Walter's Wanderings

Blue

2010-01-17T23:27:00.004+08:00

After an eternity of rain (50 continuous days), then the worst winter and snow in a hundred years, I went outside today to find Brixton lit up with brilliant sunshine and blue skies. I have been aching for some warmth since I arrived here a few months ago and today, finally, it was warm enough for me just stroll around my neighbourhood, soaking up the sun.

Perhaps I am fussy, but I don't mean the oppressive humidity of Singapore, or the bone-dry 44 degree oven of Melbourne, I just want a moderately dry 25-30 degrees, with a cool evening breeze, the weather my Brazilian friend is having over her summer. Thats the weather I want right now...

But perhaps I am just being overly wishful today under the blue sky...

I get that way sometimes :)

Walter x

Christmas Musings 2009

2010-01-04T05:14:00.006+08:00

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love

It’s snowing. Cute little snowflakes are swirling all around me on an icy terrace in Hampstead as I stand here with a frozen glass of good champagne on this New Year’s Eve in London. This insignificant snowfall has gladdened my heart and made me feel that change and joy really are coming, that Christmas and New Year’s Eve have waved a magic wand over my world, and everything is softer and more beautiful :)

I recently went back to my home town of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy, for a Christmas with the few remaining cousins that still have a house to live in or still have work nearby. It was a wonderful time, but it brought on mixed emotions – the sadness of seeing the ruined city, the dread of realisation that mum would not have survived, and the joy of hugging and kissing beloved relatives again...

The Nature of Things

Abruzzo differs from the soft rolling hills and sunburnt hayfields of Tuscany and Umbria. In the Abruzzo, nature is as untamed as tradition is undiluted. Only here do the Apennines assume truly alpine proportions, topped with Gran Sasso at 2914m. It is rugged sheep country rather than farmland, and mostly consists of tall craggy peaks, deep frozen valleys and wild untamed parks where wolves, wild boars and bears still flourish and roam. Rather than having a Renaissance or Baroque imprint, it has been shaped mainly by the harsher Middle Ages. It really is more like an austere “Tibet by the sea” than elegant Italy. And so it is against this craggy template that its people have been shaped – they are a hardy, stoic lot, joyous in celebration and their traditions, but with their feet planted firmly on the ground...

Aftermath

As many of you may know (Easter-Musings), at 3:30am on the morning of April 6, 2009, most of the people of L’Aquila in Italy were asleep in their beds. There were 3 major jolts they said, each one more powerful than the last. For a population somewhat used to earthquakes, the first 2 quakes gave most people enough warning to run from their beds and leave their houses in time to survive the last and most destructive quake. What happened that night gives many of the population of L’Aquila nightmares to this day - most earthquakes happen in one dimension, left to right, or front to back, or even up and down. This last quake was in all three dimensions, a truly horrific nightmare that lasted 30 agonising seconds; the top halves of whole Palazzi lifted and twisted in mid-air, crashing down to crush their bottom halves; scores of trees were uprooted throughout the region; massive holes gaped open between houses, swallowing dozens of cars like toys; and medieval L’Aquila was in some places reduced to piles of dust and rubble just 30cm high.

My large family (48 first cousins, 10 aunts and uncles, and so on.), were amongst the lucky ones, only losing property and furniture - just some of the 29,000 left homeless; just some of the 15,350 moved to 139 hotels on the Adriatic coast, and their homes just some of the 15,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Many other families were less fortunate. The night ended with 1000 people injured and 308 people tragically dead, many of them children and grandparents. In a country and a culture that venerates its aged and adores its children, L’Aquila still mourns both the loss of its past and its future. The worst hit was the small village of Onna - being closest to the earthquake’s epicentre, every building was completely destroyed and of the 300 people who lived there, a tragic 50 souls from this small community were killed.

Every relative I have spoken to has a story to tell of that Monday morning; when three massive quakes from below heralded three gigantic waves of destruction. The final quake destroyed every one of L’Aquila’s 99 churches (seen as a sign amongst the population), lifted whole palazzos from their foundations, and literally shook medieval buildings to piles of dust. The destruction remains there today, throughout the whole city and all the surrounding towns, a grim testament to the power of an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale - the energy of 50 x Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

SO it was with some trepidation that I drove into L’Aquila 8 months on, not sure what to expect...

Silent Passage

It is an extraordinarily eerie feeling to walk through a city you love and know intimately, but in utter silence and completely alone. On my first morning I decided on a pre-breakfast walk. From my hotel, I found myself walking in a silent ghost town, every building cracked and leaning, propped up by wire and rope, scaffolding and steel bracing.

I found myself retracing the path of the evening passegiata that my cousins and parents and I would have wandered along in normal times - along the cobbled main artery of the Corso, wandering past smashed shop windows with art-nouveau lettering. Here the shops used to sell beautiful Italian shoes and handbags, elegant clothes, delicious Torrone (chocolate nougat), and confetti (sugar-coated almonds to be showered over Abruzzese brides and grooms). Thankfully there are still no global brands in sight, no chain stores, no cyber-cafes or fast-food joints – and that is a small but significant joy to my saddened heart. I wandered down each of the maze of medieval alleyways leading off from the Corso and again these were silent and broken, the holes in the walls allowing me to peer into the now crumbling palazzos, once boasting intricately carved facades.

The scale of the damage was too great to really take in; every single building and church and paving stone and archway and statue was broken - every single one. And there was no-one else around. I was walking in utter silence for hours, criss-crossing the city. It felt like a disused Hollywood movie set instead of a bustling, busy town that should be full of Christmas shoppers and families. Inevitably I would stumble into a Red Zone and some military policeman or worker with a red hard-hat would come out of the scaffolding to gently shoo me away from the very real danger of collapse.

At the end of my walk I found that I had arrived at my mother’s apartment. It was horribly cracked and ruined on the outside, completely collapsed within. The realisation that my mother would never have made it out alive caused me to hold my breath and I found tears running down my face. A few minutes later I ran into some surviving neighbours and found myself being hugged and kissed and asked all sort of questions about mum. In the face of such staggering destruction, they just wanted to know what mum was up to and when she was going to come and visit.

When I returned to the hotel, I just wanted to cry – it felt like I had been visiting a much-loved aunt in hospital, covered in bandages and bruises after a terrible accident.

But the people of L’Aquila are a hardy lot as I said, and Christmas with them was as loud and joyful and bountiful as ever...

Noisy Celebration

Apart from the religious foundation of Christmas, the other focus of Christmas in Italy is the food. The food of the Abruzzo tends to be hearty mountain fare, rustic with large portions and everything sourced regionally. Over the three days of feasting I was served mountains of rustic antipasti, maltagliati (“badly cut”) pasta with truffle and porcini sauce, beef lasagne, spinach & sheep-ricotta cannelloni, maccheroni alla chitarra (a homemade pasta cut by a guitar-shaped implement), served with a delicious sauce of lamb, pancetta and pecorino cheese. roasted chunks of local lamb, pork and veal, wild boar casserole, melt-in-the-mouth beef, braised in red wine and garnished with truffles, Italy's best lentils, stews of hot peppers and beans, spicy rice dishes, and a risotto made with local saffron. This was all mopped up with the best bread in Italy (I mean it) and washed down with the best red wines east of Rome. Later, with coffee and slices of homemade walnut cakes, chocolate cakes, Nurzia Torrone and endless chunks of Panettone, we had a variety of sweet local liqueurs like Aurum (made from made from rum, bitter orange peel and saffron) or Ratafia (made from wild cherries), to the knockout, dark green liqueur, Centerbe, with its 72 per cent alcoholic content... Burp :)

We ate, we played music, we played cards, discussed politics, played tombola (Italian bingo) and watched the world on television celebrate Christmas. A normal, happy, reflective Christmas with loved ones...

The Beginning
There is no end to this story, it is just the beginning...

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.

L’Aquila is in transition now, the people passing from survivors to rebuilders, and as always with my stoic town-folk and family, carrying on as normally as possible while this progresses around them. The people of L’Aquila aren’t looking for a hand out, they’re looking for a hand up, they’re looking for help; they just want to go back to their homes. There is a spirit of optimism, defiance and solidarity among the mainly young people here. They have a simple demand: to reconstruct the damaged homes, including those in the centre of the city. They fear that Berlusconi's hollow promise to "build better homes" will result only in the cheap new housing estates (see below) being built on the outskirts of the city, and that the claims of the citizens for a proper restoration will soon be forgotten. Unfortunately for Berlusconi, the people of L’Aquila have very long memories and never give up on anything.

I might have driven into L’Aquila unsure what I’d find, but I drove out of L’Aquila knowing exactly what I had left. The people of L’Aquila are young, organised and media-savvy; they even hosted a special Christmas Eve mass for thousands in the half-collapsed Santa Maria di Collemaggio, pronouncing it the Cathedral of L’Aquila until the real Cathedral can be restored. They televised the whole event and used the moral and ethical leverage of the night, invited the Italian media and all the restoration workers to the front of the church, and held mass below the temporary plexi-glass roof and within steel-braced walls and columns. They wanted to leave no doubt in the Italian government’s mind what the city wants and still expects...

Unlike last Easter where I was just glad to be here, now I am very happy to be involved and going back, seeing my family again, checking on their slow journey back to their homes...

Happy New Year everyone – may your new year start as positively and joyfully as mine did :

Walter x

In the Skin of a Lion - A Christmas Tale

2009-11-23T00:19:00.016+08:00

Shedding my old skin, trying on some braver ones…

It’s Saturday night, I’m home alone, too tired from my travels and my first week at work to move far from the sofa. It’s been dark since 4:30pm and its freezing cold and raining hard outside. I’m on the floor by the fire, wrapped in woollen armour, watching the clever show ‘QI’ on TV, a large mug of hot, sweet tea and a small tower of digestive biscuits for dunking. It’s a world away from the relentless heat and humidity, singlet and shorts of Singapore. But then again I have actually been around the world and back again in the last 8 weeks, so who knows what’s normal for me any more.

In a nutshell: after Singapore I spent two weeks in hot Melbourne renovating my old house, then in the pursuit of love and good fortune and a new life abroad, I headed over the pacific, passed through extraordinary Brazil, landed in wintery London, hopped over to elegant Oslo, back to London, spent a week in exciting Paris, back to London, Oslo again, back to London, then on the brink of giving up on my chances, I received the nod to start work in London. So I then flew back to even hotter Melbourne for a week or so of packing up and closing down my life there, and after putting the house out for rent, I boarded yet another plane to find myself settled back in cold, wet London.

So I find myself sitting here writing this, truly exhausted, physically and emotionally drained and needing a quiet night in and a mug of warm sweet tea. Just perfect...

The Pursuit of Happiness

I wont go into any details of my love life here, but lets just say that sometimes it’s not the destination that’s the point, but the journey itself. I left Melbourne for love and good fortune. These are not painless pursuits, especially when navigating the tricky roads and muddy rivers of human emotions, faults and expectations (not to mention the ravine-like chasms of cross-cultural divisions). And if you drive as fast as I do and swim as badly as I do (and leap as blindly as I do), then the ways to the human heart can be either wonderfully rewarding or emotionally devastating. I eventually lost what I hoped to keep, but over the years I have learnt to hold dear the fact that for a while at least I ‘had’ what I wanted and this is better than not having it at all – so I am moderately, if not sometimes more-so, ‘happy’ As they say, “Love is blind, so you have to feel your way”. I am still feeling my way - the bumps and bruises are just reminders I think..

Away from the dangers of love, and onto the quest for good fortune, there is an old saying that ‘Almost everything comes from nothing’. Well I had to admit this whole journey has come from nowhere. Determined to push my way into London again, to be closer to the affairs of the heart, I initially spent a month here as my resume and my desire to work here, zoomed from one department to another, one country to another within the European arm of my company, until it settled on the London desk of the Director in charge of a massive contract here in London. I now find myself the Managing half the projects for a major Public Service organisation in London, just off Oxford street. Challenging in just the first week, with hundreds of Projects and Program Managers to organise and manage, but I am as happy as I can be for the opportunity that has come from nothing except my desire to be here…

A Tale of Three Cities

I will tell you that Brazil was extraordinarily beautiful, wonderfully complicated and sexy, but very difficult to define or understand. I need more time there, to understand it better and for it to understand me. Paris was, as always, a feast of the senses, the food and drink and sights I shared with my good friends from Melbourne were unbelievable. Oslo was as warm and elegant and beautiful as ever before, but hard to understand the changes there, so this trip may be my last for a while.

Walter in Real Life

I can also tell you that I am living with a cascade of friends at the moment, sleeping on a series of sofas and fold-out beds in attics and lounge rooms around London. Thankfully this is only until the obstacles of International Security Clearance, UK Bank Account creation, National Health Insurance Number and First Pay check have all been successfully navigated (about 4 weeks they tell me). After that I can think about getting a flat of my own and inviting those that are brave enough to travel here, to stay.

A Christmas Tale

Being a transient right now means I don’t actually know where I will be over the Christmas break, or even where I am spending Christmas or New Year's Eve, but with only 4 weeks to go, I can happily wish YOU all a very warm and Merry Christmas and a very safe and Happy New Year, hopefully surrounded by your loved ones, family and friends. May your turkey be moist, may your pudding be rich (with custard, of course), and may you truly appreciate the terrible ties, socks and underwear you get from under the tree – as a transient away from my own small family, even socks and ties would be wonderful :) But after the deadly trials by fire and earthquake of my friends and family and the flattening of my poor home town this year, I am as I said before, just happy to be here, content in the fact that I am as happy and handsome as always (that was a joke, ok?) hahahaha…

“Love, Light and Peace” to you all…

Walter xxx
Boun Natale a tutti e Anno Felice :) :)

A Christmas Joke:

I learnt a joke in Salvador, told to me by Brazilians, about Brazil, so I feel it is ok to re-tell it here :)

There was a Brazilian, an American and a French man flying all around the world in an airplane….

The French man stretched his arm outside the airplane:

-French: we are flying over Paris!

-Brazilian: how do you know?

-French: I felt the Eiffel Tower.

Then the American stretched his arm outside the airplane:

-American: and now we are flying over New York!

-French: how do you know?

-American: I felt the Liberty Statue.

Then the Brazilian stretched his arm outside the airplane:

-Brazilian: ok, now we are flying over Rio...

-French: how do you know?

-Brazilian: someone stole my watch...

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

2009-07-12T02:11:00.012+08:00

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting.

They say that the first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are. Well just a short while ago I decided not to stay where I was. It wasn’t a hard decision for me, I had spent almost two years in Singapore and it was time for a move back to my friends and family, back to the kind of life I have missed during my time here.

Sing Sing

When asked to describe Singapore in five words or less, westerners usually say "sterile, strict, shopping, steamy and sleepy". They are basically correct, although I’d add “safe” to the list.

It is a land where the law prohibits most things other countries actually enjoy: selling or importing chewing gum S$1,000 (you are actually allowed to chew gum though), littering S$1,000, dancing in public (includes pop concerts) S$5,000, skateboarding S$500, smoking in most public places S$1,000, busking without a licence S$500, vandalism S$5,000 and public speaking without a permit S$2,000. Jaywalking, indecent exposure and "unnatural sex" also risk punishment under the Public Environment Health Act.. There is even a law here that you cannot be naked in your own house and can be fined heavily if someone sees you and complains! hahaha

It is also a place where the authorities organise loud and colourful campaigns to teach people to “be nice to each other” (“Hey! It’s Smile Week!”), and they actually line up for miles to receive sober instruction on how to do this by people wearing Smile for Singapore badges. It may be apocryphal, but a senior official here is once said to have remarked in all earnestness that Singaporeans needed to work a lot harder at having fun. My personal observation is that any government urging people to be happy only ends up with people grimacing instead of smiling.

Singapore is just a little too unhappy, just a little too controlled and too damn hot and humid for me to stay on any longer. And really, any place where you can see women eating croissants or pizza slices with chopsticks is a little weird for this little Italian :)

Another kind of home

When I left Melbourne 2 years ago to come and work in Singapore, I didn't really bother with a going-away party because I thought I'd return sooner, rather than later. After 2 years I seem to have been badly mistaken. And sadly after all this time here, I haven’t really moved much around Asia, been too busy working almost every night, almost every weekend (another Singapore trait I can’t wait to leave behind). You can easily recognise other Melburnians in Singapore: an obsession with espresso coffee and cricket, a thing for "little bars" and a longing for long breakfasts on weekends, gives them away.

In London, after two years, it had become ‘home’ it had become “my flat”, but here, each new month that passed still felt uncomfortable — it could never become home. This apartment still feels like someone else’s hotel room.

Don’t get me wrong, beside the obvious – the clean, safe, green environment and the lovely friends I have made here – there is much in Singapore to seduce the passing Italian/Australian; on certain days walking around the magnificent Singapore Zoo or stunning Orchid Garden, or sitting serenely in a cool evening breeze on the East Coast eating Chilli Crab, or drinking lychee martinis at a late night jazz bar surrounded by beautiful Singapore girls in mini skirts, you really do think about staying on.

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But then at work or at a (very rare) group outing, people would talk nothing of joy or fun or art or travelling, only of property prices (they pretty well know how much a square foot cost in any apartment building in Singapore), or car leasing agreements or argue (again) about where the cheapest Chicken Rice was, and my mood would be ruined. Then my heart would yearn for another ‘kind’ of home and I would plan to leave Singapore.

In London, I adjusted easily. After all, I had felt Melbourne in zero degrees and had stood on the platform at Richmond station on countless bitter mornings and experienced some arctic Anzac days that were not worth living through. In London my body instinctively leant away from the wind from years of long Melbourne winters, I already knew how to tie a scarf and make pea and ham soup.

In Singapore, I have adjusted with great difficulty. I does not even feel firm underfoot, it is a ‘porous’ city, absorbing and losing expats with ease, without any ill feeling. You're meant to leave, they say. You leave and go where the work is, they say. And no matter what I wear, no matter how I stand in the breeze, nothing saves me from the relentless heat and humidity every day. I have to live in unwelcome and unnatural air-conditioning to survive and sleep.

It is a strange observation that I have found that people from Melbourne actually express ‘anguish’ at returning home: they don’t so much as have homesickness here in Singapore, as its opposite - dread. And I can actually understand it: They talk of all their friends getting married, mortgages and babies while they were gone and they half-fear, half-yearn for the same fate. I know this fear well…

And I will have to adjust a lot more now, London to Melbourne was ok, but Singapore to Melbourne will be a shock: $20 for some noodles? $3o for a taxi ride? And through my Singapore-sanitized eyes it will have become a loud and grubby place populated with hoodies and street rubbish. The traffic will seem bad and the drivers will seem aggressive. Furious, drunk men screaming obscenities at people in the morning won’t be unheard of.

The last time I was in Melbourne, passing through, the feeling of falling back in time was so intense that I couldn’t go back to some places without feeling dangerously nostalgic and seriously melancholic. I had to avoid some places that drew me back too deep. The old Leonard Cohen line: "I ache in the places that I used to play" was what coming home felt like.

But I digress, as I often do…

Nature’s Trail

Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.

The Romans had a saying: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.” In my case, the baton of Singapore soon passes on to the new leg of the next journey. The plan is to head back to Melbourne for a few months, catch up with all my lovely friends and their families, fix up my poor decaying house and rent it out, then head to Brazil to meet someone I dearly adore, to see what future (if any) she may hold for me, then head on to Europe for another chapter in my life.

Home is where the Heart is

Back on Nature's path...
Walter x

Travelling Light

2009-05-07T23:48:00.008+08:00

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."

As I look around my "Superior Double Room with Preferred View" on the 23rd floor of the luxurious Park Lane Hotel in Hong Kong, I am looking around my 'home' for the next 3 weeks. It's a large, plush and relaxing room, filled with soft striped sofas and chairs, muted colour tones, a large flat TV, and a luxurious black and gold marble bathroom with spa bath. Room service is fast and efficient (tonight's grilled salmon salad was truly delicious), and the crisp, white, King-sized bed with 4 oversized pillows is enough for me and two friends. And of course the view is amazing…

I am in Hong Kong, unexpectedly, working on a confidential bid for the duration, coincidently giving me some well needed distance from the relentless heat and humidity of Singapore, and from my own attempts to coerce logic from my recently trampled feelings...

As many of you have pointed out, I've been way too sad of late, all wrapped up in a cheerless cocoon from the disasters affecting those around me; the sad passing of friends and family; the burnt and buried lives of Australian and Italian loved ones; and the newly exposed wounds from falling heavily into unrequited love, blinded by great beauty. But I have decided to go on an emotional diet, leave a lot of baggage behind and smile a lot more. Walter, travelling ‘Light’…

Reasons to be Cheerful Part III

Taxi:

When I called the Comfort Taxi Company on Monday morning to get me to the airport, I wasn’t expecting to wait twenty five minutes, sweating profusely in my steamy basement car park. I also wasn’t expecting to hear the continuous braking and revving of a taxi, rabbit-hopping its way down a wide, gentle ramp towards me. I also wasn’t expecting my 73 year old driver ‘Wu’ to tell me he was too scared to come into the car park because he was Blind: “Sorry, blind, too old!” I was also not expecting Wu to not understand the words “Airport. Terminal 3.” telling me he was Deaf: “Sorry, deaf, too old!” So obviously I wasn’t expecting to have to keep shouting “AIRPORT!!! TERMINAL THREEEEE!” until he nodded and smiled into the rear view mirror. I also wasn’t expecting for us to take 15 minutes to turn around in the spacious car park – Wu being too scared that he might hit something. I also wasn’t expecting to take 40 minutes to get to the airport, crawling along the freeway as the whole of Singapore seemed to pass us by. But Wu was a lovely old man, smiling all the time, loving life and cheating death as Singapore’s only deaf and blind taxi driver.

7-Eleven:

Against all logical reason, 7-Elevens are very popular here. Unlike London and Melbourne where they are staffed by quiet, polite Indian men, the one near me is like a Japanese soup kitchen, young girls nasaly screaming "welcomesevenelevennnnn!" at you when you enter, nasaly screaming "thankyousevenelevennnnn!" when you leave. At lunch time with a continuous throng of people coming in and out, the cat-like din is fantastic. My particular branch is a little different than most, with a very masculine, darkly tanned, deep-voiced woman, obviously of recent male origins. Her very 'male-in-a-dress' features took some getting used to (the pink lipstick clashing with her blue eyeliner), but we have an 'understanding' now, and I can get a can of diet coke without being overly bothered by such terrible make-up. People hang around outside my 7-Eleven, milling around like fans after a concert. Mostly groups of smoking men, or texting teens, but sometimes i have to tip-toe through sitting daisy chains of pretty Chinese Goths, or giggling circles of Little Bo-Peeps with long socks and frilly mini skirts.

Supermarkets:

These are also a little different here. In London the cashiers sit down, moan about the weather and you have to pack your own goods (although see Julie at Checkout 13 at Pimlico Sainsburys and she'll pack for you). But here they stand up, pack like their life depended on it (re-arranging things in each bag to almost Porsche-like aerodynamic efficiency), insisting on a plastic bag for almost every item. And unlike most places in the world, the very pretty checkout ladies are almost painfully polite; smiling sincerely, apologising to you for the delay, the lack of exactly the right bag, and for taking so long to run to the other side of the building to weigh and price the banana and plums you were meant to weigh back in the fruit section. Wonderful.

Toilets:

Japanese electronic toilets to be exact. These large white, nuclear-powered contraptions usually have a control panel on one side, with a confusing array of pictogram buttons and displays. I have never been game to actually push anything while using one, and certainly never tried any of the advanced options- the alarming arrangement of hoses focussed on my ass is a little too 'personal' to be inviting. But then I’ll spent about 25 minutes standing safely to one side, pressing all the buttons in every combination - warm seat, wash seat, wash male parts (two hoses), wash female parts (three hoses), steady stream, machine-gun pulse, and so on. The last time I encountered one of these babies, I was about to try the “warm water, random pulse flow, cold blow dry” combination when the thing froze up on me and all the lights started blinking. I hope it was under warranty.

Olives:

In a land where people eat Durian, (that spiky fruit with the horrible drain-like smell that evokes reactions of intense disgust, banned from hotels and public transport), or Laksa (thick, hot sour coconut milk soup full of paprika, cumin, turmeric, chilli, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, shrimp paste, and coriander), and every form of crunchy dried fish, buried black ‘century’ eggs and pig organs stew on rice, if you try and feed my lovely friend BB a small green olive, she will spit it out and turn up her nose! :)

Bits of Time
My mate Champak loves watches – he knows the inside and outside of every important timepiece since the 50’s and takes me around the exclusive watch houses of Singapore, cooing over every new arrival, drooling over a “Rare 1960'S Breitling Cosmonaute 809 model, hand wound mechanical, 3 register chronograph with 24 hour dial” as he describes it :)

But I prefer the moments when the watches are all in pieces, with every cog and spring and wheel laid out carefully on smooth black velvet. It is like looking at time, dismantled and controlled. I wish my life was more like this; being able to reduce it to all its bits, spread them all out, clean and oil them properly, then put them back together so that my life can spin on as it was supposed to. But I am an incompetent craftsman, and I seem to end up with left-over parts after each major event or heart-crush, after each major rebuild.

Life can make me lose sight of things, but when I travel, everything seems to balance out for me. I am hoping that sailing in Greece with Nina, Andre, the crew and little Isabelle will balance me out, help me put back all my parts, getting me running smoothly again. So Greek Islands for 2 weeks, here I come :)

“Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.”

Taking my travel very seriously...

Walter x

Easter musings - L'Aquila 2009

2009-04-11T17:59:00.013+08:00

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow"

At Christmas I wrote how blessed I was, in the way of Buddha, by the string of good fortunes bestowed upon my friends in their own successful journeys and emotional milestones. Now at Easter I seemed to be blessed all over again, by the altogether greater, more mortally-threatening good fortunes of my friends and family. But for me, the price of my inherited blessings seems far too great - the loss of so much life and the environment that shapes and identifies us, taints these good fortunes too much, stained with the soot and cement dust of destruction, the blood and tears of despair...

Matter
As the world now knows, at 3:30 am on Monday morning, my home town of L’Aquila, an elegant medieval city nestled gently into a valley of the Apennine Mountains, was struck by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake caused serious damage to the whole central Italian state of Abruzzo, killing 290 people, injuring over 1,000 and leaving 28,000 homeless, including all my relatives. Despite the dangers from a week of massive, continuous aftershocks, the search for survivors under the rubble continues, day and night, until tomorrow, when the sad decision will be made to stop looking for ‘life’, after which the daunting tasks of cleanup and reconstruction will begin. It has been my own personal 9-11, terrifying every time I looked at the news, petrifying every time I called or emailed a relative to find out if they were still alive…

Yesterday, I watched as a firefighter from Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, collapsed in tears after finding the body of his stepdaughter, who had been studying in L'Aquila.

Today I watched the funeral of all the victims – I owed my people that much at least from my safe Singapore apartment. Like most of the 5,000 people who walked to the parade ground, I gasped at the sight of so many coffins covered with flowers, including many small white coffins covered in toys. More than 800 aftershocks have rattled the region since the earthquake, and they didn’t stop for the funeral. As the earth shook below them, I watched as everyone held onto each other, but no-one moved, no-one left the funeral. You have to admire the pride and bravery of the battered people of L’Aquila.

Then I watched the families of 205 of the 290 victims lay their loved ones to rest after the ceremony. I listened to the awful outpouring of grief and the heart-wrenching sobs of the mothers, cascading in overlapping waves as each coffin was raised and pushed into the burial niches of the nearby hillside cemetery of L’Aquila. I know this cemetery all too well. Overlooked by the snow-capped peaks of Abruzzo, it is where my Father, and my grand, great grand and great, great grandparents are all buried.

To my own personal relief and joy, although my 100 or so direct relatives have all lost their homes to piles of rubble and dust, their limbs and lives are all safe and sound. As all my Uncles and Aunts are between 70 and 85, my heart was in my throat every time I rang to find out how and where they were. Stories of amazing luck left me smiling during the sadness, like one courageous aunt (75) who ran down 10 flights of stairs as the tremors started, just leaving her building just as it collapsed behind her.

The rebuild of the historical buildings, the medieval identity of L'Aquila, is another thing all together. It is not a trivial thing, almost as important to the city as the lives that were spared. The city dates back to the 12th and 13th century, with the only Pope to be buried outside of Rome and many historical buildings of architectural importance, with archaeological treasures dating back to 10,000 BC - mostly all piles of dust.

I can't actually recognise the city from the ‘After’ photos, only when they overlay the ‘Before’ photos does it begin to make sense. My family (which dates back to 1673 in Italy, originally from Spain), have lived in some of the same homes for 100's of years. The house where I was actually born is gone and the house my mother's family lived in for many generations has also gone. Yes they are only buildings, but they were our buildings, they gave the city and its people an identity and collective soul. And for me personally, to picture my old Aunts and Uncles in shiny temporary flats for their final days, instead of their 800 year old apartments with the worn down terracotta floors, solid walnut doors, and ancient plumbing, seems such a shame to add even more heartache to the human loss. Tomorrow is Easter, the day of rebirth in the Christian Calendar. I can only hope for the rebirth of L’Aquila from the rubble..

I don’t believe the Vatican, that it was an act of God, a spiritual divination conferred upon the city. I believe that sometimes reality can blithely exhibit the most terrifying coincidences and events that no credible fiction (or divination) could convince us of; only reality – mindless matter – can be so unthinkingly cruel.

I didn’t get any presents for Easter this year, but like Christmas, I don’t really care about the presents, I’m just happy to be here, still...

So, take care, keep safe and love and courage to you all:

Happy Easter
Buona Pasqua
Hyvää Pääsiäistä
Joyeuses Pâques
God påske
Feliz Páscoa
¡Felices Pascuas!
Glad Påsk

Walter x
Photo Link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=88795&id=621580247&l=d28a663994

Norwegian Christening

2009-02-21T00:25:00.028+08:00

Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway?
No. No, I didn't.
Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges…

It's late on Friday night. I am exhausted from long, long hours at work this week and very little sleep as although my work follows the globe, my nap times can’t keep up. I am lying on my very comfortable lounge (tan with white piping), listening to the hot and humid wind outside and the cool and mellow voice of Sarah McLauchlan inside. I have a tall cold glass of bubbly Italian water on the floor below me and a diminishing piece of 70% chocolate in front of me. It's a perfect time to take a sip and a bite, and recount my recent time in Oslo for the Christening of the engaging Isabelle - daughter to my lovely friends Andre and Nina, and now God-daughter to the equally lovely Merete and yours truly. I feel blessed by the privilege and responsibility bestowed upon me. There is an Old Norwegian proverb - "That which is loved is always beautiful”. Isabelle has captured the heart of all who have met her and as you will see, she is surrounded by three generations of love and attention, so as a consequence she is as beautiful as a baby girl can be...

Elegant in White

Norwegians believe that here is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. That's a very optimistic outlook on the type of weather they can get in this little 'crinkly' country. On the day I arrived I must have been wearing very terrible clothes as it was -8 degrees and snowing hard. I had left hot and steamy Singapore just a day or so before and here I was in a landscape, frozen, silent and elegant compared to the heat, noise and chaos of Singapore.

After Andre and I landed, and sped blurrily across Oslo on the fast train, we received the always gracious, always warm and happy welcome of Nina's family; Kai and Katrina, Anne and Roger (he’s family now), at their Oslo home. It was here that I met my little God-daughter for the first time, and I was immediately smitten. It was also here that I was put to work :)

I found myself cutting the crusts off a few thousand (well it seemed like it), loaves of Norwegian bread, to then slice horizontally to make massive rafts of soft white bread destined to float on lakes of cream, packed with prawns, caviar and smoked salmon. I found out that Nina was making the old fashioned Norwegian 'sandwich cake' called smörgåstårta (popular also in Finland and Sweden they tell me). Three of these huge, multi-tiered 'sandwiches' were enough to feed 40 people. These were the T-Rex of sandwiches, humungous homage’s to bread, cream and fish – Norway in a creamy nutshell.

Vigeland

Later that day, colossal cream creations fully assembled, we all rugged up in ‘good’ clothes and headed off into the weather to spend the afternoon walking around Oslo’s famous Vigeland Statue Park, now covered in an elegant blanket of snow.

I had been told about this park many times over the last few years, making it one of my travel ‘musts’. So I was downstairs in my woollen armour, wearing Kai’s snow boots and standing in the snow before you could say “Det er en herlig dag i Norge!” (It’s a lovely day in Norway!). It was a wonderful 20 minute walk from the apartment, through the dry, squeaky snow, passing all the kids and families sledding down the gentle slopes coming off the back of the nearby school.

Nothing prepared me for the wonderful feeling of peace and humanity that the park’s statues radiate into you - you almost feel as if you are intruding on something intimate. In the dead of winter, with the eerie silence that snowfall brings, I felt as if I was alone and I was singularly captivated: The most obvious feature is the towering, 17m ‘Monolith’, surrounded by radiating rings of life-sized nude statues in poses from everyday life – mothers with children, arguing couples, old men just chatting, boys playing roughly and so on. This true monolith - carved from one single granite block (‘mono-litho’ means ‘one-stone’) - has carvings starting with birth on the top, down to old age and death at the bottom. The obvious interpretation, and the one given to me on the day, is the ‘cycle of life’. Perhaps it was the purifying snow, or the overdose of creamy seafood, but I found that if you stand on your head, look ‘up’, rather than ‘down’, it seemed to me that the spire was a finger pointing up, not spiralling down. It occurred to me that this might actually depict man’s (women’s) longing for the spiritual and divine. If you think of this as ‘life aiming towards heaven’, these stone people then actually seem drawn to this lightening rod, drawn to some personal quest for heaven and the divine. In any case (and I will leave it up to you to make your own interpretations when you get there), there is a real feeling of humanity, togetherness and belonging when you walk around these statues, you feel part of something. It’s hard to describe on paper, but let me just say that it is a very spiritual place, not just a good place for picnics in the summer. Oh, and the stupendously rich mug of hot chocolate at the coffee shop & bakery at the end of our walk, was pretty wonderful too :))

At home with Merete

That night we went to Merete’s mother’s house for Merete’s birthday celebrations. I hadn’t seen the lovely Merete since Nina and Andre’s wedding and now had the chance to wish her Happy Birthday and also to give my best wishes to Merete and her new husband, after their own wedding just last year. Merete’s mother was just as she has been described to me, full of life and energy and a desire to please – she reminded me of my own mother in many ways. And you have to like someone who loves dogs as much as she does. Everyone was relaxed and fun and there was lots of laughing and harmless humour (mostly at my expense :) ). The wine and food was wonderful, including the much prized reindeer which was delicious in its creamy mushroom sauce. At the end of the night, Merete cut everyone a piece of that Swedish delicacy ‘the world’s best cake’ (delightful custard-filled creamy sponge cake), and after some great coffee we eventually drove home through the snowy streets of Oslo.

At Home Away from Home

I was billeted out to another family for the night (the family home was full), and my attic bedroom next to the floor-warmed bathroom was warm and welcoming. The house was part of a group of heritage-listed wooden homes, and it was an architectural paradise when I woke up in the morning and explored the house and surroundings. I actually woke up at 4am (jet lag) and took some photos, before the sun eventually came up and allowed me to have a long, happy breakfast with my adopted family and to photograph the frozen boats on the frozen fjord outside, and the local deer that actually live at the end of the garden. Architecture aside, I always miss this normal familial interaction, so to have a family breakfast with all the noise and chaos that ensues, was very welcome. It was a magical start to a magical day...

An Amusing Baptism
Showered, shaved and suited up, we all headed to the darkly austere and frankly very pointy Lutheran Church down the road. Seated on the left, next to Merete with all the others involved in the Christening, we were fronted by a young female Priest with a nose stud and a posse of pretty young female seminary students. On the right side of the church seemed to be general members of the public, here for a formal Sunday High Mass: This wasn’t going to be the sort of Christening I was used to...

Pretty soon I was completely out of synch with the ceremony: As a good Catholic boy I kneeled to pray (they all stood up), and I stood to sing (they all sat down), and then as Father Bruce taught me back in Sydney Sunday School, I said a deep and solemn ‘Ah-mennn’ at the end of every read passage (they all remained silent). This was very confusing, and a little embarrasing, (my Norwegian Hymn singing has to be heard to be believed). And I am ashamed to admit it, but Merete and I were giggling a lot through the long, preceding High Mass – the atonal squeaky singing voice of the female Priest, and the terrible lisping speech impediment of her only male assistant did little to keep me from laughing, but when main assistant girl read a long and quite detailed account of something grave and solemn, then started to cry half way through it, it was too much for me and I had to bite my lip hard to hide my guilty smile and giggles. I am probably not going to heaven now.

But Isabelle was the perfect baptisee, happy to be dampened by holy water and happy to just watch while people milled around her with lit candles, prayers and speeches. She just smiled and gurgled and was happy to see everyone, and then went to sleep :)

After two hours of very serious mass and baptism, it was time for Champagne and cake, so off we went, with our young, newly christened bundle, to the nearby Senior Centre.

Let them eat Smörgåstårta

As we arrived at the reception, Nina welcomed us all and said nice things about her choice of Godparents, and then thanked me for coming all the way from Singapore. Then out came Nina’s smörgåstårta and after two lovely pieces of creamy goodness, I was treated to a piece of the most glorious chocolate cake you’ve every seen or tasted.

Beautiful

It’s hard to describe how it felt, walking around the noisy, crowded room, holding this little bundle of love, watching people’s eyes light up and their smiles grow wide as she arrived at their table. We were creating a tsunami of love, flowing throughout the crowd, everyone focused on little Isabelle, and as a consequence she was indeed the most beautiful girl in the room.

Later that afternoon, as they proudly assembled four generations of Nina’s family, with Isabelle’s Mother, Grandmother and Great Grandmother, I knew my God-Daughter was in good hands, literally...

…or perhaps I was just overloaded on feelings of love. I do that sometimes.

.
Norwegians say that "Adventure is just bad planning"
.

Until my next bad plan :)

Walter x

The Photo Links

Norway 3

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75273&id=621580247&l=693ba

Norway 4

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75315&id=621580247&l=9d7d8

Christmas Musings

2008-12-30T16:09:00.010+08:00

"Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love."

Blessed

Buddhists believe that a friend’s good fortune is a blessing. If this is the case, then I have been extremely blessed this year. The happy cascade of engagements, weddings, pregnancies and births (not necessarily in that order), happy reunions and safe journeys of many of my friends means I’ve actually been blessed enough for years to come. Although some of life’s milestones keep eluding me (love, marriage, kids - not required in that order), I can’t really complain; despite some very sad moments in the last few weeks (one insane scenario I can't even begin to describe, and one very sad passing away), 2008 was a good year overall.

I’m currently in Darwin for Christmas and New Year, staying with my mother and brother – celebrating together for the first time in a decade. Everyone is relaxed and content and there’s lots of laughing and harmless humour; Since Christmas Eve the house has been full of noise and joy, the food has been wonderful, and the floor covered in layers of wrapping paper and tinsel. In my many years of long journeys from one distant place to another distant place, I have missed this familial chaos. Although it still feels weird not being in London or Melbourne for Christmas, it does feel like I am ‘home’ for Christmas :)

Singapore's street population is a huge floating crowd that ebbs and flows around the city, and whenever there is a festival or free show, it contracts to form a tight, neck-craning mob at the festival stage or show grounds. Darwin's street population trickles quietly along fine lines joining small suburban nodes scattered amongst long expanses of luscious palm-lined grasslands. Here there is no crush, no central grind of people, just a gradual filling of one 'venue', at the expense of another 'venue', and then visa versa the following day.

It’s hard to describe the luxury of doing the 'nothing' that Darwin forces upon you: of just relaxing, of moving slower, of reading a good book for an entire afternoon until it’s too dark to see; of walking the length of a deserted beach in the cool breeze of the morning until you tire of picking up seashells and smiling at the flat, grey sea. It took me a few days to get to this state, to shake off the shackles of work and the obligation of early morning rises and over-crowded trains. Now when my alarm goes off at the usual 7:30, it arrives as just a ‘reminder’, a mere ‘suggestion’ to get up. Mostly I ignore it, but occasionally the little brrrrring! from my phone is welcome at the end of 9 hours of tranquil sleep :)

I didn’t actually get any presents for Christmas this year, but that’s been the norm for a while now – I guess it’s just too hard for people to know where I will be next, and I guess it’s even harder to think of what I could use since I am always arriving back from one place or heading away to another place. But to tell you the truth, after the sad end to my year, I really don’t care about the presents, I’m just happy to be here.

So, to all, take care and:

Merry Christmas!

Buon Natale!

God Jul!

Hyvää Joulua!

Boldog Karácsonyt!

Z Rizdvom Hrystovym!

Feliz Navidad!

"There has been only one Christmas - the rest are anniversaries."

Oh and Happy New Year too!

Walter x

The Photo Links
Darwin Christmas Pics - Part 1
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=68887&l=f34eb&id=621580247

Darwin Christmas Pics - Part 2
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=69071&l=c3dc7&id=621580247

Darwin Christmas Pics - Part 3
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=70560&l=d9a4a&id=621580247

Darwin Bites

2008-10-28T16:43:00.019+08:00

Survival of the Fittest

"No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow."

I travelled to Darwin twice in the last few months; first to see my mother and brother, for mum's birthday and secondly just for a weekend away. Darwin is as hot as Singapore but it was the ‘Dry’ season, so without the crushing humidity of equatorial Singapore it was a wonderfully comfortable time for me. Mum was in good spirits in her new home, but still hates the heat…

Mendorah Shore

Survival of the Fittest

I had never been to Darwin before – it was wonderful.

I had never been on Tiger Airways before – it was horrible.

Singapore Budget Terminal

Tiger Airways is an ultra-budget airline stationed at the aptly named Budget Terminal, set a kilometre or so from Singapore’s Changi Airport. There is no alternative to Tiger or Jetstar to get to Darwin from Singapore, so budget flights were my only choice. Crappily, the flight crew get a percentage of anything they sell, so no personal food or drink allowed to be brought on the plane, and you have to buy blankets and pillows in tiger print if you want warmth or comfort against the cold air and hard small seats they have for you.

Tiger Air

Singapore Budget Terminal - I was on time!

I took Tiger (instead of Jetstar) because they arrive in Darwin/Singapore at the slightly more respectable 1:00am (zzz), compared to Jetstar’s 3:50am arrival times (zzzzzzzz!). I won’t say much about the flights, other than they are always delayed, very uncomfortable, there is no entertainment (not even for sale), and the crew keep turning the lights back on to wake people up to sell them shitty food and shittier merchandise. Bastards!

Darwin to Mendorah Ferry

Mendorah Jetty

My Brother's House in Mendorah

Mendorah Pub

Mum heading down Mendorah Jetty

Someone had organised a great celebration for mum’s birthday; a large group of us went to Char Restaurant @ Admiralty (the Old Admiralty House) for great steaks and seafood, ice cold beer and delicious wines. It was a wonderful night, cool and full of twinkling stars.

Sitting next to our table was Anthony La Paglia, the Australian star of ‘Without a Trace’ in the US and the movie “Lantana” – he was in town for a movie shoot. Everyone, especially Kim (who bravely went up and said hello!), was very impressed.

Kym meets Anthony La Paglia

Mum Blows out her Candles

The Birthday Group

Crocodilious Humungous

The following day my brother took us to Crocodilious, the famous Darwin Crocodile Farm. Here, 5 metre monsters weighing over 500kg wake from their sleep to leap 3 metres out of the water to grab a chicken drumstick for their dinner. Then they go back to basking in the sun, to sleep away the week or so it takes to digest the little leg. Reptiles, even ones this big, only need to eat once a year, so one drumstick a week is all they can handle before they get overweight!

Sweetheart

For approximately five years a huge male saltwater crocodile, locally known as “Sweetheart”, was (uncharacteristically) responsible for damage to aluminium dinghies and their outboard motors on the large “Sweets Lookout” billabong on the Finnis River in the Northern Territory.

Wildlife rangers from the Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory set a snare and on the morning of 19th July 1979 “Sweetheart” was captured. After five hours of work, four men retrieved Sweetheart from the trap and loaded him aboard a trailer for Darwin. Unfortunately “Sweetheart” drowned in the trap. Stuffed and mounted, “Sweetheart” is now a permanent exhibition at the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (not my photo above).

Sweetheart was 50 years old, weighed 780Kg, was 5.4m long, and his stomach contained wild pigs, long-necked turtles and large barramundi. They found a bullet lodged in his spine which they think caused him pain and to turn against the boats and people who did this to him. So I raise a glass of cold beer to the poor old bugger – we should have just left him alone…

Sunset

Darwin sunsets are supposed to be the most beautiful. I took mum to the Darwin Sailing Club for dinner before my plane left that last Sunday evening, and I can verify that, yes, Darwin sunsets are the most beautiful I have seen…

Home...
Since ‘home’ is usually where the family heart is, and since this has now become Darwin, it seems it will be a long while before I get back to my own ‘home’ of Melbourne, and that puts me in unfamiliar territory, emotional roots-wise, especially for Christmas.

Methinks I need a plan…
Walter x

The Rest of the Darwin Photos:

Darwin 3: Rainy Singapore departure, Mandorah and Sunset
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=50105&l=ca67c&id=621580247

Darwin 2: Crocodile Park
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44838&l=80021&id=621580247
Darwin 1: Mendorah and Mum's Birthday
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44834&l=35067&id=621580247

Honk Honk

2008-10-25T21:55:00.019+08:00

"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."

Over the last few months, I’ve had to go to Hong Kong a couple of times for work – presenting to potential customers the virtues of dealing with our company and with me. But as soon as we finished the presentations, I was straight out with good friends and Hong Kong residents Damien & Stephanie and the lovely Lydia.

CSC Office View

Steph and Damian

Lydia

Goose Dinner with CSC Team

Getting There

As each country tries to outdo each other with the biggest, most palatial, most expensive, the airports in Asia are wonderful places, almost works of art. Singapore’s new Terminal 3 is truly an amazing space. There’s nothing for me to say, just look at the photos :)

Room With a View

Hong Kong is an amazing place – similar to, but nothing like, Singapore. Similar in that you are in a crowded, Asian country full of people and high-rises. But very different in most other respects:

My Hotel Room View

My Hotel Room View

My Hotel Room View

My Hotel Room View

The first thing you notice is how dirty HK is compared to hospital-clean Singapore. Most of the poorer, outlying areas of Hong Kong I saw were in need of either governmental aid, or preferably, a flamethrower. Like some other parts of rural India and Asia I have experienced, these areas are beyond squalor and have come out the other side; noisy, decayed and sultry, smelling all the while like a cowshed floor. In Singapore there are hundreds of Bangladeshi workers trucked in every morning (and trucked out every night), raking every leaf, picking every twig and plucking every scrap of litter, from the ever-groomed lawns and ever-swept roads and pavements. Even metal is too nervous to rust in Singapore. Hong Kong looked like no-one has bothered. The place hadn’t been swept in ages...

The next thing you notice is how fast Hong Kong is. This is one huge mass of people moving at a rapid pace, like New York with noodles. Singaporean shoppers amble about at a glacially slow pace, stopping for no apparent reason to hover at doorways, or turning about-face in a packed corridor with no warning, or pausing mid-step to discuss something as they leave or enter an elevator, or stopping at the top of escalators to look around - all the while looking at their Play Stations or texting on their mobiles. They seem oblivious to other people around them. When they eventually run into you (or a tree or a pole), they give you the look I imagine sleep-walkers give when woken in the middle of a busy shopping centre in their ‘Little Devil’ underpants - staring at you, confused and angry. A minute later, they look back down to their games or phones and amble off in another direction entirely, playing and texting all over again. Just this morning I saw a texting girl walk directly into the side of very stationary and very pregnant woman – the woman screamed and slapped the girl in the face, knocking her at least 3 metres back into the Bank she came out of. The girl didn’t even react or argue; she just held her face and walked off looking very confused. I don’t think she even realised where she was or what she had done.

Hong Kong Crowds

There doesn’t seem to be any destination in mind in Singapore, the mall/street/passageway is just a place to ‘be’ when playing or texting. So in Singapore you are essentially driven mad if you want to actually ‘get’ anywhere. (Cinemas are similar – it seems that most people go there to text friends and eat popcorn and hotdogs).

Hong Kong Crowds

Hong Kong is a completely different kettle of fish. There you find efficient schools of people all moving with speed and purpose, but somehow knowing where each other is and avoiding each other – if there is a larger or faster object passing or crossing through the crowd, a hole inexorably forms before it, and then the gap behind it just fills back in, like human mercury. It is fluid dynamics on a hominoid scale – a real sight to behold. I loved the pace and vibe of Hong Kong and had a great time moving about, unheeded in the noisy chaos.

Hong Kong Crowds

Death Becomes Her

On the way back from one of the Hong Kong trips, I found myself sitting in the aisle seat on the left side of the Singapore Airlines 777. Next to the window was a pretty young Chinese girl (Let’s call her Elly-May) and sitting in the middle seat was (I found out), her ancient and cantankerous ancestor (let’s call her Granny), resurrected from some dusty tomb. When I say ancient, I really mean it. This woman wasn’t simply at death’s door, she was all the way inside the hallway, admiring the carpet and criticising the art work.

From my seat on her right, Granny seemed like any other normal Chinese relic from the Ming Dynasty, a little fragile and dusty, but when she turned to face you, she could make starving wolves back away; this semi-demised woman was tiny and bony and had the unlikely complexion of old putty. Her earlobes and jowls hung past her face like pendulums, keeping track of time from some ancient point in the past. But what was really scary (yes there’s more), was the result of some radical neck surgery - the left side of her neck was not where it would normally be and would seem necessary to be, to hold up her head. This ‘bamboo pole’ of a neck looked like someone had placed it 3 inches to the left of centre; it looked structurally and functionally unsound. Even more unnerving (yes there’s even more), was the fact that I could see everything she swallowed, like some cartoon pelican. Completely unsettled by this unbalanced, unsecured, melting head, I turned back quickly and sat there staring forward at my video screen, daring not to notice her, in case she slumped forward as she fell asleep and I had to look for her head on the floor. And the idea of a food service coming soon was alarming to say the least.

I must have fallen asleep, because at some point Granny woke me up by elbowing me repeatedly in the ribs, turning her unsecured head and shouted ‘Toilet!’ in the gravelly croaking language of her home town of Angry Province, China. Keeping my eyes firmly above her neck, I could see she had the look about her that if I didn’t get out of her way immediately, unmentionable parts of her would be making their own bathroom arrangements. So I simultaneously leapt out of sleep and my seat and offered her my hand to help her out. She stood up, making no noticeable change in her height, took my hand and tottered out. Once in the aisle, she slapped my hand away as if I was trying to kidnap her, then rocked, ET- like into the distance.

After a while I must have fallen asleep again, because I was woken up by her slapping me repeatedly in the head, saying something croaky and unpleasant, kicking my legs impatiently until I got out. Taking my hand to steady herself, she settled unhappily back in her seat, then slapped my hand away in that special way of hers. I smiled at her, all the while growling “I wonder what your last slave died of”, under my breath…

About 20 minutes out of Singapore, Granny elbowed me in the ribs again and shoved two passports and two landing cards in my face and croaked “You help! No inglis!”, and crossed her stick-like arms impatiently. Elly-May rolled her eyes apologetically at me, then said something a little stern to her grandmother. This had the even more unnerving effect of forcing Granny to smile at me for a second. With just three randomly placed teeth on show, and her head tottering about on her offset neck, I was more petrified than ever, smiling on the outside, running away on the inside. Honestly, that smile on that melted face on that wobbly neck, would scare the fur off a cornered Grizzly. Trying not to look up, I started filling in their landing cards. About half way through this process, Elly-May asked the stewardess something in Chinese and then it was evidently determined that as Transit passengers they didn’t need the forms after all. Granny looked horrified, snatched back her ‘stolen’ passports, barked “Transit!! Transit!” angrily at me and gave me a look you’d give a blowfly found in a trifle. Of course I apologised, got back to my less surreal existence and waited until we landed to escape the plane. After landing I shot down the aisle and out the plane like a whippet on steroids.

I last saw them as I was going through Singapore Customs at Arrivals; they were clearly lost and clearly outside the permitted Transit zone. Granny was kicking angrily at two Customs officers (armed only with guns and bludgeons), who were trying to lead her back into the building. I didn’t fancy their chances, poor guys.

Signs seen in Hong Kong

Hong Kong supermarket: “For your convenience, we recommend courageous, efficient self-service”

Hong Kong supermarket: “Completely tasteless tuna”

Hong Kong tailor shop : “Ladies may have a fit upstairs”

Hong Kong dentist sign : "Teeth extracted by the latest methodists"

See you around life’s terminal – I’ll be the one with the Gulyian Hot Chocolate...

Walter x

The rest of the Hong Kong Photos

Hong Kong 1: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=41379&l=82246&id=621580247

Hong Kong 2: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44820&l=72599&id=621580247

Ooh La La

2008-10-24T13:13:00.014+08:00

Singapore 2

”One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."

It’s hot, I’m sweating and everyone is shopping – I must be in Singapore

I’ve been in Singapore for almost six months now – time is flying by and I am a little bored, a little lonely and a little weary. I’ve been working long days and longer nights for many weeks now - my apartment is becoming a messy second office with handy sleeping and catering facilities - such is the curse of working on global projects with unfriendly time zones. I still don’t know many people here, so weekends can get a little boring – I envy those with family or friends here, to have people to eat or travel with. Now that friends Alex and Ren have returned to Australia I guess I’ll just have to start travelling alone again, or I’ll miss out on the ‘Asian’ opportunity while I am here. So Borneo and Cambodia are in my sights and learning to Scuba dive is on my agenda. I am supposed to be heading to Korea for three months consulting work, but this has been postponed so many times I will only believe it now after I am getting a room service Club Sandwich in Seoul, but it will be exciting if I get the go-ahead…

Saturday Shopping on Orchard Road

Lunch at Lau Pa Sat

Going Bonkers in the Bank

Banking in Singapore can be a very smooth, even relaxing experience; unlike London where there are signs which declare “Physical or verbal abuse of staff will not be tolerated”, Singaporean banks are fast, efficient, air-conditioned, clean, helpful and nice. But recently I have been encountering Mad Willy (what I call him), at my local DBS branch. Willy is a tall, fit, well tanned, well-to-do local gentleman with gleaming white teeth, a bright plain white T-shirt, long (old-fashioned) white shorts, white socks and white shoes. He has a sheen of perspiration on him that hints of a badminton game just prior to his banking duties. What makes Willy ‘Mad’, is that he insists on doing his warm-down callisthenics while in line at the bank. This has the effect of watching a male ballerina on stage. He huffs and puffs in loud and exaggerated fashion as he kicks and swings his arms gracefully from his waist, all the while spinning and pirouetting on the spot. Of course, this shocks and unnerves the extremely conservative Singaporeans lined up in front or behind him, all backing away, not used to individuals being publicly demonstrative, let alone in the quiet safety of their bank at lunch time. Even the armed Guard looks on in wide-eyed horror then in feigned amusement (smiling apologetically at me as the only foreigner), but with a reassuring pull on his gun and baton-laden military belt to show he is in charge and there is “nothing to worry about people, just look away”. Once Mad Willy gets to the service counter he always apologises profusely, holding his hands in prayer fashion, smiling and bowing to the counter girls and the crowd for forgiveness. I once tried to take a photo (for the Blog) but the guard waved at me to stop, pointing to the No smoking, No photography, No dogs and No Durian (stinky fruit) signs, so you will have to take my word on this one.

Elvis lives

Elvis lives. He does. He is hiding in the Church of the Sacred Heart near Simon and Meegan’s place where I play tennis on the weekend. He can often be heard singing away, live and loud, from the church on Sunday afternoons as I leave the tennis game. And he’s on the radio a lot here. A real lot…

Sacred Heart Church

Killing Elvis

It was 3:33 am, Wednesday morning, a few weeks ago. I know exactly what time it was because Elvis woke me up. He’s in my bedroom somewhere, singing. After realising that he wasn’t going to stop singing, I crawled out of bed as he was asking me whether I was lonely tonight (did my hair look a fright?). I was planning to abuse (with a large stick), whichever neighbour was having a late party on a weeknight. Leaving the light off (hoping I could delude myself into going back to sleep quickly), I put my ear to the near wall in my room- nothing. Then I ambled over to the far wall in the lounge room – nothing. Nothing from the floor (note to self, sweep up more often), and nothing from the ceiling (don’t ask). So after falling over my dark blue exercise ball in the lounge room, I made it to the balcony window and heard it loud and clear…Elvis was outside my window.

I walked out onto my balcony and saw, through the trees, that six ‘Comfort’ taxis were lined up across the road, doors open and their radios tuned to the same, Elvis-playing station. The drivers were all milling around on the traffic island nearer my apartment, having a 4:00am cigarette and mini-concert. I toyed with the idea of going down there with a baseball bat, but I could hardly find a coherent thought at this hour, so I figured finding shoes and sporting equipment was beyond me.

With my brain reluctantly waking up, I called ‘Comfort Cabs’. It took a while to get an answer but finally a sleepy girl asked if I wanted the (yawn) taxi straight away. This is when it became a little surreal, describing my situation. She went a little quiet and asked me “So you (yawn) want your taxi to play Elvis on the radio?” I took a deep breath/yawn and broke my situation down into smaller, easier-to-digest bits until she finally understood my situation. Giggling slightly, she asked what I wanted her to do. I suggested that she contact the taxis and tell them to shut up, or I will have to call the police. She sounded relived and then started to read out the number for the Police. “No”, I said, I wanted her to try and do something first. So I suggested she either send another taxi to them or send them a broadcast message like they do when there is a traffic problem. She was going to try both. I fell back into bed. Ten minutes later I heard a car horn repeatedly blasting out, and the music stopped. I had killed Elvis in Singapore, for one night at least…

Pimp My Ride

But Taxis aren’t just good for channelling Elvis; they are a direct aid to my love life here in Singapore. Over the last 5 months, three taxi drivers have offered their daughters to yours truly. The taxi trips all went a little like this:

Driver: [Looking in the rear-view mirror] Where you from?

Me: [Looking in the rear-view mirror] Um, Australia, Melbourne

Driver: You don’t look Australia. You like Singapore?

Me: Well I was born in Italy. You know, Italian? Pizza? Lasagne? And yes I like Sing..

Driver: So you expat?

Me : Oh, um yes, sort of. I’m here on a…

Driver: You marry?

Me : No, not married. But I once had a…

Driver: My daughter she 28, she not marry. She too old now, only got a career

Me : Well 28 isnt very old, perhaps…

Driver: You wanna meet her?

Me : What? Who? Umm no, not really, I mean…

Driver: She got good job, she make 13k! 13K!! [That’s $13,000 SGD/month]

Me : Well, that’s very good money, I’m sure if…

Driver: Ok. We here!

Me : [Looking out the window] Where is here? This is not CSC

Driver: [Looking out the window] This HP Building, my daughter work here – you wanna meet her?

Me : HP? Daughter? Err, no sorry I don’t want to meet her, but thank you

Driver: She look ok, smart, 28 too old in Singapore. She need get marry

Me : Well I’m sorry, but my…err..girlfriend! in [thinking quickly] ‘Sweden!’ would not be happy.

Driver: [Looking in the rear-view mirror] You got girlfriend!?

Me : [Looking in the rear-view mirror] Yes she’s in…err…Sweden on…err…holiday!

[The driver goes completely silent for the rest of the trip]

Driver: [As I am getting out of the taxi] You sure you don’t wanna meet my daughter?

Me : Um, no thanks. But please keep the change!

Singapore Traffic

Very Civil Disobedience

I must predicate this story with the fact that in Singapore all TV is heavily censored – not a breast or bum or bad word ends up on screen to pollute the poor defenceless minds of the citizens of Singapore. So imagine my surprise when, during a night customer meeting, I hit upon a children’s interactive channel (where they SMS in their name and a number, to fire a flower at a passing bee), only to find that "fuckyou" was playing "Anne Lee". And that "fuckyou" was winning! I started laughing and had to go on mute until "fuckyou" finally won. Some kid was really going to get into trouble the next day when the complaints came in. Rebellion in Singapore; who would have imagined it…

A Coffee Mugging

Coffee has been grown in this part of the world for centuries now, so perhaps it wasn’t too much to ask for a good cup of Joe. Those of you that know me know how important good coffee is to my well-being, so I had some small part of my sanity (and the length of my stay here), riding on there being good coffee in Singapore…

The local coffee houses, called ‘Kopitiams’, serve something called Kopi-o, something dark and altogether evil. Kopi-O would drive my ancestors from their Italian crypts, running and screaming for the nearest espresso machine. In a world dominated by the precision-ground, perfectly-brewed and artistically-poured Italian thoroughbreds - Espresso, Latte and Cappuccino, classic ‘Kopi-o’, is a real mongrel: the beans are roasted with sugar and margarine (and sometimes corn), in a wok, until dark black-brown, ground down, then brewed in a sock-like cotton strainer lowered into watering can-sized pots of hot water. To my Espresso-tuned palate, the ‘O’ stands for ‘O-my God!’ - Kopi-O’s mouth-coating murk is a terrible plane crash of an experience.

The Block Hole that is "Kopi-O"

The locals defend this pitch black, smoky mess by saying it is the perfect partner to their traditional breakfast: Kaya Toast (pronounced “Car-Yah Toast"). Once you’ve been served this culinary confusion of mismatched mutts, Kopi-O actually fits right in!

So, for your culinary curiosity, the traditional breakfast in Singapore:

1) A plate of Kaya toast: sandwiches of thick brown wholemeal bread, toasted, crusts trimmed off, spread liberally with a green, slightly furry coconut jam (Kaya Jam), with cold slices of hard butter inserted in the sandwich, before being cut into dainty triangles;

2) A soup bowl with two slightly warmed up, almost raw eggs, which one beats slightly and to which one applies a liberal dose of dark soya sauce (turning it an eerie black/green); and

3) An over-large cup of Kopi-O coffee with extra sugar, turned grey by the addition of milk.

Kaya Eggs with Soya

Kaya Toast with cold butter

I tried to like the breakfast, I really did, but give me a Cappuccino and fresh omelette Pannino anytime…

“If Espresso is to Italy, what champagne is to France, then Kopi-o is to Singapore, what sump-oil is to Nascar.”

The Newsroom

Just recently: Daniela begat Gianni in Melbourne and Nina begat Isabelle in Norway, and very unexpectedly, the lovely Carolina Napoleone in London declared she was newly pregnant. I wish them all well and hope they keep safe. To them all, the best advice I can give is a quote I read once:

"Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings."

Until the next exciting episode…
Walter x

La La Land

2007-10-30T14:48:00.000+08:00

Singapore

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."

It’s a dim, dark Sunday afternoon at Latitude 1° 14’ N, Longitude 103° 55’ E - Singapore. There is a wild and crazy monsoon outside, the torrential rain, lightening and booming thunder are attacking my apartment windows and obscuring the view of the even the nearest of nearby buildings. I’m sitting on my plush lounge in my PJ’s and socks, all washed and squeaky clean with a café latte and a pair of cold Tim Tams. I’m in this cosy state because as I was heading back from my usual Sunday lunch at the tasty ‘Epicurious’ Café along the river, the downpour hit, catching me on a rare day without my umbrella. Pertinent to this discussion is that in Singapore, as soon as it rains, the ever-present Taxis either disappear or become ‘Hired, at the same time. So I had to limp-jog back (my dented knee will be mentioned later). Thirty long minutes later I arrived home as if I’d been swimming with my clothes on.

Singapore or Bust…
For those of you on one of the smaller back roads of the information highway, I arrived here 2 weeks and one day ago from a rapidly cooling London where I had made a home for the last year or so. As I had only just arrived back in London from 2 wonderful weeks in Mexico for Will and Carolina’s wedding (story coming), I am really messed up, time-zone-wise. So I’ve been unable to really fit into the Singapore day/night thing, and the occasional 3:00am thunderstorm wake-up call isn’t helping.

Singapore is quite a different state of affairs compared to London. Immediately north of the equator, it’s a tropical 31 degrees, 94% humidity most days (except when it’s 100% like now), its lush and green and steamy, and the food is wild and wonderful. Air-conditioning saves the day for temperate ex-pats and is glacially evident in the taxis, lobbies, shops and offices, with outside fans replacing the footpath gas heaters of London. It’s extremely neat and tidy, there’s no graffiti, no litter and the happy locals are polite and friendly. They even have a Marks & Spencer’s and sell Vegemite and Tim Tams in the supermarkets - everything a Melbourne lad like me needs to feel at home. But it’s a funny old town and I’d like to share my findings with you all…

Wet Dog Island
Fittingly, given its "tip-of-a-peninsula" position and wet weather, Singapore was originally called Puluozhong (“Island at the End”) and Temasek ("Water Town"). And there this story should have ended. But, during the 14th century, some visiting Sri Vijayan prince saw an animal in the rain that he mistook for a lion (a lion?), and named the place "Singa Pura" ("Lion City"). Strangely, seeing an opportunity to 'upgrade', and not without a certain quest for grandeur I suppose, this regal sounding name stuck with everyone - the whole country quietly deciding not to correct the stigmatic imperialist and point out that really he saw a wet dog. Good thing he wasn’t Swahili because “Singa” in Swahili means “Massage” :)

After Sir Stamford Raffles established Singapore as a trading station (and also established a nice hotel and bar on the side), free trading Singapore attracted merchants from all over Asia and from as far afield as the United States and the Middle East. By 1824, just five years after the founding of modern Singapore, the population had grown from a mere 150 to 10,000. Today it’s about 4.5 million, all cruising Orchard Road on Saturday morning.

Saturday in Orchard Road

You Can’t Be Too Careful!
Singapore is a very careful city. Everything here screams “Take it easy, those noodles are hot!”, or “Don't be crazy, wear flat shoes!” At the cinema they even have a government service announcement about “Reckless Johnny”: Overlaying the corny footage of Johnny smiling and winking to his family at lunch, or being real popular on the basketball court at school, a sombre commentator describes how wonderful Johnny is...except for his desire for...recklessness! Suddenly the footage cuts to ‘evil' Johnny with zany smile, weaving through traffic on his motorcycle. Eventually his recklessness does him in and there he lies in his own fake blood on the road. “Recklessness Kills!” splashes across the screen. All the people in the cinema that weren't constantly texting their friends, all tch'd and shook their heads at the late and reckless fool...

Even the women of Singapore are at risk! Each Saturday there are young, earnest student types wearing red T-shirts and thick glasses in front of a big red sign, garlanded by big red balloons, handing out little red boxes, shouting out some slogan in Mandarin. Thinking this was like back home where they hand out Muesli Bars, I went to take one: “No! No box for you!” said earnest student girl with bad hair-cut. Then I noticed her T-Shirt and the big red sign: ”You must be careful! You may not know you are having your Period today!” They were handing out free Sanitary Napkins to the hormonally reckless women of Singapore.

The cigarette packets here are equally loud and earnest, screaming out “Don’t Smoke! Your Penis will rot off and your babies will be born with 3 arms!” I’m not joking. The packets are covered with big photos of rotting mouths, deformed foetuses, gangrenous limbs and tongue stumps. Thank God I prefer heroin.

The traffic lights are a little more gentle to the community at large - even kind and caring in their own way. After a perfectly appropriate amount of time, the green walking man is joined by large red numbers counting down from 20, telling you how many seconds you have until the taxis and truckloads of Bangladeshi workers start running you down. Nice. So you have to be careful in Singapore – or else!

But it’s not all dragon fruit and tapioca pudding in Singapore. Danger exists, despite all the precautions:

Cracking Pavements
On my first day, walking with Andrew into the CSC building on Cecil Street – perhaps I was tired, perhaps it was the wet, shiny stairs, perhaps the Gods are just plain mean – on the last step as I transferred all my weight onto my right foot, it slipped from under me and I came down hard onto my bent right knee and then the rest of me came down on my bag with my PC in it. Suffice to say that once the sensation of a hot, jagged, twisting knife left my knee and I wiped the little tear from my eye, I hobbled into the office to discover my PC screen was hanging together by wires and broken plastic and my keyboard now bends up oddly at each end. But it still worked. The state of my knee was a little similar – a little bent and broken but working. Officially I have a left-to-right dent across my knee-cap, and X-rays tell of a small fragment of bone lurking with intent at the back of my knee. It took 3 Neurophen-packed days to get me walking well again, but it’s not yet right. I am seeing the Orthopaedic Surgeon on Friday to see what he thinks needs to be done. Sigh :(

The Apartment
My serviced apartment just south of Orchard Road is lovely. And quite massive: this 17th Floor, three bedroom, three bathroom, marbled floor affair, with a lounge and dining area able to host 40 people, and with pool and gym on the ground floor, is just begging for visitors. Oh and there is cable TV, wireless internet, a stereo and air-conditioning in each room. So please come and visit…

#17-03, Leonie View, Leonie Hill

Botanicals
I spent the day walking around the Singapore Botanic Gardens the weekend before last -very beautiful Orchids and great palms - some are 40ft high and growing.

Cats and Dogs
When it rains here, it rains with some serious intent. After I swam home today I took some photos from my (tinted) windows - hopefully you can see (or not) what I mean.

La La Land
People end their sentences here with ‘La’, like some sort of exclamation mark. So they say “You want a beer La? “It always rains on Tuesdays la”. And so on. I'm getting used to it, but it’s certainly different la?

Here's a link to all my Singapore Photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=18561&l=ec0aa&id=621580247

Love and Singapore Noodles

Mister Walter La! xx

Mexico Magic

2007-10-29T20:33:00.002+08:00

As I sit in a nearby traditional Singapore Coffee Shop, sipping my over-sweet Nescafe 'Copio', writing this after a long day at work, surrounded by the ambling throng of Orchard Road, I can't help but think back to a more relaxed state of being; Mexico was a magical place, forming a lovely, lasting impression of contentment on an ever frowning brow. Amongst such glorious surroundings as the Mexican Coast and the lush Yucatan forests, the wedding of Will and Carolina took on an enchanting aspect. I can’t think of a nicer place to go back to...

“I found Jesus in Mexico... Amazing because he is always in the last place you look.”

Burger King

The 4 hours I spent in Miami airport en-route, was a very un-cool experience. Let me say on the outset that the people in Miami Airport are either Sumo-mongous, or very tiny. Everyone spoke Spanish, hardly anyone spoke English. Even the Information Desk lady struggled when I asked where my connecting flight was leaving from: “Gaydafoeeay” She said, smiling. “What?” I said, leaning in a little closer. “Gayyyydaaa! FoeeeAaaaay!” she said, louder, slower and eyebrows raised alarmingly, “GAAAAyye..Foeee..Aay?” I repeated, even s-l-o-w-e-r, my eyebrows raised so high to be resting somewhere near the back of my neck. Eventually I handed her a piece of paper and a pen. She wrote down “Gate 48!” Oh silly me..

Lunch was more American, and not in any good way. With only the Tex Mex Café, Burger King or Philly Pizzas to satisfy my hunger, I headed to Burger King. Everyone in front of me ordered something called a “Extreme XXX Whopper”. This was a massive construction of three dinner plate-sized beef patties, each smothered with slabs of orange cheese and pounds of dripping bacon, all pressed between two halves of a soccer ball-sized bread roll. The plastic trays literally bowed under the weight of a couple of these babies. The poor plastic food court chairs splayed alarmingly when these massive customers sat down to tuck in. I felt positively anorexic in this company.

I was happy to leave this place. I was looking for peace and quiet and some cultural dignity, and I was anxious to see if Mexico was going to live up to my hopes…

México Magic

On my first morning, I woke up at 5am and went for a walk around the Azul Beach Resort in the misty silence. The only sounds were my own breathing and the sand shifting beneath my feet as I walked along the deserted beach in my shorts and Polo top. It was truly beautiful; in the morning haze, the glowing hint of the sun created pink and orange coronas around the edges of the towering, distant clouds and the silverly-blue light hypnotic as it shimmered on the sea. Small bamboo huts with thatched roofs and white lacy walls sat lightly on the sand like four-poster beds, their walls waving gracefully in the tiny breeze. Nothing had prepared me for such a feeling of peace and wonder that morning.

I stepped slowly into the warm, salty bay, walking out until only my head remained above water. Nothing stirred, nothing moved, only the breeze caused things to shimmer ever so slightly, like pushing pause on a video. Suddenly and silently, a small brown Pelican glided just inches past me, its wing tips just millimetres above the water, raising an even larger smile on my face. As the avian intruder became a small black dot on the silver horizon, I stood there in the water, breathing, listening to my heartbeat until even that seemed to disappear, happy as I’d ever been. When, an hour or so later, I climbed out of this silvery dream I sat on the sand, wrapped in my huge pink and orange towel and watched the sun rise slowly and silently in front of me. Shakespeare was right: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Breakfast at the resort was wonderful, with friends and families assembling noisily and happily, treating themselves to a whole range of Mexican treats: coriander scrambled eggs, spicy beef sausages, Burritos, Tamales, Refried Beans, Huevos Rancheros, all with spicy tomato salsa, great coffee and fresh orange juice. Talk centred on the wedding later that afternoon, the food, the great rooms, the fantastic beach and so on. No-one mentioned work or home. Mexican guests arrived throughout the morning, setting up camp in people’s rooms, to shower, dress and look tres cool in the hot, humid sunshine.

Horse and Carriage

Of course the focal point of this trip, the Reson D’etre for this gathering, was Love and Marriage - specifically, the wedding of Will and Carolina. These two lovely friends had invited about 50 people to the other side of the world from almost everywhere, and everyone who could come, did. That’s an amazing testimony to the love people feel for these two.

Sorted into our fineries, the men in formal suits and ties, the women in gorgeous dresses, we were witness to a serious-yet-fun affair. After the cute-but-earnest flower girls walked in throwing rose petals over the wooden duckboard path through the sand, Carolina and her Father arrived on the beach to greet Will and his Best Band of Brothers. During the ceremony, the celebrant said some beautiful words, emphasising the need for love and truth and communication, but also how important it was for the couple to continue to play and smile. After becoming husband and wife, the beaming couple kissed and smiled - then the Etta James classic song filled the air (“At last, my love has come along, My lonely days are over…”), causing a rush for the tissues amongst the happy throng…

You can Mariachi my Maracas anytime

After the ceremony, and after a few pool-side games and champagnes, we strolled happily into the reception, the main outside dining area of the resort. The traditional Mexican food was just wonderful, the beer icy cold, the desserts rich and sweet. Everyone was treated to a gift set of Maracas, ‘Will & Carolina’ thongs (flip-flops), a silly straw hat and a bright bandana. Dancing came easy to this happy crowd; they even knew all the words to all the Mexican songs being played. Once the beautifully dressed, authentic Mariachi Band arrived with massive Sombreros, everyone was up, in long linked groups, swaying and singing to the great live music. It was fantastic. At one point someone shouted out “Cielito Lindo, por favor!” They launched into it and everyone sang their lungs out. If you don’t know Cielito Lindo, it’s that stereotypical Mexican song, the one most of us know as the “Ai… Yi.. Yi Yi!” song.

We were all delightedly damp and happily hoarse by the end of the long night; those that could walk headed to the Tequila Bar to down some shots and drink a great Mexican dark beer called ‘Leon’. It was a lethal concoction for some; at one point I remember kissing everyone good night, being very happy and very drunk, walking alone along the dark beach front, putting plastic necklaces (don’t ask me where I got them from), around all the mermaid and sea goddess statues around the resort. I vaguely remember finding my room and falling on my bed, but not much else until I woke up with a smile on my face and sand between my toes…

A Mañana

Late the next morning, after a long indulgent shower, a slow and spicy breakfast and a cool and relaxing swim (wondering, where did the statues get all those necklaces?), I had a long decadent massage. In a bamboo hut set on stilts, lying face down over the gentle waves crashing below me, I had 90 minutes of a fragrant, firm Swedish massage by one of the cute Mexican girls that Miki had recommended. My body almost collapsed from the long, smooth pummelling my muscles were getting, a perfect cure for squeezing out the tension (and toxins), of a hard working year and a long heavy night of dancing and drinking. It was bliss and I struggled to keep awake, the rhythm of the massage matching the ebb and flow of the waves below zzzzzz…

I spent the next two days swimming in the turquoise sea or sun-bathing on my lounge chair reading a trashy novel. The Beach Butlers hovered gently each day, ensuring I had ample supplies of seafood and freshly made Pina Coladas delivered regularly to my lounge chair. A truly terrible ordeal…

Road Trip

After the wedding guests left the resort, high heels in one hand, Maracas in the other, wearing their silly straw hats over their bright bandanas, sweeping up all the confetti before them, the extended Pohl and Shugg families herded into two buses for a guided tour of Mexico with Carlos the Wonder Driver.

1. The Sacred Blue Canote
Our first stop, located in the Eco-archeological Park Ik Kil, just under 3 hours from the hotel was an underground wonderland, an underground water hole called the "Sacred Blue Cenote". This perfectly round, well-type of cenote, sunk about 85 feet below ground, with an opening to the Yucatán sky, offered a magical place to relax and swim. Long, searching roots draped down the sides of the hole, with the crystal clear waters illuminated by the sunny Mexican sky above. The ever-running waterfalls gently cascaded down through the roof, creating a soothing and peaceful background sound at the pool. What a truly amazing place.

2. Chichen Itza

The ruins of Chichen Itza (or ‘Chicken Pizza’ as I remember it), one of the 7 Wonders of the World, lie about midway between Cancun and Merida, so it only took us 3 hours via the crowded highway in our air-conditioned chariots. We walked onto the grounds in hot blazing sunshine, in the middle of a large open field, at the base of the Pyramid when the heavens opened and we spent the next 20 minutes dog-paddling from tree to tree, chasing our guide (let’s call him Ralph). Undeterred by the torrential rain and the booming thunder, Ralph (under a massive umbrella), just kept walking about, reeling off facts and figures about the ruins. Suddenly the rain stopped, the sun came out, the humidity hit three figures, and a lovely dog appeared at our feet. Drenched, but warm and happy, we spent the afternoon following Ralph’s dramatic discourse, now with cute dog in tow. This is what I remembered after I knocked the water out my ears…

2.1 The Pyramid of Kukulkan
Towering above the other buildings at 90 feet (27m) high is the wonderfully dramatic Pyramid of Kukulkan. Two of its sides have been completely restored, the other two were left to show the condition before work commenced. Each side has 91 steps, and adding the platform at the top as a final step (and a bit of a cheat of you ask me), makes 365 in total, one for every day of the year. Ralph said that on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadow of the sun plays on the stairs, causing the illusion of a snake slithering down the pyramid in the direction of the cenote (sink hole). It is a wondrous structure to behold and touch and clap at (great acoustics), but Ralph told us that some tourists have been taking the stones as souvenirs and leaving graffiti, so you can no longer climb to the top – which is a shame as it’s something I had always wanted to do.

2.2 The Ball Court (Juego de Pelota)
Chichen Itza’s Great Ball Court is the largest of its kind in the Maya world. The playing area is 545 feet (166m) long by 225 feet (69m) wide. The two long sides are bounded by high vertical faces, the two shorter sides by rectangular temples. Halfway up along each of the long sides are the ‘goals', actually large stone rings, and the objective was to knock a rubber ball through them. According to Ralph, the game involved two teams, each able to hit the ball only with elbows, wrists or hips (who makes these rules?). Ralph was eager to point out that this was no casual sport, leading us to weathered but clear carvings of one team member with blood spurting from his headless neck, whilst another holds the head aloft. Supposedly it was an honour to be sacrificed in this way. Me, I’d settle for a small trophy and the meat tray.

2.3 Hacienda Chichen
Our hotel for the night was the first hacienda built in Yucatan, around 1523. According to the posters and old drawings in the Foyer, this hacienda was built to establish a centre for Spanish rule over the Mayans and functioned as a cattle ranch. Located on the fringes of the Chichen Itza site, the Hacienda Chichen was a perfect base to explore the Pyramids, and had a lovely old chapel in the lush gardens. My only complaint was the very noisy air conditioning keeping me awake. But as they say in this part of the world: "In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well."

3. Merida
Our next stop was Mérida, on the Yucatan Peninsula. We based ourselves here for 3 days while we explored the surrounding landscape and the wonders of Izamal, Uxmal and spotted some Pink Flamingos.

3.1 Izamal
Just 40 minutes from Merida was Izamal, Yucatan’s officially ‘magical’ town. The first thing that catches your eye (assuming you are not colour blind), is that the town is painted egg-yolk yellow: all the colonial buildings, the market, the huge convent, absolutely everything. If you stand still long enough little guys with paint cans and brushes start eyeing you off, measuring you up for a coat of ‘Izamal Standard’. Better to keep moving about in this town. The cobblestone streets and colonial lampposts completed the colonial aspect. Clean, peaceful and quaint, this was a great town to stroll around. There were Mayan pyramids, colonial-style buildings, parks, plazas, great horses and buggies and even an ATM machine. Izamal was conquered by the Spaniards, and the monks in their eagerness to convert the Mayan Indians to Catholicism gave the city its religious distinction. To this day, Izamal's people are very devoted to the Immaculate Virgin. I tried to meet her Virginal One-ness, but she was out having her ‘Immaculate’ lessons when I got there.

In the middle of all this yellow was the biggest yellow thing of all - the Franciscan ‘Convent San Antonio’ that was built over one of the Mayan pyramids. This sprawling yellow pile is equally infamous for the monk Fray Diego de Landa, its founder, who, being grumpy for missing his morning coffee or having a bad hair day, burned all the rare and unique historical Mayan scripts, and then (shit! shit! shit!), felt remorse for what he had done (bit bloody late now), and tried to rewrite all he could remember of the ways of the Mayans. So you can blame him for everything we don’t know about the Mayans.

3.2 Uxmal
The next day we headed to the nearby pre-Columbian ruined city of Uxmal, pronounced "Oosh-mahl". It is considered by many archaeologists as one of the finest examples of an ancient Maya city, but I was dying to go there for other reasons. Firstly I had heard there was a pyramid built overnight by a dwarf magician (this I had to see), and secondly, I had heard that I could actually climb one of the Pyramids :-)

The wonderfully imposing “Pyramid of the Magician”, standing 117 feet (38 m) high, dominates your view as you enter the complex. Standing there like a big-bottomed woman in a wide skirt, this elliptical pyramid is the result of five superimposed temples. This is the one the dwarf built overnight to become king. He must have really wanted the job.

Peeking from behind this overnight miracle was “The Great Pyramid”. Originally nine levels high, The Great Pyramid had been partially restored. It seems that another temple was to be superimposed on the existing structure and some demolition had taken place before the plans were halted, leaving the pyramid in bad condition. But I didn’t care, because here I finally fulfilled a childhood dream and was allowed to climb a Mayan pyramid, treading in the footsteps of the Mayan Kings. The climb was extremely steep, especially on a hot humid day, but going down was more worrying as the steps were less than my foot long and dropped at an alarming angle. But I loved it, reveling in my dream fulfilled.

I’m not saying that there was unnecessary cruelty during Mayan times, but according to their own chronicles (and of course the helpful carvings in the ball court), there were human sacrifices performed at the highest temple of the nearby “House of the Magician”. Obviously, with full justification and permission of the authorities, with the victim still alive, the priest would rip out the heart with a flint knife, and throw the body (allegedly still moving) down the steep steps. As I said, I am sure the Mayans had a perfectly good explanation for doing this…

3.3 Hacienda Yaxcopoil
Later in the afternoon we arrived at a traditional Yucatan Hacienda. The name of this sprawling 17th century pile literally means "The place of the green Alamo trees" and offered a look back at the glory days of Yucatan haciendas - this classically beautiful home spanned over 22,000 acres and three centuries of historical settlement: the pre-hispanic period, Spanish colonial times and the years of henquen (cactus fibre) production. The large traditional rooms of the Casa Principal (the residence of the owner) had authentic antiques and furnishings from the old days and the Chapel had an oil painting of its patron saint, San Geronimo de Yaxcopoil. In "The Mayan Room" were original Mayan pottery and other artefacts found on the grounds dating back to the "classic period" 250-900 AD. But this was all just girlie stuff – downstairs in the Barn was the he-man stuff: massive, greasy diesel engines that powered the threshing, crushing and weaving machines for the working farm.

3.4 Pink Flaming Dingos
The highlight of our last day in Yucatan was a boat excursion through the tidal estuary of the Ria Celestun Biosphere Reserve, affording us views and photo opportunities of the vast flocks of flamingos and a walk through the sloughs that penetrate the dense mangrove forests that flank the estuary. I have never forgotten a small girl in Adelaide call out “Look mum, Pink Flaming Dingos”, at a ‘flock’ of plastic flamingos in a garden centre. Ha ha…

We were instructed to board one of the 8-seater boats navigated by Pedro the Wonder Guide, our muy amable young barcadero, who provided very informative commentary identifying the various species of flora and fauna and explaining the sights. After we settled into our seats we were off on a speedy 20 minute dash down the Gulf coast to the estuary entrance.

According to Pedro, the limestone bedrock beneath the shallow water imparts a stony, grey hue to the otherwise turquoise Gulf water and an even darker hue to the water of the shallower estuary. After entering the estuary Pedro steered the boat north, then cut the engine to drift silently closer to large flocks of shy and very pink flamingos. Their pinkness, Pedro informed us, was due to their beta-carotene rich prawn diet. The prawns themselves were made pink from eating micro-organisms coloured bright red by red tannins leached from leaves into the bay during the rainy season. There are also lots of grey and white pelicans, cormorants, vultures circling overhead and egrets, but no-one was watching them, they just weren’t pink.

Taking the boat into the mangroves was an eerie experience, like floating past a prehistoric massacre – the trees and roots looked like the bleached bones of some major beast and the still, bracken water was tannin-stained blood red in places, looking all the while as if the primeval battle had only just ended.

4. Playa Del Carmen
The final 2 days of our magical mystery tour put us back on the beach for some coastal R&R, based at the Shangrila Caribe Resort, for some more sun and surf. Most notable was the warm weather, sumptuous seafood, soft white sand, topless Spanish beauties and the feisty land crabs that I battled with both mornings on my way to breakfast.

We popped into Cancun for an afternoon of ‘civilised’ shopping, but this was more depressing than I was expecting; sprawling plastic malls of American franchises, sitting across the road from massive examples of the usual hotel chains, all jostling for space on the overwhelmed beach front. I found no joy here except for one place – Johnny Rockets. Johnny Rockets is an American burger restaurant franchise whose motif is to recreate the American diners of the 1940s and 1950s, with decor including jukeboxes, lots of chrome and red leather seats, and customers are waited on by waiters and waitresses dressed in New York Yankee stripes and caps. The staff even burst into a small song and dance and made smiley faces of ketchup on my plate of fries. But the Peanut Butter Thickshake was just too much. Burp.

Hasta la vista
Well that’s it, Mexico, a perfect refuge from the modern world and all its worries, and a perfect place to get married as it turns out.

Of course I’m sure I over-romanticised the whole thing. I do that sometimes.

Walter el Perro Pedorrero x
(A kid said this when I said my name was Walter – it means ‘Walter the Farting Dog’)

Farewells in London

2007-10-29T20:33:00.001+08:00

Cornwall - Crabbing

2007-10-29T20:32:00.001+08:00

Sweden - Nina and Andre's Wedding

2007-10-29T20:31:00.012+08:00

"I haven't spoken to my wife in years. I didn't want to interrupt her."

As I pan across my lounge room, finding focus on the angry sky outside, I find that I am half blinded and half deafened, by the flashes of lightening and window-rattling volleys of thunder attacking my 15th floor apartment. It is a surprising and remarkable spectacle, with lightening going more horizontal than vertical. I am sitting on the cool marble floor of my temporary Singapore home, late on a Sunday morning. Breakfast is a sumptuous sugar rush from my wholemeal toast smothered in Swedish Honey (Svensk Honung), washed down with sips of strong, hot, milky tea from my green coffee mug.

In this electrified, sugary haze, I am inspired (finally) to write about the equally sumptuous, sweet and surprising, Swedish wedding of my dear friends Nina and Andre. Like this intrepid couple, Sweden was graceful and beautiful, generous and welcoming. I can’t wait to go back…

I have an IKEA

I, like most other people I know, had my own vision of what Swedes and Sweden would be like. But I thought I would wait until I got there and see for myself before coming to any conclusions. Here are my completely accurate and non-stereotypic observations:

All Swedes are tall, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, and wear woolly hats in the winter
By nature they are shy, reserved, serious, industrious, and find it hard to laugh at themselves
Swedes are usually punctual, honest, reliable, and clean, they brush their teeth religiously, and are very law-abiding - in fact, I understand Swedes will get soaked to the skin rather than cross on a red walk light even when the streets are empty
Swedes are very cautious and rarely do anything on impulse (sneezing may be an exception). Take a simple matter like buying cheese - I saw a guy try at least ten different sorts of cheeses with intense deliberation, before finally deciding to buy twenty grams of Brie
A male Swede is quite unlike most European men. Anything a housewife can do, he can do better – from cooking to sewing on buttons. In fact, everything in the home seems to be shared
Most Swedes are fitness fanatics and seem to spend their weekends running through the nearest forest or sailing the nearest fjord or cycling up and down the nearest mountain. With their health in mind, they have also seem to have given up smoking, sugar, drinking coffee in the evenings and going to bed after 10 o’clock (wedding parties excluded of course)

Yes I am exaggerating, but only slightly (the cheese buying and the sewing & housework things were true, and they do wear woolly hats). But mostly they were just like other Europeans, and as a case in point, (forgive me for jumping ahead slightly), I have to tell you about the end of the wedding dinner: there I was, sitting outside in the freezing midnight air with a wonderful group of ‘elders’, some in traditional Norwegian garb, with a generous glass of single-malt whiskey in one hand and a long, smooth Cuban cigar in the other. Even with very little common language, and even though my smoking skills are rudimentary at best, I found myself laughing and singing, sipping and puffing, and smiling almost painfully wide; these people were as warm and generous and open and funny as anyone I had met anywhere and if I could have only felt my fingers and toes at the time, I would have been the happiest man in Sweden that night - after the groom of course.

I must say, before I go any further, that it must have been a logistical nightmare for the family; getting people from all over the globe to fly in on the right day; securing them the only hotel rooms left in this part of Sweden; organising the Icelandic Michelin Star Chef to come and cook on the night; designing, translating and printing off menus and invites in two languages; having the bridesmaids from four countries get their own dresses in vaguely the right shade of pink; getting Andre and his best boys into suits; getting everyone to write their speeches and songs; and having me (the Toastmaster), know how it was all going to be put together and by whom. This mostly happened thanks to Nina’s Dad, Kai and his determined efforts - Kai had written up the whole wedding into a spreadsheet with tasks, dates, locations, start and finish times and the people responsible for each task. I’m sure Nina thought this was organising overkill, but for me, since I had some 23 speeches and 7 food courses to announce over 6 hours, I welcomed the military order of things.

It is testimony to Nina and Andre that everyone did turn up on time (except Nina at the church, obviously), everything did go well and everyone (except maybe one unhappy person, to be mentioned later), had a fantastic time. Love, in that precise, organised, Swedish sort of way, really was in the air…

But I am way ahead of myself; meanwhile back to the Wedding…

Getting there
I had already spent a planning weekend prior to the wedding with Nina & Andre and Nina’s parents at the family Summer House near Gothenburg, so I knew the lie of the land; I had seen the flower arrangements, help design the menu, survived a Hitchcock-like picket line of angry black ravens at the church, survived the parents (always a bit tricky), and worked out how to get into and out of my bed in the Summer House roof space (the hardest part of the wedding weekend).

My own journey started in London, with several of the wedding party. Since we are all cheapskates when it comes to flying in the UK, it was the usual 4:00am wake up at Nina & Andre’s, then a host of phone calls to the Iranian party (I use the word ‘party’ advisedly here – they do love to have fun), then a long, dark dash to the airport by mini cab, and after the usual McDonalds breakfast of egg-n-bacon muffins and bad coffee, you could find us all sleeping soundly in the tight Ryan Air 737-300 seats, heading to Gothenburg.

Sweden
I spent my first night in Sweden with Stina in a sort of plutonic love nest. To do the honour of being co-toastmaster justice, Stina wanted us to share the whole holistic moment together, going through her speech, my speeches and the plans for the day, showing me her wonderful dress and picking out which tie and cufflinks I should wear, and so on. So after much cold beer, much agreement on what we were doing, some dodgy McDonald’s burgers and a fashion show, we finally got some sleep in a small dark room off the main strip.

Röd Hus

The next morning we were picked up by Nina and Andre and I was taken to the Offenguard Summer House at Kolhättan, a ‘Red House’. In Sweden, wooden architecture is considered to be an important part of Swedish identity – the concept of the ‘Red House with White Corners’. To me, the red house has similarities to Roman architecture with low roof angles and its symmetrical design. Everywhere we went in Sweden, we saw these lovely Swedish wooden red cottages. You see other colours on more modern houses (there were some unpleasant grey ones nearby the Summer House), but they seem out of place somehow and everyone seemed to frown upon them – being traditionalists here in Sweden. In the 17th century in Sweden it was a sign of wealth and status to own one of these houses since bricks, common in other European countries, were very rare at the time. I did some research and found out that the red paint originates from a small region called Falun, based on a pigment which was a by-product from the Copper mines there. Although the mines have been closed for decades, there is still enough pigment stockpiled for centuries of red houses.

The Offenguard Summer house was one of these traditional red houses, poised perfectly on a granite outcrop, encircled by wide, wooden decking. Inside, the design was very modern in appearance, very white (they even use milk to seal the untreated pine boards), and quite minimal, although very well laid out and extremely comfortable. The house looks down on a wide channel of grey, choppy North Sea water, held in place by the lush green hills on the opposite side, and bisected by the large yellow car ferry. The view from my wooden seat on the decking outside was very soothing and calming, especially in the late afternoon when the low sun warmed my back in the cold air as I sat and read my book. As an admirer of sailing boats, the frequent passing of the elegant white and blue Malo boats through the channel was also an added delight, just for me. I have to say, Nina’s parents, Katarina and Kai were perfect hosts, and I could do nothing but love this place.

Gothenburg

The next day was spent in Gothenburg city where we caught up with rest of the wedding party guests – this pretty University town, bisected by the Göta River, is lovely; clean and bright, with excellent coffee and tall, pointy architecture hedging long straight boulevards towards large open squares. It was full of those gorgeous blond, blue-eyed Swedish women in short skirts and pony-tails I’d read about, and after a long walk around and a great lunch of crayfish and buttered brown bread with cold beer, I bought some local Aquavit glasses and Crayfish forks to remind me of the day.

Nösunds Värdshus & Orangeri

The next afternoon we all went out for a tour of the nearby town for some pizza and a few ciders.

Later that afternoon, Andre, Walter V, Paul and I moved to this small family hotel (I never did find any Orangeri), located about one hour north of Göteborg, on the Swedish west coast archipelago. Later that night I found myself up at 2:00am sitting in the bar of the hotel, with Andre, Walter V, Paul and a few glasses of cold German beer, writing the speech introductions for 23 people and adding jokes to most of the major speeches for the next day. It was a quiet end to a great few days, surrounded by very merry people in a very merry mood. But eventuality I had to get Andre to his bed, so he could be up again the next morning to get him to the church on time.

The Wedding

My first task of the day was to get Andre up, dressed and to breakfast. But he still needed to pick the wedding waltz song. So, after a quick breakfast, still suffering from broken sleep and a mean hangover, we found ourselves down by the shore, with a car door open, singing and dancing to various CD’s, picking that special song.

Later, we were back at our room, standing around in dress shirts, ties, cufflinks, and our underwear. By the time the cleaners (also gorgeous tall blondes), came around to do the rooms, we decided it was easier to explain ourselves to their strange looks by getting our trousers on. After a glass of champagne or two to ease the nerves, it was on the bus, off to the church…

The beautiful wedding was held in the bright, upright and lightly decorated Summer Church in Ödsmål. Although a little late (only 20 minutes), Nina arrived by Bentley in full white splendour to an eager Andre at the end of the aisle. After Kai escorted her to the altar, Nina, framed by the pink entourage of her bridesmaids, took her place beside Andre who was flanked by his groomsmen in classic dark suits. They made an elegant, loving picture…

Very bravely if you ask me, Andre had rehearsed his pronunciation over the last few weeks, and recited his half of the required responses in perfect Swedish, balancing his umlauts flawlessly. After the usual compliment of vows, hymns, “Ya’s” and “I do’s” they exchanged their hand-picked Greek wedding rings and were pronounced “Maka och Fru!” to us all. As they kissed, camera’s flashed, some people clapped, while other people dabbed tears from their eyes. It was a lovely, romantic moment that seemed the perfect result of their equally romantic engagement in Venice the year before…

Stina and I then leapt into action, quickly ensuring all the cold champagne was waiting outside, the bubble blowers were handed out for their exit, and we set out to make sure everyone enjoyed themselves until it was time to get back on the bus. After much champagne, photos in every pose and some rounding up of those Iranian’s having too much fun, we were back on the bus.

M/S Byfjorden

After a short bus ride to Byfjorden, we found ourselves on the windy docks, ready for a short jaunt down the coast on the good ship “M/S Byfjorden”, to the reception at Nösund. After a short delay to retrieve some forgotten documents, it was a very pleasant wind-in-your-hair ride down the coast. The drinks and finger food were very welcome, and I finally had time to sit and meet some of the people carrying out the speeches later in the evening.

The Wedding Dinner

I have to say, the menu was fantastic and the wine divine, so much so that I am forced to list the dishes here for prosperity – the Michelin Star Chef from Iceland outdid himself:

Menu:

Grilled scallops in a pureed garlic and white wine sauce
Homemade Nösund toast with crayfish tails in a smoked eel and red onion mayonnaise, with rainbow salmon caviar
Västerbotten pie in a lemon and dill shell, served with rainbow salmon caviar and a marinated red onion relish
West coast Sole filled with assorted shellfish, served with a vanilla-infused lobster sauce and new potatoes
Grilled fillet of Venison in a thyme and port wine jus, served with Swedish gratin potatoes
Raspberry yoghurt mousse topped with a dark and white chocolate fan, served with Bourbon vanilla foam
Coffee, Tea, Baileys, Cognac

Wine:

Pierr Sparr Alsace One, Alsace France
Tarapacá Sauvignon Blanc, Chile
Faustino VII, Rioja Spain

The evening started wonderfully; we had the grilled scallops on the terrace as the sun set; the champagne was flowing; I looked sharp in my London suit, shocking pink tie and Silver Italian Vespa cufflinks; I was sat opposite the gorgeously matching-pink Stina, and next to the equally lovely Merete (also in pink); I had written most of the speeches and jokes myself the night before so I wasn’t nervous, and everyone was in a happy, receptive mood; Stina and I had shown everyone to their tables and introduced the wedding parties and newlyweds to everyone, and I even had enforced ‘spacers’ between courses on my call sheet, for “toilet breaks and cigar business” as Kai notated them. We were very organised :)

Kiss! Kiss!

I loved the added customs in Swedish weddings – like most European weddings if people tap their wine glasses the couple have to kiss, but here, if you tap and also stomp your feet as well, they have to balance on their chairs and kiss. Harder as the evening wore on and the couple became a little unsteady. Then, in a throwback to more Viking times I imagine, if the groom leaves the room at any time, all the men in the room get a chance to kiss the bride until he returns (Nina really encouraged this manoeuvre during the night, shouting at us to run and quickly kiss her whenever Andre went out), and if the Bride leaves the room the reverse is true (unfortunately, Nina has a small bladder and so Andre had a better time of it). The word "love" was repeated all evening long, by every speaker. Being bathed in such an atmosphere was a wonderful experience. I will always think back to this wedding with emotion and nostalgia. It was a great way for them to begin a life together.

Speech! Speech!

Anyway, as I said, the evening started wonderfully, so full of promise: The first speech was presented as an old fashioned two-hander by Kai and Katrina. It was hilarious to watch Nina’s parents act out a conversation of the sort:

Kai: “Well Katrina, look at all the people here today, just for our little Nina”

Katrina: “She certainly has a lot of lovely friends”

Kai: “So what do you think about our Nina marrying this New Zealander?”

Katina: “Well Kai, he seems like a good fellow – why, should we be worried?”

And so on…

It had us all in stiches, as the very funny jokes were delivered in parent-corny fashion. Wonderful! It really set the relaxed and happy tone of the evening. Nina’s sister Anna delivered probably the funniest speech, made all the more impressive since she delivered it in Swedish and even the non-Swedish speakers like me were laughing :)

A speech too far…

By speech eight or nine I began to get grips with the people and the material. This was a good and responsive audience, and although my English jokes were pretty tame and corny, the parents and Norwegian and Swedish elders were grinning widely, and Nina’s mascara had begun to run down her rosy cheeks. We had sung several hilarious songs to the couple (oddly, all to the tune of “My bonny lies over the ocean”), and the lovely Stina and Merete were all smiles and encouraging nods. I was on a roll, what could go wrong?

As the laughter died down from the last speech, I stood up and called for the next speaker. It was then I noticed the full moon…

The room suddenly lost all colour and I was greeted by an arctic chill. Turning around to see what the problem was, the new speaker rose unhappily from her chair (if unhappy was a colour, this was a particularly dark shade of unhappiness), she gave me a look that could turn your bowels to ice water – the kind of look a can of insect-spray gives a fly. I didn’t know what had happened to the universe at this minute, but as my testicles ascended deep into protective tissue and my feet started to turn to the nearest exit, my instincts told me I was in deep trouble - the sort of trouble where the scars would be visible for weeks. My smiling, delusional mind told me I would be fine as long as she said nothing and just sat down. This protective silence enveloped me for just an instant, but ultimately I was done for. After a brief torrent of accusing abuse in front of everyone - to the effect of “you knew didn’t you, so you did this on purpose! How could you!?”, (this woman clearly had issues), and with me replying gently that it was obviously MY mistake, and would she like to just sit down and we’ll go on to the next speech, she eventually cursed my future children, turned back to the audience, then gave a short and somewhat muddled speech about Nina, correcting herself out loud whenever she made a mistake. When she finished her speech, stopping half-way through a random sentence, she came over to my table to give me that look of “your testicles are mine” (and not in a good way), then sat down, glaring at me for the rest of the wedding. Two people clapped (out of synch) in the silence.

[Insert long silence here...]

Smiling rather fearfully by now, and with a noticeable sheen of perspiration, I stood up and continued with the speech introductions. Worried about what the next speaker might say I was a little wary to say the least. But some fourteen speeches and five hours later, the dinner and speeches were over, I had completed my duties for the night and the live music and dancing was set to begin.

Avoiding the crowd and carrying a large alcoholic drink, I ventured out the back of the venue to take a breather and get some distance between me and the angry woman. It didn’t work. She had tracked me down (she really did have issues). Moments later, I had a manicured fingernail (Chanel Sheer Ballet Pink 145), thrust into my face and a bout of swearing and abuse more appropriate for a Hell’s Angels rally than a wedding reception. I was accused of all sorts of things (seems I am also responsible for Smallpox, Menopause, and that Asparagus pee smell), and I had to defend myself for half an hour before I eventually convinced the very unhappy woman and her sassy female entourage that I knew nothing about her “problem” (I found out later that it had to do with a break up with a boyfriend, so she was in no mood to give speeches about love and marriage), and that the speech list was actually given to me - I repeated it slowly “g-i-v-e-n” to me, repeating that I had no idea what her situation was. I had to show her my printed speech list, character references, pictures of my cat Cosmo, my Amnesty International Membership card and receipts of my donations to various charities, before she calmed down. But she still stormed off, looking unconvinced. With the full moon looking down at me, it took a good ten minutes to coax my happy face back from under the stairs.

After a few final sips of my drink, I rejoined the flock, everyone dancing and singing and having a wonderful time. As I mentioned, I had been up until 2am that morning writing speeches, so I was a little weary, but fun and laughter is infectious and I danced and laughed until the hotel cut us off around 1am. The evening finished with the ‘Polynaise’, not the healthy sandwich spread you might have thought of, but a sort of dancing human chain winding its way around the chairs and tables. At some point Merete grabbed my hand and I found myself whizzing through the various rooms and even the outside areas of the hotel until I eventually slipped from the chain and sat down with some of the elders. This is where I was offered a big Cuban and some 16 year old Lagavulin – and you know the rest of that happy story.

Eventually, after Stina rounded everyone up, I left my smoky refuge and joined the others for the cutting of the cake in the Atrium. At some time, between cream and chocolate fillings, the beautiful Lia and I got engaged (much to the dismay of the male waiters at the hotel). Obviously my pick-up line must have worked: “Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini” :) So as we slipped on our cardboard engagement ‘rings’ to formalise proceedings, we promised ourselves a life of love and happiness.

At 3:00am the hardiest of us were looking for a place for our party to continue (not easy to find in a quiet seaside town in the middle of nowhere), but Nina and Andre were given a luxury honeymoon suite around the coast a little: one of the Luftslottet rooms. So, armed with baskets of champagne, strawberries, glasses and nibbles from the hotel, we small band – we small, happy band – ambled our way around the coast, drunkenly shooshing ourselves whenever we passed an inhabited house, until we found this little cottage with sunken bathtub and king-sized bed. Hours later, after much out of tune singing, all the champagne and all the fruit and nibbles, we bid the happy couple goodnight and stumbled out into the emerging dawn. I found my room (it took some finding), as the sun was rising. After some tricky key turning, I found the inside of my room, and then found my bed (it also took some finding). Smiling a lot, I crashed like a fallen tree into the cool white sheets. I figured I would undress at some later point in the morning. Where were those lovely cleaning ladies when you need help getting your suit jacket off? Zzzzzzz

The day after the night before

A very generous 7 or 8 minutes later, I was awoken by the cleaning beauties, wondering when I was checking out. Looking dashing in my crumpled suit, in a sort of shabby-sheik sort of way, with my eyes closed (they refused to open) and those enticing pillow marks on my face, I held on to the door frame (for vertical support you understand), and replied that I would be leaving soon after breakfast, for which I am late so I must go and shower and change and eat breakfast, yes I must. I was making complete sense to myself, but not so much to them I imagine. They just giggled slightly (I checked, my fly was not undone), and said they would come back later to clean the room.

At some point I managed to let go of the door frame and managed to find the shower, and shave and re-dress myself without too much injury. By now, with my headache enthusiastically beating out the Rumba behind my eye sockets, my need for strong coffee won me over, and I headed very delicately to breakfast with dark glasses and mismatched socks. Coffee, banana cake and lots of aspirin and orange juice later, I was feeling almost sub-human. I was still talking as if I had a mouth full of pebbles, but at least I was talking. At some point, my eyes creaked open from behind my glasses and I noticed other people around me – the happy cheery couples with children who left the party very early and were noisy and in full spirits; the one or two young guys who hadn’t gone to bed yet but looked fine; and the rest of my own party who shuffled in with dark glasses, mismatched socks and a loud sighs as they sipped their first coffee. I knew their pain…

Eventually we rounded ourselves up, packed our things and headed to the summer house for official Coffee and Cake.

Coffee and cake at Kolhättan

I didn’t say much during the day, preferring my sunglasses to speak for me. My mouth was very occupied with coffee drinking. But the cakes were delicious, the coffee strong and plentiful, and the gorgeous Carolina and Lia (my new fiancé) were there in good spirits.

We spent the last day and a half in quiet seclusion, the happy couple, Kai, Katrina, Andre’s Mother and Sister, and me. We had dinner at one of the local pizza parlours, walked around the small town nearby and eventually parted our ways until Nina, Andre and I caught the late night flight ourselves and ended up back home in cold, grey London.

It seems a long time ago now, sitting in hothouse Singapore writing this, but the feelings, the love, and that weird brown Norwegian Cheese they have for breakfast (Gjetost), have all left an indelible mark on me that I will remember forever.

Trevlig resa!

Walter x

London - last look

2007-10-29T20:31:00.001+08:00

Italy

2007-10-29T20:30:00.001+08:00

Neighbours in Town

2007-10-29T20:23:00.000+08:00

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away...Wayne and Sharron came to visit!

"No matter where you go, there you are."

From their warm and cosy home in Melbourne’s café heart, Fitzroy, my lovely neighbours Wayne and Sharron endured the bum-numbing 30 hour transit between Tullamarine and Heathrow to arrive in London smiley but weary and ready for a cup of strong British tea. They set themselves a heavily paced tour, plotting a determined course through the Monopoly Board sites, eating Fish & Chips nude and on a bike. Your everyday, normal London romp…

I tried to map their course but it took too much effort – these two blurs in T-shirts and shorts, covered a lot of territory in the two weeks they stayed with me. But I did start a map…to give you an idea:

Most days I had to work, as they ventured out for the day, but I tried to catch up with them when I could – mostly weekends. So for the time I spent with them, here are the pics:

Double Decker Bus into the City

Walking along the Thames

The London Museum

Cycle Pour Des Vêtements

One day, through no fault of my own (and I continue to stand by this), we encountered, by accident, a veritable Tsunami of nude cyclists pouring down Whitehall towards us. “Walter’s Blog goes Blue!” shouted Wayne, over the happy bell ringing of the green, pink and lavender painted breasts, bums and balls bouncing down the street. After a good 30mins of this (I took photos for research purposes), Covent Garden was finally in sight. But then…they all came around again, this time with legs and bells akimbo, taking photos of us dumb clothed people walking to get around. Wayne and Sharron looked at me as if I had planned this all along. After the river of flesh and that poor guy on the Unicycle (ouch!) passed by, we headed into Covent Garden and sat down for strong cuppas and salami focaccias. Whew!

Covent Garden

New Scotland Yard

Spiced Ham
As their only London theatrical treat and as very generous gift to me, we ventured out in our fineries one evening to see “Spamalot” by Eric Idle. It was wonderful and very funny. I hope I thanked Wayne and Sharron enough for one of my very few theatre moments in London.

Big Ben

I love that they came to visit me in London – it was uplifting to finally receive friends from home – and it was a pleasure having them.

Walter (Second place getter in a Beauty Contest)

In The Eyes Of The Beholder

2007-08-03T18:55:00.000+08:00

I have been extremely fortunate, firstly to have the lovely Bec & Glenn in London with me during my time here, and secondly because Bec's work allows her corporate passes into some of the most wonderful art exhibitions in London. And I get to go too...

Here are some pictures of the last two shows - the Dutch Portraits at The National Gallery (Classic art with lots of Rembrandt etc.), and the Royal Academy Summer Gala evening at The Royal Academy of Arts (modern art, including flying pigs, TV's with eyes and a mouth, and works by unknown artists), where I was able to bring along lovely friend Penelope.

Someone once said that the holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it. Seems the Grail has been found, since even standing on my head did nothing to improve some modern pieces - I mean, prints of a pig driving a model T Ford!

Dutch Portraits

Royal Academy Summer Gala

After all, it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it...

Van Walt (with a French Champagne in hand, during my Blue Period) x

Gorgeous

2007-08-03T06:40:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I don't need to much to say, especially in the presence of beautiful women.

Here are two occasions at Nina and Andre's when I said very little...

Lia and Lia's two sisters (Brazil) and Nina (Norway)

Lia (Brazil) and Sunithi (Sri Lanka/USA)

Moya's Birthday

2007-08-03T05:38:00.001+08:00

In April we were treated to Moya's annual birthday celebrations!

From her Marsham Court apartment, I helped Moya carry the drinks and nibbles she provides for everyone each year, and then met up with a large number of her friends and family at the local Gourmet Pizza place. After a loud and happy meal, most of us walked down to Victoria Tower Gardens (by the Thames next to Big Ben) with Moya's drinks and parked ourselves on some benches under the large trees to enjoy a picnic drink or two in the evening light. At one point two female Police officers approached us and told us that drinking in public parks in the Borough of Westminster was actually illegal, but after some lighthearted banter with Moya, they told us to at least hide the drinks from the road so they wouldn't get into trouble or they would have to 'confiscate' our champagne :-)

It was a great night with the kids playing on the grass and the adults concentrating on the wine.

Here are some photos...

Sailing Away...

2007-06-30T22:49:00.000+08:00

Ever since Homer first picked up a lyre, there has been something terribly romantic about sailing the Mediterranean. It’s a profound feeling of contentment as you point the bow towards a speckle of green on the big blue horizon, and settle back to enjoy the dazzle of the sun, the creak of the rigging and the plink-plink of ice tinkling in one of Stina’s G&T’s. Tradition says it was down to Scylla, Circe and a Cyclops, but I think Odysseus spent 10 years getting home from Troy because he was having too good a time.

Someone once said that “A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours." Trust me, Swedes and Norwegians have the vaguest notion of time on earth (best to invite them a few hours early for a dinner party), so it was a marvellous holiday...

The Journey

I was hoping to astonish and amaze you all with the memoirs of the grizzly sailor and explorer Captain Jack D’Onofrio who joined forces with seven strangers, aboard a forty-six-foot sailboat, for a six-month, 30,000km voyage around South America, en route to the Panama Canal, the Galapagos, Easter Island, Cape Horn, and the Falkland Islands. I was hoping to write that my experience was one of excitement and fear, battling equipment failures, interpersonal conflicts, the hazards of the ocean, and a near-tragedy rounding Cape Horn. I had every intention of recounting my personal search for will and greater self-understanding against the challenges of the world, and the quest to fulfil an extraordinary dream, a personal search for understanding. That’s what I was hoping to write about - you will have to settle for ten days of gently sailing and sunbathing around the Saronic Sea with attractive Swedes and Norwegians. I hope you don’t mind too much…

Le Map

After dismissing Alaska (too cold), Australia (too far), South Africa (too expensive) and a traditional Caribbean cruise (too touristy), I was about to give up hope of a hot summer holiday, like those of my seaside childhood; where my skin glowed golden brown, my limbs were swim-weary and my hair encrusted with sea salt. I was about to resign myself to remaining pale and pasty under the weak London sun, when the recently engaged Pimlico couple Andre and Nina (Venetian Wanderings), invited me to join their annual sailing trip around the Greek Islands. I had sailed Greek waters before with my then UK-bound Melbourne friends, so I was very happy to be one of this new crew. We were a team of eight – four Swedes, two Norwegians and Andre and I were the token Antipodeans – and half of us would be in small bikinis and half of us could also sail and tell the Bow from the Stern – we were set.

Handy Tips

If you haven’t been sailing for more than an afternoon spin around the bay, there is much to discover new about the experience and about yourself when cramped, damp and crowded.

There are some classic tips:

Tip 1: Bring very little with you – it only gets wet and stays damp and there is very little storage on a boat in any case. Well, as if five Nordic girls would bring the bare minimum of anything. While I rotated my three tops and two shorts for ten days, the girls brought an ocean of clothes, shoes and bikinis, and hanging forests of dresses filled their cabins. Admittedly they all looked fabulous when we went out, so no complaints here.

Tip 2: Bring earplugs - besides the usual snoring or port-side disco music, you’ll lose sleep to what Dick once described to me as "boat noises", but which actually sounds more like a horde of pots and pans rattling around your room. Trust me, take earplugs.

Tip 3: Leave your embarrassment at home - once you go sailing, you can forget about privacy. Living in a damp, rolling shoebox with walls thinner than your towel means everyone can hear the snoring, the feminine giggles, night bumps, morning bumps (me hitting my head each morning, getting out of my bottom bunk), see the odd flash of flesh and certainly smell the plumbing. You have to take the philosophy that you have the rest of your life to be alone.

Meanwhile, the crew had assembled on deck…

The Crew

Clockwise from the left:

Stina - Swedish party girl who was my opposing number on the boat - First time sailing

Nina - our diminutive Norwegian/Swedish Captain - had learned to sail with her sister Anna under the controlling tutorage of their Father in Norway. Both had been sailing since they were in Ikea (Pööpit) Nappies

Anna – Nina’s sister and co-trained in the art of sailing.
Roger - Anna's curly-haired beau who has sailed before.

Cecilia – David’s Norwegian/Moroccan partner - First time sailing.

David - Norwegian Cousin of Nina and Anna. David had sailed before.

Andre – New Zealander, First Mate and Nina’s fiancé.

The Crew of the 'No regrets' Stina at rest
Captain Nina punishing the First Mate

Anchors Away
Sailing from Athens is a bit like casting off into a maritime spaghetti junction (like that massive one near Birmingham), but on our first day, huddling from the cold rain, we pointed our bow in the right direction and in just a couple of hours we found ourselves in the sheltered Saronic Gulf, with its islands of Poros, Aegina (famed for its pistachios) and Hydra.

The weather was variable to say the least. From the outset, every other day (and the best part of the first week), was wild and stormy, with low, dark skies, high winds, higher waves and icy cold rain. The other days were hot and dry with a lovely light breeze. On sail-worthy days we made it to several islands, including Poros and Spetses. On really good days we ducked into small isolated coves along the way to dive into a clear blue sea, sunbake under the clear blue skies and listen to unusual Swedish Country&Western Music (David’s favourite). Thank God for my iPod and my Chillout playlist. Fortunately we brought time with us - about two weeks - enough to get some sunny days under our belt and to relax, tan, collect small stones and explore to our hearts content.

Poros
Called Calaureia in ancient times, is the island of Poseidon, god of the sea. In the War of Independence against the Turks in 1821, Poros fought alongside the other islands, and in 1830 became Greece's first naval base, and the base still forms a major part of the social scene on the island (sailors everywhere). I’m not sure it’s related, but very good coffee can be found on Poros, so I was happy. That’s our boat, 3rd from the left.

Poros Harbour from abovePoros at Sunset
Poros Harbour looking in

Spetses
Unforgettable scenes of natural beauty are created by the harmonic combination of crystal clear waters and ageing pine trees on Spetses. Countless picturesque coves around the island offer moments of peace and tranquillity (and a place to find great stones and shells), and a peaceful walk in the nearby forest gives you a serene experience amongst all the tourism and commotion.

Spetses harbour looking in

Spetses Mermaid

Spetses Harbour Looking Out

My Breakfast at Spetses

Sea Rations

Food was quite different this trip – both on and off the boat. Where the menu was important to my last Australian comrades in water wings, Swedes and Norwegians only seem to eat to fuel themselves, not really worried what or when they eat as long it has fibre and no olive oil (obviously no chance of olive oil in Greece). Breakfast was a completely separate affair with everyone making their own porridge, or ham & cheese sandwiches or in my case, bananas in yoghurt with a drizzle of honey…yum. Lunch was a little more communal, with the girls handing out flat–bread sandwiches with tomatoes and fetta.

Dinner on board was an ‘unusual’ and somewhat confusing event to this little duck. Left to the girls downstairs, meals often incorporated some unusual ingredients. But they were certainly ambitious and filling. An odd collection of meals were strung together by the girls for the 10 days, from pasta with tuna, left-over Ikea Hotdogs, fetta and dried oregano, or some combination of the same ingredients but with Swedish meatballs and on rice. These were often washed down with warm Greek Beers by the boys while the girls began their challenge to drink the Diet Coke supply of Greece. Half the Gin supply went in the first night and beers were sunk in dozens most nights by the lads – I forgot how much Swedes and Norwegians could drink. Food was a little more ‘normal’ the couple of times I cooked, but I was glad to give over the reigns to the people who wanted to have a go.

Dinner on shore was very delicious, if not strangely described on the menus: We were offered ‘Lamps in Lemon’, ‘Lamp Chops’, ‘Marines Pasta’, ‘Stuffed Beef Burgers’, and other weird and wonderful things usually involving a large school of grilled octopus, Greek salads (no oil of course, we’re Swedish/Norwegian), and most of the island’s supply of white wine. Delicious…

Typical Menu

Typical Entree

Getting In Step
The whole experience was over too quickly and we were all sad to let it go. Summery Greece is a great place for rest and relaxation. And even in the relatively developed islands, you don't have to go far to tune into their timeless rhythms. Most sunny afternoons on shore you would find us sitting quietly at some café, under a large umbrella, bordering a hot dry square, with stunning views of the Mediterranean, drinking long cold beers, watching happy men and women sitting and chatting over glasses of ouzo; children on the fringes playing a game something like hopscotch.

Watching over us in every port was the ubiquitous statue of a moustached soldier who performed heroics in 19th-century battles against the Turks (some of the men in the square still have the same moustache). Into this happy scene often strode a larger-than-life (very fat) Greek Orthodox priest with long black robes, his little square hat and flowing beard. He would wander around chatting and joking with his flock, and the sound of laughter would fill the air. (They were a jolly bunch, these priests, at the airport we even spotted a group of them smoking and having a beer and a laugh together in a quiet corner).

I wasn't sure I was going to find such obvious examples of authentic Greek life, or at least not in the height of the summer holiday season and in the highly developed islands. And yet here it was, playing out in front of me.

Returning to Port
On our last day we sailed back in a raging storm, taking 5 hours or so over high rolling seas to get back to Athens to park overnight, ready for our return flights the next day. At the marina, after a cold shower, lovely seafood dinner and a much-disturbed sleep (large, loud wedding at the Marina – thank God for those earplugs), some of us took a morning walk around Athens and we had a genuinely illuminating and entertaining view of the messy and somewhat run-down capital of the land of Zeus and Athena. We even made it to the base of the Acropolis, but were tired by now and decided to have Cappuccinos instead of climbing up. Nina and Andre found beautiful hand-made gold and silver rings, and will be going back to pick two up next month, to be their wedding bands for the August celebrations.

The taxi got to the airport a little too quickly (doing over 160km/hr on the freeway helped), and security is a little looser than Heathrow, so it was a long, long wait at Athens airport to get on the plane to get home. When Nina, Andre and I arrived on English soil it was dark, a freezing 7 degrees, with cold horizontal rain. After the train and taxi and the 45 stairs to my front door, I finally made it into the warmth of the flat. Lovely house guest Cilla had cleaned the flat beautifully and left me lots of provisions in the fridge, so I was very happy. After a long hot shower, a strong cup of milky tea and a toasted ham and cheese, I crashed under the warm, dry doona and slept like a baby for about 10 hours.

Athens Harbour

I’ll leave you with the only sailing story I know…
An elderly sailor wrote to a mail order house the following: "Please send me a pair of sails for my boat you show on page 438, and if they're any good, I'll send you a cheque." In a short time he received the following reply: "Please send cheque. If it's any good, we will send the sails."'

Still avoiding the rocks…

Captain Jack X

Terra Australis

2007-06-08T05:47:00.000+08:00

Standing on a brown disk, under a blue dome...

It's late. Too late for the weary Wayne and Sharron, my Melbourne neighbours who are staying with me at the moment. They have been re-tracing the Monopoly Board sights of London for about eight hours a day since they arrived and are usually horizontal by about 8:30 each night. It's gone cold again, and I am considering turning on the central heating under protest, to counter the bloody weather! Just back from Greece I am tanned, toned and feeling relaxed. But need some time to write the Greece story, before any other trips or milestones intervene. Meanwhile back in Melbourne...

A while back now, I had the chance to go home to Melbourne for the first time in almost a year. Besides the obvious joys and delights of going home after so long, I had been using up all my weekends studying for the previous 10 weeks and I had planned to use this down time to do a final SWAT and do the exams upon my return to London. But as fate often does, it intervened maliciously and the day before I left, the customer decided to install a raft of new equipment, months ahead of schedule. So I had to work every week-day from about 5pm to about 10pm, matching UK day-time, to manage and coordinate things. Not my most relaxed break and I missed out seeing my beloved Lou Lou and Jac as a consequence.

Luckily for me I had rented a car for the duration and the weather was lovely so I made much of the available daytime to take mum out and see as many friends as I could in the short week I was actually on the ground.

Over the week, between pilgrimages to Mario’s for coffee, I was privileged to have coffee with Tamie; have lunch at Andy & Jac’s new home; have lunch at Julie and Gerry’s new home; dinner with Annie, John and the now tall and beautiful Freya; lunch with Miki, Mary and Charlie in their new apartment (followed by a walk in the Fitzroy Gardens); and then a group dinner with Tim &Amanda, Dick, Andy&Jac, Ross&Cristina and Dee&George at the great Arkibar in South Melbourne. I even popped into the office when I could, but since my work day only really started at 5pm there wasn’t much point, but it was great to catch up with the gang again and the lovely Doris organised a group lunch which I really enjoyed - although I do seem to have lost my chair, desk and phone at the office…

Miki & Mary's apartment

The days zoomed by and I ran out of time to see anyone else (for which I truly apologise), and pretty soon I found myself back in a taxi, heading back to the airport. But this time the class was Business, the sleeping arrangements horizontal, the bubbly French and the 6 hour wait in KL bearable (in the first-class lounge). But it took almost 40hrs, door-to-door, so I was frankly knackered by the time I climbed the 45 stairs, opened my door, and collapsed onto my bed.

My flat was considerably smaller, cleaner and much quieter than I remembered it. And like my post-Christmas experience, after a week of familial noise and company for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I felt the pang for a real house with people in it. Within a day I was back at work, like I had never left really. Within a week it all just seemed like a distant dream.

So I'm back at work now, "flat out like a lizard drinking", tanned from Greece..but that's another story.

Wombat xxx

Spring is Sprung

2007-06-08T04:47:00.000+08:00

It’s Saturday night, almost 9pm, the sun is just setting to the west, planes miles above me are leaving criss-cross trails in the remaining blue of the reddening sky, and a welcome spring breeze wafts over my shoulders. Having spent the whole day bound to the flat as a major milestone of my UK project was carried out, as soon as I got the all clear that things went well, I left for a long stroll, setting pace to the beat of my iPod. After a long hot shower and a bowl of my own Thai chicken noodles, I find myself sitting here writing this. I’m running a little late with the stories these days – too much work occupying my time. So there is Easter, then a quick trip to Melbourne and so on. But it’s a lovely time of the day at a lovely time of the year. So without further ado…

Boing!
"Spring is sprung , the grass is ris. I wonder where the birdies is… "

Springtime in London is one of life’s great visual and scented delights, and to have 4 days off for Easter, exploring the city in a deserted state, just added to the pleasure. Lovely weather and warmth followed me everywhere and I was happy to be pursued. Just a few weeks previously I was shuddering from the ice and snow and just 4 degrees. Although at any temperature above 20 degrees for more than 3 days, Londoners melt and they become alarmed...

Easter
"My mum used to say that Greek Easter was later because then they could get stuff cheaper"

The Easter long weekend consisted of leisurely walks in 20 degrees, bright blue skies and pale lemony sunshine. A typical day consisted of walking the well-worn Northerly path along the Thames to Borough Market with Pooneh and husband Shahrom to meet Bec (Matt was working) and my new friend, the lovely Cilla. We three arrived early to devour one of Borough Market’s famous chorizo sandwiches then Bec arrived to share a cold cider at the Globe pub.

This was Shahrom and Pooneh’s first time and Shahrom was in heaven as the delicious paprika-ridden juices dripped down onto our shoes as we moved among the stalls covered in the slender stalks of purple-sprouting broccoli, the fabulous deep-green spring greens (young cabbages picked at the beginning of spring before the plants form a head) and the tiny Jersey Royal potatoes not much bigger than marbles. Cilla joined us later in the day to stock up on produce and we all had a lovely day together.

On the way back, strolling through St James Park, the walking paths were edged with violets and primroses, and garden beds loaded with daffodils and jonquils. The pigeons and sparrows jostled competitively with the American Grey Squirrels that fill London’s parks with cute leaps and bounds, all hoping for a peanut or two. It was really very lovely.

Easter Monday was a grand affair, with my beloved Oxford crowd (Lynne and Jon, Clare and Luiz, Olivia and Ben, Jess and Cliff, Catharina), and me, all squeezing into my cosy apartment for a long, slow, Tuscan lunch. After my chemistry-set dining experience at Melbourne's Interlude (http://www.interlude.com.au/) a year ago with the delightful Miss Mollica, I resolved to serve heartier portions in less towering arrangements. I remain unmoved by expensive foams, froths, flavoured sheets of agar-agar and dehydrated wafers or iced confections alongside the hot and savoury. Rather I want my guests to be delighted by flavour, texture and interesting combinations of normally arranged food.

So, for the culinary-curious amongst you, lunch consisted of:

Antipasto: Salumi and Crostini alla Chiantigiana (Chicken Liver Pate Crostini);
Primo: Linguini with Rocket and Walnut Pesto;
Secondo: Arrosto di Agnello (Roast Lamb) with Quince Aioli, Roast Potatoes and Broad Beans cooked with Pancetta and Sage;
Dolce: A pair of rustic Tuscan Torte di Mele (Apple and Stewed Apricot Pies), served with Marsala cream.

Suffice to say, the Oxford crew have grown wise over the years and had shrewdly worn their elasto-pants.

A very cheery, chocolatey and cosy time was had by all.

I even saw the real Gromit measuring his spring veggies in HMV on the weekend...

So although a little late now...

Buona Pasqua xx

The Art of Travel

2007-03-31T07:12:00.000+08:00

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." - Susan Sontag

As I shed the woollen armour of winter and embrace the coming sun with sunglasses and floral shorts, I thought I should post my upcoming travels with the happy abandon that such a list warrants. I believe you have to seize life’s moments, to let opportunity meet preparation; and as someone once said (and Tamie lives by), "Eat dessert first, Life is uncertain".

Holiday of the First
is me heading to Melbourne for 10 days in mid April, to take a quick break to see me mum and as many of you as feasible, and to basically swap my current plane ticket (running out late May), with another plane ticket that will see me through to the end of the project.

Holiday of the Second
is 10 days sailing around the Greek isles in late May with an attractive gaggle of Swedes and a New Zealand Captain and Australian cook (me!). SunSail has provided us soundly with a 44 foot, twin-helm, sexy yacht...

Holiday of the Third
is a quick jaunt to the fjords of Norway in late June as Poonah and I accompany Nina to meet the flower girl for Nina’s wedding and spend a weekend in Oslo, south of Holmenkollen and north of Tusenfryd.

Holidaying Forth
will see me heading to Sweden in late July for a Summer House weekend with Nina’s family to pre-plan the wedding. I intend to sit around the summer house and whip myself with birch branches while sipping Aquavit, with beer chasers. My brain cells remember this tasty little beverage very well, as dinner at Andre and Nina’s flat one night ended with a gallon of this pale yellow Scandinavian liquor being poured continuously into my glass by Nina’s dad. Sitting at about 45 Proof, it is distilled from fermented potatoes, and was lightly flavoured with caraway seeds. I staggered home with a fixed grin and an unsteady gait (and a strange caraway smell) that night.

Quint-essentially next
sees me at Andre and Nina’s wedding in late August. What with the river boat trip and the Viking castle venue, the host of attractive Swedish extras and the endless flow of Aquavit I predict an extremely very merry time for all. I am remaining a few days after the wedding to take in the waters and sauna out the vodka and Aquavit. Something tells me I'll need it.

Holiday of the Sixth
sees me wearing a Sombrero, Poncho and Cigar, Clint Eastwood style, in Mexico for the wedding of Will and Carolina. We are talking sunshine, panama hats, Mojito’s, the Salsa (the dance and the dip), the Mamba and so on. I look forward to hot Cuban cigars, cold Mexican beers and pretty signorina’s in summer dresses. Oh and of course the divine and holy union of two lovely people…again.

So there it is, a season to look forward to and to relish, before I head home. I am lucky to have such lovely opportunities and such lovely new friends. But I believe you make your own luck. Actually, most lucky for me is that I look nothing like my passport photo – as Sir Vivian Fuchs once said, “If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren't well enough to travel”. I do love that quote.

I leave this week’s posting with the words of Mark Twain (thanks Moya); apt words to live by given my travel plans :)

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

London from Space

So, with as the wind picks up and I start throwing off my bowlines…

Walter x

I hab a cod

2007-03-18T10:46:00.000+08:00

Blahhhh
I hab a cod id by doze
I cab hobby breed
Imb copink all de dime

Little on the Blog front this week 'cause I've been tied up at work with the client for the last two weeks and now I hab a cod. I am currently in the "hacking up a lung" stage, which followed the "my nose is dripping like Victoria Falls" stage. Although I have found that I need fewer tissues for my ever-sensitive nose if I remain motionless on the couch watching re-runs of Star Trek and drinking copious cups of tea. If I don't make sense it's because my brain is basically scrambled and thoughts and actions basically reduced to eat, sleep, cough, and make tea. Anything more complicated is met with me staring at the object (awakening to people calling my name), or thinking out loud trying to remember what the word is for ‘window’ or ‘banana’.

As you can see, it’s almost 3am, just after my 3rd attempt to get to sleep (horizontal = coughing), and I didn't get much sleep last night either, so if I sound a little crazy, it’s because I probably am!

So pease send sympathy or chicken soup…or both. I need some :(

Bolda x

PS. It's the lovely Anita's birthday today - "Happy Birthday!" I wish I was there xx

Solar Power

2007-03-12T07:21:00.000+08:00

In the immortal words of failed pilot and sometime singer John Denver, Sunshine on my shoulders does indeed make me happy :)

Since my last posting, London has become bathed in warmth and sunshine, the sky turned a brilliant blue and I found my happy face. I went from being a over-beiged Submarine Captain, to taking last Sunday off and indulging in some shore leave around London. I had planned another lunch at my place, but I had to cancel as my Customers were in town and insisted on having a late breakfast meeting at the 'Apostrophe' cafe in Regent Street.

So at around 7:30am (a real lie-in for me), I woke up to rays of heavenly sunshine streaming through the wooden Venetians; I rolled out of bed, showered and shaved, then shimmied to the kitchen to make an early breakfast: Lavazza Qualita' Oro coffee from Venice, an organic three-egg omelette with fresh Italian Buffalo Mozzarella and Smoked Wild Alaskan Salmon, and a slice of organic Caraway Rye with unsalted Danish butter - in my tracksuit and explorer socks while watching cartoons on the tellie in the lounge. Truly wonderful. Ahhh...

Sunday Breakfast

Then I put on my Kathmandu walking trousers, Italian walking shoes, Polo shirt, my Red Italian Ski Jacket (it was still quite chilly at this time of the morning), Police sunglasses, iPod and Hugo Boss aftershave...I was set. As I had a few hours up my sleeve I took the circular route, across Vauxhall Bridge to the South side, then up the Embankment along the river, past the London Eye and then crossed over Hungerford Bridge to head up to Regent Street to meet them at 9:30.

London Eye views

Hungerford Bridge

A shadow of my former self :)

After good coffee and some project talk, I left my customers heading for the Natural History Museum while I headed up to Oxford Street for a perusal of the DVD offerings at HMV. As the day was getting sunnier and warmer, I decided to call Moya (who had just got a new major script writing job), and Will and Carolina, and meet up for lunch at 'Eat and Two Veg', a modern vegetarian restaurant in fashionable Marylebone High Street. So Moya walked in and met me at Piccadilly Circus to walk there, and Will and Carolina caught the quicker tube and met us inside.

Eat and Two Veg

Lunch was delicious and the bottle of Prosecco (to celebrate Moya's mew job) helped wash down our yummy Soya and nut loaf 'Sunday roast', with veggies, Yorkshire pudding and gravy. After a few hours of lunch, we ambled to a nearby pub where Moya treated us to cold ciders outside and a bowl of brain-numbing Wasabi Peas. Then it was a few hours of walking about in the lowering sunshine, window shopping, until it started to get dark about 6:30 and we split up and headed home.

On the way home I took a bad photo of the illuminated London Eye from the footbridge in St James park to remind me of the lovely day...

Illuminati

...the day I found my smile :)

Captain Nemo xx

All work and no play...

2007-03-04T10:27:00.000+08:00

As I sit here in my rather beige flat writing this, it is a surprisingly balmy London evening and the last of the day’s low sun is streaming through my window. I am made warmer by the last licks of sunlight, the central heating just kicking in and a mug of hot, strong tea. More importantly I am cheered up a little by three double-choc Tim Tams from a pack brought back for me recently.

I am working too hard, I can tell I am working too hard because of the signs: I have a stack of Christmas presents and cards still to be sent; Judy at checkout 13 at Sainsbury’s asked if I had been away so long because I'd been on holidays; and the pretty Japanese/Brazilian girl who cuts my hair had to bring out the hedge trimmers. All this work and no play is making me very dull. But I’m not the only one…

I looked it up: in 2400 B.C., the Egyptian sage Ptahhoptep was the first to write something like ‘I reckoneth I toileth too hardeth and time passeth without any funeth to gladdeneth my moodeth. Someone killeth some slave-es and cheereth me up.' - My translation. Then there's a huge quantum leap to 1659 when English scribe James Howell actually wrote the more familiar ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ in his very popular tome 'Proverbs in English, Italian, French and Spanish'. Meanwhile, 400 years later in a Pimlico flat…

Not that I mind working a lot – it is why I am here after all – but working a lot is all I seem to be doing lately. All attempts over the last few weeks to write something interesting and insightful have ended in big sighs and blank pages. I have nothing to write about that isn't contained in the four beige walls of my room, and that is too boring for words, I can assure you. But for your viewing pleasure...

Beige

And with everyone back home seemingly getting engaged, getting married or getting pregnant, it’s only making things worse as I find myself treading water in 'that' department. So everyone, please give me a break and just wait until I get back home before you get any more engaged, married or numerous. I need time to adapt (adopt?) and catch up :)

My clever Oxford friend (and ex-landlady), Lynn tells me we are all in the same boat, reminding me it is February in the UK and that I have just forgotten what February is like (cold, dark, wet and miserable). Optimistically, she tells me “we will all explode into joy at Easter, you wait and see.”

So (he says, optimistically), until next time, when you’ll surely find me outside the apartment at Easter, exploding into joy :)

Walter x

Richie and Caroline come to visit

2007-03-04T09:18:00.000+08:00

I had some welcome visitors the other week, Melbourne suburb-neighbours Richie and Caroline popped in to London for a bit of a visit. Richie has been in the UK for a while now, up north in the city of Hull doing his Surgical Fellowship. So he caught the train down the day before to meet wife and recently pregnant ('avec bump') Caroline, who flew in from Melbourne to join him for a year in the UK.

Caroline was a little jet-lagged so Richie was doing his best to walk her about and keep her up each day. On my day with them, I showed them the Thames route from my flat past Big Ben, the Houses of Parliment, Westminster Abbey the London Eye, Millenium Bridge, St Pauls, and so on, before leaving them at St Paul's Tube Station for them to head back to their hotel and me to head home.

Caroline & Richie next to the London Eye.

The next night we met up to eat at the delightfully old-fashioned Hungarian restaurant the 'Gay Hussar’ just off Soho Square. It was a unique experience.

This 50 year-old eatery is famous for feeding large plates of Hungarian food to Labour politicians, the likenesses of which, line every square inch of wall space.

We ordered Cabbage Rolls, Double-roast Duck on red cabbage, and so on. Huge servings of very delicious food with the kind of waiters and service you see in old movies, with slicked-back hair, matching moustaches and a crisp white serviette draped over their arms. It was a fabulous meal washed down with a bottle of 2004 Egri Kekfrankos-Cabernet Sauvignon, and we finished the night with a glass of lovely 1996 Aszu 5 Puttonyos Tokaji.

It was so nice to see them both, and to be able to congratulate them on their bump in person. I find myself invited up to spend a weekend with them in York (about half-way between London and Hull), which I am really looking forward to - when I can find some time to actually go :)

Love and Káposzta,
Walter x

London Snow - Pics from my window

2007-02-12T21:44:00.000+08:00

As most of you suffer from the heat back home, our reasonably mild Winter took a turn for the worst last week. Overnight the temperature dropped into negative figures and the snow storm covered most of the country - the worst snow in 10 years. From my 3rd floor window I snapped some late morning photos of the street, although my phone fogged up a little, so some are a bit blurry around the edges. Then I went for an afternoon walk as the snow was melting and snapped a wall plaque from a nearby Victorian era children's hospital, a flower pot downstairs and some footprints.

Children's Hospital Wall Plaque

The Milbank School across the road

Erasmus Street looking North

Erasmus Street looking South

My footprints on the pavement

Brrr

Walter xx

Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees...

2007-01-26T00:33:00.000+08:00

Australia Day...

Australia Day is Australia's official national day, 26 January. It commemorates the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove on that day in 1788. As controversial as this date is amongst the indigenous population of Australia, it is a Public Holiday celebrated across the country with family BBQ's, sailing on the bay, fireworks in most major cities, cricket matches on the beach or a day by the pool.

For those of us in far away lands, we try to get out hands on some TimTams, Cherry Ripes, Violet Crumbles and Vegemite Sandwiches, then invite some Local folk (Londoners in my case), for a roast lamb dinner, cold beers and Coonawarra Reds...

This is a little song you have to learn for the BBQs on the day:.

Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees
Give me a home among the gum trees
With lots of plum trees
A sheep or two and a kangaroo
A clothesline out the back
Veranda out the front
And an old rocking chair

Of course, the cute bits are the little gestures that go along with the song. They're easier to show than explain in words but here goes:

Give me a home..
Hold your arms over your head, coming up to a point at the hands. This is the roof of your home.

..among the gum trees
Move your arms out and spread your fingers. You're a gum tree.

With lots of plum trees
Wiggle your fingers and wave your arms slightly to indicate the plums.

A sheep or two..
Hold your hands to each side of your head with your index fingers pointed up. These are the horns of your sheep.

..and a kangaroo
Hold your arms up tight in front of your chest, wrists limp and fingers curved so that they point back down to the ground. Hop a couple times. Congratulations, you're a kangaroo!

A clothesline..
Hold your hands out in front of your chest, index finger to thumb on both hands and start out with these four fingers together. Move your hands apart, keeping index finger to thumb on each hand.

..out the back
Point your thumbs out and bend your arms up to point behind you with your thumbs.

Veranda out..
Hold your arms up in front of your chest, bend your hands at the wrist so they point straight up and bend your fingers so they point straight in front of you. Push your arms forward while straightening your hands & wrists out. Your fingers should stay at the same level as you do this.

..the front
Change your hands to point in front of you with your index fingers.

And an old rocking chair
Hold your arms out to each side like they're resting on the arms of a chair. Rock back and forth at your waist.

Wombat D'Onofrio xx

Venetian Wanderings

2007-01-20T02:37:00.000+08:00

Well the weather Gods have gone mad and as 80 mph (130 kph) winds whip around London causing the large windows in my coffee shop to literally bend and flex today, and then to shove me from one side of the road to the other on the way back, I thought it would be appropriate to tell you of a more gentle and calm time. Venice just before Christmas with friends...

Venice! Everyone knows Venice. Everyone knows about the Canals and tourists bobbing about in Gondolas, Piazza San Marco, the glass blowing, and of course the cute and dinky bridges, but to me it seems to be the most extraordinary endeavour for a group of humans to undertake. Two thousand years ago a crazy mix of hunters and fishermen escaping Attila the Hun and then the Lombards, came together to settle on the rich mudflats of these 140 or so islands, to raise fish in ponds and build wooden huts on stilts to stay above the streets stacked with garbage and pigs (to eat the rubbish). Over time they stripped the mainland bare of millions of trees and built a whole city out of wood, joining the little muddy islands with all those dinky bridges I like so much. They eventually replaced the wood with stone, got rid of the pigs and horses (yes horses), and became one of the greatest sea ports in the history of Europe. It always amazes me whenever I remember this story.

Anyway, my fascination with bridge building fanatics aside, a few weeks back, ten of us ventured to the aforementioned Venice, specifically The Hotel Principe, via an obscenely early EasyJet flight from Stansted airport. The point of the trip wasn’t to make me happy (although I was), but it was set up for Andre’ to surprise-ask the lovely Nina for her hand in marriage on a Gondola on the Grand Canal. We had all been in on the secret for two months by now, helping in the planning and the deception, so we were all happy to now reap the rewards of our deception. Three of the group came over to London from Sweden, including Nina’s sister Anna, to make the journey with us.

The Good Ship Daniela

The Hotel Principe

We bump-landed on Italian soil on a grey, wet Saturday morning, but nothing could dampen our spirits as we were ferried across on the beautifully sleek, wooden water taxi ‘Daniela’, to check into the hotel straight off the Grand Canal. The Hotel Principe was a pile of 4-Star marble loveliness, and to heighten the magic, Andre and Nina moved to the Honeymoon Suite with French (Venetian?) Windows onto the Grand Canal – it was a beautiful room with a beautiful view. But the real adventure started when we invaded a nearby Italian Bar and everyone had rich coffees and amazing pastries – I have to say I had been harping on about real coffee for months now – Café Nero in London really doesn’t cut it for me. The look on everyone’s faces when they had a real Espresso and a perfect Café Latte was vindication for all my months of whinging I think.

Coffees at the Bar

Cakes at the Bar

Coming out of a Bar and into the chaos that is Venice will silence even the most jaded traveller. Time doesn’t pass in Venice; it flows. Here, you are at the mercy of the water that surrounds you: you either walk or take a boat, or you don’t go anywhere. The city’s pace envelopes you, and suddenly you welcome the time it takes to walk to Piazza San Marco and the twisting turns and dead ends you encounter along the way. The layers of this enchanted place are so deep with history, passion, and life it’s difficult to even scratch the surface.

Saturday Ambling

Saturday Ambling 2

We excitedly ambled and photographed and window-shopped our way along the Northern route of the Grand Canal until we came across a small place for lunch with an almost London name – The Golden Lion: “Ristorantino Cicchetteria Veneziana - Al Leon d 'Oro”. We piled in for a hearty, tasty lunch of seafood antipasto, then pasta or risotto or tuna salads, all washed down with the excellent Veneto-region house red. After lunch we ventured out to find the sun had come out.

It was time…

Andre was looking a little nervous as we approached just the right bridge and picked just the right Gondola for the ‘big question’. We convincingly negotiated Andre and Nina to take the first Gondola while we all pretended to be picking our own to follow. Once they were out of sight of course, we followed our secret instructions to get champagne and glasses and meet by the next bridge in 45 minutes.

About 55 minutes later (oops), after a slight mix-up with the bridges, they glided back slightly flushed and with beaming smiles; Nina holding out her hand with a beautiful white gold diamond ring sparking in the sunlight, shouting “We’re engaged! He asked me to marry him!” It was a lovely moment for us ‘surprised’ bystanders, and I don’t think I was alone when I felt real pangs of love and envy for the beauty of this moment and their unbridled joy and enthusiasm.

We're Engaged!

Showing off the ring

After kisses and hugs and tears and some frantic Swedish chatter between sisters, we fired the corks into the Grand Canal, spilled warm champagne on the pavement and drank to our collective joy and admiration from cute blue (Venetian!) glasses from the supermarket.

It was time to celebrate so we wandered arm-in-arm around the city, until we found a lovely restaurant for the evening, booked it, then spread out to do some shopping. Andre’ and I spied some lovely Lui di Lancetti watches, smiled at each other and went in. I bought one for myself and Nina bought one for Andre’ (her engagement present to him), and then we two lads walked out, proudly knowing exactly what time it was in Venice.

Eventually back at the hotel we rested, showered, changed and met everyone in the Honeymoon suite for more champagne and cork firing into the Grand Canal (I was getting good at this by now). The nearby restaurant was lovely, the food fantastic, and the wine again just perfect. At the end of the meal Andre then told us he was treating us all to dinner as his gift to us for coming and sharing the moment, so naturally the girls then ordered desserts and the men then ordered whiskeys and coffees. We had another slow amble around our part of the city to an eventual welcome sleep after a long, alcoholic, emotional day.

The next day was icy but bathed in low, golden sunlight. After a long, leisurely breakfast at the hotel we somehow split into two groups, one group following the same, northern path to Piazza San Marco, while the other half, with me included, taking the southern, less touristy path. Lunch was at a pizza place that didn’t do pizza for lunch, but too lazy to find another, we settled in for more lovely food and wine. I don’t remember having a bad meal in Venice. Granted, I tend to spend a little bit more than most, but the competition is so tight that restaurants have to perform. Meals are paced, wine is savoured, and it’s as though time doesn’t exist. We found ourselves easily lingering over our meal for hours and not regretting it.

Sunday Ambling

Sunday Ambling 2

Later in the day, after buying some lovely Venetian glass rings and a very tasteful Snow Dome (Piazza San Marco with bobbing Gondola!) as gifts, and a tiny Christmas tree, long bars of Torrone and a Panettone for me, we ended up at Piazza San Marco.

Piazza San Marco, in all its grandeur and ostentatiousness, is, as expected, spectacular, especially when you arrive at dusk when the square starts to light up and the heavy, foggy air settles in. The San Marco district itself is very commercial, with everything from Gucci, Armani, and Dolce to the surrounding ring of dodgy Murano Glass shops under the cloisters. But all this tackiness is offset by the amazingly enduring Basilica San Marco, looking all the while like “a vast and warty bug taking a meditative walk” as Mark Twain once described it. It always makes me smile. We found the whole place just a perfect setting for our final few hours of exploring before our flight that evening.

Piazza San Marco at Dusk

Piazza San Marco at Night

In Venice, what immediately remains with you are the vivid, sensual memories of the sights and smells and tastes, but it is hard to ignore the resonance of the two thousand years of habitation and the souls these small islands were home to. Just near where I sat as I was thinking all this, stood Marco Polo’s actual house, below which I once kissed a pretty girl many years ago and Nina said yes to Andre just one day ago. Five hundred years apart, we all came together - linked by the tangible history that embraces you here. The city may be decaying, sinking, a bit musty and dilapidated, but it’s the stories and the history that makes it beautiful.

Next story is Christmas in France...

I hope it's warm and dry where you are,

Walter x

Joyeux Noel

2007-01-12T07:42:00.000+08:00

As some of you know, I had inital intentions of going to Italy for Christmas, but this fell through at the last minute so Stef and Caroline invited me to join them in cold and misty Brittany for the festivities. As they are family to me, it was a great pleasure to be able to see them again and share the love and the Christmas pudding...

Christmas in Brittany
“If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.”

Stansted airport is your basic small, untidy, overcrowded, understaffed London airport catering to the budget airlines I frequent so much when in Europe. But the difficulty in getting there and the mentally eroding time it takes to get through security these days, means that it is an ordeal comparable to the pain and desirability of multiple root canal. Arriving 2 hours early, for a 55 minute flight, meant that I had just enough time to check in, run to the mile-long snaking cattle line through security (of course, only 3 of the 15 desks are manned), then run to the gate to just make it in time. Remember that if I am just 10 minutes late I don’t get on. So we boarded the plane, fought for a seat (no seat allocation), then sat, ready to leave.

Approximately 30 minutes later, after studying the Air-Menu of chips, chocolate and curry snacks at Hotel Bar Fridge prices; our Swedish pilot explained to us in an excited, Swedish tone, that we “either, have a problem with the engines, or the computer telling us there is a problem! So we will just park over here on the left while we get an engineer to come and have a look”. Another 20 minutes later, Pilot Sven declares that "the computer had to be re-booted, just like your computer at home that needs to be restarted every now and then”, and that now there is no indication of any engine trouble. Terrific! Wow! I'm confident. People pale visibly around me. So, with everyone completely silent, we taxi out to the runway. We are just 45 minutes late for a 55 minute flight – not bad for Ryanair. Dennis Potter once said (while dying of lung cancer), that he did not fully understand the dreaded term "terminal illness" until he saw Heathrow for himself. Same applies to Stansted.

At the very tiny, but welcome Dinard airport (think of a shed with passport control), after extracting my bag from the 100m of luggage piled onto 20m of conveyor belt, I walked into the warm and loving arms of Stef and Caroline. The next day their London based son George also came to stay for the week. I love this family and was so happy to be invited to share Christmas with them.

Stef and Caroline, formerly of Wolverhampton, now live in the delightfully rural region of Quimper (pronounced ‘Camper’), in Brittany. Surrounded by rolling hills and misty valleys, their property is a wonderfully peaceful and calming refuge. They live in a typical Briton stone and wood house with rooms over multiple levels including in the roof, a main fireplace tucked into an unlikely corner of the living room, and busy wallpaper on the walls, doors and ceilings.

Caroline, Stef and George - avec house

The huge kitchen was just the thing after my small flat - eating at a dinner table was a great treat for me. The newly finished Library/Multimedia Room off the lounge room was a wonderful haven for anyone who loves books or movies (ie. me). With every wall packed floor to ceiling in books, a lovely 7.1 surround sound system, a cinematic LCD screen TV and 250 DVDs to pick from, most nights were movie night at the Bukowski’s. I was as happy as can be. Downstairs in the basement, Stef has his mini charcuterie (butcher shop), producing fantastic Prosciuttos, sumptious hams, spicy salamis and rich, strong cider. Besides the wonders inside the house, they have enough green land outside of the house to keep sheep and chickens, have a pond and a few barns.

The lounge with fireplace

The Kitchen

Over the week or so I was there, we spent a series of quintessentially French days together; walking the two dogs through the back hills before dinner; meeting the French neighbours for a Ricard (anise liquor) or two; dining out for a beautiful French meal at the local restaurant; having a traditional Breton lunch of galettes (dark buckwheat pancakes filled with ham and cheese) at the local creperie, washed down with cidre (cider); popping in to see Stef’s delightful parents Doris and Lesh for coffee and cake; making food forays into the nearby towns for some excellent local seafood, cheeses, breads, pates and wines; taking a long cold walk at the nearby seaside, out across the muddy shore at low-tide; visiting various neighbours with very pretty daughters (one was, delightfully, “in lingerie in Paris”, although this was unverified); and even popping into town for some Belgian chocolates.

Setting the tone of the week, on our first night Stef and I prepared a wonderful pasta dish of seared lobster and scallops, followed by bowls of the very small and tasty mussels particular to Brittany. Yes it was a painfully hedonistic week, but we managed to bear every moment, suffer every morsel and endure every mollusc…

My plate of Mussel shells

Le Bukowskis on Le seaside mudflats

Christmas lunch was a visual and gastronomic delight. The free-range, locally- plucked Turkey was unbelievably delicious. The roast potatoes, pumpkin, carrots and brussel sprouts (blagh) were wonderful; the pudding divine, and the perfectly aged bottles of old Gran Vin de St Emillion from Bordeaux completed the perfection. Actually we were lucky as 30 of the Turkey’s siblings were taken by a fox just a few nights before (they got the fox in the end). Stuffed now, we retired to the nearest pieces of suitable furniture and assumed reclined positions to unbuckle our belts and give thanks, burp and digest…ahhhh.

Over the following few days we attended two more Christmas dinners. We had a delightfully yummy dinner at Doris and Lesh’s, and a slightly stranger dinner at a nearby Jamaican couple’s house. The Jamaican dinner was unusual to say the least. First thing that was noticeable was that the couple were both white, but with that Jamaycaaan Maaan accent you identify with black Jamaicans smoking something medicinal while sipping some rum on the beach. So that was interesting. Then the food was such a weird mix of traditional European and Jamacian fare, that I was slightly confused. French Roast Duck, English roast potatoes with peas, carrots and gravy mixed it up with mashed yams, spicy seafood rice with peas, sweet potatoes, fresh pineapple slices, very dry roast taro root, and so on. My palate may never be the same again.

By the 28th December it was time for me to return home, happy and well rested, but vowing (for the umpteenth time) never to board another cheap airline again. Carrying with me a few kilos of French cheeses, Italian salamis and Belgian chocolates, I was a veritable Ambassador for European Gastronomy.

Doris laughing at something funny :)

After the inevitable hours to retrieve my luggage, catch the city train and catch the delayed Victorian Tube, my Pimlico flat felt considerably smaller and quieter than I remembered it. Actually with all the ripe cheeses in the house, it was also considerably smellier that I remembered it. After a week or so of familial noise and company for breakfast, lunch and dinner avec pets, I felt the pang for a real house with people in it.

Within a day I was back at work, fending off the issues that had arrived at my virtual doorstep in my absence. Within a week it all just seemed like a nice dream. It took a long while to get back into my solo life groove - I missed the Bukowski’s terribly – still do.

So, better late than never I suppose I wish you all:

Merry Christmas!
Nedeleg laouen na bloavezh mat! (old Breton)
Joyeux Noel! (new French)

La Wally xxx

Shaken. Not Stirred.

2006-12-05T00:38:00.000+08:00

It’s a cold, wet and miserable London afternoon. The central heating has kicked in, the rain and hail drums madly against the giant leaves of the maple trees just outside and the fierce wind rattles my frosty window for attention. The nostalgically black and white classic “It Came from Outer Space” is on the tellie, and strong, sweet tea sits steaming in my Ikea mug. It’s been an age since I wrote anything and after lots of emails from lots of you for an update, I thought I’d send one! So in the spirit of the latest Bond movie…

Casino Royale
I saw the new Bond movie the other day – most excellent, I highly recommend it for those who like high class violence, gritty revenge, beautiful women and suits so sharp they could cut glass. I also saw the stirringly wonderful “Little Miss Sunshine” a few weeks back (my favourite movie for the year), and Moya took me to yet another BAFTA event last week: the premier of the new Aardman movie “Flushed Away” where Hugh Jackman and the directors came out after and regaled us with great stories about the making of the movie.

From Russia with Love
I was a little shaken today, to realise over coffee with Andre and Nina that before we saw “Little Miss Sunshine” the other week, that we actually ate at the “Istu” Sushi Bar that Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in, the day after he was poisoned! I only realised that today, so I may make that call to the NHS for a spot check on my Polonium levels…yikes!

The Man with the Golden Gun
One weekend, Stef came to London from Brittany and invited me out with son George to the Science Museum for the day. I love Science and I love Museums, so guess how much I like Science Museums? THIS MUCH! Jumping to the chance, I tubed it to the nearest tube station, shared a pizza lunch with them, and then set about absorbing ourselves in the History of Computer Games exhibition. This actually really only involved playing Pub Pong, Frogger, Galaxian, Donkey Kong and Pac Man (to name a few) and shooting cowboys on a screen with a toy gun for a few hours, before we tired of the exhibition and ventured out to the Museum proper. This was a great adventure: real Spitfires, real scorched NASA Luna Modules, real German V2 rockets – Boys Own Manual stuff. I was in Walter’s Own Heaven. After a few beers in a nearby pub, with darkness and the cold settling down for the night, we hugged and then parted ways. It was so lovely to see them both again. I will be popping over to Brittany soon.

The World is Not Enough
For some it isn’t big enough, so they are in motion and so I have had some intrepid visitors:

Bec and Glenn: First to arrive was this much tanned duo from Melbourne, here via 6 months through the Americas. They stayed with me for a month while they trawled the internet and the pavement to see lots of apartments. London is hard on those searching for their own place to live after coming down from the relaxed and mellow highs of self-managed travel. On their feet now, I think the red tape and process one has to go through here just to get mail to arrive, phones to connect, real estate agents to reply or the visa people to act at all, probably got them down. I couldn’t actually help them other than to cook, give them a nice room, share my precious Vegemite and show them where the nearest IKEA was. We did have some shocking news during their stay – somehow Glenn found a fault in the wiring behind the fuse box in the hallway and every time we plugged anything in we got smoke and sparks! The electrician eventually found that two overstretched and unsealed pieces of wiring had eventually come apart (someone tried to save 10 pence in wire), leaving us with no Neutral and almost leaving us in ashes. But we survived and Bec and Glenn have since moved into a lovely modern flat on the other side of London, and Glenn is working, so they seem well set on track for a great London life. I look forward to their housewarming party!

Jo and Ashley: Next arrivals were the lovely Jo and Ashley, from our Peruvian trek last year. It was so lovely to see them after so long. Michelle couldn’t come as her boy was heading to some dangerous part of the world the following day, but otherwise it was a Peru micro-reunion. They came for Saturday dinner (Middle Eastern, from Claudia Roden’s, “Arabesque”), stayed the night, then after a hearty breakfast we walked around London all day, stopping to have a London Pub roast lunch about half way round, and stopping for the photo at Covent Garden. Once back at my place, we had tea and jam muffins, and then they whisked away by train to be home for tea! Can’t wait to do it all again.

Jo and Ashley at Covent Garden

Picadilly Circus

Diamonds Are Forever
Several weeks back now I was honoured to attend London’s glamour event of the year, the Wedding of William Pohl and Carolina Vilchis in the Green Room of The Old Marylebone Town Hall. Attended by Mexicans and Pohls alike :) , it was a sweet, touching and rather musical celebration of their love, everyone looking splendid in their summer suits and dresses. Mary stayed on to organise the whole affair, and Miki and Caro’s parents flew in (separately), to attend. After the small and charming wedding, we all taxied to the ulta chic “Luciano” of Mayfair. This "new collaboration between two legends of the UK hospitality scene, Marco Pierre White & Rocco Forte, is a thoroughly glamorous & grown-up affair. The interiors come courtesy of über-designer David Collins & he’s excelled himself: the bar at the front of the operation, devoted to us for the afternoon, involves eye-catching mosaic floors, sumptuous ox-blood leather seating & a sparkly back bar", washed over with Cuban rhythms coming from the mini Bose speakers. Oh how we laughed and danced, oh how we drank champagne and smoked Cuban cigars and oh how we ate fine Italian finger food. For some unknown reason, in the middle of all this, some of us ran across the road and sank tall shots of aged Tequila, then ran right back. It was truly a wonderful day, although once the Tequila kicked in, most of us just sat there and smiled a lot.

Will and Caro (Miki's photo)

The Two Papas

Moya and Mary

The Living Daylights
One fine evening, long ago now, my favourite Iranian couple here in sunny Pimlico, Pooneh and Sharhom, invited us all to a Halloween party at their place. In a strange case of life imitating art, on a cold foggy evening I stood looking up, under a lone Victorian street lamp in my Catholic Priest’s costume (black suit, black shirt and white cardboard collar), clutching a bible (Lonely Planet Guide to London), with a briefcase of holy water (French Reds). Immersed in my own opening scene from The Exorcist, I was startled by a poncho, hat and cigar getting out of a Taxi and standing next to me. Then, like the oasis scene from "Lawrence of Arabia", Clint Eastwood and I watched as an approaching black dot came closer and closer through the fog. It turned out to be Blackbeard, with NHS glasses. Then Walter finally turned up from work in his normal suit and tie, whipped out a pointy witch’s hat and donned a long rubber nose with warts. We were set. Inside, we met our hosts Fred Flintstone and Princess Jasmine (from Aladdin), met a gaggle of Fairies and Princesses and other strange figures, and feasted on wonderful Iranian food and Cabernets. Great fun.

Nina and Pooneh

Blackbeard, Princess Sunithi and Walter

You Only Live Twice
Several weeks ago Moya generously invited me to another offering from her BAFTA film nights, a Hollywood satire called “For Your Consideration”. Not only did I have the opportunity to see this funny film and then meet the actors and directors afterwards, I found myself sitting next to Prunella Scales (Sybil in Fawlty Towers), and in front of Tom Conti and Richard E Grant as a bonus. Then I found myself listening to Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, Ricky Gervais and the others tell very funny stories about making the film. I was in cinematic heaven. Moya plucked up the courage to actually mention to the assembly that Catherine O’Hara was actually being toted for an award for this movie (the comical point 'within' the movie), and this raised a howl of laughter amongst the whole auditorium. Catherine O’Hara actually came up to Moya afterwards and thanked her personally (and by name), for her comment – a real “London Moment” according to Mary Pohl’s guidelines. So I am taking the opportunity now to thank the amazing Moya for all these once in a lifetime experiences.

Moonraker
A few weeks ago I was happily invited to stay at Henk and Suzy’s place for Guy Fawkes’ night. I hadn’t seen Henk or Suzy for over 5 years and I had missed them a lot. I also counted on lots of the old Oxford medical crowd to attend (Fifi and Steve Wall and so on), so I was very happy at the prospect. Upon arrival I was presented with my very own Finnish winter hat, embroidered in reds and blues, and with tassels, so I was well armoured against the cold night. Once we lit the huge bonfire and threw on the unfortunate Guy, we had to strip off a little because of the heat. I must admit I was actually only expecting the odd tiny rocket or a whirling pinwheel or two, but this was a whole different story: The assembled crowd of old friends (dangerous felons), had brought with them a veritable arsenal of intercontinental missiles and window rattlers. Our direct competition seemed to be some distant neighbours and the British Infantry, but our blitz of Moon Rakers and Widow Makers basically blew the tops off the trees and the hats off the kids next door, filling the grounds with a heady fog of cordite. Intermission was greeted with a brief walk to the nearest Chinese restaurant where Henk and Suzy treated us all to a feast of dim sum and stir fry. Well lubricated by the wine and beer, we wondered back and then the very same felons broke curfew by carrying on with a few well-placed nuclear devices; deafening and blinding in the darkness. It was a great night, rounded off by more wine and whiskey in the lounge. After a night sleeping on the huge couch and a hearty bacon-butty breakfast, I returned home on the train with the wonderful smell of wood smoke in my hair and clothes.

GoldenEye
What can I say about my fair-haired friend and UK guide, Tara? Without help from this clever, generous, attractive and resourceful person, my entry into London life would only have been possible after months of drug therapy. The red tape and confusion that the UK can dish out to the unwary traveller is about as welcome as Measles, but Tara turned up one day and somehow ironed out all the British bureaucratic bumps, organising both my apartment life (and recently, even some of my personal life), all with no sense of bother, and a smile. So I thank her!

Tara

For Your Eyes Only
People seem very interested in my eating out habits here, so I made a list of notable eateries. Take a look at them in www.squaremeal.co.uk if you want photos and details:
Benares (Modern Indian, Mayfair)
Just St James (Modern Eclectic, Mayfair)
Kazan (Middle Eastern, Pimlico)
La Poule au Pot (Traditional French, Chelsea)
Luciano (Italian, Mayfair)
Mango Tree (Thai, Victoria)
Rules (English, Covent Garden)
Sartoria (Italian, Saville Row)
Thomas Cubitt (Gastro Pub, Westminster)
W'Sens (Modern French, Mayfair)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Well, that’s it again for a while. I’m really busy at the moment, with work and study kicking in with a thump over the last month.

I am off to Italy next weekend – I can’t wait to breathe in the air of my birth, drink proper coffee and just get away from the apartment for a while!

Be well, take care and although I’m hoping to get my Christmas cards out in time, I need time to buy some first! So please forgive a busy lad his duties and chores. I am hoping to be in Milan for Christmas and Paris for New Year’s Eve, but with no confirmation yet, I am quickly looking for other possibilities. So if you have anywhere I should be for Christmas, please let me know.

Love and Christmas Pud,
W x

Pimlico in Pictures

2006-10-17T04:47:00.000+08:00

In the intermission before I think of something interesting to say, I thought you might like to see some of my neighbourhood of Pimlico...

The iconic Regency Cafe

Pausing in the rain on Belgrave Road

The wonderful Tate Britain

Outside the Pimlico Tube Station

Porticos along Belgrave Road

The Grosvenor Estate

So that was my week or so - in pictures.

Take care,
Walter