The next week of my life was taken up in a sort of return-to-travelling mindset, ably accompanied by Gareth, with visits to Austria and Slovakia.

Our first stop was Linz, capital of Upper Austria and in my head a bit of a Birmingham. But how wrong I was! Linz is delightful (if you ignore its steel industry suburb, which is easily done on a lunchtime visit). There was snow on the ground here as in Munich, and the sky was overcast, but nonetheless the architecture managed to look lovely.

Our main reason for stopping at Linz was for lunch. In the station after we had arrived and dumped our bags in a left luggage locker, I asked the woman at the information desk if she could give us a lunch tip. She went one better, and handed me a hefty tome of a flyer with all of Linz's many dozens of eateries in it! We picked a central, Austrian-cuisine one and were not disappointed. My Schnitzel was appropriately enormous, and the Gösser beer tasted mighty fine.

It was lovely to be in a town where people talk the dialect I grew up with again. After all, it's only 50 km or so to my grandmother's village from here. I felt the beginnnings of a stirring of homesickness for my childhood, a feeling which peaked as we passed right by the village in the train on our way to Vienna that afternoon.

It's a while since I've been to Vienna in cold weather. I have to say the area south of the centre, which we caught the tram to in order to meet with my friend Michael at his flat there, reminded me very much of East Berlin: that same stark architecture, almost Soviet in its bleakness, combined with the sense that you are in a city of some considerable size. Nowhere in Munich or Linz gives the impression that the buildings stretch on and on to the horizon, but the slush-clogged boulevards of Berlin and Vienna certainly do.

We got to Michael's building just as he was returning from work (he is a teacher). Having brought our luggage to his place, we immediately went out for some Big Austrian food and lots of beer. (Hm, a bit of a theme developing here!) Michael & I were equally horrified to hear Gareth's favourite quote from a Let's Go Europe guidebook he was given by a friend, which said that Austrian cooking is "nothing to write home about". !!!!!!! What do a bunch of spotty American hamburger-munching layabouts know about cuisine anyway?

The next day was devoted to culture. Gareth & I went to the Secession, the home of Jugendstil (which in other countries went by the name of Art Nouveau) which with its golden cupola adorns the Austrian 50 Euro cent coin. The building might be iconic, but the contents weren't! What a load of tosh! The only thing I enjoyed on the inside of the building was a rakishly slanted oval window into a ceiling store cupboard in an area that we snuck into without really being allowed access there.

Our next port of culture call was the Albertina gallery, where we lost ourselves in an excellent exhibition of the work of Egon Schiele, after Klimt perhaps the most famous Jugendstil artist. I remember going to the Schiele museum in Krems many years ago and not really being that into his work, but this time around it impressed me much more.

For the rest of the afternoon, after a well-earned coffee and cake in one of Vienna's famous coffee houses (in case you didn't know, it was the Austrians that invented the coffee house as we know it today, after finding bags of roast coffee beans lying around in the remains of the Turkish military camps that besieged Vienna in 1572 or thereabouts - too lazy to google the date for you, sorry chaps), we did a bit more aimless wandering, including for good measure a trip on the tram that goes right round the ring road that now runs where once Vienna's medieval city walls stood.

We stopped for another coffee at the Hundertwasser Haus (Friedenreich Hundertwasser is Austria's best-known 20th century architect, who also decorated a suburban Viennese waste incineration plant in pure gold and - believe it or not - did the northernmost public toilets on Australia's east coast, somewhere near Cairns), then met Michael at the entrance to the Stephansdom (Cathedral of St Stephen, the double-spired emblem of Vienna).

He took us for food at a place that does Sicilian style pizzaesque sandwiches (Gareth informed us they are called panzerotti; that's the kind of nerdy knowledge you can only get by living in Italy for a year as he did) and yummy yummy beer. It's good to know there are quality cheap eats right in the centre of town. Now, the only problem is remembering where the hell the place is the next time I'm in town!

After food we went for more drinks to a typical Viennese cellar bar, this one three floors underground. There, the table next to us was treated to a musical cabaret by a geezer on an accordion and his mate on a fiddle in true Central Euroean style, and Michael (& even I at times) joined in the singing of old Viennese songs. It was quite the quaint tourist experience!! But at the same time I did feel a glow of familiarity and cultural at-one-ness with all things Austrian.

Right, this has got totally out of hand. I've been rushing around doing five thousand things and not finding the time to write about any of them. So here, in very brief, is what I've been up to for the last month:

I went skiing in Arctic Finland, near a town called Ruka, with Ruth & Andy and their friends Julian & Carol & their 11 year old son Rupert. We had a lovely log cabin just for us, which was toasty warm and amazigly well insulated - a good thing because it was down to -25°C at night and crept up only as high as -15°C during the day.

On the plus side, the walk up to the skiing hill was scenic, across a frozen lake and through bizarre landscapes of twisted trees that were coated in so many layers of snow & ice it was impossible to tell what kind of tree they were. And I had a nice teacher who was very amusing as well as thorough and good at motivating the group.

On the minus side, it's pretty damn flat in the Arctic, and there really wasn't much skiing to be had. Also, the food was generally bad (one exception being a delicious smoked reindeer and peach pizza and another exception being these übersized donuts coated in sugar and cinnamon). Also, the beer was generally expensive and shite - get this: they pre-pour them in the bars, then hand you a beer when you pay for it! - with the exception of Lapin Kulta, which can hold its head up with many a Euro lager.

We had quiet evenings that revolved around us taking turns to cook (we'd done a massive shop on our first night in a supermarket on teh edge of town) and then playing this cool game where you each write a famous person's name on a bit of paper, then these go in a bucket, then you work in teams to play three rounds against the clock: the first round you have to describe who it is without saying the name; the second round you're only allowed to say two words to describe the person on the bit of paper (but everyone's heard them described in the first round already, so it's a bit easier); and the third round is charades-esque miming of names.

There was a sauna in the house, which we used with glee to ease our aching bones. But sadly, this being a houseload of English people, we offended the sauna gods by not being butt naked. We did however try to please the sauna gods by actually running out into the front garden and throwing ourselves into the snow to cool off. Mad? Yes.

Enough about Finland (there were plenty of anecdotes, but I really should have written them down sooner).

So next stop was Guildford for packing and time with nieces. I stayed there two days and then flew back to Munich, laden down with some of the many belongings I had retrieved from my flat in Leam.

Back in Munich I began to feel angst at suddenly having so much stuff again after three years of living pretty much out of a rucksack. It will take time to become reacquainted with my wardrobe.

The highlight of the next few days was a curry with Lisa the boys' kindergarten teacher and friends followed by Brokeback Mountain at the English language cinema followed by drinks with Lise from the EPO and friends (quite by chance, they were sat in the same row as us in the cinema). The girls were blubbing all the way through the film, but unusually for me I was completely tearless. It was a sad film but somehow not a tear-jerker.

I had my first official visitor from the UK at the weekend: Gareth who I used to work with arrived late on Friday and we had a quiet evening at home because the next morning we were catching the train to St Johann im Pongau for another weekend of skiing. Because of the recent huge snowfalls, the skiing was glorious, with fantastic deep snow all over the place. We met Michaela, Tim & the boys down there at Frau Schnell's Pension and had a jolly good time of things.

On the train on the way back, Gareth & I treated ourselves to a slap-up Hungarian meal (well, it WAS the EuroCity train from Budapest to Munich, after all). This made up for the hunger we had to endure from St Johann until Salzburg - not even a snack trolley!

Monday was dedicated to aimless wandering around town, the highlight of which was the moving Alice (a broadband company with a most attractive blonde woman as their slogan) advertising in the Hauptbahnhof: at first we thought they were robot hoardings, operating on some sort of infrared camera in the base, but soon we realised that the hoardings were just too good at creeping up behind people. That's when we saw there was a couple of guys controlling them remotely from an upstairs ledge. Most amusing!!