The Tree of Hearts

Winter rolled around as it normally does at this time of year, but this year for a change, we had a bonus 3rd holiday, just before Christmas, but hold on you may say:
"Didn't you have a 3rd holiday a couple of years back?"
Well, sort of...
"Yes I remember, you went to Bruges, you titled the Blog 'In Bruges'"
Yes, rather witty I thought.
"No, Not really."
A Little bit witty?
"No, not at all."
Well forget you then.
No, that was more of a day trip I went on with my brother, this one was a proper multi-day holiday, with a hotel and everything. I went on this one with Rachael, so it gets a green pin in the map.
We decided that the week before Christmas we should go away somewhere nice, somewhere we had never been before, we decided to take that Scandinavian trip we had been promising ourselves for a while and go to Copenhagen in Denmark.
Before I get into the holiday properly (Look at me, all business, I mean apart from that bit above where I converse with myself, but I could have dragged that out for a lot longer, I must be maturing...) I'll just talk a little bit about how this was the easiest start to a holiday ever, we hit absolutely no traffic on the way to the airport (despite being told that we were going on one of the busiest days of the year), we had one of those tunnels where you walk straight on or off the plane, at both ends! (normally you have at least one walk down to the tarmac and often you have to take one of those buses) The Plane ride was the best plane ride ever (This may just be my bias, but I say to anyone with the opportunity to fly Scandinavian Airlines to do so... You get a free cup of tea on board. Yes, that is worth the ticket price alone), the train station was right in the airport and following a 12 minute train ride, our hotel was pretty much right outside.

Also, what made a nice change was that on giving my name at reception, I was not asked to repeat or spell my name - Just to clarify, this isn't some borderline racist rant about language barriers, this happens all the time in the UK, but there is a benefit to being in Denmark with a Danish sounding name.

December is a nice time to be in any European city, wherever you go, there are going to be Christmas Markets and Copenhagen is no different, the little sheds selling festive trinkets and nice smelling foods were all over the place, including a little ramshackle recycled one.

While walking one day, we overheard a tour-guide complaining that the Christmas Markets were closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, he suggested that this made the whole enterprise a bit of a Christmas cash-in, his argument being that tourists might be around over Christmas and might be upset that nothing was open. We obviously didn't confront this man about the comments, but I'm going to argue about this now via the medium of blog.
First of all, who are these tourists going away over Christmas and getting upset that nothing is open? Where people celebrate Christmas, things tend to be closed, you have to be a special kind of selfish to expect other people to forego their Christmas just because you're there. Second, surely by your own argument regarding the tourists, being open over Christmas would be the Cash-in, the fact that they're not open shows that the people running them actually want to celebrate Christmas.
Those comments annoyed me.

Anyway, Right next to the train station is Tivoli, a really old theme park, it still has a couple of rides and at this time of year, it becomes a winter wonderland, it's all decorated and lit up and nice to see in the evening, this is a Tree of Hearts which I hadn't realised before but Hearts are a really Danish thing at Christmas (I think they are the rest of the time too), they have Christmas traditions such as making paper hearts or crocheting hearts and out in the streets there are hearts everywhere, above the streets and here in the tree.

Although, if you look at the tree full of hearts, if you imagine that they are real, human hearts the picture becomes a lot more gruesome, something sat at the bottom of a serial killers garden where he collects the hearts of his victims and they sit there, shrivelled and in various states of decay, you know, until someone looks into his garden and notices his heart tree and he goes to jail.
For the sake of honesty, I should point out that the heart tree bit was from Rachael.

ΣΙΔΑΡΙ

Aren't digital camera's great? Time was you would bring your camera on holiday, with your roll of 22 photos available on the film and every shot you took would have to meticulously planned, you would need to ensure all of the pieces of scenery you wanted were visible in the shot, everyone would practice the smiles they would have on their faces and you would carefully select a trustworthy looking passer-by to take the photo (this was also before the invention of the outstretched arm). Obviously it goes without saying that you would also need to make sure you had wound the camera back to take the next photo, a self winding camera being an unattainable dream achieved only by the ultra rich.

This time I am referring to is a long time ago now, it even pre-dates this blog and this blog will be celebrating it's 10th birthday next year, look back at the start, I am so fresh faced, full of hope and in need of a slap (it's so hard not to hate your younger self), over the years the destinations and the travelling companions have changed, but even back then in pre-medieval 2007 all of the photo's were digital, there was never any need for the winding and the trustworthy stranger.

The point of this is that photo taking habits have changed, rather than taking the 22 perfect photos (well 20 and the 2 that don't come out due to over-exposure) you now take hundreds of holiday photo's in the hope that a couple come out ok, the ones that you tell yourself you will one day make use of that snapfish voucher you got that time to get them printed out, but really they are just going to sit on that memory card, probably forever. If you're me, there will be a handful that you put on your blog too, but they're never the good ones, somehow I seem to be drawn almost exclusively to the worst  ones, just because they accentuate the point I am trying to make. I believe several people share pictures on Facebook too? I think I prefer the sitting on the memory card thing.

Where am I going with this? Difficult to say. The point I am slowly labouring my way towards is that of the quality of photographs, that even among those crappy photos there are some photographs that go that extra mile, that seem to directly question you as to why they are allocated any megabytes to exist in the first place (Re-insert your own reference back to this blog 2007 – present).

After all that build-up you probably expected something worse? You're probably wondering why this is the worst example of a holiday photo I could find? At least it's clear and hey, you have taken far worse photographs before, surely you have something worse than this to show us? you sicken me (Internal monologue may differ from person to person). I will defend my choice forthwith, I feel that the clarity of the photo makes this much worse, at least the blurry ones only exist as a mistake or from some attempt to capture a better photograph, someone took this photograph on purpose, the camera was switched on and pointed at a sign to capture it forever (I realise that I am the on that has ensured it's longevity by putting it here, but I will ignore that). This isn't even the best sign there was for Jim's Bikes, there was one that said "Jim's Rent Bikes" which at least conjured up some seedy imagery that I could have got some good mileage out had we photographed that one, but we didn't so I can't even do that. We didn't even rent one of Jim's Bikes, so I can't even use this as a jumping off point for that particular adventure. We did see people on their Jim Bikes riding around the place, but really, why on earth would you rent a bike, when it's also possible to rent a boat? You can drive on the roads any time, how often do you get to drive on the sea? You don't even need a boating license.

I suppose that did work as a jumping off point for an activity after all, yes we hired a boat, so obviously that is going to be the main thing I talk about, but first I suppose we should get some other things out the way, meet you after a couple of obligatory filler paragraphs for the discussion about boat rental. Also, I told you I only include the worst photo's here.

This year, our holiday was in Sidari in North Corfu (or ΣΙΔΑΡΙ if you're using the Greek Alphabet) it's not a very old town, a taverna nearby boasted it was the first and oldest taverna in Sidari, built in 1959 (again probably a better sign to have a picture of).

We stayed at the Megali Luxuries Apartments, a small apartment complex with only 10 apartments, chosen mainly due to them being maisonettes with  spiral staircases.

But this place was also very close to a beach and only about 5 minutes to the centre of Sidari so it was handy too.

If you've ever been on a beach resort holiday, you will probably be familiar with how they usually go, so I don't feel it necessary to write in any great detail about any time spent in the pool or swimming in the sea (Though actually, it could be interesting to point out just how shallow the sea is and how far out you need to go to do any swimming, but I won't), but luckily we probably did enough other things so I don't need to stop right here.

The Canal D'Amour is probably the most interesting part of the coastline, a natural rocky area, full of little rocky islands and tiny caves all still being eroded away by the sea all the time, we would later come to walk around the Canal D'amour, though having learned a lesson from Portugal, we stayed away from any coastal paths that we could not see how to progress, so there is no interesting near death experience to share this time.

The photo above was taken from a boat, not the boat we rented, but from an excursion we had gone on early in the holiday, before we had even thought about renting our own boat. Canal D'Amour means "Tunnel of Love" and here is the tunnel itself, the excursion boat  went in... then reversed back out, the tunnel part is a little bit small to pass through completely in a boat.

We took a day to go to Corfu Town itself, where we visited an old fortress and... Yea, that was about it, I mean we walked around the town a bit, watched some Turtles in a fountain and stopped for some food, it was a nice day, but there's not really much else I can say, I'm not really sure why I started talking about it, but there you go.

I've obviously become so focussed on the idea of talking about a boat, that nothing else holds enough of an interest for me now. So, Let's do that.

"Go past that big boat, when passing the beach stay on the other side of the buoys and stay about 100 feet away from the rocks. This lever makes it go faster (try not to use up all of the petrol) and there’s your steering wheel. See you in 2 hours"

That is the extent of the instruction as you are given a boat, following that intensive training, you are free to head out to sea all by yourselves.
Regular readers of this blog (who am I kidding?) may recall previous tales of rented seafaring vessels, which were all good fun, but those had pedals, this one had an engine and incredibly, we were allowed to drive it.

On the way out, we followed his instructions to the letter, we turned near the big boat and we stayed on the other side of the buoys, right next to the buoys. We were cautious, maintaining a steady speed, keeping that 100 yards from the coast, feeling every dip and rise, constantly nervous that the next wave would be a big one and would knock us out of the boat (spoilers: none did). But the nervous cautiousness soon passed, our return journey was much speedier, we were moving around the boat and swapping drivers with greater ease and we pushed the boat to it's full speed, even doing a few doughnuts (well we drove it in a a few circles).

When we were heading back to the beach, it was quite hard to tell if it was the right one, the buoys we had followed so fastidiously on the way out were impossible to see, even the big boat was a speck in the distance, we were having fun and had absent-mindedly drifted quite far out.

Since we didn't have to bring it back yet, we decided to switch off the engine and bob around for a little bit. Either that or by this point I was a bit TOO relaxed about the whole boat driving thing.

I think if this is an option on future holidays, there will be many more boat rentals in the future, it's so much fun, so I'm afraid in blog terms, this may mean future blogs will become quite samey (What do you mean it already is? Why are you reading it if you don't really like it? Oh right, because I asked you to, sorry Rachael, please still read my blogs)

I feel like this particular entry deserves an "And Finally" section to finish it off, while I talk a bit about animals. Obviously I chose some photo's that showed whatever I was talking about, but if you looked through the camera yourself, you might be forgiven for thinking we had holidayed on a farm or some sort of animal sanctuary, there were Donkeys, Ponies, Horses, Goats and obviously lots of Lizards (what's a summer holiday without lizards?), on the camera they will stay for now, but I have decided that I should share one, a picture of a puppy found down near the beach, in this particular photo, he is caught mid gambol and if it does not make you smile, you are dead inside.

My new found interest in Cartography

Welcome to this, the second  in the series I like to call "Returning with Rachael to places I've been with Titch" there is probably a catchier title in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it, so just like with the 2011 trip to Berlin I can copy and paste a 2008 post, replace Titch's name with Rachael's and then job done, you can read about me and Rachael crawling around caves underneath Budapest, walking up hills and sitting practically naked in some sort of bath house, so here goes...

Wait, that isn't going to work, quite aside from the fact that we didn't do any of these things (photoshop can easily make it look like Rachael is emerging from a hole beneath the earth, it doesn't matter if I lie to a blog), there is a major plot-hole in the story that will reveal itself much more obviously, that bath house was men only.

It looks like I'm going to have to write a new one, I think once I've gone through the effort to unpick the bath-house bit from the story, I might as well have just remembered back to a few days ago to the holiday we just took. Besides, I've already done my favourite part of the blog, which is the stupid meandering bit at the start where I ramble on seemingly endlessly while resolutely refusing to talk about the holiday itself, if you don't know which bit I mean, I'm talking about this bit right here, the bit that you're still reading and I'm still writing, you see it, the bit that's now become all self referential so it even now still hasn't ended and I have now referred to the fact that it has become self referential, potentially creating an endless reference loop to allow me to keep writing this bit forever referring to the fact that I have referred to the fact that I... and so on.

This trip started a little bit differently as we went down to London for a day 1st and flew out from there after completely failing to attend some VR zombie thing, though it turned out it was just a demo for a new video game anyway...

Not including the 2 flying days we spent 3 full days in Budapest and during that time we did 5 room escape games, 5! that was the total number of games we had played in total up until that point, If you scroll down 2 posts (or just remember), you can see that we did 2 last year in Riga, but Budapest is full of them, they started there due to the large number of unusually shaped buildings with really low rents.

The first was called Claustrophilia (apparently the first one) unlike with UK ones, they don't seem to take photos of their participants in Budapest, so I don't have a victory / failure photo to share (this was a victory) but I do have the map I drew to get there. I am perfectly aware that there are real maps available and that nowadays with this new fangled internet thing, I could easily show you a real map, but this one is better, way better, this is quite a simple one to follow, not as complicated  as say the map for the invisible exhibition.

The invisible exhibition was a museum about blindness, there’s not much to show as the whole thing was in complete darkness, we were led around by a blind man through different rooms, across pretend streets (where I presume I was hit by a car and am absolutely certain I walked into a traffic light) Not being able to see anything was confusing, disorientating and terrifying, even though logically I know I'm not going to get lost, I just kept on expecting my eyes to adjust to something or wishing that they would just put on a light so I can get my bearings, but obviously, that isn't the experience, so that doesn't happen.

What I do have pictures of is the Braille we learned to type beforehand and because now I feel bad that all of the pictures so far have been of pieces of paper (however tempting it is to include nothing but pictures of pieces of paper in this particular post, mmm don't they make you feel like you're there? All of these were created there so they should...) a picture of the ducks we watched for probably close to an hour before we went in.

There were several ducks on the pond, but these 2 were the 2 we adopted as Rachael and James duck that sat lazily by the side of the pond around which the soap opera that was the life of the ducks on the pond, this show had it all, relationships, the one lonely duck, fights and the bully duck going around trying to chase the other ducks out of the pond. Rachael and James duck mostly just sat by the side or they would float about 3 feet to the left and sit there, not even swimming across the pond to the humans delivering occasional gifts of bread, we became so engrossed in this drama that we actually felt proud of James duck, when the bully (nicknamed "bad duck" our names were great) came over and tried to chase them out of the pond and James duck fought back and managed to chase him away.

Yes, that duck story did just happen.

Back to the escape rooms, we did 5 and won 4 of them, they were very well made and themed and they made good use of the spaces with the games opening out into new rooms, there was a good Egyptian one with no padlocks just push blocks, rotating disks other Indiana Jones-esque puzzles.

What else, well we did visit a rock, well it had once been a rock, but it had been converted into a hospital, well it had once (actually twice) been a hospital, but it has been converted into a museum, to get there we had to climb up all of these stairs, oh sorry, that's too visual, these stairs:

The hospital in the rock was used during the siege of Budapest when they were invaded by soviet forces near the end of world war 2 between 1944 - 1945 (oh yea, they were on that side!) and again in 1956 during an unsuccessful revolution.

I did not take this picture.

Deák Ferenc tér, where Metro lines 1-3 meet, there is something magical in the air, we passed through a few times before investigating what that something magical was, it turns out the something magical was the smell of the Kürtőskalács or chimney cakes being sold, pleasingly they were just as nice as they smelled as well, I don't think a picture will do it justice, so here is a nice smell file.

Mmm isn't that nice!

Before we left we had a visit to the Zoo Cafe as well, which is amazing, while you sit there and have your food and drinks, the staff bring you animals, such as chameleons, snakes, guinea pigs and rabbits, oh and these guys.

That was a nice way to spend a few hours, much nicer than when we got home and searched for our escaped hamster.