diverse catch up
Feb. 10th, 2007 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ruthct21I took my lovely new light laptop with me earlier this week in a roundabout journey to meetings in London, Chippenham and Brussels. This allowed me (amongst other tasks) to make some notes for livejournal - things I'd like to remember later.
Before I start, I have had a wonderful exchange of emails with a friend in Finland. She had signed off "from the real winter in Finland". I spent some time sounding off about the way England seems to react to winter weather with total surprise, as if such a thing had NEVER happened before. (Showing my age, I can remember lots of walking to school in the snow in 1950s winters, and schoolrooms being full of steaming wellies and school milk - anyone out there remember that? - defrosting on the radiator) Anyway, Heini has just replied that it is just the same in Finland, they have lost the ability to cope now that they have all the seasons at once, often in the same week.
Marrakesh
I remember writing about arriving in Morocco for the United Cities and Local Governments meeting at the end of October last. The next morning (the only free time I had) a colleague took me to see the Souk....
The Souk covers an immense area and has clearly grown organically with flooring from packed mud to smart inlaid tiles and stalls anything from cages of birds on rough trestle tables to luxurious wonderfully scented curtained rooms. It sells almost anything you could imagine or wish to bargain for. Avenues are marked with product type but it is remarkably easy to get lost and even find yourself in the residential areas which surround and overlap the stalls: we had to get directions out from a bored child on a bike. Due, I was told, to a government edict, tourists can wander fairly freely (and even take the odd atmospheric photo) without being constantly accosted by would-be sellers. (However, I got roundly denounced when I took a photo of a storyteller in the square outside without prior permission. To my embarrassment I had no coins handy to pacify the minder)
In the evening the square outside is full of stalls which gradually light up in the twilight, impossibly romantic. By day it is a kind of thoroughfare and we drank mint tea (ferociously sweet) in a roadside café and people-watched. Hardly any women were wearing veils (when they did they were normally light translucent things), although quite a number (and men too) were wearing the long loose Arab dress and and trousers, with sandals: very sensible in the climate. Lots of lovely bright colours, on both men and women. However, a large minority of women, even those in western dress, wore a headscarf of some kind.
There was a wide choice of food at the hotel and at the Palais du Congres where we had our meetings, from Euro-standard to Arabic, some freshly cooked to order, so I had no problem finding lovely meals there. The evening receptions were more difficult as local cuisine seems very much meat and 2 meat. I took care to fill up on the nuts, fruit and other snacks offered before the main dishes arrived. In one place, the meal was lamb stewed with nuts and, I thought, vegetables, so I asked the waiter to bring me plenty of nuts and leave out the meat. My dish arrived: about a teaspoonful of nuts and a great pile of figs and prunes! Not a dish to eat the night before a long plane journey…..
Tallinn
Thanks to a bit of forward planning, Mick was able to come with me to the EGM of the Liberal Democrat CoR group in Estonia in mid-November and we stayed on for the weekend. To me, Tallinn looks like a place out of a story book. Much of the old town was built all of a piece in the 14th or 15th century and is still in use, though much repaired: tall, colour-washed buildings, winding cobbled streets, churches and old inns with interesting twists and towers. Amazing statues and wall plaques.
In one of the old coffee-shops, just off the iconic main square, I had a wonderful drink (do try it at home!): hot chocolate with a large slug of grappa and a generous handful of tiny cubes of gorgonzola cheese stirred in.
In the newer areas, there is an energetic programme of replacing or refurbishing the Soviet-era blocks of flats with attention to public space. Lots of modern stuff in the shops and lots of people buying, plus assorted street stalls, many of them selling lovely woollens in traditional designs. Shops we could see from our hotel included a casino and a "gentleman's club".
They told us that one of the keys to Estonian independence and a resurgent sense of nationhood was the annual music festival in Tallinn that started featuring local and traditional songs and got a bigger and bigger attendance until in the late 1980s it was about one-third of the total population, maybe 300,000 people!
Saariselka
A Council in Lapland in Northern Finland invited the External Relations Commission (RELEX) of the Committee of the Regions (CoR) to discuss the Northern Dimension of EU policy: primarily cross-border cooperation in the Arctic to protect the fragile ecology, ensure appropriate economic development and retain/promote cultural diversity. The venue was a ski village called Saariselka, close to the Barents Sea. Facilities a bit basic but included a great sauna open from very early, which I patronised several times a day. The sign outside made it clear that nudity was compulsory and one woman who innocently came in wearing her swimsuit was steered out of the door until she complied.
It was very cold in Saariselka (4 to 12 degrees below zero centigrade) but largely free from wind so it felt fine outside (when suitably damarted-up), even on the “evening of outdoor cultural activities” in the local park. We were offered ski-boots and all-in-one suits to wear for this so we looked like a pack of large fluorescent babies on the loose. Activities included skibob and go-karts on hard-packed ice (no thanks): hot spiced drinks (yes please!): and traditional Lapp stories in a big tent lit only by a wood fire in the centre (very yes please!) This involved sitting on furs on the ice, mainly involved women, and was very enjoyable.
Apart from folklore, the women told us that the traditional Lapp dress (hat covering ears, long loose dress over baggy trousers tucked into boots, with plenty of room for extra layers) is subject to fashion. Sometimes the dress will be long, sometimes short and more fitted: the embroidery changes according to what fabrics they order. And they don't make them at home during long winter nights any more, they order them from a specialist store in Norway.
Mick had ordered me some spikes to slip onto my boots so I felt quite safe walking around on the ice and snow. On the last evening, as I wandered around the village trying to find which pub the rest of the Brit delegation were in, I got chatted up by a local Finn. As I was wrapped up from head to foot and wearing trousers, I was surprised that he even realised I was female: but maybe he didn't mind.
Hong Kong
2006 was a bit of a blur for me thanks to the various side-effects of chemotherapy (nb. I have been assured by the doctors that I am well on the road to recovery and no further sign of cancer has been found). So Mick and I decided to give ourselves a Christmas treat in the shape of a short holiday in Hong Kong. Although I have been to China (Beijing, Shanghai and a bit of the Great Wall), neither of us had ever visited HK. The outward flight, including obligatory waiting around in Amsterdam Schipol, seemed very long, particularly as the plane was extremely full. (It was 21st December!) We spent a jetlagged first afternoon walking slowly round the sights nearest to our hotel and watching the boats on the waterfront and had a welcome early night.
My main impression of the town centre was the inescapable insistent pressure to buy. Everybody was trying to sell you something and once you expressed any interest they would push you for more and more. Then after a bit of bargaining they would suddenly get fed up, settle for whatever you had then reached, grab the money and start talking to the person behind you. The best experience was probably getting a ludicrous quantity of clothes made-to-measure – we had to buy another suitcase! – with a lot of detailed attention. The worst was trying to buy a laptop only to be bullied and upset by the manager who thought he knew what I wanted more than I did. Only when I burst into tears and threatened to walk out of the shop did he start a panic negotiation down until he reached a price some 200 below my maximum for the machine I actually wanted. (It is a good laptop, very light with lots of battery time: I'm using it right now).
We did all the expected sightseeing and were not disappointed. Food was wonderful: this included an ace curry at the Delhi Club on Nathan Road (the main shopping street in Kowloon): a Japanese fish lunch on Christmas Day: and "afternoon tea" at the Sheraton Hotel in Kowloon, which comprised everything from the expected sandwiches and cakes to a variety of cook-to-order Chinese meals! Having said that, the hotel breakfast was pretty good with the full range of Chinese and European breakfast dishes and no limit on going back for more. No wonder we needed to walk around a lot.
We wanted to go to midnight mass but found we would have to queue and get tickets in advance, with no certainty of getting inside the Church, so we reluctantly gave up on that and went back to our hotel for a (outdoor) swim and hot tub. We were soaking in the hot tub under the stars and remarking that although we had heard Jingle Bells etc about a million times we had missed hearing real carols, when suddenly a choir started singing nearby and worked its way through a very good selection of traditional carols! A beautiful moment.
Chippenham
I attended Full Council a few days after my birthday in January, which I share (day and year) with another Councillor. I had suggested to him that we should treat the Group to a celebratory drink. I turned up with a quantity of chilled Cava, he failed to turn up at all, but those members of the group who were there seemed to enjoy it and were very laid back in the meeting! The opposition seemed fractionally less boring after a glass or two of fizz.
A week later, I attended Chippenham Area Committee, probably the last North Wiltshire meeting I shall go to as Councillor. I made sure I got two solid items minuted about issues in my ward, for my successor to take up in his campaign. The highlight for me was a discussion much later in the meeting about lost lorry drivers. There is apparently now a unit at County Hall dealing specifically with complaints about misdirection by satnav (largely due to drivers asking for the fastest route). Every day, drivers follow the siren voice of the satellite without paying any attention to common sense, ending up in streams or farmyards or wedged into tiny lanes at risk of demolishing historic buildings. One councillor related a conversation between a lorry driver and a farmer as they watched the lorry sinking into mud (or worse). Driver: “but she TOLD me to come this way”. Farmer: “Didn’t you notice you were driving into a field?”
A friend of mine lives in the village of Sherston by a street called Ford (a clue in the title!) and is forever having to fish out and dry out people who think they can drive through a river that is at least 2 feet deep even in the middle of a dry summer just because the satnav says so.
Brussels
I was there earlier this week with a group from the party's International Relations Committee coming to find out more about how the EU works. For the first time, they included a session at Committee of the Regions in their programme, with which I was delighted to assist. As I think I mentioned in my notes about the ELDR Congress in Bucharest a few months ago, the UK Liberal Democrats find themselves on the radical wing of the European Party and need very much to make contacts and have proper policy discussions with members of sister parties.
Incidentally, it was snowing in Brussels most of the time I was there but nothing appeared to be closed down or delayed. My only complaint was that my hotel - which I had picked out because it offers both Chinese and English cuisine - was unusually full of Chinese guests who had scoffed nearly all the Chinese breakfast before I came downstairs! I did manage to get a small bowl of fried noodles and rice soup but had otherwise to be content with bread and spread.
Enough for the moment.......
Before I start, I have had a wonderful exchange of emails with a friend in Finland. She had signed off "from the real winter in Finland". I spent some time sounding off about the way England seems to react to winter weather with total surprise, as if such a thing had NEVER happened before. (Showing my age, I can remember lots of walking to school in the snow in 1950s winters, and schoolrooms being full of steaming wellies and school milk - anyone out there remember that? - defrosting on the radiator) Anyway, Heini has just replied that it is just the same in Finland, they have lost the ability to cope now that they have all the seasons at once, often in the same week.
Marrakesh
I remember writing about arriving in Morocco for the United Cities and Local Governments meeting at the end of October last. The next morning (the only free time I had) a colleague took me to see the Souk....
The Souk covers an immense area and has clearly grown organically with flooring from packed mud to smart inlaid tiles and stalls anything from cages of birds on rough trestle tables to luxurious wonderfully scented curtained rooms. It sells almost anything you could imagine or wish to bargain for. Avenues are marked with product type but it is remarkably easy to get lost and even find yourself in the residential areas which surround and overlap the stalls: we had to get directions out from a bored child on a bike. Due, I was told, to a government edict, tourists can wander fairly freely (and even take the odd atmospheric photo) without being constantly accosted by would-be sellers. (However, I got roundly denounced when I took a photo of a storyteller in the square outside without prior permission. To my embarrassment I had no coins handy to pacify the minder)
In the evening the square outside is full of stalls which gradually light up in the twilight, impossibly romantic. By day it is a kind of thoroughfare and we drank mint tea (ferociously sweet) in a roadside café and people-watched. Hardly any women were wearing veils (when they did they were normally light translucent things), although quite a number (and men too) were wearing the long loose Arab dress and and trousers, with sandals: very sensible in the climate. Lots of lovely bright colours, on both men and women. However, a large minority of women, even those in western dress, wore a headscarf of some kind.
There was a wide choice of food at the hotel and at the Palais du Congres where we had our meetings, from Euro-standard to Arabic, some freshly cooked to order, so I had no problem finding lovely meals there. The evening receptions were more difficult as local cuisine seems very much meat and 2 meat. I took care to fill up on the nuts, fruit and other snacks offered before the main dishes arrived. In one place, the meal was lamb stewed with nuts and, I thought, vegetables, so I asked the waiter to bring me plenty of nuts and leave out the meat. My dish arrived: about a teaspoonful of nuts and a great pile of figs and prunes! Not a dish to eat the night before a long plane journey…..
Tallinn
Thanks to a bit of forward planning, Mick was able to come with me to the EGM of the Liberal Democrat CoR group in Estonia in mid-November and we stayed on for the weekend. To me, Tallinn looks like a place out of a story book. Much of the old town was built all of a piece in the 14th or 15th century and is still in use, though much repaired: tall, colour-washed buildings, winding cobbled streets, churches and old inns with interesting twists and towers. Amazing statues and wall plaques.
In one of the old coffee-shops, just off the iconic main square, I had a wonderful drink (do try it at home!): hot chocolate with a large slug of grappa and a generous handful of tiny cubes of gorgonzola cheese stirred in.
In the newer areas, there is an energetic programme of replacing or refurbishing the Soviet-era blocks of flats with attention to public space. Lots of modern stuff in the shops and lots of people buying, plus assorted street stalls, many of them selling lovely woollens in traditional designs. Shops we could see from our hotel included a casino and a "gentleman's club".
They told us that one of the keys to Estonian independence and a resurgent sense of nationhood was the annual music festival in Tallinn that started featuring local and traditional songs and got a bigger and bigger attendance until in the late 1980s it was about one-third of the total population, maybe 300,000 people!
Saariselka
A Council in Lapland in Northern Finland invited the External Relations Commission (RELEX) of the Committee of the Regions (CoR) to discuss the Northern Dimension of EU policy: primarily cross-border cooperation in the Arctic to protect the fragile ecology, ensure appropriate economic development and retain/promote cultural diversity. The venue was a ski village called Saariselka, close to the Barents Sea. Facilities a bit basic but included a great sauna open from very early, which I patronised several times a day. The sign outside made it clear that nudity was compulsory and one woman who innocently came in wearing her swimsuit was steered out of the door until she complied.
It was very cold in Saariselka (4 to 12 degrees below zero centigrade) but largely free from wind so it felt fine outside (when suitably damarted-up), even on the “evening of outdoor cultural activities” in the local park. We were offered ski-boots and all-in-one suits to wear for this so we looked like a pack of large fluorescent babies on the loose. Activities included skibob and go-karts on hard-packed ice (no thanks): hot spiced drinks (yes please!): and traditional Lapp stories in a big tent lit only by a wood fire in the centre (very yes please!) This involved sitting on furs on the ice, mainly involved women, and was very enjoyable.
Apart from folklore, the women told us that the traditional Lapp dress (hat covering ears, long loose dress over baggy trousers tucked into boots, with plenty of room for extra layers) is subject to fashion. Sometimes the dress will be long, sometimes short and more fitted: the embroidery changes according to what fabrics they order. And they don't make them at home during long winter nights any more, they order them from a specialist store in Norway.
Mick had ordered me some spikes to slip onto my boots so I felt quite safe walking around on the ice and snow. On the last evening, as I wandered around the village trying to find which pub the rest of the Brit delegation were in, I got chatted up by a local Finn. As I was wrapped up from head to foot and wearing trousers, I was surprised that he even realised I was female: but maybe he didn't mind.
Hong Kong
2006 was a bit of a blur for me thanks to the various side-effects of chemotherapy (nb. I have been assured by the doctors that I am well on the road to recovery and no further sign of cancer has been found). So Mick and I decided to give ourselves a Christmas treat in the shape of a short holiday in Hong Kong. Although I have been to China (Beijing, Shanghai and a bit of the Great Wall), neither of us had ever visited HK. The outward flight, including obligatory waiting around in Amsterdam Schipol, seemed very long, particularly as the plane was extremely full. (It was 21st December!) We spent a jetlagged first afternoon walking slowly round the sights nearest to our hotel and watching the boats on the waterfront and had a welcome early night.
My main impression of the town centre was the inescapable insistent pressure to buy. Everybody was trying to sell you something and once you expressed any interest they would push you for more and more. Then after a bit of bargaining they would suddenly get fed up, settle for whatever you had then reached, grab the money and start talking to the person behind you. The best experience was probably getting a ludicrous quantity of clothes made-to-measure – we had to buy another suitcase! – with a lot of detailed attention. The worst was trying to buy a laptop only to be bullied and upset by the manager who thought he knew what I wanted more than I did. Only when I burst into tears and threatened to walk out of the shop did he start a panic negotiation down until he reached a price some 200 below my maximum for the machine I actually wanted. (It is a good laptop, very light with lots of battery time: I'm using it right now).
We did all the expected sightseeing and were not disappointed. Food was wonderful: this included an ace curry at the Delhi Club on Nathan Road (the main shopping street in Kowloon): a Japanese fish lunch on Christmas Day: and "afternoon tea" at the Sheraton Hotel in Kowloon, which comprised everything from the expected sandwiches and cakes to a variety of cook-to-order Chinese meals! Having said that, the hotel breakfast was pretty good with the full range of Chinese and European breakfast dishes and no limit on going back for more. No wonder we needed to walk around a lot.
We wanted to go to midnight mass but found we would have to queue and get tickets in advance, with no certainty of getting inside the Church, so we reluctantly gave up on that and went back to our hotel for a (outdoor) swim and hot tub. We were soaking in the hot tub under the stars and remarking that although we had heard Jingle Bells etc about a million times we had missed hearing real carols, when suddenly a choir started singing nearby and worked its way through a very good selection of traditional carols! A beautiful moment.
Chippenham
I attended Full Council a few days after my birthday in January, which I share (day and year) with another Councillor. I had suggested to him that we should treat the Group to a celebratory drink. I turned up with a quantity of chilled Cava, he failed to turn up at all, but those members of the group who were there seemed to enjoy it and were very laid back in the meeting! The opposition seemed fractionally less boring after a glass or two of fizz.
A week later, I attended Chippenham Area Committee, probably the last North Wiltshire meeting I shall go to as Councillor. I made sure I got two solid items minuted about issues in my ward, for my successor to take up in his campaign. The highlight for me was a discussion much later in the meeting about lost lorry drivers. There is apparently now a unit at County Hall dealing specifically with complaints about misdirection by satnav (largely due to drivers asking for the fastest route). Every day, drivers follow the siren voice of the satellite without paying any attention to common sense, ending up in streams or farmyards or wedged into tiny lanes at risk of demolishing historic buildings. One councillor related a conversation between a lorry driver and a farmer as they watched the lorry sinking into mud (or worse). Driver: “but she TOLD me to come this way”. Farmer: “Didn’t you notice you were driving into a field?”
A friend of mine lives in the village of Sherston by a street called Ford (a clue in the title!) and is forever having to fish out and dry out people who think they can drive through a river that is at least 2 feet deep even in the middle of a dry summer just because the satnav says so.
Brussels
I was there earlier this week with a group from the party's International Relations Committee coming to find out more about how the EU works. For the first time, they included a session at Committee of the Regions in their programme, with which I was delighted to assist. As I think I mentioned in my notes about the ELDR Congress in Bucharest a few months ago, the UK Liberal Democrats find themselves on the radical wing of the European Party and need very much to make contacts and have proper policy discussions with members of sister parties.
Incidentally, it was snowing in Brussels most of the time I was there but nothing appeared to be closed down or delayed. My only complaint was that my hotel - which I had picked out because it offers both Chinese and English cuisine - was unusually full of Chinese guests who had scoffed nearly all the Chinese breakfast before I came downstairs! I did manage to get a small bowl of fried noodles and rice soup but had otherwise to be content with bread and spread.
Enough for the moment.......
