Farewell Angleterre

I have now wrapped up my six day trip to the UK’s capital, during which time I met up with a lot of people, ate a lot of fine food, wandered around in the sunshine and, I admit, went through a veritable swathe of beverages.

On my last full day in the UK my brother and I felt it would be inopportune of us to miss out on spending at least a short amount of time in the pub. We popped out to one of his many locals in the afternoon, where I tried some of the further ale options, which Phil peered at suspiciously before continuing on with an expensive sounding premium continental lager.

Shortly before arriving at the pub, we stumbled across one of the new bicycle hire racks which are being installed all across central London, allowing people to pick up a bicycle, and for a very nominal fee, transport themselves to another bicycle stand somewhere else in the city. There are, I am led to believe, thousands of bicycles about to appear at these stands all over the city. Always nice to see more options for commuting or just cheap transport being opened up, although I have often suspected people willing to cycle on the roads of London to be a teeny bit mad. What with the buses and taxis and cars and, well, all manner of metallic objects that would usually beat a bicycle at a game of chicken. We debated the pros and cons of the bicycle hire scheme with a chap who was also inspecting the new system, before meandering our way to the actual pub.

Not a lot else seems to have changed in London since I was away. A giant new skyscraper is being erected over London Bridge, which looks like it will be suitably futuristic. One of the artistic impressions renders an almost Blade Runner-esque view of the London skyline once this spire, shaped like a  shard of glass, is completed. I expect that to be pretty impressive when finally done. Otherwise, people have moved houses, or jobs, or had kids, or got engaged. Life is, therefore, going onwards as it is wont to do. The city, and indeed the nation, had not entirely ground to a halt in my absence, which was nice.

My final few waking hours on my last day were naturally spent in another pub, meeting up with a friend to say farewell. As we were leaving this venue, we re-encountered our friend from the bicycle rack, who, to put it mildly, had clearly already partaken of more than the odd glass of something. Swaying gently, he exclaimed how delighted he was to meet us again, and regaled us with stories of his saxophone playing life. His name, interestingly, was Charlie,  the same name as the Czech chef from the now infamous buffet incident. So the visit was rounded off nicely, finishing in much the way it had started, in a pub, talking to a stranger called Charlie.

I am now back in Germany after a lovely flight with Easyjet (I can confirm that it is possible to go from bed to in-flight within two hours from central London, but I would not recommend this as a course of action if you want a stress free travelling experience), and I have to say, it is nice to be back. Absence does, it seem, make the heart grow fonder. The weather is glorious, I have a wedding to go to (suit provided courtesy of my dear brother, I promise to look after it carefully), and everything continues to look, well, joyful. To everyone I saw this week, thanks for coming along folks!

Further cycling action

I went for another cycle today. The overall process went quite well, in that I got to grips with the whole cycling on the wrong side of the road thing, plus the giving way to merging traffic from the right in small villages thing, but my confidence was perhaps an error now I look back on the whole affair.

My approach to cycling in places I’ve never been before is much the same as my approach to walking in places I’ve never been before, i.e. set off with no specific goal in mind and wander aimlessly for a while. On foot this is a fairly safe approach as you can’t really get too far away from your starting location, but when transporting oneself at high speed on a veritable locomotion of a vessel, the whole process becomes slightly riskier, if you hope to make it back to the place you started from. Which is fairly important if you are in a foreign country whose language you do not speak, with no means of communicating because you do not have any mobile technology, nor in fact any real idea where you live.

Anyway, after some fascinating detours around a variety of exciting housing estates (which I can report, are about as exciting as housing estates elsewhere in the world - I am becoming quite the housing estate connoisseur, the ones in Sydney en route to Bondi are particularly fine), the realisation that heading towards the autobahn is not the greatest idea in the world, and some orienteering using the sun, plus some not entirely legal roundabout manoeuvres (you go round them anti-clockwise over here it turns out), I did in fact make it back home. I know, I’m as relieved as you are. In fact, I suspect, more so.

I have learnt some other things today. I wasn’t supporting North Korea, but they still managed to lose fairly spectacularly against Portugal. Roger Federer nearly made it out of Wimbledon in the first round, but then won back. And some chap in Germany threw a puppy at some bikers before escaping on a bulldozer he had stolen. To be fair, he did abandon the bulldozer and hitchhike the remainder of the way home. The puppy was fine. No word on how the bikers managed.

Finally, I have given in and embraced the world of Twitter. If that is your sort of thing, you can keep up with a shortened version of my ramblings there. Plus my blog posts will be tweeted there too, due to the magic of interconnectedness that is the internet. Who needs decent content when we have so many platforms to play with! It’s @Lozula if you have a desire to see what happens there. I cannot promise you magic.

Cycling al fresco

It turns out that there is an interesting law of the road in Germany, pertaining exclusively to small villages. This is that if you happen to be driving along a road you must, for largely inexplicable reasons, give way to traffic joining the road. It is unfortunate if you happen to find this out through the medium of your girlfriend shouting at you whilst you happily sail into the path of an oncoming BMW, but let us assume that the lesson was learnt and no physical harm was incurred.

This, our second attempt at the cycling expedition, was in fact a marked improvement on the first attempt, despite the almost fatal lack of highway code knowledge. Our first expedition was undertaken with only a rudimentary mechanical check of the bicycles, which had been sitting unused for nearly a year, and it turns out that nuts and bolts can loosen in this period. Checking they are tight with your fingers is insufficient I now realise. As it was, my back wheel almost detached from my bicycle frame, and a fabulous sequence of events took place following this realisation, culminating with me landing on top of my lovely lady, with our bikes a happy tangle of metal. Some minor bruises and scrapes were incurred. We elected to push our bikes back, just as it started to rain. And there was me thinking It was hard enough cycling on the wrong side of the road.

Following this, some more serious bicycle maintenance was undertaken, with a wrench no less, and our steeds were finally deemed ready for us. My steed in particular is a real beauty - wonderful handlebars curve backwards like antlers, there is a braking system that quaintly involves you pedalling backwards, and it has a frame that is built, from what I can tell, out of steel girders. Oddly, the word gazelle is written down the side. I would perhaps suggest rhino would be more fitting. Gears are apparently available, in flavours one or three. Two is yet to be found.

Germany, like so many other European countries (I continue to leave the UK out of Europe for some reason, I think its island like nature confuses me), has a wonderful cycle network. Little cycle roads pootle all over the place, signs mark the distance and route you may wish to take, all in all it is a very pleasant experience. The village we are living in is nestled at the foot of some hills with a huge flat valley floor to explore. I admit that much of the exploration involves riding through scenery of a largely agricultural nature, but we did see a rabbit, and one of the villages we passed through had a castle surrounded by a moat no less, so all was good.

In other, non cycling related news, I feel I should share with you my ongoing attempts to learn German. It turns out that reading the name of a cooking spice in German and assuming that it is a certain English spice due to the similarity in name is not a valid approach. I have now learnt that Caraway is not an adequate substitute for Cumin in Mexican food. That may be of use to you, if you ever find yourself cooking in German.

Finally, always always check how spicy your cooking oil that is flavoured with whole chillies actually is, before cooking dinner in it. My companion did admittedly eat what I created, but there was a certain amount of nose blowing and appliance of cucumber juices to the meal which indicated perhaps I had overdone it somewhat. C’est la vie. More to come.