Rome 1965

More from eight-year-old Heidi's journal in October 1965. I particularly like her optimism about Italian drivers, her view of the Colosseum, references to the River Tigre and the statue with the face like God. The pictures are a mix of her photos and postcards that are in the journal. (I bet some modern Roman postcards look exactly the same as they did in 1965.)

For any youngsters who are reading this blog, the people in the photos are Mom, Dad, and Mom's parents (Roy and Jessie Sater aka Bop and Ganan). And me, at five years old.

What I have seen
ROME
Monday 27.9.'65 we left Jan Smuts airport in the BOAC VC10 and arrived in Rome next morning. We stayed at the Madrid Hotel. When we arrived there, we had breakfast on a funny place on the roof of our building.

We went for a walk in the rain, and took shelter in some shops. The drivers in Rome don't stop at stop streets, but they never crash.

We saw the fish and fruit market, daddy bought us some fruit. We also saw the Trevi Fountains and had lunch at a very nice place. 

In the afternoon we went for a bus tour, and saw such a lot of things and places.

Bop and I saw Moses and his two wives, and then went to see the colosseum. It was a very big and round place, and all broken up. 

We then went to St Paul's.

We saw alot of ruins on the seven hills of Rome, we also saw the River Tigre. The best of all was our visit to St Peters, it was a magnificent Church, and inside it was so beautiful. The Pope lives in the Vatican quarters of the Church.

On Wednesday the 29.9.'65 we went for another bus tour in the morning when we saw the Vatican City. It was very interesting. We saw beautiful paintings by Michelo Angelo. We also saw some lovely statues, one of them had the face like God. All of us followed the guide into the Sistine Chapel. It was very beautiful. 

When we left, a guard at the Vatican City shook hands with me. He was very tall, about six foot, six ins. In the afternoon we went on another tour, and saw people in a Church going up the stairs on their knees. We also saw the Holy Stairs, that Christ walked on which were brought from Jerusalem. 
Our next visit was to the Catacombs. We went down about sixty steps below the surface, into very narrow passages. This is where the Christian Martyrs buried their dead. To do this they dug rectangular shaped holes in the walls of the passages. Some were over six feet long for big people, others were smaller for children & babys. The rich & important people had big burial chambers in which there were separate places for each member of the family. They looked like small caves.

Postscript
Heidi doesn't mention it in her journal, but at some point, Bop chanced upon a namesake.

And next, we shall make our way to Venice.

Winter wedding

Smuts and I went to a wedding today. Smuts met Dipankar, the bridegroom, through work and they have known each other for some years.The ceremony was at 11.30 in the garden of a beautiful old house, now a function venue, followed by lunch inside. The maximum temperature was about 10 degrees all day, so coats and boots were required.

But the pretty little flower girls braved the cold, and the beautiful bride wore a sleeveless dress. Hsu Mei, the bride, is of Malaysian Chinese descent; Dipankar of Indian descent. It felt like a very Australian occasion, with its multicultural flavour! Beautiful flowers, cakes, and dresses, and lots of happy people. A lovely day.

Koala 'bear'

Koalas aren't bears. They're marsupials. I took this photo at Healesville Sanctuary a few weeks ago.

Koalas have two thumbs on each hand. You can't see both thumbs in this picture, but you can see the very long nails on the hands. They use these nails to help them scoot up and down trees. Koalas seem quite lazy, really, except for when they are whizzing up and down trees. They eat only one kind of leaf (how boring): the eucalyptus leaves below the koala in this picture.

One of the interesting things about koalas is that they have a hard pad at the base of their spine, around where we have our coccyx. This hard pad is what they sit on, in the crooks of trees. It's like a built-in cushion.

Pretty darned cute, isn't it? (Particularly the ears.)

CookSister

Dusty and Neats have the cutest little Yorkshire Terrier called 'Cookie'. Weighing in at under 2 kg Cookie is big enough to play on the beach in Dubai and even venture into the sea.

Cookie is called 'Cook' for short. Not bad for such a little dog who is almost the same size as a 'Koek'sister which is a South African doughnut - a deep fried twist of dough which is then submerged in a sugar syrup.

Lagos

I spent the last 4 days in Lagos, Nigeria on business. Lagos is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and is definitely one of the most populated. It takes about 6 hours to fly from Johannesburg to Lagos which has temperatures of between 28 and 32 degrees all year round. There are two seasons - a wet season and a dry season.

Its oil reserves has brought great revenues to this country.

Nigeria is the most populous county in Africa and is the 7th most populous county in the world.

Do you know that 1 in every 4 Africans is a Nigerian?

Grindelwald 1965

Melbourne is in the grip of the first winter chill. There is snow on the nearest ski-slopes, about three hours' drive away, and it is wet and grey and windy in the city.

So my thoughts have turned to Heidi's and my first encounter with snow. In 1965, Mom, Dad, Heidi and I went to Europe with Bop and Ganan (Roy and Jessie Sater, Mom's parents). Heidi was eight years old. She took photos and kept a journal, and here's what she wrote about Switzerland (unedited):

On the 20.10.'65 we flew from Venice from Zurich over the alps. We went two trains before we arrived in a place called Grindlewald. The first day we went by funicular railway up a mountain called 'The Jungfrau' wich is over 11 thousand feet high and covered with snow. We went into a tunnel which was 7 miles long through the mountain. We climbed up on to the Plateau. Then we went into Ice Palace where we saw a motor car, a piano and a tea room made of ice. We went on the chair lift. It was wonderful to hear the cow bells tinkling on the cattle below us. The grass was stil very green. We stoped half way and went into the forest. We saw a chalet named Heidi. We then travelled through Switzerland down to Geneva.

Eight-year-old Heidi took four photos in Switzerland; also in the journal are a number of postcards of 1965 Switzerland. (Dad: did you know that you can click on any photo on the blog to make it bigger and see more detail?)

Here is Heidi's photograph of Grindelwald ...

... and here are two postcards of Grindelwald. That's the Wetterhorn in the background, according to the caption on the postcard. (Don't you love the cars?)

Heidi took three photos of the Jungfraujoch. The postcards, which follow Heidi's photos, say that the view is of the Jungfraujoch 'mit Aletschgletscher'. According to Wikpedia, the Aletsch glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps and has been a World Heritage Site since 2001. (Hope it survives climate change.)

And here are the postcards:

Postcards of the Ice Palace on the Jungfraujoch are also in the journal. The top one is captioned 'Schlittschuhbahn', which Google tells me means 'ice-rink'. Fantastic! Imagine skating in the Ice Palace!

Heidi doesn't mention the Eiger Mountain but the railway tunnel that she does mention runs inside the Eiger, from Kleine Scheidegg. Even in 1965, the Eiger would have been famous for the many climbers who had died trying to climb it. Here is the 'Station und Hotel Eigergletscher' (another glacier!), followed by 'Alpenhornblaser mit Eiger':

Now let's leave the mountain and descend back into the valley by chair-lift ('Grindelwald: Firstbahn mit Wetterhorn'), where we can hear the tinkle of cowbells and see a chalet (possibly named Heidi).

Well, that's it for our little tour of the Bernese Alps. Dad, hope these bring back some good memories of 1965 Switzerland!

PS Now, where shall we visit next, on our 1965 tour of Europe? Our choices: Rome, Venice, Paris or London.

Lights, camera, action!

Dad and I have organised for one of his 16 mm films to be converted to DVD. He shot this particular film in 1960, the year in which I was born.

The person doing the conversion has just emailed me these frames from the film. These frames show: (1) Mom and me (and someone in the background with a dog); (2) Ganan (Mom's mother) and me; (3) Mom, Dad, Heidi, me and Bop (Mom's father); (4) Grandma (Dad's mother) and me; (5) Heidi; (6) me, Bear and Heidi the Fairy.

Can't wait to see the movie.

Baby wombats

Wombats are large, ungainly animals which do little but dig burrows and eat grass. But aren't these baby wombats gorgeous? We saw them at Healesville (Wildlife) Sanctuary last weekend.

Actually, probably the most interesting thing about a wombat is its rather unusual pouch. A wombat, like a kangaroo, is a marsupial. Like kangaroos, wombats keep their babies in a pouch. But the wombat pouch faces backward. If a wombat was a kangaroo, standing on its hind legs, its baby would drop out of its pouch. Being wombats, however, they don't stand up on their hind legs. They burrow. So the baby in the pouch -- which faces backwards -- doesn't get a faceful of mud when Mother Wombat digs into the ground.

Isn't Nature wonderful?

Wind walkers

A crazy physicist called Theo Jansen (or a normal artist, it's debatable) creates enormous wind-powered "animals", which he lets loose to roam the beaches of the world. His website with some videos and info is here

http://www.strandbeest.com/index.php

It is well worth a look.

He recently released some more sensibly-sized versions of his Strandbeests (beeste?) which I bought for Lisa. Here is the first model:

And a video of it in action:

The second model:

Video:

Desert Golf

Dustin and Don played a round of golf at the Al Bahdia Golf Course, an 18 hole championship course in Dubai.

It was a bizarre experience -  40 degrees Celsius, pretty humid, beautifully green fairways and putting greens, running streams and amazing small lakes, abundant bird life, all in the middle of a desert!

The highlight of the day was on the 10th, a par 4, when Don's second shot stopped 150 mm from the hole.