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.

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.

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?

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.