I used to post to my blog about various holiday travels. I wont try to catch up on the past two years, but here’s a little post about Strasbourg where my girlfriend and I spent a pleasant long weekend (avoiding jubilee). Some photos mainly. Photos of food mainly. Strasbourg is in the Alsace region of France on the border with germany, which has some great specialities.

I had this in a restaurant in London once where it was described as “Alsacian pizza”, but it’s not a pizza, it’s a “tarte flambée”. Thinner than a pizza with no tomato, but with white creamy sauce.

“Choucroute” is the french word for sauerkraut, but you can also order a full dish named choucroute, which is the pickled cabbage with assorted meats swimming around in it.

This one’s called “Baeckeoffe”, which I hadn’t heard of before, but wikitravel told me to try it, so I did. It’s a hot-pot of pork, spuds and other veg.

In case you thought Strasbourg was all about food…

This is the view from the top of the cathedral. Lots of steps to climb. A good way to work up an appetite.

This is the “petit France” and on the right there is a very nice restaurant with friendly waiters. I’m still talking about food aren’t I?

Tell you what. Here’s a skeleton:

Can’t remember if this one is stone age or bronze aged or iron aged… but it’s old. The archeology museum in Strasbourg talks about how human settlers were in the region going back at least 600,000 years, since before they’d sussed out how to make fire!

In case you missed all my gloating tweets (@harry_wood), I’ve been away in Brazil in the baking summer sunshine for the past three weeks. Here’s some pics:

There’s more on facebook too.

Another great Brazil holiday. I’m starting to get to know the girlfriend’s family a bit better despite not really speaking Portuguese at all.  Spent Christmas with them this time. Lots of amazing food! I can feel a new years resolution coming on… Learn some Portuguese. I gathered a fair bit more mapping data for the São Paulo map, and meeting the other paulistano mappers was a lot of fun. We also got away from São Paulo for some beach time in Ilhabela and Fortaleza. We saw in the new year there, with spectacular fireworks on the beach.

Of course the only year I’ve ever not been at home for Christmas, and the UK has it’s first white Christmas in years. Gah! It’s quite a shock to be back in the cold #uksnow after the heat of Brazil. In fact my baggage didn’t make the flight connection at Madrid on the way home, so I had to head home from heathrow without my big jacket (Given the level of competence on show by the Spanish iberia staff organising connecting flights, this wasn’t a surprise) At first I thought this wouldn’t be a big deal, since I had fortunately stuffed some trousers and a fleece in my hand luggage, but the 10 min walk from my local tube station to my house was a chilly welcome back to the UK. I could feel my sun tan peeling off.

So… 2010!  Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!

Went to Liverpool last weekend. Fabiana wanted to go sight-seeing there before she heads back to Brazil.

We stayed in Jurys Inn, which was good value, but a bit travelodgish, and breakfast was unpleasantly busy. Nice shiny new building though. Near the Albert Dock. There’s lots of shiny new buildings in Liverpool actually. Some of the shopping areas are spectacular, and we saw them adding the final stone cladding to outside of a snazzy new river front museum of Liverpool. We’ll have to go back for that one.

We also saw the modern (but not quite so brand new) architecture of the Metropolitan cathedral. Seeing the bells ringing at the front was pretty cool. There’s another “Liverpool Cathedral” in Liverpool which is less well known I suppose, being as it’s a boring old normal cathedral, but we wandered over to check it out, and it was well worth it actually. It’s massive! We called in at the liverpool tate for some art too, but unfortunately left this until we were knackered and could hardly stand up any more.

We did those things on Sunday. Our priority had been to go see “the Beatles Story” museum. I vaguely remember wanting to go into this as a kid while the parents were dragging us around art galleries and boring shops in Albert docks. Didn’t go then, probably because it’s quite expensive. £12 for an adult. Not sure if it’s worth it really, but it was quite interesting.

It really does tell the “story” of the Beatles from beginning to end, which gives you a feel for what a bonkers time it was (the 60s I mean). The Beatles were lucky, as any band which reaches megastardom is, but they were lucky to have struck at just that time too, before we’d had any megastar bands before, and seemingly just as the world was ready for some cheeky chappies from Liverpool. I also learned the sad story of their manager Brian Epstein, who was a friendly, enthusiastic, supportive guiding force who did a brilliant job of launching them on the world stage, but eventually he died of an overdose of anti-depressants. The Beatles fell apart shortly after. You don’t really hear his tale as much as the John Lennon shooting thing.

Afterwards on the Saturday night we headed to the Cavern (where the Beatles played lots of gigs). We went into the cavern pub instead of the cavern club, but then I think I read that neither of them are really like the original anyway. Quite good though. Saw some live music.

After eating we found a chaotic street (here I think) full of drunken party goers surrounded on all sides by blaring music from pub/clubs. We went into one which was a 90s bar. A “90s” bar! Are we far enough away from the 90s to start having 90s bars?? The cheesy banging dance music brought back a few memories… yes apparently we are far enough away.

I’ve been having a chilled out week back home in Yorksestershire. Fairly subdued New Years celebrations last night, due to many friends choosing to do something different from the usual. “What?? What d’you mean you don’t want to get together and get drunk?”. Bah! Everyone’s getting old. I still managed to guzzle quite a few beers washed down with quite a few glasses of bubbly.

My older sister lost in our little competition for who would be the first to not show up to the family Christmas. Guess that means the world is my oyster next year. I no longer need to feel compelled to be here. But I always enjoy Christmas here. It always involves lots of food, and is usually a reasonably chilled out experience if you ignore the family arguments. This year we brought Grandma up to Yorkshire with us which probably made us all argue slightly less.

Egypt

Before coming back for Christmas we had a holiday in Egypt. We decided to sneak that one in there since Francine is currently out of work, and we were both feeling the need for some warm sunshine. We had a fair bit of that, plus snorkeling on the red sea, a Cruise on the Nile, and visits to the pyramids and many other ancient Egyptian temples.

We found it to be quite a culture shock dealing with taxi drivers and the people selling stuff in Egypt. Of course you know about these things from reading a description, but going through the process of haggling and the worry of whether you’re getting a sensible price for something was surprisingly stressful. After a while it felt like we got better at it, and almost enjoyed it at times, but at first it was quite unpleasant. The best example of this was a taxi driver who was so determined to demand extra money from us that Francine resorted to flinging open the doors while it was speeding down the motorway to force him to stop while we discussed it! It’s a shame I only studied my wikitravel printout in detail after this happened (excellent information about Cairo taxis)

Luckily we’d booked onto a guided tour for most of the Holiday. I imagine you could have a fairly miserable holiday doing stressful transactions for every meal and every mode of transport if you decided to go it alone, or maybe I’m just not adventurous enough. In any case the guided tours of all the temples were excellent. Two Egyptians talked us through about ten different temples and other sights. They were obviously very knowledgeable (qualified Egyptologists) This was travel talk booked via travelmood.

We loved Northampton so much last time we decided to come back again. This time visiting Nick & Joe in their new house near the old lift testing tower which was looking spooky in the nighttime fog.

For a wild Northampton night out, we went and played bingo! It was quite good… as an experience. …I mean …I suppose it’s something everyone should try at least once.

….maybe just once in fact.

tempted?Bingo announcers (or whatever they’re called) have a funny way of reading out numbers. e.g. “Four and six, forty-six…. All the threes, thirty three….  nine and one, ninety-one….” and so it goes on. It goes quite fast, and one interesting aspect of the rules we didn’t really realise at the time: If you are lucky enough to get a “line” or two lines or a “full house” you have to shout out as soon as the number has been called out. If they’ve moved on to the next number, you’ve missed it! No prize money for you! Would have been quite annoying to find this out the hard way. As it was, we didn’t get any lines or full houses, but then it seemed like quite a big bingo hall. Probably 200-odd people. So the chances were pretty slim. Everyone groans each time somebody wins, which was quite amusing to join in with.

I said I would blog about my nice holiday in the South of France (catching up on a blogging today)

We were staying with a bunch of friends in a villa somewhere between Nimes and Montpellier (map). September was pleasantly hot but never too hot, and pleasantly un-crowded with tourists in the various places we visited: Montpellier, Nimes, Pont do Gard, Carnon Plage, Petite Rhone, and Aigue Mortes. I was surprised by the number of things to see in these places. Even the local un-touristy towns like St Christol and Somieres, were fun to look around, with charming historical steets, and a mediterranean sun-baked atmosphere.

It was great to catch up with Nick again, and Latham’s antics with Beany’s pink poker set were highly entertaining. On this holiday I learned to play poker properly for the first time, having tried and failed to understand anything on many previous occasions. I think I’m missing the part of the brain which is good at remembering card game rules.

So I should present you with all my gloriously sunny holiday snaps now… but I can’t. I carefully separated out my photos so that all the boring photo mapping pictures of street signs were seperate from my proper holiday snaps. I then left my holiday snaps on a laptop locked in a cupboard in the other office. I’ll stick ’em on facebook eventually.

Among the mapping pics I did find this nice picture of the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes. This was a highlight of the holiday actually. Running around the castle walls like a medieval knight carrying a message for the king… with only 20 minutes to go until our parking ticket ran out! In fact I’ve created the wikitravel.org article for Aigues-Mortes