Sunday, December 16, 2007
Wrapping up things
At first we were unsettled being here, but meeting familiar faces at every turn, and being greeted with enthusiasm by people who've known we've been away and are glad to see us back, is actually very pleasant. Plus we're both back at work, and that makes a difference too, as we have some purpose to our days again!
The house is a bit chaotic, as Celia got into renovation within days of our return - the tenant's toddler had pulled some wallpaper off the wall in one of the bedrooms upstairs, so Celia pulled the rest of it off. And off the bedroom next door. And will paint the lounge upstairs too.
She's been plastering the two bedrooms preparatory to painting them as well, so the place isn't quite in its tidiest state. And things aren't going to change in that respect for a while. My daughter's coming to live with us - with her four-year-old son - and that means more shifting around of furniture. I'm starting to get my muscles back again, the ones I've used constantly over the years in shifting furniture around our house, or in and out of our house and in and out of various children's flats and so on. Might get fit again after all!
Friday, December 07, 2007
What we saw and didn't
In fact, we saw quite a lot of wildlife while we were travelling around: a fox in a churchyard in Kentish Town (a London suburb); plenty of squirrels around the Norfolk lanes and even one in the backyard of my niece’s house in Braintree. He was running along the fence as if he owned the place, stopping when he felt like it, and taking stock of the situation.
We saw a deer one day – apparently they’re quite common in the forest areas on the sides of roads, and there are signs warning motorists to watch out for them in places. I’m told there are some deer in the woods at my great-nephew’s school in Taverham.
Pheasant were common hopping in and out of the hedgerows, and pigeons were everywhere on the country roads. They appeared to have no common sense. One of them flew up in front of us when we driving along one day, and instead of flying to the side, it kept going straight. It didn’t even go higher than the car – just straight. Fortunately at the last minute it swerved, but I thought we were going to make impact at some point.
At my other niece’s house, there were frogs in the garden, and even on the roadside near where she lives. And in the place we stayed in near Bury St Edmunds, there was an infestation of moles – though we never actually saw them, only what they left behind: large mounds in the grass.
Domestic animals were a different matter. We hardly ever saw a cat, though there were plenty of dogs around. Dogs everywhere: held in their owner’s arms, tangling up their owner’s feet; on the buses, on the tube; in the museums, and other public places.
And the only place we ever saw sparrows were in some of the cities. I never saw one in the gardens of the houses I stayed in. Isn’t that strange? I really missed the little critters.
This photo was taken by Tony Northrup; you can see a large version of it on his site, as well as other nature photography.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Back in our own bed
Some were drastic, most were okay. Probably the best one was at my sister-in-law's place in Northampton. They'd bought a new bed before we came (I think for us, in fact), and it was very good to sleep in.
Perhaps the worst was in a room above a cafe we stayed at in West London. The middle leg was broken, and had to be propped back in place. Consequently sleeping on it was a bit of a ‘take care’ situation, in case it suddenly collapsed.
On the Continent we found that in Germany and Switzerland, they don’t have pillows the same shape as those at home. They’re large and almost square, and virtually flat, and it’s hard to know how they’re supposed to function. We never quite found out.
Some Continental hotels put two single beds together as though they were a double. You discovered the gap fairly quickly. Others were double beds, but they had separate covers on them. This worked quite well, except when Celia threw her cover over on mine. Still, it’s something she does at home anyway, so what’s the difference?
Many places don’t use a top sheet any more, including many of the places we stayed at in England. And they use duvets almost everywhere. I found the problem with these was they were often too heavy for the summertime, and I’ve lost count of the number of nights I woke up sweating.
The great thing about it all, I suppose, is that we became more flexible about just getting on and sleeping, whether it was in our tent with airbeds, or in a king size double bed in Valencia. Many places don’t have curtains heavy enough to keep out the light – many places, especially in Spain, don’t have curtains at all. So sleeping under these conditions is a test of how tired you are and whether you’re going to make a fuss about it.
Anyway, we’re home, and we’re back in the bed we belong in – and it’s great.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Korea, and the return home
Seoul is an enormous city, full of contrasts in terms of the buildings. There are skyscrapers, modern apartment buildings, little old one-storey shops and multi-storey department stores, ancient buildings (such as the palaces and the original city gate) and winding alleyways full of tiny shops. The streets are so narrow in some places only a motor scooter can safely drive down them, and so wide in other places that there are four lanes on either side of the road. The motorways are extensive and there are several long bridges over the (very wide) river. It takes an hour and a half to get from any of the major hotels in the city to the airport, and for much of that distance there are buildings or industry. We passed a quarry at one point which went on for at least a couple of miles alongside the road. The city has churches everywhere, both ‘foreign’ style designs, and more modern buildings. Yonggi Cho’s church is a great modern building (it doesn’t look like a church on the outside) that rises several storeys high.
And there are gardens everywhere, from tiny ones to huge botanical parks.
Our flight from Korea was longer than the one from Heathrow by a couple of hours, so by the time we got to Auckland we were very glad to get off the plane. I actually slept an hour or so at one point, which was a major achievement, and kept the material shades on over my eyes at another point, just to get some rest from the light.
This time we didn’t have the little tv screens on the back of the seats in front of us, and had to watch whatever was showing on the main screen. One film - which I watched part of without the sound - was Gracie, a rather second-rate piece about a girl who wants to become a soccer player, and the other was the Simpsons Movie, which turned out to be a lot of fun, full of clever lines and crazy ideas.
I managed to read another Ian Rankin book between the time we began the flight and the time we reached Dunedin, but neither of us enjoyed the flight much: Celia wasn’t feeling great, having got a solid dose of the cold I had a couple of weeks ago, and I still had leftovers of the cold itself. Besides that we were both just tired, and couldn’t get enough sleep to catch up.
And then there was the stress that Security on planes causes these days. Both of our main suitcases were large and fully-packed. Apart from lugging them about they turned out to be the least of our problems. In Heathrow, we’d been told in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t carry more than one bag into the plane itself. This meant that we had to try and shove stuff from Celia’s handbag into the backpack she was carrying and the computer bag I had. Both were already full of bits, so it was a major task. Yet Korean Air didn’t have any such restrictions at all, and when we got past security we just reverted to what we’d started with. In fact, they’d taken the third overnight case with the other two big ones without a qualm or any extra cost.
Likewise when we left Korea there was little difficulty; even in their security area, they didn’t worry about us carrying both our handbag and manbag as well as the other two large items - and a stone plate Celia had decided she had to have at the last minute. (We’d been for lunch in a restaurant where they presented the food on utterly hot stone plates, and also cooked meat and vegetables on a little stove on the table.)
However, when we came to leave Auckland, they charged us for extra kilos on the large cases, and told us if we’d come via America it wouldn’t have cost us anything. Weird.
It all adds to the stress of travelling.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Getting lost in Seoul
Finally, a man came along and offered help. The only trouble was he didn’t speak any English. Consequently, somewhere along the line we had a misunderstanding, and he led us two blocks in the wrong direction!
It was quite cold at this point, and, against all our best principles, we went into Starbucks and bought some very expensive cappuccinos. In there, I met a young lady (I think she was one of the staff, but was off duty) who spent quite a bit of time trying to help. Even she couldn’t figure out from our map where we were (!) but she finally offered to go and look on the Internet (in the staff quarters) and print out a map.
After some time she reappeared, with the map. Great relief.
We thanked her and set off in the right direction this time. Crossed the canal we shouldn’t have crossed before, crossed the square as marked on the map, and before we came to the street where we should have turned left on according to the girl’s map, we found the fish market! Having been caught out several times before in terms of thinking we knew where we were (previously we‘d two or three times seen what we were sure were shops we‘d previously passed but they weren‘t), we weren’t completely convinced this was the same fish market we’d seen before, but we decided to go through it anyway, and gradually realised it was the same one. Enormous relief.
In Europe, for the most part, I could figure the language, but of course here, even though there’s a lot of English signage around (particularly in advertising) the majority of words are in Korean.
I meant to mention, in my post about the shops here, just how small many of them are. Many stalls cover a very small area, but the shops aren’t much better: some are so crammed with stock that there’s virtually no room for anyone inside. Some shopkeepers work outside on the footpath. All your competitors are likely to be within spitting distance, selling exactly the same items. And the tiniest shop I saw had a man sitting in what must have once been the doorway to an upstairs apartment. He was surrounded by keys and his key-cutting equipment. He wouldn’t have been able to stretch out either arm, let alone both. There was no room behind him, and presumably he could only get into this ‘shop’ by taking out the little barrier that was in front of him.
Celia made some rude comment about just how much room we’d ‘demanded’ at the bookshop.
Shopping in Seoul
Breakfast wasn’t quite up to the standard of our other Korean hotel, but it was still fine, and the room itself is very comfortable. So far, that first hotel has set the bar for all others.
Korean traffic is interesting: there’s plenty of it, but no one seems to be hassled, and there aren’t horns blowing all the time. Italy was the worst for city traffic: it was dangerous for pedestrians there, quite apart from the speed everyone drives at. (I nearly got run down twice by cyclists in Italy, and motor scooters paid no attention to pedestrian crossings.) Here in Seoul they drive fast enough (our taxi driver was doing 80 kph at times) but they don’t give pedestrians so many frights, even though motor scooters drive on the footpaths as well as the roads.
We decided to go walkabout this morning, and investigate the markets. Went down the road and found the fish market - or what we call the fish market: the stallholders sell fish almost to the exclusion of anything else. Sardines, fish like whitebait, herrings, all that sort of thing as well as bigger fish. But there are thousands of them, boxed or strung together on strings. The place smells very interesting. And it’s packed: the stalls all run into each other, and go off down other lanes on either side. There are real shops, but even these tend to have stalls outside. Many of the stallholders were sitting watching mini-televisions while waiting for customers.
After this we turned right, intending to go towards the Dongdaemun Market, which is held within the Dongdaemun Stadium. This wasn’t so interesting, because many of the stalls were still closed. I don’t know whether Monday is a holiday for many or whether they just start late. But again the place was packed with stalls, and with stuff. Koreans don’t go for the minimalist look: quantity is everything. In a European or British department store, you’ll have plenty of stock, but it’ll be laid out with some breathing space between items. In Seoul, the shops are stuffed full. We road up the escalator in one clothing shop (about eight storeys high) and every floor had mannequins standing row upon row, and clothes taking up every bit of available space.
We had lunch at a roadside stall - it had seats, some of them on the road itself. It was a wonderful lunch, a thin soup, noodles with a spicy sauce, and chicken kebabs. The lady didn’t sell coffee, but gave her mate along the road a bit a wave and she brought a couple of small coffees over. The woman was very friendly and helpful and we really enjoyed the meal - until we had to pay. It was 25,000 won, which is about £13. A lot more than we thought it would be, because food is very cheap here.
It’s been very overcast and misty today, and even rained a bit. It’s even cold, which we didn’t expect!
Flying home...
I’d slept a bit on the coach coming from Attleborough to Heathrow, so that helped, but I would have been happier to have slept some of the night as well.
When we got to Incheon airport in Seoul, it was 3.35 local time - but about 6.30 am England time, which is what my body was still trying to run on in spite of my efforts to convince it otherwise. So I’d been awake all night.
On the coach into Seoul itself I slept a couple of brief times, and again since we arrived at our hotel. Which means my sleeping clock is completely out of kilter.
We were at Incheon for quite some time in the end, firstly through trying to find somewhere to park our two large suitcases for the two and a half days we’re here, and then trying to find the right bus to catch to get to our hotel - a hotel virtually nobody seemed to know about. When you see the size of Seoul city, it’s probably not surprising.
Finally we caught a 5C bus outside the airport, but as time went on and the bus seemed to be travelling forever, we asked a couple of guys behind us, Koreans who spoke good English, if they could help. One of them finished up ringing up the hotel to check where it was, and wrote the address down in Korean. And then when they suggested a stop to get off at, they helped us get a taxi as well. Meanwhile, three black English-speaking women in front of us on the bus got in on the act as well, and discussed at length the fact that they didn’t know where the hotel was.
However, the taxi driver drove with confidence (and considerable speed) to the hotel, and was enthusiastic about finding it. So were we!
The Korean man at reception, when I wrote that our home address was Dunedin, cried with delight: Dunedin! I stayed there four years ago as an exchange student. If he hadn’t liked us before, he certainly thought we were wonderful after that!
Sunday, November 25, 2007
We're off! We're off!
The song is buzzing round in my head. This is the last post I'll be writing from Attleborough (certainly in the foreseeable future), and in an hour we catch the bus to Heathrow, and not long after get on our plane for Korea.
The phrase, mixed emotions, doesn't cover it. We had a family tea here last night with all the family connected to the people we've stayed with the most, plus another of Celia's brothers and his wife. Last Tuesday we said goodbye to another couple, and Celia's just been on the phone to both her sisters. We're feeling keen to get off yet know that we won't see any of these people again in any hurry - in some cases we may not see them again at all. (The older members of Celia's family are getting up round the 70 mark.)
Four of the great-nieces and nephews were here last night, and two of them went home in tears, apparently. One of the little g/nephews did an anagram puzzle of his family's names for us, as well as a kind of poem of the important things he's done with us, and a maze, in which I was stuck at one end missing the flight, while Celia was on the plane. Help Mike get on the plane, was the instruction.
Both the nephews were here this morning for an informal breakfast, so we said goodbye to them again; one of them prayed for us as well. We're going to miss all these people we've got to know while we've been over here, as well as those we've known before.
There have been times when we thought we hadn't had much of a time here, but in fact, when we look back and remember things, it's been a great time. The bad days are nothing compared to the highlights and the general times of just enjoying other people's company. We've been very well cared for by the family, and we've met dozens of people both here in England and on the Continent who were friendly and helpful. It's been rare to be rebuffed by anyone.
How much longer this blog will carry on after we get on the flight is a question. No doubt my inveterate writing fingers will insist on adding some more, and no doubt we'll have other things to say about our travels.
Meantime, we watch the minutes go by and keep breathing.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Selling the car
I also advertised it online in the Eastern Daily Press (EDP), the big Norfolk-wide daily newspaper.
Out of this I got two calls, and as well as this my brother-in-law had an inquiry from one of the people he works with. So we were feeling as though we might get it sorted.
And we did. The second person to call, a woman from Norwich, wanted to check it out today, so we went to her home on our way back from Cromer, where we’d been staying overnight with one of Celia’s brothers and his wife. We found the house via our faithful friend, Malvina, and within half an hour the car was sold, and a deposit made on it. It’s going to be picked up on Thursday morning from Attleborough.
Hallelujah! This will also give us a bit of spare cash, as we were getting very low on funds.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Going Attractions
I have this feeling that when we get home some people will say, But why didn’t you visit the….? (Enter a word of your choice, such as the Louvre, or the Prado in
Partly the reason we didn’t was budget constraints. Partly it was laziness – making the effort to get to some things proved beyond our combined energies. Partly it was a rather laissez-faire attitude to the attractions. If we missed them we missed them. Simple as that. They’ll still be there, and we won’t be.
In the end, there’s only so much you can see, even in six months. And if you’re not in
If you miss getting to
Yup. But the problem was also that we were continually swamped by choice. There is just too much in the world to try and catch up with. And the bigger the city the worse the choice gets, until in the end you’re inclined to stay home and watch the telly out of enforced apathy.
Partly this holiday was also about revitalising ourselves, and sometimes that involved nothing more than sitting beside some nondescript stream and reading.
Countdown
It took a bit of organising to make sure we still had somewhere to stay in
We’re also trying to sell the car, that great little Peugeot that’s served us so well. We’ll be sorry to say goodbye to it, really, because it’s very economical; far more so than our Mitsubishi at home. But trying to take the Peugeot home isn’t within the possible budgets, so it’ll be staying here, hopefully with a new owner very soon.
The only thing I don’t like about it are the bucket seats (typical of most small cars, of course). I get back ache very easily in them, and that, combined with the neck ache I got from the stress of driving on English roads I wasn’t familiar with made life a bit unpleasant for a while. I think I’ve learned how to deal with both, as I’m certainly not getting the problems now. I suspect we’ll find driving on NZ roads a breeze after the English ones.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The joys of owning a car in England
However, we had to pay for its annual registration last month - £63.00 – which works out to about the same as we’d pay in NZ. But we also had to get an MOT – the equivalent of the NZ Warrant of Fitness – and this has been a bit of a shock.
I’m not sure what the current cost of getting a WOF in NZ is. (This is a post full of acronyms, isn’t it?). I don’t think it can be more than $40 or so. That would be the equivalent of around £14.85 in British money. Here, however, the cost for the MOT is £50.35 (goodness knows what the 35p is there for – it’s like the sign in the Italian subways, where they would charge you 50 euros and 5 cents if you didn’t have a ticket). That’s about $135NZ. Good grief.
Worse, because there were a couple of things wrong with the car (two of them utterly minor, and one to do with the brake pads) we had to have some work done on it. This cost another £80 – or $215NZ.
And then, because the people who’d tested the car had to do a ‘partial re-test’ they charged us again: another £25.13, making the total for the MOT about $200NZ. How on earth that can be justified is anyone’s guess. (I happened to look up this garage when I was trying to find their phone number the other day, and obviously I’m not the only customer who hasn’t been satisfied with them. Have a look at the comments section.)
So in the last couple of months our great wee car has cost us over £200, which has seriously reduced our bank account. We’re now heading towards almost nothing in it – gulp! – and we’ve still got another week here, as well as staying two days in Korea. It reminds me of a time when I was young man and went to
Friday, November 16, 2007
A few notes
One of the great advantages of having relatives in
I’ve just been checking back over some of the words that HitTail has turned up and find that the windmill in Cley, which we visited (well, we walked around it as it was closed at the time) was restored by the parents of a singer/songwriter called James Blunt. His real name is James Blount and he’s the composer of the album, Back to Bedlam. There now, did you know that?
I mentioned too that we’d had to get Vodafone to unlock the content control on the mobile connect, and that it had been a bit of an issue doing so. Seemingly, Vodafone is the only company that actually does this for free (why do they lock them in the first place?). Some companies in
I’d talked about Gaudi’s architectural approach to the Holy Family Cathedral in
Our frequent mention of McDonald’s brought us into a search result as well. I don’t know if I wrote that we didn’t go to McDonald’s in
It was interesting the way the McDonald’s vary. When we came back to
I said in my last post that we’d been to
And finally, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture gets yet another mention in HitTail. I haven’t had to use it yet for the cold I’ve got at the moment, but just the mention of it brings to my senses that wonderful aromatic and throat-burning mixture.
Catching up
Before we left
Onto
We also went to see Ratatouille, which Celia had been keen to see for a while – even though it’s an animated movie and she normally falls asleep during them!
Stopped off in Cambridge on the way back, a place we’d talking about going to see a couple of times previously but hadn’t ever managed to do so. It’s different to
Monday, November 12, 2007
Third day in London
Third and last day in London and a bit muddly. First we drove up the road until we found a couple of churches: we decided on the Methodist one. At first thought there wasn’t going to be anyone there, but in fact it was quite full - and it was a fairly new building. And talk about welcomed. We hadn’t even got out of the car before an elderly couple who’d parked in front of us came up and greeted us, talked about New Zealand, told us about collecting NZ postal items, and gathered us up. Inside it was the same; people didn’t just say hullo, they actually spoke to you, both before and after the service. It was Remembrance Day and at eleven o’clock the radio was turned on for a few minutes and we listened in to the service (with the Royal family) at the Cenotaph. The rest of the service consisted of various people talking about their war experiences, and especially the many people who hadn’t necessarily served at the front but had been back-up workers in various places: firemen, voluntary constables, nurses and so on. They also had communion which was good, as we haven’t been to many services in England where there’s been a communion (except last week as well!)
We were going to go to the movies after lunch but it took too long to get there so we went right into London central again and pottered around a bit. Celia wanted to get some of the artificial snow from Hamley’s (not Hambley's as I think I wrote previously) - you add water to it and it grows to ten times its original size. The place was still abuzz with people, far more than in most of the other shops along Regent St. (Though when we came back along the street later in the evening, the streets were packed again.)
We couldn’t decide what we wanted to do so in the end we got on a bus and went for a ride. Wound up at the Albert Hall and found that there was a concert on in the evening at 6.30. And there were tickets going at a reasonable price. So we bought some, got back on the bus, went and had something to eat (Celia had a little snooze in the café!) and got the tube and bus back again. (The joys of one day passes.) The concert was wonderful - I’ve written about it in more detail on myother blog.
Still in London
Later on we went to Hamley’s, the huge toy shop - and another five storeys. It was absolutely packed with shoppers, and toys, and lots of happy faces and people - adults and kids - having fun and enjoying themselves. Quite a few of the staff were demonstrating toys and having a ball playing with them: a tiny helicopter that actually flew around people’s heads, cardboard planes that would invariably return to the person who’d set them off, racing cars with front wheels that could go into a 360 degree turn and so would never get upset by any angle, a wipe-off board which a young guy was drawing coloured pictures on with great ease, three or four guys playing with a more update version of the yo-yo. One boy of about seven or eight was having a great time clapping his hands and making a whole rack of teddy bears shake - clapping was what set them off. Occasionally adults would join in the fun. Around the store were waist-high boxes with walking fluffy toys in them - little dogs that yapped, a drummer boy, a giraffe that moved its long neck up and down. I was very tempted to get the giraffe, I must admit.
We were out of our hotel room by eleven this morning and didn’t get back till around 8.30, so both of us were whacked. I’ve been reading the Hitchcock book while Celia snores.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Back to London again
Korean Air is situated in Piccadilly, so after we’d been there we wandered back along the street looking at the shops, including one extraordinary place (called Andy and Tuly) that supposedly sells waistcoats primarily, but had nothing but cufflinks in its windows, hundreds of pairs of them. And all of them priced over the £100.
Crown Relocation, who are sending our extra stuff home, couldn’t have been more helpful. They provided everything, were very pleasant with it, and best of all: we managed to get everything we’d taken with us into the two boxes.
We’re staying in a rather unusual accommodation: it’s over a Café in North West London - South Ruislip, to be exact. The café obviously caters for drivers and other blue collar workers and its food is good old-down-to earth English; the room we have isn’t the best we’ve had (!) but for three days it’ll be okay. The leg of one of the beds ’broke’ when a certain wife sat on the bed after we arrived, but the leg has obviously been broken for a while. I told the owner, and he feigned surprise - I say, ’feigned’ but it may have been genuine. The room has a tv, fridge, microwave and a kettle - the latter item is something that’s always been missing from European hotel rooms.
I drove all the way into Ruislip today - a first. I haven’t driven in London at all before. It certainly wasn’t as bad as the previous two times we came when we got stuck in long traffic jams and the brakes heated up and failed.
The Indian community is apparently celebrating Diwali - or else there are a lot of people using up unused fireworks out there. One enthusiastic lot let a whole pile off while we were standing at the South Ruislip station this afternoon - it was a bit pointless since none of the lights could be seen. However, there was a much more timely display later on, when it was dark, while we were sitting in a café in Shepherds Bush having milkshakes (with NZ icecream in them).
We had a meal in the West End, at a some sort of noodle house in the Haymarket. The food was great: I had a chicken satay and Celia a large noodle soup with chicken. This was after we’d spent some time exploring the five storeys of Waterhouse’s - good grief. Too many books, but I finished up buying one on Alfred Hitchcock and his movies anyway, by Patrick McGilligan.
Then we got the bus back to Shepherd’s Bush, pointing out well-known places as we passed them, checking out the Christmas lights in some of the major shops (Fortnum and Mason’s is celebrating its tricentenary and have done the Twelve Days of Christmas as their window display. Hugely detailed and wonderful conceived.
We also stumbled on the Orlando Chamber Choir rehearsing for their performance tonight of Handel’s Jephtha. It was a bit bitzy, as you’d expect, but worth sitting in on all the same.
Friday, November 09, 2007
All quiet on the East Anglia front
Celia dropped her handbag out of the car while we were there, and only discovered later that she didn’t have her cellphone. She’d picked up everything that had dropped, she thought, but obviously the cellphone went somewhere different. Anyway, we weren’t aware of having left it in Gresham until this morning when I tried ringing the phone to see if it was in the car somewhere or around the house. A woman answered, instead. She said she’d found the phone yesterday and had picked it up, thinking it probably belonged to one of the locals. We’ve arranged to go and get it when we get back from our London/Northampton trip. (We leave tomorrow and come back Wednesday.)
We didn’t do anything particularly exciting in Sheringham. Celia just wanted to ‘breath it in’ again. Even managed to avoid picking up anything in the op shops, though we did find four Ian Rankin books that we haven’t read going at £2.50 each.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Snooze level
Another quiet day. Virtually all of interest we’ve done is book ourselves a room in
We’re going up to
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
A little shock
This morning we went into
The guy in Vodafone Norwich looked up the number on the screen and said, There’s nothing wrong with it. A credit bar has come up because there was concern that someone was using it illegally. Because there was so much owing on it.
Like how much?
£969.
Yup, you read that right. That’s $2618.29 in NZ dollars at today’s exchange rates. Yet we’d been using the Internet in
I got shivers up and down my spine and spoke to the customer service people at Vodafone on the assistant’s cellphone. It didn’t help. That was the bill, the girl said.
The assistant asked if I knew about an alternative way of using the mobile connect on the Continent. In that case you paid £111 and could download 200 megs. That would have been better, although we’d managed to get through 200 plus megs in the times I’d been using the thing.
We went home in a state of shock. Literally. Celia was in tears, as you might expect, and I didn’t know what to say at all. The only thing that the assistant had recommended was to ring Vodafone back again and get hold of a Team Leader, as they were sometimes able to do something about such unexpected bills.
I had some lunch, though had some difficulty downing it, and finally rang Vodafone and asked for a Team Leader. They told me one would be available to ring me back in about an hour, so I thanked them, and hoped I wouldn’t be waiting too long.
Tried to do other things, without much success. And then the phone rang. Before I could say anything much the guy announced who he was and that he was putting a credit through for the £969 and he was charging out each 24 hours at $8.50 a time and that the bill would come to $59 or thereabouts, plus the usual monthly charge.
I was almost too stunned to thank him. Not only having the gift of such a large amount rescinded but to have it done without me even asking for it was extraordinary.
There was sudden rejoicing amongst the Crowls. And on top of that, a short while after Celia unexpectedly found the connection to one of the innumerable electronic toys she plays with which a long search yesterday had convinced us was lost. We’d gone to
Monday, November 05, 2007
Quiet
Things are a little quiet on the travel front, so there’s not much to report here in the blog. Spent most of Saturday resting after our long exertion on the Friday, watched X-Factor in the evening and disagreed entirely with the judges and then watched some odd pilot and the second episode which was showed straight after it. It was a tv series called Shooting the Past, and it turns out it was made back in 1999. More about that on my other blog.
Today we’ve done nothing more than go to church, have lunch with our niece and her family, and come home.
Life may get more interesting –who knows?
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Home to Attleborough
Long day yesterday, all focused on travel. We could have quite happily have got on a plane back to New Zealand, but we still have a month to go in
The plane didn’t go till 16.20 so we had quite a lot of time to fill in. The trouble with travel days is that you tend to do little else except wait around: so we had a coffee and coke in a café around the corner from our apartment, moved up the road and read for a while under a willow, moved further up the road and caught the tram, transferred to the Metro which conveniently took us all the way to the airport, sat around in the airport reading, had more coffee (our own from the famous flask this time), read more, eventually stood in the queue to get on the plane (I stood in the queue – Celia sat and read), sat and read some more, had more coffee, stood in the melee to get on the plane, got on the plane, read on the plane, snoozed on the plane, got off the plane, got on the bus and finally got home. Exciting.
The biggest bonus of the day was that we already had our ticket booked for the National Express and there was no problem getting back with them, and they got us here a quarter of an hour earlier.
The other unusual thing was getting to Stansted and finding that all the passengers, having disembarked from the plane, then got on the airport tram and were shot off to the arrival lounge, which must have been a kilometre or more away. Stansted is huge.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
More details about paddling
We had nothing much in the house for lunch so we walked in Plaza de Reina (Reina meaning Queen) and pretty much took up the first café/bar we found. It was advertising an English breakfast, but once inside we opted for the Paella, even though our last experience of paella, in Barcelona, was most disappointing. It had been very salty and rather burnt underneath.
We also opted to stay inside out of the sun, because by that time the sun had decided to give it a go, and it had become very hot. Opting to stay inside meant we were (a) able to read Lesson 42 in the Spanish/English course that was left on our counter. It was a lot of fun, and obviously was partly done with tongue in cheek. ‘Your cologne smells like gasoline.’ ‘You remind me of Robert Redford. You have made me feel like a real man.’ ‘Why aren’t these accounts up to date? What, you think I’m some kind of magician? You need to be, or else you’ll be looking for another job.’ ‘I read The Economist. It tends to focus on gay marriages and the legalisation of drugs.’ And so on.
(b) We were also in the firing line kitchen-wise. It was rather like being not in the restaurant but in the kitchen itself, and of course, with the staff all being Spaniards, there was a great deal of full on in-your-face discussion. Fun.
The paella was lovely when it came, and just what the doctor ordered.
From there we caught the tram back down to the beach, which was more crowded than the other day: lots of families, and kids, and couples. We watched a father play with his children (aged from about four to fourteen) for ages: he was creating a circle in the sand and they had to get him out of it or get him down. They never did. Even when his wife joined in, he stayed on his feet - she went down with quite a thump at one point. Celia was tempted to join in, but restrained herself.
We also paddled in the Mediterranean. The first wave was cold, but nothing like Dunedin beaches. And after that you didn’t feel chilled, but just comfortable. We walked along the beach quite a way, Celia’s foot apparently enjoying the change.
The NZ tourist paddles
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Quality end to the European holiday
The new apartment is about five minutes walk away (at normal walking speed: with our bags and Celia’s foot it took us somewhat longer), and it’s entrance is in a much narrower street again. In fact cars don’t go down it. There’s a square just on one corner with a statue of what looks at first like a skateboarder; think it’s some explorer, though. The trees in the square seem to be growing mandarins, or some equivalent, and outside one of the balcony windows is the back of the Cathedral with a door that looks as though it hasn’t been opened in some time.
The apartment is much more luxurious-looking than the other place, although both of us found the previous place to be very comfortable and up to date. This one has a lot more ‘antique’ furniture. It may actually be antique; I don’t know, but it probably came with the place when Nicholas, the owner, bought it. Again it has a superb oval glass-topped table, with six chairs this time, instead of four. There are all the mod cons in the kitchen and bathrooms (two of these again!) including a dishwasher again. We’re not much into bothering with dishwashers; most of our English rellies have them, but we’re quite happy to wash up as we go.
There are original paintings everywhere, some by an artist called Antonio Ferri. You can read a short biography of him here. Seems he’s a local painter, who’s spent some time in the States but has decided that home is best.
There’s even a hallway to this apartment, something our previous only pretended to have. In it is an antique couch with cushions, gold braid and so forth, and opposite a shelf with a delightful statue of a horse. Celia’s a bit iffy about being in a place with so many knickknacks of the antique sort; she doesn’t want to turn round suddenly and break something.
The lounge has two modern couches facing each other, another glass-topped (square) table, and more antique furniture. Plainly the latter isn’t hard to find in Spain!
Finally, there's an even more up-to-date tv and dvd. And a different collection of movies. We're having a blob day (after all our exertions yesterday) and Celia's watching something while I type.
I haven't mentioned that in both these apartments I've had free wireless for the Internet. The last place had one option - this has three!
The picture by Antonio Ferri comes courtesy of Galeria Estil in Valencia.
A little frustration
We arrived in Alacante without any hitch and without having to pay any additional supplement on our Pass. The sun wasn’t shining much when we got there and I anticipated a chilly day, but it got hotter and hotter and finally we were shedding stuff in order to survive.
We discovered that there’s a tram system in Alacante and thought we’d take it to one of the beach stops, Costa Blanca. But finding the tram was a major issue. We found the place the main stop was named after - the Mercato, a two-storeyed market with dozens of fish and meat stalls - but couldn’t find the tram. Celia saw a sign for the tourist information - and then we couldn’t find that. But we did come across a small museum dedicated to the artists who are involved in the St John’s Festival time. (Hogueras St Juan is the Spanish name.) Seemingly they elect a Princess (and possibly a Prince sometimes) and they make all these extraordinarily imaginative installations (Celia’s word, and apt) which in some cases stand several metres high - and seemingly at some point they burn them! Now I may have got something wrong here, so don’t quote me on this yet.
Anyway, in the museum were posters, photographs and even better, working models of the installations, mostly done in plaster. At least that’s what I gathered they were: things rescued from oblivion by some interested parties. They were a delight: fantastic and detailed and very creative, done by men who were superb artists and sculptors, men who had great senses of humour and weren’t afraid to be robust in their humour!
After this we found the Information place, and had to walk back up the street (and a short hill) to get to the Tram. Still no sign of it and then we realised it was underground - again. Certainly it is a tram, but it begins its run underground and only gets to look like a tram after about five minutes.
We got to the beach and had lunch and sat and read and probably got burnt a bit, and were greeted with a Buenos Dias by two elderly Spanish ladies, but ignored by the Brits. And finally we decided it was time to come home.
We were going to catch the 15.25 but when I checked I was told it was full. So I booked on the next one at 16.16 and even got a refund on the booking charge we’d had to pay last weekend for our tickets to Madrid. But then the fun started.
You might remember that we had to get a bus from Barcelona Sants to Tarragona last week before we could get on the train. This is still happening, and today it caused a great long delay. The train from Barcelona arrived about 16.35, and because they then had to clean the thing before anyone could board it, no one was allowed on board till well after 17.00. I don’t suppose we were the only frustrated people, but the Spaniards in general kept it hidden from view.
The train shuffled off at 17.25 and meandered its way to Valencia. Instead of taking only about an hour and a half, it took nearly two hours, the same as it had in the morning, when we’d been on a slower train.
Got into Valencia and intended to catch a 5B which goes down our street. 5Bs were few and far between apparently. In the end, (frustrated) we got on an 8, which we’d taken this morning, only to find that the board that allows disabled people to get on the bus wouldn’t retract after a person in a wheelchair was put on. Several people got off, intending to get the next number 8 (they were much more frequent), and then a 5B turned up! We raced for it - even Celia with her sore foot - only to find that the driver refused to accept our tickets. ‘But the ramp was stuck!’ cried Celia, frustrated. The driver hadn’t a clue what she was saying but there was no doubt that he wasn’t going to let us on his bus with another driver’s tickets.
I got off in a little dudgeon. (It wasn’t ‘high’ just moderate.) And we boarded the number 8 again, which had now got itself sorted out (a mechanic had appeared from somewhere). Amazingly they offloaded the person in the wheelchair and left him sitting on the pavement! The ways of the Spanish are beyond the ken of English-speaking people.
Finally got to the famous Towers of Serranos once more and crawled back to the apartment. Which we have to vacate tomorrow morning, so as to move to our next apartment five minutes away.
And then home on Friday. Well, home to Norfolk.
Of course, I found out all about the Bonfires Festival on the Net after I'd written the stuff above. Check it out here.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
An arty morning
Anyway, Celia went off to the mall/supermarket (I hardly need to remind you that these are her museums), and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts, which is in easy walking distance. And it was free.
What a dream of a place! In the large foyer, there are paintings that would barely fit on the walls of our apartment. As you go in beyond this there are rooms and rooms of wondrous religious art, some of it huge. Upstairs is a mixture of later art works, with more portraits, and then upstairs again are more modern works, though nothing seems to date much beyond the beginning of the twentieth century.
It was exhausting just trying to take it all in, what with Goya and El Greco and various other great Spanish painters on display. And then there were two courtyards: one is a wonderful fresh garden, with palm trees, and green, green plants. The other is bare apart from a statue of Martin de Tours and the beggar. However, around the windows on the first floor is a wondrous blue colour.
It’s interesting how limited the range of subject matter is in religious art. While the Spanish paint St Francis a good deal more than other countries, there are dozens of versions of the Crucifixion and the events surrounding it. Curiously there aren’t many Nativity scenes in this museum. But there is one vital and energetic picture of the Holy Family (plus John the Baptist). Unusually the two boys are grown men in this picture and along with Joseph they’re hammering away at something not very obvious in the centre in a very muscular fashion. Mary is stuck on one side.
St Sebastian comes in for several portraits. [That's him in the picture.] Here in Spain he’s always shown in his dying agony with just one arrow in him. (Usually in other countries there’s a welter of arrows). It’s a puzzle why he’s such a choice subject for artists. I’ve just had a look at the interesting Wikipedia article on him, and seemingly even though he was shot full of arrows he survived, was nursed back to health, and went on to bring more people to Christ. So it’s interesting that the Spanish versions have him with only one arrow, and obviously dead. The other curious thing is that he’s always virtually naked in whatever country he’s painted, and his body is always romanticised as being a fine specimen of young manhood. (The Spanish tend to make him a youth, in fact, which he wasn’t when he was shot.)
In the museum there are few examples of mythical art, though the Rape of the Sabines makes its usual appearance. It’s curious that this is another motif that’s so common in art of this time. Is it because we lean towards certain themes, or is it because of something altogether different? It’d be interesting to know.
After this I made my way into town (which is when I discovered that the Metro is both underground and tram) and finally found a place to post the postcards we’ve been carrying around for days. At the Post Office, of course. Post boxes are a rare thing in Valencia, as far as we can make out.
Celia finally arrived home half an hour after our arranged time, absolutely exhausted, of course, but still fairly cheerful. Her foot had stood up to the pace, apparently.
Lost, language, and other matters
What does Valencia have in common with Rotorua? Every so often you get a whiff of something unpleasant - in Valencia’s case it’s more likely to be the drains.
The streets around the historic city, where we are, are very confusing. I’ve now got lost twice today, though tonight it wasn’t as bad. If I’m not careful I’ll be the next thing we leave behind on this trip. One part of the problem is that you’re surrounded by three and four storey buildings in narrow, one-way streets, and you’ve no landmarks visible. The other part of the problem is that on our map the street names are in one language while the street signs (which are mostly attached to the corners of buildings, as they were in Italy) are in another. In some cases there’s not much difference, but in others the difference is considerable. Once you get the hang of the fact that you’re possibly looking for a different word on the map, things fall into place a bit more, but it still trips you up. There doesn’t seem to be much consistency in the use of the languages: in some places you see things in both languages, particularly on public transport, but in others you have no idea what language is being used.
I’d thought I’d got the word for milk sussed: La Leche, as in the breastfeeding League. That was easy. But when I’ve tried leche in Valencia, they look blankly at me. It may be lette or latte; I really don’t know. Some shopkeepers have patience; others get into a Spanish grump, as in: You are a fool who only speaks English and dares to try to speak our wondrous language. Desist!
And there are two distinct types of people here. Those who we’d regard as Spanish from movies and other pictures, people who look more European. And then there are those who appear to be South American in origin. I suppose hundreds, maybe thousands of them were bought back as slaves during the Conquest, and these are the descendents, living alongside their original conquerors.
Rethink and Rules
The Metro in Valencia isn’t just a tram. It’s also an underground. Ah, well, we’ll get it right eventually.
The Spanish don’t seem to have a sense of personal space: they’ll bump into you in the street and make no comment, and if you ask them something, they’ll often seem to ignore you. On the other hand, when they do respond, they’re just lovely and friendly. Well, apart from the bus driver we got last night, who wouldn’t let two old people off the bus (he’d missed opening the door for them) until they shouted at him - and then he wouldn’t let a woman on at the same place! There have to be exceptions everywhere, I guess.
I’m going to start compiling a list of tourist ‘rules.’
1. If you see a toilet, use it, even if you don’t want to go at that point. Toilets are hard to come by. (Curiously, toilets in Spain are called the WC.)
2. Words like ‘hola!’ in Spain, ‘prego’ in Italy, and ‘bitte’ in Germany may mean anything the speaker wants them to mean. But they’re handy words, all the same.
3. It is inevitable that you will lose things while travelling. Don’t fuss. So far we’ve lost the cover to Celia’s knife, maybe even the knife itself, possibly a pair of my underpants, a piece off Celia’s Swiss Army Knife, and maybe some things we haven’t noticed so far. I got all the way home today before I noticed I’d left my jersey somewhere - probably in a café where I stopped for a cup of very milky coffee. Trouble is, I probably can’t find the place again - I got completely lost on the way home as it was.
4. The main thing is, Don’t lose each other. And be nice to each other - this makes a big difference under stress.
5. Never assume that you know everything about the city just because you’ve found your way from the railway station to your place of abode. Usually the city is a hundred times bigger than you thought.
The picture is of a toilet in Spain - not one we've used though.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Celia puts a brave face on it
Today we managed two trips out, in spite of Celia’s sore foot. She bravely walked along at a snail’s pace, and eventually we got to where we were going.
First trip was to the covered Market, [see photo] which is reputed to the be the largest covered market in Europe. It may be, but it wasn’t somehow as pleasant as the market in Barcelona, which was only a couple of blocks away from our place of residence. The Valencia market is very spacious, and things are divided up more clearly, so that the fish market is isolated from the rest. Yet it didn’t have the friendly feel of the Barcelona one, nor the exuberance of the Melbourne one we saw three years ago. Never mind, we bought plenty of food there, enough to keep us going until we go home. It’s the first time we’ve actually had food on hand to any extent. We had a cup of coffee each in the café across the road - a real blue collar café - and the coffee was very black.
On the way back I found that there was an art exhibition in the building next door. I think the place is called Obras Sociales - or it could be Caja Mediterráneo. Both names appear on the two catalogues they gave me for free. Entry was free as well.
There were two exhibitions, one related to mental health in the community (related very loosely, but that’s by the by), and the other by Marlén Ramos, about whom I know nothing really since the text is all in Spanish. Both were good exhibitions: the first had paintings collected together from a variety of 20th century artists, many of whom are now dead. Ramos’ work came under the cover of ‘Patchwork Paintings’ and were carefully crafted abstract pieces. Both the catalogues have reproductions of all the paintings in their respective exhibitions. That was a bonus.
Our second trip out was to the Aquarium. We got the 95 bus as far as we thought it went and then found that it went all the way. Unfortunately this meant Celia had to walk some distance, from in front of the Science Museum, past the next building and the covered garden and right down and around the corner to the Aquarium entrance. In due course we got there!
Pluses. The walruses were a delight, swimming on their backs right under where we were watching from, and huffing and puffing and grunting and making rude noises in their usual fashion. The something-or-other whale (I’ll really have to take a notebook with me) was equally enthusiastic about swimming past us, as was a single penguin in a large area that had lots of other penguins preening themselves. The first area we went into had fish from coral reef areas; two huge tanks with hundreds of fish of all sorts swimming around. There were seats between the two tanks so you could just sit and relax. (After our walk it was essential.) The hypnotic tank of jellyfish, and of course, the seahorses and seadragons were a delight.
Minuses. In spite of this being touted as the biggest aquarium in the world, it isn’t the most exciting. It’s spread out over a large area, but includes three restaurants in that area. The walruses and that whale are in tanks that really aren’t big enough for them long-term, and having an aviary in an aquarium seems a bit odd. The flamingoes and pelicans have a lot of room, but there are only ducks in another pond (!) and what are they all doing in an aquarium? The tropical fish aren’t particularly colourful - in fact, there were far more colourful fish in the shop we went to in Norfolk (for free) than there were here.
I think the aquarium in Melbourne, though not so large in terms of space, is actually better value for money. Presumably the Valencia one has plenty of room to expand!
Worst Minus: the terrible music that accompanies you wherever you go in this place. It's monotonous and trivial.
And so back onto the 95 bus, which we thought would take us in a loop back around to the Towers of Serranos, which are at the top of our street. When we got to the bridge across the riverbed that leads onto the towers, Celia said she didn’t feel like walking across, so we stayed on the bus assuming that in ten minutes or so it would come back closer to home. Half an hour later we finally got there, having gone into the depths of suburban Valencia, and sat for five or ten minutes while the driver had a break. In the meantime it had got dark, which made seeing the Towers more difficult. And we were very hungry.