Luke and tilly abroad #3 – eurasia 2014

Monday 11 August 2014

Ordinary Things, Smashed and Reconstituted is back, more pulverised and reassembled than ever! (Whatever that means ...) 

The first time Til and I went to Europe it was the trip of a lifetime, so we know how lucky we are to be doing it again. For the last few weeks, whenever I've mentioned our holiday to friends and family, they've been astounded at how long we're going away for, and everybody from the doctor who administered my typhoid and hepatitis vaccinations to the hairdresser who cut my hair before I left has misheard 'four months' as 'for a month', which just keeps underscoring how extraordinary such a long break is for most people.

Travel plans

This time the plan is to hit a lot of the places we had to miss last time, plus return to a few old favourites. We're starting off with a few days in Beijing before we join the promisingly named tour group 'Vodkatrain' for a three-week train journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway along with twelve other under-25s. Along the way we'll stay in a Ger camp in Mongolia, see the world's biggest lake, Baikal, in my Russian friend Alissa's hometown of Irkutsk, and visit Ulaanbaatar and Moscow and finish up in St Petersburg on the second of September.

The Vodkatrain route. Fear not, the closest we get to Ukraine is Moscow (ten hours away), and we won't be anywhere near any Siberian sinkholes!

From St Petersburg we wanted to head south to Croatia to take advantage of the dying summer, but we were a little iffy about the Russian airline offering the flight, so we decided instead to catch the train to Helsinki in Finland and spend a couple of days there before flying to Dubrovnik with the more reputable Finnair.

After a few days in Dubrovnik we'll catch the bus to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina (on the glowing recommendation of our friend Hayley) via the stunning town of Mostar, before crossing back into Croatia for Ljubljana. From there it's north into Austria, where we'll stay in Salzburg, before we meet our friend and former Aschroft Lodge housemate Kate in Munich, Germany, for five days of Oktoberfest!

Our plans get increasingly hazy from there, but we know we'll move south after that into the north of Italy, possibly via Switzerland, before moving west into the south of France, then a tour around the coast of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), then back into France at the beginning of November. From there we’ll continue north into Germany and the clump of countries surrounding it.

Then we want to go north into Scandinavia, where we hope to see the Northern Lights (and freeze our butts off and become vitamin D–deficient), before returning to the British Isles to visit some friends before our flight home.

Possum-gate

With such a protracted journey comes, of course, a buttload of organisation, and Til and I have joked more than once over the past few weeks that it's become our fulltime job. This, of course, wasn't aided by losing whole days to ridiculous events like possum-gate, wherein a ringtail possum somehow found its way into our oldschool gas-fired water heater:

We know a bunch of possums live in the tree out the front of our house because we've woken up to them a couple of times scrabbling around on our windowsills trying to get in and one time even lapping up the dregs of my iced coffee, and we notice they're particularly keen to get in on cold, stormy nights.

'Let me innnnn!'

It wasn't until I was washing my hands with hot water in the bathroom that Til heard violent rattling from the heater in the kitchen from our bedroom, all the way on the other side of the house!

When I investigated I could definitely smell burnt hair coming from the heater, a stench that continues to haunt the kitchen whenever we turn on the hot water. It was a pretty horrible thought that something was trapped in there, but we couldn't actually see in because there's a cover that sits over the top of it that we didn't know how/aren't allowed to remove. We thought it must've been a rat, because we thought it'd be too small for anything bigger in there. But when help finally came it all turned out okay – he just had minor burns to his paws and singed fur.

Wildlife encounters in the last days before we move out of places, of course, are becoming a trend. Remember this?:

There's a snake in my roof!

Fond farewells

Thankfully we did have time for a few good farewells before we left. Our friends joined us for drinks at the Commodore Hotel in McMahons Point on the night of the Waratahs–Crusaders Super Rugby final. Then we went for Indian in Caringbah with Dad, Brooke, Nan, Jennie, Jeff, Courtney, Bryson and Braxton, where I had one of the best Indian dishes I’ve ever had – some mushroom and eggplant thing. 

The next night Til’s parents had her family over to see us off, and the night after that I had dinner with Charlene and Alexandra in this amazing vegetarian place called Yulli’s in Surry Hills where I had a massaman curry pie, cider and sticky-date pudding with butterscotch icecream – all vegan!

Let's just say we got a bit silly.

Eager to get in as much good vegan food as I could before we left (and spent three weeks on a train subsisting on potatoes and noodles), we had brunch with Mum, Amanda and Harrison the next morning in Cronulla at the veggie burger place Pilgrims.

As a side note, when we were on our way back from Indian we were being very grown up and talking about our plans for when we get back and whatnot when Tilly fittingly found my first grey hair! Must be from all the stress of travel planning.

What a timely reminder of my own terrifying mortality … 

'Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not 
to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.'

Sydney gave us a good farewell, too, with beautiful weather in the days before we departed:

The view from our rooftop.

Crossing off bookcrossing

One other thing we squeezed in before leaving was finally releasing the Bookcrossing book I picked up in the Colosseum in Rome back in 2011. I read it while we travelled around and intended to take it home and release it on the Opera House steps, but I never got around to it, so I promised myself I would do it before we left this time.

We got a few snaps and left it in two plastic sandwich bags for rain protection halfway up the stairs of the Opera House, then hung back and waited to see if anyone picked it up. 

The closest we got was this guy, who picked it up but then set it back down:

I really hope someone finds it and takes it to some other landmark, and that they record it all on bookcrossing.com so I can see where it goes next!

Flying out

The last two nights before we left we got very little sleep, ’cause we were up packing up the house and organising stuff, which made it all the harder to get up at six and head to the airport.

Apprehensive, sleepy and cold upon departure.

At the airport we were disappointed that we didn’t get to make use of my hard-earned Qantas gold frequent flyer status at the Qantas lounge because the currency exchange people sent us all the way to Gate 63 (the furthest flung of them all) to collect our Russian roubles, but our connecting flight in Beijing got delayed, so we got to make up for it gorging ourselves on the extensive free vegetarian fare of the (much classier) Hong Kong lounge.

I think that’s all for now. My next post will be about our time in Beijing. I would’ve had this up sooner, but China has to be all weirdo communist and block Google/Gmail/Blogger/Youtube/Facebook from its citizens’ internet (as well as, you know … commit all sorts of other grievous human rights abuses …).

Anyway, thanks for reading!

That dirty little town on the thames keeps calling us away

It seems we just can't stay away from London. We don't plan to go back there so often, but people keep turning up there who we have to meet up with this and last visit was my fourth and/or fifth, depending on what you count as a visit. This time it was to meet up with one of my best friends from home, Alexandra.

We got to London from Amsterdam at around nine at night after a ten-hour bus trip. I’d just put my stuff down at the very London-style (by which I mean huge, functional, impersonal, alcohol-oriented and poorly painted) Generator Hostel when Alex called and we arranged to meet up for dinner.

You know that awkward thing where you haven’t seen someone for a long time and your meeting point happens to be in a really open space where the other person can see you approaching from ages away and you just have to walk towards each other silently not knowing where to look? Well instead of doing that I decided to run to Alex dramatically, arms flailing like in a movie.

After dinner we stood outside the restaurant talking for a while before parting ways, and a green dress on a mannequin inside a shop began mysteriously to move, seemingly autonomously! A ghost or some other numen, surely, and not an airconditioner or wayward breeze.

Alexandra gasped. ‘Anne Boleyn wore a green dress once!’ It’s like her favourite historical topic. ‘And look, she’s been beheaded!’ Obviously it was an omen that in precisely two days we would go to Hampton Court palace, one of the homes of Henry VIII. It felt good to know the spirits had preordained our travel plans.

For the next day, though, Alex and I had arranged to meet up with our old English friend from high school, Lucy. We met at a quarter to ten at platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross Station, just like in the Harry Potter books. Except it wasn't the real platform, just the fake tourist one. We still thought it was awesome that a book could become so popular that they would install something from it in a real life location from the story.

 Til breezes through.

 I'm a bit more anxious.

Alexandra finds it hilarious.

The first place Lucy took us was the very cool Camden Markets, some kind of magical transposition of Bali into England. It has all the desperately persuasive South East Asian vendors of the Indonesian tourist island, but the higher prices and quaint uniform shopfronts of England. But best of all, the food vendors force free samples of their delicious crispy chicken into your eager hands! Heavenly if your vision of heaven, like mine, involves free stuff (mostly food) all the time. It just sucked we couldn’t really buy anything because we'd have to carry it around with us till we got home.

 Straight out of Bali.

 Why does this dog have a pokéball around its neck?

After that we hit up Harrods and bought some sugary delicacies to eat in Hyde Park, where we sat on the crap-covered ground eating them because the chairs cost 2.50. That's right: wealthy enough to eat from Harrods, but too tight to pay for a chair to avoid duck crap.

 
A chick seeking donations came up to us, probably having noticed our expensive treats and thinking we were good for it, but Tilly genuinely couldn't get her malfunctioning wallet to open.

 We eventually had to resort to desperate measures, and I tore it asunder with my bare hands.

In the afternoon I recreated the New Europe tour Til and I took with Kirbie for Alex and Lucy. Afterwards we tried to eat at The White Horse but had to leave because I didn't have ID, so we settled in at the Queen's Head, where the age restrictions were apparently more lax.

Postprandium, Alex, Til and I bought tickets to Les Mis for that night and said bye to Lucy. It wasn’t too sad, though, ’cause she’s coming out to visit early next year.

Les Mis was really great, and not as depressing as everyone said, though still mildly sad. I ran into a bit of my personal distaste for ‘theatre cheese’ again, but that was unavoidable.

Next day was Hampton Court, which Cardinal Wolsey gave as a ‘gift’ to Henry VIII four centuries ago. It was great. Amazing to see little things like the symbols of Katherine (his first wife) and Henry that he later ordered removed but must’ve been missed (awkward). They have actors roaming around the castle all day playing the parts of Henry, his (soon-to-be) fifth wife Kathryn Howard, her sister and her courtier-lover, as well as a bunch of guards. At first I thought having all the actors was lame, but I increasingly found it entertaining. It really did manage to bring the castle to life. Touring the later additions to the castle where there were no such actors later in the afternoon, I realised it felt kind of dead and lonely and found myself wishing there were actors there too.

Henry

 

 My camera-shy friend.

 Think he wet himself; that's probably why.

 Alex humbly approaches Kathryn.

That night we went back to The White Horse, this time with ID, for dinner and drinks. We were intrigued by a man in a BRIGHT pink shirt who came out of the building he was in like clockwork every fifteen minutes to have a cigarette. We ended up watching out for him to appear, and constructing a story about him. We decided he was a Russian opera singer who had to quit for some reason, possibly connected to his smoking habit, and now he’d moved to Piccadilly to be close to the theatres he once loved. He also had a wife with some kind of mental illness, and the story would be about him meeting a girl while smoking who looks over his drab outfit and sullen expression and suggests he brighten up a bit. He goes through his wardrobe and the only bright piece of clothing he can find is the pink shirt his wife got him years ago and he never wore. His wife thinks he’s started wearing it for her, and he thinks the woman he met is interested in him, when really she’s using the brightness of his shirt and the regularity of his appearance on the street to some end we haven’t determined yet ...

The next day we had to return to Norwich to move out of our accommodation, but we returned the night after for one more dinner with Alexandra. I’d been talking about how, every time the tube announcement that ‘there is a good service on all lines’ comes on, I feel like I’m a mindless drone in some dystopic Orwellian future with a voice constantly reassuring me ‘All is well, all is well’ so when we received the bill with a card urging us to give feedback (online, but whatever), guess what Alexandra wrote.

We saw the waitresses giggling over it on our way out.

We finished up with an exorbitantly priced ice cream in a wanky ice cream shop in Covent Garden.

After that, on our way to the train to our hotel, I decided to get rid of all the useless one and two penny coins Til and I had accrued during our stay in England by dumping them in one busker’s hat, which was pretty funny. I don’t think they knew whether to be happy or annoyed. Altogether it was probably worth a couple of pounds, but they’re so useless!

There was even more than there looks.

Struggling with the weight of it.

 The act. Check out the dude on the left's face.

Thus concluded another London trip. Only one more to go now, to get our flights home!