Author: sylvia

St pancras international

Less than 3 days to go and King’s Cross will be home to the new euro star station. I decided to take a quick peek before opening day on Wednesday. Seems I’m not the only tourist. People are already snapping photos.
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Safety first!

It’s a well known fact that years of sketchiness has resulted in kings cross becoming home to the most CCTV units per capita in all of London.
And as you can see we have 2 right outside our house. It’s nice to pull our curtains open in the morning and taken that nice urban view of a maze of electrical cables and CCTV cameras. …. And not a patch of green in sight!

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Drunks on the tube

Friday night, district line. 1 Ginger and 2 blonds and 2 bottles of rum bacardi breezer.
I’m not sure I like this public drinking thing any more. At first I thought it was quite liberating …. But now? It’s quite annoying. God they are on quite the piss up.
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Must resist …

Lately I have been tempted to use my free newspaper as a fly swatter for the tourists who get in my way. Move! And stop leaving that giant suitcase in the (sidewalk, escalator, platform) such that I can’t get past.
Such is life when you commutte between 2 out of London’s 4 most-visited-by-tourists train stations.
Bonus points if you can name all 4.
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The commuter train to Cambridge

In a very last minute decision to dash up to Cambridge to meet Jason for dinner and drinks, I find my self on a commuter train. Here I am thinking the tube is bad! You probably can’t see in this photo but people are sitting in the aisles while others stand over them. I chatted with one woman beside me who tells me that most people don’t even buy tickets because as a regular commuter you know it’s always this bad, and there is no way a ticket collector could ever make it down the aisle to spot check tickets. Nice. So due to the crowds this service desperately needs more trains on it, but due to the crowds people aren’t paying the money to fund more trains.
At least dinner with Jason’s coworkers was absolutely delicious. Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device

Rugby world cup

The mood was quite electric at the start, but as reality sinks in … The pub is quiet. Congrats to south Africa.
Ps. Thanks for a boring as sin game.
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7 Things I Hate about Moving

1. Not being able to figure out new appliances.
Our slick stainless steal gas stove has been well loved. All the numbers and settings are rubbed out. How I managed to
cook a turkey on Monday I’ll never know, but cooking has become a retro experience. If the recipe says cook at 350F …
I cook in what feels like a hot oven when I stick my hand in to check.

2. Not being able to figure out new appliances, again.
After several hours of angry beeps from our washing machine Jason figured out the the cold water pipe connected to the machine had been shut off. Fun.

3. Getting screwed by moving companies and their supposed maximum prices

4. Trying to get the Post Office to forward our mail to the new address when postal workers are on strike and the post office is closed.

5. Not knowing where any of your stuff is. Problem is much worse when you have 3 floors to contend with.

6. Dodgy pipes that lead to leaking showers that lead to wires shorting out that lead to lots of sparking and arching that lead to small panic attacks, a mad (futile) dash to Tescos in search of a fire extinguisher and a quick call to the fire brigade.

7. Trying to find the cats after 2 trucks worth of firemen search the entire house for that illusive fusebox (in noisy boots I might add) and scare the ba-jesus out of them. Note, cats like to hide IN fireplaces.

8. Not having internet for almost a month while the internet muppets sort out how to hook us up again. Come on!

Well lets hope the new place is worth all this hassel.
At least this answers where Britlog has been lately.

Back to the grind

And back to the moaning about the tube. I missed my themeslink connection this morning and had to take the smouldering Victoria line. Maybe it.s a good thing, this is a shot of the districtcircle line platform I would have had to have been on.

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A Change of Season

You can pack away your tank tops (or vests as these crazy Brits call them). Summer seems to be over folks. Maybe I shouldn’t call it Summer since we never really had Summer. No, I arrived in March and suddenly the jet lag faded and Spring hit us with a warm smack upside our heads. I remember April lunches in the city parkette across from my work and the weekends with Jason trying each park on London’s leafy menu.
But it never really got warmer than that. I think we had Spr-ummer. Which is probably why I’m more aware of of this change of season.

It’s cold alright, early November in Toronto cold.

I don’t have much else to report. We might be moving soon, but I don’t want to share too much. We haven’t seen the lease yet and I don’t want to jinx it. We’ve come so close to renting a new place twice now, I can’t bare the thought of having to start the search all over again.

For now, I wait for my lease, pull on a jumper (that’s a sweater don’t yu know!) and watch the MOBO awards on BBC Three. How can such a powerful voice come from such a tiny shell of a body?? Amy Winehouse, put down the heroin and pick up a Banger in a Bap (..bap! see, I’m learning).

Summer is coming to an end

It’s around 7pm and on my walk home from work I can see the sun setting. After a slightly annoying day at ye old office a walk through Hyde park hits the spot, and I welcome the visual spectacle. But it does mean those really long summer nights are coming to and end. For the last few months I’ve enjoyed sunsets after 9pm (well when it’s not pouring down new historic rainfall amounts) and lots of daylight.
This weekend the mayor is hosting the annual Thames festival self described as the offical end of summer festival.
I can only hope we get that Indian summer meteorologista are talking about.
Fingers crossed.
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Sweet or salty?

I know everyone speaks English but sometimes you really can feel like a foreigner. Last night we went to see that Bourne (incredibly loosely based on the book) movie. I bought some popcorn like I often do, but here in jolly old England I was asked ‘sweet or salty?’ The lady looked quite confused when I said ‘no, and no’. She actually looked quite baffled and asked again. ‘Sweet or salty’ ‘Um, … Normal?’ Confused pause. ‘Sweet or salty!’
‘Uh, salty I guess …’
She handed be over the largest small I’ve ever seen and I marvelled in the fact that the popcorn wasn’t bright yellow and oozing with butter ala Toronto.
It was however as expected, salty. WAY to salty.
I think next time I’ll go for the beer they were selling in the adjacent kiosk. Yes, beer in a movie theatre
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Tourist day 2

In between the england vs isreal football match and Canada vs whales rugby match we take John and his friend Chris to London’s must see spots. Today, tower hill and tower bridge.
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The strike continues

The tube entrance at King’s Cross. This is the wait to get on the two running lines. The line goes a block long. Meanwhile across the street the buses are full and stops are rammed. But if my coworkers can catch their black cabs in to work from south Kensington … Well then surely I can make it in on time too.
No smiles for me today
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Strike again

So far I have to say, loving the tube strike. It gave me a great excuse to sleep in, and for once living at kings cross worked to my benefit. King’s Cross provides loads of bus options and the themeslink (over land rail) is still running and 2 or the 3 remaining functional tube lines run throug King’s Cross . Not that I dared try to take the tube. I’ve seen the scary amounts of people who come off those commuter trains, I’m not fighting with them. No, I took the rail down to blackfriars in the city and enjoyed a nice 30 min walk to work. The sun is shining weather is crisp, and I’m getting a bit of exercise.
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Let the Chaos begin..

Fresh off the BBC website:

Tube strike travel chaos expected
Tube passengers are braced for travel chaos this week after unions confirmed a 72-hour strike by maintenance workers would start on Monday.

This should be a fun few days. I can’t even imagine what the streets will be like, and Jason has our camera!

Update your damn website

I’m coming home from Berlin and I’m on the standsted express and it’s late. We get to tottenham hale were I can connect to the Victoria line and get home quite a bit faster than if I stayed on the express all the way down to London Liverpool. But it’s late it’s 11.45 so I decide to check London tube online for their last tube time, I.m that clever:
Tottenham Hale 0528 0544 0555 … … 0057 … 0720 … … … 0020
You can imagine my shock and anger when I get through the turnstile and hear that the last train left 15 minutes ago. Seriously? How? I read your damn schedule and checked!!! I go talk to the unhelpful man in the booth who tells me that it’s Sunday, trains finish early. I show him the online schedule still loaded up in my handheld and he frowns and says, oh … That schedule is wrong. Wrong?! How?!? How can you be wrong about the last train by 45 minutes?!? I’m pissed and I tell this guy how ridiculous this is. I’m trying to get to kings cross and had I known your schedule is WRONG I would have stayed on the express train all the way to Liverpool street and taken the tube there (which generally runs later) or taken one of the many short bus options. Now I’m stuck in zone 3 waiting for a series of2 night buses at midnight because you incompotent monkeys can’t get your schedule right!!! I know I say this all the time, but I am SO writing them an angry letter.
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Quiet morning

This is an odd site on the morning rush to work. I usually need to elbow a few old ladies and hip check the odd pregnant lady to get a seat. Not this morning, I seem to have happened upon a district line train less than half full. Has daylight savings kicked in?? What’s going on?!
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Pining for the Fjords

To set the record straight, no we don’t have a thing for rain.

Several of my friends who lived here last year told me about this heat wave in London last year in August and about the general lack of air condition in the city that makes things miserable. When I started working and commented on our freezing cold a/c (in April!) coworkers told me I would be happy come August, when it’s HOT. So, with that in mind, I figured we’d be eager to escape the heat and want to head north into Scandinavia. So several months ago I booked us tickets to Bergen, a city that averages over 260 days of rain per year! 3 days in the crisp Norwegian Fjords, oh how clever I thought I was.

But then we get the 2007 floods and the worst summer on record (since the 1700’s apparently) and I feel a bit silly flying north for the last bank holiday of the year.

But with e-tickets burning a hole in our inbox, it’s off to the fjords for us.

As the plane makes it’s pass over Bergen, first impressions are excellent: dark green landscape of small islands dotted with brightly coloured houses. After a slight delay with EuropeCar, we loaded into our green Ford and headed North.

Driving in western Norway is probably as close to driving in a car commercial as you can get. Tight narrow roads wind through the forested hills meanwhile breathtaking scenery drops down into the valleys below you. Once you get about 2 hours outside of Bergen the traffic dies down nicely giving you that “closed course” feel (Except when you round those blind corners and find yourself head on with a tour bus).

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To get through the impossible landscape, the Norwegians have cut hundreds of tunnels into the fjords, some as long as 24km, many of which cut directly through the fjord. But with the landscaped so geographically shredded the infrastructure is further supplemented with high class car ferries.

We made our home base for the weekend in Mundal, a tiny village in the Sognefjord, Europes largest Fjord.

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This village may only have 2 hotels and 1 cafe, but it still manages to have 14 bookshops and the self declared title: Norway’s Book Town.

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I’ll be honest, those who know me well, know that the idea of paper books sitting out in the damp outdoors does not sit well with me. But that’s another story.

***

Sunday brings us across another car ferry to Ornes to check out the Norway’s oldest stave church:

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.. and later that day to Jostedalen Glacier, the largest glacier in continental Europe. Both stops involved a bit of a hike, clearly the glacier more so:

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The fjords are a place where photos just can’t do it justice. The scenery is truly magnificent.
After several weeks in Iceland in 2003, we are no stranger to glaciers. But with this one we managed to get a more dramatic view of the glaciers edge. In Iceland, the end of the glacier more subtly melted into the rock, where as here it appeared to be cleanly sliced revealing the layers of blue and white on the interior.

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That evening we drove back to Mundal snacking on Wasa rye crispbreads topped with local Yarlsberg cheese and thin slices of dried salted lamb. Norwegian food is in fact quite delicious. The meatballs with cloudberry sauce we had for dinner the night before were excellent as was our lunch of Smorbord, open faced sandwiches common to Scandinavia that we first sampled in Copenhagen in 2005. And as we learned earlier that day, local raspberries taste uncannily like gummy Swedish Berries. Thankfully unlike Iceland, Norway is not a culinary dead spot.

***

Monday we decide to take a long scenic route back to Bergen starting with an hour and a half long car ferry across the fjord to the small port village of Vangsnes. Cruising the fjords gives you perspective as to just how massive the surrounding hills are. Ribbons of glacier waterfalls trickle down the slopes of the hills; it’s a peaceful way to travel.

As we make our way back to Bergen, our little green Ford makes the shockingly steep climb out of the Sognefjord away from Vangsnes and remarkably over into the next fjord just south of us.
It’s at the top though that we experience the most memorable scenery of the trip.

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At the top of the fjord, the trees disappear and the landscape turns to rugged moss and rocks. The temperature drops to about 6C and for a while it’s only us and the frisky sheep. We stop and take time to breathe in the air.

I look around and note a scattering of small bright red coloured farm houses and quietly hope that we can find a guest house for next time.

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Oh, to spend a weekend on top of a fjord in almost solitude rambling along the rocks with only the sheep.
I quickly sketched out a future long weekend.
We learned early in our travels that even though we adore living in big cities, we do have a thing for vacationing in remote desolate places. Iceland, Atiu, and now this place, Vikafjellet.

With an early evening flight to catch, we tore ourselves away and zipped down into the valley on the other side and after a few hours (and many more winding roads) later we reached Bergen.

It may not have been sunny skies and beachy weather, but a weekend in the Norwegian wilderness seemed to satisfy our August Bank Holiday needs.
But perhaps I’m not entirely fulfilled.
After 3 days I’m left pining for the fjords.

The Italian Shop

I new deli slash sandwich shop slash cafe opened in Belgravia the other week. It seems I’ve found London’s version of my much loved Toronto Bay street establishment, Mercatto’s. Except perhaps that this place takes the Italian vibe beyond shelves stocked with Italian products, and further stocks their shop with (pretty, this is belgravia after all) Italian staff who yell orders at each other in full on pationate Italian.
They make a tasty rocket and tomato salad too.

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