It's a rainy, windy, sit-inside-with-a-good-book-and-a-cup-of-tea weather right now. Basically, it looks like a typical winter day in Washington, or England, or anywhere else, for this matter, near the ocean at this particular latitude. Of course, my jeans are still wet halfway up the calves and my coat's hanging up to dry because I went out tromping through the rain anyway. But more on that later...
Two days ago, on a greyish Tuesday morning in London, I met Stephen outside the Victoria Palace theater doing what Brits do best: queueing. You see, if you go early in the morning to the theater, you can get cheap tickets for good seats for same-day performances, and that was what we were attempting to do, and sure enough, we secured two third-row tickets for Billy Elliot for £19.50 each--not bad. But that was for that evening, and what we were tackling that day was Greenwich.
Some very few of you may remember that this was not my first sojourn in Greenwich with Stephen. Almost exactly two years ago, I visited London for the first time in early January with Jewell, Chelly, and Edith. We were all on a budget and asked Stephen to take us to a cheap restaurant, and he said he knew one in Greenwich, which sounded good to us. However, Expert Guide Stephen got us off the Tube at the wrong stop, and although we got a good look at the O2 Center (which I lovingly call the Impaled Jellyfish, since it looks like a white jellyfish impaled on a yellow anemone), we had to hike for at least half an hour although dark roads through fields to get back to Greenwich, when the DLR stop we should have used was just around the corner from the restaurant. To top it off, the sweet-and-sour that Stephen and Edith ordered made them both feel queasy. We've never let Stephen forget it, and Greenwich has had...interesting memories attached ever since. On the plus side, we did get to see the brilliant green laser marking the Prime Meridian piercing the mud-colored sky overhead.
This time around, Stephen got the Tube stops right and we took the DLR train out to the right station. For the Whovians: I got very excited going through the Canary Wharf stop, laughing and pointing and generally embarrassing Stephen as I looked for signs of Dalek attacks. Unfortunately, when the Doctor sealed up the hole in space, all traces of alien invasion seem to have vanished. More's the pity.
We stepped out of the station in Greenwich to a nice English drizzle. From what I saw, Greenwich is a rather sweet collection of small shops and curvy streets on the banks of the Thames; it doesn't feel much like London at all. The trinity of blessings to the budget sightseer are the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House, and the Observatory, all free admission. We popped into the museum first, looked at one exhibit about nautical exploration, and then Stephen decided he wanted to take the guided tour of the Queen's House, so we left again and went next door.
Apparently, the Queen's House is so called because it belonged to a couple different queens whose names I have forgotten (Wikipedia it if you want to know!) and was used to host parties and such--which, incidentally, it still does; you can rent out the house for weddings and such if you have £7,500 laying around). Now it is mostly empty, displaying a tiny percentage of their collection of nautical paintings--mostly dramatic pictures of boats. The major lulz here is that the house is built directly over a main road, with two wings on either side and then a bridge over the road so the masses could still use it as, y'know, a road. Apparently, the queens used to watch the commoners go by and, presumably, contemplate how glad they were to not be unwashed, ignorant peasants.
(Side note: Ski jumping is on in the background as I write this, and I didn't see the whole thing but it looks like one of the skiers' skis--there's no better word for this--exploded when he landed. Holy crap. I mean, if you're in a sport that consists entirely of skiing off cliffs and trying not to break every bone in your body when you land, the least you could expect is that your skis won't freaking explode when you touch down. The guy's okay, somehow. But still, damn.)
Anyway, it was lunchtime, so for old times' sake, we went to the same cheap Chinese place that had been so much trouble to get to the first time 'round, and Stephen very pointedly did not order the sweet-n-sour. With fuller stomachs and no trace of nausea, we braved the cold back to the NMM to look at more fancy boats. (The pieces of that guy's ski are still just lying there at the bottom of the run for other skiers to ski into. This is a sport for the spectacularly suicidal--no, that's not right, it's run and organized by serial killers. "What, after you ski off a ledge and fall hundreds of feet, you want to land on a smooth surface? Dude, we're looking for ratings here. The demolished pieces of ski are an extra challenge." WTF?) However, I'd heard that there was a planetarium show narrated by none other than David Tennant on, so we hiked up the hill to the observatory.
From the observatory's perch, we had a good view of the Docklands and Canary Wharf, with the Gherkin and St Paul's just visible as silhouettes in the misty distance. We found out that the show cost another £5 or so, and so we opted out and looked at astronomy pictures instead. We also got sucked in by a fun little simulation/game where you had to build and test out some kind of space probe, and if you did it wrong the computer would go on and on about how silly and incompetent you were. We even dragged one of the staff over to play with us and successfully launched a comet probe. We then finally got to see the house where the Greenwich Laser shoots out toward the Impaled Jellyfish and stood on the line marking the Prime Meridian, which was much more exciting for me than for Stephen.
Eventually the observatory closed, and we took a stroll in the direction of Blackheath to get a look at the church that Stephen will be married in. (Ask him, I don't know.) We took a bus to Waterloo and from there back to Victoria (over Westminster Bridge; no matter how many times I see it, the sight of the Eye and the Houses of Parliament lit up at night makes me very happy, especially from the front seat on the top deck of a red bus). At Victoria, we had a quick dinner at Wagamama (I didn't read the menu very closely, apparently, and missed the part where my soup was going to be spicy) before we headed back to the theater for our musical.
Billy Elliot is a musical, as mentioned, about a boy for a family of miners in Durham who turns out to have a great passion and talent for...ballet. Not expecting that, were you? Now, I assume many of you are Americans, and when I wrote "Durham" you just assumed that was some place you've never heard of and went on to the part of the sentence about ballet. That's fine, because pretty much all I've known about Durham for most of my life is that it has a hospital in it (because Stephen applied to do an internship there) and that it is somewhere north-ish. Now, this is key: it's in the north. Still nothing? Okay.
I really hope I'm not going to be stabbed by a bunch of English people for this, but like all dialect families, English in Britain is less like a jigsaw puzzle of distinct accents and more like a watercolor painting, where the accents all bleed into each other with certain distinguishing marks in different places. Yes, apparently, British people can place each other to a specific city by their accents, so there are some clear markers, but there are also general tendancies, from the famously posh and traditionally southern RP (think the Queen and Stephen Fry) up to Scouse in Liverpool and Geordie in Newcastle and on to the Scottish. In between is a whole continuum of accents. Am I boring you? I'm sorry. The point is, Durham is in the north, and the northern accent sounds nothing like the southern accent and is often unintelligible to me. Almost every character in the musical (accept for some comically posh southerners) spoke with this accent. If not for the months I've spent listening to Bethany, it would have taken much longer to figure out what on earth was coming out of these people's mouths.
(Bethany, if you ever read this: Yes, I know your accent is totally different from the Durham accent. Yes, I know that you are from Noath Yoaksher. I'm trying to illustrate a point here.)
Anyway, once I got over the shock and settled into the rhythm of the thing, the accent wasn't so hard to decypher. Apparently back in the day (not sure of the exact time period, but last hundred years-ish?) Durham was a big mining town, and there was a huge strike/class war over the miners' rights/pay/something important, during which time poor cute Billy was learning to dance. Of course, his dad wasn't having any of that rubbish, but finally learns to support his son and help him get into a ballet academy. Everyone is happy--well, actually, the miners' union gives in and the strike ends unsuccessfully, so all the miners have to give up and go back to work underground, and Billy leaves all his friends and family to try and make it as a ballet dancer as an underprivileged, undereducated, working-class, low-prestige-accent-speaking kid in a Royal Ballet Academy on his own. But, y'know, he's following his heart and all, so I'm sure that went without a hitch...
The next day, Stephen and I met at Victoria to catch another train--this one to Canterbury. I'd planned on doing Canterbury the first time I was in London and, like with Greenwich, never found the time. The centerpiece of Canterbury is, of course, the cathedral, which has been the seat of the archbishop of England for, like, a super long time. Way back in 15-something, Chaucer was writing about the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury; I'm sure you've heard of the Canterbury Tales. Have you ever wondered why the pilgrims were going there, though?
I'd always assumed it was because it was the archbishop's church, but that's only half the story. A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away...), Henry the Something-th (second? Third?) was squabbling with Pope and the Church about something (can this get any more vague? I'm sorry) and he wanted to have an archbishop on his side. He appointed his friend and adviser, Thomas Becket, to the post, but this did not go as planned. Becket got religion and became an outspoken defender of the Pope and the Church, enraging the king who'd put him in that position of power. After a while, the King burst out with a not-very-subtly-phrased wish that someone would get rid of that damn priest for him (possibly accompanied by some winking, nodding, and nudging) in the hearing of four of his knights, who promptly went off and killed the heck out of Becket by stabbing him and chopping the top of head off in his own church. But after they buried Becket, miracles started happening, and a cult grew up around the guy, who got sainted just a few years later. Thus the pilgrimages.
ANYWAY. Very pretty cathedral; big and soaring and full of stained glass, like a cathedral should be. We wandered around and petted the cathedral cat and took pictures, and Stephen ran into some people he knew from his hometown (England is a really small country). Any guesses what we did next? That's right: TEA. Stephen had found a teahouse online, so we went for cream tea with scones and clotted cream and jam. The whole world could do worse than adopt this food for daily consumption; it tastes like summertime and happiness. Anyway, it was getting late, so we hurried to the Roman Museum to look at some of the cool stuff they'd dug up from Roman Canterbury; apparently the Nazis helped with this by demolishing a lot of the buildings that stood over the remains, though I'm sure the inhabitants of these buildings weren't too thrilled with that at the time.
Stephen took an earlier train back to London, so I wandered on my own through the darkening streets of Canterbury. I found an Oxfam bookstore and treated myself to three new books, since my Kindle's acting up again and is unusable. I got dinner at Boot's and headed back to London and to my hostel to pack.
When I'd planned this trip, a flight at 6:25 am from Stansted sounded like a good idea. I would arrive in Hamburg before 9, so I'd have the whole day to explore instead of wasting the time en route. Great, huh? Yes. Except. For international flights, you're supposed to arrive two hours early; two hours before gate closing was 4am. It's an hour from London to Stansted, so I'd have to get one around 3 or a little earlier; and the bus left from Victoria, so I'd have to leave time to get from my hostel to there. All together, this meant leaving my hostel at 1am. I tell you, the guys at the front desk sure gave me weird looks when I presented myself before them at 1:05, all bundled up with my pack on my back and my arms full of my stripped bed linens, announcing that I wanted to check out.
Long story short, I got to Stansted at just after 3am, wide awake and wishing I wasn't. My bag, I was sure, was far too heavy. At check-in, I tried to make it look light by slinging it on one shoulder, and the guys at the counter didn't bother to ask, so I thought I was home free. Imagine my horror when we started boarding the plane and the guy at the counter had a scale sitting there and was asking people with bags smaller than mine to weigh them. One woman said that she'd just take her coat out of her bag, which was fine with him, but doesn't make any sense--you're still taking the exact same amount of weight onto the plane for the same price, so what difference does it make? Anyway, he had already pulled two people out of line to reconfigure their luggage, and I was bursting with impatience to get through before they rejoined the line, since there wasn't any room around the scale. The guy barely glanced at me and let me through no problem. I can't wait to get home and weigh the thing to see how much extra weight I got away with.
I slept fitfully on the plane and staggered back into Germany sleep-deprived and disgruntled at not being in England anymore. I got off the bus in Hamburg and found my way to my hostel, where I was way to early for checkin. Maybe it was how I was tottering and slurring my words, or maybe it was the bags under my eyes, but the kind receptionist checked me in anyway, and I went up to my room and collapsed into sleep. So much for extra time to explore. I am never doing that again.
I peeled myself out of bed around 4pm, feeling hungry. On the map, the town center didn't look too far away, so I started off walking. I detoured briefly out to a park with a view over Hamburg's harbor: the sun was just setting, a dirty gold on the horizon, mirrored in the thousands of orange lights sparkling over the water. The shipping cranes towered over labyrinths of shipping crates like enormous steel giraffes as a few ships went puttering serenely past.
The street I was on was mostly uninteresting until it suddenly transformed into the Reeperbahn. The Reeperbahn is Hamburg's main tourist attraction besides the harbor--it's the entertainment, clubbing and *cough* red light district. I was a little nervous and a little curious to walk through after dark, but since it was barely 6pm, the crowds hadn't gotten going yet.
Since I had no particular desire to see the inside of a strip club or sex shop, I kept going, getting hungrier as I went.A good two hours after I left the hostel, I arrived, footsore and rather hungry, at the Rathaus. Unfortunately, the Rathaus is located in what is, apparently, the main high-class shopping district, so there wasn't much in the way of affordable restaurants. I wandered through the streets, increasingly despairing of finding somewhere to eat, until I found a cute little Italian restaurant full of kind Italian staff who seated me right away and brought me some lovely tortelli. I don't know if it's rude to read a book when you're in a restaurant by yourself, but I did anyway. I took the S-Bahn home.
So, that brings us to this morning. My goal today was to take the free walking tour, but although yesterday had been clear, today was, as stated at the beginning, cold, drizzly, and windy. There were only six people, including me, who showed up for the tour, but our fearless Dutch guide led us through the wind and rain to all kinds of interesting buildings in Hamburg. We saw the Nikolaikirche, which had been the highest tower near the harbor in WWII, and as a result was the reference point for Allied bombers and was itself destroyed, leaving only a tower, now a war memorial, and a few ruined walls. We saw the building where a pest-control company made the Zyklon B gas, a form of cyanide used to murder people in the gas chambers; the two company heads had participated in the genocide, but the employees hadn't known what their product was being used for, and were horrified to discover it after the war. We saw the offices of a shipping company with a statue of a poodle on top, because the owner's pet name for his wife was "My dear poodle" because of her hair; apparently their ships are still called "poodles." We saw where the Great Fire of Hamburg started in 1842 because some jackass set a tobacco manufacturer on fire and subsequently destroyed 45% of the city. We heard about the firebombing of Hamburg in WWII that killed tens of thousands of people, because the dry weather and incendiary bombs created a firestorm over 800 C so that people trying to escape would sink into the melting pavement. And we saw Hamburg's work-in-progress, an orchestra house that the city hopes will become a symbol of the city like Sydney's operahouse, except some architects think the powerful winds from the harbor will blow it over.
After the tour, I made my way to the Hauptbahnhof to find tourist information for some recommendations, but the info guy was thoroughly unhelpful and I left no more informed than I'd entered. I decided instead to come back to the hostel and get warm and write this, which has taken rather a long time. So I'm going to get some dinner. Bye!
Showing posts with label cathedral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cathedral. Show all posts
Friday, February 4, 2011
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Iberian Adventure: Portugal
[UPDATE: Pictures now available in my Picasa album!]
Mm, Portugal. I had been determined, when this trip was in the planning stages, to go to Lisbon, despite the fact that it was actually pretty far out of the way. Now, I'm very glad we went, and I'd love to go back, but going to Portugal presented a new problem. Up till this point, my Spanish had been sufficient to get us by, but neither us spoke a word of Portuguese. Gestures and smiles, here we come!
DAY SIX
Another day, another new city. We arrived in Lisbon and stared eagerly out the windows of the bus at the sun-drenched metropolis flashing by. The bus left us in the massive Praca do Comercio, presided over on one side by an enormous white arch and opening out on the other side into the water. We went to our hostel to check in, forgetting it was barely 10am and we wouldn't be allowed to check in, and instead dropped off our stuff and, on the recommendation of the clerk at the hostel, headed towards Belem.
Belem is a suburb/neighborhood/somehow or other a part of Lisbon, and is generally frequented by tourists for its beautiful church and cloister and its waterside promenade. There was a bit of a faff getting there (we missed the first tram, then the second tram stopped before Belem and we had to take a very crowded bus the rest of the way), but this turned out to be because of another mounted parade. We seem to have been stalked by mounted parades...Anyway, unlike the one in Madrid, this was some sort of military demonstration, complete with rifles and uniforms and horses and everything. We watched the band march around for a while and then wandered on, partly because one of the regimental dogs was barking incessantly, despite the efforts by his handler to make him stop. He was probably too hot in that long coat sitting in the sun, poor thing.
We stopped at a sidewalk cafe for lunch which, though touristy, was friendly and cheap. (Get your head around that, if you can!) We made it to the church/cloister and I left Bethany standing in line while I went to check out what the deal was. It took the guard a couple of tries to communicate to me that the entrance to the cloister was free before two o'clock. I went back for Bethany and we made our way inside.
The Belem cloister is one of the most gorgeous religious edifices I have ever had the honor to lay eyes on. The ornate two-storey structure surrounds a grassy courtyard with a fountain; above, the sky was pure and unblemished blue, and the midday sun dusted the white stone walls with gold. The cloister consisted of arched walkways facing the courtyard with intricately carved pillars and columns, each one different. Even in the shade, even filled with tourists, the whole place just radiated warmth and beauty and peace. It was an effort of will to force myself to eventually leave.
Since 1) we would have to pay and 2) there was a line, we skipped the church and headed straight down to the waterfront. Beside the towering monument to Portuguese seafaring explorers, the promenade sloped down into the water, and across a narrow channel, the green hills rose up from the waves. (Didn't know this, but Lisbon is built on the estuary of the Tagus river into the Atlantic; the Tagus spreads into a wide sea before narrowing into a small channel before it issues into the ocean. This was briefly disorienting, so...now you know.) We slurped up some quick-melting gelato and then lay on the warm pavement with our heads pillowed on our backpacks, took off our shoes, and soaked in the sun.
Eventually, we had to peel ourselves from our comfortable spot and continue on our way along the water. Our next goal was the magnificent Tower of Belem, a fortress on the river. We explored from the dungeons all the way to the top of the winding staircase, where we curled up on the benches and admired the play of the sunlight on the sparkling waves. There wasn't much else to do in the Tower except admire the views and take dramatically angled pictures, but that's plenty to keep me amused.
By this time, it was getting later in the afternoon, so we began the long slow trudge back toward the tram. My foot was aching so much that we were forced to move at a painful limp, but that didn't stop me from looking at every single booth in the open-air flea market in the park between the Tower and the tram stop. I bought a few gifts before we finally made our way back to the center of Lisbon proper, although on the way back, I stopped for postcard stamps and had this delightful exchange:
Me: "I'd like three postcard stamps, please."
Younger lady who speaks good English: "Where to?"
Me: "The U.S."
Lady: *in Portuguese to an older lady behind the counter: something about Europe*
Me: "Will those go to the U.S.?"
Lady: "It's in Europe, yes?"
Me: "Uh...no."
Lady: "Where?"
Me: "Um...America?"
Older lady: "America? America!" *digs around and gets me the right stamps*
Lady: "Isn't that in Europe?"
Me: "...No."
Proving once and for all that geographical confusion is not solely an American trait.
We'd not slept much the night before, and we were both exhausted, so when we finally checked into our room, I crashed for an hour or two. When I regained consciousness, it was dark outside, and both Bethany and I were very hungry. We consulted the desk attendant and got a recommendation for a nearby restaurant in the Chiado district, so I told Bethany to get us there (she was in a traveling-on-a-budget apprenticeship/crash course) and we wandered that way together. The place that we finally found was an almost literal hole in the wall--a tiny, warm, close-quarters kind of place that looked, to me, just fantastic. Even better, as we were looking about with the kind of pathetic pleading that begs for someone to offer to let us sit with them, we were invited to sit with three very friendly Canadian woman who instantly made us feel welcome. We spent a couple hours laughing and drinking wine with them and eating really wonderful food--I had a sort of seafood stew with rice. The three ladies were sisters who travel to Europe together every year. They gave us recommendations on what to see in the city (since I had no RFS to guide me!) and made me laugh until I cried--they reminded me of the kind of carefree, wacky joviality that my mother and her friends share.
The city, which had been sun-soaked and quiet during the day, was coming awake as we left the restaurant. The streets were bright, and many pedestrian alleys were almost completely blocked by the tables of restaurants spilling out into the pleasantly cool night air. Bethany and I strolled down the streets where the whim took us, admiring the facades of churches and the music of buskers playing for wine-sipping diners. We would've liked to explore more, but we were both very tired and had a long day planned the next day, so we wandered our way back to our quiet room and got some much-needed sleep.
DAY SEVEN
We started our day with an amazing breakfast at the hostel: sausage and eggs, coffee and tea, toast and jam, all free (!!) and very delicious. Our first objective was to get tickets for a performance of fado, traditional Portuguese music, that night, but we hiked all the way up to the theater to find it closed. We finally got our tickets at a nearby mall and were ready to begin our sightseeing for the day.
Our Canadian friends from the night before had recommended that we visit an old church, only the skeleton of which remained after being destroyed in an earthquake, and an elevator that afforded a view of the whole city. We walked to the top of the elevator and had some very nice views from the bridge out to it, but they wouldn't let us up on the top viewing platform without a ticket. Screw that, we said (or I did; Bethany doesn't talk like that), and continued on.
We walked through the steep and winding streets down to the main square, Rossio, a very impressive public space framed on all sides by tall, pale, majestic buildings. Our aim here, though, was around the northeast corner of the square: a small hole-in-the-wall shop selling only cherry liqueur, which had also been suggested by our Canadian friends. We each had a taste (very sweet, with cherries floating in it!), bought some pastries at the bakery next door that had also been recommended, and continued on our way.
Our two main objectives of the day were the cathedral and the castle. Our map suggesting a walking route that connected the two through the beautiful Alfama neighborhood. I'd given Bethany the map for the day, and she got us safely to the cathedral, which was pretty but somewhat forbidding and gloomy. We didn't stay too long, since the day was bright and clear and we still had a lot to see. We wound our way through narrow alleyways between towering red-roofed white buildings, up and up the curving staircases, under laundry lines and flags, catching through narrow cracks occasional glimpses of the water shining in the sunlight below. We finally came out to a main street and marveled at the view: the jumble of red and white sloping away to the sea, crowned by majestic white churches in the distance. We paused here for a while to soak in the sun before continuing uphill.
We got a little lost, but a helpful security guard and a friendly Dutch tourist got us back on the right track, and we were soon inside the walls of Lisbon's castle. The castle sits hunkered down on the highest hill overlooking the city; the elevator that had seemed so high that morning was a small grey smudge far below. Bethany and I walked every inch of the castle complex: we visited the obligatory museum tracing the history of forifications on that spot; we visited every wall and turret in the castle itself; we visited a dig site for Muslim ruins; we even visited the cafe. The sun was bright and warm but not scorching, the sky a perfect blue, and the white city below, speckled with green and red and yellow, gleamed and shone. I could've sat up there all day in the sun, leaning on the warm stone, smelling the fresh air, breathing in the ocean and the sunlight and the beauty.
Time was short, though, and we needed to head out. We made our way back down the hill to our hostel, where we picked up our stuff, then we went by a grocery store and filled up our packs with food. Staggering back up to the Chiado district, we made our way to the theater and sat back to hear fado. This had been one of my priorities in Lisbon. Fado is a famous, very Portuguese musical style, full of sadness and longing, and the performance, though clearly aimed at tourists, didn't disappoint. Neither of us could understand a single word of the Portuguese lyrics, so we listened instead to the music of the words themselves. Fado would make any skeptic of phonaesthetics a believer; as far as I can tell, every word of Portuguese is euphonic.
From the theater we had to book it to the metro out of town. When we'd been planning our trip, I'd only really booked up to Lisbon, though we were planning to go on to Sevilla from there. Turns out that although Lisbon and Sevilla are geographically not far apart, and both major tourist attractions, there is no convenient direct transportation link between them at all, and taking either plane or train would lose us an entire day that we couldn't spare. The only solution was to take an overnight bus, departing from Lisbon at quarter to eight and arriving in Sevilla at five in the morning. Yippee.
After the plush, quiet theater and soulful music we had just experienced, it was a bit of a shock to sit in a garishly lit bus station, dreading the long trek ahead of us. We managed to find and get on the bus and settled in for a long night. I did not want to leave Lisbon at all, and watched as long as there were still lights going by. The seats were too small and, like airplane seats, seemingly designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, but sometime during the night we both managed to fall asleep and left Portugal behind in the darkness.
Mm, Portugal. I had been determined, when this trip was in the planning stages, to go to Lisbon, despite the fact that it was actually pretty far out of the way. Now, I'm very glad we went, and I'd love to go back, but going to Portugal presented a new problem. Up till this point, my Spanish had been sufficient to get us by, but neither us spoke a word of Portuguese. Gestures and smiles, here we come!
DAY SIX
Another day, another new city. We arrived in Lisbon and stared eagerly out the windows of the bus at the sun-drenched metropolis flashing by. The bus left us in the massive Praca do Comercio, presided over on one side by an enormous white arch and opening out on the other side into the water. We went to our hostel to check in, forgetting it was barely 10am and we wouldn't be allowed to check in, and instead dropped off our stuff and, on the recommendation of the clerk at the hostel, headed towards Belem.
Belem is a suburb/neighborhood/somehow or other a part of Lisbon, and is generally frequented by tourists for its beautiful church and cloister and its waterside promenade. There was a bit of a faff getting there (we missed the first tram, then the second tram stopped before Belem and we had to take a very crowded bus the rest of the way), but this turned out to be because of another mounted parade. We seem to have been stalked by mounted parades...Anyway, unlike the one in Madrid, this was some sort of military demonstration, complete with rifles and uniforms and horses and everything. We watched the band march around for a while and then wandered on, partly because one of the regimental dogs was barking incessantly, despite the efforts by his handler to make him stop. He was probably too hot in that long coat sitting in the sun, poor thing.
We stopped at a sidewalk cafe for lunch which, though touristy, was friendly and cheap. (Get your head around that, if you can!) We made it to the church/cloister and I left Bethany standing in line while I went to check out what the deal was. It took the guard a couple of tries to communicate to me that the entrance to the cloister was free before two o'clock. I went back for Bethany and we made our way inside.
The Belem cloister is one of the most gorgeous religious edifices I have ever had the honor to lay eyes on. The ornate two-storey structure surrounds a grassy courtyard with a fountain; above, the sky was pure and unblemished blue, and the midday sun dusted the white stone walls with gold. The cloister consisted of arched walkways facing the courtyard with intricately carved pillars and columns, each one different. Even in the shade, even filled with tourists, the whole place just radiated warmth and beauty and peace. It was an effort of will to force myself to eventually leave.
Since 1) we would have to pay and 2) there was a line, we skipped the church and headed straight down to the waterfront. Beside the towering monument to Portuguese seafaring explorers, the promenade sloped down into the water, and across a narrow channel, the green hills rose up from the waves. (Didn't know this, but Lisbon is built on the estuary of the Tagus river into the Atlantic; the Tagus spreads into a wide sea before narrowing into a small channel before it issues into the ocean. This was briefly disorienting, so...now you know.) We slurped up some quick-melting gelato and then lay on the warm pavement with our heads pillowed on our backpacks, took off our shoes, and soaked in the sun.
Eventually, we had to peel ourselves from our comfortable spot and continue on our way along the water. Our next goal was the magnificent Tower of Belem, a fortress on the river. We explored from the dungeons all the way to the top of the winding staircase, where we curled up on the benches and admired the play of the sunlight on the sparkling waves. There wasn't much else to do in the Tower except admire the views and take dramatically angled pictures, but that's plenty to keep me amused.
By this time, it was getting later in the afternoon, so we began the long slow trudge back toward the tram. My foot was aching so much that we were forced to move at a painful limp, but that didn't stop me from looking at every single booth in the open-air flea market in the park between the Tower and the tram stop. I bought a few gifts before we finally made our way back to the center of Lisbon proper, although on the way back, I stopped for postcard stamps and had this delightful exchange:
Me: "I'd like three postcard stamps, please."
Younger lady who speaks good English: "Where to?"
Me: "The U.S."
Lady: *in Portuguese to an older lady behind the counter: something about Europe*
Me: "Will those go to the U.S.?"
Lady: "It's in Europe, yes?"
Me: "Uh...no."
Lady: "Where?"
Me: "Um...America?"
Older lady: "America? America!" *digs around and gets me the right stamps*
Lady: "Isn't that in Europe?"
Me: "...No."
Proving once and for all that geographical confusion is not solely an American trait.
We'd not slept much the night before, and we were both exhausted, so when we finally checked into our room, I crashed for an hour or two. When I regained consciousness, it was dark outside, and both Bethany and I were very hungry. We consulted the desk attendant and got a recommendation for a nearby restaurant in the Chiado district, so I told Bethany to get us there (she was in a traveling-on-a-budget apprenticeship/crash course) and we wandered that way together. The place that we finally found was an almost literal hole in the wall--a tiny, warm, close-quarters kind of place that looked, to me, just fantastic. Even better, as we were looking about with the kind of pathetic pleading that begs for someone to offer to let us sit with them, we were invited to sit with three very friendly Canadian woman who instantly made us feel welcome. We spent a couple hours laughing and drinking wine with them and eating really wonderful food--I had a sort of seafood stew with rice. The three ladies were sisters who travel to Europe together every year. They gave us recommendations on what to see in the city (since I had no RFS to guide me!) and made me laugh until I cried--they reminded me of the kind of carefree, wacky joviality that my mother and her friends share.
The city, which had been sun-soaked and quiet during the day, was coming awake as we left the restaurant. The streets were bright, and many pedestrian alleys were almost completely blocked by the tables of restaurants spilling out into the pleasantly cool night air. Bethany and I strolled down the streets where the whim took us, admiring the facades of churches and the music of buskers playing for wine-sipping diners. We would've liked to explore more, but we were both very tired and had a long day planned the next day, so we wandered our way back to our quiet room and got some much-needed sleep.
DAY SEVEN
We started our day with an amazing breakfast at the hostel: sausage and eggs, coffee and tea, toast and jam, all free (!!) and very delicious. Our first objective was to get tickets for a performance of fado, traditional Portuguese music, that night, but we hiked all the way up to the theater to find it closed. We finally got our tickets at a nearby mall and were ready to begin our sightseeing for the day.
Our Canadian friends from the night before had recommended that we visit an old church, only the skeleton of which remained after being destroyed in an earthquake, and an elevator that afforded a view of the whole city. We walked to the top of the elevator and had some very nice views from the bridge out to it, but they wouldn't let us up on the top viewing platform without a ticket. Screw that, we said (or I did; Bethany doesn't talk like that), and continued on.
We walked through the steep and winding streets down to the main square, Rossio, a very impressive public space framed on all sides by tall, pale, majestic buildings. Our aim here, though, was around the northeast corner of the square: a small hole-in-the-wall shop selling only cherry liqueur, which had also been suggested by our Canadian friends. We each had a taste (very sweet, with cherries floating in it!), bought some pastries at the bakery next door that had also been recommended, and continued on our way.
Our two main objectives of the day were the cathedral and the castle. Our map suggesting a walking route that connected the two through the beautiful Alfama neighborhood. I'd given Bethany the map for the day, and she got us safely to the cathedral, which was pretty but somewhat forbidding and gloomy. We didn't stay too long, since the day was bright and clear and we still had a lot to see. We wound our way through narrow alleyways between towering red-roofed white buildings, up and up the curving staircases, under laundry lines and flags, catching through narrow cracks occasional glimpses of the water shining in the sunlight below. We finally came out to a main street and marveled at the view: the jumble of red and white sloping away to the sea, crowned by majestic white churches in the distance. We paused here for a while to soak in the sun before continuing uphill.
We got a little lost, but a helpful security guard and a friendly Dutch tourist got us back on the right track, and we were soon inside the walls of Lisbon's castle. The castle sits hunkered down on the highest hill overlooking the city; the elevator that had seemed so high that morning was a small grey smudge far below. Bethany and I walked every inch of the castle complex: we visited the obligatory museum tracing the history of forifications on that spot; we visited every wall and turret in the castle itself; we visited a dig site for Muslim ruins; we even visited the cafe. The sun was bright and warm but not scorching, the sky a perfect blue, and the white city below, speckled with green and red and yellow, gleamed and shone. I could've sat up there all day in the sun, leaning on the warm stone, smelling the fresh air, breathing in the ocean and the sunlight and the beauty.
Time was short, though, and we needed to head out. We made our way back down the hill to our hostel, where we picked up our stuff, then we went by a grocery store and filled up our packs with food. Staggering back up to the Chiado district, we made our way to the theater and sat back to hear fado. This had been one of my priorities in Lisbon. Fado is a famous, very Portuguese musical style, full of sadness and longing, and the performance, though clearly aimed at tourists, didn't disappoint. Neither of us could understand a single word of the Portuguese lyrics, so we listened instead to the music of the words themselves. Fado would make any skeptic of phonaesthetics a believer; as far as I can tell, every word of Portuguese is euphonic.
From the theater we had to book it to the metro out of town. When we'd been planning our trip, I'd only really booked up to Lisbon, though we were planning to go on to Sevilla from there. Turns out that although Lisbon and Sevilla are geographically not far apart, and both major tourist attractions, there is no convenient direct transportation link between them at all, and taking either plane or train would lose us an entire day that we couldn't spare. The only solution was to take an overnight bus, departing from Lisbon at quarter to eight and arriving in Sevilla at five in the morning. Yippee.
After the plush, quiet theater and soulful music we had just experienced, it was a bit of a shock to sit in a garishly lit bus station, dreading the long trek ahead of us. We managed to find and get on the bus and settled in for a long night. I did not want to leave Lisbon at all, and watched as long as there were still lights going by. The seats were too small and, like airplane seats, seemingly designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, but sometime during the night we both managed to fall asleep and left Portugal behind in the darkness.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Iberian Adventure: Spain, Part II
[UPDATE: Pictures now available in my Picasa album!]
But first: Wow, has this been a long weekend.
On Saturday, we had Imkertag (beekeeping day), which was basically a conference of top beekeepers from Thueringen, Sachsen, and Sachsen-Anhalt, with a couple people from Berlin and Brandenburg, too. And I discovered on that day the German love of long, monotonous speeches. Pretty much the entire day was a series of presentation after presentation; about a third of the way in, my brain started shutting down--you know, maximum overload, where your brain simply can't process more new information and strikes in protest. I learned a few new things, but I spent a good bit of it reading my Kindle.
Sunday I went with Bethany to visit Victoria in Ilmenau. We ate Vietnamese food, shared pictures from our vacations, and munched on cookies. It's so nice to have a friend to go visit, even if it takes two hours on the train to get there...again, Kindle.
Today was a free day off class because it was the official opening ceremony of the Fachschule. And yet again, more long and painfully unintelligible speeches, from 10am to 4pm with just one hour break in the middle for lunch. I didn't last as long this time; I only made it through the first presentation (something about agriculture as relates to politics or something) before my brain saw what the second one was on (genetics and breeding) and went "Aw, hell no," and bailed. It was a long seven hours. I was there for the whole thing because I was supposed to be officially introduced, except the head of the school forgot to introduce me at the beginning and didn't get around to it until the closing remarks. The only redeeming feature was hanging out with the fun Hauswirtschaft ladies and drinking copious amounts of coffee.
Anyway. Back to the adventure!
DAY FOUR
Our plane to Madrid was delayed (of course), so we got in later than expected, but the kind tourist info lady at the airport got us back on track quickly. We took the Metro into the city center and strolled through the sundrenched streets to our hostel. The reception was pretty janky, but the rooms were brightly colored, with a tiny balcony looking out onto the pedestrian street.
Bethany and I were starving, so we immediately set off in the direction of our next stop, the Prado Museum, in search of some food. We found...nothing. Well, nothing affordable, at least; there were no cafes or sandwich shops that we could see. We ended up...I'm ashamed to say this, but we got take-out from Burger King and sat out in the sunshine in a park. I was surprised how delicious that hamburger was.
The Prado is like Spain's Louvre, except much smaller and containing mostly paintings by Spanish artists. We got an audioguide, but seriously, all of the paintings sort of blurred into each other. I did like some of the works by Goya, and it was fun to see the real Las Meninas instead of Picasso's wacko caricatures. After a few hours, we were both willing to be done, so we headed in the direction of El Parque del Retiro.
The park is one of those enormous, perfectly groomed, so-pretty-it's-fake parks that Europeans seem to love so much. We wandered down the tree-lined lanes as the sun wandered toward the horizon; finding a nice little lake, we bought some drinks, sat on the steps of an enormous monument and watched the sun go down over the water while I learned from Bethany about British royalty. Bethany has a great head for history and is a good storyteller, and I'm always up for a good story.
With darkness falling, we headed out of the park and up the Gran Via on our way back to our hostel, where we asked for directions to a good restaurant. They pointed us to a place that did little tapas things on toast (so yummy!) and gave us free glasses of sangria. We returned to the hostel for sleep, although Bethany was kept up by some obnoxious Americans who were prepping for a night out clubbing and, completely ignoring the fact that there were people in the room trying to sleep, kept the lights on and their voices up until they finally left around 1am. Gah, some Amis give us all a bad name.
DAY FIVE
As usual, Bethany popped out of bed way before me and had to convince me that being awake is actually a good thing. Our first task of the day was following RFS' self-guided walking tour through the city. We started in the Puerta del Sol, a large and beautiful public square that, at 10am, was almost completely empty. We headed into the streets and found ourselves in another wonderful pedestrian square, Plaza Mayor, where the cafes were just beginning to set their chairs out in the sun. Dropping by a market, we made our way onward until we stopped outside a church to witness a random parade.
There were men in uniform on horses, and women in traditional dresses, and people carrying gold and silver staffs and ornately decorated banners. We stood around gawping for a while, and a camera guy took some footage of us standing there looking mildly bemused, but no one we asked could tell us what was going on beyond, "it's some kind of religious procession." Yes, I can see that, thanks.
After a bit, they started singing and parading and such, so we followed along and split off from them at our original end destination: the royal palace. The audioguide took us through ornately furnished room after room, explaining to us in meticulous detail where each piece of furniture came from, who had designed and built it, and what artistic movement who had inspired it. Some of the rooms were very lovely, but as opulently beautiful as these palaces are, they have small windows and not much sunlight (can't be getting all weather-worn like those peasants!), and they feel like a circular maze, so that the rich and royalty just go around and around and eventually forget that the rest of the world isn't covered in silk and gold. Anyway, after glancing through the armory (look, another suit of armor! Wowee!) we bailed and headed to the cathedral right across the plaza.
The cathedral was singularly unimpressive from the outside--well, compared to many other cathedrals I've seen. Inside, the most impressive thing was the psychedelically beautiful rainbow ceiling, painted with fantastic colors in complex geometrical patterns. The underside of the dome had its four walls painted like the four elements, and the sunlight shining through the stained glass bathed the crucified Christ in rainbows. The only slight weirdness was one of the transepts, which was devoted to an enormous golden altar to Mary.
Since we were now quite hungry and it was well into the afternoon, we stopped by an overpriced, touristy cafe for lunch and then continued to our next stop, an Egyptian temple. When we arrived, it was closed, but the posted schedule said it would reopen in 45 minutes, so we enjoyed the view into the city and took a nap in the deliciously warm sunlight. An hour later, we managed to peel ourselves from our comfy spot and totter back to the temple, only to find we'd read the time wrong and the thing was actually closed for the rest of the day. Oh well.
We set off instead in search of our next goal: a chocolate shop recommended by a friend of mine. On the way, we stopped by the Corte Ingles department store, where Bethany gave me a heart attack by wandering off and losing me completely (this is like a 10-storey store, too). With no way to page her (the help desk refused), my cell battery dying, and no idea where she'd gone, I was just starting to formulate how to say, "Please help me, I think my friend's been kidnapped" in Spanish when we found each other again. Whew! By now, the streets that had been quiet and empty were starting to swell with people, so we took ourselves off again and eventually found the chocolate shop. There we enjoyed churros con chocolate, a yummy treat involving churros (strips of deep-fried dough) dipped in thick, pudding-like hot chocolate.
From there, we headed back to Puerta del Sol. That morning, it had been quiet, bright, and almost deserted; now, with the sun setting and the lights beginning to glow, it was filled with people, tourists and locals, listening to bands, taking pictures, chatting, enjoying the atmosphere. Bethany and I sat by a fountain to enjoy it, but after we were each approached by older gentlemen determined to converse with us, we decided to move on. We wandered looking for a restaurant for a bit, but my foot was aching, so we eventually took RFS's advice and found a tiny little tapas place that served gazpacho, which my grandpa had recommended, and we had a delicious dinner followed by gelato. It was getting late by then, and we had yet another early-morning flight the next day, so we took ourselves off to bed.
I have to say that I really loved Madrid. My impressions of Barcelona had been mixed, but somehow Madrid felt to me much smaller than it really is, and very open and welcoming. Maybe it was the warm weather, the cheerfully conversing crowds, the wonderful pedestrian streets and sidewalk cafes, and maybe it's because my great-grandmother's family was from Madrid. Whatever, I felt very comfortable there. I was impressed and surprised, and continued to be throughout the trip, by how much I loved and enjoyed almost all the cities we visited, and how sad I was to leave them.
But first: Wow, has this been a long weekend.
On Saturday, we had Imkertag (beekeeping day), which was basically a conference of top beekeepers from Thueringen, Sachsen, and Sachsen-Anhalt, with a couple people from Berlin and Brandenburg, too. And I discovered on that day the German love of long, monotonous speeches. Pretty much the entire day was a series of presentation after presentation; about a third of the way in, my brain started shutting down--you know, maximum overload, where your brain simply can't process more new information and strikes in protest. I learned a few new things, but I spent a good bit of it reading my Kindle.
Sunday I went with Bethany to visit Victoria in Ilmenau. We ate Vietnamese food, shared pictures from our vacations, and munched on cookies. It's so nice to have a friend to go visit, even if it takes two hours on the train to get there...again, Kindle.
Today was a free day off class because it was the official opening ceremony of the Fachschule. And yet again, more long and painfully unintelligible speeches, from 10am to 4pm with just one hour break in the middle for lunch. I didn't last as long this time; I only made it through the first presentation (something about agriculture as relates to politics or something) before my brain saw what the second one was on (genetics and breeding) and went "Aw, hell no," and bailed. It was a long seven hours. I was there for the whole thing because I was supposed to be officially introduced, except the head of the school forgot to introduce me at the beginning and didn't get around to it until the closing remarks. The only redeeming feature was hanging out with the fun Hauswirtschaft ladies and drinking copious amounts of coffee.
Anyway. Back to the adventure!
DAY FOUR
Our plane to Madrid was delayed (of course), so we got in later than expected, but the kind tourist info lady at the airport got us back on track quickly. We took the Metro into the city center and strolled through the sundrenched streets to our hostel. The reception was pretty janky, but the rooms were brightly colored, with a tiny balcony looking out onto the pedestrian street.
Bethany and I were starving, so we immediately set off in the direction of our next stop, the Prado Museum, in search of some food. We found...nothing. Well, nothing affordable, at least; there were no cafes or sandwich shops that we could see. We ended up...I'm ashamed to say this, but we got take-out from Burger King and sat out in the sunshine in a park. I was surprised how delicious that hamburger was.
The Prado is like Spain's Louvre, except much smaller and containing mostly paintings by Spanish artists. We got an audioguide, but seriously, all of the paintings sort of blurred into each other. I did like some of the works by Goya, and it was fun to see the real Las Meninas instead of Picasso's wacko caricatures. After a few hours, we were both willing to be done, so we headed in the direction of El Parque del Retiro.
The park is one of those enormous, perfectly groomed, so-pretty-it's-fake parks that Europeans seem to love so much. We wandered down the tree-lined lanes as the sun wandered toward the horizon; finding a nice little lake, we bought some drinks, sat on the steps of an enormous monument and watched the sun go down over the water while I learned from Bethany about British royalty. Bethany has a great head for history and is a good storyteller, and I'm always up for a good story.
With darkness falling, we headed out of the park and up the Gran Via on our way back to our hostel, where we asked for directions to a good restaurant. They pointed us to a place that did little tapas things on toast (so yummy!) and gave us free glasses of sangria. We returned to the hostel for sleep, although Bethany was kept up by some obnoxious Americans who were prepping for a night out clubbing and, completely ignoring the fact that there were people in the room trying to sleep, kept the lights on and their voices up until they finally left around 1am. Gah, some Amis give us all a bad name.
DAY FIVE
As usual, Bethany popped out of bed way before me and had to convince me that being awake is actually a good thing. Our first task of the day was following RFS' self-guided walking tour through the city. We started in the Puerta del Sol, a large and beautiful public square that, at 10am, was almost completely empty. We headed into the streets and found ourselves in another wonderful pedestrian square, Plaza Mayor, where the cafes were just beginning to set their chairs out in the sun. Dropping by a market, we made our way onward until we stopped outside a church to witness a random parade.
There were men in uniform on horses, and women in traditional dresses, and people carrying gold and silver staffs and ornately decorated banners. We stood around gawping for a while, and a camera guy took some footage of us standing there looking mildly bemused, but no one we asked could tell us what was going on beyond, "it's some kind of religious procession." Yes, I can see that, thanks.
After a bit, they started singing and parading and such, so we followed along and split off from them at our original end destination: the royal palace. The audioguide took us through ornately furnished room after room, explaining to us in meticulous detail where each piece of furniture came from, who had designed and built it, and what artistic movement who had inspired it. Some of the rooms were very lovely, but as opulently beautiful as these palaces are, they have small windows and not much sunlight (can't be getting all weather-worn like those peasants!), and they feel like a circular maze, so that the rich and royalty just go around and around and eventually forget that the rest of the world isn't covered in silk and gold. Anyway, after glancing through the armory (look, another suit of armor! Wowee!) we bailed and headed to the cathedral right across the plaza.
The cathedral was singularly unimpressive from the outside--well, compared to many other cathedrals I've seen. Inside, the most impressive thing was the psychedelically beautiful rainbow ceiling, painted with fantastic colors in complex geometrical patterns. The underside of the dome had its four walls painted like the four elements, and the sunlight shining through the stained glass bathed the crucified Christ in rainbows. The only slight weirdness was one of the transepts, which was devoted to an enormous golden altar to Mary.
Since we were now quite hungry and it was well into the afternoon, we stopped by an overpriced, touristy cafe for lunch and then continued to our next stop, an Egyptian temple. When we arrived, it was closed, but the posted schedule said it would reopen in 45 minutes, so we enjoyed the view into the city and took a nap in the deliciously warm sunlight. An hour later, we managed to peel ourselves from our comfy spot and totter back to the temple, only to find we'd read the time wrong and the thing was actually closed for the rest of the day. Oh well.
We set off instead in search of our next goal: a chocolate shop recommended by a friend of mine. On the way, we stopped by the Corte Ingles department store, where Bethany gave me a heart attack by wandering off and losing me completely (this is like a 10-storey store, too). With no way to page her (the help desk refused), my cell battery dying, and no idea where she'd gone, I was just starting to formulate how to say, "Please help me, I think my friend's been kidnapped" in Spanish when we found each other again. Whew! By now, the streets that had been quiet and empty were starting to swell with people, so we took ourselves off again and eventually found the chocolate shop. There we enjoyed churros con chocolate, a yummy treat involving churros (strips of deep-fried dough) dipped in thick, pudding-like hot chocolate.
From there, we headed back to Puerta del Sol. That morning, it had been quiet, bright, and almost deserted; now, with the sun setting and the lights beginning to glow, it was filled with people, tourists and locals, listening to bands, taking pictures, chatting, enjoying the atmosphere. Bethany and I sat by a fountain to enjoy it, but after we were each approached by older gentlemen determined to converse with us, we decided to move on. We wandered looking for a restaurant for a bit, but my foot was aching, so we eventually took RFS's advice and found a tiny little tapas place that served gazpacho, which my grandpa had recommended, and we had a delicious dinner followed by gelato. It was getting late by then, and we had yet another early-morning flight the next day, so we took ourselves off to bed.
I have to say that I really loved Madrid. My impressions of Barcelona had been mixed, but somehow Madrid felt to me much smaller than it really is, and very open and welcoming. Maybe it was the warm weather, the cheerfully conversing crowds, the wonderful pedestrian streets and sidewalk cafes, and maybe it's because my great-grandmother's family was from Madrid. Whatever, I felt very comfortable there. I was impressed and surprised, and continued to be throughout the trip, by how much I loved and enjoyed almost all the cities we visited, and how sad I was to leave them.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
The Iberian Adventure: Spain, Part I
[UPDATE: Pictures now posted in my Picasa album!]
But first...an apology.
It was recently brought to my attention that it's now been a month since I've written anything on this blog. I'm very sorry to the three or four of you who actually read it. I'd like to say I've been busy, but that would be so much of an exaggeration to be untrue. Since my return from Spain, I've certainly been more busy with many new classes, but I still have quite a bit of free time. I'm beginning to think that it's inevitable.
I've mainly been delayed by the fact that I wrote drafts of both Barcelona and Madrid, which have subsequently mysteriously disappeared. (Update: found the part on Barcelona!) So, I'm going to try to catch up by giving you, quite belatedly, the exciting story of our adventure in the Iberian peninsula. It may take me a few installments, but I'm going to try, okay?
DAY ONE
Our adventure began on Tuesday, October 12th, when we left the Wohnheim with our backpacks to catch the train to Altenburg. The weather was cold, drizzly, and grey, and we were desperately hoping for better on the other end of our flight. First, we had to wait for a few hours for the bus to the airport, so we did some shopping in a half-awake little shopping mall to pass the time.
The airport was typically tiny--like someone had set up a check-in desk and a couple of X-ray machines in an oversized shed--and we settled down to, once again, wait, talking sporadically with a nice German girl heading back to Barcelona for her half-year study abroad. From her report, she wasn't too impressed with Spain; she complained about the Spanish midday siesta and their supposed inability to take anything seriously or do anything urgently. Personally, that sounds good to me.
Our plane was supposed to leave just before 6pm, but by then, the plane hadn't even arrived. When it finally did arrive, and they had disembarked, cleaned it, and let us on, we were already quite late. We settled into our seats and waited. Finally, the captain came on the intercom to tell us that would be able to start the engines in about 40 minutes. After about half an hour more waiting, we were informed that due to "problems" (i.e. strikes) in France, we would not be allowed to enter French airspace and were looking at a delay of about three and a half hours. It was now dark outside, and we were getting hungry and thirsty, but apparently they aren't allowed to serve any food or drinks until in the air, so we sat there and waited. And waited. And waited.
Like a miracle, at about 9pm, our captain informed us that we could take off. We taxied to the runway, and I saw the rows of lights stretching away into the darkness, pointing our path into the sky. And we sat there, not moving, just waiting, as I rocked back and forth, clutching my half-dead copy of A Tale of Two Cities and doing my best impatient-Jeremy-Clarkson impression: "Let's go! Come on, come on!"
The whine of the engines built to a roar--the most wonderful sound I've ever heard--and we accelerated into the sky. Two hours later, we arrived in Barcelona in wind and rain, only to stagger onto a bus for the next two hours into the city. At the station in town, I was suddenly confronted by a problem that my sleep-deprived brain could hardly surmount: a cabbie asking me, in Spanish, where I wanted to go. I told him the name of the hostel, and when that didn't work, tried to tell him where it was, failing entirely to remember the words for "intersection" and "nineteen." I showed him the address, and we finally arrived, tottered in, got our keys, and wandered off to bed.
DAY TWO
We began our exploration of the city with a walk down Las Ramblas--a wide, tree-line boulevard connecting the newer Eixample neighborhood with the harbor. Apparently, in the summer Las Ramblas is swarming with tourists, pickpockets, and those annoying living statues people, but for us it was quiet and mostly empty. Partway down, we turned off down some narrower, twisting streets to arrive at the scaffold-bedecked cathedral.
I've said before that churches, no matter where they are, are oasises of cool peacefulness amid noise, heat, and stress. The Spanish churches are a bit different, though; walking in, the clamor of the street is replaced by the familiar comforting murmur of prayerful awe, but instead of coolness, these churches are full of warmth. And the smell! The first church we dropped by, off the Ramblas, was scented by the rich aroma of warm wax from the prayer candles burning in each chapel. When I smell the sweet, musty perfume of old books, I think of knowledge and learning; wet stone and moss smell of age; but warm wax smells of holiness.
Unfortunately, the cathedral has done away with real candles and replaced them with frankly pathetic electric ones, and the peace was disrupted by construction noise, but that didn't make the tall pillars and magnificent arches any less beautiful. Also striking was the tomb of a young girl, who was tortured and martyred by the Romans for her faith. She's now the patron saint of the church, and her ornate tomb lies under the high altar. I can't help but wonder what she would think to see all that pomp and honor for her. Of course, the church also can't pass up the opportunity to make some money: to turn on the lights to see the tomb, you have to slide in a coin.
The best bit about the cathedral was, by far, the cloister, enclosing a small garden, a fountain dedicated to (and sporting a very small statue of) Saint George, and thirteen white geese. While the cathedral, while beautiful, felt a bit kitschy (I mean, paying to turn on the lights? And electric candles? Really?) the cloister was full of that cool serenity that characterizes churches.
We dropped by the Deacon's House, now the Archives, for the a look at their pretty courtyard and enormous palm tree (which had to be tied to the surrounding building to stay upright) before going to seek some lunch. We rejoined the Ramblas and followed it the rest of the way to the harbor, where we sat by the water to eat. On the way, we passed the Colombus monument, topped by the man himself pointing out to sea. It doesn't cross my consciousness too often that Colombus was Spanish. Huh.
After lunch (and a quick chat with a nice old Dutch couple), we headed back up into the city through the Barri Gotic and made our way to the Picasso museum. Factoid of the day I didn't know: Picasso actually could paint well. Like, real, recognizable faces and landscapes which, although unremarkable to me, look quite nice. The museum focused on his early years (i.e. before he went all four-year-old-on-LSD-y) and by golly, the man could actually paint. This just made it all the more ridiculous and horrifying to see the hideously deformed block-people he began to paint instead for no obvious reason. Did the "making sense and having good taste" gland in his brain just spontaneously crawl out of his ear in boredom after the thousandth sketch of countryside rooftops? I like to imagine, though, that the conversation went like this:
"Hey, Picasso my man, whatcha paintin'?"
"Oh, I'm doing a reinterpretation of Las Meninas, widely regarded to be one of the best paintings of all time."
"Uh...are you sure? I'm pretty sure most people's eyes aren't stacked on top of each other. Where would the nose go?"
"...Under the ear. Obviously."
"What ear?"
"Oh, well, in this case her ear's actually on her forehead. And purple."
"That's ridiculous and possibly insane."
"Well, luckily for me, apparently the art scene is so desperate for innovation that 'ridiculous' and 'genius' are indistinguishable..."
(Except all this would be in Spanish. Obviously. And, er, apologies to people who understand/appreciate Picasso...)
All that this proves, I'm sure, is that I'm just not sophisticated enough to appreciate Picasso's genius. To which I guess I have to say, um, yes, and if sophistication means liking Picasso's wonky doodles, then no thanks.
To recover from the museum, we took a break in another warm, wax-scented church, then headed to the concert hall, designed by a guy named Gaudi. From what I can tell, Gaudi designed half of absolutely everything in Barcelona (churches, concert halls, parks, lampposts, etc), but this is okay with me because his style, although definitely odd, is kind of fantastically intriguing. Anyway, we scored some cheapish tickets for a concert that night, so we dashed off for a quick dinner of tapas and wine before returning for the music. The two-part concert was very nice--the piano/violin combo was better than the woodwind/brass quintet, I thought--but the concert hall itself was the main attraction, designed with fanciful sculptures and unlikely colors, along with the odd random Pegasus. After the concert, we made our way back to our hostel via another coffee shop, where I had my 4th coffee of the day. Mmm, the coffee is just delightful...
DAY THREE
I was awoken by Bethany, my human alarm clock, and we eventually headed out. (I hate mornings.) We began at La Bouqueria market, a riot of colorful fruit, twitching crustaceans, and assorted animal parts. We strolled through the aisles, sipping fruit drinks, before heading for the Metro.
We stepped blinking into the sun to behold before us a fantastical display of Jesus and genius gone mad. La Sagrada Familia (the Sacred Family) is a church, covered in scaffolding and presided over by watchful cranes, but not for renovation: begun over 100 years ago, the church is still being built. Designed, like everything in Barcelona, by Gaudi, the building looks like someone built the most exuberant, mind-bogglingly intricate exposition of Christianity--including all symbolic animals and people from the Bible--out of wax, then left it outside too long in the Mediterranean sun. Far from solemn, but somehow possessed of a sort of wacky, melty dignity, it's nothing if not striking.
We entered through one of the side door, featuring a much more subdued portrayal of Jesus' life than the Nativity Door's lavish effervescence, paid our 10 euro (?!) to get in, and wandered around. The interior is mostly barren except for the construction equipment, but somehow the fact that the cherry-pickers look tiny next to the enormous stone forest of tree-pillars holding up the half-finished roof doesn't hurt the church's awe factor at all. I can't wait to see what this place will look like finished, if they finish it in my lifetime! For now, I have to be content with those beautiful pastel stone trees, bathed in the soft light that the rainbow-tinted windows allow to enter. What a brilliant church!
Regretably, we had to keep going, so we left La Sagrada Familia behind and strolled through the city, stopping briefly for lunch, on our way to a park that Gaudi had also designed (surprise!). The park afforded lovely views of the city stretching down to the sea, and we got to see the adorable mosaic lizard guarding the entrance to the park. We dropped by the bookshop and then, as we were both getting very hungry, we decided to head back into town.
We found a good restaurant and took a break with some good food and sangria. My feet had been aching for a while, so it was wonderful to sit back and rest...until I found that my wallet was missing. Damn. Anyway, we then walked back through the Eixample to our hostel, since we'd have an early day the next day on our way to Madrid...
TO BE CONTINUED
But first...an apology.
It was recently brought to my attention that it's now been a month since I've written anything on this blog. I'm very sorry to the three or four of you who actually read it. I'd like to say I've been busy, but that would be so much of an exaggeration to be untrue. Since my return from Spain, I've certainly been more busy with many new classes, but I still have quite a bit of free time. I'm beginning to think that it's inevitable.
I've mainly been delayed by the fact that I wrote drafts of both Barcelona and Madrid, which have subsequently mysteriously disappeared. (Update: found the part on Barcelona!) So, I'm going to try to catch up by giving you, quite belatedly, the exciting story of our adventure in the Iberian peninsula. It may take me a few installments, but I'm going to try, okay?
DAY ONE
Our adventure began on Tuesday, October 12th, when we left the Wohnheim with our backpacks to catch the train to Altenburg. The weather was cold, drizzly, and grey, and we were desperately hoping for better on the other end of our flight. First, we had to wait for a few hours for the bus to the airport, so we did some shopping in a half-awake little shopping mall to pass the time.
The airport was typically tiny--like someone had set up a check-in desk and a couple of X-ray machines in an oversized shed--and we settled down to, once again, wait, talking sporadically with a nice German girl heading back to Barcelona for her half-year study abroad. From her report, she wasn't too impressed with Spain; she complained about the Spanish midday siesta and their supposed inability to take anything seriously or do anything urgently. Personally, that sounds good to me.
Our plane was supposed to leave just before 6pm, but by then, the plane hadn't even arrived. When it finally did arrive, and they had disembarked, cleaned it, and let us on, we were already quite late. We settled into our seats and waited. Finally, the captain came on the intercom to tell us that would be able to start the engines in about 40 minutes. After about half an hour more waiting, we were informed that due to "problems" (i.e. strikes) in France, we would not be allowed to enter French airspace and were looking at a delay of about three and a half hours. It was now dark outside, and we were getting hungry and thirsty, but apparently they aren't allowed to serve any food or drinks until in the air, so we sat there and waited. And waited. And waited.
Like a miracle, at about 9pm, our captain informed us that we could take off. We taxied to the runway, and I saw the rows of lights stretching away into the darkness, pointing our path into the sky. And we sat there, not moving, just waiting, as I rocked back and forth, clutching my half-dead copy of A Tale of Two Cities and doing my best impatient-Jeremy-Clarkson impression: "Let's go! Come on, come on!"
The whine of the engines built to a roar--the most wonderful sound I've ever heard--and we accelerated into the sky. Two hours later, we arrived in Barcelona in wind and rain, only to stagger onto a bus for the next two hours into the city. At the station in town, I was suddenly confronted by a problem that my sleep-deprived brain could hardly surmount: a cabbie asking me, in Spanish, where I wanted to go. I told him the name of the hostel, and when that didn't work, tried to tell him where it was, failing entirely to remember the words for "intersection" and "nineteen." I showed him the address, and we finally arrived, tottered in, got our keys, and wandered off to bed.
DAY TWO
We began our exploration of the city with a walk down Las Ramblas--a wide, tree-line boulevard connecting the newer Eixample neighborhood with the harbor. Apparently, in the summer Las Ramblas is swarming with tourists, pickpockets, and those annoying living statues people, but for us it was quiet and mostly empty. Partway down, we turned off down some narrower, twisting streets to arrive at the scaffold-bedecked cathedral.
I've said before that churches, no matter where they are, are oasises of cool peacefulness amid noise, heat, and stress. The Spanish churches are a bit different, though; walking in, the clamor of the street is replaced by the familiar comforting murmur of prayerful awe, but instead of coolness, these churches are full of warmth. And the smell! The first church we dropped by, off the Ramblas, was scented by the rich aroma of warm wax from the prayer candles burning in each chapel. When I smell the sweet, musty perfume of old books, I think of knowledge and learning; wet stone and moss smell of age; but warm wax smells of holiness.
Unfortunately, the cathedral has done away with real candles and replaced them with frankly pathetic electric ones, and the peace was disrupted by construction noise, but that didn't make the tall pillars and magnificent arches any less beautiful. Also striking was the tomb of a young girl, who was tortured and martyred by the Romans for her faith. She's now the patron saint of the church, and her ornate tomb lies under the high altar. I can't help but wonder what she would think to see all that pomp and honor for her. Of course, the church also can't pass up the opportunity to make some money: to turn on the lights to see the tomb, you have to slide in a coin.
The best bit about the cathedral was, by far, the cloister, enclosing a small garden, a fountain dedicated to (and sporting a very small statue of) Saint George, and thirteen white geese. While the cathedral, while beautiful, felt a bit kitschy (I mean, paying to turn on the lights? And electric candles? Really?) the cloister was full of that cool serenity that characterizes churches.
We dropped by the Deacon's House, now the Archives, for the a look at their pretty courtyard and enormous palm tree (which had to be tied to the surrounding building to stay upright) before going to seek some lunch. We rejoined the Ramblas and followed it the rest of the way to the harbor, where we sat by the water to eat. On the way, we passed the Colombus monument, topped by the man himself pointing out to sea. It doesn't cross my consciousness too often that Colombus was Spanish. Huh.
After lunch (and a quick chat with a nice old Dutch couple), we headed back up into the city through the Barri Gotic and made our way to the Picasso museum. Factoid of the day I didn't know: Picasso actually could paint well. Like, real, recognizable faces and landscapes which, although unremarkable to me, look quite nice. The museum focused on his early years (i.e. before he went all four-year-old-on-LSD-y) and by golly, the man could actually paint. This just made it all the more ridiculous and horrifying to see the hideously deformed block-people he began to paint instead for no obvious reason. Did the "making sense and having good taste" gland in his brain just spontaneously crawl out of his ear in boredom after the thousandth sketch of countryside rooftops? I like to imagine, though, that the conversation went like this:
"Hey, Picasso my man, whatcha paintin'?"
"Oh, I'm doing a reinterpretation of Las Meninas, widely regarded to be one of the best paintings of all time."
"Uh...are you sure? I'm pretty sure most people's eyes aren't stacked on top of each other. Where would the nose go?"
"...Under the ear. Obviously."
"What ear?"
"Oh, well, in this case her ear's actually on her forehead. And purple."
"That's ridiculous and possibly insane."
"Well, luckily for me, apparently the art scene is so desperate for innovation that 'ridiculous' and 'genius' are indistinguishable..."
(Except all this would be in Spanish. Obviously. And, er, apologies to people who understand/appreciate Picasso...)
All that this proves, I'm sure, is that I'm just not sophisticated enough to appreciate Picasso's genius. To which I guess I have to say, um, yes, and if sophistication means liking Picasso's wonky doodles, then no thanks.
To recover from the museum, we took a break in another warm, wax-scented church, then headed to the concert hall, designed by a guy named Gaudi. From what I can tell, Gaudi designed half of absolutely everything in Barcelona (churches, concert halls, parks, lampposts, etc), but this is okay with me because his style, although definitely odd, is kind of fantastically intriguing. Anyway, we scored some cheapish tickets for a concert that night, so we dashed off for a quick dinner of tapas and wine before returning for the music. The two-part concert was very nice--the piano/violin combo was better than the woodwind/brass quintet, I thought--but the concert hall itself was the main attraction, designed with fanciful sculptures and unlikely colors, along with the odd random Pegasus. After the concert, we made our way back to our hostel via another coffee shop, where I had my 4th coffee of the day. Mmm, the coffee is just delightful...
DAY THREE
I was awoken by Bethany, my human alarm clock, and we eventually headed out. (I hate mornings.) We began at La Bouqueria market, a riot of colorful fruit, twitching crustaceans, and assorted animal parts. We strolled through the aisles, sipping fruit drinks, before heading for the Metro.
We stepped blinking into the sun to behold before us a fantastical display of Jesus and genius gone mad. La Sagrada Familia (the Sacred Family) is a church, covered in scaffolding and presided over by watchful cranes, but not for renovation: begun over 100 years ago, the church is still being built. Designed, like everything in Barcelona, by Gaudi, the building looks like someone built the most exuberant, mind-bogglingly intricate exposition of Christianity--including all symbolic animals and people from the Bible--out of wax, then left it outside too long in the Mediterranean sun. Far from solemn, but somehow possessed of a sort of wacky, melty dignity, it's nothing if not striking.
We entered through one of the side door, featuring a much more subdued portrayal of Jesus' life than the Nativity Door's lavish effervescence, paid our 10 euro (?!) to get in, and wandered around. The interior is mostly barren except for the construction equipment, but somehow the fact that the cherry-pickers look tiny next to the enormous stone forest of tree-pillars holding up the half-finished roof doesn't hurt the church's awe factor at all. I can't wait to see what this place will look like finished, if they finish it in my lifetime! For now, I have to be content with those beautiful pastel stone trees, bathed in the soft light that the rainbow-tinted windows allow to enter. What a brilliant church!
Regretably, we had to keep going, so we left La Sagrada Familia behind and strolled through the city, stopping briefly for lunch, on our way to a park that Gaudi had also designed (surprise!). The park afforded lovely views of the city stretching down to the sea, and we got to see the adorable mosaic lizard guarding the entrance to the park. We dropped by the bookshop and then, as we were both getting very hungry, we decided to head back into town.
We found a good restaurant and took a break with some good food and sangria. My feet had been aching for a while, so it was wonderful to sit back and rest...until I found that my wallet was missing. Damn. Anyway, we then walked back through the Eixample to our hostel, since we'd have an early day the next day on our way to Madrid...
TO BE CONTINUED
Saturday, August 21, 2010
York. (Sorry, I'm getting lazy.)
Originally written August 17
There is something very, very strange about not knowing where you are.
I am currently in Lancaster. This is apparently in northern England, but, allowing for the possibility of teleportation, I could just as easily be in Pennsylvania for all I know. It's cool and partly cloudy, with large patches of deliciously blue sky, and I've just had a prefectly wonderful cup of coffee at Costa to kill time waiting for the train to Penrith. As far as I can seen, there's a fairly deserted road out one exit and a couple of buildings in that ubiquitous greyish tan stone out the other--no town in sight. Although I've just been informed that the town is not five minutes' walk down the hill in the direction of the buildings. Odd.
There's a sort of deep-seated terror of being lost that rises up in strange places like this. Obviously, there are people on the platform and in the shops, and I'm sure I could start walking in almost any direction and come across someone who could help me in minutes. I'm hardly, in other words, in the middle of nowhere. And yet, there's a sort of nervous itch that pokes at my spinal cord. What if the train doesn't come and I'm stranded here? What if I get on the wrong train and end up in Nowhereton-upon-Tinkle with no way of getting back? The unfamiliarity is disconcerting. It's the small, annoying Chihuahua cousin of the wolfish terror that preys on people lost in the wilderness with dusk approaching.
It's also wonderful. Familiarity, while comforting and snuggly and good for evenings in the winter, can also be frightfully dull. The sense of being, and going, somewhere new has drawn humanity forward for millennia.
And yet, this is all rather grand when you're sitting in a train station in a quiet town in northern English, waiting for a comfortable train to whisk you off to another quiet town in northern England. Or possibly Pennsylvania.
Anyway. I've just left York, which makes it somewhat fitting that I'm passing through Lancaster as well. For those not acquainted with English history (which includes me, but here goes), the houses of York and Lancaster fought for a good long while for the rulership of England in a conflict known as the War of the Roses. Before I'd made the connection between THAT Lancaster and the small, seemingly isolated train station I was sitting in, I'd asked a very talkative lady next to me if I was still in Yorkshire. Hah. Oops.
Keep getting off track. I shall tell you about York. Calling into effect the First Day Rule, I dropped off my stuff at my new hostel (which was, unfortunately, 20 minutes' walk out of town) and went to have a little look around. The sun was shining brilliantly, it was warm and lovely, and so naturally, the only thing for it was to find cafe with tables out in the sun and have afternoon tea, which I promptly did while planning my next move. This turned out to be getting a ticket for a local performance of Henry IV, Part II--an exciting prospect, since I'd seen Part 1 in London (as you may remember) and was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to see the end. Having got my ticket for that afternoon, I set off walking on a bit of York's medieval wall, a pleasant stroll made fantastic by the views of the enormous, creamy white minster looming in a dignified, meranguey sort of way over the busy town center. I'd intended to walk the town walls all the way round, but got easily distracted by Goodramgate, a street leading into York's center positively overflowing with charity shops.
Charity shops are a wonderful idea. Apparently, charities open a shop and ask for donations, and at least part of the profits they make selling people's unwanted stuff to other people goes to fund the charity. Basically, it's like Value Village, except small, English, and for the benefit of heart patients or orphans or something. Not needing clothes, board games, furniture, dishes, or jewelry, I always make a beeline for the bookshelves, because if I'm lucky, I just might find a book I'd like to read. I've already mentioned how I bought far too many books at an Oxfam store in Liverpool, and yet I just can't seem to stay away.
The interesting thing about these places is that you only find there things that people have at one point owned, decided they don't want or need anymore, and have accordingly given away. If you're looking for particular books, like I am, that are popular at the moment, you're not likely to find them, because they're popular, and therefore people are reading and keeping them. The great thing about this is that you can kind of get a feel for unpopular books by their relative frequency between stores. Find one copy of something, and one person doesn't want it; find ten or twelve, and clearly, a lot of people don't want it. This is why I laugh to myself every time I find a brand new hardcover of one of Jeremy Clarkson's books, which happens in about half or more of the shops I've been in. The only people who are ambivalent about Clarkson, it seems, are the people who don't know about him.
Incidentally, in almost every one of these shops, there is also a copy of Jane Eyre. But I digress.
I was doing really well in the not-buying-more-books department until I came across an honest-to-goodness Oxfam bookstore and found yet another book I can't live without. Ah well.
I returned to the middle of town for evensong at the minster. I didn't have much time to look at the church and was ushered straight into the choir, where a guest choir from Arkansas sang the service quite beautifully. I only had time to peek around a few corners before I was chased out of the minster again and was left staring up at the spires rising golden above my head in the afternoon sunlight.
I carried on wandering through town and finally made my way to the church that had been converted to a theater for the play. Although I was a little too cold, the play was fairly good, if still somewhat baffling. I was reminded of when I picked up third-quarter physics to complete a GUR when I'd taken the first two quarters at a different college two years previously: I had a vague idea of what was going on, but I'd forgotten some important details (like which names belonged on which side) and, of course, all the faces were different. So, frustrating, but on the whole not bad. On a random note, during the play they mention that the King's forces are divided because he's also fighting Owen Glendower; this made me smile, because Glendower's rebellion was in North Wales, where I'd just been, and I'd been hearing about the noble Welsh rebels' fight at Conwy castle. Nothing like a little personal connection to give a story some context. I left contemplating the nature of kingship, the passage of time, and the meaning of loyalty, but was quickly brought back to earth by having to walk around a man who was standing on the pavement outside a bar with his friends, laughing as he urinated on the wall. Turns out the theatre/church is right in the middle of the bar and clubs area, so I had to wend my way past scantily dressed girls and drunk men to end up, eventually, back at my hostel.
I made it into town the next morning after a nice stroll down the river just in time for a walking tour around the city. The tour covered mostly ground I'd seen the day before, but I was introduced to some new places as well as learning more about what I'd seen before. After the tour, I got lunch at Greggs (<3!) and popped into a small church in the middle of the bustling shopping area.
This was an interesting thing. The cars were whizzing by, the people hurrying past, and yet all of them seemed to be completely oblivious to or uninterested in the fact that there was a very nice-looking church right there in the middle of it all. I wandered in to find something I always treasure: a calm, cool, peaceful, beautiful santuary. The traffic was right outside, but inside the stone walls, it was quiet and unruffled--and totally deserted. A poster on the wall told the sad story of how the church had once been grander, with much more land, but slowly, bit by bit, it had sacrificed more and more to the growing city around it. It reminded me of the giving tree in a way: dignified but a little sad.
I made my way through the center of the town, taking some pictures of the Shambles--a narrow, shop-lined street dating from way back in the day, medieval times or something. The shops on the ground floor are modern, but overhead, the old houses lean and sag into each other with a sort of sleepy forgetfulness. Eventually I made my way around town to the Castle Museum, which had exhibits on things like washing machines and wedding dresses that were mildly interesting, and a recreation of Victorian-era street, down which I walked, pretending I was Sherlock Holmes. I also wandered through the '60s (it was scary) and York's old prison. I then spent far too much time on the Internet at the local McDonald's and finally made it back to the hostel late only to find a nice young lady from Japan with whom I had a very nice conversation before finally going to bed.
The next day, then August the 16th, was cool and cloudy, and that to me means museum, so I hung out in the Yorkshire museum look at the skulls of YOrk's citizens from thousands of years ago, old jewelry and pottery and a could of animal skeletons. I then finally made my way to York's Minster and wandered about with my head thrown back and my jaw hanging. The minster is enormous, and inside it feels huge, but it's also airy and full of light. I also paid a few quid extra to climb the tower, and peered through the wire caging to keep people from throwing themselves off (apparently) until the guard made me go back down. After dinner, I spent more time in McDonald's, mostly downloading a bunch of shows from the BBC to keep me occupied in my internetlessness.
My final day in York, I spend the morning running around doing errands. I managed to mail off most of my library and donate a couple books I didn't want to keep. As I keep mentioning, I've been compulsively buying books all over the place, and this has led to a rather heavy "travel library" that I don't want to keep carting around. Instead, I mailed them to myself in Germany, so I'll have my own library already started when I get there. In the remaining time before my train departed, I returned to the minster and had a quick look around the undercroft and treasury and one last gawp at the magnificence of it all before I had to book it to the train station for a very long journey to Keswick.
At the station, I got pulled in by the irresistable gravity well of a WH Smith and bought two more books. Facepalm.
There is something very, very strange about not knowing where you are.
I am currently in Lancaster. This is apparently in northern England, but, allowing for the possibility of teleportation, I could just as easily be in Pennsylvania for all I know. It's cool and partly cloudy, with large patches of deliciously blue sky, and I've just had a prefectly wonderful cup of coffee at Costa to kill time waiting for the train to Penrith. As far as I can seen, there's a fairly deserted road out one exit and a couple of buildings in that ubiquitous greyish tan stone out the other--no town in sight. Although I've just been informed that the town is not five minutes' walk down the hill in the direction of the buildings. Odd.
There's a sort of deep-seated terror of being lost that rises up in strange places like this. Obviously, there are people on the platform and in the shops, and I'm sure I could start walking in almost any direction and come across someone who could help me in minutes. I'm hardly, in other words, in the middle of nowhere. And yet, there's a sort of nervous itch that pokes at my spinal cord. What if the train doesn't come and I'm stranded here? What if I get on the wrong train and end up in Nowhereton-upon-Tinkle with no way of getting back? The unfamiliarity is disconcerting. It's the small, annoying Chihuahua cousin of the wolfish terror that preys on people lost in the wilderness with dusk approaching.
It's also wonderful. Familiarity, while comforting and snuggly and good for evenings in the winter, can also be frightfully dull. The sense of being, and going, somewhere new has drawn humanity forward for millennia.
And yet, this is all rather grand when you're sitting in a train station in a quiet town in northern English, waiting for a comfortable train to whisk you off to another quiet town in northern England. Or possibly Pennsylvania.
Anyway. I've just left York, which makes it somewhat fitting that I'm passing through Lancaster as well. For those not acquainted with English history (which includes me, but here goes), the houses of York and Lancaster fought for a good long while for the rulership of England in a conflict known as the War of the Roses. Before I'd made the connection between THAT Lancaster and the small, seemingly isolated train station I was sitting in, I'd asked a very talkative lady next to me if I was still in Yorkshire. Hah. Oops.
Keep getting off track. I shall tell you about York. Calling into effect the First Day Rule, I dropped off my stuff at my new hostel (which was, unfortunately, 20 minutes' walk out of town) and went to have a little look around. The sun was shining brilliantly, it was warm and lovely, and so naturally, the only thing for it was to find cafe with tables out in the sun and have afternoon tea, which I promptly did while planning my next move. This turned out to be getting a ticket for a local performance of Henry IV, Part II--an exciting prospect, since I'd seen Part 1 in London (as you may remember) and was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to see the end. Having got my ticket for that afternoon, I set off walking on a bit of York's medieval wall, a pleasant stroll made fantastic by the views of the enormous, creamy white minster looming in a dignified, meranguey sort of way over the busy town center. I'd intended to walk the town walls all the way round, but got easily distracted by Goodramgate, a street leading into York's center positively overflowing with charity shops.
Charity shops are a wonderful idea. Apparently, charities open a shop and ask for donations, and at least part of the profits they make selling people's unwanted stuff to other people goes to fund the charity. Basically, it's like Value Village, except small, English, and for the benefit of heart patients or orphans or something. Not needing clothes, board games, furniture, dishes, or jewelry, I always make a beeline for the bookshelves, because if I'm lucky, I just might find a book I'd like to read. I've already mentioned how I bought far too many books at an Oxfam store in Liverpool, and yet I just can't seem to stay away.
The interesting thing about these places is that you only find there things that people have at one point owned, decided they don't want or need anymore, and have accordingly given away. If you're looking for particular books, like I am, that are popular at the moment, you're not likely to find them, because they're popular, and therefore people are reading and keeping them. The great thing about this is that you can kind of get a feel for unpopular books by their relative frequency between stores. Find one copy of something, and one person doesn't want it; find ten or twelve, and clearly, a lot of people don't want it. This is why I laugh to myself every time I find a brand new hardcover of one of Jeremy Clarkson's books, which happens in about half or more of the shops I've been in. The only people who are ambivalent about Clarkson, it seems, are the people who don't know about him.
Incidentally, in almost every one of these shops, there is also a copy of Jane Eyre. But I digress.
I was doing really well in the not-buying-more-books department until I came across an honest-to-goodness Oxfam bookstore and found yet another book I can't live without. Ah well.
I returned to the middle of town for evensong at the minster. I didn't have much time to look at the church and was ushered straight into the choir, where a guest choir from Arkansas sang the service quite beautifully. I only had time to peek around a few corners before I was chased out of the minster again and was left staring up at the spires rising golden above my head in the afternoon sunlight.
I carried on wandering through town and finally made my way to the church that had been converted to a theater for the play. Although I was a little too cold, the play was fairly good, if still somewhat baffling. I was reminded of when I picked up third-quarter physics to complete a GUR when I'd taken the first two quarters at a different college two years previously: I had a vague idea of what was going on, but I'd forgotten some important details (like which names belonged on which side) and, of course, all the faces were different. So, frustrating, but on the whole not bad. On a random note, during the play they mention that the King's forces are divided because he's also fighting Owen Glendower; this made me smile, because Glendower's rebellion was in North Wales, where I'd just been, and I'd been hearing about the noble Welsh rebels' fight at Conwy castle. Nothing like a little personal connection to give a story some context. I left contemplating the nature of kingship, the passage of time, and the meaning of loyalty, but was quickly brought back to earth by having to walk around a man who was standing on the pavement outside a bar with his friends, laughing as he urinated on the wall. Turns out the theatre/church is right in the middle of the bar and clubs area, so I had to wend my way past scantily dressed girls and drunk men to end up, eventually, back at my hostel.
I made it into town the next morning after a nice stroll down the river just in time for a walking tour around the city. The tour covered mostly ground I'd seen the day before, but I was introduced to some new places as well as learning more about what I'd seen before. After the tour, I got lunch at Greggs (<3!) and popped into a small church in the middle of the bustling shopping area.
This was an interesting thing. The cars were whizzing by, the people hurrying past, and yet all of them seemed to be completely oblivious to or uninterested in the fact that there was a very nice-looking church right there in the middle of it all. I wandered in to find something I always treasure: a calm, cool, peaceful, beautiful santuary. The traffic was right outside, but inside the stone walls, it was quiet and unruffled--and totally deserted. A poster on the wall told the sad story of how the church had once been grander, with much more land, but slowly, bit by bit, it had sacrificed more and more to the growing city around it. It reminded me of the giving tree in a way: dignified but a little sad.
I made my way through the center of the town, taking some pictures of the Shambles--a narrow, shop-lined street dating from way back in the day, medieval times or something. The shops on the ground floor are modern, but overhead, the old houses lean and sag into each other with a sort of sleepy forgetfulness. Eventually I made my way around town to the Castle Museum, which had exhibits on things like washing machines and wedding dresses that were mildly interesting, and a recreation of Victorian-era street, down which I walked, pretending I was Sherlock Holmes. I also wandered through the '60s (it was scary) and York's old prison. I then spent far too much time on the Internet at the local McDonald's and finally made it back to the hostel late only to find a nice young lady from Japan with whom I had a very nice conversation before finally going to bed.
The next day, then August the 16th, was cool and cloudy, and that to me means museum, so I hung out in the Yorkshire museum look at the skulls of YOrk's citizens from thousands of years ago, old jewelry and pottery and a could of animal skeletons. I then finally made my way to York's Minster and wandered about with my head thrown back and my jaw hanging. The minster is enormous, and inside it feels huge, but it's also airy and full of light. I also paid a few quid extra to climb the tower, and peered through the wire caging to keep people from throwing themselves off (apparently) until the guard made me go back down. After dinner, I spent more time in McDonald's, mostly downloading a bunch of shows from the BBC to keep me occupied in my internetlessness.
My final day in York, I spend the morning running around doing errands. I managed to mail off most of my library and donate a couple books I didn't want to keep. As I keep mentioning, I've been compulsively buying books all over the place, and this has led to a rather heavy "travel library" that I don't want to keep carting around. Instead, I mailed them to myself in Germany, so I'll have my own library already started when I get there. In the remaining time before my train departed, I returned to the minster and had a quick look around the undercroft and treasury and one last gawp at the magnificence of it all before I had to book it to the train station for a very long journey to Keswick.
At the station, I got pulled in by the irresistable gravity well of a WH Smith and bought two more books. Facepalm.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Loving Liverpool
I woke up on the eighth of August in a quiet hostel bunk bed in Liverpool. The long journey lugging my pack through Venice, the interminable plane flight, and the late-night arrival at the Beatles-themed hostel all floated sluggishly back through my consciousness. I sat up in my bunk, careful not to hit my head on the bottom of the bunk above.
I remembered being slightly worried the night before. Despite the fact that I had arrived at 1am, the room, although containing shoes, backpacks, and rumpled sheets, had been devoid of human life--a fact for which I had been very grateful. It had, however, seemed odd. The whole room had seemed odd. But I'd been too tired to care.
Now it made sense. Because all five other beds in the room were now occupied by lightly snoring males.
I froze, like I'd woken up in a lion's den. I'd planned on just getting my stuff together and leaving when I woke up anyway, and now this sounded like the best idea ever. I locked myself in the bathroom to get ready, quietly packed up my bag, and booked it out the door.
At the reception counter downstairs, I handed in my key. There was a pause.
"You were in 104?" the guy behind the counter said.
"Yep."
"104? Not 105?"
"Yes, check the key."
He stared at me for a second, clearly trying to work out where the disconnect was. "But 104 is a guys' dorm."
"Yes," I laughed, "I noticed that when I woke up."
I finally got checked out as he muttered dire threats of tongue-lashings for the poor guy who'd given me the wrong key in the middle of the night. I left my baggage there and headed out to explore Liverpool for a few hours.
I hadn't really expected much of Liverpool. I mean, put "liver" with "pool" and the best you can possibly get is a puddle of reddish-purple ooze. Surprisingly, I found it to be clean, respectable, and in many places, quite pretty. And quiet--uncomfortably quiet. This is because it was Sunday. This turned out to be a big problem, because I passed a BBC office building with an attached store that was, naturally, shut for the Sabbath, which meant I could only drool at all of the Top Gear and Doctor Who stuff through the window. Then again, this was actually probably a good thing.
I stopped first at the Central Library which, though impressive, was closed for renovations for pretty much ever. Next up was the World Museum, a kid-oriented but delightful place featuring a small aquarium, bug exhibit, ancient civilizations bit, and a natural history section. I breezed through it in an hour, but it took all my willpower.
I'd decided next to head toward the cathedral, but I detoured on the way through the pedestrian heart of the city and dropped into a Greggs for some lunch. (I <3 Greggs so much!) I got directions from some helpful locals and got myself reoriented toward the cathedral, only to get sidetracked by an Oxfam store. Inside, I found a wonderfully well-stocked books section, and only managed to escape after giving up £12.50 for two Clarksons, a May, a Hammond, and a Bryson...to add to the five books I was already carrying. I know, bad idea. But I'm an addict. I can't help it.
I finally made it (with a noticeably heavier backpack) to the looming red cathedral. This is one properly massive and intimidating building. It looks enormous on the outside, and then you wander in the unassuming doors and crane your head back for some truly staggering, holy-criminy-this-thing-is-ginormous awesomeness. I hope you can see in the pictures the people that I've tried to include for perspective. Besides the sheer bigness, it's also very lovely, although sometimes it's hard to tell because the stuff on the ceiling is so very far away.
Against my better judgment and time constraints, I took the lift up to the top of the tower for a magnificent view of the city in every direction. I had a nice chat with a couple from Manchester on the way up, snapped some pictures from the top, and then booked it back to the hotel, but I still missed my train by quite a bit. Never mind, I picked up my bags and took the next train to Chester anyway.
I arrived in Chester with just over an hour to kill. My choices were 1) walk into the town with all my bags to sightsee for, oh, half an hour, and risk missing the once-every-two-hours train, or 2) snuggle down in the pub across the street for some late lunch. I chose #2, obviously.
An hour into the second train ride, things started to get interesting. Suddenly there was the sea, unfolding, untroubled, to the horizon, sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight. I disembarked on a tiny little platform in a tiny little corner of Wales. From cramped medieval canalways to metropolitan streets to rolling countryside and seaside in 24 hours...not bad.
I remembered being slightly worried the night before. Despite the fact that I had arrived at 1am, the room, although containing shoes, backpacks, and rumpled sheets, had been devoid of human life--a fact for which I had been very grateful. It had, however, seemed odd. The whole room had seemed odd. But I'd been too tired to care.
Now it made sense. Because all five other beds in the room were now occupied by lightly snoring males.
I froze, like I'd woken up in a lion's den. I'd planned on just getting my stuff together and leaving when I woke up anyway, and now this sounded like the best idea ever. I locked myself in the bathroom to get ready, quietly packed up my bag, and booked it out the door.
At the reception counter downstairs, I handed in my key. There was a pause.
"You were in 104?" the guy behind the counter said.
"Yep."
"104? Not 105?"
"Yes, check the key."
He stared at me for a second, clearly trying to work out where the disconnect was. "But 104 is a guys' dorm."
"Yes," I laughed, "I noticed that when I woke up."
I finally got checked out as he muttered dire threats of tongue-lashings for the poor guy who'd given me the wrong key in the middle of the night. I left my baggage there and headed out to explore Liverpool for a few hours.
 |
| FISH! (World Museum) |
I hadn't really expected much of Liverpool. I mean, put "liver" with "pool" and the best you can possibly get is a puddle of reddish-purple ooze. Surprisingly, I found it to be clean, respectable, and in many places, quite pretty. And quiet--uncomfortably quiet. This is because it was Sunday. This turned out to be a big problem, because I passed a BBC office building with an attached store that was, naturally, shut for the Sabbath, which meant I could only drool at all of the Top Gear and Doctor Who stuff through the window. Then again, this was actually probably a good thing.
I stopped first at the Central Library which, though impressive, was closed for renovations for pretty much ever. Next up was the World Museum, a kid-oriented but delightful place featuring a small aquarium, bug exhibit, ancient civilizations bit, and a natural history section. I breezed through it in an hour, but it took all my willpower.
 |
| See the cars? Yeah, thing's big. |
I'd decided next to head toward the cathedral, but I detoured on the way through the pedestrian heart of the city and dropped into a Greggs for some lunch. (I <3 Greggs so much!) I got directions from some helpful locals and got myself reoriented toward the cathedral, only to get sidetracked by an Oxfam store. Inside, I found a wonderfully well-stocked books section, and only managed to escape after giving up £12.50 for two Clarksons, a May, a Hammond, and a Bryson...to add to the five books I was already carrying. I know, bad idea. But I'm an addict. I can't help it.
 |
| Oo! |
Against my better judgment and time constraints, I took the lift up to the top of the tower for a magnificent view of the city in every direction. I had a nice chat with a couple from Manchester on the way up, snapped some pictures from the top, and then booked it back to the hotel, but I still missed my train by quite a bit. Never mind, I picked up my bags and took the next train to Chester anyway.
 |
| Liverpool from above! |
An hour into the second train ride, things started to get interesting. Suddenly there was the sea, unfolding, untroubled, to the horizon, sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight. I disembarked on a tiny little platform in a tiny little corner of Wales. From cramped medieval canalways to metropolitan streets to rolling countryside and seaside in 24 hours...not bad.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Prächtige Prag
You never forget your first cathedral.
I saw my first cathedral on my first trip to the Continent at the tender age of 16. My mother and I had just begun a month-long tour around France, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden, and were spending our first few days in Paris. Although perhaps not the best place to get a good first impression of Europe as a continent, Paris is lovely in many ways and has enough gasp-inducing landmarks to impress anyone, much less your average 16-year-old.
Along with the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe, of course we had to visit Notre Dame. I was immediately impressed by the creamy stone towers and beautiful carving, and inside, the vast arched spaces and, especially, the gorgeous stained glass windows. I remember being particularly enthralled by the rose windows--like frozen fireworks in lavender, magenta, azure, and gold--and standing motionless as other tourists swirled and eddied around me, trying to hold my breath so I could get a clear picture of every detail. We climbed the towers and I leaned beside a gargoyle, delighted with the height, astounded by the view of the city spread out before me.
Since then, visiting churches has become a priority in my travels. After the rush and stress of finding a hostel, looking for reasonably priced food, trying to spend money frugally and sensibly, worrying about pickpockets and watching the clock, these still and ancient churches are refuges for me just as they´ve been for pilgrims and wanderers for centuries. No matter what country you´re in, the cool dimness is welcoming, comfortingly familiar, intriguingly unique. Each one has a different character--different saints and patrons frozen in stone in the act of benediction or caught in the dramatic moment of miracle or martyrdom.
Some churches I experience and enjoy, then promptly forget, but others stick in my head forever for some impression on me. As I said, Notre Dame was the first, and has a special place in my heart. For fond memories, there´s Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, where a rector took my friend and I and a couple other people on a wonderful private tour for sheer enthusiasm. For romantic beauty, I always think of wandering past the warm golden light spilling out of cafes on dark, twisty streets, only to round a corner and find the white domes of the church of Montmartre looming like the spires of an Arabian palace in the gathering Parisian twilight. For pure shock-and-awe grandeur, the Dom in Köln is unbelievable; as you leave the Hauptbahnhof, it towers over you, filling your field of vision, forcing you to crane your neck just to see where its black spires meet the heavens. And for spectacular ambiance and stained glass, I always think of St. Vitus´ Cathedral here in Prague, which brings me in a roundabout way to today´s adventure.
We slept in somewhat and left our hostel late, wandering through the city and up the hill to find spectacular views over the city from a monastery perched high above the red tile rooftops. From there, we drifted back down to Castle Square and entered the castle complex. The entire top of this ridge is crowned by Prague Castle with the cathedral as the spiky, green-domed jewel in the center. The castle looks less like a castle than it does a row of fancy pastel houses, but the cathedral that sits in the middle is unmistakably grand, so we headed there first.
Through the doors and into the relative coolness and silence we obediently filed, navigating around tour groups with matching lanyards and oblivious sightseers with audioguides mashed to their ears. The wonderful thing about St. Vitus´ is that each window, down both sides of the cathedral and around the apse, is a different style and color scheme, so each chapel is a surprise. My favorite is the Mucha window, an absolutely stunning work of art in glorious colors depicting, in the center, an old woman representing the past and memory and a bright-eyed young boy in red looking to the future of the Czech people. There is so much detail and care in these windows that you could spend hours just studying them and staring.
We walked around the outside of the church, very impressed by the intricate golden mosaic over the doors, and then headed off to find dinner. We followed RFS´ recommendation to a hidden-away little place with views over the city and a very friendly, Anthony-Hopkins-look-alike waiter who impressed on us the importance of ordering things that were ´´traditional Czech.´´ By the time we left, evening was approaching, so we started to make our way back down toward the city, although we kept getting distracted by panoramic views over the city. On our way back to the river, we stopped by the Lennon (not Lenin!) wall, where Czechs expressed their hopes for peace and freedom during communism, and the tradition now continues with colorful graffiti messages. We finally made it back to Charles´ Bridge (with a short detour to see some of the sets from MI:I) as the sun was going down and wandered in a roundabout way back to our hostel.
Tomorrow is our last day in Prague. We will then be moving on to Salzburg, which is new to all of us. I´m looking forward to and apprehensive about this for the same reason: I will once again be expected to act as translator. Here in Prague, all three of us are on equal ground, being equally unable to make any sense of the (utterly fascinating) Czech language. In Austria, we´ll be back on familiar ground with German...but I´ll be expected to talk again. To everyone. About everything.
Ah well, it´s good for me. Good language practice as well as good practice being bold. I´m going to need both once I finally get to Stadtroda.
P.S. I know I keep saying this, but pictures coming later. Promise!
I saw my first cathedral on my first trip to the Continent at the tender age of 16. My mother and I had just begun a month-long tour around France, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden, and were spending our first few days in Paris. Although perhaps not the best place to get a good first impression of Europe as a continent, Paris is lovely in many ways and has enough gasp-inducing landmarks to impress anyone, much less your average 16-year-old.
Along with the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe, of course we had to visit Notre Dame. I was immediately impressed by the creamy stone towers and beautiful carving, and inside, the vast arched spaces and, especially, the gorgeous stained glass windows. I remember being particularly enthralled by the rose windows--like frozen fireworks in lavender, magenta, azure, and gold--and standing motionless as other tourists swirled and eddied around me, trying to hold my breath so I could get a clear picture of every detail. We climbed the towers and I leaned beside a gargoyle, delighted with the height, astounded by the view of the city spread out before me.
Since then, visiting churches has become a priority in my travels. After the rush and stress of finding a hostel, looking for reasonably priced food, trying to spend money frugally and sensibly, worrying about pickpockets and watching the clock, these still and ancient churches are refuges for me just as they´ve been for pilgrims and wanderers for centuries. No matter what country you´re in, the cool dimness is welcoming, comfortingly familiar, intriguingly unique. Each one has a different character--different saints and patrons frozen in stone in the act of benediction or caught in the dramatic moment of miracle or martyrdom.
Some churches I experience and enjoy, then promptly forget, but others stick in my head forever for some impression on me. As I said, Notre Dame was the first, and has a special place in my heart. For fond memories, there´s Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, where a rector took my friend and I and a couple other people on a wonderful private tour for sheer enthusiasm. For romantic beauty, I always think of wandering past the warm golden light spilling out of cafes on dark, twisty streets, only to round a corner and find the white domes of the church of Montmartre looming like the spires of an Arabian palace in the gathering Parisian twilight. For pure shock-and-awe grandeur, the Dom in Köln is unbelievable; as you leave the Hauptbahnhof, it towers over you, filling your field of vision, forcing you to crane your neck just to see where its black spires meet the heavens. And for spectacular ambiance and stained glass, I always think of St. Vitus´ Cathedral here in Prague, which brings me in a roundabout way to today´s adventure.
We slept in somewhat and left our hostel late, wandering through the city and up the hill to find spectacular views over the city from a monastery perched high above the red tile rooftops. From there, we drifted back down to Castle Square and entered the castle complex. The entire top of this ridge is crowned by Prague Castle with the cathedral as the spiky, green-domed jewel in the center. The castle looks less like a castle than it does a row of fancy pastel houses, but the cathedral that sits in the middle is unmistakably grand, so we headed there first.
Through the doors and into the relative coolness and silence we obediently filed, navigating around tour groups with matching lanyards and oblivious sightseers with audioguides mashed to their ears. The wonderful thing about St. Vitus´ is that each window, down both sides of the cathedral and around the apse, is a different style and color scheme, so each chapel is a surprise. My favorite is the Mucha window, an absolutely stunning work of art in glorious colors depicting, in the center, an old woman representing the past and memory and a bright-eyed young boy in red looking to the future of the Czech people. There is so much detail and care in these windows that you could spend hours just studying them and staring.
We walked around the outside of the church, very impressed by the intricate golden mosaic over the doors, and then headed off to find dinner. We followed RFS´ recommendation to a hidden-away little place with views over the city and a very friendly, Anthony-Hopkins-look-alike waiter who impressed on us the importance of ordering things that were ´´traditional Czech.´´ By the time we left, evening was approaching, so we started to make our way back down toward the city, although we kept getting distracted by panoramic views over the city. On our way back to the river, we stopped by the Lennon (not Lenin!) wall, where Czechs expressed their hopes for peace and freedom during communism, and the tradition now continues with colorful graffiti messages. We finally made it back to Charles´ Bridge (with a short detour to see some of the sets from MI:I) as the sun was going down and wandered in a roundabout way back to our hostel.
Tomorrow is our last day in Prague. We will then be moving on to Salzburg, which is new to all of us. I´m looking forward to and apprehensive about this for the same reason: I will once again be expected to act as translator. Here in Prague, all three of us are on equal ground, being equally unable to make any sense of the (utterly fascinating) Czech language. In Austria, we´ll be back on familiar ground with German...but I´ll be expected to talk again. To everyone. About everything.
Ah well, it´s good for me. Good language practice as well as good practice being bold. I´m going to need both once I finally get to Stadtroda.
P.S. I know I keep saying this, but pictures coming later. Promise!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Leaving London (aka Part V)
My bus journey to Cambridge today is taking me through a greatest-hits tour of London on my way out, which seems appropriate, since I'm leaving now for good; I won't be back for a while, at least not for the rest of the summer. I think we're currently in the City (hypothesis based on the fact that all of the shops are selling suits, ties, and button-up shirts of that curiously ubiquitous shade of periwinkle), having started in Victoria and gone through basically all the interesting landmark parts of London. Hey, there's the Avocado! I don't know what it's actually called, but it's a big dark-greenish building that looks remarkably like...well, you should be able to guess. It also has a distinct resemblance to a 20-storey hand grenade. (UPDATE: this one. I typed into Google: "What is the building in London that looks like an avocado?") Go figure.
Being my usual brilliant and forward-thinking self, I left myself about 35 minutes to make a 20-ish minute Tube journey, which probably would've been fine except for totally unforeseeable delays on not one but TWO different lines that I needed. This culminated in me arriving, sweaty, tired, hungry, and ready to kill with my bare hands the screaming child the next gate over, at 9:37 for a bus that left at 9:30. Grrr.
I got some breakfast (Cornish pasties are God's gift to budget travelers) and tried to focus on puppies and rainbows and Jeremy Clarkson's book and not the ear-shattering, soul-murdering screams of the drooling child who refused to shut up. (I'm a little cross about this.) I'd pre-bought my ticket, which meant I had lost my £7 into the ether and had to buy another ticket, which luckily was not too expensive or I might've cried. I got on the next bus with no problem and settled down to read car reviews on the cloudy two-hour journey.
The excited movements of the Spanish-speaking family behind me made me look up a bit later to find that we were passing by the Houses of Parliament. I said a fond farewell to Big Ben and the Eye and smiled down the gated, policeman-guarded lane down to Number 10, then we were trundling down the north bank of the Thames, past my favorite Sphinx crouched with eternal patience on the bankside and down towards...well, St. Paul's. We passed, literally, within a block of where I had left, hauling my heavy bags in a rush, two hours earlier. Again: Grrr.
St. Paul's is basically in the City (I think), so that brought me to where I started--at the Avocado. We're now heaven-knows-where--still trying to leave London, which, like Tokyo, covers the surface area of basically the whole island--on the way, as I said, to Cambridge.
Now, our dear friend RFS has said that Oxford and Cambridge are both beautiful, historic university towns, but if you have to pick one, go for Cambridge. Consequently, he provides no information whatsoever about Oxford, assuming that you wouldn't dare contradict his advice and go somewhere he hasn't recommended. This continues to pose a problem for me; in August, I may be spending some time in Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, none of which are RFS-approved and so consequently, he hasn't bothered to describe, so I'm going in blind. Unless I want to buy another guidebook. Which I don't.
Anyway, this wasn't a problem in Oxford, because I had lovely, friendly people to give me advice and go around with me, and in Cambridge, I'll have a guidebook. Yay. On a completely unrelated note, it's blowing like mad out there and doing that obnoxious drizzling thing that isn't quite rain and just gets in your eyes. Good thing that the week I spent in London was sunny and beautiful.
Since this is my blog and I can do what I like, I'm going to again put off Oxford and talk about yesterday instead. This is partly because Oxford was wonderful and I want to do it justice, and partly because I know that some of my new friends from Oxford have been reading this blog and I want to make sure I think very carefully about what I say. ;)
I was awakened at 7:30 yesterday morning when every last girl in my dorm room decided that she had to get up right then. For my part, I just lay there and let them bustle about, then hauled myself from my bunk when I had the room to myself. I left the hostel and trundled across the Millennium Bridge to the Globe on the other side and purchased a ticket for the exhibition and tour. As I mentioned, I'd already been the Globe for Henry VIII, which was mostly incomprehensible, but I wanted to hear more about it anyway. For those who don't know (and this is interesting, I promise...at least to me), the Globe that stands now is not the original, which burnt down in the early 1600's. A second was built, but was torn down again. Anyway, an American Shakespeare enthusiast, hoping to bring Shakespeare to life for the uninitiated, started a movement to rebuild the Globe, which, after several decades of fund-raising and construction, they did. The new Globe was built using materials and techniques as faithful as possible to those in the 17th century, so the entire thing is made of oak beams and cow hair plaster held together with wooden pegs and topped by a thatched roof.
Anyhow, the tour was great, and as we were sitting in the Globe watching them change the sets, I thought: I don't have anything planned for this afternoon. There's a matinee showing today. Hmmm...
So naturally, on impulse, I went as soon as the tour was over and bought a ticket for the afternoon performance of Henry IV.
This meant, though, that instead of the unlimited amount of time that I'd thought I would have to wander through the Globe exhibition and St. Paul's Cathedral, I actually had about two hours. So I took the exhibition at high speed (pretty books, gorgeous costumes, yay Shakespeare) and booked it back across the bridge to the Cathedral on the other side.
Now, St. Paul's is lovely on the outside: the grand front steps, the towering white stone, the majestic dome topped in gold. Inside, it's just as beautiful. To me, it feels brighter, more open, and more welcoming than Westminster Abbey, and as in many churches, it's cool and quiet with just a murmuring hum of the awed gasps and subdued exclamations of tourists. I joined a 40-minute intro tour and then bolted up the stairs to first the Whispering Gallery and then the Golden Gallery at the top of that impressive dome. Although when I say "bolted", I mean, went as fast as I could, and when I say "as fast as I could", I mean, I was being overtaken quite a bit. Whatever, I made it to the top, where we were herded by impatient attendants around the small gallery and then back down the 520-some-odd stairs to the Cathedral floor. Unfortunately, I had to dash to get in line for Henry IV, so I only had time to walk quickly around the high altar before I had to head off again, although I could happily sit in that awesome place for quite a while.
After the subdued and reverent murmurs of St. Paul's, the din on the streets was positively alarming. I crossed back over the Thames in record time and got a good spot in line for the play, striking up a conversation, meanwhile, with a Shakespeare fan from Edinburgh. (I can't hardly remember how to spell "Edinburgh" now that I've started to pronounce it "Edinbruh" instead of "Edinburg". Please don't ever say "Edinburg".) It was just starting to drizzle when they let us inside, and my new acquaintance and I got a fairly good spot, leaning our elbows on the stage.
After the verbose and largely actionless Henry VIII, Henry IV (Part 1!) was brilliant. It tells the story of Henry IV (don't you love all the obvious names in this post?), but it focuses mostly on his son, the dashing and dissolute Prince Hal, who spends his times in pubs with his ne'er-do-well buddy Falstaff, who is simply hilarious. Henry IV has some really brilliant comedy as well as drama and some kick-ass sword-fighting. I'm very sad that I won't be able to see Part 2.
Of course, partway through the second half, the heavens opened. Now, you know how in every Hollywood romance ever, when it looks like the two leads are destined to be separated forever, one or both of them must trudge dejectedly through the rain? You know how, when it starts raining, it looks less like atmospheric precipitation and more like someone's spraying them with a fire hose, so they're drenched to the bone in about three seconds? I have never believed that this is true to life, and I still don't; it just doesn't rain like that everywhere in the world (although it certainly does in some places), all the time, as Hollywood would have you believe. For heaven's sakes, if they can make giant transforming robots and exploding planets and stuff, how hard can it be to make rain in moderation? Then again, every Hollywood romance ever is set in New York, and having not been there, I can't testify to the relative heaviness of the rainfall.
I can, however, testify to that in London, it's like being in Hollywood. I was partially under cover, and I was still drenched. I barely remembered to pick up my backpack in time before the entire groundling area became a lake. I retreated under an overhang and wondered if I shouldn't just leave, but then suddenly, the rain stopped as quickly as it had come, the sun even came out, and I was back with my elbows on the stage just in time for the epic swordfight.
As soon as the play finished, I was off to Leicester Square. I'd been recommend to see Les Mis while in London, so I headed in that direction to see how the ticket prices looked. However, given that I had already seen three shows in two days, even the cheapest tickets were a little too much for me to be able to justify, so I headed back towards St. Paul's. However, it was still too early to call it a day, so I got some food and walked back out to my perch between the paws of the Sphinx to eat. When the wind got too chilly, I meandered back across the nearest bridge and along the South Bank before returning to the hostel for the day. I had a nice chat with a girl from Japan and gave her my Rick Steves chapter on London, which she probably can't read but may still find somewhat useful. I hope so.
I'm still on the way to Cambridge, but now you're up to speed. After so much typing (I really do make these posts agonizingly long...sorry) I'm just going to stare out the window for a bit. I'll be leaving England tomorrow, so I have to enjoy it while I can.
Being my usual brilliant and forward-thinking self, I left myself about 35 minutes to make a 20-ish minute Tube journey, which probably would've been fine except for totally unforeseeable delays on not one but TWO different lines that I needed. This culminated in me arriving, sweaty, tired, hungry, and ready to kill with my bare hands the screaming child the next gate over, at 9:37 for a bus that left at 9:30. Grrr.
I got some breakfast (Cornish pasties are God's gift to budget travelers) and tried to focus on puppies and rainbows and Jeremy Clarkson's book and not the ear-shattering, soul-murdering screams of the drooling child who refused to shut up. (I'm a little cross about this.) I'd pre-bought my ticket, which meant I had lost my £7 into the ether and had to buy another ticket, which luckily was not too expensive or I might've cried. I got on the next bus with no problem and settled down to read car reviews on the cloudy two-hour journey.
The excited movements of the Spanish-speaking family behind me made me look up a bit later to find that we were passing by the Houses of Parliament. I said a fond farewell to Big Ben and the Eye and smiled down the gated, policeman-guarded lane down to Number 10, then we were trundling down the north bank of the Thames, past my favorite Sphinx crouched with eternal patience on the bankside and down towards...well, St. Paul's. We passed, literally, within a block of where I had left, hauling my heavy bags in a rush, two hours earlier. Again: Grrr.
St. Paul's is basically in the City (I think), so that brought me to where I started--at the Avocado. We're now heaven-knows-where--still trying to leave London, which, like Tokyo, covers the surface area of basically the whole island--on the way, as I said, to Cambridge.
Now, our dear friend RFS has said that Oxford and Cambridge are both beautiful, historic university towns, but if you have to pick one, go for Cambridge. Consequently, he provides no information whatsoever about Oxford, assuming that you wouldn't dare contradict his advice and go somewhere he hasn't recommended. This continues to pose a problem for me; in August, I may be spending some time in Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, none of which are RFS-approved and so consequently, he hasn't bothered to describe, so I'm going in blind. Unless I want to buy another guidebook. Which I don't.
Anyway, this wasn't a problem in Oxford, because I had lovely, friendly people to give me advice and go around with me, and in Cambridge, I'll have a guidebook. Yay. On a completely unrelated note, it's blowing like mad out there and doing that obnoxious drizzling thing that isn't quite rain and just gets in your eyes. Good thing that the week I spent in London was sunny and beautiful.
Since this is my blog and I can do what I like, I'm going to again put off Oxford and talk about yesterday instead. This is partly because Oxford was wonderful and I want to do it justice, and partly because I know that some of my new friends from Oxford have been reading this blog and I want to make sure I think very carefully about what I say. ;)
I was awakened at 7:30 yesterday morning when every last girl in my dorm room decided that she had to get up right then. For my part, I just lay there and let them bustle about, then hauled myself from my bunk when I had the room to myself. I left the hostel and trundled across the Millennium Bridge to the Globe on the other side and purchased a ticket for the exhibition and tour. As I mentioned, I'd already been the Globe for Henry VIII, which was mostly incomprehensible, but I wanted to hear more about it anyway. For those who don't know (and this is interesting, I promise...at least to me), the Globe that stands now is not the original, which burnt down in the early 1600's. A second was built, but was torn down again. Anyway, an American Shakespeare enthusiast, hoping to bring Shakespeare to life for the uninitiated, started a movement to rebuild the Globe, which, after several decades of fund-raising and construction, they did. The new Globe was built using materials and techniques as faithful as possible to those in the 17th century, so the entire thing is made of oak beams and cow hair plaster held together with wooden pegs and topped by a thatched roof.
Anyhow, the tour was great, and as we were sitting in the Globe watching them change the sets, I thought: I don't have anything planned for this afternoon. There's a matinee showing today. Hmmm...
So naturally, on impulse, I went as soon as the tour was over and bought a ticket for the afternoon performance of Henry IV.
This meant, though, that instead of the unlimited amount of time that I'd thought I would have to wander through the Globe exhibition and St. Paul's Cathedral, I actually had about two hours. So I took the exhibition at high speed (pretty books, gorgeous costumes, yay Shakespeare) and booked it back across the bridge to the Cathedral on the other side.
After the subdued and reverent murmurs of St. Paul's, the din on the streets was positively alarming. I crossed back over the Thames in record time and got a good spot in line for the play, striking up a conversation, meanwhile, with a Shakespeare fan from Edinburgh. (I can't hardly remember how to spell "Edinburgh" now that I've started to pronounce it "Edinbruh" instead of "Edinburg". Please don't ever say "Edinburg".) It was just starting to drizzle when they let us inside, and my new acquaintance and I got a fairly good spot, leaning our elbows on the stage.
Of course, partway through the second half, the heavens opened. Now, you know how in every Hollywood romance ever, when it looks like the two leads are destined to be separated forever, one or both of them must trudge dejectedly through the rain? You know how, when it starts raining, it looks less like atmospheric precipitation and more like someone's spraying them with a fire hose, so they're drenched to the bone in about three seconds? I have never believed that this is true to life, and I still don't; it just doesn't rain like that everywhere in the world (although it certainly does in some places), all the time, as Hollywood would have you believe. For heaven's sakes, if they can make giant transforming robots and exploding planets and stuff, how hard can it be to make rain in moderation? Then again, every Hollywood romance ever is set in New York, and having not been there, I can't testify to the relative heaviness of the rainfall.
I can, however, testify to that in London, it's like being in Hollywood. I was partially under cover, and I was still drenched. I barely remembered to pick up my backpack in time before the entire groundling area became a lake. I retreated under an overhang and wondered if I shouldn't just leave, but then suddenly, the rain stopped as quickly as it had come, the sun even came out, and I was back with my elbows on the stage just in time for the epic swordfight.
I'm still on the way to Cambridge, but now you're up to speed. After so much typing (I really do make these posts agonizingly long...sorry) I'm just going to stare out the window for a bit. I'll be leaving England tomorrow, so I have to enjoy it while I can.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Wandering In Wells and Gallivanting Across Glastonbury
Unfortunately, the Internet connection here at the hostel has been spotty, so I haven't been able to post anything before it shuts down on me, which is why there's now four new posts up. It's a significant amount to read, so sorry about that.
Anyway, today was my last full day in Bath, so I had to pack in everything that I wanted to see in this area into this last day. Whew.
I started out in the Bath Markets for a very specific reason: there was a stall full of discount paperbacks that I had heard from a very reliable source (i.e. Shannon) had books I was looking for. Sure enough, I found literally stacks of books by Jeremy Clarkson and even a couple by James May; I couldn't find Richard Hammond's autobiographies, which was somewhat sad. One of these days, I'll write a little more about my interesting relationship to Jeremy Clarkson, but for now, just suffice to say that I bought three of his books, sacrificing a dinner's worth of money, and have been reading Clarkson instead of Dickens all day.
I moved on with my treasures to the imposing and gorgeous Bath Abbey, which I posted a picture of in my previous post on Bath, to take the guided tour. The tour was just delightful: we climbed up the levels of the bell tower, saw beautiful views of the city from the tower in every direction, and looked at how the inner mechanics of the abbey's architecture and machinery work. I would've liked to have stayed longer in the abbey, but I was off again, this time to the Fashion Museum.
If you just said, "Fashion Museum? Jennifer? ...What?" then you know me better than Rick Steves does. He told me to get a combo ticket with the baths, so I did, but the Fashion Museum was rubbish and pathetically short. 'Nuff said.
From the museum, I walked across town and hopped on a bus to Wells. After careening around Bath all morning, the bus ride to Wells was very pleasant. I read my new book for the first half of the ride, then looked up at the rolling, sun-drenched hills and realized that not only should I enjoy the views, but I had no idea where I was. The bus trundled along between golden-green fields, cut into patches by ruler-straight hedges, on roads lined by chest-high stone walls and hardly wide enough for two cars to pass each other, even if you asked really, really nicely. The gentle hills were dotted with small houses, and every now and then we'd pull into an utterly adorable little town with some quaint English name, and I would barely have time to wonder where we were before we were off again through the countryside. I realized that if I had accidentally gotten on the wrong bus, or if I neglected to get off when necessary, I would never know until they finally threw me off at the end of the line in Bristol or Cornwall or York or wherever. Given the beauty of the view and the tranquility of a warm summer's day in south England, I couldn't really find any real problem with this, but it turned out to not be a problem, because the bus deposited me right in the middle of the market in the twee little town of Wells.
If you've never heard of Wells, that's fine, because I hadn't either until RFS told me about it. Apparently, its only draws are its markets, its general English-y cuteness, and, like a Lamborghini in a country shed, its gigantic and utterly gorgeous Gothic cathedral. The mighty structure towers over the town, its spiky towers looming across the rooftops, and looks, to me, altogether out of place. It is still breathtakingly beautiful and grand, and was the main reason for my visit.
I was facing a time dilemma at the moment, and in order to resolve the issue of having mismatching schedules and too much to do in too little time, I said "Screw it," bought a bag of strawberries from a nice lady in the market, and had a picnic on the lawn to admire the cathedral. That done, I ventured inside, which was similarly magnificent. I didn't, however, take any pictures, since I was unwilling to sacrifice £3 for copyright fees, and just chatted with one of the welcomers and bought a postcard instead.
The problem that I mentioned above was that I was planning on seeing both Wells and nearby Glastonbury that day, and I had to be back in Wells for Evensong in the cathedral and then catch the last bus back to Bath. By the time I arrived in Glastonbury, I had only an hour and a half or so to get the bus back to Wells for Evensong, so I cut the number of my sightseeing goals in Glastonbury by half and contented myself with the abbey.
Now, Glastonbury's a little bit different. It's also cute (I don't think there's much here that isn't), but to start, it's been overtaken by hippies and New Age types. Why? Because Glastonbury is the source of the King Arthur legends, and all of the Celtic mythology surrounding him. Chalice Well, which supposedly holds the Holy Grail and produces waters with healing properties, is nearby, and the abbey I came to visit has the tomb of King Arthur--or used to. Supposedly.
In the center of a town filled with Tarot readers and Egyptian goddess worshippers stands the grand old ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in their own beautifully quiet park. Only bits of the abbey and the surrounding buildings remain, and in some cases are just outlines in the grass; they are now carpeted by daisies and roofed by clouds. It was quite a jump from the cool and polished grandeur of Wells' cathedral to the warm, golden smell of summer and the rough remains of the ruined abbey. It was a sad but peaceful place, and I would've liked to have had much more time to explore and think about history and the passage of time, but I didn't actually have much time to spare.
Just outside the town of Glastonbury rises a huge hill (500-some-odd feet) with a tower, creatively called the Tor, at the top, with lovely views of the countryside. This had been my other goal in Glastonbury, but by then it was clear that I'd have to choose between climbing the Tor and hearing Evensong in Wells. I chose Evensong, so instead of taking the shuttle to the hill and climbing to the top, I just took a picture of it and returned on the bus to Wells.
Even though I returned in time for the service, I could only stay for about 20 minutes before I had to hurry back to the bus station to catch the last service of the day back to Bath. I didn't get to hear much of the service, but I strongly believe that, as beautiful as churches are during visiting hours, they are meant to be experienced in a service. The vaulted chamber reverberated with the hum of the choir's voices, which followed me out into the afternoon sunshine as I regretfully headed back across town to the bus station. I'd been fortunate enough to hear the organ being played when I had come earlier, but there is nothing like the harmony of a choir's voices in a church.
The ride home was uneventful, and I decided to celebrate my last evening in Bath by allowing myself to spend a little more on my dinner. I have been averaging £50 a day for everything except lodging--so food, transportation, souvenirs, admission prices, et cetera. I still had £15 left over from my original £250 at the beginning of my travels, so I decided to finish off a day of adorable Englishness with a very traditional (er, not at all, actually) meal of yakisoba and plum wine at a hip noodle bar. Tomorrow I depart in the morning for a week in London--a big change from the peace and relative quiet of the countryside. I am looking forward to London, though; I think I'm ready to move on.
Anyway, today was my last full day in Bath, so I had to pack in everything that I wanted to see in this area into this last day. Whew.
I started out in the Bath Markets for a very specific reason: there was a stall full of discount paperbacks that I had heard from a very reliable source (i.e. Shannon) had books I was looking for. Sure enough, I found literally stacks of books by Jeremy Clarkson and even a couple by James May; I couldn't find Richard Hammond's autobiographies, which was somewhat sad. One of these days, I'll write a little more about my interesting relationship to Jeremy Clarkson, but for now, just suffice to say that I bought three of his books, sacrificing a dinner's worth of money, and have been reading Clarkson instead of Dickens all day.
If you just said, "Fashion Museum? Jennifer? ...What?" then you know me better than Rick Steves does. He told me to get a combo ticket with the baths, so I did, but the Fashion Museum was rubbish and pathetically short. 'Nuff said.
From the museum, I walked across town and hopped on a bus to Wells. After careening around Bath all morning, the bus ride to Wells was very pleasant. I read my new book for the first half of the ride, then looked up at the rolling, sun-drenched hills and realized that not only should I enjoy the views, but I had no idea where I was. The bus trundled along between golden-green fields, cut into patches by ruler-straight hedges, on roads lined by chest-high stone walls and hardly wide enough for two cars to pass each other, even if you asked really, really nicely. The gentle hills were dotted with small houses, and every now and then we'd pull into an utterly adorable little town with some quaint English name, and I would barely have time to wonder where we were before we were off again through the countryside. I realized that if I had accidentally gotten on the wrong bus, or if I neglected to get off when necessary, I would never know until they finally threw me off at the end of the line in Bristol or Cornwall or York or wherever. Given the beauty of the view and the tranquility of a warm summer's day in south England, I couldn't really find any real problem with this, but it turned out to not be a problem, because the bus deposited me right in the middle of the market in the twee little town of Wells.
If you've never heard of Wells, that's fine, because I hadn't either until RFS told me about it. Apparently, its only draws are its markets, its general English-y cuteness, and, like a Lamborghini in a country shed, its gigantic and utterly gorgeous Gothic cathedral. The mighty structure towers over the town, its spiky towers looming across the rooftops, and looks, to me, altogether out of place. It is still breathtakingly beautiful and grand, and was the main reason for my visit.
I was facing a time dilemma at the moment, and in order to resolve the issue of having mismatching schedules and too much to do in too little time, I said "Screw it," bought a bag of strawberries from a nice lady in the market, and had a picnic on the lawn to admire the cathedral. That done, I ventured inside, which was similarly magnificent. I didn't, however, take any pictures, since I was unwilling to sacrifice £3 for copyright fees, and just chatted with one of the welcomers and bought a postcard instead.The problem that I mentioned above was that I was planning on seeing both Wells and nearby Glastonbury that day, and I had to be back in Wells for Evensong in the cathedral and then catch the last bus back to Bath. By the time I arrived in Glastonbury, I had only an hour and a half or so to get the bus back to Wells for Evensong, so I cut the number of my sightseeing goals in Glastonbury by half and contented myself with the abbey.
Now, Glastonbury's a little bit different. It's also cute (I don't think there's much here that isn't), but to start, it's been overtaken by hippies and New Age types. Why? Because Glastonbury is the source of the King Arthur legends, and all of the Celtic mythology surrounding him. Chalice Well, which supposedly holds the Holy Grail and produces waters with healing properties, is nearby, and the abbey I came to visit has the tomb of King Arthur--or used to. Supposedly.
Just outside the town of Glastonbury rises a huge hill (500-some-odd feet) with a tower, creatively called the Tor, at the top, with lovely views of the countryside. This had been my other goal in Glastonbury, but by then it was clear that I'd have to choose between climbing the Tor and hearing Evensong in Wells. I chose Evensong, so instead of taking the shuttle to the hill and climbing to the top, I just took a picture of it and returned on the bus to Wells.
The ride home was uneventful, and I decided to celebrate my last evening in Bath by allowing myself to spend a little more on my dinner. I have been averaging £50 a day for everything except lodging--so food, transportation, souvenirs, admission prices, et cetera. I still had £15 left over from my original £250 at the beginning of my travels, so I decided to finish off a day of adorable Englishness with a very traditional (er, not at all, actually) meal of yakisoba and plum wine at a hip noodle bar. Tomorrow I depart in the morning for a week in London--a big change from the peace and relative quiet of the countryside. I am looking forward to London, though; I think I'm ready to move on.
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