A few notes

One of the great advantages of having relatives in England who care about you is that we’ve been looked after very well, even by those who’d hadn’t seen us for more than thirty years. Without our extended family over here, this trip wouldn’t have been possible in any sense.

I’ve just been checking back over some of the words that HitTail has turned up and find that the windmill in Cley, which we visited (well, we walked around it as it was closed at the time) was restored by the parents of a singer/songwriter called James Blunt. His real name is James Blount and he’s the composer of the album, Back to Bedlam. There now, did you know that?

I mentioned too that we’d had to get Vodafone to unlock the content control on the mobile connect, and that it had been a bit of an issue doing so. Seemingly, Vodafone is the only company that actually does this for free (why do they lock them in the first place?). Some companies in Australia, apparently, charge anything from $27.95AUD to $199! What a racket.

I’d talked about Gaudi’s architectural approach to the Holy Family Cathedral in Barcelona, and said it looked like the stone was melting. This isn’t unusual in Gaudi’s work, apparently: in a recent article in the NY Times, the writer talks about the way Gaudi used this melting effect on houses and roofs and other architectural features.

Our frequent mention of McDonald’s brought us into a search result as well. I don’t know if I wrote that we didn’t go to McDonald’s in Spain because they didn’t serve milkshakes. Whether it’s something to do with the way they bottle milk or what, I don’t know, but we couldn’t get a milkshake in Spain (not from McDonald’s anyway).

It was interesting the way the McDonald’s vary. When we came back to London we had more trouble communicating with the staff in the two McDonald’s we visited than we did in any of the countries in Europe. There the assistants were pleased to interpret our English into McDonaldsese. In England, even though the assistants were all English-speaking, they got our orders muddled, didn’t seem to hear what we were saying and in generally were surprisingly obtuse. Ordering in McDonald’s shouldn’t be that difficult: they have a kind of universal language, and you find the order boards are the same wherever you go around the EU.

I said in my last post that we’d been to Cambridge. Apparently Sir Humphrey Cripps, the man who built up the Pianoforte Supplies company in Roade was an honorary Fellow there. He was ‘the greatest single benefactor the College has had since its foundation over 500 years ago.’

And finally, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture gets yet another mention in HitTail. I haven’t had to use it yet for the cold I’ve got at the moment, but just the mention of it brings to my senses that wonderful aromatic and throat-burning mixture.

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.

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.

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.

First day in Hamburg

....and exhausted. We came home about 4.30 and slept.
Most of the day we’d spent in doing the hop on hop off thing on one of the double-decker buses that tour around Hamburg city. They take about an hour and a half to do this, and we got off twice. The bus we’d started out on was the 100, but the one we went back onto was the 200, and it takes a somewhat different route - in fact we wound up going over much of the route we’d already taken but approaching it from the opposite direction. Finally, somewhat desperate that we were never going to get back to point A, we got off in Rathaus Square (Rathaus is just the Town Hall - I suppose the ‘rat’ part has some links with ratification), and walked back along Monckebergerstrasse to the Hauptbahnhof - the main railway station - which is just near the hotel.
Doesn’t sound like an exhausting day, you say?
Well, our first hop off was at St Michael’s Church, and instead of going into the church proper, as we’d thought, we found ourselves climbing up the tower. At least 25 flights of stairs, if not more. By the time we’d got to the point where we’d both have preferred to have given up, we thought we might as well carry on. Certainly the view from the tower was amazing, but it took a while to get the breath back. We got the lift back down (yup, this is a church with a lift to the tower), and none of the passengers had quite figured out, when we got to the bottom, how to get the door to open. So we all went up to the top of the tower again, before coming down.
After this we finally got into the church itself, and it’s an amazing building. Wonderful curves everywhere to offset the usual straight lines of the architecture. It’s been thoroughly restored, so all the golds and whites are as they would have been. It just glistens. And because it’s Harvest Festival (here as in England) the church was full of decorations related to food: wreaths made of vegetables and stalks hanging from the balcony; breads in all sorts of shapes (such as a mouse and a snake); an enormous canopy affair hanging in the sanctuary made out of corn sheaves, and various statements such as Our Father (in German, of course) made out of bread on a baked backing.
Hamburg is an extensive city, with a large port and waterfront. We went past areas with houses that are worth several million euros - wonderful places on the street that’s closest to the large lake that’s within the city. There are embassies everywhere, and of course these are all large and imposing - and no doubt costing their home country a large amount of money. The buildings vary in their materials, but there are many that are made out of bricks, vast structures rising way above the street. The whole place has a very permanent air about it, an air of having survived a cluttered history. It’s going full steam ahead at present: there are acres of building going on, both office space and apartments, down by the water.
It was a holiday today (not sure what holiday) and the crowds were out in full force, but most of the shops were shut. Restaurants were doing an enormous trade. We went into the railway station first thing this morning to get our Eurail pass sorted out. We were hoping that they actually knew what it was all about, and of course they did. We’ve booked ourselves a couple of seats to Cologne for tomorrow - booked seats because of the holiday today, which apparently might affect tomorrow‘s travellers.
The railway station is large, as you’d expect, full of shops. There’s one area that’s given over to food shops, all within a kind of mall. You just wander from one food group to another. And there are plenty of other shops - including the ubiquitous McDonald’s where we went and had a milkshake (again) tonight, and watched while a couple of teenagers spent almost all the time we were there in a long, long kiss. A long kiss.
There was also a kind of large mini-market (if that makes sense) and Celia was in her element. I’ve come to the conclusion that English or Continental supermarkets are a kind of art gallery or museum to her. When I proposed this new theory, she smiled enigmatically.