As I Xi It v2.3

Since I’ll be off to Switzerland soon, I thought I’d best write my entry about Austria,  which I visited two weekends ago. We flew into Vienna first which turned out to be much warmer than I’d expected. Like most cities on the continent, it was pretty walkable, all the main sights are conveniently located around the inner stadt, however, Schloss Schonbrunn was located a bit way out, but extremely easy to get to especially if you’re staying near the Westbanhof train station. It’s well worth visiting, the gardens are pretty and good for a long stroll, especially up to the top of the hill where you could see the Schloss and the rest of Vienna.

The hotel we stayed at was right by Mariahilfer Strasse which is the Viennese equivalent of London’s Oxford St. They had the same brands as in London so I felt fairly at home, but the main difference was that there seem to have more alfresco dining facilities. Since it far less busy than London, the pollution’s rather low which makes it more plesant to sit outside in the summer months. I had the best croissants ever at Cafe Westend around the corner from my hotel. The coffees are generally pretty good, quite enjoyed my iced viennese coffee at Cafe Sacher, however, I didn’t find the famed Sachertorte to be as impressive as its made out to be. It was a touch on the dry side. When in Austria, one must have apfelstrudle! Hmn… not bad, not bad at all. One thing that annoyed me, and it’s probably because I’m used to a 24/7 city, is that everything shuts around 7/8pm and nothing’s open on the weekends. It’s quite typical of most European cities.

We’d had enough of Vienna and took the train cross country over to Salzburg, home of The Sound of Music! Unfortunately, the night we arrived, it poured down with rain. Mum and I were searching high and low for something to eat for dinner and ended up at Burger King by the Hauptbanhof, it was only 8pm. Anyway, the next day, we went and explored the ‘city’. The old town looked remarkably like the new town. We visited Schloss Mirabell which was famously featured in the do-re-mi number in The Sound of Music. Of course, being in Salzburg, we just had to join one of those tacky Sound of Music Tours. The tour guide was a brit, and it was actually not as cringeworthy as I thought it’d be. The coach took us out to some of the sites where they filmed the movie outside the city, however, it didn’t get as far as Germany where they did the famous hill scene (you know the one, the opening number where Maria is twirling around in the hill). One thing I will say about the tour is that there is some singing involved, but one doesn’t feel under pressure to perform. Salzburg is also the birthplace of Mozart! They certainly capitalise on that by selling those Mozart sweets. I find them to be a bit too sweet.

We were only in Austria for a few days, but there are a couple of things I feel like I ought to do, like visit the Krimmel waterfall, and the salt mine and ice cave by Salzburg. Maybe next time.

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From a stroll along the Thames a few weeks ago.

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Ahead of my upcoming trip to Austria, I picked up a new tripod! It’s far more compact than my other tripods and extends up to my eye-level with the centre column down.

The original ballhead it came with was fine with my Canon G11, but I wouldn’t trust it with my 40D, so I’ve swapped it out for my Manfrotto 486RC2. The whole thing weighs around 1kg with a maximum carrying capacity of around 2kg, fine for a semi-pro DSLR and standard zoom/prime, but definitely not for telephotos.There are variable leg locks and you can remove part of the centre column to further reduce weight. It’s reasonably sturdy, but won’t replace my Gitzo for shots up in the Arctic. Further specs are available here – Slik Sprint Pro II GM.

Given its petite proportions, its easy to pack making it ideal for weekend city breaks around Europe.

How exciting could a mug be? Well, apart from all that commotion with the Canon mug in recent months, I came across the Sea to Summit X-Mug which is just so neat that I had to share!

Basically, the X-Mug is a drinking vessel by Sea to Summit made of food grade silicone, acepting both cold and hot beverages . It folds down to a disc shape approximately 1.5 cm x 11.3 cm and has graduations on the inside for measuring things out. Being fairly light and compact makes it ideal for those travel adventures. It seems fairly robust and there is also the X-Bowl and X-Plate in the collection of X items which all nest together when squished down. I’m pretty confident that this will replace the Lifeventure mug I usually pack for my next globe trotting adventure… assuming that this dastardly cloud of volcanic ash moves along.

So, here I am, back at my desk in London having returned from a very chilled out tropical holiday. It was hot, hot, hot.

Spontaneous Singapore 2010 from Xi on Vimeo.

Sometime last week, Marcus and I went to Fika, a Scandinavian restaurant in Little India which I thought was a little odd location-wise. You’d expect that sort of European cusine to be somewhere along Orchard Road. It was quite good, but I didn’t see any reindeer on the menu. No elk either eventhough the logo was the shiloette of an elk. On the menu were the usual Scandinavian type things, potatoes, salmon, meatballs. I was a little surprised not to see chopped dill in the boiled potatoes. After Scandinavia, I had my much awaited cendol at some Malay place, shooting the breeze in the outdoors table. There was a bit of a confusion where our cendol ended up on another table, but then it eventually wound up at ours. It was mighty good and some of the green snotty bits looked like leeches. Nice. While we’re on the topic of deserts, I managed to have my much awaited ice kachung! It was very colourful and artificial and syrupy. Mmmm…. muy bien.

Jac and I caught up with Cherlyn who neither of us have see since Biology and went to the Sunset Grill & Pub in the middle of Seletar airbase. It was really cool, all the roads were named after places in London and the ambience of the place was quite good. Ate outdoors, I believe Jac got nibbled by some mozzies, I didn’t surprisingly.

We also visited Pulau Ubin, one of the offshore islands where we shot some insects and I managed to get attacked by both the sun and those pesky mosquitoes. It was seriously hot, hot, hot! While I was reeling off a couple of shots of a katydid, I could feel myself get drenched from all the sweat. For an offshore island, it wasn’t as windy as I’d expected. However, when we sat down to lunch, the breeze blew the spicy hot chili fumes towards us causing us much occular and nasal irritation. I also managed to get myself sunburnt with the most spectacular effects. In the pics, you can clearly see where my sleeves end and the sunburn begin. I’ve never been so sunburnt, my arms were red hot during the night and turning down the AC to 16^oC didn’t seem to help all that much. I was radiant like a cooked lobster.

I guess no entry (or series of entries) about Singapore is complete without an account of the shopping. Well, there certainly isn’t a shortage of shops there. The other day, Jac and I visited Vivocity where the Singapore branch of The National Geographic Society shop was. It was very much in the same style as the one in London on Regents Street, but I reckon the London one is bigger (spread over three floors) and it has an integrated cafe which the Singapore one hasn’t. There were far more NG London tees than Singapore ones which I thought was odd. Vivocity also had the Japanese equivalent of a pound shop here. It has some pretty cool crap for only $2 (£1). I brought a whole bunch of miniature wooden clothes pegs and other things I never thought I needed till I saw them. There was also a pet shop with some neat pet things (duh!) and everything was laid out so much more neater than the typical British pet shop. It didn’t even have that characteristic pet shop smell of dry cat/dog food and woodshavings. I was a little disappointed not to find a cute little house for Watson. Vivocity had a whole bunch of shops selling odd, useless but very cute things too. Although I didn’t see one, I’m sure there was a Giordano’s in there. There’s always a Giordano’s.

After yum cha with The Lau’s, Jac dropped me off at nearby Raffles City since I had some errands to run and of course more shopping to do. I had a wonder around, popped into the supermarket downstairs and stocked up on a bunch of snacks. I then strolled over to Suntec and got bored there walking round and round the endless collection shops.

On my last night in Singapore, Jac, LK and I went to Fort Canning Park. Marcus was being a poo poo head so didn’t come with us. Apparently, Fort Canning is suppose to be haunted, but I didn’t see any ghosts or poltergeist activity. I’ve also been informed that there are lots of mozzies there, but I failed to get bitten by one. I thought I was attacked, but it must’ve been psychosomatic. Unless they were phantom mozzies… woooo….

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Oh, I should probably say something about my flight home. There were no problems with the first leg apart from me possibly missing my flight due to a combination of Jac and I waiting ages at some food outlet at Changi airport for a rather bland French toast, odd tasting coffee and a rather dry and pathetic so-called “English” muffin and whining about said “edible” items. The last call announcement was made, but I wasn’t the last on board. There were still plenty after me. Didn’t get a chance to do browse duty free. Obviously haven’t shopped enough.

On the way back to London, the transit time in Dubai was only about 2 hours. I browsed through duty free and there were many novelty camel figurines and stuffed toys. None of which I had the desire to purchase. I suppose it would’ve been nice to get a wooden camel to keep the wooden giraffe I brought at duty free in South Africa. I guess I could start up a wooden duty free zoo then. No calamaties for me between DXB and LGW, however, the man sitting in the aisle (I was by the window) did have water spilt on him. Normally, when flying solo, I prefer an aisle seat, however, I predicted that on the flight to LGW there would be a good chance of flying over those man-made islands. I was right. Now I feel like I’ve seen Dubai and can add that to my list of places I’ve visited.

So, here I am, in Singapore. I’ve been here for a couple of days now and I’ve got to say that the weather’s been rather variable from thunderstorms to rather pleasant sunny weather.

It’s been a fairly relaxing holiday, just chilled out really. Took a stroll along Orchard Rd., did a bit of shopping, met some of Jac’s chums and did some photography.

Bioluminescent Fungi

Visited Venus Drive on Friday night to photograph some bioluminescent mushrooms and other night time critters. The fungi did glow in the dark, were reasonably easy to spot and some glowed more than others. Naturally, I got attacked by some mozzies. Bizzarely, all my bites were on my left arm. I counted four. The swelling has reduced significantly over the past couple of days. Still a little itchy from time to time.

On Saturday, I mostly hung out with Marcus, we had a stroll around Little India and made our way towards the Esplanade by foot to take pics of Scouts as commanded by Jac.

Earth Hour by The Esplanade.

It was also Earth Hour where they kill the lights on some of the buildings in the central business district (CBD) as part of the WWF campaign on climate change I think it is. It’s something eco and green. I did notice some buildings and monuments go out, but not that much.

Singapore Skyline

Anywhoo, I took a couple of snaps of the Singapore skyline to go with my collection of skylines from around the globe and I’ve got to say that it’s a pretty good photo. The sky was a nice graduation of blue with a couple of clouds. While sitting along the waterfront, Jac and I reminised about how when we were doing night photography along the River Thames, it’d be absolutely freezing, we’d be all togged up and still cold. There’d be drunken passer by’s inviting us to Coventry, random guys just standing next to us and we’d be hungry for any tasty morsel of food. Here, I’m just in shorts and a tee, reclining on the steps of the Waterfront.

I’m writing this from Dubai airport (DBX) while waiting for my flight to Singapore (SIN)…in 5 hours time. So what better way to will away the hours than to do some writing.

Anyway, lets start with how I got here.

Last Thursday, I had lunch with one of Jac’s mates from Singapore who’s working over here. He’d written a book with Jac about Singapore’s heritage sites. I flicked through it and it made me realise how long it’d been since I saw Jac, how I missed our adventures and how I missed travelling (I know I was in the Arctic Circle a few weeks ago, but that was last month!).

When I got back to the office after lunch, I had a look at last minute flight prices to Singapore, found a reasonably priced one and then reeled off and email to Jac to see whether she’d be free for me to visit. It turned out that she was and so I booked and here I am. Flying Emirates, departing from Gatwick (LGW), connecting in DBX both ways.

It’s been a rather eventful trip so far. First, I had a run-in with security at LGW. I had forgotten that I’d left my credit card Swiss Army Knife in the zip pocket of my Filofax! Given the option to go through check-in again or to have them confiscate it, I just told them to dispose. Can’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of check-in again, even though the Emirates queue was really short, unlike Easyjet who, unsurprisingly, had a very long queue. Probably mostly Brits all going to the Costa Del’s.

Next, up in the air, the flight attendant managed to throw an ice cube at my head. Not really a normal accident, but it happened. That was fine, it just slipped and aimed at me, I managed to salvage it after it bounced off my forehead.

A couple of hours later, another flight attendant who was serving me tea managed to serve it all over my lap. It was hot, Hot, HOT! I was somewhat soggy, but managed to dry off by the time I’d arrived in Dubai.

I’ve still got my connecting flight from DBX to SIN to go. I wonder what’s next, ambient temperature viscous juice?

This is just brilliant!! For those who don’t know, it won the 2010 oscar for best animated short film and rightly so!

I was about to brush my teeth this morning when I looked out the window and saw some sort of ginger four-legged animal run across the garden and scaled the fence. I rushed back to my room, put my glasses on and saw that it was a fox! At first, I thought it might be that big ginger cat who sometimes likes to terrorise Cici. So, I dashed back to my room, put on the telephoto and shot it. Not the best pic, but you can clearly tell that it’s a fox. It’s not as manky as some of the foxes I’ve seen at night.

Fox!

What would be really nice to see is a hedgehog. Haven’t seen one in years. When I was a kid, they’d always be visiting and staying over in the garage.

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.