Huge Bag Found on Street!

SURELY THIS IS A SIGN! I found an enormous sports bag ~ almost big enough to hold golf clubs and hence lots of German books and clothes ~ with trundlesome wheels on the bottom at the end of the next road along from me yesterday afternoon, so I thoroughly enjoyed trundling it behind me, imagining I was on the way to the Saint Pancreas International for the beginning of my Berlin expedition.

I know what y'all are thinking: Let's wait and see what actually happens. I've heard enough bluster and guff from this blogger to keep a fleet of hot air balloons afloat!

Well I am going to Berlin. Berlin is one of my top three "most want to see" cities on earth, along with New York and Tokyo.

I don't know how on earth I'm going to get there, by the way. Not a single website I've found will sell me one all-in ticket London to Berlin return. I don't know why. Only last month I heard a government minister blustering about high-speed rail infrastructure. What's the point of all those whizzy trains and new tracks if you can't go where you want? I am NOT going by plane, unless I really have to. It's the stopovers along the way (and it's looking like Paris at the moment, with a €50 sleeper "couchette" each way, which would push the cost of tickets up to £170) that are half the fun. If I took the Eurostar out of London on a Sunday, I could see the Paris bird-market, which is amazing. All those feathery little pixies tweetling away on the pavements...

Today I found a book by my illustrious old German teacher, who (I found out years later) was being tipped as a potential Nobel laureate ~ until he died in a car crash in 2001. Austerlitz by W G Sebald. He was known to us at UEA as Max Sebald and he taught my German grammar class. OK, I seem to recall it might have been just once when the ordinary teacher was sick, but he did teach me German grammar!

Click here for a beautiful blogger's writeup on the marché aux oiseaux in Paris ...

Underground Overground

FURTHER to my metro/subway/tube post the day before yesterday ~ about tube stations in cities near and far of which I know nothing about where they actually ARE ~ ie what's actually there above ground, here's the pictures:

TOKYO: HIGASHI-NIHONBASHI



Nihombashi/Nihonbashi (you can spell it either way) "Japan Bridge East" is Tokyo's major business district, full of high class hotels...

BERLIN: UNTER DEN LINDEN



This is what's actually under the legendary lime trees ~ rather a nice park with the Brandenburger Schloss at the end...

PARIS: LA MOTTE PICQUET GRENELLE



This interchange station, about 2 stops from the hostel where I once stayed in Commerce, in the 15th arrondisement, on line number 8, direction Balard, marks the intersection of Aveunue de la Motte Picquet and Avenue de la Grenelle. Pictured above: Avenue de la Motte Picquet (all very left bank) ~ and very swish!

LONDON: MUDCHUTE



Although, most disappointingly, there is no mud and no chutes to be seen at this DLR station, Mudchute is, amazingly, well known for its city farm where sheep graze against a backdrop of glittering towers..!

Metro Mystery...

SURELY y'all remember arriving in a big city, full of names ~ legendary and half familiar... you get off the plane, train or bus wanting to see as much of this place as possible ~ yet the first thing you have to do is plunge into a hole deep underground and ride the city's metro system before you can really see anything.

These are five metro stations in four cities (only 2 of which I've been to). The metro stations themselves are a point of fascination because I NEVER GOT TO SEE what was actually there...

PARIS:



Paris was the first metropolis I ever got to wander round at leisure for days on end ~ not London (long story). I was there for just over a week and saw more of Paris in this time than just about any place I'd ever been on earth.

LA MOTTE PIQUET GRENELLE was the interchange station about two stops from the Three Ducks Hostel in Commerce ~ which has a traditional provincial style park where old men play boules ~ and is about 10 mins walk from the Eiffel Tower. A pretty cool place to stay.
The name evokes no imagery in my mind as I haven't a clue what a motte, piquet or grenelle mean, but there is something catchy about those words, which is why it remains in my brainbox to this day...



LONDON: MUDCHUTE

In theory I should have seen something of this, perhaps the ugliest-named place in town, because the EastEnd Docklands Light Railway runs above ground. But no. No mud... and no chutes! Pity!



BERLIN: UNTER DEN LINDEN

Linden trees are lime trees. Unter den Linden U-bahn stop was for many years just to the west side of the Berlin wall and, railways aside, I have always wondered exactly WHAT is under those legendary trees...

TOKYO: HIGASHI NIHOMBASHI



You could translate this literally as "Eastern Japan Bridge", or render it in metro speak as "Japan Bridge East"...
I like the way it rhymes. And I would like to see the bridge. And I really want to go to Tokyo one day soon...



TOKYO: TSUKISHIMA

This means "moon island"... I would really like to see the moon shining on this mysterious isle in central Tokyo...

YOU CAN FIND OUT WHAT'S above/around these stations by clicking the highlighted links...

PS: so much for romantic images of the moon glittering mysteriously on waters around silhouetted kimono-clad geisha-girls strumming tuneless mandolins against cherry-blossom-strewn pagodas. THIS is what "Moon Island" actually looks like!!

I Dream of Paris

I KEEP DREAMING I'M IN FRANCE ... more specifically in Paris. In these dreams I'm ecstatically happy, the sun is shining, I have a feeling you only ever have when on holiday abroad (a feeling that keeps coming in random flashes more and more these days). Last night I was marvelling at the beauty of the French language as some unseen person babbled away...

... What these dreams mean I have no idea. But I decided if it doesn't work out on German-speaking shores, I would flee to France instead (which just came out with the highest quality of life rating in Europe) ...

Illustrated: Paris as it actually looks when you're there. Probably the "Left Bank"...

Mon rêve parisien: la vie en rose

ZUT ALORS!!... last "night" I slept in (and in; and in...) longer and longer until it was past 3pm. I must have needed the sleep... and my dreams! I was dreaming galore! My heart tells me to up and flee to Berlin or Paris. I am in a quandry as to which, but as I know Paris a little, I dreamed about there...

Illustrations: top: metro map and RER map below that ... (click twice to see in vast detail); left: Paris nightscape; right: Galleries Lafayette, view up from the perfume hall...)

Galleries Lafayette (Parisian Harrods).. Shakespeare & Co. (English language bookstore providing free accommodation to anyone willing to muck in int shop that day...) the pursuing aroma of doggies' diarrhoea from Parisian pavements (all those pampered pooing pooches...) and the most luxurious of luxury goods I have ever seen (on the Champs Elysees)... only place in my life I've ever glimpsed a genuine crocodile-skin bag! And I'll never forget the amazing Egyptian room in the Louvre. Or the assistant who directed me there, stopping my dead half way through my "excusez-moi madame; où se trouve le département des antiquités égyptiens et orientales?" with a halting hand and a businesslike: "what language?"!

... and later following signposts to La Joconde... eventually to file amonst a transcontinental crowd into a chamber where from about 4m or 12 ft away and through the bulletproof sheen of several smoked glass coffee-table-tops I was at long last able to glimpse the tiniest and most famous painting on earth: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa!

The best art in Paris is to be found in the Orsay museum. A bright, light and airy former railway terminus, this features a room packed with about 20 Van Goughs. All I could think as I craned to within inches of the legendary brush-strokes ~ and how they stick out! ~ and through no glass, no barriers bar an ankle-height metal string... This was the late 80s/very early 90s when Sunflowers and Irises had sold for upwards of £50m each or $100m a piece (in today's money) ~ I was in the presence of over a billion dollars' worth of modern art!

The Mona Lisa, incidentally, was vlued by would-be insurers at $100 million at the turn of the 20th Century. So costly in fact was the premium that the Louvre baulked at sending it on an American voyage and, one adventurous theft aside, it has remained at home in Paris ever since... Where its value has surely surpassed the one billion dollar mark...

My Mum, who spends some months a year in a 2nd home in the French countryside (where I've never been invited) described an hilarity moment back here in Angleterre when, caught up amongst a roomful of babbling fellow-humans, she quite unexpectedly realized: wow! I can understand every word they're saying! She's definitely a chip off the same block as me: my lifelone obsession with acquiring exotic languages stems from a sheer repulsion of not being able to understand similar crowds of foreigners from my own childhood as they blibble-blebble-blobbled in "foreign" ~ a tongue I had decided I should master so that nobody would speak over my head ever again!

Photo-blog of the Day:
Misty's Musings www.mistysmusings.com
... fantastic wildlife shots...