkor looked when it was discovered. Overgrown with massive tree roots, it looks straight off an Indiana Jones set. Indeed, it was used as a location in the film Tomb Raider.This is the last entry for the trip, but check back in a little while for links to the photos as I get them uploaded.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)