The Big OE

Well life is still ticking along just nicely over here, on the other side of the world. Thankfully the sun came back, and winter has held off for a wee bit longer. I get strange looks when I drop the boys off at school, when I casually stroll around in my shorts and t-shirt while the flash mummies are all wrapped up as if it’s the middle of a NZ winter. Although it’s not exactly tropical, I’d describe the temperature more as ‘fresh’. I hadn’t really thought about it but I have had a year long summer, so winter is going to be a bit of a shock to the system when it does arrive in full swing.

After Mum left, and carried on her way to Croatia and Bosnia on her religious pilgrimage – I got straight back into things and I joined the library and the gym. The library has reasonable size English section, €10 for a year’s membership so I am in heaven. The gym thankfully has quite a high number of staff who can speak English or at least a bit of Germish. I spent last week getting weighed, measured and condition tested, of which I was absolutely horrified at my initial analysis. But that’s why I signed up in the first place huh!? The gym works a little differently to home – hell what do I know I only went about 5 times to the one at the University in Hamilton. But basically I pay my monthly membership which is €39, and then I have access to everything, even free massages!! I have a personal trainer whenever I need one, literally, and they’re making up a nutritional plan for me for teaching me how to eat whilst in Germany. They have lots of classes running which will be perfect for me, and might be a chance to socialise a bit. Strangely enough I had already managed to loose 10 kilos since arriving, with out even really trying. I think all the walking in Italy, the decrease in consumption of takeaways and the reversal of eating patterns has helped considerably. Germans have their main meal at lunch, eat a very light dinner and seldom have junk food. But the weight loss still surprises me because all they ever seem to eat here is bread, cheese and meat. Hmmm.

I went to another BBQ with a different English speaking group, I was feeling absolutely awful but dragged myself along anyway for a nice sunny Sunday afternoon BBQ. I couldn’t eat a bite all day, but managed to plonk myself at one of the tables and didn’t move for nearly five hours. The group was mainly made up of British, but there were a few Americans, one Australian, and a few Germans. I was of course the youngest there, but it wasn’t a problem. I met a nice Scottish woman who is more than willing to off load all her old books to me.

As there’s never a dull minute when I’m around, I received a phone call from a young girl nearly two weeks ago claiming I had hit her car, a brand new ‘Smart car’. Yes another traffic incident! You would think the car crash before, and speeding tickets were enough wouldn’t you! One morning on my way to taking the boys to school, I had moved behind a car blocking a side street, to let another car coming up the main (yet narrow) street to pass. The car in front of me suddenly started to reverse and so I honked the horn to warn her not to hit me, as it then became obvious she hadn’t pulled over to let the car pass but was instead trying to get into a car park which I was now in. The other car coming up the street passed, and I went on my way. Apparently she is now claiming I hit her car, and scratched and dented it, then I left the scene of an accident and she has an eye witnesses. As it happened virtually right outside the house, and our names are on the front gate I imagine that’s how she got our phone number; otherwise they must give out personal information to people who have your license plate number. I am really peeved because I never felt any impact what so ever, neither did the boys, and if there was an impact surely it must be her fault for not checking her rear-view mirror?!? She told Frank I must have been in a hurry, that’s why I honked the horn and then drove off. I never thought there was an accident, so of course I didn’t stay. But it may get tricky because she claims she has eye witnesses, who could be bloody anyone (probably just one of her mates) and the whole thing could end up in court and get messy. The alternative is I pay for it to get fixed and it gets forgotten about. But as I have very limited income as it is, it would be a devastating blow and I really don’t feel I have done anything wrong. A whole big case of misunderstanding!! I have since seen the car parked outside the house, as she goes to the high school a few doors down, and I can’t see a mark on the car at all, but it could have already been fixed by now.

To add to the chaos, I came out of the supermarket the other day and low and behold, someone has driven into the side of my car, and dented it with out leaving any details! No one was around either so I couldn’t ask anyone what had happened. It is really frustrating because I know how careful I am whilst driving here, and it just feels like one thing after the other – and Frank and Nicole have enough things to think about without me adding to it.

The last few days have also been rather eventful, as Max got sick at school and so he got taken to the doctors and then admitted to hospital where he spent two nights. The health system works very differently to home, and instead of kicking them out of the beds ASAP they try to keep them in there as long as possible because the Insurance companies shell out hundreds of euro a day to the hospital. Max had a bit of a fever, stomach cramps and funny red spots all over his head, they kept talking about it being ‘Scarlet Fever’ but nothing is still clear yet as to what was wrong with him. He is now home, as Nicole refused to play the hospitals game, and it was obvious he really didn’t need to be there any longer. Frank is in China for work, and Oma and Opa are staying for a few days. I have been looking after Mike and keeping him entertained, which usually means playing soccer in the drive way, and making sure Max is ok.

But it’s not all work, yesterday I spent the afternoon sitting on a rug in the sun by an old castle and big lake in the park, and read my book, ahh bliss. Then for dinner we went to a nice wine garden along the Rhine River. I have been going to the gym nearly every day, I go for walks through Wiesbaden city centre and I’ve also driven into Frankfurt and gone to the English Cinema and saw ‘Das Parfum’ (sorry no idea what the English title is) and also ‘The Break Up’. I like to sit out in the garden and attempt reading a German magazine, and watch all the squirrels in the trees collecting food for the winter. The first signs of autumn are here, the tree lined streets are turning red and there are carts with big orange pumpkins on the sides of the country roads. Nicole has brought a few home, and the boys are well practised at craving them. I have been told I need to master the art before Halloween arrives, as each year they have a big party and go crazy with decorating the house. I also have five days off in a row at the end of next week so I am off to Berlin with Stefan, and he’s going to show me some of the sights and sounds. So one could say, life’s not to bad for me at the moment.

Well that’s all for now, can you believe I have been here almost four months? You better start thinking about Christmas and birthday presents for me, because it’s going to take a while for any packages to get here, with the way the German postal system operates. Hint hint!

Well the first day back to school for the boys this week. Mike has moved to the big boys’ school, a year ahead of the rest of his friends to start in a bilingual preschool, housed just a room away from Max’s class. Nicole and I were both surprised when we left Mike with his new teacher, and there was barely any reaction. He had been the king of his kindergarten, and was one of the bigger kids there and here he starts right back at the bottom without knowing a soul in his class.

Summer is well and truly over and it feels as if the weather gods have decided we won’t bother with an autumn this year, and let’s just skip straight to winter. I unfortunately do not own any winter clothes and am forced to endure the cold chill in the air. This summer has been one of the hottest recorded in years, and it also strangely happens to be one of the shortest. But the sun could come back, you just never really know.

Nice and early on Tuesday I was sent to pick up a family friend from the Airport, the last person I expected to see through the arrival gates was my very own Mother all the way from New Zealand. She had been planning a trip to Eastern Europe months before I had even mentioned my intentions of moving to Germany. So she had contacted Nicole, and arranged to come and stay for just under a week, before joining her tour group for the rest of the religious pilgrimage throughout Croatia, Bosnia and Italy. She hadn’t even told my grandmother she was coming, until the day before she left NZ. I was a little taken back to say the least, and I my first reaction was of course to swear. I didn’t take any notice at the time, but apparently a few people around us were quite startled with my reaction. Mum even pulled out the digi to start snapping away at my reaction.

When I had composed myself and recovered from the shock, I took her shopping in Wiesbaden – to get some of the winter clothes I desperately needed and to show her the sights. On Wednesday we did the tour through Mainz, and I took her to several churches (dutiful daughter that I am). On Thursday we went to the Kaiser-Friedrich Irish Roman Thermal baths, which are famous in the area, and of which I didn’t realise fully until I had gotten there, were ‘textile free’. So I had to cast aside twenty-one years of inhibitions and get back to nature, my only saving grace was that I couldn’t wear my glasses, and so I had no way of being able to see peoples reactions and expressions. So we spent the morning going around the different pools and saunas, the Finnish sauna had an air temperature of 85 to 90 degrees celsius. We even went so far as to have a Rasul treatment, where we had to cover ourselves in different mud, then sit for half an hour in a scented steam room before rubbing oil all over ourselves. The Germans are crazy about ‘spas’ and there is a whole health-craze phenomenon surrounding them, they are even covered by their health insurance. I am glad I stuck it out, and it certainly opened my eyes to a different way of life. Germans (and most other Western European countries) are surprisingly liberal when it comes to nudity and censorship. Throughout summer, it was not uncommon to see women sunbathing topless in the cities parks during their lunch breaks, and boobs are flashed all over the TV and in normal magazines, not at all like our reserved attitudes back home in New Zealand, a hang up I guess from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers.

Finally I took her on a tour of some of the villages along the Rhine. I even managed to find a historic Cistercian Monastery, a religious order my mother is connected with back in NZ. Thankfully, the monastery has been un-inhabited since the early 19th Century so it was more of a museum, than a religious institution. I took her to the touristy town of Rüdesheim, where we ate schnitzel and strudel then we walked amongst the tour groups of old ladies in twin-sets and loud touritsts along the famous ‘Drossel Straße’. The highlight of Mums day was seeing a small dog, with what appeared to be underwear covering its backside.

So even though it was an unexpected visit I got to show Mum some of the sights and sounds of my life as an Au Pair in Germany. She was impressed with how well the boys behaved, the standard of my driving, the life style the family lives and the ingenuity of the way the Germans do things or the way things are made.

When I finally got to escape Naples, I took the overnight ferry to Palermo and then got a train right through the heart of Sicily. My first impressions were that Sicily was very, very dry. Not a touch of green to be seen anywhere. I had never expected so many cacti, growing all along the train tracks, let alone that people would grow them commercially (people eat the cacti fruit, they do not have a very strong taste, and have lots of very small and stone-like pips that you have to swallow). At each rural train station we stopped at, there was a little statue of the Virgin Mary and most of the stops didn’t feel like they should be there at all, with small stone farm houses scattered only every few kilometres.

Castelmola

I got off at Taormina which is a very touristy part of the coast, half way between Catania and Messina. There Lisa (high school friend from Gisborne) and her boyfriend Andrea picked me up, and took me to Castelmola, a small village on top of a very high hill over looking the coast with Calabria in the far east, and Mt. Etna to the south. It is named Castelmola, for a very simple reason, it has a Castle on top of a hill that looks like a molar tooth. Castelmola is a strange mix, it’s full of very old houses, tiny narrow cobbled streets, cats dozing in the sun, little old ladies sitting out on their front door steps watching the world go by, and then it’s quite young and contemporary at the same time. At night a lot of the tourists staying in Taormina come up to one of the several restaurants, or go to Bar Turrisi which is four storeys high and bursting full of penile paraphernalia. It’s the kind of place that there is no need for the Internet, or even telephones for that matter. People know who you are, and your life story within minutes of arriving.

Andrea’s Mother, Angela has come to Castelmola each summer for years as their summer house has been in the family for generations. They normally live in Palermo, the capital of Sicily but during summer it is virtually uninhabitable because of the heat. We did not stay with the family however and instead stayed at the house of Carlo, one of Andrea’s friends. Casa Turrisi was right on the main street of the small village, and you could hear all the noises of daily life in Castelmola. From the old man ringing his bells every bloody ten minutes (trying to sell them to tourists) to the old ladies catching up on the latest gossip. Apparently Carlo’s grandmother was none to happy about us staying in the house all together. I think she thought we were there to have raucous sex parties and take crack cocaine.

View from the Piazza towards Calabria

I immediately slotted into the daily routine of Sicilian life, a welcome relief from Rome and Naples. My days consisted of getting up at 11 am, reading for a few hours or going down to the piazza and getting gelato. Then at 2 we would go to Andrea’s family’s house and Nonna would make us a huge lunch. Nonna was 83, and didn’t speak a word of English, so a lot of the time I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about, and was at the mercy of Lisa and Andrea to translate. We’d then go back to Casa Turrisi and have a couple of hour’s siesta. Then get up and go down to one of the cafés or bars and have aperitifs then go out to dinner around 10 or 11 pm. I got to have amazing Gnocchi with Pistachio, Vino and lots of Antipasto. Can’t say I was really overwhelmed with the Pizza though, I think I prefer the bastardized American versions – naughty I know. We would then chill out, maybe sit in the Piazza and watch all the people go by, or hang out with their friends, and then go to bed in the very early hours of the morning.

The heat and humidity was all consuming. The entire time I was there, there was virtually no relief from the heat. Even having a cold shower was not refreshing, as the effort to get dressed again made you hot. You couldn’t see very far out into the distance because the humidity put a thick haze over everything. Sometimes there was a strange hot wind, which had come from Africa and brought sand from the desert with it. Although we had access to a car, it was just too much effort to go down the hill to the beach. The beaches were packed with people, all baking themselves to a crisp. Surprisingly I thought I handled the heat extremely well, it did not get to me, as much as it did to Lisa and Andrea - I think the heat wave in Germany a few weeks before I’d left, had been good training.

View from Mimmi´s country house at Dusk

I got to go out to Mimmi’s country house, he is one of their friends who works at the Pizzeria, and is an incredibly nice guy, who plays the guitar and sings extremely well. So I’d either sit under the hazelnut trees or read my book, eat figs or picked blackberries and looked out to the hills covered in the thick humid fog, as he strummed his guitar and wrote songs with Andrea. One night after some of the locals had finished work for the night, we walked down a dark path covered in cacti to an old church lit up on the side of the hill. They sang songs in Italian and just chilled out for a while, and I couldn’t escape the thought of just how far away from home I was.

Because it was so hot, random fires would break out all over the place and it was alarming to me how blasé everyone reacted to them. Most of the time they were just left to burn themselves out, unless they got extremely close to houses, then maybe the fire engines would come. I think every day I was there, I could see a fire somewhere in the distance, some days I was so close to them I could hear the cracking of the dry wood. The fires were so common, that they weren’t even included in most daily conversations.

Piazza

The best part of staying in Castelmola, is that I wasn’t considered a tourist. Because I was with Lisa and Andrea, I was welcomed everywhere I went and treated like royalty. I basically didn’t have to pay for anything, and people were so friendly it was just fantastic. Although don’t get me wrong I still did a few very touristy things. One night we walked through Taormina and I got a caricature drawn of me. It was quite well done, and unfortunately I left it at the train station on the way home. I also got serenaded by three old men at a restaurant singing Italian love songs, and playing on the Accordion, Guitar and Tambourine.

I found that throughout Italy I would be stared at all of the time, and mostly by people who looked like locals. I am not sure if it was their curiosity or if it was just my paranoia but it really became uncomfortable. Most of the time, it was when I was waiting in queues, or on public transport but the bizarre thing was that they made no effort what so ever to hide the fact that they were staring. Often when you catch someone looking at you, they automatically avert their eyes, but here they just kept looking, and looking. It got so bad that I snapped in the line for the café on the Overnight ferry. I just started screaming ‘WHAT????’ at this teenage guy, he got really startled and wouldn’t make eye contact for the rest of the night.

View from Casa Turrisi towards Catania

Reluctantly I left Sicily and headed back up to Rome. I luckily found an Australian woman and we were headed in the same direction. It is funny when you are travelling on your own, and you make ‘day friends’ you become best of friends just for a day and then when its time to leave, nothing is lost – I never even found out her name. When I got to Rome just on Midnight, it was too late to find accommodation, and my transfer to the airport was at 4.30 am so on my last night in Italy I slept in a train station. Yup, I along with about thirty others slept on platform 1 at Termini station. I found a spot slotted between a Muslim who got up at some point to pray, and on my left an older woman (I’d say in her late 50’s) who was glad to be by another woman. All the homeless people get kicked out for the night, and so all the people there were travellers. It was a very surreal environment, people from all walks of life, and all nationalities, had found themselves in the same predicament. I had imagined staying up all night and perhaps writing this very blog in a 24 hour internet café, but it was not to be. Although I probably only got half an hours sleep max, others found no difficulty in sleeping amongst strangers. Even though on reflection, I was in an incredibly vulnerable situation, it did not feel unsafe – definitely dirty, and odd but not unsafe. I couldn’t get over, how normal everyone acted that as a large group of strangers, there was an unwritten rule to not speak to one another, not to move around too much and to respect each others space. So the only noises were those of the night staff. Something I hadn’t counted on was that we were in fact locked in. And at 4.20am all of the night staff and security people had magically disappeared. I was put in a very tricky dilemma, I needed to get out in order to catch my transfer to the airport, but large gates blocked my exit. I didn’t want to throw my backpack over the gate, in case I couldn’t make it over and then we would both be stranded. So I started to scramble over, pack and all, before I was promptly stopped by a security guard who had magically materialised from somewhere – no doubt after a laughing fit from staring at the security monitors. I think my only saving grace was that I was trying to get out, and not in, so he lowered the gates, just in time to see my bus driving off. Thankfully, it had stopped at a red light not to far away and I was able to catch up to it. I got to the airport and boarded the plane, without further incident. Perhaps wearing the St Christopher’s pendant Tube gave me before I left NZ, was not such a bad idea. When I landed in Germany I felt like I was home, and the moment I got in the door I fell asleep for 18 hours straight.

One of the strange things I found about my trip was that when people asked me a question, I would often answer automatically in German, and now that I am back, I answer in Italian - go figure. I think your brain gets screwed up because you know you’re in a foreign country so it just scrambles around trying to find any foreign word.

Mt Etna

I enjoyed my trip to Italy. Although I didn’t particularly like Rome or Naples, I still want to go back to Italy and travel the rest of it. I strongly recommend taking a guidebook, and buying it in your home country, at least to give you some idea of how to get around there and what to see. Unfortunately I didn’t have that luxury as it’s not that easy to find English guidebooks for Italy in Germany. And when in Italy it’s not that easy to find good guidebooks for the whole country, they only sell books for each region or town. Keep your wits about you, and try to look as less like a tourist as much as possible. Try to learn as much of the language as you can, because a lot of the time no one around will speak any English. Always make it known your not American, a lot of the time people didn’t give me the time of day, until I said I was a New Zealander, then they warm up instantly. Unlike home, people wont help you at all if you can’t speak a little of the language. Don’t look like a victim, when in Naples, I made sure at all times I had a ‘Don’t mess with me look’ and I was luckily left alone for a lot of the time.

Italy is not always beautiful; it is quite poor in a lot of areas and is actually incredibly ugly in some parts. It can be congested, polluted, dirty, smelly, scary and noisy and some of the people are simply not very nice. But on the other hand, you can be overwhelmed with its beauty, embrace its simplicity, marvel at its ingenuity and feel incredible hospitability all in the same breath.

Ok where to start? I have finally made it to Italy and although I have not been here even five days, I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. It’s polluted, swelteringly hot, unorganised, crowded, smelly and it is the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life. It’s not all bad though, and it’s my own fault for coming here in the middle of the high season! I landed in Rome, and immediately got on the bus to hell. Remind me NEVER to drive in Italy; it would freak me out for life. Lanes mean nothing, stop signs mean nothing, and pedestrian crossings definitely mean nothing. You just have to start walking in to the middle of the traffic and hope to survive.

My first hostel in Rome was really dodgy, and didn’t even have a sign. First I had to walk with my huge backpack, past homeless people sleeping in shop doorways and then couldn't find the blimmen building. It just had a tiny piece of paper on the buzzer, and you had to go in the dodgiest elevator to the 5th floor. As I got there pretty late, I just crashed straight away. The next day I meet some Americans at breakfast, (if you could even call it that; juice and a small bun) and they took me under their wings. So I went with them to the Pantheon, Coliseum, Roman Forum and out to dinner in a nice Piazza across the other side of the river.

Jill and Mike, the Americans in front of the Pantheon

Jill and Mike, were lovely and didn’t make me feel like a third wheel at all. I got to see a lot more of the city than I probably would have if I was just by my self. I was a little worried that they thought they were stuck with me, but they assured me that it was nice to have some different company as they had been travelling together for the last two months. So if you're reading this you two... thank you very much for all of your kindness and I wish you all the very best for the upcoming nuptials!!

My hostel in Naples was more of a hotel and was fantastic. Although it was in a dodgy area, I ended up having the whole room to myself on my first night which was sooo good to actually get some sleep. As I hardly got any sleep in Rome. I visited Pompeii, a historic Roman city being excavated and Sorrento an unabashedly tourist town on the side of some cliffs. Sorrento was really nice, it was good to get out of the doom and gloom of Naples. A bit expensive - but nice views and pleasant atmosphere.

I have come to loathe Naples with a passion. While in the trains people walk through the carriages playing the accordion, and thrusting their children at you (some only look 18 months old) who are clutching plastic cups for you to give them money. When I was in McDs (the only place I could find actually open on the National holiday) a girl came right up to me and was begging for my food. I felt positively awful, I didn't know whether to ignore her or be a 'stupid tourist'. Then some man started shouting at me in Italian through the window, I think he was angry that I was even in the building, let alone also eating. On my second night in Naples I meet an Australian and a Venezuelan. We were all solo female travellers and so we went out to dinner. The Australian could talk Portuguese, and so she could somehow communicate with the girl from Venezuela who spoke Spanish and a little Italian, and basic English. At the restaurant we drew a bit of attention from the locals and so they joined in and the process of translation was hilarious. In order for the waiter to communicate to me, he first had to talk to the Venezuelan, then she talked to the Australian then the Australian told me what the question was, and to answer it was the reverse. The locals then got in to a very loud argument about which wine we should have, as they had conflicting opinions over which was the best.

Next day I headed to the port, and got my tickets to get out of Naples ASAP. Short and brief blog I know, but just wait till you hit the epic blog for Sicily.

This week I took the boys to Bavaria, to see their Grandparents. Oma and Opa live about an hour away from Munich, in a small village called ‘Burgau’. Thank god the navigator is back up and running otherwise I would have had a hell of a time trying to figure everything out. As I mentioned in the previous blog, I am getting quite used to driving on the Autobahn, and now feel completely normal driving on the wrong/right side of the road. I think my average speed is around 150 to 160 km/h and Mum before you freak out there are people going much much faster!

About 15 minutes away from Burgau is Legoland Deutschland. So of course Oma and I took the boys along for the day. Now I have been to Dreamworld on the Gold Coast, but the queues for Legoland were just ridiculous. Apparently it’s in the middle of most peoples journeys to other places, so every man and his dog comes for a day. Luckily it was slightly overcast the whole day so it wasn’t too hot, but there really was no chance of going on many rides. Most of it was pretty well done and actually kind of interesting, if you were a kid you’d be in heaven.

Mike and Max at Legoland

I got a little nostalgic; especially when in the Duplo section as I used to have some of the books as well as all the bricks. You could probably spend several days there, but one was more than enough for me. That night before sunset, I took a walk out in to the country, past mostly fields of maize and listened to the glorious sound of nothing – reminded me of home until I turned a corner and saw Europe’s (and possibly the Worlds) biggest Nuclear Power plant. Ahhh bliss.

Guarding the castle gates, in Legoland

The next day the weather really turned bad, you would never believe it was the middle of summer. I took the boys to an indoor play centre, and then Opa took us on a drive out into the country and we had a tour through some caves. The region is famous for uncovering lots of dinosaur fossils and also bones of Neanderthals and Mammoths. The caves were ok, but as the tour was in German I switched off. I kept on thinking of comparisons to NZ. Although I haven’t been in the Waitomo caves, (so I may need to be corrected) I don’t think New Zealanders would actually intentionally destroy a naturally phenomenon like stagnites and stallites just to put some lights up would we? I am sure the caves I have been in before, you either individually carry torches, or the leader carries a big gas lantern thingee. Well in the cave I went to, they had strung lights up everywhere, and you could quite clearly see where they’d knocked things down, and then put putty like substance over cables to attempt hiding them. And sadly no glow worms.

On the way back Opa took me to some Bavarian churches in the Baroque style, which are quite different from other parts of Germany. Every village, no matter how small has a huge church – usually smack bang in the middle. It is incredible to think that most of these churches were built in the 17th Century and at the time there were probably at most only 200 people living in the actual village. The churches are massive, and because most of them are Catholic they are lavishly decorated inside, and would have been phenomenally expensive and time consuming to build. I left the boys in Bavaria, where their parents will join them tomorrow and then they’ll all head to Austria.

Well I now have two whole glorious weeks to spend as I please, so I am off to Italy - who knows what adventures await me.

P.s. For more images, check out my Image Gallery which should be accessible on your top right, under the authour section - click on my name and it should take you there or at least mention something about a photo gallery.