London -> Stockholm -> London -> Canterbury -> London -> Gent -> Brussels -> London

Well folks, it’s been a while between blog posts, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been idle. In fact the last month has been very busy with travels and I’m going to cram trips to Stockholm, Canterbury and Belgium into this post. This obviously doesn’t do justice to the destinations, but then neither does spending just a weekend in them.

One Friday night shortly after my return from Egypt, Tony and I headed out to the airport and another low-cost flight, this time to Stockholm. Or rather, as is the low-cost want, to a small town > 100km from Stockholm. (For those concerned, like myself, about all this climate-change malacky, I have recently bought carbon credits for all the flights I took since leaving NZ. Whether this is truly worthwhile or just contributing to the retirement fund of someone clever enough to take advantage of well-meaning middle-class trying-to-be-eco-concious travellers, I’m not sure. Anyway, I did. And decided in the coming months to avoid planes a little more than I have been so far.) Our Chilean-Swedish host, Jose`, showed the overwhelming hospitality of couchsurfing, and wouldn’t let us sleep during the weekend because there was too much that we had to do. It is a very nice city, built on a series of islands and rivers, with a nice old quarter of church steeples and cobblestones. The Nobel Prize museum and the modern art gallery were excellent. It is hard to get a feeling for anywhere in so short a time, and I think even harder to understand Sweden by seeing only its cosmopolitan capital, and even harder from the generally reserved attitude of the natives. But it was a nice city, and would probably be a lot nicer in spring when things start to defrost, literally and otherwise.

Tony searching for the meaning of life (and finding only fishing ships)

We arrived back in London late on the sunday night, saw a fox (my first) snooping outside our flat as we arrived, and crashed straight to sleep. But there’s no rest for the wicked, and next weekend…

… we were back on the road. This time just down the road in fact, to Canterbury. It shares its name with my home province. Older for one. Much bigger and nicer cathedral for another.

The real Canterbury Cathedral

It is a very nice town and was the first place in England I’d really been. (London is definitely not England. It is the world.) Instead of endless fried chicken and kebabs there were cups of tea and warm ales.

Ye olde Canterbury

It was very nice. And the cathedral was amazing… someone had told me that it is the same as the one in Christchurch, but they obviously haven’t been there. It is very much older, wiser, and more ornate. It’s the home of the Church in England… Christianity was brought to the UK – before there was a UK – by the local king marrying someone from France, who brought the religion with her and the pagan masses of England were saved by the benevolent church. Hooray! The town really is like I picture England, and I liked it very much.

Chillaxed in London the next weekend, but did the tourist thing a bit too…

London

Last friday night at 630 met Tony and Lucas at Kings Cross – St Pancras station. Less than two hours later we were in the centre of Brussels. High speed rail is awesome. We then changed trains and headed out to Gent, where we stayed with a Belgian-Italian couple we’d hosted a few weeks earlier. I don’t know your preconceptions of Belgium, but mine were of a fairly dull, orderly country full of mussels and fried potatos. Which just reinforces a line from my favourite poem, which says that ‘the more one travels, the less one knows’. Once more I was reminded how wrong I was; Gent was full of artsy grafitti, funky bars, and had a very youthful vibe.

Old building in Gent

Crossword grafitti

And a mean castle. We then returned to Brussels and visited (amongst other things) a very large molecule and a statue of a boy urinating, and it was monday morning already and time for the train back to London. A really good weekend that seemed that much longer for being able to stay three nights instead of two, and visiting a couple of different places.

Lucas avec Atomium

Atomium avec Bruxelles