An arty morning

For the first time since we’ve been in Europe, Celia went in one direction this morning and I went in another. We arranged to be home by three o’clock. I had the cellphone, and Celia had the number (and the street address). It felt quite strange, as we’ve hardly been apart for more than half an hour since we arrived in Hamburg at the beginning of the month.
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

Tonight, went back to try and find the jersey I’d left behind today. Found the café, which was an achievement in itself, as there’s a café/bar about every ten metres in Valencia (and probably in most Spanish cities). No joy. My miming and pulling at the other jersey I had on brought some recognition of what had happened, but no jersey. I think what the woman probably said in Spanish was: You are a fool and only a fool leaves his jersey behind. Go! The only reason I was carrying one was because it was chilly again when I set out this morning. By the time I’d got up the street the sun was well and truly hot, and I didn’t need the jersey for the rest of the trip. In spite of that most Valencians were wearing coats and scarves, even though the temperature, according to the sign in the underground train, was 20 degrees.
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.

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.

Need to correct a recent post

The riverbed in Valencia, the one that’s dry, is now called the Gardens of Turia, Turia being the river’s name. It has been diverted to the south of the city in a specially made canal and the great flood that brought this about happened only in 1957 not 1907. Besides the playing fields we saw there are actual gardens, and at the other end from where we’re staying the Science Museum, the something else museum and the Aquarium (about which more later) are all built on the former river.

Quiet Sunday in Valencia

In spite of Celia’s sore foot, we went to High Mass at the Cathedral this morning. Mass seems to happen every hour on the hour there, as well as next door (literally) at the Basilica! Not that the Cathedral was packed, but there were half a dozen priests saying Mass together. It’s the second time we’ve gone to Mass since we’ve been away: in Florence we went to one in an ancient church in the old city. Again it wasn’t far from where we lived. On both occasions I can truly say I had no idea what the priest was preaching about!
Came back from there and decided to get out of the apartment anyway, even though Mrs’ foot was sore. Walked up over what used to be the river. I don’t know quite what happened, but there are notices locally about the Great Flood of 1907 (if I’ve got my facts right) when the historic city (where we’re staying) was flooded badly. The river bed is very wide, so for it to have flooded must have been a considerable achievement.
Equally, for it to be totally dry, as it now is, is another considerable achievement. Again, I don’t know why this is, but presumably any water that used to go through there is now diverted somewhere else. This afternoon the area closest to us was being used as a parade ground for umpteen soccer teams (all dressed in the most colourful uniforms) and when we returned several teams were still playing games. The whole river bed near here at least is one large community recreation area.
We finally discovered, after four days in Valencia, that the Metro here is not an underground train, but the tram system. The trams are very new and tidy, and we caught one down to the beach where we sat and did very little for quite a long time. It was a lovely afternoon, and people were out in full force. That actually meant little, because the beach is so vast, and the promenade area is wide and long, that you didn’t feel crowded in the least.
We watched half a dozen people playing volleyball for a long time, and then later saw a man and a woman flying kites in tandem. They both had the same model kite, one that has two strings attached to it. The strings are connected to a handle that the flyer uses, and because of the shape, the kite can be manipulated very readily. The man was ‘leading’ with his kite, and where he led, the woman would aim to follow with her kite. I think he was coaching her in some way, but my Spanish is a little limited. Anyway, it was a lovely sight to see these two kites echoing each other around the air space.
And so home to the apartment, where we snoozed for an hour or two (it’s daylight saving changeover here today) and then Celia whipped up a perfectly decent meal from the next to nothing we had in the fridge.

The picture is of the Cathedral; just to its left is the Basilica (not shown). Celia missed the step just near the door.

A bit of a rethink

We’d thought that Celia’s foot had reverted to her old problem from a couple of years ago, but we’re now wondering if it’s not a reaction to when she was walking across the Cathedral Square (which is just a couple of blocks from our apartment) and missed seeing a step down at one point. She jarred herself badly and it may be that her foot is reacting to the mishap. In a way that would be better than if the heel thing had started up again. In a way.
Anyway, it’s caused up to rethink our options, and so it may be a good thing that we couldn’t book Madrid to Paris yesterday. We’ve decided to go back to England the day after Valencia week rather than heading up into France. Our concern was that with her foot being so sore to walk on, another series of walks with the full rucksack wouldn’t help things to heal. So we got on the Net this morning and rearranged our flight. It cost us a bit more, but it’s better that she gets ‘home’ to Attleborough as soon as practical, where at least she may be able to talk to a doctor who understands English.
Unfortunately it means we might not be making the fullest use of our Eurail Pass, but again, her health comes before that as a consideration. Our ‘landlord’ here in Valencia has kindly said we can go to another one of his apartments for the extra day at the same price as we’re paying here. It’s only five minutes away, so it shouldn’t be too much of a shift!

Frustrating Day

We’ve had a rather frustrating day today, though not entirely. You can read about the good bit on my other blog.
We sat down to plan what we’re doing next this morning. We know already that we’re flying home from Lyons in France on the 7th November, but what we were going to do in the week before that hadn’t been organised. In the end, after some debate, we decided to go overnight from Madrid to Paris on the 3rd. Tried to book online. Complications. Eventually decided we’d go down to the Railway Station and book there. This was after lunch, and we arrived at the station just before 13.58. How do I know it was that time? Because that was the time we picked out a ticket from the booking office and sat down to wait.
We were ticket number 567. The tickets that were being handled when we sat down were in the mid 300s.
It was around four o’clock when we finally got attended to, so you can imagine our disbelief when the guy behind the glass told us we couldn’t book an international ticket because international tickets were only booked on Saturdays until 1 pm. And not at all on Sundays.
Celia berated him a little. To put it mildly. I had to carry her out of the office screaming. We did manage to book a ticket to Madrid for the 1st at least - before she had hysterics.
So that put paid to another day in Valencia. Our intention had been to go to the Market, and then get a tram to the beach. Achieved neither. Worse, Celia’s heel, which hasn’t been playing up since she had a cortisone injection last year suddenly decided to make its presence felt again. We’ve been walking around Valencia mostly, so far. But with her heel playing up we’re not sure how we’ll get from A to B. We got a bus to the show tonight, but we walked back (because it was difficult to find a bus), and her heel didn’t enjoy it.

In Valencia

In Barcelona, as we’ve no doubt mentioned, we were on the fifth floor - officially the fourth floor, since the Spanish call what we call the first floor the E floor (don’t ask me what the E stands for) - but anyway, there were 83 steps up to our apartment. We know this for a fact because Celia counted them every time - up and down.
In Valencia, which strikes me as a very pretty city, with real style - and rather more aggressive traffic than Barcelona - we have an apartment with around 40 steps. 40 steps are a lot less than 83, believe it or not, and Celia has not counted them every time. Once was enough.
The other difference, however, is that we have the whole apartment to ourselves. Unlike our place in Barcelona, which was part of a system called The Loft, where unused apartments were rented out to as many people as they could get into them, (and where they must have made well over 200 euros a night, and still couldn’t supply toilet paper), here in Valencia, the owner of this apartment has rented out the whole place to us (two bedrooms, laundry, bathroom, kitchen, dining-cum-living room) for 75 euros a night. Not only do we have privacy, but it’s a lot less noisy (and far fewer steps - did I mention that?)
Moreover, it’s well-decorated with a modern painting over on one wall (looks as though it’s an original, too), a large hanging version of Da Vinci’s man in a circle (or is it two men in a circle - or one man with four arms and four legs?), a really comfortable couch, an equally comfortable armchair (in which somebody is currently asleep), good beds that neither squeak nor roll nor anything else that beds shouldn’t do, an equipped kitchen (it has a toaster! and an electric kettle!! and much more), a television and a DVD player - and about a dozen DVDs. In English. (We watched Finding Neverland again last night.) On the walls are other decorations: Spanish decorated plates, or little round ceramic sculptures; there are plenty of standard lamps and a general air of comfort. And a washing machine. Wow! No more laundrettes for a bit.
So pleased with the place was Celia that she remarked: the pièce de résistance (she lapses into French on special occasions) would be if the laptop could get on the Internet here. And it does! We’re using some apparently free WiFi without difficulty. Which means we’ve spoken to most of our kids today again, via Skype.
Our intention in Valencia is to rest. Which is why we’re here for a week. We’ll take a couple of trips out of town on the train (we’re getting to the point where we’ve got to use some of them up) but in general we’re not going to push ourselves. In spite of being on holiday, we’re actually tired…
Incidentally, when we were in Rome, we booked into an expensive hotel thinking that for once we'd treat ourselves. It proved to be very ordinary: a room with a bed and an en suite. And seven towels in the en suite. It cost us an unbelievable 140 euros a night. Yet here in Valencia we have a whole apartment for 75 a night. It's hard to get a balance, that's for sure.


Incidentally, I now discover that the da Vinci isn't called a couple of blokes in a circle, but The Vetruvian Man. There, isn't the Internet just wonderful for educating us?

Train joys

As I said in another post, there has been some interruption to the train services - ours particularly, so that when we got to Sants this morning we found we had to reserve a seat, like it or not. We sat waiting for some time and then suddenly everything was go: officials galore gathering up the passengers and, with signs, walking them outside to a waiting bus. Where we waited. Finally, at eleven, we took off. Knowing that there’d been some interruption, we weren’t too worried as we thought the bus would just drop us off at the nearest connecting station. It did. An hour and a half later - at Tarragona. By that time everyone on the bus was sweating profusely as the heating was one (it is autumn in Spain, after all) and the air conditioning wasn’t. With great relief we all abandoned the bus, and are now all on our way to Valencia (and several points in between), forty minutes late, but at least there’s room to move - and there’s a movie (Orlando Bloom in Spanish - it’s something we’ve seen before [Elizabethtown] and it isn’t very good), and the train has a decent toilet and a restaurant car with reasonable prices.

What a night!

Our room in the apartment in Barcelona is one of five bedrooms and mostly they’ve been fully occupied since we’ve been here. And equally most of the occupants have been pleasant and fairly quiet, from a Russian woman and her six-year old daughter, and their adult lady friend (the child’s former kindergarten teacher), to the Australian couple and a Japanese pair. But last night, after the Aussies and us had gone to bed (the Japanese were still out and the others had gone back to Holland), we were awakened at around one in the morning by the most outrageous yahooing and banging and crashing you can imagine. As it is there are notices everywhere about the other tenants of the building being likely to call the noise police (fine 400 euros), but whoever these two guys were, they couldn’t have cared less. Celia got up at one point and told them to Shut Up!, and briefly they did, but the shouting and noise carried on, along with what sounded like boots being dropped on the floor continually. They’d left the apartment door open (another no no) and when they went to their room there was screaming and yelling like I’ve never heard. Only God and them knows what was going on.
Finally silence.
And then the Japanese arrived at two…! The lift well, which was outside our window, amplified all sound (including that of the person in another apartment whose tv went from 9.30 am to 11 pm), so the Japanese footsteps up the 83 stairs, and their voices sounded quite clearly - along with the stair light being switched on. The gave the apartment door their usual crash shut, and then wandered around doing their ablutions and what have you with no great concern for the hour.
This morning we are shattered.

Getting Lost in Barcelona

Our intention today was to go and see the Picasso Museum. Unfortunately a couple of days ago we lost the index booklet that went with our map, and so it proved to be a bit of an issue trying to find the street. Finally I saw on the map that Montcada was served by a Metro station and a bus. But when we got to the Metro station itself there was no sign of Montcada. So we deduced that the bus 96 must take us to it. Twenty minutes later we arrived at a outskirts suburb called Montcada. Celia didn´t want to get off there as it looked as though we might be in the middle of nowhere. And there was no sign of any museum - she said it was unlikely that it would be way out there anyway.
So in the end we gave up on Picasso.
We came back into La Rambla via the Metro planning on walking quietly along the seafront. However, I needed a loo (what´s new?) and there was a boat sitting there waiting to go for a tour round the harbour and beach.....
So on we got, into the loo I went, and we spent an hour and a half on the sea. It was very pleasant actually, although the water was quite rough outside the harbour basin (one woman was sick on the way back). Anyway, we saw Barcelona from the water....
When we got back to shore, we decided to have a cuppa from our faithful flask (the one we bought in Hamburg after our English one broke only a couple of weeks after we bought it. And because we weren´t sure where the train station is in Barcelona, we decided to have a recce and find it, so as to save ourselves hassle tomorrow, when we leave for Valencia.
It was just as well we did. The station at Arc de Triomphe (sorry, can´t remember how the Spaniards spell it) someone had told us served the trains doesn´t. There´s only a very large bus station there. We got back on the Metro and headed for the station called Espana, where the real train station is.
After getting on a suburban train instead of the Metro, and going three or so long stops before we realised something was drastically wrong (none of the stations were named on our Metro map), we got off and went back to where we started - almost. We were able to save one train stop by getting out a stop early. Eventually we found the Metro to Espana only to arrive there and be told that the train is kaput (as one non-English-speaking official told us). It turns out that the line is ´broken´ as another official charmingly put it, and we could either get a bus from Espana to Sants Estacio or get the Metro to it.
I´d read something to this effect in the Metro newspaper, one of the freebie papers that turn up on the underground, but hadn´t quite been able to figure out from the Spanish when the train was going to be kaput. I´m still not sure how long, but hopefully, when we go to Sants Estacio tomorrow, we´ll be able to get the mainline train to Valencia without difficulty. If not, we´re in trouble!

More on Parc Guell

The gatehouse is out of a fairy tale; the house opposite is a like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel - and has an enormous turret on top. A sweeping balcony further up the hill gives a wonderful view of the city, and is decorated with mosaics in every colour. And of course the edge is wave-like. Further up the hill again is a kind of walk made from stone pillars. But being designed by Gaudi, they’re made from stones of all shapes sitting on each other, and seemingly barely holding together.
The other house that was completed is slightly more ‘normal’ but only slightly. There is a long stone corridor with more of Gaudi’s leaning columns - and built onto these are all sorts of statues, some very defined, some only just creeping out of the rock. Across from there is the area beneath the balcony (when I say balcony, I’m talking about something that’s at least half an acre), in which the usual round columns you’d see in most places appear - but they’re everywhere. And between them, on the ceiling, are large plates of mosaics, not set into the ceiling but hanging from it.
The man must have had a wonderful sense of humour as well as design. Though how he persuaded some people to take up his ideas is something I’d like to know! Maybe the Spaniards are more open to quirkiness than other people.

Sacreda Familia

Yesterday we got to Sacreda Familia (Holy Family) rather late, so didn’t go in. It’s Barcelona’s Cathedral, and is still being finished - after more than a hundred years! This isn’t for want of trying - there may have been some patches of inactivity since it was begun in the 1880s, such as during the Spanish Civil War (when the Cathedral was damaged) but in general it’s been on the go since day one.
It was the dream of a Barcelona bookseller, but I don’t suppose he ever dreamt he’d get what is now in existence. The first architect got as far as building the crypt area, which is substantial in itself, and now houses a museum to the second architect, Gaudi, who between other projects made it his life’s work to design the most remarkable cathedral in Christendom. He sometimes lived in the Cathedral; he had his workshop there at times, and he’s buried there. He’s so honoured that I’m sure most Barcelonians know his name. And he deserves all the honour heaped on him. Somehow he managed to create a monument to God, to Christ (and Mary) and to creation that is so strange and so remarkable that at first you just don’t know what to make of it.
Our first view of it, from across the street, made us wonder what the heck the place actually was. Because it’s still being built, there are cranes everywhere, and scaffolding. Several of the twenty odd towers that will eventually exist are there, and some of them have been there for more than a century. But your first impression of the building is of towers that are full of strange holes, and of a surface that’s so decorated you can’t grasp anything.
Fortunately, when you get up close you realise what’s going on. The way the surface seems to be sliding off itself, like icing melting on a cake, isn’t the case at all: the surface is covered with natural things such as plants and animals. Sculptured vines and creepers cover the building; there are dozens of sculptures of animals and people: stories from the Bible, and liturgical symbols. Each spire has a different top, and nothing is repeated anywhere. At present the tallest tower is 120 metres; in due course the one that focuses on Christ will be 170 metres, making the Cathedral not only the tallest building in Barcelona, but also the tallest church in the world.
Gaudi said: to be original go back to the Origin. And he has done. He continually studied plants and animals to see how things were structured, and used the designs in his buildings. (Not just the Cathedral but also all of his other architectural pursuits.) This created enormous problems for his sculptors, his engineers, his stonemasons, and everyone else connected with the building. But so loyal were they to Gaudi, and to his vision, that they overcome the problems again and again. Gaudi himself made intricate models of the most difficult parts of the structure, and many of these are on display in the museum in the crypt. Unfortunately most of his drawings and plans were destroyed in the Civil War, but subsequent architects and others have worked hard to discover exactly what he intended and to make sure his intentions are carried out.
The inside of the cathedral is at present full of scaffolding, but some areas are complete. In due course all the windows will have stained glass in them, but for now only two of these are finished, and they are both kaleidoscopes of colour. The inner columns weave up to the ceiling area like great plant stalks. None of them are simply round: they have been built so that they almost spiral upwards. In the ceiling itself, the stone is shaped like flowers and leaves, and these hang out over the columns. The balcony, which is high above the floor, and goes along both sides of the building, will hold 1200 to 1500 singers one day - when the place is complete. It’s shaped in a great wave, weaving in and out. The staircases are spiral, and you can already climb far up to the top of what’s completed - or take a lift. Celia reckoned Health and Safety would have something to say about thousands of tourists coming into a building site - which is what it is. Most of the floor is covered with moulds, and great pieces of stone, and building materials.
Outside what is currently the front entrance, are some of Gaudi’s famous leaning columns. These start out some distance from the wall, and fall back onto it, as it were. And over the doors are sculptures of the fourteen stations of the Cross. They’re not in the usual order - Christ naked on the cross is at the centre - but they wonderfully vivid, and striking.
As you can see, the place made quite an impression on us. And then we got a bus to Parc Guell, which was originally intended to be a place where sixty of Gaudi’s designed houses would be built. In the end only two (and a gatehouse) were finished. It’s now been turned into a park for the public, and has more of his almost outrageous designs scattered about. Perhaps more on those in the next post.

In Barcelona

We weren’t sure how far it was from the ferry to the place where we had to get the key for our ‘loft’ in Barcelona, but a policeman at the port area said La Rambla, the street we were looking for initially, was only ‘past the monument.’ Okay, we thought, we’ll walk to the monument. And then we walked up La Rambla (Barcelona’s most famous street) and then, when we were going to catch a bus to Caller de Portaferrisa, which runs off La Rambla, a woman told us it wasn’t worth getting the bus; only five minutes’ walk. So we walked some more - with our rucksacks on our backs and our heavy smaller backpacks in front. And finally we found Portaferrisa, and then had trouble finding the little lane called Caller de Roca, for which we’d been given precise instructions. It was so little that we missed it altogether. Finally found the office for the people who run the ‘Loft’ system, and then we had to walk for at least another five minutes (rucksacks, backpacks, sore feet) with one of the staff to the apartment we would be sharing with whoever else was staying there. (The Loft is a group that rents out unused loft space - or areas high up in buildings - maintains them and offers them at very cheap rentals.)
Finally got there (rucksacks, backpacks, sore feet and sore backs) and found that we had to climb five flights of stairs! The lift doesn’t work anymore.
At least here we have a kitchen to cook our own meals, and though we’re sharing bathrooms, there are two of them. We had our first ‘home-cooked’ meal since we left Switzerland, and used some Mexican sauce which turned out to be very hot (though not as hot as the next level up apparently).
Anyway, Barcelona seems a pleasant place: the traffic isn’t nearly as frantic as in the Italian cities, and people actually stop at pedestrian crossings. In Italy it’s a challenge as to whether they will. (The motor scooters are the worst culprits for trying to run you down.) Even the Metro doesn’t seem as crowded - though we got literally shoved onto the train tonight by an enthusiastic feller, who laughed at our surprise - along with his friend. You couldn’t get mad at him.
La Rambla is a long pedestrian street with single-lane traffic up either side. There are buskers all over, especially those ones who act as statues, and it’s full of life even late in the evening. Unfortunately, the McDonald’s doesn’t sell milkshakes, which is the only disturbing thing we’ve discovered about Barcelona so far.
The place we’re staying in is only a few minutes from La Rambla, and there are little shops everywhere, plus clothes hanging from the balconies, tv aerials covering the roofs, dogs barking, people relaxed and pleasant (apart from a bit of fisticuffs we saw about to happen this morning), and at least two internet shops within spitting distance. On the ferry we’d had to pay 7.50 for half an hour for the privilege of using their internet; in the street near here it’s one euro an hour.
And this morning, as I was going to pay the bill for the room we’ve got, I got caught up in the making of a movie. A man ran out of a building and handed a bag to a guy on a motor scooter. This fellow had horns on his helmet (!) As he drove off, another scooter with a driver and a cameraman raced behind him. There were the usual twenty or thirty crew scattered about, and one person who looked like an actor but didn’t actually do anything. I might have been in the shot of the scooter taking off, but they looked as though they were going to shoot it again, so I might not get into a Spanish movie after all.

On the Ferry

21st Oct, 2007
I’m writing this on the Ferry from Civitavecchia (pronounced, roughly, Chiv-ee-ta-veck-ee-ah) to Barcelona. We left over an hour late last night, so it doesn’t look as though we’re going to get into Barcelona (which apparently is spelt, Barcellona, in Spain) until at least an hour late, and maybe longer.
We got to the ferry terminal much too early, being a bit concerned in case we missed the thing. As it was, we sat around from two to six waiting. And reading - more of Ian Rankin. Stood out in the cold waiting to go on board because Celia was concerned that the machine we had to go past might notice that she had knives in her pack - and so we were trying to avoid it! In fact, we didn’t put our luggage through there at all in the end. Maybe they don’t use it anymore.
When we finally got on board we found that the cabin is more than adequate for anyone’s needs: a shower and a toilet included, and bunks and a little couch, and a small desk with a chair. Only about seven foot across, but surprisingly well-designed. We opted for the buffet meal because the ‘proper’ restaurant was expensive. Perhaps we should have gone with the expense: the buffet food was lukewarm, and the beef stew was full of gristle. Very disappointing, and not that cheap for what it was. Breakfast this morning wasn’t much better: very little choice - the only cereal was cornflakes. Never mind, it’s fun being on the boat with hundreds of Italians all doing their usual shouting at each other, and with East Europeans who’ve been shopping in Italy and are bringing all their goodies home.
I didn’t find it easy to sleep, though Celia dropped off while listening to one of her audio books around nine and didn’t get out of bed again until eight this morning. The boat rocks, of course, but that’s no big deal. But when you’re lying in bed you’re much more aware of noises and movement. It shudders continually, but like it’s breathing; so there’s a space and then a shudder, a space and shudder and so on. And every so often it hits a solid rock of a wave, and it sounds like one of the articulated lorries in the hold has come loose and gone for a wander. After this crashing down below had gone on for quite a while this morning, I went and talked to the Purser, and an Italian-speaking guy came round to explain, not long after, that it was the ‘machina’ that was making the noise. It still sounds as though it’s trying to drive a hole in the side of the hold, however!

Some notes about Rome

Rome has been interesting, but because our hotel has been so far away from the tourist areas, we’ve had to do a lot of travelling. It’s cheap enough to do so, because the three day tickets are very reasonable and you can go on the Metro too, but the buses leave something to be desired. They have very few seats (so more people can cram onto them) and with everyone hanging on - and sometimes almost falling over - it’s quite an experience in human contact! The trams seem to have gone from the Roman streets - Celia says it was trams we used last time. The streets aren’t really built for vehicles: rattling over the cobblestones in a bus is bone-wrenching and this morning I couldn’t get words out to Celia because my teeth rattling around in my mouth.
Italian is a language I think I’d get tired of soonish: the way the words are overloaded with vowel sounds gets a bit tedious. German, by comparison, was actually a lot more varied on the ear. And the Italians, some of them, race through the words at a speed that’s quite phenomenal - again it must be something to do with the excess of vowels. It produces a kind of sing-song effect after a while. Furthermore, they all talk at full bore - there’s no kind of quietness about their conversation. Everything has to be done as though the whole world wanted to hear.
ATM machines in Germany are called Geldautomats. In Italy they’re Bancomats. Geld of course is the word for money in German - and has links with our ‘gold.’ Banco is the Italian ‘bank.’ Occasionally you come across a Postomat in Italy; the Post Office has its own system, seemingly.

When in Rome - do the laundry!

Yesterday [now three days ago] was another laundrette day. Don’t know why we’d run out of clothes so quickly again, but it was very necessary. Maybe we’ve left some behind somewhere. Anyway, we also supermarketed, which gave Celia a bit of a rush. In the afternoon we headed into the old part of town again, specifically to the Colosseum. Got ourselves conned into having our pictures taken with a couple of ‘Roman guards’ who then demanded ten euros for the privilege. Celia gave them two euros and they said she was stingy. The Colosseum, like much of the area in the old Roman forum, is being restored. Some of it looks quite new, in fact. Many of the old columns in the forum have been put back together, jigsaw fashion, and there’s a huge amount of restoration going on. I don’t know that we walked through this area last time we were in Rome, but it’s certainly getting a lot of attention.
As we came out of the forum we discovered the Paul Gauguin exhibition that we’d read about. It was being held in the back of a building which we’d passed several times and hadn’t been able to name. Turns out it’s the main Art Gallery - at least as far as I understand.
The Gauguin, interestingly enough, didn’t have many of his South Sea Islands paintings, which are mostly what I’ve known him for. But it did have a wide range of his pictures overall, including a lot of his early work, which is wonderfully coloured, and a delight to the eye. To the end he remained a superb colourist, and seeing these early works as well has confirmed he’s an artist I really enjoy. His life, like so many of the artists of his time, was a muddle, and the political statements that the write-ups on him in the exhibition claim he was making are not that obvious - to my eye, anyway.
And talking of painting: we made our way to the Piazza del Popolo towards evening (after having had an excellent and economic meal at the Railway Station). Celia wanted to go there because it was close to the place we stayed at last time we were here. But neither of us could remember exactly where we had stayed, unfortunately. Anyway, the Piazza, when we got there, didn’t look at all familiar (!) and neither did the surrounding streets. But halfway along the Corso we came across this boy, who couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16, and he was painting with spray cans. He’d flip each can out of the box, give it a twist and a shake (rather like those guys in bars who throw cocktails around to mix them - and show off), and then set to with complete understanding of what he was doing to produce a painting. The whole thing was performance art, really, because it was done at great speed, with utter confidence, using the cans, the hands, pieces of cardboard torn on the spot, an old pie dish (for part of a circle), mixes of colour done with ease, and a total concentration that was a bit scary for someone of his age. At the end of it he sold the painting on the spot to someone for ten euros (!) He was working by the light of the shop next door, and at one point someone came out and said he needed to move along because the crowd watching him was blocking the shop doorway. So he just upped his equipment and moved a metre further, and then got back onto the job. There was another painter doing something similar further along the road - actually working almost in the dark - but he none of the panache of the boy.

Tripping around Roma on the bus

Turns out that the 881 goes from outside the door of the hotel to St Peter's and Vatican City. Suddenly we turned a corner and there was the famous dome and colonnade. Still as extraordinary as ever, even though it's a place we've been to before. We followed the crowd in one of the queues and discovered that the bag Celia was carrying - with her Swiss army knife and another knife - had to go through a metal detector. For some reason it went through without the guards paying the slightest attention, and so we were able to park it in 'left luggage' and go inside without carrying it.

It turned out that we were in the queue that was heading for the crypt area, where Popes are buried. Well, we hadn't been there before, so we thought we'd give it a turn and catch up on the Basilica itself later. It wasn't the most inspiring place - except for those Catholics wanting to pray in front of the tomb of Pope John Paul II - and we trundled along with the crowd, climbed some stairs at the end, not quite knowing where we were going, and suddenly: we were inside the Basilica itself, with that awe-inspiring altar of four spiralling columns made of black marble.

Celia says we didn't get inside the Basilica when we were here in 1974 because there was a Mass being celebrated. I can't particularly remember. I know we saw the then Pope from a distance at one point on that occasion; he was being carried around on his throne high above the crowd. Anyway, the Basilica is fantastic, as you'd expect. This is one of the treasure houses of Catholicism after all. It's full of wonderful statuary and paintings and design. And then there is an actual treasure museum which we visited. Seemingly these particular treasures have been ransacked more than once and have had to be re-found again. Strangely enough, one of the most impressive items in the collection is very new: Pope John Paul II's vestments. They are so richly brocaded and designed that you just stop and wonder with delight.

We spent quite a long time at St Peter's all in all, and didn't actually get round to having lunch till five o'clock! (We'd stoked up on breakfast in the morning, anyway.) Found a restaurant near one of the bridges over the Tiber where the food was at our sort of price. Celia had a very nice spaghetti cabonera and I had a beef dish. Plus we shared a salad. Very tasty meal, slightly offset by the fact that what they then charged for the bottle of water and the bread was exorbitant.

Celia's idea of fun is to jump on a bus and see where it goes. She's full of confidence because we have a bus route map. So we got on a 64 and it took us through some of the touristy areas to the main station, where we discovered a bookshop with a whole area devoted to English novels, and yet another McDonald's. The latter have infested Europe like flies - but their milkshakes are rather refreshing, even though in Italy they only seem to have to flavours available: strawberry and chocolate. And their milkshakes are smaller than the ones McDonald's provide in Germany, where you get a choice of large or small.

Sleeping in Rome

Neither of us slept well last night, so we finished up having breakfast in the hotel this morning (part of the package, for once) and going back to bed for a snooze. It had been increasingly humid during the day, and stuffy during the night. Celia even got up at one point and leaned out the window to get some cool air. We may just have to get used to it: Barcelona, our next stop, probably won’t be any cooler. Seems there’s been very little rain in Italy generally over the last while, although it rained during the night a little. The riverbeds throughout Italy - the ones we’ve seen - are very dry.
After we’d booked this hotel, which, for a change, was supposed to be an improvement over some of the places we’ve stayed, we realised that it was quite some distance from the centre of things. So the night before last we’d sat down with a Roma timetable and map and worked out how we would get here. Mumma mia! what a trip!
We would get on the Metro at the Roma Termini (where our train would come into), travel some eight or nine stops to Cornelia, hop on the bus to Villa Cartegna, get off, get on an 881 bus and come to the hotel. The actuality was somewhat different: we got the Metro part right, sweating all the way, got onto the bus (the 791) to Villa Cartegna, with the help of some non-English speaking people (!), got off at the right stop, and then proceeded to go in the wrong direction on the 881. Saw the street number of the hotel as we passed by, got off, had a conversation with a woman who only spoke Italian as to where we should be going - lontano (a long way) - had another conversation with a rather blunt woman in a street front office who told me it was Pisana, not Pasana, as I was saying it, but who at least told me that if we went the way we were going we would land back up in San Pietro (a Metro station we’d already been through). Went back to the bus stop, smiled at the old lady who’d told us lontano, and discovered that it really was a long way to Via Pisana. But another older woman on the bus knew the hotel, and helped us arrive at it - in due course.
When the Italians are smiling and friendly, they’re lovely. When they don’t want to know, they seem very cold. Fortunately there are plenty of friendly ones!
Getting a meal last night proved to be a bit of a mission too, as there are no restaurants around our area - in fact, it’s a bit of a semi-industrial area mixed with residential. (Which isn’t uncommon in Europe.) We got on the 881 one again, went back to Villa Carpegna, because it had seemed that there was more life up there, and found that while there were some restaurants, they weren’t the most economic. In the end settled for a ‘first course’ of pasta each, which was plenty. The restaurant was very busy, the food was fine, we had a quattro litre of red wine between us (which is also plenty) and came home on the famous 881 (in the right direction) and tried to sleep.

Travelling to Rome

17 October 2007
Travelling to Rome, after a quick detour to Pisa, to see the famous leaning thingee. We had to get a bus to it, and it does lean fairly dramatically (the thingee, not the bus - though that was pretty rough as well). I wouldn’t trust getting on it, though people were climbing to the top quite happily. The cathedral it’s alongside is also leaning a bit, I think, though Celia wasn’t convinced.
Pisa was very hot, and it’s got hotter since. We’re travelling down the coast some of the time, though at present we’ve lost sight of it. It’s nice to be near some sea again.
My post about yesterday’s sightseeing was a bit short, and during the early hours I was thinking what else I should say, but, as though things do, they’ve now dissipated. I meant to explain what a double recorder was: seemingly it’s something you can blow two notes on at once, as it not only has two mouthpieces (very close together) but also the note holes are separated into two halves. Be interesting to have a go on. There were richly endowed early keyboards, one with some thousand jewels embedded into its surface. The serpent I spoke of yesterday is a serpent-shaped horn, seldom used in orchestras or bands these days, but reasonably popular in its brief heyday. There were some other pseudo-serpents: instruments that looked playable but were probably just for use in a theatre performance. One violin had an absolute encrustation of carving on its underside; would have been quite uncomfortable to hold, I think. It was sitting alongside a Stradivarius, that doyen of violins. There was an upright piano - literally. The keyboard was still in the same position as usual, but the strings were vertical, as they are in modern uprights. However, the difference was that these strings were arranged in the way a grand’s strings are.
The Palazzo Vecchio, apart from what I said about it yesterday, has room after room upstairs with decorated ceilings. I don’t mean a pattern painted on, but umpteen paintings, some mythic, some religious. The artists must have worked years on the place. It also has many wonderful craft works on display: items that are for practical use but have been adorned by men (perhaps women) with an artistic nature, and the results are just wonderful. Superbly fine carving in bone with details so minute you wonder how they managed to avoid damaging the work. It was the same with Michaelangelo’s David: one misstep in the making, and this enormous work would have had to have been abandoned. The actual statue is twice human size, I’d gauge, and it stands on a plinth that’s about human size again. So it towers above you. You can’t see some of the detail, but we were looking at a book after we’d viewed the statue, and the eyes are done in such a way that they appear to be looking at something. They’re not just blank, in other words. The strap of his sling is pitted, as though it was some material. The details of the limbs are extraordinary (though of course Michaelangelo wasn’t the only master of such details); but there is a sense of human flesh under the skin, and there are even veins showing in places.
We also saw statues by Benvenuto Cellini yesterday - he was virtually Michaelangelo’s equal in his ability to work with stone, and various other wonderful artists whose names didn’t mean so much to me.

Just a quick note

As I'm running out of time in the Internet shop. By the way, Italian keyboards have the ' up the top, the @ as a third option on a key in the middle row, and various other quirks. Makes typing interesting.
We spent the day visiting galleries. Missed out on the Uffizi, unfortunately, because there was a huge queue and we weren't sure how long the other galleries were open. But managed to get into the Palazzo Vecchio, the Galleria Academia (where the 'real' David statue is - and what a wonderful piece of work it is) and the Bargello, which also has some Michaelangelo work.
David is outstanding. We stood and looked at it for ages, and nothing else in the gallery comes near to it. Though there was an intriguing and quite unrelated exhibition of old and odd musical instruments there too - double recorders, for instance. And a serpent (you'll have to look it up!)
The cinquecentro gallery (not the quatrocentro, as I originally had here!) in the Palazzo Vecchio is wonderful, but there was a conference going on in half of it, so we couldn't get up close to some of the statues. Nevertheless (in spite of Celia counting all the steps we climbed) it was well worth a visit.
Left the hotel at 8.50, walked to the Uffizi, where we decided that spending an hour in a queue wasn't the best option at that point, and then spent nearly an hour trying to get in to see David. Very tiring day, but mentally and aestethically very stimulating. Though of course we had to visit a supermarket on the way back to make it complete! (And that was around four o'clock, which gives you an idea of how long we spent out gallery-visiting.) Rest day tomorrow, I suspect, when we go to Rome.

Bit more update

Celia's over in the corner reading another Ian Rankin thriller - he's become our writer of the month while we've been on holiday, even though we had to leave behind one of his novels because of the weight (we'd finished it, of course) along with a Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) that I brought with me.
Anyway, today we've been on two city bus tours, and seen a good deal of the place, including Fiesole, the kind of 'other' city that exists near Florence. (It's virtually a suburb these days.) Seemingly the two places have a long and entwined history of conquering and being conquered. I didn't realise Florence was the capital of Italy for a relatively brief period in the 19th century, either.
Fiesole is set up on the hill above Florence. The villas there are surrounded by cypress trees, many of them planted by the British when they fell in love with the place in the 19th century. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried in one of the city's inner cemetaries, along with other British worthies.
We haven't yet got into any of the galleries - some of them were closed today - but that's on our agenda for tomorrow. I thought we'd found Michaelangelo's David, yesterday, but it turned out to be a copy they have in one of the squares here (along with some dozen other famous statues). It's full-sized, and is still a remarkable piece, but in fact the real thing is inside a major gallery here in Florence. We'll track it down tomorrow.
Michaelangelo is Florence's famous son, of course, but he shares fame in the city with Dante, Goldini and a heap of other well-known names. Did someone mention Da Vinci? Think he's well connected with the place too, if I remember rightly, but my brain's gone a bit numb listening to an endless commentary while on the buses.
Part of our day today involved doing the laundry. Things like that shouldn't happen on holiday, but of course there was no way we could carry enough clothes with us not to have to do the laundry at all. Celia sat in the laundrette chatting to a couple of New Zealanders who were there at the same time.
I've bought what she calls a 'man bag' after my wallet loss. It slings around my shoulder and curiously enough it's a lot easier way to carry far more than I could ever carry in my pockets - and it's still relatively compact. Jokes about the ' man bag' have been rife, but I've got big enough shoulders...
Tonight we dined in the Chinese restaurant across from our hotel. Had four and five course meals between us, sharing a good deal. Ended up with fried ice cream. Yup. Ice cream inside a ball of batter. In-ter-est-ing.
Our hotel room has a balcony with shutters on the outside of the window, french windows inside that (made of aluminium), ordinary french windows inside that again, lace curtains, and shutters on the inside over the glass in the inner french windows. Hope you're thoroughly confused. The only doors that actually shut out of that lot are the outside shutters.
There's an antiquated lift that will only hold the two of us (getting inside it with our backpacks was a mission), but it works well. Needs to, as we're on the fifth floor. Our hotel reception is on the second floor (piano in Italian) and another hotel has the floors between. There's a third hotel on the same side of the building somewhere, plus the two or three in the other half.
Italy is certainly different. The bathroom basin doesn't drain for ages, there are bidets everywhere you look (in the bathrooms, I mean - we had one in our bedroom in Milan), all the wall plugs are funny shapes (Switzerland's were worse, with about six holes to a plug), our room overlooks a balcony below, and right into the windows opposite.
But Florence is a delight. After Milan, it's just lovely. And sunny! Eat your heart out, all you poor freezing Dunedinites!

On the Eurostar

14 October 2007

On the Eurostar, going from Bologna to Firenze. We’ve just come from Milan on a train on which we had to pay a reservation charge of eighteen euros. We were told about this when before we got on the train by the guards, and thought perhaps it only applied to first class, so we sat in second class, which was certainly comfortable enough anyway. But the charge applied to second class as well! Worse was to come: the guard on that train told us that we’d need to book on the train to Firenze, so we did - at a cost of thirty euros! This is because it’s the Eurostar apparently. We’re sitting in first class, not even with each other (across the aisle) and it’s not even particularly roomy. Hmm. Not that impressed with the Italian trains. The toilet on the previous one could only be described as grotty: you could see straight down through the toilet onto the tracks beneath! There didn’t seem to be anyway to flush anything (not that that mattered much since it was already dispersed along the line) and the tap wouldn’t work. The two compartments that should have been shut were both hanging open, and I couldn’t find anywhere to put the paper towel. Oh, dear. And we paid an extra eighteen euros for that.

Celia worked out this morning on one of her little machines how much I lost in NZ dollars when I had the wallet stolen. She claimed it was close to $500. Good grief. I’ll have to get a ‘man bag,’ as they’re nicknamed, so that I can keep all the bits close to me. Forgot to say that the pillows in Germany and Switzerland are virtually flat. And square rather than diagonal. Not sure how you’re supposed to use them; Celia folded hers up. Amazingly I’ve been sleeping comfortably on them without doing so. Maybe coming away is making me more flexible after all!

More on Milan

Amongst other things today we wandered down the Corso Buenos Aries, claimed by the Milanese to be the best shopping street in Europe. Well, by day, it looks like one of the more scruffy shopping streets to be honest, but by night (we were back in it tonight) it’s very sparkly and glitzy and certainly everybody and their brother was out. Along with a million cars.
We also went to the Duomo, a wondrous cathedral with its own Metro station and an immense Piazza, While we were there, we watched a Liturgy being conducted by a Cardinal - we think it might have been some sort of Harvest Festival equivalent, but can’t be sure. Anyway it was being relayed onto big screens around the immense church, while the voices of the speakers echoed and boomed. We couldn’t actually ‘attend’ it - they were keeping touristi out, but we watched it for some time, and, because we were handed a booklet with all the text in it, actually spoke along with the congregation - and sang. All in Italian, of course, at which we’re becoming very proficient. (As we did with German!)
Outside the church is a huge kind of 18th/19th century mall - a huge covered-in gallery with shops all down each side, and apartments up above. All of it in wonderful stone, with carvings and paintings. And as you come out the end of that, you run into one of the most famous opera houses in the world: La Scala. I’d completely forgotten it’s in Milan.
After some debate over how to get there - because Celia wanted to go on the buses in preference to the underground (not just because of yesterday’s incident, but to see more) - we found our way to the Castle. What a whopper! It puts most of the castles we’ve seen to shame, though it doesn’t have the antiquity of many of them. It’s as wide as it’s long, and though I would have thought it’s two or three hundred metres each side, Celia seems to think it’s only about one hundred. Not being able to get on the Net I can’t check. It has three moats because there are three walls, the second inside the first and so on. It’s thirty or forty feet high, and the tower at the front rises up way above that again. There are huge turrets on each corner. Inside it has cloister-like walls, and arched windows, and because it’s not made of the grey stone most other castles are made of, but rather a more reddish stone, it’s somehow more imposing. Very impressive, anyway.
By the time we finished with the Castello, it was getting on for half past five or nearly six. Celia wanted to go on a bus to find an area where there were restaurants, but we couldn’t in the end figure out which part of the loop the bus we’d caught to the Castello was on, and so we gave up and got on the Metro. We got out at Lima Station, which turned out to be back on the Corso Buenos Airies again. (We’d earlier found ourselves back on the street with the main police station in it while heading towards the Castello. It goes by the delightful name of Via Fatebenefrattelli.)
After we’d wandered up and down the Corso for nearly an hour we still hadn’t been able to find an actual restaurant. They were all bars, or pizza places. No spaghetti, no ravioli, no nothing - and no Asian or Indian restaurants either. Celia was getting exhausted by this time and proposed coming back to the hotel. We’d check on what was able at the Loreto Station area, and go from there. There was nothing. Not a thing. Even the McDonald’s was back down the Corso!
She couldn’t take walking around any more and we came back ‘home.’ And rustled up a perfectly good meal of wholemeal bread and cheese (she had the Gorgonzola, I had the Gruyere), apple, the remains of a salad we’d bought at lunchtime, and apricot jam. The bread and cheese we’d acquired during the course of the day, the former at an Arab bread shop, and the latter at Celia’s most favourite ‘museum.’ It’s a wonderful shop underground in the Loreto station. When we were in there today, around ten assistants were talking loudly to each other and the customers, and the customers talking loudly back, and there were cheeses galore, and all sorts of meats, and whole hams hanging up, and it all looked more like something out of the movies than real life. ‘My kind of shop,’ says Celia.

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, the computer’s mobile connect continues to play up, so that we can’t use it to go online. This had become quite an issue, as we hadn’t booked places in Florence or Rome, and we are due to go to the first of those tomorrow. The reason for delaying on this had been that the YHA had advertised a special deal in both cities in hostels, and we were waiting for a response from them. For some reason they’ve been very slack, and still haven’t replied - and we couldn’t get them on the phone either.
We finally found a Vodafone shop here in Milan today, and got a definite No from them in terms of help. They’re a different company, and don’t help UK customers. Finalmente! We found an Internet shop where we could use the computer for an hour for one euro. Very cheap! Found that my daughter had managed to cancel both the NZ cards, and had also found the address for sorting out my NZ driver’s licence. Later in the day we found a second Internet place where we surprisingly quickly booked hotels in Florence, Rome and Barcelona. Think they go from the sublime to the ridiculous, but at least they’re booked.

The traveller’s worst nightmare

13th Oct, 2007

Well, maybe a worse nightmare would be to fall down the Spanish Steps and break your neck. Okay, this wasn’t as bad as that, but it certainly pained us considerably. We’d managed to find our way around the Metro here, and were starting to get confident. (Plus we managed a long ride on the 33 tram, which was a bit scary, but not impossible. Plus we didn’t pay, because we didn’t realise we were supposed to have a ticket before we got on.)
Anyway, about seven we got on at the Central Railway Station underground stop where there was a real crush, with people pushing and shoving to get in the door. That meant that everyone was bang up against everyone else as well, and we all travelled that way for the two stops that Celia and I were going. We got off the train at Loreto, and I suddenly realised there was a lightness in my left trouser pocket - the place I keep my wallet. Someone had nicked it, presumably during all the hustle. Consternation.
All sorts of thoughts of not being able to travel because we had no money came to mind, though in fact Celia had quite a bit of cash in her wallet (which she didn’t fail to remind me was around her waist and secure), and she still had her debit card and credit card. But I lost both my debit card and three credit cards, two of them from New Zealand, plus maybe a couple hundred euros, and my driver‘s licence.
We told the guard at the Metro exit, and he said we needed to go back to Polizei at another one of the stations (I’ve now forgotten which, but I think it was Duomo). So we did, feeling increasingly stressed, got there and found the police, who very helpfully pushed us onto the main police station near Turati Metro Station. And even though they gave us instructions how to find the Police station, it took us something like half an hour of wandering to track it down. People twice sent us in the wrong direction, which didn’t much help!Eventually we got there and while they weren’t offhand about it, they weren’t greatly concerned either. Which isn’t surprising, probably, as both they and we knew that’s unlikely we’ll see the wallet and its contents again.
Celia was feeling very low about it all, and even more, was concerned about our contacting the banks to stop the cards. And of course, I’d left my cellphone back at the hotel, so we couldn’t do anything about that until we got there. Finally we dragged ourselves home, very dispirited, and I eventually managed to get hold of someone in the UK about the HSBC cards. Fortunately that didn’t take as long as I’d thought it might, but I won’t have any cards of my own for the rest of the trip. Celia’s cards remain valid, which is a major relief, and certainly left us feeling better. Eventually.

On language

12th Oct, 2007 again..

The language situation in Luxembourg was intriguing, you might remember. It‘s equally so in Switzerland, where German, French and Romany all exist - as well as Swiss German. The latter is their ‘native‘ language, but is so different in pronunciation from German itself that I found it impossible to recognise words when people were speaking. And yet they read and write ‘High’ German as their language, because it‘s the common denominator. Very confusing. Swiss German is even more gutteral than ordinary German, which sounds relatively soft by comparison. Celia reckons if she goes along making gggghhhh noises with her throat, she’s doing a pretty good version of the language.
She’s also discovered that the word, Migros, means supermarket in Swiss - it’s obviously a brand name but it helps to know what sort of shop it is. In some Migros stores there is a great range, but in the one we went to the other night on the way home from Thun, we went round and round struggling to find any sauces to use with the chicken we were going to buy. In the end we bought yet another couple of packets of Pelican filets - I don’t know they were filets of, apart from being fish (and they certainly weren’t Pelican; that’s the brand name) - which we’d already tried before and found quite tasty, if a bit salty and buttery. But to buy fruit and veges in this particular store you had to sort out the price ticket yourself, which meant getting the number from above the item you were buying, taking the goods to a weighing machine, pressing the number on the screen and waiting for a ticket. We’d already got to the check-out before we discovered this and had four items needing prices, which flustered the woman at the counter not a little. Rather too much in the way of self-service, to my way of thinking. Though in England, in some of the big stores like Asda and Sainsbury’s, you can check out all your items yourself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite fun in the end.

Phew! Found a way

12th Oct, 2007
If you’re reading this, you’ll know I’ve solved our problem with the mobile connect: it's done a bit of a runner, and won’t connect - so at present it’s mobile but nothing else. So the notes following are catch-up stuff.
I’m writing this on the train from Brig in Switzerland to Milano in Italy, where we’ve got a couple of nights booked. We had a major rest day yesterday: slept till at least ten (Celia quite a bit later) and then had another snooze in the afternoon. Read a lot, and had dinner with our hosts. Even managed to get a hold of their baby; we’re missing holding babies. Today is mostly a travel day. Celia had been a bit disappointed that we hadn’t stopped longer in Zurich, so we decided to travel back to Bern, by way of compensation, travel forward from there to Brig and then onto Milano. Bit of back-tracking, but the famous Eurail pass covers it all. Bern turned out to be a very grey city. Grey might not exactly describe the colour: it was kind of sandy stone colour, meaning it had a slight beach sand tint. But all the buildings in the old city were made of this, and they’re all solid and imposing. It’s like someone has said: we’ll build a city all in one colour, all in one dominant style and that’ll be it. This is the old town I’m talking of; across the bridge over a huge drop down to the river, there are many houses that are much traditionally Swiss - and to our eyes, much pleasant.
Anyway, we ‘did’ Bern, and hopped back on the train after about an hour and a half. That took us back along the line past Thun and Spiez, and then it veered off somewhere, and we climbed and climbed until we were so far above the valley, the cars looked like insects crawling along. Why they built the train up on the side of the mountains I‘m not sure. You‘d have thought they‘d have built it in the valley, since most of the towns are down there. Still, the views are spectacular - when they‘re not interrupted by one of the innumerable tunnels. Huge mountains, caverns, raging torrents, waterfalls, snow on the highest peaks - you name it! This is certainly a marvellous piece of countryside, though it might be a bit difficult of access! And now we‘re heading through more of the same, so I‘m going to stop typing.

Travel writing in abeyance

Sadly, I can't get online to upload my notes about the trip at the moment. As I've explained in an email to some people, the mobile connect has gone AWOL - we've tried all sorts of things, like uninstalling it and so forth, but it's just not wanting to work. This means I'm having to rely on Internet cafes\shops, and though they're not expensive, it's not so easy to get things uploaded.
We went to the Vodafone shop in Corso Buenos Aires yesterday, but the young man in there refused point blank to help us. He belongs to Vodafone Europe - we belong to Vodafone UK. And trying to ring Vodafone UK from here doesn't work at all. We get a lovely Italian lady telling us something at great length, and then the usual English woman saying we appear to have dialled a number that doesn't exist.
Anyway, I've written up lots of notes and have them on my computer. If we have time I'll come in and put them on here. If not, know that we are still doing things! (In Florence, at present.)
PS Everything on Google is in Italian. Makes a change from German.

A proper look at Thun

Another trip into Thun yesterday, to check out booking a ferry from Rome to Barcelona. When we got on the bus, I asked the driver if we could purchase a return ticket. No, we couldn’t, but did we have a Eurail Pass? !! Of course we did, and we got on [for] free. Strange, but good.
Had a much better look at Thun, especially the main street shops (!) and the Castle. Thun has two rivers/streams running through the middle of it, so that its main street is divided from the next section which is then divided from the part that the Castle is on. Bridges everywhere, of course, and what looks to our eyes to be a very cluttered set of buildings along the riverbank. I’m not sure that they’re actually a rivers/streams, having said that. The two arms of water seem to flow off the Lake itself. Where they go from there I don’t know, and why the Lake doesn’t empty out rapidly I don’t know either.
Anyway, we climbed to the Castle. Celia had got to about 107 steps when she lost count. And there were a lot more to go. Anyway, the Castle looms above the town so that by the time you’re standing in one of its top towers the buildings below are miniatures.
The Castle contains a museum, some of which seemed to be in a state of shuffling about, as there were displays with nothing in them, and others that didn’t seem relevant. Nevertheless, by the time we’d seen about four floors of museum, we were well acquainted with some of the wonderful craft work done by the Thun people: beautifully decorated plates, and fine miniature pottery to name but two. And then there was the very impressive sleigh, with a full-sized dog carved onto the front of it. Not your poodle-sized dog: this was a fiercesome large creature. It would have gone well in the production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Castle itself is fairly well preserved. The wooden beams, great chunky things, that hold up the roof of the Knights’ Hall, date back to the original building. A lot of it has been renovated at different times, however, so it’s not easy to tell what was there from the beginning, but I guess the basic structure, with its wonderful four pinnacled towers, and its two round prison cells, is all original.
We were standing waiting for a couple of people to come up the stairs at one point (because most of the stairs inside are circular and not negotiable by people going up and down simultaneously) when we heard this distinct Australian accent. ‘Come on, you Australians!’ cries Celia, and next minute is in full conversation with an Australian woman who was pleased to hear an accent close to her own.
As you come back down to the town, the houses are all clustered together on the hillside, with winding lanes, and steps, and tiny gardens with fountains, and a general sense of beauty. The Swiss delight in decoration: there’s one house near where we’re staying that has its front covered with pots and pans. And another that has a model of the house itself parked outside. And another where there’s both a live parrot and a model one.

Sailing away

We went for a boat ride on the Lake of Thun today. We thought we’d have to pay part of the cost, but for some reason which we didn’t quite understand, the trip was free today only, via our Eurail pass. The boat took us to Interlaken, which I’d heard about from some source - can’t remember which - as being a special place, but it struck me as Switzerland’s equivalent of Queenstown, that is, all tourist shops, and lots of things to do if you’re an outdoors person. (There were several people paragliding when we arrived, for instance.) The buildings are a delight, however, and speak of a time when people paid big money to build in Interlaken.
In spite of my misgivings about Interlaken, the trip itself was lovely, the lake calm, the mountains a little misty but still reasonably well-defined, and the air warm. We sat outside on the boat for most of the trip. At the end of it, the ferry navigates its way down a narrow channel, with only a few metres to spare on either side.
Though we could have gone back on the boat, we decided to have a look around Interlaken for an hour or so, and get the train back to Spiez, and then the bus to Einigen. The train, of course, was covered by our Eurail pass anyway, so the trip only cost us the bus fare. (Though no one actually came to check our pass on the quarter hour trip from Interlaken to Spiez, so some people might well have got on for free!)
I didn’t mention yesterday that we had a mini crisis. By mistake I put my debit card (Eftpos, in other words) into a ticket machine at Spiez railway station, thinking it was a money machine. I tried to cancel the operation but no card appeared. Nothing worked, and suddenly we began to think we’d have to face the next week or two unable to get money. (We have quite a bit of cash with us, but we hadn’t got any Swiss francs before we arrived in Switzerland.)
In the end I went up to the ticket office, and explained the situation to the man behind the counter - who fortunately spoke good English. (The Swiss don’t seem to be quite as strong on the English as the Germans are, and some of them don't care!) He came down with a tool, opened the machine, pulled out the part that had the card in it, dug around at it, pried at it, worked on it - all to no avail. We stood there chatting, trying to feel confident that he was going to achieve something! Finally he went back upstairs, called the office in Bern, and they told him on the phone what to do. Voila! one returned debit card - and considerable relief.

Heidelberg

Heidelberg was lovely. Wonderful old houses and streets echoing with voices; huge churches in the middle of the residential area; bars and restaurants galore; wonderful wide river that turns out to be the Neckar and not the Rhein, as I’d thought! We must have given the Rhein the slip at some point in our trip south.
We were in the Aldstadt, or Old Town, and it’s obviously the tourist area. We walked right to the end of the Haupstrasse last night, and came to Bismarckplatz, a platz we’d remembered from our rather hectic bus ride a couple of days or so ago. It leads into the new town, but it was all rather dark, so we didn’t venture much further.
Tried out the strange taste of a Heidelberg schneeball (snowball) yesterday; it’s hard to describe exactly what it is: something between a sweet biscuit and a pastry coated with different flavours. A bit too sweet for our taste, but memorable (even more as we asked to sit down in the place where they were selling them - and have been making them for generations - and it cost us extra to do so!)
We didn’t stay up for last evening’s World Cup game. Couldn’t take any more disappointments on that front.
Missed out on our breakfast of one hot drink and one croissant this morning, because the place that provided it doesn’t open till eight, and we had to be away before that to catch the train. We tried to get the proprietor to give us the drink and croissant last night by way of recompense, but he wasn’t having it on. Not the most PR minded, this particular lot!
Anyway, today we’ve travelled from Heidelberg to Stuttgart in one 45 minute stretch, hung around at Stuttgart station for just under an hour and got on a train to Zurich, (another three hours) and then less than ten minutes after we got to Zurich we headed for Spiez, (another hour and a half) which is just near where we’re staying with one of the people (Darren Hight) who used to be at DCBC, our home church. He married a Swiss girl about 18 months ago, and now they’ve just had a baby daughter - she’s two weeks old. They’re living in a community that offers hospitality to different groups, Christian and non-Christian, and also has a small farm. We’re in the first floor of a chalet (some three hundred years old, but renovated) and have a view overlooking the Lake of Thun - with the Alps in the background. Celia said, If she’d known she was coming to Queenstown she wouldn’t have bothered, but she was kidding! The place is absolutely beautiful. Certainly it’s reminiscent of Queenstown, though the Alps are probably bigger still than the mountains there, but it’s also reminiscent of Dunedin and its harbour.
Since we’re catering for ourselves here, we walked down to the dairy/grocers - the only one in Einigen, the local village - and back again. Going down was fine, but the walk back was a bit of a mission: all uphill.
The photo is of the oldest church in Einigen; in fact, one of the oldest in Switzerland.

We watch the World Cup

Last night we had a donor kebap at a narrow shop around the corner from our hostel; the proprietor’s daughter (about five or six, maybe) was playing with her ‘pinguin’, after she‘d had a go at cracking some nuts by bashing them on the marble counter top.
We strolled down the Hauptstrasse, looking at the shops - it seems that German shops must stay open till all sorts of hours as a matter of course, but they’re closed on Sundays - and were just checking something out when Celia said, with some excitement, They’re playing the NZ national anthem. And they were. An ‘Irish’ pub had just begun showing the NZ v France quarter-final game on a huge screen. We bundled ourselves into the pub, found some space near the back with three friendly young Americans, and made ourselves at home. A female bartender kept coming around to get drinks for people, so that everyone could stay in place and not have to lose their spot.
The Americans had never seen rugby before and were surprised at the energy and brutality. Even the way one of the players is hoisted up in the air during a line-out gave them a thrill. It was a great game which NZ should have won: a couple of moments undermined their chances. One, when there was an ongoing ruck towards the try line by the NZeders, they lost the ball at the very last moment. And Dan Carter’s replacement missed a goal kick. Either of those would have kept them in the game.
Back at the hotel, the bed turned out to be fairly hard, but not impossible. (It still doesn’t beat our hardest hotel bed ever which was in Roxburgh.) Celia still has a cold, and needs to rest a lot, so we didn‘t get up till fairly late. Even then we were up long before the place downstairs where we were supposed to get our hot drink and croissant (the ‘breakfast’ part of our hotel bill). They finally opened about 11.00, so we had the coffee and croissant as a morning tea instead, having made ourselves breakfast in the hotel room.

Bits and pieces

We took the scenic route from Köln to Heidelberg, which meant we were travelling alongside the Rhein for a good deal of the time. And built along the Rhein are dozens of small towns, villages, and a few cities. Nearly every place had its own castle up on the hill above the town. Some of the them were more like fortresses, some had those delightful turrets that look as though they should belong in a fairytale illustration.
The more you travel around the more you wonder about all the people who live in these places, and what they do and how they all make a living. It’s strange how communities thrive in one place and not in another, how cities come into being in one place when another place never seems to grow. Just seeing the neverending crowds in the streets here is mindboggling. Where do they all come from? Do they all have homes somewhere? How did they come to be in this place at this time?
And as you travel along in the train you seen the endless building work that’s gone on: houses, factories, skyscrapers, railway lines by the million, train stations galore - and all the paraphernalia that goes with the presence of humans. We certainly make our mark on the earth.
And then there are the beggars. It’s very difficult to discern whether some of them are just conmen/women, or whether they have a real need. I determined not to pass another beggar by when we were in England, even if it was only to hand over a pound or two, but it’s become an impossible task here in Europe, where begging is a full-time profession for many. And as Celia says, some of them are so well-dressed. What are they doing begging?
How do you reconcile what Jesus says about caring for the poor when you’re overwhelmed by beggars on every hand? Do you have a right to give to one and not another? How much should you keep for yourself? The questions go on and on, and I don’t find the answers coming very easily.