The Real Life Fantastic

London was wonderful!

I‘m a bit bummed to be back in reality, but at least the Easter holidays are coming up. Thank the Easter bunny for five day weekends!

I‘m going to tell you all about the trip, but since it was quite packed with activities I will break it down with LJ cuts so that you can skip over stuff that doesn't catch your interest. You are of course free to skip everything and just read the tl;dr at then end. (But then you miss the pictures!)



( Thursday – Travel and Tesco )

( Friday – Harry Potter Studio Tour and Book of Mormon )

( Saturday – The Parliament tour and afternoon tea )

( Sunday – Windsor castle )

( Monday – St. Paul‘s and Oxford Street )

Tl;dr version:

- Harry Potter studio tour: Very train. Delicious butterbeer. Much emotions. Wow.

- Book of Mormon show: Incredibly funny and worth the ticket price. Met interesting Doctor Who couple who were about to be engaged!

- Parliament tour and afternoon tea: So majestic! And the best scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam you can imagine.

- Windsor castle: Queen was at home but did not come out to greet us. Also, breaking news: Rich people make giant rooms with awesome paintings and furniture.

- Went to church??? (Got to sit in very fancy church chair.)

- Saw St. Paul‘s from the outside and also spent money on Oxford Street.


So. That was my trip to London.

Like I said before, I'm glad that I have another few days off coming up so that I'll be able to rest and recuperate. Although, I'm already invited to one party on Friday, and my mother got tickets for a Jesus Christ Superstar show on Thursday. Still. I think I'll probably have plenty of time to rest as well.

You guys have any plans for Easter?

Soon I will be in the air heading for Sydney! Before I leave I wanted to give you guys a brief overview of what I've been doing for the past few days in Albury.

- I went swimming! It felt like I was home. Also it was exercise. Desperately needed physical activity. (Am turning into a blubbery beast.)

- I visited the family of an exchange student that used to live with my aunt. Turns out his family home is right outside Albury, and he put me in touch with his mother. She proceeded to invite me and Þorri to lunch and feed us all the things. (There was quail, squid and kangaroo meat among other things. All super delicious!)


The house was beautiful!

- Erin took me and Þorri to see Beechworth. It's an old gold rush town just south of the border in Victoria. We had a wonderful afternoon of walking up and down the picturesque main street, buying sweets and amazing honey, checking out the old court house and the old jail where Ned Kelly bought it. (Ned Kelly is a sort of Robin Hood figure in Australia.) There was also a telegram station! You could send an actual telegram and watch this amazing old gentleman send it in Morse code! Most entertainment I have ever received for four dollars.


Apparently sending a telegraph via Morse code has beaten a text message via mobile phone!

- I checked out the Hume Dam and the Hume Lake with Erin and Þorri. It was really beautiful, and we were able to wave to Jack (Erin's boyfriend) who was out sailing on the lake on a yacht. Erin and Þorri did a little bit of wading and skipping stones, but I kept to the shade since I had forgotten all about sunscreen. Silly me.



- Otherwise Þorri and I have been playing a lot of Scrabble, eating a lot of yummy food (Erin is a wonderful cook) and using up all of Erin and Jack's internet. It's been great!

Since my last update I have enjoyed a lovely stay in London, been reunited with Thorri, and flown to the other end of the planet.

I can't believe I'm in Australia already. It's been this far off part of my journey for such a long time. When I saw my grandmother and Lindsay waiting for me and Thorri at the Tamworth airport I was struck with the sheer insanity of it all. I can't really put the feeling into words, but it might have been close to how you feel when you've been spinning around on a desk chair for ages and then suddenly get up.

( London )

My last full day in London, Monday, was spent getting ready to meet Þorri at the airport. I must have made it to the arrivals gate almost two hours early because I was so eager to see him again! You can imagine how happy we were when we were finally reunited. ♥

We stayed at an airport hotel that night, making it easy to get the airport the next day. I won't bore you with the details of our journey (6 hours to Abu Dhabi, 10 hours waiting in Abu Dhabi, 13 hours to Sydney, 4 hours waiting in Sydney, 1 hour to Tamworth, 2 hours driving to Narrabri) except to say it was exhausting. Especially since I came down with a sore throat right at the start of the journey. I did manage to catch up on all the recent film releases, though.

After we got to my grandmother's house we've been doing a lot of eating and sleeping. Þorri is loving all the animals that you see around the house (mainly birds and some lizards) and I'm loving my grandmother's collection of murder mysteries. Oh, and last night we started watching Downton Abbey! I've already become quite invested.

Tonight there will be a dinner party. My grandmother has invited some friends that I'm looking forward to seeing again, and there has been talk of pancakes. Yummy Icelandic pancakes!

Hopefully my throat will get better soon, being sick is no fun. Will you send me some healing mojo if you have any to spare?

Since I left Berlin I have visited Jói in Copenhagen, Alda in Stockholm, had lunch with my former coworkers Siggeir and Tóta in Gothenburg, and crashed at Vera's place in Århus!

Copenhagen was a lot of fun. Jói and his girlfriend Sarah took really good care of me. We spent our first evening having a lovely dinner, drinking red wine and catching up. The next day Jói showed me the botanical gardens (which have a greenhouse full of tropical jungle!) and some very serious guards outside the place where the crown jewels are kept. If you got too close to the guards they would very seriously stomp the butt of their guns to the ground and give you A Look. Scary!

I went on a boat ride around Copenhagen, saw the new opera house and the new theatre building, a lot of weird looking church spires, a lot of bridges that we needed to duck in order to sail underneath without incident, and some renovated boat houses that are now used as offices!

The evening was spent eating way too much candyfloss at Tivoli, after a lovely Japanese dinner which threatened to burn my mouth away. (I had the firecracker shrimp...) I got to ride the second oldest rollercoaster in the world! I was so happy that Jói and Sarah were willing to accompany me. ♥



The next day I woke up early and caught a train to Stockholm. Alda met me at the station and took me to the nice apartment that she and Al are living in. Al cooked amazing food, we watched 'Allo 'Allo and drank white wine. It was awesome. We also watched Adventure Time and Buffy! It was nice to just hang out and watch TV. Sometimes that's exactly what you need.

I spent the next day in Stockholm's old town with Alda. We did some exploring, some sitting by the ocean, and some fake CPR on statues of rabbits. We also visited some kind of royal park. I think it's called Hagaparken. There was a pretty cool royal summer house or something there. It was beautiful.



We met up with our friend Gutti for Kebab pizza in the evening (Kebab pizza is amazing. Swedes are geniuses in disguise.) It was really nice to see him and just hang out and talk.

Yesterday I got on another early train. It took me to Gothenburg where I had sushi and white wine with Siggeir and Tóta - and got to hear all the news I've been missing. Apparently I just missed Maren (another coworker) when I was in Berlin! Such a shame.

After I lunch I managed to book all the trains I need to get myself to London. Such a relief! Then I got on the train that took me to Århus. Vera met me at the station, gave me candy and was generally delightful. We're going to go explore Århus now!

Hope you guys are all healthy and happy. Miss you!

Prague has been amazing!

I've spent two days exploring the city. Yesterday I went to the Prague castle, the Strahov library, and the Loreta church. The treasury in the Loreta is full of shiny things, the library was very cool, and the castle had a place called 'The Golden Lane' where I was able to shoot a crosbow! I totally managed to hit the target. Once. Out of four tries... I also walked over to the Charles bridge and wandered around the old town for a bit.



The weather was a bit cloudy and drizzly, but I had an umbrella and some warm clothes that I now feel vindicated for hauling around with me.

Today I started by walking around the Vyšehrad area (since I'm staying right next to it), then I went to the Klementinum library - it was gorgeous - saw the Astronomical clock do its little show, walked around the Jewish part of town for a bit (it was boring because all the Jews go on vacation or something on Saturdays) and then I checked out the Museum of Decorative Arts. I really liked the dresses at the museum. Pretty! ♥

Also, I tasted garlic soup, Czech dumplings, rabbit and 8 different flavours of Czech beer.


Sour cherry, banana, nettle and coffee flavours were among the ones I tried.

My impression of Prague is very favourable. It would have been nice to glimpse some blue sky, but you can't have everything. The people seem nice enough - although it's every man for himself on the subway - the food is delicious, and walking around town is sort of like walking into a wormhole and being transported to medieval Europe, except not smelly! I can understand why my friend Elín loved it here.

Tomorrow I'm going to Krakov in Poland!

Since my last update I have done a lot.

- I visited the Chateau d'If and said goodbye to Laufey and Marseille.

- I jumped on a train to Geneva, where I ended up drinking Swiss white wine aboard a boat on the Geneva Lake within hours of my arrival. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love the couch surfing project?)

- Visited CERN and saw physicists hard at work, analysing fresh data from the LHC.

- Spent more than 10 hours on trains getting myself to Rome. This included amazing views of Switzerland and Italy.

- Saw the Vatican museum, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's Basilica, the Castle d'Angelo, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Fountain of Four Rivers and many many other famous and important things.

- Watched The Artist under the stars.

- Ate the best gelato I have ever tasted. (Banana and dark chocolate flavours mixed together with whipped cream on top!)

- Went on a road trip to see the pope at his summer house (he totally blessed my hat) and then to see a small town called Palestrine, where there was a pretty cool museum with stunning views of the surrounding area. Ate at an awesome restaurant along the way - was the only tourist in there!

- Tasted real Italian coffee in the tiniest cup I have ever seen. (It was probably 50% coffe and 50% sugar, though.)

I wish I had time to go into detail about all of this, but I feel like I'm hogging my host's computer enough already. Maybe next time? Although by then I will hopefully have accumulated new and exciting stories to tell you.

Bonjour!

I'm currently posting from my couch surfing host's computer. His name is Ivan and he has been taking wonderful care of me and Thorri.

The past two days have been quite the whirlwind! Yesterday we arrived in Paris - very early in the morning - and spent most of the time before lunch getting to our host and catching up on sleep. Then we went to see the Victory Arch and the beautiful shopping street Champs- Élysées. Thorri bought some clothes that were on sale, and I renewed some MAC supplies that I was running low on. For dinner Ivan cooked us some delicious risotto and we split a bottle of white wine. We ate outside in the nice weather and talked until it was very late.

Today I managed to wake Thorri up at around lunch, and we headed for the Louvre soon after. Before entering the museum we looked at the Paris Opera House and strolled down some of the nearby shopping streets. There were a lot of jewelry stores with sparkly things!

The Louvre was amazing, but exhausting. I didn't realise it was so huge! It was really nice to see all those beautiful and famous works of art. Aside from the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo there were so many gorgeous pieces! I fell in love with a particularly beautiful painting of a martyr in a white dress, floating in some water with the figure of death hovering in the background. I think it's called 'A Young Martyr' and it's by Paul Delaroche.

Dinner was eaten at a very unique restaurant that Ivan took us to. It used to be a train station! It's called Bouillon Chartier and the food was amazing! I tried snails and foie gras for a starter, duck comfit as the main course, and a baba au rhum for dessert. It was all delicious!

After dinner we walked around for a bit, and Thorri and I joined a group of people who were dancing the tango on the steps of the Opera House. I was a bit nervous since I haven't danced the tango since I left Iceland in April, but it was fun!

Anyway, I need to go to sleep now. We're going to try to get out of bed a bit earlier tomorrow and it's already after midnight!

Peru! That is where I am right now. How weird is that?

So far I've spent an evening and a day in Lima and a day in Cuzco. I stayed in Miraflores while I was in Lima. (It is a very beautiful, tourist-friendly part of Lima.) I didn't have to worry about walking around by myself - although I didn't venture out on my own in the evening for anything more than a quick trip to the store around the corner from my gorgeous colonial hotel - and the Peruvians that I interacted with where all amazingly friendly. I would have worried that I was being scammed, except they never tried to sell me anything or take me anywhere. They just seemed genuinely interested in chatting!

I ended up spending my free day in Lima walking around Miraflores, staying close to the ocean for the most part. The waves were beautiful! And there was a cool shopping centre in the cliffs overhanging the ocean. I ended up going back there for dinner later in the day with a couple of Norwegian girls who are on the same tour as me. It was nice to get to know them a little bit. They both had soup, and I went with some fish of the day special. It was hilarious when the waiter brought them their soups - I have never seen such generous proportions! The one with the seafood soup pretty much got what I would consider to be a full pot!

This morning we flew to Cuzco. It's about an hour away from Lima, so it wasn't a big deal. The view of the mountains from the plane was amazing! Snow-capped peaks and deep valleys... Just gorgeous. ♥

The afternoon was spent getting ourselves situated at the hotel, going on a walking tour of the city, and receiving information about the coming days.

1. The hotel is nice and I love my roomate. (She is just like me! We both finished grad school, both studied Immunology, are both travelling around the world for about the same length of time, and have really similar opinions on all sorts of subjects.)

2. The walking tour was a lot of fun. We went to a local market - sort of like Kolaportid in Iceland. Local people had stands with everything from clothes made from llama wool to whole entire pigs, or even live frogs! But mainly it was flowers, fruit, herbs, nuts, and other run of the mill food items. We also went to see the main square. There was a beautiful colonial cathedral, and a very impressive fountain. Also, since the Peruvian independence day is in July (the 28th, I believe) there were Peruvian flags everywhere. (And I thought the people in the USA were patriotic!) It looked really festive and beautiful. We stopped at a little juice shop for lunch, and I got the most amazing fresh Papaya juice along with a chicken sandwich. Yummy!

3. I'm terrified of the coming days. The Inca Trail sounds like it will be hell on earth - but with amazing catering. (Three course breakfast, lunch and dinner on the hiking days!) The first day will be 10 kilometers. The next day will be the same length, but steeper uphill and also steeper downhill. The third day will be 16 kilometers, but apparently it is supposed to be very beautiful. On the fourth day we will wake up at four AM for a two hour trek to Machu Picchu. In the dark. But I think we're supposed to be arriving at Machu Picchu around sunrise for the grand effect. Oh, and there will be no electricity while we are on the hike.

I am so scared! But also kind of excited to see if I will be able to handle this. If I do this I will have major bragging rights. And you will all have to put up with endless 'When I was at Machu Picchu' stories. (Hopefully I won't chunder everywhere, though.)

Tonight I'm staying at a hotel. Tomorrow I'm going to the Sacred Valley and staying at a hotel again, but the day after tomorrow (11th of July?) will be the first hiking day. I should be back to civilisation on the 14th-ish.

Hopefully I will be able to post something then. I'm not sure what the computer situation will be. But as always, no news is good news!

I just got back from eating way too much pizza with the Norwegian girls, my roomate and an Australian girl who joined forces with us. I really like all of them, but only my roomate and one of the Norwegian girls will be joining me for the Inca Trail hike. The Australian is doing a different hike, and the other Norwegian girl is taking the train. (I'm so jealous of her.)

Anyway, I'm going to go pack now. I can only bring the bare essentials for the hike and I need to decide what to leave behind at the hotel. Our porters will carry 6 kilograms for us, and half of that is the sleeping bag and the mattress... I'm going to have to think very carefully about this. I really don't want to have to carry a lot myself. It'll be hard enough to hike with just my body to lug around!

I don't have a lot of time on this public computer so I'm just going to post what I posted on facebook:

"New Zealand is amazing. The nature is unbelievable! I never want to fall asleep on the bus because there's always some new gorgeous view around the next corner. I've been to a beach where you can dig a hole and hot water springs up, in caves with glow-worms that make the ceiling look like a starry night sky, and today I went to see a Maori cultural show! It's all been amazing. ♥"

I was one of the very few who went into the hot water pools that we dug up on the beach. The tide happened to be at night, so it was pitch black and freezing! But I held up the honour of my Viking heritage. It was nice and warm in the water, though.

The glow-worm cave in Waitomo was a dream come true for me. I've been wanting to see them since I saw David Attenborough talk about them in one of his documentaries. It was a surreal experience!

I just got back from the Maori cultural show here in Rotorua. They fed us a feast of traditional hangi after the show. (It's slowly cooked meat and veg, basically.) I'm so full! The show itself was very educational and fun. The Maori did their war dance (Haka) for us and sang traditional songs. We also had to choose a chief from our tour group to represent us, and he got to take part in the opening ceremony. The war dance was quite intimidating!

Tomorrow we leave Rotorua, a place which reminds me of Iceland since it is full of hot springs, and go to Taupo - the adventure capital of the northern island. I'll be sad to leave Rotorua though, the lake here is gorgeous. I walked out to it earlier today, and some black swans swam right up to where I was standing!

I hope you're all happy and healthy! ♥

I've had an eventful couple of days in Osaka!

My bus arrived at Osaka station very early yesterday morning. I spent my first hour or so just wandering around the station. It's incredibly enormous! It must be at least 11 floors, if not more, and it seems to stretch on and on in every direction. Far too easy to get lost if one is not careful!

And I thought Kyoto station was nuts...

Thankfully I was able to find my way to the information desk and Get Informed. I purchased a two day city pass and received maps, coupons and other such shiny things. I dropped my bags off at the hotel where I stayed my one night in Osaka, and then I was off to see the Osaka Museum of Science.

The museum was a lot of fun. It is aimed mainly at children, but that suited me well. I couldn't understand any of the Japanese explanations, but the pictures intended for the kids helped me understand. Also, there were a lot of things to play with! Science things. It was great!

Oh, and there was a human sized robot there that solved Rubik's cubes for you if you stood in front of it for a while. Japan is just awesome like that.

After a lunch of Kushi-katsu (basically deep fried pork with sauce) I decided to go to the zoo. It was nice to see the animals, but I wish they had more comfortable surroundings and more space. Especially the chimps. They looked so sad.

I saw an Asian elephant while I was there! My first time seeing an elephant in real life. Interestingly, there were art students milling around the elephant enclosure. They were drawing and painting the elephants for school. One of them asked if he could draw me as I watched the elephant! I didn't mind, so he went ahead. The sketch was quite nice! He let me take a picture of it. Another student walked up to me as I prepared to leave and gave me a postcard sized drawing she had made of me as a gift. It was quite lovely!

I felt very flattered. ♥

Outside the zoo there are criss-crossing streets full of shops, stalls, and restaurants. Many were selling tako-yaki, and I had read that one simply must try them if one is in Osaka. Tako-yaki literally means fried or grilled octopus, and according to Wikipedia it is a popular ball-shaped Japanese dumpling or more like a savory pancake made of batter and cooked in a special takoyaki pan. Also it is delicious. I ended up eating it twice again today!

Yesterday evening started out very nicely. I went for a ride in a big red Ferris wheel close by my hotel. It was around sunset, so the view was very pretty! The rest of the evening was spent having a bubble bath in my hotel room, talking to Thorri over Skype, and reading Great Expectations.

Today I went for a cruise around the river, looked at the beautiful Osaka castle (fantastic view from the top!), saw Men in Black III at the cinema which is located at the top of Osaka station, and after it was dark, I went to the top of the Umeda Sky Building. It's a really cool pair of skyscrapers that are connected by a circular building at the very top. You can go out and get a 360°view of the city from the 39th floor.

I'm glad I decided to wait for dark to go up there, Osaka at night is magical! ♥

Right now I'm about to board my bus to Hiroshima. Hiroshima will be my last stop before I return to Tokyo.

Catch you later!