I got an email from Virgin Atlantic about this. Here is a link to the news as reported in the London Telegraph. Yahoo! (I love Virgin).
From Deutsche Welle.
Greek olive oil is some of the best, but producers need a way to get the stuff onto the global market as the terrific oil that it is. Currently, Greek olive oil is mixed with Italian to improve the Italian oil. Greek farmers are looking into ways to get their product on the market so they can increase profitability.
From France 24.
Milan’s Duomo needs 25 million euros for cleaning. Budget cuts won’t begin to cover the costs, so they’ve come up with an interesting idea – adopt a gargoyle! The price to adopt one gargoyle is 100,000 euros, but smaller donations can be made on the campaign’s website. The website is in Italian, but clicking on the English version brings you to getyourspires.com. I linked to the Italian version just because I like the sound of the Italian phrase ‘adotta una guglia’.
It’s just a tad curious that the website talks mostly about the spires. Still, I suppose the grime affects the entire structure, not just on the gargoyles. It may also be that the website has been used for a variety of fund-raising efforts over the years. The gargoyle thing was only announced today.
From Deutsche Welle.
The EU is letting non-EU airlines off the hook for carbon emissions regulations, at least for the time being. I suppose that’s nice because it will be one less reason to boost the prices on plane tickets. On the other hand, it just aggravates that climate change thing, dont’cha think?
From France 24. A proposed tax on one of Nutella’s main ingredients could cause a price increase. Quel horreur! This is the French equivalent to a price increase on Oreos or Coca Cola here, I think.
From Rick’s Facebook page, an interview with Seattle Business. His opinions on travel and the business of travel are deeper than mine even if his travel habits are similar to many of mine – simultaneous creation.
From France 24. Sounds amazing to me, but there it is. France gave the Aussies an absolute thrashing for the first time in 7 years.
From the London Independent.
Britain is not the first or second place on most lists of European destinations with great cooking classes. These classes sound interesting enough, though, that I’d seriously consider building a future trip to include at least one. Not the one with the “basic butchery skills” though. Chocolate, cheese, beer – now those could be a whole lot of fun. Expensive, but fun.
This weekend’s Tube closures in London will mean big headaches all over.
All of the Northern Line from Charing X north, the Central line (Sunday only) west from North Acton and large sections of several other lines all weekend.
Disruptions will be equally messy next weekend, then December outages will be minimal until the Christmas -New Years week when several lines will be affected by line and station work. Here is the planned works calendar for TfL.
From Oxford Mail. Blenheim Palace’s sheep are now producing wool for a green scheme, in addition to their lambs.
And here I was thinking all they did was keep the grass down to save on landscaping costs!
From DutchNews. A heads-up if you are planning a trip soon which includes taking the train between Rotterdam and Antwerp – the only train beginning on 9 December will be the (expensive) high-speed Fyra train. Budget accordingly.
From Oxford Mail. Oxford Blue, a gastro-pub in East Oxford that’s getting a whole lotta buzz.
From Deutsche Welle. New euro notes will go into circulation starting in 2013. The new notes are designed to combat the rise in counterfeiting.
As an amusing observation – the bill shown in the article is a 600 euro note (no such thing) and the images on it are much more interesting than anything on the real bills.
I usually have a few notes left over after a trip but this time I only had one ten-euro note unspent. That was partly because I put most of my euro cash on a pre-loaded debit card from Travelex. Slightly expensive, but worth it for the convenience. You just have to be careful that you don’t run out because these cards are not easily reloadable and, depending on where you get the card itself, ATMs often can’t see what the balance is. I have less than two euros left on that card! The way you find out is to try to use it and it gets rejected but, again, no balance.
This weekend’s Tube closures in London are similar to last weekend’s – pretty light.
Paddington is closed for Circle and Hammersmith/City, the northern reaches of a few other lines are shut and London Overground between Islington and W Croydon.
Disruptions will be messier on the following two weekends, then December will be minimal until Christmas thru New Years when several lines will experience outages throughout the week. Here is the planned works calendar for TfL.
In case padlocks on a bridge might already be feeling old, a wire strung across the end of a side street near the river has become home to pairs of shoes.
Mostly sneakers, tied together by their laces and flung up onto the wire, it might be seen as a bizarre street decoration until you realize that Ljubljana is a college town. What could be more normal?
“high” street art in Ljubljana
Pedestrian bridges in cities around the world are acquiring spontaneous decorations from lovers – padlocks. This global custom is popping up in all sorts of places. While the first city where it cropped up may be an open question (Paris claims it started there), there is no denying its growing widespread appeal.
The idea is that two people declare their love by putting their names or initials or other message on a small padlock. Then they fasten the lock to the bridge and toss the key into the river below.
I saw two such bridges in surprising places on this last trip (see slideshow).
Salzburg, Austria – the chain link on Makartsteg Bridge over the Salzach River turns the padlocks into more of an art installation than Ljubljana’s almost hardware store display. These padlocks looked more colorful even as the shackles began to rust and the inscriptions – scratched by hand or professionally produced – more personal because they faced the bridge. Give Matthew credit, he’s covering all his bases!
Ljubljana, Slovenia – The cable wires on Ljubljana’s Butchers’ Bridge (the original name) spanning the Ljubljanica River mean that the padlocks can nestle together and the faces of the locks can’t be read from a distance. On the upside, there’s plenty of room to add more. Part of the bridge pavement is made of glass which is unnerving to stand on. The blue cable lock raises an interesting question – is this a combination lock and if so, are the lovers hedging their bets in case things don’t work out? Just wondering.
In all these cities though, I find myself wondering 1 – what happens to the padlock if the relationship crashes? and 2 – do the keys piling up on the riverbeds pose any health issues for any fish down there? OK, OK, so maybe if I clamped a padlock to a bridge somewhere in the world I wouldn’t be thinking about the poor fishies. (Untrue. I always worry about the other critters on the planet).
There are two other concerns, at least in Paris – the physical aesthetic of having an iconic piece of the city buried under a bunch of ugly padlocks and the idea that love should be represented by an item as closed and unforgiving as a padlock.
See? The holiday season can start early when Thanksgiving Day is not part of the calendar. Guy Fawkes day is November 5, then it’s off to the races!
Covent Garden has lots of activities planned, including live reindeer on the weekends as well as plenty of holiday decoration to put you in the mood. HoHoHo!
I flew to Dubrovnik, Croatia the day before the packaged tour I signed up for began. My express goal was to visit Mostar in Bosnia. There are day trips by bus from Dubrovnik most days. When you look at a map, you see that Croatia is actually divided in two, separated by about 15 miles of coastal Bosnia, which is where the excursion leaves the main coastal road and heads inland towards Mostar. Before you come to Mostar, though, there are a couple of stops to make.
There’s only one Bosnian town along the Adriatic – Neum. It has a dozen or so large seaside hotels, some restaurants, a bunch of smaller places to stay and, like most of small town Europe, many private homes offering accommodation.
Neum, Bosnia
view of the Adriatic and Elephati Islands from Neum
According to Wikipedia, Neum has a population approaching 5000. The most active spot in the town seems to be a mandatory rest stop for tour buses. How the drivers of these motorcoach behemoths manage to wedge their vehicles into the shallow parking lot without bouncing off one another or ripping off their floppy bunny-ear side-view mirrors is a marvel. Most Dunkin’ Donuts shops have bigger parking lots than this! One or two guys are always on hand to signal the drivers just how many (or how few) inches there are between their bus’s bumper and the next guys’.
Neum’s tour bus pit-stop (the empty part of the lot in foreground usually holds at least four more buses)
You recall I said mandatory rest stop? I’d be willing to bet this tour bus pit-stop pulls in as much money on any given day as some of the hotels. I visited it three times in the space of two days. Two of these were on this excursion between Dubrovnik and Mostar; the third time was on the Dalmatian Sunshine tour as we left Dubrovnik and headed north towards Split and other destinations to the north. I know, I know, distressingly touristy but they’ve got to start somewhere. In addition to a small cafe with its much-appreciated toilets, there was an ice cream vendor, a coffee bar across the highway (pretty safe to cross this main highway, since all the tour buses were either entering or leaving the parking lot, not screaming down the road) and a small market underneath the cafe. The market had all the usual souvenir tchotchkes as well as packaged snacks, fresh and dried fruits, breads, cheeses and salamis, bottled water, juices, soda and beer in the cooler and bottles of wine. Bus drivers loaded cases of bottled water into cargo areas to sell to passengers later on for 1 euro per bottle. No opportunity goes unexploited.
On the way to Mostar, the bus stopped at the tiny Muslim village of Počitelj.
welcome to Počitelj
Wikipedia says the village has 900 inhabitants, but there were so few buildings visible from the roadside, it seemed to have far fewer than that. Like almost everywhere else I went on in this trip, streets and paths were painfully cobbled and steep. No health club needed here; just walking uphill the fifty yards or so to the mosque gives you all the cardio workout you could possibly need.
Počitelj pomegranates
Villagers were selling fresh and dried fruits and colorful knick-knacks which may or may not have been locally made. In a large courtyard near the road stood a large specimen of my favorite tree in the world, an albrizia, (aka mimosa).
Počitelj mimosa
Its signature puffy, pink-and-white blossoms popped up among a dense canopy of feathery leaves that hid the delicate branches, leaves that fold up at night or during a rainstorm. What a nice surprise.
I probably should have bought some fruit, too, but I was all too aware of my much-less-than-adequate budget for this trip and also felt that the first day of the trip was not the time to be testing the lining of my stomach with the local produce. Hindsight is 20-20 (I never had any problems) but this part of Europe is arguably the most exotic place I’ve ever visited. It could have turned out differently.
view of Neretva river from Počitelj
The visit here only lasted about 15 or 20 minutes. Next stop – Mostar.
For those who don’t know, easyJet is a cheapo carrier that flies from the UK to lots of destinations in continental Europe. The planes are small, the seats don’t recline, the food and drink is not free and there are no reserved seats, though there will be a small number of reserved seats offered in the near future.
I’ve used them to fly to Prague and Dubrovnik – both times leaving from Gatwick – and find the corners they cut are bearable because the flights are nonstop and flight times are short when compared with the 7 hour trans-Atlantic marathon that bookends my trips to Europe.
Here are some new destinations they’ve added.
This weekend’s Tube closures in London are some of the least disruptive I’ve seen.
Mostly station closures and a few partial line closures that begin beyond the Circle Line area.
From France 24.
Archaeology is a fascinating topic and this news item about Europe’s oldest prehistoric town being uncovered near Provadia, Bulgaria is no exception.
From the London Independent. Another top ten list, this time for autumn walks. The article is called walks in Britain but from what I see, they’re all in England.
Here are this weekend’s London Tube outage updates. Lotsa work. Lotsa disruption.
From the London Independent.
I always thought that if my dad had lived to see cannabis legalized and had the inclination, he would have had results like this! They just don’t mention how tall the thing was.
Aah! Leave it to AOL…
From Deutsche Welle a few weeks ago. Air passenger rights when European flights are cancelled are being improved.
It was bad enough when they found high levels of methanol in vodka last month. It killed people who drank it. There was also some tainted rum found at the time.
From Prague Post. Now a new stash of local rum has been found in a warehouse with lethally high levels of methanol.
Best stick to the beer for now.
This weekend’s Tube closures in London include partial closures on several lines, including most of the Victoria line and all of the Circle line, although the color-coded map doesn’t show this. The double closure between Earls Court and Edgware Rd is in force again, since both lines serving that path are shut. Folks will have to find the “long way round the barn” to reach Bayswater, Notting Hill Gate and other destinations on that side of the parks.
High speed rail services between A’dam and Brussels will boost prices by almost 30%. Yikes! From DutchNews. US tourists would do well to double-check prices from RailEurope in case there are savings to be had there.
Then there is the possibility that some regular train services will disappear as a result of the high speed implementation. The high speed trains don’t stop in the Hague but the ‘slow’ trains they are replacing did, which cuts service to den Haag, a major center that can’t exactly be called a backwater. Somebody should be rethinking this revised train schedule.
While followers of this blog wait breathlessly for my upcoming posts on Croatia, Slovenia and beyond (yeah, right), take a peek at ten of the best autumn walks in Britain. From London Independent. Length varies between one and nine miles, so no excuses!
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Don’t wait to see if you’re collecting regrets to feed on in twenty years’ time. Define your travel dreams and GO!
SuzanneTheTravelMagpie 