Terrible I know but I have been too busy taking in the winter wonderland to write much.

I have done a couple of paintings of the village and the chalet we are in. Bloody lovely sort of sums it up.
In between painting I have been nursing my knees, my hips, and a few egos.
I hope you like my latest editions and sorry for the quality. We do what we can here in the French Alps… C’est la vie.

One of the joys of travel in winter is layering. Black on black on black as it turns out. Layering is something we are only able to do a few days a year in Melbourne and generally only indoors due to our archaic heating and insulation.

M reminded me of staying in Kaikoura Ave with Penny and I the 90’s where the floor boards were so wide apart you could see through them and you needed a beanie indoors. I then recalled the day I got up for work, had breakfast in aforementioned beanie plus coat, scarf and woolen socks with boots. Once I’d eaten I grabbed my bag and left. Whilst waiting for my change of train at Spencer St station I noticed in a window reflection that there was a bag lady following me. On closer inspection it turned out to be me, still in my pyjamas (and beanie).

Needless to say any subsequent and previous clothing faux pax does not parallel turning up to work in pjs.

This brings me to a more serious topic of the numbers of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets of Europe in the middle of Winter. Most disturbing are the Roma children begging with their mothers. What sort of a life is that? It makes me so angry on so many levels.

Its one of the difficult things you really have no good answers to when your kids ask why. The puppies are bad enough. Every second beggar has a puppy. What happens to them when they are no longer cute? But then they may be the only love they get. And the people asleep across the pavement in the rain in the middle of a busy shopping strip. We are very sheltered in Northcote. It is far from PNG.

Today 10.20, still at home on second coffee. Yesterday’s 690 steps+ up the Eiffel Tower, followed by four hours of walking was too much for some, even though we had climbed three bell towers in preparation. Unlike the youth hostels of old, which made themselves as unappealing as possible to get you going (and besides they close their doors from 10 till 2) the places we are staying in are so homely and cosy that we can barely drag ourselves away. This ‘charming flat in the Sorbonne’, sides onto the ‘smallest street in Paris’ and it has a bathroom to match, where even my knees touch the wall when I am on the loo and I need to have the door open to stand in front of the sink. The floor, walls and ceiling are on a slope so it appears that we are in a perpetual Escher painting and you don’t even need to have indulged in 3 Euro bottles of sav blanc to stagger about the room. Totally gorgeous. Totally what ones expects from a building with 13th century foundations. It is a slight change from M and M’s apartment whose living space was possibly larger then our whole Northcote block. With 5 storeys from laundry to playroom, who needs jogging or the gym.

…. it is the next day now as Mick and I spend every evening playing scrabble online and making up words, many of which the computer accepts. What on earth is a wawa or laids. When in doubt just make up a work and hit ‘play’. Anyhow, I rarely have time to write as I labour for hours over how to use my ‘x’, ‘z’ and ‘g’ in the same word. I am going to try to cover a few days with this one.

(two days later)

Going backwards… we have just had a great meal with 5 tired kids at a restaurant called Fish a Bouillabaise. Apparently it is an Anglo hang out, though we did not know this as we walked past. It just had an interesting menu and could seat 9. The staff speak perfect English, but the menu is only in French. They offered to do us a special menu for the kids of Barley with eschalotte sauce. Frenchy ate hers. Lala required some bribing. When we left it was packed and there were people waiting for tables, glasses of wine in hand inside and out, even though it was about 1 degree.

This followed an excellent lunch at the Musee D’Orsay, in the old train station dining room, with a ceiling to rival St Peters in Rome. We arrived there about 1pm to find that there was a queue of about 400-500 people (give or take) and we were all set to bail when M decides to have a chat to the man at the door who promptly waves us past the whole queue. Go figure! M claims he just said that the kids were hungry. Maybe that is all it takes in France: Les Enfants qui ont faim. Once inside it was absolutely overwhelming: the architecture, the artwork, the sheer amount of people. The kids of course were soon restless and underwhelmed by the art, but did not lie on the ground claiming utter boredom as they did at the Uffizzi. Instead they ran around and we were given two whole hours to see a couple of thousand works.

Getting around town with 9 people is always a bit of an effort. Our last two big journeys also involved 9 but we had 3 boys to complement our two girls. the boys kept things moving and also provided entertainment for our two watching the boys beat each other up all day. This trip the girls have taken to beating each other up, which, along side, not having trimmed their nails has made for a few tears. Today we are off the the louvre with the promise of no conceptual art and more hot chocolate

Its been a while, I know, between posts.

This one is going to be a long one, so brace yourself with a big cup of kaffee or a nice bottle of Bordeaux. Just incidentally, we have now settled on espresso after more dismal large, weak coffees than my digestive system cares to think about. I take back my earlier pre-Europe claim (to L and M) about liking UHT milk and join them in the lament for the forgotten art of making coffee with fresh milk.

The reason for the long post is that we are now we are on a bus to Paris. We chose our day well as it is 5 degrees and pouring outside. The bus has WIFFY, as it is said here, and we can charge our 9 electronic devices as we travel. What is with that! The Man doesn’t even have a phone with him. Next time we might try keeping it to two devices apiece to keep our CO2 emissions down.

Why are we on a bus and not a train?? Because we didn’t think to book in advance and so we went the 87 Euro option rather than the 300 Euro option (and they have WIFFY).

Part of our days are dedicated to a nostalgic revisiting of our (separate) travels 20 odd years ago. For those of you who didn’t travel in the olden days, as Lala puts it, let me revisit some highlights:

* Lugging our trusted 800 page Lonely Planet guides, with the pages ripped our of of previously visited cities.
* Collecting letters from post offices sent ‘poste restante’.
* Eating yogurt three times a day as it was the easiest thing to steal from the Youth Hostel breakfast buffet
* Writing on our Eurail passes with delible ink.
* Falling asleep standing up in a packed train carriage to Rome, and being woken by the conductor, still standing up in an empty carriage in Venice
* Befriending someone at the hostel who appeared to have better reserves of Vegemite than you did to discover that you went to primary school with them,
* Pulling out yesterday’s dirty undies from the legs of your jeans in the middle of a busy bank.
* Hitchhiking.
* Making plans months in advance to meet someone on a certain Ferry on a certain day and then 6 months later both of you showing up!
* Saving for days to have enough coins to ring home on someone’s birthday only to have the 6 year old Nephew refuse to pass on the phone as ‘Aunty Mon doesn’t speak English anymore’.
* Having to leave ‘the east’ as you have run out of the toilet paper you took from the German railways and you cant find any more for love or money.

The other night during a great dinner of 40 something ex-pats we began a sentimental discussion as per above about the joys of backpacking in our twenties and how we hoped our kids will enjoy the same coming-of-age experiences. After a bit of story telling oneupmanship (true and perhaps slightly misremembered) we came to the conclusion that we should do everything in our power to keep keep our kids from straying from High St, Northcote. Hitchhiking – need I say more.
Sorry no pic today. Bus sickness!!

Yesterday we arrived in Brussels to stay with an old school friend and her family. Since we arrived we have been treated like royalty and have had a years worth of chocolate spread over two meals. There was 6 different ‘chocolate’ to try over brekkie. The girls are in heaven.

We also had the pleasure of some excellent wines, which was a nice change from the 1.50 Euro poison we were drinking in Berlin. I confessed to M that I tried mixing the vinagrette passing as shiraz with the syrop passing as riesling, to see if it was more drinkable. Alas it was not. Needless to say it took me 6 days to get through one bottle. Last night M and I finished a lovely bottle over a couple of hours and this morning I paid for it.

Luckily I did a drawing of the nuclear plant behind the wind turbines on route from Koeln to Brussels. Today my brain can’t cope with drawing.

Now for dinner!! We have slowly been making our way through the 2 kg bag of carrots kindly left by F’s sister. Tonight is schnitzel with carrot.

You may be wondering what we do all day in between searching for coffee and Flashdancing. Mostly we have been doing all the museums of Berlin. Nefititi’s bust was today’s highlight. Yesterday we dragged the girls through one too many rooms of conceptual art. Beuy’s room of tallow blocks was a bit if a hard sell. Today’s mummified Egyptians were more on the mark. Tomorrow we are off to Brussels in search of better coffee and wifi!

And for your penance for getting thus far, below are two more of my last three early morning’s paintings of F’s flat.

Hello readers,

I think when we left you, we were on route to Berlin on the very lux Deutsche Bahn traveling first class due to some anomaly whereby it is cheaper than second class.

We have now truly settled into our friends’ F’ and T’s flat in Berlin and are all eating brekkie at 5 am, as jetlag and walking for 8 hours saw us all asleep by 7 pm. Looks like we won’t see much of the Berlin nightclubs. We are enjoying every minute. Loving the food and the cold. It is apparently the warmest winter people can remember, around 1 in the mornings and then up to 10. With buds on the trees. Normally it is minus something!
We are staying in a very Turkish area, a bit like Sydney Rd only over the whole district. Feels very familiar. My German returns in dribs and drabs. (What is German for dribs and drabs I wonder?)
Bis spaeter!

Day three unterwegs, and already German is creeping into my conversation without me noticing. This is surprising as as we spent our first night in a hotel adorned with Aboriginal prints, rooms named Queensland and Victoria and a $120 brekkie (not included).

Thankfully our taxi driver understood our outraged

strine

and directed us to a 5 Euro feed at the local kebab shop. Unfortunately it was shut at 6 am (we had all been awake since 2) so we continued to the train station. Home at last.

The smell of freshly baked pretzels and pastries, though slightly marred by the omnipresent aroma of Maccas, is a joy I cherish each time I return. It takes me straight back to 1990 and back-packing in Dad’s old leather jacket that neither fitted nor kept me warm, and when meals consisted mostly of butter pastries and whatever I could steal from the hostels breakfast buffet.

In those days coffee was either an esspesso or a slightly larger kaffee creme. Now to our horror kaffee is either L or XL (see animated photo above)

And then on to the train!!! One of the thing I promised my reader (Hi mum!!) was art. So here it is. My pic of Lala, held captive by the ipod, on route to Berlin.

Course toujour!!! Apparently french for ‘whatever!’

And so our French sojourn begins! The first challenge is the master this blog thing on an iphoney thingo.

And because it is the day for romantics, a word from our sponsor…..