For Valentines day, Sarah and I went for a walk to Alexandra Palace Park. It is a couple of km from our flat, so we were able to walk the whole way there without to much problem.
Alexandra Palace and Park
At the park we had a look at the deer, and fed the birds in the lake.
Political prisoners
Greedy Canadians
The palace has been used for a lot of different things, and is still used as an ice skating rink and for TV broadcasting.
Alexandra Palace
Everyone loves a list. Here is one for you enjoyment. You are supposed to do 4 of everything, but I stopped if I couldn’t think of 4 in a minute or 2
Jobs I have had in my life
Movies I would watch over and over
Places I have lived
Places I have been
TV shows I watch (sometimes)
People who email me regularly
Favourite Foods
Sports I have played
Things I am looking forward to
Before
After
Now, on day 3, we have had some sort of grit put on the sidewalk, which looks like a cross between cooked mince, and the stuff you spend most of your time on the sidewalk trying not to step in.
Sidewalk with grit and snow
Our plane landed in London at 7:30am on Tuesday, Feb 3.
We got out of the airport and onto the tube at about 8:30am
We got off the tube at our station at about 10 am.
We got home stortly after that and slept until around 4pm.
London got a bit of snow, but the country as a whole, and people as individuals don’t know how to cope with it very well. In Canada the amount of snow that fell would have been a non event, but here because of the rarity, and lack of preparation / resources / knowledge, most of the country was apparently shut down for the day.
Our backyard, the day after the big snow
I see in the paper that 40% of the garbage that was supposed to be picked up since the start of the week hasn’t been yet, since the garbage trucks can’t go down many streets, since they are still too icy. Also, some garbage trucks have been taken off duty and are being used to lay down grit. Now rats and foxes are scavenging and starting to “cause problems”
No one on our street seems to have thought to clear the snow off the sidewalk, and so it all got trampled down and turned to ice. This makes walking up and down the street fun, since there is a hill on our street. We have been walking down the middle of the road, since that is clear, but usually have to move to the side a couple of times for cars to get past.
As a funny aside, the directions we got from the backpackers were along the lines of:
We followed them on the day we arrived, but thought it was a bit strange. On the 2nd day of our trip, we had to go back to the train station to go to Bruges, so we took to more direct route of just going 3 blocks east. It turns out the reason for the detour was that the 5 blocks between our hostel and the train station were the red light district.
At least that is what I think it was, but it might be a Belgium tradition to put red neon lights around the corner of your full length street level window, and then sit on a chair and watch passers by. In a bikini. At 9am on a Sunday.
For some reason all the ladies seemed to be Black, but maybe that was just the streets we walked down.
On our last day (or so we thought) in Brussels we didn’t get up to much. We checked out of our hostel in the morning, and left our bag there in a locker to pick up on our way to the airport.
It had been snowing during the night, and there was about 2 cm of snow.
A winter wonderland
Mysterious Tracks in the Snow
We did stumble across this cool sculpture by Arne Quinze called “The Sequence”
The Sequence, by Arne Quinze
Around 5pm, we went back to our backpackers, picked up our bags and went to the airport. When we got there we found out that our flight had been cancelled, due to the heavy snow in London. We were able to rebook for 7am the next morning.
We looked into taking the train back, but it was €250 per ticket, and there were no more trains that evening. To give a sense of scale, our cheap air tickets were £90 return each.
After that we thought about staying at the airport hotel, but that was €260 for a room. Our hostel had been £50 a night, but we weren’t sure if we would be able to get another room there, and didn’t really feel like getting a train back into town, and then having to walk back to the hostel again. So we decided to spend the night sleeping in the airport.
Staying at an airport over night is something that I would recommend everyone do at least once in their life. Unfortunately I had already done it when I was 16. We got a spot on some chairs by an area that was walled off for construction, so it had a little section of kind of secluded floor space. It was quite close to the elevators and escalators though, and I’m pretty sure that someone driving a Zamboni drove right past us 4 times in a row at around 3 in the morning cleaning the floors.
At least we didn’t have any trouble getting up for the 5am check in.
On Sunday, the second day of our Belgium trip we caught a train to Bruges.
It has quite a nice old city center, with cobbled narrow streets and not many cars around. There were also quite a few horses + carts around, carrying tourists on trips around the city.
We climbed up the tower in the center of town, which had 360 or so of the worst steps I have ever used. The stairs start out ok, and get increasingly narrow, steep and tilted as you climb up. It seemed like at the top every stair had a different slope, width and height, which made climbing up and down quite an adventure.
The Belfry Tower, Bruges
This tower is featured in the movie “In Bruges” in a scene where Colin Farrell tells a fat American he will never make it up the tower because he is too fat, and the stairs are too narrow. Colin was absolutely correct, and probably saved the guy €6, but he didn’t get much thanks for it.
There were good views from the top, and also cold fast winds. The bells also chimed the quarter hour, and I feel sorry for people who get caught up there when they really go off.
View of Bruges from the Belfry
After the Tower we had lunch at a place in the square. It was a pretty fancy restuarant, but luckily Sarah decided to order the €10 mussels special instead of the €45 1/2 lobster in love (in gin and martini). The mussels were quite good, although much smaller than the mussels you would get in NZ. They came in a pot, and there were probably 30 – 50 mussels, with the eatable part of each one being about the size of my thumb.
I had 1/2 chicken and chips, and a €3.50 200ml coke! That makes it the most expensive coke I have had so far, and of course I didn’t know how small or expensive it was going to be before I ordered it. At least the chicken and mussels were good.
After lunch we went to a chocolate musuem, which had a history of chocolate, a chocolate art gallery, and a short demonstration of making pralines.
Chocolate Madonna and Child
The most interesting part to me was to make the praline shells, they fill the mold with chocolate, leave it for a few seconds to let the outside harden, then flip the mold over and let the rest of the chocolate fall out. I thought it would be harder than that, but sometimes life is simple I guess.
Chocolate Statues
Sarah and I went to Belgium for a long weekend.
We spent Saturday and Monday in Brussels, and met up with Manneken Pis, a famous statue of a happy pissing boy whose name in dutch means “Little pee man.”
Manneken Pis
The day we saw him he was wearing what looked like a boy scout uniform. He has over 600 different outfits in all, and they get changed regularly. We just missed out on seeing him in his Mozart outfit. Sometimes he gets hooked up to a keg of beer, and they fill cups up and hand them out to the crowds.
He wasn’t doing that the day we saw him, so we went across the road to a pub and had a couple of large glasses of Belgium beer. Sarah really liked the cherry flavored beer called Krick.
Sarah and cherry beer
I bought a fake australian hat from a traveling hat salesman, after shrewdly bargaining him down from dix-neuf to cinque euro in the space of about 10 seconds by repeatedly telling him I didn’t want to buy it. Sadly the thrill of the incredible discount was soon replaced by buyer remorse.
Shen and €5 hat
We also went to the cartoon museum, to see about Belgium comics, of which Tintin, Lucky Luke and the Smurfs are the most famous internationally.
Tintin on the moon
Discovering America
I went to Oxford to see James and Victoria, and celebrate with them for finishing their PhDs. They finished their oral examinations on the 20th (James) and the 21st (Vic). They were both done in just over 2 hours, which is apparently pretty fast, and only have to make some minor corrections.
Hooray for James and Victoria! James is already a medical doctor, so they are now know as Doctor doctor and doctor.
The first day I was there, James took me on a quick tour of the city, while Vic had her oral exam. We saw the Oxford bridge of sighs, the Radcliffe Camera (not a camera at all, but a boring old building), and some theatre called the Sheldonian, which had a bunch of busts out the front.
Oxford Bridge of Sighs
The Sheldonian
After Vic finished up we celebrated with a few bottles of sparkling wine (champaine that isn’t from Champaine, France) and then we went out to dinner with a large group of people from James and Vic’s research labs.
After that we went for a few ice cold tubes (of amber neck oil), at some of the local pubs, and even managed to wangle a lock in. A good time was had by all, and no one needed to throw their voice (technicolor yawn).
Oxford school chums
I had originally booked a return train tickets from London to Oxford and back again for the same day. They cost £8 in total, so I figured I might as well miss my return train and go home the next day. This meant I was able to go to the dinner and drinks. Imagine my surprise when a one way ticket from Oxford to London ended up costing me £20!
As an aside, On the trip over to Oxford I was looking out my window at a disgusting light industrial wasteland, and thinking how terrible it was. A few seconds later we passed the train station, and it was Slough, the town immortalized by The Office and the funny 1937 poem “Slough” by John Betjeman.