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.

Flying home...

The flight from Heathrow to Seoul left at around 8.45 pm which should have meant we could fall asleep naturally and spend some of the flight in slumberland. Well, some of us did, but not me. Tired as I was I remained awake and finished up watching three movies: Oceans Thirteen, the latest Die Hard and, for my choice from the classic movies, The Grapes of Wrath.
I’d slept a bit on the coach coming from Attleborough to Heathrow, so that helped, but I would have been happier to have slept some of the night as well.
When we got to Incheon airport in Seoul, it was 3.35 local time - but about 6.30 am England time, which is what my body was still trying to run on in spite of my efforts to convince it otherwise. So I’d been awake all night.
On the coach into Seoul itself I slept a couple of brief times, and again since we arrived at our hotel. Which means my sleeping clock is completely out of kilter.
We were at Incheon for quite some time in the end, firstly through trying to find somewhere to park our two large suitcases for the two and a half days we’re here, and then trying to find the right bus to catch to get to our hotel - a hotel virtually nobody seemed to know about. When you see the size of Seoul city, it’s probably not surprising.
Finally we caught a 5C bus outside the airport, but as time went on and the bus seemed to be travelling forever, we asked a couple of guys behind us, Koreans who spoke good English, if they could help. One of them finished up ringing up the hotel to check where it was, and wrote the address down in Korean. And then when they suggested a stop to get off at, they helped us get a taxi as well. Meanwhile, three black English-speaking women in front of us on the bus got in on the act as well, and discussed at length the fact that they didn’t know where the hotel was.
However, the taxi driver drove with confidence (and considerable speed) to the hotel, and was enthusiastic about finding it. So were we!
The Korean man at reception, when I wrote that our home address was Dunedin, cried with delight: Dunedin! I stayed there four years ago as an exchange student. If he hadn’t liked us before, he certainly thought we were wonderful after that!

Train joys

As I said in another post, there has been some interruption to the train services - ours particularly, so that when we got to Sants this morning we found we had to reserve a seat, like it or not. We sat waiting for some time and then suddenly everything was go: officials galore gathering up the passengers and, with signs, walking them outside to a waiting bus. Where we waited. Finally, at eleven, we took off. Knowing that there’d been some interruption, we weren’t too worried as we thought the bus would just drop us off at the nearest connecting station. It did. An hour and a half later - at Tarragona. By that time everyone on the bus was sweating profusely as the heating was one (it is autumn in Spain, after all) and the air conditioning wasn’t. With great relief we all abandoned the bus, and are now all on our way to Valencia (and several points in between), forty minutes late, but at least there’s room to move - and there’s a movie (Orlando Bloom in Spanish - it’s something we’ve seen before [Elizabethtown] and it isn’t very good), and the train has a decent toilet and a restaurant car with reasonable prices.

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.

Two hectic days

Two full-on days. We drove back down to Northampton yesterday, aiming to arrive for lunch at 12.30 but were already running late by the time we left, and finally got there at 12.45, which was pretty good considering that there’d been delays on the road. Nothing like the last time we went, though.
It was my oldest sister-in-law’s birthday, and Celia had made her a birthday cake, and bought a bunch of food to take. Far too much food, of course, but that’s always the way with any Crowl celebration. We stayed with my other sister-in-law and her husband, again, and I finally remembered to return the key we’d borrowed last time. It was a blisteringly hot day - the hottest we’ve had since we’ve been here perhaps - and major change after all the rain.
The birthday party went off well, though most of them had to retreat in out of the sun because it was too hot. It wasn’t much cooler inside, however. At the end of the day we offered to take my nephew back home to Milton Keynes. This set up a chorus of ways we should gon to take him there (he doesn’t have his own car at present), and we had to leave in the end, and rely on our Sat Nav as there would have been no consensus from the other four. We went via a back road rather than the M11, and that was much more pleasant, and quicker!
Came home to our hosts and watched Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood’s first outing as director. More of that on my other blog.
Slept in this morning, and finally got away about ten. Arrived home at Wicklewood some ten hours later!
We wanted to take a quieter route than the one we’d come down on, and also see some other places. Headed to Wellingborough, which was a pleasant town, with op shops, a church with a spire in the Market Square, and a market in progress. In the church there are a number of new stained-glass windows - new in the sense that they were made in the 20th century. The creator of a couple was John Piper, and these are startlingly beautiful in a modern way, when the sun is shining through them. The woman who greeted us and talked to us about the place said that the minister who’d been there for some forty years (if I remember rightly) had had a way with getting people to part with their money and help improve the church. Consequently it has a mural over one altar painted by a Dutchman called Hans Feibusch (the woman said she’d never got to like it, even though she’d been longer than it has), the several stained-glass windows and several other modern works. Unfortunately the church is in a bad way outside, with the stonework deteriorating rapidly.
We went on to Oundle - don’t ask me how to pronounce it - where all the houses and buildings seemed to made of the same light-grey stone. There was such a uniformity about the colour that it almost didn’t seem real. Probably a very pleasant place, but that stage it was very hot again, and we didn’t stay long. Another church with a spire. (The Norman and Saxon towers aren’t much in evidence around here.)
We were going to go to Peterborough, but didn’t make it due to the fact that we decided to look up my cousin who, with another woman, runs a Christmas tree business. She also works at a full-time job. It took us two or three attempts to get to the place: for some reason our Sat Nav took us to a completely wrong place, recommending we pull into a private driveway where three houses were situated. Two little dogs gave a sort of effort to warn me off, but it was too hot for them to be really bothered. The man gave me fairly clear instructions, and we allowed Malvina to offer to put us on the right road as well, and eventually we got to the place - after first driving up a farm road that ran straight into a field.
My cousin wasn’t home when we arrived, so we walked around the house - and found a photo of one of my NZ uncles was up on the wall, which confirmed that we had the right place at least. And then, after we’d had a cup of coffee, my cousin suddenly turned up as we were about to leave, telling us my NZ uncle was coming along behind with the other woman - on bikes. He’s only 82.
Finally, after this, we headed straight home. It was a couple of hours of travel, and finished up taking us back down the road we’d come from King’s Lynn on Thursday.

A lack of verandahs

Things are still a bit quiet on the Crowl front, but we’ve now booked a flight to Hamburg for early in October, as the beginning of our European train tripping around. And we’ve booked our first piece of accommodation. Scary.
Meanwhile, today we went into Norwich intending to go to see the Roman Catholic Cathedral (which we tried to see a few days ago and couldn’t find where to park conveniently), but Celia got stuck in a department store while I went to take some books back to the Norwich library (yes, of course I have an English library card) and that was the last I saw of her for an hour and a half or more. When I say ‘stuck’ I mean she decided she could do some shopping while I wasn’t standing alongside her being annoying, so she just got on and did. The poor old Cathedral missed out on our patronage again as she was too exhausted after all the trying on of clothes to walk along Chapelfield from the main shopping area.
Never mind, we’ll get there eventually.
It was raining in a misty sort of fashion when we got into Norwich, and continued to do so while we were there. What the English cities and towns could do with are the verandahs we have in NZ, which protect shoppers from the rain - pretty much. Dripping your way around a shopping area with no cover isn’t fun.
It was raining last night too, when we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum. The Riverside complex, where the multiplex is, doesn’t have any shelter either!

Rochester and a party

Back into Norwich yesterday for a short visit with the aim of trying to find a travel agent who could tell us more about rail travel on the Continent. Neither of the places we went to were much on to it; seems they don’t handle rail travel a lot. So in the end we went back to the online info in the evening, and are trying to work from there.
Today we drove down to Rochester in Kent, via the M25 at one point, and the bridge at Dartford. Four lanes of traffic on our side all slowing up to pay a pound toll (see picture). The bridge is massive, a great creation slung from towering pillars. And it rises way up in the air before hitting it’s peak and coming down again. Quite impressive.
We drove to Rochester because we were attending a ‘welcome ceremony’ for a recently-adopted child. She’s near to two, and has the energy of a fireball. Her father is Cockney Indian, so there were a lot of his Indian relatives there making us welcome. Her mother had friends from the library where she used to work. And there were various other ring-ins like us (we‘re not related to the family, but my daughter in NZ is). One of the librarians used to be in the Poetry Library which is situated in the Festival Hall building on the fifth floor; she‘s now in the British Film Institute Library - just as intriguing!. The poetry library has nothing but 20th and 21st century poetry in its stock: two copies of nearly everything, one for borrowing, one for the collection. Another friend at the party was a poet, Patience Agbabi, a lovely London-born woman from a Nigerian background. We’ll have to try and track down some of her poetry; though from what I read on the Net it sounds fairly radical!

Introducing Potter

We went to see Harry Potter’s latest outing today. Classy movie, and succinct storytelling. More about it on my other blog.
But it was our first experience of moviegoing in the UK. The prices, as we expected, were pretty much on a par with prices at home. The expensive icecreams were pathetic: two scoops barely appeared above the rim of the cone. And the taste of the mint with chocolate bits in it was unpleasant, rather as if you were eating spearmint and chocolate together. No wonder some shops advertise New Zealand Ice Cream. From now on I'll make sure I buy from them.
But the worst feature was to come. At home we’ve come to endure the ten minutes or so of recycled tv advertising and trailers that come before the main feature. Ten minutes is copable with. 25 minutes is outrageous. Twenty-five minutes of advertising!
And because so many of the ads were played at full bore soundwise, we were nearly deaf by the time Harry and his cohorts arrived. Fortunately the film was worth watching after the interminable introductory stuff, almost fifty percent of which was advertising for cars. Do they have trouble selling cars in Britain? You wouldn’t think so by the number that are on the roads.

Limited Choice

After the bomb threats in Piccadilly Circus in the last couple of days, I’m not sure that I’m dead keen to go to London to see any of the big shows anymore; at present it doesn’t seem like the safest part of town to be in.

And the other aspect of the big shows is that so many of them are recycled pieces or revivals:

Billy Elliott: the musical (recycled film)
Blood Brothers – been around forever
Cabaret – been around forever (and been filmed)
Chicago – been around forever and been filmed)
Dirty Dancing: the classic story on stage – (recycled film)
Fiddler on the Roof – been around forever and been filmed)
Kismet – been around forever and forever – and been filmed
Les Miserables – been around forever
The Lion King – (recycled film)
Lord of the Rings – (recycled film) (And can you imagine this saga being reduced to an evening's musical entertainment?)
Mamma Mia! – recycled music
Mary Poppins (recycled film)
The Phantom of the Opera – been around forever and been filmed
The Sound of Music – been around forever and ever and been filmed and shown forever

Out of these shows only The Lion King, Mary Poppins and Mamma Mia! get enough stars to warrant making the effort to go.
That leaves just two shows that are original pieces: The Drowsy Chaperone, and Spamalot. The DC is about a modern-day theatre buff whose favourite 1928 musical comes to life. Though this is a Tony award-winning show, and stars Elaine Page, it doesn’t get many stars. Spamalot, it turns out is another recycled piece: it’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail turned into a musical. However, it does get the fingers up as worth going to.
When I was in London last time, there was always so much on you didn’t know what to go to, and got to the point where you went to nothing through having so much choice. Now it’s the reverse: so little that’s really worth the effort. And when I was here last time, I went to Fiddler on the Roof after having seen it already in Sydney, Australia. The Sydney version was vibrant, and breathtaking; the London edition, which had been going for ages, was a total bore.

On the way to Korea

I’m trying to write this over the Pacific Ocean - with some difficulty. Turbulence has started since I got the laptop out, and as well I’ve just managed to lose the paragraph I had written. Anyway, we’ve not long passed over New Caledonia, which wasn’t very visible, as there was a lot of cloud about. Nevertheless, the long white beaches and the bright blue waters inside the reefs were plain to see.
We’d had lunch not long before that, which for Celia and me was a great relief, as both of us had had breakfast about 6.30 am, and it’s now 3 in the afternoon. I had bought some Oddfellows (the last packet of ordinary ones they had on the shelf in Whitcoulls - the others were Spearmint and Strongmint which I don’t like so much) and at the same time had bought some top-ups for our cellphones (for some reason Vodafone couldn’t accept my ordinary credit card, even though I bought the top-ups and Oddfellows with it a few minutes later). While I was busy paying for the purchases, my precious wife was hassling me in the background, telling me how clever she’d been to prove that the card was working, and I left the Oddfellows on the counter. Of course she’ll blame my imminent dementia, but! (We discovered these a couple of days later in a different part of our baggage.)
So we had lunch, as I was going to say. And what a lunch! Wine was served with it, for starters - as part of the package. Celia had a Korean meal, with steamed rice and vegetables and beef and hot pepper - which came in a little tube you mixed in with your rice and sesame oil. She also had seaweed soup. (And her neighbour’s little container of salmon and potato salad - this was from a family who had brought a pile of food on board with them, so perhaps they weren’t hungry by that time. We’d been sitting here enviously smelling the wonderful aromas wafting across the aisle.)
We both had melon and pineapple pieces for dessert. I had a more European-style meal with pasta and beef and vegetables. Delicious. I think inflight food is always nicer because you have to wait for it so long. I had a small bun with Anchor butter spread on it - and the wines were NZ too.
At present we’re doing 896 kilometres an hour - that seems a phenomenal speed. But in spite of that we still have a long way to go: about the equivalent of a full working day According to the little map that keeps coming up on the computer screens we’re heading towards the Coral Sea at present, Cairns is off to the West, and Fiji to the East.
The terminals (one on the wall and one hanging from the ceiling) keep going all the time, either with advertising or clips from movies, or sports, or news - or our present whereabouts. We don’t have little screens on the back of the seats in front of us, unfortunately, but we can listen to our own choice of music via earphones plugged into the seat arms. However, these haven’t proved very satisfactory. The classical selection is very much top of the pops classical, and with all the noise from the engines, most of the time you can only hear the loud stuff, not the quiet.

Where it started

I'm debating putting an abridged version of my journal online here; testing out how I feel about doing that yet, though, and whether it's worth the effort. Oh, the effort!

Somehow in my efforts to get the last entry on, I've managed to put it on twice. I thought I could edit the additional version out, but can't seem to. Ce la vie - more clogging on the blog.

Celia’s present, for my birthday, was an all-weather hat, which turned out to be slightly too small – we can get a bigger one, but that was a disappointment for her, as well as me. Stef and Doug gave me a black jersey with white stripes across the chest that I’ve been wearing all day, and Abby and Steve turned up with a little bonsai – a tiny one – as well as bringing Steve’s Mum, Dawn, for tea. So it was crowded Crowl house again. Ben had the bright idea of going to see the film Memento – Dominic had been last night – and so he and I went. Celia wasn’t keen on it – we’d discussed the possibility a couple of weeks ago – and anyway was too tired to do anything else, like sitting through a movie that tests the brain somewhat!

Memento will be well known by now as the movie in which the story is told backwards, scene by scene, the beginning of each scene proving to be the end of the next one we see. And in the middle of it we have the Guy Pierce character, Leonard, talking on the phone in a rather disjointed fashion, telling us about the past, which is all he remembers, because he has some rare disorder, as the result of an ‘incident’, which causes him continually to lose all his short term memory, like the latest ‘scene’ he’s just been involved in. The result is a jigsaw for the audience as we have to figure out whether Leonard is telling the truth, or the detective, Teddy, who keeps popping up (and whose photo has on the back that he always tells lies), or whether the girl who appears about a third of the way through is as honest as she first ap-pears – it’s all mind-boggling, and though I don’t imagine it’s anything like the mental problem that the character is supposed to have, dramatically it makes for a most interesting movie.

It’s set in a sleazy area of California (I think!) and drugs and murders are fairly com-monplace. To talk about the plot would only annoy anyone who might read this (and who hasn't seen it) because it’s almost impossible to talk about it without giving something away. Suffice to say, you’ll come out of the theatre with your head buzzing, and discussing with whoever your with what they think happened and what you think happened. Ben caught the trick of the ending fairly well, which I didn’t, but Dominic seemed, when I got home and talked to him about it, to have a slightly different view of things. I’d enjoy watching it again on video some time, and seeing what more I pick up than I did at the first viewing.

We went and saw it at the Metro, that tiny cinema next to, and overwhelmed by, the Town Hall. It’s almost a nothing place, with only about fifty seats, and the screen in a sense is rather like a large home tv – naw, it’s actually larger than that! While we were waiting for it to start, Ben and I went over to the Pool House and had a quick couple of games of pool. He won one, and amazingly, I won one. Perhaps I play better under such speed conditions (less than ten minutes all up) than when I have time to consider what I’m doing. I certainly played better than that night the men from church went and played – then all I could seem to do was pot the occasional ball, or judder the cue in such a way that the ball dribbled off a few inches with an insolent sort of sneer.