Category Archives: General

Travelogue Japan 3: Hiroshima

HIROSHIMA

09 January 2015

When we’d first started planning the trip to Japan, we’d debated spending a night in Hiroshima, thinking it to be such a noteworthy city in world history that it would be unmissable. Very watery reviews from a good proportion of travellers + Lix and RoRo’s lack of motivation to go there + an already decided-upon unlimited travel Japan Rail pass made the decision that much easier: Christian, Michele and I would daytrip it from Kyoto.

This turned out to be really easy as our house’s local subway station was 2 stops from Kyoto main station, from where we would catch a Shinkansen bullet train to Hiroshima. We didn’t have to pre-book anything, just up and out by 7.30, through the morning peak hour subway chaos and into the supreme calm that is the big and beautiful Kyoto Station.

The building is all stone and metal inside and even though it’s all grey, it’s neither cold physically nor perceptually. It’s only 4 floors, but the central hall is quadruple volume and each upper level is reached by a set of escalators, which run almost end-to-end up to an open-air roof garden terrace so look a bit like a metallic waterfall climbing upwards to the heavens when viewed from the bottom.

Our tickets required a train change in Osaka, but the lady at the ticket office had told us which platforms we needed for each departure and arrival so it was easy-peasy getting to the right train. It’s all such a well-oiled process and the trains are so clean and comfortable (seats similarly sized to aeroplanes, but with triple the legroom) that all 3 of us slept…

… through…

… and miraculously woke each other up in time for our arrival in Hiroshima.

The station was a bit smaller and a lot easier to navigate than the previous had been – and the tourist office was very proactive in guiding us to all the freebies that were included in our Japan Rail passes, including the hop-on-hop-off sightseeing bus and the ferry to Miyajima Island, home to Torii Shrine just off the mainland.

The tourist bus was a great place to start, so we hitched a ride in it to Hiroshima Castle.

Established in 1589, the castle tower was destroyed in the atomic bombing and rebuilt in 1958. Inside the tower is a museum of Samurai culture. We were relieved to discover all of this after we thought we’d failed epically after having to remove shoes and don house slippers to view 2 very average exhibitions. Fortunately these were just the entry compound and there was more beyond when we entered the Castle complex beyond.

There still wasn’t much of interest to us so, after a wander past the shrine and tower, we walked through the gardens to the castle complex rear exit.

The most effective walking tour route fortuitously meant we had to tackle an early lunch as next item on the agenda. An easy call since we already knew we had to have the local speciality in the area which had made its name.

We walked through Hondori Street (a long shopping arcade) to reach Okonomu-mura village for our okonomiyaki (described in the guide as “flat cake of unsweetened batter fried with various ingredients”).

We were very pleased that there was an okonomiyaka restaurant directly under the “Welcome to Okonomu-mura” sign. Done.

We were ushered into the restaurant and chose a booth opposite the now-standard counter alongside the kitchen which, in this case, was a wall-to-wall flatbed silver fry counter.

There were 3 guys manning the kitchen, working from the far end to our side: First guy stacks raw cabbage, onion and pork onto a pancake. Next guy flips it over to cook the pork, while he has noodles and specified ingredients frying on the side. Then he pops the ingredients onto the noodles and flips the pancake et al on top of the noodle pile. Then he cracks 2 eggs onto the flatbed grill, loosely scrambles them and shifts the noodle pile on top. The whole pile then sits for a minute while the egg cooks, he flips it to reheat the pancake and deftly chops the pancake-noodle-stirfry-omelette into 6 edible portions using cross-swipes of the flat scraper-lifter tool in each hand and deposits the whole lot on a cast iron skillet. The server brushes the top with basting, adds cheese and seasoning and serves!

Really yummy! AND we managed to double-bill with a deep-fried oyster starter (important as the city is equally known for eating inexpensive oysters in casual setting “oyster huts”).

Our restaurant was close to the historical sites, so we walked the few blocks along the river front. Everything is named Peace -Something so we walked along Peace Promenade to get to Peace Park where there are Peace Memorials and a Peace Museum.

The first sight is the A-Bomb Dome. The building was first built in 1915 as a government office of sorts and was popular for its distinctive – and considered attractive – dome. The building now is relevant as it was the only building left standing near the hypocentre (the epicentre of the blast) from the notorious A-bomb drop on 6 August 1945.

The building soon became commonly called the Genbaku (“A-Bomb”) Dome, due to the exposed metal dome framework at its apex (all the roof tiles and outer casings had burnt instantly in the blast). The structure was scheduled to be demolished with the rest of the ruins, but the majority of the building was intact, delaying the demolition plans. The Dome became a subject of controversy, with some locals wanting it torn down, while others wanted to preserve it as a memorial of the bombing and a symbol of peace. Ultimately, when the reconstruction of Hiroshima began, the skeletal remains of the building were preserved and now serve as a tangible icon of what happened and place where people come to honour the lost and commit to peace.

Over the bridge is the Cenotaph memorial for A-Bomb victims. Quite austere with the eternal candle, giant flagpole, dedications and lots and lots of fresh flowers on display, the monument is the central element in a big quad and park with water features and smaller monuments dotted about.

Behind the cenotaph is the Peace Memorial Museum, offering bargain entry price of 50 Yen (R5).

The museum is a small but well structured collection of photos, exhibitions and artefacts from the fateful day, explaining how it all came to be, what happened and – refreshingly – educating on what’s happened subsequent with nuclear armament and why we need to sustain peace and avoid such an awful thing from happening again. To anyone.

Sure, we learn what happened in history at school, but it’s so “day and date” that you lose the perspective on the human element. The displays really drove home for me how utterly devastating that bomb was. A fireball a million degrees Celsius at its core, reached maximum diameter of 280m in a second. Fierce heat rays and radiation burst out in every direction, flattening buildings within a 2 km radius and burning hundreds of thousands of people to death instantly. 85% of Hiroshima’s buildings were within 3km of where the bomb exploded, so the damage extended to virtually the entire city with 90% of all buildings destroyed beyond repair.

And yet, despite getting the magnitude of the destruction, the display that hit me the most is one of the steps of a bank that have been lifted to be displayed as they were in situ, and you can see how the stones on the wall and steps have been whitened from the heat… except the grey patch where someone had been sitting. The remnant shadow of where someone literally instantly melted.

Our little tour of the peace sights vindicated our decision to daytrip to Hiroshima. Otherwise, it’s a lovely city anyway. Beautifully laid out and pleasing on the eye. Apparently at a British junket in Hiroshima a few years ago the mayor was asked why Hiroshima is so neatly grid-style unlike other major Japanese mazes and he was quoted as saying “We had some help from the Americans.”

I would have liked to catch the ferry across to Miyajima Island to see the famous torii gate at Itsukushima Shrine, but with a 20 minute streetcar + 20 minute train + 10 minute ferry, we’d left it a bit late. Oh well, next time.

Travelogue Japan 2: Yuzawa

YUZAWA, NIIGATA

03-07 January 2015

After our exuberant last night in Tokyo, we overslept and missed our intended 10h00 departure for Niigata. Fortunately the trains ran more or less every half hour so we subsequently ended up on the 12h16 train to Yuzawa.

The Shinkansen bullet trains are incredible – so fast, yet so solid that you don’t feel like you’re hurtling across Japan. Which is exactly what we did. East to West coast in an hour! I had slept soundly the whole way (having woken with the lurgy that had stricken RoRo on New Years Day) but am told that there was nothing to see as the train was parenthesesed by barriers, blocking the view completely.

Arriving in the sleepy winter wonderland valley of Yuzawa in Niigata, we were instantly in love. Beautiful thick snow everywhere; mountain rising up directly in front of us as we exited the station. We caught a taxi to our accommodation, mainly because it would be too hard to negotiate our bags in the snow (and we didn’t realise the journey would be so short).

We’d been told that the Airbnb we’d booked was previously a hotel – and we had the whole hotel to ourselves! Our arrival confirmed it: we were to be the sole guests of 3 storeys of slopeside hotel. Quite a contrast to our Tokyo home – which could fit into our Yuzawa lounge – it was big, airy and comfortably furnished with plus-sized couches and king-size beds. The hotel had an unassuming roadside entrance, but the living area had wall-to-wall windows facing the ski slope, which served as very entertaining live “Ski TV”!

We got a quick tour of the facilities – including the 2 private basement onsen baths and a detailed review of the remote control panel to operate the heated toilet with all sorts of spray options to rinse and blowdry your bits – and settled into our rooms. Michele had been allocated a first floor room (which was described as 2nd floor because Japanese start counting from Ground), but ended up sleeping in the lounge in the living area adjacent to our room because her heater wasn’t working properly and she said the uninhabited hotel reminded her too much of The Shining. And with The World’s Most Comfortable Couch as an alternative, she was spoilt for choice.

It was a bit late (mid-afternoon) by this point to fuss with ski rentals etc, so we took a walk along our road instead to see what there was, get some supplies, scout a spot for dinner and whatnot. Even with the inordinate amount of snow everywhere, the kilometre walk to the Station was easy enough, assisted enormously by the jets of water spurting out from the middle lane of the road and running from side feeder roads, keeping the road clear of the enormous amount of snow. Our host, Gabriel, had explained that the source of this water was the underground spring – same one that fed the onsen. Very clever.

Our initial preview of Yuzawa revealed that it was different to the ski resort towns we’d previously encountered in that there wasn’t an apres ski bar anywhere to be found. Most other resort towns we’d been to had put equal energy into entertainment on and off the slopes. Also, while everything we’d read pointed to Yuzawa being a tourist town, nothing had indicated that it’s very definitely only a Japanese tourist town since the restaurants we passed were all Japanese menu only.

On returning to the house, Gabriel warned us that we’d be well advised to get to dinner early as everything filled up when the slopes close at 5pm and since the restaurants are all small with only a handful of tables, short of waiting (outside, in the snow) the next easy-access sitting wouldn’t be until around 9 o’clock.

Just after 5pm already, he and his family were on their way out for dinner and he offered for us to walk with them so he could point out his recommendations of restaurants and shops.

We were already too late for the tonkatsu restaurant he had suggested to us but, based on the queue of people waiting in the cold for a table, we assumed it must be as good as Gabriel said and noted to return there the next day, early enough to avoid the queue.

We took our chances and went into the first restaurant without a waiting list, which turned out to be a tempura restaurant. What a luck!

We ordered the set menu, which was an awful lot of food! A miso soup, big wedge of tofu, small plate of pickled veg (no idea what it was), bowl of rice and a mountain of tempura veg (including an enormous shitake mushroom), fish, calamari and prawns (each easily 20cm long). Everything was served at once and made for a very busy table! Salt and pepper ween’t standard table items as they are in the Western world. There were always soy sauce and chilli flakes on the table and often another condiment or two, in this case a cellar of sesame seeds.

Our feast behind us, we returned home for an onsen and a quiet night in, enjoying the comfort of our new home with its warm and inviting living room (and the simple luxury of being able to speak out loud after being repressed in Tokyo!)

The onsen wasn’t what I expected. I’d thought it would be a sort of warm swimming pool, Turkish Bath style, but it was more a very hot bath suited to shorter dipping. Our house had 2 onsen – one “personal” one about a metre by a metre and a half and a group one about twice the size (and the perfect width to sit back against the wall and toes touching the other side). Both followed the same format with a small reception room with wooden shelves to undress and redress, hand showers in the onsen room to clean off before entering the onsen, and the onsen itself a simple rectangular bath like the swimming pools of yesteryear when they were still tiled.

Each bath was fed by a continuous trickle of hot spring water and the bath simply overflowed like an infinity pool when it was filled to capacity, draining from the bathroom floor (probably on to somewhere useful if the cistern-basin idea is anything to go by). The onsen also had a plug, so could be emptied if the water got icky (which shouldn’t be too often since the rules are strict about showering beforehand and there is a constant flow of clean spring water entering the bath). It was very hot so, contrary to our expectation that we’d spend hours languishing in it like a Jacuzzi, we only lasted about 10 minutes.

SUNDAY

The next morning we went to the Yuzawa ski hire shop, conveniently just across the road from our hotel. We were pleasantly surprised at the rates – R420 each for 2 days equipment hire! – and were soon on our way with skis, poles, boot and for Christian and Michele pants and goggles too. I went to secure a ski pass (R700 for 2 full days) while the others went to find an intructor to give them a private lesson.

As promised on our “Yuzawa ski in/out” hotel’s write-up, there was a ski chair lift right outside our door.  Our pass covered not only our slope, but the whole mountain including the gondola that ran from the Ropeway Station a few hundred metres down the street to midway up the slope, which had a few restaurants and shops.

Having snowed all through the night before, the powder was perfect! The slopes weren’t busy at all – not like the mayhem in Europe when I’d learned to ski – so it was an ideal training ground and a pleasure for the already initiated.

Alex was having her turn at being ill that day so had, wisely and with remarkable restraint, stayed in for the day. I took on the mountain as a solo mission and worked out a run from the gondola station to the very top of the mountain that had me entertained for an hour at a time through a variety of green, red, black and blue routes.

By the end of the day, we’d all fallen in love with Yuzawa and asked Gabriel if we could stay 2 extra nights (conveniently, he was our landlord for our intended next stop so we simply traded properties). I guess we’ll never know what Hakone would have been like but since its main attraction was its private onsen and we had two at Yuzawa anyway, we were very motivated to stay at our lovely hotel.

After a brilliant full day’s skiing, we were at the restaurant for 5 o’clock… and were still second in the queue! Fortunately the wait wasn’t very long though and since they had taken our order while we waited, the food was served to us as we sat down.

It was another set menu type thing with the standard miso soup, pickled veg, tofu and rice and the most incredible tonkatsu, which is a breaded pork fillet along the lines of a schnitzel but thick and tender and juicy, served with a mountain of shredded cabbage, carrot and watercress. Its partner condiment was a sticky sweetish barbecue sauce which matched perfectly and there was a creamy light sauce that we only realised afterwards was likely a sort of salad dressing to make a coleslaw type effect with the veg.

Since Alex was still quarantining herself, we made short work of dinner and picked up some beers and sake from the bottle shop to take home for a quiet night in. Made for a really nice evening.

MONDAY

Day 2 of skiing was even better because I had Lixi with me – and it was a great feeling just knowing we’d extended our stay so there would be no mad panic to pack and leave later on.

We made arrangements for the full group to meet at the Alpine restaurant at the top gondola station for lunch and each spent our morning making the proverbial hay while the sun shone.

The slopes were brilliant, so much snow, wide and long runs and, with relatively few people, no queues at any of the chairlifts. Alex and I managed all the runs before lunch, including her first go on a (steep and narrow!) black run ever!

We were pooped by lunchtime so had a lovely long and lingering pizza/pasta lunch at Alpine, comparing notes on who had done what in the morning and watching Ski TV through the big window (although we witnessed far fewer and less spectacular bails than our house’s view).

Alex and I skiied for about another hour and caught the gondola down rather than risking the long black slope in the failing light.

Our onsen awaited and was practically a religious experience for our tired bones and aching muscles! The water was 44 degrees so it took little more than 10 minutes to get to watershed invigoration.

Lovely and clean and toasty – and in no hurry for dinner after our leisurely lunch – we settled around our lounge table, with its traditional floor cushions on 2 sides and The Most Comfy Couch in The World on the other 2, and got stuck into the bottles of local sake we’d bought at the shop Gabriel recommended.

Michele was having her turn at the flu, so decided not to brave the cold for dinner. The four of us wandered up the road heading for a restaurant called Yoshi Toshi (one of the few restaurants with English signage) which Christian had spotted and wanted to try. Unfortunately it was closed, but there was another restaurant directly opposite and a peek through the door showed it was quite full – always a good sign – so we gave it a bash.

Much like the other traditional restaurants we’d been to, it was very small with only 4 low tables and a counter of about 10 chairs facing the open kitchen. We were seated at one of the 4 low tables and given menus… all in Japanese. There was one picture, which looked like a set menu so, since we’d done well with those so far, we ordered 4.

We ordered sake too, which was served the traditional way into a small cup to the point that it overflowed and filled the saucer below. This apparently symbolised the welcoming from the restaurant and the generosity that they will display in looking after you.

The meal was excellent! Tasty miso soup and superb chicken tonkatsu breaded cutlets.

We celebrated our success with a visit to Swing Bar, which still appeared to be the only bar in town and advertised on its signage that its operating hours were 8pm to 3am daily. How odd.

We soon made friends – or rather, in this case, were made friends with – a trio of young US Marines. They told us that their deal is 5 years in the Corps and in return the Marines pay for 3 years university education for them. Seems like a great system. Must rack up since there were apparently 5000 marines on their ship alone!

A couple of rounds of beers and Jagers (the killer mammoth tumbler “shots”) and it was hometime. It was so awesome surfacing to the crisp night air, with all the pretty snow and mountain backdrop for the short walk back to the hotel. Such simple pleasures we miss out on at home.

TUESDAY

Our last day was taken very slowly with all efforts concentrated on relaxing. It was raining lightly so nobody was keen on skiing and it was an indulgent day of napping, chatting, slothing and of course onsen, all set to the rhythmic “bing-bong” warning chime that the ski station outside our window made every few seconds as each chair arrived.

The first time anyone left the house was close on 6pm, to return ski equipment, do a spot of souvenir shopping and source a place for dinner.

The first 2 were easy, the third not as much so. We wanted to try something that we hadn’t yet eaten and the task is harder than you might think when the display menus are Japanese only and the 1000 words that the accompanying pictures speak are clearly Japanese as well!

The answer came to us in the form of a glowing billboard opposite the station: Kenchin Soup.

The restaurant looked like such a good find. With a charmingly rustic entrance complete with the traditional sliding paper doors, the inside was warm and comfortable but more ‘functional’ than a lot of the places we’d been to. With wooden floors and normal chairs and tables, we surmised this to be more of a canteen for the locals.

As with most places we’d been to, there was only 1 person working the floor (doorman, waiter and bussing functions) with 2 people in the kitchen. Our server was an old man, who was delighted to see us and ushered us into the back into a private dining room with traditional straw mat floors, low tables and cushions. As had been our lure, he pointed excitedly at the picture of the Kenchin soup in the menu, clearly recommending it to us.

Unique to the local area, Kenchin is a thick Japanese stew containing more than 10 different vegetables, soy sauce and miso paste. The picture on the board looked like a hearty beef or lamb stew but, even though all veg, Kenchin is just as hearty and delicious and there are some of the more exotic veg that you’d swear are meat from their texture and flavour.

We had ordered some side dishes too, including tempura prawns (as big as the monster ones we’d had the first night), hire-katsu (crumbed pork cutlets) and negitoro (minced tuna sashimi served as a tartare-style meatball in a bed of Japanese spring onion). Everything was so tasty; really fresh with sharp and defined flavours.

It was snowing properly by the time we left and we all looked like snowmen by the time we got home.

Our evening round-up (“clearing the stocks from the fridge that would be too cumbersome to carry”) had us in complete agreement that staying in Yuzawa had been a genius move that might just have ruined all future possible skiing holidays for us!

Travelogue Poland 3: Warsaw

WARSAW

11-12 June 2014

We’d done the right thing booking the first flight out from Katowice to Warsaw because, while it was a mission to get up early after the NIN concert festivities, it meant that – even with commute and transfers – we had a full day in the nation’s capital.

We caught a taxi from the airport for about R200 that dropped us almost at our lodgings, unable to drop us at our door as we’d booked to stay right on the Old Town Main Square (Stare Miasto Rynek), which was pedestrian-only for a few blocks around it.

Our apartment was a bit like the one we had in Zagreb; quaint, perfectly appointed, huge wooden bay windows, translucent curtains… but minus the unexpected old lady live-in landlord (and hopefully minus the church bells at dawn!). The building must’ve been super old, with its entrance a mere tunnel off the Square, the wide and winding staircase (we were on the 4th floor; no lift!) in the original bare wood, the front door thick, heavy and solid with the original brass key (and a collection of deadbolts that the door had obviously collected over the various periods of strife it’d lived through).

We were an hour early, so literally bumped into the caretaker and his wife (as they were coming up the stairs and me careening down the stairs to tell Christian the bad news, that there was nobody to let us in). They were more than happy to let us deposit our bags as long as we got out of their hair to make up the flat. Not that we needed any encouragement on that front; we were out the door in a flash!

As luck would have it, there was a Tourist Information office right beneath our apartment, so we grabbed a free map… and were almost immediately able to tick off number 10 (The Old Town Square), 11 (The Warsaw Mermaid Statue), 12 (The Historical Museum of Warsaw) and 13 (The Museum of Literature) of the Top 30 Things To See in Warsaw!

Founded in the 13th century as a prince’s headquarters and a fortified settlement, the Old Town is an exceptional place. Almost entirely destroyed during World War lI, it was restored so faithfully to the original that UNESCO still listed it as a World Heritage Site. The Square is a constant hub of activity, with cafés and restaurants on the fringe spilling out umbrella’ed decks and beer gardens, artists exhibiting sculptures and paintings, children playing in the fountain, and buskers creating a continuous melodious soundtrack making every moment a memory.

In the centre of the Square is the Warsaw Mermaid Statue, paying homage as the mermaid is Warsaw’s symbol and on its coat of arms. Legend has it that a mermaid swimming in from sea stopped to rest near the Old Town and liked it so much that she stayed. The local fishermen thought she was interfering with their hauls so intended to catch her, but fell in love with her instead when they heard her sing. Along came a baddy rich merchant and actually did capture her, so when a young fisherman mobilised his mates to free her, she took arms with sword and shield and vowed to protect the city and its people.

Our walking tour next took us one block down to an even bigger square, Plac Zamkowy, in front of the Royal Castle. This had been the headquarters of kings and authorities since the 16th century, was the place where the Constitution – the first in Europe and second in the world – was adopted, and is now a museum. It was almost completely destroyed in the war, but was rebuilt using the parts that survived.

Again the Square was there to be enjoyed and people were darting in and out of purposefully-placed sprinklers to soothe the searing heat. There was a lively atmosphere and the resonance of people enjoying themselves – in the restaurants as well as just hanging out, walking or cycling. Not entirely sure why so many people were free on a Wednesday afternoon, but that’s a different discussion entirely.

We walked past the Waza Column – erected in 1644 by King Wladyslav in honour of his father who’d moved the capital to Warsaw from Krakow – and down the road. While there weren’t any places of interest according to the tourist map, the road and its buildings are still surreal and breathtaking. Double lane wide pavements on either side of a double lane road, everything immaculately paved and cobbled, dotted with neat street lamps and flower boxes. Grandiose buildings on either side hosting all sorts of things, arbitrary and otherwise. And ice-cream shops. Lots and lots of ice-cream shops.

Every second person has a varigated chocolate and vanilla softserve cone, with the ice-cream spiralled gravity-defyingly taller than the depth of the cone below it. Ice-cream is a big business in Warsaw, it seems. Apparently it’s all year round too; obviously in the blazing summers, but also in winter where people bundle up so much that they get hot in all their thermals and buy ice-cream to regulate their body heat!

By now it was lunchtime and so stumbling across a Molly Malone’s was all the serendipity we needed to get a grazing happening. We still went local though, sharing a wicked but delicious chleb (lard with bacon bits served with slices of sourdough and rye to smear it on), a bigos (sour stew made from cabbage, sausage and mushrooms) and a plate of pierogi (mushroom and cabbage). Polish food is really tasty – and of course agrees with me since their main food groups being sausage, potato, cabbage and mushroom!

Lunch gave us quite a bit to work off! Luckily all the sites are walking distance, in a convenient loop and – like Krakow and Katowice – Warsaw is completely flat, making walking a pleasure.

We tackled the inland sights first, heading for the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier where, fortuitously, we caught some sort of military parade with loads of soldiers dressed in different types of uniforms were marching with all the usual pomp and regalia.

On the road again, we headed through the Barbican and curtain walls into the New Town, which is not so new now having been around since the 14th century. Until the 18th century it was a completely separate town, with its own town admin, city hall and church. Its Rynek (Square) doesn’t hold a candle to Old Town though, being a fraction of the size and – besides living up to the by now quite passé breathtaking beauty of the buildings in general – quite unremarkable, with its only piece of interest being a cast iron well adorned with a virgin and a unicorn.

We’d long-since gotten church fatigue, which is a pity because, of course, all of them are magnificent. They stand out even among the rest of the picture-perfect city… but there are just too many to make any stand out as of consequence. We did however pop our heads into the St Francis Seraphic Church as it is famed for its original 17th century baroque interior escaping the fires ensuing from the War’s bombings. And we were walking past. And it was open. And it was free. And there was no queue.

That was the farthest point on our plan, so we changed direction toward the Vistula on a road that junctioned at a panoramic viewing deck. Sadly, Warsaw has opted to put a double lane freeway along the bank of the river, so it’s not as pretty or serene as Krakow’s. They do however have a Multimedia Fountain Park on the riverside, with literally hundreds of fountain nozzles ejecting water in sequence for a constant show, which apparently is accompanied with lights and music on Friday and Saturday nights. The fountains are all housed in pools the size of Durban’s paddling ponds, but swimming is not allowed, just dipping of feet, made comfortable by a thick flat lip around the pools for people to sit on.

We of course were on a mission, so no time to dillydally in the fountains! We had a few last things to see before sundowners at the oldest pub in Warsaw (not that there was any danger of the sun going down for hours yet, just that our body clocks are preprogrammed on SA time and you can’t mess with that!)

The most notable stop was a turn through Kanonia, a small triangular square behind the cathedral where the canons (priests) had been housed in the 17th century. Besides being charming in its crude rickety cobbledness, it also houses a large gunmetal bell, which was never hung. Apparently, going round it 3 times brings luck so, never one to turn back on a superstition (as Granny said, just in case), that’s what we did.

We also saw the narrowest house in Warsaw, which is only one window wide. This shrewd builder avoided taxes as back in the day land tax was based on the width of your facade, just like in Hanoi). Still, more scientific than our dear City of Joburg who seem to do property valuation using ouija boards and bingo balls!!

Sights done and dusted – and probably a good 10km of tread clocked – we crossed the river to the oldest pub, Pod Barnlka, for a Guinness. We thanked our lucky stars that we booked the apartment we did as we’d very nearly booked one on this Square (almost expressly for its reference to the oldest pub!). While still ok and still an easy walk into the Old Town – everything is after all walking distance from everything – it didn’t hold a candle to where we were based, right in the thick of things!

Having seen everywhere on our walking tour, we’d pinpointed New Town for our dinner so wound our way slowly back there, taking time to stop at some of the sights that had been busy earlier when there had been lots of tour groups (refreshingly seemingly mostly young Poles) out. The most notable was the Little Insurgent Monument – a statue of a little boy wearing a helmet way too big for him and carrying a big machine gun, commemorative of the contribution made by the heroic children who took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Scary that times were so awful that small children were actively fighting wars.

The day had provided lots of good fodder for dinnertime conversation at our chosen destination, Podwale Piwo Kompania, which we’d chosen for the setting, the atmosphere and – most importantly – gabolki on the menu… which turned out to be so delicious that we contemplated ordering a second round!

But we didn’t, and rather went for a second round of sundowners outside the Palace. Very confusing with the sun only setting so late and throwing everything out of sequence!

When we were finally en route back home we considered stopping for a finale at the beer garden outside our apartment, but were lured into the Shamrock underground (literally) pub. With a normal (but small) entrance on rhe road level you enter onto a landing and then veer down some steps, snaking to the tunnels below, where the pub itself is housed. They reckon some of the cellars date back to the 13th century and are naturally the best preserved because they’re underground so they avoided all the chaos of the wars and whatnot.

The tunnel we were in was semi-circular and only just high enough at it’s highest point for Christian to stand upright with a smidge to spare. Couches were built into the low part on the one side and a well-stocked bar ran the length of the other. Not a window in sight! Moving to the end of the bar we saw a few steps down, which opened into a full blown (big!) undeground tavern, with the only natural air or light coming from a small delivery chute at the far end.

What a wonderfully weird and wicked place to conclude our trip!

Travelogue Poland 2: Katowice

KATOWICE

09-11 June 2014

The train from Krakow was supposed to be 2 hours (for the 70 km journey), but took almost 3 thanks to some indeterminable delays en route. It was hot as Hades on the train which, although spotlessly clean, looked like it had survived a bygone minimalist era with its maroon springy cushioned benches and spartan finishes.

The station is far grander though, with double volume ceilings, shiny floors and lots of shops, restaurants and cafés. Apparently this is a relatively new thing, with this sparkly new building only replacing its drab communist predecessor in late 2012.

Exiting the Station (at what we were later to discover was the worst possible exit) we found ourselves on a main road, with no clues as to where we were or where we needed to go. We ended up circumnavigating the block and ending up at the other end of the Station… and conceded and jumped in a taxi, showing him our hotel booking form for direction.

We’d – cleverly, we thought – based ourselves at the hotel closest to the stadium hosting the concert we’d come all this way for, but started to have doubts about this wisdom as the timer ticked over in the taxi as we inched through the evening’s 5 o’clock traffic. Twenty minutes later we were checking in at the Olympic Spodek and not too concerned about anything, having laid eyes on the magnificent oddity that is the Spodek Arena.

Built between 1964 and 1971 and weighing in at some 246 thousand square metres of circular arena with space for 11000 people, the building was nicknamed the “Latajacy Spodek” for its striking resemblance to a flying saucer. Our hotel was nestled in just behind the arena, and was very comfortable as a single storey of identical rooms laid out around a long central lounge area with several poof leather couches, a bizarre indoor putt putt course and a handful of gym machines, with the whole lot in the searing spotlight of a skylight that ran the length of the room.

The hotel provided us with a tourist map and Katowice guide, which we took to the only shaded couch to study, fearing we were to hell and gone from everywhere and everything would be a mission. Au contraire! Our location was not as dire as it had seemed. As can happen, the taxi had had to go the long way round, where we as pedestrians had the option to walk across the Square in front of the arena and through the spaghetti of tunnels that ran under the big traffic circle (of cars and train tracks) that separated our side from the main town.

It wasn’t much of a walk for us and we were at the station no more than 10 or 15 minutes later. Amazing how different – and much easier – the town looked when we had a map… and no luggage.

The Pocket Guide tourist map we’d been given was really self-deprecating on poor Katowice, apologising for its newness, its stem primarily functional in the industrial age. Not to say it didn’t have a long history before that – the area having been chronicled as inhabited by Silesians in 1299, changing hands a few times, and settling with the Prussians under the name Karolina in 1942 – just that, while it had suffered mercifully little comparatively during WII, it had been shamelessly and primitively exploited of natural resources following the war and all the ensuing Communist complications. Now, with many clunky bronze statues dotted around the city to commemorate their crawl toward a market economy, Katowice is only now starting to embrace the possibility of a bright future.

This is all gone into at great length in the guide as a prequel to stating that there is little to see and do in this city.

While it does lack the textbook palace / Old Town / ruins / bohemian district, as long as you’re keen to eat/drink/shop in wide café-lined pedestrian streets then Katowice is not so bad! And  we’re always keen to do all 3 or any combo thereof, so had a lovely wander through a mall and around the town and then set about tracking down Bar Pod Siodemka (Bar 7), which had been recommended for its local fare.

While we were disappointed that they were out of golabki (meat parcels wrapped in cabbage and baked in tomato sauce), this gave opportunity to try other exciting things and, despite the temperature still being over 30 degrees in the evening, we had soup to start – zurek (sour rye soup with sausages and potatoes) and garlic broth with soaked croutons. For main course we shared 2 quite different things: placki (potato pancakes, served thick like flapjacks but crunchy on the outside like hashbrowns) stuffed with chicken and wild mushrooms, and a Silesian speciality called rolada slaska (rolled beef filled with onion, bacon and pickles, sort of like a beef olive) served with kluski slaska (pillowy potato flour doughballs – essentially a Pierogi without filling – like big gnocchi). All washed down with the local Tyskie beer (although our other favourite, Zywiec, is also from Katowice). Delicious!

Having been solidly on the go for days and with the reason for the whole trip – the Nine Inch Nails concert – that night,  Tuesday was scheduled as a “go easy” day. We slept in, had a lingering and leisurely feast of a breakfast (watching the band busses and trucks buzzing around, preparing for the show), wandered into town, ambled through the mall,  grabbed some lunch, and retired to the hotel in mid afternoon to relax and prepare ourselves. But the excitement got too much and at about 4 we headed out to see what was happening at the Arena. There was already quite a crowd gathered on the steps at the entrance, but not enough to hold our attention, so we went into town for a sundowner.

Much better idea! A good proportion of people were wearing NIN (or comparative bands’) merchandise and there was a lot of excited energy in the pubs and restaurants. It was all like one big pre-party!

Arriving at the Arena first order of business was, of course, the merchandise stand. Their prices were, as always, heinous. But one must do what one must do and I’m super stoked to have my most expensive to shirt yet!!

We stocked up with a tray of Tyskie only to find out on entry to the grandstands that no drinks – alcoholic or otherwise – was allowed in the stands (unlike home, where that is the point of decanting into plastic cups). Worked out to our benefit though as we were allowed to stand at the back of the landing and finish them and this turned out to be the best vantage point – and an excellent private dancefloor! So we sloooowly sipped our drinks to make our exile last well into the performance. And by time we were caught for having finished, the show was so far in and we were so immersed that there was no quieting us! We simply got more beers and moved to the next landing!!

The show was brilliant; truly worth travelling for and a quite lifeline landmark for me, as a lifelong fan! The venue was excellent; full of energy, but not too crowded. The set list was great – a good mix of crowdpleasers and unanticipateds with the usual emotional rollercoaster of cutting between the manic and the depressive tracks. And we’ve been in presence of (and probably quite close to, seeing as his tour bus was right outside our hotel window) our heroes – truly a legendary musical genius of our time.

We went into town afterwards to grab a much-spoken-of post-concert kebab, which was lifesaving… and it turns out shrewd as well, since the band was still packing up and weren’t allowed in until the talent had left the building. No mind though. After all that excitement, who could sleep?!?

Travelogue Poland 1: Krakow

KRAKOW

06-09 June 2014

I was lucky enough to be surprised with a trip to Poland for my birthday, ostensibly to go and see Nine Inch Nails, a lifelong favourite band.

While a week surely seems long enough to go to a concert, once we started researching all there is to see and do, I was worried we’d be short on time. Our first eager-beaver landlord must’ve thought so too as he called me on Thursday at 14h30, enquiring my whereabouts and was surprised when I said “Johannesburg” as he was at the airport waiting for us – a full day early!

That must really thrown him off as he then forgot to fetch Alex and Robbie, who were flying in to join us for the weekend in Krakow and who he’d committed to collect at midnight. Tables were turned when he got their call, waking him up! He gave them details on a taxi company and they ended up getting a taxi cheaper than the committed transfer.

We were very excited to hear the news that our apartment – and indeed all of Krakow – gave first impression of being a winner.

We got this news update text message from our friends while we were connecting in Dubai, having flown Emirates as usual. We still had 2 flights ahead of us, to get to Warsaw and then on to Krakow, but the journey was easy enough and soon it was 15h30 and we’d landed and were manning the only carousel in the modest Krakow Airport Arrivals terminal, eager to get our bags and start our Polska adventure.

We’d anticipated a relatively long transfer into town, having been told that traffic would be “very bad” at that time of the afternoon, but 20 minutes along a windy single lane road flanked thickly with trees on either side and we were in the Jewish Quarter, mounting a pavement (as seems conventional) on Bozego Ciala Street outside our residence. We wasted little time offloading our bags (mercifully light at a record 11kg and some change each) and were promptly gazelling up the four flights of stairs (no lift!) to the welcoming arms of our friends… and an induction Polish Vodka shot!

There’s always much excitement when we reunite and this time was no different. Animated chatter and feverish catching-up on our marvellous balcony, over snacks and chilled beers and punctuated with Vodka shots with orange wedge chasers.

Lix and RoRo had, despite their late arrival, done a remarkable reconnaissance job the night before – and it was soon clear that the good people of Krakow had done more than their fair share to make sure that this was so. The city is as alive at night as during the day and our apartment had a 24-hour bottle store and an “open until the last person leaves” pub downstairs with numerous other entertainment options along the road, round the corner and on the rooftops.

We’d decided to start the evening with the Plac Nowy (square), literally around the corner from us… but we didn’t even get that far, being lured in by a gorgeous little beer garden on Meiselsa Street that connected us there. It seemed like the perfect place for a sundowner – and the perfect time, despite being about 8pm already, since the sun was still up and it was still bright as day! We had a lovely time at a cosy table nestled under a big old tree with low hanging branches creating a lush green ceiling.

By stark contrast, the next place we visited – one of many on the Square – was a dark tavern,  relying on candlelight even in the daytime to provide the murky glow. Still charming though, in its own way.

I ended off my evening at (what we called) The Robert Smith Pub, so named for the psychedelic portrait of said hero on the wall in the main bar.

By now the vodkas had done their mileage and the gals headed back to the flat, while the boys went to forage for food. Some time later they arrived with toasties, but I was out for the count already, so the only evidence of the mission was the 2 empty plates in the morning  (delivery vehicle of the clearly unplanned take-away!) and a single lonely cherry tomato that had made its escape from the plate on the stairs at the front door (which remained there for much of our stay).

SATURDAY

Saturday saw a slow start thanks to Friday’s antics – much to my chagrin, waking starving from having missed dinner the previous night. Christian and I eventually pulled ourselves together enough to take to the streets to gather supplies for a “simple” bacon buttie brekkie. Easier said than done.

No problem finding a shop (as with everything else, conveniently just around the corner), but once at the shop everything was complicated (on an already self-complicated day!) We managed to find the bread (flat oval loaves, not square ones like ones like have at home), cheese (marked “Salami”), butter (which turned out to be garlic butter), ketchup (which ended up being pimento-flavoured) and orange juice relatively easily,  but couldn’t find bacon anywhere (!!!)

Weirdly, there is no pre-packaged meat at all, with all meat offerings behind the (single) butchery/deli counter. An enormous amount of choice considering the space – mostly sausages and cold meats, but also all the essentials from a red meat and chicken point of view.

We couldn’t see anything that looked like bacon and got got a blank stare when we asked for it. Christian asked the butcher lady if she spoke English; she nodded and said “f*@#” and the other 2 deli ladies roared with laughter. Clearly on our own, we ended up with white Kielbasa (the only ones that looked like they could be cooked, the rest looked like Russians or Franks) and Krakowska Kielbasa (which looked like ham).

Worked out OK in the end, with a delicious ham and cheese sandwich and a sausage sandwich each to show for our labours.

Good humour restored, we were newly motivated to take on the sights of Krakow. There was a tourist map on our coffee table that confirmed what I had ascertained from the accommodation search – the 2 big areas of interest are the Stare Miasto (the Old Town) and the Jewish Quarter (where we were staying) with one or two other things off to the sides.

We started with a walk through the Jewish Quarter, taking in all the many old and beautiful churches and temples. Krakow is a remarkable place being an ancient city relatively unharmed during World War II, so having much of its centuries-old history and landmarks perfectly preserved – and accessible to anyone and everyone. This can surely also only be possible with the support of a respectful and responsible people, which is evident but the noticeable pristine maintenance of the city, with no litter anywhere!

We walked down to the Wisla River and enjoyed a stroll along the wide promenade, alongside a good number of Krakowians out taking a walk / cycle or sunning themselves on the grassy banks. It was a perfect day – not too hot, with textbook blue skies – and we’d walked all the way around the peninsula to the base of Wawel Castle, so we stopped to have a cold drink on one of the many bankside barges with rooftop cafés.

Refreshed, we walked around the inside of the castle complex with its famous Royal residence and cathedral and enjoyed the spectacular views over the Dragon’s Den. This deposited us at the bottom of the Planty (park) that runs in a light bulb shape around the entire boundary of the Old Town. The Planty is divine – a thick, lush green avenue with lots of benches and places to sit and enjoy and wide smooth walkways to easily traverse the town as an experience rather than a chore.

Our destination was the middle of town – Rynek Glowny,  the Main Market Square – and we were there in less than 10 minutes. Alex and Robbie went up St Mary’s Basilica while we went on the hunt for a tour operator (for an Auschwitz tour for the following day) and some Pierogi (stuffed dumplings, already a day overdue). We had no trouble with either mission and 15 minutes later were reunited and in the Number 7 bar beer garden,  with beers and Pierogi (one portion filled with meat and another with cheese) on order.

I left the gang and went off to shop for souvenirs at the legendary Cloth Hall at the centre of Market Square and soon returned with arms laden with bags of goodies. Poland is mercifully cheap even travelling on the Rand!!

We’d spent the whole day skirting around the idea of having a hangover curry, with only the faintest hint of conscience at needing to have a traditional Polish meal instead. Now, having ticked the Pierogi box, we felt vindicated and succumbed to going to Roti Roti (their menu was also on our coffee table and had planted the idea in the morning). Our karma must’ve been good as we stumbled on a Carrefour en route and managed to secure their only 3 packets of bacon! Streaky, thin-cut and only 150g per pack, but still… it was bacon!

The curry was good, the setting fun (we had their single wooden table on the pavement, with a hand-painted map of India on it), the ordering complicated (our waitress’s English was only marginally better than our Polish! And the restaurant was out of Masala, which limited options somewhat) and the company superlative, so a great time was had by all.

We wound our way back home, with the obligatory stop-in at The Robert Smith Pub,  but didn’t make a big night of it seeing as we had our Auschwitz tour early in the morning.

SUNDAY

Bacon butties!

The flat oval loaf bread turned out to be really good – soft on the inside with a nice chewy crust – and garlic butter and pimento ketchup fortunately all complimented each other, as well as the thin cut streaky bacon (which we gluttonous devoured all 3 packs of for breakfast!)

Exemplary tourists, we were outside and waiting when our driver arrived to fetch us at 9 on the nose. The same cannot be said for the other 4 passengers in our party,  who kept us waiting for 15 mins outside the Hilton while they smoked! We took an instant dislike to them and didn’t engage with them at all on the hour-long journey to Auschwitz.

What an amazing excursion. I’m not much of a history buff, but you can’t help but have a mental image of what the place will be like. Having seen countless black and white images in textbooks and on TV of Jews and other prisoners being trundled along train platforms, stripped, counted, marked and worked to emaciation; having learned and regurgitated stats on the number of people that were delivered to these camps and the very different numbers on how many left; having heard the stories of what the Germans soldiers did to and how the German doctors experimented on these people…. none prepares you for actually being there.

The planning, design and development are truly a testament to Germany efficiency. The camp is so much bigger than I would have thought. And super structured, symmetrical and organised. Everything accounted for and everything in its place. The buildings all still standing and in perfect condition – a credit to the Polish government for declaring the site a museum in 1947, when they could just as easily have torn it down.

There is a sign at the entrance that says something to the effect of forgetting about what happened opening the door to it being able to happen again. What’s really scary is that this compound was built to last this long! Had history turned out differently, who would be there now? Would Hitler have continued the genocide, taking it further afield (he was already bringing in train loads from Norway and Greece, over a thousand miles away!) or finding new blights to remove from his world??

The Auschwitz tour is, hardly surprisingly, very well laid out and executed and you see and learn a lot in the 2 hours, being led in and out of buildings, each with different stories and artefacts. Some astounding exhibits that have to be seen to be believed like the goods removed from prisoners, including the 90,000 shoes, 40m X 6m room of suitcases, mountains of spectacles,  (wooden) toothbrushes, dolls… and the room of 7 tons of human hair that the Germans were cutting off the women before they were executed and selling to make hair cloth!

Other absurdities like the court and jail in the compound. It’s farcical to have run these token hearings when nobody was given a chance to defend themselves and everyone was found guilty and condemned to gallows or firing squad. The inhabitants of the jail were sentenced to death by starvation and the lucky ones either asphyxiated from the poor ventilation or froze to death on the stone floors in winter.

Truly atrocious. And so scary that it was all so organised and out in the open – not like the Killing Fields we saw in Cambodia that at least had the decency to be secretive and hidden!

Worse than Auschwitz I though was Auschwitz ll – Birkenau. Somehow at school it was the poor cousin to Auschwitz,  where in real life it is quite the opposite. It’s enormous and was an outright deathcamp, complete with gas chambers and incinerators, on mammoth scale.

The purpose-built tracks saw trains pulled into the central platform whereupon a doctor decided by inspection who was well enough to work and who not. Being one of the 70% on the “not” list could make your stay at Birkenau less than 3 hours! You arrived, were separated from your stuff, herded into the queue, told you were going to be disinfected, stripped, gassed and incinerated. Making the other queue (a man healthy enough to work) gave you an average life expectancy of 3 to 6 months, doing hard labour on about 600 calories a day (a fraction of what you need to survive) so that you worked/starved yourself to death, if the cold / disease / rats didn’t get you first.

The Polish climate is not ideal for the prisoners either – very hot and humid summers and bitterly cold winters. By a cruel twist of fate the winter of 1942 was one of the coldest ever, with temperatures dropping to -40s!  It was a very warm day yesterday – but by no means the worst summer has to offer – and we each had a litre of water over the 3 hours of the tour. The prisoners were given none. They resorted to drinking from muddy puddles after the rain and melting snow.

The cruelty and the indignity that those poor prisoners were subjected to. It’s shameful that people can do that to other people (and it took a *lot* of people to run that machine, with over 7,000 SS soldiers based at Auschwitz alone). The wording on the door at the entrance was right;  we can’t change what happened, but we can prevent it from happening again. And experiencing it firsthand really brings the history to life. It’s a pity more young people don’t have access to travel to see these things or I’m sure – maybe over-optimistically – that the world would be a better place.

What was a better place was Market Square, and that’s where we got our driver to drop us off after the tour. We’d located the 2 Irish pubs in town and thought those to be the perfect mission to follow such a serious day.

The first one, Mbassy, was just off the main market square, in Stolarska Street.  It was nice enough – the Guinness fresh and cold, the decor predictable,  the atmosphere average. It only held our attention long enough to log a pint on our Guinness Index.

Alex and I had done a quick reccie in the adjacent little square (Maly Rynek), where there was a stage and some stalls erected in what seemed like a mini summer Sunday festival.  We found an incredible food stall, retrieved the boys and relocated to the bench  tables on the Square for a tapas of sorts of glazed mini pork roast, giant mushrooms, pierogi and Kielbasa. YUM!

We then continued to the second Irish pub (creatively named The Irish Pub) where we were lucky enough to catch SA vs UK darts on the telly which was as good and reason as any to settle in.  Quite by accident we spotted the Florian Gate at the end of the road, which warranted a visit for the sake of completeness,  being the last actual landmark place of interest on the tourist map.

This left us at the most northerly point of town, so we walked along the Planty to enter the town from the West to find a pub recommended in the guide, called BaniaLuka,  known for its festive crowds drawn by the 1 Euro drinks and 2 Euro meals. We were having a much easier time with the map since Anglocising all the road names. For example, BaniaLuka was much easier to find on Ski Pants Street than on Szczepanska Street!

The place was a bit of an oversell, although granted the guide did push its second main virtue (after bargain booze) as it being open 24 hours, so more the fool us for arriving sober in the harsh light of day.

We decided instead that the right mission was to hunt down a gabolki (meats and rice in cabbage parcel baked in a tomato sauce) closer to home in the Jewish Quarter, so off we set across the Stare Miasto, through the beautiful shopping streets and along the now-familiar Stradomska Street to our ‘burb… halted only in our mission by the quest for a loo.

We found a tiny bar, which had an online jukebox, so we had to stay and do a Furtado dance (to show Lix and RoRo what all the fuss is about). We asked the barman for the best gabolki restaurants nearby and when he recommended Kuchnia Domowa (“Dorothy Kitchen”, a good omen indeed being Christian’s mom’s name) a couple of hundred metres down the road, we were sold!

And a good choice it was too! We shared meat and cheese pierogi and had the much-anticipated golabki… and it was delicious!

But obviously must have been very light as it didn’t take much more merrymaking  before we were queued up at the zapiekanki stalls in the middle of our local square.  Zapiekanki is a toasted baguette with melted cheese poured over it, then covered with mushrooms and ketchup and other toppings of choice. We kept it simple and just added pepperoni. What a perfect midnight snack!

MONDAY

On our last morning,  the only thing left undone was a visit to Schindler( of List fame)’s factory, so we got up and out and trekked across the bridge to Podgorze to find it. It’s not as well sign posted as you’d expect, so we had some challenges,  but we found it in the end. It’s been turned into a museum, but we were too short on time the help give it much attention.

We instead caught a cab back to our spot to have a decent breakfast before going our separate ways.  Despite really really really wanting a Full English, I had the Polish breakfast, which turned out to be really good (and not too experimental) as a pair of fried eggs, toast, ham, cheese and cottage cheese with chives and cucumber diced in it (sort of like tsatziki).

We’d timed everything perfectly and had 10 minutes to spare to go up and get Lix and RoRo’s bags to meet the driver at 12. Christian and I jumped in the car too and got dropped off at the train station to see what time we should leave for Katowice. Fortunately, there was a 13h48 train which allowed a generous amount of time for us to get back and gather our things, drop off the keys and get back. We were delighted to find as well that the tickets – for both of us – came to 26 Zloty, which is only about R70!

Travelogue St Louis 2: London – St Louis

April 2008

Sooo…. it’s been quite a week in St Louis since Travelogue I. They’ve actually had me <gasp> working. Gggrrr. To make matters worse, there was a dark patch from bedtime on Tuesday (later than I care to remember, but late enough that I’m constantly getting thooose impression-inspired reminders!) to lunchtime on Thursday where there was no computer time at all. I KNOW!!! Can’t remember the last time I was offline for that long!!

Now, where were we? … Mmmm…. at Faye’s lounging and slothing.

Post watching bubblegum horror film, having a superlative daytime nap (which NEVER happens) and much-needed showers all round, we headed off for Lix and RoRo’s place. Plan A (some schmancy restauranty thing) had been fraught with too many possible temptations for our resident Athlete – who we all know would have been led down the evil path by us, being Satan’s children wildly and freely wherever we can as we do <throaty> hahaha – so we cast aside all idea of going out into public and headed for Plan B – the ‘burbs. What a marvy idea!

Lix outdid herself with ridiculously juicy and tender chicken Schnitzels, with the most scrumptious mushroomy garlicky white winey sauce. Which we made her make twice ‘cos it’s one of those things where you just. Can’t. Get. Enough!! Gggrrr (in a nice way). Complemented with a great vintage… erm… beer…. erm… or 7.

A great afternoon led to a great evening and into the inevitable grrreat night :o) lots of crap-speak, bonding, larfs and good times. Yay us! Got to bed way later than expected, after the usual bouncing around the lounge, with the added spice of Alex The Helicopter and a fun chapter called Clarks and Lix Fall Into The Telly. <blazing blushing stuff>

Thought I was going to die when I woke up on Sunday morning. Real early. Keeping real still so as not to turn queasy to dry heave (and / or worse). Didn’t help. After fighting for hours I had to leopard crawl to Lix to seek direction on The Strongest Drugs Known To Man Which Clearly Are The Only Thing That Could Save Me Now.

Dunno what them little effervecenty things are, but man oh man – The Bomb. The world stopped spinning, thoughts of solid food (in the distant future of course) didn’t cause shudders and shiverless thoughts of day, outside and bright gave me hope that we might actually make it to the marathon that we’d travelled 11,000kms to see. Happy happy days.

Am so pleased too ‘cos the race vibe was rocking (or maybe that was just me, being noticeably shakier than ever before) and Faye was considerately on time-ish so there wasn’t too much arsing about with all them family and athleticky types. Dry heave returned briefly when a runner in a Borat cozzie passed us. Gave me a new mental image for next time I hear “Jump Around” hahaha.

Sadly, had to hit the road straight after seeing Faye in an effort to automobile, train and plane to the States. Burger King saved my life. had a Number 1 with cheese and bacon, which was a trifle dry. Mental note to self, First World countries don’t give you any condiments unprompted. Suck suck suckedy. <how ungrateful am I>

Got to the airport on time. And was first in the airline queue, which I have never ever had before… would be the one time I didn’t need it! My colleagues (bless ’em) had checked in my suitcase so I sailed through and had time to chill with an ice cold coke.

American Airlines food is superlative. Had a chickeny cheesy pasta-y thingy. And a pizza later for a snack. Actually, if that’s what they serve you gotta wonder about what Italia serve. Mmmmm.

Got in about midnight. Great time to check in ‘cos there are no queues. I also had no strength and no power of speech and the receptionist clearly no training and no logic. So, all in all, it was a worker of a moment, missing only someone to capture it in a moooooovie to make America’s Crankiest Home Videos.

Alrighty, so now that we’ve put the ho into hotel, it’s a good time to take a repose and keep you hanging for the next gripping installment. That and I have to leave for the airport now (or you’re going to continue to get Travelogues cos i’ll never get home!!)

Toodles xxx

Travelogue Turkey 1: Istanbul

ISTANBUL

13-15 April 2012

After a mad panic of a day (and starting packing at 17h25), I arrived at Mother’s house at 18h00, exactly an hour late. Fortunately, our plan had lots of buffer time so there was little harm done and we were soon on our way to the airport to start the adventure.

We arrived at the airport with time to spare, especially seeing as international departures was tumbleweeds and there were no queues. After having our bags plastic-sealed (mandatory and free for all Egypt Air flights we were told) we breezed through check-in and passport control, leaving plenty of time to hit the Slow Lounge.

Or so we thought. Apparently this is only a benefit for FNB Private Bank customers at international departures, so we were unceremoniously turned away and ended up (after unfruitfully checking every single other lounge to see if there was some card, ticket or membership profile we fitted) setting up camp at the boarding gate.

This allowed perfect space and time to set up Mother’s Kindle (The Perfect Birthday Present, clever girl I am) and Amazon Account. We delighted in downloading her first 4 (free) books in mere seconds and were soon being urged to board.

Dinner on the plane took an interesting spin on the usual dichotomy, when the hostess started off with “Fish or beef?”, changed to “We’re out of beef; there’s only fish left” by the row before us and, after checking with another trolley after the impassioned resistance from the man in front of Mother, ended up serving us chicken. Not bad: salad for starters (Mother and I simultaneously picked the feta off and abandoned the rest – this not-apple definitely didn’t fall far from that not-apple tree), chicken fillet with tomato and peppercorn sauce, mash and soggy carrots and broccoli for main and coconut cake thing for pudding (left untouched, no danger).

The Egypt Air entertainment programme – on communal screens – had a few false starts with the scheduled movies cutting out a little after the (always stirring) Fox intro sequence and then settled on screening a movie listed as being for ‘Flights out of Egypt’. Or so I’m told, I was out by then.

(What felt like) A few moments later (but was 4 hours) it was breakfast time already. A disappointing affair with rolls and very unremarkable confitures. A situation easily remedied at the Cairo Airport transit lounge with Burger King (for the body) and free wi-fi (for the soul).

The four hour stop-over passed quickly with eating, BBM’ing, reading and people-watching (largely comatose dreadlocked hippy to the left, German mother and *very* active toddler at 2 o’clock and Sleeping Tiger Drooling Asian to the right of me). All the while I was being ignored by Mother who was spending quality time with her Kindle 😀

Cairo to Istanbul is a mere hop in the international flight stakes, made even easier by having secured the best seats in the house (the emergency exit seats are the only 2-up set of seats on a plane of 3-up both sides of the aisle, with obscene amounts of legroom). The only downside is a steward’s seat facing, made infinitely more awkward by our steward’s combination of permanent-fixture dark glasses and teary demeanour (we amused ourselves with fantasy scenarios to explain the situation).

Our driver was waiting to meet us when we exited the airport from (our feather-light) baggage claim. We were a bit disappointed to see that it was raining, but pleased to have pre-planned transfers so as not to have to brave new ground with the handicaps of luggage and language. After a combination of chaotic highways and suburban twists and turns, we arrived at the very lovely Old Princess City Hotel.

We checked in, did a quick freshen-up and were about ready to hit the town when our tour Operations Manager called and asked for a quick meet-and-greet. We agreed and were face-to-face in the reception some 15 minutes later.

The meeting was opportune as one of the priority items on our agenda was to find something spectacular to do for Mother’s birthday on Friday. We set our sights on adding a daytrip to Capadoccia onto our itinerary over all of the cheesy and over-priced alternatives for dinner cruises and cultural evenings in Istanbul and our operator committed to leaving a message at reception with options for us.

With that, it was up and out and off to the Grand Bazaar, which was the perfect outing for a rainy day and an itinerary-timing necessity since it is closed on Sundays.

The Old City Princess Hotel was conveniently located alongside the city’s tramline system and we found to our delight that our station (Yusufpasa) was 2 stops away from the legendary Grand Bazaar – the biggest and oldest bazaar in the world.

The tram system was super-simple. Figure out which direction you’re wanting to go (easily done from the routing diagrams mounted at each station) and then it was 2 Turkish Lira (about R8.20) to get on and stay on for as long as you like. Cash was exchanged for a tramline token at one of a bank of terminals just ahead of the entrance turnstiles and were idiot-proof to any literate person with only 3 buttons to worry about: change language (good thinking, Turkey), quantity of tickets and confirm. The trams are not only cheap and easy, but also spotless. Not a sign of graffiti or litter anywhere, seats intact and clean with young people ceding for old people. Surreal.

The Grand Bazaar was located along side the tramline, so it was easy enough to hop off and run for cover under the awnings that lined the walkway into the bazaar. We almost made the rookie mistake of shopping in this walkway, lured in by the shopkeepers’ friendly greetings and the gorgeous leather goods, delicacies, confectioneries and other exotic items on display. Little did we know what lay ahead…

The bazaar was a monster extending 30,000 square metres,  including 18 gates, 65 streets, 21 caravanserais, 5 mosques, 6 fountains and 4,000 shops. Once inside, it was a maze of shops selling everything and anything, but with a distinct concentration of jewellery, leather jackets and bags, carpets, knock-off label clothing and handcrafted wooden items (mostly games and chests) interspersed regularly with tea/coffee booths.

The Turks are hard-sellers and haggling was an interesting exercise. Asking questions seemed to some degree obligate a purchase and the shopkeepers got quite verbally hostile when you tried to extract yourself from their store. Nothing was marked with prices and any enquiry stimulated a barrage of banter and a physical ushering into the store, which was inevitably big enough for both of you, but small enough that the seller blocked your escape and could reach almost anything from any shelf to ‘show and tell’ until you succumbed.

Getting out of the store unscathed (well, emotional spend rather than monetary) was best achieved by a 2-pronged approach. 1) fake left, move right and 2) a constant flow of thanks and promises to return to buy later. Don’t get eye-contact, don’t let them speak and definitely don’t stop! It may sound rude or heartless, but once you’ve had your first lecture on what a bad person you are for not buying the wallet/carpet/bag/shoes/souvenir, you’ll appreciate where I’m coming from.

Nonetheless, we had a ball in the Grand Bazaar and emerged several hours later (always the last to leave) with bags of shopping of all descriptions.

What a relief to have the tram right outside so we could get back to the hotel, relinquish the new treasures and head out for dinner.

Sadly, it was still raining (although very lightly) so we opted to keep local for dinner. We walked up the road looking for a place of interest. The roads were largely peppered with eateries (restaurants, local and western fast foods and lots and lots of bakeries and confectionery stores). There were also clothing stores with the odd supermarket or goods retailer and very rarely a commercial office – really my kind of place!

We window-shopped for food until we found the best of everything – a lovely little wooden chalet-looking cafe with a huge L-shaped glass counter packed with all sorts of savouries and sweets on display, a chef manning a chicken doner kebap (literally translated as “rotating roast”) in the doorway and a pizza oven and coffee station. None of these elements was unusual on our road, but this was the first place that had all of them.

We shared a chicken doner wrap and a mince and cheese pide, which is a pizza sort of thing that looks more like a flattened sub and has a very aerated, light and fluffy pastry. Both were winners. Mother had a very frothy and creamy-looking cappuccino, afraid to tempt fate with the more traditional Turkish brew, which looked fatal in the sleep stakes.

After a long first day, we headed back to our very comfortable hotel to enjoy a horizontal night’s sleep.

SUNDAY

Sunday seemed to come all too soon – mostly because we had a City Tour booked that was collecting us at 08h30. Breakfast was a continental buffet affair with fruits, cereals, Turkish bread (scone things, rolls, sesame-seeded baguettes, all fresh and divine), cheeses and a selection of meats (all very processed-looking and nowhere near as good as Seemann’s). The hot food section was thin with hard boiled eggs, very scary bright pink viennas and split pea soup (?!) The juices were also a selection of orange, (and the more unusual) peach and cherry.

Despite ourselves (and our family’s notoriously poor timing-keeping), we were ready and waiting at the prescribed hour – although, in a cruel karmic twist, our driver was not since he was having breakfast in our dining room!

We picked up the rest of what we thought was our tour group of 10 people and headed for the sights. When we got there we were split from the rest and assigned our own tour guide. A mixed blessing because while we would have the freedom to move freer and quicker, the other group got the more eloquent guide.

Istanbul (pronounced “e-stan-bul” by the locals), boasted the 3rd largest city wall in the world behind China’s great wall and another city in East Turkey. The city was very clean and well looked after, with cultivated and manicured gardens a frequent fixture on pavements, corners and centre islands. The gardens always have tulips as this is a Turkish cultural icon, often alongside carnations and always with sprays of colour giving a cheerful and well-tended feel throughout.

The Old City is on the European side of Istanbul, but the city continues over the Bospherus Strait into Asia. This strait runs for 32km and is the only route for the Black Sea in the north (with Bulgaria and Russia on its West and Northern shores respectively) to get to warmer seas, namely through the Marmara Sea (the only sea owned by a single country), the Dardanelle Strait (65km) and into the Aegian Sea and subsequently the Mediterranean.

But I digress. We were just arriving at the Hippodrome, which was a central quadrangle where all the entertainment went down in ancient times, namely chariot races and such. Makes sense since it was commissioned by the same chap who did the Circus Maximus in Rome. It must’ve been quite something in its day, 450m long and 130m wide, able to hold 100,000 spectators on 40 steps. The guide reckoned that events drew the majority of the population out to view since there were (clearly) less entertainment options than today. Or maybe chariot races were just that good.

The original track was some 5m below the present surface, with the only surviving monuments being the 2 obelisks and the Serpentine column (made of brass and long-since relieved of the entwined serpent heads after which it is named) that once adorned the Spina (middle barrier of the racecourse) and now sit in holes in a landscaped garden.

Conveniently, the other major sites were all in the same complex (which makes sense since olden times didn’t have the luxury of minibuses and trams). So, next up was a few steps to the left and some jumps to the right and we were time warping to the Blue Mosque – queue-jumping up a storm with our slimline tour group of 3.

The mosque was really quite something. The typical high-roofed, multi-domed, big mural windowed, gold-gilded old school place of worship, but with the added novelty of 21,000 ceramic tiles all hand painted with bright primary colour tulips and carnations. Cleverly, they always used to build markets alongside the mosques to fund the build and provide sustainable sources of income to keep adding to it.

Although glad to have seen it, am very glad not to have stood in a half hour queue to goose-neck at some tiles and stained-glass windows – and was very relieved to be able to put shoes back on after standing on bare marble in socked feet (I bet a fair number of worshippers have used their time there to pray for carpets and/or underfloor heating!)

The route from the mosque to Hagia Sophia walked past the Turkish Baths, still in full operation today. It was a delight to again skip the queue into the Hagia Sophia (a big reason to opt for organised tours with guides that pre-buy tickets) and head straight into the building. The Hagia Sophia (translated as ‘divine wisdom’) was originally built as a church and has been burnt down twice. Remains and relics from the first two buildings are on display in front of the current one, which has been acting as a museum since 1934.

Within the building, you can clearly see from the decor that it was built as a church, with Christian murals and mosaics adorning the walls, ceilings and domes. Peculiarly, the conversion of the building to a mosque was simply done by adding enormous (8m diameter) black disks with gold Islam symbols and writing on top of the existing artwork along the ceiling cornices. Sort of screws up the original vibe without definitively staking claim to the place.

Still, we enjoyed all the obligatories, walking up the 3 sets of ramp passages to see the church from the emperor’s viewing deck and sticking thumbs in the wishing hole where if you can do a full rotation of your hand without your thumb coming out of the hole then your wish is supposed to come true. If that turned out to be real then I would be in the Pound seats for sure!

While it was a better experience than the average church, it was still good to be outside because it was colder inside than outside from all the marble in such a cavernous space.

Right next door was the Sultan’s Palace Complex. We didn’t pay to get into the palace (20 Euros each seemed a bit steep for our level of sight-seeing involvement), but did wander around the gardens, where you could see Asia from this European vantage point. The area also contained the only church in Istanbul not converted to mosque and once had a hospital, mint and bakery that serviced just the people that live in the palace complex (over 4,000!) Concluded that part of the tour with a quick sneak through the Gates of Salutation (the pay part) for a photo.

The minibus collected us from the morning of city touring and was all ready to set off to drop us at our hotel when we hatched a wicked plot: “let’s go to Asia for lunch!” (seemed only right seeing as 97% of the country actually is in Asia and we’d been frittering away all this time in Europe). With the guide still hellbent on selling us an over-priced cruise meal rather than realising that we are more than capable of self-navigated explorations, we realised that first step was to ditch him. We got them to drop us off at the ferry and bought our tokens (also 2TL, bless the Turks and their elegant simplicity!) and boarded the ferry for the cross-continental traverse.

Couldn’t have taken more than 20 or 30 minutes for the whole journey and presto, we were disembarking at Kadikoy, the main port on the Asian Istanbul coast.

Different to, but just as cool as, the Old City. The port was busy, bustling and neon branding, with roads satelliting up the hill away from the coast with lots of buzz and activity. Just as much shopping, but bazaars were replaced with rows of little roads and pedestrian avenues with (bargain) shops melding into a sort of flea market with little shops and stalls.

First order of business was lunch and we found a gem of a place with self-service canteen-style set-up which replaced the language barrier and foreign menu with point-and-service idiot-proofing! We hit paydirt first time with a portion of besemel kebaplari (chicken and mushroom “pie” with a light dough cap baked with bechamel sauce on top) and a chicken portion stuffed with savoury rice served with sauteed potatoes. Just gets better and better!

After a lot of walking and a fair amount of shopping (again), we headed back across the Bosphorus Strait to get to the Spice Bazaar.

To be honest, the Spice Bazaar is – as a smallish L-shaped market – a bit disappointing after the magnitude of the Grand Bazaar and most of the shops sell (not surprisingly) spices, tea/coffee and knick-knacks and souvenir items so it can’t compete with the variety of Kadikoy. It did have the inevitable colourful history seeing as it had been around since 1660 etc etc, but its fate was sealed when the adjacent mosque wailing started, which was just too much to take at sunset after such a long day of pavement-pounding.

We grabbed the tram and headed back to the hotel to drop our shopping off and ended up meeting with our tour operator to confirm our Mother’s Birthday Excursion to Capadoccia. With that all sorted, we headed out for dinner and did a typical for us, trawling up and down the street for somewhere appealing… And ending up at the diner directly across the road from the hotel. Another feast of toasted doner, 1 chicken and one beef, jam-packed and delicious!

What a day! What a city! Istanbul is incredible.

Being a good sport

I’ve recently started playing action netball (again) and have a fab group of girls that are spirited, committed, enthusiastic… and well-dressed thanks to our spanky new Hoopers tees, with the logo and slogan – ‘so refined, delightful in takkies’ – a spoof on Hooters. BUT, as yet, we haven’t won a game. Which means, yes, we’ve lost all of them.

I’m not a big advocate of the ‘it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game’ malarkey on the sports field. I’m competitive. And I would like to win for a change! Off the court is a whole different story – how you play is vital, games aren’t in anyone’s best interest and winning isn’t always what you think it is.

In my world that has been seemingly consumed by sport, I’m going to put all the constructive lessons into play in an effort to be the best sport I can be. No point getting teed off and tearing around parring for the course; no point in making craterous divots which could easily be nice little molehills. That’s just not cricket. The score’s Love all, but 3 strikes and you’re out. Do a little crouch, touch, pause, engage; do a lot of puck shit up; tackle some challengers and score a few goals of my own.

I’m on a good wicket. It’s playtime and I’m amped to bring the fun!

Frienemies and enemends

Why do they say ”keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”? Surely it’s effort better spent to get the enemies to disappear altogether?

The suffixes of the very words (enemy vs friend) give enemies jurisdiction over you and a doomed outlook on the prospect of friendship. Surely keeping the enemy closer just makes them a frienemy, when it’d be far more functional to make them an enemend!

Why do we waste so much energy on people that will just never fit into our life? Excess baggage that will always cause discontent by their very presence. If only the enemy could be banned from the future and stricken from the record. Deleted for good and feel good for deleting. Don’t build bridges that are better off burnt; right the wrong feuds and mend the right fences. Focus energy and action on the people that count. People that you care about and that care about you in return. Focus on the people that will be in the albums of photos you haven’t yet taken.

Bring back the good and banish the bad. Take out the frienemies. Bring on the good times!

Between mi and you

Anyone who’s had a migraine – meegraine as they say in English and mygraine as they say in American; no matter how you say it, right now the only thing explicit is that it’s mine! – would know that it’s not fun. It’s the cold cruel king of the headaches and usually hits you when you least expect it or can least afford it. It’s tiring and leaves you bed-ridden but high and dry of the one thing that would give reprieve… sleep.

Being a big proponent of sayings like “what’s bad for the body is good for the soul” and “the only thing worth doing in moderation is moderation”, I would be able to deal with it if it was a hedonist-ache rather than a garden-variety headache. It’s all fair in love and war if the ache is earned – and you can concede that no matter the plans, a good time was had by all. A headache out of nowhere, at the tail end of a busy day spent doing constructive things just seems so unfair, so unwarranted and so unnecessary.

But still, no matter how lousy it is, if i had to choose between mi and you, I wouldn’t wish a migraine on you because (even though you can be a pain in the ass sometimes) I’d know how your yougrain feels and that would make me feel twice as bleak as I do today.