Louisa Parry » travel

The only photo I took in Madrid

louisa — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:15:41 +0000

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Things we made in Staithes

louisa — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:29:34 +0000

John and I have just returned from another fabulous holiday at Northside Cottage in Staithes.

We first went in January 2006 and loved it to bits but what with starting our own companies and everything, we’ve not really had time to go again. We finally decided a break was in order last month and though we both had to work a little bit every day, it was just as wonderful and relaxing. Except the bit where we nearly drowned, that wasn’t particularly relaxing.

Things we made in Staithes:

John made a mushroom risotto, which was lovely despite us forget our bag of fridge food so not having any garlic or the nice mushrooms we’d bought for it.
I made fiery ginger biscuits on the first night – unused to the oven, I burned the first trayful but the second batch was spot on. Not bad considering it was all off-recipe and completely estimating the quantities of everything.
I made John a pair of mittens – my first entire double-pointed needle projects. I was chuffed with the first one – great thumb gusset, rounding at the top and everything – but the second one was even better (albeit with a slightly stubby thumb) and John says they’re super warm, so all hail me.
We made ick faces when the grease from our fish and chip trays re-solidified while we were eating in the cold, cold, wind.
We made 16p on the 2p machines in an amusement arcade in Whitby. We promptly “reinvested” it.
We made a new rule for air hockey: no scarves allowed, or rather no dangling scarves allowed to block goals.
We made a lot of fires: the cottage’s storage heaters etc do a fine job but there is a reason we go there in winter – pretty much constant open fires (and fewer people about too).
We made an incorrect judgement about the size of a wave while watching the sea on the Staithes breakwater thing. Said incorrectly judged wave made us very wet from head to toe. (see above note re: nearly drowning).
John (or rather the sea) made John’s very expensive phone no longer work. We also had to dry out the contents of our wallets in front of the fire.
We made me a little less fearful of fire but more scared of the sea (see above).
I made the wearing of pyjamas into a garish art form.
We made a lot of holiday-related Twitters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25.
I re-made half a slipper twice before giving up because I decided I needed different type of wool – it is a simple crochet pattern that will result in a very cute slipper though so I’ll definitely give it a go again.
I made lots of “aww”ing noises at all the dogs I saw around the village and walking past the cottage.
I made friends with a ginger cat, who chased a duck outside the cottage then walked with us into the village.
We made sad faces whenever we remembered our lovely felines – we missed them so.
John made a Debian/Ubuntu package for Sphinx, a Ruby “Enterprise Edition” one and a GlusterFS Nagios plugin. ie, he fiddled on his laptop a lot.
I made lentil & sausage casserole from handmade-by-the-butcher-in-the-village sausages. Served it with herb & parmesan scones — another complete guestimate of the quantities of everything but they worked splendidly. A lovely, lovely comforting winter meal. Will post the recipe because it rocked.
I made a pointless but silly video of some ducks swimming around on the beck.
We made cities and roads and rivers and farms after buying Carcassonne from the fab games shop in Whitby. We liked it so much we went back today and bought an expansion pack for it too. Expansion packs for board games = awesome!
John made a great spaghetti bolognese. We had bought pork mince to make it like his grandma does but left it in the forgotten fridge bag at home in Leeds so had to make to with beef mince. Lovely and rich.
We made a hermit crab retreat back into his shell by casting shadows over his rock pool.

→ Some of my photos from around the cottage and the village

Our weekend in London in numbers

louisa — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:18:57 +0000

20 – cost, in pounds of our return train fare (each)
15.1 – miles walked (above the surface)
16 – painkillers popped by John (who hurt his back on the way to the train station in Leeds)
7 – cost, in pounds, of a sundae in the Haagen Das restaurant (worth it)
5 – drinks drunk at The Chandos pub
4 – doughnuts eaten (between us)
24 – amount of doughnuts bought by the woman behind us in the queue, stocking up for her six hour journey to Devon (she is our new hero)
2 – meals eaten in Chinatown
5 – amount of times (out of 11) that Big Ben rang while we were standing DIRECTLY underneath it before we actually realised it was ringing
3 – scarves bought: one pink/blue, one turquoise and one green/orange
7 – cost, in pounds, of a small bottle of beer and half-a-coke at the Hippodrome bar while watching La Cirque
10 – inches, the diameter of the tennis racket that Captain Frodo of La Clique squeezed himself through
1 – number of joints he had to dislocate to be able to do that
0 – the amount of laughs the ‘Viva Croydon’ song in La Cirque elicited from us
32.50 – cost, in pounds, of stalls tickets for Spamalot from the tkts booth in Leicester Square
2 – the amount of people who pushed in front of me in the drinks buying queue at the Spamalot interval
2 – museums visited
3.50 – cost, in pounds, of our British Museum guide book
2 – time, in minutes, spent looking at British Museum guide book
10 – tube stations visited
2 – maximum time, in rounded-up minutes, that we had to wait for any tube train (probably more like 90seconds)
6 – number of times I jokingly complained about the waiting times on British public transport when arriving on a platform exactly as a train arrived
3 – amusing overheards*
1 – potential punfolio submissions about ghee

* #1 – “Did you tell her about the death? Oh good.”
#2 – “If we all thought like that, we’d all live in poverty.”
#3 – something in Spanish which we didn’t understand but accompanied by a spanking motion

Berlin

louisa — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:04:22 +0000

I went to Berlin with Team Brightbox last week (1st-5th September) and as much as KLM conspired to make it otherwise, I had a great time.

It took almost 24 hours to get there with the quote-unquote “Reliable Airline” because the flight between Leeds-Bradford and Amsterdam was delayed, causing us to miss the last connecting flight onto Berlin. Cue four tired, sweaty hysterical people trying to maximise our return at a “participating bar and restaurant” at the airport after being given “we’re sorry we messed up” vouchers worth 10euros a piece (we scored two glasses of champagne, a “luxury” mojito, a cola beverage and two giant slices of chocolate truffle cake). We then had an indescribable meal at the airport hotel and about three hours sleep before catching our onward flight to Paris at dawn the next morning.

Paris? Yes, because all the Amsterdam-Berlin flights were booked up so we had to go via Paris. And we found out when we finally reached Berlin that my suitcase liked it in France so much, they decided to stay there for an extra day. Sigh.

Anyway, we finally reached our hotel – me sans luggage – around 2.30pm on the Tuesday. My original – pre-airline farce – plan had been to take a bike tour of Berlin on the Tuesday morning with Fat Tire Bike Tours. I’m not usually one for tours but because I was completely on my own (John was tied up at RailsConf with Brightbox) in a strange city, I thought it might be a good way to get a lay of the land. I’d obviously missed the morning one but decided – despite the lack of clean clothes (hurrah for promotional tshirts) and sleep – I’d go on the 4pm one instead. Capsule review: awesome fun and I was so glad I went on it. Even though it was rush hour ish, there was less traffic than a normal day in Leeds and anyway, we spent most of the time on bike paths or down back-streets. It took about 4.5hours including a refreshment stop at a beer garden in Tiergarten and I got to see a few things I probably wouldn’t have found/bothered with on my own (eg the abandoned guard tower near Potsdam Platz). Well worth the 18euros.

On the Wednesday, I had to work in the morning (John did too) and just as we were leaving the hotel for our respective afternoon pursuits, my suitcase finally arrived and I just about hugged it. I then got a taxi with John to the RailsConf hotel near Friedrichstrasse station and took a pleasant (burning, melting hot) stroll down Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. From there, I took the UBahn to Magdalenenstrasse at the former Stasi Headquarters. My my, that was a surreal experience (when I finally found it). Because it was a random Wednesday afternoon, there weren’t many people in there and it felt like I was trespassing in some governmental offices from the 1970s – which I guess I was. Away from the offices, the exhibitions are all in German (an English guidebook is available for 3euros) but even without knowing the language, I was moved by a lot of the displays and intrigued by all the former Stasi spying devices.

After I was done (and bratwursted up), I headed back into the city and to the exhibition underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (as fascinating and upsetting as expected). After that, I got on the third wrong train of the day and ended up at Friedrichstrasse so decided to take donuts to the Brightboxers at RailsConf. We all hung out in that hotel’s lobby for a few hours while John & Baz finished up some work then headed out for dinner with Deb & Rob, Paul & Charmaine. There was an irony travelling all that way and hanging out with Leeds people but it was a good night.

On Thursday, I went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. I had originally intended to take a tour with the non-profit group Mosaic Tours because it’s out in the sticks and given my train issues the previous day, I wanted some help getting out there – but when the tour was cancelled due to low numbers, I took some directions and went anyway. It wasn’t that hard to get to in the end – a train out to Oranienburg then a bus from the station to the memorial – but Oranienburg station was surreal: a beautiful picturesque station, complete with a McDonalds, a live DJ playing 1970s German disco, dancing drunks and someone dressed up as a cartoon Viking. Perfect mood setting.

When I got to the Memorial, I was glad I wasn’t on an organised tour – I realised I could more concentrate on the things that interested me and also I wouldn’t have to be constantly be apologising for my sometimes inappropriate sense of humour. I took the audio tour instead and found it thoroughly absorbing – I just wish I could have a recording of it to keep and listen to again because there was so much to take in. The museum exhibitions are equally thorough and this is where the “concentrating on things I wanted to learn about” thing was the most important – I spent a lot of time in some of the areas but barely any in others. I spent just over three hours there in total – all I could take in a single sitting – but I’d go back on another trip to the city and spend even more time there, absorbing more, learning more…

Thursday night, John & Jeremy had to meet some clients so I found a Thai place for food near the hotel – yummy tom yam gung followed by mussaman gai – then we all had dessert together in the hotel’s bar before contemplating the journey home on Friday morning. The Berlin-Amsterdam leg went ok but when we got to Amsterdam, they told us we wouldn’t all fit on the connecting flight and one of us would have to wait for the later flight. In normal circumstances that would have been fine – annoying but fine – but after the 24hour journey there and lost luggage issues, we weren’t particularly impressed at the idea – plus John had a gig later that evening and we didn’t think he’d be able to text/phone in his drum beats. Eventually, after having to wait for seat allocation at the gate, we were all allowed on together and got upgraded too (which doesn’t mean much on those cityhopper planes – we were just grateful to have seats).

I certainly do think we’ll go back to Berlin again – if only so John can see something other than the taxi ride from airport-hotel & hotel-conference. I’m surprised we hadn’t gone sooner to be honest given my 20 year long interest in the last century of German history. There is so much to see and think about with all the Nazis stuff and all the DDR stuff – but history aside, it is a great city anyway. Despite my repeated errors on it, the public transport system makes it super easy to get around (Potsdamer Platz = haaaaate) and I loved how bike friendly (and flat!) it was. While it’s big, it didn’t feel scary-big like Moscow and maybe it was just the people I met but there seemed to be a really laid-back vibe to it too. We’ll return – just not on KLM.

>> Some of my photos

Sunset in Sunny Southport

louisa — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:04:16 +0000

We took a trip to Southport today for a day out and to see my mum’n'dad – and we got a lovely day for it for a change – sunny, crisp and clear.

We bought some books (including a cool photo one on human dissection), wandered around the town for a bit and ate some fresh donuts before strolling off down the pier in time for sunset – well, coincidentally being on the pier at sunset anyway. For once the sea looked to have been in to almost the sea wall in recent times so the dying sunlight reflected quite beautifully off the sand and I took some photos. I used the “Sundown” setting on my camera sometimes (the redder pictures) and the standard setting the rest of the time (the ones with the blue sky). I’m quite impressed by how my little camera managed it – as usual, all I’ve done to the photos is scale them – haven’t changed any colour levels or anything.

After all that perambulation of the pier, we went to the Guesthouse pub for John to try a Southport Brewery beer but they didn’t have any on so he had to have something from Blackburn or somewhere instead (he said it was still good). After that, we went home so Mum could make us some home-made chips (actually from potatoes and fried! such a novelty these days!) and we all watched some godawful thing that passed for Saturday night prime time TV.

Then John and I had a heated discussion about the welfare state, the role of government and the two-party political system in the car on the way home.

It was a good day.

(Manhattaners, aka Andrew: I took a picture of the majestic building and of the foyer through the letterbox – see the small Manhattans subset. I so wished I’d thought ahead and seen if I could have arranged to go inside… next time maybe. I also took a picture of the Back Bath Street roadside because we were passing and it felt it needed remembering since we forgot about the skipping at Christmas. Next time maybe for that too.)

A long weekend on Lindisfarne – Monday

louisa — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:00:20 +0000

We had to leave the cottage around 10am so got up around 9am to finish packing and have breakfast in good time. We packed everything into the car then took it down to the visitors carpark (in case the cottage’s cleaner, who was due to arrive imminently, needed to use the driveway). Then as we walked back into the village, we remembered we’d left our bag of fridge stuff in the fridge so grabbed that and left it secluded in the shaded front garden to pick up after we’d dropped off the key in the village.

We went to the winery to buy the mead and a last stroll about the place (which was swarming with day visitors and school children because the causeway was open practically all day), then picked up the fridge stuff on the way back to the car. We stopped halfway down the causeway for a quick run on the dunes then started on our way home.

Since it was pretty early in the day still – and knowing we’d only come back to Leeds and sit on our laptops (which we’ve done), we decided to stop in at Whitley Bay for fish and chips for lunch. I’d always assumed Whitley Bay was to Newcastle what Southport was to Liverpool so they’d be comparable – but Whitley Bay seems a lot smaller, less chainstored and with a much better beach. The dry sand at the top of the beach was golden and so warm (I took my shoes off instantly) and towards the (retreating) water, there were loads of coolly eroded rocks and lovely tiny pebbles/sea glass – my jean pockets were quickly weighted down. We stayed on the beach for an hour or so then went off in search of food. We first tried the cafe on the beach but the menu didn’t inspire us so we thought we’d look elsewhere – we weren’t looking for anything amazing but still. After a brief stroll along the promenade (with me noting how Whitley Bay’s promenade was much better than Southport’s – since WB’s is actually worth promenading along), we ended up at an Italian restaurant called Al Forno which served lunch. The manager/head waiter guy didn’t seem to be too happy to see us (even though it was quiet, just a few other customers, and still well within the lunch opening hours) but the food was alright – John had a veggie pizza (peppers, onions, mushrooms, a single piece of carrot (?) and what appeared to be artichoke) and I had a very creamy (but not much else-y) linguine carbonara. It looked quite new and fancy – I bet it’s heaving of a Friday and Saturday evening – but was cheap because of a lunch time offer – Â£12.10 for the two of us, including drinks and an espresso for John.

After we’d finished there, we headed back to the car and the GPS took us through a crazy tour through Newcastle/Gateshead back to the A1, then it was straight down until Leeds again. We got home around 4.30 and the cats – well, Carla and Carbs – sulked/were scared of us for the first time ever. My mum and dad’s cats always sulk when they return from short breaks but I was just saying the other day that ours never do that … until this time. They’re back in love with us again now though :)

Pictures (click for bigger ones)

Top: the cool eroded rocks at Whitley Bay
Lower: my feet, sandy and sun-warmed

A long weekend on Lindisfarne – Sunday

louisa — Sun, 20 May 2007 20:00:18 +0000

Another 9.30am get up on Sunday – with the same streaming sunlight but instead of getting up early to get off the island, I got up early to do some work (boo). John read in the conservatory and photographed frogs in the garden’s pond while I worked and the plan was that I’d finish at lunchtime so we could go into the village to get something to eat at a cafe or the Crown & Anchor pub. But when the time came, we weren’t hungry so we checked what time the cafes closed (5pm-ish) then retreated away from the crowds over the sand dunes near the start of the causeway to the North Shore to build up an appetite.

It was about half a mile over the dunes but thankfully the wind had finally died down so we didn’t go blind from sand blowing around. In fact, Sunday was a beautiful day – sunshine but enough breeze to stop it being too hot. In the dunes, there is a commemorative bench near the remains of a 9th century village so we sat there for a little while before hitting the beach. John was a bit meh about going to another beach since we’d been to the causeway area a couple of times and to the rocky harbour on the south shore but the North Shore was by far the best beach we’d gone to on the island. Nearer the mainline, the beach was all golden sands and crashing blue waves but we didn’t stay at that end for long – preferring the rocky rockpools of further east. The rockpools were AWESOME. We saw a big giant crab (dead though) and lots of little crabs and little starfish and hermit crabs and fish and shrimp and loads of limpets and birds and cool eroded rock formations and big piles of driftwood and John gave me a pointing stick and a stone and it was great. We stayed there for longer than intended – John photographing creatures and me watching the waves until the incoming tide got my jeans wet – then John sat on the dry pebbles at the top of the beach while I collected more interesting wood and stone specimens for my collection.

Eventually we headed back to the cottage and realised we’d been out in the sun much longer than we had intended (oh such pink shoulders for me). Having missed the cafes, we just had more soup and bread in the garden (it seemed strange eating hot soup in the glorious warm sunshine) then read/fiddled into the evening. We tidied the cottage (in advance of leaving the next morning) and had a late, candlelight mushroom risotto in the conservatory. T’was all very nice.

Pictures (click for bigger versions)

Top: the very nice beachy bit of the North Shore from the bench in the dunes.
Lower: the cottage’s front garden at sunset.

A long weekend on Lindisfarne – Saturday

louisa — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:00:17 +0000

We woke up around 9.30 on Saturday – which if you know us will have you gasping out loud in surprise. We’re not morning people and usually only get up at around 11 on a weekday (hurrah for working for ourselves), let alone at the weekend. We didn’t really have any plans for Saturday but knew if we fancied leaving the island, we’d have to get back before the causeway shut at 3pm so we might as well get an early (for us) start. Plus, we were staying in the east-facing bedroom so the novelty of sunlight, actual sunlight in a house, helped us wake up earlier than normal too. (The east-facing, back bedroom was the cottage’s twin bedroom but the double room at the front was so poky in comparison, we decided we might as well just squish the twin beds together in there instead.)

We had breakfast in the conservatory and over my cocoa puffed rice and John’s nutty, crunchy flakes of corn, we decided against leaving the island — while it wouldn’t be the end of the world, it would have been annoying to miss the causeway coming back in and we didn’t have anywhere we wanted to go that desperately. Instead we read for a bit then walked into the village. We visited the winery’s “craft shop” (is writing ‘Holy Island’ in silver pen on cheap generic fridge magnets a craft?) and the main mead-selling shop, where John tried some of the produce and deeming its sweet-sweet honey-taste acceptable, vowed to return to buy more when we wouldn’t be carrying it around. We bought a fab granary cob from the village store and went to the Ship Inn again for a drink before heading back out towards the cottage. We didn’t stop there though – went on to buy a dressed crab for me from the fish van in the visitor’s carpark (John was both impressed and disgusted when I ate it for lunch) and since we were practically there, walked down to the tide-exposed beach near the causeway to look in rockpools. It was still so so windy though that it wasn’t a terribly fun experience: wind+sand+eyes=owee.

The wind kept up all afternoon so we stayed in the cottage, reading and napping and fiddling about (well, guitar/harmonica/penny-whistling about). In the evening, we went to the Ship for dinner. It was nice enough (I had sea bass with sliced peppers in a sweet chilli sauce and John had a giant Northumberland sausage in an equally giant Yorkshire pudding, and after that, we had chocolate puddle pudding and sticky toffee pudding respectively) but nothing terribly special – good pub food but pub food all the same. By the time we’d finished, the wind had dropped down a smidgen so we walked to the harbour near the castle and walked around on the rocks for a bit before heading back to the cottage for, surprise surprise, more reading. We also played with the “marble maze” thing in the cottage’s small board games collection because we’re just big kids at heart :)

Pictures (click for bigger ones)

Top: me on the road to nowhere – or at least where the causeway was before the tide came in. This photo was actually taken on the Friday trip down there but whatcha gonna do?
Lower: John and his ultimate marble maze – and John after the temptation got too much.

A long weekend on Lindisfarne – Friday

louisa — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:00:32 +0000

We’ve just got back from a long(ish) weekend in a cottage on Lindisfarne, just off the coast of Northumberland.

We drove up on Friday and planned to get to the island just before the causeway shut at 2.15pm. I somehow managed to get the maths wrong so we ended up leaving for the three hour drive at 9am-ish. We fought with the GPS most of the way – it didn’t seem to have the island in its village/town/city listing and when we tried to browse it like a normal map, the whole of the north-east was underwater for some reason – but we didn’t really need it: the directions were pretty much “get to the A1. Drive on that for a while. Then turn right. Drive for a little bit. Turn left into the cottage.”

We nearly had a car crash on the later part of the A1 bit (a sudden traffic jam on the wet, downward slope of a hill, with a heavy lorry with dodgy breaks unable to stop behind us) but aside from that, it was a pretty clear run so we got up to the island for around 12.30pm. We picked up the keys from a house in the village then retraced our (driven) steps to the cottage which was back near the end of the causeway.

We were staying in Skylark Cottage – which is at the causeway/visitor car park end of the village, and backs onto the fields in the centre of the island, looking out towards Lindisfarne Castle. The “cottage” is a very nice two-bed bungalow that I found somewhat randomly on the internet but it was great. The living room alone was as big as a single floor of our house and it was such a novelty to have space to move in the kitchen. But the best bit as far as we were concerned was the conservatory – as big as our living room, looking out over the private garden (with the Castle and harbour in the distance) and with the world’s biggest, comfiest sofa. We spent a lot of time on that sofa. Everywhere felt light and open – and it was such a novelty to have more than one door and windows on more than one side of a house!

We threw our stuff inside and had a quick collapse on the sofa then went back into the village for lunch at the Ship Inn. I had thought about staying at the Ship before I found the cottage but they didn’t have internet access for guests (the cottage has ADSL) and in the end we decided that we’d like the space of a cottage rather than just a room. For the holiday that we wanted – just hanging around, relaxing and doing our own thing, we definitely made the right decision – the space in the conservatory and garden were awesome for that. Anyway, so lunch at the Ship – I had a cheese ploughman’s (or monk’s tucker as they call it) and John had a ham and mustard sandwich – thick slices of homecooked ham for him and enough cheese to induce an instant heart attack for me (I gave some to John to share the clogging). John also had two pints of Holy Island Ale – the local (but probably not as local as it makes out) real ale. He loved it and Dathan very nearly got a text message ordering him to “get up here now, it’s only three hours drive, I’ll get them in”.

The pub closed around 2 and we were done there anyway so wandered back up to the cottage for a read/snooze on the sofa in the conservatory. Around 4, we went out for a walk towards the causeway – by then, it was high tide so it was completely flooded. I’d heard the character of the island changed a lot once the causeway shut – the steady stream of tourists heading to the castle, priory or Lindisfarne Centre instantly vanish and the 162 usual residents of the island breath a sigh of relief – but I didn’t expect it to be quite so severe – it was great :) Anyway, we hung around on that beach for a while then headed up through the village to the back of the Priory (where we met the world’s most excitable soon-to-be guide dog), and out onto the Heugh at the bottom of the island. The Heugh caused us to jump quite a bit (in honour of various old first person shooters that use that noise when you hit the jump key) and the wind, which was by then really rather windy, caused us to swear a lot in amazement – but fitting swearing given we were on Holy Island (all naughty words were either blasphemes or preceeded by the world “Holy”). We stayed up there for ten minutes but it was really too windy to enjoy it properly so we went to the other pub on the island, the Crown and Anchor, for quick drink before heading back to the cottage again. (The Crown and Anchor, incidentally, was alright but it felt like we were drinking in a hotel bar – there was something about it that seemed a bit odd. Not exceptionally so – we had planned to return there for a lunch, although never got around to it – but we didn’t feel completely comfortable there.)

The wind kept rattling the house all night so we stayed in the conservatory reading, then after a short soup-and-bread break, we retired to the living room to watch a film.

Pictures (click for bigger ones)

Top: The view over the fields to the castle and harbour from the cottage’s garden
Lower: Me looking out over the Heugh and/or to the excitable doggie down field, behind the Priory,

The things you see

louisa — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 16:49:23 +0000

I’ve been going through our photo collection recently to select some for uploading to my new photos gallery and it reminded me that John and I have seen some unusual sights (and sounds) during our travels, for example:

just going out of shot but half a dozen men with mowers cutting a single piece of grass outside the Kremlin in Moscow.
the open air reception outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg for two bikers who had just got married.
a reindeer gondola full of Santa Clauses punting along the Grand Canal in Venice.
a door to the other side of the sand in Whitby.
we were wandering the park land on Margitsziget (Margrit Island) in Budapest when we heard loud music – some large scale opera tune. We wandered closer to a small building – a cafe-like building but couldn’t see any speakers that could be kicking out that much noise but lo, there was a small curtain at one side of the building. Pulling back the curtain in a Wizard-of-Oz style, we expected to find the speakers but instead we found a full orchestra and choir on a stage rehearsing.