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photos to come…

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I spent a little more time hanging with family, including some time with my cousin and his family as a working bee was launched to beautify their courtyard. Well let’s just call him my cousin, technically he’s my mum’s cousin’s son but that just gets too convoluted. Anyway he and his wife have a gorgeous 2 year old son who spent the day keeping us women busy as the guys were outside working in the rain. Little Colin was learning how to ride his walking bike and apparently the day after I saw him managed to do it all on his own. By all accounts he was as proud as punch. He reminded me that the best sound in the world is the gurgling laugh of a happy child. The second best sound in the world is the clink of ice cubes in a gin and tonic on a hot and sunny afternoon. Before leaving I also spent a day hanging out with some family friends who have twice done long trips around Australia and visited us both times. The first time was with motorbikes and the second with a campervan and kids in tow. They can’t believe an Australian wants to move to Germany when all they want to do is move to where I’m leaving. Funny how that works.

From Stetten I headed back to Munich to pick up some stuff I’d left at the hostel and discovered one of the inexplicable phenomena of backpacking: if you have a full bag, take some stuff out and leave it behind for a while then pick it up again, there is little chance that the left behind stuff will fit back into the bag you originally took it out of. Admittedly, some stuff was bits and pieces Brett left behind for me to carry, but that doesn’t account for the whole problem. I swear there could be a PhD thesis dedicated to the quirks of living out of a backpack and it would probably involve some quantum physics, elementary particles or other seriously complicated sounding scientific words. Anyway, I was left with an extra bag as well as my big backpack and daypack. I feel like a fool.

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Tags: Amsterdam, Munich, Pecha Kucha, Pfalz, rock climbing, Stetten

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photos to come…

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Brett didn’t leave for work on Saturday and so spent another few hours on the phone to change his flights to this Tuesday. It then looked like that wouldn’t happen either because the boat was waiting on parts. Finally at 9am on Tuesday he got the OK to fly and we immediately left for the airport. He’s now in the far north of Norway getting ready for a five or so week stint in the North Sea.

A few days before he left we headed out to the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, which was really interesting even for someone who isn’t overly interested in cars. It gave a good history of the company from the independent development of the first motorised vehicles by Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz and Wilhelm Maybach in the late 1800s. The Daimler and Benz companies merged in 1926, when high inflation in Germany and general economic turmoil meant that companies were fighting for survival. It is now the world’s 13th largest car manufacturer in the world. Something I found interesting is that the Mercedes brand was named after the daughter of a rich Austrian businessman, who persuaded the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to make another race car after a fatal crash in 1900. Sometime later the company’s racing cars became known as “silver bullets”, because one had its paint sanded back to the metal when it was 1kg over racing weight.

Since Brett left I’ve been hanging out with relatives and starting to do some research on health insurance for when we move here. I won’t bore you with too many details but needless to say we don’t fit very well in the nice neat German boxes. And neither do my language skills. I’ve been negotiating most of it in Schwabisch, the dialect of German that I speak, and people tend to think it rather strange that I can speak either English or Schwabisch but not proper German. Apart from my situation there’s really no other reason that would be the case. Anyway, apart from the occasional “you’re really weird” looks and comments everyone has been really helpful and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pull out some more proper German when I head to a different part of the country.

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Tags: Daimler Museum, Stetten, Stuttgart

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Trying to get the classic photo of Neuschwanstein castle turned out to be quite an adventure. Actually it should have been simple – we knew where we wanted to be. Getting there was another matter. Slopes were steep and unstable, groves of prickly trees grew in the most inopportune places, and we discovered that ticks exist in Europe, too. Thankfully after all the clambering we found the view we were looking for and snapped a few photos before scrambling back down to civilisation. The afternoon was spent exploring the town of Fussen which has a beautiful old quarter that’s generally overlooked by the hordes of bus tours.

From there we headed east toward Stuttgart to where my mother was born. Actually it’s a bit outside Stuttgart, in a town called Stetten. Relatives are spread around a bit in different towns nearby and the names of the different areas evoke memories of previous visits or stories I’ve been told growing up. We’ve been welcomed with open arms and it’s great to be able to introduce Brett to everyone and show him where my German roots come from. Actually, his German roots aren’t from all that far away, about 60km as the crow flies. Thankfully his ancestors left Germany in the early 1800s so the chances of us being related are pretty slim. Back then 60km was a longer distance than it is now. We plan to head there at some stage and sift through the old church books for details of his family, but before we do that I have to learn some of the old German Sutterlin script. As if learning  proper German isn’t enough of a task already!

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