A Munchkin's New House

Hej hej everyone,

The epic ordeal of moving house has now been completed, hooray! The mental trauma was kept to a minimum and no nuclear weapons were used when deciding on where the couch should go. The ridiculousness of trying to find a place to live in July is like trying to find half a needle in a haystack the size of Canada. It is very similar to Canberra in January. Uni students arrive, they have a hard day at O-week (although it seemed to be O-3 weeks) and then have to look respectable to claim any and all the housing available. They run around town in bright yellow overalls and funny hats and there are an extreme amount of males in tight pink tights, some in dresses, some trying to look like superman. You know it's bad when websites advertise for apartments, villas, rooms and .................couches. We even investigated the possibility of hiring a cardboard box or two. Then there is the saga of 1st, 2nd and 3rd hand renting which is confusing and dodgy (but I won't bore you with the details).

So the new apartment is in a new suburb, down a new street, in a new town, with a yellow door! It's kinda like an estate type area with lots of apartment/duplex buildings and cool playgrounds. It reminds Jochen and I of a cross between holiday park by the coast and a retirement village.
So you would think that when you move into a new house you might get a light or two, perhaps a curtain. Well you don't! For some reason white goods like a dishwasher, dryer, washingmachine, and fridge are included but light fittings, bulbs, curtains and curtain rails are not. I am amazed! Mostly about the lightbulbs. So when we next move we will be well supplied, as we have now spent all our monies on this stuff and we can move our custom fit curtains and rods to a new house where they will be the wrong size.

In other non-house news, more like "Adventure News", I have been to the beach. And what a beach it is! It's about 15-20 minutes drive from town and it is beautiful in a grey kinda way. There is not much sand but it's made up for by the large amounts of seaweed lining the shores. The water is shallow for a very long way out (I am told, as it's way to freezing to go swimming) and it's also suprisingly un-salty. Near Bjärred there is a long pier, 574metres long with a restuarant and sauna at the end of it. We didn't go in for the sauna this time around but we almost became Mary Poppins being swept away by the wind. Even with all the wind it was still a great place to view the edge of the world from. You can see Malmö and Copenhagen joined by the Oresund (imagine that O has a strike through it) Bridge and you can watch the incoming storm where there is no distinction between rain clouds and water anymore and the cities disappear. That was therefore our cue to leave, sorry there is no picture, the Munchkin forgot her camera.

Now for a new section of my blog called "You know you're not in Yackandandah anymore when..." (thanks goes to Tommo for the title inspiration)

a) Eggs come in cartons of 10 instead of a dozen. Although funnily enough they do have half dozen cartons, hence why it's taken me 3 months to discover this :-).
b) You know how great the health system is when the Sjukhus (hospital, or word4word translation - sick house) is sporting a lovely view of the the cemetry across the road.
c) Speaking of cemetries, they are really pretty and green, almost as pretty as the botanical gardens. No brown dead grass and pattersons curse here.
d) Speaking of pattersons curse, I keep getting in trouble for calling native european wild flowers "weeds"!
e)They sell diaries that go from July 2010 to June 2011, who would have thunk it!
Last but not least....
f)The word for 'exit' contains the word 'fart' in it "utfart", rather appropriate I think.

That's it for now, it's actually sunny today so I am off to soak it up before another week of rain.
I hope you are all well and I hope to post some more Spain pictures soon.

Keep in touch.

Hej do.

Spain Part 1

Thank you Hef for the much needed kick up the bum! I was getting to it, however a little trip to Spain seemed to get in the way :-)

This next one is especially for Dad, I've put all the pictures of the Roman built El Acueducto in just for you.

So the next few posts will mostly be about the Spain adventure.

It all started on a sweetly cool summers evening with an amazing mediterranean meal in Lund full of MEAT. This should have been an indication of what we would encounter in Spain and prepared us for our new dietary food groups, meat and bread! How naive we were.

After packing late into the evening we got up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5am for our train then plane to Spain (no 'my fair lady' pun intended). Since I had not been awake at that time in Lund before I thought it worth mentioning that the small city waking up is quite lovely, although we felt sorry for the market stall set-er-up-er-ers already well under way.

Ok, train, plane, Hola hot, sticky, muggy, Madrid. Once we navigated the metro and found ourselves in Plaza de la Puerta del Sol - "Gate of the Sun" we found our hostel was conveniently located between two tapas bars. This was the beginning of the end! Beer, bocadillos, pintxos, tapas, montaditos, beer, every type of cured pig meat you can think of, did i mention beer, bread, tapas etc. this cycle went on for the entire trip and tapas became more than just food, but a mantra we lived by.

Our lovely patient, problem and argument solving guide the lonely planet pointed us in the direction of the 'Cerveceria 100 Montaditos' where we filled ourselves with mini bocadillos of all different fillings and flavours, even a dessert one of white chocolate and fruit jam (sounds weird, tastes great). Most of the choices of fillings were lovely surprises as our abysmal knowledge of Spanish was failing us. We ended the evening with some beer at Plaza Mayor, which is a grand square full of restaurants, buskers and pretty lights. It is here that our second mantra was born "dos cervezas? ummm.......por favor". Also, Jochen developed a great fear of scary devil goats! Shiney, sparkly devil goats that make weird clicking noises and jump up at you if you donate money to them, they were altogether very disturbing.

The next day we made our way to Toledo, a small walled city set up on a hill where broadswords, shields, morning stars, daggers and suits of armour are sold. They set our fantasy book reading hearts aflutter. Toledo was settled by the Romans in the 6th century, Muslims conquered in 711 and became the centre of learning and arts in Spain. It is now known as the capital of the province Castilla La Mancha (once having been considered for the capital of Spain). During the 11th century, Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully until Alfonso VI conquered the city with Christian forces and forced the Jews & Muslims to convert or bugger off. So there's lots of history and old stuff to see. Definitely worth a look for the buildings, the wall, the Rio Tajo, the small winding streets and the view.

Next we made our way back on the fast train to Madrid and picked up our hire car which we affectionately named Jose. He got us through thick and thin, especially thin as small towns only believe in a road big enough for one car. Luckily for me I didn't have my aussie drivers licence so Jochen was the designated driver. Woohooooo! Getting out of Madrid without a city map or a working GPS was an adventure. As the Navagatrix I chose a random direction which proved to be the wrong one. This of course is one of the only times I have ever been wrong! So we took the scenic detour out of Madrid to the south-east when we wanted to go to Segovia on the North (slightly west) side of the city. Oh well! Lucky I wasn't driving. One very important lesson was learnt on this detour: never eat Racciones Calamares from a truck stop restaurant! Ever!

We finally got to Segovia behind schedule to spend a few hours gazing at the amazing El Acueducto. As time was of short supply we only saw the El Acueducto and the Catedral. The Romans occupied Segovia for a while from 80BC and they decided to build a huge f*&^ off aqueduct in the 1st century AD. The aqueduct was built to transport water from the Fuente Fria River 15km away to the city at a grading of 1 percent. At its tallest it is 28.5 metres tall, is 894 metres long and has 167 arches (from it's entry to the city) all of which were built out of granite blocks without mortar. Various restoration projects have made it one of the best preserved aqueducts and an important historical monument.....this is why we took lots of photos!

Then we went to the Catedral which is an amazing Gothic building. First construction was in 1525 and then took about 200 years to complete. It has two massive amazing organs and the choir stalls are a big cage where all the seating and inner walls are carved walnut. However they do like to lock up their musicians and priests with lots of grilled walls.

And that was Segovia, or what little we saw of it before heading off to El Burgo de Osma.
Have a look at the photos if you are interested. Apologies if this was too historic for your tastes, as the story continues there will be less history and more drinking.

(Not really sure what these are, teapot? bong? Spain definitely has interesting souvenirs)

On a more recent note: we are not homeless anymore and will be moving to our new place next week.....all very exciting!

Seeya later alligators.

So, as you can see there are some photo's to the right. These are mainly of Midsommar a couple of weeks ago. For some reason the order is backwards so please go from the bottom if you don't like reverse chronological order. If you click on them it will take you to a Picasa web album (basically they appear larger).

Swedish Midsommar involves tradition Swedish songs and the decorating of a phallic symbol, the maypole, that children (and adults) dance around to emphasize procreation. These dances and songs are about doing washing and being a small frog or pig, as you can imagine it was very entertaining.

After all of this excitement we went to the park to drink, eat and be merry, hooray!!!

The Very First Munchkin Post.

Välkommen to “A Munchkin’s Adventure”! This is all very new and exciting and hopefully I will get the hang of blogging before too long.

As most of you know I am now living in Sweden, I have gone into early retirement and live the life of a lady of leisure. Life is so very hard! I am intending to use this blog as a means of updating you all, the idea being that it will be easier than mass emails. So feel free to comment, be a twit, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with these things. I will of course regale you with tales of my adventures and observations about the world in general.

At the moment I live in a world of apartments, cobbled streets, buildings without eves, pretty parks, greenery in summer (very weird), a combination of kebab meat on pizza (which is amazing!), not understanding Svenska and everybody loves ice cream!

I will keep this short and sweet. I will be updating this very soon with more details and hopefully some photos.

I hope you are all well and happy.

Keep in touch,

Cara (aka Munchkin).