20 posts tagged “travel”
well, things have been terribly confused for weeks now, but they slowly seem to be getting back on an even keel - the tidal wave of bad news seems to have passed, the tax is coming along nicely, with the end in sight, and it seems we're not about to be evicted, so YAY!
djelibeybi and i are currently up in shropshire - with the end of his telford contract, he has the coalport flat until the end of april, so we figured we should make the most of it and do a little exploring and walking and seeing of castles and old blast furnaces and so on, so we're having a fine old time. i also have a probable contract (possibly in germany) coming up towards the end of may, which doesn't leave much time in between for contracts, so i am taking my courage in both hands, putting my trust in Providence and have started telling employment agents that i won't be available till august (when the parents leave). it feels a bit scary - that's a long time without either of us bringing in any income, and of course it includes traipsing about france with parents and a possible trip up to scotland and who knows what surprises, but it feels like the right thing to do. i was freaking a bit about having to try to find a job and the money situation, and i think it'll all be better if i just calm down and take this opportunity as a chance to keep doing what i want to do.
assuming our visas are renewed, djeli may find employment quicker than last time (heck, maybe revenue & customs will pull their finger out and finally do their budgets and he'll get his job back!), and if they're not, then at least we'll have made the most of our last weeks and not randomly wasted them on work. and while i owe djeli a truckload of ££s (he finally worked out the true state of the joint account which revealed £3000-worth of debt for me) he does have some savings so we won't starve or not be able to pay the rent or anything.
so it's scary, but it feels like the right thing to do.
that said, if you need an experienced web interface dev for a couple of days, don't hesitate to call!
i can't imagine there are terribly many people who just randomly go off to belgium for three days with very little notice... for fun. but, yes, i am one of them. i confess that i love belgium. i love the confused languages, the horror that is the mannekin pis (alas, he was not wearing one of his costumes this week - apparently earlier in the week he was dressed as a dentist), the food... dear god the food, and the peculiar dark underbelly of the belgian character.
i was originally meant to meet up with a friend to show her the delights of brussels, but when that plan fell through after the eurostar tickets were booked, i decided to take a slightly different tack and make a plan that would ensure i'd see something new. i've been impoverished in brussels before... it's not really a city that is good to be poor in and i could do without going through it again, so i caught my eurostar to brussels... and then went to ghent.
alas, along with my general current penury, the fates saw fit to make a complete joke out of the ££/€€ exchange rate, so it was not a tour of 5-star hotels, but rather an experiment in youth hostels. i find it rather interesting that you get the same quality sheets in a youth hostel as in a 5-star hotel. it's only the places in between that attempt to impose thinning, greasy polycotton nasties on you. so in that respect it was quite luxurious. dying for a bath and a quiet night now though!
anyway, ghent is delightful. i say this categorically and heartily recommend it, especially if you're thinking of having a nice quiet weekend or long weekend away. it's pretty but not chocolate-box - it's a real city and it feels lived in. it also has this somewhat bizarre mediaeval theme going for it. maybe i need to explain though. yes, it's a mediaeval city. but it's nowhere near as mediaeval as it looks. at the end of the 19th century someone looked up and said "hey! we have a castle!" so they promptly pulled down some of it and rebuilt bits that weren't there any more (or indeed ever - apparently the roof was quite different originally). then some bright spark decided that while they had some very nice mediaeval houses, if they had more then perhaps more people would come and see them. so they found some plans and built some more mediaeval houses. um. according to my map, although i didn't go forth and confirm this for myself, there is one house which actually exists in two different places - they found plans for a particular house, went ahead and built it new... then discovered that that exact house already existed once they stripped off whatever had been done to the facade, but underneath it was the genuine mediaeval version of the not-so-stately home they'd just built. bizarre and wonderful. the castle is all about the torture - grand living doesn't enter into it - they even have a rather too detailed torture museum. it's just wonderful.
so i spent two days in ghent, doing a lot of wandering. saw both the museum of contemperary art and the older stuff (a lot of which was by flemish/belgian artists, and showed things like belgian interpretations of impressionism and so on - great stuff) then caught a train back to brussels, where i explored... um... an art gallery - the musées royaux des beaux-arts de belgique. just for a change. and wow, what a collection! genius heironymous bosch, and their late 19th/early 20th century collection is brilliant too. apparently later this year they are opening a dedicated magritte museum next door, which sounds amazing. guess that means i'll have to go back again soon!
home from all the travelling at last! and it's not really like i have anything terribly much to say, but i thought i should at least pop my head up so you didn't all think i wuz dead. so i guess i shall summarise:
- switzerland was great. snowy mountain walks on my own, hot tub with friends with an awesome view of the alps, too much food, definitely too much wine, lots of drawing
- france on the way back was also great. fabulous church service stumbled on at random in nancy, followed by a promenade with the citizens of the town through the sunny streets and park. reims we didn't see so much of, but a very nice cathedral with rather marvellous stained glass windows by chagall. oh and champagne, being the champagne district, and yes, we did bring some home :-)
- am now immersed in the jobhunt. i have an interview tomorrow with 7digital which scares me somewhat - scares me because it sounds like it could be an awesome job (working on music download sites) but would entail 3 hours' travel each day again. and is permanent. but we'll see how the interview goes. if we really have to, i guess we could move to hackney. hmm.
- i have found myself a nutritionist and will be seeing her for the first time on thursday. hoping she can do something about my myriad health issues which the doctors don't really seem to know or particularly care what the causes are.
i've been doing a fairly vast amount of drawing lately. no music whatsoever, but the visual ideas are flowing freely and fast and my composition journal is filling up. here are a few samples:
back from paris now. and next weekend we go to switzerland skiing for a week with some friends. djeli is dying to go skiing, but it's looking like i won't be able to ski at all because while we were in paris my leg and foot started to swell again and the whole left leg has been uncomfortable (to the point of needing the heat pack again) all week. i blame the paris metro. all those stairs. grr :-) but at any rate, i doubt very much that i'll be skiing while lopsided, so i need to make a plan that involves accompanying djeli on his drive to troistorrents (nearish lausanne) and then playing hermit for a few days to do some work while avoiding the 2-year-old that apparently populates the place where we'll be staying, and maybe fitting in a day-trip or two to lausanne and/or berne as well.
paris was pretty good though. my french is getting better and better and i was quite shocked to discover that i had better french than anyone else who was there (we went with two of djeli's sisters and their families). i've now got to the point where i can natter a bit with shopkeepers and don't feel so flustered about asking them to repeat themselves if i don't understand because i feel now that if they repeat, i have a chance of working it out, and sometimes they simplify the vocab too, which makes it easier. we did a bunch of touristy stuff because none of the kids had been to paris before, so there was notre dame, with attempts made on the saint-chapelle (closed), the conciergerie (closed), a view from a particular department store that susie (older sister) had been told was great (closed for refurbishment) and djeli's and my absolute favourite-ever patisserie and home of the chocolate-encrusted brioche (closed down); then the next day to the science museum (always very cool and my translation skills much improved over the last time we were there, thank heavens), then the eiffel tower and our favourite posh supermarché out at porte maillot which spared us from the tedium of a fourth trip up the arc de triomphe in three years. and then a little required shopping at sephora and the galleries lafayettes food hall on the last day. i'm looking forward to going back again soon. i really really want to go to the (i think) palais de tokyo where they keep all their early-mid twentieth century art - matisse and so forth, and also thinking that i should make a concerted effort on the louvre sometime - maybe a three-day midweek trip on my own, sketchbook in paw. might try catching the bus across. i adore the eurostar, but if i can stand the bus then it's likely to be a lot cheaper, and it was quite bearable from brussels to london. must start trying to cut back on the 5-star travel...
i took delivery of two new books between copenhagen, sussex (where we went for new year) and paris - the last of my gift voucher bonus from PwC (which I have to say has been the best bonus ever) - both of them excellent. The first is a tiny little book by an advertising guru called paul arden and is called it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be which is an excellent summary of all sorts of things i need to keep reminding myself of with my work and i'd recommend it to anyone who needs a pocket-sized kick in the artistic pants every now and then.
the second one is a book called inspired which is a series of interviews with assorted creative folk, looking at where they find inspiration, what their working environment is like and so on, with a ton of photos of creative journals, collections of this and that, and brilliant workspaces. i find the creative process and the different ways people approach it to be absolutely fascinating and this book in itself is amazing and has inspired me to be a bit more creative with my own creative (mainly composition) journal. i always thought i must be a bit mad to keep the ton of bits of paper that i do simply because they have an image that intrigues me on it - i like the texture or the colour or the shape, or it makes me smile and i can't throw it out - but reading this book one thing i found was that about 80% at least of the people interviewed confessed to collecting something - from adidas shoes to fabric swatches and packaging - so now i don't feel quite so weird and i'm starting to stick these random bits and pieces into my composition journal so they (a) don't clutter up the place and gather dust and (b) can be got at when a little spare inspiration is required. i'd much rather store a bunch of composition journals than a box full of little pieces of paper i'm not looking at. anyway, it's an excellent book and so many ideas to play with! now i want to do EVERYTHING - i want to paint and collage and draw, and write music, and write lists, and dance and walk and tidy and bake - all sorts of stuff.
just a quick post today - we're back from denmark, had an awesome awesome time, saw a ton of stuff (photos will follow on flickr) and had a most marvellous christmas, one of the results of which is that djeli and i are now both podpeople - 8gb ipod nanos for both of us - his black, mine red, as it should be :-) this evening we've been having a ton of fun filling them up and synching contacts and calendars and so on - i had no idea they could do soooo much. i do love being able to set up multiple clocks. now i need never ever get confused about what time it is in australia - or lose my auntie madge's address when i want to send her a postcard from foreign places. and i can't believe how much room 8gb has turned out to be. i thought i might get about 30 albums on there (i don't do anything less than 320bit) but it's looking like it'll be more like 45!!! so between us that'll give about 90 albums for roadtrips. yay! tomorrow we test-drive the fm transmitter and see if it works...
other lovely treats: how to be a domestic goddess from my friend chris, a bunch of marvellous books, ranging from the sublime (a book on the santiago pilgrim trail) to the ridiculous (jilly cooper's appassionata) and an assortment of other delights. as a surprise souvenir of our danish christmas, as well as to give us a decoration in our hotel room, djeli bought me this year's christmas mobile from georg jensen, being ever so surreptitious about it.
tomorrow we have our house inspection that we were supposed to have the morning we left except that the owner got stuck in traffic and we had a plane to catch, then off into town to buy the last presents for the relations we're going to see over new year and ipod cases so our new little darlings don't get all scratched up. then off to sussex for new year!
have a great new year, everyone - see you in 2008!
still in my recovery phase which means i'm pretty uninterested in anything i'm not already familiar with - rereading books, rewatching movies, reading tried-and-true favourite websites, listening to music i know really well which puts no demands on my brain. but at last i'm finding myself getting interested in new recipes anyway, and so today i tried a new one: chocolate and cranberry biscuits from tessa kiros' absolutely stunningly gorgeous book apples for jam.
and wow. i think i have a keeper here. pretty much definitely not a kiddies' biscuit, i'd say (in spite of what tessa says about her kids loving them, but with a chef for a mama, i guess they try all sorts of stuff) - with the tart cranberries and bitter chocolate, encased in a light, crisp, buttery-but-not-too-sweet biscuit, these are simply grand. and terribly christmassy. and, for me, one of the excellent things about them is that while they are delicious, they're also not the sort of biscuit i can't stop eating, so will be excellent for daily treats without completely blowing the diet.
i've never used dried cranberries before. or for that matter fresh cranberries - certainly the fresh sort never seem to have been available in australia. these biscuits used the dried ones - i could only find them with cinnamon on them, but the result was still excellent and the tiny touch of cinnamon worked well. we also bought fresh cranberries because the same book has a recipe for a cranberry syrup (basically cordial) which sounds fabulous and we have some fizzy water left over from summer taking up space in the cupboard. ah - happiness!
UPDATE: yes, the freezing worked well. they defrosted pretty quickly and have cooked up nicely, so i hereby declare these a success as freezer bikkies. huzzah!
no, i haven't started the shopping; no, i haven't sent a single card - but at least we know what we're doing - we're off to copenhagen!
after two cancelled trips, denmark has felt a little like a jinxed place for us, but we're determined to beat the jinx and have booked flights (BA so we can take advantage of the business class check-in and lounge cos djeli's a qantas club life member) and a one-bedroom apartment for an 8-day trip over christmas. tivoli will be open, there'll be scandinavian christmas decorations abounding in the design shops, i'm sure, and a bunch of christmas markets to peruse. we're planning to find somewhere that can give us a proper traditional danish christmas dinner on christmas eve. can't wait!
my parents left to go back to australia this afternoon, and in spite of all my grumbling over the past three weeks i'm really sorry to see them go. things were just starting to get fun, and the sun had come out, and all in all, it was starting to be a really good time. i guess the whole thing just got messed by bad weather and illness and all the plans being messed up by same, which was a real pity, cos i suspect they didn't have as fun a time as they ought to have had all round, but it was lovely to see them, and to be able to show them where we live and do some cool stuff together like we never have time to do properly on our visits to australia. and cornwall was lovely, and this week we've visited some great grand houses - kenwood, marble hill and then today, osterley park - plus i finally got to the design museum too (if you're considering it, the jonathan barnbrook exhibition is well worth seeing - really impressive, i felt).
we also visited the osterley bookshop while we were en route to osterley park today - djelibeybi's current project is walking the length of all the tube lines, and in doing so has become anorakedly interested in abandoned tube stations, one of which contains the osterley second-hand bookshop, and it was actually really interesting to see. you could see where the old corner shop had been and the main ticket hall, and all in all i was glad to have seen it. even gladder to have made the acquaintance of the bookshop, which is quite a find - a proper second-hand bookshop - AND they were having a sale. i picked up a lovely old king james bible, pocket-sized, for £1 with the inscription on the flyleaf "Given to Sybil by her Father on her Birthday March 24th 1905. Read, Mark, Learn and inwardly digest." "Digest" is double-underlined. It's a lovely little volume, leather-bound, with the leather folding over the edges of the book to protect them. marvellous too to have a copy of the king james psalm translations - this will definitely come in handy. sybil doesn't seem to have marked anything in it, but i hope she at least inwardly digested :-)
even more exciting, in the music section i found a FIRST EDITION (!) of nancy perloff's art and the everyday: popular entertainment and the circle of erik satie which is a very important book in satie scholarship, and a very thrilling find. i wavered a bit because £22 was rather steep for my unemployed pocket, but the marvellous parentals made me see reason - i.e. "remember what happened last time with the orledge book" (robert orledge's satie the composer which was $90 when i found it in sydney when i was at uni and i didn't buy it - now it's out of print and cannot be had for love nor money) and foisted £15 on me to buy it. aren't they lovely? so i took the plunge, and i think it's going to be very useful for my dada article. looking forward to reading it. addendum: in trying to find it on amazon i've just realised i've had an amazing bargain - near-mint condition, first edition hardcover for £22? dear lord, on amazon, the cheapest one is £82.82 and doesn't mention anything about being a first edition! crumbs, dm!
anyway, so i am now parentless, which is making me feel rather sad, but on the flip side, it'll be nice to have my life back too! tomorrow i start work on my CV and vaguely commence the jobhunt, plant the new strawberry plant my mother gave me, scatter slug pellets around my sprouting lettuce seeds and so on. must continue to work on my photos from their visit too so they've something to look at in return for their own photos which no doubt will start springing up on flickr soon.
finally back home after a lot of toing and froing, and also finally getting to the end of a horrible coldy-fluey bug i picked up on the eurostar coming back from paris.
my parents are staying with us at the moment (and both getting over the same bug as me, which i so very kindly gave to them), and we've been having a bit of fun.
djeli & i went over to paris to spend a week with them, staying in the montmatre flate they rented, which, while rather small for four people, was a marvellous spot to stay - close to the metro and all sorts of fabulous food shops, and of course the famous 'butte' which we walked up and over and back again about 4 times over the course of the week. and i finally got to see the centre pompidou which was terribly exciting - the first time we went to paris, in 1998, it was closed cos all its famous pipes were apparently falling off the building, then when we went for new year, we timed it all wrong and it was shut for the public holiday, and last time i was sick as a dog and someone told me that apparently they'd sent off all their most interesting artworks to exhibitions elsewhere, so it really felt like quite an achievement to actually get there this time round. and there was some lovely stuff there too. some nice dada bits and pieces in particular.
we also made our way out to monet's garden at giverny which i've been wanting to see for a while, and which was lovely but absolutely crawling with tourists. i can't imagine what it must be like in august - there was barely room to move in mid-june! admittedly, it might have been better to go on a weekday, but our planning wasn' that organised.
i learned two new words too on this trip: paille (straw - that you put in your drink) and poivron (capsicum), both of which i am sure will stand me in good stead on future trips.
i also went to cornwall for a few days with the parents. it was supposed to be a week, but with the bug(s), the whole thing had to be shifted back and shortened, but we had a lovely time anyway. we stayed at a b&b on the lizard peninsula and drove about all over the place - a day in st ives, penzance for mazey day, the minack theatre (really amazing - we'll have to go to a performance there when i take djeli down), and the eden project (fantastic) being the main things we saw, so a nice selection. but so flipping freeeezing! i ended up having to buy a new jumper cos - silly me - i'd packed for summer - short sleeve tops, cossie, light cardigan, and then it turned out to be mostly cold & grey and pouring with rain. heigh ho. fun was had though, and many photos were taken. maybe one day i'll get around to sorting through them.
the day after coming back, djeli had a job interview in birmingham, so we went up together and i wandered round birmingham art gallery (some very fine stuff in there) while he was interviewed, and then we went for a stroll in the cold rain down by the canals and had one of the best burgers i have ever eaten for a rather late lunch. cold and damp, but enjoyable nevertheless. birmingham looks like a nice city to live in really - the centre has a great feel to it, even if the bullring shopping centre is scarily enormous - not too much for a tourist to peer at for more than a couple of days (correct me if i missed something!) but a nice place to drift about and shop and eat and so on. they had a completely bizarre urban beach set up in the square outside the art gallery - very peculiar! they had a huge billboard-sized photo of a palm-fringed island, with sand and beach chairs, and people sitting in the beach chairs under the grey birmingham sky looking at the palm tree photo beside a very victorian fountain that they weren't allowed to even dabble their toes in.
heh. and just as i get home, vox posts a new sydney cityscape banner :-) so i'm just going to use it for a few days, i think. will replace the now-very-out-of-date easter eggs anyway.
yes, i'm home. as of 5am today, i am safely back in london at last. it feels a bit weird to have cupboards and my own kitchen and stereo and stuff about and to actually not have to go anywhere, and very little i really have to do. very very weird. but hopefully by tomorrow i'll be a little acclimatised.
i'm going to try not to rabbit on too much today, but so much stuff has accumulated in my brain over the last seven weeks or so, and feeling so jetlagged that it may be a hard ask. i humbly beg your forgiveness in advance.
to start with, i feel like the universe is giving me hints. big fat hints. big fat obvious wet-fish-slap-in-the-face hints. when i first quit my job, i had a nibble of a choral commission, which still may come through, but i haven't heard anything yet. while i was in sydney, a good friend of mine asked me to write something for the amateur choir she conducts. i wrote to the old girls' union at my school about their newsletter while in sydney, and got an email back including a suggestion that i might want to consider writing for an anniversary concert they're having next year (choir and/or orchestra). and now, coming home to find a file of spnm newnotes magazines, with their attendant flyers and composition opportunities, i discover that there's a juicy-sounding composition competition coming up, for - yup, that's right - SATB choir. so i think i'm meant to write choral music at the moment. which is fine and dandy by me. i've been feeling vocally inclined for a while now, between the satie song arrangement and the set of little walt whitman songs i've been working on, so might as well go the whole hog and work with SATB. so yay! direction!
which realisation has had me a little hyped up (well, as much as the jetlag will allow) to get back to sorting out my creativity stuff. i've done julia cameron's the artist's way a couple of times now, and it's been fabulous, but i'm still feeling a bit of a need for direction but it's too soon to read the same thing again, so while ordering another book from amazon this afternoon (more on that in the next paragraph, but it's medically related so feel free to skip that one), i made up the gap to get myself free shipping by ordering cameron's walking in this world as well. i've heard mixed things about this - some people saying it's great and a little more advanced than TAW, but others saying that she goes over a lot of the same ground. i think i'm not too concerned about the latter because she has a lot of useful ideas and approaches in TAW, and it's sometimes beneficial to run through ideas in different ways anyway, so i'll see how that goes. hopefully my new books will turn up at the end of the week.
the other book i ordered was because while i was in sydney, my doctor was finally able to diagnose the digestive problems i've been having which has set me off on an investigation of my assorted health issues in a quest to finally sort myself out and make life a little more enjoyable. at first she thought i might have some kind of bug we could kill, and i was most disappointed when she got my tests back and gave me a clean bill of health - no bugs to be found anywhere - grrr! but on the other hand, she was able to put a name to my problem - irritable bowel syndrome - and a bunch of reading has actually given me hope that i can really do something about this. seems it's not uncommon following gall-bladder removals as one's innards have no way of regulating the amount of bile floating about. so i have a couple of strategies for that, and we invested in both books of the csiro total wellbeing diet, which not only has had rave reviews from all sorts of people but came recommended by our doctor as a healthy and sustainable way to lose weight, lower cholesterol, etc. etc. (and the recipes look and sound - and by all reports are - delicious) and the second book i ordered today is about controlling the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (another fun little health issue i have which mostly raises its head in the form of insulin resistance and a tendency to put on weight as soon as i look at anything that has a calorie) by diet. so i've got my reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead! i need to read all this stuff, digest (hah!) it and then come up with a plan based around the csiro diet which will keep the PCOS and IBS under control, allow me to lose a little weight, and keep my meals at least approximately in line with djeli's so that we're not having to cook six (or possibly nine - seems that small meals and lots of them may be the way to go for me) completely different meals every day.
</medical bit>
but it's marvellous to be home. i have no energy whatsoever at the moment, so just messing with some photos, ticking things off, deleting them or adding them to my to-do lists on rememberthemilk.com (which i am absolutely loving, i must say - it came in so very handy in our frantic last few days in sydney), catching up on a little tv and eating chocolate to try to avoid re-napping (i caught four hours earlier today during which djeli went up to the bank, came home, called the AA, changed the battery in the car, then drove to oxford and back to make sure it was ok - really need to not sleep again until it's properly night). tomorrow i think will be the time to clean off and reinstall the old vaio laptop in preparation for hooking up the 100-odd Gb of mp3s i ripped while in sydney. i'm fairly sure that if we counted individual discs, at least, i'd have ripped over 500 of the things. if i never look a ripping programme in the face again, it'll be too soon!
