Category: Europe 2016

So there is (probably) still a wrap to come, though once we get back into normal life, maybe that won’t be so formal.  Whenever you do a trip out of your own culture into different parts of the world, there is some reflection that happens.  It’s been a somewhat tempestuous time for the world these last few weeks, especially in Europe where we have been.  England voted to leave the EU, there was an attempted coup in Turkey, and several violent events.  None of them really impacted us, but You can’t help but reflect on those things, and I’m sure we’ll continue to do so over the next few days once we get back to normality.

In the meantime, on a more lighthearted note, as we fly back into Canberra to the soundtrack of Baker Street and babies hating the descent, we come to the Awards.

Best food: Hótel Stracta salmon (Justine, Iceland); Bourganes Seafood soup (David, Iceland)

Most exotic animal eaten: 1. Whale (David, Iceland); 2. Reindeer (David, Iceland); Horse (David, Iceland)

Most asked question: “what’s the wifi password?” (Aidan, everywhere)

Most annoyingly repeated phrase: “I’m a survivor” (Lauren, everywhere)

Most annoying photo model: Aidan

Best dessert: Apple cake (Hótel Skúlagardur, Iceland)

Friendliest people: Scotland

Best timed non-rain: Cairngorm trek

Comfiest bed: Djúpivogur

Furthest point North: 66.20 degrees

Best airline: Qatar

Worst plane: SAS flight 811 from Oslo to London.  Old, rickety and almost felt unsafe.

Best bedrooms: Pines House (Scotland)

Smallest airport: Edinburgh

Most unpronounceable place name: Bókhlödustígur (our apartments in Reykjavik, Iceland, of course)

Worst injury: Aidan’s infected leg

Least ill person: Justine (and daylight second)

Hardest Monopoly location to get to: Old Kent Road

Biggest variation in stress levels at an airport compared to previous visits: Öslo

Best hide and seeker: Aidan

Fastest discoverer of available wifi networks: Aidan (everywhere)

Most overused phrase: “what’s the wifi password?” (Aidan, everywhere)

Most appreciated drink: London smoothies after walking for hours on the hottest day London has ever experienced

Most lost item: all the device chargers and cords.  All of them. 

Best abs: Aidan (everywhere)

Longest queue: Customs line at Perth

Best buys: Justine – earrings (Scotland); David – summer clothes (London); Aidan – troll playing cards (iceland); Lauren – Nessie toy (Scotland)

Most surprising moment: Aidan – how unbusy London was; Lauren – how dirty Edinburgh looked; Justine – that on her next trip she wants more challenge; David – how much fun it was to just hop on a random double-decker bus in London.

Worst moments: Lauren – being sick on the first long haul flight; Aidan – having Apple juice spill in his bag during the check in process in Reykjavik; David – trying to find food and drink at Doahaairport on theway back; Justine – resolving everyone else’s bad moments.

And of course:

Best toilet view: On the Cairngorm trek. It was never going to be beatable really.

And that is all.  For now.

Perth.

And, as the lady on the plane helpfully pointed out, Perth, Australia.

Pretty good day of travel in the main. I had a few critisisms of the signage at Doha airport, which resulted in us walking most of the way to Dubai in the process of not getting a fruit smoothie, but other than that glitch, it was all survivable.  Pretty turbulent crossing the equator south of India, but the kids slept through it, so we were more than happy on balance.  They are so much easier now than one previous trips, albeit that they take up way more of the seats when they fold in half and lie across us to sleep.

The longest queue of the entire trip was to clear customs at Perth – as apparently they were totally taken by surprise by the actual arrival of aircraft, and their practice of directing thousands of people through a single bloke who cursorily scanned whatever boxes we ticked on the landing card and waved everyone through didn’t seem up to the challenge. I guess once someone invents radar or radio or something they will have a better chance of knowing when planes might show up like that. At least they had a polite pre-recorded announcement asking people to be patient due to the unexpected arrival of planes putting them under strain – something which at least they were able to prepare in advance…

Anyway. We’ve now arrived at Hötel Wolfe, which is very comfortable and comes highly recommended. Four and three quarter stars on Tripadvisor I’m sure!

Not sure whether or not we are still on holiday, or if the holiday has finished and we’re in transit. I think it depends whether I still wear the same clothes tomorrow (it’s transit) or put on something different (last day of the holiday).

When I put it in those terms, I think I will definitely get changed!

Here’s a few final photos from London that I got around to processing on the plane.   The awards are being shortlisted, and the trophies secretly being engraved. All will be revealed shortly…!

  

Underground frolics

 

  

The apartment in Fitzrovia

 

  

  

Gherkins, towers, bridges, bridge references and a train.

So the last little bit of the holiday had a slight departure from the plan.  Firstly, Lauren and I went out and did her last two things: a fruit smoothie on the rooftop terrace and a photo with an old red phone box:

Justine and I did indeed then make it out to Soho for a few drinks and some dinner. We stopped off at a few old, packed English pubs, which were just what we were looking for.

Unfortunately, I then suffered a choking incident with a lamb shank that I won’t go into great detail about, and thankfully there are no pictures!  However, it took about 15 hours to clear, which oddly happened only as I was coming through security at Heathrow.  Hence the title “relief”, as I was very unsure about getting on a plane feeling like that.

Resulted in a bit of a downer at the end of an otherwise great last night, and a strangely subdued farewell from mum at Paddington Station. Still, it’s been a great trip for the most part, and we will have to ponder on the coveted awards on the return flights. I think the Cairngorm trek is a shoo-in for Best Toilet View, but plenty of others are up for grabs.

Next update will hopefully be from Doha, where we have a long enough connection this time to actually look around rather than run to the next fate. Or even next gate. Seems a lot more than three weeks ago that we met the Blebys at Doha on the way to Scotland, but I guess that’s all it is.

Actually, when I say I had ‘no plans’ for London, I did have one kind-of-plan.  I’ve always been partial to a bit of toast – current low-carb diet notwithstanding – and in the in-flight mag as we left Australia there was an article on great places of the world t have toast.  Several of them were in London, and so I took a shot of the addresses and made a mental note to try them if I could.

This morning presented a bit of an opportunity.  While Justine took the kids to Madame Tussaud’s (one of the non-negotiable destinations in her list), I had some time to jump the Central Line over to Liverpool St Station (ka-ching!) and hunt around to find one of them.  It didn’t turn out to be too hard (being on the main road through Islington), but oddly and randomly I came across a new outlet of one of the others on a little alleyway I was cutting through!  Thus, it was toast for breakfast and, after an elongated stroll via some other Monopoly locales, it was also toast for lunch.

  

L: OTTOLENGHI; R: St John Bread and Wine

 

Alas, I can’t say that the toast was amazing – but it was a heap of fun wandering over there to find them, and the locations were cool if nothing else.

Just a few hours of the holiday left now.  By this time tomorrow we will be on a plane home and mum will be off cruising around England and Spain, just because she can.  We have one last afternoon and evening here though, and I thoroughly intend it to be focused on food and drink in Soho as much as is possible.  So, uh, I’m off…
    

I came to London with ‘no plans’, and while the Monopoly mission has proven a mostly fun distraction, the basic lack of plans hasn’t really changed much.  However, that isn’t to say that none of our party had plans.

Justine had a lot of plans.  Not having been here for 20 years, she has things to do and places to see.  Unfortunately, it turns out to be rather slower getting around with 4 or 5 of us than when she has been here before, and so her plans have had to be scaled back a bit.  There is so much to see here that you would never be able to do it all in four days anyway, so hopefully the revised agenda isn’t too unsatisfactory for her – and the things that we do get to are all going to be pretty interesting.

Lauren had one thing on her list, and one thing only: to ride on a red, double-decker bus.  We did our best to over-complicate things by asking pointless grown-up style questions like “where” and “when” and “what direction” and a whole lot of other completely pointless things.   Once we got over that, we just wandered down to Oxford St and got on the first red dou
ble-decker bus that came along – which was exactly what she wanted, and a surprisingly soul-lifting thing to do.

Even better, we got to sit in the front row up the top, which was also precisely what she wanted.  It turns out to be an awesome place to see London from.  Aside from being a weirdly dissociated place to watch the traffic from (there were several times I was listening for the bumps as we ran over pedestrians and small cars, none eventuated), it is exactly what the London Eye is not.  It’s a superb, immersive, ground level view of London, where you see the shops, the roads, the people and the buildings, all at eye level.  Save yourself time and money if you come here, skip the big ferris wheel and just go riding the front seat of random double-decker busses.

Our particular random bus went down Oxford St, and then rather conveniently down Park Lane and past Mayfair.  I’ve accepted that I won’t get to every place on the Monopoly board (Old Kent Road, for example, is simply not likely to be doable), and these two were going to be hard without this little bus ride!

  

Aidan and mum did a quick trip out to Kings Cross Station to see the Harry Potter references (man is that book everywhere!).  Ka-ching!

Turns out that that station is right on Euston Road at the point it turns into Pentonville Road.  Ka-ching, ka-ching!  Not only that, but they were sharp enough to spot the underground stop for The Angel (a collection of buildings in Islington).  Ka-ching – and with their good work I can now buy a hotel there!

    

Our evening finished off with a train ride out to Worcester Park to visit a childhood friend of Justine’s and her family, where we celebrated the great weather with a lovely BBQ and conversation.  While we did that, Mum just popped out to Leicester Square to catch a movie, because she could.

For all that (one bus ride, one BBQ – perhaps not that tough a day I guess), one of the quirkiest parts of the day was spending half an hour with a lovely London Transport lady whose name was, according to her badge, ‘Max Power’.  I need to see some more of these people and see if they have name tags or if they really do have little slogans on them.  If that is her name, she should be doing something way cooler than just providing outstanding customer service to confused tourists in sweltering underground station foyers.

London is one of the world’s iconic cities, but one thing I do not associate with it is hot weather. Nonetheless, today it was hot. Tomorrow is also supposed to be hot – and then it rains. I can’t help but think some of my preconceived images of the place will be easier to spot that day.

Anyway, today in the heat we wandered around with only partial aim, and hence only partial success. The first move was to Foyle’s bookstore, which was very deliberate and very successful. After weeks of failing to locate a suitable book for Lauren to read (ie: her approx age group and in English) we resolved that problem. We also bought Aidan a copy of the Shakespeare text he’s about to study, just because we could.
After that I managed to update the wardrobe with some hot weather clothes, and snaffle the first few of the 26 Monopoly locations I intend to see in these four days.

  

  

In fact, our apartment in the West End turns out to be pretty well-located for Monopoly. It’s also pretty well located for food and drink, as we discovered to our disadvantage. Soho is right next door, and literally right next door is a nice little eating and drinking strip.

However, we walked off towards the city to go on the Eye, but walked too far. Once you hit Leicester Square you are suddenly in tourism central, and we learned in Lisbon in particular, that that is not the place to try to get food. Anyway, long story short, we eventually found a nice little pub for lunch, but not without covering some miles and some grumpiness.

We then did the obligatory walk past whatever the tower which is commonly mistaken for ‘Big Ben’ is called, and on to the Eye. A ratio of 30 minutes in a queue and 20 minutes on the ride wasn’t too bad, and helped immeasurably by the ice creams. Both Aidan and I were surprised by how uninspiring the view from the Eye is. I was keen to go and expected a great view, but London is actually waaaaay more impressive from ground level. However, here is the legally required view.

From there, the girls headed home by underground to prepare for their show, the stage production of Matilda. Aidan decided to join me to go collect some more Monoploy locations, something he is no doubt still regretting. It turned out to be hot, further than it looked on the map, and totally devoid of the juice bars we were looking for. We got a few more, but you’ll notice the for Fleet St we only got number 3, and that is because it turned out to be a long hot walk in the wrong direction.  Anyway, it completed that set, and now I hope to put a hotel on it and at least recoup some of what we invested to get there!

  

  

  

 

We then staggered back to the apartment, finally finding a gaggle of juice bars within 200m of the place. I’m seriously thinking that we shouldn’t leave the immediate vicinity without being fully provisioned.

Aidan and I then sat out on the rooftop terrace to eat dinner, and watch the moonrise. And do maths homework (the real world, frankly, bites).

For a final hurrah, when the girls got back from their show (excellent, just alas in the wrong part of the theatre to be showered in confetti), we wandered round the corner for a late evening snack and drink. A great thing about London is that everyone is so poorly dressed I was able to go out in my indoor ‘slipper-type’ shoes that at home I wouldn’t be seen dead in out of the house, without looking remotely out of place – so that was excellent for my poor, tired, sore feet.  🙂

First time for 10 days we’ve seen actual night!

Also, we’re in London!

And it’s hot. Like, supposed to be in the 30s all week. I definitely didn’t pack for that! I figured it might drag into the mid-20s, but that my Scotland / Iceland wardrobe would be applicable. Looks like I’m going to be hoping there’s a clothes shop in this joint somewhere…

Justine has some plans for our time here, but I must admit I don’t have many myself.  I’ll largely be tagging along behind her agenda and that of the kids, who do have some iconic things to see.

However, having just successfully completed Icelandic Bingo, I have a hankering to take a shot at 4-day Monopoly…

Regular readers of this column may recall a diabolical experience at Öslo airport about five years ago, when a surprise passport control line almost caused us to miss a flight to Dublin. 

We were not about to make this mistake again! Today, with a fairly tight connection through to London, we scarpered off the first plane and raced to the line as quickly as we possibly could. 

So of course, this time the line was orderly, efficient and quick. Oh well, I don’t think we regret the rush after last time!

It’s been a long day, and not just because the last time it was ‘night’ was on the 8th of July before we flew to Iceland.  I had the alarm set for 3.08am so I could wake up and write a review of the Carlton-West Coast game.  Turned out to be a very bad game, as near as I could tell on the radio feed, which doesn’t help make such a dumb idea seem any better.

After that, we did “The Golden Circle” – the Gullfoss waterfall, the Strökkur geysir and the Pingvellir national park.  Strökkur is next to the original and eponymous geysir, which is pretty cool – though I never did find out what the correct pronunciation really is.  Gullfoss is also a darn fine waterfall, and as the place on the planet where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates pull apart and leave a Rift Valley, Pingvellir is quite an awesome place to contemplate.  However.  Having seen the rest of Iceland (Ísland), it’s quite apparent that the Golden a Circle is only so-called because it is within a day-trip of Reykjavik.  By comparison to the rest of the country, it is really pretty uninspiring.  If you ever aspire to coming here (and you should), don’t allow less than 10 days and whatever you do, get out to the south and east coast regions at the very very least.

Also, try the food.  Most of it is excellent. Turn the part of your brain that can do maths totally to sleep mode, and just order what sounds tasty and enjoy the fact that it is.  Having tried reindeer, horse, goose and whale so far, today I did order the tasting plate.  It had some good things, but it also had wind-dried fish and fermented shark.  The wind dried fish was no better or worse than eating bark.  Dry, mostly flavourless and pretty tough, I guess it would keep you alive in a pinch and is the piscine equivalent to jerky.  The fermented shark comes served in a sealed jar.  That’s a reasonable sign of what is to come, and everyone in the restaurant could instantly tell the moment anyone else opened a jar.  It’s not pleasant at all, but it’s not disgusting either.  It’s a very strong and long taste, one that keeps brewing in your mouth well after you’ve swallowed it, in kind of the same way blue cheese does.  I wouldn’t seek it out again, but given a choice between fermented shark and blue cheese, I would choose the shark.

Which brings us to the end of Iceland.  Tomorrow we fly, via Öslo, to London.  If the food is as good there, I will be surprised. The scenery certainly won’t be.  For a last hurrah tonight (and for the small matter of our 17th wedding anniversary), we went to a fancy restaurant and had a fantastic time.  We’ve been lucky enough to have anniversaries in some pretty nice places, but Reykjavik for the 17th will likely stand up to most comparisons.

Have we seen and understood Iceland?  Possibly.  The country is a little odd, in that it has a lot of history from 1,000 years ago, but then there was a long break and it only started developing as a modern country in 1944 when US and British soldiers came here in WW2.  That leaves kind of a gap in the historical and cultural record.  We saw stunning scenery, landscapes that are just not part of the experience of living in an ancient place like Australia. Here, the landscape is evolving and being created, not worn down for rebirth.  It’s a different paradigm, but an inspiring one.  Justine feels like we missed the cultural interaction that a guided tour may have provided.  I wonder if that level actually exists, or if it is just us imposing the norms of other places onto it.

The summer / light factor shouldn’t be underplayed.  We have not seen night for 10 days, and that probably isn’t good for most people.  For me, personally, it is a little bit of a siren song.  My mother has done genealogical tracking that suggests we are of Viking descent, and while I’m not massively attracted to that lifestyle, I do fit easily into this sort of daily cycle.  I’m possibly less interested in the dark season, but these incessantly light months I can do with ease.

But, like sands though the hour glass, must all things be replaced by what is to follow. We’ve packed our bags, gathered our possessions, set our goals and charged our devices.  Tomorrow, it is one of the legendary cities of the modern world that awaits us.  London. I have recommendations for places that do good toast, and there are probably other things worth seeing from what I have herd.

Also, from what I have heard from the herd.

I’ll let you know.

Gullfoss:

Active Geysir Strökker:

Tectonic plate Rift Valley:

BINGO!!