Month: October 2005

And so Friday’s 5.30pm rolled around, and I found myself not really doing much of anything at my desk, so I decided to head off to Heathrow, ridiculously early of course, but at least on holiday. Probably just as well, in the end, as I had to endure an excruciating wait to check in at the Singapore Airlines desk, standing in a queue that failed spectacularly to move for absolutely ages. Seriously, what takes some people so long? Oh look, there’s Mr flying economy but I’ve got ten million bags to check in, and oh, there’s Ms don’t know why it’s taken me ten million years to be allocated a seat on this plane and given a printed bit of paper, but I’m waving a credit card around for some reason. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Rather predictably, this was followed by a similarly baffling delay at security (I mean do people not realise that, um, metal objects are going to set the alarms off, and things will be a lot quicker for everyone if they put them in their hand luggage before they get to the scanner? No, obviously not).

Anyway, I eventually got through security in time to grab a rather disgusting meal in one of the restaurants (washed down with a couple of hoegaardens that left me feeling surprisingly tipsy), grab a book or two for the flight and the holiday, and head over to find my plane.

The first 13 hours of my trip, which have brought me to Singapore, have been fairly uneventful. I watched The Wedding Crashers, which was much worse than I expected it to be (i.e., ultimately just a generic romantic comedy, with all the usual clichés), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was rather better than I expected it to be. Perhaps a sign of a Burton renaissance. And I spent hours upon hours watching that little plane image slowly crossing that little computer map of the world that you get. At one point I woke to see us skirting around the top edge of Iraqi airspace by just a few pixels, and then heading just past Tehran. Strange to think of all the things going on below us as the 747 rumbled on.

Purely for novelty value, I was almost going to start this blog from 30,000 feet (a service that Singapore Airlines are now offering), but sadly I think my laptop battery would barely have survived the time it would have taken to log on. So I’m in Singapore using the free wireless access. Because I can.

See you in Melbourne.

A nice little early birthday present was waiting for me when I got home on Friday night in the form of a court summons for our errant landlady. You may remember our potential eviction woes back in July following her apparent failure to bother to pay the mortgage. We thought it had all been resolved, but it appears not, and proceedings initiated by her bank to recover possession of the property will be heard at a central London court next month. Oh joy of joys. Once again I’m reminded that as tenants we have no rights whatsoever if she opts not to pay her mortgage and no right to be provided with any more information about the case. Well, it’s only our home after all. Luckily it turns out that the wheels of legal process turn mightily slowly, and we should have a good while (imminent holiday in Australia notwithstanding) to make alternative arrangements. I wonder what level of Spencer Mike’s Instant Bankruptcy Programme (TM) she’s reached now.

Another present arrived in the middle of the night, some four hours or so into the day of my 28th birthday, as the car alarm on the BMW belonging to one of our fellow residents went off for the second night in three (it’s now become 4 in 6). After a few minutes of this we became aware of an unusual hissing sound, and peered out into the car park to see if the foxes we’ve previously noticed engaging in some kind of late night vulpine Fight Club back there were at it again (and the impetus for the motion related alarm to disturb most of the block). No, actually, it was just a fellow resident who had snapped, in a Michael Douglas Falling Down sort of way, and who was now spraying shaving cream all over said BMW. [In the morning we subsequently heard the chap–an Aussie, natch–chatting to the bloke who owned the car and claiming to have “left a note on it”. Well, you could say that, I suppose…]

These distractions out of the way, and with our friends George and Rohan about to leave London for good in the back of their imminently arriving taxi, we headed over to the local to join them for their final pint in the UK and start my birthday celebrations. Things go a bit hazy at some point in the afternoon, but thanks to everyone who came, on the off chance that you’re reading. And thanks to everyone who bought me drinks (but not the shots; they were foul).

The other weekend Sal and I popped over to Naples as part of my work’s annual company holiday. It’s always an entertaining experience watching your colleagues get spectacularly drunk and do silly things, and this weekend was no exception. Before we went, I’d heard many things about the fine city of Naples, mostly along the lines of “nice pizza, shame about the city” (my mum, helpfully, said “well, isn’t that what they say: ‘see Naples and die’?”)

Of course with our expectations set suitably low we couldn’t realistically be disappointed, and it turned out to be not nearly as bad as we were expecting (thinks… perhaps other shabby cities could use this kind of reverse psychology in their marketing–“come to Bognor Regis, you’ll hate it!” etc). The pizza is indeed fantastic, but the memory that will remain with me and no doubt most of the other visitors to the city is not, sadly, the wonderful dough-based food, or the beauty of the coast, Vesuvius or Pompeii, but the city’s drivers. I’ve seen some crazy driving in my time (in Turkey and Barcelona this year alone), but the roads in Naples operate in a world of their very own (I don’t believe I saw a vehicle without dents during the entire weekend), and a stay in the city is soundtracked by the continual wail of ambulance (never police) sirens.

Crossing the road is also a rather interesting feature of the city. The best strategy seems to be just walking out in front of the cars looking like you know what you’re doing, not showing any signs of hesitation or weakness and hoping for the best. Takes a bit of adjusting to remember that that isn’t such a good idea when you get back to London, though…

The company weekend is mostly an opportunity to get drunk somewhere interesting, but we do have the formality of a company meeting on the Saturday afternoon during which we spend hours discussing how to make the company better and then instantly forget everything we’ve decided and never implement any of the proposals. (It did provide some amusement value, though: I had to try my best not to laugh at one point during the meeting, when the director who was chairing our discussion group–who had been calling one of the other members of the group by the wrong name for the first half of the meeting until he asked her a direct question and she was forced to stop ignoring it and correct him–suggested that the directors “may be out of touch with what’s going on”. Hmm. You don’t say…)

With the formalities out of the way, we all headed off into the city in teams to attempt to complete a list of challenges and return with photographic evidence of team members doing things like making silly poses outside various monuments, or drinking in various bars. By far the most interesting challenge was attempting to persuade strangers to kiss various members of the group. With 3 bonus points up for grabs for every member of the team photographed being kissed by a stranger of the same sex, the scoring system was heavily skewed towards this one challenge. Sadly, it turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to persuade Italian men to kiss another man on the cheek in public (“…if I do this here, people will think things about me”, said one). The silly macho homophobic idiots…

Over two weeks ago now (yes, I’ve been awfully slack, I know), I spent a weekend in a blur of lederhosen and steins at the world-famous Oktoberfest in Munich. For some reason, it’s not an event that attracts many Brits, as far as I can tell, but as even a cursory glance at a copy of TNT will tell you, it’s well and truly on the default itinerary for every antipodean temporary London resident (ethically dubious bull related hijinks in Pamplona? Check! Dawn Service at Anzac cove in Gallipoli? Check! Shared house in Action with 15 other people sharing rooms and a bunch of “dossers” sleeping on the couch? Check! A weekend drinking litre glasses of beer in Germany? Check…)

I travelled over on my own, to meet up over there with the Australians with whom I was tagging along so as to feel like something less of an interloper, but there were plenty of them surrounding me on the plane to help me feel that bit more at home before I even arrived. It was only when we landed that I realised that I’d just arrived on my own late at night in a country where I speak little to none of the language. Rather conveniently, though, I was able simply to follow the accents to find my way into town (after a few seconds of stabbing wildly at the little picture of a Union Jack on the ticket machine screen–or at least for long enough to work out that it wasn’t actually a touch-screen machine–I opted to just push the button that everyone in front of me had pushed, and hope for the best, and then follow everyone else onto the train, hoping for the best.

Luckily, everyone else was heading into town, and I was transported into the city centre quickly, efficiently, and (best of all) quietly enough to listen to my iPod with the volume at a sensible level. The only potential disruption to my listening pleasure was the consistent grumbling of the drunk elderly German who boarded the train with a beer bottle in one hand and proceeded to talk to himself in German for the duration of the trip. I can only assume he was employed by the city council to provide a helpful warning about the dangers of drink to all the crazy foreigners descending on the city to celebrate the wonders of the fizzy orange stuff.

After a suitably early night, we roused ourselves at an ungodly hour in the morning to begin the challenge of finding a table where we could install ourselves for the duration of the opening day. Unfortunately, we had awoken to some rather miserable weather and the kind of pathetic but constant rain that’s more characteristic of London in October, than the sunny September Munich we’d all been expecting (I had even returned to the flat the previous morning from half way down the street to collect my almost forgotten but entirely redundant shorts and flip flops). The effect of the weather was that no one wanted to sit at any of the thousands of outside tables and instead had already packed themselves in to the tents. With the knowledge that you can’t get served a drunk at Oktoberfest unless you are seated in the back of all our minds, things were starting to look rather bleak.

After some time we eventually discovered one table at the back of the Lowenbraü tent that appeared to contain neither a lot of thirsty Germans nor a small reserved sign, and we eagerly snapped it up. It wasn’t quite that easy, though, because we still weren’t sure whether the table was in fact reserved–after a while one of the waitresses produced some more reserved signs for the table. When we asked her, she seemed to suggest that we could sit there in spite of this, but at the same time told other people to simply go away. Had she misunderstood us, or did she just not like the look of the others? At this point there were still several hours to go before the official opening of the festival (and our first beer of the day) so we sent an advance party out into the rain to hunt for an alternative. Sadly they returned with just some comedy Oktoberfest hats, but no table.

Ah, but it was all ok, because our waitress did happen to like the look of us after all: shortly before 12 she asked us if we could squish down the end to let a German bowling team join us on our table, and at that point we realised we were probably safe. After what seemed like an interminable wait, the procession arrived in the hall and the beer began to flow. Things get a little bit hazy from this point onwards. I can remember being consistently amazed by the ability of the waitresses to carry 10 or 11 steins in one go (it’s quite a sight to behold). I can remember that the German bowlers turned out to be very entertaining company–they taught me the words to the repeated-every-5-minutes oompah, oompah drinking song “Ein Prosit, Ein Prosit, der Gemütlichkeit”, for example (although admittedly those in fact are the words to the repeated-every-5-minutes oompah, oompah drinking song, it’s still something of a feat after several steins). They were also engaging in entertaining challenges like timing each others trips to the toilet. He who takes longest buys the next round, apparently.

At the same time, I don’t remember one of our party emptying the contents of his stomach into his stein (and no, it wasn’t me), and I don’t remember quite how I came to fall asleep on a chair in a bar some hours after the beer hall had closed. I do remember waking up to find a couple of Germans guys poking me to see if I was still alive (presumably), and thus realising that it might be time to go home to the hotel to sleep.

On the Sunday, things were much calmer, and we arrived at the Paulaner tent with plenty of empty tables to choose from. With none of the “no beer until noon” rules in effect on the opening day, we had our first steins in front of us at 9.30 am, and consequently I had to stop drinking by mid afternoon, conscious of my early flight back to London (and straight to work) the following morning. We rounded the weekend off by sampling some of the fairground rides (surely a dangerous combination–very drunk people and machines that tip you upside down at high speed), and heading for a kebab.

Anyway, it’s all rather good. I strongly advise you to go (but maybe just the one time will be enough…)