holiday – Page 2 – Where is Phil now?

A bit of Berlin concrete

Berlin 03 – 08 October 2024

As longer-term followers will have observed, in the last few years, particularly during and post-Covid, the blog took a massive swerve from photographs of landscapes and trees to photographs of cityscapes. I’m not sure if that change of focus was a reaction to the pandemic or how it affected me and my view of the world. I don’t think I’ve become more insular; and this isn’t the sort of place for any kind of diagnosis, self or otherwise. However, it’s still true; trees and nature walking have largely disappeared from my feed and architecture and urban walking has replaced it; especially the more ‘brutal’ type of modernist building that I’ve sort of fallen in love with. So, maybe after saying all that it’s possible I have become more insular and my world view has reduced at the same time as expanding. I must stop the self-diagnosis. I’m fine.

As our last visit to Berlin was with friends and it had a packed schedule there was no opportunity for me to disappear for a few hours and look at some raw concrete, or beton brut as the French would have it. When we planned this trip I factored in a visit to a classic Le Corbusier building on the way to Spandau on the Saturday, as well as a few hours of solo travel to see a couple of other ‘brutalist’ buildings. There will be more on the Spandau visit in the next post; but spoiler alert – it wasn’t worth it…

Unité d’Habitation of Berlin aka Corbusierhaus

Completed in 1957 it was the third building in Le Corbusier’s Habitation ‘series’. The first and best known block is in Marseilles, France. The phrase ‘beton brut’ has been attributed to Le Corb, and it has morphed in its English translation to Brutalism. It describes buildings largely made of unfinished concrete, rather than the harsh, ‘brutal’, often militaristic design generally think of when people think of brutalism. Some buildings obviously conform to that harshness, but the Corbusierhaus does not, it is just a 50s concrete apartment block outside the city centre with some very colourful panelling. It is lovely and is a tourist attraction in its own right. The only quibble I had was half the front was covered over by scaffold and cloth; oh well. If I come back it will be mid-winter when all those interfering trees are shorn of their leaves.

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Bierpinsel

We had put Monday morning aside as ‘do our own thing’ time as I wanted to get out and look at buildings and while Eleanor tolerates this with a smile it seemed unfair to schelp about looking for buildings on holiday. Inconveniently the best ones are out of town and in no way where they close to each other. There was a small wrinkle in my original plan as one of the train lines was closed for engineering works. I made some rapid plan changes and set off to visit the ‘Café Exil’ record cover; The Steglitz Tower Restaurant, AKA the Bierpinsel (Beer Brush). And wow, what a building it is! It is as mad and as glorious as I hoped it would be. Sadly it’s been closed since 2007, but achieved listed status in 2017 and more recent owners have plans to renovate the building. I certainly hope they do. It is properly fantastic and I would love to see it back in garish Café Exil red. I had a go at emulating the record cover, with limited success. I loved it…

Cafe exil Cover

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Wilhelmstrasse 150

With my plans now changed, I caught another couple of trains to WilhelmStrasse 150. A nice looking apartment block with some magnificent curving concrete painted a fetching pink. This has not been on any record cover that has passed my way.

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Band of the Covenant Buildings

With less time in the day due to some poor public transport choices (read this as me missing stations as I was reading my book on the train) and then misunderstanding some messaging about closed lines on the Berlin transport network I headed back towards Alexanderplatz and our hotel to meet up with Eleanor for some afternoon roaming. We had a loose plan that involved walking to a record shop, a photography gallery and whatever else took our fancy, as long as it ended up in a cocktail bar come late afternoon. It was our last day in the city and there is still so much to see, just around the inner north east were we are staying.

When we visited Berlin in June one of the places I was keen to visit was the concrete ‘circle building’ I’d seen photos of on Instagram. I’d spotted it from the train heading west towards the fantastic Teufelsberg on the woody outskirts of the city so had a pretty good idea where it was located. It was only when we ventured into the city centre, near to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building, that I nailed down its exact location; right behind the ‘no entry’ tape blocking off a bit of the city sacrificed to the pending European Championship football competition. Oh well, it was something to save for next time; i.e. this time.

And this time there were no restrictive lines of tape or armed coppers making sure no one crossed those lines of tape. In fact, for a series of government buildings there was very little visible security. As a New Zealander and a Brit I still find armed police unnerving, and I work in Whitehall where all the police carry guns, not seeing them here in this almost sterile, yet serene location, was verging on a relief.

I think this small block of buildings on either side of the River Spree is utterly beautiful and not because of the concrete, the design is just so fresh and free and walking around looking at them genuinely made me happy. I think the complex is called ‘Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus’ and it is made up of an art gallery and the government library, among other probably less public parts of the German government. Construction was mostly completed in 2003 so these are not the post-war concrete rebuilds you see in other cities.

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The ‘gun thing’, and yeah I will put it out there. I fucking hate guns, and everything they represent and really don’t understand this fascination so many have with them. I understand the US is just obsessed with arming everyone, seemingly to keep those who make weapons and all the bollocks that goes with that in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to, but why do the rest of us have to support that? Why do we have to see guns on our streets?

This was brought into stark relief on the opposite side of the river to the buildings above. There are four white memorial crosses wired to a low fence in remembrance of four, mostly young people, who were shot and killed by East German guards as they tried to flee to West Germany, the youngest was 18 and she was shot in 1984. Like the memorial plaques outside of the houses were Jews lived pre World War Two which I mentioned in the previous post, I didn’t take photos of these poignant reminders of humanities capability to be utterly evil.

I can’t possibly imagine what it was like for the Jewish and Roma people, the LGBTQ, disabled and other communities before and during WW2 and for those East Germans who wanted to go west to be so savagely betrayed, persecuted and murdered by their own countrymen. How fucked up was that? And the saddest thing of all is that for many around the world that hasn’t changed.

Berlin

Berlin, Friday 03 to Tuesday 08 October 2024

Needless to say, but I will anyway, that I’m really excited by being back in Berlin, even if it’s significantly cooler and a bit damper than when we were here in June. I loved the short few June days we spent here and returned home with quite a list of other things to see and do, and a plan to come back again. I suspect that I’ll have a new list when we go home again on Tuesday.

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Last time we visited I’d been sound tracking the days before with the ‘Cafe Exil’ album, a compilation of tunes that the compilers imagined David Bowie and Iggy Pop listened to when they lived in Berlin in the mid-1970s. I bought the LP when I returned to London and it’s still regularly on the turntable. Little of the music on that record is music I would’ve listened to in the past, but am much more willing to try new sounds now.

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Before this trip I’ve been listening to a couple of dance music compilations from a Berlin based label and will see how that goes while we’re here. I can’t see us going to a club mind, even if Berlin is one of Europe’s clubbing centres. There will more on ‘Café Exil’ in a coming post.

As I commented in June, 20th Century history looms large over the city. While the cold war and the Wall are the most prevalent; especially in the parts of the city we visited, the Second World War and the events leading up to those terrible six years are not written out of the city’s history either. This was particularly notable in the small brass plates on the footpath outside of houses where Jewish families lived before being brutally removed before and during the war. Over 60,000 Jews were deported from Berlin, many of those to the death camps the Nazi regime created in the east.

This is a city of dark and light, and as middle class, middle aged tourists, we really only get to experience light, and this was particularly so this weekend as it is Festival of Lights weekend; not that we knew this when we were planning the trip. We visited three different outdoor ‘venues’ over the weekend, a different one each night. It was hugely popular, with loads of families out enjoying the light shows, and unlike the UK, the security was all very low key and each location was a very pleasurable experience, the highlight being Brandenburg Gate. I was surprised, pleasantly so, at how many of the light shows included works by street artists I was familiar with; like Thierry Noir on the side of the Cathedral and Otto Schade at Potsdamer Platz.

Museum Island

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Potsdamer Platz

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Brandenburg Gate

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We did a lot of walking over the four days, averaging about 17kms a day, just meandering around with some sort of vague sense of purpose. Berlin is a very walkable city, though it has a very good public transport system which we made good use of as well. Some of the U-Bahn (underground) stations are visual treats, and I planned to take photos of them as we travelled, though really only managed to properly photograph one of them; Schloss Strasse, where the tiles were so colourful.

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I snapped a couple of images at others, though most of the stations and platforms were very busy; and I’m a bit shy when it comes to public space photography. Something I still find hard to believe after doing this for 20 years.

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That is enough for today, over the next few posts I will share more from those very enjoyable four days. And yes, I’m thinking about the next visit!

Oslo, Norway

Friday 15 to Monday 18 – Oslo, Norway

Lakes and steep but low rocky bluffs, stony ground, more lakes, and rivers; I mustn’t forget the rivers. It’s obvious that we’re not passing through England; the trees are different, even the silver birch and pine don’t look the same, the forests seem denser and darker; and you know you’re in Scandinavia when you see those ‘classic’ red wooden buildings.

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It’s cloudy outside the train window and staring into the seemingly never ending forests you get this disturbing feeling deep down that there is something ancient and probably malevolent lurking deep inside those trees. It somewhere you could easily get lost in and are perhaps never seen again…

Does difference always allow dark thoughts to surface? Maybe I’ve watched too many of those Scandi-noir tv series.

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We’re on the train from Gothenburg in Sweden to our final destination on this holiday, Oslo in Norway. It’s a fairly slow train, with stops every 30 minutes or so and as we draw close to Oslo the carriages fill up to almost London morning commute level, though everyone seems much nicer than those I share a 7:30am tube with. I’m glad I’d pre-booked seats, which was more difficult than it should’ve been, and I can now confess to being slightly nervous that the train I booked us on didn’t actually exist until we saw it arrive at the platform. Internet scams for fake transport lines are not uncommon and surprisingly there are few cross-border trains in Europe.

I’ve not previously been to Norway so this is country number 64, and the first time since India in 2016 that I’m visiting somewhere new. Oslo was where we going to start the holiday we had planned prior to Covid arriving in 2020, so I’ve been looking forward this for a while and I’m really happy to finally visit. It is my kind of city; arty and interesting, with good food and the people we met were all really nice. I took too many photos to do one post, so this will be a three parter, with the other two covering Vigeland Park and the Munch Museum, and both were magnificent.

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We did a lot of walking over the three days, particularly between the hotel and the waterfront by the Munch Museum and Opera House. The central station was just back from Opera House and we took a tram from there to our hotel. We used a few trams in Oslo and it’s a nice way to get around.

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We took a 90 minute tour of the fjord which was largely disappointing, I was hoping we were going to go right out of the city into the fjord proper, but the quite large tour boat just puttered around the islands close to the city. It was scenic enough, but the highlight was meeting a couple of other Kiwis and spending the entire journey talk to them and not paying attention to where we were going.

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We also took a ferry to the closest island – Hovedoya, for a walk around and I found a nice ruined abbey; surprisingly these are ruins from a 12 century abbey founded by catholic monks from England.

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The island is five minutes from downtown Oslo, had a couple of nice, small, beaches – and the water was surprisingly warm, and some good green space. There were a couple of small groups of young people enjoying themselves and it looked and felt like such a nice spot near a busy old city.

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It’s a reasonably attractive city, there is a good mix of old and new buildings, a couple of 70s brutalist buildings, though nothing overly interesting that I saw on our walks.

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The Museum metro station entrance not far from our hotel was very cool with this amazing ‘Acoustic Sculpture’ ceiling which had the most fantastic echo. If you stand in the middle the echo was huge, walking outside of the circle meant there was no echo at all. It was very cool and not something you would expect to find in a metro station.

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We ate well, there is a lot of vegetarian and vegan places to eat which suited and I’m keen to go back to the Grunerlokka area when we go back, which I’m sure we will. It’s the Oslo version of London’s Shoreditch, admittedly smaller, with bars and eating places, graffiti and a suspicious looking non-swan in the river. It looked like a decent spot for an evening out.

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We also stumbled on one of Oslo’s heavy metal bars so popped in for a gin, beer is so expensive, for a look around. It was way too early in the day for the place to be rocking; though they were pumping out the Hanoi Rocks at a decent volume while we were there.

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Oslo is a cool city, we enjoyed our time and it’s another place to add to the ‘must go back to list’…

We can be Heroes – Bowie in Berlin

07 – 10 June 2024 – Berlin

I think it’s more than fair to say that I love music and have done since I was a teenager. My taste has always verged towards the esoteric and while I think you can safely say that ‘esoteric’ is one of many apt descriptions for David Bowie, the man and the legend, it can’t always be used to describe his music. Which is a long way of getting round to saying I’m not really a huge Bowie fan. I like some of his music, especially the older ‘classic’ stuff and I particularly liked ‘Dark Star’ his final album, the music of the 80s, 90s, 2000s, yeah most of that I can leave behind. Saying that, the world is a less interesting place without him.

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Amongst my social group I am the outlier, my friends love Bowie and a ‘Bowie Tour’ was very much on the Berlin itinerary. An organised commercial tour was out of our price range so as friends of ours had done their own self-guided Bowie related tour, it seemed like the right thing for us to do as well. Given the internet is such a wonderful source of all things I found a few ideas and planned what turned out to be quite a long, but interesting walk. In my view walking is the best way to see somewhere, if there is a plan or not.

David Bowie lived in Berlin from 1977 to 1979 and wrote and recorded, what in my view is his best record, ‘Low’, the first of what is known as the Berlin Trilogy. The second, and much better known album is ‘Heroes’ and the final, though not recorded in Berlin is ‘Lodger’. Bowie and Iggy Pop came to Berlin to escape the coke-ridden excess of Los Angeles, start afresh in a new city. A city that had been developing its own musical identity, an identity not founded on US and UK rock music, grounded in the avant-garde, jazz and the eclectic electronic sounds of the synthesiser.

It was a busy time for Bowie, as well as developing his own material he is also co-wrote songs and played on Iggy Pop’s LP ‘The Idiot’, co-authoring the track ‘China Girl’; which Bowie turned into his own global hit in 1983. It’s a song I hated at the time (and still do) and was a core reason I lost interest in his music for the next 40 years…

Our tour started at the Berlin Wall Memorial, which of course didn’t exist in 1977 as the wall between east and west Berlin was still dividing the city.

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Is ‘Heroes’ Bowies most well known song? I can’t think of anything better known. It contains a direct reference to the wall, so making the classic Bowie track our starting point was a no brainer, plus it was not that far from our hotel.

David Bowie – ‘Heroes’

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes, just for one day.

Bowie and Pop apparently frequently crossed from West Berlin where they lived to visit Brasserie Ganymed a couple of kilometres on the other side of the wall on the Eastern, communist, side of the city.

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Ganymed is (still, and I love this about Berlin, so many of the small things like cafes from the 70s still exist) located next to Bertold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theatre whom both Bowie and Pop were interested in. Bowie recorded the EP ‘In Bertold Brecht’s Baal’ in 1982 to coincide with his performance in a relatively poorly received BBC production of Brecht’s play of the same name. We stopped in for breakfast and a quick look around the interior, which I suspect hasn’t changed much since the 70s; or probably the 30s….

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Our next stop was the Reichstag, the German parliament building. In 1987 Bowie played a concert in front of the Reichstag which was right on the border with East Berlin, with the stage speakers pointing over the wall to the east, where decedent western rock was effectively banned. Access to the Reichstag was effectively banned for us in 2024 as the entire area has been closed while a ‘fan zone’ is built for the pending Euro 2024 football tournament that starts soon after we leave.

It also blocked me from getting close to this building, and it’s lovely concrete circle which was on my list of ‘possible modern buildings to see that weren’t too far off the beaten track’.

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Our next stop was Hansa Studios, Berlin’s best known musical landmark; a working recording studio since the early 1960s. This is where Bowie recorded Low and Heroes with innovative German producer Conny Plank, and also where quite a few of the records in my collection were also recorded. It’s an iconic studio.

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We stopped for lunch in nearby Potsdamer Platz, where I had the much desired, and very enjoyable Berlin lunch staple – curry wurst and a beer.

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Potsdamer Platz was referenced in one of Bowie’s last hit songs, the stunning, sad and beautiful ‘Where are we now’. Released in 2013, almost 50 years after the first single, it’s one of my favourite of his songs and probably the one that will remain in my head.

“Had to get the train
From Potsdamer Platz
You never knew that
That I could do that
Just walking the dead”

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We’d walked a fair few kilometres by now so caught a train over to the far side of the Tiergarten to Zoo Station (title of a U2 LP) and walked to the fabulous Paris Cafe, another Bowie haunt and a lovely art filled bar. It felt like a good place to stop for a drink… It was early afternoon when we arrived and I imagine this place has many night time stories to tell if you lived here.

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Out final stop, and another train ride away, was the apartment where Bowie lived while he was in Berlin, and a shrine to his memory. 155 Hauptstrasse.

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The night before we left London I’d been out with some friends and when I said I was coming to Berlin and was going to do some Bowie stuff, Rob said I should check out the album ‘Cafe Exil; new adventures in European Music’ , an imaginary jukebox in the Cafe Exil, which was another Bowie Berlin hangout. I become mildly obsessed with the record (and that cover!) while I was away and pretty much listened to it the whole trip; and I subsequently bought the record.

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We loved Berlin and are already planning a return in September to see more of this fabulous city and check out Cafe Exil and hoping for a good jukebox…

Next stop Stockholm

Berlin to Olso, via Stockholm and Gothenburg

The night before we flew to Berlin I went to a gallery opening for a friend’s exhibition of brutalist photos and ended up staying longer and drinking a lot more beer than I expected when I left home after my day’s work. Stupidly, I went straight to bed when I got home and subsequently had a terrible sleep. As I lay in bed I thought of a great opening paragraph for this first holiday post, but of course I remembered none of it as I started typing this on my phone on the flight across the channel, then over what I think is Belgium and across former West and East Germany to Berlin.

I’ve decided to break with twelve and a half years of posting habit and not write daily posts for the ten days we are away; travelling by train from Berlin to Stockholm to Gothenburg and finally, to Oslo. Visiting three countries and completely traversing a fourth, Denmark, while we ‘slept’ on the overnight train. I will see how it all works out over the next few days. I’ve a log of photos to review and my laptop is barely coping with the much larger image sizes from the XT2 camera; which I’m very much enjoying using. It’s slow progress.

I was both excited and pensive about this trip. Excited for all the obvious reasons, but pensive as we travelled with friends and before we left home I’d know idea how this would work. We’ve holidayed with friends on numerous occasions in the past, though this was the first time we’ve ‘travelled’ with anyone. There is a different dynamic with moving around places to that spent in a single city or town where there is room for some ‘me’ time, and I like my me time.

The trip started rather frantically, Eleanor and I had decided to use public transport, as we always do, to get to London City Airport for the flight to Berlin. In between checking that all services were running and us arriving at Leytonstone Station 10 minutes later, the entire Central Line had shut down due to signal failure. Luckily we are who we are and had left home with loads of time to spare so we decided to get the bus to Stratford where we would change to the DLR (Docklands Light Railway), as we would if we had caught the Central Line. Once on the bus and slowly under way due to heavy traffic I discovered I had left my phone at home! I jumped off at the next stop and managed to get a taxi to take me home and then on the station. Eleanor remained on the bus, sticking to the original plan and in the end I beat her to the airport. I’m happy to say we got there with plenty of time before boarding and it was the only hitch in the holiday.

Now we are back in London I can say that the holiday was a great success, there were no issues with travelling with others and the trip was mostly a complete joy and I would happily go back to Berlin, Stockholm and Oslo to see more.

This post is a quick summary of the ten days away and buys me some time to edit down a load of photos and write up my notes.

Berlin

Needless to say I totally loved Berlin (I know I love every place I visit, but this was beyond all those other loves!) We saw a lot, but barely scraped the surface of things to see and experience. A lot of the time was spent in the old ‘East’ where our lovely hotel was based and we barely had to time to visit the old ‘West’.

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Berlin is a me sort of town, it has a rich and recent history, particularly the period from the rise of fascism, through the Second World War, the cold war, the tearing down of the Wall and then unification. It also has a fantastic music history and is a liberal and relaxed city. I really felt at home there and can’t wait to go back; especially to do some brutalist building photography .

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We took an ‘underground history’ tour, which looked at some of the ingenious methods East Germans took to escape to the West. Photography was only allowed in a couple of places which was annoying but also good as I spent more time listening to the history and stories about some of those who did, or didn’t, escape.

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The Wall features a lot in the photos I took and in the history of the city.

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The Stasi (East German Secret Police) Museum. The museum is in the old Stasi headquarters. As the end of the communist East German state was becoming more and more obvious the people basically stormed the building to prevent the secret police destroying the massive number of files they had on citizens. Parts of the building are now a museum.

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The amazing Teufelsberg – a favourite part of the entire trip and probably worthy of its own post.

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David Bowie

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I had to try a curry wurst (sausage), the supposed ‘dish of Berlin’ for lunch, and I believe it is in the rules to accompany it with a cold beer. It was very nice! We also had dinner at Cookies Cream, a fantastic Michelin starred vegan restaurant and another holiday highlight.

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Stockholm

We took a 16 hour sleeper train from Berlin to Stockholm in Sweden. The train left Berlin just after 9pm and arrived in Malmo, Sweden around 7am the following day, passing through Denmark over night. We crossed ‘The Bridge’ between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmo for those familiar with Scandi-noir TV. The sleeper carriage was right at the back of the train as far as Malmo, when further carriages were added on the end. I enjoyed standing at the back looking at the world pass rapidly by.

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The Swedish, and subsequently, the Norwegian countryside is quite beautiful, with lots of water and pine forests and we pass very few large towns, it is quite rugged and a bit dark. I can see why there are some many dark stories made in this part of the country.

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We arrived in Stockholm mid-afternoon and took a local train to our hotel in Hornstull on one of the many islands that make up the city. Like Berlin we mainly used our feet to get around, occasionally catching local trains when we got tired or in the case of Stockholm when it poured with rain – and pour it did…

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I particularly enjoyed Gamla Stan, the old town, and visited it twice, both times in the rain. Rain on cobbles down a narrow alley is one of my favourite things to photograph.

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We also visited the modern art museum which was interesting, and at times disturbing, especially the works of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. I won’t spoil the surprise with this piece ‘Him’ in case anyone is visiting the gallery.

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Gothenburg

Gothenburg was a town I’ve wanted to visit for a while and one I made sure was on the itinerary for this trip, but sadly/annoyingly it was my least favourite place. Maybe it was because we only had 24 hours and we stayed in a hotel right on top of the station; though the hotel was good and wasn’t the problem. I’m more used to staying in the inner suburbs rather than a city centre and being in a more relaxed environment. More on that in the Gothenburg post later.

My Gothenburg highlight was Fiskbar 17 where we went for dinner. It’s a small restaurant with only a few dishes on the menu. All four of us had the same thing, the fish of the day, which was lovely, as were the cocktails we preceded dinner with and the music that was playing the background.

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As we did in every place we visited we did a lot of walking and I took a few photos, but it wasn’t particularly photographic, or at least I wasn’t feeling it. I did find a nice brutalist building, though it looks like it’s being clad in something colourful, and there was a decent fort as well.

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Oslo

I enjoyed the four hour train ride from Gothenburg across the border into Norway, there was some stunning scenery out of the window, though I didn’t get many opportunities to take photos as the train got quite busy the closer it got to the final destination. The forests were suitably dark, and I would be quite interested in exploring a bit of the Nordic countryside.

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I really liked to Oslo, second favourite to Berlin on this trip, and like Berlin (and Stockholm I guess) we only skimmed the surface of the city. As everyone knows it’s expensive, but with the pound having a good exchange rate against the Norwegian Kroner it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Oslo felt like a young city, a bit like Berlin and most of the people we met in hospitality were very friendly, and naturally everyone spoke very good English. It had a vibe I really liked.

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We took a 90 minute tour of the fjord which was interesting, though the highlight was meeting a NZ brother and sister who we spent the entire trip talking to. That was fun.

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The highlight of Oslo, and possibly the whole trip was Vigeland Sculpture Park. It has merited its own post later on. Vigeland was a Norwegian sculpture who designed the 212 pieces in the park. I would say as individual works they would be OK, but as whole, they are wonderful. The facial expressions are just so wonderfully human and beautiful. My absolute favourite sculpture is the second one, with the two old people. Just stunning.

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We also visited the Munch Museum, a gallery containing thousands of the works of Norway’s most well known artist – Edvard Munch. I didn’t get that close to ‘The Scream’, his most famous work, but really enjoyed the gallery.

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The weather wasn’t great in Oslo, but we did get to walk a lot and on the Sunday night we walked to one of Oslo’s hip inner suburbs, Grunerlokka and ate in a large food hall. GrunerLokka is somewhere I would like to back to; there seems to be a decent music scene in Oslo as well which I would like to check out next time.

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All too soon it was time to head to the airport for the flight back to London and the end of 10 busy and fun days. I didn’t want it to end.

Florence, day two

Friday 20 October 2023 – Florence.

After the big day of walking and sightseeing yesterday it was a relief to be able to take it easy today. Without any time restricted bookings ahead we took a leisurely and enjoyable breakfast on the balcony of the hotel. It’s a nice to place to relax but the weather hasn’t really allowed us to make proper use of it before now. The ticket for the Uffizi yesterday also gave us access to Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Pitti, both nearby and on our side of the River Arno. We set out for our morning mission to visit them both once our breakfast had settled.

We really enjoyed the gardens, they are huge, though appear to be suffering in parts from the very dry weather. I imagine maintaining such a vast, and popular site is not easy in these times of uncertain weather. We entered from what possibly is considered the back entrance, though it had a great view up the central path leading up a hill which overlooked the river and central Florence, with views similar to those yesterday from Piazza Michelangelo.

There were a few statues scattered around the gardens, and I particularly liked the one that looks like two blokes doing the ‘holding up the Leaning Tower’ pose we saw so much of earlier in the week.

We had arrived at the gardens not too long after opening and it was very quiet, though as time passed and we got closer to the Pitti Palace the number of visitors grew.

There is a grotto in the gardens I wanted to see, though I was a little disappointed when I found it. Though it turns out there are two grottos and I had found the smaller one, the ‘Grotta di Madama, rather than the more impressive Grotta di Buontalenti. Both were built late in the 16 Century. Madama is presumed to reference Maria Maddalena the wife of Cosimo Medici who the gardens were originally designed for.

Purchased in 1550, the Palace was chosen by Cosimo Medici as the new Grand Ducal residence, and it soon became the new symbol of the Medici’s power over Tuscany. It also housed the Court of other two dynasties: the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (which succeeded the Medici from 1737) and the Kings of Italy from the House of Savoy, who inhabited it from 1865. Nonetheless the palace still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti that in the mid-1400s started its construction. It’s a fabulous huge building containing five different art museums. It was my favourite of the galleries in Florence, perhaps because I had no expectations compared to what I had for the others.

The art was secondary to the interior decoration, the walls and ceilings are just beautifully painted, admittedly extremely excessive and over the top, but glorious still.

For such a huge patron of the arts there are few works that feature Cosimo, and here he is looking quite imperious.

We found an exhibition in the Russian Art gallery with these giant stiletto shoes made entirely from pots and pot lids by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, they looked amazing and were a highlight of all the galleries we visited.

We left the Pitti Palace and stopped for a pasta lunch in one of the squares on the way back to our hotel. I love outside eating, glass of wine and some pasta. I could do this every day. This was definitely a tourist priced trattoria, but the food was very nice. Walking back to the hotel I found a few more of the shrines I’ve been enjoying over the past couple of days.

After an afternoon rest we went back across the River Arno to Florence’s centre in search of the buchetta del vino, the wine wall, we passed yesterday. It is top of my list of things to do in Florence. We found it easily enough but annoyingly it didn’t appear open.

It was too early to eat so we wandered about the centre of Florence for a while, pretty randomly will say, finally stumbling on a few streets with shops that weren’t global brands. I was looking for corduroy trousers, though I didn’t find any that fitted that I liked. There are some very well dressed men in Florence, I would guess most of those were local, us tourists are way more casual! Completely by accident we found an open wine wall, yay! We had to queue for a few minutes and received our glasses of wine just as the heavens opened and it poured. We joined some of the other wine window guests standing in a small private car park out of the rain. It was very nice, proper stemmed glass as well, none of the plastic cups you would get in England.

Naturally we didn’t have umbrellas today. Once the worst of the downpour had passed we started the walk toward the hotel.

Crossing the Arno again I spotted a small murmation of, I guess swifts, over one of the other bridges and we stopped to watch them as they flitted back and forth across the bridge. Our dinner was taken in a small local restaurant as the rain was coming down quite heavily and we didn’t want to go to far. It was our first non-vegetarian meal in Florence and I had fish which was really nice. Annoyingly the rain would remain for most of tomorrow, our last day in Italy.

Another fabulous day I love Florence!

Pisa to Florence

Wednesday 18 October 2023 – Florence.

As anticipated the rain came in the early hours and was still with us when we got up. With no early attractions booked and a checkout at 10:00 there was no need to move fast. We had breakfast at the same café as yesterday, and we had the same breakfast, though unlike yesterday the place was packed. I guess no-one was rushing out into the weather. We were very pleased we had the opportunity to climb the Leaning Tower yesterday when it was sunny. I discovered this morning that I’d left my umbrella at home. I realised I hadn’t packed in the middle of the night the night before we left but had completely forgotten I’d had that thought by the time I got up. At least I’d remember to pack a rain coat, or two.

After breakfast we packed and then took a rapid walk, sheltering where possible, to Pisa Station to get a train to Florence. We were lucky and got most of the way to the station between heavy showers, though the last 100 yard dash was in a sudden downpour.

We’ve taken the approach of dealing with today one action a time rather than trying to book and plan things ahead, so we arrived at the station with no stress about getting pre-paid tickets and finding a specific train. As expected it was all very easy and there were plenty of working ticket machines and they were simple to use. Train travel in Italy (like all of Europe) is significantly cheaper and easier than the UK. It poured with rain all the way to Florence, but I didn’t care.

I was kinda of expecting the view from the train to be all beautiful Tuscan villages and green rolling hills layered in vines and fruit and olive trees. For the first quarter of the journey we seemed to be passing industrial estates, (yeah, yeah). It was not as scenic as expected. There wasn’t a lot of interesting things to see but I enjoyed gazing out the window anyway.

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The journey to Florence took an hour and it was still raining when we arrived. We had planned to get a bus from the station to the hotel we had booked so joined the queue for the bus ticket machine. It was slow, then got slower and more and more people crowded around trying to help those in front to get tickets; it turned it had basically stopped working. We both downloaded the bus company app to our phones and I managed to get a reliable enough connection to pay for two tickets. Annoyingly the tickets didn’t arrive in the app, grrr. I tried again with a different card and the same happened. Double grrr, though the language actually used was a lot more ‘colourful’ shall we say. I wasn’t a happy bunny. We thought sod it, lets take a cab, but the cab queue was absolutely huge; apparently there was a big football related event at the Fiorentina stadium out of town and all the cabs were taken up ferrying big wigs out there. Eleanor managed to actually buy two tickets for the bus on her phone so we joined the bus queue.

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There was a sign board telling when buses were coming though it was as useless as the app. I got grumpy standing in the rain and when the bus arrived after 30 minutes t was packed; though we managed to squeeze on and our stop was only four away from the station on the far side of the River Arno, so it wasn’t terrible.

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The hotel Ad Astra was a two minute walk from the bus stop and I suspect they don’t get too many guests who arrive by bus carrying a wet backpack, though they were very welcoming! It’s a lovely place, our room was gorgeous and the staff are fabulous. the hotel backs onto the largest private garden in Florence, though the garden isn’t accessible by guests. It almost had a country villa feel to it. The presenter Clive Myrie stayed and filmed here when he made his recent BBC series on Italy,

After unpacking we had a glass of wine in a shelter on the hotel deck and unwound after the morning; writing notes, reading and gazing out over the very peaceful garden.. We had an early evening table booked in a vegetarian restaurant in a book shop so didn’t do much in the late afternoon before leaving for a slow walk to dinner.

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I’d loved Pisa and its lanes and old buildings, the slight smell of damp and sewers, its age and history, but it has nothing on Florence. Florence is just amazing and by the end I never wanted to leave. The Ad Astra is located on the southern side of the River Arno, the opposite side to the centre, in the Oltrarno district. It’s a nice area, old of course, less busy than the centre, but there are still nice places for coffee, wine and food. It is my sort of place and I would stay in Oltrarno again for sure. Like Pisa, Florence felt like a safe place to walk and get lost in, there always seemed to be others out walking the streets and at no time did I feel we were unsafe, it is a tourist town after all. Like Pisa there were few cars moving on the roads outside of the various rush hours and this made walking around almost a joy. There are still lots of motor scooters and cyclists, though in general they were polite and not intimidating.

We reached the Arno as the sun was dropping below the horizon, sadly not a night for a sunset over the Ponte Vecchio, Florence’s most well known and loveliest bridge.

We passed Plazzio Uffizi, which we will visit tomorrow, one of the many places I’m super excited about visiting over the next few days. The Uffizi Gallery is one of the major tourist attractions and we have pre-booked tickets for tomorrow afternoon.

Dinner at Libreria Brac was delicious, I wasn’t expecting to find excellent vegetarian or vegan food here as Tuscany is quite a meaty region. It was busy so must be doing something’s right. We had vin santo for desert and OMG! I’ve not had this before and can’t believe I’ve missed it for the 61 years I’ve been on earth. Vin santo (holy wine) is a luscious thick and very sweet, dessert wine, it comes with a small plate of cantuccini, a typical Italian hard biscuit, that you dunk into the wine and let it soak a bit before munching the biscuit. Lovely. I had it every night and it will be a Christmas treat this year.

With very full bellies it was a slow meander back to the hotel. There is always one more narrow street to take a photo of.

This bust is in the entrance to our hotel. The building has been owned by the same family for a very long time and I wonder if this was an ancestor?

I was loving Florence!

Pisa

Tuesday 17 October 2023 – Pisa.

I was surprised, and pleased, to wake up under a clear blue sky. It was unexpected as the forecast had shown rain for most of the week. The B and B room came with a voucher for a coffee, pastry and a glass of juice breakfast in a café around the corner. The café was very modern and could have been anywhere in the world, though it was the only really modern place we entered on the trip. I liked it and the coffee was superb; as was most of the coffee we had in Italy. Coffee is important, as is red wine, and I had lots good wine too; just not for breakfast.

Our first, and only appointment, of the day was a 9:15 visit to the Leaning Tower. We’d booked online for an early visit to get in before the rush. It was still busy, but not as busy as it was later in the day. We arrived early so took a walk around the site, popping outside the ancient city walls to look at the souvenir stalls (Messi, Neymar and Mbappe shirts. None of whom played football in Italy, let alone Florence). Eleanor was looking for a dayglo David statue, though she didn’t find one here.

I’m glad we got into the queue to enter the tower early as we were advised that bags were not allowed inside, and that free baggage storage was nearby. I should quickly note that the organisation at the big attractions we went to in both Pisa and Florence was utterly superb. Walking into the base of the tower I was surprised to see it was completely hollow, with just a stairwell winding round the empty core. What was very weird, though on reflection it should’ve been expected, is the floor slopes inside. It felt really odd walking into a building that sloped downhill.

Construction of this most famous of towers began in the twelfth century from a design by the architect Diotisalvi (possibly as there are contentions about the original architect) and it started to tilt almost immediately due to the soft ground it is built on.

The bell tower was added in 1372 to finish off the build. By the time remedial works starts in 1990 it was leaning at a precarious 5.5 degrees. It is now stable at 3.97 degrees, though it looks worse. There are seven bells in the tower, one for each musical note. The largest bell was installed in 1655.

Though free standing, it was built as the bell tower for the cathedral nearby, the construction of which started in 1064. It also tilts, but only slightly. The cathedral, tower, baptistery and the monumental cemetery make up the Piazza dei Miracoli, a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is all rather lovely. I wanted to visit the baptistery as it’s supposed to have the most magnificent interior of all the monuments, but it was closed in this off-season for renovation work.

There are 251 steps to the top of the tower and one bi-directional staircase. Visitor numbers are, as you would expect, restricted, so it wasn’t too busy, though passing those coming down as we headed up was tight in some spaces. There were some conveniently placed ‘viewing’ stops on the way up; puff, puff…

The view from the top was, as you’d imagine, wonderful. We were lucky with the day as the rest of the week was rainy or cloudy or both. We got the view. It was a little un-nerving standing outside at the top, when you leave the stairs you come out on to a fairly level platform, but as you walk round and get to the section where the tower is tilting down its slightly unpleasant. A narrow marble step, tilting down and eight storeys up. Not my thing. It was nice going back down to the ground. It was fantastic going up though; it’s a marvellous construction and should be on everyone’s to do list.

Back at ground level the tour bus tourists had arrived in force; there were thousands, and this is off-season. I wanted to mock the dozens of folk striking the various Instagramable ‘holding up the tower’ poses, but it was somewhat endearing, though I’m way too cool to do it myself, obviously.

After the rush of the tower and the exquisite view the cathedral was a little ‘meh’, maybe I’ve been in too many. I mean it’s huge and beautiful and the art is stupendous, but I’ve seen it all before; there was some repair work going on as well so scaffold all over the place and I guess that broke that special ambiance of sacred places. At least they didn’t have builders radio going.

The doors of the cathedral are fabulous, with intricate bronze carvings from 1602 in panels on all the doors. I particularly loved this panel where centuries of visitors have been rubbing the naked bum…

After collecting our bags from the baggage office and stopping for coffee and a snack at a nearby tourist joint (expensive) we took to the streets of old town Pisa and wandered randomly for a few hours. I very much enjoyed it.

We crossed the River Arno, which also flows through Florence, we will cross it a few times there as well, and took in an avantgarde exhibition in Palazzo Blu which was really interesting. other than the tower there was one other thing we both wanted to see in Pisa and that was Keith Haring’s Tuttomonda mural. Painted in 1989 it was one of the artist’s final works. It’s huge and rather beautiful and we return here on our final day.

We meandered back towards the B and B, ducking in and out of narrow cobbled streets as the fancy took us. I immensely enjoyed the walking in both Pisa and Florence; there are cars, just not many, and away from the main roads people mainly walk in the street. It’s the way it’s always been and will continue to be as more and more young folk (and some of the not so young) choose to not rely on a car to get around. I also enjoy walking down narrow lanes surrounded by 4 or 5 storey residential buildings; these places feel lived in with a sense of community and I always want to live in one. Though I know the ‘sense of community’ is likely just as much as a fantasy as my dream of a perfect local pub that only really exists on the telly; at least in England anyway. I particularly like the religious images on the walls, the small shrines, and the paintings with a donation slot on the side of churches. This is all so not-England, or New Zealand.

We stopped for lunch (gnocchi for me and a duck bolognaise for Eleanor) and a glass of wine or two in a café on a small square surrounded by young folk from the nearby university. It was entirely pleasant and energising, though we did go back to the B n B for a brief rest after eating. The B n B is just off another, larger square, through a small road arch with the most remarkable and faded painted ceiling that I know nothing about, and don’t want to. It looks very old and the fact it is just there in the street with cars and bikes and pedestrians passing through, or stopping for a smoke and shelter from the rain, is just lovely.

The building our room in has a small shrine on it.

Our final tourist activity was to head back to the Piazza del Miracoli (or Piazza del Duomo depending on who you read) to visit the Camposanto, the memorial cemetery. Construction started in 1277 to house the growing number of graves that were scattered around the cathedral grounds.

The frescoes that cover every wall were finally finished 200 years later. It was my favourite building in Pisa and I’m very glad we decided to visit. The frescoes are amazing and in hindsight I wish I’d spent more time looking at them. Work continues to restore the site and it seems to be being done very sensitively, the work done on the frescoes for instance looks almost as dated as the originals.

My favourite was the depiction of the torment of sinners in hell. It reminded me of similar works I saw in SE Asia and I love that no matter the religion there is always eternal damnation for those who transgress the, often arbitrary and confusing, rules.

The site houses numerous statues and memorials of wealthy and famous Pisans from the past, including Finobachi, the father of mathematics as we now know it. With Michelangelo, Galileo, De Vinci and others Tuscany was well endowed with visionaries.

There are a number of plague death victims here too. The plague didn’t really care who you were or how much money you had when it visited.

We wandered the streets again, stopping for a magnificent gelato before heading out for the evening. We hoped to find a bar to watch England host Italy in an international football match, but we didn’t have any luck so watched it on the TV in the room. We were exhausted and it was only day one, but man it was a good day. I really could holiday forever.

I will give a hard recommend for Pisa, and if you read this and want to visit, stay overnight and walk to the tower, it’s magnificent and comparatively peaceful; then book your tower visit early the following day.

A night in Pisa

Monday 16 October 2023 – Pisa.

I’ve not been to Italy since 1986, sort of. I spent 48 hours on a bus from Bari to London, after getting off a ferry from Athens in 1987, but I don’t recall anything more than getting off the ferry and taking a seat in on the bus. It was a long journey a long time ago. I’ve never been to Pisa, Florence or anywhere else in Tuscany. Weirdly Tuscany and its famous towns haven’t been very high on my ‘must visit’ list until recently, and I lay that positive change squarely at the feet of the actor Stanley Tucci and his fabulous recent BBC series on Italy through the lens of Italian food. Surely, Pisa’s famous leaning tower should have been on my list of wonders of the world/monumental architecture that I must visit, but it wasn’t. That was rather stupid.

Eleanor hasn’t been to Florence or Pisa either so it was the ideal location for a week way, cunningly planned by me to be at the end of the main tourist season, but the week before most schools have their mid-term break. It was so cunning that there were still thousands of people there, but not tens of thousands. I took too many photos and we had too good a time to try and fit things into a single post so this one will just cover the first day, or rather, night we spent in Pisa. I suspect the holiday will take a few days to write up and the photos even longer to edit. I’m happy to say it was a wonderful week away; other than the torrential rain on the last day.

I’ve been finding it difficult to book holidays these last couple of years, I’m wanting to be more eco-friendly and use trains were I can, I’m not worried about the slower journey, but Christ, going anywhere by train from the UK is expensive. Flights have gotten expensive as well, so it took an age to find something that suited our budget and timing, and my desire to never fly Ry*n Air or E*syJ*t again. We flew BA out of Heathrow on a very convenient mid-afternoon flight, arriving in Pisa just after dark. It’s much less stressful travelling later in the day.

We had a lovely room in a B and B a ten minute walk from the tower so set off soon after dropping our bags to get a quick glimpse before the tour we’ve booked for 9:15 tomorrow. We stopped for food and a drink on the way at a small osteria (a local wine bar serving simple food, usually without a menu). They only served one thing, a massive plate of cheese, preserved meat, olives and the local pomodoro, something I’ve never had before; a mix of tomato, garlic, olive oil and bread mashed into a gooey paste and spread on bread. With a glass of local red wine it was a perfect introduction to Tuscan eating.

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After eating we headed off to find the tower, before discovering that my sense of direction was 180 degrees out of whack and we were going the wrong way. We realised this as we arrived at the River Arno, 10 minutes in the wrong direction. The good thing about walking around these ancient towns is no walking is wasted, every narrow, cobbled street is unique to my day to day existence. I felt like I can walk here forever and there will always be something new to see.

I never really recovered my sense of direction after that early blow. However, we did get back on track and eventually hit upon the right path, following a noisy group of ‘jocks’ that really didn’t lift my feelings about Americans overseas, though, admittedly they had better map reading skills than me. We’d just passed the ‘jocks’ along a fairly typical Pisan narrow, gully-like street when we popped out into a square and ‘boom’ there it was, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, gloriously lit and looming imperiously above the buildings surrounding the square. It was a proper OMFG moment. I was unexpectedly and massively excited to see it. It’s magnificent, but not as tall as I expected.

It was only a couple of minutes more to the area around the cathedral and tower. Surprisingly, there were hardly any other people there and we got to wander about and take photos pretty much as we pleased.

We went for a walk around the old town, not getting too misplaced too often now I knew my usually reliable sense of direction wasn’t working. I really like it here, it has a decent vibe and I’m loving the old architecture. At night it had the feel of an ex-European old town somewhere in SE Asia, a little bit crumbly, mouldy and close, and there was a slight smell of sulphur and drain to add to the illusion of being somewhere ancient and barely discovered. I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow when we can explore in the daylight.

Lille; A short break.

Thursday 26 January 2023 – Lille, France

It was cold in Lille, much colder than London; the shock of the cold cutting through my open jacket as I got off the train. We stopped in the almost empty concrete wind tunnel that is Lille Europe Station to don the scarves and hats we pocketed when we got on the tube in Leytonstone almost four hours earlier. Eleanor wore gloves, I was map reading on my phone as we walked the 20 or so minutes to the guest house.

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It was Tuesday morning, Europe is in the grip of an air pattern generated by storms in America, the sky is a solid even block of grey and there’s a firm but gentle breeze that feels like it could cut through lead, its sharp. The light is weird, and would remain so until Thursday morning when the rain finally comes. Though we are six hours early the guest house owner shows us to our room and we can dump our bags; I change into a warmer jumper, then we head back out to explore Lille. Neither of us has been here before so everything is new. Other than some recommended places to visit over the next couple of days we have no plan. The best way to travel somewhere different; slow and at the whim of fancy.

We’ve come to Lille for a short break to celebrate the 25 of January, when, 10 years ago I met Eleanor for the first time over a drink or three in Camden’s famous rock and roll pub, the Hawley Arms. They’ve been a very happy 10 years and life without her would be a lot less bright. We chose Lille as it’s easy and quick to get to on the train, it’s not in the UK and we want to travel in Europe more than we have and, as I said earlier, we’ve not been here before, so there’s plenty to explore.

We spent Tuesday afternoon walking aimlessly around the old town, a lot of the shops were closed, early in a winter week I guess. nothing seemed permanently shutdown or derelict mind, a healthy sign for the city. I have the camera with me though don’t take a huge amount of photos.

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Lille is in northern France, close to the Belgian border and architecturally is a mix of French and Flemish, a lot of the old houses would not be out of place if they were picked up and dropped into Ghent or Bruges. I like the mix of styles.

There’s a lots of churches; including a Notre Dame. The touches are so gothic (it is a famous gothic cathedral), but also a touch Gaudi-esque; though of course he was Spanish.

One of the things I like most about European towns, and it does seem to be unique to mainland Europe rather than the UK, is big old double doors, either as an entrance to a courtyard or directly into a house. I particularly like them when they are faded, grubby and time worn.

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I also found the narrowest building ever, none of those big old double doors would have worked here.

We had an amazing run of finding great places to go for a drink or an evening meal during our short European break in September and I’m pleased to say that luck stayed with us on this trip as well. I found Soultrain bar online, I was looking for an ‘alternative’ bar and one that was preferably a few minutes walk from the guest house. Soultrain met those requirements and lived to up to expectations. We were the oldest people there, though we loved the vibe. The food was a choice of simple bar sharing plates, the cocktails were cheap and smooth and the bar staff were uber friendly. I didn’t expect that a bar playing a mix of American and French hip-hop would be my sort of place, but it was. Thanks internet. This was only our second drink, honest.

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Anniversary night was Wednesday; Eleanor had been recommended a small local bistro by a friend of a friend who lives in Lille and made a reservation before we left London. I booked the guest house based on its close proximity to the bistro. Bistrot Brigand is small, maybe a dozen tables, the music was soul/funk/jazz, and like Soultrain the night before, it was unobtrusive. The food was fabulous, with combinations of things we hadn’t eaten before, mainly vegetarian, which seems unusual in Lille, and the staff were brilliant; this is a small inner suburban bistro, not a tourist place, and we were welcomed even though we have speak French.

There was no rush on Wednesday, breakfast in the guest house; coffee, cheese, bread, fruit and pastries, more coffee. It was cold again, grey, low clouds, we wrapped up and walked to the nearby Metro station and caught a train to nearby Roubaix, near the border with Belgium. Our destination is La Piscine Museum of Art and Industry, recommended to us by my cousin’s wife who is from Lille; she recommended a few places to us. The gallery was the day time highlight of the three days, not so much for its art, there was little that wowed me specifically, it’s the building that is the real highlight of the show.

The gallery first opened in Roubaix in 1835 with an emphasis on textiles, a key industry in the city. Like many museums and galleries across France and western Europe it was closed during the Second World War and the artworks secure elsewhere. What is somewhat ironic is the gallery had just finished an exhibition of textiles by the great Victorian socialist and craftsman William Morris, who’s home and now museum is a five minute walk from our old house in Walthamstow. You can take the girl out of Walthamstow…

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The museum had trouble finding a new base until 1990 when the city council agreed the 1932 municipal swimming pool building, closed in 1985, would make a good home for the collections. No-one who has visited since it reopened could argue that this was not an inspired, if very brave decision. The place looks fabulous and I particularly liked the way the old dressing cubicles are being used to show art works. The tiling is beautiful though, stupidly I didn’t take any photos of it. I did take a photo of this bath though.

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We had lunch, I had a very nice 4 Euro glass of red wine to wash it down, in a nearby café. We hen took in the town square before catching the tube back to central Lille.

An afternoon nap was in order, but it was slightly too early so we wandered about the old town a bit more. I finally found a few narrow streets with not too many cars in to take some photos. I love these cobbled lanes as much as I hate there being cars in my photos.

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I was a bit gutted that the book, record and print market wasn’t properly open on either of the days we walked through it.

This is a holiday, so we picked up a bottle of cheap wine before climbing the three flights of stairs to our room then slobbing on the bed with books for a couple of hours before dinner. Note to self, next time you go to France take a cork screw as virtually no wine comes in a screw top bottle.

Thursday, today, our last day, dawned wet, though much warmer than the last two days. We’d planned to walk to a nearby market for a look and maybe pick up some cheese to take home, but decided in the end to just hang out in the guest house room, enjoy another leisurely breakfast then walk to the station when the rain abated; stopping for a decent coffee on the way.

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I’d booked us seats on the 13:35, giving us time for a last walk if we’d wanted to get wet, but early enough for us to be back home by mid-afternoon, leaving time to unpack and get ready for work the next day (Boo hiss).

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It was a very enjoyable 10^th anniversary trip and I’m looking forward to more visits to Europe this year and of course 10 more years plus with the lovely Eleanor. xx