Bye Iceland, hi London, bye London, hi Zermatt

Oops, haven’t kept this up to date.

Iceland was fun, great catching up with friends, but unfortunately the weather didn’t play nice and I didn’t get to see the northern lights, just the northern clouds.

It didn’t get too cold there, but I did get to dance in snow!

Flying out of Iceland was delayed by an hour as it was too windy for them to open the aircraft door to let the previous passengers off! It was a tarmac gate and when our bus got to the stairs it was hailing horizontally. I was rather pleased I was wearing my jacket 😂.

Then it was an overnight in London, which included replacing my day pack with something better than the absolute garbage Amazon one I was using. 

My next destination was Zermatt, I have reasons for going there, and I could get there by flying to Geneva and then catching a train… or I could take a train from London to Zermatt.

This involved the Eurostar from London to Paris, then a rather complicated navigation to Paris Lyon station, since the usual method (metro D train) was cancelled.

After that I had an hour to kill before getting the TSV across the French countryside to Lausanne (just past Geneva) Switzerland. Unfortunately the French countryside was covered in fog, and when it wasn’t it was covered in dark.

It’s now 19:45 as I write this and I’m almost on my last leg to Zermatt. This has been a whole day trip, the total cost was about £100 more than I would have spent had I taken the cheapest airline ticket and cheapest rail, and it would have required me to take some really early flight, necessitating staying near an airport. Admittedly it would have gotten me in around 17:00 instead of what will be 22:00

Overall I think I prefer the rail, especially since part of the trip is as going to require it anyhow. It’s certainly much better than the mob that is RyanAir. 

Welcome to Iceland

Here in Reykjavik for a few days catching up with friends who I haven’t seen in a year — they’re stopping here on their way to Germany for Xmas. 

One thing I didn’t appreciate is the international airport is just over an hours drive from Reykjavik— this isn’t much of a problem, except that the buses to/from the airport add another 30mins or so with the stops etc. Combine this with my Heathrow gate being a remote gate (bussed to it), to go from London to Reykjavik, I spent 1.25hr on the train, almost 2hrs on a bus, and 3hrs on a plane. So the majority of the time was spent not on a plane 😂.

Anyway, Iceland is beautiful, and to be honest the early evening just reminded me of London. The late sunrise (due in a couple of hours) is a little different though. The twilight is beautiful though.

London for a couple of days

At the moment I’m back in London, visiting some friends but also swapping out gear.

Next stop is Iceland, where I’ve heard a rumour that it’s kinda cold there, so I need to swap out my warmer gear for cold. 

This has given me the opportunity to try what I said in a previous post — doing just carryon only. As such I’ve repacked, dropped some stuff, swapped out others, and here is what results (note: the big grey thing attached to the back is my very warm jacket, I’ll wear it onto the plane, so it doesn’t count 😁)

It’s a nice backpack, and i spent a couple of hours today wearing it when fully loaded and I had no problems. 

It does weigh 12kg now, but that does include my 2kg laptop and my jacket. The other space user is my meds, they can’t really be shrunk/compressed, as they need to stay in their original packaging, least some customs official wonder what this unlabelled bottle of pills are.

Adios Madrid

My brief time in Madrid has made me aware of two things — I need to learn more Spanish, and then return to Madrid. And to everyone who has tried to politely tell me that Central American Spanish is not the same as Spanish Spanish, yeah, I’m aware, but even a little is better than none, and my lessons don’t stop with the six weeks of language school.

I’m thinking if the budget and time allows, it might be nice to return to Spain at the end of the trip.

Madrid Pt 2

Past couple of days I’ve done afternoon meal with Martin 
who has said that he only eats two meals a day here, breakfast and afternoon meal.

Past two days that’s exactly what I’ve done, and it’s been good. Part of that is probably due to the size of the Spanish meals.

Words cannot describe the size of that nacho dish. We had to go mining with a spoon to find the chips.

I find myself once again still working on drawing, and not even writing a single line of code. I did however open my laptop and confirmed it still works. At least I’m drawing in the hostel common room, rather than locked away.

On the art front, I’ve finally called my Mal picture done. 

It’s taken awhile because I wanted to get every fine detail right. Still can’t get the face correct, but I’m blaming Mal for that.

Tomorrow is my last full day in Madrid, so I shall have to make the most of it, today was definitely a rest day from the large amount of walking I’ve been doing.

Hello Madrid

Following on from the previous post, I’m now in Madrid. The train ride from Valencia to Madrid was rather quick, look at that speed.

I did however discover i had booked a train going to the north of Madrid, not the southern station — about 40 minutes apart by metro, but no worries.

The hostel is very nice, exactly the sort of high quality I’d expect for the price (€50, you’d be paying twice that for a cheap worse hotel).

For everyone who has been asking, yes, I slept very well in the dorm. Everyone is respectful of noise, in fact I’ve stayed in hotels where the overall noise in the room (from AC and neighbours/street) was louder than this. 

Last night I went for a walk through the Sol district of the city, and to say it was busy is a vast understatement. 

Goodbye Valencia

Well, I’m terrible at keeping this up to date, but yesterday I took the trains to Madrid.

Cullera was a great place to visit, very beautiful. In the summer months the population goes up by an order of magnitude from all the Spanish and British people who own summer flats here.

Those condos are all basically empty during the winter.

Directly on the beach are smaller condos that apparently are occupied more often. Shockingly real estate prices are surprisingly low here. Makes it rather tempting!

I enjoyed the last few days here, and I thought I’d be spending my down time writing code — why else would I bring a heavy large laptop with me? — but instead I spent it working on my digital art. I’m assured that this is perfectly normal, there’s a history of artists holidaying in the south of France and Spain and being prolific in their works 😂.

My cousin has a lovely place about 20mins walk to the beach, and beautiful views of the river.