Greg and Kat's blog

We left off with Rome…

The cruise ship docked in Naples the next day: it’s a port city, so no shuttle buses to worry about. We had no agenda in Naples, other than to eat pizza.

We walked around the city a bit, but mostly killed time until our lunch at Pizzeria Brandi. They are the creator of Pizza Margharita, and that’s exactly what we had. We had planned a second lunch before leaving the city, but all the restaurants closed for the afternoon and we were foiled.

Then, an at-sea day and the next day at Palma de Mallorca.

I had been thinking of Palma as kind of just a place for them to stop the ship for the day, so I wasn’t expecting much. It ended up being one of the prettiest places we went the whole trip. The guide books said that it was a late-night party city and things didn’t really get started until late morning. We got off the boat at around 10:00, but everything except the occasional coffee shop was closed until noon or even a little later. Two notable finds: a cathedral with palm trees (which was both beautiful and novel), and café bombon (espresso and sweetened condensed milk in equal parts; look for it at your local Cafe Artigiano soon).

Then we took an extra day in Barcelona before we made our way back.

On the way back, we spent a few days at my parents’ place in Ontario. That was fairly uneventful, as a family gathering should be.

All told, we were gone 25 days. That’s just about my limit for travelling: I’m glad to get back to my own bed. However, our bathroom is dirty, and I don’t think the maid is coming.

The last two days have been spent cruising to cities that aren’t ports: Florence and Rome. Both days involved a 1.5 hour bus ride from the local cruise ship port into the city. So, all of a sudden, our 12 hour port days shrunk to 8 hours in the city.

In Florence, we stumbled on the Galileo Museum, which was very cool: collections of old scientific instruments from Renaissance Europe, including some stuff from Galileo. At the time, science was all about showing off at your benefactor’s parties, so a lot of the instruments were built to look cool. Finding that was a happy accident.

But the biggest highlight, by far, was lunch. We had copied some pages out of Italy for the Gourmet Traveller to bring with us and managed to find one of the places for lunch. Look at our lunch. Just look at it! Best food of the trip, by a wide margin. (Although I’m hoping Naples tomorrow will give it a run for its money.)

Today was Rome, starting with a tour of the Vatican. The Vatican is full of all this, like, old stuff. Mostly with pictures of Jesus and Saint Peter on it. The rest of Rome is full of old stone stuff.

I don’t know why I’m the one writing about Rome, frankly. Kat’s much more into old things than me: I tend to zone out the moment a tour guide mentions a year.

The Sistine Chapel is a helluva thing, though. And I’d like to point out that I Totally Did Not take any illicit pictures of the ceiling by holding my camera in front of me and casually pressing the shutter.

Tomorrow: Naples.

We’re currently ending the University of Sussex leg of the trip: Kat’s conference. She should probably be writing about that since it’s her party, but since I’m the one with my feet up all day in a residence room, I have more time to actually do it.

I’m actually enjoying what feels like a vacation from the vacation. I walked around Brighton and the university. Read a bunch. Surfed the web. Good stuff.

But as I near in on my third day at the university, I’m starting to feel like a hunter-gatherer: most of my time is being spent trying to ensure an adequate food supply.

I was prepared to come to England and learn that everything I had heard about British food was exaggerated. I really was.

But, the food options available to me (here and London) seem to fall roughly into three categories: (1) pub food, (2) pre-wrapped sandwiches, and (3) restaurants that are too expensive for an average meal. There is also a minor fourth category: (4) food from elsewhere on the planet, adapted to British tastes.

(1) The pub food is good, for what it is: unseasoned meat and starch. For example, pies (meat filling and crust) and fish and chips (right there in the name). I’ll also throw into this category the full breakfast and while there is a certain awesomeness to it, it’s still fundamentally meat and starch. This can only sustain one for so long: barely a vegetable to be seen.

(2) Douglas Adams was certainly exaggerating somewhat, but this quote rings true:

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

‘Make ’em dry,’ is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ‘make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.’

Marks and Spencer seem to have been able to step cautiously away from this advice, but one store can only stray so far outside the norm.

(3) We did have a very nice meal in London at a place that was a little too expensive to go to regularly. Oddly, it was still full of men standing around, drinking beer, but not eating.

(4) In an effort to break into option 4, I just bought a “mexican bean wrap”. Much to my dismay, it was actually a cleverly-disguised option 2 sandwich. It was a pita (!) containing about a tablespoon of bean-like substance (with the volume of the thing being made up by pita, not filling). The pita was stale enough that the term “steel reinforced” came to mind.

Really, Marks and Spencer has been keeping me alive. A few days ago, Kat and I got a couple of cornish pasties (pub-style meat + dough) and some prepared food from M&S to round out a meal. I took one bite of some pasta salad and realized that the parsley on it was both green and uncooked. I was so happy to have a vegetable (small though it was) that I turned to Kat and said words to the effect of “this is mine and you can’t have any!” I did eventually share.

Our time in London is almost up: we leave tomorrow for the University of Sussex for Kat’s conference, which is the theoretical purpose of the trip.

We have covered London pretty well, considering the short time we were here: British Museum, Greenwich Observatory (and thus the Prime Meridian), Westminster Abbey, and we walked around/past Trafalgar Square, Westminster Hall, Buckingham Palace, Trocadero, Chinatown, Covent Garden, London Eye, St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Certainly the highlights for me were the British Museum and Westminster Abbey.

The British Museum (motto: “we’re going to steal your antiquities, but promise they’ll still be around in a hundred years, okay?”) has an awesome collection and I’m glad I had a chance to see it. The Westminster Abbey (motto: “if they’re important and dead, we have them here”) audio tour was narrated by Jeremy Irons, which alone was enough to put it near the top of the list. Also Newton and Darwin (and a bunch of kings or whatever) are buried there.

I have posted a few photos from the trip. More will appear when we get back (and Internet-access-permitting, through the trip).

But more importantly, I have several questions about British people, based on observations made in and while walking past British pubs.

Question 1: Do British people not eat? Every restaurant and pub we walked by were filled with guys drinking beer. I don’t think I saw more than a dozen people actually eating in restaurants the whole time we were here. That was consistent across the whole after-work time span. Do people skip dinner just to drink? Do they somehow rush home and eat before getting to the pub at 6:00?

Question 2: Following up from the previous evidence: Where are the women? Every pub I was in was about 3 men (drinking beer) to each woman (drinking white wine). I assume women do something and don’t all just sit at home when the men are out? Are there places somewhere with 3 women to each guy?

As I write this, it is the morning of our first full day in London. We got in yesterday mid-day.

So far, so good. We are saying in a hotel just around the corner from Trafalgar Square, which is walking-distance to a lot of stuff.

We found the hotel with not more than 10 minutes of walking in the wrong direction. After checking in, we walked the neighbourhood for a bit and walked by Buckingham Palace.

My initial impressions of London:

• I miss streets that meet at right-angles. Take for example this intersection near our hotel. It appears on our pocket map as five streets that come together, but when on the ground, is 100 m of roundabout where “we want to go straight” is not a useful thing to have deduced from the map.
• When in China, the dominant feeling was “wow, everything’s big”. Tienanmen Square, for example, is almost incomprehensibly huge. Here: everything so far has been smaller than I imagined it. Buckingham palace: not all that big. I think I should be more in the New York mindset: everything very dense and close together.
• British pubs are funny places. Need to investigate further.