Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

Man, getting home was HARD. For the first few days I kept on waking up in my bed, looking around and going "what is this strange place???"

And going back to work was a major pain in the butt. Both the projects that I was working on when I left were still going and desperately needed my attention...

And much as I feared, I now have the travel bug - and I'm not talking about the fun Giardia infection I brought back from Cambodia. BTW, looking up pictures of a parasite whilst you actually have the parasite is a really bad idea. I could feel their little flagella flailing...

So, here then are the next three.... No, wait, four... trips I want to take, in roughly the order I want to take them:

Return trip to Cambodia Cambodia freaked me out, in some ways, although I'll go into that more when I get around to blogging about my time there. But I'd like to go back for a few reasons - it's close by, it's warm, it's cheap and the few bucks I spent on things probably genuinely helped the locals. So, possibly as soon as winter of 2010, I'd like to go back for up to three weeks, head to Siem Reap and Ankor, Phnom Penh, and a town on the coast called Kep. Basically, lazing about in the tropics to get away from winter.

Central Australia It's about bloody time I made it to Uluru and the Olga's! Fly in, walk around the Rock, take it from there.

American Cities Trip There are several other cities in the States I'd like to go to. Chicago, San Francisco, to name a couple. So I might try and do a big arc across the country, start in California, end up back in New York.

The Netherlands and more Berlin (shite, I still haven't blogged about my time in Berlin...) I'd like to spend some more time - up to a month - in Berlin. Interesting city, really feel like I only scratched the surface. And I have loads of distant relatives in the Netherlands, so I should pop in there, visit the places my family is from.

And on top of all that, I'd like to live overseas for a couple of years. Not really sure where, except it needs to have a couple of requirements: first world, English as the main language. And somewhere that Deb could also get a job. I could pretty easily get work in London or New York or San Fran or even Chicago, to name some places. Or even Singapore. That might also enable to me to see more of the States - London to New York is not far :-)

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 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!

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...

London has some places with really funny names. Cockfosters being a personal favourite. Deb and I were on a tube train which had that as its final destination. We giggled a great deal every time the destination was announced. Not to mention places whose names have been plagiarised for Australian locations - Camberwell, Eltham, Camden and even St Kilda - which is an island off the north east coast of the UK. And then the plane strange places, like Marble Arch, where there is a marble arch, and Swiss Cottage where there is, you guessed it, a Swiss cottage.

Deb has an Australian friend, an ex-boyfriend in fact, who lives in the delightfully named Tooting. We left our lodgings in lovely quiet Blackheath, and headed out to a station called Tooting Broadway. Man, you couldn't make this stuff up... Anyway, we went to stay with him (Mikey) and his wife (Cecily).

Tooting is more like the "Real" London according to Deb, who found Blackheath a smidgen clean and suburban. Having seen some of the scruffy parts of London, I can't say that's a bad thing... And indeed, staying in Tooting was far more of a London as a broke itinerant Australian might experience it. Mikey, an Aussie, is married to a Londoner, Cecily (she of he lack of Lego at Legoland). They live in a falling down house in the aforementioned Tooting, a house in which every single floorboard creaks, where one of the showers works some of the time, until the hot water goes haywire. And they share it with three blokes from New Zealand... And Deb and I crashed on the living room floor on an inflatable mattress we took turns inflating with only our lungs! So all in all, a very London experience.

We shifted all our crap from Zoya's place to Mikey's place, after getting back from Legoland. We blew up our mattress (literally) and then headed out for Curry! Whatever else you might say about Tooting, it does have good curry. We ordered far to much of it and had a great old feast. And finally got some sleep....

What do you think of when you think of the UK? Dr. Who of course! At least, that's how my girlfriend's brain works. So when we decided to travel to the UK together, high on her list of things to do was to visit a Dr. Who museum. Now, there is no such thing as a Dr. Who museum as such, but there is more than one travelling exhibition on the subject.

There is also a building in Cardiff in Wales which apparently features in Dr. Who and Torchwood, a newish centre for something or rather, which is apparently also the secret headquarters of Torchwood. Deb wanted to go visit it, but I drew the line at travelling all the way to Wales! I did however allow myself to be talked in to visiting the Dr. Who exhibition which was in.... Coventry. (For those of you who don't know the UK, Coventry is a fair way out of London, sort of north east, and is mostly known for being a rusting industrial area. Well, not sure about rusting, but it is the centre of British car manufacturing, which will give you some idea of how thriving and prosperous it is at the moment!)

So we book seats on a train, and took the hour and a bit train ride out to Coventry, then went looking for the famed Coventry Transport Museum, where, for reasons unknown, they'd plonked a whole bunch of Dr. Who stuff.

Now, it's not a show that I have watched much since the early Eighties - I mean, THE Doctor is Tom Baker, and I will broach no arguments on the subjects - aside from the episodes Deb has been showing me lately. The revival certain benefits from advances in special effects and possibly budgets, I mean, there's only so much you can do with a bunch of balloons with a spray-painted sheet over them... But the baddies for the most part are still the same, Daleks and the like. A certain segment of the population, most of it female and some of it Deb, think that David Tenent is a hotty. Personally I think he's kind of funny looking, but I am a heterosexual man so my opinions on the subject are therefore suspect...

The exhibition was actually quite good, there was all the things one might expect to see, Daleks and Cybermen and what have you. K9 was also there, which was a nice throwback to the last Dr. Who Golden Age. And a Tardis, which strictly speaking should be written TARDIS, it's some awful acronym... Some of the exhibits were animated, which I wasn't quite ready for, so when Deb pushed the button which got the Cybermen moving I was a bit freaked out.

There was also a great Dalek display, with moving, talking, laser firing Daleks. We ran that one at least three times, and then filmed it, complete with Deb screaming. Two Daleks wave their sensors around and talk about detecting live forms, which they identify as human, and then they started shooting green lasers at the ceiling (and not at the visitors eyes), then Davros turns up and makes some random statements about his plans coming together.

And... That was about it... It wasn't a really huge exhibition, we'd looked through it in about forty minutes. And so there we were in Coventry, a town not unlike Geelong, apart from having been bombed to buggery in the second world war, with some hours to wait before our train back to London...

I killed some time wandering through the transport museum proper. Lots of funny old push bikes, two large jet powered speed-record setting cars (Thrust II and Thrust SSC, I think) and a Delorian, and that was about all I found of interest in the place.

We amused ourselves by sitting in a park next to a church, where we were befriended by a couple of squirrels - much to Deb's delight. We went to a pub which miraculously had a range of gluten-free dishes that Deb could eat. She also had a large bottle of Cider which made her go very silly indeed. And eventually we made our way back to the station, where our train was cancelled. But somehow we caught the one before it which was, instead, majorly delayed...

And that was how we spent our Thursday in the UK!

*sigh* I am so very homesick.

Exactly a week after my ancient and amazing grandmother died, and not twenty four hours after she was buried, the mother of my Aunt, and hence the grandmother for many of my cousins, also took her last breath. It's been a tough week for my family back home, and especially my aunt and her branch of my family. It really is making me feel a long, long way from home.

She will be buried in Bairnsdale on Saturday Australian time, next to her husband. Her name was Rakel, she was the mother of my aunt Turid, and the wife of Thor (yes, as in the god of thunder!) They were originally from Norway (you'd never have guessed) and moved to Australis after retirement because both their children and all their grandchildren where here. Must have been tough changing countries that late in life...

My grandmother, aka Marion aka Farmor, was burried on Friday. Late Thursday, which was early Friday their time, I called everyone I could think of - my dad, some of my cousins - just to tell them all I was thinking of them. My aunt and a number of my cousins who live in Switzerland where there, I'm visiting them later this week and funnily enough they'll have seen my dad more recently than me. Life is very strange sometimes. My sister and her husband, who I am also visiting, in Phenom Phen, were there too.

My sister read something at the funeral for me, which I greatly appreciated. They also made a recording of it for me. And when I get back, the first thing I'm going to do is to take some flowers out to the St. Andrew's Cemetery...

Nestled just under the awnings, my feet are almost in the rain. It rains hard when it rains here in Paris, and yet the locals still drink their espressos and smoke their cigarettes in front of the cafes.

I borrow a light off the two women next to me for the cigar I picked up for twenty Euro cents. The first cigar I've smoked in a very, very long time, but when in Paris do what the Parisians do. I order a hot chocolate from the nice waiter who I remember from the day before – you go back to the places where they’re happy to speak English back to you. And you order the things you recognise, not being game enough to try and order something exotic like green tea or chai. I’m pretty sure chai hasn’t made it here.

The rain buckets down on the statue in the middle of the Republique square. Some Parisians don’t seem to notice, they walk by in their suits listening to their MP3's. Others are in various kinds of rain gear in various bright colors or under large umbrellas.

Cafe Republique is close to my hotel, and its coffin-like lift and room the size of... Well, my flat at home actually. Le Marias was dotted with restaurants and cafes, but by the time I was hungry, from the sustaining double croissant treat behind the Pompidou centre, I was a long way from any of them.

I reflect that the hot chocolate probably cost the equivalent of twelve Australian dollars – drinks seem priced on a different scale here, the food is less frighteningly priced. And I'm not brave enough to find out what the "grog" on the menu is.

The guy next to me in more or less chain smoking cigarettes. He reads a book and drinks a beer. So I pull out the book I bought from the English-language bookshop I stumbled upon in Le Marias, the Red Wheelbarrow. Who knew that Primo Levi wrote poetry? I read my book and attempt to smoke this cigar.

The cigar makes my head spin. I watch a woman attempts to lug an iMac in a huge box into a taxi, who seems reluctant to take her. The rain eases up for a moment then begins again with renewed vigour.

The dedicated tourist goes for a walk in the interesting back streets of Paris even in the rain. The organised tourist knew it would be wet here and packed a serious rain coat, intended for long hikes. Several people said that Paris could be cold and wet, and I heeded this advice.

My cigar goes out whilst I fumble with the hot chocolate and the five Euro note I'm trying to give the waiter. Being literally on the street one is expected to pay immediately. I decide that reading, smoking and drinking hot chocolate requires more hands than I have, so I put the book down on a dry part of the table.

Primo Levi's first published book was called "If this is a man". It was never clear why it was called this – the phrase is not used in the book at all. In fact the American edition was retitled "Survival in Auschwitz". But here in his slim book of poems there is a poem written right after the war, in which the lines "if this is a man" and "if this is a woman" appear.

Le Marais looks the way Paris does in the movies, narrow streets and shops selling fromages or cured meat or wine. And beautiful objects of one sort or another. Eventually the rain gets too much even for the dedicated tourist, and he hurries to another convergence of streets onto yet another round about with a heroic sculpture, which is barely visible. On the assumption that there will be a Metro station there – and indeed there is. This is Bastille apparently, presumably the building itself is here nearby, but I’m too busy making my way down the stairs and trying not to get anyone else wet.

I think about getting some dinner at the cafe republique. Then I think about the number of Euros I had in my wallet this morning, and the number I have now, and decide that maybe a sandwich from the take-away place next door is the wiser option. There are no ashtrays visible, so I drop the butt of the cigar into the puddle near my foot, to join a large number of its friends. The women next to me are playing with a mobile phone and smoking Marlboro's, which have "Fumer tue" written on the box.

Another quick walk around the area reveals I seem to be in the computer game selling part of Paris. And the cafe part, but that seems to cover the entire city.

Rain has finally soaked its way into the sleeves of my raincoat. My jeans are wet from the base of the pockets down. But damn it, I am only in this city for one more whole after today, so I will see the sights even if they are very very damp.

(Quick whinge: I'm writing this without an internet connection, which is both good and bad. Good because it means I'm far less likely to get distracted. And might actually get up to day with my blogging. Bad because it means I can't post links, at least I can't test them. And the rest of the whinge: I had a draft of this entry which my Livejournal client seems to have eaten. Bad livejournal client!)

Thursday of my first week in the UK, we went out looking for Squirrels. Zoya, Catherine and I headed out to Greenwich Park, home of Greenwich Observatory amoungst other things. It's also home to a numer of squirrels! I had to find a source of squirrels (that sounds kind of wrote...) because Deb loves them and she was turning up in the UK on Saturday. What better way get over jetlag than to chase squirrels? And indeed, they are a bit damn cute! And I do follow the Common Squirrel on Twitter...

Greenwich park is a nice one, but a bit busy when we turned up there. It was school holidays, not to mention the large number of tour buses there to visit the observatory. I counted three just from the Czech Republic. So the squirrels were both slightly freaked out and yet also well fed! Zoya had armed us with a bag of peanuts, still in their shells. Squirrels like 'em in their shells, if they're not to hungry they'll bury them, otherwise they'll gnaw the end off and eat the yummy peanut inside! We couldn't get any of them to actually come take the peanuts from our hands, but they did get close enough to make a good photo. So we threw them the peanuts, and if the damn pigeons didn't get them first, they looked like happy squirrels.

We refreshed ourselves at the tea house, and after stuffing my gob with a scone covered in cream (my arteries are not going to be happy with me after this trip) I headed off to the train station, and headed out to the... Imperial War Museum! Grand bloody title. It is indeed a museum of the various wars the UK has fought, and is "imperial" because when it was founded the UK still had an empire, and the various branches of it wanted to be included.

Said museum is in, er, well I'm not sure, but it's near Lambeth and Waterloo station. Parked out the front, as one might expect from a war museum, is a couple of huge ships guns. And, less expected, a piece of the Berlin wall - this making two chunks of it I have now seen (I blundered upon some in New York) before I even make it to Berlin! I suppose it could be seen as a relic of the cold war, which I guess did indeed involve Britain in a big way.

The museum is full of old relics, including things like captured German tanks and aircraft, not to mention beat up trucks found in the desert where they'd been abandoned by a patrol-in-depth group from the New Zealand army. It's a measure of how many museums I've been to that a couple of the bigger items - the V-2 rocket for example - made me go "oh look, another one of them."

The whole place is presented in an understated way, far better than one exhibition I saw in the states on America's wars, which annoyed the hell out of me. The brits seem a little less inclined to show off about battles they have fought.

A couple of vehicles really caught my attention. One was an old London us, a double-decker red thing, kind of like the great-grand-daddy of the buses they have now. It was from about 1910, and duing the first world war, it had more or less been enlisted. It spend the rest of said war driving troops around in France and Belgium. When the war was over, it was sent back to work in the UK, complete with a name (which I can't remember now) and a plaque identifying it as a "war veteran", listing all the places it had been! And so it served some more years trundling around, before finally being retired and ending up in the museum.

The other vehicle with an amusing history was a Jeep - which reminded me of the one I'd seen in MOMA. In 1942 it had been given to a woman who was quite senior in the medical corps, as her personal transport. After the war, she held on to it for forty years, until eventually she bequeathed it to the museum in her will! It didn't say if she'd been driving it all that time, but I had this mental image of a hearty unstoppable woman tearing around in her own jeep!

The had a number of other rare items, such as an intact V-1 flying bomb - which was next to a sign which mentioned that over 10,000 of them had been fired at the UK during the war!

Actually, it was amazing to see just how much of the UK had been bombed and damaged during the war, whole suburbs and towns levelled. More on that later...

The museum kicked me out at 5.30PM, after I'd bought some amusing postcards saying things like "eat less bread!" I looked at a map and realised I was actually quite close to the Thames and indeed one of the bridges over it - I think it was the Waterloo bridge, it was certainly close to that part of London. So I decided to make use of the remaining daylight and head over to the Houses o' Parliament, and have a look around there. So toddled over the bridge - why I don't know, my feet were still killing me from my epic journey from the states - and got my first look at the Thames.

I walked from what turned out to be Lambeth, over said bridge, and into the park at the south(?) end of the houses of parliament. Pretty spot! Westminster is quite an impressive thing from most angles. I walked along the street side of it for a but, and then under Big Ben. Then I ended up on the river front again, this time near Westminster station and a big statue which I took to be Bodicia (turns out I was right).

I had a look at a map, and decided that something called Cleopatra's needle was worth looking at. This sits on the side of the Thames, down past, er, Canning Street station I think.

Cleopatra's needle is a very, very good example of how the amount of history in the UK hurts my brain. It's not just that there's lots of history going back thousands of years, it's that often there is history laid upon history in weird layers. The story of said object is a good example.

The needle is in fact an Egyptian obelisk, if that's what the Egyptian ones are called - one of those tall fou-rsided stone affairs, with a pyramid shaped point at the top. It's some three and a half thousand years old - so relatively recent really! It's carved with hieroglyphs which didn't sound like they had much to do with Cleopatra at all. And at some point in its history, it was carved again with more hieroglyphs.

So that was the first part of it's history.

Then, in 1870-something, an English chap decided he was going to bring it to the UK. So he had it encased in a large steel cylinder, so it would float! They'd towed it a fair way through the Mediterranean when they lost control of it, and later had to reclaim it from some Spanish fishermen. Eventually, it made it to the Thames, and was erected where it sits now...

And then... During the fist World War, a German plane dropped a bomb on the road near it, spraying the pedestal and one of the neighbouring sphinxes with shrapnel. They were left unrepaired to recall the event.

There, is that enough history for ya? Every day in London, I had to go home and look things up on the wikipedia! Too damn much history!

After that I wandered up to what turned out to be the Strand in search of sustenance. I actually stumbled across a really great place called Leon, which turned out to be a chain - isn't everything these days - but they did serve me a very freaking healthy dinner. Then I accidentally stumbled across Charing Cross station, and was delighted to discover that some trains from there went through Blackheath! So I made my way "home".

Wednesday in New York (Yes, I'm now a week and a half behind in my blogging. These entries might get a little shorter from here on) I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge - there are some pictures here in this set on flickr.

Actually, before I made it to the bridge itself, I ended up in the Fulton Street area of New York. Nice part of the city, lots of winding older streets, unlike the grid on most of Manhattan. I also blundered into what purported to be the biggest IT retailer in the city... And didn't really find anything that I couldn't get in Melbourne or online.

So wondered over to start of the bridge walkway. Me and some four thousand tourists did the walk. The only natives I encountered were on bikes, and pissed off with everyone blundering into their lane!

It's a nice walk. Really nice, you get a view of the city and a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. It was a warm day and it really is an impressive bridge. They're very proud of it too, there are lots of panels under both arches describing the building of the bridge. The cables holding it up form a very graceful set of arcs.

That week was also Fleet Week in NY. Whilst I was on the bridge, a large Navy vessel was entering the East River, complete with tug boats blowing water spouts.

I wandered off the bridge, and turned left into an area they call DUMBO, for "Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass". As opposed to Dumbo. It's a recently gentrified area of Brooklyn, lots of old warehouses which have been turned into shops and apartments.

Then I wandered over to the other side of the shore front of Brooklyn, and had a rather ace organic beef burger.

And that's about as far as I got into Brooklyn. I'm sure there was more to it, but I didn't really have the energy to penetrate further into the borough.

So I hopped on a train, which delightfully was on the line that lead past the place I was staying, and headed over to the rather unusual Intrepid Air and Space Museum. It's a retired aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, which is now parked at a pier in the Hudson with a whole bunch of random aircraft parked on it! Most of them aircraft which would never have fitted on an aircraft carrier - such as an A-12, which would need a heck of a runway to get off the ground! Not to mention a more or less randomly parked Concorde, sitting next to it on the pier...

An aircraft carrier is a mighty big ship, I have to say. And this is apparently a small one by comparison to the more recent ones.

And then, I trundled back to the place I was staying in the Upper West Side, and we went off to see the aforementioned play.