Location: Tulum, Mexico
LIVE LARGE, LIVE FREE, TULUM JULY 17
The final whistle has been blown on the World Cup. The final beer has been drunk in Prague. After saying our sad farewells to Sylv´s family in Moravia, closing bank accounts and disconnecting phones, we started on the homeward leg of our journey. In Frankfurt we boarded a long, wide-bodied jet, full of short, wide-bodied Mexicans headed, strangely enough, for Mexico City. We sat next to Yei (pron: Jay) who had just returned from a month from doing an aeronautics course in Moscow – as the birthplace of the Antonov, the Tupolev and one of the world´s most secretive air-safety records, I couldn´t think of a better place to learn about aeronautics. Yei was tossing up between a career in aeronautics and life as a magician. Yei showed us several very clever card tricks, leaving us both very impressed. More impressive, however, was Yei´s magical cocktail – beer with tomato juice, salt and pepper. “You should also use chilli.” Indeed. He assured us it tasted very good. We believed him.
After 12 hours of staring incredulously at beer and tomato juice we arrived in Mexico City and despite the altitude, managed a brisk run for our connecting flight to Cancun where we arrived at 11pm. I could be judging Cancun too hastily, but at 11pm it looked like the Gold Coast on steroids, with a lot of lights and lots of bad seaside resort sculptures. It looked like an architectural theme-park boasting the biggest, ugliest hotels built outside of the former Eastern Bloc. We stayed at the Maya Hostel, called as such because the bed linen and air-conditioning system dated from around 1200BC. AS we didn´t plan on a vacation doing Tequila slammers on bartops with American summer-breakers in Cancun, we rose after our Mayan-style night´s sleep and took an 8.30am bus south to Tulum. We passed a procession of time-share resorts, hotels and holiday villages with evocative names like Freedom Paradise (see note below), Desire Resort and Secrets Excellence Riviera Cancun, each with an entrance statement bigger and better than the next that all looked like stadium gates. In Tulum we are staying at the Papaya Playa Cabañas. We are staying right on the beach in a cabaña which is Spanish for “something a hurricane threw together” – a random-looking collection of wood and palm thatch, with all the thermal qualities of a mosquito net and which includes a double-bed and mattress which seems to be in a constant state of damp. It´s very hot in Tulum, so it´s good that it´s only a 20m stumble to our Caribbean beach - all turquoise and sugar-white sand. The beach is coincidentally also a “clothes optional” affair which yesterday meant that it looked like a series of dried floral arrangements, one chap´s undercarriage so sun-burned I thought he´d come to the beach looking for a game of cricket…. (think about it).
Cultural Observation No. 18: Among the many resorts along the coast is one called Freedom Paradise. With its motto “Live large, live free”, FP is the first and only size-friendly resort in the world. “Here guests of all sizes and ages are welcome to fully enjoy their beach vacation … Size-friendly amenities include sturdy furniture, majority of wide armless chairs and sun beds, walk-in pools with grab bars, few stairs, just two-story buildings, standard rooms with sturdy comfortable beds, walk-in showers with grab bars, shower seat available on request, staff with a size-friendly attitude”. In addition the hotel has no less than four restaurants including Pelicanos, serving “hamburgers, French fries, hotdogs and mini pizzas while you watch pelicans fish for their own lunch”. Nice.
Location: Dortmund, Germany
CALLING EMMA
Hello Emma from Oz,
sorry but i pushed reply on your message and now can´t find it anywhere in order to send a reply. Many thanks for your message, and yes I normally work at the Herald Sun. I took a year off and have been living in Prague since July last year. Alas, it´s back to the Sun at the end of July. You can find my World Cup diary on the Herald Sun site under sport or under my name in the navigation bar to the left.
Thanks again for your message.
cheers
Mike
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_p...
Location: Berlin, Germany
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Location: Stuttgart, Germany
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Location: Stuttgart, Germany
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_p...
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Location: Near Frankfurt, Germany
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Location: Berlin, Germany
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Location: Berlin, Germany
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_p...
Location: Kaiserslautern, Germany
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_p...
Location: Dortmund, Germany
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_p...
Location: Prague et al, Czech Republic
GOOD THINGS
I WRITE this entry from the trains and train stations of Germany. I have essentially farewelled Prague to spend the month in Germany “reporting” on the World Cup (see www.heraldsun.com.au and click on Mike Bruce on the left navigation bar for the daily diary). For the past few weeks Sylv and I have been in melancholy reflection on our time there and all the things we really like, some of which we shall miss about Czech. Here is my list in no particular order.
1. BEER – okay, okay, I know this is just reinforcing a cliché, but I shall genuinely miss Czech beer. Having lived in Germany and Belgium, no mean brewers themselves, Czech beer is my undisputed heavyweight champion here. I love its flavour, its temperature (ie, not served with a thin ice-cap as in Australia), the fact it is not too gassy and how it’s drunk mainly by the delicate half-litre. I also adore the Czechs’ appreciation of beer, how they know and appreciate the difference in quality of the tap over the bottle, and how they nip across to the pub to fill up their jug or glass to take home rather than buy a bottle and how they genuinely believe beer to be healthy, a thirst quencher and the best antidote to a hangover. Na zdraví! (Note, the 3crown deposit on beer bottles is another winner – good for the environment and a steady income stream for the homeless.)
2. PUBLIC TRANSPORT – beautiful trams, regular trams, efficient trams, fast trams and a network, which for a city of 1.16 million, makes Auckland, for example, look pre-trogladite. One thing, I guess, for which we can thank the Bolsheviks. I also love the way the young immediately jump up to offer seats to the elderly, gout-ridden, hip-replaced, the crutch-carrying and ladies with children. Something which, if not observed in Melbourne, should be punishable by a good ol’ public stoning.
3. COST OF LIVING – I love leaving the supermarket with a cubic metre of groceries and still having change from 200 crowns ($12). I love the ability to buy a 500ml bottle of beer for 9 crowns (50c), a flock of chicken for $2.50 and a schnitzel and spuds at our local for 70 crowns ($3.90). If only we could bundle up the cost of living and take it home with us.
4. POTATOES – I can eat a bowl of them on their own. I’ve always loved Europe’s golden, waxy, firm, creamy spuds that hard to find in the Antipodes. New Zealand is getting there, but don’t get me started on Australian potatoes. Poop. No wonder McDonalds Australia goes to North Otago for its chips …
5. SYLV’S FAMILY – while my communication with them is limited largely to swearwords and the realm of food and beverage, such as “see the beer, the beer is big, I like the big beer,” and other primary-reader dialogue, you don’t always need the language to know what makes good, kind and warm people. They have done so much for us and given us experiences we would ordinarily not have had in Czech and have more than justified Sylv’s decision to come here for the year. We’ll really miss our weekends in Southern Moravia, the “Tuscany of Central Europe.”
6. FILM – Czech really hides its light under a bushel here. They make some amazing, intelligent films which seem to get relatively little publicity I have yet to see a bad film and am surprised we don’t see more of them down at Coburg Blockbuster and Videoezy (iro.). Apart from Kolja which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, modern Czech film seems to be unheralded. If you get a chance to see Up And Down, We Must Stick Together, Pupendo, Happiness or Dark Blue World, do it.
7. THE WEDNESDAY GIRLS – Each Wednesday morning was English-class time with three girls who worked up the road Martina, Misha and Lenka, and then with Jana in town. This became my Wednesday routine, a welcome break from the four white walls of our apartment, and most importantly some interaction with someone apart from my best friend in Prague, the BBC Foreign Service. They were all such lovely people, great company and very patient with my limited pedagogical ability.
8. GRANDMA’S APRICOT JAM – This stuff should be on the shelves of those boutique food shops in New York, London and Paris. Using apricots (and other assorted fruit) grown on their farm-size allotments in Southern Moravia, Sylv’s grandma and grandpa make a few metric tonnes of jam each year (we are still getting through the 2004 stock!). Forget those fancy Yarra Valley jobs with the designer jars and designer prices, this is the Jonah Lomu of jam, a Titan of conserves.
9. SVICKOVA – There probably won’t be a lot of Czech foods we will really crave back in Australia. Czech food is generally described as a bit dull, but like the curate’s egg, there are good parts to it. One is svickova – sirloin beef roasted with a vegetable-stock and cream sauce, served with a slice of lemon, cranberries and whipped cream … and of course dumplings. It might sound strange but it’s delicious. Fruit dumplings is another favourite – flour dumplings with an apricot or plum, for example, stuffed into it and sprinkled with butter, sugar and breadcrumbs. Soups are also excellent here, especially zelnicka, or cabbage soup. And what Sylv’s granddad calls a “light meal” - fried cheese with chips. Wouldn’t quite make the Jenny Craig Top 10, but it’s surprisingly good.
10. ABSENCE OF RETAIL HASSLE – The usual negligible service you get in shops in Prague has its positive flipside – you can go wander around most shops, and (apart from being closely watched as a shoplifting suspect) you can shop without the insidious US-style “how can I help you today, my that really looks lovely on you, how about something for the lady, just your colour sir, and how many other ways can we possibly upsell you?” retail crap.
Location: Venice, Italy
THAT SINKING FEELING
IN my experience Teutonic rail conductors are usually tall, fair-headed, well-groomed men, often with facial hair, a blue blazer and a peaked military-style hat. They are generally not 5ft-tall Afro-Caribbean men with negligible dental hygiene and dreadlocks. Ours was. Our “Austrian” train conductor told us, very nicely, that there was a 24-hour train strike in Italy so we would have to disembark at the Austrian-Italian border at the ideal time of 4am and board a bus to Venice – for this privilege we would also have to pay an extra €30. Oh, and because of the disruption to services, we would also have to change trains in Salzburg at the equally ideal time of midnight. When we reached Salzburg and schlepped our luggage across to the second train in the dead of night, The Hills Were Alive With The Sound of Expletive Grumbling About the Woeful State of the Italian Civil Service, I can tell you. We actually reached Venice on time and made our way to our accommodation on La Giudecca – the island which lies opposite the thronging St Marks, the quarter neatly divided into the areas known as Little Boston and Little Tokyo (this is a joke, there are NO areas called this in Venice). Located under La Redentore church where the bell-ringer’s watch clearly needed an overhaul, our B&B was, by Venetian price standards, palatial – for €80 we got a large room, large bathroom, terrace, garden, fridge and 700 satellite TV channels which allowed you to switch directly from Muslim World to Transvestite TV, or from the Sabbath Hour to Euro-Dominatrix. Something for everyone. Our personal favourite was clearly VIP-TV which involved an energetic compere standing on a stage with 15 naked ladies, who -somewhat less energetically - danced around careful not to make any sudden movements for risk of taking someone’s eye out. It was all to promote an online betting site – the link between the two is obvious … to someone I’m sure.
For the next three days Sylv and I walked the lanes and alleys of the part-theatre, part-museum, part-stunning-city that is Venice and tried to avoid some of the 16.5 million tourists who largely seem to ply the route between St Marks Square and the Rialto bridge. La Giudecca (our "home") was a gondola-free zone, a sanctuary from the mask shops, plastic gondola models and overpriced restaurants of St Marks. Over there life has a fairly vernacular rhythm, with markets and normal shops and where people seemed a little warmer to the tourist presence than across the water.
On the last day in Venice I interviewed the chairwoman of, and the scientist for Venice in Peril (the mob trying to stop the city sinking into the lagoon) for a feature article in the Herald Sun. From what she said, we're glad we visited Venice now and didn’t leave it until 2106.
Cultural Observation No. 18: Venice is sinking faster than ever. In the first decade of the 20th century St Mark’s Square flooded less than 10 times a year - by the 1980s the city was flooding more than 40 times a year, and in the 7 months from September 2000 to March 2001 alone, it flooded 40 times. Of the 10 highest tides between 1902 and 2003, eight have happened since 1960. These are of course frightening statistics for people producing Carnevale masks and plastic models of gondolas.
Location: Manchester/London, England
COTE DE MISERE
Oh, to be in England, Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England, Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf, Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough, In England -now!
Robert Browning (deluded English poet)
Yes Bobby, that’s all very well when you’re overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal (as you were) and not actually freezing your sheaves and boles off back in 8°celsius in England. On the public holiday weekend straddling April and May, Sylv and I headed to the UK. For much of the time we had weather which would have made the Falklands feel like Montego Bay.
First stop was Manchester which, unless you're on a Coronation St fan-tour, would not be on your average UK itinerary, but it was on ours as my best friend of 31 years Dean lives there. In Manchester we drove up hill and down dale, sampled persistently bad beer, walked footpaths and towpaths, saw town halls and stone walls, and enjoyed a sublime curry in the city’s Curry Mile – a kind of Boulevard of Balti lined with hundreds of painfully polite sub-continental men reminding us that his restaurant won best Tandoori Chicken in the 2003 Manchester curry cook-off.
The next day (Sunday) Dean drove us “up” (as one says) to London, where for the first time in way too long, I caught up with an old friend from Christchurch, Annabel Newman, and we got to meet her fiancé Stu, and flatmates and friends. The re-union and the evening were, for me at least, easily the highlight of our London visit.
And that, I'm afraid, is probably the best thing I can say about our London visit. By Monday evening in London, for the first time since last September, I turned to Sylv and said: “I can’t wait to go ‘home’ to Prague”. By Tuesday even Zizkov looked pretty good.
Cultural Observation No. 17: Lonely Planet’s 2006 London guide rates it as "one of the coolest capitals of the world" but hugely expensive. London remains the place to be for its club scene, theatres and improving restaurants, it says, but its underground transport system and hotels are "horrendously overpriced". The guide also laments the "conversion of traditional pubs into alcoholic theme parks". No kidding.
