Getting lost in Seoul

After our market and mall explorations, we started to walk back home. Went down the underground, which runs the length of one long street, and contains dozens of shops (as well as the tube). Thought we knew which exit to come out of, and did. But even though it seemed as though we were in a place we recognised, it turned out not to be. So we crossed the road (via the underground again) and came out on the opposite corner. Went along the road: gradually realised this wasn’t an area we recognised either. Scary, since the streets don’t appear to have street names (unlike most of Europe where signage is very good, and usually on the corner buildings). We looked at our map, but it’s a tourist map and shows buildings and places rather than streets. Tried to work it out from the underground map but it was just as confusing because we couldn’t reconcile streets with the area above us. Went above ground again and found a bus map which had streets on it, but it didn’t seem to match up with our map either.
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

Slept really well last night, in spite of being woken at 3 am by someone trying to get into our room when they were supposed to be going next door.
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...

The flight from Heathrow to Seoul left at around 8.45 pm which should have meant we could fall asleep naturally and spend some of the flight in slumberland. Well, some of us did, but not me. Tired as I was I remained awake and finished up watching three movies: Oceans Thirteen, the latest Die Hard and, for my choice from the classic movies, The Grapes of Wrath.
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!

We're off! We're off!

Twenty years or more ago, I began writing a children's opera, in which the children sang a rousing chorus, We're off! We're off to the Fantabulous Mountains.
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.

Selling the car

Over the last few days we’ve had a bit of concern about being able to sell our car. We’ve put ads in the windows of the car and sat it outside the local supermarket. This was quite effective, as when I turned up to collect it (after having left it there for just under two hours) a couple was looking at it, and I was able to give them one of the signs to take with them. When Celia went back to do some shopping later she also found someone interested. However, nothing came of either of those.

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.

Going Attractions

When you go to the cinema you often see a board advertising ‘Coming Attractions.’ I’m inclined to think I should post about ‘Going Attractions,’ all those things we didn’t quite make it to while we’ve been overseas.

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 Madrid, the latest musical, Covent Garden, or…)

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 London for much of that time, you won’t see much of what’s on in London. (Even when we were there, the 50% discounts for several theatres still amounted to tidy sums).

If you miss getting to Paris or Madrid, you’ll miss the big museums. But why didn’t you make the effort? This may be your only opportunity!

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

Well, it’s a week today till we head for home. We’ve changed our dates without difficulty from early December to the 24^th November, meaning we’ll be home before the end of the month. That gives us a bit of breathing space at the other end, before we head back into work.

It took a bit of organising to make sure we still had somewhere to stay in Seoul, Korea, on the way home – the travel agents in NZ must have started to tear their hair out a little when we changed the dates not once, but twice. However, everything is all organised now – we just have to figure out how to get from the airport to our hotel and we’ll be fine.

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.

The joys of owning a car in England

You’ll no doubt remember that we bought a car for the time we’ve been in England. It’s been great, a Peugeot 306 XR, and we’ve done a lot of mileage in it. It’s also been very economical in terms of petrol, probably a lot more economical than our Mitsubishi Chariot at home.

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 Australia to see if I could work there as a repetiteur (I’d already worked professionally at the job in NZ). I didn’t get any work, and after a month of swanning around, came home, only to realise when I flew into Christchurch, that I didn’t actually have any money to get the train home to Dunedin. Fortunately the lady I was staying overnight with in Christchurch coughed up the readies, and I was able to repay her later (no doubt out of my mother’s money, since I didn’t have a job to come back to either!)

A few notes

One of the great advantages of having relatives in England who care about you is that we’ve been looked after very well, even by those who’d hadn’t seen us for more than thirty years. Without our extended family over here, this trip wouldn’t have been possible in any sense.

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 Australia, apparently, charge anything from $27.95AUD to $199! What a racket.

I’d talked about Gaudi’s architectural approach to the Holy Family Cathedral in Barcelona, and said it looked like the stone was melting. This isn’t unusual in Gaudi’s work, apparently: in a recent article in the NY Times, the writer talks about the way Gaudi used this melting effect on houses and roofs and other architectural features.

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 Spain because they didn’t serve milkshakes. Whether it’s something to do with the way they bottle milk or what, I don’t know, but we couldn’t get a milkshake in Spain (not from McDonald’s anyway).

It was interesting the way the McDonald’s vary. When we came back to London we had more trouble communicating with the staff in the two McDonald’s we visited than we did in any of the countries in Europe. There the assistants were pleased to interpret our English into McDonaldsese. In England, even though the assistants were all English-speaking, they got our orders muddled, didn’t seem to hear what we were saying and in generally were surprisingly obtuse. Ordering in McDonald’s shouldn’t be that difficult: they have a kind of universal language, and you find the order boards are the same wherever you go around the EU.

I said in my last post that we’d been to Cambridge. Apparently Sir Humphrey Cripps, the man who built up the Pianoforte Supplies company in Roade was an honorary Fellow there. He was ‘the greatest single benefactor the College has had since its foundation over 500 years ago.’

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

Spent our last morning in London in the launderette where the woman in charge, with some amusement, was letting one of her customers show us how to work everything. The women were all giving each other cheek and generally enjoying themselves.

Before we left London, we had a cup of coffee in a café run by a man who was more than a little off the wall. He sang, and he made ridiculous jokes, and claimed that the old woman assistant and the attractive young assistant were both madly in love with him. He had a voice like a door in need of oiling, and appeared to do far more talking than working. But it was fun to be there watching and listening.

Onto Northampton to see Celia’s two sisters and their husbands for a couple of days. This is the last time we’ll catch up with them and it was all a bit sad when we left. Watched the latest James Bond movie on DVD because my brother-in-law is a mad Bond fan, and has all the movies in his library. (When he came to NZ a few years ago he watched most of my son’s collection of Bond movies…!)

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 Oxford, which appealed straight away, but it has its own charm – and when we went exploring St John’s College (pretending we were students rather than tourists) we discovered just how pleasant it must be to attend University there. The buildings, dating from the late 17^th century, are certainly very pleasing to look at, and have been built to delight the eye. We didn’t explore a lot more (apart from a wonderful bookshop and the market) because it was getting colder and colder and a chilling drizzle was starting.

It's also a bit strange wandering around a town that has an area called Jesus.

And so back to Attleborough, by which time a cold that’s been hassling me for a couple of days decided to get itself into full gear.

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

Another day in London. We met up with an old friend, Cathy, and had lunch with her, then walked down the road to the Science Museum and checked it out. It’s a massive place - five storeys - and full of quite remarkable things. Unfortunately, like so many of these places, you can’t take it all in at one go, and it gets tiring trying to absorb all the info and exhibits. There are lots of hands-on items, and both the adults and kids were having fun with these.
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.

Back to London again

We travelled to London today, partly to box up the extra stuff we’re sending home separately, and partly to catch up with one or two people (and London itself) who we won’t see again for a while. And thirdly, to check out with Korean Air as to whether we could alter the dates for our return. We’ve decided we want to come back a bit sooner. Korean Air was very helpful, and will do the alteration for free! So we’re going to leave England on the 26th November, rather than the 2nd of December.
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.

All quiet on the East Anglia front

We went back to Sheringham yesterday. Sheringham, as you might remember, is Celia’s other ‘home.’ On the way we called in at Gresham Church where her parents are buried, along with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. We’d been there once before, back at the beginning of our English stay. Yet again we forgot to take the camera - or rather I did. It’s in my man bag which I haven’t been using much since we got back to England.
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.

Snooze level

Another quiet day. Virtually all of interest we’ve done is book ourselves a room in South Ruislip and go and see one of Celia’s brothers.

We’re going up to London on Friday for three nights for two reasons. One is to say goodbye to a couple of our friends, and the other is to drop off a pile of stuff at a removal company that’s being sent home separately. One of my daughters works for the NZ branch of this company and has arranged for our excess stuff to go at a super cheap rate. So yesterday we sorted through the books we’ve bought and the other items, and the clothes, and organised what we’d send that way and what we’d take with us. Hopefully everything we want to send separately can go. If not, we’ll have to do a bit of a rethink.

A little shock

This morning we went into Norwich to check out the mobile connect, which you may remember suddenly stopped working in Switzerland. We’d been a bit concerned at the time that maybe it was chewing through the costs, and that we’d get a large bill, so I was also rather screwing up my courage in terms of how much it was going to cost. I hadn’t been able to get Vodafone to respond by cellphone or email to my request for assistance in this area while we were in Europe.

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 Barcelona for a euro an hour!

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 Norwich this morning to get a replacement for it, but had forgotten all about it in the stress of the moment…

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?

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 England before we go home. That’s okay, we have all these friendly relatives here who look after us, so we can’t complain!

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.

More details about paddling

The apartment we’ve moved into isn’t quite up to the standard of the previous one, even though by all accounts it’s more luxurious. There’s a lack of kitchen utensils, for instance; a lack of dinner plates (Celia reckons they’re back at the other place and the rest of the set is here); and various other small things that add up to it not being quite what we first thought. That’s okay; we were much better off in the other apartment for the week.
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's wife paddles

Celia sampling the not too cold water of the Mediterranean, in a Valencia beach.

The NZ tourist paddles

Mike paddling in the Mediterranean. Notice the rolled up trouser legs, the man bag, and another bag as well containing books to read and various odds and ends.

Quality end to the European holiday

Today is a public holiday - All Saints - so things are fairly quiet out on the street, though they weren’t during the night when lots of young people were out and about yahooing and generally waking up old people in the middle of the night. Anyway, we didn’t have to get up quite so early this morning, even though we shifted out of the apartment.

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 decided to go to Alacante today and use up at least some of the remaining money on our Eurail Pass. This meant getting up at 5.45 in order to catch a train at 7 am. (This was Celia’s idea, not mine.) We managed this task, although for some reason (I think I’d eaten too many grapes in one go) I had to get up during the night at least three times, and I had the most incredible dreams which didn’t make me feel as though I’d slept well at all. In fact I actually went to sleep on the train for a half an hour, something I rarely do.
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.