See ya bye Barcelona, Hola Servilla

Lets just say the Spanish rail system is an experiance and leave it at that shall we. Tips if you are planing on travelling by rail in Spain:-
1. Go buy your tickets a couple of days in advance.
2. Take provisions as you never know when you will have to line up for HOURS!!
3. If taveling by rail when hot expect to be late arriving.
On the plus side the place where we stayed was beautiful, down a little alley way tucked away off the main shopping strip. Lots of very fashionable people doing their thing. We found a little public park thingy that had some really fun water featurs where people would go to cool off and let their dogs have a play during the day, and at night lots of little resturants would open so there are lots of people out for dinner and such. I'm going to find it a big adjustment being back home and not eating dinner at midnight. Is there any chance of the library adopting the siesta? I quite like a little snooze in the afternoon! Haven't done much in the way of sight seeing in Servilla but it's nicce to have a bit of a break from all the culture. (WOW how much of a bogan do I sound!!)

One thing we did find in Servilla is this shop

Has the best in the way of tasty tasty treats, they even have olives made out of chocolate. Are making our way to Madrid for four days, looking forward to a change of location, as every thing in Servilla seems ato be under construction.

Ash.

Photo's and lots of them! Well not lots cause it's taking ages to load them and I'm impatient!

Here's some photo's from the start of our trip, which we spent in the beautiful Milano and our day trip to Venice. We got to see lots of beautiful sights, if only we had more time to play...hint hint Sue...we can has more holidays???

Here's Asha and Wombat - we finally made it to Melbourne and here we are hamming it up, waiting for checkin.

Here's the closest any of us got to first class...sigh...

Enjoying a delightful cup of Hagen Daaz at the Dubai airport. Yummy!

Here's Wombat enjoying his first breakfast buffet. Not shown is the MASSIVE plate of cake he had. Naughty, naughty!

Not sure what this building is called but it's one side of Plaza Duomo. More importantly - pretty things live here. Prada and Louis Vuitton!

Here is Asha in front of Milan Cathedral in Duomo - along with pigeons of death. If you visit remember, no sudden movements and don't mention pie!

Here's some of the fantastic buildings in Venice.

Gondola complete with Gondola Dude.

One of many of the gorgeous views from the boats that visit the islands.

We saw this on the way to impress boys with our Italian pizza ordering skills. (They are vast, let me tell you). Lots of beautiful glass bits on Murano.

Views from the canals around Venice.

Here's Wombat enjoying an icy cold orange granita at Storza Castle - our last full day in Milan, off to Barcelona tomorrow!!

and here he is with our last scoop of Italian gelati...
a very tired Cathy

and Asha on our last night in Milano.

Hola Barcelona!

What a beautiful, erratic, fun city, itś really laid back and relaxed and crazy all in one colourful package, on one hand the tourist population is completely overwhelming, drunken lads from the UK and Ireland mixed in with middle aged Americans (who travel in packs) all mixed in with street vendors trying to sell you everything from 'genuine' fake bags to beer. We have done some of the tourist stuff, like visit Gaudi's work in the city as well as walking down las Rumblas just to see the hoopla that it inspires. We also had lots of fun wandering around the labyrinth of side streets and alleys full of beautiful shops selling jewelery and art as well as boutiques and chocolates, then all of a sudden you will stumble upon little out of the way public spaces with the locals watching the tourists take photo's.

This is Cathy and I in park Guell. We spent the day touring Gaudi's work in and out of the city. I went a bit crazy with the camera, more photo's to follow.

Hola from Barcelona

Well, itś been ages since our last post, the wifi here is non existent and we get the computers in 15 min blocks, so here it goes anyway! You will also have to excuse bad typing as the keyboards are different here and sometimes I just can't make it work, no matter how hard I swear at it!

On Monday we did the Gaudi tour (2 actually), both 3hrs. In the AM it was a tour round 3 of the houses in the city that he designed then out of the city to Park Guell, which had 4 more houses he designed along with a big wall/seat and a giant lizard. When we get to the new hostel, Iĺl add some pictures, but it was fantastic to see and out tour guides were lovely and very accomodating. In the PM we did the Gaudi out of the city tour, with a visit to some fences - sounds very silly, but they were great fences! We then went up to a small village that Gaudi was building a church in (which he never finished - apparently he took too long, so they asked him to stop work), so the town now uses donations and money from tourist visits to continue working on the church. There was lots of stained glass and beautiful mosaics, looking at it from the entrance you wouldn't think it would still be standing, with lots of curves and uneven angles. My explanations don't really do it justice, so will have to add some photos.

We've arrived at the new hostel and the wifi works perfectly - it's apparently not that hard. It will be a lot easier to blog now which is good. Just for Julie Sy - here's are a couple of photos that we've taken just for you...





Prada & Louis Vuitton! - we did consider worshipping at the doorsteps, but thought that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to disturb the peace when there were special police guards 2 metres away, I'm thinking that jail in Italy isn't all mars bars and work out room ala Prison Break, on the plus side the boys in uniform here are very pretty.

Anyway, I'm going to finally post this as it's been a few days in the making, more to come soon.

C.

Ciao Milan, Hola Barcelona!

Well our time in Italy is at an end, we fly out this afternoon, so I thought I'd do one last posty bit before we left. Notepad is a wonderful thing, here is something I prepared earlier...

I thought it was high time I added another post to the blog, our wifi at the hotel has been uncooperative of late, but I thought I would give it a go as we've had a busy few days. And just to make you even more jelous, I'm typing this to the beautiful sound of rain - actual rain, not pansy assed spitting - rain!! But I digress.

Monday was the start of the presentations of papers and both Asha and I sat in on the 'Public Libraries and Metropolitan Libraries: Framing the future for a new agenda for Public Libraries.' It was a great start to the week, with some really interesting ideas from Queens Public Library in New York to Copenhagen Public Library in Denmark.*

Next up was the 'Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning' with more fantastic speakers, beginning with Loida Garcia-Febo, from Queens. Asha and I follow Loida on twitter, so it's great to be able to put a face to the name. Vanessa Warren from UTAS also presented a paper, so it was great to see the 'skippys' being represented, (we spent the week hearing "there's lots of you this year"). I say watch out - we're planning to take over the world, one unsuspecting European at a time. Then it was time to get better aquainted with the various exhibitors.

Tuesday was more of the same, with another walk around the booths and a fantastic @ your library presentation from 'Michael Dowling from the ALA, with some help from George from the recently formed Greek Library Association. It's great to see libraries so enthused by the @ your library campaign. We also met up with another lady we follow on twitter, it was great to have the oppertunity to do that. We've also been invited to come visit the Library of Congress in D.C., by a lady that was staying in the same hotel. Asha had a gallery tour in the arvo and I disovered the joys of international Document Delivery!

Later Tuesday night it was on to more important things - Asha's 30th Birthday! We had the social evening, which wasn't quite what we expected and sadly the food left a lot to be desired, but the coffee was good, although we were discouraged by our waiter against having espresso, as it's 'too strong' for so late a night, (I think they are used to Aussies/UK/USA visitors having cuppacinos and lots of milk so they don't think we can handle it) - but Asha & I are now enjoying the less milky side of coffee. We had the chance to head in Duomo and see it at night, it had a completely different atmosphere. We were able to see two pages from a book of drawings from Leonardo Da Vinci and more importantly - Julie we came nose to glass with Prada and Louis Vuitton - photos to follow. Then it was into the gallery to view some Monet. It was a great night for it, a bit cooler than it has been.

On Wednesday we had the visit to the Children's Library of Rozzano, it's a fantastic facility, housed in a converted water mill. They also have a separate adult library, this was converted from a barn.

The lovely people at Rozzano provided us with morning tea, lots of tasty pastries and very strong coffee as Wombat found out.

and here's Wombat with some new friends he made, librarians from South Africa.

Here's Miki and Wombat, Miki is from Japan and was very kind and gave us a Japanese manga, Wombat picked Bleach, which I personally think was an awesome choice!

Yesterday we had a sleep in then ventured into the city to do some sightseeing at the Storza Castle, we met some lovely Italian boys and wombat had a great time posing for photos. I am going to leave it here as my eye's are falling out of my head! I'll add the rest of the photo's in the next few days.

Cya in Barcelona.

C.

Look what I found

I was pleased to find that along with junk food, soft drink, coffee, and ice cream that some Milan metro stations also have book vending machines.

IFLA 2009

Things got under way today, Cathy and I went to register and pick up our packs of goodies. We had started noticing a lot of people all looking like they were a group and sure enough hundrds of Librarians were converging, we are all very distinctive with our orange bags and yellow ID cards.

It was amazing to walk into the exhabition space and see so many things all at once. We spotted the Proquest booth straight away and on our wander around we were able to pick things that were familiar to us. The wine and nibbles were quite good as well.

Had a chat to a couple of Australians that Cathy found as well as a chat to a lady from Atlanta, very interesting to talk to them all and find out a little more about other corners of the world. Once we got back to the hotel we made a list of evereything that we wanted to do and wouldn't you know it most of the things clash. We will have to get creative with how we manage our time I think.

Catch up with you all soon.

We went to Venice....Jelous?

Cathy on her way to Venice.

Well we finaly made it to Venice after a slight mis cuculation about how easy it would be to get tickets but never the less we made it. After a train ride through some very beautiful country side we pulled into the train station,
this is the view imediatly outside the station. *sigh* it's a hard life but I suppose someone has to do it.

We spent a bit of the day on the island of Murano where they make the most beautiful glass, it would of been very easy to buy lots and lots of stuff, but I restrained my self to a few pieces of jewelery. We had lunch a a little cafe and amused the staff with our very bad Italian. We then headed into the more tourst area of San Marco. It was very beautiful but I think I i was to go back I would go early in the morning and avoid the hords of people. It was fun to explor the little side streets and the shops to be found there. I wish I had had more time and more money as the lace work was stunning but very expensive. All in all it was a good day, but it was getting quite late by the time we got gack to the Hotel.

Day Two in Milan.

It was supposed to be off to Venice today, but we didn't mobilise early enough, so it's on the books for tomorrow. Instead we visited the church in Duomo, the Milan Cathedral, which is beautiful to say the least, I can't really describe it, but it was magic! It took 5 centuries to build and is the 4th largest church in the world. Sadly no photography allowed inside, but fingers crossed if the IT gods are kind, there will be photos in this post!! They were! Yay! I've just realised that they are in reverse order, but I'm tired so I'm leaving them as is. Above is a side view of the Cathedral, with the Madonna statue at top, bit hard to see - but she's gold.

We also went and saw the Robert Wilson Voom Portraits in the piazza, which was beyond this building, also lovely, it was all rather surreal, with the portraits 'staring' at you.

This was out the front of the gallery, not sure what it is, but who doesn't love a pink centaur.

Here's Asha, in front of church, with attack pigeons at the ready.

This is another building on the piazza.

Horse & Rider statue which I'm also not sure about.

Front view of church, this is nowhere close to doing it justice - you need to see it in person!!

Well, as we have to be up extra early, I'll sign off, enjoy the pictures and ciao until next time.

Asha, Cathy & Wombat :)

Greetings from Milan!

Well it's the end of day one of our Italian leg, after a lovely sleep in, Asha and I had a smashing breakfast buffet, (which Wombat also enjoyed - photo's to follow). From there we took the tram into the city center (Piazza Del Duomo), in typical holiday fashion we went 9 stops too far first off, but eventually we found our way to Duomo. We had a quick walk around, gelati in hand, the church is just beautiful and there is a gallery which is in the same piazza, so we've got some of our weekend sightseeing picked out. It's off to Venice tomorrow, which I'm sure shall be lovely, hoping to see where they make the venetian glass and I do believe Wombat would like a gondola ride so we shall see what we can do about that.

Until next time it's cya bye from Asha, Cathy & Wombat.

Look out Milan Here we come

Good lord what a day. Everything was tootling along fine until we get to the Adelaide airport, talk about a plava. One small heart attack and quite a bit of stress later Cathy and I find our selves wandering around the Melbourne airport ah la Kath and Kell (sans delightful jumpers) Finialy we were able to check our baggage in (Very proud of my packing effort 14.7kg's)just waiting for passport control to open so we can get to international departures where things are actually open ( that by the way was a lie as nothing was open when we went through) Who knew that the domestic terminal closed down at midnight. Going to go now because this computer doesn't have a mouse that works which is more than a little annoying at 2:54am. Talk to you from Dubai.

Well thought I would add my two cents worth to our first blog post. We are finally through to the international departures area. We still have 2hrs before our flight leaves, so we are trying not sleep. It would be a whole lot easier if they would open up the shops already! It's all very exciting, my first trip out of the country. It's not very touristy, but I think our first action in Italy will be to sleep. We're both exhausted and it doesn't help that our flight has been delayed for 2hrs. But as Asha said - it's better to be delayed than dead! What's planned for our first few days in Milan you may ask, the first day is recovery, breakfast buffet and coffee, lots of coffee! Then friday, all going to plan it's off to Venice, to take in the sights, and some gorgeous Murano glass. Souns like a plan Stan says Wombat. Di, you will be pleased to know that Wombat has been on his best behaviour, no wombatising, hard liquor, or general shenanigans. He has already posed for some lovely photos and seems to be happy to travel in style in my very fetching carry on bag. It's a wombats life one might say. Well I'm signing off for the moment, so it's cya bye from the international lounge @ Melbourne Airport.

It be day two of travelling, we are currently in Dubai Airport, it's rather modern with lovely reclining seats, which Asha and I are taking full advantage of after being smooshed in the plane. I made my first overseas purchase, inhaler as I forgot mine and then some Hagen Daas, which wombat thoroughly enjoyed. Not much else has happened, didn't get a great deal of sleep, but did manage to watch lots of movies in between dozing. It's nearly time to board for the Dubai - Milan part of the flight, blog again when we get to Italy!!

C.