The first week is gone already...

Well, we're 10% through the trip already. It has been a pretty cool week. We didn't suffer too much jet lag (surpiringly since we spent about 40 hours travelling to and from airports and sitting around waiting...), but are a bit tired from general sightseeing.

Vienna was pretty amazing and beauiful (we appricate it so much more now we're in Slovenia!). Everywhere you turn there are more fantastic buildings. I had to stop myself from trying to photograph them all! There are horses everywhere too - we were sitting in a nice cafe (one that Freud and Wagner used frequent) at rush hour, and there was horses with a carriage waiting at the lights. We saw lots of Klimt artworks and Otto Wagner buildings (they seem to just jump out at you everywhere and are really peautiful - the photos in books don't do them justice). We also went to see some Hundertwasser buildings, which are just crazy. He covered some ugly buildings with very wacky colourful tiles and curvy stuff (they like to relate him to Gaudi, but he's really an artist not an architect).

On Friday evening our Friend Sandra (who we met in NZ when she was doing her Masters) came down to Vienna from Berlin with her boyfriend Sven, on their way to Hungary. We had dinner (I had wiener schnitzel - as you do in Vienna, aka Wien), and tried Almdudlez (Austrian soft drink - much the same as L&P).




On Saturday our train to Maribor didn't leave until 4pm, so we met up with Sandra and Sven again and had a look at the Vienna Architecture centre, which outlined the recent history of architecture since the mid 19th century when they removed the city walls and built the ring road around. Braedon and I had a look at the Museum of Modern Art, which was housed in the coolest building I've been in so far. It's 9 stories, clad in concrete panels inside and out, has glass lifts with semi-transparent floors in the central circulation area and glass walls - felt a bit of vertigo. My photos don't really do it justice so you'll have to go yourself. There were some cool exhibitions too of various types of modern architecture.

The train wound through the countryside of Austria and into Slovenia. It took about 3hrs 45 mins, but there were lots of stops. It was quite beautiful. It's all very green and hilly with cute little villages. Colourful houses with terracotta tile roofs, and of course the church in the middle or up on the hill. The Slovenian police who stamped our passports had guns in their pockets - scary.

Maribor doesn't seem to be very exciting beyond the Lent festival, but I haven't really explored much yet. There are a lot of building in bad need of repair. The hostel is fairly nasty but OK. We've given up on the food already (there really wasn't anything suitable for freedivers at breakfast, and dinner was unidentifiable) We went for dinner at the festival (it's comparatively pretty cheap here), and band that seemed quite good started playing, but I was too tired and had to leave. I won't go tonight either as I need to get some sleep and have to get up early tomorrow. There are not a lot of hours of darknees which doesn't really help - it's still light at 9pm and I woke up at 5am (briefly) this morning and it was already light.

We had our first training session at the pool this morning. It's 50m x 25m x2.2m. It seems quite nice. It's probably the clearest water I've ever been in, so the videos should be great... I whipped up a neck wieght last night, so was really just rying out the equipment. We were swimming in the 50m direction too, which is fairly exhausting without fins, so didn't do anything spectacular. I have re-made the neck weight this evening, so hopefully it'll be perfect now.

This afternoon we did an excursion. We went to Olimje and Podčetrtek (try saying that one to yourself!), where we visited a chocolate shop (very nice), an old pharmacy in a monastry and their church. The monastry dates back to 1550 when it was re-built (initially 1100-ish). Then we went to a deer farm and had yummy ice creams, and on to a local brewery and restaurant, where there was beer ˝tasting˝ (or fairly excessive comsumption from some of my fellow competitiors) and sammies. They brought out a giraffe, which is like a jug of beer (it actually looks like a huge blender that holds about 3L) with a little tap at the bottom. There's ice in a tube in the middle which keeps it cold. Braedon thought it was brilliant.

Tomorrow Braedon is doing the judging course and I'm going on another excursion to Lake Bled and some caves somewhere in the south (covering pretty much the hole country in a day - it's a big triangle). I'll have a rest day from training and try to catch up on some sleep.