Korea, and the return home

On our second day in Korea we left our bags at the hotel reception and went on a bus tour with Seoul City Tours. We’d asked the man at reception if there were ‘hop on hop off’ tours in the city, and he was most intrigued by the phrase, repeating it several times to get it into his head. The SCT was the best bet, though they weren’t quite as hop on hop off as the European tours we’d done. You had to state where you were going to get off, and couldn’t just keep going round the tour when you passed your initial stop. That was okay, we didn’t have time to do too much anyway.
Seoul is an enormous city, full of contrasts in terms of the buildings. There are skyscrapers, modern apartment buildings, little old one-storey shops and multi-storey department stores, ancient buildings (such as the palaces and the original city gate) and winding alleyways full of tiny shops. The streets are so narrow in some places only a motor scooter can safely drive down them, and so wide in other places that there are four lanes on either side of the road. The motorways are extensive and there are several long bridges over the (very wide) river. It takes an hour and a half to get from any of the major hotels in the city to the airport, and for much of that distance there are buildings or industry. We passed a quarry at one point which went on for at least a couple of miles alongside the road. The city has churches everywhere, both ‘foreign’ style designs, and more modern buildings. Yonggi Cho’s church is a great modern building (it doesn’t look like a church on the outside) that rises several storeys high.
And there are gardens everywhere, from tiny ones to huge botanical parks.

Our flight from Korea was longer than the one from Heathrow by a couple of hours, so by the time we got to Auckland we were very glad to get off the plane. I actually slept an hour or so at one point, which was a major achievement, and kept the material shades on over my eyes at another point, just to get some rest from the light.
This time we didn’t have the little tv screens on the back of the seats in front of us, and had to watch whatever was showing on the main screen. One film - which I watched part of without the sound - was Gracie, a rather second-rate piece about a girl who wants to become a soccer player, and the other was the Simpsons Movie, which turned out to be a lot of fun, full of clever lines and crazy ideas.
I managed to read another Ian Rankin book between the time we began the flight and the time we reached Dunedin, but neither of us enjoyed the flight much: Celia wasn’t feeling great, having got a solid dose of the cold I had a couple of weeks ago, and I still had leftovers of the cold itself. Besides that we were both just tired, and couldn’t get enough sleep to catch up.

And then there was the stress that Security on planes causes these days. Both of our main suitcases were large and fully-packed. Apart from lugging them about they turned out to be the least of our problems. In Heathrow, we’d been told in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t carry more than one bag into the plane itself. This meant that we had to try and shove stuff from Celia’s handbag into the backpack she was carrying and the computer bag I had. Both were already full of bits, so it was a major task. Yet Korean Air didn’t have any such restrictions at all, and when we got past security we just reverted to what we’d started with. In fact, they’d taken the third overnight case with the other two big ones without a qualm or any extra cost.
Likewise when we left Korea there was little difficulty; even in their security area, they didn’t worry about us carrying both our handbag and manbag as well as the other two large items - and a stone plate Celia had decided she had to have at the last minute. (We’d been for lunch in a restaurant where they presented the food on utterly hot stone plates, and also cooked meat and vegetables on a little stove on the table.)
However, when we came to leave Auckland, they charged us for extra kilos on the large cases, and told us if we’d come via America it wouldn’t have cost us anything. Weird.
It all adds to the stress of travelling.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Wir sind in Hamburg

Today was a day of chunks of travel. Two hours from Attleborough to Stansted Airport, by bus, with the weather becoming increasingly overcast (and the toilet on the bus, which we’d chosen to sit beside, giving off incredibly unpleasant whiffs every so often). The obligatory two hours at Stansted waiting for the flight to take off (decreased somewhat by the fact that we were late getting there, and there were queues for everything (but for some reason we were given priority tickets so that helped to get us on board a bit faster). They took my laptop off in the security area, and gave it a looking-over. Poor Alphonse! - the laptop - he was appalled to be considered a security risk. But at least we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Not sure what they’re expecting to find in shoes.
An hour and a half on the plane (virtually) with the usual Ryanair minimalist approach to service - not enough coin change when you bought something, no sick bags, no string bags on the backs of the seats to put your magazine in, no room to spread out in any direction.
And then an hour and a quarter or so from Lubeck airport into Hamburg city, again by bus - a very quiet bus, it must be said, so quiet that you weren‘t really aware of the speed you were doing.
And into Hamburg BusPort. Which is only a little way from our hotel. We had to go to the Hotel Keiler Hof to pick up our key from a very grumpy receptionist. She was friendly really, just liked to do the grumpy thing. The reception desk was on the first floor - I have no idea what was on the ground floor, but it wasn’t part of the hotel. And then we had to take our three keys to the building next door, Luebecker Hof, use the large key to open the building door, go up to the first floor again, use the blue key to open the door to that floor, and then use the third key for our room. I thought our room number was 213 until I realised that the label actually read Zi3 - or zimmer 3. (Zimmer being ‘room’.)
The room is quite large, with a private shower. The shower isn’t exactly en suite, as it’s in the room itself, next to the wardrobe. The toilet is across the hall, and serves all the people staying in rooms 2-6. (Room 1 seems to have vanished). We’re going to have our breakfasts in the Keiler Hof. On the first floor. This idea of having hotels on the first floors and upwards seems to be a European thing. It was the same in both the hotels I stayed in, in Rome. The ground floor is usually occupied by some other business altogether.
After settling ourselves in we went out again to get something to eat - it now being around 9 pm. Found a kebap place around the corner (yup, kebap), and had a very nice meal in the open air. It's been a very warm day in general. The area we're in seems a bit less than salubrious - ladies of the night are very visible, as is the sex sho (not sure whether it's meant to be shop or show) just around the corner.

Getting to grips with Luxembourg

Two of the Express trains meeting in the Pétrusse Gardens. The tail of the train we were on is at the right of the picture.

This afternoon Celia and I went into Luxembourg city again, and caught the Pétrusse Express for a trip round the gardens and through various streets and byways. It’s a kind of train, in that it has an engine and engine driver, and three or so carriages. The travellers sit in little sections each for three people - though we managed to get a section to ourselves for some reason. The train doesn’t go on rails, however, but drives about on the road, a little like those children’s trains you see at festivals and such; in fact, it seemed debatable that this train would manage to carry its fairly large number of passengers up and down the steep roads. It did.
We’d booked online, but when we took the printed out email to the booth, the woman looked at it in some bewilderment. Seems as though online bookings are fairly rare, and that her boss wasn’t being very helpful at the other end of the phone. Nevertheless we got the tickets, and caught the train. There’s an ongoing commentary in various languages presented on earphones (you plug into the ceiling) and though it’s a little odd, because it dramatises some of the history (and one bloke even breaks into song) it gave us some background to the places we were passing. Though it wasn’t as clear as the commentary on the bus that we got on next. This hop on hop off bus (how is it that English is used for some things here?) goes round the main city and outskirts, and you can get on and off at various points along the way using the same ticket. We didn’t get off but decided to go the whole way and get an overview. Tomorrow we’ll hop on again and hop off a bit more readily. (We can still use the same ticket within a 24-hour period.)
When we got off the bus at the Gare (Railway Station for those who’ve forgotten their French) we went to look for a loo. Luxembourg is still one of the places where they make you pay for going to the toilet. We’d kind of got used to Celia having to fork out 50c while I went for free in the older shopping area, but she baulked at 1Euro 10c at the Gare. (And I would have had to pay 60c which didn’t grab me either.) Foolish pair. If you find a toilet in Luxembourg, go. We spent the next half hour trying to find another; went into McDonald’s and they didn’t have one; in Quik, and they required you to get a token from the counter - and presumably buy something; and even into some smaller malls. No joy.
Finally came across one up near the bridge leading back to the old town. Occupé. Well, that’s what the light said, but whoever was occupeying it was taking forever, literally. Desperate straits. Finally, gritting our teeth, we walked towards the Cathedral and the old town. And just when I was planning (in my head) to sneak behind a bush or building, we came across a portaloo in the Cathedral grounds. Don’t ask me why it was there, but obviously God had decided enough was enough.