From A to Zoo

This summer I took a lap top with me - fully intending to write a column or blog 'on the road'.... somehow it never happend but I did post regularly on Facebook....  this is an adapted and edited collection of those posts in travel blog form.

There is a steady stream of migrant and seasonal workers from Eastern Europe looking for work here in the west.
We decided it was time to reverse the trend - we took off in the opposite direction to work part-time on a campsite in Romania. Passing through Slovakia on the way and Ukraine on the way back.

Entering the Czech Republic was not a great moment - but the next day the sun did shine - and anyway we were only passing!

For the five days in Slovakia, due to the weather forecasts,  we booked an airbnb instead of camping. That  turned out to be a wise decision however the very worst weather, and there was a lot of it about, missed us.  Mostly we ignored the forecasts and pretty much go away with it, cycling in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains.
We had an apartment with a large covered patio complete with a table tennis and billiard table, so there was plenty to do during the frequent, and sometimes heavy, showers. The downside is that Yvonne can't play table tennis or billiards and the impressive collection of ice hockey sticks were no good to either of us!

No comment neccessary!

This was our home (a tent on a Romanian camp site), our work place (the campsite) and our village for the next three weeks. We were free on Sundays… we started our official working week on a Sunday..... a day off !!!

In the mornings cleaning the utilities - in the evening "..entertaining folks, singing songs and telling jokes.." !

Thursday was market day just down the road in Ocna. Alongside fruit, vegetables, clothes, kitchen utensils and hay making tools there were a selection of gravestones on offer………….    

 

'Time flies by when you are having fun'
We managed to fit in a fair number of activities between our cleaning duties and the rain (there was a lot of rain). We drank some beer and palinka, sang a few songs, tasted some good country food, cycled up to our axles in mud, visited some wooden churches and a comical graveyard....and suddenly it was market day again!!!

It was one of those days you long for when travelling… we had seen posters announcing a local event -  from what we could understand it looked like a religious festival - and so it was...... however by chance we discovered that in the afternoon there was  singing and dancing...an opportunity not to be missed.

There was plenty of music, song and dance.. and even free food! …and hardly a tourist in sight except the ones we took with us.  

 Oh, and a group of musicians we'd met briefly five years ago were there too. Surprisingly they recognised us!

Monday morning, after a weekend of singing and dancing, it was back to work for the local farmers...

 

well...first there was the monthly livestock market in Sighetu Maramatiei...we managed to resist a special
'two for the price of one' offer on piglets........... 

The first time I left the British Isles was a visit to Switzerland with a friend. While he tried to sort out his relationship with the farmer's daughter I spent most days in the fields. My time, it seems, was not wasted. When I decided to help out in Romania the farmers wife, usually either critical of, or highly amused by, outsiders efforts, was complimentary about my hay-making skills!!....  and that after forty years or more…..


Back on the road again.....apart from the unfriendly border control and a torrential rainfall, our first days in the Ukraine were pretty good. 

We found okay accomodation in an hostel where our double room  was a whole lot larger, better and cleaner than many hotels we've stayed in and a Motel where the staff were so pleased to have foreign visitors that they often joined us for a chat, the fact that we didn't understand a word they said didn't seem to matter! .  

In between we checked out as many potholes in the roads as we could manage.

Cycling in Ukraine IS gravel-grinding!

Live from L´viv… after our time in the Ukraine countryside we arrived in L´viv the only city we'd planned to visit this trip.

L´viv is a busy, bustling, vibrant city… with beautiful old building some restored, others in various states of repair or decay. Like most western cities there are plenty of trendy coffee houses, craft beers and restaurants... the contrast with the rural areas could not be greater and there is nothing to indicate that there is still a bitter struggle in a distant part of the country. Surprisingly, maybe, the background music was mostly blues and jazz.

After more than two pleasant days strolling around town, dodging the sometimes heavy showers, my feet were sore and my muscles ached.

Yes - it was time to move on. Next stop Poland.   

Something for all those ……. …...s who voted for Brexit to think about… it took us six hours to cross the border from Ukraine (a European country that is not in the EU) to Poland (a European country in the EU) !!

Every picture tells a story..... the last week of or trip was, at first, not much fun and mostly wet... but luckily there was one more surprise in store….

….yes... we ending our tour surrounded by wild, and some not so wild, animals. It was not planned but the last part of our trip took us through Poland so we decided to drop in on our friends in Wroclaw and this, in turn,  resulted in us being invited to use the guest accommodation in Wroclaw zoo.

These were some of our neighbours during our stay…….

Back in town! A holiday is a holiday, a vacation a vacation but when you are away for more than two or three weeks it becomes something different, almost a way of life. However beautiful the scenary , however impressive the architechture or however fascinating the history , it's the (sometimes small)  events and the (sometimes brief) encounters along the way that make it all worth doing... and doing again...and again.......................

Buckets,Brushes and Broomsticks (Back to Breb)

Buckets, Brushes and Broomsticks (Back to Breb)

Most of our friends thought we were mad when we announced that this year we would be replacing our road maps, spanners, screwdrivers and bicycle repair kits with buckets, mops and toilet brushes. For three weeks instead of planning, testing, riding and/ or guiding mountain bike tours, we had volunteered to clean and maintain the showers, toilet facilities and hostel on a Romanian camp site. It may have been even more surprising for them to discover that it was my idea. Yvonne would claim that I don't clean very much of anything and even when I do, I don't do it properly.

Ah - but I'm always looking for new challenges and, let's face it, cleaning toilets is further outside my comfort zone than, say, cycling through the Caucasus or Kyrgyzstan!
To tell the truth both of us had our doubts but we did have a pretty good idea of what we were getting ourselves into. We had visited the campsite on a previous occasion. It is small and in idyllic surroundings. As far as we could recall the sanitation block and hostel were compact and in good condition. Oh, yes, and we knew that the busiest period of the year started about the time we were planning to move on!
Our recollections proved to be accurate enough except that the owners turned out to be even friendlier, nicer and more relaxed than we remembered. We arrived on a Friday evening, Saturday they insisted we should settle in, Sunday was our day off, so it was Monday before we started working!

When the season really begins, we were told, things can get hectic, the campsite can become (over) full and the facilities are stretched to the limit, needing almost constant attention. However, although the number of campers varied greatly from day to day, during our tour of duty it was generally not very busy. Our official working days involved about 1½- 2 hours of intensive labour, although we rarely could or would manage to work without interruptions; there would be somebody wanting a last minute shower, others wanted advice or directions, some stopped to chat about the weather, 'grandma' , the original farmer's wife who came with the property, wanted her chickens let out or a buckets carried. Our bosses, for want of a better word, were very strict, we were not allowed to work on our day off, nor were we allowed to do more than our allotted chores , sometimes they forced us to take an extra coffee break or drink beer and watch football with them in the evenings.! One day they even made us take an extra day off! We were encouraged to socialise, play music, drink palinka and generally have a good time with the other camping guests!

Yes I know it sounds tough going.....but it just had to be done!
A few things that did conspired to make life just a little more difficult.
Firstly a group of 4x4 enthusiasts from the Czech Republic who thought it was okay to clean their muddy clothes, boots and equipment in the showers. Then there was the weather, the second week it rained a lot, and often, turning the path to and from the sanitation block into a muddy slide...and thirdly, the owner himself, who insisted on mowing the grass during the drier periods so that the camping guests could have some creative fun decorating the floors with grass cuttings!

Before returning to Breb we wondered if it would have changed much in five years. Would this quiet, picturesque, unspoiled rural village  have become more of a tourist attraction. (https://onlyalso.blogspot.com/2018/01/breb.html) It is, after all, often mentioned in tourist guides. But we need not have worried, nothing much had changed. The village centre had not become a huge car park, in the weekend there were not coachloads of day trippers, and some of the old farmhouses had not been converted to gift shops or tea houses. There were still just three shops and none of them had any souvenirs or post cards. There WAS now a proper road sign on the main road pointing down to the village. There was a little more activity based around the one guest house in the village and a few more local farmers offering home cooked meals or selling jam and handmade craft.
One new initiative, across a field and up the hill from our campsite, was an al fresco bar & restaurant which opened the day we arrived, when the weather permitted we became regular visitors. After all the rain in the second week, there was the added attraction of wading ankle deep through a stream to get there. Which brings me to another thing that had definitely not changed. Our first visit was in late August, it had apparently been a long hot, dry, summer. After just two days it started to rain, heavily and frequently. This time we arrived in the middle of June. It had been an unusually hot and dry spring, it had not rained for six weeks but just two days after we arrived.............................

The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence

I live in Breda, a Dutch city situated close to the Belgian border. Not so long ago the town prided itself on becoming the eighth largest city in The Netherlands. Shortly after, though, things went quiet. Apparently Breda had slipped back into ninth place. Somebody must have moved out.

Despite it's prominent role in the history of the Lowlands, outside of the Benelux countries few people have heard of it. Those who have, apart from a handful of historians and some war games enthusiasts, know it only as a place one passes on the motorway between Amsterdam and Antwerp. However if you have the time it is worth while stopping for a visit and not just because it has more bars and cafés per square meter than any other Dutch town. The whole year round  there is plenty to see and do including several events to suit a variety of tastes and... you can drop in and see me!

The apartment block I live in is about half way between the town centre and the forests to the south of the city. A quiet fairly dull suburb with unimpressive architecture but plenty of green space. Well, it's quiet most of the time, except in the mornings and late afternoon when it's a short cut for commuters – oh – and the mini buses and cars picking up or dropping off children at the various schools dotted around the neighbourhood. In the summer the field across the road is used by the schools for outdoor activities... on the whole a quite joyful background noise but it is amazing how loudly even the smallest little girls can squeal when they are playing. At the other end of the field older boys live out their Champion League fantasies. GOAL! PENALTY! CORNER! PASS! SHOOT! YEEEEAAAAAH!

In the weekend it's more peaceful, that is if nobody is repairing, rebuilding or extending their house or just trying out a new drill they got for their birthday..
Oh yes, and we live on the fourth floor and for some reason, maybe the wind, the architecture or just the way sound travels, if there is a festival in the centre of town or even further away we can hear every word, note and bass beat quite clearly while at street level the event may be barely audible!
Otherwise it really is a quiet leafy district ...well except that we've had a circus just across the road for the last two weeks. The music they played during the performances wasn't exactly my taste but the donkeys braying for food or attention was quite endearing although they had some difficulty getting themselves heard.  
You see our apartment building is being renovated...
...one of the advantages of not owning a house is that you don't have to bother about maintenance or renovation. In our case the housing corporation does that for us. The disadvantage is that we have no control over what, when or how they do it. Usually when the time comes we are descended upon by an army of workmen, a great deal of dust, disruption, noise and inconvenience which is close to being traumatic but is over in a relatively short time. A short, sharp, shock. However in this current, less drastic, renovation round the corporation has chosen a different tactic. The work has been spread over several months and involves just five men, three hydraulic work platforms, one paint brush and a hammer. Every work day morning the team arrive at seven  o'clock in high spirits, there is plenty of laughter, at seven-thirty the mobile platforms are started up and moved around a bit before the coffee break. After the break a lot of standing, looking and thinking goes on, followed eventually by some indiscriminate drilling and random hammering until they drop tools at four o'clock sharp!

Some of this work force are from eastern Europe, Poland to be specific, they speak broken Dutch with a Flemish accent. In Western Europe there is a constant stream of migrant and seasonal workers from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and so on. Without them our building industry, agricultural industries and health services, among other things would be struggling. However, and it probably won't surprise you, we are going against the flow. For part of the next six weeks we will be working in Romania. Helping out on a camp site in a small village where there are just three shops, no cafés and generally the only sounds are the village church clock and a few clucking hens. I just hope we don't find it too quiet!

Frappé - Ice Coffee

Frappé – Ice Coffee

I don't have, and I never have had, heroes. Neither have I ever been a real 'fan', not of a pop singer, film star or football team. There are however people that I admire. Some of them quite obscure like the East German, I don't know his name, who escaped in a hot air balloon over the heavily guarded border to West Germany. The attempt was desperate, difficult and above all dangerous. The craft was improvised and under powered. To have any chance of success weight had to be kept to a minimum, he took no luggage, just his wife, baby and.... his racing bicycle. Now, through my eyes, that's pretty close to being a hero!

Another person who certainly deserves to be mentioned is Dimitrios Vakondios, the man who invented Frappé in1957.
Ancient Greece has given us Theatre, Drama, Poetry, Philosophy, Physics, Astronomy, and Geometry – The Archimedes' Principle and the Pythagoras Theorem. Frappé, Greek Ice Coffee is a relatively recent invention and in my opinion should be right up there at the top of the list alongside, or even above, Democracy. Democracy is generally believed to be the most important thing that has come out of Greece however the democratic process does have many inconsistencies and imperfections. There are several ways that democratic elections can be organised and many and various ways of counting and appropriating the popular vote, all have their advantages and disadvantages. All can lead to distorted, unsatisfactory, or even curious results.
With Ice Coffee there are no such problems. Two easy choices: with or without milk and how much sugar. A cool and refreshing drink with no complications. Okay you can add whipped cream, chocolate chips or other embellishments but that's overdressing. Anyway I prefer the most simple variation, made with instant coffee, water, ice cubes and not too much sugar.  I've never managed to master the art of drinking iced coffee Greek style though. I guess I'm just not relaxed enough! In Greece men and women, young and old, rich and poor, can be seen anywhere and everywhere, slowly sipping Frappé through brightly coloured plastic drinking straws. They seem to spend hours over just one drink!
However it's not because Dimitrios Vakondios invented this popular drink that I am nominating him for my personal hall of fame. It's the reason why he invented it that makes him a serious candidate.
The reason: he was desperate for a cup of coffee and couldn't find any hot water!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Have Pen, Will Travel...

HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL...

I was aimlessly trawling though my archives recently – these short autobiographical sketches are based on what I found there:

Go West!
Mutual histories, myths and legends are what keep families together. Unfortunately in my family these are few and far between. As far as I know one of my grandparents was mad or French or both, another, the only one I ever knew, was either Irish or Cornish. He owned a ukelele. I know even less about the others. There is a hint of Italian somewhere but I think that had something to do with my father's first wife. Yes both my parent had been married before as a result I had a half brother and a half sister. Judging by my date of birth I was probably a direct result of the World War II ending and the victory celebrations that followed. I was born and grew up in London. After my father died, relatively young, for some reason the two halves of the family didn't mix. I lost, until recently, all contact with my brother and his family. The other half of the family moved out west to seek their fortunes. Well, not very far west at first, just about 100km, to Swindon. There they settled and multiplied before moving on. Some of them are now so far west they can't  go much further. Just this year my sister's oldest son was the last to leave Swindon and head for the West Country. So that just leaves a nephew in New Zealand.
Oh - and me..... I went East!

Have Pen (1)

I think I have been drawing all my life, as far back as I can remember, probably from the moment I could hold a crayon.
Right through school and all through my first job. I was  a trainee civil engineer, I never progressed much further than holding the wrong end of a tape measure but my technical drawings were quite impressive if not always as accurate as they should have been. Bored and unchallenged, by ' mutual consent', I left. After a series of odd jobs, and even odder job applications, I applied to a teachers training college in Canterbury, I chose art as my main subject, to be honest, not because I thought I could draw well but simply because I thought it was the easiest option. I learned a lot at this college, mainly that I didn't really want to be a teacher! However I also discovered that I had a wide range of creative talents. With no real background I was, it seemed, quite good at a lot of things, including painting, drawing, pottery and textile design, writing poetry and drama. The downside being that I was not exceptionally good at any one of them. Forced to specialise I surprisingly chose textile design because of the wide variety of techniques available and there was no graphics department.
On leaving college I led pretty much the traditional/cliché artist life: penniless and living in an attic. I moved back to London and then on to The Netherlands. A new town, Breda, and several new attics. I had several exhibitions, in cafés, cultural centres and minor galleries, some more successful than others. I went through various phases and artistic styles but increasingly visual 'jokes' were creeping into my work. Almost without realising it I evolved into a cartoonist. At first illustrating educational material, then books, pamphlets and public service campaigns. Yes, I even earned some money!  Well - enough to provide myself with regular meals!
My main body of work over the years has included annual illustrations for a writer and publisher of books on management, weekly and monthly spots on trade magazines and work for various departments of Breda City Council, a local pressure group representing the interests of the handicapped and chronically sick, Phillips and Mikrocentrum a high-tech institute in Eindhoven.
Apart from illustrating other peoples books, magazines and articles a book I both wrote and illustrated was printed and published in Kyrgyzstan, now that doesn't happen to everybody!!!   

Have Pen (2)

If I could draw as soon as I could hold a crayon, I started writing as soon as I could join letters together or maybe even before. I have no idea what I found to write about at that age! My memoires or the meaning of life maybe? Probably not, I think there were a lot of cops, robbers, cowboys, indians and pirates involved. Through junior and secondary school I enjoyed writing essays. Essays were the only pieces of homework that I ever managed finished on time. In those days at school and later in college exams were not mulitiple choice, we mostly had written exams and, here's something I wouldn't have admitted to my fellow students at the time, I liked them. I was never very good at names and dates but given a pen,unlimited paper and two or three uninterrupted hours to write I could generally write enough around and about most subjects to convince the examiners and, unlike homework,  I enjoyed doing it.

By the time I went to college, which was several years after leaving school, I had started writing poetry. Some friends who were studying English persuaded me, with some difficulty, to show my poems to the head of the English department. He was so impressed that the same friends, all aspiring poets, regretted having sent me to him! My work was published in many British fringe poetry magazines and, when I moved to the continent, also in Dutch and Belgian publications. Hard to believe now but I even gave some poetry readings and, I have suddenly remembered, I had a book of poems published by a small independent Dutch publisher! I wonder if anybody still has a copy? I don't.

I also wrote some songs for a rock band, I needn't have bothered, no one could hear the words, a few sha-la-la's or doo-wa-diddies would have done just as well! 

At some point painting and then cartooning took over, pushing any writing into a distant second place. What I did write was limited to translation work on a wide variety of subjects, from sociology to sperm donation, and occasional short English texts for websites or presentations. It was only about seven years ago that I seriously started writing again having decided to begin a monthly column for a handful of students in Kyrgyzstan.I always found it difficult to write or concentrate on anything much longer than a poem or a short story and even more difficult to decide if I wanted to be serious or funny. Writing these columns, which now have a much wider audience, enables me to be both – often at the same time.

Will Travel

I like to think of myself as something of a traveller but the truth is although I may travel more than most people I have travelled a whole lot less than many others. Anyway if a desire to travel is genetically determined my chances were no better than 50- 50.
My father was a hard working man but when there were things to do around the house that he couldn't, or wouldn't be bothered with, he would say “I'll do it when I come back from my holidays”... he never , ever, went on holidays. 
My mother was quite the opposite, if fact she went out one day and kept going all the way to the West Indies leaving me at home alone with my father while my sister was sent to live with strangers.  
When my mother returned a year or so later my parents must have come to some sort of agreement, after that they lived, not exactly together, but under the same roof. Why? I can only speculate but whatever the reason this agreement didn't involve family holidays and certainly not trips to foreign countries!

I did run away from home once when I was about seven years old. The escape was well planned and cleverly executed however I had not thought things through. Once out I had nowhere to go!

I was soon recaptured.

Going Back

My trips back to England are not particularly frequent and a whole lot of things have changed since I left Britain more than 30 years ago...and so have I. What's more - they go on changing with the result that each time I return I feel like I am in some sort of parallel universe. Many things seem at first sight familiar but then again nearly everything is in some way different. The names of the shops on the high streets have changed. In restaurants I am not sure what to order. Worse, in pubs I often don't even know which beer to ask for! I am constantly, unrealistically, amazed by the prices. Not because things are so much more expensive but because I have an outdated concept of the pound and due to the infrequency of my visits prices always seem to have increased by huge amounts while, in fact, they have been creeping up incrementally, day by day, like everywhere else!  

Not obviously a foreigner but hesitant with my choices, puzzled by the prices and fumbling with coins I am no longer familiar with, I'm sure shop or bar staff think that I am mentally deficient in some way and who can blame them. In a totally foreign country difficulty with the currency, prices and terminology is all part of the fun but being a stranger in my country of origin is at best a surreal experience at worst it makes me feel really stupid!

 

 

Everything does eventually start falling into place but by then it's time for me leave!