Belgian Waffle

Amsterdam: city of sin and stag parties. I went to the Rijkmuseum - well "Lad".  It had just been refurbished after however long and I figured it was one of the big ones to tick off.  And yeah, the refurb is pretty good, the building is impressive and all the rooms seem all light and airy, the downside of the new, light, airy rooms is that it completely emphasises how brown ALL Dutch art is.  So. Very. Drab. All of it.  

Mainly though, I went to Antwerp. Which may just be the coolest city I've ever been to.  That is if you count "cool" by how many art galleries and cheese shops somewhere has, which I do. Seriously, so many art galleries. Maybe 1 in 5 buildings, until you get to the artist district, by which time it's 2 in 3 - and the things that aren't art galleries are trying to be - clothes shops called Your with a sign in the window "We will rip you off"; basically an art gallery. It was a whole city of Chorlton.

Slight gripe: I feel like all I've eaten is chips, sorry frites.  Even going out in the evening my bucket of mussels came with chips (conversation: "Have you tried muscle sausage?" "Erm?" "Sausage, for your mussels." - he meant sauce - I didn't correct him). I feel somewhat starchy.

More Rained Against than Raining

I was going to call this "Paris When it Drizzles" - the wordplay pleased me - but it would be inaccurate, it didn't drizzle it was full on rain. Rain rain rain. The sort of rain that lets you know it's raining.  Still Paris was pretty good on the whole.  Didn't get to the Musee D'Orsay due to unnecessary queue lengths, and the general meandering was cut a bit short by the aforementioned inclement weather, but apart from that all pretty Parisien, which is no bad thing.

Continued by Peter Nichols fest by going to see A Day in the Death of Joe Egg over in Kingston.  How comes I've never been to Kingston before? It's both quaint and bustling at the same time.  Pleasantly impressed. Play wasn't bad either, nice mix of zany and borderline taboo edginess.

Whilst we're talking plays - and this will lose me some culture points - I didn't get King Lear.  For a play that's often lauded as being The Best Tragedy I just found it boring.  Does that make me a bad person?

Just checked out my blog stats - I'm trending in Malaysia and Indonesia right now.  Guess there's a Peter Nichols revival there too...

Peon Play

I've had quite a Nicholcentric week.

I went to see Peter Nichols' Passion Play.  Enjoyed it but didn't love it.  Not certain that was because the first half is a lot better than the second half or because I was surrounded by cretins who spent the bulk of the play whispering.  Obviously being English I didn't tell them to keep the noise down - that would be far too easy, I just stewed on it for a few days before referring to them as "peons" in a blog that they won't see.

I saw Phil Nichol accidentally.  I'd mainly gone to see Dan Antopolski supporting; he was on first and crashed and burned: always a bit painful to see a comedian die on stage, especially if it's someone who's stuff you like. Not sure what I made of Phil Nichol.  I'm fairly certain that none of his jokes were actually funny - it was all fairly obvious lowest-common-denominator stuff - but he sold everything with such conviction that us peons lapped it up.

Support Your Local Comedy Festival

It's been the Colchester Comedy Festival - hooray - but it took me a bit too long to get into it - boo. They had a pretty good line up, but a mixture of other commitments and laziness meant that I didn't get there until Richard Herring, a few days before the end.

I went along to that there New Comedian of the Year competition - one of the heats and the final.  It was in the old bus station waiting room, which had been turned into a rather tasty little venue.  I don't remember it being half as nice when it was an actual bus station. Toilets were a bit weird, with everyone relying on a radar key tied to a walking stick; queues a plenty.

Congrats to Ben Clover, a most worthy winner, not least because he did a different set in the final to the heats. Feel I should drop mentions at Ed Hedges and maybe Mark Sidcox whose party popper joke was one of the funniest things I've heard in ages.

Aswan

I like Aswan.  It's a bit more chilled out than either Cairo or Luxor.  By which I mean there's a lot less dudes with guns, which is quite a relief.  i get the feeling I'm not great for Africa. Aside from a couple of weekends in Morocco I've had three proper holidays in Africa; the main destinations of the first two - Zimbabwe and Mali - went absolutely nuts as soon as I left and this Egypt place seems to be absolutely on a knife edge.

Went to the temple of Philae (the one on the island).  Now don't get me wrong, all these temples are proper old (this one's a comparative baby dating back only to Roman times; but all the biggies date back to 1400BC, except the pyramids which add an extra millennium and a bit to that) and it's amazing that they managed to do what they did, and even more so that it's lasted so long but they do get a bit samey after a while, what with all these Pharoahs (that look the same) giving gifts to all these gods (that look essentially the same as the Pharoahs, give or take the odd animal head).

I feel a little bit hieroglyphicked out...

Exit Through The Crocodile Museum

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I didn't realise that Luxor Museum was in Luxor - I've seen pics of it. I assumed it was hewn out of a cliff - it's not. It's bang in the town centre.  Still wherever it is, it's a pretty good place to spy some sphinxes.  Between there and Karnack there is pretty much loads of them.

Saw that Valley of the Kings place too, whilst I was in Luxor.  Didn't get to go ballooning, apparently they're looking into the safety aspect.  Big fat boo.

Currently cruising the Nile. The boat goes from Luxor to Aswan, via two other temples which, whilst plenty temple-y, don't have the big name cache of, say, Valley of the Kings.  So they've tried to do something a bit different to make it memorable. In Edfu (formerly Apollopolis which is a lot more fun to say) they've made it so that the only way to travel is by horse and cart. In Kom Ombo (fun to say as it is) they found a heap of mummified crocodiles dedicated to the local crocodile god, consequently you exit through a crocodile museum, which makes a change from a giftshop.

Pharoah 'Nuff

So Cairo, biggest city in Africa; one of the biggest cities in the world.  And it looks big, anytime you get up above the building line the barrage of ugly, beige, half-built blocks stretches further than you can see. After the bigness - in fact, well before the bigness - you notice that the temperature here is a whole heap more balmy than that sub zero nonsense back in Blighty.  It's just about the first time I could classify the ambient temperature as "not cold" since leaving Latin America last year.

Cairo is pretty much empty of tourists at the moment due to the old civil unrest thing.  Not certain whether this (the emptiness) is good or bad. On the plus side you do get the big sights - like King Tut's mask - almost to yourself; conversely the millions of people that rely on tourism are all trying to sell you a statue of a cat anytime you do anything.

So yeah, been doing the cliches. Perhaps not in the order we intended, again due to politics (FYI avoid "the Garden City district on a Saturday" is a bit like saying avoid the Trafalgar Square area, it takes a bit of a dent out of the 'stuff what you can see').

Saw the museum and the Tutankhamun stuff. Not meaning to belittle him, but he wasn't one of the big Pharoahs, what with dying when he was still a kid, and if his tomb was so chock full of trinkets the important Pharoahs - your Ramses and whoever - must have been, well, quite shiny.

Staying in Giza, so can see the Pyramids from the roof, which is a bit surreal. Just been out there for a spot of Sphinx watching. Only saw one, poor show.