Archive for November, 2009
29/11/2009
Today the only thing on my agenda was The Louvre as on yesterday’s tour the girl told us that if you spent 30 seconds looking at every piece without a break (apart from when it’s closed) it would take you over a month to see everything, crikey. I spent around 3 and a half hours there quite happily and if I’d have got there earlier I’d have spent longer.
Once I’d seen The Mona Lisa (which is what today’s blog title is a reference to, just in case you suspected it was to Bo Didley’s ‘I Need You Baby – Mona’ covered with some sucess by Craig McLachlan amongst others) and The Venus de Milo it was just a case of wandering around aimlessly and seeing what treats I came across.
The place is huge, I never walked in the same room twice. Well worth the €9 entry fee (though once again it would have been free with my student card if I was but a year younger). I definetely want to return for a longer look at a later date.
In fact I haven’t seen a quarter of what I wanted to. There’s at least another 3 museums I want to see and plenty of other sights besides that I haven’t had a proper look at. Paris is high up on my return to list.
I did intend for this post (as well as yesterday’s which I’ve only just had a chance to edit and upload) to be more detailed but as I’m doing most of it on my phone and it’s half 2 in the morning so it shall not be. I did some of it on the PCs here before but they are painfully slow and at €3 for an hour (most of it spent waiting for pages to load), a rip-off (as is the food and drink at this hostel). Also there was an annoying man next to me alternating between dreadful humming and a little girly snivel. Roll on netbook.
So this is the last night of this particular trip. I can’t figure out if it’s gone quickly or slowly, a bit of both perhaps. Which would surely mean that it’s actually run at your bog standard and traditional 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week time etc. time, no?).
Tags:Blogsherpa, Bo Didley, Craig McLachlan, Europe, France, Mona Lisa, Paris, The Louvre, Venus de Milo
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29/11/2009
Last night’s sleep didn’t go very well. Partly due to people coming in the room late and leaving early but mainly due to the fact I was anxious to get a decent kip after not looking after my sen too well of late. When this is the case an over active mind kicks in and a restless night follows. It always makes me think of this SFA tune.
I decided to go on a walking tour today, run by the same company as the one I went on in Berlin. I’m not overly keen on these sort of things. But when you’re pushed for time they are quite handy for packing a lot in cheaply. I’m on my way to the meeting point now. The weather is ruddy awful though, wet and windy all over. I’m anything but adequately dressed for it so it’s going to be a long 3 and a half hours trek around the sights. Shiver shiver.
It included Pont Neuf, Academie Fracaise (where men in berets spend all day trying to think of fiendish ways to stop the inferior English language creeping into their own), The Louvre, Tuileries Gardens, Place de la Concorde (the square that holds the gold-tipped obelisk that Napoleon nicked from the Egyptians), the Grand and Petit Palais, The Sacre Coeur, Notre Dame Cathedral, The Eiffel Tower and many more. It was okay but as Paris is quite spread out we didn’t really get that close at all to a lot of the sights I’ve listed. It certainly wasn’t as good as the excellent one of Germany’s capital.
A very French lunch was had imbetween the 1st and 2nd half of the tour, quiche Lorraine with a pain au chocolat afterwards to fill my stomach up a bit. After the tour had finished I was that freezing I couldn’t be arsed going off and having a more in-depth look at some of the stuff covered so I just mooched back to the hostel.
The bed in the new dorm I’ve checked into is a cosy little number. They are built into the wall in banks of 2 (one above another) and each has a little curtain for some privacy which is a nice touch. Though the large security cages on underneath look good for the job, they also make a hell of a racket when used which doesn’t bode well at all for shuteye later.
I’ve enjoyed getting to grips with the Paris underground today, the metro system that is not the crime world. It’s a chaotic affair but pretty easy to master.
The pic is of Charlie D hanging out on the Champs d’ Elysée.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Charles de Gaulle, Europe, France, Paris, Sandemans, Super Furry Animals
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28/11/2009
This morning we had a plentiful full English brekkie with all the trimmings which was just the trick and hit the spot nicely.
Then a while later we all went for a walk up to the river which was nice, St Jean d’Angely is a lovely little town. The weather was bobbins though so I had to borrow a pair of Nimrod’s size 40 jeans (well that’s how they felt anyway) as I’ve only 1 pair with me.
After that I said my goodbyes to all and Nimrodian dropped me off at Surgeres station where I picked the TGV up direct to Paris.
That all went very smoothly. I was feeling a bit peckish when I got off so I got this hot dog thing that was a frankfurter enclosed completely in some sort of large cheese roll with mayo. It was utterly rank and I’m not sure my insides will ever be the same again.
As I was going through the ticket checker machine thingy at the metro station a dodgy French guy behind me tried to jump in on my ticket too and got caught in the barriers for 6 or 7 seconds. Plonker.
St. Christopher’s Hostel is where I’m crashing for the next 3 nights. I like the name as St. Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, I even have a little medallion of him glued to the headset of my Vespa.
It seems alright, it’s a large scale operation and a bit more commercial than I like but the facillities are decent and it will meet my needs nicely. One thing that is a pain though is that I had to make 2 seperate bookings as the 16 bed dorm (about €20 a night) is full tonight so I’m in a 6 bed one (at €40 a night) meaning I have to check-out at around 10 in the morning and can’t check-in again until 14:00. As I’ve not been to bed before 02:00am for the last 4 or 5 nights a lie-in would be useful.
This will likely be the last hostel I stay in for quite some time. This may be an issue for me as I’ve stayed in that many now I think I’ve become instituionalised.
There’s actually an awful lot I want to see in Paris, much more than in most of the places I’ve been. I don’t really have very long though so I reckon I’ll have to settle for half of it for now.
Today’s photo is of a cool painting they had up in the subway corridor, there were lots of different ones. This one reminded me a bit of the artwork of a Radiohead record sleeve.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Europe, France, Paris, Radiohead, St Jean d'Angely, St. Christopher, St. Christopher's Hostel
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27/11/2009
I finally placed the order with Amazon for a netbook yesterday, I opted for this bad boy. I also purchased the Windows 7 Starter to Home Premium upgrade and then used eBuyer (as they were cheaper) for a 2GB memory stick and a 500GB compact portable hard disk. Once I’ve got it all setup to my liking, bring on New Zealand.
My hosting quandary for this site has been answered too, as my mate Dave is in the game and can sort it out gratis for me while also giving me the weighty benefit of his experience in the field. Jobs a good ‘n.
This evening we were joined by an old friend of Liz’s and her husband who are visiting for the weekend. To celebrate the occasion Liz made a cracker fish pie. Prawns, haddock and another couple of fishy related things that I can’t remember were all included. Beaut, beltin’ and all round yumtastic was the verdict. Here’s the recipe.
Grub was followed up with plenty of beer and wine, a bit of whiskey and some shockingly poor games of Jenga, Trivial Pursuit and The Game of Knowledge, ‘the entertaining trivia game for children’.
So tomorrow I’ll be heading to my final destination of this trip, Paris. This blog may well begin to resemble a travel one once more.
The photo is of a war monument in Tiraspol, Transinistra.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Europe, France, Jenga, Samsung N140, St Jean d'Angely, The Game of Knowledge, Tiraspol, Transinistra, Trivial Pursuit, Ultimate fish pie
Posted in France, Transnistria | 2 Comments »
26/11/2009
You may like this article if like me, you’re a traveller, and if like me, you have an iPhone. If you’re not and you don’t you probably won’t.
Hopefully the new STBB banner at the top of the site has caught your eye and if not, why not? Nimrod’s significantly better other half Liz, very kindly helped me create it. When I say helped I mean she pretty much done it by instructing my every click in the overwhelmingly powerful Adobe Photoshop. Check out her site as she is an excellent illustrator too.
Chip and Camembert tortillas with salad and sweet-chilli sauce was for tea, lovely. Erm, then for a change we watched ‘Celebrity Come Dine With Me’, that pap is seriously addictive and funny.
The photo is off some street art I liked in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. There was quite a lot of it knocking about.
Tags:Adobe Photoshop, Blogsherpa, Bulgaria, Celebrity Come Dine With Me, Europe, France, iPhone, Lizzie McKenna, St Jean d'Angely, street art, Veliko Tarnovo
Posted in Bulgaria, France | 2 Comments »
25/11/2009
I’ve spent most of today doing work behind the scenes on this site. I’m looking at migrating to Worpress.org which is a lot more powerful version of WordPress.com which is where what you’re reading currently resides. This means I’d have to pay for hosting though but if I can find something meeting my requirement at less than a fiver a month (which I should be able to) then Bob’s your father’s brother, features aplenty will be forthcoming. A fair bit of work will be necessary to make this happen so that will give me something to get my gnashers into for December at home.
My train ticket to Paris for Saturday has been booked and printed out. €30 on the TGV which takes about 3 hours. Luckily there is some sort of promotion on at the moment or I’d have been paying twice that.
Me and Nimrod made pizzas from scratch for pre-pub evening grub. A cheesy meat-feast with scandalously hot peppers was my effort, yumarama. Then it was off to the said pub (Ellis Park) which Nimrod’s mate happens to own, it’s quite handy having a mate who owns a pub. The obligatory girafe à bière was of course had, 2 of them actually as a French doctor was helping us sup them.
Today’s photo is of the River Nervion in Bilbao.
Tags:Bilbao, Blogsherpa, Europe, France, girafe à bière, River Nervion, Spain, St Jean d'Angely, Wordpress
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24/11/2009
Erm, well today I’ve updated the firmware on my iPhone, watched ‘Celebrity Come Dine With Me’ (that Christipher Biggins is a character eh) and ate some lovely pesto gnocchi with chorizo and melted cheese bread. Basically, it was all go again.
The photo is from Zaragoza.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Celebrity Come Dine With Me, Christopher Biggins, Europe, France, iPhone, Spain, St Jean d'Angely, Zaragoza
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23/11/2009
I’ve completed a blog entry for every single day of this trip (over 100 now, crikey) before arriving here at Chez Haslam in St Jean d’Angely and my mild OCD/OPCD won’t let break that pattern when I’ve only a few more to go. The problem is I’m not really traveling per se, I’m just dropping in at my friend’s gaff to catch up and relax, that’s a bit of a problem for a travel diary.
So the entries until I depart for Paris on Saturday may (will) be somewhat more banal and mundane than usual, the silver lining they will also be much shorter.
When I get over to New Zealand (and beyond) there will be a much larger gap between posts (1 or 2 a week maybe) when stationed in one place and then when I’m on the move I”ll revert to the one a day plan that has served me since the beginning of April.
Today I’ve printed off my NZ visa, researched netbooks (this is looking likely), ate homemade chocolate and beetroot cake for lunch and homemade meatballs with spaghetti for tea, drank a little wine and beer and watched ‘Come Dine With Me’ on the Channel 4 on demand web channel. It’s been all go really.
The photo is from somewhere between Madrid and Bilbao. Stop by this time tomorrow folks for another exciting entry of STBB.
Tags:Blogsherpa, chocolate and beetroot cake, Come Dine With Me, Europe, France, netbooks, OCD, Spain, St Jean d'Angely
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22/11/2009
I awoke this morning to a phone call from reception of which I understood very little but I just said d’accord a couple of times and left it at that. I gathered we were late for check-out.
This new ‘gîte’ I’m crashing at is pretty good. Excellent character, security, location, facillities etc. I’m not to sure about the staff though, especially the shifty looking one who is like a cross between Fred Elliott and Gareth Gates.
It’s been nice to see Liz again and little baby Olive, the most inquisitive tiny character I’ve ever seen.
Roast pork with rosemary and potatoes, cauliflower cheese, broccoli and gravy was for tea. Yum. Followed by a bit of vanilla and chocolate ice cream later. I could get use to this.
So it’s obviously been a pretty uneventful day of just lazing about today. Probably more of the same to follow tomorrow.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Europe, France, St Jean d'Angely
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21/11/2009
The journey to Bordeaux went splendidly, €35 wasn’t too bad either. Then I hooked up with Nimrod at the hotel (a very decent 2 star gaff) as planned and we made it to the Connemara Irish pub about 20 minutes into the City match.
The first half was all pretty standard stuff and then begun the 2nd half, oh dear. As I’d not seen Nimrod in nearly a year he kept distracting me with involved conversation, then when I was glancing up at the screen it looked like Adebayor had nicked a goal so I shouted “Yeah, get in!!!” only to realise seconds later that it was actually Skrtel behind Adebayor who had put Liverpool ahead. I then sunk to my seat in utter shame much to the amusement of Nimrod. This was all worsened by the fact that I was wearing a City shirt and the pub had plenty of City and Liverpool fans in it. Slightly embarrassing eh. The only sort of defence I’ve got is that the game had only just kicked off again pretty much (accounting for them shooting the opposite direction), there had been 6 minutes injury times in the previous half (meaning, erm, I don’t know what), I was utterly distracted and finally I was very fatigued from 7 months of travelling. Actually I don’t have any defense at all. 2-2 was the final result.
After that we nipped back to the hostel to freshen up before going back out on the lash and to the Bordeaux vs Valenciennes game.
€12 was the price for the game, how good is that. Unfortunately it was a very bobbins game though and Bordeaux went down 0-1. The great bit though was that you can drink in your seat, how good is that.
Then we went to another host of bars before having the best meal I’ve had on this trip. I forgot to take the name of the joint (that might have been down to the amount of bars we visited before). €20 for frog legs (taste like chicken, quite nice actually) with salad, steak (beaut) with fries and finally creme brulée (delicious) for desert. It was an ace looking place too. The only thing not ace about it was the very rude and mincey French waiter.
After another bar or 2 we could only find one club knocking about and it was awful but at that time of night awful is better than nothing. We got the impression we were being charged more to get in once they realised we were English which is quite funny.
We turned it at around 05:00am.
Tags:Blogsherpa, Bordeaux, Connemara, creme brulée, Europe, FC Girondins de Bordeaux, France, frogs legs, Le Chantry hotel, MCFC, Nimrod, TGV
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