Dealing with damp times

Somewhat unusually for the season it appears, we are passing through areas where it is continually raining. For us, this rain brings little threats and opportunities. For Randall this travel through Bavaria and Austria is a bit of a joining activity as we head towards Slovenia, a country new to us. For Yvonne it is more about not wasting the opportunity to DO something. So we are having different views on what to do to fill in our wet days.

In Munich, after exploring the city centre, we exhausted ourselves by touring the former royal residence and the treasury. We are not experts on European Royalty so the Bavarian line of Protectors and Kings is still somewhat over our heads. The treasury has some fantastic and priceless items often made by French and German craftsman. But in reality these items were symbols of power and excess and a means of demonstrating what? Having the finest gold crowns, exquisitely carved rock crystal serving and display items and military orders created for only a select few of certain breeding, seems to be obscene. But perhaps that is what we humans are at times.

In Salzburg, we wandered again around the old town with the other tourists, mainly American it appears, after we had a typical Austrian lunch in a beer house. Salzburg has definitely been taken over by tourists since we last visited some years ago. After lunch we walked around in the ever increasing wet town before calling it a day and heading back to the shelter of our hotel.

We are now well beyond our normal comfort zones; we have little German language, of the 30-40 TV channels, we only really comprehend CNN and organising our meals and travel has been interesting. Yvonne is comfortable with the lack of language in that most people here have at least a little English but Randall finds it frustrating at times.

Technology is everywhere these days and we are contributing to its spread. In Munich we breakfasted at perhaps the best internet cafe we have come across. Good coffee and light breakfast, plenty of comfortably spaced terminals and great tables and couches for us wireless types. On the walk, we were getting updates on AFL scores as we wandered through medieval France and a couple had the walk programmed into their GPS telephones so they were able to keep us on track without our paper maps from time to time. Even in the train from Munich on Wednesday, we had continual map progress updates, predictions and actuals on next stops and train speed on screens throughout the train.

But the TV news is pretty much the same everywhere, whatever the access. European and US channels show the same shots of Sam Stosur beating Serena Williams and the Jankovic at Roland Garros as our internet access to ABC news. Everyone now has the same story on the UK taxi driver shooting incident and on troubles in Gaza and we can watch “Midsummer Murders” in at least three languages so I wonder about news items from time to time.

Which leads me to a final comment for this blog. Yvonne thinks I am a bit twisted and perhaps she is right but I cannot help imagining just how many humans are crawling over the planet these days and what it must look like from above. In Paris, the metro was packed with all sorts dashing around under the ground on their way to? All of the railway stations have seemingly masses of business types, pensioners, back packers, school kids, tourist groups and travellers like us towing their bags and setting off all over the continent to what end? What are we searching for?