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I am sterdam (and nothing’s gonna colour me)

As far as I’m concerned, Amsterdam is THE greatest place on Earth. That I’ve been to, anyway.

 

It’s difficult to explain how instantly I fell in love with the Netherlands. Every time I encountered something new, discovered another fact about it, talked to another person, I was only convinced more of its utopia. Wherever we went I was clutching onto my idyllic conception, just waiting to come upon some rude local, some druggo, something that would make the city sink, even an inch, in my estimation. But it never happened.

 

Tilly was asleep when we crossed the border from Belgium on the bus, and I didn’t pay much attention. The next time I looked up from my book I instantly saw two people on bikes and knew we were there. I love the fact that they all ride bikes. It’s so romantic and environmentally friendly, as well as preventative of judgement of those that don’t drive (haha). I love how they ride them, as well, with such good posture. And I love how every road has like, seven lanes for traffic, trams, bikes and pedestrians.

So … many … bikes.

I loved the scenery as we drove towards the city – flat green fields divided by irrigation canals and dotted with windmills, the old ones beautifully nostalgic, the new ones proudly green. I loved how beautiful the city was – the canals and the old leaning buildings.

 

Beautiful Amsterdam.

I loved the weather, and the afternoon sun dappling through trees that shed millions of seed pods, which fall to the ground like snow, gathering in the gutters like piles of Cornflakes or woodchips. Tragically, the DSLR was out of commission for most of the visit, but hopefully that won’t show up too much in the photos.

 

Seed pod storm.

Seed pod fun.

Til dejected after coming under seed pod attack.

 

 

I love that every ten metres is another sculpture, the mark, I think, of an advanced, cultured society (I can’t believe the prevalence of the view in Australia that art and arts degrees are ‘useless’ – utilitarianism of this kind is for cavemen). In the same way, I love that even their corporate buildings are architecturally fascinating. I love that, in a world I’ve only recently realised is almost completely authoritarian right (in other words, evil) they’re so libertarian left. And that’s without even having mentioned the people themselves yet!

 

It was such a change to be in a place so welcoming after Paris. I think the Dutch have the best attitude to tourists – they have the perfect mix of retention of their own language and culture but being open to anglophonic tourists. So many times during our trip we would just be standing somewhere and a local would go out of their way to approach us and ask if we needed help. While Til was waiting for me outside the toilet, someone showed her the information desk in case she needed it. Later on the tram a guy nearly forced us to take his seat for our massive bags. And again, when we were a bit lost, a guy came up to us and asked if he could help.

And trams! We don’t have them in Sydney, obviously, and I never really liked the idea of them before. But now I realise they’re the perfect mix of the above-ground, light-filled, visible accessibility of buses and the fixed-track, reliabile predictability of trains.

I think one of the things that makes the city so good is that it has a small population for a world city, despite the fact that the Netherlands is the most populous country in the world for its size. They must just be more evenly spread, or something, because Amsterdam only has somewhere around 700,000 people, where Sydney has around 4 million. I don’t think people should live in huge numbers – it makes them callous. There’s simply not enough time to be courteous to everyone; friendliness is impractical. Too many people are vying for too little resources. Like the song goes, ‘Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.’

There was only really one place left to stay in Amsterdam by time we booked – The Van Gogh Hostel. Presumably this was because of its low ratings on hostelworld, but after some investigation you could see that the low ratings were only because it is brand new, a fact that shows in its facilities. It felt almost like a cross between a hotel and a hostel – the room was as nice as a decent modern hotel room and each room had its own beautiful bathroom, the only difference being that there were six to eight beds in the room.

 

When we first arrived we found in the room some luggage and three pairs of Crocs. From this, Til deduced that we were either staying with Asians or people middle-aged or older. We went back out and when we returned once more it proved to be the former. We walked in on three Asian girls huddled around a chair.

‘Hi,’ I chirped.

They looked up, seemingly stunned. They said hi back, then burst into giggles and turned back to the chair, where I pretended not to see them removing some wet pairs of underwear they had just been laying out. Later I found out they had been told it was a girls only room, hence their surprise.
We had dinner that night in a really cool restaurant where we were serverd by a guy so friendly it almost made me cringe. AND we got free bread and garlic butter. I LOVE free stuff – how did they know!?

Free bread!

So in case you hadn’t deduced, the title of this post is a modified version of a Grates song that I kept getting in my head because ‘Iamsterdam’ is Amsterdam’s tourism slogan.

 

The much-photographed ‘Iamsterdam’ sign from a different angle, wearing a crown for Queen’s Day.

And it turns out I was being ironic when I included the lyric ‘nothing’s gonna colour me’, because something did colour us. That colour was orange, and that something was QUEEN’S DAY! Queen’s Day is like the Netherlands’ Australia Day, except instead of laconic barbeques, picnics, beach expeditions and Sam Kekovich ads, they have a MASSIVE street party in honour of their royal family, the house of (ta da!) Orange. Wearing orange is a requisite of Queen’s Day celebrations. The entire city turns orange. It’s not a very common colour; I’ve never seen so much in my life!

It’s interesting to see how much the Dutch love their royals compared with the Brits.

 

 

 

 

 

We started out at the markets in Vondelpark, where there were lots of talented children dancing and playing instruments for money, games involving throwing eggs at people, and junk to buy.

There was also zorbing for kids! Jealous!

After that we ventured to a supermarket for alcohol. Our plan was to get a large quantity of potent, delicious, refreshing, alcoholic, orange drink that the two of us could drink in the park with some nibblies, and we ended up concocting a mixture of rosé and juice which fit the bill perfectly and got us nicely, mildly inebriated.

 

 Magic nectar.

 

 

 

 

 After that we had a wander into the center of town.

  On the way.

 

 Love  the sign.

 

 Street market.

Inner city Maccas devastation.

In town we found some more alcohol and a few dance parties to join in, lunch, a little park in which to laze full of lizard statues which we conjectured might be to discourage birds from eating the bulbs planted there, and then a pretty little canal to sit by.

A man dancing effeminately outside the lizard park, attracting quite a crowd.

 

 

 From the side this guy’s helmet looked like a gigantic splodge of toothpaste.

We also found a toilet for Til, the use of which she had to wait for for like half an hour. It was easy enough for me, ’cause they had these additional open-air urinals everywhere.

 

They were extremely convenient, but it was a bit weird being so in the open, and they STANK. It seems to be the attitude over there, though – they have permanent versions of these around where you stand in like a giant metallic coil, but only the mid-section from your shoulders to knees is screened and you have a view of the outside. The first time I saw a guy using one I thought he was a homeless guy pissing in a phone booth or something.

 

Later, on the free tour we took of the city, our guide pointed out the devices below, which are apparently installed solely to stop people pissing on buildings. If you try to, you find it splatters back considerably. After telling us about them our guide jokingly told us to touch it and I did just to shock everyone. He said he’d remember me as the only person ever to take him up on the suggestion haha. I reasoned that as a piss-deflector it was probably actually the safest place to touch, but he assured me their main victims are drunk people in the dark. Whatever, urine is sterile haha.

 

After sitting by the canal and drinking another litre of rosé-juice concoction, we were feeling the drawbacks of wine – it works fast but makes you sleepy, so we reasoned that if we headed back to the hostel for a nap we would be reenergised to party on that night. Unfortunately, as Amsterdam newbs, we didn’t realise that the Queen’s Day celebrations commence on Queen’s Night, the evening before Queen’s Day, and continue on through the night, meaning that by the end of Queen’s Day the party is dead. We headed back out and couldn’t work out where everyone was. We missed the end of Queen’s Day!

Sunday we visited Anne Frank’s house, a really moving and depressing experience. Even so, it was a shame because it was so busy that you felt like you had to press on through to the next room to let the next people in. It was surreal, but I couldn’t really reconcile the information I was reading in the pamphlet, that I was hearing from the TV displays, with the fact that I was actually standing where it all happened. I saw the posters she put up on her wall, but while reading about it I couldn’t appreciate that fact. There was a room at the end of the tour outside the house which was devoted to Anne Frank’s older sister Margot, which I thought was so beautiful and touching. They had a video of one of her school friends saying what a beautiful, intelligent, kind young woman she had been, and how the friend felt a bit bitter that it hadn’t been Margot’s diary that was found, that it was Anne who got all the fame. I thought the room was a nice gesture towards redressing that disparity.
After that we really needed to cheer up – it was so thoroughly disturbing. We got ourselves some frozen yoghurt and consoled ourselves with the beauty of sitting on a canal. The frozen yoghurt, by the way, was a thousand times better than Snog!

 

The aftermath of Queen’s Day – a broken dinner table in the canal.

 

We were further consoled by coming across Lijnbaansgracht, the most beautiful street in Amsterdam, and where we will write our novels when we’re rich. Take a look and tell us if you hink it’s worth $800 a week (for a crappy apartment) or $2800 a week (for a nice one), as we discovered later on a real estate site:

 

Ducklings in the adjacent canal.

 

The residents of Lijnbaansgracht dancing on their boats. I’d be dancing too if I lived there.

The next day we did yet another free New Europe tour. At first I was hesitant about our guide because he had such an annoying American accent, and when I overheard another guide ask him for his email address I heard him spell it out with a ‘to the’ between each letter (eg ‘L to the U to the K to the E, etc) and I didn’t think it was ironic. In retrospect it must’ve been, because he turned out to be pretty cool and funny. And the accent was just a result of having gone to an International school.

The tour went through the Red Light District, which was surreal. I can’t believe those girls just stand there in the window until someone comes along and picks them up haha. He stopped us at one point to show us the artwork below that just appeared overnight in the street which the council considered vandalism and removed until the locals complained and it was reinstated. Thought that was cool.

 

Our tourguide telling us about the most famous ‘coffee shop’ in the world.

More nonsensical Queen’s Day aftermath: a ski boot?

He also explained to us why all the houses along the canals lean so drastically. The ones which lean sideways, he said, were accidents due to the fact that most of the Netherlands is reclaimed land and the foundations have sunk, but the ones that lean forward are by design. Apparently, in order to fit the highest number possible of merchants into the city, there were restrictions on the widths of houses, meaning they were all really tall instead. But with such narrow, tall houses, the staircases were too tiny and winding to transport goods to any of the higher floors, so they would winch them up to the top floor using a pulley system hanging off a pole at the top of every house. Because Amsterdam is quite windy, though, this could get dangerous when hauling up heavy loads that could blow around and damage the property. To remedy this problem, houses were built with a forward lean so that the goods could be hauled up and be far enough away from the house not to bash into it. Our guide did tell us, though, that they later realised they could just build a longer pole at the top and get the same effect.

On our way from the end of the tour into town for lunch we came across a super cool novelty shop where we thought we might find some good souvenirs for people, but we could only find ones that would be good for us, like coffee bean-shaped ice cube trays that you’re s’posed to fill with coffee-water to put in your iced coffee so it doesn’t get watered down as the ice melts. Ingenius! I also came across a card I consider to be very relevant since I managed to get upgraded to business class on the flight over here, and am hoping for the same on the way back:


After that we had the most serendipitous, delicious, inexpensive lunch at this place called Broodje Bert.

Blew this picture up because of the unfortunate woman in the bottom-right corner that I managed to catch at the wrong moment.

 

 

Our good friend Gilly, of ‘A vindication of the rights of sloth’, ‘Winchester II: return to gilly’s’, ‘Winchester III: darrel’s revenge’ and ‘University of east anglia: a crytoscopophiliac’s dream’, formerly lived in Amsterdam, and gave us a lot of advice about where to go and what to do. She was the one who told us about Queen’s Day in the first place. She said one must-see in Amsterdam was this old-style cinema called the Tuschinski. It was really beautiful. Unfortunately, though, we didn’t take any photos in the lobby, and we were seeing True Grit, which had come out quite a while ago, and consequently wasn’t in the main cinema, which was the only old style one. Still worth it, though. Good movie, too.

The next day, all too quickly, we had to leave and embark upon a massive coach journey back to Norwich. Amsterdam, though, is without a doubt our favourite place that we’ve visited so far, and we’re resolved to go back very shortly and have a long weekend with Gilly and our other UOW friend on exchange in Spain, Elisa, and do everything we didn’t get a chance to do on our first visit. It’s gonna be awesooooome!

 

Cheers,

 

Luke

Posted by  |  May 31, 2011 | Categories: Festivals, Netherlands | 1 Comment

Au francais day! Camus! Calais!

“‘Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy.”

Greetings, reader. Luke from UEA in the UK here, writing about mine and Tilly’s trip to Paris.

I mentioned parts of our journey from London to Paris in ‘Three wollongongers do London: the longest post ever part one’ so I won’t say much about it here, except that despite its being eight hours long, it was surprisingly pleasant. I slept the first two hours, in the middle was a scenic ferry trip from Dover, and the last two hours were spent watching the beautiful French countryside at sunset.

 The White Cliffs of Dover.

 

 Calais, my favourite place, onomastically speaking.

 Compiegne, where Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians in 1430 (HSC Exthistory major project knowledge YAYUH!)

… And a statue of Joan we came across later in Paris.

One of the highlights of the journey was Til pulling the face below and looking exactly like her brother Riley:

 

Family resemblance.

We stayed in Paris for a week, on one of the St Christopher’s Hostels one-week deal things. The hostel was pretty awesome. It was purpose-built, so the rooms weren’t cramped or anything, everyone had massive storage lockers, and each bed had a curtain around it. The staff were really friendly, too. We had these two English roomates who’d cycled from Dover to Paris. We were talking and when I mentioned I was doing this blog they wanted to know if they’d get a mention in it and I was like, ‘You might need to make more of an impression.’ And then they kept trying to think of ways to get in, including making Til sit through this weird video they’d taken on their phone the night before. Hey guys, if you’re out there!

Obviously one of the best things about Paris was the food culture. We pretty much had baguettes at every meal, and camembert, and cherry tomatoes, and this AMAZING JUICE that I drank litres of at a time, and wine, and also Pringles, which I’d taken to calling ‘Pwong-glaze’ in an exaggerated French accent. They sure take their bread and dairy seriously over there, which results in incredible food. One supermarket we went to had TWO AISLES of yoghurt. We thought this one was funny, though:

Til getting Japanese with some Flanby because it sounds like a Pokémon.

‘Flanby Flannn.’

(an amalgam of images from http://www.proxilivre.fr and ‘http://fc06.deviantart.net)

Every night there were groups of picnickers lined up all the way along the Seine, and this community of Jews would congregate around this one street corner. It was so cool:

 Our accommodation on the left (not the huge one).

 

Sounds like something out of the first line of an American short story: ‘When I was a boy growing up in Paris, all the Jewish men in the community would congregate on the corner of [something something] and Rue [something] on Saturday nights, dressed in black and white, while the wives and mothers [something something]. Me and my cousin Schlomo would always [something something something] …’ Obviously I don’t have the actual knowledge to furnish the story, but you get the idea.

After the events I think Tilly might be planning to write about in a blog post of her own involving a lost passport, we went for a relieved walk along the canal and got  some snaps. The next day was Easter, and I was desperate for some Cadbury, but it seemed they don’t have it over there. We decided to spend the day doing another one of those free New Europe tours, which was great, but perhaps not as good as the London one. Where it started up there was this group of exhibitionist Brazilian dancers, and this little white-as French kid was trying to join in:

The tour took us all over Paris, to heaps of great spots. Our guide Jenny told us about the bizzare Metro entrance signs. Apparently they were done in the Art-Nouveau style at the turn of the twentieth century, and they used to have big glass cases as well which scared the people of the time, new to underground trains, because they looked like giant monsters (which I think is understandable):

   A special commemorative Metro entrance.

We also saw on the tour a bridge that Jenny calls the world’s first Facebook photo album because it’s covered in sculptures of the drunken attendants of a royal party. Apparently the king had his sketch artist walking around taking comical likenesses at the bridge’s opening party to be sent to the guests, but he then decided to have them turned into sculptures and displayed on the bridge for all to see instead, hence, Facebook.

The other cool bridge was the Ponts des Arts, or the Arts Bridge, which crosses the Seine between the Louvre and the Académie française, and which is one of those places where lovers attach locks and throw away keys. I awkwardly asked Jenny if she had one on there and she said she did, but it was gone now and so was the boy … Overstepped the bounds of tourist-tourguide familiarity, I think.

Jenny telling us about the Académie française in the background. I’m abivalent about the concept. I like that they value their language enough to defend it so militantly, but I also don’t think language should be regulated in such a way. Pretty funny though, that when something new is invented they have to decide whether it’s feminine or masculine in French. Apparently it took ages for them to decide about the iPod.

A guy painting on the Arts Bridge. He’s ACTUALLY WEARING A BERET!

I love the way the French value art. At one point we stumbled upon an orchestral group just performing in public, just for no reason. There were so many people just sitting playing instruments and singing in the streets or along the Seine in the evenings, without anything to put money in. They were just doing it for the love of it. Amazing:

 By the end of the tour we were once again weary, worn and dusty.

Dusty feet while listening to the last story of the tour – the Parisian resistance in World War II.

We wandered lackadaisically into Parisian suburbia in search of food and stumbled upon what was to become our favourite French bakery, the Boulangerie/Patisserie Julien. They sold pre-filled baguettes which … words fail … They were PHENOMENAL haha. BEST EVER. We went there like, three times over the week, sometimes crossing the entire city just to get there.

The next day we set out needing to purchase deodorant, thongs, and shorts for me, and supportive shoes and some other crap for Til. Typically I had all my stuff within the first hour or two, but it was more difficult for Til. I bought a pair of ten euro thongs from Marc Jacobs, where shorts cost 700 euro, then got to walk around with the bag all day pretending I was rich. What we really needed was a shopping centre, but not knowing where any where, we stupidly ended up on Champs-Elysees and, as we know,

‘The Champs-Elysees is a busy street’

and not the best if you want supportive girl’s shoes and not high heels, haha. It was a bit of an ordeal, so we eventually had to go and have a Julien-aided laze in a nearby park, which resulted in my first of three park siestas during our trip.

 

You know you’re near Champs-Elysees when …

We had another picnic that night on the canal.

On Tuesday we visited the Musée d’Orsay, the foremost French Impressionist art museum. It was really great. The line to get in was astonishingly intestinal. We actually couldn’t find the end because it had coiled out beyond the rope barriers. We found what we thought was the end but was actually just a bend and I left Tilly there while I went to see if I could find the end anywhere else.

Where, where, where, where’s Tilly (wah-a-wah-a-wah-a-where’s Tilly?)

By the time I came back she’d been osmosed into the queue and we’d accidentally cheated the system, but we weren’t complaining.

Wednesday was a biggun. We went to look at the Eiffel tower in the morning, then went on a tour of Monmartre in the afternoon.

Graffiti near the tower. For some reason it’s hilarious to me that French gangs do this too. Oh yeah, Villejuif boys. You’re real hardcore.

Start of the Monmartre tour.

 

 Van Gogh’s apartment block.

 

Sacre Coeur.

 

 An amazing street performer.

 

The cafe from Amelie.

We went to the Louvre that night, which was obviously fantastic. Although, to be honest, we were a bit museumed and galleried out. We’s seen the National Gallery, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Musée d’Orsay all in the space of a week. Although I know there’s not really any alternative, I really believe that the amassing and displaying of art in huge collections is not the best way for it to be experienced. It’s the same principle as a single person’s death being more affecting than thousands – too much and it’s an overload, we can’t appreciate it. I think the only way you could fully appreciate these great galleries would be to live locally and explore them bit by bit over a series of visits.

The Victory of Samothrace, one of my favourites.

 

 The obligatory, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Eugène Delacroix’s beautiful La Liberté guidant le peuple, or Liberty Leading the People.

 

Me with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s The Murder of Agamemnon.

Til enjoying her favourite, with a title as long as the painting is big, Jacques Luis-David’s Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 December 1804.

 

 Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Education of Achilles by the Centaur Chiron

Aphrodite of Milos, or the Venus de Milo

 

Athena’s all like, ‘Whatever, Zeus.’

‘This is for Works and Days, Hesiod!’

Homer.

Nip in the bud.

 

 Tearin up the D-floor with the Louvre statuary.

For our last day in Paris, we planned to take a picnic to the Palace of Versailles.  Unfortunately it was a disaster. It’d been remarkably clement up till this point, blazing everyday, and we’d been wasting it inside at the museums. We really should’ve saved one of the museums for a rainy day and taken advantage of the sun while it was there. We didn’t really know how to get to Versailles, and we kind of got lost. We were on a train we thought was taking us there, but then there was an announcement in French and it stopped and everyone got off and I was wearing shorts and thongs and FREEZING so we just decided to turn back.

We ended up eating our picnic on the train back. Because we’d been picnicking almost every meal, we were forever in need of cutlery. There was this one supermarket up the road which had a torn open packet of plastic knives in it, so I kept stealing them out of there. We ended up calling them Subtle Knives because of the subtle manner in which I’d taken them.

The Subtle Knife.

(an amalgam of images from http://writerspet.files.wordpress.com and http://www.acepackagingsupplies.co.uk)

Unfortunately, the Subtle Knife shattered on the journey back from halfway-to-Versailles whilst dealing  with some particularly stubborn butter:

 The scene of the accident.

 

The extent of the damage.

But the Subtle Knife will live on forever in our heavy hearts and our buttery, buttery hands, and also in the epilogue to the His Dark Materials trilogy that Phillip Pullman is sure to write, Shards of a Broken Knife:

(an amalgam of images from http://www.webstaurantstore.com and http://www.amazon.com)

And so our trip to Paris ended in failure and tragedy, but that couldn’t tarnish the amazing, though somewhat travel hungover from our previous escapades in London, time we’d had. Vive la France!

 

Cheers,

 

Luke

Posted by  |  May 31, 2011 | Categories: Cultural differences | Tags: , | Leave a comment

You Know Your From Thessaloniki When…

There is also a group that I found on facebook which gives some interesting/humorous insights into living in Greece’s second largest city!

It also helps you to understand the Greek culture a little better 🙂

Here are a few of my favourites:

You go to a restaraunt and expect the fruits and dessert to be free of charge, and sometimes the wine as well.

You set up an appointment with friends at 8.00pm and the first person arrives at 8.30pm, the last at 10.00pm.

Dinner reservations are always made after 10.00pm.

You start off for university in the morning but end up at a cafe having a frappe with friends instead!

The people you talk to look you straight in the eye and tend to stand about 5 cms away from you.

It doesn’t matter what you have on you always find time for a frappe.

Said Frappe takes you five hours to drink.

The metro is a legend to you.

You think Athens is a country north of Libya.

Also im not sure how to post videos but check out this video of the local football team Paok. This is the reason they are routinely banned from the stadiums.

 

Morganx

Posted by  |  May 31, 2011 | Categories: Greece | 1 Comment

Mykonos

I recently spent five glorious days in Mykonos, the ‘party island’ of Greece.

It was in a way a trip to say farewell to Greece, as due to visa issues I am going home end of this week.

I went with my two best friends Julie and Bella and simply spent the time swimming and picnicing on the beach, drinking frappes, playing the Greek version of backgamon and eating fine food in tavernas.

Mykonos in Greek means “windy” and it is one of the windest islands in Greece.

It is also one of the most beautiful with crystal clear turqouise waters, rocky and dramatic coastlines and the typical white washed square houses accented with blue trim.

To anyone else who is facing the prospect of returning home to a cold Australian winter….well as cold as it gets.

Here are some pictures to maybe make you feel a little less sad 🙂

Typical street in Mykonos

Myself and my two best friends

The only way to transport your dog in style!

Morgan x

Posted by  |  May 31, 2011 | Categories: Greece, Not ready to go home yet | Tags: | 4 Comments

Welcome to the new guys

Hi

To all the new students joining the blog for the first time or just having a bit of a look before you take the plunge, welcome. Please explore the blog – have a look at the different posts by theme (you’ll see the links on the right hand side of the blog page), read up on the photo competition, and immerse yourself in all the different stories and images students have shared over the past year. We can’t wait to enjoy yours!

As soon as you have received your blog invite from Greg or from WordPress (let Jan, Tonia or Greg know if you are still waiting…), you can start new posts; in the meantime, we woud love to hear your comments on other people’s posts !

We look forward to all your stories.

Jan

Posted by  |  May 31, 2011 | Categories: Fish out of water, I wish someone had told me, Predeparture | Leave a comment

Three wollongongers do london: the longest post ever part two

Luke here, continuing on from my last post.

The last thing I said was about how we kind of poorly timed our trip because we missed the Royal Wedding, but one way it wasn’t poorly timed was meteorologically. The weather was spectacular. Last time we were in London it was grey, bleak, positively Russian, but it couldn’t have been better this time. Compare the pair:

December

 

April

Actually, those two pictures probably don’t really demonstrate the difference that much. Except for the leaves. That was just the only thing I took a picture of twice. 

After the tour, lunch and Snog we returned to Trafalgar Square to go to the National Gallery (yet another free attraction – although we did donate), but first we saw the performers outside:



That second guy was such a wanker. There’s pumping the crowd up and then there’s gratuitously wringing them for all they’re worth. I swear he took half an hour just to get through that stupid tennis racquet. It’s not even impressive; you’re just skinny …

The National Gallery was good, but we weren’t really up to it after the walking tour and all. Our feet were killing us so we ended up surrendering and going for cider and wine in St James’s Park. I love that you can drink in public here! They’re not, however, very big on screwtop lids, so getting to our precious liquid required some ingenuity:


Kirb using Til’s fake plastic key; I favoured my metallic phone case.

After that it was more predrinks in a bar and then back to Jamie’s Italian for a delicious, inexpensive dinner.

 Predrinks at Verve.


 Til being counselled by our (pleasantly) surprisingly knowledgeable waiter.

 

Til’s truffle tagliatelle


 My lemon curd.


Kirb’s raspberry chocolate brownie


 Til’s walnut slice.


What looks to be an authentic Crapper’s toilet!

The next morning we visited Westminster Abbey. Of course, the first thing I did when I got inside was get the baby (DSLR) out to get  a photo of the amazing stained glass windows. Before I’d even gotten the lens cap off, this waspish old bag in an absurd green cloak had blustered over to me and snapped, ‘There’s no photography in here!’

‘Oh, sorry’, I said, immediately repentant. I was a little embarrassed. ‘Really?’ I asked, suddenly finding it astonishing that you wouldn’t be allowed to take photos of such an iconic attraction.

‘Well there’s notices everywhere!’ she snarled, as if I’d just whipped it out and started pissing on Chaucer’s grave or something.

I looked around, genuinely looking for a single one. ‘Well I don’t see any, and that’s a really nice way to speak to someone, isn’t it? Very Christian. Turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour and all that.’

Except by the time I’d turned back from looking around she’d already stormed off, probably luckily, or I really would’ve said that to her and then gotten kicked out of the church. But what a bitch. It was just the way she spoke to me, and the fact that we were in a church and that she was presumably Christian. Sorry if I was so distracted by the magnificent historical splendour around me that I didn’t notice one tiny green sign prohibiting photography. As if I’d walk in and blatantly take a photo right in front of her if I’d seen the sign. Besides violating her Christian beliefs, she was also not living up to her job description which, according to the Westminster Abbey website, includes ‘[h]elping visitors to feel comfortable in the Abbey and not to be daunted by the building.’

Now, I’ve been to a lot of churches and abbeys and cathedrals since I’ve come to Europe, and at first I did feel a bit guilty taking photos in a place of worship. It felt disrespectful somehow. But I’ve since come to the conclusion that it’s not me turning them into a tourist attraction – it’s them. They’re the ones charging a seventeen pound entrance fee, hawking cheap religious merchandise, trying to elicit a few more pounds out of you by deliberatley funnelling you past the coffee stand which, I might add, is sitting ON TOP OF PEOPLE’S GRAVES. But oh no, we wouldn’t want to defile the sanctity of the church by cheapening it into a mere tourist attraction with our photos. I’m sorry, but if you’re selling it like a tourist attraction, the tourists should be allowed to take photos of it. Also, you can’t forcibly dominate one and a half thousand years of human history without surrendering some privileges; it’s part of the bargain. When a culture or institution gains a certain amount of supremacy in the world, it relinquishes control of the institutions and constructs it previously commanded and enforced so that, today, many of the irreligious celebrate Christmas, and Christian relics such as abbeys are of as much, if not more historical importance than spiritual.

But anyway, I am glad I didn’t get kicked out, ’cause the church was really cool. The audioguide was narrated by Jeremy Irons! I was having inappropriate Lolita flashbacks. Saw the graves of lots of famous people. Sure wish I had some photos. Haha. We saw one grave of some guy named something like ‘Baganoll’, and we were going to get a cheeky picture, but then we remembered a fact from Dave’s tour: that Britons are the most watched people in the world, with some ridiculous amount of the planet’s surveillance cameras situated there. So we thought maybe not. Also we’d had the fear of the ‘greencloaks’, as I’d taken to calling them, struck into our souls.

 ‘No photos!’

We did get a few photos in the cloisters, which I later discovered you were allowed to do anyway, but whatever.



In the cloisters was the coffee shop I mentioned above, and the delicious pastry fragrance wafting from it wasn’t helping the fact that I was starving. I refused, however, to give any more of my money to this evil institution (haha), so we finished up in the abbey and since I LOVE them and Kirbie hadn’t tried one yet, went in search of pasties. Usually it’s not that difficult: there’s a Cornish Pasty Co every five seconds in this country but, like Starbucks, you can never actually find one when you want one. 

Next up was the British Museum (free once again!) which was, ironically, having an Australian exhibit that we, needless to say, didn’t see. There I got to see a lot of old friends from Ancient History, plus some other cool stuff.


 Cool roof.


 

 Me with the Rosetta Stone.

 Only mention of Hatshepsut I could find.


 Lindow Man.



Once again, after the museum our feet were dying. Kirb went back to her hostel to get ready for the pub crawl that night while Til and I dropped dead in the nearest cafe to be replenished by some surprisingly good (by European standards) iced mochas. 

Known for their restorative properties.

After a minor travel mishap which involved me running all over London looking for an internet cafe, we were reunited with Kirbie for a speedy Maccas dinner and the pub crawl. I was neg-vibing on it a bit at first, due to exhaustion, but it turned out great.  There was one crazy Western Australian guy who must‘ve been on drugs, and a Swedish girl who challenged us and a Canadian guy list ten famous people from our countries, only to list brands when we turned the tables on her.


Crazy guy



It kind of became evident as the night went on that the pub crawl was more of a singles-fest than anything else. By the end of the night it was kind of just the guys passing around the girls, which was funny and gross to watch, but we left around that point.

The next day was Kirbie’s last in London, and I had high expectations. We were going to the Tower of London and to see Lion King, two things which I’d really been looking for. And as always, ‘when a man get something he wants badly he doesn’t like it’ (VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street). I did like them both, I just had such high expectations that I was slightly disappointed.

That’s one major lesson I’ve learned from my exchange experience so far. It’s been a fair while since I’ve made new friends – everyone I’m close to at home has known me at least since the startof uni. So having this intense experience of becoming close to people in a period of six months has been a kind of checkup on what I’m like as a person right now. Everyone else I know has preconceived notions of me, but the people I’ve met overseas have nothing to go on but what they’ve discovered for themselves in the last few months. In a way, their opinion of me will be the most unbiased account of who I am, perhaps not wholly, but currently. And it’s interesting because two of the people I’ve grown closest to over here, Sam and Kim, have both said I’m a very cynical person – which is something I don’t know many of my friends at home would call me.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and learned from it. I think the best way to be, in this respect, is to have the acuity to be able to perceive things as they are with all their faults; the disposition to not be bothered by those faults; and the social awareness not to come across to people as a critical asshole who can’t be pleased by anything. I think I had the first two to begin with, but I was never aware of the need for the third until now.

I think I have a higher tolerance for faults than other people. Yes, I can pick holes in something and point to the parts of it that I didn’t like, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it otherwise. That doesn’t mean I dislike it all together. I have an exacting standard of perfection, but not an exacting standard of enjoyment. So yes, I can be disappointed by a whole lot of things in Lion King: the fact that the lines were rushed and said without conviction, that the additions to the show weren’t of the same quality as those from the original, that Simba’s accent was far too posh, that Nala kept making the same ridiculous gesture with her body and so on and so forth, but still come away from the show having loved it.

I love language, and think it’s our best medium for communication, but even so, it’s so inadequate. There is no way to economically modulate it enough to accurately convey the middleground, the liminal, the grey , the inbetween of human experience, and you can see this in the way we think. It’s difficult to list the faults of something without it seeming like you didn’t enjoy it because language forces us to make assertions in relative polaritie, with only clumsy adjectives and things as modifiers. That’s why you get all these people saying in their Facebook ‘About Me’s that they’re ‘a walking bundle of contradictions’ and ‘so random’, because when called upon to give an account of themselves in words, they find it difficult to reconcile any words which contradict one another, they are ‘unable to hold in their minds … two contradictory ideas’ (Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance – you can tell I’ve just been studying for a Postcolonialism exam, can’t you?). They go to write that they’re quiet, but then they remember that, when they’re with a certain group of friends they’re really boisterous. But what? Quiet AND boisterous? No! God, I’m just sooooo random! 

You’ll notice how long and dense (and boring?) all my posts are, and how full of relative pronouns (which etc) they are. This is because I’m trying to accurately represent my experience, and that requires modulation. But people don’t like picky people (everyone hates professional critics), and it’s my responsibility, not theirs, to control how I represent myself. I think sometimes I’ve got to just hold my tongue and say I liked something instead of saying I liked it, except for all these things, but I still liked it. Lesson learned.


 Insecure, much, Henry VIII?



After the Tower of London, we went to this really bizarre restaurant. It wasn’t overtly weird, it just kind of built up in strangeness so that by the end, I was convinced it had been started by this family who had everything except the chef, and they finally found one to work for them, but he was like, ‘All right, but we’re gonna do things MY way’, and from then on the family lived in terror of displeasing the chef by violating any of his punctilious rules. First, they didn’t have eftpos. Then they wouldn’t take our order until Til had gone to the ATM which they said sometimes didn’t work, they wouldn’t let Kirbie have two toasted sandwiches instead of one (without getting two entire meals), and they gave us paper coffee cups for our Coke. They had a whole page of restrictions on the front page of their menu, essentially saying things like ‘no alterations’ and ‘too bad if your food comes out at different times’. Do you see what I mean? How it was all so self-oriented instead of customer-oriented. Like, NO we don’t have EFTPOS even though it would be really easy for us to get it because we’re in the middle of the city next to a gigantic tourist attraction; NO we won’t take your order yet because we don’t want to be inconvenienced if the ATM doesn’t work; NO alterations, NO food out at the same time, NO proper glasses because we don’t want to wash them up! It’s like, it’s called the hospitality industry for a reason …

 Coke in a coffee cup.

The bill said service wasn’t included, but there was no way we were tipping, so we just left the exact money and sketattled.

Sadly that night Kirbie left. It’d been so good having her there; we probably wouldn’t have done half the things we’d done if she hadn’t been there to energise and motivate us – we were leaving the hostel at nine in the morning and not coming back till eleven, twelve, or one every night. She really made our visit.


Kirb being swallowed by a sea of tube commuters.

After Kirbie left, Til and I walked around Covent garden and watched an amazing busker for a while before heading home.


Our last day in London turned out to be a return to all our favourite places without us meaning it to. We started out at the National Gallery, this time in the Portrait Gallery, where we saw some very cool familiar faces:


 Anne Boleyn

Charles Darwin.

Charlotte Bronte.


Ted Hughes.


And guess who else we saw? That’s right, Mandalf!:

‘JUST, KIDDING’.

It was this guy:


(image from http://www.life.com)

After that it was a return to St James’s Park and Snog:

 BAMF once more.



And then finally we revisited Covent Garden, my personal favourite, for some chorizo and chicken rolls which were AMAZING. It was the perfect way to  end our stay in London.

Cheers,

Luke Bagnall

Posted by  |  May 23, 2011 | Categories: Rants, The UK | Leave a comment

Three wollongongers* do london: the longest post ever part one

*I think ‘Wollongoners’ is the most suitable demonym for Wollongong. Better than Wollongongian or Wollongongite or any other suffix combination, anyway.

This is Luke Bagnall from UEA again, writing on our trip to London.

As I’m writing this, which will probably be a long time before it’ll go online, Til and I are lounging in the indoor deck of the Pride of Kent, crossing the English channel to Calais.

I love that word. Calais. If it didn’t sound so much like a wankified version of ‘Kelly’ (à la Ja’mie from Jamie), I’d want to name my future daughter Calais. Sounds kind of Elven.


‘Illué alloay Arwen. Callathee allathar cathai calais.’

We’re sitting next to a depressingly nuclear American family who talk (in especially annoying accents, no less) to each other like they’re from 7th Heaven or something. It’s all très bourgeois (getting my French on), so I’m distracting myself from their twee blather with what will probably be an epic blog post.


Where do you go when the world won’t treat you right? The answer is Calais, evidently.

We arrived in London from Norwich last Sunday, and stayed in what looked like the fairly posh suburb of Pimlico, judging from the beautiful olden-day apartments and the concomitant rows of Audis, Mercs, BMWs and Alfa Romeos parked outside them.



Our hostel itself wasn’t so posh, offering what a website tactfully describes as an ‘iconic view’ of the hideous Battersea Power Station. We had to stay in separate male/female dorms ’cause everything else was booked out, and that wasn’t fun because the types of people to deliberately book all-male dorms can easily be the creepy fifty-year-old kind who stand eerily in the corner of the room over the sleeping body of another guy for hours on end (this only happened once, but that was enough). 

And I’m not even just exaggerating to fit this picture into this vague LOTR motif – the dude really kinda looked like Gollum.

The showers would be more adequately described as dribblers (not that showers ‘show’), and there was a fifteen minute walk to the nearest tube station. But on the upside, it was very cheap, the service was friendly, which is rare in England, the pub downstairs was cool and played good music, the fifteen-minute walk kept us out all day and burning calories and, best of all, despite the first being low quality and the second being of the Pepsi-not-Coke variety, we got free breakfast as well as free softdrinks whenever we wanted.


My cousin Kirbie was also in London at the time after attending some scientific conference or seminar or workshop or something in Dublin a few days before, so we made plans to meet up at Jamie’s Italian on our first night. Amazingly, it wasn’t outside the restaurant that we met, but in one of five or six elevators at the tube station – we just happened to get in the same one at exactly the same moment. Things like that keep happening, I’ve found. Like Jean-Paul, the only other person on our Topdeck tour to Les Deux Alpes, happened to be staying in Kirbie’s hostel as well, and we ran into him there one morning.

We postponed Jamie’s Italian in favour of something less busy,  which ended up being Spanish restaurant La Tasca, where we supped upon delicious (and expensive) sangria and incredible paella.


 


During our stay we came to feel like regular Londoners, spending almost a hundred pounds a day, passing iconic places like Pall Mall, The Strand, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Coventry Street, Piccadilly and so forth on a quotidian basis (but unfortunately not passing ‘go’ and not collecting $200) and expertly swiping our Oyster cards with the utmost nonchalance on public transport of at least two kinds. Sydney really needs to get something like that. So much more efficient than stupid prepaid bus tickets and weekly/monthly/yearly Shityrail passes.



I started out loving the tube because you can just go down there at any time, wait three minutes at most, and a train will arrive. But a couple of travel disasters later I was over it. I don’t understand how people use that thing every day, in BUSINESS SUITS. It must be awful in summer. They should really be air-conditioned.

The first thing we did on our first full day was the free walking tour where you just tip what you think your tourguide is worth. It’s clever, because knowing you don’t have to pay makes you want to pay more, provided you had a good guide, which we did. And it encourages the guides to make an effort too, I’m sure. Ours was a pretty cool guy named Dave, a musician.

I love the kind of stories they tell you on these tours – anecdotal, urban legendary. It’s rooted in historical fact but not always accurate, and it doesn’t need to be. I think it harks back to that primal act of oral storytelling or something.

Anyway, we started out in Hyde Park Corner, where we heard about Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, apparently an arrogant, elitist, sexist war hero. His mansion was right across from the park (at the awesome address of ‘1 London’) and he had a mounted statue of himself erected there, reportedly so he could see it from his windows whenever he wanted. This not being enough, he built his own Arc de Triomphe in the park as well, after he defeated Napoleon, with another statue of himself on top. Apparently Queen Victoria hated the statue so much she replaced it with another one as soon as he died.



Next stop was Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard. It was madness. I think London was just brimming for the impending royal wedding, so there were so. Many. People. Dave said he’d never seen it like that.




Outside the palace, Dave told us some pretty hilarious stories about people who broke into the palace. One did so wearing a Batman costume and stood on the balcony for hours; others, German tourists, wanted to go camping in Hyde Park, saw the trees over the walls of the palace and assumed they’d found it. They jumped the fence, set up camp, and were only discovered the next morning when they asked a guard how to get out. There was a standout about a drunken homeless Irishman, but it was different to the account I found online. The gist of it was that he ended up on the end of the queen’s bed in the middle of the night, chatting to her for about ten minutes after having consumed half a bottle of her wine. And afterwards, some quirk in the legal system meant he couldn’t be charged for trespassing on public property, so he was just charged for stealing the wine!

Next we walked up Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square, where we saw the hideous Olympic countdown clock and the monument to Nelson.


Here Dave told us about the legend that the term ‘stiff drink’ comes from when sailors preserved the body of Nelson in a barrel of brandy during the three-week journey back to England, but once they had exhausted the ship’s alcohol supply, they proceeded to drink some of the brandy with the body inside (stiff = corpse, therefore ‘stiff drink’). He also told us how they reduced the number of pigeons living in Trafalgar Square – by putting birth control chemicals in the pigeon feed. Just as he finished the story, a lone pigeon swooped JUST over our heads, as if to say, ‘Yeah, but we’re still here!’ and I caught it on camera.


 

We were then led to the Admiralty Arch.


Til and I had seen it on our previous London visit, but we hadn’t noticed its nose, which sits embedded in the wall for no known reason.



The tour ended at the Houses of Parliament and the Clock Tower (which we now know is only called ‘Big Ben’ metonymically for the bell within). It was really worthwhile hearing all the little stories you’d never know about otherwise. I always think it’s interesting the way you learn the geography of a city – Sydney, Norwich, London. You start out knowing enclosed individual areas, but not how to get from one to the other, and as you wander around you’re always surprised when two areas separated in your mind link up. I think it’s the same way with knowledge, in this case of history. I know separate historical facts about the history of Britain’s royalty, but it was great having them unified by the stories on the tour – learning that so and so was whatsisname’s grandson, etc.

Tilly had heard before coming to London that frozen yoghurt was the latest craze. 

  The frogurt is also cursed.

 So we headed to the place she’d heard about, ‘Snog’, which was admittedly pretty cool. I didn’t think the yoghurt itself was that great, but the décor was interesting. And the concept is clever. And the lighting was sensational! (Just kidding. But seriously, it was).





Our timing of this London-Paris-Amsterdam trip was a bit out, really – we probably should’ve made sure we were actually in Britain for the royal wedding. 


Okay, so this one was a bit contrived.

But seriously, it would’ve been great to go to an ironic student party, or play The Royal Wedding Drinking Game. As it turns out we’re in the Netherlands instead, for a different (better) royal event – 


 Sorry, couldn’t resist!

(Picture from http://www.squizzas.com)

I actually meant Queen’s Day – but more on that later. So while we won’t be in London for the party, we did get our fill of tacky wedding merchandise. It was in every shop window! Walls and walls of poorly Photoshopped, terrible photos on tea towels and plates and keyrings and such.


Who buys this stuff!?


Everyone’s trying to cash in. Glad someone called it. 

Due to its unwieldy mass, this post will continue above.

Posted by  |  May 23, 2011 | Categories: Festivals, The UK | Leave a comment

Bacon with icecream

I just wanted to share this promotional display I found at a popular US fast food diner. I’m not brave enough to try it :/

Posted by  |  May 23, 2011 | Categories: Only in..., The US, You eat what!? | 5 Comments

Coming home

Hi

Some of you will be beginning to think about returning home – if you’re lucky, after some more time travelling before you get here.

How do you feel about the return – nervous? apprehansive? exultant? can’t wait? We hope it has been an awesome and inspiring time away, but also that you will continue to share your thoughts with us once you get back to Australia.

We will be offering you the chance to capitalise on your time away through re-entry workshops back on campus, and hope to see you all there, sharing your thoughts and learning how to make the most of your experiences once you’re back – whether that’s in an educational or a professional or a life setting.

If you find you feel a bit like a fish out of water once you’re back, remember that transition is a great opportunity for growth. Enjoy!

Keep blogging – your posts have been wonderful. And don’t forget, there are cash prizes for students from each campus for photographs and reflections – details on the blog.

Jan

Posted by  |  May 20, 2011 | Categories: Going home, I'm not from here ( any more), Not ready to go home yet, Re-entry, Reverse Culture shock, Time to reflect | Leave a comment

Winchester III: darrell’s revenge

LUKE: I’ve already written two posts about Winchester. How can I possibly come up with another title?
TILLY: What were the other ones?
LUKE: ‘A vindication of the rights of sloth’ and ‘Winchester II: return to gilly’s’.
TILLY: How about … ‘Winchester 3: darrell’s revenge’?
*LAUGHTER*
LUKE: I’m so calling it that!
And there ends the significance of the title of this post. In no way did my friend Gilly’s husband Darrell exact any revenge during our stay in with them in Winchester … that I’m aware of …
Anyway, the reason for this, my third return to Winchester and the abode of the Grundys, was for Gilly Grundy’s G-Themed Fortieth Birthday Costume Party!
This party was during the first weekend after classes finished at uni, so we didn’t have very long to put together G-themed costumes. We were brainstorming and I said we could go as Graham Gooch, which made Tilly think of going as goon! This would be significant because, while she was a foreign student at UOW, we younguns introduced Gilly to all sorts of awful cheap goon drinks by which she was continually disgusted.
 
 Apparently only one cognitive leap away.
It was then simply a matter of deciding which form of goon would be best: Fruity Lexia or Berri Estates box? Goon Sunrise? Should we attempt to drink a goonsack every night until the party and wear a suit made of blown-up goonsacks? Goon Commandos with goon box helmets? We decided going as giant goon sacks would have the maximum effect for the minimum effort and price. We went around Norwich searching for electrical tape, thermal shock blankets and something suitable for nozzles, and were serenaded on our way by two buskers, one of whom was naked to the underwear, who sang something about us looking like lumberjacks as we passed because we were both wearing flannos. This is why I love this city.
Typically, we were still finishing our costumes thirty minutes before the party, on the train and in Winchester train station, where we attracted all sorts of looks and questions.
Plastic wine tumbler/goon nozzle stickers on her eyes.
Hasty assembly.
But the final result was worth it:
Goon sack costumes.
The party was awesome. Our costumes were a conversation starter, since the English don’t use the word ‘goon’ and therefore our costumes’ ‘G’ connection (sounds rude?) had to be repeatedly explained. People kept telling us they could hear us coming, ’cause the thermal blankets rustled so much – we also had to spend most of the night outside to prevent overheating; those things retain ninety per cent body heat!
There were some really terrific costumes, among the best of which were Gilly’s parents’, Galadriel and Gandalf, and Gilly and Darrell themselves, Lady Godiva and the Grinch.
They made the costumes themselves if you can believe it.
  Nipple repairs.
‘Goons. Hired goons.’
‘Hired goons?’
After the party we stayed a couple of days. Sunday was a beauty, and we went for a walk to G&D’s allotment, and then to the Black Boy for some drinks.
 
 Til being cooperative.

Like something out of an Angus & Julia Stone film clip.
 A bumble bee on a wet-the-bed before the massacre, which left flower blood on our hands for days (had to pull them all out by hand). Out, damned spot!
BAMF.
While we were sitting outside at The Black Boy, two people started looking up at the sky. Til worked out that it was just a parachuter, but a couple more people started looking so I started taking photos and pointing and saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it!’ until there was a line of six or seven people all trying to see what it was.
The Black Boy was the really cool English pub I said I should’ve taken photos of in ‘Winchester II: return to gilly’s’. So have some now as a redress:

There was a game where you had to swing a ring on a chain onto a hook. I was too impatient for it, but Til got it.
 Hours of fun.
‘I’m really into this cup and ball now.’
Once again we balanced out our lazy, movie-watching days with day trips to Oxford and around Wiltshire. We made a special stop to see the shark house on the way into Oxford, which was everything I always dreamed and MORE!
 The house across the road is called ‘Sharkview’.
We had lunch in the White Horse again, and oh my God the food. I’m instituting a rule from now on that if something on a menu says ‘Chicken, mushroom and white wine sauce’ I MUST eat it. Also the cheesecake was the best I’ve ever had. I have this theory that the measure of a dairy product is how much it can be compared with another kind of dairy product. ‘This milk is so good it’s like cream!’ ‘This butter is so good it’s like cheese!’ ‘This cream is so good it’s like yoghurt!’ and so on. This cheesecake was so good it was like icecream.
My favourite place of the day was the shop that Elisa and Gilly found when they visited previously. It was like heaven. What is it about that certain kind of product, that stationeryish, leather-bound, handmade, old-timey kind of crap that appeals so much to us writers!? I never wanted to leave!

 
Our other daytrip, through Wiltshire, organised by amazing trip planner Gilly, took us to Stonehenge, Lacock, Salisbury and the New Forest. Stonehenge was Stonehenge. Pretty damn cool for a bunch of rocks in a field.

‘Oh, we can’t touch it, dad! It’s behind a velvet rope!’

‘The veeelvet roooope.’
Lacock is an entire village owned by the National Trust which hasn’t had any new buildings in two hundred years, so it’s constantly being used for TV shows and movies – it was Meryton in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and the abbey was used for parts of Hogwarts.
 Gilly reenacts Lydia’s admiration of a fabric in P&P.
The whole town was obsessed with the word ‘quintessential’. Every book I picked up in the giftshop used it – ‘Jane Austen, the quintessential English writer’, ‘Tea, the quintessential English tradition’ – and there was even a shop in an old house called ‘Quintessentially’:
Looking through Quintessentially’s secondhand book collection was pretty amusing – it featured Anne, The Princess Royal – A Princess for Our Times (1973), and Our Princesses and their Dogs (1937).
 In the abbey.

After Lacock the camera ran out of batteries and we sang our way in the car from Alanis Morissette to The Eagles in Gilly’s iPod until we got to Salisbury, only to find that the award-winning fish ’n chip shop we’d come for had closed down. But we found another, and also FINALLY some nice crusty fresh bread, of which I bought two loaves.
From Salisbury it was Enya to Howie Day and we were in the New Forest, so called because William the Conqueror declared it his new hunting ground in 1079, where horses, ponies, cows, pigs and donkeys roam free. We drove around and went to a pub before heading back, by which time we’d come back to Miss Morissette, presumably much to Tilly’s dismay.
The next morning we were off, after probably my favourite Winchester visit yet! Fear, all you travellers, the wrathful, grinchy revenge of Darrell!
Cheers,
Luke

Posted by  |  May 13, 2011 | Categories: Cultural differences, The UK | 2 Comments