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Initial Greek Perambulations

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It was all downhill from here…
If, like me, you harbour illusions about your ability to navigate around a foreign city unaided, Thessaloniki will disabuse you of them. Not so much the newer city, with its straight lines parallel to the dockside, but the older city, in the vicinity of the ancient acropolis and slightly less ancient Byzantine walls.
Here, roads go up and down, intersecting in random fashion, usually one lane wide but sometimes no lanes wide, owing to either parked cars or suddenly turning into stairs instead of a street. And while you’re trying to figure this mess out, the cats of the old city are watching you, aristocratically amused by another human struggling to survive in their domain.
I managed well enough last night, locating my hostel, the exceptionally welcoming Little Big House, and a pleasant place to have a beer in the form of Toixo Toixo. That was limited stuff though, and not long after beginning a day of perambulating this morning, I was reduced to heading vaguely downhill and hoping that I’d run into either the city walls or the sea.
Not that wandering wasn’t fun though, and once I did get my bearings again, there were plenty of places for this historical traveller to see, many of them relating to the little-thought-of Roman Emperor Galerius, who made Thessaloniki the capital of his eastern empire, a status it only held for a little time before Constantine moved the entire business to Byzantium/Constantinople.
Between that and the museums and the White Tower, wherein medieval prisoners were wont to be, well, imprisoned, there has been more than enough walking done today. The time has come to eat, at the Kitchen Bar by the waterside, before figuring out a route back to the Little Big House. If you don’t hear from me in the next ten days, send a search party…
Note: The wifi in the Kitchen Bar was pretty dire, so I’m posting this from the Little Big House. Which wasn’t impossible to find. Not easy, but not impossible either.

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The White Tower. Once known as the Bloody Tower, before they literally whitewashed it.

Travel

Danish Pastry Stopover

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I’ve been devouring Copenhagen in bite-sized pieces over the past few years. Right now, the piece that I’m devouring comes in the form of a ham and cheese toasty in Kobenhaven Airport. As always seems to be the way with the Danish capital, I’m only here on my way to or from somewhere else. Maybe someday I’ll stick around long enough to see some of the country itself. (I’ll spare you the “Aarhus, in the middle of aarstreet” joke I’ve been working on for the last few days.
This time, I was actually here long enough to stay overnight, in the Generator hostel in the heart of the city. After navigating my way through a Friday night crowd that was notably better dressed and less drunk than their Dublin equivalents (they had to be – lots of them were cycling), I made it to a comfy bunk in a dorm room, if not quite so quickly to sleep, due to a combination of music reverberating through the building and snoring from the bunk below.
The day that followed, I decided to focus on Christiansborg Palace, or rather on the ruins underneath it. It’s honestly a bit of a shame that the ramshackle old castle (a model of which is pictured below) was flattened to make way for a Versailles-aping edifice during Denmark’s golden age of trade, in a particularly expensive form of keeping up with the Joneses. In a turn that the Monty Python troupe would have appreciate though, the new palace burned down not once but twice in the next century and a bit. The third one though, that’s stayed up (so far).
Next to the palace are other sights worthy of your time: the delightfully strange Exchange Building, one of whose gargoyle-like decorations can be seen above, and the Thorvaldsen’s Museum, a celebration of Denmark’s greatest Neoclassical sculptors (and of the few nearby buildings to survive the second burning of Christainsborg intact).
Sadly though, it’s another flying visit for me to this city. The airport, Thessaloniki and Greece are calling. This particular odyssey has a long way to go yet.

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Travel

The Historical Traveller

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Mind you, I live in Dublin now, so visiting this is a holiday in itself.
A millennium and a half of history just down the road. But if you can go further, why wouldn’t you?

There’s a certain set of rituals to be undertaken before a long holiday. Eating the last of the perishable food in the house. Considering what clothes to take with you (there may be shorts, and the baring of milky-white leg flesh). Making sure that no one gets left in the lurch at work (inevitably, though, the clock draws the eyes more and more strongly as the end of the last day approaches). Reminding yourself not to forget your passport (which has absolutely no effect on whether or not you do eventually forget it).

I’m in the middle of all of this right now—in two days I leave Dublin for Greece (via Copenhagen for reasons of cheap flights and the prospects of a pleasant layover). On this trip, I’m staying true to one of my main reasons for travelling. There are many things that can drive one to visit distant places—time in the sun, adventure in an exotic locale, a new cultural experience, encounters with natural wonders—and over the years I’ve resorted to them all, either solo or in company. The draw that most informs my list of “must visit” places though? History.

Experiencing history is something like floating on an ocean. There are depths below you, all around, and every so often you can catch glimpses of what lies below. Back at home, familiar sights included a schoolhouse more than a century old, a ruined church more than a thousand years-a-crumbling and a stone circle dating back to the Neolithic period. Being surrounded by all of this as a child made me feel like I could reach out and touch the people who shared my homeland, no matter how separated in time we might be. The same feeling hits me on my holidays too, whether in the Colosseum in Rome, Tycho Brahe’s observatory in Copenhagen or a temple in Kyoto.

Greece has been on my top-ten list of places to visit for a long time. In fact, in the current political climate (which rules Egypt and Iran out) and in the absence of a long sabbatical from work (ruling out much of the southern hemisphere), it’s probably the most desired unvisited destination I have. Ten days won’t be near enough to see everything that I want to see (I’m focusing on the mainland rather than the islands) but they’ll be a packed ten days.

Why Greece? Look back to a childhood dominated by myths and legends for the main clue. To travel around Greece is to step back through time: from Ottoman rule to Byzantine domination, beyond that to the time of Imperial Rome and Macedonian kings, then to classical Athens and archaic Mycenae and Knossos. To return to the ocean metaphor, travelling through Greece is like floating above a wonderful mix of coral reefs and abysses. There’s always going to be something to see, layered everywhere you look. It’s a beautiful country too, full of wild mountains and deep valleys.

My basic plan is to start in the north, near Thessaloniki, and make my way south through the mainland, visiting Delphi, Athens and Mystra before hopping on a ferry to Crete, from where I’ll fly home again. Unlike my last long journey through Russia and beyond, there’s no need to exhaustively plan everything out, so I’m happy to wing it to an extent. That’s another benefit of travelling solo, I suppose: you can indulge your own whims without worrying about the impact they might have on your travelling partner. Of course, the drawback is not being able to share your enthusiasm and experiences, but that just provides a reason to repeat the journey again in the future.

All of which is to say that there should be, before too long, another travelogue appearing under the long-neglected “Travel” tab above. Between now and then, there will be reports from Greece whenever I get the chance to add them (not having planned out my accommodation to the last detail, I have no idea when and where I’m going to have Internet access—again, on the bright side, it’ll be nice to get away from LCD screens for a while).

In the last couple of days, I’ve realised all the things I’m going to be missing while I’m gone: a comics convention, Dublin’s Culture Night, the Ryder Cup and two weeks of rugby, West Brom and Doctor Who. For all that though, it’s been too long since I travelled. The excitement is just starting to kick in now, and it’s a nice, unfamiliar feeling. When I finally head to the airport, it’ll be in my preferred fashion, with a bag on my shoulder, a passport in my pocket and history in my future. I hope, in whatever I come to write about it, I manage to share some of that excitement with you.

College

Intermission

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Gulfoss Falls, Iceland
Some gaps are for jumping into. This one isn’t.

 

A few weeks ago, I went to the cinema with a friend to see one of my favourite films. Specifically, 2001: A Space Odyssey in a 70mm print. Being such an old print, it was scratchy in places, though the glorious visuals more than covered for that. As an old print though, it had another surprise to give: a little over halfway through, the screen went dark and a single word popped up. “Intermission.” Now that was an unfamiliar experience.

Maybe not all that unfamiliar though. Two years ago, a lot of the things that had defined my life had come to an end. The most recent of them was that the company I’d worked for had been bought out and the job I’d been in since college was being made redundant. The first part of my working life was over. Time for an intermission.

My first reaction was the obvious one: start looking for work, start looking for something to fill the yawning gap that had opened up in my life. Obvious, but wrong. I’d been complaining about being in a work rut for years at that point, wondering how I could get out of it. Well, life had delivered a short, sharp answer.

So, I took my severance package, had a quick think about what I really wanted to do, eyed up that yawning gap and jumped. Within a few months, I was travelling around the world, visiting places that I’d wanted to see for years (and, as a direct result, starting up this blog – the earliest posts are all about this trip).

It wasn’t all indulgence though—I was thinking about what sort of working life I wanted on the other side. On my return I secured a few freelance jobs, leveraging my publishing experience, but the two-dimensional nature of my career to date limited my opportunities. Luckily, there was another jump to take.

Not long after my travels, I was at a meeting of publishing folks, where I was told about a course in Trinity (by one of the people taking it), the MSc Interactive Digital Media, which covered a broad array of media forms and the technologies used to manipulate and present them. A pretty good fit for my interests and skills, even if some of them were dusty from years of disuse.

So I applied, to just that one course, and after a certain amount of trepidation on my part, I got in. That was just under 12 months ago. It’s been a year of fascinating education, good company from my new classmates and more pressure to excel and achieve than my job had thrown at me in a decade and more.

This morning, I gave a presentation (together with the rest of my team) on the project that we’ve been working on for the last two-and-a-bit months. You can see our work here, though be aware it’s a hefty download and requires a WebGL-compatible browser (and doesn’t work at all on IE). Tomorrow, we get our results and find out whether we can append that MSc to our names.

So. Intermission over. Time to retake my seat, metaphorically speaking, for the second act. Once again, it has the look of a yawning gap of uncertainty ahead of me. But you know what? Having jumped once, the second time really isn’t all that daunting.

Travel

Flying Solo, One Day More

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Not a bad sight to wake up to.
West coast of Norway, complete with glaciers and fjords.

The last day of the holiday is usually the occasion of the shortest report in these records. So it will probably be again, but this holiday was a little unusual. For all that it’s a short break, it’s really three holidays in one: a day trip to Copenhagen to meet some friends, three days in Iceland with another travelling companion, and today: one last solo trip to Copenhagen as I return home. As always seems to be the case when I travel solo, a good portion of the trip involved climbing very tall things.

Dr. P and I would have been up at the crack of dawn in any normal country, but this close to the Arctic Circle in summer, dawn is hard to nail down. The grey clouds had returned overnight though, and sleepy as we were, we had packed and prepared well enough to have time for breakfast before heading down to BSI for the bus to the airport again (the tickets were a promotional gift as part of the previous day’s car hire).

Once again we passed through the lava fields that led to Keflavik, glimpsing the steaming geothermal plant beside the Blue Lagoon, a reminder of where all this had begun. In Keflavik Airport though, there was none of the relaxed vacancy of three mornings previous: the place was jammed. Unsurprising really: Monday morning has the cheapest flights, so everyone was leaving while the price was right.

Having bags to drop, Dr. P joined the queues, whereas I, with my carry-on, browsed the shops and changed my money. We met again before too long—Scandinavian efficiency is the same everywhere—but having already eaten there wasn’t much to do but say our farewells and head to our separate planes. After the briefest period of waiting, I was once more aloft, once more solo and swiftly asleep.

I snoozed for half the flight, timing my waking to coincide with the first view of western Norway. Site of another trip, some years back, this was a view I hadn’t previously enjoyed: the now-clear skies revealed a landscape of deep fjords, rocky mountains and distant glaciers. That and a few episodes of Journey’s End kept me going until we touched down safely in Copenhagen Airport.

Once again, the plan was to spend my four-hour layover in Copenhagen, so I passed swiftly through the airport, hopped on the Metro and into town. It was, if anything, even warmer than it had been on my previous visit, so I needed a plan. Stage one: return to Norreport station and find myself a pastry shop. One caramel-filled, nut-encrusted fløldebolle later, I was ready to go and still making my plan up as I went along.

Second stop: the round tower that once served as Tycho Brahe’s observatory. Even with my luggage in tow, I had no problem making my way to the top and decided I’d well deserved some ice cream as I lounged on the upper parapet, doing some observing of the city myself. It was only about then that I came up with a finalised plan: make my way south across the river to Christianshavn, using up the remainder of my time in the city in exploration and then jumping on the Metro back to the airport.

It all worked out very well, despite the heat and the efforts of city cobbles to destroy my luggage’s wheels. The palace and the stock exchange with its wonderful dragon steeple passed by on my right, and hordes of cyclists passed me on my left. By the time I got to Christianshavn, I had added one last item to the agenda: the spiral tower of the Church of Our Saviour.

This time, I dropped my luggage at the ticket desk, and just as well. To get to the base of the steeple itself, you have to climb 65 metres up steep and narrow wooden steps, dodging tourists going the other way. All this in stifling, non-air-conditioned heat. It didn’t get any less hot once outside either, just sunnier. The steps that corkscrew around the steeple get narrower and narrower as they ascend, so much so that there was a queue to see the very top. Not that anyone can reach it—in the end, the climb is too narrow for anyone to fit. The view, though, is spectacular.

Having worked off my pastry and ice cream in sweat, I descended briskly, picking up my luggage and heading for the Metro. After that, it was pretty smooth sailing, to the airport, through security and onto the plane, pausing only for a hotdog to keep my spirits up. Then, as always, the very last trip of all, into the air and back to Dublin, another journey at an end.

Travel

Doing the Rounds in Reykjavik

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It’s not all like this, but quite a bit is.

Reykjavik’s architecture is varied. The dominant material is corrugated iron, often painted a wild array of colours to distract from its utilitarian nature, but there are areas of the city where efforts have clearly been made to ignore the local climatic realities and try to be a bit more adventurous. Hallgrímskirkja, for example, is a massive concrete church, and the concert hall is a honeycombed glass confection on the waterfront.

One other thing to notice about Iceland in general is the water: hot water is easy to get on a volcanic island, but one thing that Iceland has in abundance is sulphur, so that hot water comes with a definite smell of rotten eggs. It doesn’t linger, but it’s hard to miss.

On this Saturday, Reykjavik was slower to wake than I was, possibly because I’d been earlier to bed than most of it. In an effort to save money, I was out gathering breakfast essentials, grateful that despite the grey clouds it wasn’t raining. When we were finally fed, we headed out the door, aiming to climb the steeple of Hallgrímskirkja and get the best view in the city. Unfortunately, we timed our arrival to coincide with a morning concert, so the church was put on the backburner.

Instead, we headed down the hill and across the Tjornin pond to the National Museum, where the next two hours were spent examining the history of Iceland. As Dr. P remarked at an end, the problem with Icelandic history is that the Scandinavians are so reasonable. Once the era of settlement and sagas was over, Icelandic history is mostly bereft of major conflicts, progressing to independence without a huge amount of fuss. (Icelandic readers may not agree, but that’s the impression given.) Still, the museum is well laid out and worth a visit.

From the museum, we followed Suðurgata past the Hòlavallagarður cemetery, which is beautifully overgrown, with trees planted not just beside but in many graves. At the end of this walk, we came to the 871±2 museum, where an entire longhouse is preserved (the name refers to the estimated date in which the house itself was built). Even more so than the National Museum, it’s a fascinating recreation of the earliest days of settlement on the island, though seeing the multimedia recreation of the longhouse blue-screen out on when Dr. P tried to use it raised a smile.

871±2 was just around the corner from the harbour, so once again we took a stroll by the water’s edge, dropping in on the flea market there and checking out the Sun Voyager sculpture (a symbolic viking longship) as we did. Then it was back up the hill to the Hallgrímskirkja, where once again we found our entry plans blocked, this time by a shiny vintage Buick the car of choice for the couple getting married within. Luckily, we had to wait no longer than fifteen minutes to effect an entry.

The view from the steeple of the church is easily the best in the city, and on a clear day you can see for miles. Sadly, the day was grey at best, and fuzzy around the edges. Still, it had been worth the wait to get up there, and on getting back to the bottom in the cramped lift, we found a massive queue, suggesting that our timing hadn’t been as bad as all that.

Iceland’s not a cheap place though, so instead of eating out, we did some shopping. Back in the apartment, we divided up the chores in the kind of equitable fashion that has marked our various travels together: Dr. P did the cooking and I did the cleaning. Afterwards, he got to snooze some more while I once again caught up on this writing and the escapades of the rest of the world. Outside, the rain came down heavy for the first time since we’d arrived, but luckily it was just a brief downpour.

There was one last task for the evening. The Kex Hostel was holding a 12-hour concert of indie performers, from noon to midnight. We’d already heard some of it as we strolled around the city. Now we were going to catch the end of it. After a short stroll down Baronstigur, we could follow the sound of music to the yard behind the hostel, where a crowd was gathered, bouncing along to a white-dreadlocked chanteuse belting out indie pop as though her life depended on it.

For the next couple of hours we enjoyed the scene. The crowd seemed to consist of Iceland’s entire population of hipsters, but perhaps they were enjoying themselves too much to qualify for ironic detachment. The highlight was the last act, a Hawaiian-shirted funk band with a full brass section, a bongo player in a fez and a wooly-hatted bandleader. The best way to describe how they sounded is to direct you to the climactic sequence of this video. Seriously funky stuff, and we barely noticed the return of the rain.

Still, at midnight it all had to wrap up, possibly to the relief of nearby residents. We grabbed a consolation pint in Dillon, but an early start kept us from straying too long. Time for exploration, in the manner of the Viking settlers of old…

Travel

First Day in Iceland

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The Hallgrímskirja and Leif Ericsson, discoverer of America

The takeoff from Copenhagen airport saw more sideways motion than any airplane should indulge in that close to the ground. I’m normally okay with these things, but I couldn’t restrain the urge to grab hold of the seat ahead of me. Luckily that was all the drama that the flight offered (Les Miserables was my choice for inflight entertainment, whereas I should have been watching the wonderful Journey’s End documentary about the Icelandic sagas).

We chased the dawn north west for three hours, above a solid bank of grey cloud, crossing two time zones, making that three zones in one day for a total of −1 on my personal total. For an actual sight of Iceland, I had to wait until the last few moments of the flight, as the clouds were thick and low, and the mist heavy. At around 11.30pm local time, I did what Viking explorers and Celtic missionaries did more than a thousand years ago and set foot on Iceland.

Whereas Copenhagen had been mostly empty when I arrived and left, Keflavik Airport was jammed. I shouldn’t have been surprised. By virtue of its northerly position in the middle of the Atlantic, Kelfavik makes for a great pit stop for long-haul flights crossing the Atlantic. That and the lack of a true sunset this close to the Arctic Circle in summer (I’d never been this far north either) means that even at midnight, the airport is full of people who’ve just landed or are just leaving.

Long story short though: I was tired. So I nipped outside, thankful once more for sticking to cabin baggage only, and found a taxi driver. A few minutes later, I was in the nearby town of Reykjanesbaer, at the A-10 guesthouse. Despite arriving past midnight, I was welcomed without fuss and shown to my small, tidy room. Thin walls couldn’t keep me from sleep for long.

Next morning, I awoke to find a message from my next travelling partner, Dr. P. He was already in Keflavik, so I arranged to meet him there. After a shower and breakfast, the hotel owner gave me a lift back to the airport, providing an swift example of Icelandic friendliness.

Dr. P and I have travelled together several times before: Istanbul, Paris, San Diego and New York. This time though, he was on the homeward leg of an epic journey that took him all the way to the Bering Sea. So once he’d been suitably caffeinated, having flown direct to Keflavik from Anchorage in Alaska, we found a bus that to take us somewhere we can relax: a pit stop at the Blue Lagoon.

As a lump of still-active volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Iceland is justly famous for its geothermal spas. The Blue Lagoon is one of the most famous, and being halfway between the airport and the capital, it’s a favourite of tourists. Early in the morning though it was (and Keflavik is far less crammed than it was at midnight) the bus was packed.

Keflavik itself stands at the end of a peninsula extending west into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a mostly flat expanse of volcanic rock, old lava flows eroded into jagged lumps and covered with moss and a patchy layer of soil and grass. There’s nothing to stop the wind, so there are no trees to be seen, and the houses that we see have a hunched look designed to survive Atlantic storms.

We spotted the steam coming from the Blue Lagoon long before we see the site itself. The cloud turns out to emanate from the geothermal power plant next door (another benefit of living here). The lagoon itself is housed in a low-slung building nestled amid volcanic outcroppings. The pools are a startling milky blue colour, steaming gently in the chill summer air.

It’s not a cheap experience, but I’ll say this for nothing: if time wasn’t so limited in this trip, I’d give serious thought to going back for another go. Dr. P and I were ushered through the changing areas with Icelandic efficiency and spent two hours bobby gently around the pools with the rest of the crowds, enjoying a waterfall shower than delivered an effective head and shoulder massage, a sweat lodge of a steam bath, saunas and a facial scrub made of the silica that coats (and smooths) the volcanic rocks of the pool. We also enjoyed smoothies made from the local delicacy skyr and beers from the poolside bar. (Everything, including lockers, is controlled using your wrist tag, and it’s all paid before you leave.)

Sadly, we couldn’t stay all day, and after a couple of hours we hopped out of the pool and caught one of the buses that leave every hour for Reykjavik. The road from airport to capital was clearly one of the beneficiaries of the now-gone boom times, as it’s new, smooth and swift, and as the bus followed it, the landscape shifted from volcanic semi-wilderness to something a little more hospitable to humanity.

Dropped off at the BSI bus terminal, we found our way to our apartment on Liefsgata in the shadow of the hilltop Hallgrímskirja. For all that Dr. P was starting to feel the effects of jetlag, we didn’t linger longer than it took us to deposit our luggage. (To be fair, I was feeling snoozy too – two hours of quality soakage inclines the body to recumbency.) A tour of Reykjavik was the plan, with food the first goal.

From the outside, Vita Bar looks like a corner shop, but it’s actually a cosy little cafe, and its burgers are among the best in the city. Just the kind of fuel we needed to keep us going as we circled the city centre. We geeked out a little on Baldursgata (if you don’t get why, you probably wouldn’t anyway), then circled around to the main shopping street of Laugavegur. We weren’t looking to shop though, just to check out the sights, and our circle took us past the conference centre and concert hall on the dockside, as well as the nearby statue of Ingólfur Arnarson, first settler of Reykjavik.

Back on Laugavegur, we actually dropped into a few shops, noting the dry, absurd sense of humour that marks Icelanders: one tourist souvenir was a tub of Eyjafjallajokutll ash, with a warning not to use near jet engines. However, at this stage Dr. P was fading fast, so we aimed back for the apartment, where he could have a snooze in an attempt to reset his body clock.

Doing so gave me a chance to catch up on a few things too, and when he arose from the dead, the plan was to round the evening off with a few drinks in town. First a little more food though, so we dropped in on Cafe Loki near Hallgrímskirkja, where we both opted for the descriptively titled “Meat Soup”. Thus fortified, we went in search of a drinking establishment or two.

First up was the Lebowski Bar, which was decorated just as you’d expect and showing E.T. on the big screen. Whether we would have stayed beyond one pint, I can’t be sure, but the arrival of a large stag party suggested to us that moving on was the better part of valour. So we headed down the street a ways and found ourselves in the Dillon whiskey bar, which proved even noisier, but seeing as the noise was in the form of live rock music, it was much more to our tastes.

Also to our tastes were the selections of beer and whiskey, and we whiled away the remainder of the night propping up the bar. The intervention of an aggressively friendly and very drunk young Icelandic Chelsea supporter eventually sent the evening into a tailspin, but by that time we were both well oiled and ready to move on. Past midnight, the locals were only getting started, but these two weary travellers were only going to recharge.

Travel

An Afternoon in Copenhagen

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Still can’t remember the name, other than it sounded like something the Muppets’ Swedish Chef would say.

Further to my mention in the previous post: the reason I had only a quarter of an hour in Copenhagen first time around was due to a mix up on my part with regard to the efficiency of German trains. Specifically, I missed my connection in Cologne because I didn’t realise that German trains can go in several directions at once. Seriously. While I was sleeping, my overnighter train would have split into multiple parts, each heading in a different direction (in my case Copenhagen). Sadly, I missed this momentous event due to my confusion and instead had to doze on an uncomfortable bench seat and get into Copenhagen with just enough time to buy a sandwich before heading on to Stockholm.

Still, it’s an ill wind that blows no good, and my first real experience of Copenhagen had two major advantages over the one I would have had two years ago. First, it was longer, at eight hours instead of two. Second, it was in the company of two of my friends, who were coincidentally at the tail end of a week-long stay in the city and had just enough time to meet me off the train and show me around a bit.

Copenhagen Airport is as sleek and clean as any Scandinavian public service, though the odd choice of mingling arrivals and departures meant that a seemingly empty airport became very crowded where the two streams met. Still, despite not having any Danish and not knowing what I was doing, it wasn’t long before I was in possession of a Metro ticket and speeding my way into the city proper.

First admission: the big child trapped in my even bigger adult frame wasn’t about to do anything other than sit up front on the Metro, where a huge windscreen provided a view of, well, not much really. Copenhagen’s suburbs are neither high rise nor particularly interesting, and one subway tunnel tends to look much like another. Still, I got to sit up front, and that made me (and the other kids who joined me there) happy. Isn’t that what really matters?

Disembarking at Norreport Station, I was swiftly taken under the wing of my friends, who had the advantage of six days of exploring the city and proceeded to regale me with stories, many of which involved dogs or bicycles, and occasionally even dogs on bicycles. Under a sun only slightly less torrid than Dublin’s we headed south east through the main shopping area of the city, pausing only to grab some local delicacies, eventually landing ourselves a cafe table by the Nyhavn, or New Harbour, which is, in true European fashion, the oldest harbour in the city.

As an opening chord to a holiday, that kind of experience is hard to beat, and I wasn’t about to disagree with my friends’ determination to some day return to the city, either for a visit or a longer stay. We cooled ourselves off with cold beverages, then trekked the length of Nyhavn to the waterside theatre, where we sat again, watching the boats, kayaks and water taxis go by. I also broke open the confections we’d bought earlier and helped myself to one. Shamefully, I can’t remember the name, but it was a mass of marshmallow and caramel, heaped on a thin waffle and coated with chocolate and chopped nuts. Utterly delicious, dreadfully unhealthy and very, very sticky on a hot day like that.

My friends had their own flight to catch, earlier than mine, so too soon I was bidding them farewell with as much thanks as I could offer for their hospitality. After that, I hopped in a canal tour boat for a one-hour trip around the canals of the city. Copenhagen may be short on canals compared to Amsterdam and Venice, but it does okay for itself. The Little Mermaid might have been less notable than the crowds surrounding her, but the city had plenty else to offer, with the highlight for me probably being the twisted dragon-tail tower atop the old stock exchange. It looks like something out of a fantasy novel, and it seemed like a good omen for my trip to a land of myths and sagas.

When the tour was over, I was deposited back at Nyhavn and then roamed the city for an hour or so. The shops were closing up, but the summer spirit was keeping everywhere else alive. Food was needed though, and when an al fresco restaurant proved too expensive, I found myself something a little more to my pocket’s taste: Sunset Boulevard, a Danish spin on fast food, offering sandwiches and herby fries. The bread was very tasty, if a little rough on the soft palate of someone who wasn’t brought up chewing shingles, but for the price (Denmark is not cheap in any sense) it was very welcome.

After that, more roaming, before I headed back to the airport. Perhaps earlier than I needed to, but I had the advantage of knowing that I’d be coming back this way in a few days. The airport’s free wifi having been cracked, I at least had the opportunity to see if anyone had missed me (of course not) and check the status of the world while I was gone. Oh, and write this, of course.

Travel

The Icelandic Saga: Book One

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A fountain of herons in Copenhagen. I had to fight the urge to use a food photo…

It’s been a while since I’ve written once of these. Getting on for two years, in fact. Recent times have not been kind to my straying feet. Still, the fact is that I’m back on the road, or rather in the air, once more, and not just for a quick hop across to London—my only other overseas destination in all that time.

The opportunity to finally make it to Iceland, a long-desired travel destination, was too good to pass up, and I consequently raided my piggy bank to pay for the cheapest flights I could find.* Which brings me to this point: up in the air, on my way to Copenhagen as stage one of a two-part trip to the land of ice and fire.

These days, the act of travelling doesn’t excite me half so much as the fact of being somewhere new. I have an eight-hour layover in Copenhagen between flights, which is something of a bonus arising from my pursuit of value. On an earlier trip, I had intended to spend a few hours in Copenhagen on my way to Stockholm, but train-related misadventures turned those few hours into around 15 minutes. Barely enough to peek outside the train station (the view consisted mainly of bicycles) before catching the next overnighter on my itinerary.

It’s an odd time to be leaving Dublin too. The sun was baking the airport tarmac as we boarded the plane, granting a Mediterranean feel to a nation more accustomed to rain and climatic misery. I should feel right at home in Iceland, it seems: While Copenhagen is sunny at present, Reykjavik seems to be under a cloud right now. Rain-bearing, that is.

This isn’t entirely a solo trip either, for all of my use of the first-person singular thus far. I have friends to meet in my brief tour around Copenhagen, and while I may be arriving in Iceland on my lonesome, and close to midnight, I’ll be meeting my travelling companion the next day. Hopefully, at least: he’s coming from a lot further away than I am, and his travels have been much, much wilder.

 

*Not a metaphor. At the tail-end of my second college career, my piggy bank is more fully funded than I am.

Travel, Uncategorized

Bags of Memories

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Shattered in Salt Lake City: Near the end of its journey…

On my travels around the Northern Hemisphere last autumn, I had the benefit of three faithful companions: three bags that between them carried all my gear. They were on their last legs even then – their ratty appearance, I suspect, had something to do with the fact that I didn’t once face anyone trying to steal from me – and now the last of them has been replaced. Seems like a good time to reflect on them.

The biggest of them, pictured above, was a mid-sized rucksack. It was also the oldest, originally purchased for a skiing trip when I was around sixteen, meaning that it was with me for something close to twenty years. Too unwieldy for short trips, it accompanied me whenever I was going somewhere for a week or more, meaning that it was with me on my most memorable journeys. Its waterproof inner coating was already coming off in sheets at the start of my round-the-world trip, and by the end one of its shoulder straps was hanging on by a thread. However, it went out in a blaze of glory, from Irkutsk to Vladivostok and on to Walden Pond.

My sports/shoulder bag, a black Nike sack, wasn’t quite as old – I bought it around the time I started college – but it was a far more regular companion, seeing use day in and day out for much more than a decade. Quite how it survived all the wear and tear, I don’t know, but it wore down slowly rather than gave way suddenly, and I used it long after it had ceased to look respectable. A hole in a side pocket led to a few lost coins and the right shoulder strap was more of a string by the end, but it was still useful right up until the end. Much less of a traveller than the rucksack, it proved a much more convenient store for everything I didn’t like letting out of arm’s reach as I headed in search of the rising sun.

The smallest of the three bags was a washbag. When I got it, I don’t remember, but I do remember how: it had lain unused in my parents’ house and I nabbed it for a trip somewhere. Ever since then, it accompanied me on every journey, long or short, full of all the toiletries that kids don’t seem to need but adults do. Nothing more than a pouch with a zip and some internal pockets, it was replaced yesterday by a bigger, fussier-looking alternative, which currently sits half-empty in a bigger bag, ready for a trip home.

Three bags, long-used and redolent with memories. All gone now. That’s the way of things. We can hang onto items longer than we should, spurning better alternatives because of the memories that they accrue over years of use. Not the best of ideas. I’m a partial fan of the idea of a de-cluttered life, but my main argument in favour of letting things go is that separating the memories from the things is a good step. Learning to let go of things takes you halfway to allowing your memories to release their hold on you.