Last night in France

Thanks to everyone who made my stay in Grenoble so wonderful. I had not been back since we left for Australia and it was wonderful to catch up with you all. Very sorry that I couldn't see everyone but between Control Technique and trying to sell the car, and partying with neighbours and having lunches here and there, etc. There wasn't much time. I even had a friend hop off the tram she was on because she spotted me and wanted to say hi, lol.

So right now I am trying to get to sleep. Only problem I can't. I guess I am just wound up from all the socializing that I have been doing. The wake-up call is for 5.30 tomorrow morning!?!?!? Can I do it?
I am flying to London and then on to Singapour and Sydney, hoping to catch up on many good movies. I don't do sleeping on planes so it is 24 hours awake basically. Please don't be put off, if you were thinking of coming to visit though. This is just my little thing; hubby is asleep before we even leave the airport. It has happened that he falls asleep and then suddenly wakes up and asks "Where are we?" and we haven't even left the airport yet.

Villard de Lans, you rock!

I am back in France after a 2 day nightmarish drive from Sweden to Grenoble. Not only did it rain most of the way but Germany has decided to repair its Autobahn.  Normally it is THE way to get from Scandinavia down to the south of Europe relatively quickly but not this time. Instead of driving 130 km an hour it was limited to 80 km an hour most of the way. And did I mention the rain? It was truly a dreadful trip. The other thing is that I get so sleepy so I had quite a few power naps on the way as well and that also slows you down.

I stopped off in two different place, Lübeck in the north of German, which is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site and producer of marzipan, yum! They also had lots of amazing bridges. I am sure hubby would be delighted to have a little stop there another time.

I also spent the night in Ettingheim, a very cute baroque town with lovely old buildings. Both those places are well worth a visit but I was a bit limited for time.

This beer was true nectar when I arrived in Ettingheim, just a shame about the food. I guess after living almost 30 years in France you are a bit spoiled and the German cuisine can be a bit stodgy (sorry German readers.)

The title of this blog is 'Villard de Lans, you rock!', and there are several reasons for this. It has lots of things on, and today they had a special market on so we did a bit of shopping, of course. My friends have fairly recently moved up here from Grenoble and since this is my first trip back to France since we moved to Australia I had not seen their house nor did I really know Villard de Lans. 

The other reason for mentioning a rock is that their house has a huge rock in front of it in their garden.

So standing on their balcony looking out this is what you see:

However, walking around the village you have lots of opportunity to see beautiful views of the Vercors.

The rock is a real feature, and it is classified, so they can't remove it, even if they wanted to, which they don't.

Last blog from Sweden for a while

I am sitting in the Ängelholm McDonald's since they have WiFi here (and in all McDonald's I think.)

Well, the long summer is over and I am now driving the car down to France before going back to Australia. I use the word summer loosely since it has also been a lot of almost autumn-like weather. The last few days were spent being a tourist with my girlfriend from the UK. It is always nice when you have visitors that make you go and see things you haven't seen before.

One of our outings was to Läckö Slott, and it was beautiful and very interesting.

After the guided tour and the tour of the beautiful gardens we spent a few minutes waiting for the ship Sigrid Storråda to sail past us. We had seen people go onboard in costume from the era and we were really looking forward to seeing them row out and then set sail. But no, serious disappointment when they came chugging out with a motor; not cool!!

I have to leave this lovely little cocoon now and get out on the roads again. I just get so sleepy. I have already had two little naps and I am not even in Denmark yet. Stay tuned for more from the road!!

Australia night

Monday night I went to an Australia night held at the Henån Kajuta. It was really interesting but a bit weird to hear someone from Sweden talk about the country that you actually live in. It wasn't so much that as the fact that "his" Australia was not "my" Australia.  However, I would love to discover "his" Australia one day.

His name is Lars Wallin and he has worked a lot with aborigines up in Arnhem Land and played with an aborigine group as well. I loved how he used the didgeridoo in his music.

He also told us a few things that I didn't know. For example, it is only the group of aborigines up in Arnhem Land that use the didgeridoo. It is an instrument to accompany singing and always played by men. The name didgeridoo was given to this instrument by a "white feller", the aborigines themselves have other names for it depending if they are from the eastern or western part of Arnhem Land.

He had invited a group from Melbourne.  They were called College Fall and I really liked their sound as well. Some of their song sounded a little bit sad. They actually explained that. They both came from small cities in the country around Perth but due to the isolation there they had moved to Melbourne for their music. Sometimes they felt very homesick though and this is what came through in their song, I guess.

Here is my mother last Sunday when I took her out for lunch at the Långedrag sailing club restaurant. We had great fish on the terrasse in the sun.

When we walked out I noticed this sign. So this was the club that the Swedish medal winner belonged to, well done!!!

Slippery slope

Hi again,

Yesterday, before I almost went down the slippery slope at the cemetery, I had time to visit something interesting. We actually noticed it on our last visit but this time I had the camera with me.

They had two different areas where soldiers from the First and the Second World Wars were buried. There is one section for German soldiers and one for British, Australian (5) and New Zealand soldiers.

The ones from the First World War were mainly sailors from ships that went down in the North Sea and the ones from the Second World War were pilots that were shot down and then floated ashore in Sweden.

It fills you with the same sort of sadness when you see these graves as you get when you visit the ones in the north of France even though that is on a much bigger scale. I'll never forget when we visited the  Canadian War Cemetery near Dieppe some years ago with our youngest daughter. There was one white cross after another with names of young boys not more that 18 or 19 years old or even younger in some cases.  It was really an eye opener, especially for our daughter who was just about that age.

Remember that I said yesterday that we went to a coffee shop after our scary cemetery experience and had some goodies. Well, here is what we had among other things. It is  a very decorative shrimp sandwich and some places make them better that others. This particular coffee shop has been one of my favorites since I went to school. It is quite old, from 1901, and the interior is pretty much the same as I remember it.  My mother worked nearby and as a special treat she would take me there on my lunch break. I think I was a little spoiled!!

Just a normal Friday

I am back from an exciting visit to Gothenburg.

Well, I had a phone call from nephew last night and I thought I heard him say that someone had peed in his shoes when he visited my mother at her retirement home. If you have visited me out here in the cottage you know that we have very poor mobile phone connection. You might hear a word here and there and then you have to guess the rest. So when I heard "the peeing in the shoes" many things went through my head that I won't go into here.

It turned out that a man who lives at my mother's retirement home walked into my mom's room and proceeded to pee where he stood. Unfortunately it was exactly where my nephews shoes were placed. They had to let him finish his "thing" and then it was cleaned up and nephew's shoes were thrown away. It is not the first time he has come into her room. Another time he was fiddling with the bed to lay down and have a nap.

We felt that mom could do with a day out after this little incident so the next day,  before going somewhere for lunch, we went to visit her cousin's grave at the Kviberg's cemetery. I hope you don't find visiting cemeteries bizarre, it it just something we do sometimes. Mom had been asking if we knew where her cousin was buried, so we thought it would be a nice outing.

It was raining a little so I decided to drive up a narrow path, that might have been a walking path, to save mom from walking, since she is a bit dizzy. After having stopped to let mom out I couldn't drive up the hill again. Every time I tried I slipped down more and more, sideways off the road. Finally the car was at such an angle that I was almost driving on the graves, so I had to stop trying and think of plan B. Nephew bravely tried to both look after mom and push when I was trying my futile attempts to get up the hill.

It got worse and worse, in fact it was very dramatic. You couldn't get a grip since we have had so much rain, the car just kept slipping further and further down.

Fortunately the cemetery staff saw us and came over to see if they could help. They rapidly realized that I needed to be pulled out of there so they called someone to come. It was one of the tractor/diggers that they use to dig graves and to make a long story short, they pulled me up. They helped me out of the car and one of the guys got in very carefully since anything could have make the car turn over.

Before the digger came I had a surrealistic conversation with one of the staff. She was going to Sydney for a year's study and wanted to have a chat. Here i was sitting in a car very close to tumbling over and chatting about life in Australia.

Saturday in Henån

This is an example of what goes on in Henån in summer on a Saturday. The audience is usually me and some old guys who look like they have had a few drinks, and maybe some kids, and we all enjoy "the show". The musicians are just so cute and they enjoy their moment of fame up on a stage so much. I wish I could play the accordion like they do, or for that matter, the piano, or the harp or drums. It is a wake-up call when you realize that even if you start learning to play an instrument today you won't have time to learn it very well or have the agility for that matter. I actually filmed this part but I can't put it on here. The song was quite catchy.

Tomorrow I am off to see friends in the south of Sweden for a few days. They live in Grenoble but like us they have a summer house in Sweden. They said that some other friends from Grenoble will also be there so that will be very nice. So stay tuned for more from the south!

Every move you make

London is famous for the number of surveillance cameras (CCTV), with tens of thousands watching your every move.  It is very apparent that surveillance and security is of highest priority for the Olympic Games, and rightly so.  Who, with any connection to London, can forget the chaos and heartbreak caused by the tube and bus bombings of 2003?

You can debate at length about the infringement on civil liberties of external surveillance cameras that also, possibly unintentionally, record events within private houses, but there is another negative aspect. The average Briton is allegedly filmed by about 300 cameras each day.  Now I have no aspirations to grace the pages of Now Magazine, but I do prefer not to be caught wearing the same outfit in successive photographs when on holiday, in part to avoid comments like 'Hmmm, that dress has seen much happiness.' How can I follow this principle in Britain?

While on the subject of surveillance is anyone else out there spooked by the song 'Every breath you take'?  Does this reflect the band's name?  If I was Mrs Sting, I wouldn't be too pleased.  And don't get me started on the angst generated by the line 'Is there anybody out there?'

Anyhow, while London is in benevolent view of CCTV, our house is Sydney is also being watched over, but by less-high-tech means.

Well, I am off to the port now to do some laundry again since the washing machine has not miraculously fixed itself. Still very chilly here in the south-west of Sweden with just the occasional sunny moment.

Fire

Not much to tell, summer in Sweden is dreadful: cold, wet, and now and then only a few seconds of sun. Fortunately I have had lots of visitors since hubby left.  Eldest daughter came back with me from London and stayed a week. My mother has been here for two months and one nephew has been here quite a lot too, playing Scrabble, Swedish version. Right now I have some visitors here in their camper van which is parked outside. They became our friends when we lived in Nyköping and our two daughters became friends.

We have had a ceremonial burning of a chair that we must have had for almost 20 years. It was left to me when a friend went back to the States. She knew I loved it and she kindly left me her whole set. It was two couches and a love seat. However, now was the time for the love seat to go. Here it goes!

Today we had a little day trip to Lysekil, which is a nice town and has a beautiful port, and there is also a place called Havets hus which is a nice place to visit even though we didn't have time to do it.