A little shock

This morning we went into Norwich to check out the mobile connect, which you may remember suddenly stopped working in Switzerland. We’d been a bit concerned at the time that maybe it was chewing through the costs, and that we’d get a large bill, so I was also rather screwing up my courage in terms of how much it was going to cost. I hadn’t been able to get Vodafone to respond by cellphone or email to my request for assistance in this area while we were in Europe.

The guy in Vodafone Norwich looked up the number on the screen and said, There’s nothing wrong with it. A credit bar has come up because there was concern that someone was using it illegally. Because there was so much owing on it.

Like how much?

£969.

Yup, you read that right. That’s $2618.29 in NZ dollars at today’s exchange rates. Yet we’d been using the Internet in Barcelona for a euro an hour!

I got shivers up and down my spine and spoke to the customer service people at Vodafone on the assistant’s cellphone. It didn’t help. That was the bill, the girl said.

The assistant asked if I knew about an alternative way of using the mobile connect on the Continent. In that case you paid £111 and could download 200 megs. That would have been better, although we’d managed to get through 200 plus megs in the times I’d been using the thing.

We went home in a state of shock. Literally. Celia was in tears, as you might expect, and I didn’t know what to say at all. The only thing that the assistant had recommended was to ring Vodafone back again and get hold of a Team Leader, as they were sometimes able to do something about such unexpected bills.

I had some lunch, though had some difficulty downing it, and finally rang Vodafone and asked for a Team Leader. They told me one would be available to ring me back in about an hour, so I thanked them, and hoped I wouldn’t be waiting too long.

Tried to do other things, without much success. And then the phone rang. Before I could say anything much the guy announced who he was and that he was putting a credit through for the £969 and he was charging out each 24 hours at $8.50 a time and that the bill would come to $59 or thereabouts, plus the usual monthly charge.

I was almost too stunned to thank him. Not only having the gift of such a large amount rescinded but to have it done without me even asking for it was extraordinary.

There was sudden rejoicing amongst the Crowls. And on top of that, a short while after Celia unexpectedly found the connection to one of the innumerable electronic toys she plays with which a long search yesterday had convinced us was lost. We’d gone to Norwich this morning to get a replacement for it, but had forgotten all about it in the stress of the moment…

Luxembourg 2

More travelling around Luxembourg today. This time we walked down to the Place de la Constitution and caught one of the green buses that do a continual loop around the city - the hop on hop off fellers. Near the Philharmonie (a wonderful round building where concerts and such are presented) we got off and went into the Musée d’Arte Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. This has been built partly over old city walls and battlements - the originals are still there, but they’ve been built up again with modern stones and plaster. It’s a large glass and stone building, very light and airy, and with a very open feeling. And, after yesterday’s trials, it was great to find that not only did they have free lockers for our bags, but free toilets! (So we both went twice.)
The exhibitions are another story. At present there is a great deal on Science Fiction and Modern Life scattered around the place. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is very strange, and some of it is more philosophy than art. It was worth going to, but we might have felt more aesthetically satisfied if we’d made it to the Gallery that we keep missing out on seeing, which is in the older town.
The photo is of a house that was to have been the prototype of many similar places - until the 1973 oil crisis caused problems. The houses were to be made in plastic. Curiously enough, there’s a house constructed on exactly the same lines near Warrington, close to Dunedin. I think in fact that that house is bigger - and I don’t think it’s made of plastic.
After the Musée we got the bus again and went to the building which has a name that sounds like Ocean, but isn’t. It’s a large mall with an enormous supermarket on the first two floors (Celia was in her element in the supermarket: the choice!), and then up above are offices, in one of which our host actually works.
We had waited at the bus stop with a woman from Belgium. She’d been to Luxembourg a number of years ago and was astonished by the rapid rate of building along the area where the Musée and the Ocean are. The place has been taken over by Banks - Luxembourg has some 200, apparently - and not all of them are squeaky clean, according to what she was saying. There has been some scandal with Clearstream Banking and the French Government and others, for starters. But the EU also came in for some criticism: a man from one of the EU countries wanted to retire to Greece (I can’t remember at the moment where he came from). This should be perfectly acceptable under EU terms, but he’s been blocked from doing so. Not being the sort of person to take this lying down, he has made aggressive protest in the EU Justice System (which is in Luxembourg), talking in terms of dictatorship and other such pleasantries. He’s now been in Luxembourg for 250 days, fighting his case.
Luxembourgers are losing their own status in the face of thousands of workers who stream into the place daily from nearby countries, and through the many foreigners who live there permanently. I was asked by a German tourist how to get to the autobahn while I was waiting at the bus stop - of course I didn’t know, and neither did a young couple who came along, and neither did someone else. ‘Luxembourg is a city of strangers,’ I said to a woman standing by, and she agreed. No one really lives there, so no one knows anything about it.

England is riddled with history

Let’s face it, England is riddled with history. You trip over it at every corner.

We went into the Abbey Gardens at Bury St Edmunds today and found children playing on the ruins of the original Abbey, stones that go back nearly a thousand years. Yesterday we went to Melford Hall near Sudbury, and also visited a church that’s some 600 years old. At every point in the flooring, practically, you’re standing on the tombs of people who’ve been dead for centuries. Next to the church was a hospital originally set up for people who couldn’t afford to go anywhere when they were dying – several centuries ago. The place is still being used for the same purpose. Just up the road was another historic home that’s now home to operas, concerts, plays and the like. Furthermore, family members still live in many of these places. They’re people who can trace their family back for generations – as opposed to the Crowls, who can only go back to my great grandfather, or the Hannagans (my mother’s side), who can only go back a generation or so before that.

In the back lanes near where we stayed, we kept coming across churches that have been used by Christians for centuries. In some cases they’re in very good condition (the churches, I mean); in other cases, the current generation is struggling to keep a church functioning that hasn’t had enough work or money put into it for decades. But nobody seems to think: this is too old; we’d better pull it down. Nope, they have great respect for these old buildings, and there they sit on the landscape as they have almost forever, in spite of the dissolution of the monasteries and all the destruction that went with it, in spite of wars and the ravages of time.

Perhaps because we’re not so familiar with it in New Zealand, we're struck by all this history. Perhaps local people take it more for granted. Whatever, it’s great to see it here, and all this viewable.

Don't bank on it...

Yesterday we received a letter from the Bank in the UK that we're going to be dealing with, asking us to either send them a pin number to enable internet banking, or to ring the number through. Since it was ten o'clock at night when I talked about this with my wife, we decided to ring.

What a schemozzle! For some reason the letter had come addressed only to my wife, so she made the call, while I listened in. The guy at the bank, when they finally answered after a variety of options were presented, and after putting in our account number to help them identify us, didn't really know what my wife was talking about. He said he'd have to ask her several questions, some of which she might have to go away and check and ring back with the answers (!). Anyway, he first asked for her date of birth, which wasn't too much of a problem for her, and then asked if she had a debit card. She said no, because we're due to pick up cards and such when we get to England. That seemed to stump him, somehow, and he asked her to hold for a moment while he went to confer with someone else.

At that point, some canned music came on the phone. It sounded like a tape that's been used over and over, and was wearing out. Not only that, it was the same piece played over and over, some unidentifiable piece played mostly on a piano. We had the joy of listening to it two and a half times through before the bloke came back on the line. A long confer, by the sound of it.

The music reminded me of the canned music used in the public toilets here in Dunedin It's a short piece played on a piano, and on an average visit to the toilet, you'll hear it played at least twice. It has a glitch in the middle, and repeats a couple of bars as a result. Very annoying, if you're a musician who uses the public toilets a lot!

Anyway, when the guy came back on the phone, he said he'd have to put us onto his confrere, and did. She said they couldn't actually help us, because they couldn't do anything until we got our debit cards and we weren't going to be getting those till we got to England! I suspect that someone in one part of the UK sends out these interesting letters, and puts a phone number on them for a different part of the UK – where no one knows what's being done.

The photo isn't of our bank, by the way.