Iceland

Kyla and I, plus her parents, went to Iceland for a few days. A lot of my ideal holiday destinations were planted in my head when I was a kid, so usually involve dinosaurs / fossils and volcanoes. Iceland had earned its place on there after I’d read about the formation of the island of Surtsey, and now I think I’m clear to draw a line through it.

It’s a pretty crazy (as in, pretty and crazy) place. The midnight sun is less intrusive than you’d imagine, though it is just as confusing; it seemed wrong to shut the curtains when it was still light outside. However our room in Hotel Reynihlid came equipped with black-out curtains, so sleeping was no great hassle. (Get that Pacino, next time you go to Alaska spend a bit more on the hotel, maybe you won’t have any trouble sleeping!) We were staying near lake Myvatn, which is on the line where the Eurasian plate meets the North American plate, and next to the site of a fairly active volcano, Krafla. Mvvatn translates to midge lake, and it is named with good reason. One morning we planned to walk up a hill to get a good view of the lake. As we drove there we thought it was started raining, but quickly realised that actually it was insects hitting the windscreen, not raindrops. It looked like the surrounding countryside was undergoing some sort of six-legged sandstorm, and knowing that they’re non-biting doesn’t improve things; apparently they’re attracted by carbon dioxide, so make a bee-line (midge-line?) for your mouth and nose. We decided to find a different area to go walking in.

All told, it was a good few days away; a particular highlight was lounging around in a geothermally heated pool watching the sun edge towards a mountain range on the horizon.

Ceiling @ Benelux

I’m currently sat in the Benelux pub enjoying a pint of their rather good stout. And hey, free wifi! It’s snowing outside, and pointing that out every time it happens is something that the Canadians have been mocking me about. I wonder if it’s actually possible to get bored of playing with snow? If I lived up a mountain or in Canada I’m sure I’d still be throwing snowballs at all and sundry every time the opportunity arose.
There seem to be quite a few places that serve decent beer in the city, something that I also found on the North West coast of the US (Seattle, Portland, etc). Though similar to there, there is a tendency to serve it perhaps a touch too cold; there’s good brewing going on, but the warm British pint doesn’t seem to have quite been equalled
For the next stop on my world tour I’m off to what is apparently a rather fog-bound and water-logged Chicago. Apparently O’Hare at Chicago is even worse than the passport control log jam at Montreal airport; it took all of Brand New Second Hand to make it through the queue to get into Canada, so I’m wondering how many albums I’ll get through on my way into the USA.

I’m in Montreal

Not for a holiday though; the company I work for has its HQ there.  I flew over with BA, and in business class, which is a first for me; getting my “Dr” put on my passport has so far failed to score me any free extra luxury at the check-in desk, this was actually paid for.  However, from reading this article it would seem that the only way the hoi polloi can make it into business class is to actually die, so maybe I shouldn’t be too disappointed.

Skiing in La Plagne

The one downside to the Acuphuncture gig on the 2nd was that I was leaving (on a jet plane, no less) for France from Gatwick airport at 7AM the following morning. Made it to bed at 1AM, then up at 2.40 and off we went! Kyla and I were in La Plagne this time, with a big bunch of friends. (Never mention that you’re going skiing – even distant acquaintances will latch themselves onto your holiday, and suddenly you’re booking and organising 15 people… fortunately I managed to duck any responsibility for planning this time.) The holiday was with Skiworld, who were… ok. The flights were delayed both ways, and Lyon airport really isn’t suited to the arrival of several hundred people, so getting there and back was a drag.  The delay on the way back was alleviated by an impromptu game of “Passport Top Trumps,” followed by opening a book on how late we’d leave (winning answer: 1 hour 20 minutes). Still, the chalet was pleasant enough (apart from the comedically small hot water tank for our basement room, which ran out quicker than loo roll at a fig-eating contest.) The weather was good on the whole, and Kyla and I now finish our third skiing holiday with a skill level of Not Shit. (In Elite terms, I’d say we’re Average.) We even took time out to chuck ourselves off the mountain not attached to sticks: we went parapenting (paragliding) off the top of Grande Rochette, which was good, albeit slightly incompatible with the raging hangover from the pubcrawl the previous night.

If you’re really bored, you can check out our holiday snaps here.

Thailand

Miss me? I’ve been on honeymoon in Thailand for a couple of weeks. Yes, honeymoon. But more on that later.  Despite it being a) rainy season and b) coup d’etat season, Kyla and I still went ahead with our holiday.  Actually it turned out fine: the rain did appear most days for an hour or so each afternoon, but as the temperature was above 30 degrees it was actually quite welcome.  We didn’t see any evidence of the coup (quite disappointing, I was looking forward to getting my photo with a tank), but given that we bypassed Bangkok when we arrived, heading straight down to Koh Samui, that is hardly surprising: Samui doesn’t have much law and order at the best of times, being mainly concerned with seperating tourists from their cash.

We stayed in two different places on Samui: Choeng Mon, which is a fairly relaxed little village on the North East coast, then Chaweng, which is significantly more “Yarmouth”.   Actually, “Camden-on-Sea” might be a  better description, due to the number of people trying to sell you tat.

After a week or so on Samui, we headed North to Chiang Mai.  Kyla and I were surprised to find that going North in any country seems to have the same effect: the local food immediately changed to more meaty broths incorporating distressing amounts of liver.  I was waiting for someone to offer me a cup of tea and a bit of Lancashire hot pot.  The holiday took a turn for the cultural at this point; we wandered around various temples, went hiking in the jungle and visited a few hill tribe villages (mostly a highly-choreographed tourist “experience”).

We finished off in Bangkok for a couple of days. The idea behind this ordering of destinations was a gradual increase in stress levels, from quiet beach to busier beach to small town to megalopolis wig-out.  In the latter role, Bangkok did not disappoint.  Up until that point we’d laughed at the insane recklessness of the taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, but in Bangkok we finally found someone who seemed hell-bent on finding out whether or not the Buddhist idea of reincarnation is true.

Still, I’m back now.  Normal service will resume once I’ve shaken this jet-lag.

Skiing in Les Menuires

No updates for a few days because I’ve been falling on my arse in the French Alps for a week. (I used the “post-to-the-future” option in WordPress to give y’all a few morsels while I was away.) I’m getting better at this whole “dicks on sticks” malarkey, though I still have an urge to try being a “gay on a tray”; I gave one of the guys a hand carrying his board, and he looked at me and said, “You know, holding that, you look ever-so-slightly cooler.”

Most of this holiday was spent trying to hold the umpteen different facets of a parallel turn in my head without falling over during the actual execution of one. One the way there were a couple of impressive sites; firstly the Couloirs of Courchevel, a series of black runs accessible from Saulire. Here’s a photo looking down the spine of rock one must traverse to reach the runs themselves; there was no chance I was getting any closer than this.

Secondly, here’s the panorama from the Sommet des Pistes in Val Thorens (well, strictly it’s in the unofficial fourth valley of the Three Valleys resort):

Breath-taking stuff, particularly the un-bashed red run it was necessary to take to get down from there!

Cologne

I started this week off with a couple of days in Cologne (I’d say Koln, but I can’t work out how to put an umlaut on the o in WordPress; I don’t approve of translating place names), on a conference. The social event was a tour of the cathedral followed by a “surprise.” After the tour finished we walked down into the nearest underground station and waited on the platform. And waited. And waited some more. Mutinous whispers went around about buggering off to the pub for food, and people started joking that we were waiting for the party train.
As it turned out, we were.
Up rolled a little two carriage train that we piled into to find a bar and buffet, then off we went on a tour of Cologne (the train ran above ground as well, it wasn’t just a scenic view of the inside of a tunnel). Imagine a slightly more organised Circle line party and you’re there. The beer was served in 200ml glasses, which meant that I quickly lost track of exactly how much I’d drunk, the numbers becoming too large for a booze-addled mind to hold onto. After a couple of hours of waving at commuters waiting for their trains, we decamped to the pub. It was here that I realised that I’d definitely had enough to drink when I wandered into the loos, spotted these rather funky splash mats:

And actually took a photo of one. Hmmm.
The weirdness didn’t end there. My flight back with German Wings was slightly delayed, but they were handing out sparkling wine so I didn’t mind too much. There were a few guys with TV cameras hanging around, but I assumed they were making a German equivalent of that Airport series. Eventually we boarded the plane, and once we were in the air a chap got up and announced that to coincide with the start of London fashion week, German Wings had organised a mid-air fashion show, a “catwalk in the sky.” Cue music and various oddly dressed people parading up and down the aisle. How rare. I wondered if I would get applauded if I got up to go to the loo, but I don’t think I was looking “urban” enough. I’m more urbane than urban.

On holiday

There’s been a lack of updates here because I’ve been on holiday: four days in France, followed by a few days visiting friends around the south coast of England. The first part of the holiday was in a little village just outside Toulouse. Recently I said that Belgium was my spiritual home (beer, chips, chocolate), but the Gascoigne region has to be a close second (duck, red wine, Armanac). I think I ate more duck and pate de foie gras than is quite sane, let alone healthy, and enough cheese to give a person bad dreams for seven years. Actually, between eating and lazing around by the pool, I did very little for the four days I was over there, which is unusually sedentary by the usual standards of my holidays.
After returning to England I visited Winchester, Fletching, Herne Bay and High Wycombe, so a bit of a tour. Of those, perhaps only Fletching is of interest to anyone else: Kyla and I stayed at a little pub called the Griffin Inn; terribly rah, if you know what I mean, but really really fantastic food and good rooms. There was a double bassist and pianist playing jazz in the bar in the evening, and they were joined by a local singer on a couple of numbers. Both Kyla and I thought his voice was more operatic than jazz in style, which turned out to be quite correct as he then sang a short aria from Tosca and O solo meo. As I was sat about two metres from the singer, and it being a fairly small pub, I thought my ears were going to implode he was so loud. Impressive.

Salty

It was a long day yesterday: I went to a meeting in Copenhagen, which involved getting up at 4.30am to catch a 7am flight. (Oooo, hark at me, the international jet setter.) My usual excuse for being up at dawn is playing stupid 3am slots at the Cambridge college balls, so often these early morning vistas are populated by students in dinner jackets and bin men. Despite the students having gone home for the sumer there was still a good population of random people wandering around, sometimes looking like they’re still trying to get home. My new piece of advice is: don’t do a load of exercise before a night in which you know you won’t be getting much sleep, you’ll wake up utterly shattered.
On the way back we took the opportunity to pick up some foreign confectionary that our company loves to hate: salty liquorice. I’ve said before that nations should be divided along their confectionary, and this stuff is an easy way to split the Scandinavians off. The sweets are liquorice, but contain 7% ammonium cholride. It’s like chewing a chemical factory. It can result in three grown men sitting on a plane seeing how many they can stand to eat simultaneously, whilst giggling and dribbling like loons. Dangerous stuff.

Mort Subite

Kyla and I went to Brussels on the weekend; a cheap hotel + train ticket offer on the Eurostar proved too tempting to resist. Plus Brussels is my spiritual home, being packed with beer, chips and chocolate. Of course travelling on the Eurostar meant we passed through London on the Friday. The tube lines in London’s centre were mainly closed following Thursday’s attacks, and the station concourses were either empty or packed with silent people awaiting delayed trains. One we’d safely negotiated the capital the rest of the journey went quite smoothly. Our hotel was La Plaza, chosen mainly for the fact that it offers free draft beer. It became obvious upon our arrival why it needs this carrot: the surrounding streets are the red light district. Still, free beer is not to be sniffed at. Our weekend was mainly spent wandering around the city looking in churches and at the art nouveau facades that many of the buildings have, and when not being culture vulture we were making a concerted effort to work through the ~200 different varieties of beer that are available. A fact that I wasn’t previously aware of is that Lambic beer, one of the local methods of brewing, does not involve the addition of any yeast to the brew, it simply ferments with whatever yeast falls into mix. That’s my kind of city: leave water around and it turns into beer.
The locals speak French or Flemish, though the majority speak English, which is lucky as my French is more than a little rusty. One particular bit of trouble that this got me into was while ordering dinner on Friday night: we were in a Vietnamese restaurant, and surprised that I couldn’t see any chicken curries on the menu, I asked what the cuisses de la grenouille were. We gleaned from the waitress that they weren’t a bird, nor were they meat. When we asked what they were, she made a short waving motion at waist height that did nothing to narrow the possibilities. I ordered them, curried spicily. The dish arrived, and I gained a new phrase for my French vocabulary: it was frog’s legs. I’ve had them before, many years ago and probably following a similar number of beers. And yes, as everyone no doubt says, they taste just like chicken.
One extra point: I was watching BBC World whilst in the hotel, when all of a sudden on comes Top Gear. BBC World, the international mouthpiece of a highly respected journalistic institution, and it’s used to pump that odious twit Clarkson around the planet. What made it worse was that I spotted that there was a repeat showing of the same episode later in the day in case anyone missed it. Insult, meet injury.