Return to Oz

We arrived back in Australia on Sunday 6 August. It's good to see our friends and family, but we could quite happily have stayed another year or two in Japan. Of course, we have jobs here in Australia and we couldn't really give them up. Hopefully, we'll get to catch up with all of our Australian friends sometime soon. Sayonara to all our friends from Japan, we hope to catch up with you guys soon too. In the meantime, keep checking out our web album (http://picasaweb.google.com/skerr3), there's a lot more great stuff coming.

No more takoyaki for us.

Picasa Web Albums

Adding photos to my blog just ended up being too time-consuming. The new version of Picasa just lets me upload a whole pile of photos really quickly. I think it does the job. Click here for lots of pictures of our holiday and fun times in Japan.

http://picasaweb.google.com/skerr3

I've been adding more photos everyday, so keep checking for more good stuff or, alternatively, just subscribe to the RSS feed, if you're a big geek.

By the way, a new addition to the blog is my schedule listed on the right. If anyone's wondering what cool stuff I'm up to, that's the place to look. This should also be the first point of call for anyone considering inviting me to a social function.

London, Paris, Vietnam - Day 1,2

In March, Beth and I went on an overseas holiday. We managed to cram London, Paris and Vietnam into two weeks. We left Osaka ridiculously early in the morning after celebrating a Sayonara party in Triangle Park the night before. The good thing about the early start was we slept really well on the flights over. The way back was a different story. We caught a flight from Osaka to Ho Chi Minh City, where we weren't allowed to leave the airport at all during our 9 hour wait. That would have counted as a stopover and cost us an extra $100 (roughly).


I know this picture is a little out-of-focus, but it was the highlight of the long hours we spent in Ho Chi Minh Airport, so I think it's definitely blogworthy. This complimentary dinner consisted of noodles with a very spicy chilli sauce, delicious bananas, salad and yoghurt.

Next, we flew from Ho Chi Minh to Paris.


At Charles de Gaulle airport, you walk off the plane onto one of these cool buses. The carriage then lowers itself to the ground, drives you to the terminal and raises itself up to the level of the entrance.

Obviously you need to be careful not to fall out.

On the subway from Charles de Gaulle to Gare du Nord. I still don't know what "les tampons" is. I don't think there was much risk of me doing it by accident though.

The security in Paris was pretty over-the top. This is at Gare du Nord train station, but these UNIT soldiers were all over town, there was a contingent wandering around the Eiffel Tower. Obviously I took this photo as far away from the troops as I could, those guns were big.

We then caught the Eurostar from Paris to London.


Two and three-quarter hours later, we were enjoying a pint of real ale in London. A guy at our local bar in Osaka tried to tell us about "real ale", but all he could do was mime the motion of pulling a beer with a beer tap and say "real ale...whooshhhhhhhhhhh". No one really understood what he was on about, but when we got to London, pretty much every pub advertises their "Real ale". It's ale served at room temperature and pulled by hand.

Pretty much once a week we hear complaints about English food, "too greasy", "too oily", etc. But we were pretty damn excited to have this big plate of bangers n' mash. Every pub seemed to have a Sunday roast lunch. Oh boy, if only we hadn't left just before lunch on Sunday.

Cheers! (That's English for "Kampai!")

Our hotel, The Regent Palace, was right in the heart of Piccadilly Circus, only a couple of doors from the Burger King pictured here. It was really, really cheap and actually not too bad. Only complaint was that you had to ring the cleaning staff whenever you wanted a shower and they would come and unlock the shower for you. I've never had this in any other hotel I've stayed in. More than anything, it just seemed a little odd.

The highlight of the trip for Beth was, of course, watching Neighbours again.

So, that was the first two days of our trip, minus the odd pint of ale or two. There's about twelve days of excitement left to go, so keep checking for updates over the next week or so. I'm going to try to keep our photos in order, which isn't the easiest thing to do with Blogger. It means a lot of fiddling about with dates and times, but I think it'll be worth it in the end.