McPlassmann Honeymoon

We had our "little" party here at Hester's parents place in Hilchenbach two days ago which was great. Food was awesome - Annette and Ortwin hired a caterer to provide the food and there was so much and so much choice it was a feast.

Couldn't have been luckier with the weather, a gorgeous day actually quite similar to the day we had in Australia for our wedding, so everybody drank and talked in the sunshine. The garden is looking very different to when we were here last, as Ortwin has had a gardener rip out all the old bushes and new plants and garden beds have been planted all around.

It's a nice new perspective of Germany with such beautiful spring weather - whenever I have been here it has been cold or snowing. We have been spoilt with more presents from friends and family on this side of the world, so I think we may have to send a box back by post otherwise our luggage will be overflowing.

Thanks to Roland and his Krombacher connections, I have lots of Krombacher merchandise!! Sadly, no actual beer though because of the new travel restrictions on liquids

We caught the train from the airport when we arrived in Frankfurt and as we boarded the train there was a bucks party in full swing - nice to know so things just don't change at all no matter where you are in the world.

Sadly we didn't get upgraded to business class on our flight - everybody turned up unfortunately. But we did get 4 seats in a row all to ourselves, thanks to the lovely flight attendants, so can't complain too much.

We went out shopping (yes more) in Siegen yesterday and caught up with some of Hester's friends last night for dinner and a few drinks and now today is our quite do nothing day. It's a public holiday here, so everybody is relaxing.

Tomorrow we fly out to Singapore, where we're staying overnight, then on to Sydney and home! Have loved our honeymoon (we are already planning our next trip to Thailand...) but we are looking forward to getting home to our own bed, awesome pillows (thanks Mum!) and home cooked food.

Craig and Hesti

Here we are back in Hilchenbach (Hester's home town) for the first time in about two years and the weather is fantastic! We're enjoying the sunshine while we can before we fly back to the Aussie winter. The sky even looks like Aussie blue at the moment.

Its nice to not be using paid internet for once so I'm not rushing to remember everything that I want to say and to catch up on some rugby and world cup cricket news (for those who care, the Brumbies are still just in with a chance, and the Aussies won the cricket WC which sounds like it was a complete farce of a tournament anyway).

I now remember a few other random facts about NY and America that I couldn't remember in the last blog entry... so here they are:

-It's always the little things about visiting different countries that interest me - like when walking down a crowded street you have to remember to pass ppl walking in the other direction on the right. Aussies drive on the left side of the road, so ppl tend to subconciously expect you to pass on the left, but here it's opposite. If you forget and go on the left hand side, chances are you confuse them or run into them entirely! LOL

- Same story on escalators - if you want to cause problems, stand on the left hand side so ppl cant pass walking up the escalators (your supposed to stand on the right!)

- I think I now have a better perspective on the TomCruiseScientology crazyness. Scientology strongly denounces drugs as medicine as I understand it - well maybe that comes from all the TV ads in the U.S. advertising drugs. It is amazing - you watch the evening news and just about 75% of the ads shown are trying to sell you some new drug to help you sleep, or lose weight, or prevent heart attack, or whatever. It's insane. They say the pharamceutical companies are very powerful in the states, well now I see it.

- Watching some footage of the Virginia Tech shootings, viewers were writing in with their opinions on CNN and one guy says something like "If more citizens were allowed to carry guns, then this tragedy would never have occurred in this scale, because somebody would have shot him before he could have killed all these people." My reaction was something like WTF! What kind of reverse logic is that????