Just an Update

Phew, finally I feel better, and so does T, so we've taken the chance to get out as much as possible, singly or together, cycling or walking.

One day we went to the outskirts of London to where the huge Crossrail project is underway at Abbey Wood. Crossrail is going to improve London's transport system from West to East, involving many new stations.  The areas around the new stations are expected to be transformed, although methinks it will take a long time for Abbey Wood to develop anything resembling "metro chic."

But it has a lot going for it. Just up the hill from the station are the remains of medieval Lesnes Abbey, now being done up with a Heritage Lottery Grant, and then the ancient woodland begins.   Although it was wintry, walking along these muddy tracks felt like being in the countryside. 

A few miles of woodland walking later we arrived in Plumstead, another forgotten place. Most people who don't live near it have no idea which bit of London it's in, but it is basically somewhere near Woolwich.   By this time we wanted a cup of tea, and spotted this - "Tony's Cafe,"  next to a kebab shop near Plumstead Common. It looked cheerful but downmarket. 

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Once inside, we found it was no longer the workman's cafe it resembled but a piece of pure hipsterville.  We had some delicious tea and clementine cake, and if it had been dinner time we'd have stayed and tried some of the interesting food but since it wasn't dinner time, we decided to come back another time and give it a try.  The owners were almost insanely enthusiastic about their work, but Plumstead also has some way to go before becoming anything resembling "chic".  

Another day we took the train out to Charlton - another area about which most people (except fans of Charlton Athletic Football Club) say "Where???" 

We walked through a preserved chalk pit which is famous for its geological strata and fossils, and gives a glimpse of what a countrified place Charlton was a hundred years ago. Then we made our way round to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. 

It's a fantastic museum, even if you aren't that interested in the sea.  I fell in love with the ships' figureheads - here are some of the ones on display.  How I wish ships still had these. I once interviewed a very old man who remembered the London docklands in the early 1920s when some of the ships still had them, and he said how exotic it seemed looking up at the battered figureheads and knowing they'd faced all the oceans of the world. . 

Many figureheads have stories - some exciting, some dramatic, some rather sad.  This beautiful example, from the Victorian yacht "Sunbeam," is a portrait of Constance Brassey, daughter of the boat's owner, who died in 1873 at the age of four. Her father sailed the yacht all round the world. 

I really adored a mural in the museum by the 1940s-50s artist Alan Sorrell, it's so colourful and full of life and fun.   I can only show a tiny bitt here, where a seal*  is about to have a cup of tea spilt over it.  *(oops, I mean a shark! Thanks, Tabor and Graham!)

This museum deserves a whole post to itself, which I can't give it here - but I'll just add that we went to see its current exhibition about Samuel Pepys, the famous and very frank diarist who recorded the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London and knew just about everyone worth knowing in the days of Charles II. 

One of the things that caught my eye in the show was this pair of men's gloves, which would originally have been trimmed with brightly coloured ribbons.  They were quite preposterous.  Admittedly they were wedding gloves...., 

and the "look" in those Restoration days was pretty preposterous too, as you might agree  ....

 We made our way home past the tea-clipper "Cutty Sark," overlooking the glittering river.  It has been extensively renovated after a fire and the floodlighting showed off the intricacy of the rigging. 

Another day we went to Regents Park to see the exhibition that's mostly about some of the books which belonged to the Elizabethan magician and polymath, Dr. John  Dee.    Dr. Dee  has fascinated people for years and several well known books have been written about him, including The Queen's Conjuror and Peter Ackroyd's The House of Dr. Dee. . He seems to have been prodigiously intelligent, but since he lived in an era when magic was taken for granted, he might be thought to have rather wasted his talents on things which we now know not to be true, like alchemy and the casting of spells. 

Most of the books on show in this exhibition were actually stolen from him, but that bad behaviour meant that many of them were preserved, since many years later, they were bequeathed to the Royal College of Physicians,  which is mounting this show.  The College has also got hold of some other things which relate to Dr. Dee and his magical crystal somehow gripped my imagination.  

Recently we had Japanese friends over, and they love beer,  so we went to several pubs and also had a tour of the Fullers Brewery in South-West London, at Chiswick.  It's a good tour which offers the chance to taste 10 different beers. I am a very light drinker so that meant about 10 sips of beer for me!  

  After, we walked along the river and it looked very strange. The weather has been so warm in England that many Spring flowers are out in peoples' gardens, and it looks and feels all wrong.  The weeping willow is usually one of the first trees to come out, and flowers are never normally seen until it is showing at least a haze of green.  

Even weirder are the roses against bare winter branches. Roses are definitely a sign of summer, and yet these are not all withered remnants of last year, as you can see.

There have been various family events too.  Today it was the twins' second birthday party, an exhausting affair for everyone, including them, although they all enjoyed it.  

 And now I have a busy couple of months coming up and am looking forward to being able to relax in the Spring.... the real Spring, I mean. Though I get worried that at the present rate, Spring will all have all taken place by the time the calendar says it should be arriving. 

Chilling out... and Japanese Food

A friend let us use her family's cottage in Suffolk so we took the chance to go for a few days, and a very good idea it was. I've been getting all wound up about various things that aren't worth getting wound up about... and then feeling annoyed with myself because I know it's all really trivial YET I KEEP FUSSING ABOUT IT.  As I expected, a few days without phone or internet blew it all away!

I will download the photos soon, but first.... I still have a few images of Japan in my file, mostly about food.  You might remember I was a bit iffy about Japanese food before I went, but now I'm a fan.  I hope you enjoy looking at these aspects of food.  I start with a picture of how it feels to come into Tokyo in the evening.  We were arriving from Kyoto and had a dinner date within about an hour of arriving, so this picture recalls that feeling.  To be honest, Japanese cities do not present a very pretty appearance from the train but the light gave it a strange charm.

At the station, before each trip, we usually bought snacks to eat on the train, and I was always attracted by the variety of brightly colourful bento boxes. They look as if they are full of sweets, but most of the food is savoury.

Before setting out we had had a  Western style breakfast, with persimmon, salad, mini frankfurters and omlette and mashed potatoes.     Western style food, but far from the fry-ups you  will get at the average British b&b. 

Some of the restaurants presented food in the most elaborate ways. This was seafood - almost too amazing to eat. 

I considered going to MacDonalds and sampling their "take" on Japanese food (it wasn't all hamburgers). But in the end I didn't. 

This tiny model of an old fashioned cake shop stood on a table in the real cake shop we visited in Kanazawa with our friend Rie.   I thought how trusting it was of the owners to leave this little model here unprotected on the table with us.We admired the little display counter full of sweets, and the sweet boxes in the shelves behind. There is a low table so you can sit down, and that is a very interesting green mask hanging on the door.

Here is the real shop, 

This is an autumn cake,  with an autumn leaf and autumn colours and the autumn taste of chestnut, most beautifully presented in a tea house in Kanazawa.

Also in Kanazawa we admired a particularly large sake shop. Bottles of all sizes from tiny to truly huge, ranged along shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. I am afraid I couldn't tell the difference between different types of sake at all. 

Don't know what these bottles are supposed to hold  - look a bit scary actually - but they are some kind of a drink.

I think this little boy is dressed up for Shichi-Go-San, when little girls of 3 or 7 and little boys of 5 dress up in traditional costume.  I was told that the children are given sticks of red and white candy on this day, but if this little lad had had any candy, he'd already eaten it.

I think he might have liked some of the pancakes and waffles in Tokyo's Takashita Street.  It is where teenagers congregate to see and be seen.  Sadly for boys, sweet waffles seem to be considered a bit girly. Certainly it seemed to be only the girls who were buying.

On the whole, people didn't eat the great bags of sweets and snacks that they do here. Perhaps that is why nearly everyone we saw was slim.  

And oh yes, I'll be restricting calories tomorrow.  There is also some excellent food to be had in Suffolk and I feel as if I ate too much of it.  Those Womens Institute cake sales have a lot to answer for! 

Athens - Mostly Food

Before I say another word,  can anyone suggest a browser for Apple devices that supports Blogger? Safari doesn't, so I can't blog when on the move, and I'm away a LOT this year. So I am really sorry it's taken me so long to write about Athens, and that I haven't been commenting much on blogs. Well, hopefully that will change!  

I really loved revisiting Athens after several years away.  The picture above shows a stunning sculpture of a boy jockey on a horse from the transformed Athens Archaeological Museum.  I can't get over that that it was created when we in Britain were scratching things on walls of our mud huts, or whatever we did in the years BC (see below). 

I knew there were many new things in Athens since my last visit, over 10 years ago.  The cleverly-planned, world-class Acropolis museum, extensions to the fascinating Benaki, new venues, parks, restaurants and hotels. But I'd also seen some negative stuff because of the economic situation, and been warned by Greeks to be a little more careful about personal security than before, even though the city is still very safe by most standards.

So I took the advice and was careful, but despite more empty shops, to me Athens seemed much the same as usual, better in many parts, the only worse thing I noticed was more graffiti than before.  I felt safe, welcome and happy there.  In fact, people seemed to go out of their way to be generous, hospitable and friendly; but then, I tend to expect that in Greece.

For instance, in the city's central market, I saw these strawberries, very cheap. I bought half a kilo, and the stall owner tipped in an extra handful, and knocked off the extra cents due to him when he weighed them.  And they were the most wonderful strawberries, very fresh and just as good as they looked.  I was impressed. He knew we were just tourists, probably wouldn't be back, but still treated us well.

So as a little thank you to that proud and generous Greek stallholder, I'll tell you a bit more about the food in Athens.  Of course it's a great city to walk around the back streets of, and en route to the central market we saw all kinds of interesting things, including a shop selling honey and bee products, with honeycomb stained glass


 and we met this nice lady who feeds the tortoises who live in the grounds of the Petraki monastery.

We climbed the many steps up Mount Lycabettus,

and saw the silver icon of St. George in the little church at the top

and the views on the way down.

And finally arrived at the market. It's still a typical old European city wholesale market, lots of fun to walk through, looking at lots of good quality stuff, while the owners call their wares.

  A lot of meat, mostly lamb....

Fish of all kinds, very fresh

preserved fruits and nuts

 - all kinds from sesame roast almonds to silvered wedding nuts, dried nectarines, peaches, kiwi-fruits

I bought crystallised kumquats and hibiscus flowers

Red easter eggs (since it was Easter)

Great piles of whole spices...



All types of unusual olives

and, in the familiar,scruffy area around the market, there are now shops selling wonderful cakes, which there certainly never used to be.

I remember when it was impossible to get decent international food in Athens, even though Greeks seem to use very good quality ingredients.   That's not the case now.  The hotel where I stayed, (Airotel Stratos Vassilikis) had remarkably good food for what was otherwise just a pleasant, middle priced hotel.    This was all I managed to photograph at breakfast, but they had lots of unfamiliar things, sweet and savoury, and different each day.  The evening meal we had was also way above average, and not expensive. I reckon they have a chef who loves his job. Although the hotel was some way from the centre, I'd stay there again for the care they took over the food.

Oh, and I was pleased to learn that a whole lot of travel articles I wrote years ago are coming online. Nice to know they have not been forgotten. I will investigate and will link to them as soon as I can, in case anyone's interested. (Well, I am! ) I'd added a couple to the sidebar already, but it will be much quicker to link.

A Change of Plan

The photo below shows a bundle of Swiss francs.   I think they have a really colourful and attractive design (though I'm not sure I'd want that right hand picture of architect Le Corbusier staring out at me every time I bought a cup of coffee).. 

I was due to go to Switzerland last Friday.  Although most of my expenses are paid when I'm working, I did what I usually do, and purchased a bit of local currency in case there was something I wanted to buy ....

like sweeties

Or sausages...

Or weird creepy things ...

Or wonderful things

Or naughty things....

Or things that were just a bit unusual, like these pretty little Anismodel moulds, below, for making special decorative cookies. You can buy the little biscuits ready baked in the shops, but it's more fun to make your own. (Follow the link for more information about Anismodeln)  

But actually I won't be using my Swiss currency for a while, because my trip to Switzerland last week had to be cancelled at the last minute.  My mother is not at all well and I didn't feel okay about going away.  So the Swiss currency will be going in the drawer for now.