Posts filed under 'Travel'
Have just looked back at the last two posts, and funnily enough, they are both about food. Again. So I might as well have thirds, and write another post about food.
Dan has put up a picture of Eric in Paris, but truly, we were there too…We had three and a bit days there before a work meeting for me, and made the most of trying out the amazing range of restaurants around the Montparnasse area where we were staying.
Adding on my few days for work meetings too, managed to truffle through Japanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, French (restaurant, and bistro-style), Breton (ie crepes). In a work culture where you have wine at lunchtime, lunch is subsidised at the office you are visiting, and the meal lasts two hours, it was all very pleasant.
Meanwhile, the b’stilla is a reference to the Moroccan restaurant we visited. B’stilla (or pastilla) is a dish I have wanted to try for a long time, and the restaurant happily had it on the menu. It is essentially a speciality of the kind brought out for weddings - a very special chicken pie, or pigeon in the more traditional version. It is encased in very fine filo pastry, and has the sweet-savoury thing popular in the eastern Mediterranean and middle East. For the pie, this meant that the top was dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon.
The other attraction of the restaurant was the cat. As we arrived, we could see a waiter trying to catch a cat which was paused to run into the restaurant - and as we walked in, so did the cat. This is clearly not very hygienic, it’s true, but we happened to be given a table by the waiter’s stand where the bills were made up. The cat was clearly well known, and ended up curled alongside the senior waiter, who laid on a saucer of something, while directing the other waiters.
The cat knew its stuff too, and proceeded to charm several other tables. I’m sure that there must have been some kind of truce between leftovers and pushing your luck, and the waiters seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The title is of course an attempt at a pun on a line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The middle talky bit, that everyone thinks they know. Go on. You know you want to sing along.
May 14th, 2007
A week ago we were strolling through the hot streets of Paris, gazing at Notre Dame (we went in), scaling the escalators of the Pompidou Centre and having some ‘us’ time.
I’ve promised some friends to put up a post showing Eric at the La Defense - in front of the Big Arch (L’Arche de la Defense) - so here he is. More to post on our time there later.
April 22nd, 2007
Hoping that we can get on this ride after Christmas with my mum and Alison at the Turbine Hall at the Tate.
Will edit this report if we get on it.
December 9th, 2006
It’s time that I wrote a bit about the time that I spent in Africa at the start of the year. Being more precise, I was in Kenya and Tanzania with David Hewitt and Carna Hodge from my church. David Hewitt set up something called The Africa Fund in 2000 and I’ve been helping here and there with publications for fundraising and the website since then. At the end of 2005 the opportunity came up to go on the trip and everything all came together very quickly.
The main purpose of The Africa Fund - TAF for short - is to raise money for organisations that David visits and help them to help themselves. We ‘invest in virtuous circles’ - giving money, mostly to local churches, to support local projects. The money is raised here in Edinburgh and goes to people we know - that’s the difference.
Before going - even before talking to David about going - I got excited about the whole principle of micro-finance. This has done some amazing things to help people set up micro-enterprises [self-employment to you and me] and has been particularly profound in India and Bangladesh. There small amounts of money are lent to people wanting a bicycle so they can ferry people around.
It’s not a new thing in Africa either, but our involvement in running a micro-finance scheme has been relatively recent. In Moshi in northern Tanzania we gave some money for one to be set up. We call them revolving funds. The principle is that money is lent out by a responsible committee and when the loans are repaid more people can benefit from loans.
While travelling around, I was involved in talking to people to find out whether they would find a revolving fund useful. We’ve been able to give money to start new funds in Arusha in Tanzania [part of the Mkonoo offering in March 2006] and Kisumu in Kenya [general offerings]. We hope to extend these to our Uganda contacts in 2007.
Anyway, for the moment, please give us some money! You can give money towards a goat, a bee hive or a revolving fund. I’ve been mostly involved in the revolving fund side of things, so would prefer if you gave towards that, but I do understand the appeal of a goat. Give anytime, but the sooner the better, and invest in a virtuous circle!
December 9th, 2006
I’ve written separately about the Berlin museums, and also about the shop selling products relating to German traffic light men. In the same complex as the shop, there’s also a museum focused on Anne Frank.
I read Anne’s diary while doing A-Level German, and knew about her story in general. I also knew of the museum in Holland, based in the house where she and her family were in hiding.
What I didn’t know was that Anne was born in Berlin. Even more interestingly, the museum in Berlin told her story from the point of view of her friend Hannah, who she met on their first day at a Montessori kindergarten. Seeing materials from the school, photographs of them playing together, all served to remind me that Anne’s story began before the family went into hiding.
Probably the most affecting part was seeing video footage of Hannah, describing what it was like to be friends with Anne. We tend to think of the girl who wanted to be a writer; we also know that her diaries were all she was able to put across to the world. Hannah also describes the naughty Anne, the one who stood up to the boys at school; less of the ‘quiet saint’ we may have in our minds.
For me, the most shocking part was where Hannah discovered, after being moved to a concentration camp, that Anne was there too. Despite the danger of being caught, the two friends managed to ‘meet’, whispering through a partition of straw and barbed wire. At that point, Anne’s mother and sister had died, and she thought her father was also dead. Although Hannah encouraged her to keep going, Anne seemed to have lost hope, and was dead within a month.
Hannah reflected on the situation - Anne and her story became famous world wide, but she didn’t live to see it. Hannah’s experience of occupation was perhaps just as typical as Anne’s, or others at that time - and somehow she lived.
Perhaps she felt not unlike Anne’s father, who did in fact survive, and who in some ways came to know Anne more through finding and publishing her diaries. You can be tremendously proud of and affected by someone who writes openly about such difficulties. But you’d far rather you had them with you, and not just their words on a page.
A fitting end to the exhibition was a separate, smaller section, based on a competition where children were encouraged to write about relatives who had been affected by war.
Some wrote about their own situations - one fifteen year old who survived the Yugoslav conflict noted that he had experienced war for thirteen of those fifteen years. Some wrote about experiences their grandparents had that are now less well remembered than that of Anne Frank - one grandparent survived the siege of Leningrad, another witnessed the annexation of Kaliningrad, to the north of Poland.
The stories were powerful - and made more so by the children’s own efforts in retelling them in their own words, and illustrating them, or including photographs where those were available.
A little more indication if I needed it of Berlin’s complex history, and of Germany’s attempts to engage with these difficult topics today.
December 8th, 2006
When I was in Berlin in mid-September, on a work trip, the office was close to the Museumsinsel, a series of museums on an island in the river that runs through Berlin.
I bought a 3-day pass, and although the museums shut at 6 most nights, I was able to spend a bit of time in them at the end of the day.
The main attraction is the Pergamon Museum. This is one I went to on my initial visit to Berlin, aged 18 and on a ‘culture vulture’ trip with my German penfriend. I’d just finished A-Level Latin, and the highlight for me then was the huge Roman frieze, part original, part reconstruction.
It’s the first thing you see when you go in, and it gives you some sense of what temples and other official buildings must have been like. The stairs up to the top are very steep, but you can also see the frieze from lower down. I probably spent a whole hour in that room the first time.
A few years later, when I was working in Poland, Dan came out to see me, and spent some time in Berlin on the way back. He too went to Pergamon, and loved it.
I think we first went there together at Easter 2002. There’s also art covering other civilisations, including a reconstruction of the Ishtar gate (Babelonian) and lots of Islamic art. One part has a reconstructed room from the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain.
I knew this time I would only have time for the hightlights, so: back to the frieze, to the Ishtar Gate, and a quick sweep round the Islamic section. This time, there was a photo exhibition of Turkmenistan, up the stairs to the Islamic section, which was also great: beautiful colours in people’s costumes and homes.
My next day, I went to the Altes Museum, one of the museums I hadn’t visited before. Its treasures are its ‘Greek boy’, a bronze statue of a boy in prayer, and a mask of Nefertiti. So, with the minutes ticking past, I managed to see both. The mask was really amazing, but probably more so for having had a look at other sculptures in the Egyptian section first. Some of the most unusual ones were of families - the children are shown in minature on the lap of either parent.
The museums are due for a big face-lift and restoration is underway on the five different buildings. To see more, have a look at the websites for each above, or here for a picture of Nefertiti herself.
December 8th, 2006
Dan’s digital camera has been kept very busy this year. Much of the time, we’re taking the more conventional kind of holiday snap, but I’ve also been taking pictures on work trips which I can use in presentation, to bring the language assistant experience to life.
So, as a mix of both: here are some of the more unusual examples of signage we’ve come across this year.
And first prize for signage has to go to Madrid’s airport, which helps you locate the right place with use of beautiful colour coding. It’s not just us - it won the Stirling prize this year for UK architecture (as the architect is from the UK, even though the building is elsewhere). If you were to ’sing a rainbow’, this would be a good starting point.
December 6th, 2006
Dan and I are not necessarily known for being the sportiest people, but we like a walk, particularly where there’s some good scenery to take in.
Our summer holiday in 2005 gave us lots of walking opportunities, visiting a town in Slovenia which is a ski resort in the winter, but has lots of walking and biking options in the summer. The views were fantastic, and there were lots of well-signposted routes to try out. We even came back contemplating further active holidays, which is a good sign for us.
This year, we didn’t really manage anything on the same scale, although we did some walking in Fife around Easter time. However, going to Austria, which has some stunning mountains, we felt we had to have a day’s walking at least.
Maybe it’s an efficiency thing in Germanic countries, but when we set out to do our walk, we found a lot more people with us! The Alpine societies keep everything in very good order, and we took on a gorge climb, mostly through series of wooden ladders which enabled you to move from level to level.
I gave up counting how many we’d been up after 100 - and yes, every bridge was neatly labelled…What impressed me was the number of families where everyone was out walking, even where the kids were quite small.
By the top of the gorge, the organised air continued: a fully functioning pub serving meals as well as liquid refreshments. Admittedly the weather was good for walking that day, but the pub and surrounding meadows were packed with people resting after the climb.
We headed back down the path, rather than return down the gorge, though the path was also pretty steep in points. The number of people who had climbed with kids in backpacks or brought trecking-type pushchairs up became more and more impressive. It wasn’t as restful as being able to hike almost on our own in Slovenia, but we came away feeling we had gained an extra insight into Austrian society.
We also felt we should gain some extra points for hiking from a starting point town called Mixnitz. Maybe there’s room for some kind of pre-Christmas product called Mixnutz.
December 5th, 2006
Maybe it’s a year of celebrating small pleasures. A medium-sized pleasure was having the chance to be back in Berlin for a few days in September, as the mid-point of my work trip to Germany and Austria. But the small but perfectly formed pleasure is the traffic light men.
Some of you may know that East and West Berlin had different symbols on their lights for pedestrians. Both had a green and a red man, but of different shape. When the wall came down, there was talk of converting all the traffice lights to having the West Berlin type of red and green men.
East Berlin is becoming increasingly trendy, with films like Goodbye Lenin becoming more widely known. But part of the early assertion of East Berlin culture was the campaign to keep their traffic light men. My former German flat mate, Grit, even had a book about it, and about traffic light men in other countries. I also have postcards of the East Berlin ones in the bathroom from a previous trip.
So, the great excitement was being able to visit the Ampelmann [traffic light man] shop, situated conveniently close to the British Council office in Berlin. Many more people would have received Ampelmann Christmas presents, if only I could be sure you would like them as much as I do! But for those who are intrigued, you can also buy online: http://www.ampelmann.de/
So, I stuck to buying an Umwelttasche [’save the environment’ reusable bag] with the Ampelmaenner on. But a couple of months later, on a trip to one of these pottery shops where you choose the item and decorate it yourself, I decided to increase my stocks, and paint my own mug.
The delight of the blog is that I can also show you pictures of these to fuel your interest.
Just remember to look both ways before crossing over to the Ampelmaenner.
December 3rd, 2006
Yes, I will stop writing titles that repeat the same words, but this one was hard to ignore.
When we send language assistants to start working abroad, they usually get to go to an induction course on arrival in the foreign country. There’s usually one British Council colleague at most induction courses to help answer questions and support assistants as they adjust to being abroad.
This year I was able to go to the Altenberg induction course for Germany, held at a former monastery complex near Cologne. The cathedral is visited by lots of people, and it’s a popular retreat centre for youth groups.
I was in a room which overlooked the central courtyard. It’s a really pretty setting, and you can see some pictures here. Two downsides of the location though: the assistants tend to sit out socialising until at least midnight on the courtyard side. Then at six in the morning, the cathedral (at the back of my room) kicks into action, when the bells start playing. They also play again at seven, just when you’ve drifted back off to sleep…
Despite this, the course went well, and most assistants were looking forward to starting teaching. They also put on a great cabaret on the final evening. The highlight had to be a performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, the whole thing performed on a grand piano by one male assistant. Naturally the audience sang along all the way through, at least where they could remember the words.
December 1st, 2006
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