This is not the post I promised

So it turns out I spent most of the weekend planning the coming week and mildly panicking.  I found out on Friday afternoon that I was lucky enough to score two job interviews this week. Luckily they aren’t on the same day.  They are however, on two consecutive days in places that are a five-hour train ride apart.  And, they are not turn up, do your interview and leave processes.  Both interviews require the better part of each day for interview, tests/ presentations and for one, a buffet lunch with prospective future bosses.  I’m ok with all this and happy to finally being going to interviews again but it did require a little research on my part aided and abetted with research conducted in the Southern Hemisphere. 

It’s all sorted now though and I have trains tickets (some cheap, some not) and accommodation (not too bad considering short notice) because I’ll be away for a few days.  Both sets of accommodation have wi-fi so I might be able to pop up some more pictures soon but even if I don’t, I’ll certainly be taking more for when I get back to the big smoke.

Weekend travel in the Capital

Welcome to weekend travel in a city of roughly 7 million people (and don’t forget the tourists).  Some of whom may actually want to travel by tube without having to change lines three times or catch multiple replacement buses.

The forecast for this weekend:

• Bakerloo – Good Service
• Central – Part closure
• Circle - Good Service
• District – Part closure
• Hammersmith and City – Part closure
• Jubilee – Part closure
• Metropolitan – Part closure
• Northern – Good Service
• Piccadilly – Good Service
• Victoria – Planned closure
• Waterloo and City – Planned closure

Note this doesn’t take into account station closures for refurbishment or anything else that might go wrong in the mean time (I  mean, there’s a whole other day till these planned closures start).  It’s a good thing I’m going to spend most of Saturday walking through London – here’s hoping the Bakerloo will still be going to get me back to the south side of the river, because after that it’s rail replacement buses all the way.

London travel tip

When you’re standing at the ticket window at Charing Cross station with staff ready to sell you a ticket, this is not the time to answer your phone and tell the person on the other end ”Yeah sure I can talk now”. If you could possibly see all the harried commuters standing behind you, please know that you’re holding them up.

Where was the Hogwarts Express????

Platform 9 3/4

London travel tip

The top of the escalator leading to the Jubilee line at Waterloo is not the place to stop and have a discussion about whether or not you want to get on the escalator.  See all these people streaming around you into that tiny space you’ve left and getting on the escalator?  You’re in their way.

A day trip to the country

Yesterday I had an appointment to keep in Dorchester which for those in the know is in Dorset.  Approximately a 2.5 or more usually 3 hour train trip from London Waterloo into the West of England. The train trip wasn’t too bad despite some delays. It’s amazing how taking a long plane ride make even a three hour train trip seem easy. The countryside was lovely, all green rolling hills dotted with hay bales and sheep or cows and the occasional pony. Dorchester is a lovely county town that was bustling with people when I visited.  It’s biggest claim to fame is being the home of Thomas Hardy and it played the setting in a number of his books including The Mayor of Casterbridge. It has some beautiful stone buildings and a mostly pedestrianised shopping area.  Here are some of my pictures (which also prove that it is sunny in England on occasion)

Mr Hardy

stone cottages

High Street

beautiful church doorway

The old brewery - development happening here

Cornhill shopping precinct (with generous ad for costa)

I had lots more pics but you get the idea. Just for fun here’s one last one back in London at Waterloo station – if you look real hard you can see a tiny bit of the London Eye (really, really hard).

See, I am in London - taking blurry pictures

Flashback – eight years

Eight years ago this Easter I was in Rome.  It’s not a bad place to spend Easter (although it is one of the busier times of year to be there).  I didn’t originally plan it this way.  Beginning a month and half long trip around Continental Europe and Ireland from London I had decided that I would spend a a day or two in the big cities I visited in Western Europe and take longer in places like the Czech Republic.  I budgeted four days for Paris which was great but only one for Barcelona after hearing many a horror story about pick pocketing and theft from fellow travellers.  But less than a week into a trip across Europe on the trains with new friends I’d met less than a week earlier I was rethinking my time allocation.  Arriving into Barcelona late at night after a cross country struggle with France in the grip of a train strike, I was not in the mood to get moving again after just one day rest.  The trip to Barcelona from Brive in France involved multiple trains, a longer than average stop in Toulouse  and buses (including a scenic bus ride to the Spanish border through the Pyrenees), and a stop for the train to be sprayed with noxious substances right near the border – this being just after the height of the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain in 2001.  It was also many, many, many hours longer than it was meant to be and although beautifully scenic, it was very, very tiring.

So my travelling companions and myself decided to spend a few extra days in Barcelona, not realising that this would set us up to arrive in Rome right before Good Friday just a few stops further on the journey.  As it turns out, Barcelona was beautiful.  It was sunny, and warm and friendly.  We wandered through Parc Guell for hours, marvelled at stunning Cathedrals and drank lots of bad sangria (not all at the same time) and marvelled at the discovery that a six pack of coke cost the same as a six pack of beer.  Good times.

But on to Rome another week or so into the trip.  Navigating a foreign city around a major religious festival can be interesting.  The city was busy as always as we made our way through all the regular tourist sights and came to grips with the supermarkets around the central train station.  We also came to grips with sharing one bathroom between two dorms of people, each with about ten or so people in each.  The only person getting a good night’s sleep was the deaf guy who took out his cochlear implants to sleep and could subsequently hear no mumblings, murmuring, snoring or rustling in backpacks.

Bereft of touristy things to do so close to Easter and with all the shops shut (which also meant we had no dinner that night because we’d run out of food), we walked to the Coliseum to watch the Stations of the Cross.  The Coliseum was lit up for the occasion and the area was crowded with thousands of people waiting for Pope John Paul II to arrive.  He was already quite elderly at this time and was very late in arriving but no one in the crowd seemed to mind.  The service was, of course, in Italian and we couldn’t understand a word and even though I’m not religious it was one of the highlights of the trip.  To be somewhere with so many other people, seeing the Coliseum (usually thought of as a remnant of the past) used as part of the service to honour Christian martyrs, while the Pope conducted the service from atop the ruins of the facing church on the hill was great.  So many times while travelling you feel like it’s all just sightseeing.  Taking in too much information and retaining too little while not really getting to see what the non-tourist oriented part of the city/country is like.  This allowed us to experience a different part of Rome and share that experience with the others there that night.