London

Arriving in London. About a 12 hour flight to Frankfurt, then a one hour one to Heathrow.  Quite a contrast in airports- Frankfurt nice and tidy with architectural details well thought out.  The handrails at Heathrow looked like a fitter's mate knocked them up.

The Heathrow express was excellent though, taking only 20 minutes to get us into Paddington station. Our room is fine, near an interesting street called Queensway.

On our first day we went on a Big Bus Tour. Part of the tour was a short trip up the Thames to the Tower of London,  which had a bit of queue, but did not take long to get in.  Once in, more queues, moving at a glacial pace, so we flagged it away and had lunch just by Tower Bridge. Rose had swollen feet,so it was hard going for her.

The second day the plan was to visit the main shops, so I went and bought a 7 day travel card. Our first stop on Oxford street was Selfridges, and it did not disappoint.  Just one problem: all we could afford we're some magazines. My turn for sore feet as I had worn dress shoes-ouch. Back home for recovery, then out to Oxford st again, to have a look at the Burlington Arcade and the Picadilly Arcade. Then off to Trafalgar Square.

It seems like tourists are 50 percent of the population, and big red buses fill the roads.

This bit has been added in July 2015, where I have decided to add photos to the blog (not easy to do at the time on an ipad).  Browsing through them, I am amazed by the photos I did not take, and though I did take pics of Buckingham Palace etc, I think posting them is a waste of time. Rather, I will post just a few that vaugely capture the feel of London.

Our first day in Kyoto

Our first day in Kyoto.  Finding breakfast was easy, just out the door and down the street to  a lift set in a shop front. Something that never occurred to me was how to get photos on to this blog. Real easy if you use  Windows. Not quite so intuitive to me at the moment, so photos may have to sit on Flickr, which although I now have an app for the ipad, I still am having fun with that. I have a suspicion all these things have issues with the Japanese language.

Delicious! See photos.  I thought this might be a good time to try out my new cash passport card. Imagine my surprise and shock when she took it,scanned It, and gave it back with no need for a pin or signature!

Breakfast!

Oh well, just better not lose that one. 

The number one attraction in Kyoto is the Kinkakuji Temple. Which from the map seemed miles away. So we decided to go have a look at the Imperial Palace as it seemed to be just North of us. To keep walking to a minimum, i planned to catch a subway train,just across the river. I expected a polluted fairly deep river because it was quite wide. Nope. About metre deep and crystal clear.

Rubbish bins: there are none.  Park benches to sit on-none of these either.

Here is the river:

Down into the subway and no, you have JR pass, not subway pass.  Grr! Time for a coffee. Drag mrs sore feet in direction of Imperial Palace. Nice grandiose gates, but no way to get inside, and someone's feet dictated a return to hotel needed. Rose reckons the temp was 35. High humidity too, so beer consumption was recommended.

Nice Gates:

All the way down Karasuma st, and Bill the famous navigator took a wrong turn, which was not relayed to the troops as these were a little tetchy. Think bright red face. My pedometer showed 27,000 that day,a personal best ( hi Martin!).

Dinner at Korean restaurant. You don't order, you buy tickets, which we messed up but still enjoyed whatever it was. Crab shells and noodles.

The street naming and layout was hard to get a hang of, being on a grid and with names like Kawaramachi. The tourist maps have very small print and are very cluttered. In hindsight, I should have memorised all the street names in the area of the hotel.

Typical street corner in Kyoto:

Well hello..

Seems like a good title for what has happened so far.
It all started when I realised with a shock that the plane's leaving time was no 10.00 am, but 8.45 am. Fortunately we are enjoyer's of the Auckland Airport leaving experience, so we were within time at the end and got on ok.
Once on board the time passed quite quickly watching movies and eating breakfast and dinner. Not sure what happened to lunch, there was none. The Air NZ cabin crew were great.
I managed to see two and a half movies, Cloud Atlas starring Tom Hanks which I found confusing as it jumped all over the place in time, but came right in the end. The other was I Anna, a detective story set in London,  which took a while to get going , but proved a good watch.  The last one was Upside Down, which was a rather strange SF story, which I liked.( me strange? No!)
Customs at Kansai was no fun. The queue took an hour of standing in what seemed 30 degree heat.

Catching the train proved easy enough, once we were pointed in the direction of the ticket office.
There were a load of confusing offers, and I selected one that gave us a freedom to us all of the JR network in the area.  Very nice, but I found out that it did not include the Kyoto subways, a glaring mistake as it turned out. At the taxi stand the fun began as driver after driver did not know where the Best Western Hotel Kyoto was located. My problems were solved when one driver at the end of a large and growing queue leapt out of his cab and ordered one of the don't knows to take us any way.
Turns out he could not speak English. Good grief, what is wrong with these people?
Somewhere he used the word walk, which I took to mean we may as well walk, as he could not take us, but what he meant was he could take us, but we would have to walk a bit at the end.
In the end he used the novel idea of consulting his map to locate the hotel.

Here it is, not easy to see, just to the right of the van. This is not a road, but an alley.

Before I came here, I had this idea that Kyoto was a small town, say about the size of Tauranga.
Not so as it turned out. Think of Auckland CBD.  Now multiply that by about at least 20.
We are up a little alley off one of the main streets.  You would think an alley would be a dusty grimy place with rubbish everywhere.  NO.  This part of Japan is amazingly clean and tidy. There is no litter.
The inhabitants are all well dressed and none are overweight.  Must be the food.

This is a typical street corner:

Tips for travellers

Scan your passport and email it to yourself.

Trip to Australia

We went for 9 days, 3 in Melbourne, 3 travelling up coast road, and 3 staying with brother Allan in Sydney.

I'm 65

Oh well, it had to happen sometime! It seems far more significant to me because I am now able to receive the "NZ Super". Which if you are working, gets trimmed back. Which is fine as far as I'm concerned. Like every other country in the world it seems that NZ is spending more than it is earning, so any savings made by the government must be looked on as a good thing.

Seems to me that this idea that countries are able to borrow money is a dangerous idea. If I were in the business of writing a constitution for a country, I would make it mandatory that no borrowing of money was to be done.

What we are seeing now in the world is the sad results of this policy.

I have just checked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt

and the New Zealand debt is $219,589,000,000, which is $50, 260 each person. Which seems high compared to other countries. For instance, expressed as a % of GDP, ours is 127%!

Which is strange, because in the USA they are wringing their hands, and saying the end of the world is nigh at only 99%.

There are a lot of ifs and buts though-this is external debt, somewhere like the USA, only about a third of United States public debt is external.

Seems a bit strange- our unemployment rate is 6%, USA it is supposedly 9%.

What a day!

Every so often I get to do something that afterwards I just know I will remember.

Today was one of those. Not the work part though!

I had taken my running gear to work with the idea of doing a 6km run at lunchtime, by myself or maybe with one of my workmates who seems to be getting more obsessed with this fitness stuff.

(Me obsessed with fitness??Maybe.)

Last week I had done the run from work (NZ Sugar Ltd) to a place called Kendall bay. I had taken my swimming gear and a towel. That was a good day, except for a little incident that "messed it up" . When I got to the beach, while I saw nobody there, I thought to go behind some bushes to get changed. Following a beaten path into the bullrushes I thought to stop and think to myself that this is the sort of place people use for a toilet and backed out a bit, and got changed. After a very nice swim I returned and when I went to put my running shoes on I realised I had stood in something nasty. It had to get washed off, but it still lingered to I had to wash them thoroughly when I got home.

Which took the gloss off that particular day.

Anyway, today, my workmate suggested we go there. Then he said he would try and rustle up some more people, and he managed to get two more.

It is a really nice walk (we did not run much) along the tops of the cliffs in the bush as you can see from the photo above. When we got there we had a nice swim in our running gear.

After winter in Auckland where it did rain every day, this is surely paradise.