Last day in Sydney....Sitting infront of the OperaBar with the views of the Bridge.



So 16 hours left for the plane to take off from Sydney International Departures! Didac and Anna are takig off in 30 minutes from El Prat! So half of the team is on their way! Too excited right now to sleep or do anything like read a book. I just cant wait to get to the hotel in Bangkok and get our tickets to Laos :) Everything has been packed and I have finally restored both my Chinese Copy Ipod and my International Adaptor! Both are working again ueueueu :D

Also, let me introduce you to the Palican that I met in the fish market! Quite huge!! And i had a bag of fish with me.

I was not happy when this beast started to walk towards me! Luckily i got to eat the fish in the evening...
Currently trying to kill time by watching Cricket and I seriously dont understand this game. Games that can take up to 5 days?With lunch breaks?All dressed in white-who wears white to play games? I thought this was reserved for golf players. I should read a bit about the game to actually understand the rules, cuz after 47 minutes of staring at the screen i still dont get it! And now craving for icecream but every shop is closed :S

And check out how nice Sydney is...! This is Balmain in "the middle of the winter"!....Transparent water, shark nets, boats,surfboards,beers and SUN!!

Nois Fins aviat!! Vosaltres sortiu el dia 30 a la tarda jo el dia 31 a la tarda...aquest mon i els seus horaris em confonen molt, Pero el fet es que ens veiem DEMÀ PASSAT a Bangkok!! Fins aviat!! Malauradament us informo que no podré portar la meva música dels pets…això vol dir que tindre que cantar les cançons!!!

Laos i Cambodia ja estan a les nostres mans!

Definately Will Miss it..... The Land Down Under

next time: The Outback

So close to Laos&Cambodia!

4 days left for the 3rd part of my trip to start... Asia!

Even better 4 days till I meet Anna and Didac in Bangkok and we start our trip up to Laos and then Cambodia. Im getting things ready and planning to take as little things as possible. Even less than I took last year to India.... However, between plugs, adaptors,medecines,soaps etc the things to take are looking like a lot :S Im seriously bearly taking any clothing which means I will once again be a pig in the middle of south east asia but im not worried about that. Im more worried about malaria and about the land mines in Cambodia -although these shouldnt be a threat to tourists- I hope everything runs "smoothly" like last year and I dont get sick...

Im very very excited about Laos and Cambodia. I believe this is the first time I actually go to a country my dad hasnt been to...quite an acomplishment, and he is getting all worried again as I get ready to leave cosmopolitan Sydney! :-) I dont really know what to expect of the trip besides a lot of chaos, great food, lots of rain, cheap life and lots of bargaining....heading to "forgotten" Laos will be a great adventure with good friends...cant wait!

Will keep you posted as the preparation for the trip continues.

The next 3 nights will get long. Believe it or not I get very anxious the night before plane rides and I usually bearly sleep.... Even more anxious if Im heading to Asia!!! :)

This drives me nuts!

This is what drives me nuts, the multiple types of plugs in the world.

And yeah I have a all world plug which doesnt work :S and anotherone which I have in my house 16,000km away from here. Why is it so complicated to just have one type of plug! Honestly...

Looking for some warmer weather we are heading up north to the whitsunday islands on a family holiday :)

Ill be back with 1,000 pictures in 7 days :) Until then. . . bye bye!! If im not back in 7 days, then ive been

eaten by a shark while snorkling...Hope to be back though.

Good Luck to ChristinaJingaling

So its official, someone who i met in rdam the first day I arrived and since then has ended up being my Bthesis partner and my never ending talking friend is heading to live to China for 1 year to learn chinese... :) Well we will both be beggining our "new lives" exactly on the same day/s 9-10th of September so from here im just wishing you a lot of luck now and asking you for a favor. Don't just go to China to do what you do so good, meaning study...get a boyfriend and invite me to your wedding. Ive never been to a wedding so come on just do it for me! Plus if its in China evenbetter. Also favor number 2 make the wedding in Shangai since ive never been there. Please :) And obviously keep in touch and dont complain you have too much to do. You already have a foot into chinese so take advantage of that! Anyways gooood luck! (remember the wedding thing!)

Blue Mountains

8am Wake up and look out the window, it seems like a nice day, nobody is awake. Didnt they say we were going to leave at 8.30? Why is no one awake. Too bad, im not gona wake up if everybody is snooring. 9am door opens, shouts starts, movement is frantic. We are leaving we are leaving the day is nice, get up and get ready its lateeee. Tsk!9.30 Voices shout again, "i said hurry up we have to take advantage of the great day"...9.40 Leave the parking lot 9.50 Try to annoy and wake up my brother who is trying to sleep in the car...almost make it but at the end he falls asleep 11.40 Finally arrive to the blue mountains. As they were before they are lovely, quite a few tourists and nice. Take a cable car. Suddenly meet some catalan dude that wants to know where we live etc...short converation and keep walking in the path. 12.20 Take another cable car, make this 50 minute path that tourists seem to avoid. Really nice, it feels like we are in the middle of the jungle. Finally start meeting toursits again. Take the steepest train in the world up back to the parking lot. 3.00 Starving. Look quickly through the souvenier shop and run to the car to find a restaurant. All restaurants look bad. Finally find a nice one. Sit down,order and wait wait wait. 4.30 Take the car. Traffic,Traffic,Traffic. After 1 hour only have done 17km! TSK! Still atleast 2 hours to go...CD has played twice,fed up! Change CD.Still Traffic. Frustration. 7.15 Finally home

Today has been a "dutch" day as i've been biking. For the dutch for some reason it seems that biking cant be associated with pleasure, but I grew up going for "bike rides" as a way to entretain myself......Even though you better be carefull if you are biking in Barcelona as probabilities of dying in an attempt are very high.

Anyways, this morning Miquel and I headed to the Centenial Park in Sydney and rented some bikes and just biked around. What can I say, I really missed my great Fiets from NL. My fiets was so comfy,always waiting for me , just so great getting me from work to home late at night..... and of course coming with me to our great Fiets Expedite to Leiden haha.. oh well!

I wount find a bike like that one again I think :( The centenial park was beautifull, a huge park with lots of green spaces where there were fotie games going on,rugby and cricket games!!! In another area people were riding horses. A small area was reserved for kids to learn how to bike. A large lake full of all kinds of birds...It was nice to bike and later just lay there on the grass pretending it was summer... Unfortunately, the sun decided to hide behind the clouds so I started to freeze and decided to return my bike and head for a bite at "Bite Me". Funny when stated that I was from Barcelona, Spain the reply was "That is not spain its catalunya!" :) A restaurant where I was reminded that aussies are so nice and friendly!!! I have this gut feeling that next year the friendlines of the French will be null....

And now I had to make a call to NL which led me to having to listen to a dutch answering machine for 5 minutes! Bringing the theme of the day "dutchness" back...

And not to lose my dutch and cuz today is a "dutch" day I just turned the radio on in dutch where they are now talking about the "weer" and "verkheer" in the A5 richting bla bla... :) Eindhoven, Groninge,Den Haag ohhhh!!! Well time is going fast and I will soon find myself in one of those traffic jams or in one of the vertragings from the NS :)


It seems that tommorrow there is another trip prepared, but not to Canberra cuz nobody wants to go see the Ugly Capital City... Tsk!

So today was my last day at my Job. I have been volunteering for the past three weeks in an NGO that gives microcredits. Some weeks worked 3 days other 4. It has been quite intresting to see how the organization worked from the inside. Although everybody was working many hours and very hard the atmosphere seemed more "relaxed" than in other companies that I have previoiusly worked. So today i got a book as a goodbye gift... a booked called "Opportunity Knocks". Its about how the organization has changed the lives of many people in the world. First it seemed like a big marketing thing,but it seems to be quite intresting.... we shall see.

Well i have previously done some voluntary work this is the first time that I do it in the office. Sure, office work specially voluntary might not feel as rewarding as you dont see the "happy faces" of the people. But lets face it being able to change people lives involves a lot of planning, donations etc which all needs to be coordinated.Therefore its something that must be done and im happy i ve been able to help out in that... The team has also been really nice and friendly :) Next task...work in relief logistics or development agency somewhere in the world :)

New Zealand Flag

In the Bay of Islands, New Zeland I visited a placed called Waitangi. In Waitangi the treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the Maoris and the English to create a land where each would be respected. This treaty basically made New Zeland a colony of Britain and gave rights to the Maori to own land, be citizens etc.

What is more intresting is that the Maori chiefs that signed the treaty of Waitangi had in 1834 developed a flag for New Zealand that looks as follows:

According to my guide that day that flag is still considered official and can be flowned together with the commonly known flag of New Zeland:

The first flag that I put up is known as the flag of the United Tribes and was created as the Maori where in a tradding shipped and where stoped by customs in Australia because they didnt have a flag. Maoris where not allowed to put the flag of Britain and thus decided to create the flag of the United Tribes.

According to various Internet Sources there seems to be an argument about changing the flag. Some people argue that the flag does not represent New Zealand and that many people don't associate with it and thus dont "hang it out". In addittion, its too similar to the Australian one and it doesnt represent the Maoris at all.

--- intresting.... :)

Short and Great visit to New Zealand

(google image)

The following statement might cause me problems in countries like Australia...but after having spend 5 days in NZ i have to say its a super awesome country! Definately goes up in the rankings of my 5 top favorite countries (dont ask me which the other 4 are..its too hard of a decision). I cant comment too much after beeing in New Zealand for only 5 days of which I have only trully had 3 full days here but the country is beautiful. New Zealand is one of the countries with less persons per sq. kilometer in the world having a total population of 4 million. You dont have to drive that long out of Auckland (the largest city of New Zealand) to start seeing lots of green hills, full of dairy farms. The greeneness of the country remineded me of how beautifully green Holland is. However, NZ had a plus first there were lots of trees and in addittion there were very intrestingly curved hills everywhere. Beautifull coastlines,lakes and rivers were to be found everywhere. Driving to Rotorua (about 3 hours south of Auckland) it seemed like everywhere you looked a landscape picture could be taken. You just had to leave the city to see that all roads had only one lane in each direction. This uncondensated roads were also a great contrast with Holland.

It was trully amazing how calm and beautiful the place was. Not to mention how nice and layed back the people from the country were. Policeman at the airports never are too nice. They tend to always look skeptically at me and ask me 1,000 questions. This is what happened when I landed in NZ. I give the passport in to the police man and he starts to speak spanish with me. As they do in Holland I thought he just wanted to test if I really speak spanish and if im really spanish. Then he sais " is it fine if i carry on in spanish, i just really like the language and need to practice. Actually, you know i lived in Valladolid for who knows how long. And well, i had to stay with a family and they only spoke spanish..blabla.." I was SHOCKED! Of course the real questionaire started afterwards with. Who bought you the ticket?Where are you staying?Why do you go back to Australia?What will you see in NZ? Why do you live in Holland?What do you study? All in all to end up with a big smile and a comment " The story seems good enough, you can pass". Its true it took ages for them to let me pass, but half of the time was in practicing his spanish!!

In New Zealand and in Australia they are extremly carefull about what you can and cant carry into the country. You are not allowed generally to take any food with you, and also not allowed to take wood, medecines made out of herbal stuff etc etc. So believe it or not but I had to declare that I was carrying with my 3 m&m bags. Even after having declared that i had food with me they passed my bag through a scanner (they do that with everybag, in both countries) and then they asked me "we saw you have candy in your bag, what is it?"..... Im so not gona risk taking a good Jamon (typical delicious spanish ham) into Australia...Imagine seeing your Jamon Serrano ending up in the hands of the Police :(

(google image)

Unfortunately the weather was horrible almost all the days I was here. Actually when I left NZ the policeman asked me what i had seen. Then he asked if i had liked it and i said "yeah had lots of fun but the weather wasnt that great"..then he said "oh that is a wrong answer! i cant let you pass" then i said "its a great country...had lots of fun" ..to which he replied " good answer.. you can go ahead, have a nice flight"... these people are just really nice! :-) I think im moving here rather than to Oz...!!! ( ...my thoughts of moving to Oz are slowly decomposing due to visa issues...that goes for another blog entry).

As I was saying when I first arrived after a 1 hour delay of the plane I got a taxi to go to the house where I was staying. The taxi got lost and coudnt find the place but after 4 U-turns he finally found it! Got soaking wet just walking from the taxi to the house. I stayed at the house of a friend of my dad. He had 3 sons (8,6,3 years) and 1 girl of 9 months.. They were sooooo cute and nice!! :) I just love kids....

The next morning we went to Rotorua with the 3 boys and the father. Their grandmother lives there so we slept over there. Trust me 3 kids can be so exhausting i did not go to sleep any later than 10:30 on any night and the latest i woke up was 8:00 .... In Rotorua we went to see the Agredome, which is this farm in which they have all type of sheeps and animals and they explain you how farming in New Zealand is done. We went to this show about sheeps and it was great! They got the wierdst kinds of sheep ive seen in my life. Then i got to feed a little sheep..so cute!! Later we went to see other touristy attractions they have. For instance you can go into a huge plastic ball that they roll down a hill...you can bungy jump, you can fly..they put warm air under and you "fly" like a bird for 4 minutes. Quite awesome all the things they had! :) The next day we went to the glowing worm caves of Waitomo.Really impressives. We went to these caves were you can sit on a boat and then the walls are full of worms with glowing tales. So when you sit and look up all you see are blue dots all over the black cave. Trully amazing! Unfortunately there had been a flood the previous week so we couldnt go too far into the cave,but we still got to see quite a large amount. Later we drove back to Auckland. I do want to return to those caves cuz you can actually do rapelling and intresting activities in the caves with tours that last from 3 to 7 hours! Awesome!


The next day I went on a tour to the Bay of Islands. About 3.5 hours drive north from Auckland. Lucky me, it was a very personalized tour. Because its winter and the weather wasnt that great we had a huge bus, but it was only 3 of us in the tour. Me and a 74 year old couple. The couple though were amazing world travellers. The man was a physics and electrical engineer proffessor who was about to retire. Unfortunately after 30minutes of traveling he started to feel quite sick. So he sat and slept in the bus all day long. That left me with his wife. His wife decided she had a need to practice spanish with me. She had learned it all on her own and spend the next hours (tour lasted 12 hours) talking to me about her past life, about history etc etc all in spanish. It was inspireing to see how much knowledge some people had. She was challenging the bus driver/tour guide all the time with questions, hahaha! But at somepoints i just wanted to look at the landscape. After arriving in the bay of islands we both took a catamaran with some more people. Unfortunately the sea was a bit too rough, so we didnt get to see the famous hole on the rock. We traveled from island to island with beautifull views, but it was raining. At some points the ocean was really rough and ill admit i got really scared. Some stupid kids were shouting which for me made matters worse. Later though the best of all happened. The capitan said he had seen some dolphins and was going to try and get closer. I wasnt expecting much, but the dolphins got closer closer closer and closer. Until they were touching the boat!!! they were jumping up and down,there were at least 10 of them! It was amazing! Then another boat came and they were jumping right infront and behind the boat (like one sees in the movies!) it was GREAT! I have always wanted to swim with dolphins and never done it as the only places that I have found you can do that is in Aquariums. And I have been waiting to find the right place to swim with the dolphins. I dont want to waste 200 US$ to go to an aquarium and swim with a dolphin for 2 minutes. However, I have discovered that in the bay of islands you can swim with them in the ocean. Having seen how close they get to the boat i have no doubts that its very easy to swim with them, and im quite determined to come back just to swim with them. Unfortunately my camera did not recharge itself during the night, so I dont have that many fotos of the bay of islands :( After our boat ride we came back to Auckland....that was one long ride. However,the view of Auckland skyline by night was really beautiful.

(google image)

This morning i decided to visit Auckland,but it was raining a lot. Therefore, I couldnt go up the sky tower to see the view. I was quite excited about seeing the view because I have been told the view is beautiful...but there is no much point in going up if the weather suxs, is there? I ended up at Dymocks where i went to buy a book of the history of new zeland and came out with two books non of which were related to New Zealand...tsk!So now i have more literature to read..... Due to the coldness and to the bad weather I decided to come to the airport earlier so now i have a long waiting time. Fortunately I got into the lounge so im taking the opportunity to send a few emails and update the blog! I do have the feeling the flight will be delayed as the flight to Brisbane and to Melbourne have both been delayed...fingers crossed! So that is all folks... just one suggestion:

If tommorrow someone knocks on your door and sais you have won a trip wherever you want in the world. I suggest you answer New Zealand... (that is, if you aint Australian. IF you are from Australia then I suggest you go to the other side of the world.... my choice would probably be Italy... just adore that country!).

Do expect more entries on New Zealand...do you know they have 3 official languages? English,Maori and NZ sign language? !!!

OH YEAH IM SPECIAL! I knew I was, except i never had the info infront of me... im SO SPECIAL that even a part of Arizona has been named after me. In fact,Gisela is a census-designated place (CDP) in Gila County, Arizona. Since I knwo you are all dying to go there let me tell you that it can found in the following coordinates 34°6′7″N, 111°17′7″W ! So yeah, now you know where my future trip will be to! :D Hehehehe, i find this so cool!... i bet NONE OF YOU has a town named after them :P

Make Poverty History has started a campaign called "Face Up" right by my house in which they take pictures of persons with any message they want to write in a board and then put them up in an enormous panel. The pictures are small and the panel quite big, they give you binoculars so that you can find your picture. I took a picture today so I will go tomorrow and try and find myself, which probably will be impossible due to the size of the pictures. The initiative was developed to remind the Australian government that it’s time for them to react to the many promises they made of giving aid and cancelling the debt of poor countries. So many promises were made when the millennium goals ,which must be attained by 2015, were developed. So many promises, so many utopic goals, that will lead leaders and countries to focus, but which will not be achieved. Definately not by 2015. In many regions of the world the number of people that live on a dollar a day has decreased, however in sub-saharan asia and in Central Asia it appears to have increased in the period from 1993-2002. How are we meant to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty by 2015?

There are loads of literature regarding policies to take to reduce poverty. There are many agencies trying to help. Sometimes there appears to be a lack of coordination and too much focus in certain areas...We can not all go to a country and help. Not only because we must follow our daily lives and survive in our own chaos and societies,but because there is no point in all heading to a country to help " in the field". But all of us can take 1 minute to sign a petition, raise awarness, sign a check or reasearch and support different entities. I think its quite hard sometimes to think that that will help, but I do believe that every small action can help. And also, I dont believe that pepole should do this to check a point in a list of things to do such as "good dead of the year" or the well known "corporate responsability" but that they should be convinved that what they do is the right thing.For me it’s hard to understand how many of us can keep living everyday and leading our normal lives when in A LOT of parts of the world people are starving due to poverty and attempting to survive.You just need to see the following map to see in how many countries (data from 2006 some coutnries missing) people are trying to survive on less than 1 dollar a day. Afterall we are all sharing the planet. Quite shamefull and embarrasing for those that never helped. You dont have to have money with you, you can just help the money get from one place to the other.

Due to poverty 30,000 kids die every day.... so basically I am saying that about 85 jumbo jets crash everyday full of kids. Many of us revolutionize ourselves when the media says a small jet plane with 15 people crashed, but we have started to assume poverty is normal and when each day 85 of those planes crash we don’t seem to do much. It’s generally due to the media that we are forced into watching and focusing in the death, burials and remembrance of a few individuals in this planet...but what happens to the rest?

No worries, nobody will change the world on their own....but I do think in the cliche that some lives can be changed if YOU help.