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.

Frustrating Day

We’ve had a rather frustrating day today, though not entirely. You can read about the good bit on my other blog.
We sat down to plan what we’re doing next this morning. We know already that we’re flying home from Lyons in France on the 7th November, but what we were going to do in the week before that hadn’t been organised. In the end, after some debate, we decided to go overnight from Madrid to Paris on the 3rd. Tried to book online. Complications. Eventually decided we’d go down to the Railway Station and book there. This was after lunch, and we arrived at the station just before 13.58. How do I know it was that time? Because that was the time we picked out a ticket from the booking office and sat down to wait.
We were ticket number 567. The tickets that were being handled when we sat down were in the mid 300s.
It was around four o’clock when we finally got attended to, so you can imagine our disbelief when the guy behind the glass told us we couldn’t book an international ticket because international tickets were only booked on Saturdays until 1 pm. And not at all on Sundays.
Celia berated him a little. To put it mildly. I had to carry her out of the office screaming. We did manage to book a ticket to Madrid for the 1st at least - before she had hysterics.
So that put paid to another day in Valencia. Our intention had been to go to the Market, and then get a tram to the beach. Achieved neither. Worse, Celia’s heel, which hasn’t been playing up since she had a cortisone injection last year suddenly decided to make its presence felt again. We’ve been walking around Valencia mostly, so far. But with her heel playing up we’re not sure how we’ll get from A to B. We got a bus to the show tonight, but we walked back (because it was difficult to find a bus), and her heel didn’t enjoy it.

When in Rome - do the laundry!

Yesterday [now three days ago] was another laundrette day. Don’t know why we’d run out of clothes so quickly again, but it was very necessary. Maybe we’ve left some behind somewhere. Anyway, we also supermarketed, which gave Celia a bit of a rush. In the afternoon we headed into the old part of town again, specifically to the Colosseum. Got ourselves conned into having our pictures taken with a couple of ‘Roman guards’ who then demanded ten euros for the privilege. Celia gave them two euros and they said she was stingy. The Colosseum, like much of the area in the old Roman forum, is being restored. Some of it looks quite new, in fact. Many of the old columns in the forum have been put back together, jigsaw fashion, and there’s a huge amount of restoration going on. I don’t know that we walked through this area last time we were in Rome, but it’s certainly getting a lot of attention.
As we came out of the forum we discovered the Paul Gauguin exhibition that we’d read about. It was being held in the back of a building which we’d passed several times and hadn’t been able to name. Turns out it’s the main Art Gallery - at least as far as I understand.
The Gauguin, interestingly enough, didn’t have many of his South Sea Islands paintings, which are mostly what I’ve known him for. But it did have a wide range of his pictures overall, including a lot of his early work, which is wonderfully coloured, and a delight to the eye. To the end he remained a superb colourist, and seeing these early works as well has confirmed he’s an artist I really enjoy. His life, like so many of the artists of his time, was a muddle, and the political statements that the write-ups on him in the exhibition claim he was making are not that obvious - to my eye, anyway.
And talking of painting: we made our way to the Piazza del Popolo towards evening (after having had an excellent and economic meal at the Railway Station). Celia wanted to go there because it was close to the place we stayed at last time we were here. But neither of us could remember exactly where we had stayed, unfortunately. Anyway, the Piazza, when we got there, didn’t look at all familiar (!) and neither did the surrounding streets. But halfway along the Corso we came across this boy, who couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16, and he was painting with spray cans. He’d flip each can out of the box, give it a twist and a shake (rather like those guys in bars who throw cocktails around to mix them - and show off), and then set to with complete understanding of what he was doing to produce a painting. The whole thing was performance art, really, because it was done at great speed, with utter confidence, using the cans, the hands, pieces of cardboard torn on the spot, an old pie dish (for part of a circle), mixes of colour done with ease, and a total concentration that was a bit scary for someone of his age. At the end of it he sold the painting on the spot to someone for ten euros (!) He was working by the light of the shop next door, and at one point someone came out and said he needed to move along because the crowd watching him was blocking the shop doorway. So he just upped his equipment and moved a metre further, and then got back onto the job. There was another painter doing something similar further along the road - actually working almost in the dark - but he none of the panache of the boy.

Onto Köln

We went on our first train trip today, from Hamburg to Köln. We had seats in first class, in a carriage that was virtually empty - it was the first carriage behind the driver. There was only one other person in our compartment (six to a compartment), so we had plenty of room. The second class part of the train was much fuller, as I found when I went for a walk from one end of the train to the other. At the back of the train was half a carriage reserved for large luggage and bikes - there was none of either - and a few let-down seats. So I sat in the space for a while and watched the world go by.
The trip took four hours, but it didn’t seem long. Apparently this was the ‘slow’ train, if you can call anything that goes at a normal speed of 163 kph, slow.
It was just beginning to rain when we left Hamburg (after a beautiful day yesterday) and it had obviously been raining over most of the country we passed through. However, by the time we got to Köln the sun had come out and it was hot enough to change back into short sleeves and my faithful sandals - which I’ve worn most of the time we’ve been away. The pair of waterproof shoes I bought in Oswestry a couple of weeks ago are great, and have been useful during the rainy days we’ve had recently.
Which reminds me: we’re back in the land of toilets you have to pay for. England has pretty much got rid of this archaic notion - Oswestry was the only place in England where we had to pay - but Germany still regards it as the norm. At the railway station yesterday I went down into the gents and Celia went down into the ladies opposite. I put my money in the machine, went through the turnstyle, and then heard her speaking in the ladies, which was open to the men’s! Weird.
Our hotel in Köln is near the Cathedral, and the railway station. Which is convenient, except that the railway line runs along the back of the building, and the rumble of the trains is fairly loud. But the Cathedral (or Dom, as they call it here) is superb. How it survived the bombing in the War God alone knows: the surrounding area was mostly destroyed.
Furthermore, the Dom is free: you don’t have to pay to go inside. And it was packed with visitors, of course. It’s awe-inspiring: the vaulting soars forever above your head, the stained-glass varies from detailed 19th century pictorial to wonderfully mosaic-like modern. And it’s just vast. You could walk around in it for days, so it feels. We might go back tomorrow!
Just around the corner from the Cathedral is a street that leads into the shopping area, which goes off in several directions and was also packed with people. I don’t know whether it’s a late shopping night or what, but the people were out in droves, even though it was getting on for 5.30 by the time we went looking. We bought a few odds and ends for tea (we’d had a very late Thai lunch) and a new flask, since the one Celia bought only a month or so ago has gone kaput. And we were both struggling yesterday in not having a cup of tea/coffee handy. I had to go and borrow an electric kettle for our hotel room otherwise Celia would have gone home, I think. Fortunately they were happy to lend us one.
The holiday Germany was celebrating yesterday, I found out, was Reunification Day.