Posts tagged ‘travel’

Valencia was the perfect place to start my trip, immediately reminding me what I love about Europe. Arriving in the city centre at 9 on a Saturday evening (after taking the metro from the airport for a tenth of what the same trip cost me in London and not even a quarter of the equivalent in Melbourne), I was immediately struck by the buildings around me — so beautifully designed and ornate, so varied in style and each, no doubt, with such a long and interesting history.

Valencia is a city of narrow, seemingly randomly arranged streets — the buildings apparently telling the road where to go rather than the other way round — leading into square after square with a church, a fountain and al fresco dining and drinking. The layout meant navigation was a little tricky and we got lost about four times within my first half hour there, but down every alleyway we stumbled there was a wealth of inviting hole-in-the-wall bars. Being Saturday night the streets were throbbing with people, getting busier and busier until we called it a night around 1.30 (with me not quite over my jet lag).

Sunday of course was a different story with barely a shop or restaurant open. Churches however were so we gatecrashed Sunday mass at the cathedral and saw the only officially Vatican sanctioned version of the Holy Grail. As grails go, it was quite impressive but some Pythonesque humour would have livened the service up no end.

Next we headed to the IVAM — the Valencia museum of modern art. The highlights included the work of Eduardo Kac whose pieces included a rabbit genetically crossed with a jellyfish so as to glow green under UV light and a microbe whose genetic code had been altered to include the text of Genesis (transcribed first, of course, into Morse code before being translated into the Gs, As, Ts and Cs of DNA). Said microbe was then placed under lights which the audience member could control to induce mutations in the microbe’s genome and hence the words of God himself. Such thought provoking work was only marginally surpassed by an exhibit of mannequins sporting Marge Simpson style 19th century hair dos, some complete with their own model boats.

A Valencian Sunday having offered us just about all it was going to, we managed to find one open shop, a bottle of vodka and saw the day out with it, ending up dancing in one of the city’s many squares to a busker’s rendition of “New York, New York”.

One of the more curious aspects of Valencia is its river. It is by no means a small river — some 100 metres across and complete with the large stone bridges you would expect to find accompanying such a river in an old European city. It is however lacking insofar as it contains no water — the Valencians apparently having awoken one morning to have found it all gone. Struck with the quandry of what to do with this now dry river bed, they responded well, building parks, football pitches, a science museum, a centre for the performing arts and, with more than a hint of irony, an aquarium.

The complex in which the last three are found is an architectural marvel of space age smooth white curves reminiscent of the Sydney opera house stretching as far as the eye can see. The aquarium is one of the best of its kind I have seen showing examples of aquatic creatures from across the world — most stunningly the Arctic section with walruses and Beluga whales.

We decided to end our time in Valencia with a trip to a vegetarian tapas bar. The concept of vegetarianism leads the average Spaniard to give a look not dissimilar to that which would result if you showed him your Flat Earth Society membership card. Stating in a restaurant ‘Soy vegetarino. No carno. No pescaito.’ guarantees little more than being served a ham omlette. The people who ran this place, however, are clearly more enlightened and the cheese, marinated peppers and mushrooms we are served are absolutely delicious and make the perfect finale to our time in Valencia.

The next day it is on to Castellón de la Plana and the Tanned Tin music festival…

After spotting the awesomeness that is Lightbox 2 online, I thought, I should get me some of that for the games screenshots on atypicalreview. And I installed it, and it was good. Or rather, it was good on everything but PC Firefox (except at my work, where PC Firefox could handle it). I went through many amusing days of saying to Andy — look at this! and having him ask What? When I click, it just loads the image by itself.

And then I thought; this stuff would be awesome for our canada pictures too. So here’s the relaunch of Andy’s fantastic journal of our travels at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004.

And at around this time, I discovered that PC Firefox seems to prefer it if you load the javascript for our stats program, Mint, first, and then the three Lightbox javascripts after that. Amusingly, IE started complaining at that point that it liked things the other way. So I’ve had to do a few IE tests to get things in the right order.

Of course, being a bit of a Javascript n00b, I have absolutely no idea why it’s doing this — but at least it’s fixed. The Canada Gallery should work on both IE and PC Firefox (and everything else). The Warrior Within screenshots might not work in IE at time of writing. Or, neither of them might be working for you at all. Let me know if there are any issues. Except for there being no thumbnails for any other game reviews save the one I sent you to. I know about that one.

[update: I switched from Lightbox to Litebox. The difference is subtle but speedy. I also discovered that I was an idiot; there was a mint extension called outclicks causing the javascript issues. It’s since been updated to fix such issues.]

My travels are over and I’m back in a country where despite the many apocalyptic events happening throughout the world, a fast horse apparently deserves the first ten minutes of every news bulletin.

The remainder of my time in India went well. As promised, I rode off in to the desert on a camel and returned 24 hours later with a very sore arse. I visited a few more forts and palaces and now know far more than I ever needed to about Rajasthani history. I went to a number of very different cities — Jodhpur which was a nice place whose major claim to fame is that most of the buildings are painted blue, Udaipur which is a beautiful town on the edge of a lake and a good place to relax before I headed on to Ahmedabad, the most polluted city I have ever been to where my eyes were burning after 10 seconds outside and finally Mumbai.

Mumbai was a good place to finish. While still being very clearly Indian, it is India’s most westernised city with alcohol being far more accepted, people more often wearing western clothes and women actually speaking and being spoken to. It also bans rickshaws from most of the city meaning all the would-be rickshaw touts seem to have become drug dealers instead.

The absolute highlight of my time in India was the food which was amazing, particularly for a vegie like me. The restaurants class themselves as either ‘pure veg’, ‘veg’ or ‘non-veg’ and even non-veg tended to have loads of vegie food. It all tasted great, full of flavour and very fresh with my favourite dish being masala dosa — a pancake filled with spicy mashed potato. After such spicy, flavoursome food everything back here is tasting a bit bland.

But its not all bad. It’s great to look at the sky and see blue rather than haze. Driving down a three lane road with only three lanes of traffic moving down it is certainly novel and the sound of silence (rather than car horns) has never sounded so good. Anyway, must go — a newsflash on the highlights of Makybe Diva’s first day of retirement has just appeared on Ninemsn.

This India place is pretty hectic. Appartently they have over a billion people here, and I think about half of them have asked me if I want to ride in their rickshaw. After about a week here I am slowly getting in to the Indian swing of things. My first few days were pretty bewildering — Delhi isn’t the easiest place in the world to find yourself in after the relative familarity of London. And after Delhi, Agra was equally challenging. The Taj Mahal is just as astonishing as everyone says it is but inevitably the more tourists there are, the more touts there are and the more aggresively they go about their touting. There I had one rickshaw driver following me around for two hours insisting I wanted to ride in his rickshaw. After that Jaipur has been pleasantly calm. It is still a big city — 2.5 million people (and a proper 2.5 mil city not a ‘somewhere between Melbourne and Adelaide 2.5 mil’) — with eight lanes of traffic trying to squeeze down a two lane road.

My more enjoyable time in Jaipur is in a large part due to Satendra, my new Indian friend and rickshaw driver who will actually take me where I want to go rather than where he will get the most commission. Yesterday he drove me round all the sites of Jaipur — most impressively the Amber Fort — about my fifth Indian Fort but by far the most impressive, nestled away on a hillside with hundreds of rooms to explore, many of which seemed like they hadn’t been found in a century or two, the Monkey valley where I made the serious faux-pas of hitting the bell in the Hindu temple with my head (they don’t plan for people over 5’10” here) which apparently meant the Hindu gods would curse me, and with 30 million of them that can’t be good, and some astronomical observatory built by one of the kings in which he felt the need to include a seven storey high sundial.

Anyway a couple of hours it is on to Jaisalmer, a desert city from where you can go even more deserty by heading on a camel safari out in to the middle of nowhere. If I survive expect another update from India in a week or so…

Over the last week I have found myself walking around London laughing to myself at the ludicrous contradictions of the place. It is one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world but is at times still so very British. Its police have apparently have a shoot-to-kill policy but hardly any of them actually have guns (probably just as well). Its people would probably come second only to the Russians in a drinking competition (and at least they have the politeness to drink their bottles of vodka in the confines of their own home) yet all the pubs must shut by 11 (although this will finally change in a few months time). No one has gone to church in decades yet on a Sunday no shop is allowed to be open for more than six hours.

Whenever anyone asks me where I lived in the UK, I always say London. While this is technically correct, I lived in an outer suburb about as far from everything you would think of as London that you can get. It makes Brighton in Melbourne seem like a buzzing centre of excitement and entertainment, a bohemian, free-thinking metropolis. When we learnt leisure activities in French class, the teacher went round the class doing an oral exercise:

Teacher: Where do you live?
Student: (insert name of home suburb here)
Teacher: What is there to do in (home suburb)?
Student: (list of such activities)

When he came to me and I said Petts Wood, he burst out laughing and answered the second question himself: ‘Rien! Rien! Rien!’. After five minutes of him rolling around on floor laughing it was starting to become a little scary and we were all quite relieved when the bell rang. A few years later when I started learning German with the same teacher I thought it safer to answer Orpington, the very slightly less boring neighbouring suburb. I make a point of going back to visit Petts Wood each time I come to London just to make sure it is still as dead as ever. Somehow it is comforting to know that in this crazy, crazy world of ours, there is such a place even in one of the most vibrant, exciting, interesting cities there is.

As my time in London is rapidly drawing to a close, it is probably time I filed my New York review, so here it is:

New York is the world city. It is after all in the US which, as Copernicus proved, is the centre of the universe. It manages to cram a little piece of all the world’s societies on to one small island (and bar about four hours in not-very-Brooklyny bits of Brooklyn and 1.5 minutes on Staten Island, Manhattan is ‘all’ I saw). Despite the masses of tourists it is very much a worker’s city and, as my aunt pointed out to me, to truly understand its psyche you would really need to be working there. As I said in my previous message it has cleaned up a lot, almost to the point where it has maybe lost a little of what made it special. Regardless, it is still a great city — when you shove 15 million people from all around the world into a space the size of Melbourne you are bound to get something pretty special.

Pros: A little bit of every culture/society all mixed up, good CD shops, good live music, good bars, easy to follow if slightly unoriginal street names.

Cons: For me it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

Score: 7.5/10

(I asked Gisela also to give NY a score out of ten. She asked what the criteria were. I said whatever she wanted them to be. She said that was a fucking stupid idea — giving something a score based on an unknown criteria — and refused to do so. I pointed out that criteria was in fact the plural, criterion was the singular. She punched me. I am therefore forced to give what I think Gisela’s score based on the unknown criteria I believe she would select would be: 9.5/10.)

Almost everyone I spoke to in the States, in two of the most liberal cities in the country — from bartenders to members of country/hip-hop fusion bands (a genre that, should it ever gain any success will no doubt be dubbed hick-hop) to homeless gay Irishmen — was at pains to make it clear what an evil man they thought W was. Once they found out that I was visiting both coasts they also wanted to ensure I had no intension of going anywhere near the mass of red states between SF and NY.

Meanwhile, Fox News ensures the other 50.01% of the nation gets its voice heard with its 24/7 spouting of hatred of anything liberal. While none of this is news, and has been widely reported, I was still shocked at how divided the country is and just how much disgust there is for the other side. It seems that last year’s elections have totally destroyed many people’s faith in democracy and their fellow countrypeople in much the same way that the Tampa election did in Australia. Speaking of which, you will be pleased to hear that Howard’s ‘me too’-ing has not been in vain and our own evil leader’s role in screwing up the world is well known here.

Ok, I’m in an internet cafe with fifteen minutes to type so you can expect a less rambling entry than normal.

New York, having about 15 times the population of San Francisco, is less easily summarisable in a couple sentences. Indeed, that is probably the thing I have noticed most about it. Even London and Paris have defining, destinctly London/Paris characteristics which you find throughout their many, varied suburbs. In the five days I have been in NY though, I have been unable to identify such an all-encompassing vibe. Each part of town, and I have only really seen Manhattan, could be in a completely different city.

The thing that has surprised me most is how much friendlier it is than I expected. I knew Giuliani had cleaned up a lot of the crime but the streets and subway feel safer here than in some parts of SF. And while there are the yellow cab filled, crowded, noisy streets around Times Square, there are many parts of downtown Manhattan, including the area we are staying which are distinctly green and suburban.

So far we have mainly just been wandering the streets of the different parts of town: the Financial district, paying the obligatory visit to the World Trade Centre site, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, Times Square, Broadway, Fifth Ave, Central Park… In our remaining two days we still need to do the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

Anyway, time is running short. More updates (and possibly photos) soon.

In many ways San Francisco is very like Melbourne. They are both bayside cities with temperate climates, no particularly exciting tourist attractions (OK, SF has Alcatraz but that is about it), but a very pleasant, laid-back, comfortable atmosphere. I am sure San Francisco’s weather forecasters also claim it is ‘the world’s most liveable city’. While SF is much smaller — less than a million people — it does feel a lot more like a major city but is still very manageable.

Pros: Great record shops. Great live music. Good pubs serving good beer. Nearby good wine region. Great friendly atmosphere. Plenty of open spaces. One of the world’s best public transport systems. Good restaurants.

Cons: Umm, this might be a struggle. Very hilly making it difficult to travel by foot (not that you really need to with the public transport). Lots of homeless people. I think that is about it…

Score: 9/10

On to New York…

Unfortunately my time in San Francisco is already drawing to a close. As you might guess I have spent a fair chunk of the last few days at concerts (Feist, Cocorosie, Antony & the Johnsons) and in record shops (bringing my grand total for CDs purchased so far to 42). It is just as well the allowance for goods you can bring back into Australia without paying tax was recently increased from $400 to $900.

In the inevitable in-between time moving from one music related event to another I also did some other stuff, including:

• Visited Fisherman’s Wharf, the most touristy part of town, from where the ferries to Alcatraz leave. Surprisingly, it was only moderately tacky and actually quite attractive. The highlight was the most amazing musical instrument shop I have ever been in with weird and wonderful instruments from all over the world. (If I didn’t have 2/3 of the world still to travel around (and a spare few grand), I would have now been the proud owner of a dulcimer, a gender, and a sitar.);

• Visited Berkeley. Unfortunately the physics part is over at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab which was well out of the way of the CD shops I was heading for so I just wandered around the campus for a bit. The grounds were very impressive with lots of grand buildings looking like they must have many smart people inside. Since the uni year is just underway here there were lots of club sign up desks. I have never been more thankful for the hours of squash training Tom and I have put in than when fleeing from the ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses of Berkeley’. Even knowing I wasn’t a student of the uni didn’t seem to discourage them.

• Put a 9V battery and my keys in the same pocket. An hour or two later, when the combination created a short circuit, my first thought was “How perculiar, my right thigh seems to be heating up”. My second thought was “Ow, ow, ow, my right thigh is burning hot. Am I about to spontaneously combust?” Removing my wallet from my pocket and seeing no reason that it should have increased in temperature so rapidly, it seemed spontaneous combustion was the most likely explanation. Eventually, as I was bidding this mortal coil my final farewells, I discovered the culprit was said battery, took it out of my pocket and then flung it across the room as it began burning my hand, getting more than a few strange looks from the other people in the queue waiting to go in to the concert. I now have a hole burnt in my pants pocket and a very sore right thigh. I don’t recommend you repeat the experiment.