5 July, 2010 | 3 Comments

Arles, France:

Now that it’s July, I thought I should write about my trip to France in the spring.  Sigh.  I’m going to cram all of this into one posting, because these travel posts are a lot of work and with the PhD deadlines, I just don’t have time to do a detailed post on each place.  Sorry if this seems a bit rushed, but if I don’t do this now it’ll simply never get done.  On the trip, I went to a writers’ retreat for three weeks, then to Carcassonne, Arles and Avignon, all in southern France.  I already wrote about the retreat and posted some photos.  If you want to see all of my photos from La Muse Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat in Labastide Esparbaïrenque, near Carcassonne in southern France, please view my new set on Flickr.  This post will mostly focus on my travels in Arles, with just a bit about Carcassonne and Avignon at the end.

Arles is in Provence and it was my favorite of all the cities I visited on the trip.  Arles is a crumbling little jewel of a town.  It has that lovely decay you find in certain European towns and cities; for me, it brought to mind Venice and Budapest. I loved just walking around the deserted streets and snapping photos.  [No idea why the streets were so empty.  Arles is a major tourist town, but I guess the mobs must descend in the summertime.]

I loved the colors of the buildings and the shutters.  Walking around there was so dreamy.  I hope the photos convey that in some way.

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10 May, 2010 | 2 Comments

I left the retreat this morning.  I will write more about the experience when I get home and also post photos, which I can’t do right now.  Overall it was a good experience and I’m glad I went.  I just needed to get away, recharge and get some work done.  I’m happy to report I achieved all my aims.  More on that to come.

I’m in Carcassonne tonight.  I saw the medieval Cité today and I think I got some good photos.  Has anyone ever played the board game Carcassonne?  It’s about a bunch of knights navigating a maze of tacky souvenir shops in the walled city.

I’ve seen the word “Occitan” around here a lot, but I didn’t know what it meant.  Apparently it refers to the Occitan language, of Occitania, which is Southern France, Monaco and part of Italy and Spain.  Never heard of this before, though of course I knew of L’Occitane, the chain of over-priced soap shops.  I figured this was linked somehow to Occitan and it turns out L’Occitane means “the woman from Occitania.”  So you see, thanks to shopping at the mall, I know stuff.

Tomorrow it’s off to Provence.

26 September, 2009 | 10 Comments

I don’t want to talk about this week from hell.  How I started the week with two jobs and ended the week with three.  (How does this sort of thing always happen to me?)  I don’t want to talk about how the two jobs were already too much for me (considering I have a PhD to finish asap).  I don’t want to talk about how much of a nightmare one of my teaching jobs is.  I don’t want to talk about the deadline I have been given to finish my novel by the end of November. I don’t want to talk about the party I plan to host if I make it to December 18th (the end of term) without completely cracking up or jumping off a bridge.

I don’t want to talk about today: working on Saturday in the office (lesson prep, for which I don’t get paid – hug a teacher if you’re near one); buying a frozen pizza for dinner from Costcutter (seriously); being harassed on my way home by low-life chavs who live in the council house down the street.  I don’t want to talk about it.

What I do want to talk about is that I’ve decided once I finish this PhD in 2010 (by June, I hope, if I’m still alive by then) I am going to travel for a month or two or three.  The idea popped into my head this week, since one of my jobs is teaching at an international language school, where my co-workers are always jetting off for trips to faraway lands.  I thought – why not me?  About eleven years ago, I visited Bangkok, Hong Kong, China (for one day!), Australia and New Zealand.  I’m ready for some of that action again.  The thought of this is what’s currently keeping me going.

I definitely want to visit Japan.  That’s #1 on the list.  (Blame Murakami.)  While I’m in the neighborhood I’d love to visit Hong Kong again, since it’s one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited.  (No real interest in the rest of China though, at least not right now.)  I’d love to return to Australia too, but it would really depend on the rest of the trip.

Where else will I go?  The possibilities are endless!  (Or at least I like to think so.)  Besides Japan, one of my dream destinations is Israel. (Oh yes, I know it’s not politically correct to visit Israel, but you know, I’m not a fan of selective boycotts.  When people start boycotting, say, Saudi Arabia and its products, maybe they’ll have more credibility.)  So Israel is definitely on the list, but could also be an easy stand-alone trip from Europe.

I’ve never been anywhere in South America or Africa, but would love to go.  I’d like to visit South Africa, but I fear the crime (also, the World Cup is there next year). Thoughts?  I’d love to visit India, but don’t know if I’d want to go there on my own?  Since I plan to go to Asia, I could visit other countries in the region (Vietnam?  Cambodia?).  Feel free to throw any ideas my way. This is all in the dream stage, but dreamin’ is all I got right now!

29 July, 2009 | 3 Comments

You know what I really hate?  People who have to act like complete as*holes when boarding trains.  Sadly, this includes pretty much the entire train-riding population.

Today is a case in point.  I was in Rouen this afternoon, waiting on the platform for the train to Paris.  The train was not originating in Rouen, but was just stopping there on its route to Paris.  The crowd awaited the train, acting jittery and crazed.  Nevermind that mainline trains don’t normally stop for 30 seconds and then drive away, leaving ticketed passengers stranded on the platform.  If you’re there on time, it’s guaranteed you’ll get on the train.  No need to panic.

The minute the train pulled up, the awaiting crowd ran toward it with such intensity, you’d think it was literally a matter of life and death to make this train.  In fact, the way these people were acting, you might think that enemy warplanes were at that very moment en route to the city, preparing to bomb it into nothing more than a fine layer of dust.  Their very survival as humans depended on catching this train to Paris, which meant trampling anyone in their path to the doors.

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29 July, 2009 | 2 Comments

It’s time to wrap up the vacation.  I know this because I have “cathedral burnout,” my term for what happens to me after I’ve been traveling in Europe for a bit.  I love cathedrals as much as the next girl, but yesterday I blew off my visit to Rouen Cathedral (!) and went to the movies instead.  I know – shameful!  Please don’t make me feel worse about it than I already do.  This is how I know it’s time to go home, or in my case, since I have no home, time to return to Paris on the afternoon train.

I’ve had a lovely time in Normandy and will write more about it soon.  You know what has really shocked me about Normandy?  How many beggars there are.  I expect this in Paris since it’s a big city, but all throughout Normandy there are so many people begging for money.  They are camped outside the tourist attractions with their little cups.  And not only that, but people come up to me on the street – people who don’t look homeless or dirty, just regular teens and parents with children – and ask for money.  [And these people are not “gypsies.”] In addition to this, I’ve seen a surprising number of people sleeping rough on the streets. Isn’t France a quasi-Socialist country with lots of welfare programs?  What’s going on?

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26 July, 2009 | 5 Comments

Photo of Omaha Beach on D-Day – June 6, 1944:

My photos of Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery that overlook it.  2009 is the 65th anniversary year:

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24 July, 2009 | 3 Comments

Menu at a Chinese restaurant in France…ewwww.

22 July, 2009 | 4 Comments

Bayeux is a lovely medieval town.  It’s very close to the D-Day beaches, but it wasn’t destroyed during WWII.  The cathedral here is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.  I hesitate to put my photo up, because it just doesn’t do it justice.

I haven’t seen the world-famous tapestry yet, but will do that tomorrow or Friday.  Today I’ve had a mild sore throat and headache, so I mostly rested.  The weather is wacky – warm and humid one day, rainy and cold the next.  Not sure if this has contributed to my feeling a bit under the weather. I hope I don’t have swine flu.  I wonder what that’s called here – flu du cochon?

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20 July, 2009 | 11 Comments

Caen is the city of William the Conqueror, who I was only vaguely aware of before this trip.  For those as ignorant of medieval European history as me, William the Conqueror became William I of England, after he conquered England, hence the catchy title. [Though really, his other handle, William the Bastard, is pretty awesome.] In Caen there is a lot of Norman history that I’m just not familiar with (though I am now – thanks Wikipedia!).  Did you know that before William I, the king of England was Harold Godwinson?  I don’t think this is accurate.  How could a king of England from 1,000 years ago have a name that sounds like he should be living in a retirement community in south Florida next door to the Golden Girls?  Surely this can’t be right.  I’ve never heard of anything so absurd.

According to Wikipedia, 80 percent of Caen was leveled during WWII.  Amazing, then, that the centuries old cathedrals and the 1,000-year-old castle made it through completely intact.  I wonder if they were bombed and then patched up, otherwise it’s incredibly lucky that these places weren’t destroyed.  There are many cathedrals here – you turn a corner and bam! – cathedral. Spires everywhere.  They make a nice backdrop for Subway, McDonalds and all the other cultural gems that abound.  Seriously, there are a lot of chains here, but it’s actually a very nice city.

I’m being a lazy photographer on this trip, just to warn you.  I don’t have the dedication to take tons of photos, edit them and organize them. It’s just too much work.  You can view my very small Caen set here on Flickr.  [At least I finally got an adapter to connect my photo card up to my MacBook - it's only taken a year.  I found one today at FNAC. I think it's ridiculous that MacBooks don't have a slot for an SD photo card.]

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19 July, 2009 | 5 Comments

Though my French skills are rusty, I can usually always figure out how to pronounce any French word that I’m faced with.  Once you learn the rules of pronunciation, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to say things.  French is pretty consistent in that way.  What actually comes out of my mouth may not sound correct, but in my mind I usually know how something is pronounced.  I don’t think English is consistent in this way. For example, a non-native speaker asked me why “go” and “do” don’t rhyme.  I had never thought about it before and didn’t have an answer for her, but she’s right that it makes no sense that “go” rhymes with “dough,” not “do.”  And why doesn’t “dough” rhyme with “tough”?  Insane.

Anyway, all of this is my extremely long-winded way of saying that as I prepared to visit the French city Caen, capital of the Basse-Normandie region, I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it.  This doesn’t happen often, where I have no clue how to say something. My guess was kay-en (with the “n” not really pronounced), but I was wrong.  The pronunciation, to me, sounds exactly like the French word “quand.”  (I’m sure it doesn’t sound like this to a French person, whose ears are trained to decipher imperceptible differences in sound.)  It’s nearly impossible to write Caen phonetically in English, but it’s sorta like “kahn” but you don’t say the “n” – it stays on the roof of your mouth.  Luckily, despite this butchered pronunciation, I bought the right train ticket and ended up in the right place.

Since I arrived here on a Sunday, nearly everything (and I mean everything, except McDonalds and a couple cafes) was closed.  Also, there are a lot of scary white guys around here with shaved heads.  I hope there isn’t some sort of neo-nazi convention going on.  There were sevearl scary dudes on the train up here, one with an enormous, vicious-looking dog that kept patroling the aisles.  Still, even with skinheads and vicious dogs, it was a more pleasant journey than anything offered by South West Trains. [Sorry, that joke is really just for Londoners - and too bad it's not really a joke.]  On the train there were separate bathrooms for men and women, which is odd, given how many unisex public bathrooms there are here.  I’ve never seen anything like that on a train.  Anyway, in the women’s loo, there was a toilet with a PINK seat!  I can only surmise that the pink seat is meant to shame and humiliate any man who dares to use the women’s loo.

20 February, 2009 | 4 Comments

I’m back from Paris. I had a relaxing time and got the escape that I so needed and craved. I’m glad to be home, however, because I want to get back to work. I have so much to do!

For the most part it was very gray and cold in Paris, but I guess that’s to be expected this time of year. The place was packed with tourists, global recession be damned. I just wandered around mostly, lost in thought. I sat in gardens, browsed in shops, visited many English-language bookshops, read in cafes, went to late-opening at the Louvre on Wednesday night.  It was lovely.

I love late-night Louvre and never miss it when I’m in Paris (on Wed. and Fri.).  I took this picture of the crowd looking at the Mona Lisa, because that’s what’s interesting – not the painting itself, but the frenzy surrounding it:

On this visit to the Louvre, I visited the Napoleonic apartments.  If I’ve ever seen them before, I have no recollection of it.  They were absolutely stunning. I thought the mannequins modeling the dresses were really a nice touch, given the French thirst for headlessness:

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28 December, 2008 | 9 Comments

I arrived back in London this morning.  Since too many of my travel-themed blog posts involve me describing airport-related disasters in a bitter tone, I will spare you the gruesome details of this trip.  After about three hours at the Atlanta airport I burst into tears.  Really, I’d rather not relive it, but here’s my holiday message of peace and hope to the folks at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and Delta Airlines:

Bite My Ass, you completely incompetent and useless morons.

Oh – and the icing on the cake.  Once I actually got to the gate to board my plane, having somehow survived what those &%?*£@! put me through, I went into the ladies room, where a piece of metal sticking out of the wall cut my leg.  It’s a small cut, but deep enough to have caused bleeding.  And given that this piece of metal was in the bathroom, it was probably filthy.  Lovely.  Today when I got home I called NHS Direct.  They think I should see the GP tomorrow for a tetanus shot just to be safe and I also need to monitor myself for signs of infection (fever, etc.).  I swear I’m not making this up. Atlanta is the gift that keeps on giving – and hey, maybe it’ll even kill me!  We’ll see.

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24 December, 2008 | 1 Comment

Nativity scene, Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, Christmas 2006.

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas!

I haven’t been online too much during my trip, but I’ll post more once I get back to London on Sunday.  Until then, I just wanted to say Happy Christmas to those who are celebrating it.  I thought I’d post a few photos from my past Christmas travels…

Best wishes for the holidays!

Love, Anglofille xx

Notre Dame at Christmas.

The Coliseum, Rome, Christmas 2006.

The Empire State Building, NYC, Christmas 2007.

20 December, 2008 | 3 Comments

I think I’m suffering from culture shock.  It’s nothing to do with UK vs. US, but city v. country.  I’ve really become such a city girl that being in a small town is tough.  I’m used to walking out the door and having the world at my fingertips.  Now if I walk out the door…I’m in a parking lot.  You can’t go anywhere here without a car!  And I don’t have my own car, obviously, and no one will let me drive their car anyway.  So I have to tag along with everyone else as if I’m 5 years old or otherwise just stay home.

It sorta feels like I’m like an animal that’s been captured and put in a cage.  Such a strange feeling…

17 December, 2008 | 6 Comments

I made it across the pond yesterday – 9.5 grueling hours from London to Atlanta.  There was only one empty seat on the entire plane…and it was right next to me.  Lucky lucky!  This almost made up for all the screaming babies and toddlers and the heavily pregnant woman nearby who filled up seven air sickness bags during the flight.  [No joke.]

The day did not start off well.  First, the backstory: On Monday I went to the Laduree in Burlington Arcade to get my sister some macarons and marshmallows, plus a bottle of Salted Butter Caramel Spread (which ain’t cheap):

I made the mistake of taking this in my carry-on bag, where it was confiscated by the security staff at Heathrow.  It’s not a liquid, so I thought it would be safe.  Guess not.  But then, we all know Al Qaeda is likely to bring down a Boeing 767 with caramel spread, smuggled on-board by American university students.  Let’s face it – the terrorists have already won.

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30 November, 2008 | Comments are off

I went through a few of my photos tonight.  Here are four of them.  More to come…

A view of Buda side from under the Chain Bridge.  The bone-chilling cold from the Danube nearly gave me hypothermia, plus my camera froze.  Good times.

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30 November, 2008 | 4 Comments

i arrived back in London last night.  Two-hour flight, eight-hour journey.  Sigh.

The last thing you want to hear the pilot say when you’re landing in London is “dense fog.” As in: There’s dense fog in London, the airport is fogged in, it’s pitch dark outside and I can’t see a damn thing, but hey, we’re landing anyway.

The last thing you want to see during landing is the Hungarian woman sitting next to you receiving a text message on her phone.  It had been announced several times that mobile phones cannot be switched on at any time during the flight because they interfere with the aircraft’s systems.  These announcements were made in English and Hungarian.  I would assume that a person with even an extremely low IQ would comprehend that “mobile phones cannot be switched on at any time” means they cannot be switched on at any time — certainly not while the pilot is landing the plane using instruments alone since he can’t see the flippin’ ground.  I said to the woman, “Excuse me, you have to turn that phone off.”  She had the nerve to act annoyed that I scolded her, then once the phone was off, she waved it in my face so I could see it was off.  I gave her an evil, withering look that sent a shiver down her spine.

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25 November, 2008 | 5 Comments

[taken on my june trip to budapest]

First things first: Congrats to my friends William and Drew on their civil union!  [W, I'm shocked that you didn't wear white.  I thought you were saving yourself for marriage civil unionship?]

Okay, so now back to regularly scheduled programming….me in Budapest.

Yesterday morning was hellish.  I was in the dentist’s chair for three hours.  [Note to any dentists out there: Don't underestimate the importance of deodorant. Also, a breath mint wouldn't kill you.  9 out of 10 dental patients recommend them.] My dentist is a bit rough.  He obviously missed the day in dental school when they taught everyone that a human being’s mouth is not made of elastic and therefore cannot stretch to any size.  He did such a work-out on my mouth that the dental assistant had to put lip balm on me twice.  By the time I left, I looked like I’d had a collagen injection.

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23 November, 2008 | 8 Comments

Well, I’m actually staying in Pest, but that’s a minor technicality.

I’m back in the Hungarian capital for part 2 of my adventure in dental tourism.  I’ll be here till Saturday.  I did all the really difficult stuff in June, but I have to stay for a whole week now because I need to have a porcelain crown made, which takes 5 days.  Even staying here for a whole week, plus airfare, it’s still only about half as much as paying for a British dentist.  Boo for British dentists.  I really love Budapest, so I’m thrilled to be back.  It’s such a charming, lovely, bewitching city.

Unfortunately, my bad luck with air travel continues.  I took EasyJet, but today’s headache had nothing to do with them (unlike the six-hour flight delay they subjected me to last time).  But I just have to say that EasyJet is a complete tack fest.  What kind of airline sells scratch card lottery tickets mid-flight?  Next time I wouldn’t be surprised to see a chimpanzee riding a unicycle down the center aisle of the plane, for crying out loud.

So this time, my troubles began before I even left London.  I got to St. Pancras to take my train to Gatwick Airport, only to discover that there were NO trains going to Gatwick today.  The British rail system often goes haywire on weekends, when they do all sorts of engineering works, but I checked in advance to make sure the trains would be running.  I planned to take the cheaper First Capital Connect train from St. P, which takes an hour. Gatwick Express runs from Victoria and is super fast, but I’m too lazy to go to Victoria (plus it costs more).  Well, no trains were running to Gatwick at all from either station for reasons unknown.  Luckily for me, the folks at First Capital Connect actually paid for me to take a taxi to Gatwick, which in the end cost the company £125/$186.

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28 June, 2008 | 4 Comments

This post is super long, but I wasn’t able to write about Prague from the road, as I did in Budapest and Amsterdam. [Can I just say these Czech words have given my international keyword a workout? I didn't even know half of these accents existed. Bloody hell.]

Okay, so I wasn’t too excited to leave Budapest, because, you know, they have such good food there and such gorgeous men. But alas, it was time to pull up stakes and head to Praha. I visited once before in 1997, very briefly. I didn’t like Prague too much back then, but I chalked this up to being tired at the end of a long backpacking trip and having some sort of stomach ailment — not ideal conditions for visiting any city. Over the years when I’ve told people I didn’t really enjoy Prague much, I have almost always received the same reaction — one of shock, horror, disbelief. I didn’t love Prague? What was wrong with me? You’d think I’d said I liked to strangle kittens in my spare time.

So I looked forward to returning to Prague again 11 years later. I liked Prague much better this time, but I have to admit I still don’t love it. I have very specific reasons for not loving it, however, which I will explain in a moment.

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