Greg and Kat's blog

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.

Earlier this year, Kat got invited to speak at a conference in England, which is awesome. What’s more awesome (from my perspective, at least) is that I’m not teaching in the fall. If you put two and two together, you can see that we have half of our trip to England paid for, and time to spend if we go.

So, we’re going.

We leave tomorrow, and are seeing London, Brighton (where the conference is), Barcelona, and a Mediterranean cruise. On the way back, we’re making a pit stop in Ontario to see my parents. All of that will take most of September: we return Sept 25.

I don’t have much to say about it at this point, other than this is why I haven’t been returning anybody’s emails: too much to get ready before we go, and no time to see anybody either.

We have given preference to hotels with internets, so there is some hope we’ll post some updates during the journey.

… and it’s days like today that I have to say that out loud to remind myself. I am not mentally or physically prepared to be done my Christmas break or resume teaching.

I have posted some pics from Vegas. The trip was good: to give you an idea, we gambled a total of $100 between us because there was too much other stuff to do.

A warning: when going to Vegas, plan to spend $100–200 per person per day on miscellaneous stuff. By the time you have a nice dinner and go to a show, $100 is gone, and that only entertains you for the evening.

The highlight for me was probably the Gun Store (not-even-subtly-racist targets aside). When else am I going to shoot an assault rifle? I should have upgraded the package to shoot a handgun too.

Other than that, we had a good set of the standard holiday stuff (including our open house, which I haven’t done the time lapse video for yet). All of that went well, but all happened much too fast.

A few weeks ago, I got to thinking about our Christmas plans…

I haven’t gone back to see my family for a while: it’s much nicer to go back (and deal with flying to Ontario) in the summer. Kat’s family does Christmas eve, not Christmas day. For the last few years, we have spent Christmas day with friends, which has always been a lot of fun, but this year all of the friends are scattering to the four corners of the world.

So I thought to myself: What’s keeping us in Vancouver? After Christmas eve with Kat’s family, we’re pretty much done with the holiday. But, anywhere we could go after that would be closed for the holiday, with one exception:

Vegas.

So, on Christmas day we’re flying from YVR to Vegas and spending four days at the MGM Grand. On the menu this time:

• We want to shoot some guns (just like Angelica did). I’ve got to shoot a Kalashnikov.
• Fremont Street.
• Seinfeld is in Vegas around then: that would be awesome.
• I have wanted to see Penn & Teller for a while and they’re performing through Christmas.
• We have never eaten the food of Thomas Keller, so Bouchon is a distinct possibility.
• Boxing day outlet shopping.
• I want to see if I can find somewhere to make a prop bet and bet on something crazy.

As an added bonus, our friend Suyoko (and her mom) are going to be in Vegas for Christmas. That means (among other things) that I don’t actually have to wait through the outlet shopping: they can go and leave me behind.

I’m going to update on the Manhattan part of our trip. I’ll leave it to Kat to talk about the wedding and Poughkeepsie.

Manhattan Part 1

[Manhattan Part 1 pictures] We got to New York City early on the red-eye. We managed to get early check-in to the hotel, which was awesome. After a bit of a nap, we hit the city, ready to go.

• Our first stop was the American Museum of Natural History. This was chosen as the one big tourist stop. I spent my entire childhood being dragged around to museums and thinking “I thought they were supposed to have dinosaurs at museums.” Finally, I got to go to a museum with dinosaurs. Even though I’m not eight anymore, it was pretty aweseme.
• We took the subway to the museum, which is right beside Central Park. Subway: check. Central Park: check.
• We pretty much walked from Columbus Circle around Midtown for the rest of the afternoon: Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, the TV studios there, the MoMA store, the theatre district, Times Square.
• After a little rest back at the hotel, we went out to see things at night. How bright is Times Square at night? I was shooting up to a full stop over my camera’s meter to get things to look right.
• Somewhere in there, we found some pizza and hot dogs in the local style.

The next morning, we went out to grab a bagel, and had a leisurely walk to Penn Station to get the train to Poughkeepsie.

Manhattan Part 2

[Manhattan Part 2 pictures] On the way back, we had a nice long layover in Manhattan: our train got in at about 3:00 and our flight wasn’t until 10:30. We managed to check our bags at Penn Station and get a few more hours in the city:

• We started at the Empire State Building. It was a clear day, so it was a nice view of the city.
• The big reason for going back out: we went to the NY Public Library which had the original Pooh and Piglet stuffed animals. (It was closed for part 1.) Kat has always been a big Piglet fan (“He’s little, like me.”) so this was definitely a highlight.
• On the walk back to Penn Station, we happened by a White Castle. Summary: I can’t imagine why anyone would drive overnight to get White Castle. Maybe being stoned helps.

I had my handheld GPS in my camera bag and on for most of the walking. So, I can offer our tracks in Google Earth for your viewing pleasure. Keep in mind the error inherent in the GPS, particularly when surrounded by tall buildings: we weren’t walking around as spastically as it looks.

Overall, I think we got as much as we could have done without ever entering “death march” territory. Excellent trip. Next time, we’d stay at the south end of the island: Chinatown and Little Italy.