Second day

Neither of us has been laid low by drinking untreated water, so obviously our stomachs are tougher than the Waitaki District Council believes. Which is a good thing. However, today we got a call from my doctor saying that they’d written out a script for yet another antibiotic! I’ve already got enough tablets of a different kind to last me till next week, but it seems that on the basis of the lab results that came back after my last urine sample, (taken when I visited the After Hours doctor on Friday night) they think I need to be on this different antibiotic rather than the other. Will I be resistant to anything at the end of all this? LOL
Anyway, to get this script filled we had to go to the nearest chemist, who just happens to have a pharmacy in Twizel, which is a good half hour up the road from Otematata. Celia found this out from a woman who lives near where we’re staying and she said there was a bit of a shortcut to Twizel on the Omarama Rd at Prohibition Rd. (Interesting name for a road.) We found it, and headed off to Twizel.
This is an up and coming burgh, with a great big market area surrounded by shops, and its own radio station. Twizel came after Otematata in the dam-building towns. Once everyone had finished dam-building at Roxburgh, they moved half the houses to Otematata, built the Benmore dam, and then did the same thing a decade or more later when Twizel was the new place for dam-builders to be.
All these little towns have also been long-standing places for people to go for holidays. We met one man today who’s had a place in Omarama for thirty years. To me the area is a bit dry and hot at its best to be really enjoyable, but the lakes are great for fishing and boating (if you fish and boat) and everyone comes up in the Christmas holidays and meets all the people from Dunedin who they normally see at home.
Anyway, Twizel, Omarama and even Otematata are all building shopping areas: who shops there when all the visitors go home I don’t know, but obviously they think it’s worth their while. Otematata is just in the process of completing a long building that has a grocery at one end, a café in the middle and an as yet unfinished community hall at the other. Twizel, as I said, has this very new market/shopping mall. Omarama has what appears to be an all new shopping area too. Including an antiques and collectables shop. Compared to the one in Kurow it’s like going from a child‘s bedroom after he‘s thrown all his toys around in a huff to a museum display. Here everything is labelled, in groups, tidy, walkaboutable - and there’s even a display of costumes from Hercules, Xena and some other fantasy show that was made in NZ in the early 2000s which I’ve never heard of: Cleopatra in the year 2525 or some such, if I recall.
We had lunch by another one of the man-made lakes (something with Taniwha on the end of the name), headed along the road to look at the salmon farm where the salmon were threshing about as though they hadn’t seen anything to eat for a year, whenever any food was thrown into their water. And then, after our trip to the shopping metropolis of Omarama, we stopped off at a Fish and Game reserve (it’s just before you get to the Lake Benmore Camping Ground going south). Tranquillity.
Although we’d struck rain a couple of times during the day, it was warm and sunny at this stage, and the lake was a beautiful deep blue, the flowers along the banks were a kind of lilac/purple, the hills were their usual washed-out grey/blue, and the grass was actually green in some parts. After we’d sat for a while half drowsing, we went for a walk down to the lakeside. (Yes, I walked quite some distance and managed it without much discomfort at all.) There we met the man who has had the house in Omarama for thirty years, and his wife - who turned out to be a patient at the Health Centre where my wife works. Of course. My wife said, what are the odds of meeting one of my patients in a place like this? I thought, on the basis of past experience, the odds of not meeting a patient were much greater!

Shopping in Seoul

Slept really well last night, in spite of being woken at 3 am by someone trying to get into our room when they were supposed to be going next door.
Breakfast wasn’t quite up to the standard of our other Korean hotel, but it was still fine, and the room itself is very comfortable. So far, that first hotel has set the bar for all others.
Korean traffic is interesting: there’s plenty of it, but no one seems to be hassled, and there aren’t horns blowing all the time. Italy was the worst for city traffic: it was dangerous for pedestrians there, quite apart from the speed everyone drives at. (I nearly got run down twice by cyclists in Italy, and motor scooters paid no attention to pedestrian crossings.) Here in Seoul they drive fast enough (our taxi driver was doing 80 kph at times) but they don’t give pedestrians so many frights, even though motor scooters drive on the footpaths as well as the roads.
We decided to go walkabout this morning, and investigate the markets. Went down the road and found the fish market - or what we call the fish market: the stallholders sell fish almost to the exclusion of anything else. Sardines, fish like whitebait, herrings, all that sort of thing as well as bigger fish. But there are thousands of them, boxed or strung together on strings. The place smells very interesting. And it’s packed: the stalls all run into each other, and go off down other lanes on either side. There are real shops, but even these tend to have stalls outside. Many of the stallholders were sitting watching mini-televisions while waiting for customers.
After this we turned right, intending to go towards the Dongdaemun Market, which is held within the Dongdaemun Stadium. This wasn’t so interesting, because many of the stalls were still closed. I don’t know whether Monday is a holiday for many or whether they just start late. But again the place was packed with stalls, and with stuff. Koreans don’t go for the minimalist look: quantity is everything. In a European or British department store, you’ll have plenty of stock, but it’ll be laid out with some breathing space between items. In Seoul, the shops are stuffed full. We road up the escalator in one clothing shop (about eight storeys high) and every floor had mannequins standing row upon row, and clothes taking up every bit of available space.
We had lunch at a roadside stall - it had seats, some of them on the road itself. It was a wonderful lunch, a thin soup, noodles with a spicy sauce, and chicken kebabs. The lady didn’t sell coffee, but gave her mate along the road a bit a wave and she brought a couple of small coffees over. The woman was very friendly and helpful and we really enjoyed the meal - until we had to pay. It was 25,000 won, which is about £13. A lot more than we thought it would be, because food is very cheap here.
It’s been very overcast and misty today, and even rained a bit. It’s even cold, which we didn’t expect!

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.

Fishy Stuff

On Sunday we had a lazy day - lazier than usual, in other words. One thing we did do, however, was go with our rellies to East Harling (I think it was East) where there's a shop that sells tropical fish, gold fish and all sorts of other fish, along with assorted snakes, crocodiles and tortoises. If ever you want to check out God's imagination, go to a tropical fish shop. It isn't just that the colours are extraordinary, from the dullest to the most startling, but the shapes and sizes and variety of extras show a mind at work that has no problem coming up with something new - or something odd.
There were tanks with dozens of identical fish in them, and the slightest movement would send them off in a group to the other end. There were tanks with large koi (or carp) in them where the fish were keen to make friends, and were coming to the surface opening their mouths wide and happy to let you touch them. There were strange wormlike creatures that were some form of anemone. Ten or more of them would be entangled with each other in a thick bunch, so entangled that when one of the staff needed to get one out for a customer, he had to literally pull them apart. And then the worm would open up its end and produce a great flowery display. There were other black creatures, whether fish or plant, I don’t know, (though they seemed to be able to climb), and they consisted of a little ball with a bunch of the thinnest spikes all over it, especially on the ‘top’. These spikes waved round continually, checking out the environment, and making sure something didn’t happen to step on them or swim past.
Walking around at a great pace were tiny prawn-like creatures, their legs going nineteen to the dozen. And in other tanks – more the size you might see in a house – there were so many tiny fish that the tank was ablaze with the particular colour they were made of.
The crocodiles were only about two feet long at the outside, with very flat, square tops to the heads. They were in the same tank as dozens of turtles, and the latter were happily using the crocs as stepping stones up onto the stones at the side of the tank. One large tortoise was outside in his own little enclosure, eating grass, and inspecting the world with wise old eyes.
And in a very large glass tank, a huge fish rolled back and forward, and certainly seemed to be well aware of the world outside the glass, as he reacted to people passing by not by flitting away, but by coming up and inspecting them.
Ain’t creation incredible? (I was watching a David Attenborough doco last night on bugs and things. Some of what they get up to is absolutely mindboggling.)