Soundtrack: Lady Gaga medley It will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken a flight in the last 30 years that standard economy seats are not designed for comfortable sleeping for any normal sized person. So when I say that the Finnair flight from Helsinki to Singapore was pretty good, it should be read with the above caveat, […]
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Soundtrack: every song about spending time in airports, but especially “Departure”, R.E.M. So begins the next adventure: getting home. Right now, L and I should have been sitting in Qatar business class, somewhere over the Mediterranean, perusing the champagne and whisky menus, before lying back in our seats and having a nap 36,000 feet up in the air. Maybe I’d […]
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Soundtrack: “Barcelona”, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe Final day in Barcelona, last day in the Iberian peninsula. Why is it called the Iberian peninsula? I have no idea, I didn’t get around to googling this, I got bogged down in how Portugal and Spain ended up as two separate countries, and how Catalonia considers itself to be a place all […]
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Soundtrack: “Red red wine” Neil Diamond A full day in Barcelona. We’d booked a food tour, after looking at several options, that promised to take us to some more local spots. I was a little worried at the 5 hour duration — being honest, no one wants to spend 5 hours trying to keep me entertained, at any amount of […]
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Soundtrack: “Lola”, Spanish cover version A fairly easy travel day, if any day on not quite enough sleep is easy. I didn’t finish writing the last blog entry until around 2am, and we’d forgotten the hostel does breakfasts in assigned shifts, we’d forgotten to change ours so 8.15 to 9am it was. We’d exchanged pleasantries with one of the other […]
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Soundtrack: “Vogue”, Madonna Sunday was fashionista day for us. After a hostel breakfast we headed north to the Museo del Traje, which google seems to think “traje” means suit. Maybe it does, but it’s a fashion museum, so it has more than suits. It’s a collection of almost 400 years of Spanish clothing. including what the aristocracy wore as well […]
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Soundtrack: “Spanish Bombs”, The Clash | “Hieronymous”, The Clouds Today is art day. Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, or The Prado for short, houses some of the world’s most magnificent paintings by white people. It’s amazing how language translation works, here Prado means things of beauty, while in Australia Prado means ugly faux-tank driven by white people. According to google […]
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Soundtrack: Hala Madrid y nada mas (the Real Madrid anthem, as they won’t be playing it tonight at Bernabeu) We had a midday train so took the morning fairly easy. My cold turned into the annoying cough so neither of us got the best night’s sleep. So we got up, packed, and trundled our way towards the trainstation, about 2km […]
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Soundtrack: “La Isla Bonita”, Madonna Our last full day in Seville. We started with a little wandering the local streets, a bit of shopping. As luck would have it, the nearest barbershop to out apartment was the eponymously names The Barber of Seville. I’ve been holding off on the shaving so that I could get a shave here, and when […]
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Soundtrack: flamenco clapping and stomping For our first full day in Seville we booked a food tour, a mix of culture, history and hopefully good things to eat. We met our guide P under Seville’s controversial Parasol or Setas (mushrooms), a huge wooden structure that dominates one of the old squares. The square has featured a marketplace for hundreds of […]
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Soundtrack: “Cross the Border”, Icehouse Portuguese trains are confusing. Well not so much the trains themselves, just the systems in place for catching them. Yesterday we had a the adventure of the identical tickets that didn’t work identically (what’s possibly even dafter is these tickets are apparently rechargeable, but it seems that once the get pre-loaded with one type or […]
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Soundtrack: “Swimming Horses” Siouxsie and the Banshees Our last full day in Lisbon, and we’d booked a food tour to make sure we got a taste of just about everything that one muse consume in Lisbon. It was a walking tour, a mix of history and culture with stops for food, and we were promised at least 17 different tastes […]
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