30 before 30 update...

It's a new year, and only a month and a half until my latest list deadline :-/ Up until about 2 months ago, I looked upon my next birthday: my 30th with dread. It's always been my scary age, where I expected to be all grown up, sorted and feeling like a real adult. But I really don't feel like that, and that's a little bit terrifying. However, since the end of last year, I realised that I can't stop the passage of time (more's the pity) so I might as well come to terms with the big 3-0. I wrote my latest list at the beginning of 2014, after collecting a few more things I wanted to see/do and with some inspiration from a birthday present from Macey (this book). I've been working through the list slowly but surely over the past 11 months, and I thought this would be a good time to take a look over what I have completed, things I will likely tick off before February and the few things I will get to after my birthday. After all, life doesn't stop after 30... I hope!  

Dim Sum (in Chinatown)

Westminter Abbey - No photos inside

Dinner at Jamie's Fifteen. Delicious! I actually ended up here twice in the same month... But it's good enough to head there more than once, and the menu changes so every visit is different! 

Eerie Highgate. Visiting both the east and west cemeteries

Dishoom: pretty good

Opera in the park - very good even though I didn't understand the plot completely!

No photos inside but a great museum to visit (even if we did have to put up with loud fellow visitors!)

An afternoon at the tower complete with a rain shower right after this photo was taken.

Wine on a balmy summer evening with Chelsea

Charles Dickens' house on Doughty Street: a small museum but one full of little artefacts and an insight into one of Dickens' houses, and where my favourite of his books was written - Great Expectations!

I didn't get a photo inside the WWI exhibit but this was from the main room at the Imperial War Museum. It's full of other galleries as well, focusing on the many conflicts our world has seen over the years.

The entrance to the Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town cocktail bar.

Kyoto Garden in Holland Park. A bit too late for the Cherry Blossoms and a little disappointing as it's incredibly small, but I'm still glad I went to check it out.

A dodgy sunrise over Primrose Hill, on the day of the Summer Equinox 

A drink on the Wibbley Wobbley pub!

I downloaded War and Peace on my kindle, and I have started it... 17% so far. But it's really dull, AND I have so much reading for my MA at the moment that it's sort of fallen to the bottom of the book list. I also have an exciting pile of 11 Christmas books to make my way through so I'm not sure I'll get back to W&P anytime soon. I'm giving myself points for starting it though!

So I've completed 16 of the things from the list. I have planned to visit Circus and Duck and Waffle for birthday celebrations, which brings me up to 18, and I have another post to write about my success with my Vintage Cook book challenge (which is almost another one off the list). In January I hope to get at least another 2 (St Paul's and a sunset on Waterloo Bridge) ticked off too. The Renoir cinema is closed until after Feb and I'm not going to sunbathe at Brockwell Lido during the winter so there are 2 I can't get done until after my 30th. I definitely think it's possible to spend an afternoon at the Operating Theatre and Check out the Greenwich Observatory but I might have to leave those until my latest MA assignment is handed in (Mid-Feb). Not too bad going. I am determined to get the list completed, but I'm just going to need a little more time. I'm getting old after all ;-) 

My next adventure

Living in Korea, I often felt I was living in the future; such a technologically advanced nation where electronic devices were incredibly hi-tech and widely available. My brother and sister-in-law recently bought an i-robot cleaning gadget. It seemed so out of place to see that in the UK, I'd only ever seen them in Korean electronics stores whizzing around the display showrooms. To me they seemed so futuristic! The kind of thing I'd have seen on the Jetsons when I was young.

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Amsterdam to visit Chelsea, a fellow teacher I met in Korea. From there, on Monday I'm off to Abu Dhabi. 

Looking through photos of my next new destination I'm struck by how much more ultra modern it looks. Whilst Korea was so technologically advanced, Abu Dhabi's modernistic architecture really makes it stand out as a hub of modern design. It really looks like a city of the future. How we mortals might view the world in 100 years from now. Except, it's 2013 and I'm going to be walking amid these modern giants in a few days.

I'm really excited to be heading to a new area of the world, the middle east. A place that's fascinating and incredibly far removed, architecturally, socially and culturally than anywhere I've visited previously. Travelling is such an education, and I can't wait for everything I'm sure to learn from this next trip!

Photos from visitabudhabi.ae

Cologne Chocoladen Museum

To say we were excited about visiting the chocolate museum in Cologne would be an understatment. After being put off of visiting the chocolate museum in Jeju I set my sights on Germany. Obviously not as well known for chocolate as our final destination Brussels,  that wasn't going to stop me indulging in the milky brown stuff in both Germany AND Belgium! Skipping over the boring first part of the musuem (about where chocolate we eat nowadays comes from) we headed straight for the 'chocolate fountain'. What. a. let. down. instead of flowing with the lucious molton chocolate we expected, a relatively small amount dribbled out of cocoa bean shapes on a tree-like 'fountain'. I've seen better chocolate fountains at weddings. Pfffff!

We stopped to watch a few different types of chocolates being made; custom made bars and rolled truffles. The second part of the museum was more interesting, looking at the different ways of advertising over the years, and the recreation of old style sweet shops. We read about the introduction of chocolate into Europe and how it was first consumed. Afterwards we sat in the cafe for a taste of the good stuff before making our way outside back in Cologne city centre.

It was a particularly nice day, and a celebration marking a milestone in the connection between Cologne and China (I can't remember how long now) was going on outside the cathedral.

I had promied myself a pretzel whilst in Germany, and managed to buy one to eat on the train as we left Cologne and made out way to Brussels. Just in time!

Rubbish fountain.

Putting together a custom made bar

What can I get you?

Nearly as busy as Beijing. Seriously.

Lenin and Gorky

 

Our tour guide had pointed out a few places of interest for the remainder of our time in Moscow and we liked the sound of the 'underwater' interior of the Gorky House Museum. Inside it was less of an underwater theme and more just a smooth, fluid-lined staircase but I enjoyed walking around nonetheless. I was excited to stand inside the very room where during the Soviet Union, writers discussed Socialist Realism and what it meant for their work and Russian literature in general. Many of the writers who convened here were considered too radical to fit the mold (Including Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago). Gorky was brought to live in this house as literary royalty but he was uncomfortable with it's luxury and used only the ground floor. He disliked being referred to as the 'master' of the house. He welcomed all writers into this house and liked to think of it more as a place for the literary community rather than his own private residence. 

Another place I visited in Moscow was Provokiev's house. I wouldn't recommend it however, the lady who 'showed' us around was unfriendly and as everything was in Russian there wasn't much for us to understand. Even when we tried to write a few notes on our phones to research about later the lady came over to stop us, presumably as she thought we were taking photos. 

I will admit here, I didn't like Moscow. There aren't many places I've visited that I really have not liked, or places I would not like to visit again. Manila is the only one I can think of at the moment. In Moscow, I did not feel welcome. Things were confusing, as they often are for visitors in a foreign land, but no one seemed approachable or was particularly helpful. The subway was atrocious. Built in the early 1930s, quite frankly it seemed not to have been updated since then. It's dirty, loud and old. I know I had come from Seoul, with one of the best subway lines in the world. But seriously, getting on the train in Moscow was downright depressing. There were no maps inside the train carriages, and the name of the station only displayed at one end of the platform so impossible to read as you whizz past on the train, even if I were able to read Cyrillic. The announcements were impossible to hear over the noise of the train. Tickets were confusing as you pay for how many journeys, not for how far you are going. I now realise we paid for 4 extra journeys that we never took.

The night we left Moscow added to my dislike for the city. Our train was late at night, and as we arrived at the train station and made our way up from the bowels of hell (The Subway) we exited the station and after a while and some confusion realised we were the wrong side of the road for the main railway station. Finally finding the correct place, there was no English. None at all, not even an EXIT sign. We got to left luggage and it looked like our bags were locked in. Panic began to rise, and thankfully Mary stayed calm and got someone from another counter to free our bags. Then began the hunt for our platform. We found our train details on the departures board, platform 6. But can we find platform 6? No, they appear to be numbered 1,3,5,7... We asked a couple of people, one of whom was helpful and could speak good English. He explained that the platform numbers would change in about an hour ready for our train. Of course, that makes absolutely prefect no sense. We found some seats in a cafe and waited out the hour or so until our train left. The station was full of shifty looking people, lurking in alleyways, noiselessly creeping up behind you, in doorways. It was so unnerving and I was very glad to board the train to finally be on our way to St Petersburg.

Gorky's desk, very tall and without drawers, the way he liked it.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

And we stopped for a cup of tea!

China; Revisited

Going back to China was something I had to do this year as my long train journey back to the UK was to start from Beijing. I was also very excited about heading back again, since I was to leave Asia and didn't know when I would be back again. But I was also a little apprehensive. Would I still like it? Would I see it with different eyes since I'd been living in Korea for two years now? 

Well, turns out my love affair with China wasn't over. It was so nice to be back. I could have conversations with people beyond hello and goodbye. I remembered the random water that drips from buildings, the chaos and bright lights. The noise and crazy-ness that is cycling around. I know a lot of people don't like China when they visit, and I can see why. Especially if you only visit Beijing, with it's packed pavements and endless barriers. But I would advise anyone who goes to China, firstly to be prepared for how many people will be there; pushing, shoving and ignoring your personal space. Also be aware that that general people on the street or working behind kiosks won't speak English, and this might make it hard for you. But I impore all travellers to China to; GET OUT OF BEIJING! It's a great place full of history, but China is so massive and only going to Beijing and expecting to have 'experienced' China is like buying an ice cream but only eating the cone. There's Shanghai with it's upmarket French Concession and impressive Bund skyline, Xi'an and the Terracotta Warriors, Chengdu with pandas, huge buddah and spicy food. Beautiful Guilin and bustling Guangzhou. If there is time head to freezing Harbin or sunny Hainan, there's stunning Hunan and fascinating Dandong. Get yourself out of Beijing and start seeing some of this amazing country! You won't regret it! :-)

He just couldn't stop staring at me!!