FuShMuSh

A Fox's tail is not called a whisk

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:46:19 +1000

Last night, I headed out for one last catch up with Bel and Dan before they return to Australia and reality. (Andrew is sick with a chest cold. He went to bed at 4pm yesterday and slept for 15 hours straight! Poor boy.)

Bel had organised drinks at The Castle, a lovely gastro pub in Islington. Happily, farewell drinks also coincided with the pub's quiz night. We signed up, thinking that as a team of Australians, with a token Brit or two, we wouldn't do that well.

Surprise, surprise, we came first! We weren't even trying that hard. Just chilling out, chatting away, keeping an ear out for the questions. Obviously we had some trivia experts at the table. It was nice to take part in a trivia evening. I miss our weekly sessions with The Badgers.

Some of the challenging questions were:

What is a fox's tail called?
The Bolivar is the currency of what country?
"Beyond the horizon lies the secret to a new beginning" is the tagline. Name the movie.
Acts passed in Parliament in 1729, 1736 and 1750 were designed to limit the consumption of what? (Kat and I knew this one. With all our touristing we've become authorities on English history.)
Cats meow, horses neigh and bulls what?
Which country and western singer recently surpassed Elvis as the best selling solo-artist of all time? (John had the right answer to this but we over-ruled him. Oops!)

Feel free to leave your answers to the questions in the comments. No using Google to cheat though!

Now here are the results. Yep. And we're going to...

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:51:43 +1000

Be allowed to stay in the UK.

I mentioned in my last post that Andrew and I organised a last minute trip to Scotland on the August bank holiday weekend. The purpose of which was not entirely recreational. The main reason we had to go to Scotland was to renew my visa.

My visa was due to expire on September 1^st and needed to be renewed before then. In mid-August I started researching renewal options. It was then that we realised that if I had applied by post it could have take up to 14 weeks for the application to be processed. Since you have to send your passport in with your application, you're without passport for this time. Not usually a problem but we had a pre-booked trip to Slovakia for the last weekend in August. We'd be flying back into London on the 2nd of September, the day after my visa expired.

You kinda need a passport and/or visa to get back into the country, so applying by post was out. Obviously I had to apply in person. After a quick call to the visa hotline to make an appointment, we discovered that Croydon (the office which is closest to London) was totally booked out. The only availability was at Sheffield (2 hours north), Liverpool (4 hours north-west) and Glasgow (in Scotland). We decided to book an appointment for the Friday before the bank holiday in Glasgow and then turn it into a mini-break.

So in the end, it was a great weekend. The visa application process went very smoothly and only took an hour. There were no queues, I just went from window to window. Submitting the application, making the payment and then receiving the visa. It made me giggle when they weren't interested in my financial situation at all. They were only interested in Andrew's financial records. As it's a spousal visa and I'm dependant on him, he has to show that he can keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. Obviously he can, as we got the stamp of approval.

We managed to see Stirling Castle, Loch Ness, Inverness, Highland Games, more castles, more lochs and some of the beautiful Scottish Highlands. And we made it back to London on Monday afternoon in time to see some of the Carnival.

I'm a little bit ashamed because I'm usually quite organised about these kind of things. But we certainly made the best of a bad situation. You can't complain about a chance to see more of Scotland.

Dinner and a show

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:39:58 +1000

Every year, the Notting Hill Carnival is held on the August bank holiday weekend. It is a Caribbean flavoured festival and is the second biggest street festival in the world (after Rio). The parade route goes right past our front door and we had a fantastic view from our living room window.

Well, we had a fantastic view once we arrived home. We tried to cram it in all in to our bank holiday weekend. We organised a last minute a trip to Scotland (the purposes of which were not entirely recreational... more to come) and when booking our flights home we decided to try and catch the tail end of carnival Monday.

Getting home mid-carnival was a bit of a challenge. Ladbroke Grove, our closest tube station was closed and thousands of people were using Notting Hill Gate tube station. We decided to tube it to Holland Park, which is a little further afield and hoof it. Walking down the hill from Holland Park to our house we had a fantastic view of the carnival in full swing. All you could see was a sea of people bobbing up and down to a Caribbean beat.

This view was a little stressing to us as we knew we had to wade through that crowd to get home. Poor Andrew was dragging our rollie luggage which was not an easy feat. We got a few strange looks and I'm sure most people were wondering what kind of idiot brings luggage to a street party. Eventually we made it to our front door, stepped over the pile of rubbish that had accumulated on our door step and retreated to sanity.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out our window watching the parade go by and bopping to the music. Parade is a very loose term as there wasn't a steady stream of floats. There also weren't any barriers preventing the crowd from getting up close and personal. Floats would go by every now and then with a mobile crowd attached. It seemed that carnival goers would pick a float they liked and follow the parade route with the float.

Sea of people is the right metaphor to describe the crowd, as there were definitely waves of people. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to see the road outside because of the number of people and sometimes there'd only be 50 or so revellers outside. I think it was a great way to do the parade. It gave people an escape route from the madness. I don't think the Grove's narrow streets would deal with a traditional parade.

Seven o'clock arrived, the official finishing time, and floats were still going by our house. An hour later, floats were still going past and a line down the road showed that there were several more to come. I think they were doing laps of the route. Sadly, at around 9:30pm, the happy, dancing crowd turned in to an angry, bottle-throwing mob. A group of young boys started throwing bottles at the police and all hell broke loose. It was a sad end to a really fun day.

The police response was aggressive. Large groups of police officers raced up our street and formed human barriers. They created several lines across Ladbroke Grove, some lines pushed the crowd north and others pushed the crowd south. Effectively, they squeezed the crowd out of Notting Hill. There were hundreds of police officers dressed in fluorescent yellow parkas outside our house.

Andrew and I watched the police operation from our window while we ate our dinner. It was dinner and a show! A group of kids loitered around 40m away from the police line. Every now and again a boy would dart out from the safety of the group and pelt a bottle at the police line. The police weren't wearing any protective clothing apart from parkas and bobby hats. I'm surprised that more of them weren't injured by flying glass. (The papers say that only one officer was injured.)

We watched until stray missiles started to crash on our window ledge. We then drew our blinds and turned off our living room lights. Every now and again I'd peek out to see what was going on. I saw the arrival of the riot police but not the action. At around 11:30pm, Andrew and I went to bed to the sounds of helicopters and police sirens. Luckily, our sound-proofing is quite good so it was no more than a distant buzz.

This morning I woke up expecting to see the after-math and was greeted with clean streets. Gone was the carpet of rubbish and all the shattered glass. Shops that had wisely boarded up their windows for the carnival had taken down the coverings and were now open for business. The organisers/council had done a very impressive job on the clean up.

More photos on Flickr...

The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:01:22 +1000

In March, while we were back home in Australia, we spent an afternoon with Mum, planning our trip around Spain and Portugal. Of course, we all had cities that were already on our personal agendas. Barcelona, Madrid, Cordoba, Granada, Seville were all instantly placed on the itinerary. To plan the rest of the route, we skimmed the guidebooks and looked at the places in between the must-dos. That's how Évora made the cut.

Below is the paragraph that tempted us to Évora:

"What draws the crowds though is the Capela dos Ossos, a mesmerising memento mori (reminder of death). A small room behind the altar has walls and columns lined with the bones and skulls of some 5000 people. ... There's a black humour to the way the bones and skulls have been carefully arranged in patterns, and the whole effect is strangely beautiful."

Chapel decorated with Bones! Gross!

The chapel was definitely an eerie place. Bones cover the walls and thousands of skulls feature in the decorating. This means a lot of empty eye sockets are staring at you as you walk through.

The monks who created the church thought that the chapel would be an ideal place to think about the fleeting nature of life and to help one reduce the focus on material possessions. Death is certainly something that is on your mind in a room full of bones. This message is emphasised by the greeting that welcomes you to the chapel... "We bones in here wait for yours to join us."

More photos on Flickr...

Jess really is 12

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:03:48 +1000

Maybe I'm not too far off the mark with the whole "Jess is 12!" declaration. Especially if you look at some of the presents I received this year for my birthday.

Stormtrooper Mighty Mugg

Sakura Momiji Doll

Wolverine Mighty Mugg

To balance out all these toys I gifted myself with a beautiful new handbag. It's an Ollie and Nic Dolci chocolate tote. I love it! It has that beautiful new bag smell and it's huge (it fits 2 books!). It was on sale and I couldn't resist.

Ollie&Nic bag

Jess is 12!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:11:19 +1000

I marked a few firsts on my birthday this year. It was my first birthday in London and also my first-ever summer birthday. I think it's probably also my first ever low-key birthday.

I'm a big one for parties and usually have something elaborate planned to celebrate. Car Rallies, Trivia Nights, and Fancy Dress Parties have all featured in my birthday past.

This year my birthday fell by the wayside when I suddenly found myself in employment. Not only did I find a contract but it was one where I actually had to work! The first 2 weeks of my contract passed in a blur. I worked hard all day and then often worked late into the evening. Before I knew it, it was the weekend of my birthday and nothing had been planned.

House husband to the rescue! Andrew quickly whipped up a lovely weekend away in Brighton to celebrate my birthday. We caught the train down on Saturday morning, spent a lovely couple of days relaxing by the seaside then trained it back to London on Sunday evening. Natalie also organised dinner and cocktails on Friday (888) for my birthday.

It was nice to have other people organising my birthday events for a change. Certainly different from how it usually happens (mainly because I love organising stuff too much to let other people do it!)

Andrew has been telling me for years that you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday after you turn eleven. Maybe I've finally reached that milestone. Jess is 12!

(Not if Andrew has anything to say about it. On my birthday weekend away, he continually reminded me that this birthday was also my first 30-something birthday. Not sure why he takes such delight in this fun fact. He's celebrated a few more 30-something birthdays than I have.)

Grog... skip it!

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:51:12 +1000

I'm not sure which city started the Christmas market trend, but Vienna's have been the best so far. In Vienna, there were many stalls and lots of beautiful items on sale. Unfortunately, Prague didn't cut it; there was mainly junk on sale.

The most interesting items at the markets were the Christmas food and drink treats.

Trdelnik -- a sugary donut type item which was cooked by wrapping the dough around a wooden spit and spinning over an open fire. At the main market there were six stalls selling trdelnik. Each of stall had a line about 20 people long. Obviously a very popular item at Christmas time. Makes sense, because they were yummo.
Grog -- on our first evening we were intrigued by a menu entry which read "Grog". In Australia, grog is just another word for alcohol. We had to give it a go. Unfortunately, we discovered that grog is a disgusting concoction consisting of rum and hot water. Only Andrew was able to finish his cup of Grog (he loves a challenge!).
Czech Spa Wafers -- They are delicious! A very thin wafer sandwich with a sugary filling. They are delightful toasted or heated in the microwave for a couple of seconds.

Clocks... yes!

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:37:07 +1000

At the corner of the Old Town Square, you can find the Astronomical Clock. On the hour, the clock performs a little show. We arrived at 11 am just in time to catch the display.

On the hour the fun begins. The little figure of Death on the clock inverts his hour glass. It is time for the end of Vanity, The Miser (used to be called The Jew!) and The Turk, the other figures on the clock. The Turk shakes his head "Noooooooooo!". Above the clock a couple of windows open and busts of the Apostles scroll past the open window. The cock at the top of the clock crows to signify the end. The whole show takes about 60 seconds.

I always find the size of the crowds that these displays pull hilarious. There was a crowd of about 100 people all waiting in anticipation. A minute later, it's over and everyone is left wondering "Is that it?". After our experience in Prague we can now say that we've been unimpressed by clocks the world round. (I remember waiting for 20 minutes in Munich to watch some figures twirl for a minute or so. It was so not worth the wait!)

Other Prague Highlights:

Jewish Quarter -- The Jewish Quarter in Prague used to be one of the biggest Jewish ghettos in Europe. It is the site of the world's oldest Synagogue which is still in use. It is also the site of the legend of Golem. (A legend I only know about from reading Terry Pratchett, so I'm sure my knowledge is a little shaky.)

In the Jewish Quarter, the Jewish Cemetery is artificially raised high above ground level. The floor of the cemetery is about 10 metres above ground level. In the past, Jews were not allowed to bury their dead outside the ghetto. The lack of space meant that the Jews were forced to place newer graves on top of older graves. There are actually 12 layers of graves and over 100,000 people are buried there. All in such a tiny area.
Charles Bridge -- The Charles Bridge is Prague's most famous bridge. It's a pedestrian only bridge that crosses the Vltava River. One of the Charles Bridge's claims to fame is that it is featured in the movie xXx. (I didn't say it was an impressive claim to fame!)
Prague Castle -- This is the beautiful view of Prague from the top of castle hill. We can say Castle in another language now. Castle in Czech is Hrad (which is the same as Slovak, so I'm not sure it counts).

Prague... don't skip it!

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:35:04 +1000

I continue our travels back in time with some recollections from our visit to Prague in December.

Our visit to Prague had two main objectives: visit and admire beautiful Prague and browse the Christmas markets. In 2006, we visited Vienna in the lead up to Christmas and had a lovely time browsing the Christmas markets. We were hoping for more of the same from Prague.

We always try to do a guided tour of each city we visit. No point stumbling around a city on your own. You'd never learn anything interesting that way. We prefer walking tours over bus tours too. Benefits of walking tours include an opportunity to appreciate the scenery, familiarisation with the geography of the city and getting a bit of exercise (which is much needed after all the drinking and eating we do on our mini-breaks).

We decided to do a Best of Prague tour, a four hour tour around the Old town and the New town, across the Charles Bridge and finishing at the castle. At the end of the four hours, we were exhausted and cold but definitely more knowledgeable.

I love that Prague's New town is more than 650 years old. It was founded in 1348 by King Charles IV.

Our tour guide was an eccentric character. He had a weird sense of humour and a tendency towards negativity. He was excited by the fact that the Czech Republic is one of the most non-religious countries in Europe... "Atheists! Yes!". He didn't think we should bother to read Franz Kafka or visit Dresden, Germany... "Kafka, skip it." "Dresden, skip it." He provided us with a few catch phrases for our weekend in Prague. Very entertaining.

We figured our guide was an architecture major as we received a lecture on the style of each historic building that we passed. We even received a little quiz at the end of the tour. I can now identify Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, and Art Nouveau styles of architecture. I'm not sure I care. Or as our guide would say, "Architectural styles, skip 'em!".

Although after a little bit of research, I've discovered that Prague is quite well known for fine examples of different architectural styles. Maybe everyone in Prague is obsessed with architecture.

More photos on Flickr...

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:42:52 +1000

Often, when we tell people we play ultimate Frisbee we get the reaction "ultimate what?". Yes! It's a real sport, people! A real sport with proper rules, a huge player base and even a World Championships. The WFDF 2008 World Ultimate and Guts Championships officially started this weekend in Vancouver. Go Dingos! Go Firetails! Go Barramundis! Go Australia!

If you're interested in checking out what it's all about, you can do so for free at Blockstack.tv. Look! Ultimate even has its own TV show. The current episode is a bit long but good on them for giving us a peek at Worlds. (and getting to travel around the world to watch ultimate.)

Go Aussies!