Blog 16 - from Oma to Noma
Hi all,
This blog entry will span five (well, technically seven) countries as the Carolin-Vandenbergs are no longer sitting in the castle grounds wondering what the poor people are up to, but yet again lugging increasingly heavier packs (despite sending a big package home) through Europe. We are home in under two months. I'm still not sure where the time has gone.
The plane touched down in London at an absurd time on a Tuesday morning, but three intrepid family members stood bleary eyed at the gates waiting for their Oma/Mum to arrive. (Renae was still at the Castle "handing over" and was to join us a few days later). It was great to see Mum, though she appeared rolling a suitcase that could house a small family, and it made me realise how much I was missing both her, and family and friends in general.
After navigating the trains from Heathrow in what felt a bit like déjà vu but with a different grandparent, we returned to our beloved Hackney. However, we learned that shifting one street in this area can be the difference between "trendy, quirky and arty", to "trashy, dirty and slightly scary". Didn't really help that there was a murder suicide in Hackney the week before we were due to return. Didn't recognise the street we stayed in from any news bulletins, so that's a positive isn't it?
The house itself was nice, and it was always just a place to rest our heads, but despite its fairly close proximity to Central London, everything was generally still three Tube lines away. This got tiring, especially for mum...especially for mum wearing thongs!
(Green Park relaxing...until told the chairs cost money to sit on!)
We Hopped On and Hopped Off as per the bus' instructions. It's a perfect way to see all the London landmarks, and given Mum had never been to the UK or Europe, it was a great introduction and orientation. Nice of Big Ben to chime 12 just as we went past!
Having been in the UK for five months, it was interesting for us to see the transformation of London from a cold, bleak, dark city to one that was slowly emerging from hibernation. But obviously, with that (and school holidays, and Easter) came the crowds. Changing of the guards resembled a One Direction concert. My kids greased themselves under armpits and between legs and got a spot near the gates. I spent 45mins on tiptoes (great for your calves!) taking photos in hope above my head, and mum sat in Green Park, content to be "near" the changing of the guards and snapping away on her iPhone and iPad. The spectacle of the masses (the melting pot of languages, the social media, the anti-social crowd behaviour...) far outweighed the spectacle of the event itself, which was a yawn.
We all saw a West End play called Once, about a heartbroken Irish busker who befriends a Czech girl. I was in tears after 20 minutes and for most of the second half. It was a beautiful, simple story elegantly and exquisitely told, acted and sung. Kids liked it too. I eventually got desensitised to them being desensitised to the f-word...if that makes sense.
And we shopped! Harrods! Regent St!! Carnaby Street!!! A few blogs ago I talked about the toy store Hamleys being the funnest place in all of fundom. Hamleys is a bit like a thick caramel milkshake with whipped cream (which they do actually serve on the sixth floor). Great in small doses, but repeated ingestion does lead to you feeling more and more sick. And taking a primary school teacher to a place jam-packed with hyperactive tweenies probably warranted a rethink.
(Harrods...undergarments were purchased. TMI?)
After just under a week we said goodbye to London. For us it was the last time and I left thinking it was a place I could live...near, but visit regularly! We hired a car (and it fitted all of us, and even our luggage without strapping Billie to the roof!) and headed south to Kent.
On the way we visited the home of Charles Darwin, the home where he saw out the last years of his life. It was a beautiful, stately home with lush grounds and a greenhouse full of carnivorous plants! It was a nice diversion for a few hours. Kids got to tear around the garden, mum got to sit and ingest the audioguide. Win-win.
(Charles Darwin's house. He was out, sadly)
One of the places mum wanted to see (and I wanted to show her) was Sissinghurst Castle. Owned by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, a fascinatingly flamboyant and at the time a very controversial couple, the majority of the buildings and all of the gardens and grounds are open to the public. Renae and I stayed in the B&B abutting Sisinghurst 10 years ago when we travelled, and snuck in after hours. This time, we walked a little more appropriately and legally through the front doors.
Being spring, the flowers were out, and the gardens were spectacular. It was busy, but it didn't feel crowded. You could happily just meander around the paths all day, lost in thought. The views from the towers showed Kent for miles in all directions. I loved it. More importantly, Mum loved it.
(Sissinghurst)
From where we stayed we did a day trip to Dover and naturally saw the white cliffs (sans bluebirds) as well as Dover Castle. The kids were entertained by a medieval jester, and Renae and I explored the myriad of tunnels below the castle that were used during WWII as, amongst other things, a hospital.
(Watching the fool)
We also visited the site of the Battle of Hastings, and Brighton Pier.
The Easter bunny luckily found us and scattered eggs in the back yard. Phew!
On our last day in England we didn't die wondering. We stayed a night just out of Portsmouth and ventured early an hour north to see Stonehenge. There's something extraordinarily timeless and mystical about it and despite the bitterly cold conditions, we were glad we went.
So we left Blighty, the home of things called goujons, of the OUTSTANDING quiz show Pointless, and the use and overuse of the word "bespoke" (seriously, does anyone in Australia ever use this word?), via a ferry from Portsmouth. 12 hours later and sacre bleu we were in St Malo in France!
All of a sudden we had no comfort zone again. Signs were in French, people (not us) spoke French. And when I grabbed the car we rented, that of course was all backwards too. So we relearnt what we had hitherto unlearned, and things worked out pretty well. And any anxiety I personally had dissipated the minute I saw, rising as it were out of the sea, Mont Saint Michel.
(View from the cathedral)
This was my bucket list thing, my "non-negotiable" (though it was nearly negotiated when we couldn't get passage across the Channel). Ever since I was a nerdy prepubescent (and not the savvy and cool adult I now am?) I loved this place. Just the sheer beauty of it, and the almost science fiction-like setting of a cathedral surrounded by sea. It is a true wonder of he world, and no amount of blatant commercialism, no mass onslaught of tourists, no snaking queue or overpriced crepe was going to dent my enthusiasm. And it didn't. We all thought it was very, very cool.
Next stop was Paris. You may have heard of it. It has a tower, an art place...
Our apartment was in a suburb called Belleville. It was a bit like a student accommodation. Three levels, slept 5 providing one used a wonky pull out sofa bed (hello, that was me). Mum wondered, yet again, what she was doing on this journey with us, but eventually we all found our niches and after a nice meal around the corner, we hit the sights.
There was the catacombs, the first of now a few loooooong queues we had to endure to see what we wanted to see. (I tend to now measure the cost-benefit of an attraction by whether you spend more time waiting to see it than actually seeing it). But the catacombs were cool. Tens of thousands of skulls and femurs lined the paths, some stacked into decorative shapes. It was morbid and a little spooky, so naturally the kids loved it.
(Catacombs)
We wandered to Montmartre and saw the Sacre Couer church at sunset. Paris unfolded around us. We ate crepes and wandered the streets shiny from the rain.
(Sacre Couer, Montmartre)
Of course we saw the Eiffel Tower. In the desire to avoid long queues I left early to stake my place in the line. Unfortunately the queues were actually pretty reasonable, so I had to rejoin the queue three times before the rest of them arrived! But it, of course was worth the wait. The rain held off for the window we were up the top. Jess, not one to love heights, was brave. The most fearful I got was watching mum take photos on her iPad with her hands outside the protective barrier!!
(View to Sacre Couer)
That night we ate frogs legs...don't eat frogs legs.
Oh yes and there was the art place. Trying something different, we booked in to a Louve treasure hunt. Teams received a list of artworks to locate and you had to take a photo of yourself beside if to get points. It was a bit like the Romp (for the Victorians) or the Amazing Race. So Billie and I raced (well, walked fast) against Renae and Jess and a couple from San Francisco. It was great fun - Billie and I just got the points, but Renae felt she spent so much time looking FOR artworks, she didn't look AT artworks!
They say 90% of people go to the Louvre just to see the Mona Lisa. That's a bit sad. And that's my art critique!
Suddenly, the two weeks with Mum was over and we took her to a hotel off the Champs Elysses to meet up with her friend and continue her European holiday. It was emotional to say goodbye, but I was thankful to be able to both show her sights of UK and Europe that she had never seen before and share that experience with her, and also to give her a taste of what the last nine months had been like for us as a family. She didn't run screaming - I think it got her match fit for her next leg!
The next day we caught a bus to Amsterdam, stopping briefly in Belgium for lunch and walking around for an hour so we can justify saying that "we have been to Belgium" (I mean, that's all Belgium has to offer isn't it? Just a mall next to the Eurolines terminal in Brussels?)
About 6pm we arrived at Amsterdam. We should have hidden under the coach seats and kept going, though I think it would have deposited us back in Paris.
I'm prefacing this by saying that I am proud to have a Dutch heritage, and that some (hi Dad!) may take offence at what I'm about to say...but Amsterdam is an overhyped shithole. For a city nestled in some of the most beautiful canals, with some of the most architecturally gorgeous old buildings (even if some look like they may topple into the canal at any moment), people just don't seem to have any pride in the city. It is without doubt the dirtiest city we've been to, and made parts of Easten Europe seem pristine. At one stage I had to deposit Renae and the girls on a train platform and they were literally sitting amongst garbage. And the fact that accommodation was easily the most expensive and hardest to obtain was both frustrating and bewildering in equal measures.
(Amsterdam)
People were rude. After the stress of lugging the family and all our luggage from train to tram, only to be told we needed a bus, I asked the bus driver if we were then on the right bus. He looked at me and said "Good afternoon!" because I apparently hadn't greeted him politely enough. Punching him in the face probably wouldn't have been polite either but that nearly eventuated.
What we did do in Holland, we liked. The Anne Frank museum, actually in the house where she and her family hid for two years before the sad and inevitable outcome, was extremely moving. Seeing the actual diary was also pretty incredible. The kids took a lot out of it. Jess is still reading the diary...
And yep, cruising the canals both on the bigger boats and on a pedal boat for an hour, was a great experience.
Our last anticipated night was to be in Amsterdam, but when we discovered the cheapest accommodation we could get was to be $700.00, we had to look further out...and so we went much further out...to The Hague in fact
Dad was born here (hi again dad!), and to be honest, The Hague did its absolute utmost to win us back...and by golly it almost did.
(Tram lines, The Hague)
It is lush, leafy. The sun glistened through the trees as we took a relaxing walk through the parks near our hotel. It was so QUIET. People rode bikes, but it seemed to lack the pretension of Amsterdam. (Aren't we worthy! We ride bikes everywhere...and when they break down we pitch them in the canal!)
We visited Scheveningen, one of the seaside suburbs, and we walked the beach and admired the slightly 1970s sci-fi beauty of the jetty.
(Scheveningen)
We visited the Escher museum and bathed in the sheer genius of the man (don't know Escher? Google him right now! His work is very clever!). And once we sat down for a meal of bitterbollen (deep fried meatballs) and beer (alcoholic beverage made from yeast, wheat and hops) in the town square, all was almost forgiven.
Buuuuuuut then we needed to get back to Amsterdam to connect with a train to Copenhagen. We got cocky. The train left The Hague with enough time, but then got to a station 10 minutes out, there was an announcement in Dutch and it was only when I looked out and saw everyone piling on to an adjacent train that I madly gathered up the family and bags and jumped off the train before it started heading BACK to where it came from. We them missed the ongoing train. Just made the connection to Copenhagen...
Bloody Dutch.
Aahh, I know I promised Noma and Copenhagen...and there's Eurovision and the Little Mermaid and ambulances and trauma ward and Sweden as well. But you know what? You've done a lot of reading, I've done a lot of typing, so let's leave it there and the next post will cover ALL of Scandinavia. I'll start looking for superlatives, because this part of the world WORKS.
Bye for now from the Carolin-Vandenbergs (and special guest contributor Ann Vandenberg)
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