Havana Nights (and other cuban tales) - Part 1

I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he
didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the
airport there were such enormous potholes.

Fidel Castro

And nor would I vote for Fidel, on the strength of the pot hole argument alone. It is also a fair bet that neither would 11 Million Cubans, given the chance. But, earlier than usual, I digress. The two things they do properly in Cuba is cigars and pot holes. The cigars are, provided you go for the good ones such as Cohiba or Romeo y Julieta, excellent. With the pot holes there is no need to be discerning; they are world class and they are everywhere.

It was a cold and pretty miserable March day in London when we set out for the tropical communist paradise of Cuba, to enjoy a well deserved 2 week holiday of sun, sand, rum and 30th Birthdays. With my 30th brithday bearing down and Bennett's following 5 days later we thought it appropriate to bring in the new phase of life with a bang in Castro's Cuba. Steve had organised a group of 10 inteprid travellers and Steve's girlfriend Kirsty organised the trip (Cubatour!), Shell had booked the flights and I had organised a month off from work

Brock to boss: "I'm taking a month off, I hope that's ok..."

so before I knew it Michelle, Steve, Kirsty, Paul (Divey from here on in) and I were sitting in bland high street chain coffee shop at Heathrow waiting to get on a plane. 2 other friends from University, Jo and Marie, were already in-country and Todd and Zoe were flying out the next day. Damo was the last of the group, joining us 4 days later mid tour in Cuba. We flew via Paris and after a long arduous flight, with only 1 meal I might add, we finally arrived in Havana.

Cuba is an interesting place. Muy, muy interesante, as the locals would say. The largest island of the Caribbean, a world power in the production of sugar and women's volleyball and a thorn in the side of US politics constantly for over 100 years. They have one of the world's highest literacy rates, a highly advanced biotechnology industry and a average monthly wage of about $20. The entire country is steeped in history, especially so in the exciting bits of yore, with towns ravaged by pirates, a US cavalry charge, a government effective controlled by the Mafia and finally a communist revolution that gave rise to the "New Man".

I like the concept of the New Man. Che Guevra's raison détre, it drove large parts of the revolution, especially after the military victory. It was a typically flawed socialist ideal of a worker who toiled for love of the state rather than personal gain, with typically socialist results of people that didn't love the state nor do any work; predictably ending up in widespread economic depression and politcal repression.

As the revolutionary fervor passed and Cuba entered the long dark reality of centrally planned economies and never ending 3 year plans, the rich and varied history became a homogenous lump of failures - the 10 million ton sugar harvest, artificial trade supports - Huge amounts of Soviet money for whatever crap the Cubans could churn out, and failed revolutions elsewhere in the world - over 450,000 sent to fight, 10,000 dead in Angola! Angola for goodness sake! Why would Cubans need to go anywhere near Angola? I understand the need for the communists to search build new markets for their revolutionary fervor and soviet arms however the very idea that Cuba would need to fight a war that in terms of manpower was about twice the Australian commitment to World War 2 does boggle the mind and lead us to ask - are these people insane?

Before I search for the answer to that question, I shall recount our travels which I hope will convey my impressions of what Cuba has become in the modern world since, as the saying goes, the proof is in the all inclusive, repetitive and stale pudding.

Flying into to Havana was exactly what I was hoping for - Sunshine, warmth and friendly enough immigration control who didn't seem to mind our handwritten visa's. We managed to get from the Airport to our first hotel with out too much trouble. Except for getting cash, that was a bit of trouble. Cuban money is fraught with problems and beset with trouble. The root of our present problem were, as with lots of things here, of Fidel's doing. Cuba, being a managed communist economy, shares much in common with other managed communist economies. Deciding on a value of their currency right at the forefront of the issues faced. Since the government manages, or at least attempts to manage, the prices of everything they can retain a vice like grip on the domestic value of the peso, in the case of the Cubans the Peso Moneda Nacionale (MN) or as I will refer to it from now on, the Worthless Cuban Peso (WCP). Since the WCP can't really be exchanged for goods or services no one actually wants any of these. They do get around though as all salaries are paid in the WCP. Oh sure you can purchase stuff with it; the following list is what I saw available for sale

• a burlap sack with some rice in it,
• a very cheap flight from Santiago to Havana (subject to availability: current waiting time about 3 years)
• some tinned food including black beans and white beans
  
• counterfeit cigars

Unfortunately for the Cubans, that is a comprehensive list. And whilst US$1 will get you 24 WCP's or so the fact you cant buy anything you want with it makes the peso functionally worthless, especially when they deal with foreigners who are certainly not interested in the beans and rice, and only marginally interested in the conterfeit cigars. This led the Cubans to introduce a new parallel currency (masters of financial innovation!) for people with real hard currency (US dollars, Pound Sterling, Argentinian Peso, you know stable money) to exchange - the Convertible Peso (the CUC). The convertible is pegged to the US dollar at about CUC$0.92 to US$1 and can be used to buy things: Dinner was generally about CUC$10; we bought a round of Mojitos in a crappy bar in Havana for CUC$5 each; a 750ml bottle of olive oil can be purchased for about CUC$60. With the notable exception of Rum (CUC$3 for a 750ml bottle) and Cigars (about CUC$2-4 each) Cuba is very, very expensive.

But I digress. We were at the airport and needed some cash - any sort would do - to get into town. We'd done a bit of research before leaving and I'd found a couple of websites saying that there were lots of ATM's in Cuba and they worked well as long as your Card wasn't issued by a US company such as Visa. We'd bought some pounds just in case (about 500) but were planning on using the ATM's for most of our purchasing needs. So we found the cash machine at the airport and I tried my card (RBS). No joy. Shell tried her card (Barclays). Nope. Hmmmm, we started thinking. Steve tried his card (HSBC, Premier account no less). No. Divey tried his card (NatWest), and lo and behold money magically appeared from the machine, with us none the wiser as to why our cards failed. We found a taxi driver, negotiated a price in spanish and we were on our way.

Havana was just like I'd imagined it. Ancient cars spluttering along highways bereft of clutter such as line markings or traffic signals, a bus that was well beyond full, beautiful sunshine and all sorts of people taking it easy. Our first night was spent in the rather salubrious Hotel Parque Central, one of the newer and better hotels in Havana, notable for it's rooftop pool with excellent city views. We hit the pool to try and wind down after the long flight and, after a shower, met up with Jo and Marie who had arrived from Australia the day prior. We had a refreshing Mojito and admired the views and enjoyed the warmth. The city is like nothing else you can imagine. There is the huge Captitolo building, built in 1929 and modelled on the US Congress, but bigger and with more bits falling off. The rest of the city was a visual cacophony of ancient buildings that were either in the process of or had just finished collapsing, nasty 60's style 6 storey concrete horrors that were stained with age and neglect and occaisionally a lovely old buildings such as the Telegrafo Hotel that had been looked after and restored.

We headed out for dinner and found, with the help of a tout, a rather strange restaurant on the 2nd floor of a old building that looked like a construction site from the outside but turned out to be quite a nice place inside. I had a smoked pork loin, Shell had something really garlicky and the general consensus was that it wasn't too bad, if a bit more expensive than we had thought. The next morning we had a nice hotel breakfast and day to explore the sights of Havana. We set off walking around the Capitol building, found an old Cigar factory and wandered around marvelling that a place like Havana can exist in 2009. I can't really do it justice in description, it needs to be seen, smelt and tasted. The roads are in a terrible state, families live in apartments in buildings that would be condemned in Cambodia. But still there are shops selling popcorn and ice cream and we even saw an Adidas store. Later on we found out that we had been walking through Havana Centro, a nasty part of town which is pretty much last on the list of Havana suburbs schedule for restoration. We still had fun walking around, trying to dodge the rubbish and gigantic old cars that tore up and down the streets.

We found a small bar along some back street and thought let's get another mojito. We walked in and caused a rucus! Such excitement, people running all over the place babbling in spanish trying to get 7 chairs sorted out for the gringos. Getting caught up in all the excitement, no one really asked how much a drink would cost so we bought them for anyone that would come and sit near us. It was actually quite a lot of fun. They spoke no english, we spoke very little spanish but we talked. Everyone was in good spirits until the crusty old guy Divey and I had been trying to talk to - me gusta cerveza! - decided it was time for us to go and meet his cousin to buy some cigars, much cheaper than at the shops. We weren't really interested, which got him a bit agitated and then he started carrying on a bit. He eventually settled down but I'm sure he tried to put some voodoo curse on us or something. At the very least he got the bar owner to charge us about 10 times the value for the drinks; the bill showed $40 CUC for a round of 8 mojitos, which worked out to roughly $85 Australian dollars. A bit annoyed but putting it down to the fresh tourist tax that all must pay, we cracked on.

Eventually we found some hotels that had a restaurant attached and had lunch that again wasn't bad as long as you didn't get fancy. I wasn't too hungry so I thought I'd get the Bread with Tomato, Ham and Cheese. I've no idea what I was thinking: I guess I wanted a bruschetta sort of thing with some nice bread, fancy proscuitto and good cheese and perhaps some olive oil, who knows? We already knew that nobody goes to Cuba for the food. Read it a million times. It's usually the first thing people say when you mention you are travelling to Cuba, but I'd forgotten all that, and ordered the Bread with Tomato Ham and Cheese. Imagine you asked a 10 year old who had never seen a sandwich to get you a plate with bread, ham, cheese and tomato. That's what I got. A plate with a bit of bread (stale) on one side, 3 half slices of the standard evil cheese of cuba - it's a bit like kraft singles but more processed and plasticky, half a sliced up tomato and cuban ham. For all their acheivements, one thing they do not do well in Cuba is food. And among the things they do worst with respect to food is ham. It looks bad. It tastes bad. I doubt it is made out of pig at all, or if it is the pigs must lead a hard and unpleasent life. They must be especially punished and tortured to really ruin the animal before it goes to the ham factory. Or maybe there is only one ham factory for the whole country and they don't have a very good recipe. Whatever the causes one thing is for sure: if word got out to the cuban population at large about the sort of ham you can get in the real world there would be civil unrest, coups and revolution. It is that bad.

And there it was, my $5 CUC lunch staring me in the face. A peice of bread, half a tomato, cheese and this ham. Not really what I was expecting but exactly what I had ordered. Abd you don't go to Cuba for the food, do you? Shell got homestyle chicken which was ok, Steve got fish which he said was good so I must have just been unlucky I thought. But I did learn an important lesson - our expectations on the food would need to change. On the flip side, the beers were good, the company good and the taxi we got back to the hotel only broke down once and ran out of petrol once so it was all looking up.

We got back to the hotel, and although we had actually checked out as we were staying in a different hotel that evening, we went for a swim anyway and had another drink on the rooftop bar! Some guy asked us if we were staying at the hotel - of course we are. At least we were.... Anyway we needed to find the new hotel so I again got to employ my newly aquired spanish language capabilities. Picking one of the few hotel employees that wouldn't speak spanish I wandered up and said

Me: "Excuse me, where is Hotel Plaza?"
Him:

Maybe I should try a yes no question

Me: "Is it far?"
Him: "No", which I understood. And then he started laughing a bit with his mate
Me, brandishing a very poor map: "Where?"
Him: "It's next door", of which I kind of picked up the gist
Me: "In front of this?" - I don't know how to say next door in spanish
Him: "Yes, just left" - but I struggle with the word for left. I am, however, good at the word for right
Me: "No right?"
Him, still thinking this was all very funny, walked out the front so he could point it out to me: "There"

And it was across the road, perhaps 12 metres away. But at least I'd found it. Finally Todd and Zoe arrived, we checked into the new hotel which, was a bit more "real" insofar as Cuban hotels would go, and we headed out for some Italian, which was ok with the exception of the ham. After dinner some of us headed out for a drink whilst others conserved their strength because tomorrow, with our travelling group almost complete, we were ready for the next phase: The tour!

Coming up in Part 2 - The Tour we meet Carlos, Mike and the bus and we head west to find the real Cuba!

Parisian adventures with Aunty Libby and Alex

My Aunt Libby and my cousin Alex stayed with us in London for a few weeks in February, we all headed to Paris together for an amazing but cold long weekend.

I'm not being lazy,but I have decided to publish my Aunt's account of our weekend, as I think she has summed it up better than I could have. Also its nice to hear it described as seen through the eyes of someone who's not at all sick of looking at European churches and likes pastries almost as much as we do!

Paris, what can i say, it is the most magical city. It's streets are all cobble stones and narrow, there are patisseries on every block oozing with all their wonderful pastries and breads. We went to Norte Dame and the Louvre on the first day.

Notre Dame is a peaceful place, although there would have been 200 people in there looking around at the time there was still an amazing sense of peace and calm. There is no talking allowed when inside so even though it was full of people the silence made it even more special to reflect on the feelings you felt. I again lit a candle for my family and friends and a special one for Tash and her family. The Notre Dame is still a running church where it has small services everyday and it's traditional one on Sunday's.

We proceeded onto the Louvre, again what a place! It is big big big, we covered a lot of ground but really you need the whole day there if you want to see it all, maybe 2. We visited the famous painting of Mona Lisa and many more interesting paintings, statues and jewels. Not only are all the art works on display amazing but the building it self is worth the look.

In Paris everywhere you look they have amazing statues, lamp posts with statues, you turn a corner and look up and there is a building holding statues covered in gold leaf or green copper. The history in Paris is everywhere. I am glad we were there with Michelle and Brock, Alex and I can not speak French let alone read it, Brock and Michelle could read a couple of words and say some phrases, the waiter was very helpful. (Finding somewhere to eat dinner was an interesting experience, but we picked somewhere that was full of locals and were well rewarded)We had tea and called it a night (Exhausted, I have to add - ed).

2nd day in Paris, we went on a walking tour of the village of Montmatre, on the north side of Paris up the hill. The girl who was our guide was an excellent story teller. She took us to the house where Picasso, Toulouse-La Trec and Van Gogh , and told us of their lives. On the tour we started in the middle of hill and worked our way up.

As we walked up the hill over the cobble stones and through the narrow streets, our guide talked of all the history of the place. When we reached the top there was yet another church - the Sacré-Cœur, the hordes of people as promised by our guide, tourist stands with all the cheap tourist crap and a view of Paris that was fantastic. We worked our way down, this time 'til we came to a street full of strip joints, where the Moulin Rouge is. It was horrible and seedy. It was amazing how a little hill on Montmartre can hold 3 different kinds of lives!

Next stop was the Eiffel Tower (which i was calling the Leaning Tower all day daaaaa!). We took the lift up to the 2nd level as the top was full...

I am glad we only went to the 2nd level, I found the lift ride quite scary i had to close my eyes. Once we were out side on the level it was OK. It was now night fall and the tower lit up as did the city, what a spectacular view! You can see all of Paris from every different angle. You could even see down the long stretch of the river right up to the Sacré-Cœur on the hill in the village of Montmartre! On our last day in Paris we walked the famous road of fashion, a lot of beautiful stuff but with a big price, I took some photos of some shoes to show Xenia the fashions, even if I could afford to buy any they are much to nicer to anything in Tassie! The Parisian food was as good as you would expect, the pastries even better. People in Paris seem to all have dogs they take them every where, there is a lot of dog poo on the footpaths but you learn to watch your step as you are walking. Paris on a whole is a beautiful place, I would highly recommend it to any one."

We all had a great weekend in Paris, it really was cold, snowing even at one stage. It was great to spend time with Libby and Alex seeing as she has now returned to Australia(for the time being?). Brock loves France, I think mainly for the food, but you know what they say "the way to a mans heart is through his stomach". I think both the city of Paris and I have that under wraps!

Random musings on the United Kingdom

When one considers the United Kingdom is the country that gave the world the Magna Carta and the Beatles, the current achievements lead me to think there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. With Denmark, of course, being the great UK.

London is presently my favourite manifestation of the national misadventures of the UK. Truly one of the worlds great cities, pockmarked all over with structures that pervade both my conscious and sub conscious; Westminster, Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace: places that you have been and seen before you have even been there. And it's not even the big tourist icons, it's things like the view from Primrose hill or the curves of the Thames. There's all this stuff that you know because, as an Australian at least, culturally, your culture demands that you recognise.

The really cool part of that cultural memory bobs up when you walk up Regent St and admire the grand Victorian buildings, or perhaps wandering among the bars and restaurants around Soho. Standing in the shadow if St Stephens tower while Big Ben drowns out the latent city noise it's hard to escape the achievements of British civilisation. And, for me, that compounds the, well not constant, but pretty frequent stream of dissapointments, inconveniences and generally being let down by the British service industry and the damned propensity of the people of this country to put up with second best.

The past civil achievements are magnificent. Londoners managed to construct the Circle Line Tube, right underneath some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. Underground, using futuristic mass public transport methods that had only just been invented they built an amazingly effective and useful system that worked so well they replicated it over and over until the city was riddled with underground train lines. All this in 1854 when Melbourne was a smaller city than Ballarrat. Then when they invented electric trains, they installed them and put the entire fleet into service in 11 days. A fairly impressive achievement and no doubt an indication as to why Victorian Britain was the greatest civillisation the world has ever seen.

Now lets zoom forward to 2009, where it is taking 18 months to replace 15 escalators at Bank station. Basically you can hardly move around the station if an escalator is involved. My engineer friends assure me that escalators are a tricky business and that they are much easier to build from scratch than replace etc etc etc.... They are replacing 0.8333333 escalators a month. This strikes me of a lack of will, or organisation, or who know what. Sloth perhaps?

But it's not just the tube, although living with it daily means it is always near the top of the complaints list. No, London has other problems. Fly tipping, for instance. Basically people put their rubbish on the street quite a bit. Why anyone in a modern soceity would think it is ok to just dump your rubbish on the kerb is quite beyond me, but Londoners love it. My guess is they know they can get away with it, which segues quite neatly to the general standards of service. On my scorecard it's a poor to very poor. Anyone who has opened a bank account, got a mobile phone contract, talked to any service provider about anything will know what I am talking about and this experience invalidates any argument that a larger market and more competition improves customer service. They are all as bad as each other. The list of gripes grows ever larger:

* sunday shopping hours

* the false outrage against Bankers' Bonuses from MP's committees

* The fact that 1 guy (the Duke of something or other) owns Mayfair

* Flood Plain insurance subsidising people whose house is guaranteed to get flooded every 5 years

They just aren't doing as well as they have in the past. In Melbourne when there is a total lack ability to do difficult things, such as fix the public transport system we make excuses - the city is too big, there is no real cost benefit, it's just for rich inner city residents yada yada yada there's a hint of truth to the excuses. Here they try to do all the great nation building things but just cock it up. It's good to be somewhere where the nation is willing to have a go at the hard stuff, but the results are just so disappointing.

But then the sun starts shining, U2 play a secret rooftop gig on Regents St, You go out in Covent Garden on a Saturday night, see a West End show (the Lion King - excellent!!) and all of a sudden it's not so bad. In fact London is really cool. Sure they can't make the tube work and the nation is not what it once was but you know they still do a brilliant city. For all its failings London is a place that people want to be. And if you get a bit sick of it, Paris is a 3 hour train ride away!

I love Paris (but not as much as I love London, which is less than I love Melbourne, which is marginally less than I love Richmond)

Shell turns the big 30 in style, Tignes, Espace Killy, France

After a festive period of over indulgence we headed to France to perfect our snowboarding. Potatoes cooked in goose fat were a highlight of the festive season for both of us so we thought that post New Years something needed to be done to rectify the fattening side effects of these.

It was luck that the lovely Ainslie (a colleague of mine at GOSH) had very drunkenly at our house warming party invited us to Tinges in France for a week of snow adventures. I really didn't want to be at work for my birthday and Brock really wanted to get to the snow this winter so we jumped at the chance to get away with a bunch of her friends (detecting a theme here). In the end a few of my friends jumped on the band wagon as well so then there were 10 of us which made for a pretty good contingent. Out of 10 of us we had 6 radiographers and one radiologist, a research scientist who is trying to get into medicine and a token computer nerd and an accountant just to even things up a bit.

We made the interesting and in hindsight questionable money saving decision to catch the bus all the way from London Victoria bus station to Tignes. We departed after work on Friday and arrived at lunch time on Saturday. It would have been better if our seats actually reclined, the DVD played worked and if Tweedledum and Tweedledee our drivers could have sorted out the air conditioning. I won't complain too much as it was no where near comparable in length or painfulness to our Laos to China bus ordeal of 2008. In the end I was just thankful that the toilet stops actually involved real toilets and that there were no leeches. However we did spend more money at a service station on two sandwiches than we did the entire week were in Laos on all our food (slight exaggeration but it was pretty outrageously expensive).

So we made it to Tignes in one piece but quite tired. Tignes is in the wonderful part of the Southern Alps that is Espace Killy. There is a glacier there that you can ski/board on all year round and more runs than you could actually ski in a week. We stayed at the UCPA which was simple hostel style accommodation with rooms of four and a shared bathroom, so Kylie and Sheida were lucky to get a glance of Brock in his underwear at least 2 times a day. The UCPA was pretty simple but proved to be excellent value as we had all our meals, lift tickets, a whole week of lessons and accommodation included. The food was a sensation considering they were catering for 250 people. I shudder to think what we would have been served up in the equivalent place in the UK. We all embraced the fresh baguettes, pommes frites, drinking our morning coffee out of a bowl and most of all the cheese. I think I might have actually been a chance of loosing my Christmas lard if it wasn't for all the cheese!

We took ourselves out boarding on the Sunday just to check and make sure that we hadn't over shot the mark by telling them that we could actually snowboard green runs and the odd blue run. We had plenty of tumbles but nothing too spectacular and managed to sort ourselves out so that we didn't look too foolish in our first lesson. We were pretty amazed at how fast Ainslie and Pete could get themselves down the mountain on their boards, we could only hope and dream that we would be that good by the end of the week!

Monday saw the start of our lessons and we were in the improver group, as we certainly needed some improvement. There were two improver groups so we all headed out together bright and early to sort out the boys from the men. I basically fell over a lot and couldn't keep up with half the people in the group. That wasn't really a problem as Brock's self taught technique was so bad that he got put in the boys group with me along with our travelling companion Rick, who embarrassingly for us has taught himself to snowboard the day before. We also had Helen a lovely young English girl in our group and Fred the French guy who got sick of our English speaking and didn't make the lessons after Wednesday!

Once we got put into the easy group Denis, our French hero of an instructor, took us up the mountain to "slide" and rectify all our bad habits. Our lessons weren't really very much like lessons at all, it was more like having a French mountain guide take us to where he thought the snow and conditions were the best and then we would "slide" and then "keep sliding" while he would give us pointers on how not to fall over so much, go faster and look cool as well.

Ainslie demoted herself from her advanced boarding group after getting a dose of "the fear" on the glacier and decided to join our crew. She was far better than any of us in our group but it was great to have four of us all in the same group and it was much easier for me to try to keep up with her than the boys!

So the week went on, our days consisted of "sliding" from 9am till 12pm, lunch from 12-1.45pm and then we were back on the piste for some more "sliding" until the lifts closed, we were too tired to move or we had concussion.

Thursday was my 30th birthday so I got to chose what we would do for the day. I chose for us to spend the day at Val d'Isere which was next door to Tignes and also part of Espace Killy. I had also requested for it to snow so that we would have fresh powder and my request was granted. We headed off in the morning up the lifts and down the piste until we made it across to the Val d'Isere area where the snow was brilliant. Denis found a fantastic area to hone our off piste skills and we did a few runs down the mountain in powder that was so light and deep that you couldn't see your board. We all boarded like heroes mainly due to the fact that when you fell in the fresh powder it didn't hurt nearly as much as on the groomed runs, and we had now been boarding for five days we were actually getting good at it!

We made it to Val d'Isere for lunch in a small restaurant, Denis produced birthday candles from the pocket of his ski jacket for my dessert (that Brock ate) and I had happy birthday sung to me, it was nice. We had a long lunch and Denis produced some of his homemade digestive (spirit concoction made of pure alcohol with flowers soaked in it) from another one of the pockets of his ski jacket and we had a bit of a tipple before hitting the slopes again to make our way all the way back across to Tignes. I have to say again that I was pretty chuffed to get birthday candles even if there were only three and not 30 of them!

By the time we made it back to the UCPA we were all extremely tired but we managed to down a few bottles of champagne (the real stuff of course) and head out for a quiet drink after dinner. I have to say it was one of the best birthdays that I have ever had. I got to spend it with my lovely husband, my friends, a very cool snowboarding instructor and the snow and scenery was phenomenal.

I have to admit (sadly) that by the end of the week I was pretty much broken (don't worry my dodgy knee was fine), snowboarding is pretty hard on the old body especially when its 30! I had a massive bruise on my derriere which would make for a very uncomfortable bus ride home, bruises all over my legs, an eggy on my forehead from headbutting the piste and a nice gash across both my shins from Helen and I stacking it up together. We did accomplish a lot though, we could both go really fast, ride switch (Brock was far better than me though) and Brock even managed to pull off a few freestyle moves until he fell and tore a muscle in his shoulder! Never fear though dear reader we both made it back to London in one piece and if the pound wasn't so pathetic compared to the Euro we would be back at the snow right now.

The Orphans Christmas Dinner

It is cold in England during the winter. It gets dark early. Everything freezes. The high street stores have their after Christmas sales before Christmas and Australians either get the hell out or else gather together for a proper orphans christmas in the country. It was thus that we found ourselves away with friends in Somerset for Christmas in a really big, old, cool (but well heated!) country house.

One of our friends, Deverey, had thought it fun to escape the traditional London shutdown over Christmas (no cabs, trains, buses, shops or fun) and had done some excellent googling and haggling to organise a large old house in South West England that could sleep about 30 people. As we knew we would have not a great deal on over Christmas, we jumped at the chance to get out of town and see some of the countryside. Knowing only Jo Jo, Magnus and Dev we said "yep" to her offer and on the 23rd of December hired a car and set off for our first big trip out of London.

Tonedale house was an old country house built by a some guy that built a mill during the industrial revolution and, in good industrialist fashion, built his trophy house attached to the mill. Located in a small town called Wellington in Somerset it had about 50 rooms with a really big lounge room, games room with a pool, table tennis and blackjack table, a totally excellent kitchen and a gigantic formal dining room. It was a good house. The kitchen was the focal point for the house with a BIG oven and a nice table making for a great spot for eating breakfast, reading the paper and generally hanging out with all of our new friends.

We arrived on the evening of the 23rd and set about meeting everyone, playing pool and drinking some beer. The next day we started on the bacon (2.5 Kg of streaky, 2.5 kg of back rashers) for breakfast and did a reconciliation of the food purchased for Christmas dinner. Mags and Dev had organised Christmas dinner and it was a feast, the likes of which would have enough mores for Oliver Twist and us telling stories about it to anyone who would listen.

But before we got to that, Magnus had organised some Clay Target shooting at a nearby farm for Christmas eve, so Michelle and I, Dev, Mags and one of Dev's friends Kate, Mag's boss Scott, his wife Fabi and Scott's two sons Liam and Seamus, a couple of small animals, the gameskeeper from the local African wildlife park, three 19th century boot blacks and a couple of others (those last few might not have actually come along, but it did seem like the car was awfully full) headed off to blow to the crap out of some clays.

It was fun. Shell didn't have a go because she was afraid of not hitting anything but I stepped up and didn't hit a thing with my first try. I later top scored during the competition round (although my team still lost) but got to have a crack at the fast clays and even managed to hit a few of them!

After lunch we went and got some supplies for Christmas day (another few cases of beer) and went to the pub for dinner, and spent the night playing blackjack. Fun but all just designed to kill time before the main event - Christmas dinner. Mags and Dev had procured some excellent produce for the big meal, the piece de resistance being an 11kg bronze turkey that was easily going to fill the industrial sized oven. Despite never having actually cooked a turkey, Magnus bravely had assumed responsibility for the bird and spent Christmas eve researching recipes and techniques for the perfect succulent turkey.

"Make sure there's butter under the skin!"

"Stick an orange up its butt!"

There was no shortage of ideas on how to prepare it, but few actual hands on deck at 6AM when Mags got up to put it on. We got up about 9 and made ourselves a nice cup of tea and some more bacon and eggs whilst we planned the cooking of the ancillaries. Cheese boards, pancakes with salmon and cream cheese, goose fat roasted potatoes, parsnips, carrots, pumpkin, brussel sprouts with bacon and salads were all planned, and mostly peeled where necessary thanks to Jade, Amy and Dev the night before.

But the food wasn't going to cook itself, so with apron on, a wooden spoon in her hand and a gleam in her eye that said "I was made for this moment" Michelle took command of the kitchen. With Magnus taking care of the bird, Shell organised the rest with a willing team of assistants. Orders were issued, Trays were greased, sprouts boiled, potatoes par boiled, vegies roasted, pancakes cooked, turkeys basted, hands, shoulders and fingers burnt, salads prepared, cheese boards set, drinks drunk, dishes washed and generally lots of activity around the place until the bird was taken out, rested and tested.

An intake of breath.

A deep cut in the thigh.

The juices ran clear. It was cooked! At least thats what we thought and Mags began carving. But then on the carve, the juices seemed a bit red. Not cooked through, even though it had spent 6 hours in the oven already. "Bugger it" we thought and wrapped it back up to go into the oven again for another hour and a bit. At this point everything was ready to go and we had to put all the vegies etc back in the various ovens around the place whilst we finalised the bird.

Eventually it was all cooked and we tested it again. Cooked! Despite a small downgrade, from absolutely perfect to almost perfect, the bird was pronounced ready. With that there was a flurry of activity whilst everything was served and in no time we all sat down with a glass of champagne and a plate of the best Christmas dinner one could ask for.

It was a great day and we managed to fill in the rest of the week with plenty of walks in the countryside, drives through the countryside, shopping at the Christmas sales, a proper Devonshire tea in Devon in the shadows of the cathedral at Exeter, plenty of Blackjack ("Monkey!!!!!") and, on the way home a visit to Stonehenge, which I was pretty excited about. Unfortunately I didn't get to back into the stones a la European vacation but it was still one of those great things about the UK where I got to see in the flesh things that have been a part of my consciousness since I can remember remembering. We also went to the Avebury stone circle which was also quite cool but it was so very cold that we retreated to the pub for lunch.

And with that we headed back to London after a great break with new friends and a christmas dinner that will be spoken about for years to come!

Home sweet home - London

And then it was over - admittedly over 6 weeks ago now, but just allow me to slide into a retrospective frame of mind for a bit and tie up the loose ends of our totally excellent adventure.

We flew into Heathrow on the 29th August to be greeted by sunshine, some warmth and the tube which, I thought was great, until we couldn't buy the tickets on our credit cards, find which District line train to change to for Paddington or find a seat that was not next to a smelly fat person. Geez louise. It got better soon, though as we met Steve at Paddington (he nicked off from work at about 1pm - nice one!) and then went onwards to his new flat in Maida Vale where we were staying until we could find our own place.

From there we headed off to the Waterway pub in Little Venice and drank heaps of beers while regaling the bar with stories of our daring and adventurous travel. At some point Kirsty joined us and I think we may have eaten some nice food too. The next day was a Saturday and we had some tickets to go and see the Chemical Brothers at Kensington Olympia so we had a nice sleep in and a walk around Maida Vale before heading out to see the band - wicked Audio Visual show - and have another great night out.

That more or less set the tone for the next couple of weeks as we sorted ourselves out administratively. We would go to the pub, whilst also finding a nice flat in a convenient if not fantastic part of town and Shell getting a job at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I was being a bit picky with the kinds of jobs I was putting myself forward for which was probably a bit dumb as the 2nd week we were here Lehman Brothers investment bank failed, setting off the stock market crash that engulfed the worlds finances and my prospects for getting a sweet contract.

Ahh well. I have actually managed to get a job with AOL Broadband and get to join Shell in the ranks of the employed, although she is now the breadwinner as she earns more than I do! I took a little longer than anticipated but it looks good for now.

So now we live, according to whom you ask, in either Maida Vale (the Real Estate Agent), Maida Hill (the closest post office), West Kilburn (the A-Z), Queens Park (the local council amenities) or even just good ol' London (the post code checking system on the Royal Mail website). We are sort of in a promontory of nice places in an ocean of crappy council housing. Allow my map to demonstrate the area. The green bits are nice houses with normal people walking along the streets, the yellow bits (which our house is in) are areas that are ok with the occasional dodgy off license or crappy pub but generally nice places. The orange areas are low rise council flat areas but still relatively normal streets but a higher incidence of dodgy off licenses and frequently large groups of people standing around not really doing anything except talking loudly.




The red areas are dyed in the wool council housing a la Atherton Gardens on Brunswick St in Fitzroy or the Lennox Street / Elizabeth Street complex in Richmond, putting even Melbourne's best attempt at horrible state housing to shame. I actually quite like our area excepting Harrow Road which is a crappy way to start the day. It's like Smith St in Collingwood without the charm.

Anyway our house is about a 10 minute walk from either Queens Park tube or Westbourne Park tube which is quite handy for getting around town. It is a 1 bedroom flat in a long row of terraces that has been recently renovated and furnished with a bit of style. We've got a nice kitchen, a big living room and a big enough bedroom AND there's also a rooftop terrace / decking thing on top of our bedroom so we also have an outside area which is really cool. You have to climb an extension ladder to get up there but it is a small sacrifice! We also have a very comfy sofa bed......

The only real problem we've had so far with the house was the small matter of the oven. As most readers would know, we love a good roast and Shell is a dead set genius in the kitchen so our oven generally gets a bit of a work out in normal day to day operations of the house. So we cooked a few roasts and cakes and stuff and we noticed that if we left the oven for over, say, an our or so, the house would gradually fill with smoke until the place smelt like a campsite. The first time we thought it may have been the baking paper that sort of caught on fire when it touched the grill element so we didn't think too much about it, until we had Matt and Eva over for dinner and managed to smoke out the house again.

Finally thinking something might be up I gave the oven a good clean out, in case it was some stray food causing the smoke and gave it another test but, nope, still more smoke. I began systematically dismantling the bit around the oven but not finding anything obvious and since it was neither my house nor my oven I decided to call the landlord. She organised a workman to come over and have a look, so Kevin came around and had a quick look as I explained the problem. He looked at the same things I looked at and couldn't see anything so he pulled the oven out, which actually turned out to be quite easy to do. We got the oven out and lo and behold pretty much the whole shelf was burnt to a crisp! There was a big hole burnt about 15 cm in diameter and it had started to burn through the next shelf down as well. This was not to do with the baking paper.

It turns out the oven was seriously faulty and hadn't been fused correctly when it was installed, so it was basically just waiting for the unsuspecting tenant to nick out to the shop for 15 minutes whilst cooking something for a couple of hours and burning the joint to the ground. Not the sort of excitement we need but the landlady was very good about it and had the oven replaced, by Kevin, on the same day.

Our days are now spent meeting up with friends, going shopping on the high street, drinking Pimms in the sun and generally enjoying life with practically no responsibilities! It's great, although we miss our families, our dogs, our friends and the Australian service industry (so far superior in every respect to the British standard that it is actually shocking) but I guess there is always a trade off to enjoying yourself.

Well until the next lazy Saturday morning when I feel like sharing my thought with the world, au revouir and Cole - can you throw the ball for Lily and give Burns a pat on the head and tell him he's a good boy!

Back to the real world - Helsinki, Finland

To mangle a quote from Tolstoy, all developed countries are pretty much the same, whereas all undeveloped countries are undeveloped (and a bit hopeless) in their own special way.

This was first and foremost in my mind as we cleared customs in our seats on the train from St Petersburg to Helsinki. Yet again it was a case of what a difference a border makes and for the first time in months we were now somewhere that looked somewhat similar to life as we know it.

Russia had been good to us. It was still a bit soviet at times and the wildly skewed costs of certain goods and services boggled the mind ($100 a night for a crappy hostel room with a shared bathroom, $10 for half a kilo of big caviar) but overall we'd had a great time and seen some truly spectacular things:

• Red Square - it was just like my imagination had decided it should be like
• The Hermitage - we actually got a bit bored looking at priceless painting after priceless painting, but there was some other really cool things like rooms where world changing events took place
• The Moscow Metro - these guys know how to build a train station. The subway stations are amazing, with many rivalling museums for their architectural skill and artistry. Being commies, the Moscow city fathers in the 30's decided that the workers should be able to enjoy the cultural highlights of modern Russia whilst on the way to work.

But it was still not quite right. Perhaps it was just the men going to work in business casual suits with socks and sandals, the falling apart look of St Petersburg's suburbs or the conviction of certain tour guides when they tell you that you'd be crazy to talk to a policeman in Russia, but you could just tell that while these guys are doing better than, say, your average Kyrgyz man in the street in Bishkek, Russia didn't have it all figured out yet.

The Finns, on the other hand, have. Whatever "it" is, they have worked it out, made it look good, surrounded it with a nice park and placed a statue next to it. Aside from the obvious stuff such as real prices (in euros! oh no), trams and shops for all the people selling goods (as opposed the junk, which we had seen quite a bit of) there was an obvious feel of prosperity to Helsinki, my impression of which that was no doubt fed by our stay at the 4 star Hotel Torni which was superb.

It's not like they had it easy either. Finland itself was only declared independent from Russia in 1917, which was followed promptly by a civil war (commies vs good guys and strangely for this area the good guys won!) and then a couple of wars against invading bad guys, namely the Nazi's and the Soviets. After the war the Finns, having very little aid from the West due to a couple of treaties signed with the Soviet Union, developed from a agrarian society to an industrialised economy. The US did provide aid on the sly to prevent communist overthrow of the democratic government, but most of their development was through trade, probably reindeer hides to begin with, but these days it's all about Formula 1 drivers and mobile phones.

Helsinki itself is great, located right on the Baltic sea with many lakes, rivers and islands. The architecture is really nice with most of the city built during the 1920's to 1950's in a nice and tasteful way. There's plenty of grand old buildings and statues and an excellent little tourist market they run each day down by the harbour where a lady sells baked potatoes out of one of those black kettle "Victorian Baked Potato" cookers that used to be at every holiday destination of my childhood. They were never as good as this one though, as the Helsinki version was piled high with smoked salmon and doused liberally in either a blue cheese or tartare sauce. Yummo.


There's a really cool old fortress on an island guarding the bay called Suomenlinna which was built by the Swedes in the late 18th century to ward off the pesky Russians, who periodically invaded. Unfortunately for the Swede's Helsinki fell to Russians for good only 6 months after they completed the fortress so now it sits up there with the 17" guns at East Point in Darwin as expensive, ultimately pointless military installations that now make excellent tourist attractions. We had a good time walking around the old walls and drinking "the best filtered coffee in the world", as proclaimed by a tourist magazine we got for free. We also ate some Reindeer burgers, went and saw the Batman movie and generally had a great time.

It was great to be back in the first world too, as we could drink the water out of the tap and eat ANYTHING! In fact it was the perfect way to finish off our holiday and move on the next bit of our adventure - getting jobs and going back to real life. How sad.