As trailed in my last post, we spent last weekend in Valencia to link up with Randi’s uni friend, Mike, on his post-Bar exam holiday to Spain. Spoiler alert: it was lovely!
Despite it being a quick trip we managed to pack a lot in, starting (for me at least) with a walking tour of the city centre on Friday morning. Our guide was great, and – in my personal favourite moment – did not seem fazed when Randi decided to clarify whether all of his references to the church’s statue of “our virgin” actually referred to the Virgin Mary and not, y’know, some local virgin. Close runner-up favourite walking tour moments included the history of the still-functioning Water Court of Valencia (which is both considerably older than the US Supreme Court and much more sensibly selected) and how the old course of the Turia river came to be turned into a public park. I actually remembered this fact from a Jay Foreman video (thanks, YouTube!) but I wasn’t aware of the government’s Plan A for the river’s replacement: a giant multi-lane motorway. I think Randi and I shuddered in exactly the same way.
Although it may not feel like we live in the multiverse’s best timeline right now, at least we do live in the world where Valencia has a long park rather than a long road, so the next morning we took advantage of this fact and walked through it down to the City of Arts and Sciences. This open-air complex is quite hard to describe – so perhaps just look at the surfeit of photos below – but essentially it’s like stumbling across the headquarters of the United Federation of Planets, with a cluster of culturally worthy institutions linked by open walking areas and glistening reflective pools of water. All of the buildings share a stunning modernist architecture, and I really do mean ‘stunning’ in the sense of ‘stunningly good’ rather than the stunningly awful 60s British modernist buildings made of concrete. (Dear British architects: why couldn’t we have done this instead? Is it the weather?)
Our ultimate destination in the complex on Saturday morning was the L’Oceanogràfic – Valencia’s aquarium – where we dedicated a solid morning to staring at the pretty jellyfish, watching the dolphin show, sadly not coming anywhere close to the top in the pre-show dolphin quiz aimed at 8-12 year olds, holding our hands up against the penguin ice block and, relatedly, regretting holding our hands up against the penguin ice block. Then, in the late afternoon, it was beach time! Reader: the sea was so warm. It’s been so long!
This would have been a great trip in itself, with only minor disappointment at my failing to secure any Agua de Valencia (gin, vodka, cava, orange juice) at our slightly-too-snooty-for-cocktails tapas restaurant on Friday night. Fortunately, help was at hand on Saturday night, because – by fortunate coincidence – Randi’s ex-colleague Sam also happened to be holidaying in Valencia with her friends at the same time we were there, and they were extremely on-board with the plan to go for dinner and then touristy drinks together. We all bonded immediately over the challenge of finding a vegan-friendly restaurant – and massive kudos to Randi for having an American’s instinct to bail out the indecisive Brits from the first not-vegan place we sat down in by paying our €12 water tab and getting us all out of there again – and then afterwards we finally found a bar willing to provide jugs of promised Agua de Valencia. Hurray!
Oh, and since you asked, Metrovalencia is a very nice transport system. This summer it’s also free to ride every Sunday, so many thanks to the man who stopped Randi and I from throwing away money trying to top-up our cards on the way back to the airport. And thank you to Mike for letting us crash your Spanish trip for a long weekend!
Tonight Randi has popped out to Valencia, and I’m supposed to be joining her tomorrow with a fully caught-up blog, so what you’re reading now are the panicked writings of someone trying to keep his promises intact. Let’s start by rolling back a few weeks to a Friday night at Paddington station, where – after teaching Randi the trick to coax free tap water from the vending machine which is desperate to upsell you on a water bottle – we joined my mum on a delightful journey to Hereford. Originally we had planned to go on Saturday morning, but made this last-minute change to avoid the strike… and after all, as someone once said, nothing beats the Friday evening feeling of catching a train out of London to begin a weekend adventure. (Me. I said it. Last post.)
We had a few small wedding errands to run, but mostly the trip was just an excuse to hang out and enjoy spending more time in the place where we will soon be getting married (again). In fact, the other night we had our first stab at the part of the process I’ve been most looking forward to – the seating planning – and I can confirm that few other moments in my life have given me the almost-godlike feeling of shuffling people around the Google Sheet to produce the perfect arrangement. Would recommend.
On Sunday we made it home in time to watch the Euros final at my mum’s, which was a good mixture of genuine excitement plus not-actually-having-to-watch-penalties plus actually managing to squeeze onto the Jubilee line home afterwards, despite everyone coming out of Wembley at the same time. (Apropos football: Randi and I were also strangely captivated by the first episode of a new Channel 4 documentary series, Football Dreams: The Academy, following the children and young adults going through Crystal Palace’s Academy system… worth checking out.) Later in the week I popped back west for drinks with my uncle Andrew near Imperial Wharf station, although – as you might expect – we talked mostly politics over football, with occasional overlap.
Since then we’ve just had a fun couple of summer weeks, including a lovely Saturday afternoon playing boardgames with Kira. This included, amongst others, our old favourite Carcassonne and new favourite Welcome To – the latter having a very satisfying feeling and a format which is competitive without being in-your-face competitive. We also spent an evening hanging out at Canary Wharf – lured there by the Elizabeth Line, obviously – and spent a more philosophical night closer to home drinking wine till late in our neighbour Angela’s back garden. (I mean, to be clear, Angela was also there with us… we didn’t just break in.) Incidentally, for anyone trying to relive their uni years, spending time with your neighbours is the best way of conjuring that feeling of being able to end an evening and go to bed without travelling anywhere.
On Sunday, we spent the day with Josh, Anna and Cora in their glorious garden – thrillingly equipped with a paddling pool – and I taught Cora the game of “wake up sleeping Dom with cuddly toys over and again” which she fully enjoyed. But I want to conclude a week earlier, on the Sunday before, when Randi, Simon, Fleur, Cleo, Steve, Soo-Jin and I gathered at Japes for a symbolically important order of deep-dish pizza. This place is seared in my mind because, back in March 2020, it was the last totally normal social thing we did before lockdown, so it felt good to all be together again, laughing at Randi’s attempt to order a deep-dish pizza without any of the mozzarella. (“The chef sent me back to say it can’t be done! It will burn!” “Tell him it can be done… he did it two years ago!”)
Last weekend we spent a gorgeously sunny weekend in Cardiff – a place which Randi has now totally fallen in love with and is angling to move to, despite my warnings that the weather might not always be so spectacular. Still, nothing beats the Friday evening feeling of catching a train out of London to begin a weekend adventure, and although I’d been to Cardiff once before my main/only memory of the city was hanging out at the Torchwood fountain. This time, we stayed in an Airbnb in the trendy Pontcanna area, and we were both impressed by the massive expanse of rolling parks which surround the banks of the River Taff nearby.
Our primary purpose for visiting was to spend time with Randi’s former colleague, Tom, and his family. After meeting up near the castle, we caught a boat/bus down to Cardiff Bay, walked along the coast, stared enviously at people with tickets to the Aqua Park (basically a bigger and better version of the infamous WoahZone on Lake Michigan which we also failed to get into) before making up for it with ice cream sundaes. Finally, Tom, Demelza and Ralph invited us back to their house for a highly impressive barbecue production, over which- since we’re basically all transport nerds – we all swapped notes on Geoff Marshall videos. Thanks, guys!
The other surprising thing to note about Cardiff was that somehow we fell into eating delicious Mexican American food – not once, but twice! Not only did we enjoy the “unauthentic” (but still delicious) tacos at La Pantera, but for breakfast on Sunday morning Randi scouted out the American diner-themed Hard Lines café, complete with breakfast burritos and by far the best huevos rancheros Randi has found this side of the Atlantic.
All the talk of buckling steel on the railways made us question whether we’d actually be able to get home on Sunday, but thankfully (or regretfully) we did make it home before the extremes of the heatwave on Monday and Tuesday this week. It wasn’t unbearable (thanks to our fan) but we still celebrated Tuesday evening’s rainfall with a bottle of white wine on Blythe Hill. Today we were back to pleasantly-sunny-but-not-absurd temperatures, prompting Randi and I to lie and read in Hampstead Heath for a bit before moseying down to the other exciting part of this post: this afternoon’s escape room adventure, Underground 2099, set in the abandoned South Kentish Town tube station!
An escape room in a disguised Underground station was my extremely well-targeted birthday present from mum, Tash and Cormac this year, and as a group we were in boisterous enough spirits during the orientation that our game master seemed a little taken back. (“I’ve never seen a group start arguing about Tube facts before the game has actually started… I don’t know whether I love you or hate you.”) However, once the game got going we settled down into some excellent teamwork to defeat the radioactive King Rat in a time-travelling trip to a post-apocalyptic 2099. It was a lot of fun, and I’m thrilled that we actually succeeded in our quest with barely a minute and a half spare, although I’m not ashamed to say that I jumped more than once as the mutant hordes advanced. London Supper Club 1, Rats 0.
Whenever people ask how wedding planning is going, I get a little burst of nervous energy that we’re supposed to be doing more wedding planning than we are. Essentially, you’re being assessed on your project management skills as a couple, and that would be a little embarrassing to screw up. But we have been doing wedding planning! Lots of it, in fact, and this is one of my excuses for falling behind on my blog. Excuse number two is that we’re in full-on summer mode, and isn’t it better to spend a glorious summer evening sitting out in the garden drinking wine with Promise rather than typing furiously into WordPress? Yes? No? Maybe?
Well, either way, our evening with Promise was over a month ago now but we were very happy to have her over, especially as the tone in which she asks “South East London?!” is as incredulous as if we had moved to the moon. Some people are just North West to their bones. (Side-note: a few hours earlier, while I was picking out the evening’s wine from a quiet Sainsbury’s aisle, a man approached me with nothing but a large box of Thornton’s chocolates in his shopping basket and a desperate look in his eyes. Turned out that tonight was the night he was due to meet his new girlfriend’s family and had been asked to bring a bottle, but he “didn’t drink alcohol” and really wanted some guidance on what to buy. “You mean… you don’t really drink much, or you’ve literally never drunk?” I asked. He’d never drunk alcohol in his life. Despite having very low wine credibility myself, I steered him to the reds (“more romantic”) and he left with the most expensive bottle he could find. He really was very sweet, and I got very invested, so I really hope the night went well.)
Anyway – that weekend was my birthday weekend, so on Saturday night Randi took me on a mystery walk along the New River until we arrived at Tierra Peru, which was absolutely the best Peruvian restaurant we’ve found in London so far in terms of feeling like we were back in that country. Everything was delicious – and I was very happy to have aji de gallina again – but we ended on an even higher note by combining dulce de leche-filled biscuits with caramelito ice cream. We definitely needed the New River walk back to Canonbury afterwards.
The next day I had been promised a mysterious birthday activity from Tash, which started out with a local brunch (see a next-level egg and beans on toast, above) before swinging back home for ‘reasons’ which, it turned out, really meant a ruse to be able to usher a surprise party which Randi had organised in place while we were out.
For a moment as I stood outside our front door I thought we had caught someone who had brought their own guard dog to a burglary after I heard barking coming from inside the flat, but after peeking through the letterbox I discovered Diva – Erin’s dog – and a host of wonderful humans gathered on the staircase instead. Thank you all! It was such a lovely crowd to have brought together, but it was especially magical that Conor, our downstairs neighbour, could share his toys with the full complement of my friends’ babies whose names all begin with C – Cora, Cress and Cleo – and I was very touched by everyone who went out of their way to get here. ❤️
Talking of babies: in the last few weeks we also met baby Isabel for the first time over Skype (she’s amazing) and later I got to go on an impromptu swimming session with Adam and my baby cousin Austin. Turns out it’s pretty tiring to keep up with him while walking backwards through the children’s pool! Not talking of babies: recently Katie and I also had another Doctor Who night (1982’s Kinda this time, in which the Doctor is definitely not perturbed enough by what goes on) while last weekend Randi and I welcomed my colleague Patricia to our area to give her the hard sell on moving to a flat around here. (It seemed to work!) I also spent an exhilarating evening on my local Labour Party Zoom meeting just in case there was a big fight about candidate reselection. (There wasn’t – it was total unanimity.) And then, of course, like the rest of the country I then spent a few days wondering “wait, what actually happens if Boris just refuses to resign?” before he finally (and rather petulantly) did so Thursday. (Note to Editor – I kept this bit in the baby-themed paragraph for a reason.)
With the constitution unblocked, Randi and I could go back to the important things – more wedding planning! – and had an extremely productive day yesterday hoovering up train tickets for overseas guests and planning our ceremony while enjoying the sun on a picnic blanket in Bushy Park. Sure, Bushy Park is not exactly our patch but we’d always wanted to go back there after walking through it on the London Loop and returning my colleague Tim’s water bottle to him was the perfect excuse to go. After meeting up with Tim over lunch to return said water bottle and chat, we then walked over to Teddington Lock and finally along the river to Richmond, officially connecting the London Loop to the Capital Ring and feeling proud of ourselves.
Finally, today we enjoyed another stunning day with the fam outside in Greenwich Park to see Daryl and Ermila on their latest UK visit. (Standing on the bank at Greenwich Pier and waving as they arrived off the Thames Clipper did make “visiting South London” feel more like a scene from a continental voyage.) We walked, all had a great outdoor lunch, and to top it off on the way home I spotted some kids in Ladywell Fields with water pistols who agreed to give me a refreshing blast on demand. As discussed: it’s most definitely summer.
In my job I’m lucky enough to work with a truly awesome development team, based in many different countries, and for a long time I’ve tried to get a group together for an in-person meetup. For a while this was impossible thanks to the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, but last week were able to gather in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, which meant that I could finally hang out with Kira, Maria and Hanna IRL and (spoiler alert) drink a lot of wine.
The scheduled options into Tbilisi’s airport are not fantastic, so by the time Maria and I had completed our overnight flights, met up at the airport and taken a Bolt back to our Airbnb it was already 5am and the sun was coming up. Thankfully, Kira was waiting for us with our inaugural bottle of sweet Georgian red wine, and we all sat on the terrace pretending that we’d all had more sleep than we’d actually had.
A few hours later Kira took us on a short tour of Tbilisi’s Old Town, which at 9am on a Saturday morning felt more like a film set than a real city. The streets are narrow and hilly, with plenty of quirky street art and gorgeous views over the rest of the city, but almost no other people to be seen. It soon became clear what should have already been obvious by looking at a world map: Georgia is pretty far south, hot, and therefore has the same late-rising, late-sleeping culture you’d expect anywhere else at this latitude. Only tourists would wander around in the morning, duh.
Still, I hadn’t brought my hiking boots for nothing, so the next morning we made another early-ish start so we could meet up with Hanna and climb up to the ancient fortress which overlooks the city before it got too impossibly hot to walk around. (Don’t worry, we’re a good team. Everybody came prepared with hats and sun cream.) After a while on the hills we descended into the National Botanical Garden, which was beautiful, even though I’m sure we only saw a very small portion of it. Shout-out to the large group of children, all dressed up in matching outfits, who were being filmed singing and dancing by the base of the waterfall where we were sitting, and apologies to whoever’s job it will be to edit us out of this particular music video.
Tbilisi is a fascinating place, and if you’re looking for a relaxing balance of nature plus tourist amenities in a friendly atmosphere then I would totally recommend it as a city break option. It very much feels like a place in flux. For example, the streets are lined with Soviet-era apartment buildings which feel a little abandoned on the outside, but also house one or two shops, bars or restaurants inside which are buzzing with energy and life. I was fascinated by the haunted-house foyers of these buildings, and I very much wonder what they will look like in a decade or two.
During the week we were, of course, working from our (thankfully air-conditioned) apartment, so we only scratched the surface of things to do in Tbilisi. That said, we did manage to tick off some other items, including a visit to the Gabriadze theatre on Wednesday night to see a marionette performance of Ramona. Ramona is a beautiful locomotive engine who is separated from her lifelong love, and – despite the meddlings of an officious Soviet bureaucrat – joins a travelling circus troupe and learns to walk the trapeze. It was genuinely extraordinary and moving, and although obviously the English surtitles aren’t capable of communicating all of the history and nuance of the text, listening to the Georgian voices was also beautiful. My only recommendation, if you decide to visit, is to sit further back than I did so you don’t have to crane your neck to combine the text with the puppetry!
We also made it to a jazz club on Friday evening, which I also really enjoyed. And, to make this a fair cultural exchange, I also tried to provide the very best of Britain in return: namely Jelly Babies (which went down very well, albeit with initial qualms that “it seems weird to eat babies”), Dairy Milk, Crunchies, multiple episodes of Would I Like To You? and a rewatch of one of my very favourite films – Four Lions – on the last night with Kira. Oh, and of course everyone thought I was weird to add milk to my tea.
We also watched Encanto together (which was good and all, but I’m not convinced that it’s OK for poor Mirabel to be put through intense childhood trauma just because it serves some cosmic bring-the-family-together ends-justify-the-means grand plan!) and I introduced everyone to Dominion. Since Kira is a highly competitive board game expert, this inevitably led to several more games of progressively more drunken Dominion until she could beat me – but I did enjoy my brief winning streak while it lasted.
The other obvious reason to visit Georgia is the food, which is both (a) very delicious, and (b) extremely affordable for tourists. We ate very well, including a decent fill of the ubiquitous cheese-filled khachapuri!
Overwhelmingly, though, the purpose of this week-long adventure was to spend time with some of my favourite people beyond the confines of a Zoom call. I’m super-grateful to everyone for making the effort to congregate in Tbilisi, and I hope it won’t be too long before we can all play Dominion together again.
Jeff DuBowe on Haarlem globetrotters: “One of our favorite spots. Super walking city. I think we were the ones who told your In-Laws about it…” Oct 14, 15:15
