Month: May 2014
Off to the Salt Mine
The Wieliczka Salt Mines are about a half hour drive from Krakow, in a little village of the same name. They are not the punitive form of mine that may first come to mind when you hear the words ’salt mine’. Instead, the mine was a large commercial operation and in the 1700’s, it along with […]
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Auschwitz – Some Facts
Thanks to the BBC for providing these facts about the horrors of Auschwitz. My visit yesterday is still filling my mind. In all, 1.1 million people died during the four and a half years of Auschwitz’s existence; one million of them were Jewish men, women and children. Other groups of people who died included Polish […]
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Krakow and Auschwitz
I read in the guide book that Polish trains are notoriously late and our train from Warsaw was no exception. It left 15 minutes late and by the time we arrived in Krakow, 250 kilometres away, it was around 45 minutes late. Krakow is almost directly south from Warsaw. It is the ancient capital of […]
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Warsaw (Without the Famous Concerto)
We are now visiting Poland with our first stop in Warsaw. There are 1.7 million people living in this city and the Polish population numbers around thirty-eight million people. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea. We had a six-hour flight from Dubai and have gone from temperatures […]
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Dubai – The Biggest and Tallest
It’s Friday today and the equivalent of Sunday in the western world. As a result many of the local places such as museums, markets and government centres are closed. We wondered whether we might find enough to do but as it turned out, we had an easy and relatively full day. We had booked a […]
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Dubai – First Impressions
The only time I had ever been to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) was to transit through Abu Dhabi in the old days when the airlines used it, or Saudi Arabia, as refuelling stop on the flight from Europe to Australia. Dubai has now become the focal point in the area and we arranged a […]
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Contributing to the Army Museum
During WW2 and into the early 1960’s, the Army had a very large Ordnance centre at Bandiana in northern Victoria. It had its own railway line, sidings and a mass of buildings that housed all sorts of stores and military equipment. In one of the old buildings (around 1940’s vintage) is the Army Museum. It […]
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Foggy Morning Photos
I woke up this morning to find quite a heavy fog in our area and thought that this would be a good day to capture some of its ambience on a new Olympus E-M10 Micro Four Thirds Camera that I plan to take away on my next trip. The area along the Yarra River at Templestowe […]
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Braving it with Roses
I was shopping this morning when I walked passed the fruit shop and saw that they were selling some rather nice bunches of roses. On impulse, I decided that I would buy a bunch of them for Jill for Mother’s Day. They cost me the princely sum of $16. I know that Jill is not […]
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