We had our first stop over in Singapore in 1990. The Raffles Hotel was closed at the time for renovations. We had been planning to have a drink there. So we just had to postpone it. In November 1994 we actually made it inside the hotel for a drink. And we managed to take some pictures of the occasion.
On every table was a large bowl with unpeeled fresh peanuts. Raffles Hotel patrons would have known that with the highly priced drinks would come as many peanuts as anyone would like. Of course we helped ourselves to some peanuts and discarded the peels on our table. After a while a waiter approached our table and wiped with his hands the peels off the table onto the floor. He indicated that we should do the same. We realized then that this sort of thing was the custom at this particular hotel. After a bit of musing we came to the conclusion, all right, why not?
It was November, but Christmas decorations were out already.Peter did not get me a Singapore sling. He said this would have been outrageously expensive. None the less, I was quite happy with this alternative drink that he got me.Caroline took this photo of usand I took this photo of Caroline and Peter.This walkway belongs to Raffles Hotel.This is Singapore’s Catholic Cathedral.
In my previous blog I forgot to mention that in November 1994 we also had a stop over in London before we went on to Berlin. I am going to write about our visit to England in my next post.
We moved into our new home in September 1994. A few weeks later we had a burglary. I was so upset I wanted to cancel our planned trip to Berlin. A very understanding doctor managed to calm me down with some hypnosis treatment. So in November we went as planned to Sydney Airport for our departure which led us first of all to another stop over at Singapore.
The following pictures show that our family came to the airport to farewell us. I find these pictures very interesting for our family. They show our grandchildren what they looked like nearly twenty years ago!
I noticed that all four of our children and all six of our grandchildren that we had at the time, are to be seen in the photos! Also Gaby’s carer David and our daughter-in-law.
In this picture Peter and I are with all our four children. Daughter Caroline stands next to Peter. All five children of daughter Monika are in the picture too! Her very tall twin sons are eighteen, her two little daughters in the front are Natasha and Roxanne. Well, this was more than sixteen years ago!
This picture was taken at the beginning of September 1997, a few days after our daughter Gaby’s 40th birthday! We all met for a picnic lunch at Central Park in Merrylands near Gaby’s and David’s home. David, Gaby’s carer, stands in the middle of the photo behind Gaby’s wheelchair. Our son Martin (who’s holding onto the wheelchair) lived in Newcastle at the time and had come to Sydney to see us all. Merrylands is a Western Suburb of Sydney. The Central Park there is a very popular recreational place.
Our daughter Monika holds Krystal, her five months old baby daughter. Gaby and Martin are in the picture too.
In the picture below Troy, who is one of the twins, walks with his girlfriend.
Ryan, the other twin, as well as Caroline, Martin and David presumably walked ahead.
However one of them must have taken this picture, right? Maybe Caroline?
After our picnic lunch we all walked right through the park towards the little waterfall. It looks like at the time there was still quite a bit of water to be seen. Sadly, after a few years without much rain, there was no water left in this area. When we took a picture there two years ago, everything looked completely dry. Maybe in the meantime the water situation has improved somewhat. We should go there one day and have a look.
Here we are with Monika’s daughter Natasha on that day in early September 1997.
(Reuters) – On New Year’s day, 45 asylum seekers in a ramshackle wooden boat slid ashore on a small island off the Australian city of Darwin. Four others had been swept overboard that morning in rough seas and were believed dead.
The survivors, from Africa and the Middle East, stumbled onto the beach, thankful to find refuge on Australian soil. Or so they thought.
Within an hour, an Australian warship and other vessels arrived. Military personnel forced the asylum seekers back onto their wooden boat and towed it out to sea. Their destination: Indonesia.
Determining precisely what happened is difficult. But interviews with five of the passengers reconstructs a journey they say was marked by physical and verbal abuse.
Their accounts highlight just how far the newly elected conservative government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott is going to meet his election promise to…
It was a good weekend. We had the family visiting with little Lucas. And we received the great news, that in September Lucas is going to have a little sister or brother. How exciting this is for the whole family!
Caroline and Matthew arrived yesterday at lunchtime. This afternoon they left again to go back to Sydney. Yesterday we had Kartoffelsalat (Potato Salad) and Bouletten (Berlin Meat Patties) for lunch. Caroline did bring some cake which she had baked herself. We had this yesterday for afternoon coffee when Monika came with Mark as well as Troy and Ryan who did bring little Lucas along. Ebony, the newly expectant mum, had stayed at home to have a little bit of a rest.
This is what my plate looked like for lunch, yesterday, 9th February 2014
Caroline, Matthew, Peter and I went for a bit of Supper to the AGA (Australian German Austrian) Club.
After the fall of Berlin in May 1945 the occupying forces divided the city into four sectors: One American, one British, one French and one Russian. Correspondingly Germany was divided into four different zones. In the 1950s more and more people fled from the Russian Zone of Germany to one of the Western Zones. A lot of refugees chose to flee to West-Berlin. From there they were flown out to Western Germany.
The Eastern Zone was the German Democratic Republic, West-Germany was called Bundesrepublik. That people wanted to flee the GDR showed, what a bad regime they had in the GDR. Refugees were received with open arms in the West. The GDR made it very difficult for people to flee once the “Wall” was built around West-Berlin and right along the border of East- and West-Germany.
Here are some refugees near the Brandenburg Gate in 1953:
In the picture underneath are some West-Berliners gathered waiting for the arrival of relatives from the East who presumably want to flee the GDR.
This is at the airport of Tempelhof. People are waiting to be flown out to West-Germany.
All pictures are taken from “Aus dem Berliner Tagebuch” by Thilo Koch published by Bertelsmann Club GmbH
In Singapore we went to the Zoological Gardens. Peter and Caroline had breakfast with an Orangutan.
This is a picture that Caroline took at Sydney Airport before our Departure.
Gaby had come with David. Also Monika was there to farewell us. This was 24 years ago, meaning that none of Monika’s girls had been born yet, but Monika had of course already Troy and Ryan. They were ten at the time.
Here, Caroline is in the picture too, meaning we are to be seen here with all three daughters!In In Singapore we went to this Chapel.We also went on a temple tourOur Hotel had a Swimming Pool at the Top of the building.This was the View from the Top of the Building.I enjoyed our Stay in Singapore.
After Singapore our next destination was Paris. I already mentioned in Part One that we picked up a 2CV in Paris.
We did a bit of sightseeing in Paris, where we had booked a hotel for two nights. Then we did drive through country area. Close to where the Mt Blanc Tunnel leads towards Italy we had some overnight stops at a hotel which had very basic accommodation. The good thing was, that from there it was not far to Switzerland. We had a few excursions to Geneva. I am sure we made some pictures there but unfortunately cannot find them at present. I have no idea, why they are not in the books with all the other pictures from this trip.
We arrived at this hotel in the evening and were happy to stay there for it was reasonably priced and the owners were very friendly.
I think I already mentioned what a horror the Mont Blanc Tunnel turned out to be. Well, I guess when this tunnel was built, they had no idea by how much traffic would increase, and that especially these big trucks would pollute the air and that they had to make sure that ventilation remained okay. These days they would never attempt to build a tunnel with only one lane in each direction. The tunnel goes for 11 kilometres without any interruptions.
This is a picture of the Mont Blanc Tunnel.
I am sure we took a lot of pictures in Italy. I just cannot find them at present and have to try and publish some at another time. We stayed in several different hotel during our trip through Italy. In Rome we found a very reasonably priced hotel close to the Vatican.
It was a Wednesday when we turned up at the Vatican. Lots of tourists had arrived in buses from Germany on that day. They thought we had come with them from Germany. The Pope greeted the tourists in German. We could hardly see him for he was a great distance away from us.
We spent a lovely day in Venice, we also had a look at the leaning tower of Pisa. But I have no picture of it. Here is another picture with Caroline and me in Venice.
From Italy we went to Austria and from there for a trip to Bayrischzell along the Alpenstrasse. On the way we had a look at Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart. On the Alpenstrasse we were caught in a blizzard. After a stay over at Bayrischzell we tried to reach the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. But it was bad weather. This is why the cable cars to the top of the Zugspitze were not in operation.
Here is what I Wikipedia says about the cable cars:
“Three cable cars run to the top of the Zugspitze. The first, the Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car, was built in 1926 and terminated on an arête below the summit before the terminus was moved to the actual summit in 1991. A rack railway, the Bavarian Zugspitze Railway, runs inside the northern flank of the mountain and ends on the Zugspitzplatt, from where a second cable car takes passengers to the top. The rack railway and the Eibsee Cable Car, the third cableway, transport an average of 500,000 people to the summit each year. In winter, nine ski lifts cover the ski area on the Zugspitzplatt. The weather station, opened in 1900, and the research station in the Schneefernerhaus are mainly used to conduct climate research.”
We made it to Neuschwanstein Castle just a few minutes before they were about to close. O our way back to Austria we stayed near Ober-Ammergau. We had accommodation in a pleasant hotel. When we woke up in the morning, our car was covered in snow.
Then back to Windischgarsten where Peter’s sister Eva lives with Harald, her husband. Harald built this house all on his own:
Eva and Harald with their dog Blinki in early 1983.
We stayed with Eva and Harald over Easter. Peter’s other sister, Ilse, had come also with husband Klaus and sons Daniel and Stefan. Ilse and her family live in Berlin. They all still live there. After Easter we travelled to Berlin. My Mum lived in a seniors’ home unit at the time. We took her in our 2CV to the Brandenburg Gate which was being restored after the Fall of the Wall a few months earlier.
24 years ago Mum was 79, the same age that I am now!
Here is Peter with my brother Peter Uwe in Berlin, Adenauer Platz.
After returning our car in Paris we spent a few great days exploring the city, staying in a lovely old hotel.
Caroline is only eleven. I think she looks pretty grown up already!Caroline and Peter did get into the shot I took!Waiting for our flight at the airport. Caroline took this picture. This hat I wear was still pretty new then. I still have it and wear it sometimes!
As I mentioned in the first Part, we spent three days in Anaheim to visit Disneyland. Here is just a sample of some Disneyland photos.
In 1990 we did do a trip around the world. We started in Sydney, had a stop over in Singapore. From there we went on to Paris where we bought a 2CV. We loved this car and travelled with it to Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Bavaria, back to Austria and then to Berlin where we stayed for a few weeks. At the arranged time we drove the 2CV from Berlin back to Paris. The arrangement was, that we could take the car back to where we had purchased it. What we had paid for it in the end was only as much as a hire fee.
From Paris our flight went to Los Angeles via Newark. A bus took us from LA to Anaheim where we stayed in a hotel for three nights. We actually did go for three days in a row for a visit to Disneyland. We found the visits very interesting and enoyable, especially since we had our eleven year old daughter Caroline with us who did get a lot out of it. Our flight home to Sydney was via Hawaii.
Recently I reminisced about our visit to the French Cafe GARAGE DU PONT near the Glienicker Brücke in Berlin. This brought back memories about our stay in France in 1990 and that cute little French car. We often talk about this car. It has really become special to us in our memory. Every time we happen to see a car like it around somewhere, we start talking about “our” wonderful, light blue 2CV. There aren’t that many around any more. But occasionally we still see one. We then cannot help us, we have to compare it to “our” 2CV.
We liked it that we could push out a bit of the bottom of the car’s windscreen for “air-conditioning”. There were also tiny side windows inserted in the big side window. These tiny windows could be pushed out while driving. We felt then like our car had become wings and was driving faster. Sometimes, when Peter increased the speed a bit on the free-way, these little windows would open on its own. We laughed and laughed, when the car started flying like this. However, our car could not go as fast as all the other cars on the road and everyone overtook us. But we did not mind this, not at all. We had such fun!
Leaving Sydney
From France to Italy we went through the Mt Blanc Tunnel. I think this is about the oldest tunnel through the Alps. It was a horror drive for us. As I remember it, there were only two lanes, one in each direction. There were heaps of trucks going through the tunnel. This drive through the tunnel made Caroline quite sick. There just was not enough clean air. Once in Italy we looked immediately for a hotel in the next village. Caroline and I went straight to bed feeling nauseated. We went to sleep and slept right through to the following morning. In the morning we felt all right and we all went out for a lovely breakfast.
The last pictures in this post were taken when we were already out of Italy. It was close to Easter, however we experienced still quite a bit of snow.
The following I copied from a Google page.
Tin snail, or timely saviour? The Citroen 2CV was mocked by many in its 40-year lifespan, but in the impact it had on cheap personal transportation it ranks alongside other greats like the Mini, Beetle and Land Rover.
The last ‘official’ 2CVs were built by Citroen in 1990, but now, against a background of rigorously policed speeds and closely scrutinised running costs, restored versions of the four-seat convertible are once again being built – in Wiltshire. And they’re finding a ready market among drivers looking for character, fun and an escape from depreciation.
The Sydney Morning Herald published this very interesting article about some excursions along the route where the Berlin Wall used to run through. You may also like to have a look at the beautiful pictures they published with this article!
AuntyUta 