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!
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.
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.
Before I start, I wanted to note that my great-uncle Leonard died suddenly a little over a week ago. He’s been a part of my life since I was born; indeed, one of the first photos I ever took was of Leonard, snapped from the vertically-challenged perspective of a five-year old. I will wait until the funeral to gather my thoughts and memories, but it’s a strange feeling to have someone disappear without warning. We’ll miss you.
“Let’s move to the UK!” I said. “We can go travelling all over Europe! Everything’s so close!” And for a hot minute this plan worked out great – we did make it to Amsterdam and Barcelona, after all – but then Covid happened, and after that we wanted to prioritise seeing old friends rather than exploring somewhere new. This is a long way of saying that it’s been a long time since Randi and I visited a new country together, but now the spell has been lifted after a long Easter weekend with Randi’s parents in a brand new destination for us all: Malta!
Malta is a fascinating place. It’s the smallest EU member state, by both size and population, and everyone we spoke to had a clear pride in their country. For a century and a half Malta was a British colony and some of that influence is obvious: English is one of two official languages, there are British-style plugs and red telephone boxes, Randi could order a ricotta qassata from a ‘Crystal Palace café’ and we even spotted a mysterious Clapham Junction on a map. Meanwhile, the country’s nearest neighbour is Italy – no doubt contributing to all of the delicious Italian food available – while the Maltese language itself is descended from Arabic, and when you’re walking from Mdina to Ir-Rabat it’s very easy to feel like you’re in the Middle East. To be honest, I already want to go back.
Valletta
Despite a late arrival, Randi and I forced ourselves to get up on Thursday morning for a walking tour of Valletta. Malta’s capital is very small, highly pedestrianised, immensely walkable and incredibly beautiful, with an impressive gorgeous-buildings-per-square-km ratio and photogenic streets which curve up and down before reaching the sea on three of the city’s four sides. Valletta was built as a walled city, established by the Catholic ‘Knights of St. John’ who ruled Malta from the sixteenth century until Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, and unlike most cities has a very clear ‘entrance’ over a bridge and through the no-longer-an-actual-gate ‘City Gate’.
Once inside, the first thing you’ll see is the new Maltese Parliament building – which was only completed in 2015 – built in a ‘controversially modern’ architectural style which Malta should be very grateful isn’t just a euphemism for ‘terrible’ but is actually quite striking. In fact, prior to its construction this plot of land was a car park, so this seems like a big improvement, and we were amused to spot a few designated car parking spaces which remain nearby, tucked away on a side street, reserved exclusively for the following named positions only: Prime Minister, Leader of the House, Opposition Leader, Minister for Family and Social Solidarity, and Parliamentary Secretary for Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Active Ageing.
Valletta is also a hub for buses on the island, and since it’s only a half an hour from where we were staying in St. Julian’s we ended up coming back a few times – especially to eat! Special thanks to Lee and James at work for sharing their curated list of Valletta’s restaurants with me. We tried a few places, but in particular I have to mention the amazing tasting menu we enjoyed at Legligin on our final night as our farewell to Malta.
(Since I mentioned the buses, here’s the low-down: they were mostly very good, and easy for tourists as they accept contactless card, but the big downside came when a bus was ‘full’ and refused to let us on. We could have totally squeezed on.)
Gozo
On our second day we headed to the island of Gozo for a quad-biking tour around the main sights. As the non-driver of the group my role was mostly to not fall off the quad bike while Randi was driving – which I managed with a 100% success rate – and occasionally risk taking photos.
Mdina & Marsaxlokk
The two other places we visited during our trip were the fortified city of Mdina (Malta’s ancient capital city prior to the construction of Valletta) and the fishing village of Marsaxlokk. Mdina itself is teeny tiny and feels like a well-constructed film set, with a population of less than 300, although it’s surrounded by the larger town of Rabat. From here Randi and I tried and failed to go for a hike through the countryside, having been assured the the path was ‘obvious’, although it was not at all obvious to us where the path ended and the strawberry farms began. Still, we totally forgave everything because the landscape was like walking through a tabletop of Carcassonne tiles.
We made it! Fair warning: this is going to be an exceptionally joyful blog post, because Randi and I finally made it to the US and back after three whole years of being away. In fact, our United flights were mostly covered by credit from our aborted holiday of April 2020, so we had a lot to pack in.
Our first stop was LA to stay overnight with Randi’s brother, Alex, and his partner Lia. They kindly shepherded us from the airport to an outdoor restaurant for dinner (because you can do outdoor dining in November in southern California) where we had a lovely time pretending that our sleep wasn’t 8 hours behind where it should be.
The next day, suitably reset, we spent some time together at the Huntington Botanical Gardens before moving on to Randi’s parents in Yorba Linda. This was a perfect place to relax into holiday mode – beautiful gardens, including some fearsome cacti, and all in sunshine.
Time for a quick side-quest, though! Before leaving the city, we also worked in a brief window to sneak off to Farmers Market and introduce Randi to my LA cousins Jackie and Jeff. This has been a long-overdue introduction, and they generously treated us to brunch while we made the most of our short time together. A really lovely Glamily bonus.
The number of books I’ve managed to get through during the pandemic has been shockingly poor, and I’ve now decided to blame being cut off from Randi’s family home in Yorba Linda. It really has become my happy place to sit by the pool and read, occasionally refuelled by trips to In-N-Out Burger (still delicious).
Obviously, it was also great to spend more time with Randi’s parents, and in the evenings we gathered together to keep pace with British essentials such as the Bake Off finale and a creepy Weeping Angels-centric episode of Doctor Who, during which I was pretty sure I could sense an army of malicious statues approaching from their backyard.
Just in case this makes it sound like we never left the house… we weren’t that immobile. Our furthest adventure was to Newport Beach for a fishy (in a good way) lunch with Randi’s friend Sonali, followed by a good walk along the beachfront itself. In news which will surprise no-one, we opted to join the small fraction of the population who ride the local 71 bus to Newport Beach rather than driving – and while it’s neither very frequent or particularly fast, I have nothing bad to say about my $2 Orange County bus experience, which was actually reasonably well-used for the middle of the day. And free masks, too, for anyone ‘forgetting’ to wear one – including for the woman who boarded, took her free mask and then got right back off again.
We also went for a wonderful (and quite philosophical) stroll around the local neighbourhood with another of Randi’s childhood friends, Sienna. Meanwhile, Randi cooked an amazing dinner for the Leikens when they came over for the evening, along with Alex’s friends Brian and Gabo, and I can confirm that it was me who finished the chocolate cake the next morning. For Thanksgiving itself, I found myself in the disorientating position of making the salad dressing (despite, y’know, not eating salad) which miraculously ended up being edible. Not quite as edible, however, as Andrew Shelanksy’s ginger cookies which have to go down as one of my Thanksgiving 2021 highlights.
And finally: Chicago! No matter where we live, this will always be the city where we met and we never plan to be away for such an outrageously long period of time again. Our home base was Cantherine Catherine and Blaine’s AJ’s fancy new apartment, and in addition to all of the running about we did it was just really magical to spend some time again just hanging out, drinking Spotted Cow, streaming Channel 4, revisiting their wedding, stealing pizza slices from the fridge, recreating the entire Geja’s fondue experience with a DIY takeaway kit and arguing about whether ‘takeaway’ is a word. We also enjoyed a Hanukkah latke feast with Catherine’s cousins – and fortunately, we had come prepared with offerings from the land of Peppa Pig to satisfy the youngest guest.
Oh, but we did so much more. We ordered Mexican food with Toggolyn – still, by some distance, the couple with the coolest bookshelves – and then hopped over together to Robert and Julie’s for pizza and wine and incredibly tangented stories. Their two sons are also so, so much fun. We went back to Windy City Café with one of my most favourite ex-Grouponers, Ellen, who is slowly morphing into a European before our very eyes, and hit up our other go-to brunch place, Janik’s, with the one and only Cat “I’m going to move to Madison just as you leave Chicago” Hurley.
Evening engagements included a night out in the ‘burbs with Randi’s former boss and her family, cocktails with Jason and Carrie and Thai food at Michaela and Andy’s flat where an awful lot of opinions were expressed about Omaha. I also took a solo trip on Metra out to Downers Grove for burgers with another ex-Groupon colleague, Mike, although it almost turned into a much longer diversion because I almost boarded an Amtrak train by mistake… which could have been a lengthy error.
We also spent time with our beloved flatmate Amanda, of course – not once, but twice – starting with dinner at the one-and-only La Scarola. They’ve always been suspiciously nice to me there, starting from my very first visit, to the extent that Randi assumes they’ve confused me with someone else. Still, I’ll take it, especially since this visit ended with the owner ripping off a piece of tablecloth for me to write my phone number down so he can “take me out to dinner in London” when he visits.
Anyway – having gorged on Italian food – we reunited with Amanda a few nights later at Joe and Julie’s house which, not surprisingly, is a quirky masterpiece of design. We had an uproariously great night together with Amanda’s partner John and long-time Chicago friend Karol. (Julie’s chocolate and marmalade cake is highly recommended.)
Before flying home on Saturday, we just had time for some excellent Swedish breakfasts before accompanying Catherine and AJ to buy a Christmas tree. (In truth, I think we were mostly there so that Catherine had a secure majority of people whose instincts are to bring home the biggest tree possible.) And then, far too quickly, we were in a cab to the airport. If you’re thinking that “cab to the airport” doesn’t sound like us, you should know that, when I left Chicago in November 2018, Robert very kindly offered up some closet space to store a bunch of books, board games and other possessions until we had somewhere permanent to send them to.
I certainly wasn’t intending to colonise his closet for three years, and – beyond feeling guilty – there was something incredibly gratifying about finally coming back for my stuff, even if it took an unwieldy number of extra bags to do it. Yes, stuff’s just stuff, but it was my stuff… and on the flight back, the sadness of leaving people behind in Chicago again was balanced with a satisfaction that our home in London would now become – in a sense – whole.
Appropriately, on our first flight out I reached the very last episode of Wicked Game, a podcast series recommended to me by my uncle Andrew which works through each American Presidential election from the beginning. I also picked Finding Dory for my traditional aeroplane animation fix… although, sadly, this time I found the story pretty underwhelming and one dimensional. On the way back, therefore, I went in a different direction and watched the Christopher Nolan thriller Tenet. Probably not the ideal viewing experience for that film, but enjoyable enough. The real shining moment of my first post-Covid international journey, however, was being reunited with a pack of Ruffles (Cheddar & Sour Cream) at O’Hare. Ruffles! I had forgotten about you, but you were always an excellent option from the Groupon vending machine.
It’s clearly time for this rambling narrative to end, because tomorrow we go back to the real world. At least, the real world as bounded by the walls of our flat for a few days, pending the (hopefully negative) outcome of a PCR test. We came home today to a Christmas tree of our own (it’s beautiful), a big Indian takeaway (see, definitely a real word) and the Doctor Who finale: all good reminders of our home here. But nothing makes you appreciate home more than leaving it, and I can’t wait for whatever travel comes next.
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
