The People's Race

Continuing with the firsts from the last post. Here's another one. I went to the Grand National. That's a big tickbox item, right? Right?

I didn't understand it. I liked the sitting-on-a-hill part of it - that reminded me of a music festival. But that was kind of it. It was a festival where instead of watching music you just guessed the set list, which doesn't make for heaps of entertainment.

So that leaves you to get your festival kicks from fancy dress and day drinking. Neither of which it does that well. The fancy dress theme for this year was as glamorous as possible, which meant a lot of people were not dressed appropriately for sitting on a slightly-soggy grass bank. Wet bottoms a-go-go.

As for day drinking, the service was so bad it felt like it was designed to stop you drinking, which made it all the more impressive how drunk some of the crowd were. Credit where it's due...

Anyway. Grand National. Box ticked. Let's never talk of it again.

Snowdonia

Snowdonia. It's taken me a while. I've seen it twinkling in the distance but this is the first time I've properly mountained up. 

On the way North we got our first Welsh taster when we stopped for a walk in a place with an eleven-letter-long name, but which contained no vowels. Well Welsh.

First Number One: Snowdon. The second of my Three Peaks and something that I probably should have done twenty years ago. Still box ticked now. The weather had been rubbish the week before so it looked like it might not happen, but happen it did. Yomped up the Pyg track, which was really pretty but unpleasantly full of people. Snuck down by the Rhyd Ddu track, which - after the ridge at the top - was a lot less pretty but felt less like a queue.

First Number Two: puffins. Went out on a boat from Beaumaris to see a lighthouse and some seals. Managed to see a handful of puffins despite it being early in puffin season - I say handful, you would need pretty big hands, even though they were about two thirds of the size I expected. 

Beaumaris had its own chilli shop (what castle isn't complemented by a chilli shop?). Which was where I found out how spicy Carolina Reapers actually are. When they broke me last Summer they were officially the spiciest chilli in town. If I'd known that at the time I would have afforded them more respect. 

What else? Stayed in Bethesda, where a casual run is a little bit more hilly than Essex. Stopped at Llanfair PG for obligatory station pic. Visited the Devil's Kitchen (complete with full Welsh rain) and the Anglesey Sea Zoo which I last visited in the early nineties - my gut feel is it hadn't changed too much, still who doesn't want to see cuttlefish?

We had a break at Ironbridge on the way South. The bridge had put its pyjamas on, which added an element of ridiculous to the nostalgic detour.

Oh and there was a third first I'm keeping for myself. That one isn't for you internet. Hashtag new normal.

The Room Where It Happens

I just don't get opera. I've tried and I tried and I just keep trying but I don't get it. It was La Traviata this time - I recognised tunes and everything. But didn't get it. I'm not certain why. I mean I like music but I don't appreciate classical music on any intellectual level. So that just leaves the narrative.

I've been raised on a diet of films which have complex narrative arcs and intertwined sub plots. You just don't seem to get that in opera. In my limited experience the story seems to be simplistic to the point where it's almost incidental. And I just don't find that that satisfying.

Plus I do like lyrics. And lyrics to the opera tend to be a bizarre mix of repeated nonsense and everyday speech. They don't rhyme "panicky" with "anarchy". In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I much preferred Hamilton to La Traviata.

Czech This Out

I've got a soft spot for Prague, it's the very first city I backpacked in, the first city I hostelled in. Back before travellercliche. Back at the start of the internet travel age. So long ago that Prague isn't even in the Czech Republic anymore. Well Czechia.

So I went back. But this time it was a stag do so the wide-eyed wonder of my more innocent years was substantially more red-eyed.

And no-one wants to hear about a stag do. The things that seemed hilarious at the time (the taxodermy tiger, Edgerley Edge, goulash in bread, the Nationwide text, the koala bar, the sinister accordianist, the 80s cafe, and a coffee, etc) will at best seem like cliquey in-jokes. So I shall gloss over that as much as possible and leave you with two recommendations. One for the best bar, one for the best cafe. And by best I mean weirdest, obviously.

Alchemy was a bar that seemed to base itself on Knightmare. Or a nightmare. There was a point in the evening when a cloaked figure in a plague mask carried a box of smoke to the table next door and presented them with a tarot card. You don't get that in Wetherspoons. Often. 

If you find yourself in that bit of Prague between the Old and New Towns follow the chalk signs to breakfast and you too might find yourself in Anicaffe. It's a chintz-lined cafe-cum-spa run by a lady who oozes personality but never seems to be entirely sure where she is or what she's doing. The food was good. Everything else was bonkers. Try and find it.

After All This Time?

I went to that there Harry Potter Studio Tour (first time to Watford - box tick). I took my mum for mothers' day, it seemed to be a popular mother-son destination, although I suspect we were above the expected demographic. 

I really liked it. Is it because Harry Potter is a guilty pleasure? Not really, a. I'm pretty blatant (I came third in a Harry Potter pub quiz a couple of weeks back) and b. I think it was more the scale of it than the HarryPotteriness. I really hadn't appreciated the amount of detail in the films. Five hundred handwritten-and-aged labels on bottles just in the back drop of the potions room. That's ridiculous right? A real chocolate phoenix as a table display in the background? And then there was all the things they made that they couldn't really use because CGI was better - a massive animatronic hippogriff for example. So much detail. It gave me a whole new respect for people who have to recreate worlds. 

Not blogged for a while. Do you wanna hear about the other culture I've done? Not really? Tough, telling you anyway. 

A lot of the gigs that I've been to over the last few years have been legacy gigs; bands I liked back in the day celebrating twenty years since their hayday. I assumed that the David Devant and His Spirit Wife gig would be the same. It wasn't they mainly played new stuff. What? 

Post Modern Jukebox on the other hand were a very different, crowd-pleasing beast. (You've not heard of them? They're worth a YouTube.) I did get slightly disconcerted as it seemed like the name had been franchised out, presumably so that you can have a bunch of PMJs touring at the same time. Is that really cynical? M'eh. Who cares. They were a lot of fun. 

Talking of postmodern jukeboxes, also saw Girl from the North Country. The Dylan not-quite-jukebox-musical that people seem to be raving about. I'll let you listen to their raves instead of mine...

Beer, Whine and Spirits

Well that last couple of weeks has been full of alcohol.

Beer:
I'm still not certain what I make of beer festivals, I think I'm becoming less cynical of them - is that an age thing? Am I approaching the age where I start appreciating the beers enough to stand in a church full of BO and wet dog smell on a rainy afternoon? Perish the thought.

Wine:
In house wine tasting? That sounds sophisticated, right? Turns out it's just someone trying to get you drunk enough that you think £100 for six bottles of wine is good value. Still, we got to pretend we were grown ups and use words like bouquet and depth and earthy.

Spirits:
And ginfestival. This was better than I feared it might be. I've never been one for drinking a neat gin, so had visions of spending the night making this face. Sorry that doesn't come across well typed - you're gonna have to use your imagination. But even in the sample bit they gave tiny splashes of tonic, which was nice.

Turns out I actually learned a stuff too. I now know my Navy Strength from my Old Tom. I now know that if you're going to drink wasabi flavoured gin then use ginger ale as a mixer. And most of all I know that if you are gping to drink gin neat then drink Brockman's. Turns out it doesn't make you make the face...

Verdant Mountain

So Monteverde is a cloud forest. Like a rainforest only inside a cloud, which means you get perpetual horizontal drizzle. Rubbish for al fresco reading but great for orchids. There are some ridiculous orchids here; I saw one that was so small a hummingbird's tongue would have smothered it.

So yeah, saw some more of that nature: Kill Bill toucan (sic), howler monkeys, agoutis and enough makes of hummingbird to fill a baguette. Got a bit more of a sloth fix, saw a two-fingered sloth (sic)

curled up in a slothball, almost touching distance from the side of the road, then got to see it slothing a few hours later. They are peculiar animals.

Stopped for lunch at one of those cafes set up for tourists - nothing Costa Rican on the menu, but a suitably fruity bird table outside. There was a patio of people waiting for the motmots and toucanets to come down from the trees, only to see two capuchin monkeys pillage the tables and make off with a fruity bounty. For the record toucanets are brilliant, they look like a disdainful, furry melon with a beak.

It feels a bit ungrateful to whine when I saw so much of that nature, but I'm going to anyway. I didn't see any frogs. Not one. I checked lilypads and bromeliads and the closest I came was a cane toad. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a cane toad as much as the next man - they are a no nonsense kind of animal - but they aren't the colourful frogs that the postcards promised.