Sign Retrospective

Here is the first instalment of the sign retrospective. We have 36GB of photos, so it might take two to three years to sort through them all.

This is a simple, but honest and proud watch vendor at Ephesus. Note the "Genuine Fake Watches", not cheap rip offs of rip offs as his competition would have you believe.

This is how you say "Digestive Crisis" in Turkish.

How the UN weapons inspectors failed to find WMD facilities is beyond us. This was in a MOSLEM country after all, so they MUST be up to no good. This was at Pamukkale and was swarming with German tourists.

Happy gurney. Is there any other kind? An unexpected bonus in this photo was the "Moon" brand toilet tissue.

We have run this one before but just love the idea of "stuffed aborigines". They ended up being a little bit acidic, unfortunately.

In rural India, DO NOT feel each other up, on pain of incarceration or worse.

This was another highlight. The poor cafe owner was really up against it. Without a fridge, crockery or any sort of culinary training, it was always going to be a struggle serving his "deficacies", particularly when he stole the menu from a large hotel restaurant up the road.

A highlight in Washington DC. A crazy old second hand book dealer had had enough of inane chatter, and apparently physcially removed people from the shop for transgressions.

And this was just sensational. It was taken right out the front of the largest and holiest mosque in Damascus. Young tackers have all the fun.

Monuments, big stuff and an education in tacky

Greetings from Washington DC. It's an interesting place, much like Canberra on 'roids, in the sense that it is a pre-planned city focussed around a vast array of government buildings, but with a slightly odd and artificial feeling. The upside is that it is full of highly paid young federal staffers, so there are heaps of great pubs and things to do. The downside is the high concentration of "crazies". One effect of the proliferation in mobile phones and handsets is that so many people stand in the open talking to themselves, making it hard to tell the difference between inane yabbers and genuine crazies. In Manhattan, they are inane yabbers ("yo, I told him it was my bag, it was my bag, yo, I told him it was my bag") whereas in Washington DC there is an astounding level of homelessness and people standing on street corners twitching and yelling abuse at people across the road.

Anyway, here are the happy snaps. You may be familiar with the White House.

It is another of those great optical illusions. In photos, it always looks very large and a long way away. It is in fact not very big at all and remarkably close to the road. The Prez was (we think) on the right in the West Wing just behind those trees.

Across the road is Blair House. Remember how earlier this year, John Howard, as a guest of George W, failed to decline an invite to stay there, forcing Barack Obama to stay in a hotel rather than in this house? A great moment for Australia's reputation.

We took the wind and rain with us to Washington. Here is the Washington Monument, built in 1858. As young Aussie tourists would say, a "big f&%k off obelisk".

And here is a professional-quality photograph trying to copy a scene from Forrest Gump. It was also the site of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.

Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of play in Washington. His monument is bigger than the WWII, Korea and Vietnam War monuments (also all on this mall) combined.

This is Ford's theatre where he was shot.

And we just could not resist the opportunity to take in a show at that famous venue where we sat about two metres away from his booth.

We frankly couldn't give a top hat what the show was - we just wanted to gawk and be able to say we had been there.

We spent a day touring Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court building and the Library of Congress. Here is the Capitol. The dome (or "Rotunda") sits atop a walkway which joins the House and the Senate.

It is quite palatial. This is the inside of the dome. The image is of various goddesses crowding around George Washington, who is in heaven and holding symbols of power.

It is the third attempt at a dome. The first was burned down by the British in 1814, the second started to collapse and was quickly dismantled, and the third has stood the test of time.

As is appropriate in all places in DC, the Capitol has several statues and paintings of George Washington. The Capitol also has, in its very centre, an underground crypt intended to hold George Washington's body. Sounds a lot like the great hero-worship temples we saw in Hanoi, Delhi, etc, doesn't it? The only problem was that the crypt was not finished until 25 years after the hero died, and when the dignitaries turned up at the farm to collect the body, Washington's nephew refused, so now there is an empty crypt.

Ok, let's go tacky. People spotting is important. We saw the Prez.

JFK even made an appearance. (You should have seen the first take of this photo - very saucy.)

And this is the best shot we could get of a school trip chaperone at the Vietnam War Memorial. DC was crawling with school groups from around the country. It seems for every 10 students, there is an adult chaperone to ensure the kids keep their hands off each other. Heavy petting on DC bus trips is apparently a competitive sport so the chaperones have their work cut out for them. Note the matching jacket.

Near Ford's theatre was a quite brilliant International Spy Museum. It glorified espionage, and didn't mention death and torture and other pitfalls of being outed as a spy, but they had cool stuff to look at, interesting WWII training movies, a running gimmick whereby you had to assume a new identity and get tested on it as you went, and they recreated a Cuban military installation so you can practise crawling through air vents and eavesdropping on revolutionary banter. The museum yielded yet another photo of Matt in some sort of hole, presenting an unparalleled opportunity for him to look bald.

Outside "The Washington Club" we saw some Democrat and Republican mascots. (This is as close as we could get because we failed to comply with the dress code for the driveway...)

It was Public Service Tribute Week in DC, so they celebrated by huge defence force recruiting efforts, and War of Independence bands.

Now onto the big stuff. We went (Matt salivating) through the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

They had cool stuff like ICBM's (missiles) ...

Soyez modules (Russian resupply craft) ...

Space station toilets (just continuing another theme of these blogs ... zoom in, use your imagination and be careful of the air lock) ...

A copy of the Hubble space telescope ...

An engine from a Saturn V booster rocket (five of these pushed the Apollo rockets into space) ...

And here is an Apollo astronaut survival kit. Note the "shark repellant". They had all bases covered, didn't they.

And this is the Apollo 11 re-entry module, being the one that brought Neil Armstrong and Co home.

And here endeth the story. The honeymoon is over, as they say in the movies, and we are rotting away in the Los Angeles International airport lounge at the moment, waiting for our flight home.

It has been a pleasure travelling without all of you. Thanks to everyone for working hard and paying income taxes, so that we could receive and squander our K-Rudd stimulus bonuses on cheeky Californian shirazes and chocolate on the other side of the world. It has been great. But on a serious note, thank you so, so much to everyone who contributed to this trip in many ways. A huge thank you to our parents in particular for their truly excessive generosity which made so much of this possible.

Stay tuned for one more blog post - a "sign retrospective", coming soon to a computer near you.

And in the meantime, this is to help Customs identify and nab us for swine flu.

Get down to Yankee town

They will stick flashing lights on anything in New York City.


We have now finished jam-packed week in NYC. We have walked nearly enough to cope with the tubs of frozen yoghurt, mountains of muffins, small plots of land known as pepperoni pizza slices and even a full American sized soda (survived once, not pressing our luck by trying it a second time). This is some of what we saw on our travels.

Here is the mighty Brooklyn Bridge, in its day the longest suspension bridge in the world and the tallest structure in New York.

Once you are off the bridge you get this view back over Manhattan.

It is but one example of how abruptly things change in New York. The Upper East Side (home of the Robber Barons such as Vanderbilt and Gould and Charlotte from Sex and the City) is literally only a street away from Harlem, where dawgs pop caps at each other and schools are rewarded for keeping windows in tact for a full school term. Equally, Brooklyn is very much a different place to Manhattan. Very suburban, and nowhere near as developed. By about 3 blocks in, instead of fashionistas you have drunk minorities crowding around subway entrances talking rubbish.

The financial district also has the odd surprise. Here is the NY Stock Exchange, as close as we could get.

Which was also the site of a Romanian festival one Saturday.

The highlights being the last sun we saw while in NYC and also gigantic cupcakes.

Back in Brooklyn we did the suburban thing of watching some Little League baseball. We had to scurry off to the 15 year old match. We wanted to watch the desparately cute under 6's but Matt was being eyed off by the Moms as if he were a predator so we couldn't stay long.

We mentioned Harlem a moment ago. It is on the North-Eastern edge of Manhattan and very much a home for persons of the African American persuasion, a persuasion seen only rarely in the uber-posh suburb just near it.

It is a lovely place. Family fun days of cycling early in the morning.

Stately "brown-stone" homes built before the middle class made a mad dash for New Jersey.

Jazz and street art.

Religious worship at the "African Mother Methodist Episcopal Zion Church" (a group that doesn't quite seem to know what it believes in - the priests' garments have zulu trim, with Egyptian ankhs on their chests, give prayers in support of the supremecy of the Catholic Church, and wave and sing and do those things that tourists love to see).

And drive by shootings. Read very carefully. Three dudes gunned down at the very place we were waiting at the lights. We took solace though in the knowledge that the gangsters are terribly bad shots.

Having escaped from Harlem, we went Jewish, back to Katz's deli. Here is the site of the famous Meg Ryan orgasm scene.

Here is a $20 pastrami on rye. Note the celery flavoured soda pop in the background - another bad food decision from Matt.

And here is a little girl with a very big job ahead of her.

We followed this up with cheesecake ... and apple pie ... and several Lindt balls. You can buy Lindt balls by the pound on 5th Avenue. Mmmmmm.

Another interesting thing to see was the gigantic hole left by the removal of the World Trade Centre towers. It was a surprise that so little has been done to rebuild nearly 8 years later. The limited works that are going on severely disrupt traffic, and gaggles of people walk past this everyday, serving something of a constant reminder of what happened.

Families of the victims have set up a memorial just across the road from the site, mainly consisting of personal effects found in the rubble, "missing person" pictures placed on walls in the days after the disaster, and letters from around the world expressing regret. What is profoundly obvious in seeing that exhibit and a couple of things around it is how fiercely religion is associated with the event. Churches were the focal points of cleanup operations, and the museum notes with surprise that "even Muslims" turned up to the museum's opening.

Next stop was the Statue of Liberty.

It was built in several pieces and shipped over. It could not be erected until Gustav Eiffel invented steel frame construction, and that took about 20 years. The effect doesn't come out in photos but even from a distance you can clearly see the outlines of the copper panels.

One interesting thing we learned was that the statue was originally brown, and did not turn green until 30 years after it was erected.

This is also pretty noteworthy.

It was a statue depicting the globe which stood between the two WTC towers. It was severly damaged when the towers collapsed on it (note the impact holes - some of the window casings from the aircraft survived and hurtled to earth largly in tact as projectiles) and is now one of many "freedom" memorials in town.

Now for some stuff that is "whack, dawg", to bust out some local-speak.

Green Wood cemetary is the place for fashionable New Yorkers to be buried, and they will not be outdone on style. Note the mini-pyramid tomb.

The top of this hill is a major war monument, and the site of the first battle ever fought by a United States military force. The result was one defeat and one fighting withdrawl against vastly superior English forces. History then records things changing somewhat.

The USA is, of course, the land of decentralised government. The cemetary even has its own police force.

The traffic beat is pretty dead, we hear.

In trendy Greenwich Village (home to numerous sex shops specialising in wares for gay men), we stumbled upon this little critter. We laughed our heads off when we saw the flashing lights.

Then it stood up and we realised it only had three legs. Then we laughed some more.

Greenwich Village is also home to some fairly ambitious foreign policy initiatives, including this proposal to bicycle for peace.

And we will end with another moan about our room. As spoiled honkies, we are proud and somewhat surprised that we lasted 8 nights there.

Bugs in New York City are smart. Possibly far smarter than Matt. After nearly having his leg severed by some sort of biting things (ok, maybe it wasn't that bad but it still hurt) on the first two nights, the tropical-death bug cream applied to the bottom of the bed worked a treat. Sadly, on the last night, the locals developed a cunning plan to attack Matt from the head of the bed, so now his arm is swollen. Bitch, moan, complain. Again, not a lick of sympathy is expected.

We are in Washington DC at the moment, venturing terribly close to the end of this holiday. No Obama sightings yet, but we are working on it.