Saaga

I don’t want to put any of you Sydneysiders offside, but there are definitely some areas in which Düsseldorf beat Sydney hands down. Basically, public transport here is so much better than in Sydney.

Firstly, it’s reasonably priced, secondly the network is comprehensive and covers pretty much everywhere, thirdly the services are frequent and lastly, the services are mostly on time (and even if they aren’t they’re generally not very far apart anyway). Of course, there are occasional glitches, but in Sydney it only occasionally works properly.

I guess this is one of the advantages of living in a small-ish and compact city (although Berlin is huge and also has excellent public transport). Düsseldorf has just less than 500,000 inhabitants, although it is surrounded by other largish cities (Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Cologne, Bonn etc) so there are people commuting into and out of Düsseldorf in great numbers every day. The autobahns are great and lots of people also drive, things only becoming unstuck (literally and figuratively) when it snows (which isn’t often around here).

In Australia, a town of this size would be soooo boring (no offence Jay, spending my weekends reading Hansard at Old Parliament House doesn’t really get me too excited) and probably also have worse public transport (i.e. Canberra, population 340,000 and a planned city that for some reason was planned without any public transport!!!).

I don’t want to sound like I am merely slagging Sydney off, because I am genuinely concerned about the state of transport and the subsequent effect on quality of life in Sydney. We’ll be back there sooner or later and I don’t want to live in a city where you can’t practically catch public transport and if you drive you are stuck in traffic jams stressing out for half your day. We can’t let Sydney become another Los Angeles! Something has to be done. The government needs to invest money NOW and make sure that Sydney is livable in the future. (Interesting point: Brisbane, Darwin and Perth are now growing faster than Sydney - Sydney is over-populated, crowded, expensive and, on the whole, not really that user-friendly!)

St Patrick ’s Day was a big event here in Düsseldorf, although with the amount of Irish pubs available, added to the fact that I have a few Irish friends, it feels like every Friday is ‘our hallowed snake skull cracking day’. We toured a few of our most frequently haunted Irish bars and then settled on Buck Mulligan’s, which is huge.
Dancing like a bogan to Metallica’s version of ‘whiskey in the jar’ as played by a German cover band was definitely the high light, although they could have topped it if they played ‘Paradise city’. I can’t explain why I got into it. I normally dislike those bands. Infact, the me of ten years ago is now trying to gain access to a time machine so he can travel to his future and assassinate me for acting out of character.

If bird flu ever bridges the gap of being human to human transferable I am going to lock myself in my house with a months worth of supplies and ride out the storm. I will then emerge Post Apocalyptic World style as the King of a completely depopulated realm.
I may be jumping the gun a little here, but once the inevitable mutation occurs, the new strain will kill every person in Germany for one simple reason… people on the trains here don’t cover their mouths when they cough.
By the end of my 15 minute train journey I have been coughed directly onto at least once and had the air redampeniser cycle 160 other coughs onto the walls of my lungs as well. No wonder half the staff at work have been out sick this week…they have to spend their days riding the trains and coughing on people until they are well again.

A good friend gave me a book to read and I tried, but I ended up breaking my cardinal literary rule; Always give a book until page 100 before giving up on it.
I have never failed to reach this self imposed limit before, but last night with my eyes beginning to bleed I surrendered at page 71 as the involuntary spasms wracking my body made me hurl it across the room. Looks like it’s back to Patrick O’Brien for me , which necessitates a trip to a book shop with an English language section.

Here’s more photos of Marrakech and Morocco:

We started in Casablanca, but there’s not much to take photos of in Casa, so let’s move right along to Marrakech. The main square in Marrakech is called Djemma el-Fna. It is a huge bustling market-place where there are traditional buskers, snake charmers, orange juice stalls (only 50c for a big glass!) and many others in the middle, surrounded by shops and cafes. The square is constantly being crossed by motorcycles and scotters going at high speeds, you really have to keep you eyes open! At dusk, cooked food stalls start to set up and you can almost anything for dinner, from soups and kebabs to sheeps head stew, yum!

Marrakech is a big bustling place with different strata of society all going about their lives. In the inner city area near the Djemma el-Fna, the buildings are mostly older and of a traditional style. They are also mostly crumbling and in a fairly poor state of repair. Outside the old city there are newer apartments etc but also slums.

After spending a few days in Marrakech, we joined a 3 day, 2 night tour over the mountains and into the desert. The poverty in the country-side wasn’t quite so noticable. The people, of course, seemed poor, but all the villages had good (traditional) irrigation systems for their crops and were normally still practising their traditional crafts. Of course, their access to clean water, healthcare and education leaves a lot to be desired, but the King is trying to improve things.

The worst poverty seemed to be (as viewed from the window of a quickly moving mini-van) mostly in the small to medium towns where things seemed dirtier and more depressed.

In the desert we rode camels (uncomfortable and after a little while, kind of boring), ate traditional Berber food and listened to traditional Berber drumming (and renditions of not so traditional songs, such as Bob Marley), slept in traditional Berber tents, peed in the traditional Berber desert and got up to look at a traditional Berber sunrise from the top of a big bloody traditional Berber sand-dune.

After all Steve’s whinging it turns out that Flickr is actually really user friendly (if you’re a user who isn’t Steve, that is) and that displaying your photos on other websites is child’s play (if you’re a child called Alex, that is).

The long and winding road

The Atlas Mountains which are located surprisingly near the desert.

Sahara dunes

A picture of the rolling sand dunes as promised.

Atlas

As promised by Steve I am going to tell you all a bit about our visit to Morocco. I’m also experimenting with using Flickr to put photos directly into our blog, so hopefully you’ll be able to see a rather dramatic picture of the Atlas Mountains.

These mountains start just behind Marrakech and run pretty much north-south in the middle of Morocco - kind of Morocco’s Great Dividing Range but greater.

The scenery in Morocco is really stunning, with so many different environments very close together. It took about 6 hours driving to cross the mountains in total - the roads are certainly long and winding - and then we were in the desert. At first the desert was very flat and rocky with some scrubbery, but after a couple of hours driving through that we got to the edge of the Sahara Desert, which is exactly how you’d imagine it - rolling sand-dunes as far as you could see.

I’ll post a few more pictures soon if this one works.

We have posted some pics from Morocco on flickr.com

Alex has promised she will post about the trip so hassle her for a description of our adventures in the land of camels, riads and souks. I can’t contribute on this because I can’t write in that style as I am not Bill Bryson.

We have just gotten back from our week in Morocco (well we got back on the weekend) and I have been firmly in the moist, smelly grip of Gastro-enteritis, which I think I actually got from eating fish here on the night I got home.

Our school management seriously underestimated the testicular fortitude of the parents of our student body. I suppose that is because normally parents of elementary age students are completely irrational when it comes to their offspring and will fly into a rage or a panic circumstances depending.
This morning we had an emergency staff meeting before school to discuss the likely fallout of the deaths of two grade five girls, in a school two kilometres from ours. The deaths are apparently unrelated, but the causes won’t be known until the autopsies are done and so we expected to have parents coming in all day and removing their students from the clear danger that schools possess… but it didn’t happen. No children were removed. Sensible heads reigned supreme.
It was interesting to watch the rumour machine at work over this business. I was listening to the people that were ‘sure’ what had happened and nodded knowingly to one another, but I was aghast that no one had even though to mention bird flu. So I did. As a joke. I had to leave shortly after because It looked like the Scottish Women’s Society was going to implode and I didn’t fancy being covered in scraps of bloody tartan.
I know what it was really. It is clear that it was zombies. The two girls have been recruited to the legion of the undead. Soon there will be more and more and more as they multiply and consume Germany. But I digress. And it’s time to let the cat in before it’s moaning and smashing on the door wakes the neighbours…bye for now.