Yin and Yang

No light without dark, no hot without cold, no wet without dry. You get the picture. In the very short time we’ve been away it has been a study in contrasts. We had the quickest, smoothest most luxurious flight from Vancouver to London that you can imagine. We were pampered in the preflight lounge and it just got better from there. Who doesn’t love champagne and orange juice.
We felt like royalty when we arrived in London as we were whisked along and out through customs in a matter of minutes. Then began the real business. a bit of dark to make things interesting. How to get from Heathrow to Greenwich? Well, you need to take a train which you get to through a series of down and up many, many steep steps (no lifts here) then on to a tube then up again and on to another train and...you get the picture. As light as I packed (I really did) that bag felt like a dead body. I like to think of myself as a fairly emancipated twenty-first century female but when AJ said, “Here love let me take it and balance myself out,” I gave only the barest whimper of protest. “OH, OK are you sure....?”
WE LOVE LONDON. We can say that this time because we did it on such an intimate scale. No Tower Bridge tours for us. We stayed with cousin Rosin and her husband Richard and three of the sweetest, juiciest little girls - all big blue eyes, and cascades of curls.
Just so we can say we did it we went to a London show. Agatha Christie’s Moustrap which came with a Spanish tapas dinner. It was hot in that theater and we were a little time lagged so we looked like two metronomes with our heads bobbing up and down in sleepy two two time.
Most of our time in London involved putting mileage on our comfy shoes. Up hill and down dale to see the London Observatory and stand on either side of Greenwich Mean time. Then off to the Maritime Museum to have a really good look at Nelson’s uniform. The man was tiny but much revered.
There were torrential rains on and off all day so we kept ducking into shops and arcades and restaurants with a final visit to a bottle shop for (more) wine. It wasn’t until the next morning that we (I mean AJ) noticed how light his pocket was without his wallet. Yes, it’s gone. But as I said to him, “Good now you have that out of the way early in the trip we don’t have to worry about losing anything else. He looked very pale for quite a while but he seems all sorted out now.
So a blip of lost wallet to keep us on our toes and to remind us, “You’re not in Kansas any more.” . Roisin had a birthday while we were there and celebrated near Covent Garden with her husband we meanwhile we met up with our cousin Brendan whom we haven’t seen for eleven years. You know catching up on all that time is thirsty work so we moved slowly between pubs and soothed our parched throats and lubricated our memory banks.
I am sending this first post from John and Deb’s sunny conservatory in Cardiff, Wales. It has been so wonderful spending time with them and Luka. So much to talk about long into the night. They are tour guides par excellence taking us out to see cousin Dreda her husband Colin and their daughter Catherine and new little baby Dominic in Swansea with a side trip to Gower where the changeable weather provided vast vitas off wild and windy cliffs and our first taste of Welsh customer service.
We all ducked into a small cafe to have a hot dog and get out of the driving rain when out of nowhere landed a shrieking woman who had spotted John’s hot dog bought around the corner at the stand which is connected to the cafe. “No, she yelled, no, no, no. You can’t eat that in here. Out, take it out. It’s not fair to all the other people to eat that in here.” John calmly tried to tell her we were all going to sit down and order food but it was too late. He already had his hot dog in hand and she wasn’t backing down. So back out into the rain, around the wall to the other side to order our hot dogs. They were huge sausage like things in an even bigger bun. There it lay, all hot and stinky and naked as the day it was made. And no you can’t have any mustard or anything else for that matter. We all ate our dry dogs as best we could and left that friendly lot behind us.
Customer service is learned. I know we complain a lot in Canada about the lack of it. But compared to Wales, Canada is the creme de la creme of “How can we serve you today?”
An example. Today I took myself off to a very chi chi spa for a much needed massage. Speaking of yin and yang. The very young masseuse alternated between applying stabbing pain-filled pressure and patting at me in a little-kid like distracted way. Sigh. When I left to drop off the key the two “gits” at the front counter barely made eye contact with me and whisked themselves around in a wind-producing sweep to resume their very important conversation. Double sigh.

But I digress. Back to the light. John and Deb took us on a only slightly let’s get lost drive to the village of Avebury home of an ancient stone henge. Not as famous as the other Henge but oh so beautiful. Huge monoliths standing in a circle all around the town. The whole village surrounded by those incredible green English hills and fields of yellow canola flowers. Impervious to all the tourists, untroubled by all the sheep which wandered around them pooping and chewing, the stones stand silent and unblinking. Unlike its more famous brother you can come right up to these stones and stroke them. I wonder if it was the ploughman's lunch and two Strongbow that made those rocks seem to sing?



And so the happy travelers piled back in the car again and off to Bath. Yes that Bath. Home of the ancient and sacred hot springs. And yes there is a spa there but our timing was bad. Unfortunate, because then I could have done a compare and contrast with Welsh customer service.
We have been away a week. I worry that I will go into sensory overload with still a very long time to go. Maybe I need to be more selective about what I let into my memory bank otherwise it’s going to get very crowded in there.

By PJ



post script

In the future we will choose photos that are correctly oriented as BlogSpot cannot rotate photos.

just to add a note that this has been a very relaxing time and I, AJ, am looking forward to our adventures