tom goes wild in the uk and skiing in austria

This journal entry will be one of the hardest I’ve done. See the photo album for the trip by clicking on the image below.

Okay now to divide this journal entry up into small pieces to help my current 4am state of mind work at 4pm in the afternoon (jet lag) I will even make a nice little index for us (really just for me):

Getting to the conference venue
The conference
Birmingham
London
Getting to Solden
Skiing in Solden
Nightlife in Solden
Hiking in Solden
Getting home. Sweet home.

Getting to the conference venue

• A few notable memories here. I made a contact/buddy on the plane who lives in Chapam Commons, London and grew up in Sydney – Ben Hamilton. I got his phone number so I could tag along with him and his mates on the Saturday night that I would be in London. He helped explain to me the london underground train system. It’s nuts! It’s really quite amazing, the whole structure of the tubes and tunnel networks underground, and walking around these tubes following your particular colour line to get you to the next train you want to be catching.
• What was even more crazy was getting to the train station to go to Birmingham, and seeing 500 people standing watching a big digital screen waiting to know which platform their train will be arriving at. As soon as it does, BAM and you have to watch out you don’t have 500 people stomping all over you.
• Once I got to Birmingham I walked around for abouty 2 hours longer than I needed to, trying to make sense of this stupid out of proportion map. It turns out I was also holding it upside down, and the hotel I was to check in to was actually only a few hundred metres from the train stop. FINALLY I got there, and all I wanted to do was to take a shower and have a nap – but no, you can’t check in until the afternoon! So I had no choice but to do more walking.

The conference

• The conference itself was probably two of the most insightful days of my life. I met heaps of people, lots of whom were motivating and inspirational. I’ve got big plans for the IEE YMS in SA for 2006, now all I have to do is follow through with them! Damn…

Birmingham

• I like Birmingham. Despite what the English say about it being the ‘hole’ of ‘black-dot on the map of England’, I think it’s had a lot of development since these opinions were formed, and I took many nice photos of many nice looking buildings, and random features in the centre of the city.
• I could not believe how massive the shopping malls are. It’s like ten blocks of interwoven shopping mall bliss.

London

• Got to London on the Saturday morning, and had 24 hours before going to Solden, via Munich and Innsbruck. I kicked it off by getting a hotel room for the night, and then going for a random underground catching session. I couldn’t work out why the streets of London were so totally dead, and all the shops were shut. Eventually I discovered there was just some pageant and the Lord Mayor had just given some big talk, so everyone was drawn into a small area of a few blocks to hear him talk.
• I then journied my way over the the London Eye, a massive faeris wheel that costs lots of money to go on after queuing up for 2 hours to buy the ticket.
  
  There’s one thing I got out of going on the London Eye – discovering that I really don’t like London at all. I mean seriously, all it showed me was a view of a big fat polluted city, that completely has absolutely no structure to it at all. Also, it has a river Thames that’s just as if not more polluted than our River Torrens and River Murray, but is much bigger. (I did however like the sunset gleaming through the tops of the castle like buildings, with the Thames River running along side – made a nice photo!)
  So if a city is better because it’s bigger and more polluted, then I’m happy with that becasue people will leave my little much undiscovered and under-rated Adelaide alone to myself, my friends, and my family.
• I then went back to my room for a power nap, a shower, and to give this guy I met on the plane a call to find out something to do for the night. He gets me to catch an underground down to Clapham Commons, and to call him when I get there. Unfortunately for me, my phone didn’t have access to the network there, so I called him from a public phone, get voicemail, and give up. Go for a walk to check out the scene, and end up talking to a guy in a KFC… an absolute top bloke. It turns out he’s a DJ in one of two of the biggest clubs on that side of London (in terms of reputation). So invitingly, I tag along with him.
• His name is Grant, and you can check out his website here. He gave me the full special treatment in his club, and it was one of the biggest nights of my life! I was well introduced to the “Turbo Shandy” – a 1:1 part mixture of Smirnoff Red’s and Budweiser beers. Quite tasty! After he finished working at around 3am, we went to check out China Town, and then the (arguably) biggest club in London – Fabric.
• Fabric was absolutely insane. There were three underground levels to the club – quite a scary thought in itself, and in each level there were multiple rooms, which made it VERY easy to get lost. It was still going very hard when we got there around 5am. Eventually, we decide to get out of there and head back to get a power-sleep before dropping me at the airport to get to Munic. I love his number plate – PI5T-DJ.
  
  Very cool!

Getting to Solden

• The plane to Munic absolutely succed due to feeling like I was going to be sick from too much the night before. However it was only a couple hours flight, and I took some beautiful photos of the sun beaming orangy light over the majestical looking clouds. Truly beautiful.
  
• So eventually I get to Munich, and was immediately culture shocked by the lack of people speaking English. This made it difficult to get to the international train station from the airport, but I managed to find some nice enough english speaking people that deciphered key pieces of vital information neccessary for me to get there. So eventually I get there, have a quick walk around Munich in the dark, and catch the train to Innsbruck, Austria.
• I arrive to Innsbruck at about 11pm, and have missed the last bus to Solden by half an hour, so had no option but to either pay for an extra room in Innsbruck for the night, or just catch the 120 Euro cab fare (AUS$200!) to Solden. I chose the latter, as I just wanted to get a good nights sleep.
• The sleep didn’t begin straight away when I got there however, as they tried to tell me I didn’t have a room booked. No idea what was going on there, but it all worked out, and I had a VERY big sleep.

Skiing in Solden

• The first two days (of seven) was absolutely perfect weather. The sun was out and shining, with not a cloud in the sky. Too many gorgeous photos were taken for me to be able select the nicest ones to put in this post, so check them out for yourself from here onwards. There were 9 runs open in the glaciers, and the snows was “pretty good”. I was hoping for more of it, and for it to be better, but at the same time I was still impresed. I had a tough time making friends to go skiing with due to the language barrier, but on the third day I met Niels, from Frankfurt, Germany.
  
• On the third day there was a little snow in the glaciers, and a little fog. That night the clouds must have really rolled in because on the fourth day there was fresh powder (about 20cm) and LOTS of fog. I think that was the first real snow for the season. The fog was so bad at one stage that when I was going a little off the track with Niles, he ended up stacking it dangerously close to the edge of the run we were on (and I don’t think there was much off of the run, other than a small cliff!)
• The fifth day was went it all went wrong for me. I had been eyeing off a 45 degree mogul infested slope that was off the side to a red (intermediate) run. My instructor (on the first day I had a private instructor for a couple hours) told me that it would be rated as a black (advanced) run if it were an official run. I told him I’d like to do it by the end of the week, and he laughed at me. What a tool. I think this is partly what made me feel as if I HAD to do it. I did it by traversing across the slope as much as I could until I came close to stationery, and then I would drop and turn and traverse back the other side of the slope. I had done this about 20 times and got roughly 50m down the 200m slope, when I discovered a massive ice sheet that I would have to make a turn on. This is where it went really bad, as the ice was much more slippery than I expected – I thought I might be able to carve into the ice with the very edge of the ski if I leant on one ski hard enough and on hard enough angle to really cut it, but no. So I slid for a few metres, and was sliding right toward a mogul. I thought this as a good thing as I could push through it to loose some speed and trigger some traversing action, but I discovered it was a big hard chunk of protruding glacier ice. This proved to be much harder than my back, which instantly temporarily paralysed me, and I dropped to the slope. When I say I dropped to the slope, I mean it’s more like I leant slightly to my left, and was comforted by the snow at 45 degrees to horizontal, so I was almost still standing up when I was lying down! Knowing that my back would soon be swelling badly due to the major compression jolt in my spine, I decided to get up and ski back over to the red slope where I could casually (albeit painfully) glide back down to the main lift area, and catch the first bus home.
• As soon as I got home, I enjoyed a nice one hour in duration bath, followed by two hours of stretching my back and body. That night I woke up in excruciating pain, and all I could think and dream about is painkillers. I had a dream for every time in my life that I ever had painkillers, what the were for, who gave them to me, how strong they were, where I was, and so on. This was probably the second most painful experience in my 22 years of existence, and that morning the first thing I did was to go source some drugs. This proved a challenge in itself (especially for a cripple) because I can’t speak German, and it took me an hour to realise they don’t sell them in supermarkets, and almost just as long when I made it to the chemist that they keep ALL their drugs in Austria locked up. Much stricter than here!

Nightlife in Solden

• Ordering beers and my standard pickup lines no longer worked in a non-english speaking country. Never-the-less, Niels taught me how to order up to five beers, and/or up to five red-bull jaga-bombs. In fact, some lovely english speaking Austrians I met (Maria and Ron) were surprised that we drink jaga-bombs in Ozland. Although when they drink them, they have a small bottle (shot size small) of jagameister in a glass of red-bull, but they only have one shot of red-bull, compared to us where we have an entire glass of red-bull to wash it down, and only one shot of jagameister. They then adorns their bars with the thousands of small jagameister bottles lined around the place. I would hate to be one who knocks the bar and a hundred bottles come crashing down!
• I don’t really know what else to say about the night-life in Solden, it’s really just like going out in Adelaide except no one speaks english, it’s freaking cold to walk home at night, and it’s about four times as expensive!
• Oh yes, I also learnt how to say “cheers” and “skull beer” in German (cheers is “prost”, and skull beer is something like “oz too”…? James?)

Hiking in Solden

• This is where I’m really glad I hurt my back such that I could barely walk, because it stopped me from going skiing and allowed me to go hiking! Okay, so it probably wasn’t the wisest idea to go hiking with a spinal compression injury, dosed up on 400mg isoburofen painkillers, through 2100m+ alps by myself, underdressed, without food or drink, map, or any idea where I was going at all, but that’s okay because I’m a marathon runner! AND, I’m an ex-mountainbiker – so I like to think of myself as hardy enough to do stuff like this.
• Basically, I saw the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen in the world, and I could now definitively show you my favourite place in the entire world (that I’ve been to, to date).

Getting home… Sweet home…

• This was a story in itself. I had it all planned, although it was still a challenge. The night before, I realise I hadn’t yet returned my skis. What this meant, is that since the store didn’t open until 8:30 monday morning, I had to miss my 8:14 bus back to Innsbruck. So I had to catch the 10:14 bus – short from this it’d be another AUS$200 cab fare. This late bus would get me to the train station 17 minutes before my train to Munich departs, so I was greatly concerned when it arrived half an hour late!! I checked with the bus driver though that it would get me there on time to catch that train, and he assured me it would be no problems at all. Surprised, I got on the bus and enjoyed the ride, as he flawed it from every traffic light, and showed no mercy to passengers that were slow to walk down the aisle to find a seat (i.e. people nearly fell over as he flawed it)! I ended up catching the train with 30 seconds to spare before it departed. If I didn’t, I would have missed all my three flights back top Adelaide, and as you could imagine that would have been extremely expensive!
• The fun didn’t stop there however, as in Munich I managed to catch the correct S-Bahn to the airport. Only problem was, the wrong way… I noticed about twenty minutes into the journey, and got off immediately! The only reason I noticed was because I was paranoid about getting lost, so I did a double check on the map to look up which stop I was currently heading towards. Quick smart I got off at the next stop, whilst simultaneously thinking what on earth I would do to get to the airport on time, the exact same S-Bahn but going in the opposite direction pulled up 3m away from in front of my face on the other side of the platform with the sign “airport” on a big fat digital display screen, so I literally walked straight on with only about three steps from the one I got off! That day was probably the biggest stroke of luck I’ve ever had.
• So I’m on the plane to Munich. From there on, I only experienced about 5 hours worth of delays along the way causing them to change my connecting flight from Melbourne to Adelaide twice. The total travelling time without much sleep was a shade under the forty hour mark, from my hotel room in Solden to my home here in Adelaide.

All in all, I had a fantastic holiday, one that will be hard to match. BUT it did cost me my (now lack of) life savings and a major spinal compression injury, although it was character building enough to offset the costs. I now have the desire to learn Spanish as a result of wanting to go back to Europe as soon as I have money again and some linguistic wisdom.