Thursday, May 05, 2005

Donnerstag, bummer of a day

Today marked the start of the long 4-day Ascension weekend. The Europeans love their holidays :) Which is good for us, it gives us more time to travel haha.. Celest the slack one comes out stronger than ever here.

Thursday was spent at Leichtenstein, with 8 other people. It's this small individual country right smack at the eastern tip of Switzerland, sharing a border with Austria as well. It's known for 2 things- its stamps and its false teeth! Haha Imagine that! It's ruled by a Monarchy, and a cabinet called the Diet (of all things), and they've got quite a cute crown prince, pity about the princess though haha..

We went to the PostMuseum to look at the stamp and post collection. The number of stamps they have printed up to date is just amazing. They had these display boards that you can pull out, and on each board there were stamps, stamp graphic plans and seal designs. There must have been close to a few hundred boards there. Bought a couple of stamps as well, and Victor got lucky with a Liechtenstein Monarchial first-day cover, which cost CHF12, but which he only paid CHF2 for. The salesgirl entered the cost wrongly.. Lucky lucky! Here, anywhere that uses the Frank rips you off, so budget ware and blur salesgirls are very welcome.

We walked up this steep hillroad to a castle, that unfortunately is closed all the time. So that was a non-event. The big mistake we made was to travel to Leichtenstein on a public holiday. Like I said before, the Europeans love their holidays and would never open their stores or museums to tourists like yours truly here. So non-event #2 was this art museum that we wanted to visit, but wanted to charge us CHF5 and did not allow pictures at all. And non-event #3 happened when we all got too greedy, and wanted second helpings of homemade ice-cream opened by a Filipino family, and were refused the initial discounts that we were given. All because Samuel the Tagalog expert wasn't around anymore. On another note, Sam's sketches are just amazing. He did a sketch of a horse statue in front of the Rathaus, as well as some spread-eagle sculpture in the town square.

And non-event #4 happened when my camera died on me permanently for the day when I wanted to capture a shot of the cathedral. Non-event #5 was when poor HuiKie's visa mini got stuck in a machine, just because some ditzy salesgirl pushed it up the wrong machine. Bullocks, what a bummer of a day. :( And Leichtenstein doesn't even feature on my passport, because the tourism office charges a freaking CHF2 just to stamp the word 'Leichtenstein' in fancy two-tone ink on a passport. Ridiculous innit?

Not exactly a great start to the long haul of free days, but hopefully it gets better tomorrow.

Glücklich. Nur mit Ihnen.


Laid bare at 11:24 pm
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