Tern­berg OÖ

Tern­berg is a small town in Ober­ös­ter­reich, very near Weyer where I went a few years ago.

Return to Öz

I think people get the idea I go to some kind of Alpine Scand­inavi­an utopia, by look­ing at the scenery and maybe an mental image of some long ago ski holi­day or week­end break in Vienna.

Milan Cathed­ral

While in Milan, I also bought a tick­et to the cathed­ral and attached museum.

San Donato Milanese

When you say to people “I’m going to Italy for work” they think you’re going to go to some sun-kissed medi­ev­al tour­ist spot to live la bella vita, when the real­ity is often more like San Donato Milanese.

Milan 2021

In Septem­ber 2021 I returned to teach­ing EFL abroad. I had come home from Austria in March 2020, and then not taught at all for 18 months. It was a last minute trip, because the Itali­an govern­ment had suddenly decided to allow school visits

Wack­en Earth

I got this post­card from a super­mar­ket in a small town in NW Germany near where the fest­iv­al is held. I hope it has genu­ine Rammstein tears in the soil sample, or I’ll ask for my €3 back

Australi­an Radio Playl­ist

Here’s a playl­ist I made while I was in Melbourne of (mostly current) Australi­an stuff I heard played in vari­ous shops and cafes. Daytime Australi­an radio is where cock rock goes to die, and keeps Midnight Oil forever living off royal­ties, but I defin­itely didn’t go there with this playl­ist.

Sydney Sealife

On my last day in Australia, I had a few hours to waste in between check­ing out of the hotel and getting the train to the airport. I was stay­ing right next to the Aquar­i­um, so I went there. I didn’t visit the local zoo, because it looks grim, and I’m gener­ally against city zoos with large anim­als who don’t have enough space to roam. The aquar­i­um isn’t the cruel kind with large sea mammals, so I felt ok about going there. It’s mostly small fish and coral, with some rays, sharks and small penguins.

The Inner West of Sydney

While in Sydney I met up with my friend Emma David­son who runs Take Care zine distro, and we had a wander round Newtown (not far from where she grew up) and had some dinner. Newtown is the area of Sydney next to the univer­sity, full of old houses and narrow lanes. It used to be very cheap- full of hippies and students and LGBQT bars and book­shops, but is now extremely expens­ive.

Cent­ral Sydney

To be honest I wasn’t fussed about the centre of Sydney. I was stay­ing close to the harbour, but it all felt very bland and glossy, like living in a West­field shop­ping centre. I was there to visit friends more than anything.

Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania

MONA was one of my main reas­ons for visit­ing Tasmania. It’s basic­ally in an under­ground bunker like a Bond villain’s lair, and requires a boat ride to get to. The owner David Walsh, is the richest man in Tasmania and a very strange char­ac­ter in his own right- he grew up in a rough area of Hobart, and made his fortune by using maths to outsmart the gambling industry, and then spent it on this museum. He’s simul­tan­eously “math­em­at­ic­al geni­us” and “13 year old edgelord”.

Hobart, Tasmania

Hobart is the capit­al of Tasmania, and one of the oldest cities in Australia- lots of old build­ings. Even by Australi­an stand­ards it has a really grim history of geno­cide and massacres against the origin­al local people, with lots of explan­at­ory plaques and signs around as memori­als.

Sandy Bay and Battery Point, Tasmania

Here’s Australia contin­ued- my trip to Tasmania and the pretty seaside town of Sandy Bay, homet­own of Errol Flyn. If you have any idea from the cartoon that Tasmania is a hot desert place, it’s not think. Think more New Zeal­and.

Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens is a park in the centre of Melbourne with a model village, lovely botan­ic­al conser­vat­ory and some fairly strange sculp­tures and tree carvings.

Sticky Insti­tute

Sticky Insti­tute is a Melbourne insti­tu­tion- a zine shop in the base­ment of Flinders Street train station that’s been there since 2001

Assor­ted Melbourne I

Here’s some photos from around Melbourne in Sept 2018 (yes, it has taken me that long to sort them out), they’re mostly phone photos taken as I wandered around. Melbourne is a mix of Victori­an terraces very simil­ar to those in the UK (with the addi­tion of sunporches), gleam­ing new blocks, and wild west saloon type streets like this.

St Kilda, Melbourne

Here’s a few photos from St Kilda in Melbourne. It’s a fancy coastal suburb of Melbourne filled with inter­war bunga­lows, with a pier and esplanade. In the 1960s it was run down and where all the hippies lived, but is now back to being fancy. I went there because there are wild penguins living on the pier and I hoped to see some. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t manage to spot any that day.

Singa­pore

Last year I went on a trip to Australia, with a stop-off in Singa­pore along the way. I’ve finally star­ted sort­ing out the photos and writ­ing a zine about the trip. Here’s some photos from Singa­pore- they’re all phone photos as I left my suit­case at the airport for conveni­ence as I had to fly to Melbourne the next day and I real­ised the battery char­ger for my camera was in it too late.

Louisi­ana Art Museum, Denmark

I was tidy­ing up some old photos and found some from my trip to Denmark in 2015 that I never posted. These are of the Louisi­ana Art Museum. It’s a modern art museum and sculp­ture park just up the coast from Copen­ha­gen.

Roskilde Viking Ship Musem

It’s very unlikely I or anyone else will be trav­el­ling much this summer (I’ve not been more than a mile away from home for months now), so I thought I’d sort out and post some old travel photos. Here’s Roskilde from 2015. I posted photos of Copen­ha­gen and Malmö at the time (you can see them here and here), but I forgot to do these ones.

Bulgaria- toy camera vision

In the fuzzy zone between Christ­mas and New Year I scanned a lot of old negat­ives. I’ve recently star­ted going through them and edit­ing the photos. It’s not like travel is going to be much of an option this year, so might as well sort out all my old travel photos that I over­looked.

Schloss Belvedere, Vienna

I real­ised I still had a few photos from Febru­ary in Austria left unposted, so here they are. Strange to think that six weeks ago I was trav­el­ling around Cent­ral Europe for work, and now I don’t venture more than a mile or two from home.

Japan Zine- digit­al edition

A couple of years ago I won some plane tick­ets to Japan, and went inter-rail­ing around West­ern Japan with my friend Vicky. The whole trip was short notice and on a very low budget, but we had fun. When I came back I made a zine about the trip. The paper edition is still avail­able here, but for the fore­see­able future I can only send phys­ic­al copies to the UK. So I’ve made a digit­al edition for people to read.

Amstetten

Amstetten is the most extremely aver­age place in Austria. It’s a largish commuter town in between Linz and Vienna. You have no reas­on to visit it. Its main claim to fame is that Josef Fritzl lived there. I was there to teach in one of the schools as a visit­ing teach­er.

A less than excit­ing walk around Salzburg

I was supposed to be back in Austria right now, running more school work­shops. Obvi­ously that’s not happen­ing now, due to the Coronavir­us lock­down. Here’s some photos from Salzburg a couple of weeks ago, where I flew en route to Amstetten.

What’s in the box?

Austria Post does an excel­lent fixed price box with­in Europe which is extremely handy when you’re trav­el­ling around for weeks on end with a 20kg luggage restric­tion and need­ing to dress nicely for work and no access to laun­dry.

Assor­ted Deutsch­lands­berg

Here’s some assor­ted photos from Deutsch­lands­berg. It’s a very ordin­ary small Austri­an town near Graz. Although it’s a pretty and nice place, it’s prob­ably not where you’d pick for a holi­day in Austria (although they do get hikers and people coming for the wine trail in the summer).

Arrival in Deutsch­lands­berg

My next work assign­ment was in Deutsch­lands­berg, a small town at the foot of the Koralm Alps, near the Slov­e­ni­an border. (Austria is a lot further south and east than people imagine). I was there three years ago (at a differ­ent school), when it was snow­ing heav­ily. This time I arrived to bril­liant sunshine, and went for a walk up in the vine­yard filled hills with Jemeala, one of the other teach­ers.

Graz

En route to my next work assign­ment in Deutsch­lands­berg near the Slov­e­ni­an border I stopped off in Graz overnight. I’ve been to Graz loads of times. It’s a really nice city, even if every­one does have a thick Arnie accent. 

Cross­ing the Alps playl­ist

To travel in between Vienna and Graz, until the never-ending tunnel under the moun­tains is finished later this decade, you have to take the train over the top of the Semmer­ing Pass, going up and down over the Alps. You get some spec­tac­u­lar views, and the train­line itself is a UNESCO site. It’s hard to take good photos out of the train window, so here’s my playl­ist for over the moun­tain.

Assor­ted Fertőd

Fertőd is the village in Hungary just across the border from Pamha­gen. It has a huge Baroque palace there (which we also visited) and there­fore more places to eat than Wall­ern (and the exchange rate is very favour­able). The train takes about five minutes, but only runs every four hours. In fact the train jour­ney was so quick a lot of the time the conduct­or couldn’t even be bothered to sell us a cross-border tick­et.

Wall­ern Carni­val- home of the Party Tract­or

A lot of small towns in Austria have a Mardi Gras carni­val, and they often organ­ise them to be on differ­ent days to not clash. This means that if I’m in Austria doing school work­shops in Febru­ary I often see multiple carni­vals. Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land is still the most surreal I’ve seen.

Pamha­gen and Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land- the Kansas of Austria

My next work assign­ment was in a small village called Pamha­gen on the Austria-Hungary border. The main hotel in the village was closed, so we were put up in a neigh­bour­ing village called Wall­ern-im-Burgen­land. Pamha­gen is only about 70 miles away from Vienna, but it’s a million miles in real­ity. Until 1989 it was pinched between the lake and the heav­ily milit­ar­ised Iron Curtain. The border is open again now, with no pass­port controls (thanks Schen­gen Agree­ment!) but the area still feels like the end of the line.

Győr Station Lives in the 50s

Győr station is really quite styl­ish in a 1950s way. I took most of these photos while I was wait­ing around bored for my delayed train back to Austria.

Draught excluders of Győr

There were a lot of decrep­it old wooden windows in Győr old town. Here’s some of the vari­ous designs of draught excluders I saw.

Győr, Hungary

After work­ing in Vienna for a week I headed off on the train to Győr in Hungary. It’s the region­al capit­al of NW Hungary, and exactly halfway between Vienna and Budapest. I’d never been there before, and it was an easy train jour­ney from both Vienna and the tiny village on the Austria-Hungary border where my next work assign­ment was.

Street Signs of Vienna

Vienna has strong rent controls for shops, mean­ing that many of them are in the same loca­tion for decades, lead­ing to lots of vintage shop signs around town (along with styl­ish new ones like the brew­ery one above). Here’s a selec­tion of differ­ent ones I spot­ted on this trip.

Architek­turzen­trum Wien

I also visited Vienna Archi­tec­ture Centre- I’d never been inside this small museum before, but the entry was thrown in free with the bundle tick­et I bought for the other exhib­i­tions.

Türkenschan­zpark

About 15 minutes walk from the school I was work­ing at in Vienna, and next door to the Univer­sity of Life Sciences was Türkenschanz Park

Vienna Academy of Fine Art

On a rare day off in Vienna I went to the Open Studio day at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. This is the top art school in Austria, and also the same insti­tu­tion that famously rejec­ted Hitler twice for his lack of creativ­ity. The studi­os are in this impress­ive build­ing, the Semper­de­pot, which was origin­ally built to store theatre scenery and props.

Das Geht Sich Gut Aus

I’ve been in Vienna and now a tiny village on the Austro-Hungari­an border for the last few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been listen­ing to.

Kunsthalle Wien – Nina Vobruba/​Malte Zander + Time is Thirsty

The Kunsthalle Wien holds tempor­ary exhib­i­tions- I caught the last day of this show. It defin­itely isn’t the best thing I’ve seen there- I’ve previ­ously been to block­buster Basqui­at, Haring and Švank­ma­jer shows there, but it was included in the Combi-tick­et I bought for the other museums, so I made sure to see it.

This Means Noth­ing To Me?

I’ve been back in Vienna since Saturday, but I was busy at the annu­al work confer­ence. Last year was the first in a decade that I didn’t spend any time in Vienna, and that was strange. Vienna is a very big and grand capit­al city for a small coun­try of six million sparsely spread moun­tain people, a remnant of the days when it was the capit­al of the whole Austro-Hungari­an empire, cover­ing Austria, Hungary, Czech Repub­lic, Slov­akia, Slov­e­nia, Croa­tia and parts of Romania and Poland.

Slov­ak Nation­al Gallery

The Slov­ak Nation­al Gallery was also open late- it was free that day too because they were chan­ging the exhib­i­tions and only two rooms were open. From the website it seems like there’s a lot of inter­est­ing stuff in the museum, and it’s a pity I didn’t get to see it, but I enjoyed the small section I did get to see.

Overnight in Brat­is­lava

I’m work­ing in Austria for the next few weeks. I’ve been visit­ing for the last ten years to run school work­shops. You spend a week in a local school running drama, creat­ive writ­ing, and some­times art or cook­ery classes as an English immer­sion programme. Every week you’re at a differ­ent school.

I normally take my DSLR, and sort out the photos after­wards, but I couldn’t find what I’d done with the char­ger. My phone has a very decent camera though, so I’m going to use that and post them as I go. I’ve become increas­ingly frus­trated with the way the FB and Instagram algorithms decide what people see and in what order. Everything’s jumbled up and got no context or order, and it makes seeing travel photos partic­u­larly frus­trat­ing. So they’re just going here, where they stay in chro­no­lo­gic­al order and in context.

Versailles Xpro- Summer of 2005

I’ve recently scanned around 60 old rolls of film, which I’ll gradu­ally post. These are some photos of the palace of Versailles taken on some extremely expired slide film. At the time I worked in a photo lab, and ended up with a huge bag of all the expired film from the shop for about £20, and also got free devel­op­ment as a perk. Half-melted and degraded Kodak slide film + Olym­pus XA2 camera, cross-processed as C41.

Inns­bruck

Here’s some more old films I scanned- this time of Inns­bruck from two years ago. Stand­ard Ilford HP5 with a 70s Pentax SLR.

Le Haut Boulay /​ Fomapan 400 review

Some photos of a place called Le Haut Boulay in North­ern France near where my mum lives. I have never seen a soul in the hamlet. There’s a hand­ful of houses and the road­side shrine, and that’s it.

It was really a test roll for the film. Fomapan 400- a very cheap black and white film from the Czech Repub­lic.

Robert Smith’s Cabbages

A couple of years ago I went down to Aldwick, near Bognor Regis for the summer to house-sit a relative’s house. I ended up being stran­ded there due to a lengthy train strike. Robert Smith of the Cure is prob­ably the only famous local resid­ent. The owner of one of the local shops told me where he lived, and I went along to see it once out of curi­os­ity. The house was dull and expens­ive look­ing, but the beach it stands next to was much more Robert Smith like, with windswept shingle like Dunge­ness and rare sea cabbages. I never bothered to look at Robert Smith’s house again, but I made many trips to the beach because I liked it so much. I was usually the only person there.

60s slides: Costi­era Amalf­itana

Here’s some more 60s tour­ism slides from my grand­par­ents’ house (you can see others here). This time from the Amalfi Coast in south­ern Italy, now a UNESCO site. Again I have posted all 36 images. It looked pretty much the same when I was there about 10 years ago, minus the annoy­ing coach party of loud Texans who kept appear­ing every­where you looked and complain­ing there was no Taco Bell and you had to walk places. Further along the coast in Sorrento I bought a very fancy waffle-knit towel that still serves me well for trav­el­ling. The shop assist­ant seemed very confused that I wasn’t buying a whole match­ing set of them like the major­ity of their custom­ers. Afraid I could only afford one small one. 

60s slides of Hercu­laneum

When clear­ing out my grand­par­ents’ house a couple of years ago I found seven pack­ets of these 60s tour­ist slides of vari­ous places around the Medi­ter­ranean. I’ve been scan­ning and restor­ing them. First up, these from Hercu­laneum.

Hercu­laneum is a smal­ler coastal town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the volcano. It’s not as well known, but there are some magni­fi­cent villas there in a simil­ar but smal­ler archae­olo­gic­al park to the one you can visit at Pompeii.

Dachau

On my way back from the Tyrol, I stayed in Munich en route to the airport, and visited the Dachau concen­tra­tion camp museum- it was the first Nazi concen­tra­tion camp and served as a template for many of the others…

Schwartz­see

A short train ride or couple of miles walk outside Kitzbühel is the Schwartz­see (“black lake”). It’s full of miner­als washed down from the moun­tains that give it the glassy black effect…

Kitzbühel

So here’s a couple of assor­ted photos of Kitzbühel town. It’s a ski resort in the Austri­an Tyrol, about equidistant between Salzburg, Inns­bruck and Munich…

Hahnen­kamm

In July I went to Kitzbühel in Austria for work. I was there to run a work­shop in the local middle school, and the mayor gave me and my three co-work­ers tick­ets for the local ski lift…

Büren-Harth

Here’s some more photos from Germany. From Harth in Nordrhein-West­falen to be more precise. It’s a small village in the Sauer­land, a scen­ic forest region about a hundred miles east of Cologne, popu­lar for hiking and cycling.

Düssel­dorf

I spent most of August in Germany, teach­ing some school work­shops and going to Docu­menta art fair along the way. My first assign­ment was in rural Nordrhein-West­falen. The agency has a tend­ency to book you on flights at brutal times early on a Sunday, so instead I booked my own flight to Cologne on a Friday even­ing, and claimed it back off them. I have been to Cologne loads of times, and my colleagues were flying into Düssel­dorf, which I had never visited. So I decided to stay in Düssel­dorf, do a bit of sight­see­ing, and then meet up with the others before head­ing to the Sauer­land.

Hobot­nica

And to round off my stuff from Croa­tia, here’s some sketch­book notes from Zadar museum and Trogir. Hobot­nica (pronounced hobot­nitsa) is Croa­tian for octopus. It’s a good word.

Trogir

So here’s the last of my pictures from Croa­tia. This time of Trogir, a town up the coast from Split. I went there on the bus, on a whim really, and was glad I did.

Marjan

If you keep walk­ing out of Split you end up on the Marjan penin­sula. The first time I visited I made the mistake of climb­ing up to the peak in 35c heat. After that I sens­ibly took the coast road.

Split

Here’s some photos from my trip to Croa­tia this summer. It was a real last minute thing, I suddenly had a week free in a packed summer of teach­ing engage­ments and still didn’t actu­ally live anywhere yet, so I bought a cheap flight to Croa­tia and did some sight­see­ing.

Ljubljana Bien­ni­al

This summer I had to chance to go to both Docu­menta in Kassel and the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al of Graph­ic Arts. Here’s my photos from one of the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al exhib­i­tions that allowed photos. The theme of this Bien­ni­al was this poem by Slov­e­ni­an writer Jure Deleta.

Green concrete

Here’s an illus­tra­tion of a car park in Brack­nell. Like the one I did yester­day, the origin­al artwork was a pen and ink draw­ing, and the colour was added digit­ally. It’s avail­able as a print in three differ­ent sizes, from £6 to £24.

Published
Categorised as UK

Cambridge’s Most Haunted

I didn’t have a very thrill­ing pre-Halloween week­end. I was struck down by the bug that’s been going around locally, and stayed in and watched Stranger Things instead. I was temp­ted to get a pump­kin to carve, but build­ing work next door has displaced mice that have tried to come into my flat. At the moment they are deterred by cotton wool and strong-smelling orange and lemon­grass essen­tial oils, but I’d rather not tempt them in with a large ready cut pump­kin to eat.

In the summer I went on a ghost walk in Cambridge via work. The guide told stor­ies of myster­i­ous cloaked figures on roofs, and Black Shuck the giant black ghost dog, and also poin­ted out this spot, at the back of Peter­house College, where it joins onto a grave­yard, as the most haunted place in town.

Published
Categorised as UK

Sail­ing up the Ljubljan­ica

When I was in Ljubljana this summer, I went on a boat tour up the Ljubljan­ica river that runs through the city.

Published
Categorised as Slovenia
Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.