Stuff What Happens At Home

Man, weird shit has been happening at home this week, as I sit here in Cambodia.

My little brother works in a laboratory at Melbourne Uni. Last week someone dropped a bottle of some liquid which decomposed quickly into a cloud of Cyanide gas. My brother wasn't in t he room, thankfully, but several people he works with were - some of whom, hence forth to be known as idiots, tried to clean up the spill with paper towels! Several folks were overcome by the fumes and had to be shipped off to hospital.

And my cousin, who edits the Age website, was retrenched this week. Fairfax media are a pack of fools, sounds like the print folks are pulling the strings there. Sell your Fairfax shares if you have them. Although it's also possible they'll replace him with someone younger and cheaper.

Speaking of which, my aunt was also retrenched, from a job she's had for some fifteen years helping to run a social work service provider. Seems the new owners didn't see eye to eye with the existing management and sent most of them packing.

And finally, my cousin Brita's partner, Emma, got herself lost overnight in the Grampians on a walk. Not the sort of thing you'd want to do in winter in Victoria! She didn't have a phone or anything, so huddled under a tree until dawn, then was able to find her way back to (my!) car. Did I mention she and Brita have been baby sitting my car for me whilst I've been away? And that Brita is pregnant and about ready to pop???

Weekend in Tooting

Golly, where did I get up to? Oh yes, I was staying on a living room floor in Tooting in London, with Deb, on an inflatable mattress.

On the Saturday we met up with a friend of mine - vedmajulia in fact - at the Tate Modern. The Tate Modern is on the banks of the Thames, and is in an old power station. Part of the entrance is a massive massive room where they kept the turbines. It must be six or seven stories high. At the bottom of it they had some kind of interactive art going on, with a lot of kids running about squealing.

There's some great stuff in the Tate Modern - once we finally got in there, we were somewhat distracted by the cafe and its supplies of beer and green tea. As usual, I more or less ran through some galleries, dismissing entire art movements and decades out of hand. My by now four companions - Deb, Mikey, Cecily and Julia - had to take in the art at a different rate, so there was some doubling back on my part!

I particularly liked a very large scale portrait by Diego Rivera. Was less impressed by an Anselm Kieffer installation, who is by and large one of my favourite artists. This installation consisted of a dead palm tree and some prints on the wall. On a side note, Kieffer seems to be big in Europe. There's a commissioned work by him in the Lourve, and a lot of his work in a gallery in Berlin. Which is his home city so that's not a huge surprise.

The Tate also has a huge collection of old Russian propaganda pictures, which was very cool. Luckily we had a Russian with us to translate them! Mind you for the most part it's pretty easy to tell when they're singing the praises of the five year plan or cursing the fascist beast or showing the evils of capitalism.

That was about all I can recall from the Tate, I think there was a lot of forgettable stuff, bad modern sculptures. I do remember some Anime based very shiny art which I quite liked.

After that we adjourned to the Blackfrairs Pub, back across the river. The Blackfriars were a bunch of Monks, who apparently brewed a particularly good beer. The interior of the pub is decorated with some serious brass reliefs of Monks getting up to various Monkish activities - praying, brewing booze, flagilating the new guy. Nice pub, lots of brews on hand, great Olde English brooding interior.

Then we traipsed miles across town, to a suburb near Earl's Court, because Deb had identified a Pizza joint which made gluten free pizza! Google maps on my phone showed us the way, and indeed they did have gluten free pizza! It was a themed place called Hell's Pizza, which turned out to be part of a New Zealand chain, which Deb had indeed encountered in New Zealand. I played their pinball machine a couple of times, not very successfully, what with lacking anything like decent hand-eye co-ordination. And the Pizza was Pizzery and good.

And that was pretty much all we did that day...

Bangers and Mash, mate!

Sunday morning in Tooting, we dragged ourselves out of bed and went hunting for a particular food establishment (not Pizza this time). There are a fair number of odd food chains in the UK, Leon, which serves healthy fair of interesting salads and the like, Paul which is a chain of French bakeries. And S and M Cafe, which specialises in whips and chains. Er, no, wait... The S stands for Sausage and the M stands for Mash! It's not entirely clear if they were aware of the double meaning... We actually visited two, the first being closed, but amusingly close to the building they call the Pickle, but which I call the Willy. Or 30 St Mary's Axe, to give it it's proper address. So I took some photos of that and the nearby Lloyd's building, which is also distinctive for having most of its working bits - aircon and elevators and stairs - on the outside, not unlike the Pompidou Centre. Eventually we made our way to a nearby part of town, and finally found an open S&M Cafe.

Someone had packaged up British stodgy food and made a virtue of it. The place specialised in sausages and, you guessed it, mash. And related British food like beans and fried eggs and so forth. So I had a substantial breakfast, for lunch mind you, with sausages, bacon, eggs, beans etc. etc. etc. Basically the usual pile of things I'd have for breakfast out anywhere! And it was very good, I have to say.

We wandered around the area some more, and I visted a quite large bike shop. Then we headed back to Tooting.

I needed to wash my merger supply of clothing, since I was carrying only about a weeks worth of gear with me. So Mikey took me to the local laundromat, which was run by a very talkative Iraqi. We actually ended up getting there quite late in the piece, but they guy decided to stay open when I told him I had to wash my gear since I was off to Paris the next day! He then regaled us with a number of stores about his time in the Iraqi army, being shelled by the Iranians and other fun stuff! He had a very interesting world view, for example firmly believing that the US had a base on the moon...

Finally, I dragged myself to the local Tooting gym, lifted some weights.

The Train To Paris

Can I just say that I love trains. Well, let me put in another way - when travelling, trains are generally a far more delightful way to get about than faffing around at airports and what have you. A typical journey on a plane involves getting to the airport by some mode of transport - car, bus, train(s), tuktuk, whatever. For whatever that costs. Then finding your terminal. Then finding your airline, checking in your baggage, taking all the metal and electronic shit off your belt and out of your pockets - in my case this currently includes a camera, two mobile phones, keys, a wallet, change, a small biro and a compass. Oh, and my watch. Oh, and my laptop - and placing them all in a little plastic tray so they can be X-rayed, then going through a metal detector, then putting all this shit back in one's pockets, then sitting around a gate for twenty minutes to an hour and a half staring into space, then discovering that the boarding time is a tissue of lies and that planes routinely board fifteen minutes after the time advertised. Then one gets to sit in a cramped seat whilst being hustled to altitude where the air is thin indeed... And so forth.

Getting on a train on the other hand involves turning up somewhere between eight and thirty minutes before the train leaves, waving your ticket at someone - sometimes after you're on the train - throwing your luggage into a rack near your seat, then sitting down to watch the scenery go by - all at ground level! Even if you factor in the fact that the train generally takes longer, the journey itself is generally shorter because the trains leave from the centre of town and not way out on the edge of town, and the transfer from one intercity train to the local transport is at the same damn station.

Case in point: I took the train from near Baltimore to New York. I got to the station about ten minutes at most before the train. I sat in a big seat for three hours, then I was at Penn Station in the middle of New York. Easy.

The train to Paris is a bit more involved, but not much. You wave your printed barcoded ticket at the barrier at St Pancras Station, it lets you in. St. Pancras Station is attached to Kings Cross station - on the Tube in other words. Then you hand your passport to a French customs agent, who gives it a cursory glance and sends you on your way. And that's it, you wait for the train, and if you're a clever traveller like me, you buy a five day Paris metro ticket there before you even leave London!

This train, the London-Paris train, doesn't mess about. It belts through the English countryside, through several tunnels. At some point you notice that the tunnel you're in seems to have gone on for a particularly long time and has in fact made your ears pop. Then you emerge into some more country side... And you're in France! I only realised I was there when I looked at my phone and it had connected to a French phone network...

The train makes one stop in France, then heads straight for the centre of Paris. The last stop is Paris Nord (or Gare De Nord to give it it's full title, which just means Northern Station), from which it turned out my hotel was four stops away on the Metro. I left Tooting in London at about 8AM and by 1.30PM I was out looking for the Eiffel Tower! All of which cost me about 85 Euro, because I bought the ticket well in advance, and printed it out back in Australia. Go the Chunnel, folks, it's a leisurely way to travel. And far better than, say dragging your butt to Stansted airport, fifty kilometres out of London, for a shitty Ryanair flight crammed in like a sardine - more on that to follow!