Closing Remarks

Well, we are home, and while I can't quite say it feels like we were never away, the old routines are very easily picked up.

One of the things that Justine and I really enjoy when we travel is checking out the supermarkets - I know it sounds mundane when you can have these famous and amazing sites and scenes around the corner, but it is in the supermarket that you really get a sense of the place you are in. Aside from trying to figure our what might be sour cream, or whether you are likely to be able to interpret cooking directions in a foreign language, just the differences in products available and the people buying them is quite insightful. Just finding them can be a challenge. Today we shopped at the local Coles, and it was all a little too easy and familiar. Good and bad I guess!

Justine has had a think about here favourite things on the trip, in no particular order they were: the people who spent time with us (hear hear!); Venice (agreed); and Aidan talking to the taxi driver in Vienna in Indonesian as it was the only non-English language he knew of and presumed that the taxi driver must be speaking it (clever and funny at the same time!).

Lauren can't really tell us what she most liked, but I think it would be a fair guess based on here enthusiasm for the topic, it may well have been the tunnels. There were many conversations that went like this: Tunnel! Bridge. Tunnel!! Bridge. Tunnel!!! Bridge. TUNNEL!!! and so on. Rivetting stuff - Denton would have loved it. Her other main interests were 'train', 'tram', 'big plane' and 'two dogs'. Seriously, she seems like she grew up a bit while we were away - her walking is much better and her vocab, sentence length and meaning have all improved out of sight over the 4 weeks. It would be interesting to know if that was due to travelling - but we are NOT doing a control experiement.

One thing that we hit on in Dubai was an answer to a question that Aidan frequently asks, which is about tallest buildings. He always wants to know what the tallest building is wherever we are, and then asks if it is the tallest in the world. I sometimes know the answer to the first question, but at least the answer to the second can be a fairly confident 'no'. However, in Dubai we did indeed see the tallest building in the world. It is seriously tall. It's still under construction, but I think the full height is there now - it just spindles up into a point in the sky that you can barely see. Many of the rest of the buildings there are hardly boring either...

And I think that is about all. Thanks for staying in touch, hope you enjoyed this. I know a few people were reading it, but I don't really know who - but thanks anyway, it makes taking the time to do this far more worthwhile.

If you are interested in seeing the final collection of photos from the trip, just e-mail me at davidbruce.act@bigpond.com and I'll let you know when and where you can see them (if you want a print of any, just let me know and that can also be arranged).

Cheers, Ciao, Au Revoir and whatever goodbye is in German - Weidersein I think, but it was so long ago!