Matt and Kat Brown

Hi all, I hope you have all had a good Christmas and are looking forward to 2008! We’ve both been off work since Christmas day and relaxing at home. After our various travels in November and December it’s been nice to just have some time at home. We’ve been sleeping in lots, playing board games and working on hobbies.

We went out to dinner tonight to ‘Kudos’ – the restaurant at the Clarion hotel near our apartment. They had a nice ‘asian fusion’ menu. The food was tasty but they were on a ‘Christmas menu’ which I think actually means a ‘we have restricted staff and food supplies till the new year’ menu.

I was amused to find that they served fortune cookies at the end of the meal. Matt was not amused when he cracked open his cookie and found this message:

“Behind every successful man lurks a truly amazed woman.” I got a good laugh from this – very wise for a fortune cookie I think!

I’m dreaming of a kiwi Christmas – a warm and sunny Christmas followed by long lazy days at the beach, bbq dinners and sunlight till late.

It has been quite cold here this last week. Friday was the first day I’ve seen the canals icing over. It was -4C in the morning on Friday – brrrr! All this cold and the short hours of daylight have got me nostalgic for a good Kiwi summer. Unfortunately, that’s not on the cards for us this year so I will have to hope for a white Christmas instead!

To everyone back home in NZ, we hope you have a great Christmas and summer holidays.

We’re home from Austria!

Our last few days on holiday were good. We went snowboarding on Friday and the weather turned out great for us. We had some blue sky and plenty of new snow from the days beforehand. I haven’t done much snowboarding before so spent most of my day on the beginner slopes and a good deal of it sitting on my rear in the snow! Matt was a patient but no-nonsense teacher for me during the morning and also enjoyed a few good runs down the upper slopes on the snowboard too.

On Saturday we bid goodbye to Bad Gastein and headed to Vienna via train. We arrived there in the afternoon and walked around a bit, taking in the center of the city. The next day we took a tram around the ring road to get an overview of the city sights and we stopped off in the Museum Quarter to admire the grand old buildings and to sample chocolate strawberries and roasted cashews from the Christmas market stalls. It was a cold day in Vienna with some snow and very icy air so we headed indoors after that and spent some time soaking in the Viennese culture and sipping coffee in a local cafe.

Vienna seemed like a nice city and somewhere we might enjoy more in the Spring or Summer time. The cold weather wasn’t the best for sight seeing and we were unfortunate to pick a bad hotel online for Vienna – Hotel Christall turned out to be much less lovely than we expected from the descriptions and photos online!

We made our way from Vienna back to Bratislava for our flights on Sunday evening and got home again on Sunday night. It has been 25 nights away from home for Matt so he was certainly glad to be home again yesterday and to sleep in his own bed again. Photos from our trip are up in the gallery if you want to flick through them.

As I write this, I’m looking out the window at fir trees and villas dusted with white. It is snowing outside and forecast to continue snowing for the rest of today and tomorrow. We are in Bad Gastein, Austria.

Matt arrived home on Saturday after a long day of travel from San Francisco. After a quick repacking of the suitcases and a short rest we were off again to catch another flight to start on our vacation. We flew into Bratislava, Slovakia and stayed overnight there before carrying on by train into Austria.

We were only in Bratislava overnight but managed to see a little of the Old Town there in the evening. There was a big Christmas market being held in the main square, packed with locals socialising and drinking warm spiced wine. From the little we saw, Bratislava seemed like a cool city. The pedestrianised Old Town area is very pretty and the food was yummy and very cheap! The results of recent growth and investment were easy to see with lots of new roads and buildings around.

The next day we spent travelling the Austrian train system. From Bratislava first thing in the morning we went to Vienna, made a short stop for breakfast there and then onwards to Villach and then Bad Gastein. The train trip took all day – we arrived in Bad Gastein in time for dinner. It was a very nice train trip with some beautiful scenery along the way. Lots of small villages nestled among the hills and a gradual increase in snow as the train wound its way further upwards, into the mountains. When we stepped off the train in Bad Gastein we were greeted by snowflakes!

Bad Gastein is a snow resort village that hugs the side of the mountain, stretched up and down on some steep streets. People come here mostly to ski or board and also for its unique spa treatment – soak in the thermal waters and soak in some Radon! It is very picturesque here with the fir trees and villas all covered with snow.

We unfortunately haven’t been snow boarding yet as we were waiting for a day with a bit less snow falling and a bit of sunshine. We spent a day in Salzburg on Tuesday – lots of baroque architecture and Christmas markets lining the streets. Salzburg is the birthplace of Mozart and also where ‘The Sound of Music’ is from. I loved searching the Christmas Markets and admiring the hand painted ornaments.

On Wednesday we made a last minute decision to catch a train to Munich for another day trip. After a mad dash up hill to the train station we caught the train and were on the way. Unfortunately Matt came down with an upset stomach along the way and by the time we got to Munich we spent only a couple of hours before going home again. Not a very happy day for Matt! So, we’re taking it easy today and hoping for some good weather tomorrow so we can go snow boarding.

On Saturday we’re off to Vienna (via train again) with an overnight stop there to see some of the sights before we fly home. We’ll update with some photos and more info on the rest of our trip in a few days once we get home and back to decent internet connectivity.

My first week in San Francisco passed relatively quickly in a fairly regular routine of wake-up, catch shuttle, work, catch shuttle, sleep, repeat. I did manage to walk around some of downtown San Francisco on a couple of evenings, but it gets dark around 5:30ish here at the moment, so there isn’t alot to see by the later evening.

My impression of San Francisco is fairly neutral, there is nothing that I really dislike about the place but it certainly doesn’t grab me or make me feel like I would like to stay here for an extended period of time.

Yesterday (Saturday) I met up with Sam (an old colleague from Waikato Uni, and now a colleague at Google) who has recently shifted over here to do a bit of sightseeing. Sam had car which is pretty much a requirement to get anywhere other than the very center of the city itself. We headed out over the Golden Gate Bridge and up to redwood forest 20 mins away called Muir Woods. It was very nice and rural, and refreshingly close to the city. I got my weekly quota of exercise with a 4.1mile hike to the top of a ridge on the Dipsea trail where we enjoyed some nice views out over the Pacific ocean.

After that we meandered our way back into town and had a nice late lunch at a small restaurant in the ‘Little Italy’ area of town. An interesting thing to note about San Francisco is that despite being built on a fault line (and hence being very hilly) the city is laid out in a strict grid, which leads to some very very steep roads, including one that we drove down that has to resort to a series of sharp S bends in order to descend the hill and keep the grid pattern mostly intact.

Today I spent the afternoon at the SF Museum of Modern Art which had quite a few interesting exhibitions on, I skipped through the painting section fairly quickly having seen enough paintings recently while we were in Paris! The photography exhibitions were excellent, Jeff Wall’s photos in particular were very dramatic and appealing. He puts a remarkable amount of effort into the shots too, including hiring someone to furnish and live in an apartment for six months so it will be their ‘home’ when he takes a portrait, and recreating an entire streetscape outside a nightclub in intricate detail within a studio. Highly recommended.

I have four more days working here before flying backing home, which I’m looking forward too. It is very good working here in Mountain View and meeting people who I work with day-to-day basis in person for the first time, but it is a long time to be away from home and living out of a suitcase!

Finally, it seems that I’m either loosing my New Zealand identity or I adapt very quickly to wherever I am. Over the past few months I’ve been stopped on the street in Luxembourg, Paris, Dublin and today San Francisco and asked for directions to some obscure place that only a local would know. To top it off I discovered that half my colleagues thought I was Irish (the conversation started because someone asked me why I was wearing a t-shirt with a Kiwi on it…) and during a dinner conversation on Tuesday night with a group of people I was meeting for the first time my accent was guessed as being Australian, New Zealand, English, Irish and even American!

I still feel like a New Zealander (whatever that means), but the rest of the world doesn’t seem to think so…