We have a friend, Anne, on the course we’re currently study in Language and Culture Acquisition whose husband, Doug, is a keen rat breeder. This has to be seen to be believed and last week, after dinner at their place, we were introduced to the clan. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you remember Yvonne and Ye, the wonderful couple in Beijing who hosted us when we stayed there for four days in March? Well, they’ve been keeping us up to date on how things in the city have been gearing up for and enjoying the Olympics and yesterday, when the closing ceremony took place, Yvonne was there!
We were watching it on TV here in the UK thinking, wow, Yvonne is right there. Unfortunately, she only had one ticket so Ye wasn’t able to go. She’s blogged her experience really well so I’d encourage you to read it and see her pictures. Why not comment to thank her for it? Click the link below.
Visit Yvonne’s blog.
so sorry everyone. We’ve been pretty busy but we’ve also been a bit lazy when it comes to this blog. Every time I write an email, my conscience gets me because it says “keep up to date with us” with a link to this blog. I don’t think the blog works in terms of keeping up to date with us as we hardly ever do it.
So, as a sign that we are committed to keeping this blog going, we give you a rainbow…
Click on it to see it full size if you want.
This was one of two double rainbows that we had within a week here at Horseleys Green, a tiny village just west of High Wycombe in southern England. The weather this summer in the UK has been very rainy but there have been some very sunny times too which have led to these rainbows. We’ve never seen such intense rainbows in our lives - shame we didn’t get the camera soon enough to catch them at their best.
This rainbow is over the building where we’re staying at the moment while we do language and cultural training in preparation to head to Papua New Guinea in January.
if you are quick and you visit the personal bit of our website today (UK time) you’ll be able to see something Sheena and I are going out for lunch today to celebrate
Here’s a picture for you.
Now, for those of you who follow this blog abroad and have never been to Stockton on Tees, a question: Something that most of you use regularly all over the world was first established here. What is it? A little clue for you if you want is that the road on the right is called 1825 Way.
Standing in Sargans, on the slip road of the autoroute to Zurich, we thought a ride to the city would be a sure thing. Not so, by 2pm it was cold, starting to drizzle and half of Switzerland had ignored us except for one chap who risking someone driving into the back of him had stopped to tell us that he was only going about five miles down the road. Kind of wished we taken the lift just to see how far it would have got us, but he was insistent that where we were was better than where we would be if he took us.
Here’s an interesting little fact: there are more people in our single church in Korea than the entire population of the country of Liechtenstein. Have a think about that and, if you can really grasp that statistic, it will give you some perspective on both nations.
Like virtually everyone else who says they’ve been to Liechtenstein, we planned simply to pass through it. For one thing, it’s expensive to stay in. wikitravel.org recommends staying, as we did, in Feldkirch in Austria. For another thing, you’d be really hard pushed to find any real reason for staying more than a day anyway. There’s simply little here of interest. Don’t take my word for it. History reveals that, when the land for the country was originally given to the princes of Liechtenstein (originally Austrian), they didn’t bother coming to visit it for 120 years. We were curious to see what all the fuss wasn’t about.
Despite the lack of attention we got on the side of the road outside Innsbruck as we desperately tried to get a lift to Feldkirch, we did make it there that day. We simply walked to the railway station and got on a train. And a very nice one it was with beautiful views all the way of mountains and streams and an autoroute that was virtually empty which might well explain why we never got a lift.
You may remember that we had a hard time hitching out of Rosenheim in Germany and that, because of this, my previous record of time spent waiting for a lift of 2½ hours was broken as we spent just over three hours waiting. Well, we didn’t expect that record to be broken so soon as we got a bus out to the western edge of Innsbruck.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just before we started out for Innsbruck, we had a message to say that we had a place to stay. When we were dropped off by the guy who brought us in from Garmisch in Germany, we were in the south of the city and had to walk in to the centre. It was about a half hour walk and the local gay community were having a party by the river Inn to publicise their sexual insecurities.
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