345 to South Kensington

It makes sense to write about local transport first - in London the topic fills our conversations, the printed page, and even the cinema. It is why my 35 hr week leaves me tired as. The underground system doubles as a navigation system - If you’re going to meet someone, chances are, you will choose a tube station as the spot. People find their way around London not by street names but by tube stations, in association with the Mondrian-esque trance inducing tube map. People didn’t know what to say when I told them I was a couple of miles from the nearest tube.

For the first couple of weeks, to get from Camberwell to my work in Chelsea, I would take the bus and then the tube. One upside was the the guide-book-sanctioned experience of emerging from the brushed steel interior to see the Gothic grandeur of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben's tower. Once or twice I tried the 345 bus to travel the four or so miles to Chelsea, and found it took longer than a bus from Nelson to Motueka.

A quiet tube

And I didn’t enjoy standing all the way to work, I didn’t enjoy the feeling of breathing recycled air, I didn’t enjoy spending five quid it on it every day. I didn’t enjoy reading trashy free papers to avoid eye contact. (My sister sent me a text telling me to scan the tube map to find the only station name that contains none of the letters M,A,C,K,E,R,E,L. “something to do on the tube when you don’t know where too look”) So learning how to bike to work was good.

With the help of Sustrans and Transport for London's cycle maps, I bike through Camberwell, two hundred years ago a satellite village, now very urban, with its not-very-trendy bars, 'Sophocles Bakery’; an olive vendor, the smelly Chinese grocery, and evangelical churches. I keep pedalling, overtaking gridlocked cars and buses, through Kennington, dominated by the Oval, London’s second cricket ground. I dismount to navigate the tangled crossroads of Vauxhall (once 'Folke's Hall') I like to see the collection of contemporary architecture here- the very ostentatious spy headquarters, and apartment blocks that look like the construction of a hyperactive child and the new Vauxhall station itself, with token solar panels on the steel rooves sheltering those waiting for the buses.

[photo - Johnnie Blows - licence: CC ShareAlike]

Then I meet 'Father Thames' and follow him upstream past the wasted hulk of the iconic Battersea powerstation, past a particularly hairy and unavoidable roundabout, and to Battersea Park. I hesitate now, as urban oasis is an overused metaphor, but this collection of playing fields, tennis courts, a gaudy peace pagoda, gardens, cherry trees white-blossomed against a slate sky, is my five minute refreshment - and as I reach it, I stop pedalling, and sit up straight and swallow.

Then it's Albert Bridge over the river. Seeing it lit up after dark adds to its charm. It’s an old shaky bridge this one and troops are advised to 'break step while crossing the bridge'. From there it's a short ride across the latte suburb of Chelsea to my work on Old Brompton Rd.

Albert Bridge at Night

There's the question of the danger and difficulty of cycling, but I'll leave that for another post. For now, I just want to dwell on the fact that biking to work makes me feel the city is a much more varied and lively place than hurtling under it does. My 45 minute morning ride takes me from tower blocks to topiary, from grime to glistening marble. Freewheelin.

(unless otherwise noted, images are in the public domain or distributed under GNU free distrubition licence)

Blog updated, on hiatus for now.

Entries on Barga, Pisa, Roma 1, Roma 2, have been posted in the September section - my travelogue of 2007 is basically complete. So what will you be seeing in 2008 here?

Well, I've been in Britain for almost two months now, and I notice my only post has been about New Zealand! Homesick? Perhaps a little. I'm still travelling though, for a good while yet.

I have had several experiences I have felt were almost deserving of a blog entry. They include: escorting a bleeding drunk youth home in Newcastle; Ceidlhs and Scottish folk music nights in Newcastle and Glasgow; visiting my great-grandparents' graves; looking for stray golf balls at Gourock Golf Club with two adolescents who claimed they were drug-dealers; packing gourmet smoked goods into hampers 14 hours a day in Oban; learning to understand the words 'hame' 'hoose' and 'fer'. My funniest story would be getting very excited seeing a magazine in a Glasgow newsagents, coloured green, titled 'The Alternative View'. Great! some counter-cultural reading! I fish for a pound in my pocket. On closer inspection the subtitle was
'the magazine for Celtic supporters that deals with the real issues'.
Of course it was about fitba', not ecology. But what kind of place has multiple magazines about a single football club?



But I can't keep writing this blog while I'm here. There are many reasons. Sadly, perhaps unavoidably, I don't feel the wide-eyed wonder that I have had all through my trip, including the first time I was here. I think wonder is vital to good travel writing. Practically, I want to save money here, which can lead to both fatigue and monotony. To boot, a lot of the rest of my time is spent interacting with my family, and you don't want to know what we get up to!

In any case, many of you are already very Britian-savvy. You know that it is becoming more multicultural by the minute (The manuals in my last job are now written in Polish and English, for example) You know that 'security measures' both state and non-state, are ubiquitous (closed circuit television is everywhere). You know that West Scotland is wild and beautiful and England is crowded.



I do encounter things that inspire me personally, that you will be interested in, but they will be expressed in other ways than this site.

I would like to say 'Ta very much!' to everyone who has skimmed, read or devoured my tangential ramblings, and especially to those who commented, or wanted to comment but couldn't manage Blogspot's sometimes labyrinthine interface.

Hopefully this blog will rise again on phoenix wings, when I leave the UK. When will that be? Next summer, probably. Where will I go?



Across country to Southeast Asia via more of Europe (Mycenae! Amsterdam! Stockholm!), Siberia, China and Japan.
Peace.

Updates

See here and here for the recently updated last few days of my French adventure.

Kaitakitanga

Back in the UK, my cousin shows me an old news article. "Have you seen this?" I haven't. It's quite interesting.

Triggered by the recent strange events involving 'the Urewera 16' and the armed defenders, the Guardian has published a feature entitled The Maori Resistance. Its a long article, so I'll pull out the bits that leapt out at me:

Though 'much of the very iconography of [NZ's] state is maori', the Waitangi Tribunal is basically overworked and impotent,('it's decisions are non-binding') and the UN is 'unimpressed' with the government's Foreshore and Seabed Act. In the 1960's the NZ government claimed there was no race relations problem at all.

Reading about race relations in my homeland seen through the eyes of a middle class left-leaning Brit is fascinating, like seeing one's own image on closed circuit TV. Familiar, yet bizzare (or zarrebi?). Overall it confirms my conviction that we have a long way to go to harmony in Aotearoa, and it is Pakeha who need to be doing more of the listening and making more of the sacrifices.

This is old news for some, but I've only just found out about the Wellington part to the story. Wellington readers might be interested in seeing the footage of the dawn raid on 128 Abel Smith Street. Terrorism? We fix bikes and read poetry in there. Oh brother.

Hurdling the Language Barrier.

Comfortably back in a country where I can speak (almost) my mother tongue, where visiting the library provides an embarrasment of riches, I reflect a bit on the struggles and joys of learning French in France.

Bravo for the experience of going somewhere where you don't speak the language, and trying to learn from scratch. I'd love to write about this in French, but two months with little writing practice... I'd be here all night!

France, was in some ways an easy place to try my experiment. For one, not many people speak english, and even less like to. Lots of opportunity to practice speaking. Second, there is the abundance of French words (debut, hotel, sautee...) and phrases (de ja vu, haute cuisine, en passant...) that have passed into English. I learned quickly however that there are 'false friends' - 'Chef' for instance means not only the one who cooks, but any sort of boss, a 'crayon' denotes a pencil, and the 'curiosities' of an area can be major attractions.

The huge gulf between spelling and pronunciation also provides a barrier for the cold-start immersion learner. To try to hurdle it, I taught myself a few phonetical symbols to get my head around the French vowels and dipthongs.



Much to the delight of my friends, I could never master the 'r' sound. When I tried to imitate the strange growling gurgle of my teachers, I would usually end up sounding like I was trying to throw up. Some days I practiced the sound, but the motion of pulling my tounge downward inside my mouth caused me to feel nauseous!

Why do I like the language? Well, as popularly observed, there is the sexy, exotic sound to it, but that impression faded the more I learnt (perhaps it was because many of my early sentences were about dumping rotten grapes into a huge trailer). It seems like a powerful language, like Arabic, where one is capable of both the most soothing sounds and equally harsh guttural utterances.

Then there is the great French literature... I aspire to, but may never read Moliere, Apollonaire, Proudhon, Derrida (pictured), Focault, Rosseau... the list could go on and on. But at least I can say I can enjoy and understand the mighty Asterix in the language it was written in. Mais oui! Ah yes.>



It makes sense to me too, to 'miss out' the ends of words as the French do. In conversation, any ambiguous meaning can be sifted through other cues, and so shortening words is no real problem. In print, however, it makes sense to have the full word.

And I'm not sure whether it was just mon amis, the company I was with, but I learned many colourful phrases. To be egotistical is to have 'the melon', presumably for a head. To be really hungry is to have 'les croc', to have fangs, or 'le dalle', a stone block. Curiously, modern urban French slang involves switching the phonemes in certain words, an itbay like igpay atinlay. So 'bizarre' becomes 'zarrebi'.

Can I speak French now? Not really. Could I return to France and use my melange of French, hand signs and the odd stray word of Spanish to make myself understood about day to day matters, even make people laugh with me, not at me, and understand someone who speaks slowly and clearly? Yes. One thing I believe now is that communication depends on patience and creativity much more than simple language profiency. So why learn other languages at all? To be able to say "Ils sont fous ces romains"*, of course.


*These romans are crazy

Unexpectedly

I did not intend to go to Rouen. I'm glad I did. It is pretty and rich in history.

It has more cathedrals per square inch than anywhere else I have been. The one pictured was the tallest building in the world between 1876 and 1880.

I busk by the ruins of the building where Joan of Arc was executed.



I find a quote on a sculpture

'O Jeanne, sans sepulchre et sans portrait. Toi qui savais que le tombeau des heros est le coeur des vivants' O Joan, without a sepulchre and without a portrait. You know that the tomb of heroes is the heart of the living. - Andre Malraux.

Drunk French youths buy me a chocolatine for breakfast, and give me the nickname 'solamente' (solitary)

Things I learned in Paris

1) There are three types of trains in France with three types of cycle policy

a) the TGV - the high speed trains, (Train Grand Vitesse). Using them is unavoidable on some routes. The guards may fine you or threaten to throw your bicycle off the train if they find you with such contraband luggage. I ask why this is so. 'French Law' says one. Why though? 'It is forbidden' he repeats. Someone else tells me my bicycle is more dangerous than the massive sacks others are carrying. 'someone could put their leg through it'. Right.

b) the TER run on the provincial services. They love bikes.

c)the CoRails have an ostensible no-bike policy but will let you take bikes, I hear, if you wrap the item up and make it not look like a bike.

I have a vivid memory of sprinting around the Paris St Lazare (pictured, above, by Monet) station wrapping up my bike in salvaged clear polythene (no one would sell me single rubbish bags, only packs of twenty for more money than I possessed, ripping open salvaged hairties to help bind my package, ready for the last train to Rouen. In the end no-one even asked for my ticket.

2) The magnetic strip on your visa card can fail, leaving you with just 25 euros* to get back to the UK. I found nowhere I could get money out with just the card number and the right ID. Internet booking seems promising but it seems you have to swipe your card to pick up the tickets! Luckily....

3) Fellow travellers will lend you 5 euros to help you buy a ticket if they stand in line with you, watching and waiting that you don't run off and spend it on meths.

4) You can't sleep in French train stations. Unlike the hospitable Frankfurt train station, they close from 1am to 5am.

5) It's hard to do touristy things when you are finding out the above.

*1 Euro = 2 NZ$ approx.