Shopping and rehearsal

Notes from the 5th Jan. 

In the morning, we got onto dealing with the potatoes and coleslaw, and while we were doing that Christin and Rick arrived. They're staying in a caravan parked outside the garage.  Christin is Cindy’s younger sister (one of several) and they’d driven from California, taking some fourteen hours with a bit of a sleep at some point.  They’re a great pair: she’s lively and funny and full of beans.  Rick seems laconic at first, but like all the others he’s full of stories and humour, though he takes more time about the telling. Christin chipped in and helped with the coleslaw sorting-out the moment she arrived. 

In the afternoon we went to the shops again and the three blokes (Ben, Rick and I ) initially went into Wal-Mart with the women, but later on went for a drive around Nampa by ourselves.  It just seems to go on and on, and it would be pretty much impossible without a car.  There don’t seem to be any buses either, so I don’t know how people without cars get on.   We had kind of gone out to see what the place had in the way of ‘tourist’ attractions, but all there seems to be - and no doubt we’re wrong - is retail and more retail and bigger retail. 

Anyway, home for dinner.   Meals here lean towards Mexican-style food, with chilli beans and tacos and ground beef (something like the equivalent of mince) and things like Bell peppers (our capsicums) and Jalapeños (pronounced halapeños).  This last item is another pepper, but dangerously hot if you happen to get the right one in the batch.  I refrained. 

Everyone was up fairly sharply to get to the rehearsal at nine this morning.  It’s the first time the household has really been up early since we’ve been here.  Chris normally gets up at 5.30 am and goes to work early and gets home early after a ten hour day.  So he's finding these late starts a bit disorientating, I think.  

We're expecting upwards of 200 guests to the reception.   Hopefully there'll be enough food (us Crowls always like to have more than enough, just in case - it's one of our traits.)

I slept very badly last night - took ages to get to sleep, and then woke early.   Not enough exercise and too much strolling round shops - getting ‘shopping legs’ as Cindy called them in the process. Chris reckoned it’s a world wide phenomenon: women enjoying shopping; men not.  (I think more that we tend to go into a shop to get something, not just browse.  Although that does happen: in my case in a bookshop, in the case of other men in shops like Cabela's.)

Chris is a brilliant hobby furniture-maker, (his job is carpentry) but he also does a lot of other bloke things like diving and fishing and so on.  Anyway, he dives in the local river every year and collects all the stuff that people lose in the river, or throw away for some reason.   He’s got a collection of sunglasses, and has picked up all sorts of other things, including laptops!   Last night Ben fitted two memory cards that had gone into the river into the two laptops we’ve got here.  Both Dom and mine were struggling with memory (and ours with having far too much loading at start-up)   After a bit of jiggling, both of them worked, so both the computers are running a good deal better.   

We went to the wedding rehearsal this morning: for me it was a bit chaotic with the young people clowning around. The minister was very pleasant - a little fellow called Harold (I think) - and very patient.  Perhaps he’s used to young people these days being so all-over-the-place at the rehearsal.   Liz’s grandparents were there (Cindy’s father and his second wife).  It's their second marriage in each case, and they met at the Sacramento Opera where both of them sang in the chorus.  So we had something in common. 

I’m supposed to be reading a Psalm at the wedding service.  I hadn’t heard about it till this morning, and so checked up on the Psalm that I was supposed to read - Psalm 45 - and found that while it had some connections with the wedding ceremony, it also talked about the groom shooting his enemies with arrows.  Decided there might be a better Psalm to try and eventually we went for Psalm 130, a psalm I know well and enjoy reading.  

I thought I might have to play the piano at the service too, because the church organist wasn't available.  However, a friend is happy to do it, and so that relieves me of that duty. 

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!

Getting lost in Seoul

After our market and mall explorations, we started to walk back home. Went down the underground, which runs the length of one long street, and contains dozens of shops (as well as the tube). Thought we knew which exit to come out of, and did. But even though it seemed as though we were in a place we recognised, it turned out not to be. So we crossed the road (via the underground again) and came out on the opposite corner. Went along the road: gradually realised this wasn’t an area we recognised either. Scary, since the streets don’t appear to have street names (unlike most of Europe where signage is very good, and usually on the corner buildings). We looked at our map, but it’s a tourist map and shows buildings and places rather than streets. Tried to work it out from the underground map but it was just as confusing because we couldn’t reconcile streets with the area above us. Went above ground again and found a bus map which had streets on it, but it didn’t seem to match up with our map either.
Finally, a man came along and offered help. The only trouble was he didn’t speak any English. Consequently, somewhere along the line we had a misunderstanding, and he led us two blocks in the wrong direction!
It was quite cold at this point, and, against all our best principles, we went into Starbucks and bought some very expensive cappuccinos. In there, I met a young lady (I think she was one of the staff, but was off duty) who spent quite a bit of time trying to help. Even she couldn’t figure out from our map where we were (!) but she finally offered to go and look on the Internet (in the staff quarters) and print out a map.
After some time she reappeared, with the map. Great relief.
We thanked her and set off in the right direction this time. Crossed the canal we shouldn’t have crossed before, crossed the square as marked on the map, and before we came to the street where we should have turned left on according to the girl’s map, we found the fish market! Having been caught out several times before in terms of thinking we knew where we were (previously we‘d two or three times seen what we were sure were shops we‘d previously passed but they weren‘t), we weren’t completely convinced this was the same fish market we’d seen before, but we decided to go through it anyway, and gradually realised it was the same one. Enormous relief.
In Europe, for the most part, I could figure the language, but of course here, even though there’s a lot of English signage around (particularly in advertising) the majority of words are in Korean.
I meant to mention, in my post about the shops here, just how small many of them are. Many stalls cover a very small area, but the shops aren’t much better: some are so crammed with stock that there’s virtually no room for anyone inside. Some shopkeepers work outside on the footpath. All your competitors are likely to be within spitting distance, selling exactly the same items. And the tiniest shop I saw had a man sitting in what must have once been the doorway to an upstairs apartment. He was surrounded by keys and his key-cutting equipment. He wouldn’t have been able to stretch out either arm, let alone both. There was no room behind him, and presumably he could only get into this ‘shop’ by taking out the little barrier that was in front of him.
Celia made some rude comment about just how much room we’d ‘demanded’ at the bookshop.

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!

Third day in London

Third and last day in London and a bit muddly. First we drove up the road until we found a couple of churches: we decided on the Methodist one. At first thought there wasn’t going to be anyone there, but in fact it was quite full - and it was a fairly new building. And talk about welcomed. We hadn’t even got out of the car before an elderly couple who’d parked in front of us came up and greeted us, talked about New Zealand, told us about collecting NZ postal items, and gathered us up. Inside it was the same; people didn’t just say hullo, they actually spoke to you, both before and after the service. It was Remembrance Day and at eleven o’clock the radio was turned on for a few minutes and we listened in to the service (with the Royal family) at the Cenotaph. The rest of the service consisted of various people talking about their war experiences, and especially the many people who hadn’t necessarily served at the front but had been back-up workers in various places: firemen, voluntary constables, nurses and so on. They also had communion which was good, as we haven’t been to many services in England where there’s been a communion (except last week as well!)
We were going to go to the movies after lunch but it took too long to get there so we went right into London central again and pottered around a bit. Celia wanted to get some of the artificial snow from Hamley’s (not Hambley's as I think I wrote previously) - you add water to it and it grows to ten times its original size. The place was still abuzz with people, far more than in most of the other shops along Regent St. (Though when we came back along the street later in the evening, the streets were packed again.)
We couldn’t decide what we wanted to do so in the end we got on a bus and went for a ride. Wound up at the Albert Hall and found that there was a concert on in the evening at 6.30. And there were tickets going at a reasonable price. So we bought some, got back on the bus, went and had something to eat (Celia had a little snooze in the café!) and got the tube and bus back again. (The joys of one day passes.) The concert was wonderful - I’ve written about it in more detail on myother blog.

Still in London

Another day in London. We met up with an old friend, Cathy, and had lunch with her, then walked down the road to the Science Museum and checked it out. It’s a massive place - five storeys - and full of quite remarkable things. Unfortunately, like so many of these places, you can’t take it all in at one go, and it gets tiring trying to absorb all the info and exhibits. There are lots of hands-on items, and both the adults and kids were having fun with these.
Later on we went to Hamley’s, the huge toy shop - and another five storeys. It was absolutely packed with shoppers, and toys, and lots of happy faces and people - adults and kids - having fun and enjoying themselves. Quite a few of the staff were demonstrating toys and having a ball playing with them: a tiny helicopter that actually flew around people’s heads, cardboard planes that would invariably return to the person who’d set them off, racing cars with front wheels that could go into a 360 degree turn and so would never get upset by any angle, a wipe-off board which a young guy was drawing coloured pictures on with great ease, three or four guys playing with a more update version of the yo-yo. One boy of about seven or eight was having a great time clapping his hands and making a whole rack of teddy bears shake - clapping was what set them off. Occasionally adults would join in the fun. Around the store were waist-high boxes with walking fluffy toys in them - little dogs that yapped, a drummer boy, a giraffe that moved its long neck up and down. I was very tempted to get the giraffe, I must admit.
We were out of our hotel room by eleven this morning and didn’t get back till around 8.30, so both of us were whacked. I’ve been reading the Hitchcock book while Celia snores.

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.

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!