Geneva (again) – a stuffed weekend and unhappy Heathrow

I was just in Geneva again – got back the two Fridays ago – and, apart from some stressful work involving the chaperoning of a couple of important personages, it was a rather fun trip.  (Although, thinking back, I still wish I felt less stressed and more prepared.)

The only free weekend we had, we rented a car and drove all the way to Tasch, from which we took a train to Zermatt, from which we took another train to snow-capped Gornergrat.  The thing I remember about Gornergrat, along with the snow and some unexplained swathes of bluish-green water that looked vaguely reminiscent of sulphur pools I saw in New Zealand, was an absolutely giant Saint Bernard – it was sitting there, tongue lolling, with another less impressive specimen, and would have made for a scary sight, except that like all Saint Bernards it looked utterly benign (if more or less ignorant of your presence) and bereft of ill will.  I think if I got lost in the Swiss Alps and one of these trudged up to me with whiskey in the keg attached to its collar, I would be quite assured :)  On the way back from Tasch, we had dinner at a great Italian restaurant at Montreux.  (I’ll try to find out and post its name.)  Now, I’m not a salad fan but the seafood salad – with an appetising vinaigrette and generous portions of grilled littleneck clams, octopus and squid – was absolutely delicious.

Speaking of Italian food, if you are ever in the old town part of Geneva – that’s across the bridge from Gare Cornavin – you may wish to try the seafood (fruits de mer) spaghetti at the Spaghetti Factory.  It’s good too :)

And so after about 10 days, the work was over, and a colleague and I made our way back home via Heathrow.  Okay.  (I’m taking deep breaths now as I gather myself to talk about this objectively.)  I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re flying SQ and you fly back to Singapore via Heathrow, you have to claim your baggage and then check it back in.  In other words, you have to go through immigration so that you are in the London side of the airport for a good half hour to an hour and then check yourself and your luggage back in.  And go through snaking queues leading up to metal detector gantries and the most un-chipper security personnel I’ve ever seen.  Not a happy experience.  The 13-hour plane ride back was comfortable – I was lucky enough to be on a flight that was about 75% full, and I was the only passenger on my set of three sets next to the window; I think that says something about the economy, no? – but I really wouldn’t want to fly through Heathrow again, ever.

P/S.  Oh don’t think I did not take photographs – I did, but I stupidly updated the software in my phone without making back-ups.  Sigh.

Anzac-bound Part Two

More about my New Zealand trip.

31 Aug, Fri

After the work part of my trip, my brother joined me in Wellington. I had been looking forward to this part of the trip for a long time.

While waiting for my brother at the one arrival gate, I saw an airport officer speaking with an old Chinese couple. It was clear from the way he was speaking (slowly, and with an emphasis on each word, in English) and the expressions on the Chinese couple’s faces (dogged bewilderment) that they didn’t quite understand each other. So, after a rather lengthy bit of apathy, I walked up to the little group to offer to translate. It took me a while to get up to speed. Essentially, the airport officer was trying to tell the Chinese couple, who were from Melbourne, that they had not paid the international departure charge of 25 NZD each. The Chinese couple, who had been reassured by their travel agent back in Melbourne that all fees related to the tickets had been paid for, were understandably unsure about this. Eventually, between us the airport officer and I managed to convince the Chinese couple that they could take the issue of the departure charge up with their travel agent back in Melbourne, but that they had to pay the charge before they could fly back home. And so they did.

I have to admit, being able to help these folks out, and actually doing it, made me feel really good!

Feeling flush with goodwill, I went back to standing against a pillar, to wait for my brother to walk out of the departure gate. His plane had already landed, so the wait would be a fairly short one.

The lady beside me was waiting too. She was from a local university, she said, and a batch of foreign students was arriving today for an immersion programme, which would see them learning English and then working in New Zealand for a few years. She said they had had folks from Germany, other parts of Europe, South America, even once a Japanese chap who was over 60 years old. I thought this was interesting, the way New Zealand assimilated its foreign workers (even in these admittedly small numbers).

So, when my brother came, I had two more stories to tell him :)

And after we got my brother settled in at the downtown hotel we’d picked for its location and relative economy, we went for a bit of a walk. The temperate weather was made for walking; if Singapore was like this – temperature in the teens, sunny, not overly dry – I’d walk a few kilometres every single day. (It was windy though – Wellington at this time of year, winter just giving way to spring, is characterised by bracing wind – and when the wind blew into this harbour city this far south of the equator, it got bone-chilly very quickly.) We walked around Lambton Quay, Wellington’s retail belt. We got tired, and had a small lunch at Wishbone. Then we went for another walk near the harbour area, and came across a book fair. We went in for a look, just curious, but came away, after browsing the stacks and stacks of second-hand books for more than two hours, with an eclectic bounty of 11 books, most of them for 2 NZD each: fiction by P D James, Lawrence Block, John D MacDonald and John Grisham, and Jan Carlzon’s detailed and engaging account of how he turned Scandinavian Airlines System around.

(We didn’t know it then, but being the fairly sedentary folks that we are, there wasn’t a lot to do after dinner in New Zealand, and we would have plenty of time to enjoy the books.)

Anzac-bound

Went to New Zealand recently for work, and decided to go on a vacation after that. Drafted blog entries there, but did not have a chance to post them, so will be posting them over the next few days.

26 Aug, Sun, 2203 hours

The powers that be who decide these things would know, but why Singapore Airlines would fly directly to Christchurch and Auckland (granted, two of New Zealand’s largest cities), and not Wellington (New Zealand’s capital) is beyond me. This particular SQ flight is winging me to Christchurch, where those of us going to Wellington will board something propeller-driven en route there. I will be making a few presentations at a small conference (okay, tiny conference) in Wellington, and I was a little worried about it before the trip, but up in the clouds in a flying metal tube, I am somewhat less concerned.

Note to self: when you are worried about something you can’t really control and it dominates your thoughts, imagine you’re in a plane…

Small aside: I realise I think, write and talk about food a lot. Recently, I asked someone about food (either what she had had or was about to have), and this expression that combined distaste and impatience flashed across her face. That got me to thinking: I’m actually quite a boring person.

I don’t remember having been on a rockier plane ride, but then, I like my plane rides slightly turbulent, so it is enjoyable, if unexpected.

Busan, Korea

So it’s been… wow!… nearly a month ago now since I went to Busan, Korea for a working trip. I’m not one for photos, so there aren’t any pics of the great hotel rooms I stayed at or the wonderful views from these rooms or the absolutely mouth-watering presentation of Korean food – so, sorry for that: I know photos would help tell the story, but I just didn’t take any. (If it’s any consolation, to prevent this from happening again, I recently invested in a hand-phone with a fairly good camera; at least that’s what I told myself when I bought the hand-phone. Heh :p)

Okay, so, on to some thoughts and feelings about the trip:

• Little Angels – Was treated to a stunning, magnificent, bravura performance by the Little Angels, a children’s performing arts group. They danced, they fanned fans, they sang, they played drums, they yodelled – all in a coordinated pageantry of rouged faces, painted lips, megawatt smiles and smooth, practised movements. One of the songs they sang was 甜蜜蜜, and they sang it touchingly, and with warmth and an understated joy. I really enjoyed the performance. It’s a pity I can’t share a video clip or even a photo, but you can find out more about the Little Angels here.

• Galbi – My dinner that first night, and my introduction to how replete with side dishes the typical Korean meal is. Galbi is beef rib, but along with that there was kimchi, and a soup, and tofu with some roe on it, and rice, and more kimchi, and a round charcoal grill in the middle of the table, on top of which our server soon spread long thin slices of beef (cut close to the rib) and fresh chunks of garlic and mushrooms of assorted sizes. Apparently galbi is supposed to be marinated in fruit juices. Now I didn’t know that when I ate it, but the beef slices were moist and tender and flavourful – there just weren’t enough slices to satisfy the group of us, who would have I think gladly gone without the side dishes. The beef slices were supposed, our server kindly demonstrated, to be wrapped with the grilled garlic and mushrooms and fresh sweet onion rings in lettuce and mint, but believe you me: the galbi is good enough by itself. However, good as this was, it wasn’t my favourite meal in Busan.

• ??? – I don’t know what this dish I had is called; I just did a search on Korean food, and I suspect that it was a version of maeuntang. Anyway, this was my favourite meal in Busan, and I’ll let an excerpt from an email I sent to some colleagues describe it:

“Just back from a humongous seafood steamboat. Think about this: piled on top of a lot of bean sprouts and kangkong with a dollop of concentrated kimchi seasoning are big scallops, half a big flower crab, tiny shrimp, big prawns, tiny clams, a shellfish whose name translated from Chinese means “elephant’s tusk mussel”, big mussels, and lots of sotong, all sitting in broth. Now think about high heat bring applied to all these: the big prawns slowly turning red whiskers first, the broth slowly being supplemented by the juices from the seafood and then stirred up so that the kimchi seasoning turns the broth orange red.

We had this with plain rice, and it was very very good.”

• Book your seats early! – It pays to confirm your flight early, and to book your seats through the Internet or the phone. If you’re like me, you want to be able to control when you can go to the washroom, and getting an aisle seat instead of being assigned to a window seat can make a gigantic difference in terms of how much you enjoy your flight.

• By the sea – Busan is supposed to be a seaside resort, and the excellent seafood was a sign of that. (I had a fairly forgettable sashimi meal though – the raw fish slices themselves were rubbery and too fishy, and there was this dish presented in a delicate French way, and as far as the group of us could make out, the dish consisted of whelk slices, some gooey mass that was conceivably an aggregation of eyes, and two other small piles of unidentifiable stuff, all bracketed by two halfs of a black sea urchin-like thing.) And I also had a hotel room facing the sea, and near enough to the sea so that if i jumped hard enough, I just might make it into the shallow part at high tide. Imagine this: Your eyes are closed, and you are becoming aware of the last tendrils of your dream even as you start to stir awake. You hug your pillow a bit tighter as your senses reopen, and you feel the creases in your bedsheets and the arrangement of your limbs on the bed. In the background there is a relaxed rhythm, a back and forth sashaying sound, a lapping and frothing, oddly familiar. And you remember you heard it the night before, lulling your closed eyes to sleep. And you wake up almost completely, to the sound of the rush and hush of the waves.

There is just something about going to sleep and waking up to the sound of waves that touches one’s core I tell you. Go try it if you haven’t :)