Life as a Snowbunny

It turns out that being on the other side of the world means that my birthday goes from being in the heat of summer to the depths of winter.  So I thought, why not embrace it and go all in.  Normally my birthday would be all BBQs and watersports, so why not make it travel and snowsports.

Having friends working for Contiki in Austria, I thought I could couple it with going to visit them.  So I emailed my travel agent about spending two weeks skiing in Austria over my birthday.  By the time I had booked it, I had talked myself down to one week (unsure if my body would survive two weeks, it wouldn't have) and from skiing to snowboarding.  I thought that if I was going to spend a week up the mountain then I might as well learn something new.  This turned out to be a good decision for another reason, as a couple of weeks before I left I fell down a flight of stairs and seriously hurt my knee.  Thankfully snowboarding is a little more gentle on the knees than skiing.

So the time passed and suddenly I was on a train from York to take an overnight bus from London to Hopfgarten in the Austrian Tyrol.

Kings Cross station in London

We arrived in Austria about mid-afternoon (21hrs later) on my birthday and went straight to the gear rental place to get clothes, equipment and our lift passes.  Once we got to Haus Schoneck we threw our bags in the rooms and hit the bar.  That was followed by an welcome presentation and then a delicious dinner (all of the food we had there was delicious).  After that everything is a bit black.  Not really eating or drinking for 21hrs and then drinking alot in a short time can apparently lead to memory loss.  I woke up on my bed not remembering anything that happened after dinner.

Still I was at breakfast at 7:30, ate heartily and took the 8:30 shuttle to the mountain to start my first day of being taught how to fall down a mountain on a single board rather than two sticks.  For the next 5 days my mornings were fairly similar.  Up at 7:30 on the snow by 8:35.  I did five snowboarding lessons, which took me from not knowing how to attach it to my feet, to the final day where our instructor was teaching us how to do jumps and 180s (quite an impressive achievement).  The lessons would take up the morning and then we would have lunch on the mountain before setting ourselves loose for the afternoon to practice what we had been taught in the morning.

My birthday wasn't the only event that happened while we were there.  There was Australia day, a hosted "tight, white and bright" party, another birthday, a night time tobogganing trip, a couple of nights where we ate out and the opportunity to go night skiing.  I opted out of the night skiing as I was already sore and tired enough for the day, but did the tobogganing trip.  It was alot of fun and we went down a private path in the dark trying to push each other off the track into the powder.

We had amazing weather the entire time we were there.  We had more snow in one night than they had all of last season.  As it snowed every night, we got to board and ski on fresh powder every morning.  Off piste there was untouched powder that you were riding through waist deep.  The only down side was how hard it is to get yourself out when you fall over in it.

The final day was spent entirely on the slopes.  Riding down trail after trail, just to catch the lifts to the start of the next one.  It was bliss.

Eventually we had to leave.  Another 20+ hour bus ride back to London.  I had hoped to get off in Canterbury to visit people and make my own way home, but there had been snow down at the farm and the roads were a bit dangerous to drive on.  So I had a couple of days in London, managed to eventually visit the Natural History Museum ( awesome place), before going back to York and work again.

Overlooking Hopfgarten from the baby slope

Our class (self-named the "shredlings")

View from the top restaurant

At the top of a black run

Swing made from an old chairlift

Outside Haus Schoneck

Stegosaurus in the Natural History Museum

Catching up and updating

So a new year and time keeps rolling on.  It seems that little changes year to year and my inability to keep this up to date seems to be one of them.  However, in the 4 months since I last posted something, alot has happened.

After reading back over my last post I can see that it was shortly after I had arrived in York.  Well I am still here.  I hadn't planned to be here still, but nevertheless plans change and adapt.

The cliff hanger of the last post was... would I get a job.  I did.  No surprises there.  Without a job I would be long out of money and on my way home by now.  I started a job at a bar/restaurant called Stonegate Yard.  It has had its ups a downs.  I have had to be clean shaven for the first time in my professional life, which has been difficult to come to grips with.  We were flat out with alot of hours over Christmas, but so far this year hours have been harder to come by.  The group working there are alot of fun and for the most part I have enjoyed it, even if the work itself is repetitive and not particularly complicated.

Over the past few months I have managed to see a bit more than just York.  I have done trips to Robin Hood's Bay, Leeds, Scarborough and Windermere in the Lakes district, as well as celebrating my birthday snowboarding in Austria (I will write something separate about that).  With the Northern Hemisphere gripped by winter it has been hard to get up the motivation (and cash) to drag myself out of the warm comfort to go exploring.

No longer am I a fixture in the hostel.  After living there for about 3 weeks I got a job and then set about finding somewhere to live.  I now live a short walk down the river from work.  I am renting a furnished room in a house, but seem to spend little time here recently.

So my plan upon arriving in York had been to live here for a couple of months, until about February, then do a ski/snow trip somewhere before moving somewhere like Wales to try and get another farm job.  Those plans have changed for several reasons.  One important one being that I have met a girl.

My plan as it stands currently is to travel to Morocco in April (again will expand separately), move back to York, see my sister when she visits around June/July, travel through Iceland, Norway and Sweden, before returning to the farm and job offer in Kent for the summer harvest.  Although even that is now tentative as I have applied for a science/career sort of job in York.  So we will see what happens.

Robin Hood's Bay

5pm and my walk to work

Returning to York after a walk to Bishopthorpe

Lake Windermere

Hills rising into the cloud at Grassmere

Orrest Head lookout over Lake Windermere

Just out of Windermere

The Lake

Scarborough, clear, sunny and freezing cold

Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Missis....

Waiting is boring.  I have now been in York for a week.  I have been living in a backpackers and have handed in my CV to a few places.  Now just waiting to hear back from anyone.  Once that happens I can do something again.

I have now wandered around most of the city centre of York a few times.  I have done a ghost tour (York is apparently one of the most haunted cities in the UK) and have even taken some photos.  After going to Handball training on Sunday, I spent the next two days hardly able to move.  Going almost a year between trainings, I probably should have taken things slowly on my first day back.  Instead I went all out and suffered for it afterwards.  Following all of that I then got sick.  Just a cold and it has almost gone now, but enough to be annoying.  Atleast I have had nothing to do but wait anyway.  Come on phone, ring with good news for me...

Front of York Minster

Side entrance to York Minster

Clifford's tower, York Castle

Ruins of St Mary's abbey

York city walls

Only intact Viking age building in York, Tower of St Mary's church Bishophill

The grand old Duke

So I now live in York.  Well as much as anyone can ‘live’ somewhere without having a job or accommodation.  I have been here two days so far and it is a really nice town.  Currently I am at a backpackers inside the old city walls.  However, this backpackers comes with a full kitchen attached to my room and free laundry.  They even supply tea, coffee etc.  Really it is more like a shared room in an apartment.  I should find somewhere else though.

After getting back to the UK about a week ago, I relaxed.  I applied for a couple of jobs and asked people I knew around York if they knew of anything.  For the rest of the week I relaxed, recovered and caught up with a lot of people.  It was good to see a lot of friendly faces and have time to catch up with commitments to other people (I finally uploaded some photos to Facebook for the first time since I have left NZ).  Then after a week of getting more and more restless, I decided that I had more chance of finding something in York if I was living in York.  So a quick search for a hostel and a ticket north, and I was off.  Turns out the train was about five hours faster than a bus and only slightly more expensive.  A brief stop in London, led me to York.

Since I have been here I have handed in my CV to a few places.  There seem to be a lot of places looking for waiting staff etc, so I will see what happens.  I have met some locals and drunk with them.  I have found a Handball club and am going to go along this afternoon to see what they are like.  I haven’t found somewhere to live yet though.  I am holding off on that until I have an idea of where I am going to be working, as I would like to live vaguely near where I will be working.  Other than that, I have been wandering around looking at places.  Unfortunately I do not have my camera with me and we have had good weather so far.  I wasn’t expecting that, so didn’t try to bring my camera in my pack.

So all in all, it is going pretty well at the moment.  Oh and the main point to take away is that I am in York.  Not sure how that enriches anyone else’s life, but it’s a step for me.

In Bruges

There is pretty much only one reason that I visited Bruges over any other place in Belgium.  I saw a movie when I was in Uni.  It wasn’t a massively great movie, but it was one that showed me the only view of Belgium that I have seen.  So when I was going to Belgium, I figured that I might as well go there, it looked pretty in the film.

After a change from bus to train in Brussels (which looked nice, the small part I saw) I arrived in Bruges.  I had had success using the maps and GPS on my phone in Cologne, so figured I would do the same in Bruges.  Without knowing which buses to take, I saw that the hostel I was staying at was about 2.5km from the train station.  Turns out walking that distance carrying all your gear seems further than I thought and meant that I received my share of weird looks while doing it.  I got a good initial look at the old town centre as I passed through.

After a supplied breakfast, I had a marked map and a food list.  To me food in Belgium is chocolate, beer and waffles.  So first stop in my wanderings was, when I managed to find it, a chocolate museum.  It gave the history of Belgian chocolate, from the Aztecs through to modern processing and packaging.  Also the added bonus of samples.  Needing to walk off that before lunch, I wandered the town centre crossing canals and generally just looking at stuff.  Lunch almost beat me.  I found a bakery and got a cup of soup with fresh bread and a chocolate dessert thing that had me struggling to get through it.  Tasted amazing though.  I had to walk out to the windmills before I risked going to a chocolate shop to obtain some samples to take with me.  A trip up the bell tower seemed compulsory before relaxing at the hostel bar preparing for a beer tasting.  A slightly intoxicated trip to find waffles at about 9pm showed us that apparently Bruges closes at about 6pm.

Before my bus back to the UK I had some time to kill and found the best Belgian waffles I have ever eaten.  A van in the town square cooked them in front of me and layered it with icecream, chocolate, icing sugar and strawberries.  It would have tasted great eating it without any toppings.  My bus had me wondering how to get back to Canterbury easily.  My bus was going to London, so I had a late ticket booked back down the same road to Canterbury and a bed in London sorted if something happened.  However, I met a lovely Australian couple on the bus who were renting a car in Dover and offered to drive me to Canterbury as they were heading that way too.  So got a ride there and then picked up and taken back to the farm to relax, recover and refresh before I move North.

Bruge 

Skyline silhouette

Buildings right onto the water

Canal with Bell tower in the background

On the scent, Cologne

Hmmm… how to explain Cologne?  It was ok.  For some reason I wasn’t as impressed by Cologne as other places I visited.  It was the first time on my trip that I was slowed down by rain, I had had issues with a railway driver’s strike and was still recovering from a light cold.  So there were a few things to overcome.

Although I wasn’t caught up directly in the strike, the after effects were a massive number of delays across Germany.  Overall my train to Cologne took an hour and a half longer than the four hours scheduled.  For this I was fortunately refunded 25% of my ticket price, which was a pleasant surprise.

Once I finally arrived and checked in, I was running out of daylight to see the city.  I made my way down through the old town and had a look through the cathedral.  It is a beautiful cathedral and welcoming.  The rest of the city was nice, but didn’t really make me love it.  It was actually the city I felt the most uncomfortable in.  It was just a feeling but was enough to not let me really relax into the place.  Apart from the cathedral there wasn’t much for me to see.  There was also the obligatory parade/protest.

Every city I have been to seems to have a protest or parade.  I have seen the Oktoberfest, football fans corralled by riot police, student protests, protests against the Islamic State and other protests that I have not been able to understand except to know that people weren’t happy.

Anyway, Germany done.  It has been an awesome trip and I loved most of it.  On to Belgium and the fairytale town of Bruges.

A lack of Hamburgers

First things first, although there are the normal fast-food places, I didn't find extra hamburger places. Nor was there a Hamburger Street (which I had seen in Berlin). The closest was the disappointing Hamburger bank (again with no hamburgers). Having never knowingly met anyone who had been to Hamburg I figured that it wasn't really a big player on the European tourist market. So only had a night there.

Arriving into the main train station, I found the best one so far. Big, open, clearly signed, basically a big underground shopping mall with train, bus and underground stations attached. It was also conveniently placed across the street to my hostel. After checking in and obtaining a map, I set off on my usual method of exploration, wandering aimlessly around foreign cities until I see interesting things. I walked down past the Rathaus, over canals, up to St Michael’s church, down around the harbour, before ending back where I started.

I really liked Hamburg. I wasn't really there long enough to get a real feel for the place, but the feeling I got was good. Everything was more open, fewer people (it was a Monday evening, so could be biased), next to the sea and I felt more laid back. Long term I don't know what it would be like, but the brief sample left a pleasant taste. On to Cologne.

St Michael's Church