Wednesday 12 December 2007

Curtain Call

Tomorrow I'll board a big metal pill with wings set to take me back across the Atlantic and away from the convoluted mass of buildings, roads and parks known as London. After spending three months here, I think its important to look back and take stock of what I gained here.

Its hard to believe the time has passed so quickly. But that's one of the easiest things to notice about London: your everyday shuffle becomes a bustling hurry to cross the street before the little green walking man turns red, it becomes a sprint to catch the tube train that is ready to pull out of the station, it becomes a rapid zigzag down a busy street just to walk home.

It takes a lot of energy to live here. Go to school, head home, and you're tired and ready to lie down for awhile. Its nice to spend some time reading a free London Lite or London Paper before summoning up the energy to cook dinner.

So managing energy and time are pretty important skills to develop here. It might sound like an opening speech at orientation by a college dean, but you need to know how to budget when it takes 40 minutes to get to school or 10 minutes to wait in line at the grocery store.

Yet those are skills I could have learned in any busy U.S. city. New York city would have been just as busy, and a lot less expensive. So I have to ask what I've gained specifically from being here in Britain.

The first answer is obvious. Being on another continent and seeing buildings older than European settlement in America gives you a great sense of human civilization. You can read all the history you want in a book, but until you've been at the site where Romans built a wall it just isn't the same. The understanding might be there, but it isn't as real. It gives a better sense of the human struggle -- where we've been and where we're going.

Other answers are obvious too. I've learned to fend for myself in a city, I've learned to find housing, I've managed my money in an environment so fiscally stressful you need to pinch blood from a penny. But I fully expected to become more self-sufficient in coming here.

I've visited lots of illustrious places and formatted memories that will last a long time. But memories only amount to seasoning, like the marinade on a piece of pork, unless you can draw some lesson from them. Then they might act as some sort of substance.

I won't pretend to have sorted all of my experiences into some lesson right now. To do so would be impossible, and to try would be foolish. But I do think there are two important points I've learned while in Europe.

The first is external. I understand how the world works and interacts far better now. It goes back to understanding history and from where the human race comes. Yet it goes further than that. I can better understand the way different countries and people interact. More importantly, I now understand that I'll never fully understand the way different countries and people interact.

The second is internal. I have a theory that if you uproot your life and place yourself in a new environment, you see your own personality, skills and essence in a way you never can in familiar surroundings. When you're at home or somewhere comfortable, its so easy to blend into a routine or the factors around you and lose sight of what makes your person and what are outside factors that influence it. Moving into an alien environment leaves one thing: you, perfect for introspection.

That theory has been reinforced by my time here. So what have I learned about myself?

For starters, I'm a lot more competent with a map than I would have guessed. As for something with a little more meaning ... well ... that might take some sorting.

Tuesday 11 December 2007

Paris

You can hit all the major tourist destinations in Paris in one day. Major, meaning The Louvre (housing the Mona Lisa), Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. You can hit them all, but you really shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much choice. When your schedule dictates little more than eleven hours in Paris, you have to make the most out of it. Fortunately, I was armed with my trustee translator/girlfriend Deb, who has been to Paris and actually knew her way around the city relatively well.

The day started at 4:00 in the morning. That’s right, while folks at home were bedding down at 11 at night, I was rising and showering in preparation for the first tube train of the day to carry me to the newly remodeled St. Pancras International train station.

The early hours aside, it great to have an international train station on an Island. It is even better when that station is a remodeled one that opened less than a month ago. The place is gorgeous. Its waiting area has leather seats and wood floors while glass doors keep the cold air of the boarding area out. The trains sit at a level above the rest of the station, and you go up tilted moving walkways to get to them. Its really nice for suitcases.

The high speed trains leaving St. Pancras aren’t quite as new. Eurostar has been around for awhile, and its seats look like they were build tin the 1980’s. Still, the rail is new, and it can carry a train moving up to 186 miles per hour. I doubt we made that speed because it was raining on our trip, but we went from London to Paris by train in just two hours and 15 minutes.

I missed most of the journey though. That 4 a.m. waking time put me to sleep on the train, and I fell asleep just outside London and woke up outside of Paris. I missed going through the chunnel!

An itinerary of our day in Paris looks like a weekend trip. We started by going to Sacré Cœur, Sacred Heart Basilica, which sits up on a hill and overlooks Paris with a great view. It is also some pretty nice architecture itself. We saw Place de Vendôme, a large green pillar that disrupts traffic in an expensive shopping district. The Opera House was around there, too. We also saw The Louvre and the Mona Lisa, Notre Dame and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.

Because we walked to all of those places, I got to see plenty of Paris. The city seems to have been purposefully built to not allow you to walk on one street for more than one block, since there are very few roads that stretch that far. Sidewalks are also a luxury that gets little space. But it definitely has its own flavor. My personal impression is that Paris as a whole doesn’t want to leave the glory days of the 1920s, and its plethora of neon signs and style of artwork. And that suits the city just fine.

Because we were walking, we stumbled upon Mary Magdalene Church, which looks like a Roman temple from the outside. It is definitely a Catholic church inside, though. It might be my favorite church I’ve visited this trip because of the fascinating architectural dichotomy.

I’ll skip to the big three things we did to spare you more tales of tiny city streets and tourists taking pictures. The first of those things is the Louvre and the Mona Lisa.

The Louvre is enormous. It’s an old palace turned into an art museum, and walking through it takes awhile. Eventually, though we found the Mona Lisa, which had the obligatory gaggle of tourists surrounding it. Personally, I was surprised by how big it was. Everyone always talks about how they are surprised at how small it is, and this had be geared up to see a painting the size of a postage stamp. It isn’t. It’s significantly larger than most television screens.

After taking in a few other pieces of art at the Louvre, we sadly had to leave and head over to Notre Dame. We got to snap pictures inside, which is a nice departure from England, where I am used to a bunch of figures in red cloaks running after you anytime you even think about a camera. All of Paris was very accepting of pictures, which was wonderful. The real nice thing about Notre Dame is the back, though. Flying buttresses surround the curved end of the church, making for a very nice effect.

From there we headed over to the Eiffel Tower. By this time it was very dark, rainy, and cold. Sadly it had rained on and off all day, and my socks were soaked. We were very wet and shivering by the time we reached the tower.

We took elevators to the top, where it was even colder and extremely windy. The great view was worth, it though. I’m glad we did the tower last, because I could pick out the different places we visited during the day.

After coming back down from the tower, we had to hurry to Gare du Nord (the train station) to catch our train. This necessitated taking the Metro, which was not an easy task. The station just next to the Eiffel Tower was closed, so we had to walk a good way to find another station that was open. Once there, Deb allowed her linguistic skills to take over and found out the best way to go from the attendant. I have to hand it to her: afterward she was disappointed because her grammar was wrong. Considering they had a lengthy discussion, I think she did rather well.

She also did a good job navigating the city. Normally, she has the sense of direction of a depolarized compass and I won’t let her near a map. But I could tell she wanted to be the one to navigate Paris, since she’d been there before, and let her take the lead. I don’t know whether she knew the city, but she certainly exceeded expectations.

I managed to stay awake the entire way back, although I was exhausted. The chunnel didn’t seem like much since It was already dark outside. We were riding along in the dark, then were riding along in the dark tunnel, then were riding along in the dark again.

If you’re exhausted from reading this, and you should be, imagine how tired I was after living it. It’s a shame we didn’t have two or three days to do it all.

Sunday 9 December 2007

Last Weekend in London

This was my last weekend in London. My last chance to dodge weekend Tube works. My last chance to be crushed by the gaggle of Oxford Street shoppers on Saturday afternoon. My last chance to watch The X Factor on Saturday evening.

Needless to say, some of these "lasts" are more heartbreaking than others. What it really turned out to be was a weekend of catching up on things I've meant to do for three months but never got around to doing.

Friday Deb and I headed over to the Christmas village in Hyde Park. There was a big ferris wheel and, an ice skating rink, kid's rides, a Christmas-themed haunted house, and numerous little holiday shops. When riding the wheel, we could see the London Eye and Big Ben, meaning we were looking wheel-to-wheel.

Saturday I headed over to Paddington Station to see the place where the famous bear was supposedly dropped off. Then, the afternoon slipped away into two museums: The Science Museum, which I'd never before visited, and the Natural History Museum, which was just worth stopping by to see some things that had been overlooked last time. I won't bore you with too many specific exhibits, but I saw a partially built model of the world's oldest design for a computer (adding machine). It's enormous, and its being built for an American Museum in the Science Museum here in London.

Today Deb and I checked out the changing of the guard at Buckingham palace. Pre-ceremony rain almost washed out our chances of seeing anything, but it stopped and we got to crane our necks over a crowd to see two guards march out and take the place of two other guards after witnessing a group of guards march in. They weren't even wearing red because their winter coats were gray. It was a little lackluster in comparison to the changing of the guard in Stockholm.

On the way home we walked by speaker's corner for the last time. The Christian speaker was explaining why Muslims are wrong to riot over the naming of a teddy bear. Across from him, the Muslim speaker was explaining why the Christian speaker was wrong. I'll certainly miss walking through the park on Sunday afternoons.

Sorry I kept this short and choppy, but tomorrow we take the Eurostar to Paris for the first and last time. The train leaves at 6:30 AM, so I need time for sleep.

Thursday 6 December 2007

Reuters

If you're tired of reading about weekends, lean a little closer, because this is a quick update about a Monday. Two hours on a Monday, actually, when my International Communications class went to Reuters.

Yes, the news agency Reuters. The one that supplies half the pictures you see on every TV news and the text stories you read on Yahoo! (And only on Yahoo! since practically every other print company uses AP.) They have a building here in London, and one of their larger newsrooms is in it.

The building is at the currently chic Canary Wharf, which means there is no easy way to get there from Faraday House. I settled for taking the Central Line (Tube) to the DLR (Docklands Light Railway). It was my first time taking the DLR, which runs mostly above ground and cuts through some less-than-photogenic sections of East London before it stops at a shopping mall in Canary Wharf.

Apparently the mall is quite upscale. I didn't notice, though, because I spent too much time wondering how to get out of it. It was as if the designers didn't want you to stop shopping!

Eventually I found my way out to the large "courtyard" of the wharf, where a large slab of prettied-up concrete is surrounded by the lightly lapping waters of the Thames, several buildings, and a very new Tube stop -- which was unfortunately the Jubilee line and thus all but worthless for travel from Faraday House.

Figuring out which building is the Reuters building isn't hard. It's the one with a scrolling electronic news ticker ala New York City. Getting inside the building, though, is almost as hard as getting out of the mall where the DLR stops.

But I managed, after peering in the window of several restaurants on the basement floor before walking up concrete steps and entering the first floor. Darn those buildings built on hills! Once inside, the lobby is quite impressive. A nice large screen flashes news and is augmented by all sorts of wood paneling and chrome. Each member of our class got some fancy plastic credit-card style name tags which looked like they would be nice souvenirs. Sadly, we didn't end up getting to keep them.

The tour of the newsroom was pretty standard. I won't bore you with the details. They aren't nearly as interesting as the details of getting to Canary Wharf or actually getting in to the building.

Sunday 2 December 2007

It's beginning to look a lot like its time to go home

With only two weeks left in London, its time to start doing all of the activities that have been overlooked so far. All of the museums have to be seen, the sights have to be visited and the foods have to be tried.

Thursday, November 29

Museums are a good start, since they are free. After I finished class on Thursday the British Museum beckoned. Now, the British Museum is unique in that it doesn’t contain any British artifacts, or even many European artifacts. Instead, it is a collection of treasures the United Kingdom picked up during its imperial days. You can see everything from Roman temples to Persian pottery to Egyptian mummies.

The highlight is the Rosetta Stone, though. The famous piece of carved slab that allowed researchers to decode ancient Egyptian sits in the middle of the Egypt exhibit, surrounded by glass and fawning tourists. It’s surprisingly big.

Friday, November 30

Another day, another free entry, this time to the National Gallery. I don’t pretend to know a lot about art, but Deb fancies impressionism, so we spent a good two or three hours strolling through the winding halls of the National gallery. There were some works by Picasso and other famous painters, and some of the art stretched back to the 1250s.

We started with the recent impressionists, though, and essentially went back in time. The farther back we went, the more repetitive the subjects of the paintings got. By the time we hit 1250, the only art they had was from churches. I know artists didn’t paint much else in those days, but if I saw more shepherds offering gifts to baby Jesus I was going to scream.

The National Gallery is in Trafalgar Square, and we hopped across the street to St. Martin in the Fields’ “Café in the Crypt” where we had afternoon tea. We hadn’t had a proper afternoon tea, and this one was a bargain by London Standards. Some hotels charge up to £16 for high tea, but ours cost a paltry £5 each. Each tea plate wasn’t skimpy by any standards, including two cups of tea, a piece of multilayer chocolate cake, a piece of cherry sponge cake, a scone, jam and clotted cream (thick whipped cream). It was delicious, not to mention very filling.

On the way home we ducked into Hamleys to take in the five story toy store during the Christmas season. It was everything you could expect, with parents running around looking for lost children and clerks demonstrating toys wherever you looked. I think I could live in Hamleys.

Saturday, December 1

I’ve lived on Edgware road, which is heavily populated by Lebanese, for three months now, and until Saturday I had not tried any Lebanese food. Obviously, there was a lot of choice in restaurants when I finally decided it was time.

Three of us went to Maroush, a sit-down resteraunt about two doors down from the entrance to our flat. They were pretty cheap, for a sit down restaurant, and had an expansive menu with clear English subtitles.

The food was splendid; I had falafel along with rice with lamb. Now, I’ve eaten falafel in the dining hall at Syracuse, and it was not a pleasant experience. Apparently fresh ingredients and a chef who knows what he’s doing make a world of difference.

After a very filling meal, it was time to waddle down to Oxford Street. To promote Christmas shopping, the city had kindly closed Regent and Oxford streets to traffic. I just wanted to go in order to walk on the streets that are typically populated by large buses and aggressive taxis, but it was also useful in that Deb and I stopped in some of the stores that we pass every day walking to and from school but have still never visited.

I won’t detail every stop, but Selfridge’s was definitely the most interesting. Never mind the “wonder room,” containing watches and wine worth thousands of pounds. No, the best part of the store was the foodhall. We found out, three months too late, that they stock a good deal of American food, if you’re willing to pay for it. JIFF peanut butter? £2.50. Oreos? £4.00. Aunt Jemima pancake syrup? £6.50.

The fact that it was probably the most expensive bottle of Aunt Jemima I’ll every see, it was fun to see those American brands again. Maybe I’ll go back before flying home in order to brush up on US food.

Street entertainers littered the road, providing us with lots of fun while walking. Dancing Santas, a balloon comic, Dora the Explorer and Paddington Bear were all there. They had plenty of an audience, because I’ve never seen a street with that many people walking down it. It was elbow to elbow the entire way across.

We also stopped in at the flagship Apple store on Regent street because it started raining on our parade. I checked my e-mail on an iPhone and examined the new iPod Nano and iPod Touch. I hadn’t realized that the iPod Touch has WiFi, but now I can see that it would be quite handy.

On the way home, it was “snowing” outside of Debenham’s. The snow was actually little bubbles, but it was, nonetheless, a nice Christmasy touch.

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Thanksgiving Weekend

I managed to squeeze a little turkey and football into Thanksgiving weekend. As you might guess, neither was the variety you think of in the United States, but when surrounded by foreigners you have to make do with what you have.

First things first: I could not secure any cranberry sauce. None of the grocery stores here seemed to stock it, leaving my Thanksgiving dinner devoid of color. Deb and I had to make do with turkey breast steaks, potatoes and a chicken gravy mix.

Whole birds actually did replace ice cream in the freezers of Somerfield the week before the big turkey roast, but I doubt our little oven would have done well with a whole fowl. Therefore we stuck to our dutiful little portions of white meat, which certainly didn’t give enough fat to fill even a miniature gravy boat. Thus, it was on to store-bought gravy, which was not pre-made. Just like tea, you just had to add boiling water. There was also no turkey gravy, so the chicken variety had to stand in as a substitute. At least we didn’t have to turn to duck gravy.

As far as potatoes went … well, they’re still going. The big bag was on sale at Somerfield this week, and spuddenly we only have eyes for tatties – 1.8 kilos of them. Since we had no shortage, I made myself a thanksgiving dinner baked potato while Deb insisted on mashed.

Mashing the potatoes was a bit of an unorthodox event, since we don’t have a mixer, blender or potato masher. We ended up boiling the spuds until they had practically mashed themselves before chopping them with large spoons. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but actually netted some very tasty mashed potatoes. I’ve had lumpier that were made with a blender.

With the big day out of the way, we went to Windsor Castle on Friday. The castle is the favorite residence of the Royal family, though the queen wasn’t there when we visited. As you can imagine, the real estate was rather exclusive, so we didn’t do much Black Friday shopping there.

Unsurprisingly it’s a rather large castle, and once you’re inside it doesn’t really look like a castle at all. If you could breed a castle and a palace, you’d get Windsor Castle. Well, you might want to throw in a cathedral as a grandfather, because the grounds contained quite the impressive chapel, which was done in the parallel English gothic style. In other words, it had a wide, flat ceiling that looked like it should have fallen in because nothing appeared to be supporting the heavy stone roof. Quite impressive.

In Windsor we also walked to the adjacent Eaton, which is home to a quite prestigious private school. Prince Harry and Prince William went there, so you know it is pretty swishy. Having said that, it really isn’t much to visit. The Swans in the River Thames, which you have to cross to get to Eaton from Windsor, were much more interesting. Apparently the Queen owns them.

Saturday was the football part of the weekend. Sadly I’m not talking about big men in tights and helmets running into each other. I’m talking about skinny men in shorts kicking a ball up and down a field. Whether you call it America’s name of soccer or the rest of the world’s name of football, the sport is incredibly popular here. We went to a Queens Park Rangers, or QPR game. They played Sheffield Wednesday at home, and the stadium is only about a 50 minute walk from Edgware Road.

Now, don’t ask me to explain the entire history of QPR as it was described to me. In their sordid past, they used to be in the aptly named premier league, but seemed to have forgotten some skills and dropped down into the next-most prestigious league. Apparently soccer clubs here can be dropped down or called up to different leagues much like players in Major League Baseball. I don’t really understand it. I also don’t understand why Sheffield had a day of the week in their name.

The game was lots of fun, even though it was a 0-0 tie. I don’t know how many shots hit the bar of the goal, and there seemed to be a lot of action, for a soccer game. Honestly, the sport is a bit mind-numbing, even compared to baseball, but fans do enough to keep themselves entertained. They chant, sing and generally have a good time. Oddly enough, the Sheffield fans were out singing the QPR fans by a lot despite the fact that they only had one end of the stands to fill. They made up for their lack of numbers with volume, though.

As we were leaving, I was put off to find out that the stadium held over 15,000 people, and it was nearly full. That’s for a minor league game. The place did not look that big.

Sunday we went on a charity fun run, which was followed by a Thanksgiving dinner at the volunteer coordinator’s house. The fun run was, well, fun, and I even managed to come in first out of the runners. That says something about the competition, and the fact that we had to keep stopping so someone could point out the correct route. But, it was fun, not a competition.

The dinner was marvelous. Mashed potatoes, turkey, pumpkin pie, it was all there in copious amounts. It was a proper turkey, too. Roast as an entire bird, not as a silly portion of breast meat. I also tried a parsnip, which is apparently traditional Christmas fare in England. It honestly didn’t taste like much except a slightly sweet piece of baked wood. Not unpleasant, but nothing to write in your blog about, other than to brag that you at a parsnip.

And that about wraps it up. I’ll still be on the lookout for cranberry sauce in the coming weeks, but I don’t hold out much hope. I’ll just have to wait for Christmas to have a proper feast.

Tuesday 20 November 2007

Oxford

There was plenty to do last weekend. In less than three days I went to a musical, visited Oxford, played paintball and dropped by the Natural History Museum. Some of these activities were nothing but fun, while others didn’t exactly go as planned.

Lets start with the first activity; one that didn’t go as planned but was still plenty of fun. As you probably know, one of my aspirations for my last month here was to see Patrick Stewart starring in Macbeth. I’d stopped by the box office and checked the internet for tickets several times.

Unfortunately, the box office is completely sold out. Buying online would currently require me to sell my kidney as financial backing, so the idea of seeing Macbeth has become nothing but a ghost. But Deb and I couldn’t leave London without going to the theatre, so we moved on to plan B.

In retrospect, plan B seems like a bit of a cultural step away from Macbeth. Not because it is any less British, but because it is an entirely different slice of culture. We went to see Monty Python’s Spamalot, which is based on the ever-popular Holy Grail.

The show was great fun. It contained the perfect mix of scenes completely stolen from the movie and new material so that it covered all the high points, such as migrating coconuts but was still fresh and worth seeing.

Friday we boarded a minibus outside Faraday House and rode to Oxford. Now, the main point of going to Oxford was essentially to say we’d been there. There was no studying going on and we essentially walked around and looked at a bunch of colleges from the outside. At least, we looked at them as best we could through the white fog that was our breath. It was bitterly cold Friday.

Since it was so cold, it obviously makes sense that we spent hours and hours walking outside. By the time we’d seen about seven colleges whose names I don’t remember, my feet were numb. As I recall, highlights of colleges included the one Bill Clinton attended for a time and one where there are no students, only professors who sit around and learn all day long.

Oxford follows the pattern of a British town in that there are old back roads to stomp around, some of which could be taken straight from hundreds of years ago, but if you round the right corner, you are right on a miniature version of Oxford Street. Deb and I had to go to Oxford’s commercial plaza just so we could pop in to KFC (Yes, the American KFC). We went there not because we had forgotten to pack a lunch, but because we needed to sit somewhere warm.

After a tour inside some college that will, unfortunately, remain forever unnamed in my memory, we stopped by a traveling French market that had luckily set up shop in town for the day. Deb and I each bought a pastry to eat, but she showed off by ordering in French. I can tell she’s gearing up for our day in Paris in December.

On the bus ride back we could see the mountains of Wales off in the distance. That’s probably as close as I’ll get to them this trip. No hiking in Wales for me.

Saturday we had signed up to play paintball at the urging of one of the security guards at Faraday, who runs the trip every semester. It was just about the perfect day to play paintball – dark and threatening rain. We were slotted to play ten games on 4 courses, which made for a very long day indeed.

The day got a lot longer in the middle of the sixth game, when our organizer suffered a very scary moment. Somehow, when he was falling, a paintball went under his mask and hit him in the mouth, knocking him out cold. He fell over on his back and swallowed his tongue, cutting off his oxygen supply. If one of the marshals (paintball referees) had not gotten to him and been trained to pull his tongue out of his throat, the scene would not have been pretty. As it stood, he ended up being pretty shaken up and we had to suffer a few scary minutes off the field when we didn’t know what was happening.

Fortunately it wasn’t any worse than that, and we got to go home on the bus with exhaustion as our only ailment.

Sunday was, by necessity, a little less adventurous than the previous several days. Work doesn’t do itself, and the end of the semester is fast approaching. But we did spend a little time in the Natural History museum, which is just a walk through Hyde Park away from our flat. Entry into national museums in Britain is free, and it has been foolish to not visit the several galleries that are situated just south of my humble home.

The museum taught us about bugs, dinosaurs, and the planet earth. On the way home, we even got to help a little French boy who had wandered away from his family and was running around panicked on the street. Rather, I should say that Deb helped the little French boy. I just walked along and tried not to alarm him with my beard.

It rained on the walk home, setting up a theme that the papers say will continue throughout the week. What a dreary time. We don’t get off for Thanksgiving, and the weather won’t even give us a break.

Sunday 11 November 2007

Bathking in glory

The plan was to have a little more to report this week, because I wanted to see Patrick Stewart in MacBeth Saturday night. Unfortunately, waiting to buy tickets until the morning of a show is not a good way to actually see the said show.

Shakespear had to wait, but the week’s other fun didn’t. Friday we hopped on board a coach bus outside Faraday House and took the three hour drive to Bath. That’s the city of Bath, not a cleaning. Fortunately, the showers work in London, so I don’t need to ride for 180 minutes to rinse off.

Bath is one of the more famous cities in England, next to London of course. It was started in Roman times because a geological fault leads to hot water escaping the ground. The Romans, being lovers of public bathing houses, harnessed the steamy goodness of the earth with a complex that included multiple pools and a temple to the Goddess they attributed to providing them with the warm H20.

After several hundred years and the Roman’s withdrawal from England, the public bath houses were basically built over. By the time Royalty was building another bathing house on the site in the 1800s, the city was about 14 feet higher than it had been due to a natural phenomenon where urban areas actually gain altitude because they basically build on their own refuse. Eventually, the old baths were discovered in astoundingly good condition, considering they had been buried for hundreds of years.

They were in such good shape that the baths are still watertight and the water still flows through the Roman’s channel system properly. The sight’s original temple is gone, and the bathing houses no longer have their impressive roofs, but the floors, walls and columns are still largely there.

Walking around something so old is always interesting, but walking around something so old that is still basically in working order is even better. Because there are no roofs to the bathing houses algae grows in the water and makes it green, and you can no longer go into the baths because we understand the hazards of untreated water and lead pipes, but for all intensive purposes Bath could still be bathing. We spent about two hours in the Baths and accompanying museum sucking up all of the information we could from the telephone-like self-guided audio tours.

Once those were exhausted, we walked around the accompanying tourist trap for the remaining two hours of our stay. Marks and Spencer, H&M and all the usual stores were there, trying to snatch our money. For some reason, Deb had a hankering for some hot chocolate, and dragged me into a chocolate café up the beaten path.

I shouldn’t make it sound like it was a mistake to go, although afterwards my stomach certainly screamed that it was. I got toffee hot chocolate, which was just what it sounds like. Deb got “Chocolate Indulgence,” which was basically hot chocolate poured over chocolate ice cream. The ice cream melted and rose to the top, making a drink rich enough that I was glad to be drinking my simple thick hot chocolate with toffee syrup.

Oh, did I mention that my sweet-toothed girlfriend suggested that we get some mousse, too? I had chocolate orange moose, while Deb just had chocolate mousse. Well, she ordered raspberry chocolate mousse, but the clerk made a mistake. On top of all that, each order got a complimentary raspberry crème piece of chocolate.

It took quite some time to make it through all that since it was so rich, so it was then time to get on the bus. I was glad, since I felt a little sick and really did not want to walk much. Our tour guide drove us through some of the nice sights of the city, which has buildings that are all made of limestone that oddly bears a color and texture akin to sandstone.

Outside of the city, at the top of a large hill, we could see far enough to glimpse the mountains that mark the beginning of Wales. I don’t think we’ll be making it to Wales in the next month, but at least we saw it.

On the three hour bus ride home, I started a Soduku in the Daily Metro. It was the first time I’ve ever done any of the puzzles, and I can now say that I hate them. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on two puzzles, in two days now, and I’ve managed to screw them each up beyond repair. It was Deb’s suggestion that I start one, so I blame her for my trouble.

That about raps up the Bath recap. Next week I’ll be able to write about Oxford, and hopefully MacBeth.

Monday 5 November 2007

Dublin




Dublin didn't have many of the picturesque camera moments like Edinburgh. In fact, my camera had a lot of trouble with the poorly lit situations we ran into there.

It also wasn't the cleanest city we've visited. That distinction would go to York, which was devoid of the small pieces of litter lying in Ireland's capital's streets.

We even had worse weather in Dublin than in any other city I've visited on this little European jaunt. Clear skies on Friday and Saturday morning gave way to a rainy Saturday evening and cloudy Sunday.

Yet Dublin still stands as my favorite place from this trip. Even though it wasn't the prettiest and didn't have any single outstanding activity like hiking to the top of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh or listening to the Evensong in York Minster, I would rather go back to Dublin than any other place.

It isn't because the activities we did were all very good, though they were. It isn't because the city was cheap, because it wasn't. It wasn't even because all the Irish people in the United States brainwashed me into wanting to love the Emerald Isle with their own proclamations of its beauty, though I did want very badly to like it.

The fact that I liked Dublin stemmed from the people there. As a whole, they were probably the friendliest I've ever run into. From the man who discussed the combination sink/hand dryer in the bathroom with me for five minutes to the bouncer at a pub who spent more time asking where you were from than your age, the Irish had a more welcoming and interpersonal attitude than I've run across anywhere else in Europe. Not once were we made to feel like stupid, crass Americans. On the contrary, we were usually welcomed with smiles.

Before launching into the details, let's establish the basics of this trip. It is the only trip out of England I've taken with Syracuse London. That meant that in addition to Deb and myself, there were 11 other students, a professor and an administrator traveling with us, whom I knew in varying degrees.

It also meant someone else organized our flight and about 60% of our activities, and that we payed an upfront sum before the trip to cover these expenses. These prepaid activities were, in order: A "walking tour" of the 1916 Irish rebellion for independence, a tour of the Kilmainham Gaol prison museum, a trip to nearby Sandy Cove and the James Joyce tower/museum and a "musical pub crawl." It also paid for and organized the 45-minute train to and from Stansted Airport in London, the 20 minute cab rides between Dublin airport and the city and various other required light rail and bus transit.

So we didn't have the headache of getting to and from the airport and paying for various fares. It also defrayed the expenses of traveling slightly, since we prepaid for so many activities. Finally, it made us do a few things we probably wouldn't have done without the school's urging. Those were the trip to Sandy Cove and probably the musical pub crawl.

Although we flew in Thursday night, neither Deb nor myself did much after we arrived in Dublin because we were so tired. I don't know what it is about flying, but it just sucks the energy out of me.

Friday

Going to bed early was okay, because we needed the energy for Friday. After the hostel's complimentary breakfast of toast and tea, we set off on the 1916 Rebellion walking tour, which took us to a few famous places and told us the story of the rebellion against British rule. I won't pretend to have learned everything the guide told us, because it was very easy to simply drift off and take in some of the city's sights. However, I can tell you that it basically started out with some dissidents who decided to break British rule, took over the city for a few days, and then was crushed by a brutal British general. The rebellion itself didn't establish Ireland's independence, but it did galvanize public opinion against British rule, according to our guide.

In addition to providing historic background, the tour gave me a good look around the city. Like I said before, it isn't the most stunning of places visually, but it does have a few standout places. Anywhere along the River Liffey is pretty, and the Dublin Spire, which was originally to be named the Millennium Spire until its completion in 2003, were particularly interesting points.

This brings me to an interesting point. The hundreds of years of British rule meant that Dublin looked a lot like a British city. Cars drove on the left side of the road and the architecture was largely a lump of different styles. Even though it didn't have a particularly Gaelic style, Dublin still had some touches of its own culture. Although the mailboxes were the same design as those in London, they were painted green instead of red. All the street signs had English on them, but it was below Gaelic. Even though everyone speaks English in their daily lives, Gaelic is compulsory in Irish schools, and it might even be the official national language, if memory serves.

Next we took buses to the Kilmainham Gaol Prison museum, where a lot of Irish political prisoners and general criminals alike had been held. It was originally designed to hold each prisoner in his own cell, but was almost always overcrowded. We got a tour through the prison and walked through the museum, where I browsed through more history from the 1916 rebellion.

Those two activities took us from 9 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, so we didn't have much more time that day. Our buses back from the prison passed right by the door of the Guinness Storehouse, which is Dublin's famous beer's tourist trap, ala Heineken Experience. The seven floor tour was a little more technical than its Dutch counterpart. It told us all about the actual brewing, rather than just the marketing, end. They also had malted Guinness barley for us to sample, and it tasted quite a bit like the final Guinness product, only a chocolate version.

For dinner we went to a resteraunt serving a lot of Irish food. I actually didn't have any Corned Beef and Cabbage on the trip, but I did manage to order a seafood cream soup, which came with soda bread and seemed to be a pretty traditional Irish meal. I should have a full review of it on the food blog soon, but let's say for now that it was jam-packed with delicious fish.

Saturday

Saturday morning we headed to the James Joyce Museum in Sandy Cove, which is about a 20 minute by Dublin's light rail, or DART system. I didn't care for the only Joyce I've ever read, so the museum itself wasn't much of a highlight. However, it was in a tower which had a magnificent view of the Irish coast. I really regret not having a chance to go through the Irish mainland and travel down the coast to see the beautiful non-urban sites of the country, but this gave a little taste of it. The rocky coastline was breathtaking.


There was also a nearby area with some swimmers jumping into what must have been a cold ocean. I was a little cold in my pea coat, but apparently there is a club that takes a swim every day of the year. Better them than me.

We had the afternoon to ourselves, and Deb and I essentially spent it digging through shops in Dublin. When it started to rain we resisted the temptation to take the DART farther out to see more of the coastline and confined ourselves to shopping. I got a nice "Ireland" hoodie sweatshirt to substitute for the camouflage one that I currently wear in half of my pictures from Europe.

We also went to the old Jamison Distillery to round out our tours of famous Irish exports. It filled in some of the parts of fermentation that the Guinness tour glazed over, so the two complimented each other well.

Saturday night we went on the "musical pub crawl," which consisted of a large group of people who had purchased tickets following two musicians to two separate pubs to listen to their music. They opened up a special floor on the pubs for us, and played and talked about their music. I know Deb and I wouldn't have done this on our own, and it was a great part of our experience in Dublin. I very much like Irish music, and just like listening to bagpipers in Edinburgh helped make that trip, listening to a man on a fiddle and a man on a guitar sit down and have some fun made this trip.

Afterward, we asked the performers where else we could hear live music, and they pointed us to another pub. After a slight detour, we arrived to find mostly gray-headed people listening to a group of five performers who were sitting around a table in the corner of the pub. Deb and I weren't put off by the age of those around us, we were too happy to listen to the three fiddles and two flutes playing away.

Sunday

Sunday we tried to go to mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The only problem with that plan was that St. Patrick's Cathedral is apparently now a protestant church. We still got to go in to see the service, but it just didn't feel right going to a protestant service in Ireland.



We also walked around the Dublin Castle grounds, which were quite nice. We were particularly fond of a cat that was hanging around the garden and soliciting scratches behind the ears from succeptible tourists.

And after that breathless tour, it was time to fly back. I beat Deb twice in Scrabble on the plane and train back to London, but that is the last of the highlights. It's too bad we only had a weekend. It left me wondering whether we should have spent our entire mid-semester break in Ireland.

Sunday 28 October 2007

Mid-Semester Break!

After “middling” through mid-terms, it was finally time for the much-anticipated mid-semester break.

Our itinerary read like this:

1) Depart Friday October 19 from London King’s Cross train station for York at 8:30 in the morning. Arrive around 10:30 AM.

2) After spending the day in York, depart from the city’s train station at 7:30 PM for Edinburgh. Arrive around 10 PM.

3) Spend a day and a half in Edinburgh. (Saturday October 20 and part of Sunday October 21) Depart by train for Newcastle at 11:50 AM.

4) In Newcastle, board a ferry to Amsterdam. The ferry departed at 5:30 PM and arrived at approximately 9 AM the next day.

5) Spend nearly three days in Amsterdam. (October 22-October 24) Get back on the ferry bound for Newcastle at 5:30 PM and arrive at 9:30 AM the next day.

6) Spend roughly three hours in Newcastle before getting on a train back to King’s Cross at 2:05. Arrive back in London at 5:30.

In stark contrast to most of our Syracuse University London peers, we spent several days in Great Britain. We weren’t quite sure what other opportunity we would have to visit northern British cities, and since we were living in England, it seemed foolish to spend most of our travel budget on international flights.

You’ll also notice that we didn’t fly at all. Four trains and two ferry rides let us skip the lost time of waiting in line to be checked by airport security or riding on hour-long shuttles just to get to the airport. All of the train stations we visited were right in the middle of the cities, within easy walking distance of the important sights.

But enough introduction. On to the actual trip.

Day 1: York

10/19/07

I’m actually writing the sections on York and Edinburg on the train from Edinburgh to Newcastle at about 12:45 PM on Sunday, October 21 with the Scottish lowlands swooping by out the window. There certainly is no dearth of cows or sheep roaming sloping fields here, and those grey Scottish skies you always hear about are real. But, on to recalling York.

I must have been excited about the trip, because I didn’t have much trouble getting out of bed at 6 in the morning. Pretty impressive, given that I had been up until 1 the night before after a foolish decision to start laundry at 11 PM so I wouldn’t have to deal with it on returning from the break.

Regardless, our train left Kings Cross (of Harry Potter fame) at 8:30, and I had to leave plenty of time to get ready and catch the tube to the station since I had no intention of missing the train.

That train made me understand why I’ve heard people rave about European railroads. We used an electric engine the whole way to York, and the ride was the smoothest I’ve ever felt. We also traveled staggeringly fast. I didn’t pack my radar gun, so I can’t give you an exact number, but we would have made an Amtrak train look like a little old white-haired lady doing 45 on I-81.

The other interesting thing about the train was that it had most of its seats facing each other across tables. There were still some traditional seats facing the backs of other seats, but most of the chairs had access to a nice table on which to eat, play a game, read or write. If I had brought my laptop and was willing to pay for it, I could even use the train’s wireless internet.

The “Fred Seltzer” section of the trip didn’t end when we pulled into York station. I had forgotten it until we disembarked, but the city is home to the United Kingdom’s National Railway Museum. It was the first place we went. I can’t really tell you how many trains and exhibits there were, but let’s just say it calls itself the largest railway museum in the world for a reason. It was a real blast walking through the various displays, luxury cars and locomotives housed in the numerous buildings and roundhouse.

Popular themes in British railroading seem to be the royalty’s use of the rail, and the introduction of vacuum-operated brakes on all cars. Since the royal family used personal rail cars for travel for over 150 years there were more posh examples of the former than I can remember. The latter insures that a car’s brakes engage if it’s to the locomotive is severed, insuring cars don’t roll back down hills while increasing the overall stopping power of the train.

The museum, like all good national museums in Britain, was free, so we stayed a while. Still, after about two hours I was starting to have flashbacks of the countless hours spent looking at trains from my youth, so it was time to go. I did leave with a pang of guilt that certain enthusiasts at home didn’t get to see all of the trains on display, though.

Aside from the fascinating railway museum, the really interesting thing about York is that its downtown is surrounded by sections of stone walls that date back to the medieval period. You can still walk around the city on top of those walls, which is a great way to check out the city.

But Deb and I had to grab a bite to eat after the railroad museum. Finding ourselves within the walls already, we put off backtracking to walk on them and made for York Minster, Britain’s oldest gothic cathedral. As Let’s Go Europe tells me, the Minster contains roughly half the surviving stained glass surviving from the medieval period in Britain.

York Minster is just massive, towering over the northern part of the city. It is also quite pretty from the outside. While you can’t call its stone ornamentation simple, I preferred it to the gaudy excess of ornamentation adorning Westminster Abbey.

We didn’t go into the cathedral right away because it would have cost money, and we knew we could get free access later in the evening by attending the evensong service. When we did enter, the inside was just as nice as the outside. All that aged stained glass was very impressive. Since it was so old, each different color needed its own individual pane of glass, making it much more intricate than newer windows.

The roof was whitewashed, but that didn’t take away from what was a massive enclosed space. It’s tough to describe so I’ll simply lament the fact that I couldn’t take pictures of the enormous interior. It’s safe to say that even if I could, those pictures would not have done it justice.

The Evensong service itself was a real treat. The Minster’s boy’s, girl’s and men’s choirs sang at a service dedicated to those who gave a lot of money to the Minster. The choir’s voices were superb, and they sang some complex numbers with difficult changes in tempo and pitch. The girls (and maybe the boys) sounded like full-grown women, and their voices combined to fill the humongous Minster without blowing you out of your seat.

The crowd at the Minster for this service is worth writing a bit about, if for no other reason than because I am accurate in calling it a crowd. The middle of the church was reserved for the regular paying patrons, and it was full – on a Friday night. Even the seats along the edges, which were opened to us common folk, were mostly taken. I don’t know if the particular occasion was special or whether every Evensong on Friday is so popular, but I was amazed.

They were also notable because of their age and dress. The median age had to be 75 – it was like 5:15 mass at St. Pat’s, only with fewer 25-45 year-olds. I saw all of one child. Perhaps as a consequence of their ages, they were all very well dressed. I was pretty trashy in my jeans and polo shirt, though no one made me feel conspicuous.

We did do a few things between first walking by the church and going to the Evensong four hours later. First we walked down a touristy brick lane and through a “European Food Festival.” Then we stumbled onto some Native American performers.

Now, I’m on an extended trip to London from America. From London, I’ve taken two trips where I’ve stayed overnight: This mid-semester break and the trip to Stockholm. In all of these extended trips, London, mid-semester break and Stockholm, I’ve seen Native American performers in the street. It is the strangest thing, and I have no idea what to make of it.

After shaking our heads about the Native Americans in Europe, Deb and I headed to Clifford’s Tower. Built sometime in the early 00’s – and I mean 1,000’s, not 2,000’s. It fits the castle model we saw in Cambridge, where they threw a lot of dirt and debris in one spot to make a big hill on which they could build a tower for defensive purposes. Unlike Cambridge, the tower in York is still standing. It is also a lot bigger than the tower in Cambridge would have been.

It was, shockingly, a place of historical bloodshed. At one particular flare of anti-Semitism, all of York’s Jews had to take refuge in Clifford’s Tower. Trapped inside, they had the choice of being killed by the angry crowd or starving to death. They took the third option, and committed suicide. Grim.

Now, you can climb to the top of the tower and get a good view of the city. I was wishing my camera had a panoramic function while I walked around the top. The Minster, medieval wall, Ferris wheel at the train museum, and Nestlé’s Headquarters (Yes, the candy company), which is apparently in York, were all visible.

After that, we walked around the medieval wall for a bit before heading to Evensong and back to the train station. At the station, I tried to throw away the remains of our fish & chips dinner, to find no trash cans in the entire station! No wonder its bathrooms were filled with rubbish. I know security is a concern, but having a total of zero trash cans in a train station is ridiculous.

Our train to Edinburgh was a Virgin train, the only Virgin train we had on the whole trip. All of the others were GNER. Unfortunately, this train seemed to have its seats lifted directly from Virgin’s trans-Atlantic flights, only without the nifty television screens in the back of each seat. Supplementing train seats with airline seats is not a good thing, and I was having flashbacks of my leg cramps on the flight to Heathrow.

It also arrived 45 minutes late to Edinburgh station. But it had been a big day on little sleep, and I didn’t mind a little extra time to snooze on the train.


Days 2 & 3: Edinburgh

10/20/07 – 10/21/07


If Stockholm is the prettiest city I’ve ever seen, Edinburgh is the most majestic. Built around a combination of volcanic and glacial rock formations, there are staggering structures perched upon sharp hills and crops of rock.

Adding to the charm is the fact that many buildings are very old, since Edinburgh didn’t receive the decimating bombings of the World Wars like London. Either due to the region’s particular weathering or because of the type of rock used in the buildings, the stone has mostly turned black, giving the city a very draconian feel.

The most obvious example of this black stone is Edinburg Castle, and I got a great look at it as we were about to fall in the door of our hostel on Friday night at 11:30. Perched above the whole city on a thrusting piece of rock, illuminated by an eerie white light, sat the incomparable structure. It’s just breathtaking.

It also looked just as good against the clear blue sky of the next morning. As we walked down the main street, or “Royal Mile” of Edinburgh’s old town, it became obvious that the castle is accompanied by many similar black and majestic structures.

We walked east to pick up a path which we could hike to the top of a large volcanic rock formation, Arthur’s Seat, so we could get a good view of the city. Along the way, we ran into a few things.

First there was a bagpiper wearing a kilt on the Royal Mile. There were actually bagpipers playing away and adding to the atmosphere almost everywhere we went in Edinburgh. It ended up making the entire stay feel like something out of a movie.

Next, we stopped at Saint Giles Cathedral, which is, like all other old Edinburgh buildings, made of black stone. It is also exceedingly beautiful inside. The alter is in the middle, and all seats face inward. There is an old painting of the crest of the union of Scotland and England, with Scotland’s unicorn and England’s lion supporting a shield.

Most impressive is the new pipe organ, installed in 1992. Somehow it manages to be modern while fitting in with the church’s gothic style. Its proud maroon paint and simple, clean triangular shapes pay tribute to gothic arches while not picking up their extreme complexity. Sadly I didn’t get to find out if the organ’s sound matched its beauty.

Also worth mentioning is St. Giles Cathedral’s steeple. Well, steeple might not be the right word. Four stone arches join at one point on the roof, making for a very pretty top.

At the end off the Royal Mile was the Queen’s official residence in Scotland along with the new, radically designed Scottish Parliament building. The Scottish Parliament was recently reformed, and it’s building sure looks new. It doesn’t get stuck up in the self-important classical style of American government buildings. It just…flows. Make what you will of it from the pictures.

We spent the next two hours hiking to the top of Arthur’s Seat. While my pictures from the top are quite nice, they still fail to capture the wonders of the view. The camera just caught the city and landscape fading into fog, while missing the barely visible presence of the Scottish Sea to the East.

Next we hiked back down from the seat and back up the Royal Mile, stopping at numerous souvenir shops. Not being a sucker for tourist trap gift shops, I was surprised to find myself interested in the woolen tartan scarves, kilts, highland cow dolls, and assorted “Nessie” paraphernalia. It was a lot quirkier than the screen printed T-shirts I pass every day on Oxford Street.

After trekking back up the Royal Mile we stopped staring at Edinburgh Castle and went in. It’s one of the few places I can justify spending £11.25 for admission. In addition to more breathtaking views of the city, there were national museums within the massive walls. The Scottish Army Museum, Scottish Crown Jewels, Scottish Prisoners of War Museum and Scottish War Memorial were up there. We even saw a wedding party leaving the church in the castle. All the men were wearing kilts.

The Scottish Army Museum taught me that the Scots have plenty of pride in their national identity. Some of them were still wearing tartan kilts on the battlefield until 1940!

Although it would have been interesting, we skipped the Scottish Whiskey Experience outside the castle walls. It was plenty expensive for a Chocolate World-esque tour of Scotch. We did browse the gift shop, where I learned that there are more classifications of Scotch than you can ever remember.

That day was also Deb’s birthday, so I took her out to dinner at a pub where we could watch the Rugby World Cup final between England and South Africa. Sadly England lost, but I think we managed to enjoy dinner nonetheless. After the waiter assured me it had no beef, I tried “haggis, tatties and neeps.” (Haggis, potatoes and turnips) It wasn’t what I expected, but it was still surprisingly good, considering it was lamb lung/stomach. Check ricksfoodcritique.blogspot.com for my full review of the traditional Scottish meal.

With a night of sleep and a stroll around new town, it was time to pull out of the train station and leave the wondrous city behind and head to Newcastle. Due to rail work, our train went west to go east, and we stopped in Carlisle England. Now, I didn’t think I was going to make it to the namesake of the home town, and it was pretty exciting when we pulled into the station. I didn’t get to disembark to see much, but I can at least say I’ve been there – a bonus on the trip.

The Ferry: To and from Amsterdam

10/21/07 & 10/24/07


The ferry between Newcastle and Amsterdam was the object of a lot of excitement for me. I think it was a pretty good deal for a combination of hotel room and international travel. It was also the longest I’d ever been on a boat, and it was certainly the biggest ship I’ve ever boarded.

Ferry is actually not a very good description. The King of Scandinavia has four gift shops, three restaurants, three bars, a casino, a coffee shop, a kid’s playroom and a cinema. With 11 decks, it can hold a lot of cabins and swallows your car if you want to take that overseas, too.

The trip took about fifteen hours and we got our own two bunk cabin with a private bathroom. After two nights sharing a hostel bedroom with eight strangers who walked in at odd hours of the night, we were ready for some peaceful sleep. Although there was plenty to do on the boat, it was obscenely expensive. Dinner would have cost at least twenty Euros per person. We’d brought some food, expecting that to be the case, and just retired happily to sleep after exploring the boat for awhile.

Of course, we watched our departure first. The DFDS seaways dock is down the river from the city center, but there were plenty of interesting things to watch while we pulled out. People waved to us from the shore, I watched the lighthouses approach and fade away and there were some other boats on the water to look at for awhile. I even spent some time in one of the lobbies looking at the GPS map showing where we were after it got too dark to see anything from the deck.

The ferry also didn’t dock in Amsterdam. Instead, it dropped us off in IJmuiden, about 30 minutes from Amsterdam by bus. DFDS Seaways ran the busses for us, and we got to see some of the Netherlands’ famous windmills on the drive.

The trip back from Amsterdam ended up being pretty similar, except we were even more tired, and consequently slept even more. I think the ferry was the perfect chance to rest up between sightseeing, though.

Days 4-6: Amsterdam

10/22/07 – 10/24/07

For a city in a country that’s almost entirely below sea level, it sure can be expensive to get a drink in Amsterdam.

Two Euros will buy you a small bottle of water good for about three mouthfuls. Soda is about the same. The cheapest thing to drink is beer, and there are a few reasons that might be a good idea.

First, the city might be the most confusing I’ve ever tried to navigate. Forget London’s changing street names, Syracuse’s odd one-way streets and Stockholm’s tangled web of islands. Amsterdam’s concentric canals left me digging for my map an awful lot, taking the long (a.k.a. lost) way even more. If I’d been drinking beer all day, I would have had an excuse for being lost while also have been unable to feel my aching legs.

Beer might also have allowed me to overlook some of the city’s rougher aspects. It has its nice parts, but Amsterdam takes pride in its vices. Perhaps as a result, there are a lot of trashy looking tourists around, most of who are American. There is also an inordinate amount of graffiti, although I suppose you could chalk that up to a liberal interpretation of art.

Two of the most famous brands of beer in the world are also from Amsterdam. Well, what might be the most famous brand and a pretty well-known brand, anyway. The well-known brand is Amstel, which gets its name from the former river (and current canal) that gives Amsterdam its name. The famous brand is, of course the advertising goliath Heineken.

But let me be clear about this: While there were a lot of things about Amsterdam I didn’t like, there were also a lot of things that I did like. Those confusing canals were very pretty, and the Dutch have this great habit of dousing their French fries in mayonnaise. Heineken itself was a good enough reason to visit, since its “Heineken Experience” was a great studying marketing for aspiring communications students like Deb and me.

We stepped off the bus from IJmuiden across from Amsterdam’s City Center train/bus/tram station at around 10:30. Yes, I said trams. A railway museum, three train trips and a trip on the Newcastle Metro to get to the ferry were not enough railway travel. We also got to experience trams running down the middle of the street in Amsterdam.

Since we didn’t know much about that tram system, Deb and I set out to walk to our hostel. This hike seemed to take a lot longer than it did to me, since I was dragging our luggage behind us for thirty minutes.

Now, we managed to arrive at the hostel after getting only slightly lost. Unfortunately, we managed to almost get killed about six times on the way. Amsterdam has narrow streets. It also has a huge population of people who bike around the city, a good number of cars, and those trams, which sometimes have their own lanes in the street and sometimes share lanes with cars.

That translates to a sidewalk, regular street, bike lane, and sometimes a tram lane crammed onto very narrow streets, making crossing the street a hazardous situation. That’s compounded by the fact that when side streets cross sidewalks that run along main streets, the sidewalk doesn’t end. Rather than the sidewalk giving way to the street with a curb, the side street runs over the sidewalk with a sloped tile. Mix in the fact that the bike lane is sometimes on level with the street and sometimes on the same level with the sidewalk, and you don’t know where to look and where to walk. Oh, did I mention the fact that the bike lane is poorly marked and usually shares the same color as the sidewalk?

If that paragraph confused you, you are starting to understand what its like to try to walk in Amsterdam. Needless to say, I was a little harried by the time we checked in.

We also had to wait in line to check in. During that time, we met Andrew, an American from Seattle studying in Copenhagen, and his friend Jeff, a firefighter from Seattle. They were backpacking across Europe for two weeks, and we agreed to meet them at the Heineken experience later in the day. I think Deb and I were getting in each other’s hair a bit from traveling together too much, and we needed some new faces.

But we had a few hours to kill before meeting them. After grabbing a bite to eat, Deb and I set out to get a feel for the city by walking around. Aside from stumbling across the largest floating flower market in the world, we weren’t really successful, and managed to just wander around a residential-looking neighborhood before managing to find our way to the old brewery in time to meet our new friends.

Unfortunately Heineken closes its experience on Monday. Instead, we headed to a nearby street market and browsed the stalls for awhile. After that evening, we never did see Andrew and Jeff again.

That sums up our first day in Amsterdam. Wander around, get lost, almost get hit by a tram, go to a place that was closed for the day.

Our second day was more fruitful, even though it was a lot shorter than we had planned. Knowing that we were tired, I set the alarm on my phone for 10:00, not noticing that the phone had never reset itself to Central European time, which is an hour ahead of British time. So, when we woke at 10:00, it was really 11:00, and we’d missed our hostel’s complimentary continental breakfast.

Although it was lunchtime and we’d just finished breakfast, Deb and I went on a boat tour of the city’s canals. We probably should have done it on our fist day, since it gave me a much better understanding of the city’s layout. It also showed me a much prettier side of the city than I’d seen wandering around randomly, and pointed out some landmarks such as the Anne Frank house, where the famous diary writer was hidden until she was captured by the Nazis.

The boat had a recorded narrator speaking in several languages, one after the other. First the Dutch recording would play, then the French, etc. It was actually the toughest time we had with language during the whole trip, because the English recording came last. Students in Holland have compulsory English education, so every native knew the language. As I previously mentioned, there might have been more Americans than there were Dutch in Amsterdam, and Dutch is actually pretty similar to German. Anytime there was a sign with no English, I had a pretty good shot at figuring it out with my rudimentary skills.

After the tour and lunch, we headed to the “Heineken Experience,” which is housed in the old Heineken Brewery. After the company got too big for its original building and moved in the late 1900s, it turned the original brewery where it had made beer since 1870 into a big tourist trap.

Now, you pay 11 Euros to see the evolution of the Brand, its advertisements, the way they brew the beer and various other attractions. You also get three half-pints of beer at various times, and a “free” gift, which was a Heineken bottle opener. My favorite part of the “experience” was the advertising and branding campaign, though I also enjoyed walking through the giant old fermentation tanks.

The next day was our final day in Amsterdam. We spent most of it in the NEMO Science center, which lures children with interesting gadgets ala Harrisburg’s Whittaker Center or Syracuse’s MOST.

There were some neat things there, but it was completely overrun with wild children needing more stringent parental supervision. I didn’t get to play with electricity or physics too much because there were too many eight year olds hogging the fun.

That’s the rundown for Amsterdam. In two-and-a-half days it seems like we didn’t do as much as we did in one day of York or Scotland. I chalk that up to all the time we spent wandering around either being lost or taking in the city’s pretty canals. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as York or Edinburgh, but they set exquisitely high standards.

Being lost so bloody much didn’t help matters, either.

Days 7: Newcastle-upon-Tyne

10/25/07

After stepping from the ferry back onto United Kingdom soil, we had several hours to explore Newcastle. It’s a shame, because the city was interesting, and I wish we had more time to poke around.

Aside from lunch at Pizza Hut, we spent all of our time at the Keep of the Castle Garth. There isn’t much to say about it other than that it is another old castle that contained some interesting relics and played various roles throughout Newcastle’s history.

The top of the keep provided us with some great views of the city, though. Newcastle was hit hard by the post-industrial slump, since it was a manufacturing city. Now, it is starting to recover. Bridges criss-cross the River Tyne, and the city has a beautiful new music hall, as well as one unique new bridge across the Tyne that raises like an eye to let ships pass under it. Very interesting to peer at from the top of a medieval castle.

There you have it. An exhaustive (and exhausting) look at mid-semester break. We arrived back in London Thursday night thankful that we didn’t plan any more to our trip. We were exhausted.

Next weekend is our trip to Ireland, the last of our trips from England. Here’s hoping it’s as good as Edinburgh!

Monday 15 October 2007

Slow Weekends

In order to prepare for the big trip to York, Scotland and Amsterdam that will start this Friday, I took the last two weekends slow. This helped three things: My wallet, my academics and my body. It kept me from spending too much money after the financial crisis of Sweden, gave me time to shore up for mid-terms, and let me catch up on a little sleep.
That's not to say nothing interesting happened. In order to keep you up on the latest, here is a quick rundown of the last two weekends.

10/5: Hampton Court

Friday two weeks ago was the date for my trip to Hampton Court for my Law Makers & Law Breakers in British History class.

Now, if I told you that I got a free coach ride and free admittance into a palace built my Henry VIII without even having to put down the usual £10 reservation deposit, you might think it was a pretty good deal. You might think that, except for the fact that this trip was on the same weekend as the school's Istanbul trip, which, although significantly more expensive than Hampton Court, was a bargain for traveling to Turkey.

Nonetheless, I tried to shrug off my disappointment and enjoy the sights. Unfortunately, there really wasn't much worth mentioning. It was a drafty palace of relatively modest size. The most interesting point of the palace itself was the large kitchens that had to put out enough food to feed two meals to roughly 800 people daily. Aside from that, we got to take in some very old tapestries hanging on the wall, but were not allowed to photograph them.

The gardens were really the best part of this trip. They weren't particularly large, but it is always nice to see some green after trooping down Oxford Street daily.

And that was the most interesting part of the weekend, unless you count Sunday's nail-biting weekly trip to the grocery store.

10/12: Cambridge


Another Friday, another school-sponsored trip.

This time I didn't have to shrug off the blues of not being in Istanbul. Possibly as a consequence, I enjoyed this trip a lot more than Hampton Court.

That might have just been because of the delicious fish & chips I got toward the end of the trip from The Eagle Pub. The pub's ceiling is decorated in etchings from WWII airmen. Those that were stationed near Cambridge used to take cigarette lighters and burn their names or other messages into the ceiling. Those marks are still there today. In addition, when DNA was discovered in the mid-1900's, the discoverers went to the Eagle to celebrate. A note in the corner marks that, too.

Other than that, we really just walked around a quiet university town. The streets were narrow and filled with bikes, yet the cyclists didn't have a penchant for nearly clipping me, ala London. It was just nice to get out of the rat race for awhile, even if that did mean a ninety-minute bus ride.

10/13: The Tate

Saturday Deb and I headed over to the Tate Museum of Modern Art. There has been quite a fuss in the papers about a new exhibit they have that is a large crack in the floor.

Yes, a crack. The artist says it is supposed to convey the divided issues of race in a post-imperial world, or something like that. Either way, it is quite impressive. The Tate is in a big old power plant, and the crack runs the entire length of the exhibition hall. I'm no prospector, but I would guess that was at least 200 yards. You could walk right up to the crack, step over it, peer into it -- whatever you wanted. I thought it was neat.

As for the rest of the modern art ... well, some of it was nice. I found a little bit to go a long way, so we headed over to check out the nearby Borough Market.

There's nothing like a touristy market to make you feel poor. It's not that I don't want to spend £10 on a slice of fine cheese, it's just that I'd rather head to Somerfield and spend £2 on a similarly-sized hunk. Even so, it was fun to walk around and take in all the different meats, cheeses and other various goods being peddled.

And that is about all I have to say about the last two weekends. England surprisingly advanced to the finals of the Rugby world cup, which is exciting. Sadly, we'll be in Scotland when the final is played against South Africa. I'm wondering who the Scots will be rooting for.

Ramadan ended on Friday, and there was lots of celebrating on Edgeware road, which has a large Lebanese population. Nothing got out of hand, though. The biggest activity was cheering and revving your car's engine like you were in The Fast and the Furious.

The next post should be a little more exciting. It won't be about biding time and resting up. My last mid-term is Wednesday. Actually, I'd better go study for my history test. Yes, the same history class that took me to Hampton Court and kept me from Istanbul. Sometimes academics just ruin all the fun.

Thursday 4 October 2007

Stockholm



Last Thursday, the 27th of September, was exactly one month after I left the United States for the United Kingdom. It was also the first time I left England since arriving here.

My destination was Stockholm Sweden. Now, I have to admit that I didn’t really know much about Stockholm before going there. I really booked the flight because some people I knew were going, and it was a pretty cheap flight. But for all I knew, Stockholm was a positively dreadful place to go.

Fortunately, the city is the exact opposite of a dreadful place to go. It’s built on an archipelago, so there is plenty of water. It is made up of 14 islands that are connected by a seemingly-countless number of bridges. Whoever is in charge of city planning in Stockholm also deserves a big bonus. There are stone walkways everywhere, and plenty of trees keep the city beautiful. The architecture fits in perfectly with this veritable marina metropolis. If you haven’t looked at my pictures from the city, I suggest you head over to picasaweb.google.com/rickseltzer right now.

It’s even easy to circumnavigate the language barrier. Practically every clerk or shopkeeper we ran across spoke English in addition to Swedish, and while it was tough to read menus and some signs, I never had that helpless feeling of being isolated. If anything, the different language was a welcome reinforcement of the fact that we were actually in a foreign country.

Alas, the Swedish capital isn’t without its negatives. For one thing, it might be even more expensive than the wealth-sucking vacuum that is London. I was not expecting this, since the Dollar is actually stronger than the unit of Swedish currency, the Kronor. It’s seven times stronger than the Kronor, to be specific. Unfortunately, Swedes see fit to charge hundreds of Kronor for practically anything, be it food or entertainment. It’s a little odd too see a menu listing a price as 180. A little odd and a little painful.

Now that you understand a little more about Stockholm, lets move on to the rundown of my activities.

Thursday

We started with a simple plan. Calyn and I were supposed to take the tube to the bus stop after my class at Faraday House. Deb didn’t have class on Thursday, and our flat was relatively close to the “Easybus” stop, so she was just going to walk to the stop. After we met, we would take the 2:30 bus, on which we had booked seats, to Stansted Airport, which is about an hour and a half drive from central London. That put us in the airport at four o’clock, giving us more than enough time to catch our six o’clock plane. Simple, right?

Wrong. We got out of the tube and found the Easybus stop, which had an orange minibus idling in front of it. We had about seven minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave, and Deb was nowhere to be found.

I checked my phone and sure enough, I had a voicemail.

“Hi,” Deb’s panic-stricken voice rattled from the phone. “I don’t know how it happened, but I don’t know where I am. The bus is going to leave soon, and I’m lost.”

This was not good. Deb’s sense of direction is like my father’s fashion sense in the 1970’s: nonexistent. Even worse, the bus was set to leave. There was no way she was going to make it.

Calyn went on the bus so at least one of us would be there on time. I’m not sure what she was going to do. Maybe hold up the plane by demanding to be able to leave her tray table down on takeoff. Still, it seemed like a good idea for one of us to be able to be at the airport on time. I got the exciting task of talking Deb in to the bus stop on the phone.

Oh, did I mention that I told her to spring before I realized that she had no chance of making it before the bus left?

Anyway, a very sweaty, flustered and out-of-breath Deborah arrived seven minutes after our bus pulled out, leaving us to wait for the next bus. We had to keep our fingers crossed the entire time, because while our ticket would let us on to later busses than the one we had booked, people who had booked for that specific time got priority boarding. In other words, if enough people had booked the next bus and showed up at the stop, we would have to wait another half hour, pushing our arrival at Stansted back from an already-delayed 4:30 to a more nerve-wracking 5:00.

Fortunately, we made it on the next bus. Only one person made it on after us, but we did make it. We even made through airport security and to the correct gate in time to secure spots at the head of the priority boarding line. The only thing our little drama cost us was a bit of Deb’s breath and dignity. She regained her breath pretty quickly, but please don’t mention this story to her. She doesn’t exactly like it.

Anyway, we got great seats on the airplane because we brought only one piece of carry-on luggage and didn’t have any checked baggage. That meant we could board the plane first, and since our carrier, Ryanair, doesn’t have reserved seating, we got our selection of seats. At my urging we picked sets in the emergency exit row, since it gave me plenty of legroom. It was the only flight I’ve been on where I could stretch out and not get leg cramps.

Our arrival in Stockholm at 9:10 local time was pretty uneventful unless you count a two-hour bus ride from Skavsta airport and 10 minute walk to our youth hostel as eventful.

Even at night we could tell the city was very pretty. The bus dropped us off in the middle of Normalm, on the largest landmass of the city. Our hostel was just one island away on the “Old Town” of Gamla Stan, but we could tell the city was gorgeous when crossing the bridge. The only reason I wasn’t too excited to go to sleep that night was that I was completely exhausted from class, missing the bus, and flying to a city in a new country.

Friday

This was a day of museums and touring. After grabbing an outrageously expensive cold-cut sandwich for breakfast in a café, (cold-cuts made up their breakfast menu) we headed over to the Vasamuseet. This museum, located on the museum and park-heavy island of Djurgarden, was at the top of my list of places to go. It houses the Vasa, a massive 17th century warship that sank in the waters of Stockholm just minutes after starting its maiden voyage. In the 1950’s, roughly 250 years after it sank, they raised the ship and restored it. Thanks to the particular makeup of the water in Stockholm, wood-boring worms don’t live in the waters there. That meant that the hull of the Vasa was in pristine condition when they raised it. The museum contained all sorts of insight into the history of the time when the boat was launched, but staring at the massive hull of that ancient boat was just stunning. Incredibly ornate carvings were preserved in pristine condition. I took a lot of pictures of this boat, but none of them quite capture its essence.

Next we dropped in on the Nordiskamuseet, just a few minutes away. There really wasn’t much there worth talking about, especially since half the exhibits were in Sweden. This was the most forgettable part of the day.

After that we took a 2 hour boat tour of the city. Going to Stockholm without going on the water would have been a sin. The city is absolutely beautiful from the water. I can’t name all the things we saw, but the biggest highlight was City Hall, where they select the Nobel Prize winner in literature. We were also on a lake that freezes over in the winter, allowing people to walk across from one island to another. I guess that makes the boat taxi business, which does exist in Stockholm, a seasonal endeavor.

Saturday

We took it a little easier on Saturday, partially because it rained all morning. At noon we went to see the changing of the guard at the Royal palace, which was just a 5 minute walk from our hostel. I should mention that stepping out the front door of the hostel left us staring out on the water, and we could easily walk up and down the street that ran up the east side of Gamla Stan.

Anyway, it was still pouring all through the changing of the guard, making it a very soggy affair. The new guard marched in with a lot of fanfare and a big band. The soldiers did a funny little sideways shuffle to pack closer together once they had marched in and turned to face each other. I don’t know why they did it, but it made them look like soggy ducks in the rain. It was also hard not to feel bad for the poor bloke who was left on duty at the end of the ceremony. The sky was really opening up on him.

For lunch we walked up to a bar and restaurant for our fist taste of Swedish Meatballs. They really are worth raving about. Check out my review at ricksfoodcritique.blogspot.com for a full understanding of the Swedish masterpiece.

I finally had to indulge my female companions’ wish to shop. We walked down the pedestrian streets of Gamla Stan, which is to say we perused more gift shops than I can remember. I got a moose-leather keychain as my souvenirs of Sweden. The moose is either the Swedish national animal, or people in Sweden just really love it. Either way, I needed a keychain, and this piece of moose-leather caught my fancy.

We also spent a little time in Norrmalm’s shopping district. It reminded me a little of Time Square and Oxford Street, only the spaces between the glamorous stores were giant pedestrian walks instead of car-filled streets. At any rate, we went to the great Swedish clothing chain H&M, which disappointingly was nowhere near as cheap as it is in the good old USA.

Sunday

Our last day in Sweden was perhaps my favorite overall. We went to the Skansen, a giant open-air museum and zoo. One part is a collection of old buildings with actors dressed up as Swedes from the 1700s. Another is a large fairground where two separate festivals were taking place. One was the apple festival, and it included fried apples, cider and music. The other was the autumn festival. It had everything from sheep-shearing to merchants hawking their old-fashioned products. The zoo didn’t have a lot of animals, but it did have some interesting ones. In addition to goats, cows, and wolves, there were penguins, bears and the Swedish moose. I even got to pet a mother moose!

I think we spent about six hours at the Skansen before walking back to the bus stop to take our leave. Along the way we ran into some Native American singers on the street. I have now been to two capital cities in Europe: London and Stockholm. I have now seen Native American performers in both. They seem very out of place.

We had some bus fun on the way home, too. We had bought return tickets to the airport on Thursday to save money, and arrived at Central Station secure in the knowledge that busses ran regularly to the airport. The only problem was that there is a 2 and a half hour gap in Sunday afternoon busses between 4 and 6:30. We got to the bus station around 4:15. That turned into a lot of waiting at the bus station, and it made us arrive at the airport only 75 minutes before our flight. Skavsta is a pretty small airport, (Smaller than Harrisburg International Airport, in fact) though, and the entire bus was filled with people who were taking our flight. I doubt we were in any danger of missing it.

So there you have it, 2,000 words on our trip to lovely Stockholm. Maybe now you can understand why I say it is an overlooked gem of a destination.