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.

York, day one

Spent most of today in York, which turns out to be a pleasant city, with no apparent excess of traffic. Celia had to visit the dentist first thing, and got an appointment for 11.40 am. She’s had a painful toothache on and off for about a week, and it was time to deal with it. Fortunately the dentist diagnosed it as a problem of the gum receding and exposing too much of the tooth. Some particular dental gel sorted it out, and the problem was resolved with a small fee - smaller than we expected.
It’s always complicated having to go to the doctor or dentist or whatever while on holiday - especially in another country. So we were relieved that this particular issue was dealt with relatively easily.
The inner city of York still has its old city wall mostly intact (or well restored) and you can walk for more than three kilometres along it. The pathway is quite narrow, and now has a metal fence alongside to stop you falling off, but it can’t have been much fun in the past if people started rushing along it in a crisis - knocking somebody from your own side off the wall would have been a common hazard, I’d suspect.
On our initial sortie into the city this morning, we found that the first street we entered inside the wall had no less than six op shops almost in a row, plus the SPCK bookshop (a Christian bookshop for those who don’t know the magic letters SPCK), and a National Trust shop. Too many riches!
We did a quick tour round York Minster and then had to go back to the car and find the dentist again. After that we came back into town, found Sainsbury’s supermarket by accident, bought some lunch, ate it in the carpark, and then went for our second trip inside the wall.
Now we had more time to explore. After dealing to the op shops, and the SPCK, and the National Trust (where we found that the toilets were very convenient), we went on and checked out The Treasurer’s House. This is a place near York Minster which was restored (rather oddly) by a former City Treasurer. He seldom lived there, apparently, but used it to house his collection of paintings and treasures. It didn’t strike either of us as very inspiring. Many of the paintings looked rather like copies by lesser hands than paintings by original masters, and the antiques and such weren’t up to much compared to the usual NT standards. Or maybe we’ve just had enough of those sorts of places for the moment.
Anyway, on to York Minster, that extraordinary cathedral in the centre of the city. It’s large - very large - and yet, when I walked around inside it didn’t somehow appeal. Maybe it’s overwhelming, and doesn’t inspire much reverence. Having to pay to get inside it, and having guides all over the place telling people at the top of their voices what this was and what that was, and having crowds everywhere, rather took away from the sense that this is really a church. It seems very much geared towards making money. Though admittedly the money is being put to good use in the sense that there’s been an enormous amount of restoration done. And things look very good inside. Maybe the grand scale doesn’t appeal so much to me. We went inside a much smaller church just down the road (York, like Norwich, has a church on every corner) and you felt that God probably did visit the place more than once in a blue moon.