Happy Australia Day!!!

Australia Day was celebrated in style. Our mate Richo brought some Aussie mates over from Oxford, Pete and Jess traveled over from Reading and they joined the Felsted Aussie contingent consisting of us two, two Australian GAP students and one Kiwi GAP student (token Aussie).

The party started with a barbie and beers under the gum tree in the back yard, whilst listening to the replay of the triple j hottest 100 in the background.

After downing a few snags (of the famous Felsted variety) and watching highlights of another English cricket demolition in the hands of the Aussies, we got the real shindig goin’.

The lamingtons and ANZAC bickies were a fair dinkum hit with the locals, but Skippy the blowup kangaroo got a puncture. There was a Scottish invasion when a group immigrated to the Aussie party from a Burns night celebration late in the evening. We were drinking beers like they were going out of fashion and we were all trend setters.

A traditional Aussie bacon and egg fry up the following morning got us pumped for another big bbq lunch, some backyard cricket (under the gum tree) and a safeway pav sent all the way from Australia in a box, especially for the occasion by one of Jess’ mates. (Thanks Jess’ mate!) We dolled it up with some whipped cream, strawberries and kiwi fruit and it was a ripper! We then blew away some of the hangover cobwebs by lounging around and watching the new Aussie flick “Kenny”.

It has been decided that from now on we should not just celebrate one day of Australia day, but make it a three day celebration of everything Aussie! Gotta love it!

Spanish school in Barcelona

January 14-21, 2007

I love this city! I spent one week living with a host family and studying Spanish at a language school.

I met some amazing people during my stay including my multicultural classmates. Out of 10 students there were two blokes from Switzerland, two from Holland, one from New Caledonia, one girl from Italy, one from Canada, one from England and one from the US.

The learning Spanish part was pretty tough and my head hurt for most of the time after day 1. Was that from going back to school for the first time in over 3 years and trying to learn something very difficult? Or was it from experiencing the cultural side of Barcelona?

Highlights – the night life, the sparkling style and class of the locals, all the crazy Gaudi architecture around the city and definitely the 20-25°C weather (compared to the hurricanes in England which blew down our beautiful gum tree).

Roadtrippin’ around Scotland

New Years Eve 2006 - January 7, 2007

We flew into Newcastle and paid too much for a train ticket to Edinburgh (bloody public transport) where we met our roadtrippin’ team from London.

First stop – Edinburgh for NY. The world famous Hogmanay, one of the biggest NY street parties in the world, cancelled due to hurricane strength winds and dangerous weather conditions. This didn’t stop us bringing in 2007 with a bang and a bottle of Moet (thanks to our mate Callum).

Stop 2 – Day trip to Glasgow with new Australian friends and pseudo-roadtrippers Kate and Ezzy for a Celtic football game.

Stop 3 – Stirling, home of William Wallace (aka Braveheart) monument.

Stop 4 – Back to Edinburgh because Ambo’s bag somehow got left behind.

Stop 5 – Stirling again.

From Stirling we drove north to Fort William in the Highlands. We saw some amazing scenery including Britain’s highest peaks (a massive 974m – I reckon Pyramid Hill looks bigger!) We stopped and chased a deer around the bush with a camera Steve Irwin style (got some great pics). We saw the Loch Ness monster and some big hairy highland cattle.

We also ate some traditional haggis at a little country pub – chopped up liver, kidney, spleen, lung, heart and all the leftover offal, boiled in a bag and served as minced up meat balls. It tasted excellent!

Possibly the highlight of the trip (for some of us anyway) was on the final day. Our aim was to drive from Fort William to London in a day with only one major stop to go and have a look at Hadrian’s Wall. A wall built by the Romans in 122 right across the north end of England to stop the movement of people from north to south and vice versa. Only ruins remain now. Anyway it was meant to be a short drive off the main motorway back to London, maybe 30 mins round trip to see it. So we stop at this place, after driving 30 mins, thinking that we've found the wall, really beaten up little wall. We met this old timer who was building his own little wall next to the broken down one (we nicknamed him Hadrian). He corrected us and pointed into the horizon to where the 'real' wall was! Reliable team A in the front, consisting of Ambo – mad Paris driver and Gibbo – Aussie bloke who navigates on instinct, decide that instead of turning around and going back the way we came (some would argue the sensible thing to do) we'd try a different way. So we go deep into the English countryside where pubs close on a Saturday afternoon and end up heading back towards Scotland! Three hours, one car sick road tripper trying to spew on the roadside (Dysko), one sympathy spew from another roadtripper (Fi) and a pub meal later (we finally found a pub that was open) we're back on the motorway heading to London. A team my arse! Piss funny!

Big thanks go to Dysko for inviting us on the roadtrip, Ambo for making it all possible, Azzo for the DVD player, Gibbo for the highlight and all the guys for making it a wicked roadtrip!

Our first Christmas away from home

December 20 – 30, 2006

Our search for our first ever white Christmas started with difficulty due to the mild European winter we have been experiencing, thanks to global warming. In hindsight we should have gone home to Melbourne if we wanted snow! Crazy times.

But we found a beautiful corner of the world next to Lake Como in the Italian Alps, right near the Swiss border.

We flew into the cosmopolitan/industrial city of Milan where we did a bit of Christmas shopping. We found some cool, furry, Italian leather boots for Fi and a silk bow tie for Davo from the same shop who tailors suits for James Bond, Jack Nicholson, Bill Clinton, Sharon Stone among many others.

Then to Bellagio, a small town at the pearl of Lake Como. We spent a week here eating, drinking and relaxing.

We stocked up on plenty of gourmet Italian food and wine at the many markets in the lakeside towns including salami, cheese, bread, prosciutto, olive oil, dried fruit, turkey, olives, champagne and red wine. We also found many authentic Italian Christmas presents for each other and for family at home in Australia to help us remember our special Christmas.

I’ll explain our Christmas day in brief…

First thing, wake up and Davo cooked pancakes with strawberries and icecream. We both peered out our window to catch a view of the awesome sunny weather and the snow capped Alps in the background. Then we opened our presents in our santa sacks (plain white pillow cases) and afterwards Fi made strawberry champagne cocktails.

We don our best clothes and Santa hats and down to the lakeside we ventured. We sat there for hours with our picnic of gourmet food and wine, enjoying the view of the still and clear lake and the snow and mountains, as well as the company of cheery locals walking past and envying our great idea!

When it grew colder it was back to our warm abode where we filled the last space in our tummies with a traditional Italian pudding and home made hard sauce.

As much as we enjoyed our unique Christmas in an exotic location, it drove home how much we miss home in Australia.

School trip to Venice

December 14 – 17, 2006

In brief this is what happened… 26 upper sixth students (year 12) 3 teachers (Fi included), 2 GAP students, 3 ex-students and 2 randoms (Davo included) on a History trip to Venice for 4 days and 3 nights.

Fi and Davo’s main task… (since they don’t know a lot about the history of Venice) look after the students when they go out at night because they are free to drink, smoke, whatever!

Ingredients for a disaster trip OR a bloody good time?

Result…

- One kid left his passport on the plane on arrival to Venice.

- One kid got busted for drugs by sniffer dogs, but then his bag never came off the plane, lost forever, he evaded the police.

- One group of kids got the wrong water taxi from the airport and left for the hotel with no teacher and without the name of the hotel.

- One kid fell into the canal on the way home from the pub.

- One kid turned 18 and his parents gave him a fair donation to help celebrate it… it went to a bottle of absinth and rounds and rounds of shots, tequila, sambuca, cowboys, etc, etc.

- One kid came into the pub going, “Davo, Davo, you’ve gotta come and help me, this big dark Italian guy just punched me in the face, look at my eye, it’s swollen, Davo, Davo, you gotta come and help me get him!” What actually happened was he was going around asking the other students to punch him in the face, and then he would punch them back. One kid, pretty well built, hit him and dropped him!

- One kid decided he’d give Davo a new nickname – Davo Supremo Extremo.

- One ex-student and the other random got engaged.

- One gondola driver capsized his gondola which meant that our gondola had to rescue him.

- One group of male kids decided they’d have a competition to see who could kill a pigeon on the last day. Luckily no veterinary skills were required and no pigeons were killed.

- One female kid decided she needed to bring about 30kg of luggage, included 6 pairs of shoes.

And the grand finale… how Venice was flooded…

- One kid, who doesn’t drink, had one too many glasses of wine over dinner and got absolutely plastered. He was escorted home to the hotel where he was put into the care of a completely useless gappie (although we didn’t realize how useless he was at the time). Useless gappie put the kid in his room, locked the door and then went to bed for the night. Hours later water was seeping through the roof of the second floor, out the corridor and out onto the street below, because the kid had passed out in the shower with the tap running. One senior female teacher had to knock on his door for 20 minutes to get him up and he answered the door completely starkers. All the towels available in the hotel were used to mop up the mess inside, but the gallons of water covering the pavement outside were left to drain away into the canals of Venice.

It was the best school trip we’ve ever been on and we can’t wait for the next one to Madrid.