Final stage

Now that my love is in Portugal again to finish the final part of her university semester, we've temporarily gone back to phoning, Skyping and emailing again... We're both so looking forward to simply not having to do this anymore! These last few stages of The Move before Niki returns to Australia can be stressful, so we're trying to make it as smooth and enjoyable as we can. The estate agent is still working to get the apartment rented: the final things need packing, the last forms need filling out, building works in Sarzedo need initiating. It's small wonder my love doesn't go crazy as she tries to balance all that with (cue: funny Chinese accent) China Grammar! All supportive vibes to Portugal, please!

Almost ready ...

On Monday afternoon and evening my friend Peter and I spent a few very satisfying hours recording the last song of our upcoming CD, Heartbeat. This last song is called Ride the Wave, of which we'd already recorded a few versions. At some stage, however, the song got deleted (oops!) so a new version had to be made. We were quite happy to find ourselves producing an upbeat song which lasts 'only' four-and-a-half minutes ... (I mean, that's nothing for us - I think there are three seven-minute songs on this one ...).

So after more than three years the collection is complete. Yes, we took our time, but then we're simply doing it because we love doing it. Some 14 or 15 tracks will finally find their way onto the CD: some others have not made it. So watch this spot for further news down the line.

It was lovely to spend time with Peter (and some delicious Belgian brews), and with Trix who was back from Germany looking healthy and set to enjoy life. I was happy to see that my friends are looking forward to the future again and practising Carpe Diem!

Nuther meal

On Sunday evening Niki and I joined some of our friends in Amsterdam for a meal at Dutch restaurant Het Zwaantje. Tess and Yarrow will be pleased to know that Uncle Cees was there, with his partner Eef. Cees and Eef will be moving to Deventer by the end of the year to build their new house of the future (which will sit on a revolving platform following the sun).  



Jacomien was there and advised Niki and me on the ins and outs of Chinese culture, which we can usefully apply when writing our Chinese books.

Bertie was there, whose research project From Text to Political Positions: From Sentiments and Opinions in Texts to Positions of Political Parties involves her deeply in Integrating Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Analysis.

Martina was there, full of stories about her recent foal and Anjès was there, full of excitement about her imminent trip to Australia. We had a lovely meal, served by an extremely touchy-feely Amsterdam waiter who gave free shoulder massages as he went along...

Niki was satisfied that she'd had her 'bespoke' Dutch evening with carpets on the tables...

Heb je tulpen?

'Heb je tulpen?' is one of the extremely useful phrases that Niki and I practise from time to time in an attempt to boost my love's Dutch language skills. 'Heb je rooie tulpen? Heb je blauwe tulpen?' She could certainly have employed this phrase this weekend...

On Monday we decided to venture into the tulip fields some 45 minutes from Amsterdam. My love so much wanted to see tulips fields! What we hadn't realised, or at least I hadn't stopped to think, was that on Monday (which in the Netherlands is referred to as 'Second Easter Day') everybody in Holland goes out to see the tulips at the Keukenhof in Lisse, especially when the sun is out, which it - uncharacteristically- was. On their website this 'spring garden' informs visitors this day was one of the 5 or 6 busiest in the year ....

Anjès spent the Easter weekend with us, from Saturday to Monday evening. She drove up, and drove us around Holland ... very, very competently and safely. She's a great driver. Thanks, Anjès!

So, we had set off early, fortunately, but the mere sight of the rapidly-filling car park, packed with tourist buses and cars, and the queues at the entrance made us turn round and go into the pretty town of Lisse instead. We were hunting for some breakfast... However, in Lisse the entire population seemed to have turned into a congregation, as we found most of the locals in Church. (There's a bout 15 churches of all kinds of denominations in Lisse!) Hungry though we were for breakfast, everthing was closed and eerily quiet in this tourist town, even at 10 a.m.

On our way out of Lisse we stopped at the side of the road and (illegally) jumped a fence to sit down among tulips (together with other adventurous tourists who also baulked at paying E14,50 pp for the Keukenhof...). Photos of this will be put on the blog as soon as I get my hands on them - they are at present in Portugal, on Niki's camera...

Later that day Anjès was so kind as to help drop Niki off at Schiphol airport.

75

It's been another Internet-challenged week over here in Europe, so I've been rather remiss in keeping the journal up to date. Last weekend my love and I spent Saturday and Sunday in the south of Holland to celebrate (belatedly) my mum's 75th birthday. We had a lovely dinner at the Heeren van Oranje restaurant in Breda, with my sisters and brothers-in law, Anjès and mum. Oh, and Mazzel, the dog trotted along as well. Lovely evening, mellow, excellent food. On Sunday morning my sister Marielle and brother-in-law Arthur threw a delicious breakfast spread, followed by a doggie walk in the woods and lounging on a pavement cafe for afters. A very relaxing weekend.

Kilworth house

Today we had lunch, with Peter and Ann and auntie Jane, at Kilworth House, one of the many stately homes in England that have been converted into hotels and restaurants. Situated in beautiful surroundings, among rolling hills of yellow koolzaad (or, in English, oilseed rape) we enjoyed the unusual 26-degree spring day with a glass of wine and lovely food (although the waiters, according to some of the company present, did need a bit more training to explain to customers the menu they were offering...)

Conference

Phew. I think that is the word that best sums up how my love and I feel at the moment. We have just come back from the IATEFL conference in Brighton. We have to admit that we felt Brighton was a rather downtrodden and seedy place, despite its fancy Royal Pavilion and The Lanes, with lots of homeless people, drunks along the seaboard and dirt. The conference, however, was good! We´ve met many of our professional friends there, and networked till the cows came home for future contracts. We´ve met our Chinese publisher, and have talked with many other people about current and upcoming projects. (And I know somebody, who reads this blog, and who doesn´t like the word ´upcoming´...).

We stayed in a nice B&B with a crazy landlady, and trekked 20 minutes every morning and afternoon to walk to the conference centre. This had been built in the 1970s, so (?) it has no windows to speak of ... rather depressing after five days ...

Tess and Yarrow might be interested to know that Brighton has pebble beaches, as the photo below shows. Rather strange, I must say - it´s as if it´s not a ´real´ beach...

The Lanes

Pebbly beach

Different

It´s the last night in Portugal before heading off to the UK and Holland with my love.  Even though I had to think for a moment when Niki asked me earlier today whether I felt different now than before, or whether this moment in time feels strange, or unusual. Even though I initially felt that I didn´t, it is a bit strange to think that I may not be sleeping in this house anymore - a house that has been a home for my love and I, off and on, depending on where we were, for more than two years now.  I don´t expect, being the Aussified country bumpkin I´ve grown to be over the last decade, that I´ll miss the concrete urban reality of modern Portuguese city suburbia, and yet, it has become familiar and ´close´, part of that inimitable mix of experiences, a space in the removal boxes of our lives which we carry along as we develop and grow. Another new phase begins...  and my love and I will embrace it with vigour!

Ellen

News has just reached us that Ellen is in hospital, suffering from adverse side effects of minor surgery earlier today. Hang in there, Ellen! Fight yourself out of this - you are a fighter! Channeling all our love to you!

It´s a moving business...

We just got confirmation ´that [we] have booked the packing / collection [of goods and chattels to Australia] into our work schedule for Friday 29th April - commencing at around 0845 / 0900´. As I said, it´s all happening...

Libraries

I have always been fascinated by libraries. These could be real places, or they could - equally impressively - be fictional entities that play a role in works of fiction, such as the famous labyrinthine library of the distant and wind-swept lonely monastery in Umberto Eco´s Name of the Rose (even though that wasn´t real but based on an amalgam of libraries in the writer´s imagination.) The eighteenth century ´rendition´ of this mysterious fictional Abbey, the Abbey of Melk, is shown below. Wouldn´t you just want to be there to breathe the words, thoughts, scents, and emotions of old in this amazingly beautiful repository of knowledge?

A while ago Mieke sent me a photo of a beautiful library, the Philosophical Hall, a Baroque reading room in Prague´s 868-year-old Strahov monastery library, holding just about every important book available in central Europe at the end of the 18th century — more or less the sum total of human knowledge at the time. It made me think of a library Niki and I visited in Mafra, close to Lisbon, in the Palacio Nacional de Mafra. The latter has en entirely different ´feel´ to it, although it is equally impressive - its colours are less vibrant, more subdued, milky than, for instance, the Prague library. Does anybody know of any other architecturally beautiful or otherwise impressive libraries around the world?

The library of the Melk Abbey, Austria

The library of the Palácio Nacional in Mafra, Portugal

The library of the Strahov Monastery library, Czech. (Go here to ´walk inside´ this library, thanks to a 3D photography project only recently completed in March 2011. It takes a while to ´get´ the controls, but then it´s worth it)

It´s getting serious...

It´s all happening... On Friday night, with the help of our friend Susanna, we packed a substantial part of the contents of the Lisbon apartment into a big (I mean, BIG) van which we rented for Saturday. I love driving vehicles like that, and decided that I will be a bus driver when I retire (laughing smiley here). As the photos below show we managed to pack it to the rafters (if it only had rafters).

Saturday morning saw us leaving Lisbon at 6:00 a.m. (how dedicated is that!). High and dry above the highway we rocketed towards the Serra de Estrela. Niki decided that our next car would have to be a van, because she now saw so much more of the countryside around us and things she could never have imagined as they were simply not visible from the little carette that she normally drives.

About 3 hours later we arrived in Sarzedo where the roads (well, there are only two and one of them is in need of repair) are so narrow that we were somewhat concerned the van might not even fit. With  mirrors folded in we just scraped through ... As you can see we professionally (!) stored all the things on the ground floor (which at the moment is not much more yet that a sandpit with French doors, but will at some stage be a lovely kitchen looking out over the mountains), off the floor (bricks quickly scored at the local DIY) before going up the mountain, under / in tarps. We were quite chuffed with ourselves!

At some stage one of the elder ladies in the village came in muttering and (as far as we could tell, in a bad mood) asked us to move the van. I said to Niki, ´I bet you she´s ignored the safety sign that we set up 50 metres or so down the street, and is now waiting behind the van with her cart. Lo, and behold - she was indeed, but she was not alone ... look for ´ít´ in the slideshow.

About 2 hours later, having left a few chairs, a table and a doll´s house in the part of the house where building is taking place, so the builders would have something to sit on and play with during their infrequent (!) coffee breaks, we were able to set off again (squeezing the van out of the village) towards Lisbon where at the end of the afternoon we delivered it back safely and returned home to do more clearing and shifting.

It is now Sunday morning. Unfortunately, my back is protesting after yesterday´s adventures. We´ve just had breakfast at one of the local bakery / coffee houses. As I blog, Niki is at is again / still at it - tidying, bagging, chucking away, and cleaning so by the end of this weekend we´re all ready to rock!

As I said ... it´s all happening.

Move

Hairdresser

Typing away briefly with Denise in Amsterdam on Skype this morning, in between exercises on the simple past and present perfect tenses for China Grammar (how exciting...), she tells me she´ll chat with me later because she is .. at the hairdresser! OK, fair enough, but imagine my surprise when she phones (on Skype) and on the little video screen I see ... Denise ... erm, Denise? Or some sort of futuristic alien from Mars, perhaps? Ah! She is, indeed, at the hairdresser´s and, in true form, being a Modern Interactive Woman and all that, she is Skyping with me from her iPhone - so what she is looking at is me, on her phone. I must admit I´d never actually had anybody phone me that way before, so I was quite excited. It deserved a post, if only because it looks, well, rather funny.

Real

I haven´t really celebrated this yet, but just before I left for Europe the latest two levels of Real English were published in Holland! Real English is my primary course for the Netherlands, and these two new levels are for 8 to 10-year-olds. They consist of workbooks in colour and an impressive interactive whiteboard application offered via the web. The Real English brand has now been on the market since 1984. It offers materials for 8-12 year-olds. These last two levels are a mighty fine candle on the cake! So, here´s to (big?) bucks rolling in... Proost!

Facing book

A little Facebook exchange between Niki, Tess and Yarrow after our chat just now ...

Half a chat

Just had a lovely chat with Tess and Yarrow. Sitting in the Grange kitchen, where Mieke was preparing dinner, we chatted about home, school, friends, torn knee ligaments and broken noses - and how much we are all missing each other! Unfortunately, these conversations seem to end up being half conversations sometimes (a bit like in the snapshot I took during the chat...) because the quality of the Internet varies and today it was particularly bad. Anyway - it was lovely to see and hear you both, my lovelies, and don´t worry - as the removal boxes piling up around us all over the apartment are telling me we are packing things up to come back to you!

We are also sending Good Health wishes to Grandpa / Ton who is having a bit of a dip at the moment. Ellen, will you convey our good wishes?

Snow?

Snow? Yes, snow. Tess and Yarrow will remember the snow on top of the mountain near Sarzedo, which is where we went with our friends Tony and Rita who came from Merida in Spain and visited us in Covilhã, near Sarzedo. We stayed in the Residencial Panorama, which was nice enough in itself, but was managed by what we would like to refer to as ´The Demon Manager´ (think Mr Fawlty in Portuguese) who had a rather disturbing look on his face most of the time (as if voices in his head were competing for talk time) and didn´t seem to have any sleep for all the time we were there ... 

We had a lovely time, chatting, walking, dining and driving up to the Torre, the highest point of the area (and of Portugal) although we decided not to go down the hill on the black tyres or the slides – it was simply too cold and too wet …

Personally, I had a bit of a linguistic breakthrough this time around as I jumped in and tried to speak Portuguese as much as I could - mind you, it apparently sounded like a combination between Spanish and Portuguese, which we aptly dubbed Iberian for the time being...

Cherry blossom

It´s the season of blossom in Europe and all over the Beira Baixa, where we went on the weekend, we saw beautiful cherry blossom spreading its white charm over the countryside!

Anjés

The other night Niki and I spoke with Anjès for a while, on Skype. She was lounging on a ´loungy´ Sunday, having worked her proverbial off the whole week in the clothes shop. She´s really looking forward to coming to Australia, as are we! She told her boss of her decision to go away, so she now finally feels free to talk about it with everybody!  She´s thinking about what she might do while she is Down Under (in terms of work, study and travel), but hasn´t quite made up her mind yet. She´s especially looking forward to being with family!As we chatted we checked out her visa, just to make sure it was still OK, and  yes, she´s all set to  simply ´go home´ on her permanent residency visa...

Mooooove ...

Having been through a number of moves myself over the years, the one we are ´embroiled´ in at the moment is no different – we´ve been diligently packing Stuff In Boxes for more than a week now. I think we´ve probably covered about 85% of the home contents and sorted them into ´For Australia´ and ´For Sarzedo´ piles. It´s all coming together – we want to have basically everything packed before we go to England (for the IATEFL conference) and Holland, so that in May Niki won´t have to be doing much more than tidying up and overseeing The Removal Of Stuff. She will be staying with her friend Susanna after England – living out of a suitcase for a few weeks while the house gets thoroughly emptied and made ready for renting out. Our friend Carlos did a wonderful paint job (of the Marquise, for instance, and the bathroom) while we were in Sarzedo.

I am so proud of my love for going through this ´upheaval´ - OK, voluntary of course, and she has a vested interest :), but still, it´s a Big Thing and we are both looking forward to finding our feet again Down Under.