Well, the return journey from Brussels was a nightmare. The coach started out in Bosnia, and arrived an hour late, with a harrassed german driver. When we reached Calais, French customs made us all get off the coach and take our luggage out of the hold and put it through the x-ray machine. They didn't confiscate the 16 bottles of beer in mine, thank goodness. And then when we went through British customs, they just asked for our passports, but some foolish woman from hungary had just brought her ID card, and so they spent 50 minutes on the phone to the Hungarian embassy, confirming details. So we were two hours late getting to London, and therefore missed the Proms concert I'd prebooked, three hours of Handel, maybe a good thing at that point.  And then when we checked into our accommodation, they put us in the new block where building work was going on, rather than the pretty old building, very annoying.  But we survived.  However, it seems like it hasn't stopped raining since, and i've checked the "Build your own Ark" book out of the public library. And being as a bank holiday weekend is upon us, we can expect, storms, torrential rain and high winds, perfect for those poor souls at Reading Festival or Notting Hill Carnival.  So I'm going to sit tight with constant cups of hot chocolate and pringles and watch the classic Dr Who marathon on the SciFi channel, so not a wasted weekend.

 

So we'll all expect a nice hot September then hopefully.

 

Holding my breath, NOT.

 

Mike.

Globetrotting again, staying in a lovely apartment in the diplomatic quarter of sunny Brussels. Lovely place, lots of parks, lots of monuments, went to Luxemburg and the Ardennes today, so beautiful, trees, gorges, rivers, worth a visit.  Off to Flanders tomorrow, Bruges, Ghent, lovely places, living towns with so many old buildings, not to mention the excellent chocolate, waffles and chips with mayonnaise (fries to our transatlantic cousins), will put on at least a stone.

Off to see the carpet of flowers in central Brussels tomorrow, a million flowers laid out like a tapestry in the main square, better take those hayfever tablets soon.  Back to London Saturday, with a Proms concert at the Albert Hall, Handel opera, magnificent.

 

Later,

 

Mike

Went to the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff on Wednesday, wanted Welsh culture and got it, just not in the way I was expecting.  To the non-welsh its the annual festival of amateur drama, music, singing, dancing and literature, all in the rejuvinated welsh language.

 

It was £12 (about $23) just to enter the showground, quite expensive by local standards. Most of the stalls were things like cars and overpriced craft stalls, with the odd charity and local government organisation, but you dont have to go in them do you.

 

The food was abysmal, greasy burgers, stodgy pasta, overfried Indian food, limp sandwiches and flat warm expensive beer (just like Glastonbury), so lunch was quick, but not painless. Then we had to wait for entry to the main tent (which was a nauseating pink colour), but that was our second mistake.

 

We had to sit through three welsh ladies singing exactly the same pair of songs, one after the other. The performances were excellent, although as i cant speak more than 4 words of welsh, subtitles would have been nice. But listening to the same songs repeatedly was not fun.

 

I then headed back to my aunts house in nearby Llandaff, had to wait 30 minutes for a taxi, and got rained on for dissing welsh culture.

 

Welsh culture, i'll stick to the bottled variety from now on.