Just got back yesterday - check all the photos here
It’s good to get back to the west and check up on the place, see if anything has gotten out of shape since I’ve been away. Nothing much has changed; public service staff are still rude, everything that involves eating or entertainment outside your house is still almost prohibitively expensive. The wind is still colder than you can possibly imagine, as are shadows.
Some things are changing though: the food seems to be getting better everywhere. Last time I was here I didn’t do a lot of eating out and I’ve discovered that even pubs serve pretty good meals. The price of those meals is extortionate, and the compulsory tip is always a source of resentment. In some places restaurants are asking for up to 15% now. That's fine if you give me the option of going to the kitchen myself and pouring my own drinks.
I’ve never been a tourist in Scotland before but with Ai I could do all those things that I haven’t done since I was too
So our tour of Scotland consisted of Glencoe, Loch Ness and Edinburgh, and a load of other places where we could take pictures of sheep and cows and stuff. Lots of Scottish things to show people back in Japan.
We went to the west end festival and saw a Rolling Stones cover band amongst a crowed of neds and drunken Glaswegians. Take a look at the video (and look out for the guy with the strange Mr. Bean face.
Amsterdam.
After that we went to Europe. Two days in Amsterdam and two days in Paris.
On our first day in Amsterdam we had to wait for an hour while they cleaned our room at the Swissotel hotel. The staff dress in long black coats with hotel insignia on their collars. It was a bit militant.
On our first walk around the city we accidentally got in the way of an angry Canadian/American (I’m not sure if we even did get in his way) who shouted “pricks!” back to us as he waited to cross the road. It took me a while to understand that he was insulting us and so I did the manly thing: waited until he was almost out of earshot and insulted him back half-heartedly. He swung around on his bicycle and we continued to swap insults for about five minutes, neither of us actually prepared to take out the can opener.
A stoned bouncer from a nearby pub came over and got rid of the guy and said “don't worry, if he was a real tough guy he would have done something”. That’s reassuring. I have no idea why the American/Canadian was so unbelievably angry, but I do hope it drives him to a heart attack.
Amsterdam was beautiful. I mean the place was beautiful and the people who live there were lovely. The main problem with Amsterdam is the British people. In fact not just the British – all the foreigners are a pain. No matter where you are you can hear some loud-mouth whooping or heaving out some brainless team-sport chant.
My favourite Amsterdam pastime is watching middle-aged couples walk down the street and suddenly realize the windows are filled with prostitutes. I saw one guy stepping out of a doorway stuffing his wallet into his back pocket while his fair lady waved him farewell. As normal a transaction as having your car washed or your hair cut.
Good things about Amsterdam– clean streets, nice architecture, canals, pleasant locals if you can find them, excellent transport, sensible airport, polite staff, liberal laws, Van Gogh museum, cycle taxis, cheaper than Britain.
Bad stuff about Amsterdam – British stag parties and hen parties, cyclists and cycle lanes being more abundant than walk ways, silent trams than creep up on you, the queues outside Anne Frank’s house, and the staff in our hotel. Ageing American hippies with leather waistcoats who go into bars and bore the owners senseless with mindless chat for the entire afternoon because they knew the guy who owned the bar in 1971.
After Amsterdam we took the train back to Schiphol and caught the plane to France. I tried to book a train from Amsterdam to Paris on the internet but the website was in Dutch, so then I found the English one and when I got to the confirmation page it was in Dutch. The French website wouldn’t let me print my ticket. In short, I would have to actually travel to France to pick up my ticket, or have it mailed to my address, which would take SIX days. The telephone numbers on the sites wouldn’t work either. I surely would have had less trouble taking a train from Amsterdam to France if I had lived in 1910.
Gay Paris, or as the Parisians call it, Paris De L'Homosexual.
Charles De Gaulle airport is a toilet, as is the Gard du Nord trainstation. Limited use of signage and minimalist personnel employment strategies seem to be top of the French Ministry of Transport’s agenda, as well as severely limiting taxi licences. For one of the dominant European countries I was shocked that my first impression was that it looked, well, poor. In our train carriage Mediterranean street urchins played accordion to jaded travelers who refused to give them money.
At the other end we found ourselves facing signs for the exit pointing in every conceivable direction, including up and down. We picked one and followed it and ended up outside a small back entrance called Chappelle or something like that. We waited for a taxi and because it was raining we waited one hour. I asked three taxis to take us to Rue de la Banque, and all of them shook their heads and said no. In the end we got one, and I would have paid him a thousand pounds.
“Euros” really doesn’t sound like any kind of real currency. It sounds like “credits”. And as with all money that you’re not used to, all the coins look the same and the sizes are wrong. I even find that with Sterling these days. Pound coins are massive, and the behemoth two pound coin is a bruiser. Fifty-pence pieces belong either side of a legionaire’s chariot and how could I ever have considered the size discrepancy between frizbee-like twos and invisible fives to be anything other than a joke by the Royal mint on the British public. I forgot what it’s like to pick a five pence coin off a tiled floor under duress in a busy supermarket.
Paris was beautiful. The Louvre, and Seine, l’arc de Triumph, the Eiffel tower, in that order, then a bit of shopping but they closed at five, then some champagne outside on the Rue de Louvre, and back to the Louvre for night time views. The beauty of the place and the grandeur of the architecture was spoiled only by the city’s obnoxious inhabitants. It’s Europe’s reluctant tourism capital, and you can see in the eyes of every Parisian who serves you anything or has anything to do with you that they don’t give a toss about you. Saying that – our hotel staff was quite nice.
Rudeness aside, it's a nice place. But Paris doesn’t do manners, and it doesn’t do transport.
The flight back to Britain was great fun. We went through Heathrow because we couldn’t get direct flights from Paris to Edinburgh. I don't exactly know when the excitement peaked – It was probably in the line to get the bus for the queue for the security-check queue, or it could have been in the line to rebook our tickets when we missed our flight to Edinburgh because of the security check (which robbed Ai of her shampoo but neglected to find her straight razor). Or it might have been when we ran for ten minutes with heavy bags to the rebooked flight to find that we needn’t have, as it had been delayed 55 minutes. Or possibly it was when, despite a severe lack of staff, a BA official still managed to materialize out of nowhere to tell me to delete the video I had just taken of the enormous queues.
No, it was definitely taking off in the pouring rain, and being told that we should be happy as Heathrow had just been closed behind us due to weather. All those hundreds or maybe thousands of people behind us who would have to spend the night in each others’ company. The stupid woman in the queue who said it was ridiculous being held up and delayed, but said that she always wanted to fly with an airline with the tightest security. “After nine eleven you just have to take care these days”. More Americans die from inadequate health insurance or badly engineered levees than terrorists attacks, and she was certainly more likely to be murdered by me than Al Queda.
Heathrow is crippled because of the security checks and I reckon half the people going through must miss their flights.
Back to Scotland, and a day with the family in mum’s house. It was great to see almost everyone together outside
We all spend the next day in Glasgow eating and drinking and making pigs of ourselves and in the evening risking a bit of clubbing. I always find Glasgow clubs a bit forbidding, even when I remember my stab-vest and hammers, but the club Tracey and Nick took us to was pretty nice. The clientele was a little classier than some of your more common meat markets on Sauchiehall street. There were a couple of neds though – including one Rangers supported who seemed to be aggravated because (and see if you can follow the logic here) my girlfriend is Japanese and a Japanese player plays for Celtic meaning that of course I must support Celtic. And people wonder why I hate football. Take a look at this nedumentary on youtube.
Anyway, that was fun. After the ned disappeared we had a good night and were treated to Nick’s unique form of Bodily Dance Expressions.
The next day we drove Rav to the airport and headed back towards Crieff and straight into a delay on the dual carriageway that kept us busy for the best part of forty-five minutes. Then the torrential rain made an appearance on the way into Muthill.
The very next day we embarked on the journey back to Tokyo. For those of you who are hungry for another taste of European airport delay literature let me just recap our day so far. If you’ve had enough, go and make a cup of tea.
Paul, Fiona, Isla and Ben drove us down to the airport (obviously only Paul was driving his big white whale of a van heaving and swaying through the rain and doing a pretty good job at simulating terrifying speeds). Paul got us there nice and early for our 11:45 flight – 9:30.
Entering the departure terminal we saw our flight had been delayed until 13:15. Nice.
A fry-up and a magazine later we were eventually sitting on the aircraft.
The pilot said (and I quote, with minimal paraphrasing):
“I’m not going to insult you by saying welcome to the flight as I’m sure you’re none too impressed by today’s delays. Let me just explain why we had that delay. Last night my co-pilot and I were delayed getting into Edinburgh due to weather. Now current regulations require all pilots to have at least thirteen and a half hours rest between shifts, and another effect of the weather was that all our backup crew were unavailable, and so only myself and my co-pilot were available to operate this aircraft. The earliest we could legally fly today was 1:15.
In addition to this delay, we have two passengers who have – because of the delay – booked onto different flights but have forgotten to tell BA and so their bags are still on the aircraft.”
So we waited while the two dickheads’ bags were removed from the plane and discarded on the tarmac with the contempt they deserved, and we finally took off.
Into Heathrow, and we thought we’d miss our flight but were told we’d make it no problem. We rushed all the way to the gate with 20 minutes to spare only to run into an enemy road block, or security check. 30 minutes later we put our shoes back on and rushed to the gate just as the door to the plane closed in front of us.
And they never open the doors back up, probably because of pressurization. Literally twenty seconds made the difference between us being on a plane and us sitting in Heathrow for another three hours, our home from home, the masterpiece of human misery and bested only by Guantanamo Bay in the field of detaining people for no reason other than paranoia and incompetence.
We had to go through security again just for the crack, go to the rebooking desk (the very same one I went to between France and Edinburgh) for thirty minutes, wait for a bus to terminal 3, queue for thirty, book onto a Japan Airlines flight.
So here we are sitting on our flight, and the moral of the story is – never, ever, ever, fly with British Airways unless you can afford Business Class or First Class in which case all the delays only mean more free alcohol in the executive lounge, with a cursory fondling of your genitals at your specially reserved security check.
But whatever class you belong to don’t fly through Heathrow, on pain of death. Take a canoe or a microlight instead.
I’ll wrap this mess up now, with six hours left on my flight in amputee class and my legs feeling like waxy tree trunks. Kayakists and formula one drivers have more leg space than I do. But I could moan about stuff that pisses me off until I land, but now I have to fitfully doze with my jumper wrapped around my head so people can’t see my mouth hanging open.
P.S. Just got back to Tokyo. In case you thought that all those flight troubles could have been worse, consider now the fact that British Airways have truly excelled this time by actually losing both of our suitcases. It's enough to drive a man to some kind of violent religion...
