Urban Magic

Stratford-Upon-Avon

Posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

What to say about Stratford Upon Avon?

It’s a toy town.

I mean, make no mistake, as toy towns go, it’s a very nice toy town.  For a start, it’s the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company which is, as previously established, a Good Thing.  It’s got some of the most excellent theatre going on that you are likely to see for £5 of your English pounds (if you’re under-25, that is…) and this is its major draw. Stratford was the birthplace of our Mr Shakespeare and oh boy has he left his mark on the town.  You will be lucky to leave without buying a mug entitled ‘Yea Olde Stratford’ or possibly a tea-towel bearing the serene, almost enigmatic face of the scribbler.  Whether Shakespeare imagined when writing Hamlet that his face would be used for drying dishes in the future, no one will ever know.  You are likely to have a drink in a pub somehow related to his works, or maybe stay in a bed and breakfast honouring his plays, or possibly even have a local drink that is somehow derived in his honour – yeap, there’s no getting round it, Stratford is heavy on the dude.

But personally, for me, Stratford Upon Avon is all about the swans.  I mean it’s about patching and theatre and lighting too, but if you take those out of the equation and for a moment play purely the tourist, then it’s about the swans.  Spend any great amount of time working in the town and you quickly discover that besides the theatre, the place you are likely to spend most of your time is along the canal or the river, looking at swans and listening to brass band music played on a weekend, or to the cricket scores being blasted out over a loud speaker that can probably be heard half way to Warwick.  I lived in Stratford for just under a month, and when not working, my main occupation was to sit by the river and watch boats and swans go by and read about witch hunts in the early modern period and write plays.  (All of the above seeming the most apt response to being in the town.)  On a weekend there’s a market by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where you could buy anything from Indian dreamcatchers to home-made soaps with bits of raspberry in, and of course there was the perpetual traffic of little tourist boats paddling up and down the waterways.

Other than that, though, there really isn’t much to do for a stranger in town.  If you’re a local the situation is clearly different – the family I was lodging with seemed abuzz with perpetual activity, from local amateur productions of plays to continual production of baked goods to raise money or test recipes or just have legendary ‘pudding parties’ in local villages, to football matches and skating challenges, not to mention while working 9-5 – but as a stranger whose sole occupation is based around cable and electricity, your day off can quickly become something of a muddle.  Unless you’re already involved in local activities, and unless you’re sticking around long enough to get involved, there’s really only so much soap you can buy or so many Shakespearean monuments you can visit.  The near-by hubs of alternative activity – Leamington Spa, Birmingham or Warwick – aren’t much to write home about if you’re by yourself, and quickly the project on a day off becomes one of filling it.  My first serious day off work was spent in quest for a cheap haircut, under the slightly naive belief that everything was cheaper outside London and that after a year, even I should probably consider getting a trim.  I eventually received a haircut for free, from a lovely trainee hairdresser from Zimbabwe who admitted as she practiced her art that she had never once seen a show by the RSC and didn’t really have any interest in theatre whatsoever.  Her bosses laughed and said they’d been invited to see the latest show at the theatre for free, but had drunk a little bit too much before going in so didn’t really get the plot and prefered modern dramas…

“Stratford is a dump,” was the opinion of another local resident.  “No one who works in Stratford would ever actually live in Stratford.  You’ve got to live in the countryside, which is beautiful, and keep boats, and never, ever go into Stratford unless you’re actually being paid.”  In the coffee shop which I quickly established as my base of operations on those days when work merely consisted of changeovers and where I would sit for hours writing and nursing one much-loved muffin, even the character of the tourists became kinda apparent.  This is a town where your visitor will not only complain about the level of the music being played in the back room of the cafe, but they will name the composer and opus as they do it to politely request that the works of Mr Mozart, while very fine, be turned down a little so they can hear themselves think.  Outside the cafe was a regular pair of living statues, complete with gold-sprayed ruffs and Tudor trousers (not a flattering fashion…) who would occasionally jerk into life, inducing screams from passing gaggles of teenage tourist girls in headscarves or neat school uniforms, who’d never seen such things before.

So all things considered… with my best tourist face on… Stratford Upon Avon is probably worth a weekend of your time, particularly if you’ve booked your tickets to the theatre first, but make sure to see the swans, avoid the souvenir shops, and if you’re staying for long, pack your football boots and a good recipe book first…

Cross Country via Westfields

Posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 in Cities and Adventures | 3 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’ve been off to Derby this weekend for the Alt. Literature Festival, and very fun it was too.  But this was the first time I’ve ever attempted to get to one of these events from a base that wasn’t London – in this case, my journey went from Stratford Upon Avon to Birmingham to Derby and back again.
I’ve always loved trains.  As a kid we used to go on holiday as a family of about nine by train, taking the sleeper from Calais to places like Toulouse, Rome and Bologna.  Toulouse was famous for the number of times my Mum was sick there – it seemed to be a habit – Rome was immortalised for the time my parents went second class and I went third – and of course Calais International was notorious for the institution known only as the Terminal Cafe, home of the worst food you have ever eaten in western Europe.  It made the greasy spoons of Glasgow seem like lobster and garlic in comparison.  In more recent years I’ve dabbled with the TGV from Paris to Montpellier, and the overnight train to Vienna and Berlin, changing at Cologne.  No one does mad castles clinging to sheer cliff faces like the German princes did in the Rhine valley.  It’s an ambition of mine to take the train to Istanbul one day, and perhaps one day even try taking the train across parts of the United States, where there is a train to take.  Planes are cool; but oddly enough you don’t feel the speed like you do on a high speed express, nor is the view as much to write home about after the first eight thousand feet.
Back to the trip to Derby… as a Londoner I am naturally pre-disposed to assume that a) all roads lead to London and b) only a fool would take a road in the opposite direction.  It’s therefore something of a treat for me to discover that it was surprisingly easy to get from Stratford to Derby and back; and what strange options it turns out are available for doing so!  The departures board at Birmingham New Street is rich with routes to Edinburgh, London, Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield, Nottingham and Coventry calling at Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, Durham, Luton, Exeter, Weymouth… once you’re through the ticket barrier it is more than possible to get pretty much anywhere anyhow, changing in bizarre and unexpected places to get there.  I always bring a book to read on a train and invariably spend the journey looking out of the window instead for a glimpse of isolated farms and villages, power stations sat at the end of perfectly straight roads in the middle of empty fields, church towers peeking up through trees, motorways where the traffic seems to go backwards as we overtake it, city suburbs and cathedrals, rivers and estuaries.  I love changing trains; during the volcanic ash business that shut down Europe’s airspace a few months back, I heard one story in particular that caught my imagination.  It was told on the radio about a charity that deals in organ transplants – particularly, organising the transportation of donor organs to patients from Europe to the UK.  When European airspace was shut down, there were obviously still patients in need of life-saving and urgent organ transplants, and one in particular who was just a few days from death and who needed an organ urgently.  The charity had secured a matching organ, but needed to get it from Poland to the UK without flying in less than 48 hours otherwise the organ (and thus patient) would die.  Needless to say, all the ports and stations of Europe were packed with people trying to get back on the already over-taxed services, so the charity put out a message on twitter and within an hour had all the offers of seats on trains that they needed.  As a writer, put yourself inside the mind of whoever the poor sap was who had to make this journey – a non-stop rush from Poland to the UK by train – Eurostar and trans-continental express – not quite knowing where your next ticket was coming from, with the whole of Europe trying to nab your seat, and a box under your arm containing a slowly dying human organ upon which someone else’s life depends.  Hopefully you’ll never look at the people changing trains quite the same way again…
On the subject of changing trains… my only beef with the Birmingham-Derby route was the fact that my changes seemed to perpetually involve going via a Westfield’s Shopping Centre.  Between Birmingham Moor Street and Birmingham New Street you are cordially invited to walk through one of these anonymous white monoliths to shopping on your way to your connection, and knock me down with a feather if between Derby Station and the Lit Festival there wasn’t another one, looming up on the horizon like a monument to commercialism!  As a kid I used to play in Dover Castle, where my uncle was a warden for a while, running up and down the corridors of King Henry II and all his probably rather chilly but very well exercised descendents.  I got very good at knowing which identical stairwell of identical dark damp stone led to which precise room of white-washed arches and arrow-slit windows, and myself and my two playmates could run circles round our weary parents with no trouble at all.  I wonder if in five hundred years time, future generations of kids will wander through the anonymous dark halls of historically preserved Westfields playing hide-and-seek among the remains of plastic mannequins and padded couches while sonorous tour guides pronounce on their themes of kings and castles long gone?

To Lincoln

Posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2010 in Cities and Adventures, Writing | 3 Comments

So, I should start out by confessing… I have no idea where Lincoln is.  My knowledge of the UK beyond the M25 is very much defined by mainline railway stations.  I can just about muddle by in cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and Cardiff, have a vague understanding of where Exeter, Norwich, Dover, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are, and can sorta wave you towards the Lake District if I really have to, give or take a few hundred miles.  Then there are cities like Durham, York, Reading and Coventry, all which exist in my mind as train announcements indicating a place that I am passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Lincoln is none of these.  For a start, imagine my shock to get my ticket and discover that I actually had to change trains at no less unlikely a place than a town called Newark North Gate in the middle of ??? in the vicinity of ???.  Changing mainline trains – already this had me a little unnerved.  And it’s no ordinary train you catch at Newark North Gate – oh no… it’s a one-carriage train, a sorta go-kart for Network Rail, a thing with probably the same standing capacity as your average double decker bus that clatters through a flat landscape of fields, level crossings and occasional industrial sprawl.

My trip to Lincoln was justified by going to the Lincoln Book Festival – where, I gotta admit, I had a very lovely time and ate more chocolate mini bites than the mind can comfortably conceive.  It was also my first trip as Kate Griffin, which led to a certain amount of confusion at the hotel as I tried to work out and explain exactly who I was and why my signature seemed to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the name on my check-in card.  (If anyone has any legal views on the thorny question of whether it is against the law to sign a hotel check-in card with a perfectly fine and honest signature, one that just happens not to be the same on your passport, then please let me know.)

I’d been advised to take a taxi from the station to the hotel, but looking at google maps I had one of those rash moments of confidence that goes ‘I know what to do!  Find the cathedral and walk towards it and everything will be fine!’  And let me add, navigationally speaking, everything was perfectly fine… found the cathedral, found the hotel no problem… but I was a little let down by my history degree.  I should perhaps have looked a little closer at the map and thought ‘hum… a medieval city… a cathedral… a castle… now what do I know about the building habits of medieval lords…?’  Alas, this reasoning failed me, and it was only as I slogged up the aptly named ‘Steep Hill’ that the recollection of just how much those pesky medieval architects liked being uphill of their enemies struck me.  My survival of the Steep Hill experience owes more than a little to the magic of ventolin inhalers.

Lincoln (she says from her sagely 24 hour experience of the place) seems essentially to be divided in two.  At the bottom of the hill is a fairly average reasonably-sized town, complete with shopping centre, clothes shops, more charity shops than the eye can perceive (and as a fan of charity shops, this pleased me) chippies and one-way traffic systems designed to send any driver into apoplexy.  Arriving on a Friday evening at around 6 p.m. the lower part of the town was oddly silent – shut doors and closed shutters, empty pedestrianized curling streets inhabited only on the odd corner by the traditional feral youth that is quaintly more observable in someone else’s town than your own.  Leaving the same way on Saturday afternoon it was all elbows go to push through crowds of shoppers, that seemed to have poured out of every crack in every brick to fill their bags with goodies.

As you head uphill a change begins to take over the streets, subtle at first and then growing more and more noticeable.  Shopping chains give way to art galleries selling bowls of semi-precious stone and pictures of flowers caught in heavy cold winds.  Second hand bookshops start peeking out with large sections on local folklore and history.  There’s the obligatory not-quite-magic-shop selling brightly coloured dreamcatchers, incense and smelly candles; little shops built in straight on steep cobbled roads offering cream teas and home-made pots of chilli; shops offering home-made stationary and antique shops selling five different kinds of three hundred year old grandfather clock.  Suddenly you look around at the top of the worst part of the incline and over your shoulder you’ve got a view above the buildings towards green countryside and there are cobbles beneath your feet and suddenly everything is a little bit Yea Olde and Traditionale Crafte, albeit for the most part with the sensible good taste not to proclaim itself that way.  And of course, there’s a cathedral.  What I think Eddie Izzard would probably describe as a huge sod-off cathedral.  It’s a sneaky thing – from the station you could half believe that you weren’t going to bust an artery getting there, and from the rectangle where on Saturday there is a farmers market you might almost think that it’s actually quite a modest cathedral, and once you’re inside and looking down the length of it you realise that actually, this is a TARDIS in cathedral form and if you did pay your £5 entry fee there’d probably only be a 1/20 chance of you coming out alive.  It’s a proper gothic monster, all vaulted roof and leering, tongue-waggling stone faces carved above every arch.  Some cunning wag stuck an organ bang smack in the middle of it so as you stand at the entry point, you can’t actually see the back wall, even if there is one.  And if you’re still feeling unconvinced as to Lincoln’s historical credibility, then there’s a castle not two hundred yards away, just to make the point, albeit with a lawn for playing croquet and having tea has grown.  Around these two monuments is a street sprung up heavily with restaurants of every cuisine… although sad to say as I wandered towards the theatre where the Book Festival was happening, all I could really think of was fish and chips.

Anyhow, all things considered… an awesome 24hrs somewhere between ??? and ??? in the city of Lincoln!

District 9 – South Africa

Posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures, Misc. | 4 Comments

So, we (myself and a gentleman who’ll go by the name of TLC from hereon in…) went to see District 9.  I sort of did and sort of didn’t know what to expect; whether we were dealing with a pure blood n’ guts fest, or whether this was a different sort of science fiction movie along the lines of Moon or Cypher where 90% of the tension is in things not entirely seen or known.  As it turns out…

… something in between.

When we left the cinema at the end of the movie, we were silent.  We were silent because our ears were ringing, our heads were pounding and a lot of people had, in the last 15 minutes, been spontaneously reduced by a blast of electromagnetism to a puddle of blood and fairly explicit dribbling bits.  Finally TLC, said; ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a South African film before.’

We walked a little further, contemplating mechanical killing machines, self mutilation, angry socio-cultural forces, loss of identity, aliens with a thing for cat food, potential things yet to come and really big space ships.  Now, I have seen a few South African films – not nearly enough to pretend to be an expert, but since when did that stop a graduate in a social sciences subject from having an opinion?  And District 9 fell into a fairly strong picture I had of South African films, in that it was, essentially, about apartheid.  It was about more, of course, much, much more, and credit goes to it for many things, up to and including have the brass which very few science fiction movies do of making its aliens both truly alien, yet clearly sympathetic.  (Although yeah, I can see why the Nigerian government has issues with it – but that’s another story.)  But at the end of the day, it was about apartheid, segregation, prejudice and fear, and as such was a noble, blood-drenched, limb-splattered, cringe-making addition to the genre that left a wobble in my stomach by the end of it.

To my shame, I know very little about apartheid, despite 3 years studying history.  I know all the things that everyone knows; of arrests and riots, beatings and murders, prisons, sanctions, the ANC, Mandela – I have a distant memory of Mandela being released from prison on my birthday back when I was too young to really know or care, and being annoyed that my teacher was more excited about this fact than she was about my birthday cake.  I have visited South Africa, and in that sense, I suppose, I know a tiny, tiny shard more about the legacy of apartheid than I do about the history itself, and even then, barely a sliver.

I went to South Africa a few years ago courtesy of the Oneword reading prize, and spent a week moving between Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, talking mostly to schools, for the very noble cause of promoting childrens’ literacy, and for the much less noble cause of promoting the Horatio Lyle series that I write as Catherine Webb.  Arriving at the airport in Jo’burg I was stopped at customs and received the look of all young single females traveling alone that you always receive at customs, a look which was only exacerbated by my explaining all of the above.  I remember the smell of Jo’burg when I first stepped outside, green and verdant, as were all the cities I visited, a curious fact considering that you could stand in the bathroom in front of a sign saying ‘there is a major water shortage; please consider your use of water’ while outside the sprinklers watered the rhododendrons.  I was exceedingly well looked after, cared for all the time, the recipient of more hospitality than I’ve ever experienced in my life.  A lot of it was a bit of a blur, since the day would begin quite early (by my student standards!) and invariably end with a collapse face-first into a bed, but some impressions stand out and will stay with me I think, for the rest of my life.

I remember, for example, arriving late at night in Durban and collapsing straight into bed with the gratitude of someone who’s talked far too long and fast throughout the day.  No sooner was the light out than there was a scratching at the walls; then on the roof.  Thumping and banging that went on through the night and, having no idea what it was, my heart raced every time, since it sounded almost inside the room.  I fell asleep eventually, dreaming of all the usual monsters that an over-active fantasy writer’s imagination can conjure up in a strange land, and woke the next morning to find it was still going on.  Getting up, I went outside and found a ginger cat sat on the path outside by room, looking nothing short of terrified.  Beyond it, sat with a mango in one hand and a slice of half-eaten toast in the other, was a monkey, about knee-high, wearing the smug expression of a creature that knows size has nothing on big teeth.  The hotel was next to a monkey sanctuary, a fact greeted with wonder by me (I had never seen a monkey so close before) and irritation by the hotel managers who reported that they couldn’t stop the creatures getting into the kitchen and stealing everything they could lay their hands on.

The same day, in one of the few breaks between schools, the ladies I was with took me down to the beach, and I remember drinking a milkshake and being allowed 30 seconds to run up and down the sand in front of the ocean whooping like an idiot, just so I could say that I had.  The next trip was to a school on the other side of an area of the city called the Durban Triangle, a mess of big, busy roads, in which all travellers hide their bags.  The driving in South Africa is utterly terrifying.  Red lights are very rarely obeyed, partially out of concern for crime, but mostly, I suspect, out of habit.  The ring roads of Paris, the mopeds of northern Italy and the winding mountain roads of Southern Spain, with sheer drops on either side, hold nothing on the terror of South African roads.  I think it’s an experienced best summarised by the attitude that the rules of the road… are more sort of guidelines…

Outside every city, between the airport and the centre of Jo’burg, Cape Town and Durban, there are of course, the townships.  I hadn’t imagined how big they were, how far they stretched along the side of the roads.  From the motorway they look like cardboard cut outs made by children for a Blue Peter project, blu-tacked together out of old toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, crooked shades of beige and brown.  The fences that divide them from the motorways serve as rubbish traps, and stray too close to the townships in the car of a self-respecting middle class citizen and you get a call from a security company enquiring as to your well being.  I saw no crime in South Africa; but I saw the symptoms of it everywhere, from the parking attendants charging five rand to pace up and down a street at night to watch out for your car, from the ladies hiding their bags under their seats whenever a busy junction approached.  Asking about this, a kindly man in a book shop in Cape Town who gave me a discount in his store told me that the two most commonly stolen items from his shop were, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, Tarot cards.  There was no sense of fear; merely of a thing that was lived with, because it was there.

The organiser of the trip was intensely proud of her country, and especially her city, Johannesburg.  She took me up onto a hill between talks, and I have never seen a city so green, moisture in the leaves.  Yet from air, on the flight between Jo’burg and Durban, the land was dull red-brown all the way to the foresty hills above Durban, aptly named after dragons.  She also took me into Alexandra, one of the many townships around Jo’burg.  To this day I’ve never been sure how to describe the experience.  I freely admit that I was afraid of the townships, courtesy of the foreign and commonwealth office website, which can induce anyone to a puddle of terror just by its stern font.  And yes, by every standard that I was raised by, growing up in London, they were wretched, crooked tumbles of bricks and iron, dry mud and dirt, faces by the roadside watching as if, and perhaps because, there was nothing else left for them to do, huddles of men and woman just sat on empty plastic water barrels, watching.  But there was also something more, a sense of heat, of activity, like the calm side of an ants nest and just the tiniest pressure will break through the sand and out will come a whole, busy, bursting world of which there is no end.  Then there was the township school in Alexandra, in which I received the warmest reception of my life.  Approximately thirty students, some older than me, studying in tiny little white rooms, some of whom walked ten miles a day to get to their classes, gave me the heartiest, kindest, biggest welcome I have ever had in any corner of the earth.  I distrust people who proclaim themselves to be humbled by an experience, since it’s usually something said by politicians who’ve been caught doing something shifty, but I think in that little room in Alexandra, it’s possibly the nearest handy word I can find.

I can’t make a judgment based on what I saw; I don’t know enough, I was a stranger, and this is nothing more than a medley of pictures and feelings that I still haven’t really properly filed in my own mind.  On the way to the airport in Jo’burg, the two women I was with fell to talking about their work.  One in particular worked for charities, raising money from the sales of books to redistribute, and told the story of an orphanage catering to children whose parents had died of HIV.  They had started out using the iron freight containers that are shipped round the world on the back of ships, and which in their retirement serve as temporary libraries, moving advice centres and, occasionally even, the foundations of an orphanage in South Africa.  They talked about politics, the government, disappointment with both; my limited reading on the subject of HIV in Africa is enough to scare and disappoint me too.

What else sticks in my mind?  Fruit.  I remember someone would ask me if I wanted something to drink, and I would say yes thank you, and every time, without fail, a glass would appear containing more fruit of different varieties than I’d ever seen in my life.  Salads of lettuce and tomatoes with pomegranate seeds on top.  I remember being disappointed to discover that very beautiful birds make absolutely terrible noises, and that Irish pubs the world over are a disgrace including in Temple Bar, Dublin.

My very last memory of South Africa, before catching the plane home (where I succeeded in spilling coffee on a stranger in the middle of the night… not my finest hour) was this – sitting on top of Table Mountain, watching the sun go down over the ocean, drinking hot chocolate and listening to not very much at all.  I have no doubt that a week of exhausting work contributed to my state of mind at the time, but it is a picture that has stuck with me ever since, an absolute romantic painter’s dream of a crimson sky, black rocks in shadows, a city turning on the lights below, and a sea stretching to the horizon.  It was the furthest I had ever been from home, let alone the furthest I had ever been from home by myself, and to this day I have no pat way to describe it, no easy one-liner that captures the sense of what I saw, just a mix of pictures and feelings tangled up.

Which is probably, even now, no bad thing at all.

What I Did On My Holidays – The Redemption of Detroit

Posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

So it occurs to me that I have extensively rubbished Detroit International Airport in recent blogs, and while I defend this position as being entirely justifiable based on the key fact that Detroit Airport is horrid in every way, I realise that in the interest of fair play I must point out three key things.

1.  Detroit International Airport does a really, really good jam and peanut butter sandwich.  (Or ‘jelly’ and peanut butter, I discovered.)  I mean, really, really good.  Over-priced but worth it.

2.  You can ride a sort of internal tram-monorail thing up and down and up and down and up and down the main international terminal for hours of entertaining travel based joy while waiting for your flight in relative comfort and ease, and while this may serve no practical purpose whatsoever, it is a nice way of passing the time.  You can also ride the travelators on the ground from sections A-B-C and back again, past the traditional Yea Olde Authentic Irish Pub showing football and the sushi bars and all the usual stuff of the airport, and may finally notice while doing so key point the third…

3.  The cops at Detroit airport ride segways.   Now…

… call me old-fashioned…

… but I find it quite hard to take anyone seriously on a two-wheeled vehicle that resembles something between a pram and a pogo stick.  I mean, I respect that the thing could do a surprising turn of speed and a decent turning circle,  but would James Bond really have a segway chase?   And are not Americans already suffering from a certain cliche of too much burger to too little meat, and does riding back and forth on this device really help encourage the macho image of the immigration service?  I mean perhaps they’re not aiming to encourage a macho vibe… in which case the guns and shouting are a bit of an own-goal… but segways?  Really?  It’s like having your SWAT team on a bicycles only without the charisma, or having the SAS kick down the doors of the building, storm inside and go, ‘oh whoops left the oven on’.   Anyway.  Just thought I’d share that surreal consideration for anyone who has not yet had the pleasure and the pain of trying to change planes at Detroit International Airport…

What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.2

Posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 2 Comments

Back to my inability to speak French.

I have yet to see Mission Impossible 3 in English.  But in French, it was quite clearly a work of towering genius.  I mean, in a totally rubbish way.  Oh the running!  Oh the sweaty vests!  Oh the profound staring distantly into space while declaring love on the edge of death!  I vaguely remember something about a thing going to explore inside Tom Cruise’s brain (and how this was fixed by pumping his heart?), I vaguely remember someone drawing angles on a window in a place that might have been Hong Kong.  I have a vague recollection of Simon Pegg, in French.  But plot?  Narrative?  Not a clue.  And frankly, who needs them?

In many ways, the highlight of seeing Mission Impossible 3 in French were the ads.  My favourite was a Canadian film with the title ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’, which I’ve always remembered as ‘Bon Cop, Bad Cop’, because that would make more sense, but no, my diary tells me I’ve got this wrong.  ‘Good Cop, Bon Cop’ – according to the ad – tells the story of two policemen from either side of the regional divide, one from Quebec, one from Montreal, who are brought together when a corpse is found exactly on the county line.  Whether or not all sorts of hillarious gags ensue based upon the difference between English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians, I really couldn’t tell you, not having either the language or the social background.  But it was, I felt, a nice summary of the entire English-French thing that dominated the area.

Street names alas also suffered from this division, with catchy names like ‘Rue la Councillor Bernard Smith’ and ‘Avenue de la John Howard Jones’ (I paraphrase but only a little) and so forth.  We even found some of the history of the place in the form of a largely grassed over military structure on the river now turned into a museum, where I think Wolfe either won, or lost, or both, either together, or one after the other.  I am sorry to report that it’s really not my period, and suggest you look it up somewhere more reliable.  An American hallmate of mine, when I was talking Napoleonic history with him, once remarked ‘ah yes!  1812!  That’s when the British and the Canadians burnt the White House down!’ which at kinda proved that I know absolutely nothing of the history of North American conflict and that he knew next to nothing about Napoleon.  And why should he?  Discuss.

Deciding to explore this whole Quebec thing a little more, we hopped on a bus (trains in Canada are not exactly user-friendly, it turned out) and went to visit Quebec City.  Quebec City felt like a European heart surrounded by an American sprawl, all wiggly uphill streets and crooked power lines with neat supermarkets and doughnut bars on the edges.  It was also in Quebec City where I tried to buy postcards to send to my family (eventually falling back on the time-honoured tradition of handing them over in person when I returned) and discovered that while you can get all the images of squirrels and maple leaves you’ve ever wanted in the tourist traps of Canada, it is remarkably hard to find a picture of a moose.  Hours of frustration ensued.  Quebec City was also the only place where I’ve ever visited a 5* hotel.  I didn’t stay in it, of course, but this thing sat at the very top of the highest point of the city above the oldest and most genteel square, dominating the skyline and looking out upon all it surveyed.  We assumed it was a government building of some sort and went to investigate, and discovering it was a hotel, decided to investigate further.  Finding the door to the gym unlocked we wandered into a world of swimming pools, saunas and white fluffy towels.  Investigating the corridors on the highest floors we found ice makers and endless brass handles.  There were shops selling the kind of perfumes at the kind of prices I associate with duty free, and whiskey, and newspapers in many languages, and men in white gloves and, all things considered, we felt extremely naughty just being there, before heading back to our Bed and Breakfast at the bottom of the hill.

Quebec City will also be fixed in my memory for two more remarkable qualities.  First, was that Quebec was having a regional celebration, so in the evening the streets filled up with every kind of performers.  I remember a fire dancer, swinging great big balls of flame on the ends of chain, explaining her act in 4 languages as she went along.  There was a troupe of three silent black-and-white mime artists who were oddly enough the funniest on display, largely owing to their signs declaring ‘Oh no!’ with matching expressions of dismay.  There were brass bands and we had the strange experience of sitting on the remnants of a winding city wall watching a concert that, we suspected, was highly regionalistic and full of ballads about the misery of being cultured-French-Canadians while surrounded by all these fat semi-American-Canadians, but which, alas, our languages weren’t really up to grasping the details on.  The other thing I associate Quebec with is table football.  Many happy hours spent in that pastime.  I can’t promise that you’ll get a brilliant game out of me; but you’ll certainly get a game.

From Quebec City we headed north, along great tree-lined winding roads laden with trucks (all heading the other way) carrying huge fallen timbers, across a ferry and over a fjord, to the town of Tadoussac.  Tadoussac is an escapee from a Stephen King novel, a small place of silent wide streets, white-timbered houses, low chapel, washing waves and dark trees.  On our first night we walked along the sand of one of the beeches, and found ourselves outside the main hotel (again, a thing we were not staying at) to discover a wedding being presided over by a man that all evidence could only suggest to be a druid.  Tadoussac, it turns out, is a town of fjords and whales.  It was, in fact, in Tadoussac that I saw my first ever whale, a white beluga with a (anthropomorphically unsound) smiling face that examined our little boat with the attitude of a local judging the tourists.  We also went up a fjord, a great massive valley carved out of stone and trees on every side, to a statue of the Virgin Mary raised on a mountain, to which the boat sang songs in the Catholic traditions of the place.  A national park nearby turned out to be all it claimed on the cover, beautiful until the first insect bit.  My boyfriend, being more adventurous than me, tried lobster, since it seemed to be the town’s tourist dish of choice, and I was disappointed when he managed to convince me that it wasn’t staring at me accusingly with its one beady eye, to discover that it was a rather bland dish and he could probably go back to the cheesy chips with comfort.  I have never had such breakfasts, by the by, as I had in Tadoussac.  I have never seen a plate piled so high, or so many different uses of syrup… the breakfasts, and the whales, I think, are what I shall take away from that experience, along with the low long sound of huge freight lorries come from the north, lining up in the small foggy hours of the night, for the first ferry at dawn across the fjord.

What I Did On My Holidays – Montreal Pt.1

Posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 2 Comments

Alas, I went to Montreal before I owned a camera, so this is going to have to be done the ol’ fashioned way… are you sitting comfortably?

The gentleman in my life was invited to attend a conference in Montreal for a few days in 2006, the year of the World Cup, and quickly decided that this was an excellent way to have a holiday.  I leapt upon the bandwagon, swearing that for the days immediately preceding the conference I would eat nothing at all (a pledge I did not keep) so that for those few precious moments when all our needs were theoretically on institutional expenses, I could stuff myself like a barrage balloon.  We would stay in luxury, buy every travelcard and visit every cultural monument expenses could permit… as it turned out, this didn’t entirely happen, but I’ll try not to jump the gun on this story.

Since a writer’s income is, at best, unreliable, and at worst, a bit piss-piddly, I am a natural skinflint.  If my soul is ever captured in art, suspect that attached to the canvas will be a sign advertising a 2-for-1 offer.   But so it goes.  In order to fulfil my skinflint nature, we found the cheapest flights we could which involved the interesting and entirely horrific trick of changing planes at Detriot.  I have been informed that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, despite the litigation laws of the day, still extant, so let me say two things: 1.  I have never in all my life been so uncomfortable as I was on a Northwestern Flight from London to Detriot and 2.  US border controls are utterly horrific and inane.

We weren’t planning on entering the US at all, since Canada was the final destination, but Detriot Airport didn’t have an international transit lounge and so, diligently, we filled out our green landing cards with questions like ‘were you involved in the Nazi genocide 1939-45?’ and ‘have you come to the USA to commit acts of terrorism’ (pick either box ‘yes’ or box ‘no’.)  We then arrived at customs where for 3 hours, 1000 people tried to shove and elbow there way through the chaos of custom control while one woman with a gun shouted and screamed and on occasion threatened the punters, a very large percentage of whom did not have English as a first language, to get their asses into line.  How I pined for Heathrow Airport and its lovely orderly cues laid out in lovely orderly lines.  How I pined for more than one copper and less than one gun on my side of international arrivals…

Arriving at customs we were subjected to the usual questions.  The answer ‘I’m going to Canada’ was met with appropriate snottiness, and once my fingerprints and retina were scanned, I was let through.  The first sign to greet me on arrival to the US of A was a poster proclaiming ‘US Customs and Immigration – We Are The Best.’  I should point out that on my return via the US back from Canada, my fingerprints and retina was scanned again, and I was met with the statement, ‘I see you’ve never entered the US before’ which leads me perhaps to think that this is bureaucracy too far… but who knows…

Because it had taken 3 hours to get into the US, it only took us 20 minutes to get out again, boarding a little, half-empty plane for Montreal.  We arrived at roughly 2 a.m. local time, and our taxi driver took us to our bed and breakfast where we were, according to both the sign and the man who greeted us, staying in the ‘Princess Charlotte Suite’.  Next to us were the ‘Queen Anne’ rooms and a room related somehow to a Duchess whose details temporarily evade me.  We all shared a bathroom, which alas did not go by the name ‘The Prince Regent Baths’.

Jet lag overcome, we set forth exploring Montreal.

First up, my French is lousy.  I can just about apologise for my inability to speak it, and there my abilities end.  I have, alas, acquired just about enough of a wide and eclectic range of languages that I am now incapable of speaking any at all.  Thankfully, the population of Montreal, while automatically speaking French, was willing to switch to English in the face of my incomprehension.  My boyfriend, having somewhat better French, would make the occasional stab at the language, and on resorting desperately to English, would at the very least be congratulated on the authentic quality of his ‘bonjour’.  Canadian French was, incidentally, not like French as we were taught it at school.  Breakfast was lunch, lunch was dinner, and in between floated a strange abuse of words that would have caused my French teacher’s nose to wrinkle with disdain.  Breakfast was, by the by, one of the great pleasures of Montreal, since it almost invariably consisted of eggy bread with maple syrup, one of god’s greatest gifts to man.

The city itself is…

… well…

… imagine a fairly standard American city laid out on a fairly standard grid pattern.  Stick one hell of a massive river down at its base, around which the streets become tighter and almost European in terms of tourist-trod time, throw in the remnants of major league docks out on the islands, put the menus in both English and French, serve up hamburgers and hot dogs on the same menu as duck casserole, make the buses new and the streets pock-holed and cracked, make the graffiti bright and angry and the department stores universal; stir in regional pride and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, stick a surprisingly steep hill bang smack in the middle, throw in a rusting ancient fun fair of crumbling joy rides and machinery turned into a thing not what it said on the cover, melt a lot of cheese over the chips and you have, in a strange, uneven, yet entirely familiar and recognizable form, Montreal.

Call me a decadent foreign whatsit, but cheese on the chips is a fashion that has yet to really win me over, yet I think it, along with eggy bread and maple syrup, is my dish of choice for defining Montreal.  Other key features that defined it for me was a great long jutt of land heading out to what my mental compass considered the west, surrounded at its tip on all sides by masses of rolling river water laden with heavy freight ships.  We cycled along it one day, and in the curiosity of the ride, encompassing sculpture parks, leafy suburbs, industrial waste grounds and leafy by-ways, I failed to notice that I was a) getting serious sun burnt for the only time in my life and b) had cycled 20 km.  The next day my knees refused to behave properly (cycling is not something I do that often) and I lay in bed experiencing Montreal TV while the boyfriend attended the conference.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French was, I thought, about as surreal as it was going to get.  Then Dr Who came on, and there were daleks, and i had to redefine my expectations.  The only bit of French I picked up from that experience came from watching the world cup.  ‘Penalty shoot out’ I worked out after a while, was ‘Le Barrage’, a trivial piece of information that made my linguistic holiday.  I was in a bar when England lost to Paraguay, and curiously enough, no one seemed very sad…

I also discovered the wonderful bonding powers of Neil Gaiman, when, sitting in a coffee shop reading Neverwhere (one of the greatest London fantasies I’ve ever read – although I feel I should point out for my honour’s sake that I read it about 2 months after finishing A Madness of Angels and was a little bit surprised…) – a man turned to me and spoke to me in French.  I mumbled that I didn’t speak French, and he switched easily to English (I have such envy of people who can speak many languages!) and announced that Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of all time.  (A valid point.)  We then fell to talking and, on discovering that I wasn’t Canadian, he cheerfully informed me that he was a surveillance expert who spent his time working for the police on bugging criminals.  Not really expecting to hear this in a coffee shop in Montreal, I blathered emptily and deeply regret now the opportunity to steal his life’s story.  If you’re out there – tell me all!  It was however a pleasant experience in a foreign land, and one which managed to cement in me, especially after the US Customs and Immigration fiasco, the idea that Canada really was better after all…

It turned out that we had chosen our dates for visiting Montreal at a curious time.  Formula 1 had come to the city, and at nearly 9 miles distance we could hear the buzz of the engines like a bee was trapped in the room with us.  Canada Day was also upon us, there was a jazz festival going down, and – joy of joys! – a firework competition had come to Montreal.  I love fireworks.  I mean, I really love fireworks, I’m the girl standing at the front going ‘whee’. In Quebec there also seemed to be Quebec Week happening, but as we discovered, part of Quebec nationalism was being very reluctant to explain itself in any language other than French.  However, our trip to Quebec City and beyond is a story for another time…

What I Did On My Holidays – Vienna

Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

One of the very few holidays that doesn’t come with the epithet ’so I went with my boyfriend…’ the Vienna expedition was a cunning plan formulated with me and my parents to take the train all the way from London to Vienna.  Which, as a surprise to us all, we did!  I guess my family has a sort of history of taking trains when going across Europe – with the opening of Eurostar and, even better, the plummeting of its prices, trains trips between London, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Rome, Montpellier,  Tolouse and, of course, Vienna, all became viable and exciting possibilities.  The TGV is cool, Thalys is comfortable, SNCF has its moments of wonder, Tren Italia is fun so long as you avoid the commuter trains, and Die Bahn in Germany is every part the pristine, compact symbol of German efficiency you, as a blinkered tourist, would hope it to be.  We took the Eurostar at a not-too-godforsaken hour from St.Pancras to Brussels, changed for the train to Cologne, ate dinner as the sun went down in front of Cologne Cathedral (ironically the only photo I have of the whole trip owing to circumstances too complicated to explain) and finally caught the NightLine to Vienna as the mist rose on the Rhine valley.  Oh boy did those mad German counts like their spiky castles on top of forested hill valleys… but that’s a story for another time…

Cologne Cathedral

Vienna is, by the by, all whipped cream.  For a start, 90% of the food comes with whipped cream either dolloped on the plate itself or cunningly integrated into the recipe and cake, particularly sachertorten, is the specialty.  Even leaving the food aside, the centre of town is a whole architectural dollop of whipped cream, from the paintings of chubby cherubs up every wall to the great Hapsburg Palaces dumped down left right and centre.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire is famous mostly for declining, but when not actively declining the aristocrats of the Empire were busy building every kind of baroque adornment that expensive taste could afford.  The exterior of the largely baroque buildings look almost austere, great big walls and big windows, but the interiors are packed so full of silver and the images of aristocratic warriors it’s a wonder there was room for people at all.  The cathedral at the heart of the city, St. Stephens, boasts one of the tallest spires in Europe, as well as regular gatherings of men and women dressed in mock-18th century dress trying to sell opera and Mozart concerts to the passers by, and if you look with a religious eye, there is Catholicism galore to be seen in gold crosses and saintly images scattered all over the place.  Culture, art, opera, and, of course, psychiatry, are all big things in Vienna, and it’s hard to turn a corner without encountering at least one of the above.  My family as a collective even decided that, since we were in Vienna, we should do the Viennese thing and go to the opera – my first ever opera trip – and paid a small fortune to sit in the highest, most distant seats I’ve ever experienced in my life, in an opera house of so much marble, real and otherwise, and such grandeur that really you didn’t need the show.  Opera remains not my thing.  The cake, however, was a major Viennese compensation…

Vienna gives the stranger the impression of a rather prissy city, in some senses.  My few attempts to speak German, the only language of which I have even a GCSE-grade grasp, were usually rebuffed by looks of, at best, curiosity, at worst, contempt, and I quickly fell back on letting my Dad doing the talking.  The streets are clean and orderly to the point of feeling slightly unnatural to my Londoner’s senses; the impression you couldn’t help but take away was that this was a society where the scorn you earned for littering was of a deeply penetrating, soulful kind, rather than the usual shrug of the city stranger.  The suburbs, where we were staying, and which are in truth little more than an extension of the inner city, hinted at some of the less imperial parts of Vienna’s past; endless matching courtyard-based blocks, samey shops and empty bars that could have been anywhere in Europe.  Vienna was, after all, the city of the Third Man, a Cold War spy shop almost up there with Berlin for its intrigue.

A canal runs through the heart of the city, built off from the Danube, and as a day-trip, and because we could, we took the boat up the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava.  The Danube is a Real River, at least as far as my imagination marks it.  It’s great, fat, rolling, churning, with a freezing wind on it even in high summer and all along its banks symptoms of its uncontrollable spillage; trees bent backwards, half-submerged shacks and lost wooden pillars for tying off your boat to a long-vanished bank.  This blog isn’t about Bratislava, but since I’m here, I’ll say two things; that is has a lovely small heart surrounded by a great deal of run-down sprawl, and that the Slovakian for ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is ‘Macho Puf’.  These were the two main impressions I took away from this experience.  That, and that on the Austrian-Slovakian border, you can farm ostriches.

One of the reasons why the Austro-Hungarian Empire had such a patchy time of it was that it was constantly being attacked from outside, and I can’t really walk away from this blog without mentioning my all-time favourite bit of history – the second siege of Vienna.  Oh yes, dear reader, the second one, because the first one was really a bit of a wash-out.  The second one, on the other hand, is celebrated in plaques and monuments across the city, since it was the nearest Vienna has ever come to being conquered in its history.  I’m not talking some wishy-washy nearest to being conquered – I’m talking a matter of hours between salvation and disaster.  I guess it’s fair to say that after three years of a history degree, my period, such as it is, are those nine weeks in autumn 1683 when Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans.  In other words, I know a lot about what happened in a two and a half mile radius in Central Europe for 9 weeks.  But make no mistake – it was an awesome, and arguably world changing 9 weeks.  Certainly, if Vienna had fallen, it’s likely the world as we know it would not be so today.

The Turkish Siege Camp

So, naturally, I was kinda excited by Vienna, and very much enjoyed my time there.  However, it was also rather alien to my usual cultural horizon, a fact I think best summed up by my trip with my parents to a modern art gallery.  We found ourselves, as is our way, seeking at the end of some half hour of wandering, the blissful relief of a bench, and after much searching, found what seemed to be the only bench in the gallery.  It was placed directly facing a huge black canvas, just black, plain black, whose title was ‘Untitled’.  We considered this for a while, trying to work out whether This Was Art, before finally noticing, to our left, another black canvas, slightly smaller than the first, but in every other way identical.  We craned in to see it, and this too was called ‘Untitled’.  Art or not art, I dunno, but it was, in its own quaint way, very Vienna….

What I Did On My Holidays – Istanbul

Posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | 1 Comment

I love Istanbul.

By now, dear reader, you may have noticed a pattern in What I Did On My Holidays – I do cities.  I vaguely get the idea of going on holiday to the countryside/mountains/beaches/forests etc., and find all of the above very pretty and pleasant in reasonable doses.  But the NHS makes me pay prescription fees for my asthma drugs, and having been born and raised in a city, I now find myself medically incapable of breathing properly unless surrounded by buses, trucks and carbon monoxide, so cities are my destination of choice.

And Istanbul is a city of cities.  For thousands of years it’s been one of the most important urban centres on the planet, sitting bang smack between Europe and Asia.  The Roman Emperors became the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople; the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and it became Istanbul, the heart of an empire which at its height stretched from Budapest via Baghdad to Algiers.  The fledgling Russian Empire spent many hundreds of years seething over Istanbul’s control of the Dardenelles’ strait (pity the city of Azov on the Black Sea, which spent most of the early modern period being burnt to the ground over this particular naval punch-up) – in the first world war, the Allies attempted a disastrous landing at Gallipoli to seize control of the same stretch of water.  The city itself has suburbs stretching all the way from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and for hundreds of years was the home of Christians, Jews and Muslims in every size, shape and form.  You can’t really escape the history in Istanbul, since it’s built into practically every wall.

The Hagia Sofia, is every part as huge and towering as its reputation would suggest, if sadly fallen into a bit of neglect despite the tourists, and like much of Istanbul it was built by the Byzantines and converted by the Ottomans.  It towers over the district of Sultan Ahmed, named after its principal mosque, a white edifice of long gardens and fresh running water.  In the early modern period this part of the city, which sticks out into the bay where the strait from the Black Sea meets the Sea or Marmara, was known as the Golden Horn, and has on its end Topkapi, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, a place of cool shade, endless courtyards, hidden nooks and long stone balconies.  Beneath all this you can walk through a two thousand year old cistern, an underground network of man-made caverns to rival the mines of Moria, where occasionally you can catch the glimpse of fish in the darkness, or eat sticky Turkish ice cream on a park bench overlooking the sea.  Bridges run from Sultan Ahmed to Galata, which was in the old days the quarter for foreign embassies and which now is a great bustling shopping and eating hub, which never seems to sleep and where the average walking speed after the hour of 9 p.m. is lucky to get above 2 miles and hour, the crowds grow so thick.  Crossing the bridges by anything other than the trams which run through the centre of the city can be a little nerve wracking, as they are constantly covered with men and boys fishing, and your time is spent dodging flying hooks and wriggling bait.  Turkish flags were hanging off these bridges when we went to visit, and boats pass by constantly, from the cruise ships and passenger ferries through to fishing boats and a constant stream of freighters coming down from the Black Sea.  Galata and the thrivving shops in that area are every part as globalised and commercial as anywhere else in the world, and the talk and dress could come from any busy, cosmopolitan hub, but further away are districts like Fenir, where the dress is conservative and commerce thrives around a market of spilt vegetables, torn plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes that stretches all the way from the chief mosque down to the waterfront.

It was in Fenir that we encountered gaggles of grinning children, whose English consisted of the two words, ‘hello?’ and ‘money?’ and who followed us harmlessly wherever we went.  It was also the first place we tried to get food on our first night of arrival, and encountered the curious custom of meeting the fish we were going to eat before it was served, a thing our feeble Turkish wasn’t really up to understanding.

Uphill from Fenir, back towards the sea and there is the oldest shopping hub of the city, the Grand Bazaar, where walking speed is a poor 1 m.p.h. and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not for sale.  It started in a Byzantine covered market, which still exists to this day, and where one hot afternoon we found our way up onto the crumbling thousand-year-plus old roof just as the mosques of Istanbul began the afternoon call to prayers.  This barrage of noise came from all around and lasted a good fifteen minutes as every muezzin of every mosque seemed to be operating to a slightly different time and in a very different key from his neighbour.  Some brisk muezzins belted through their call to prayers like men in need of a trip to the bathroom; others, such as the one who woke us up at 5 a.m. every morning during our stay with friends in the suburbs, would begin and stop, begin and stop, as if constantly self-checking his call for grammatical errors.  A friend of mine once described certain things he had seen or heard in his life as ‘rocking chair moments’ – a thing you would tell your grandchildren about in 60 years time when sitting in a rocking chair.  The sound of an entire city being called to prayer, heard from on top of a Byzantine roof in the very heart of Istanbul, is going to be one of mine.  The bazaar now stretches into the streets all around the area, a bewildering network of alleys and roads thronged at all hours, and hides within it occasional wonders, such as mosques built by long-dead Viziers and queens.

Public transport in Istanbul is a mix of ferries, underground lines, taxis, trams, public buses and a system that I guess I shall call a bus, but which is more like a public run mini-truck headed in a certain direction into which everyone piles elbow-to-elbow and out of which people hop at pretty much whatever location seems most convenient.  It is also the only city I have ever been to in my life in which a funicular is integrated into the public transport system.  Istanbul is a city of many hills, and the sweating tourist quickly comes to think of the well-tended gardens outside the mosques as a wonderful opportunity to sit in the shade, as well as a sight to see.

I was born in a very Turkish area of London, so was looking forward to the food, and was well rewarded.  Pide is essentially a Turkish form of pizza; yoghurt featured quite a lot in many dishes, although its drinkable cousin, ayran, wasn’t really my cup of tea; fish was everywhere.  Throw something into the Bosphorus and it will literally pop and jump with fish leaping up to catch it, although, alas, pollution has encouraged the influx of vast populations of jellyfish, which make for a quaintly alien presence in the water.

A past-time that was reasonably common in the back streets and which myself and my boyfriend indulged in regularly, was the playing of backgammon while drinking coffee (which was essentially raw caffeine with a little water on top) from a tulip shaped glass cup.  One night, the boyfriend, being braver than I, even risked doing all this while smoking chocolate flavoured shisha, although neither his complexion nor his game benefitted from the adventure.  The back streets of Istanbul also throng with cats, thousands of tiny cats of every shape and variety that nose at the feet of strangers and are kicked away by the locals, used to and annoyed by their presence.

Since the Ottoman Empire was kinda my thing at university, a quick word on some of the previous inhabitants of Istanbul.  Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, a dude if ever there was one, built his mosque right by the bridge to Galata, designed by the architect Sinan Pasha, and it is a strange mix of the zen-austere and subtly intricate, both majestic and impressive, and restrained.  When Mohammed the Conquerer captured Istanbul in 1453, it’s said that he was distraught that the defenders had fought so long and hard, thus ensuring damage came to his beautiful city.  Sultan Mehmed IV was rumoured to have run through the streets of Sultan Ahmed at night in his night robe randomly beheading people he saw.  Sultan Ibrahim the Mad was said to have sent out an image of cows udders cast in gold with instructions that women found resembling this physical feature should be bought to his fur-fettish harem.  When he was eventually murdered and overthrown by his own guard, family and staff, his surviving brother and heir to the throne, Mustafa the Imbecile, refused to leave the harem until he saw proof of his brother’s death, and was eventually – so the story goes – maneuvered out of the harem through a hole in the ceiling.  Within the harem itself there were many generations of utterly fearsome women – Hurrem, wife of Suleyman, was one of the most powerful people in the empire, as well as the founder of mosques, schools, hospitals and the champion of clean water supplies throughout the city and land.  For decades, during the difficult times at the start of the seventeenth century, it was said to be the time of the ‘rule of the women’ as the mothers and queens of the Sultans exercised power through them and from behind the shady walls of the harem.  The pirate Barbarossa eventually became admiral of the Sultan’s fleet; Lady Mary Wortley Montague stumbled upon the beginning of innoculation as we now know it in the city in the 1690s, and many floppy-shirted, somewhat stoned poets drooped around the rooftops of the city during the early Victorian period.

A week and a bit wasn’t really time to skim the surface of this city, and I would love to return one day – although perhaps, secret ambition probably never to be fulfilled – perhaps one day, I can do it by train?

What I Did On My Holidays – Verona/Aida

Posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 in Cities and Adventures | No Comments

First thing to be said about my trip to Verona is this – myself and boyfriend did very much not go and stand under Juliet’s balcony.   Because let’s face it, the idea is kinda silly.  What we did manage to do was walk for 3 and a half hours in search of a place to stay before ending up back where we’d started.  A word of warning for all potential travellers to Italy – if you’re thinking of going down the Bed and Breakfast route (which we were!) charge your phone and make sure you’ve got credit first. 

Verona is a city – or maybe a town, I don’t really know how you make the judgment – in Northern Italy with a very pretty old heart and a Roman Arena bang smack in the centre just to cap it all off.  Like most places we visited in our trip through the area, finding a grocers was one of the toughest challenges we had, and every waiter at every restaurant/gelateria recognised us for English before we’d even opened our mouths to speak.  The old town is caught in a loop defined by a fast flowing river, across which are a number of bridges, including one that was part of a castle, which was quite exciting.  A small cathedral lies to the north, replete with golden icons and, in a fashion that slightly confused me, marble statues of saints wearing what looked like triangular halos.  There are symptoms of changing ownership throughout Verona’s history, built into its streets; a church bearing the crest of arms of the Austrians in a square with the book-holding, open-jawed lion of St. Mark, looking down onto a fashion emporium selling Milanese leather shoes with a poster in its window advertising Verdi sung in a Roman amphitheatre.

To be honest, my boyfriend and I had kinda missed the minor detail of there being a Roman arena which was still in-tact enough to be used to house an opera festival capable of sitting around 20,000 people until we were actually confronted with the fact.  Despite the fact that neither he nor I are what you’d really call opera buffs – in fact, this was the second opera I’ve ever seen in my life, and I now feel a bit opera-d out - we figured that for the price of a cheap seat on a stone step, it’d be an experience worth having.

Through a coincidence of timing, the opera we ended up seeing was Aida.  The ticket said it started at 9 p.m., which surprised us, and we told ourselves that we could file in about 8 p.m. and get a ‘good seat’, since being just on stone steps, our place was unassigned.

Oh my we were a bit out of our depth…

Shuffling in at 8.15, the stone steps of the Roman arena, and I kid you not when I say Roman arena, a great giant stone splat on the landscape where once tens of thousands cheered for blood-splattered gladiators – we found the terraces already heaving with people wedged in buttock to buttock, speaking every language within a 200 mile radius.  The arena changes the opera it’s performing every night, so dozens of tech crew were swarming over the stage until right up to the word go, raising the largest set I have ever seen in my life while lighting crew focused some seriously punchy lamps to shine down over the heads of an audience packed in their thousands onto a stage that dwarved anyone on it. 

Announcements were in three languages – the German announcement was nothing short of hillarious, as I have never heard such a sultry voice wrapping itself around the words – and there were four intervals throughout the show for the stage to be reset.

Then the show began.

I have no idea what Aida is about.  I mean, I got the basic gist, but right now I still couldn’t give you a full account without consulting a book.  But I have never, in all my life, seen such a spectacular show.  Not necessarily a very good one, in that much of my time was spent worrying about the state of my bottom and wondering whether it really was 1 a.m. and they were still going, but utterly, utterly spectacular.  At the start of the show, the audience were invited to light little candles as a tradition of the arena, and as the sun went down, hundreds, quite possibly thousands of these little flames were struck in the audience as if at a cathedral.  Then over 60 flame torch-bearing Egyptian soldiers entered and spread themselves around the venue as the performance began.

The piece that I can only guess was the half-way closer was the ultimate in ridiculousness.  It featured continual processions containing no fewer than…

60 Egyptian palace guards.

30 Ballet dancing soldiers.

20 scantily clad ballet dancing slave girls.

20 Captured slaves.

30 High priests.

30 Scribes and general officials.

20 Nubian slave children, aged 3-6.

4 Horses.

Like I said, I have no idea what actually happened.  For the truly nerdy, I also have this warning; if you’re using 6 discharge follow spots to light the stage, for please be sure that 1 of them isn’t more punchy than its neighbours.  Nerdy moment over.  I should also add that even if opera wasn’t my thing, the conductor was worth every penny we paid for the ticket, an entire dramatic/acrobatic performance in his own right…

But I can honestly say, I have never, in all my life, sat through anything quite as ridiculously, astoundingly, absurdly over the top as Aida at the Verona Arena.