Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

I note that In a few days it'll be 20 years since the horrible events of September 11th 2001. In a previous generation, people would ask each other "Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?", or for another generation "Where were you John Lennon was assassinated?" People my age can ask each other "Where were you on 9/11?"

For the record, let me tell you where I was.

It was September 12th in my timezone. On the evening of our Tuesday September 11th, I called it a night and turned off broadcast television about 10.15PM. Had I stayed awake some 15 more minutes, I might have witnessed the events in real time - every channel in Australia cut to coverage almost immediately. As it was, I got up on the the morning of Sept 12th, and my housemate turned on the television. The first images I saw was a loop of two people being interviewed in front of the burning north town of the World Trade Center, just as the second plane hit the south tower. I can still remember how they ducked in shock.

I said "What film is this from?"
Rebecca (my housemate) said "It's not a film, this happened last night."
"What's happened to the World Trade Center?"
"It's gone, they've collapsed."
I paused and said "There's going to be a war."



I also assumed immediately that it was Al-Qaeda, because they had tried before, back in 1993. That time they only managed to damage the basement, and were only caught because one of the stupider plotters tried to claim his deposit back on the rented van they'd packed the explosives into.

At the time, my sister, who works in international aid, was based in Indonesia. I made at least one panicked phone call to her to check she was alright, in part because unfounded reports from around the world suggested all sorts of related events were taking place. Including air raids in Afghanistan.

Happily, despite knowing a lot of keen travellers and ex-pats, no one I know was caught up directly in the destruction. But a friend of a friend died when the towers collapsed. Because just about every city has at least a handful of Australian's in it.

For more than a week, everything stopped. The FAA ordered every plane in the air in the US or approaching the US to land at the nearest airport. Sporting events and any event of any size were cancelled. We watched as many of the other towers at the World Trade Center collapsed, and then watched as they combed the extraordinarily mangled piles of debris looking for survivors. US Air Force fighter jets patrolled the skies over New York. I still remember a photograph of an African-American man, in a suit and carrying a briefcase, walking through a swirling cloud of dusk and sheets of paper, covered from head to foot in grey dust. For about ten days every television channel in Australia was rebroadcasting American news services. Remember, these are days when we still got news largely from the radio, TV and newspapers. Indeed, somewhere I have a copy of The Age reporting the attacks.

Across the world, there was an extraordinary wave of sympathy towards the United States.

And then what happened... the United States, being the United States and at the time run by neo-cons and cold war warriors, lashed out at the nations it felt were responsible. Within a month they were bombing Afghanistan, and flying in troops, starting a war that was ill-advised and ended in defeat, at least from the US's point of view, only a few weeks ago. It could be argued that Afghanistan was a haven for terrorists, being in turmoil and almost ungoverned. But the US didn't learn from the Soviet Union's pointless war there in the 80's, and thought that if it they just used enough planes and bombs they'd succeed...

The world's empathy was strained to put it mildly.

And then they blundered into another war of choice by invading Iraq.

To quote Senator Robert Byrd at the time:

Yesterday, May 11th, marked a year since I set off on my trip around the world. I didn't get back here till July 2009... And I still haven't managed to blog about the second half of my trip - Berlin, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Cambodia... I actually do still mean to.

A lot has actually happened since then. Or it feels like it anyway... Moving in with Deb being a big one. Becoming an uncle. These sorts of things.

Back in May, I was in New York, as regular readers of my livejournal will be aware. Anyway, I was twittering vigorously whilst I was there - you know "I'm on top of the Empire State Building" and the like.

My preferred Iphone twitter client is something called Echofon, which includes a bit where you can set your geographical location via GPS. The last time I did this was... on a footpath on Lafayette Street in the "NoHo" district of New York! Whilst I was on my way to see a band called the Wet Spots at a venue called "Joe's Pub".

Anyway, I've left that as my location, because it amuses me to remember being in NY, and that evening.

Which wouldn't be a problem... Until I discovered the Twisst feed on Twitter. Basically, it uses one's twitter location to tell you when the International Space Station will be overhead. The ISS is huge these days, and quite bright, so it makes for interesting celestial viewing...

So I face a dilemma - do I still pretend I'm in New York, or do I put in my real location so I can see the space station???? Or should I just stop my worrying and get on with my life :-)

Not sure if I every posted this. Lets just say we had way too much fun at the Dr Who exhibition:

Tuesday morning in Paris, I got out of bed and had a lovely Parisian breakfast in the hotel I was staying in - Hotel Picard, more in it later. Croissant and some bread and an egg. All very civilized. I got chatting to a woman who I assumed was English, based on her accent. She might well have been, but she lived in North Melbourne, not five kilometres from my house!

Said hotel was very nicely located, so I grabbed my tourist map of Paris and headed off in the direction of the Louvre. Actually, I aimed for the Pont Neuf (litterally "New Bridge", which is 400 years old - go figure) which is near one end of the Lourve. It was actually a really nice and short walk, got to look at lots of lovely French streets and so forth. I came across one end of the Lourve - it's large and quite hard to miss - and wandered into a courtyard. I knew, roughly, that the entrance is in fact in that glass pyramid they built in front of it a few years back, much to a number of people's annoyance. Eventually I located the entrance, and was delighted there was no queues... Until I realised this is because the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays! D'oh!

I ended up sitting on the edge of a sculpture in the forecourt decided what to do, and talking to a pair of Americans who were also looking for the entrance... And telling them that they were wasting their time. I studied my map, and realised that the Museum d'Orsey (am I spelling that right?) is more or less just across the river. So I thought, damn, lets go see some art today.

Paris has three major galleries, the Lourvre, the Pompidou Centre and the Museum d'Orsey. D'Orsey houses the pre-impressionist through to the post-impressionist (roughly). The Pompidou has mostly twentieth century up till now, and the Lourve has everything else. Literally, the Louvre has ancient Egyptian and Assyrian stuff for example. The divisions are not hard and fast, but that's more or less how they've split up the Art they have lying around. So in actual fact, it was likely the d'Orsey and the Pompidou would hold more pictures of interest to me.

So I wandered across the river, and eventually found the front door to the Museum d'Orsey. It was the one with the queue snaking around and around... in the rain... Luckily, I had packed a piece of serious rain gear, a hiking rain jacket which I proceeded to put on. I'd got chatting to two poms behind me in the queue, and ended up lending one of them my umbrella. They'd driving their van there, or at least had popped it on the train and were driving around Paris in it. I scandalised them with my opinion that Van Gogh was a crap painter - which he is my my humble opinion. Mind you lots of painters were crap on a given day, there are a lot more "Minor" Picasso's out there than there are major works by him.

Eventually we made it inside the place, and I more or less abandoned them to dash off into the gallery. I'm a bit hard to impress with Art, as I may have mentioned, and so sometimes looking at it with people a bit slow and tedious - I've dismissed an entire room full of pictures whilst they're contemplating one picture! In actual fact by that stage it was already lunch time, and I was mighty hungry, so I dashed upstairs to the cafe and stuffed my gob with various yummy French food.

As I sat at a relatively uncomfortable table, I watched with interest a group of three people sitting next to me, two men and a woman, who were having an involved discussion about the availability of good coffee, and their mate who was off somewhere else. No doubt having a good coffee experience. They looked a bit weather beaten and at least one of them was dressed in blue shorts. And... They had very strong Australian accents. Not just an Australia accent, but a that old fashioned nasal Queensland accent. I didn't let on that I could tell exactly where they were from, but then before I left I offered them my table. Then I turned to them and said "Queenslanders, right?" I wasn't far off, turned out they were from far north NSW, so close enough :-) When I told them I was from Melbourne, they said they went there every year for a week around the Melbourne cup. They know what they like...

So I finally when and looked at some art. I had a detailed plan of the place, and was most interested in the post-impressionist area on one of the upper floors - well, in fact, that was the area that most grabbed my attention near where I was in the building.

The Museum d'Orsey was a train station until relatively recently - relatively recently on the kind of European time lines I was getting used to! In the 1980's it'd been turned into a gallery, quite well in fact. Looking at it, you could see where the trains had stopped and the tracks must have been. But it did make it a bit of an odd shape, so finding one's way around wasn't always easy. Some of the galleries I'd been in the US were so vast I probably only managed to see some 60% in the time I had (not to fellow travellers out there, make an early start!) So I mapped out something of a plan of attack for this place, circled the rooms I particularly wanted to see and crossing off the rooms I'd already seen.

The post-impressionist galleries were great, full of Seurat's and other painters I like a lot. Guagains and indeed some small sculptures by him - I didn't know he even did sculptures. There were also a number of painfully famous pictures like Degas' The Absinthe Drinker.

I worked my way down the floors, past some great shadow puppets from the famed Chat Noir (Black Cat) theatre.

Other things I saw: some Rodin sculptures, at least one of which they have a copy of at the NGV. There was also a whole set of Daumier miniatures, which I found highly amusing, because I'd seen bronze casts of them in a gallery in Washington (I think) where they were terribly proud of them. And here were the originals!

Other things I was really pleased to see: a lovely old pictures of a very early aeroplane flying over clouds. Also a rather great life-sized sculpture of a polar bear rendered in white marble. Also "The Gleaners", by... er, someone famous! And a couple of other famous paintings the names of which I can't now remember...!

So eventually I wandered finally out the front door. One of the great things about being in Europe in early summer is the that there's lots of daylight. The sun goes down quite late, after 9.30PM some nights, so one can go for long walks of an evening and see lots of a town, at least from the outside. Also great when you don't have long in a city.

So I went for a wander along the bank of the Seine. I came across a great little gallery that had some pictures which has been drawn on to cardboard boxes. Pictures appropriate to the writing on the boxes. Although of course now I can't think of an example. Then I wandered across a bridge on to the Ille de la Cite - you know, the one with Notre Dame on it! I found said cathedral, which didn't excite me as might since I'd seen a lot of damn cathedrals already on this trip! I also wasn't willing to to queue to see inside it, so I took a whole pile of pictures of the outside.

Then I wandered over the little bridge that connects Ille de la Cite with Ille Saint Louis, an island apparently manufactured in the seventeen hundreds. Apparently the buildings on it haven't really changed since they were built. I found (yet another) cafe, this one with a great view back to Ille (which means Island by the way) back to Ille de la Cite. I had myself my umpteenth hot chocolate - Europe hasn't discovered Chai - and a rather ace omelette, and struck up a conversation with an American family at the next table. The youngest, a teenager, had just learnt about Australia having compulsory voting and said he thought that a very good idea. I agreed!

Actually, they were an interesting family. The older sister was living in Europe, possibly Spain, and they were visiting her. They hailed from Atlanta, so I said I hadn't made it quite that far south on my so far one and only trip to the States. It also seemed the younger kid, the teenage boy, had been in a major accident relatively recently, and was only just recovered. Anyway, it was interesting to chat to some folks from the US, especially since I didn't meet to many of them when I was there.

Somewhere there my dad called me, and I chatted about the fantastically beautiful spot I was sitting in.

Lets see. I continued my wander up the middle of Ille Saint Louis, where there were shops selling the most delicious looking cheeses and other very very french things. Then I wandered off the island - sounds like something from Survivor - and wandered through what I found out later was called Le Marias, the old Jewish quarter. I did encounter a delightful - and again very french - series of connected courtyards, in a block of buildings which had Paul in their name. I wandered through them, and eventually found a train station called... Saint Paul! They like me there in Paris :-)

The train line from there ran west through Paris to the Arc De Triumph. Well, of course it went further than that, but that's where I was headed. Because I clearly hadn't seen enough in one day in Paris already!

The Arc is, again, somewhat larger than I expected. I was thinking it was kinda like an arch you might encounter in a door way. No my friends, it is at least eight to ten stories high. My legs were buggered by this stage, and even though I discovered you could walk up inside the thing, the number of stairs quoted - something over 280 as I recall - seemed a little too much for me. Too much lugging of suitcases.

Going back a bit - the train station disgorges you close to, but not next to the Arc. It in fact towers over a manic round about, which must have been five lanes of traffic wide (my memory may be exaggerated here). A family of bemused looking American tourists were standing on the edge of the road next to me, presumably having also just jumped out of the train. They wondered out loud how they might get to the Arc proper. I pointed out the entrance to what was clearly an underpass. The experience tourist can give directions even when he has only been in a location for three minutes!

The Arc is still an active memorial, there's an eternal flame burning under its arch. Although it's hard to see how it could be a quiet place of contemplation with four hundred mad French drivers spinning around the area not twenty metres away...

I have a confession. Before I'd even made it to the Arc, I spotted a mobile phone store across the road. So I darted over there, and had a conversation which went a bit like this:
Me: "Hi I need a prepaid SIM card for my iphone".
Orange Guy: "Is it unlocked?"
Me: "Yes. Mostly I want it for data."
Orange Guy: "It's is very expensive on the prepaid plans."
Me: "I know, but I need it anyway."
Orange Guy: "How long are you here for?"
Me: "Er... three more days."
Orange Guy: "Really, it's too expensive, it might be one hundred Euros. Perhaps this might be a good way to get over your addiction."
Me: "Addiction! Wait, I have to twitter about this..."

Damn it, it's not a good sign when even folks you have barely met are giving you a hard time about being on the iphone too much!

After wandering around the Arc for a bit, I decided I'd done more than my fair share of sight-seeing for one day, so I hopped on a bus down the Champs-Elysees, which is a great way to see it. Eventually the bus dumped me back near the Museum D'Orsey. I ended up finding a train line near the Siene on the RER, which is the suburban train line, as opposed to the Metro, and taking a very long and involved trip back to my hotel. Well, it wasn't that involved, but it did take me way out of the way.

I took myself out to dinner at one of the local cafes - probably the Cafe Du Republique, which quickly became a particular favourite, then dragged myself off to bed.

Not bad for one day in Paris!

Can I just say that I love Paris. There, I've said it, right out front. Several people have told me they don't like the place - they tell me its smelly and dirty, and cold and wet. I didn't find it smelly or dirty, although I took the warning about the weather and took a serious rain coat. Said people also told me the queues were a pain in the butt, trying to get into places. Here's the trick folks, you don't need to see some of these places from the inside! Notre Dame is plenty interesting from the outside!

And Paris is one of the few cities which is genuinely pretty, at least the centre is. The apartment blocks are pretty, the public buildings are pretty, the gardens and the river are pretty. Damn it, the whole place is just nice to look at. The shops are pretty, even the stuff in the shops is pretty, in so far as a pile of yummy cheese can be pretty...

There's one skyscraper which got built in the centre of town, and it annoyed everyone so much that all future buildings above a certain height were banned. Said skyscraper is actually pretty ugly as these things go, and has since been found to be full of asbestos...

So, I arrived in Paris, found my hotel (which deserves a whole entry on its own) and with my trusty map, I went looking for the Eiffel Tower. Damn it, if I was going to only be in Paris for five days, I'd better get on with seeing the place from above, and seeing that one iconic thingy that they put in the snow domes and on the postcards.

I'm always prepared to be a bit disappointed by historic and famous sites, since I've usually seen literally thousands of pictures of them. You never can tell what something is really like when it's been well over-documented. So I decided to approach the tower from the end of the park it is in - near the Eccolie du Miltarie (the military College - my apologise for my terrible French spelling). Which handily has it's own metro station. I hopped out into light Paris rain, and went looking for the tower.

It was there alright. Folks, the Eiffel Tower is big. I mean, really big. Far bigger than I had imagined it to be. It really does tower over Paris and would tower over most cities, even one with plenty of skyscrapers. It must be roughly as tall as the Rialto in Melbourne, but I'd have to check.

So I approached it from on end of the long park it is in, and it just got bigger and bigger. Later when I was looking through my photos, I discovered I'd taken eighty three pictures of it in total, including almost a time lapse as I approached it, stopping frequently to take a picture.

Did I mention that it's big? Like a bridge turned up on one end. The arches that support it must be thirty or forty metres at their peaks - planes have been flown underneath it! Being underneath it reminded me of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it's painted a similar color and is riveted in a similar way.

It is possible to take the stairs all the way to the top. Sensible tourists take the elevator! I queued up with some confused looking Ukrainians, and got my ticket.

The elevator is cool. It's two levels, and actually takes a curved path up the leg. There's one platform there, then one has to transfer to the elevator which takes you all the way to the top. The view from the first level is actually pretty good. It was slightly rainy and slightly cold when I was there, so the crowds were not as thick as they might have been. I wandered to the four sides of the place and took loads of photos.

Heading up to a high place is actually a good way to get a sense of the layout of the city, I recommend it as the first thing to do when visiting a town. And weirdly most of the places I went to had a place like that, except London. Well, there's the London Eye, but I thought that a bit naff and didn't go on it.

Having refuelled with a waffle, I took the lift to the top of the thing. Paris is mighty pretty from above as well. The top of the tower is considerably smaller than the lower levels - and considerably colder. It's also on two levels, an inside part with lots of lovely explanatory maps and diagrams. And some rain spattered windows. There's also an outside part, which is wrapped in a nice tight safety mesh. Where one can buy champagne by the glass to toast one's trip to the top!

Amusing historical note: when the tower was new, Eiffel had a small apartment built at the top, where he would entertain guests.

I popped into one of the souvenir stores on the lower levels. As usual, most of the souvenirs were very naff - bad postcards, ceramic Eiffel towers, mugs and the rest of that shit. But two of them did grab my eye - a brass rivet, just like the ones used in the tower, and Eiffel Tower brand condoms! So I got me one of each!

Where the lift drops you off a the bottom, there's a couple of the supports of the tower behind a glass wall. This reminded me yet more of a bridge, with the metal leg of the thing pressing at an angle into the concrete support.

I wandered around the bass of the thing some more, through the small park around it. There's a great deal of security in the area - heavily armed soldiers were patrolling in groups of three through the whole area. The French are found of their landmarks, no doubt, and keen to protect them.

After that, I was suffering sensory overload (already) so I wandered down to the edge of the Seine, looking for a hot chocolate perhaps. I blundered across a tour boat about ten minutes before it was due to sail again. So I coughed up more Euros, and hopped on a tour along the river. No-one could accuse me of not hitting the ground running!

The boat apparently had English language commentary on channel two of the little telephone like devices attached to each seat (so the tour guide lady on the boat explained in at least four languages!) but I couldn't get it to work. Not that it matter, Paris is great from the river as well.

We cruised down the river from where the Eiffel Tower, pasted on the right of the two little islands in the Seine, and then turned around and headed back up the other side of them. We pasted lots of big important buildings like the Louvre and the Museum d'Orsey, but some of what I liked best was the collection of barge-like houseboats on the river. Some of them looked quite luxurious, and at least two I saw had cars parked on the back! No idea how they got them off the boat...

The river obviously gets quite high sometimes, because the banks were built up quite high. There's a little walkway around both the Ille de la Cite and Ille Saint-Louis (the two islands) with trees and seats, but behind it it quite a high wall - I assume that now and then the those areas are under water.

I finally got one of the commentary things working, only to discover that the commentary was terrible! The dude reading it had a really bad affected English accent, and was absurdly enthused by how amazingly romantic Paris was, and enjoined us all to join him in listening to some awful crooner sing some song about how great and passionate Paris is. I went back to just looking out the window!

The boat docked again, and I decided it was time for an early dinner. There was a cafe attached to the boat dock, so I figured it would do nicely. I picked out some nice bits and pieces including a rather tasty looking piece of lasagne. And damn, it was all amazingly delicious. I'd heard the food was good in Paris, but this was just a random little cafe in a tour boat dock, floating in a river! With food I'd got from a bay Marie! And this was the most delicate and melt-in-your mouth lasange I'd ever had. I wanted to go find the chef and shake his hand, use words like "bonza" and "fantastic!".

I'd decided I'd seen enough Paris for one afternoon, so walked across the river looking for a train station which was marked on the map. And I blundered into another palace, a minor one I believe, called the Palias de Chailot. No idea who it was built for or to what ends, but it's quite big and has two curved wings facing the river. With some kind of militaristic fountain out the front. There's a platform between the two wings which gives a great view of... You guessed it! The Eiffel Tower! So I took a bunch more photos, and finally headed back to my hotel.

A quick note about the Paris metro. It's not unlike the other underground systems I'd encountered in New York and London, if not somewhat better. The names were in a different language, but very easy to remember, the maps were laid out very clearly, the lines given numbers and specific colours, and I pretty much figured it out in about five minutes - once I figured out which way the little ticket I'd bought in London went into the automated gates.

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.

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???

Before I left on this trip, I did some research into... Legolands around the world. Actually, initially it started as an attempt to work out how to get to Legoland Deutschland... Which turned out to be in an obscure southern area of Germany. So far from Berlin, where I was staying, that in fact original Lgoland in Denmark is closer to Berlin by about 150 kilometres.

But as luck would have it, there are no less than four Legolands - Denmark, Germany, California and Windsor in the UK. Windsor is a short train ride out of London, so I suggested to Deb that maybe we should do a little side expedition to visit it. She thought that an excellent idea!

With our wad of tickets from Waterloo station (Train, seat on specific train, bus ticket to Legoland which doubled as admission ticket) we headed out West to Windsor. There is also a major castle there, which I ashamed to say I have now only seen from the outside... from a bus... a bus heading to Legoland...

Legoland must be the only theme park I've ever actually been to, as far as I can remember - childhood visits to Wobby's World not counting. We were the only adults there, as far as I could tell, without children in tow, which made me feel a bit perverted! It's basically a series of kinda lame rides with vaguely lego themes, plus some other bits and pieces, like remote controlled trucks and boats.

We really only went on one ride, a roller coaster. We were actually sitting in the ride before Deb saw fit to inform me that what she does on roller coasters is... scream like a banshee the entire ride. So besides being flung about very quickly on a twisting turning vehicle of sorts, I was also slightly deafened in one ear by a continually screaming girlfriend! Well, next time I'll know not to sit next to her :-)

Actually, we did go on one more ride, the lego train which does a figure of eight around some of the park, past some lego animals of various sizes. Lego animals are rendered in old-style lego bricks, so they look like they're pixilated, except the pixels are three dimensional...

The best bit of the park is the lego "lands" themselves, towns and countries rendered in Lego. So there's a Lego Denmark, a Lego Netherlands, even a lego Stone Henge. And of course a lego London, complete with working London Eye and moving cars and buses. And a Lego Carnary Wharf, complete with Lego Dalek half way up one building! See the Dr Who episode featuring the Battle of Canary Wharf, between the Daleks and the Cybermen... Yes, pop culture brain overload.

I almost spazzed out when we went to the obligatory Lego store on the way out. It had whole pile of Lego stuff I'd never seen before, although unfortunately not a lego T-shirt in my size. I did however score retro Lego men in little packs complete with the year they were from, various Lego key rings, and a whole big box of Duplo for the two year old we were staying with. The most amazing part, which I kinda regret not taking advantage of, was a wall of pick-and-mix lego bricks. Basic, old-style bricks, the kind they used to make before going off on weird Star Wars lego tangents. There was at least three walls of the things, little bins of different sized and colored lego blocks. One went about with a scoop and paid by weight! I sorely regret not getting a kilo of assorted lego to take home :-)

Waiting for the bus on the way home, our huge newly acquired collection of Lego caused some consternation amongst the other kids (other kids???) waiting for the bus. One little boy looked at us for a moment with a puzzled look, then said to his parents "they have lego... Why don't we have lego?" I missed their no doubt difficult response!

Mind you, later we were telling an English friend about our trip to Legoland and the delightful emporium at its end. She'd been taken there as a kid - which now that I think about it must make her quite young, it's only been there some twelve years - and her parents had sworn blind that there wasn't a shop selling lego at Legoland! I suppose that's another strategy! She was a bit amusingly put out, realising her parents had lied to her. As parents are obliged to from time to time.

We took the Duplo back to Blackheath, and left it for our very tiny host Katherine. She was asleep by the time we go home, so we didn't get the chance to see her play with it. I personally believe that Lego is a basic human right, and should be written into the UN charter. Every child should be issued with a cubic metre of Duplo at age two, to be exchanged for several cubic metres of "grown up" lego when they're old enough to know not to swallow it - somewhere between five and thirty two. And then possibly exchanged again for technical lego if you're expected to grow up to be an engineer or a nerd of some sort :-)

There were actually some areas of the park we didn't really make it to, which I would have liked to have seen in retrospect. There's an area where you can build Lego Mindstorms robots. And another area where you can watch the lego modellers at work, making large things from little plastic bricks. Now that'd be a fulfilling job! I'll just have to go back one day...

Tuesday in London, Deb and I somewhat overslept. Ah well, we are on holiday. We had a lunch date with my friend Julia, so we hopped on various trains and met her at Barbican Station, which is next to the Barbican Centre, which takes up almost an entire suburb in London.

The Barbican is a complex of lots of apartment blocks, with silly names like Shakespeare and Cromwell, and an arts complex with several theatres and galleries and a library. It is also connected to the (rather good) Museum of London, which I visited the week before. The whole place is built in something they call the Concrete Brutalism style, which was big in the late sixties and early seventies, until they realised it was a bit crap. So the centre has, simultaneously, been listed on the Historic Buildings register, and voted London's ugliest building! I actually liked it in it's unadulterated ugliness, and bad Seventies urban planning which made finding your way around it a bit of a pain. Apparently no less than two recent attempts have been made to make it more user friendly, although it sounded like the second one was largely an attempt to undo the first!

And as usual my day in London caused me to scurry to the Internets for more information. It seemed odd for such a large cohesive architectural monstrosity to be plonked more or less in the middle of London. Or at least close to such significant centres such as the Bank of England and St. Paul's. As usual, the informative Wikipedia told me it the Barbican centre was built on the sight of a suburb called Cripplegate, so named for the nearby gate in the London wall. Said suburb had been effectively demolished during the second world war by German bombing - I saw some photos, and indeed the whole area was flattened beyond recognition. So eventually they built this huge project on the area. And despite being so ugly only it's mother could love it, the apartments being so amazingly located are very very pricey.

After lunch, we went for a rather meandering walk to St Paul's Cathedral. Meandering partly because I got us slightly lost wandering through the financial district. We ate lunch on one of St. Paul's lawns, next to what looked like a couple of graves, but which totally lacked any indication of who might have been buried there.

We wandered around the cathedral, but didn't go further inside than the entryway. I don't like churches much, what with being a long-established atheist, and deicded that the church interior would probably just annoy me.

Next we hopped on a bus over to Waterloo station, partly because we needed too, and partly because I'd never been on a double decker bus in London before! We had plans for the rest of the week, which involved booked train and other tickets all over the place. So we popped into the booking office, and monopolised one counter for a good ten minutes. Ticketing is weird in the UK, or at least it was on the lines we were going on. A return ticket was in fact two tickets, one out, one coming back, and then two more tickets for specific seats on specific trains, and then other tickets for the bus to the location, and still more tickets for entry into the attraction in question (you'll have to wait for a later entry to find out what it was :-) So for one day trip we ended up with five tickets each, or was it six? Certainly a hand full which I sorted into order so we wouldn't get completely confused.

Deb needed a nap, so we wandered over to the park underneath the the London Eye, Jubilee Park, and lay down for a bit, to be entertained by a gypsy band on and off.

After that, we went for a walk past Big Ben and the house's o' Parliament. We crossed the river and took some pictures under Big Ben - despite Deb's best efforts to spoil my pictures by jumping up and down in front of me. We might also have encountered a place that made Dr Who photo stickers on the way... Then headed home from Westminster Station.

OK, so, I'm not entirely sure how that was Taking it easy... :-)