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Flights occasionally dip below the cost of train fares, Airbnb makes it easy to get a private room, I don't expect it will last but I'm happy to go while it's there. What I need now are snow shoes.

Now that sounds a bit exciting..... whats the occasion?

I'm taking the opportunity afforded by our beneficently gracious government - the week after Christmas is allowed off for all schoolchildren! - to take my youngest to see snow, something he recently described as fictional. Switzerland has lots of snow on account of the Alps, and I found a go-anywhere Swiss Rail cheap-tourist ticket which lets him travel free.

How can a child in Europe think snow is fictional?

The Gulf Stream, apparently. He's quite right though, he's not seen snow.

Spot is currently in Wipingen according to my latest information. Now that could be Wippingen in Lower Saxony but I'd guess it's Wipkingen in Zurich - it all depends on which letter he left out

It would also appear that he left out his password list when packing and he's no access at the moment.

Now, he might be lucky and have snow to prove that it exists but the forecast for the weekend is around ten degrees Celsius (sixty Fahrenheit) so he might have some travelling to do.

It was -15 centigrade (3 Fahrenheit) with blizzard style falling snow and wind at Jungfrauhoch yesterday afternoon, the boy was disbelieving until we went outdoors in it. Even in Zurich there was an inch fell as we walked from the train to the apartment but that's gone this morning. Today we're hunting cable cars.

How might one attach the two parts of the drip tray of an inissia Koenig coffee machine to each other? They appear to be made to swivel or pivot but I don't want to force the plastc.



ETA

Ah. Discovered. Now it swivels.

zurich;1516541 wrote: How might one attach the two parts of the drip tray of an inissia Koenig coffee machine to each other? They appear to be made to swivel or pivot but I don't want to force the plastc.



ETA

Ah. Discovered. Now it swivels.


Definitely spot.

I'm returned, it's taken a day or two to get back online properly. I'm now here. I might try to find a photo or two.

Great stuff

Oops! Missed this thread, which explains my ignorance concerning spot's "adorable" son. I remember I was too jealous to read it as in the seventies I spent a year living in Zurich and didn't want to think of my former exciting life which has now been replaced by a dull one.

We're away again, this time in Beijing. I'll update this thread with this account it I may. It's warm here and 3am while jet lag persists so the boy is flat out on a sofa.

Well, THAT should be fun.

Hope they have improved the air since I was there.

I hope you get to the Summer Palace while there.

You two have turned into real globetrotters!

Honestly, I'll be fascinated by your impressions of China and the Chinese.

Not counting anyone's money, but you must be loaded.

It's been a long trip, the boy grabbing the odd hour of sleep when possible. I had several hours once we were here. He built some Lego so he's settling in. We shall take some photos tomorrow. The underground is well signposted, we registered our arrival at the local police station, we bought food, there's very little traffic noise with the door shut. I even unpacked the rucksacks.

As for initial impressions of the locals, people have been uniformly helpful and well disposed. We've not been near any touristy places yet. The food shop was a reassuring sight but there's no hint of breakfast cereals there yet.

zurich;1520125 wrote: As for initial impressions of the locals, people have been uniformly helpful and well disposed. We've not been near any touristy places yet. The food shop was a reassuring sight but there's no hint of breakfast cereals there yet.


You might find 7-11 useful. They have a few things like that.

The people of Beijing are quite used to foreigners, these days, and I also found them mostly helpful and friendly.

zurich;1520099 wrote: We're away again, this time in Beijing. I'll update this thread with this account it I may. It's warm here and 3am while jet lag persists so the boy is flat out on a sofa.


Hope you locked up.

Puts my trip to Wembley into the shade.

I always amazed me how my boys could sleep everywhere and anywhere overseas whilst jet lagged and exhausted parents hovered over them. lol

I do believe your boy is normal not caring about timezones.

LarsMac;1520127 wrote: You might find 7-11 useful. They have a few things like that.


I'll try in the morning, there's one a hundred yards down the road.

I brought with me a pocket memorandum book in which, under the heading FG, to jot the occasional reminder of any passing incident. It reads, to date:

Ad stream tunnel

Wainwright skunk

Perhaps I could address the second entry first.

Were I to be asked by St Peter why I might consider myself among the Elect, I might bring to his recollection that I had once attended a performance by Loudon Wainwright III at which he - Loudon Wainwright , not St Peter - had sung his skunk song. Case closed, surely.

This flitted through my head in the Dongsi WuMart, on the second floor, when the in-store DJ played it with Chinese lyrics, but I modified my interpretation. The notes were all there in the right order but the words were blatantly now a love ballad sung by a glossed teenager the way they do round these parts. None of his or her vocalisation suggested any familiarity with the original and yet the tune was unchanged. Somewhere in China there is a lyricist who has wittingly placed a time-bomb under that young thing's career. I might try to find a recording.

As for the tunnel event, I saw something I

I brought with me a pocket memorandum book in which, under the heading FG, to jot the occasional reminder of any passing incident. It reads, to date:

Ad stream tunnel

Wainwright skunk

I'll address the second entry first.

Were I to be asked by St Peter why I consider myself among the Elect, I might bring to his recollection that I had once attended a 90 minute Loudon Wainwright III set at which he - Loudon Wainwright , not St Peter - had sung his skunk song. Case closed, surely.

This flitted through my head in the Dongsi WuMart, on the second floor, when the in-store DJ played it with Chinese lyrics, but I modified my interpretation after a couple of verses. The notes were all there in the right order but the words were blatantly now a love ballad sung by a glossed teenager the way they do round these parts. None of his or her vocalisation suggested any familiarity with the original, but that still leaves a Chinese lyricist with a sense of humour who primed this potential time-bomb under the singer's career, hence the jotted note in the pocket book.

The ad stream tunnel moment was the first time I'd encountered a technique outside of a science fiction novel and I'm still amazed by it. We were on the underground between stations at something around 50kph when I realised the advert I was watching was outside the carriage,inside the tunnel itself. There were metre-high LCD screens all along the tunnel wall and the system was detecting the train speed and synchronising one video frame at a time to each screen in turn. In the novel - one of the Neuromancer trilogy at a guess - the system also knew who was passing the screens and personalized the ad, but even without the recognition part it was impressive. Very slight timing glitches, presumably rounding issues of a millisecond, showed up as jitter, but it wasn't so visible as to be distracting.

Getting to Badaling was fairly simple, two stations north on Line 5 and Line 2, eleven stations on Line 8, walk to the mainline for the 90 minute ride into the mountains and there was the Great Wall complete with cable cars made in Switzerland (almost as strange as finding German cable cars in Zakopane). How anyone walks on the Wall in winter snow I have no idea, it has angles approaching those of a pitched roof between flights of steps, but with the temperature in the nineties the problem is more one of overheating. The degree of reconstruction is unavoidable to cater for the number of visitors but the original footway has been left visible in places which is a thoughtful piece of design. I've been coincidentally reading Puck Of Pook's Hill to the boy this week, so the Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall are slightly meshed together right now. All in all that was a twelve hour excursion so we're having a quiet Saturday to recoup.

Jowan and I are now in Shanghai, in an apartment just off Renmin Square, having travelled something over a thousand miles in under six hours on a train the like of which Britain will never see, never afford, never come close to. The scenery was diverse and eye-popping, the rivers immense, the countryside tended, the cities straight out of 2000AD, I've never seen anything like it.

I have a personal barometer as to whether the citizens of a country have a justifiable pride in their surroundings and that's the extent to which graffiti has wrecked their urban spaces. Eastern Europe used to be clean but no longer, the daubers have spread their filth over Russia, Poland just as much as it's to be seen throughout urban Britain. China is free of it. I would quite happily emigrate here except I doubt they'd let me.

Jowan enjoyed the sights. After a while he asked to borrow my Android phone. He loaded Minecraft and built what he could see out of the window. Some buildings he caught sufficiently well that I recognized what he'd selected.

A while later he asked for the bluetooth headphones and carried on building landscapes. What, I eventually said after a half hour, are you listening to, so he handed me the headphones. I had to ask how he'd done it. He was listening to Rock And Roll off Led Zeppelin IV with a rolling thunder track on top.

Shanghai is a fascinating city. So much modern architecture, and yet, still a sense of the history of the place.

More visceral than Beijing, who's major historic places seem much more like a museum set.

We're taking a late lunch. The morning involved a stroll along the riverside and several shopping malls, the boy is mesmerised by shops and loves air conditioning on days like today. We found three floors of a specialist art supplier which took a good half hour to explore. There are unguessable thoughts recessed in his mind like he'd very much like a large gold trophy, I'd never suspected that one.

As for bits of the history, there are foundation stones in the remaining stone-built banks of the financial area laid by British colonials back before the War, designed by London architects. These days the roles have reversed. Jowan's shockingly pro-Empire at the moment, I must have explained something badly. I'll try to clear that up before he discusses it with anyone else.

I've been locked out of my debit card by a faulty ATM transaction that will take 24 hours to clear, we'll be in Xi'an by then, we fly around 1pm tomorrow. Fortunately we were only topping up on cash, not running out.