London take two

Lissa, me and Philippa at the bridge

Last year working as an advisor at Victoria University I had two coworkers, Lissa and Philippa. Lissa has spent the last six months living in Germany (I visited her in Erlangen in July) and Philippa has been in London all year (I visited her there in May). We'd talked about the three of us meeting up for awhile, and finally one weekend in November we did.

Poppy wreath outside Westminster Abbey

Lissa and I both flew from Frankfurt Hahn, my absolute favourite airport (or not, its a former army base in the middle of no where, turned into a trashy airport for low-budget airlines, I've flown in and out a couple of times). In theory it should have been an easy trip, as there's a direct bus there from Luxembourg and only a quick flight from Germany to London, but I'm amazed that I made it there! After a morning of all the errands I had to do here in Luxembourg going wrong, I left the house late and missed the bus I needed to take to catch the airport bus, got there by taxi with only seconds to spare, and then our bus to the airport got stuck in roadworks and Friday evening traffic and I barely made it through check-in!

Lissa outside Philippa's place

The next hurdle was getting in and out of the UK itself. Last time I was there I was placed on an alert list due to all of the fun and games I was having with my spanish visa, so I was scared that they wouldn't let me in this time, given all I have to prove that I have a visa is a laminated ID card. A surly looking German man studied this for a while, and then let me through and onto the plane. After we landed in London Stansted, we waited in the 'Non-European' queue watching two immigration officials rigorously interrogate everyone. Finally our turn came, and after several minutes spent swearing that I was studying Politics in Madrid on exchange and explaining who we were visiting, what job she did, and what her life plans and star sign and childhood pet's name were, we were in!

oldtimer band at the local pub

We managed to bus from the airport to Mile End station, and Philippa met us there and took us back to her flat. She's moved since the last time I was there, and is now living in a very Coronation-St-type two story, three bedroom place inhabited by five-and-a-half kiwis and with another on the couch - nine New Zealanders sleeping in a three-bedroom, one bathroom place in central London, true OE style! This house had once been inhabited by the Horror Handyman from Hell (fancy your light switches inside kitchen cupboards, anyone?) and the toilet had decided to stop working this weekend too, fun times. By this point, it was around 11pm UK time, so midnight our time, and we were quite shattered, but we did make it out for some food and a drink at their local, a crazy old-timer looking place with an amazing band made up of elderly men with what little grey hair they had left at a rock-star long length (check out the bassist in the photo).

our Yeoman tour guide

On Saturday morning Philippa and her fiance James took us out for breakfast and coffee at a wee cafe in a park somewhere near their place. The weather wasn't bad at all, after it being 3-8degrees most of the previous week in Luxembourg, having 18 degrees in London felt like heaven, and having a real Latte made by a kiwi barista was amazing! We then went to the Tower of London and did the tour inside. These tours are run by the Yeomen Warders, who, I was surprized to learn, actually live with their families inside the Tower. Imagine being the teenage son or daughter of a Yeoman Warder and asking a taxi to take you home there after a night on the town! The one who did our tour was absolutely hilarious, and earned extra respect from us for referring to Australia as 'one of the islands in the New Zealand group'.

the 'White Tower' of the Tower of London

I learnt a few things that I didn't know about the place. The Tower has a reputation for being a prison, but was actually designed as a royal residence and usually only had high-profile prisoners kept there for very short periods of time, and actually the first prisoner ever held there escaped. It was built in 1078, but there was no purpose built prisoner accomodation until 1687. The Tower was last used to hold prisoners during WWII, with Hitler's deputy the final one. The Tower of London also has seven capitive ravens living in the grounds, legend has if the 'six ravens' are lost or fly away, the Tower and the Crown will fall. The seventh bird is the reserve. There is even a 'Ravenmaster' Yeoman that looks after them and feeds them meat every day.

Spanish food at Borough Market

So, we did the tour, looked at the Crown Jewels, saw some old armour (that King Henry VIII had some serious allusions about the size of his own crown jewels!) and then wandered down to the Tower Bridge, where James left us. We went to the Borough Market for lunch, that place is amazing! It has foods from all around the world, both cooked meals and things like specialist cheeses and bread to buy. As much as I love markets here in continental Europe, its cool to have fifty different types of food in one place, rather than just fifty stands selling the same cheese and olives. Lissa and I had paella and Philippa chowed down on some German sausage.

View from the London Eye with Westminster in the bottom right

We went up the London Eye, something I'd wanted to do since the last time I visited. It's like a giant slow-moving ferris wheel, you go into a pod with about 15 other people and it does a thirty-minute circuit up and down again. It was quite cloudy but still very cool, and a nice change from walking up the windy stairs to reach the top of church bell towers! We walked over past Big Ben and Westminster, where they had war Remembrance Day memorials going on, and took a quick look at Buckingham before going back to the river bank for the Lord Mayor's Parade fireworks. They were quite cool fireworks, but from where we were sitting the Eye completely dwarfed them, and made it all kinda underwhelming.

Fireworks beside the London Eye

We met up with James again, and their former Aussie flatmates, and went for a drink and then to Brick Lane for curry. Brick Lane is full of curry shops, and the waiters stand outside the doors and make deals with you like free wine and 20% off if you come to their place. We went to what these guys consider to be the best, and it was really good (I tucked into some especially spicy stuff!) but what made the place was the decor - the walls were covered in huge paintings of erotic mythological scenes, apart from one wall that had a big painting of Diana instead. Weird. We left this place extremely full and not feeling capable of heading out, so we went back to the flat and hung out there with some flatmates and some of their friends for a bit.

Xmas lights on Oxford Street

Sunday was shopping day! We had coffee at another kiwi-barista place and then took the bus through town to Oxford Street, the road that almost bankrupted me last time I visited London. This time I was a bit more savvy, and didn't buy anything until we got to Primark, where I splashed out as one only can in a place where pants cost no more than five quid. A couple of hours later we managed to free ourselves from the grasp of Primani goodness and stumbled out to find darkness had fallen and the street full of Christmas lights. We headed up to Piccadilly to take a quick look, and then spent our final evening in London having an amazing chicken roast with all of the trimmings thanks to Philippa's awesome cooking. It felt quite weird to be sitting around with so many kiwis, eating something so kiwi, with english-speaking TV playing in the background after over ten months here in Europe!

Roast chicken dinner

Monday morning we flew back to Frankfurt. Thanks to Lissa's much more sound planning skills we managed to get a bus out to the airport without being stressed when we got stuck in early-morning traffic, but most on the bus didn't seem to be in the same boat and one man got really aggressive. I was looking forward to landing back in the immigration-slack EU, and sure enough I had no problems walking in with my flimsy Spanish ID card, but Lissa got held up a bit - her German visa was granted on the basis of her husband being here for work, and the woman demanded to know where he was (at work...can't a girl take a trip without her man to hold her hand?) and then we were back in the 2degree cold of Europe, and I was back to Luxembourg and small children once again.

More photos of London in November are here.

Sicily, Italy - days four and five

Siracusa

See Day One here, and Days Two and Three here.


Sunday morning we woke up around noon, and after collecting Roberta, who went on AFS to the USA, we drove off for what was supposed to be a surprise but had been ruined by everyone telling Francesca she had to take me there in front of me. We went out past Avola and up this huge hillside with amazing views and one terrifying moment when we stalled just around a hairpin bend on the slope and I kept imagining a car tearing around the bend and smashing into us while she got the car going again.

From the top, we could see for miles, past all of these hills and valleys out to the sea. At the bottom of a valley in front of us was Cavagrande, some blue lakes where everyone swims, but its a bit of a hike to get there, it took us 30 minutes walking downhill in the sun, and I kept thinking that the walk back up was not going to be fun!

The water was amazing, quite cool but refreshing after the long walk, and I spent a long time working on my tan (I swear I got a tan, I was just really white beforehand so you can't notice it!). We had leftover arancini and pizza for lunch with more fruit, I really love those squashed peaches, for some reason they taste better than unsquashed ones! Roberta was really cool to talk to as well. Finally around 6pm we decided to brave the walk back up. It wasn't as bad as I thought, we made it up in about 40 minutes, but 40 minutes of walking uphill in a place as hot as Sicily isn't really fun!

Me with a tan!

We stopped in at Roberta's place for cake on the way home, her older brother also did AFS in the States and has just returned from living in Spain, so I talked to him a lot. Her mother is the president of the local AFS chapter, which Francesca volunteers for. We went out to a little pub for dinner with Francesca's mum, aunt and uncle, and had paninis, which are actually quite different to the paninis we have in NZ, they are more like round hamburger buns.

Making pesto

Monday was my last day in Siracusa, and we spent most of the morning sorting out my bus and hostel in Palermo and to the airport, and buying last minute souvineers and packaging them up to post to NZ. Francesca's mum taught me how to make fresh pesto, so we had pasta out on the terrace for lunch again, and then we headed off to the post office on the way to the station. Going to the post office was a great example of times when things just don't work in Italy, because you can't post a parcel unless you have an Italian ID number. I left the parcel with Francesca to post, but I'm not sure what anyone who was just a tourist and didn't know anyone would do, we were there for ages and the guy was at a loss as to a solution. It reminded me of Spain, where you needed a national ID number to book an appointment to get said national ID number…It's kinda weird that NZ has no national ID number like all other developed countries, but I'm not complaining!

Last lunch with Francesca and her mum

So then we were running late for me to catch my bus and Francesca pulled some crazy driving maneuvers getting us there. Driving in Italy is crazy, Italian's do not like rules, or being considerate of other road users. Cars don't really go down the road in lanes, so much as a messy pack with scooters weaving in and out, and crossing the road is like playing roulette with the grim reaper, you just gotta run and hope for the best because no cars are going to stop for you! The scooters are scary too, you can start riding one at age 14, and a lot of people don't wear helmets even though they are a legal requirement. I even saw a family of four, the two parents and two kids all squashed together on one scooter!

Siracusa

I got to Palermo around 9pm, and headed off with my hand-drawn map to find the hostel. I stayed in a university student dorm that takes in tourists over summer. I think any NZ students that complain about university accommodation should get sent on exchange here. Spartan describes it accurately, with decor from the 60s and bad lighting, and a corridor that wouldn't be amiss in a horror movie. If you like paying exorbitant prices (although admittedly less exorbitant than all other hostels in Italy) to sleep in a dirty sauna with background noise akin to the sounds produced by a small highway, then this is the hostel for you. If not, then I really wouldn't recommend it!

Palermo

I headed out to try and find some food, but walking around Palermo at night was the only time in seven months that I've felt a little afraid for my safety, and I've wandered around all sorts of neighborhoods late at night and hung around train stations waiting for buses in the early hours of the morning without being concerned. So, I employed all my 'avoid dodgy looking people and try to blend in' tactics, and went back pretty quickly. I couldn't sleep because of noise on the street, so I wandered down to the bar in the courtyard, which was full of all of the Italian students studying there over summer and a lonely french tourist who I spent a few hours talking to, before I headed to bed at 2am.

Siracusa

I woke to the alarm at 6am, remembered how much traveling I had to do that day, and instantly regretted drinking that last beer the night before! I had been told by everyone I'd asked that the bus to Palermo airport left every half hour, on the hour, but as I've already said, schedules don't really exist in Italy, and after waiting for 45 minutes the bus departed. I'm always a 'better safe than sorry' person that gets there really early and waits ages in the airport, but seeing as this flight was so early I'd planned on getting there a little later than usual. This was a bad experiment to do in a country like Italy, because then with the bus issues and traffic jams I ended up as one of the last people to get through check-in and got really stressed out.

The flight back was ok, I landed at Weeze just after noon, and got a bus and train to Dusseldorf ok. The weather here in Germany is still terrible, all grey and raining and I didn't take a coat with me to Italy so I was freezing! I had an hour and a half to kill there and went to an internet cafe and then for a walk, only just making it back in time to get my next train.

Siracusa

I got back to Gottingen just after 7pm but had missed the bus to Harste by about five minutes and waited nearly an hour for the next one, so I was pretty shattered by the time I got home. Its funny how little it takes for a place to feel like home to me now, but Harste really does, I love it here and am looking forward to a few last days here before I take off again.

Siracusa

All in all, I really enjoyed visiting Italy. It felt like a real holiday, being somewhere so hot and sunny and being near the sea really relaxed me a lot. But, I don't know if I could live there. Far from the chilled out lifestyle that Italy is known for, I actually found being there quite stressful. Not only was it stressful having to do things like take buses and trains and post parcels in a country with poor infrastructure, meaning I was constantly worried that something would go wrong and I'd miss a plane or whatever, but I also got quite worked up just by the way Italian people tend to disobey rules and behave in a manner that seems rude to NZers! So a great place to holiday, but maybe not a good retirement spot!

More photos of Italy are here.

Sicily, Italy - day one

Lunch in Palermo

I arrived at Palermo airport at 9am on Thursday, and managed to find the bus going into Palermo without too much difficulty. Driving in from the airport you could see piles and piles of garbage littering the side of the highway, like all of the houses in the area were just dumping it there, and stray plastic bags blowing in the wind. In the city itself there a big dumpsters but they are absolutely overflowing with rubbish that hasn't been collected, and stray dogs get into it all and tip them over. I don't think I've ever been in a city that's so dirty, even compared to developing countries in Central America.

Palermo

I also noticed the hills. Unlike most of Europe that I've travelled through, Sicily is not flat! Its very hilly, and I love being near the sea again, after living in a harbour city for four years it doesn't feel right to me to be inland. The landscape is very yellow and brown, it looks like the drier parts of Costa Rica and was really different after Germany.

shop in Palermo

I also quickly noticed the difference between German and Italian transport systems. In Germany, trains and buses run to a schedule found on one website, and you can usually download maps of the stations that show you where the various buses from. They apologise when a train is a couple of minutes late, and only the day before I got mad about waiting 57 minutes for a bus after missing one...

apartments in Siracusa

Italy is a completely different story. Schedules and websites don't really exist. Francesca had told me how to say 'I need to take the bus to ____" in Italian, and it was armed only with this that I eventually found my way to the bus stop for Siracusa. I asked some guys sitting outside a bar about it, which provoked a stand-up-in-each-others-faces argument between themselves that I quickly backed away from, but eventually I found it, only to learn that there was a strike on (Francesca had given me that work in Italian too!) and there was no bus until 2pm.

Palermo waterfront

So I spent four hours wandering around the city. There is a big waterfront, kinda like in Wellington, except strewn with grafitti and rubbish and a few sunbathers in very tiny swimsuits. Without a map, and lugging my bag around in the 35 degree heat I didn't walk too far, just around the waterfront, through part of the old section of town with cool alleyways and sidestreets, and through the produce market.

myself and Francesca

I spent a lot of time looking for a cafe that didn't look like either an expensive tourist trap or a dive that the locals wouldn't appreciate a local entering, but the one I went into in the end was quite nice, the guy was really friendly and asked where I was from. Italian isn't that hard for me to understand, as it's quite similar to Spanish, but having never experienced the language before I didn't even know how to order a coffee! I kept talking a mix of spanish and english and hoping for the best, but my head is such a mess of different languages now and a lot of german kept popping out!

Siracusa waterfront

After an expresso that I swear was the same size as the dregs I would leave behind in a normal coffee and a tasty ham, tomato and mozzarella roll, I headed back to the train station, the 4am start, long walk and the heat catching up on me. There, I brought an english newspaper from the day before and sat reading until the bus came. It was late, and a lot of buses were all departing at the same time and from the same place, so the street because madness with buses honking at each other and stopping in the middle of the road, holding up all of the traffic and the other buses while everyone boarded. Some english tourists kept laughing and shaking their heads and wondering if anyone could possibly invent a worse system!

Playing canoe polo in the sea between old and new Siracusa

I got to Siracusa just before 6pm. Francesca lives here with her parents, she was an AFS student in Wellington for six months in 2009. She met me at the bus stop and we walked back to her place, she lives on the island of Ortigia, the old city centre, linked to the newer part of Siracusa by bridges. As we walked past, some canoe polo teams were playing in the channel, with goals rigged up on the two bridges - one ball that missed the goal bounced off a car crossing the bridge! Its pretty cool, much cleaner than Palermo with beautiful old architecture. Their apartment is in the old servants quarters of a noble house built in the 1700s. It has a terrace up the top overlooking Siracusa, so we sat out there and I ate cheese and vegetables and bread, and then we walked around Ortigia for awhile.

View through one of the doorways in Siracusa

We visited the main square and looked at the church, town hall and various plazas, but what I like best is the waterfront, its much nicer than the one in Palermo, with a big walkway and a lot of superyachts berthed along it. I also love the huge doorways that open onto a whole other scene, like another street or a plaza full of restaurant tables, and the buildings that were once very elaborate but have now fallen into decay. The sun was just starting to come down, my favorite time of day, and all of the old men were sitting out by their doorsteps chatting. It was completely different from Palermo, and my opinion of Italy soared! Just around the corner was a former bakery, burnt out by the mafia after refusing to pay protection money though, its kind of weird to actually see that sort of thing.

Dinner on the terrace with the canadian neighbours

We had dinner on the terrace again, with Francesca's mum, and her canadian neighbor and friend. They were really nice and it was good to chat away after spending so much time by myself in Harste! We had two types of pasta, bread and cheese, and a whole lot of vegetables, things like eggplant and grilled capsicum, which I loved, and wine and home-made sangria full of fruit. Francesca's parents run a bar/bakery/ice cream shop, so we had an assortment of different desserts to try out, things like chocolate-dipped balls of icecream, and layered icecream cakes.

Sunset in Siracusa

We finished off the day by wandering around Ortigia again to see what it looked like by night with two of Francesca's friends, and then I collapsed into bed absolutely shattered around midnight after a day that started out stressfully and ended really pleasantly!

Photos of Sicily are here.

I got the disposable camera I took to Festival La Semo developed, photos from that are here.

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

I left Harste really early on Wednesday morning and arrived in Dusseldorf around noon. Dusseldorf is on the western side of Germany, close to Cologne and the border with the Netherlands and Belgium. It's the capital of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has a population of 1.5 million and is supposed to be the city with the highest standard of living in Germany. It's really famous for having a good nightlife and amazing modern architecture.

I wasn't really that fussed on Dusseldorf. To me, it feels a lot like Cologne, which I didn't really like, they both have a kind of grey, dreary feel to them, I think its just the old architectural style of that area, the buildings and their rooves are grey or brown, whereas here around Harste buildings are white or pale colours with red or orange rooves. Dusseldorf also seemed full of drunks, homeless and illegal immigrants, and men who yell out at girls wearing skirts. The people there don't seem particularly friendly either. Once I was photographing a balloon and this guy saw what I was doing and walked over and stomped on it, and a couple of times I had to dodge creepy men who were following me around the city centre.

The city centre was, like I said, really similar to Cologne, although here in Dusseldorf you really notice construction going on everywhere, its a growing city. I wandered around through the old town for a bit, which was pretty unremarkable, and up and down the riverfront. There was a huge fair happening over on the opposite river bank but the weather wasn't great so I didn't head over. I did really like the bridges and part of the waterfront area that has these great iron pillars sticking up out of it, I took a lot of photos there. I went up the Rheinturm, their version of the Skytower and had a look around. The weather wasn't really good for that kind of thing, but you could notice some of the amazing architecture from above, and a lot of smokestacks on the horizon (this state is kind of the industrial backbone of Germany).

I visited the Film Museum but was disappointed. It's really basic, with displays on things like explaining the different type of camera shot, something I learnt back in primary school in NZ, and it isn't as interactive as I expected. Finally, I wandered around the old port area, where a lot of the huge modern buildings have been built recently to turn it into a new business district. This was my favourite part of Dusseldorf, they have some amazing buildings there, especially where they have incorporated old parts of the port into a new building.

So around 5pm I gave up on Dusseldorf and headed back to the train station. I was flying out of Weeze airport, another one of Ryanair's middle-of-no-where locations, at 6.30am the following morning and had to sleep out there. I caught the hourly train to Weeze, where with typical german efficiency an hourly bus departs a few minutes later to the airport. However, about 20 of us that got off the train running 3 minutes late discovered that in typical German rigidity the bus had stuck to its schedule and left without us.

57 minutes later it returned and dropped us out at Weeze, which like Frankfurt Hann is a former military base. Because it's so far away from everything there is a hostel out there, but its a weird one, you get the key from the airport and then walk 15 minutes across the abandoned base to one of the barracks, where you let yourself in. All around the hostel are disused barracks with broken windows and doors swinging in the wind, it would make a good horror movie set! I struggled to get much sleep with other people coming and going all night, and then was up at 4am to go to Italy!

More photos are here.