One Wedding And A Hangover

Helsinki, Finland, 11th-14th May 2012

I've reached the age where many of my contemporaries are doing the honourable thing, having kids, settling down and getting married. This weekend's mission was to take part in the wedding of a delightful friend of M's to an equally delightful guy in Helsinki. It was also an excuse to visit some old friends and brush up a bit on the rusty Finnish language skills.

Weddings, for some reason, make me nervous in a way. Wearing proper clothes and trying to remember wedding etiquette (I've only been to a handful and so I don't really know my way around) and attempting not to bring any form of disgrace to myself or to proceedings. I can usually rely on M to guide me through such occasions but she had been asked to fulfill the role of bridesmaid and so, for much of the evening, I was left to fend for myself. The only other person I knew at the wedding was another friend of M's who was as nervous and clueless as I was. Emilia and I managed to huddle together through the church ceremony, stand up at the right times and so on (mostly successfully done by just copying what everyone else did). Singing a church hymn in Swedish was a step too far for me but I think I got away with it by generally looking foreign and half-hearted attempts at lip-synching.  We then moved on to the reception. One feature of Finnish weddings is that, at some point early on in the event, the guests line up and congratulate the happy couple and then repeat the exercise for the happy couple's parents. As I knew the happy couple the first round of congratulations passed off without incident but I have never met any of the parents involved and they had no idea who I was. Handshakes and congratulatory messages were then followed by an awkward silence as I wondered whether to try to make small talk or not, although I had noticed that people generally passed by quite quickly and so I made a tactical retreat into the crowd of people, hoping that it wasn't badly seen. We then attacked the food and all was good again.

The speeches were apparently good as many laughs were had by 99 of the 100 guests - I noticed at this point that my Finnish comprehension had gone downhill in the 3 years since I left Helsinki. Half of the speeches were also made in Swedish, which I have absolutely no knowledge of and so I concentrated on looking like I knew what was happening and occasionally trying to find some understanding at the bottom of my wine glass. Fortunately a couple of the speeches included amusing photographs of the happy couple projected onto the wall which even I could understand. After this the band came on, the international language of dancing to 60s music broke out among the guests and the free bar was ruthlessly abused. I remember very little of the events afterwards besides ordering a coke at a nightclub and having to stop the taxi for tactical reasons on the way back to M's parents place. Another proud moment. I managed to emerge from bed at 4.30pm the next day, just in time to watch Finland get stuffed by the USA in the ice hockey world championships.

In any case the whole event was well done and I'd like to extend my best wishes again to the happy couple and to the newest addition to their family: a wide-eyed, curious and seemingly easily amused little girl. I think it will be many years before I see a baby expressing such joy at dancing with her dad to MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This"...

In non-wedding news, I thought that in my five years living in Helsinki I had seen it all. It seemed, however that this was not the case. After meeting up with my friend Kuba at an art exhibition he was volunteering at, he invited me to a sauna-and-beer event afterwards. When I turned up, it was to find this:

A home made sauna, whipped up in a car park that very morning. The rocks were placed in a stolen shopping trolley and the fire was lit underneath in a couple of beer crates. Genius.

Next stop - Ukraine in 2 weeks for some more fun and games !

The Italian Jobless

Domodossola, Italy, 31st March 2012


Introducing the newest featuring star of Okei Wapi : ATS.

We are led to believe that the woman next to him was not repulsed by his "early morning face", but was simply tired herself.

I went to school with ATS but hadn't seen him for quite a while. When he said he was coming to visit, the mind immediately started whirring and a plan was hatched to go up to Liechtenstein. The weather forecast a week before departure painted a glorious picture - 23 degrees, blazing sunshine. As the week went by, a slow collapse took place and the night before departure we were assured a grey, rainy day, with a top temperature of 12 degrees. After a long, searching discussion in a Geneva whisky bar, we decided to go for it anyway. The next morning, however, we got up too late and missed the bus which would have made the connection to our train from Geneva central station. The plans were rehashed in a hurry and so, an hour later, we found ourselves on a train bound for Italy.


Switzerland's train network is wonderfully efficient and relatively speedy although there is a price to pay for these comforts and any trip traversing the country costs the equivalent of a small house in most neighbouring countries. Thankfully, a ticket exists which allows the bearer to use the entire Swiss railway network for a day for the bargain bucket price of 35€. Unfortunately, these tickets are only available to Swiss residents. But, fortunately (especially for a pair of unemployed bums such as ourselves), these tickets do not feature the holder's name on them and so I got hold of two such tickets through slightly suspicious means (thanks Joana !!). The Swiss railway network extends over the country's borders at some points and we planned to use this technicality to our great advantage by sneaking over the Italian border to Domodossola. The 5.30am bus had maybe slipped through our fingers but at 6am we were out, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and on our way.

All aboard

The ride down towards the Simplon tunnel and Italy is probably quite nice - as it was, we rode the rails, looking out of the window with glazed eyes, suffering from our crack-of-dawn awakening. We soon shook ourselves awake, though, as we reached Domodossola and stepped out, blinking, into the bright sunshine. I'd thought the first town across the border would be fun to visit although it was only as we left the station that I had absolutely no idea what the place was like. No idea of the size, of what was there, of whether it was interesting or not. After 15 seconds of trying to work out if it was worth being here at all, we spotted the first good sign. A pizzeria, just over the road from the station.


We sat at the terrace, waited and waited, and decided that the waiter probably couldn't see us. After all, we were the only people on this windswept side of the restaurant. We moved to a terrace by the door and he came out. We conjured up our best Italian to indicate that we wanted a menu. 


"Menu ? Pizza ?"
"Ahh! per mangiare !" he exclaimed, gesticulating towards his mouth.
"Si ! Si !" We were getting somewhere.


He ushered us inside and placed us at a table. We wondered why it wasn't possible to eat outside but ordered a couple of glasses of sparkling wine which, amusingly, was served on tap. He delivered the glasses, and fired out a few sentences at a speed which, seemingly, only Italians can muster. We missed about 98% of the sentence but worked out that something would happen in 15 minutes. The gaps were filled in with guesswork and we concluded that the kitchen wasn't yet open but that we'd be receiving the menus soon. The minutes passed, the sparkling slowly went down. After half an hour, we didn't have the menus and the glasses were empty. I returned to the bar and pointed at the sparkling wine taps and was subjected to yet another barrage of Italian. It appeared that we were in the wrong room and so we were ushered a further 20 metres to another table where, it would appear, food could be served. The guy waved us through to the other room but stopped dead at the entrance, seeming to fear some kind of immigration problem if he crossed the threshold. 

Ah, a good nose, nice bubbles... and from the tap, if I'm not mistaken ?

A woman on the other side took us into her care, placing us at a table and spraying us with yet more incomprehensible volleys of sentences. She then smiled and went off to hunt for menus. We took is as some kind of greeting. It's been a while since I've been to a country where I had no idea what was being said to me and I always feel slightly moronic when this does happen. If I'm being spoken to in Armenian or in Xhosa, it doesn't bother me as much. But Italian is so similar to French that I feel I should understand it. Instead of asking politely if my interlocutor speaks another language, I just smile and nod. Miraculously, this doesn't land us in any hot water in Domodossola, and we are served with menus exactly as we wanted. The pizzas were delicious and cost about the same as a small glass of tap water in Switzerland.

When in Domodossola, do as the Domodossolans...

Domodossola will never be a huge tourist magnet, I imagine, purely due to its size. But it does have a charming little old town (all five streets of it) and many pleasant terrace cafes. It was at one of these that we stopped and ordered a Spritz. This delicious cocktail of Aperol, Prosecco and sparkling water was first discovered by my parents in Venice (of course it was known to the Italians prior to that - I use the word discover in the same sense as people describe the Americas having been discovered by Columbus) and I was determined to share the beauty of this refreshing beverage with ATS. In another charming twist, the waitress brought us our drinks and a free platter of snacks, probably worth about twice as much as the drinks themselves. As soon as we'd arrived, it seemed, it was time to leave. We'd planned to meet M in Lausanne for a wild night out at 6, as she was coming straight from work. We popped into a supermarket and bought a bottle of Aperol and three bottles of prosecco (and some plastic cups... just in case) and hopped back onto a train, Switzerland-bound.

Domodossola - you can check out but you can never leave

The 6pm meeting didn't prevent us from stopping in Montreux, a city which is known mostly for being full of money and for being home to a Freddy Mercury statue (and, at one point, to Freddy Mercury himself). We wandered up and down the promenade by the lakefront, admired the scenery, and found a bench to polish off a bottle of Prosecco in plastic cups - a classy act anywhere in the world but particularly admirable in a place like Montreux. We moved on.

View of Freddy in Montreux

View of Montreux

View from Montreux

And a view of a bench in Montreux, housing two classy young gentlemen.

The night in Lausanne was pleasant but slightly less long-lived than we'd imagined. A nice evening the presence of Agou, a friend of ATS's and his Lebanese housemate Kassem (who Agou had called out specially to admire my Hezbollah t-shirt) was followed by an attempted beginning at a night out. ATS and I had been up since the break of day, however, and M had been at work all day. Following her usual protocol, she fell asleep at the table and the two heroes of the day were left to carry her off to the train station.

Finally forgiving the Greeks for Euro 2004

M further cements her reputation as the life and the soul of the party !

And meanwhile, the night train back to Geneva threatens to claim another victim...

Le Tour de Sal

Sal Island, Cape Verde, 15th January 2012

We finally managed to get out of Santa Maria. With our apparently trusty bicycles, we headed north (the only way we could really go) aiming to get to Espargos, the capital of the island. It was a mere 18km from Santa Maria. Inna had decided that such exertion was not for her and so M and I were alone to face the elements. Things started deteriorating rather rapidly. For a start, M's bike refused to go any higher than 3rd gear. Whereas I revelled in my liberty to cycle in any gear I desired, my chain had a rather amusing habit of popping off whenever I wanted to change. Hence, barely a kilometre out of Santa Maria, my hands were covered in oil and M had repeatedly screamed "I CAN'T CYCLE ON THIS THING !". This being Sunday, of course, the bicycle shop was closed (he'd only opened in order to give the bikes to us and wouldn't be back until 5pm) and so we were stuck with what we had. A true gentleman (naturally), I offered to swap bikes with M but she couldn't reach the pedals on mine. And this was all before we reached the big hill.

By this point it seemed obvious that Espargos was to be a distant dream. We decided to aim for Murdeira, a small village on the coast about halfway to Espargos. Another amusing factor was that this was a particularly windy day, and on a small, flat island which is already one of the world's leading kitesurfing destinations that meant quite a struggle. We slalomed up and then down the big hill, desperately trying to avoid the occasional trucks and buses coming from behind us. We reached Murdeira. "Tell me", said M. "Are you really enjoying this ? Because if you are, I just can't understand your thought process". I tried to give an explanation featuring the wind in my hair and the freedom of having a bicycle. "But there's nothing to see on this island", she continued. This was a fair point. Sal is basically a big rock. Murdeira, it turned out, was a village consisting only of tourist homes and a beach resort which appeared to have no customers, low season as it was. M had had enough and, due to a strangely shaped saddle, I was sauntering around à la John Wayne in quite a bit of discomfort. We turned around and went back, found some live music and had a beer. I was unable to sit comfortably until we left Cape Verde the next day.

Post Scriptum : I'd had a plan to film some scenes from this lovely day and turn it into a small video by "Bicycle Race" by Queen as the theme tune. As it turned out, the camera packed up about 10 minutes before we left and hence we have no pictures to remind us of what was, all in all, a very successful day out.

The lesson continues

Santa Maria, Cape Verde, January 6th - January 12th 

 

The sleepy streets of Santa Maria

Fishing boats in the harbour...

The lesson in beach holiday continued at a frantic pace. The girls have experience in this domain and I feel like a total novice which, indeed, I am. The last beach holiday I went on must have been around 18 years ago when I was a kid and my grandmother had an apartment on the coast in the south of France. Still, my parents were about as talented as I am at this sort of thing and after a day or 2 of beach bumming we'd be in the car and zipping off to anywhere within striking distance. In our case we have no car and, in any case, Sal is only around 30x10km and so there really isn't all that many places to go. Nonetheless, I've roped the girls into renting bicycles someday and doing some sort of exploring. They've agreed to this in principle but getting them to actually do it may be a different kettle of fish and I'm coming to terms with the fact that I may be cycling around Sal myself. Our initial days in Santa Maria consisted of pretty similar activities :

Morning: Cook breakfast, go to the beach. I would get bored of lying on the beach and go for a swim, coming back to niggle to girls to join me given that swimming in the sea alone is also boring after a while. They'd come up with some excuse as to why they couldn't (generally "it's cold" or "I've just put sun lotion on") and continue reading their books. After a few days I got slightly better at this "lying on the beach" business but it's still the part of the beach holiday course that I'm struggling with the most. I think it just takes a certain type of person, and I am not that type of person. I'm still trying though

Lunch: at the beginning we went to various different places to eat but then started to realise that prices in Cape Verde (or at least in Santa Maria) are similar to those in Europe so we ended up cooking for lunch as well. I suppose it's reasonable given that Sal, at least, is completely barren and totally incapable of growing any sort of crops. Salt is cheap given the presence of a salt mine just up the coast but otherwise you will get a few products from elsewhere in Cape Verde (wine, pasta) or else the vast majority is imported from Portugal or in some cases (strangely, in the case of frozen chicken) from Brazil. I haven't seen anything imported from nearby Senegal for some reason, apart from the souvenir vendors who occasionally chase you down the road trying to tempt you into their shop.

 

The girls demonstrate an essential tanning skill : "keeping something on head to prevent burning face"

Afternoon: Return to beach. See "Morning". Optional addition of drinking a caipirinha or 3, which is one of the few things to be buyable at far lower prices than in Europe. A positive point.

Evening. Go out to eat and a) come back to the apartment and sit around chatting or  b) go out to a bar, have more caipirinhas or the local "Strela" beer, which is pretty tasty.

"Take a picture of this ! Every boy's dream !"

After the initial stages of my learning, I have surprisingly not put on much of a belly but I have taken a slightly reddish tinge, which could be as a result of my militant antipathy to sun cream. It's just too annoying and sticky. I hesitate to publicly write this as I can see my mother launching into a speech about melanoma and so on but my reasoning is that I go on so few holidays where I actually bare anything aside from my legs and face that the cancer Gods can probably forgive me an oversight here or there.

Sleepy street scene #2

Santa Maria town is pretty touristy although it's low key for a tourist town, particularly an African tourist town. Aside from the aforementioned Senegalese statuette and sunglasses vendors, people generally go around their own business and pay little attention to the raging hordes of tomato-coloured tourists. In fact, in contrast to many other places I've seen in Africa, local people lounge at the beach and go windsurfing along with the visitors. I'm looking forward to my potential bike exploration to go and see other towns on the island - hopefully there are some untainted by tourism so that I can see a bit more of what Cape Verde is all about. The flights to other, more interesting islands were priced slightly out of our league so we're pretty much stuck here. Still, I'm going to make the most of it...

 

Vamos a la playa

White (Sands) Christmas

Santa Maria, Cape Verde, 5th January 2012

As the New Year passed and people all over Europe looked out of their windows at miserable, wet and windy weather, two people in a small corner of France knew they wouldn't have to put up with it for much longer. No no, M and T had a master plan. They had tickets to go Cape Verde for a while.

A one-night layover in London where we were hosted by the delightful Sal (delighted by the fact that the island we were going to is his namesake) and joined by the equally delightful Dixon and Laura (see South Africa) kickstarted the trip.  Tactics were poor, though, and we  woke up on Sal's floor at 6am with pounding headaches and stiff limbs, facing the prospect of dragging our tired bodies and suddenly heavy bags to Gatwick airport. 

Sal and Dixon welcome the hardy travellers to London

T tries out his travellers sunglasses

 Our carrier for the day is Thomson Airways, some charter company which flies to a range of places where fat and pasty European tourists sit and wallow in the sunshine. Cape Verde may be heading to be that way in future but for now it's not quite firmly on the tourist map. The airfare is cheap although we decide not to take up Thomson's offer of checked-in luggage for an outrageous £36 a bag. The hand luggage is limited to 5kg so packing was always going to be an exercise in frugality. In the end I went slightly over the top and ended up wearing 8 t-shirts and a pair of shorts under my trousers in order to get my bag down to the accepted weight. My coat pockets were jammed with socks and various bits and pieces and my bag managed to get to 4,99kg. Score. They didn't weigh the bags at check-in so the effort was completely fruitless. Our seats were the only 3 on the entire plane that didn't go back and so sleeping off the hangover had to be done in a completely vertical position. Still, we arrived in one piece, got our visas at the airport and we were in !

Introducing the (very fresh) crew : T on the streets of London

 Inna enjoying the train ride to the airport

 M enjoying the travellator ride

Sal island is small, barren and windswept - from the plane we could see both west and east coasts at the same time and everything in between was a rocky brown colour. A nearly empty highway goes from north to south and a few small villages are dotted around. It's hard to believe that this is one of 10 islands which form the country. It's beautiful in a desolate way and I spend most of the taxi ride down to Santa Maria staring out of the window and taking it all in. Mentally, I'm planning to climb that hill, cycle to this village, walk around that area. Maybe I'll do those things, maybe I won't - who knows ? This is the first time I've taken a holiday of this style - renting an apartment, having a pre-paid base and not having any plans to move. No 5am treks to the bus station with bags on backs, no traipsing around new towns at 1am looking for a place to sleep. I'm not sure how I'm going to like it but there's only one way to find out !

View from the front door. Very typical of Africa.

A rocky section of Santa Maria beach

I receive a gentle crash course on day 1. The apartment is a hop, skip and jump from the beach and a mere hop and skip from a beach bar by the name of Angulo's. It's a few minutes' walk into town where there are restaurants and bars (many of them seemingly geared up for the tourist business) and the "mercado municipal". An African market is generally a place where you can buy anything you could need and when we realised we had no towels, I dropped in to find that, aside from one hairdressers stall, the entire market is dedicated to little carvings and bracelets for the tourists. When I ask one vendor where I can get towels, he directs me to the Chinese supermarket down the road. It will take a bit of getting used to I'm sure but the pace is slow and the weather is a gentle 25 degrees which is something I'd almost forgotten existed back in the European winter - I'm sure that if I can do it anywhere, I can do it here !

Angulo beach bar 

Pasty tourists checking in...!

White Xmas = Black day on the roads

Unlike most of the places featured on this blog, France is a country where everything works, where the First World in all its glory makes life simple and reliable. Which is why I have had to walk to Switzerland recently due to pick up a tram as snowfall has confused the bus drivers something terrible. At least it looks nice.

Road Trip !

Various places en route to Liechtenstein

The smallest country I'd ever been to was Bahrain. Living in the Geneva area, I'd often glanced across Switzerland on a map and been intrigued by Liechtenstein lying on the other side of it. It's a country known for being a tax haven, being extremely small, and having an extraordinarily wealthy prince. Tantalisingly, it's also known for producing rare stamps for sale to collectors, and is apparently the world's largest producer of false teeth.

Cole had expressed an interest in European country-bashing and when he and Tom (see Georgia and Armenia) landed in our little corner of Europe, a trip to Liechtenstein was on the cards. We'd go through three countries in one day (Cole, living in Vancouver, would have to do a day return to Mexico to accomplish this back home - Tom would have to sail to Indonesia via Papua New Guinea). We'd borrowed my parents trusty old car ("are you sure ? I wouldn't take this any further than Lyon, it would break down...") for the trip. And at 10.30am, a mere 2 hours later than planned, we hit the road.

Introducing the crew: M, the trusty driver

...and our intrigued tourists

Driving through Switzerland is not particularly exciting - the more beautiful, mountainous regions of the Valais and Graubunden are away to the south and our highway took us along the plans through the picturesque town of Bern and the reputedly dreary city of Zurich, famous for being full of banks and also for being voted the second most boring city in Europeto travel to by an online survey. The winner of the survey's most boring city award was Brussels, which I happen to find quite a fun place to be, so I'm not sure if Zurich is that bad. However, if it beat Geneva into the list as the Swiss representative, it must be pretty terrible. In any case, we didn't stop there. We did, however, want to stop somewhere. And this was chosen on the strength of the comedy of the name as well as its proximity to the motorway. Several towns called Egg were considered (as were offshoots named Wildegg and Handegg, amongst others), as was the Bern suburb of Wankdorf, but Wangen an der Aare won out. We pulled off and wandered around.

I wasn't joking !

"Bridge over the river Aare"

Tourists flock to Wangen

It turned out to be a delightful little place - a bizarre-looking wooden covered bridge led us from the motorway to a small car park where we were immediately swamped with armed soldiers. This being Switzerland, though, these guys were assembling for their regular military service and trotted off down the road, weapons strapped around their backs. Quite why Switzerland has compulsory military service every year when it is neutral and has not been involved in a war since the late Jurassic period I cannot work out, but at least it gives the residents of small towns like Wangen something to do over the weekend.

We pushed on and eventually crossed a small bridge over the Rhine, went past a fluttering blue and red flag and that was it. Not only were we in Liechtenstein, but we were in Vaduz, probably the least imposing capital I have ever seen. But it's also the smallest capital I've ever been to, so that's fair enough. Our plan to get a bus up to Malbun, from where we could walk across the country back to Vaduz, hit a snag when we rather amateurishly waited on the wrong side of the road.

Foreground: Delighted tourists in the Co-op supermarket car park. Background: Humble abode of the prince of Liechtenstein

About 80% of Vaduz

The next bus would come in an hour, which meant we'd be walking in the dark half of the time. Maybe it could wait until next time. We hopped back into the trusty car, struggled up the hill to Malbun, looked around and then found a spot from which we could admire half of the country as well as a decent chunk of Switzerland over the river Rhine. From here, we ate the sandwiches we'd put together in the car and drank the Liechtenstein Brauhaus beer we'd got in Vaduz.

The Xsara struggles up Liechtenstein's steep inclines, with M's gentle encouragement...

Warning: Sandwich master at work

Malbun: the end of the road. Literally

After watching the sun go down from our impressive vantage point, we realised we had another 5 hour drive to get back home. I don't have a license, Cole's is expired and Tom didn't fancy driving on the "wrong" side of the road for fear or landing the car somewhere undesirable and so M, the soldier at the wheel, took us back across the Rhine from whence we had come.

Viewpoint from the end of the tunnel. Foreground: 80% of Liechtenstein. Background: a small amount of Switzerland

We made it !!

It's worth saying that I'd like to come back to Liechtenstein for slightly longer. We left later than we thought, the drive took longer than we thought, and we probably spent about 2 hours in the country overall, which is quite a bit less than we'd planned.Nonetheless, not only is the country rather small (at 160 square kilometres, it would fit nearly 8 times into New York City and it is also narrower than the Congo river) but it also slightly impenetrable. Its border with Austria is largely inaccessible due to high mountains and the only road into Austria goes right in the north. After Malbun, the road peters out and the border is reachable only along footpaths. I'd imagine that one would probably run out of things to do there after a short while.

Still, it's a beautiful little place and well worth a visit for someone who has a spare day or two, and the beer is surprisingly tasty. Just make sure that you get to the bus on time. And the trusty old car CAN go further than Lyon.

And the tourists go home happy and excited from their trip to foreign lands..