Sometimes I'd rather be...elsewhere

From time to time, I find myself thinking that on the whole, on any given day, I’d rather be in one of the cities I visited on my honeymoon trip to Europe and Japan last year. It’s usually a different city each time – Rome one day, Paris another day, Bologna once in a while.

Actually, let’s stop that right there. The main reason I liked Bologna is that they have a café called La Nutelleria. As the name suggests, it’s a Nutella-themed café, so everything – crepes, ice cream, biscuity things etc all have Nutella in them. We went there, just to see what it was all about, and while I think we pretty clearly understood what the idea was, the guy in front of us in the queue clearly didn’t:

“I’d like an ice cream, thanks. What flavours do they come in other than nutella?”
“They only come in nutella”.
“Only in nutella?!”

But I digress. Sometimes Tokyo, sometimes Dublin, and so on.

One place I have to admit I didn’t think too much of was London, but I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t really give it a fair go. For one thing, we went directly from Paris to London, and in terms of aesthetics at least, that’s right up there with looking at a Rembrandt first and then wondering why you’re not overly impressed with a crayon drawing immediately afterwards, or with driving a Ferrari F430 and then finding your Kia a little below par. London is not a particularly attractive city, and I think the problem is all the brown brick. But then, maybe that’s the charm of the place which I missed because I’d just had my mind blown by Paris. But apart from that, I also found London hideously expensive when travelling on the Aussie dollar, the hotel we stayed in was crap, they wouldn’t let me in to the Houses of Parliament (I’m a sad case who visits Parliament pretty well anywhere that has a Westminster system, so so far I’ve been to Parliament House in Canberra - Federal and ACT Legislative Assembly - Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Wellington, and only didn’t go to the ones in Paris and Rome when I walked past them because both of those cities have better things to do), and the shower made a pretty good attempt at killing me. Let’s digress again on to that one.

So there I was, having a shower in one of those awful showers-in-a-bath that are just an accident waiting to happen. The hotel was pretty dodgy – the fire extinguishers were missing, the windows wouldn’t shut properly, many of the lightbulbs didn’t work, that sort of thing. I slipped, dropped the soap which made a loud noise, and did that whole trying-to-get-grip-shuffle that you do when you’re on something with no traction at all like ice. In one of those slow-motion moments, I decided the only thing I could do was grab the folding shower screen and hope that I didn’t rip it out of the wall, as that would surely end with my being killed.

Fortunately, it held up and I was able to steady myself. But that sort of thing coloured my experience of London, and I don’t think I gave it a fair go.

I liked the rest of England, though – well, at least the parts we saw, which were basically Bath and York. But I couldn’t help but think there was probably no real reason to visit, because all of the good things about British culture – good music, good TV shows of the type that the BBC produces, Jaguars, Aston Martins, tea, and so on – are all readily available here in Australia. Admittedly the whole English Gentleman thing that I do also quite like isn’t really available here, but it’s not as though you can visit the country and just converse with some polite chaps for a few weeks.

I think I need to go again, and do Britain properly, because after watching far too much Top Gear over the past few months, there do seem to be a lot more interesting places than just the ones I went and saw. I almost certainly need to spend more than four days trying to see the entire country, I think.

(Incidentally, Top Gear is the only thing that has ever made me think that living in England might be a good idea – for the sole reason that, if you start in London and drive for a few hours, you could for instance spend your weekend in Paris, or any one of a number of interesting places in Europe, with no real effort. If I start here and drive all day, I’ll just end up in Adelaide or Brisbane, which are not that different to here).