For the past two weeks I’ve been travelling again for work. Back to Warsaw first, and this time joined by Bex who very graciously endured my abridged, second-hand re-enactment of an Old Town walking tour. It was also great to see Mark and Caroline again, and along with a couple of others we visited what I can only assume is one of the city’s premier gambling establishments. Alas it still failed to arouse my interest in actually gambling (no surprise there) and so instead I amused the Italians by ordering tea (with milk) at the bar. I was desperate.
Bex, Sara, Rossella and me
Caroline, Mark and Rossella in a Warsaw casino
After a couple of hours wandering around Brussels on a layover, my next stop was Morocco. Having been advised that Marrakesh would be a more interesting place to spend a weekend than Casablanca, I started there.
Inside the Majorelle Garden
I was excited – this was actually my first visit to any African country whatsoever, let alone Morocco – and spent Sunday exploring the city. (Yes, I know I’m wearing a super-touristy hat: it’s only because I needed to get some change for entry into the Saadian Tombs.) The central square, Jemaa el-Fnaa, is breathtaking and the souks alongside are fun to explore, just as long as you watch out for the motorbikes which some people see fit to ride through the packed, narrow paths.
I’m also very glad I visited the Majorelle Garden – it’s a small, enclosed space but is astonishingly colourful and peaceful inside. The perfect calming antidote to a bustling market, and the last thing I saw before catching my train to Casablanca. (A three hour ride, in wonderful old-fashioned compartment style for about $14. The rest of the world should take note.) I’m pretty sure the two Spanish men to my right were complaining about the English, though.
Jemaa el-Fnaa
In the souk
Looking out over lunch
Catching the train to Casablanca
I should mention that Morocco is very much an Arabic and French speaking country, and the limitations of my English-only tongue were particularly evident in the taxi journey from Casablanca’s main railway station to my hotel. I was somewhat confused when another passenger joined us – this turns out to be a normal and, I guess, somewhat economic quirk of their taxi system – and then the driver grew increasingly impatient with my inability to answer any of his questions. Thankfully, the atmosphere lightened when he stopped the car in order to hide away some cash in a secret cubby hole hidden in the middle of the steering wheel, and we both started laughing together. You don’t really need to share a language to bond. A shared love of the absurd will do.
With Francisco
I didn’t get a chance for much touristy stuff in Casablanca, although I was well taken care of by Francisco and Jessica while I was there, and enjoyed hanging out with other visitors from the French office. We did make it to the world’s third-largest mosque one night, right by the sea, which was beautiful.
The Atomium at night
But soon it was time to go home, and fortunately this time the mysterious gods of yield-management airline pricing granted me an overnight stay in Brussels. So as a lovely bonus to the whole trip, my parents popped in by train so we could have dinner together and see the city sights by night.
So now, in terms of tourist sightseeing, I can tick off the Grand Place, the Mannequin-Pis (or the “peeing boy statue” as everyone actually says) and the Atomium. We worried the latter would be a wasted cab ride – with nothing to see in the dark – but were pleased to discover that at night it lights up and sparkles more than a Twilight vampire.
Oh, and in the midst of all of this, I also scored theatre tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an intense online booking queue. But that is a story for next year…
Dinner in Brussels
At the Manneken-Pis
Durham loses marks for ditching the National Rail symbol
For the second week of our trip, we embarked on Dom’s Complete Railway Tour of the UK (Abridged) using our magical BritRail passes, which grant non-residents an unlimited ride on trains across the country. It does feel like a scheme set up in the glory days of British Rail and then buried under a carpet, as the passes you get haven’t been updated in almost 20 years, but weirdly the merest glimpse of one is enough for a ticket inspector to decide not to bother investigating any further. And so, thus armed, we set off for our first destination. (It’s worth noting that our B&B in Bury St Edmunds was several centuries older than the country I’m writing this from.)
I’m starting to doubt the town is making much progress on the Abbey
Randi and Kuzco
Most photos of us in Cambridge feature rain and ponchos
Our next stop was a rather wet and windy Cambridge: partly for the history, partly so I could pop into the bookshop. After a day of sightseeing and sheltering, we were joined in The Eagle by Mandler and Calaresu – two of my supervisors from uni – who were kind enough to make time for a drink and some catching up. This also proved to be Randi’s opportunity to try fish pie, which she took up with relish.
(Deviation: I do wish ordering at the bar was more of a thing in the US.)
EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED at Caius. No, wait. Nothing has changed.
“Our sprinkles are different to your sprinkles”
Heading up north, we impulsively changed trains for Scarborough – which I’ve never been to before – and spent an afternoon at the seaside. There’s not a huge amount to write about Scarborough – and at one point I may have been over-ambitious in my expectations of the cliff lift “tramway” – but it was very nice to stroll along the beach and see the castle from a distance.
Who needs California?
ConSoc would be proud
Our best B&B was in Durham, because we were hosted by none other than Katie “I live here” Self! The three of us had a great time together touring the city, while also finding time to stuff ourselves with a pretty representative sample of my British food longings: Indian curries, English breakfasts, jacket potatoes and lots and lots of biscuits. It’s not about food being fancy, guys, it’s just about food being great.
Everything looked particularly beautiful here
For comparison, here we are in 2010
Talking of great: bowing to Randi’s repeated requests to see Edinburgh, we headed there next and were equally blown away by how beautiful the city is. Along with the castle, I ticked off a couple of things I didn’t manage last time, including a fantastic walking tour and a hike up Arthur’s Seat.
And of course, I checked back in with my old friend David Hume.
Seems like only one of us is getting older
Pretty stunning
At the summit
Finally, we headed to Windermere in the Lake District, which was a perfect place to walk and relax at the end of the holiday. There were sheep. There were cows. There was a bus which cost £4.20 per-person. Most importantly, though, there were stars at night – and it’s been a while since I’ve been in proper darkness, able to lie down and look up at the milky way.
Sheeeeeep!
Contemplating (mostly about how expensive buses were)
So, that’s it: a condensed account of a whistlestop tour, which hopefully did a good job at selling the country to an American. The tourist board can thank me later.
Whether you measure these things in Celsius or Fahrenheit, it’s unreasonably hot outside. To avoid frazzling to a crisp, I’ve turned indoors for some housekeeping. But housekeeping is hard, so I’ve merrily press-ganged others into service too. First, Randi and I stole Jatherine’s car and joy rode to IKEA so that after a year of living in my apartment I might have somewhere in my room to indulge in extravagances like (a) putting clothes away and (b) sitting down. Then Todd revealed that he (and I quote) “loves” putting IKEA furniture together, so I plied him with Budweiser and basically did nothing for 2 hours, 1 minute and 15 seconds (target time: 30-45 minutes) until I had a chest of drawers. Success.
Even more fun, because it didn’t involve going to Schaumburg, Illinois, was virtual housekeeping. I re-jiggered my home page, added some fancy maps of places I’ve been, and upgraded to Windows 10 on the day it came out because OF COURSE I was going to do this.
And occasionally, I was social: meeting Randi’s work peeps and feeling quietly ashamed for never having read Kierkegaard, celebrating Nolan’s birthday, that kind of thing. But most importantly, because it generated photos, I also went to the state capital of Illinois: Springfield!
The state capitol. The roof is apparently occupied by Cybermen.
I’m proud of this photo because Randi seems tall
Trying to be helpful and give them some warning
“Excuse me, but you’re doing it wrong”
With my bffl, Abraham Lincoln
The original inspiration for this trip was meeting someone who worked for the under-threat-of-closure Illinois State Museum, and wanting to visit while we still could. But Springfield is not the kind of town you head back to in a hurry, so we also took in the state capitol building, the old state capitol building (they claimed it got too small but it seemed perfectly adequate to me) and, most excitingly, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Strictly speaking, only Hoover and onwards got ‘official’ museums from the National Archives and Records Administration, but some of the golden oldies were popular enough to inspire unofficial efforts. And who would begrudge Lincoln his due?
Springfield clings pretty closely to Lincoln in general: they’ve gone so far as to preserve a whole street where he lived in nineteenth century style, though relenting to twenty first century sensibility by adding a warning sign that the paving of this era ‘may be uneven’. (I dread to think of what they would make of Brent council’s paving standards.) But screw museums and memorials: in Springfield, the 16th President is apt to wander into a bar and strike up conversation. Nice chap, and very forgiving. I approve.
Have you ever arrived at a party and realised that no one you know has arrived yet? But there’s a free bar, so you grab a drink and mingle?
Lesson learned: the mingling bit is significantly harder when you’re in Poland, and everybody else is speaking Polish.
Nevertheless, I had a great and productive two weeks in Warsaw. As most people know, the city was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, but the modern replacement which rose from the ruins is a lot more attractive than the Soviet brutalism you might imagine. Meanwhile, Old Town is quite astonishing as a monument to rebirth and reconstruction.
A baseball player (don’t ask) in Warsaw’s Old Town
Monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944
Another reminder of the uprising
MARIE CURIE WAS POLISH
Not sure what this was doing in the middle of Warsaw, but I like it
Only 1444 km away!
Other highlights included ordering French food with Steven (with a horrified “that’s not French…” reaction when it arrived), museums to the Warsaw Uprising and Jewish History, and my artificially-engineered multi-stop journey home on the last night just so that I could try the underground system. (Clean, bright and purple, with trains arriving every few minutes, if you were wondering.) I also enjoyed a walking tour which ended in free vodka shots – and very refreshingly cold they were too!
As a wonderful bonus, Katie and I also spent one of the weekends in Prague. Everybody always says Prague is beautiful, and it didn’t disappoint. After taking an overnight sleeper train – which I will always find inherently joyful and thrilling, especially when there’s no messing about with passports or border controls – we took a walking tour to take in all the main sights. And man, this walking tour was good. Our guide, Karel, was engaging and charismatic, and a perfect introduction to the city. (A city no less charming for the fact that beer is literally cheaper than bottled water.)
Is there anything cooler than a transnational sleeper train?
Welcome to Prague
Not pictured: Weeping Angels descending from Prague Castle to kill us
Scenes of death made us awkward
After a ‘Premium Economy’ upgraded flight back (oh ye gods of yield management pricing), I arrived back in Chicago in time for another Groupon Summer StreetFest. And a heatwave. As April and I laboured over a game of giant Jenga, it felt more like a military exercise…
They were excited in West Branch, Iowa when native son Herbert Hoover became President. It didn’t last.
No one seemed very excited about our trip to Iowa. “Why are you going to Iowa?” asked most. So I’m pleased to announce the following discovery: Iowa is lovely. Quiet, rural, unassuming – I am assuming this will be a once-in-a-lifetime visit – but still lovely. And as Reddit correctly predicted, the people we met were all delightful, which puts Iowans way ahead of fancy-pants Seattleites.
If you’ve heard anything at all about Iowa, it’s probably because it always snags first spot in the voting schedule for the Presidential primary elections, briefly catapulting the state onto global news bulletins for a few days every four years. With candidates already swarming to patronise woo the electorate, we were hoping to bump into something political, and as luck would have it our first night’s B&B just happened to be run by enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporters. So naturally we stuck around the next morning to watch her ‘launch’ speech and pose with banners:
Hillary for Iowa! Also, for the other 49 states too!
Later on, in unimaginatively-named Iowa City, we dined in Hamburg Inn No. 2 – which it seems is mandatory for any sort of political career in the US – and, in West Branch, we checked out the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum. Hoover is best remembered for being in office during the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, and the museum’s main strategy for tackling this unfortunate fact is to focus about 80% of the exhibit on his pre-presidential humanitarian efforts.
Hoover’s ‘good guy’ credentials thus burnished, they offer an increasingly desperate series of excuses for Hoover’s failure, culminating in “who’s to say it wouldn’t have been worse without him?”, and then a series of buttons to canvas your opinion on Hoover from ‘Strongly Positive’ (hah!) to ‘Strongly Negative’. I gave him one level up from the bottom. Hell, I can think of worse Presidents…
They wouldn’t let me get as close to Hoover as LBJ, but we still enjoyed some quality fishing time together
On Sunday, the weather brightened up and we stopped at Lake Macbride State Park for a spot of swimming and kayaking, which always reminds me of our Wednesday afternoon Sixth Form kayaking lessons down at the Ladbroke Gove canal. Anyway. Kayaking is fun!
Left, right, left, right, stop to pose
Also in Iowa:
- A sign at ‘Family Video’ by the highway promises Report Card A’s Equals Free Rentals!
- It’s not always easy to find vegetarian options on menus.
- But it is easy to find great ice cream at Whitey’s (thanks, Nolan).
- The city of Davenport has built itself a seemingly pointless but enchanting Skybridge.
- Roads are empowered to suddenly declare that ‘pavement ends’ and leave you stranded on miles of unpaved track. We didn’t stay on it long enough to discover what the ‘minimum maintenance’ section would be like.
A fair bit of Iowa was like this
And in Kalona (population: 2,363) the large proportion of Mennonites gave the place a distinctive feel:
You know what I like about horses? They don’t turn on red.
“Not This Frog”
As I say, everyone was super-Mid-Western-friendly. We so enjoyed talking to Daisy, the owner of Iowa City’s A Bella Vista, that we risked the late return of our rental car to stay and chat longer. But the final word should go to owners of Strawberry Farm Bed & Breakfast after we finally turned up at 11pm. Despite the late hour they launched into a discussion of their dog, their neighbours and – most importantly – the frog which was currently perched on their front door.
“Do you know what this is?” the guy asked, but my hopes of being the unexpectedly knowledgeable city boy (“it’s a frog!”) were soon dashed as he began to list possible species. “It reminds me of having dinner under the skylight when we were growing up”, his wife added, “and we’d look up and see this frog. Not this frog.”
Perhaps we were just tired, but it felt like a moment.
IOWA, YEAH
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
