Hong Kong, Part 1

On November 16, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Hong Kong9 Comments

I started this blog in late October of 2011, right before I moved to Europe to live for three years in Germany. Almost every country I’ve traveled to outside of the United States is recorded in this blog because I was writing in more or less real-time. There are three countries I visited before the blog began though. I don’t think I even still have any photos from the Bahamas. Canada was great, and it might get a blog post one of these days.

Then there’s Hong Kong.

Twelve years ago in September of 2008, I went to Hong Kong for two weeks for work. The days were occupied with computer nerdery, but the evenings were mine, and the weekend in the middle. Since it was three years before this blog was started, I wrote about my trip to Hong Kong on LiveJournal- remember LiveJournal? It was never committed to my WordPress blog until now, though, and NanoPoblano gives me a great reason to finally stop procrastinating and recap what I can remember of my time there, with an assist from my original notes from 2008. Past Steven is being helpful instead of being a dick for once.

There’s a lot to share, so I’m going to break it up into five posts. (Hey, my five weeks in Japan became 29 blog posts. Five posts is a breeze!) This post is kind of a rambling mess because I started with about 85-90 photos that I want to share from my Hong Kong trip and then separated them out into specific topics, one for each day. This batch is everything that didn’t fit into one of the other four.

My trip started on September 6th of 2008. I left for the Ft. Lauderdale airport at the ass-crack of dawn, connected in Newark New Jersey, and then it was just another sixteen hours to arrive in Hong Kong. All in all, I was traveling for about 24 hours. My original notes from 2008 say that the captain of my plane was, and I promise this is true, Captain Mike Fortune. What a great name for a pilot!

The biggest problem with this kind of travel, in my personal opinion, is a question of time. On the flight there, I watched Kung-Fu Panda, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and two episodes of Scrubs, plus had a meal- and still had roughly half the flight remaining. Sixteen hours is a long time to be in one of those metal tubes. I have trouble sleeping on airplanes, but I managed to doze a very small amount on this one, so I wasn’t completely wiped out on arrival.

After dealing with customs and passport control, we took a reasonably short airport express train ride to Tsim Sha Tsui, in Kowloon, and then on to the hotel.

My room was on the 16th floor, and it was teeny tiny. How teeny tiny, you might ask? I took this photo from the doorway of the bathroom near the main door of the hotel room. There was a bed, a desk, a chair, some tall windows looking down onto the neon-drenched city, and not much room for anything else. I had to keep moving my suitcase out of the way for the entire time I was there.

Once checked in, I needed to change some US dollars into Hong Kong dollars. There are three different banks authorized to print and distribute their own designs of Hong Kong dollars, alongside the Hong Kong government. This means that my bills did not always match each other in appearance- for someone used to the uniformly green all-the-same-size bills the United States uses, this was eye-opening. I did like the vibrant colors on that tenner though.

A quick note about food in Hong Kong… I appreciated that instead of water as a normal beverage with my meal, tea was always on hand. I also liked the omnipresence of chop sticks. And the hidden drawer in every table in some restaurants for other cutlery was genius.

A few nights before the trip ended, we had dinner with our Hong Kong colleagues at a local restaurant. The table was round, and they set an enormous lazy Susan in the middle, then they kept bringing food in waves. We spun the thing in the middle to serve ourselves. I tried Jellyfish, which had the taste and texture of crunchy cabbage. And I tried Thousand Year Egg, which was so-so. It looks awful, but the flavor isn’t a big deal. I also tried duck, but I could only stomach one bite of that- I saw them carving it, and it still had a bill. Luckily, I was rather buzzed on Tsingtao beer at the time.

Speaking of foodstuffs that squick me out, at one point the group got lost during lunch and we walked through an open-air market. The place was filled with pungent things- they had fish, eels in a basket, hanging meat, and foul-smelling vats of stuff that I dare not even describe. Just ew.

They had a silverware drawer built into the table. Genius!

I think this was my first time ever having a Tsing Tao beer. — They had a silverware drawer built into the table. Genius!

We used taxis several times going to and from the office. The red taxis were in the urban centers, and so we saw them close to the hotel in Kowloon and wherever the biggest crowds were. The green taxis are for new territories and we saw those when we were near the data center and office, away from the main city. There are also blue taxis in Lantau, but I didn’t see any of those.

This was also my first time in a city where people drive on the left instead of the right. The city streets were clearly labeled so that stupid Americans wouldn’t be hit by cars as they looked the wrong way while crossing the street. This particular photo is a bad example though, because this was a one-way street.

We used the train quite often over our two weeks because using taxis exclusively for a dozen people gets really expensive really fast. Every time I see the MTR logo on the front of a train, I immediately assume they’re Psi-Corps. (Yes, that’s a Babylon 5 joke.)

We changed it up a few times over the two weeks, but for the most part we took the train from Kowloon to a station closer to the office, and then a taxi the rest of the way.

This sign made me laugh. — Our afternoon train.

After work, the group would go explore the city or strike out for dinner. This is a walk along D’aquilar Street, a tiny winding road with stairs alongside- it’s steeply uphill. Restaurants, bars, and clubs dotted the length of the street. The night of this photo, we ate at Al’s, because the canopy boasted the world’s best burgers.

A visit to D’aquilar Street on a subsequent night found us in an Australian restaurant, where I tried kangaroo meat. It was a little springy.

On one of the nights, I ate at a really excellent Irish pub– their corned beef and cabbage was delightful. I have found that in most cities around the world, there’s usually an Irish pub.

Three more pictures, and then I’ll wrap this post up. The first is just a random guy walking across the bridge as seen from our taxi on that first work-day. I saw a lot of people carrying parasols to protect them from the sun- this is a very good thing It was toasty-hot the whole time we were there.

On several occasions, I saw t-shirts with things on them that contained amusing bad translations. I saw one girl with a shirt that said Snatch, another with a shirt that said “Wide Love,” and yet another with a shirt that said, “I rove you.” But the best one so far was this girl’s shirt- it’s a recipe for something. I’m curious whether this was a deliberate thing or if she just saw English text and thought it was cool in the same way that Americans sometimes get things with Mandarin or Kanji on them just because they look neat.

During a bus ride across the island on my way to Thursday’s post, I saw a lot of fascinating things. This cemetery in particular was fascinating- the plots are so close together that for it took me a moment to parse that this was actually a burial ground.

Last but not least, a delicious blackcurrant soda called Ribena. When I had this in 2008, I thought it was a uniquely Hong Kong sort of thing to drink, but I have since learned that Ribena is actually a British product. The UK had transferred control of Hong Kong over to China only eleven years before my visit, in 1997, and there was still a great deal of British influence to be seen.

A short bulleted list of observations about Hong Kong that don’t really fit with any of the photographs:

The chocolate in Hong Kong is better than the chocolate in the US. They import a lot of it from Singapore and Vietnam, and I think the cocoa levels are just higher than they are in the US. I had similar chocolate experiences in many other countries. The US just doesn’t do chocolate well.
I saw quite a few American chains in Hong Kong. I ate at a McDonalds once, in the first week, when I was sick and needed to just eat something and down some Panadol and sleep off a fever. The McDonalds burger tasted the same, but the cheese was sharper. French fries are french fries no matter where you are; they were identical. I tried to take a photograph of the menu at Starbucks and I was politely asked to leave before I could take the photo. Twelve years later and I’m still not sure what that was about. I also saw Outback, TGI Fridays, Burger King, and, oddly, Popeye’s Fried Chicken in Hong Kong. I read somewhere that KFC does more business in China than in all of the United States, so I can kind of see where that’s going.
7-11 deserves its own bullet point. The 7-11 density in Hong Kong is HUGE. Walking to dinner on one of the nights, we must have passed one 7-11 every fifty yards. And they take the Octopus Card, which is excellent- the Octopus Card is the metro card for the MTR train system. You can recharge it, and it works in every train station, every 7-11, some other stores, and some vending machines. The Octopus Card was the single smartest purchase I made on this trip- it made a great many things much, much easier.
The street hawkers were pushy and numerous- I was offered massage, luggage, “copywatch,” custom tailoring, hashish, and pretty girls. I’ve never been in a city with pushier people selling things on random street corners. This is one area where I definitely prefer being back in the US, where I’m completely ignored on street corners.
Speaking of pushy and weird, I went with some of my coworkers to the local equivalent of a strip club, and it was nothing at all like a strip club in the US. For one thing, there were only about five or six people visible, and there was a slightly older woman who kept trying to get me to buy drinks for the girls. Looking back at this with the insight of hindsight, I think “buy drinks for the girls” might have been code for something very different. The whole experience was kind of uncomfortable and we didn’t stay long.
After that, we went to a local friendly gay bar, and someone there asked me if I was Dan Savage. While I do not see even the slightest resemblance, it was a flattering question because let’s face it, he’s a good looking dude.
I really enjoyed the sound of the city when I was going to sleep. I was sixteen stories up, so it was mostly muffled, but it was soothing to have the sound of other people nearby, to hear the low rumble of traffic. Looking back in hindsight, this might have been one of my first times sleeping in a large city.

Next up, Victoria Peak and the Kowloon waterfront!

Have you ever visited Hong Kong?

37/52 (and 16 of 30!)

Orlando To Arlington: One Night On The Amtrak Auto Train

On August 24, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel, Travel Posts10 Comments

When it came to the logistics of how to move to Virginia, I gave it a great deal of thought. I had movers carry the furniture, but there was still a bunch that traveled with me- things I wouldn’t entrust to a mover or things I knew I would need right away before the movers would get to my destination. I considered three ways to do this:

Fly up and have some auto transporter move my car. This would be the most expensive option, of course.
Drive up. It’s about 850 miles between Orlando and Arlington, which means at least twelve hours of I-95 driving. While this is theoretically the least expensive option, there’s gas to consider, and very probably a hotel in the middle. Also, I hate driving more than a few hours.
Take the Auto Train. Amtrak’s Auto Train runs every day in both directions between Sanford, Florida (just north of Orlando) to Lorton, Virginia (just south of Arlington). I didn’t even know this existed until I started researching ways to get up to Virginia for the move. A one-way ticket for both me and my car cost a little more than five hundred dollars. As you might have guessed based on the title of the post, I chose this option.

On Thursday, August 6th, it was finally time to move to Virginia. I woke up, checked out of my final Orlando hotel, had a quick I-Hop breakfast, and drove my packed-up car to the Auto Train station in Sanford.

I foolishly let the little mapping robot in my car tell me how to get to the station instead of just following the signs. I took a really winding backroads path to the Auto Train station, but at least I finally found it.

When you arrive, you follow the markings on the pavement to the first check-in. The special rail cars on the left side are called autoracks, and that’s where the cars go. I’ll talk more about those later. The train on the right side is the passenger compartment- they’re separated in Sanford because they need to load the cars and passengers separately, but they get linked up before we depart.

When you get to the first check-in, the attendant will scan your printed ticket. I paid a small extra fee to be one of the first thirty cars unloaded when we got to Virginia, so the door of my car got a magnet slapped on the driver’s side door with a priority number.

One really cool thing about the Auto Train is that you can pack up your car like a giant checked bag. You won’t have access to your car during the trip, but it’s still a good way to carry a lot of stuff. I packed the things I would need for one night in a smaller bag, including my laptop and some sleep clothing, and left the rest in the car.

After the first check-in, you pull up to a canopy where vehicles are being taken in different lanes. This is where I said goodbye to my car for the duration- they have you take your carry-on bag for the train and leave the keys in the car.

I’ll focus for a moment on the car’s journey- there’s a dedicated staff at the Amtrak station that functions sort of like valet parking, except that in this case, they’re parking your car in the autoracks.

The autoracks are really neat. They’re bi-level, which is why you can see some ramps going up into them while the closest car in this photo is driving down a ramp into the lower part. I watched them take my car in, and it was on the lower level for the duration. Auto Train consists are reportedly nearly three-fourths of a mile long and can transport over three hundred cars per trip.

A quick aside for the linguistically minded among you: Prior to reading about autoracks, I had never heard the term consist as it applies to trains. Considering how much time I’ve spent on trains, that’s kind of amazing. A consist is a set of railroad vehicles forming a complete train- in other words, the engine plus the passenger cars plus the diner car and lounge plus all the autoracks together are a consist. New words are fun!

Here’s a short video of the crew driving someone’s vehicle onto the autoracks. I watched a bunch of these because I’m a huge nerd and it was fascinating to me.

Let’s move on to the passenger experience. Both the Sanford and Lorton stations have a fairly large waiting area for pre-boarding. In the case of the Sanford location, there’s a shuttle that runs every twenty minutes to downtown Sanford a few miles away, for anyone who wants to kill time before departure. I elected to stay put. (Although with Hollerbach’s just two miles away, it was very tempting.)

There’s a check-in counter where I checked in and was given a compartment assignment. I’ll talk more about that a little further on.

I mentioned earlier that the Auto Train consist is nearly three-fourths of a mile long- this is not an exaggeration. This is only the passenger compartments and dining car, and only part of that. Getting the entire train into one photo would not be possible from this close.

This is the hallway near my little sleeping compartment. Some of the larger sleeping compartments had a different hallway along one side of the train with the compartments being all to one side, but this area was all “Roomettes.”

A Roomette, in Amtrak terms, is a small enclosed compartment with two seats facing each other and a small fold-down table in the middle. There’s a knob for temperature control, a power outlet, a light switch, and curtains for privacy during sleep time. Also, the door latches from the inside, which is reassuring.

At night, the two seats can be pushed flat to make one bed, and a separate bunk pulls down from the ceiling. When it was time to sleep, I actually chose to use the upper bunk instead of the lower, even though I was alone and could have done either one.

Our departure was at 4pm, so they rolled the passenger compartment forward, coupled the autoracks, and then we were off. While they were coupling us and getting us ready, an engineer somewhere on the train gave us some raw statistics: Our Auto Train had 182 passengers, 14 crew members, and four engineers/conductors. 111 people were in sleeping compartments, and our train was carrying 101 four-wheeled vehicles and three two-wheelers.

The first few hours of the train ride were all Florida, but I still saw a few pretty things out of my window. There were lots and lots of cows, for a start.

And waterways, weather, little boats…

…and some neat smokestacks.

My sleeping-compartment ticket included a dinner and a small continental breakfast. When I checked in back in Sanford, I was given a small flyer with my dinner choices. Normally, you would be assigned a dinner slot and you would go to the dining car for this. These aren’t normal times, however, so all meals were taken in the sleeping compartments.

Technically I can say that I had dinner in Jacksonville, but I was just passing through.

Here were the selections for dinner:

The flyer was actually not correct about everything, but they were pretty close. For example, here’s the “first glass of wine” mentioned above. You can tell it’s a red because the cup has an ‘R‘ Sharpied onto the lid.

Presentation aside, the food was great. I chose the flatiron steak. I wasn’t really expecting much from an Amtrak steak, but it was delicious. The veggies, mashed potato, and bread were also excellent and I cleaned my plate.

Dessert was a chocolate cake. It was delicious and moist. It was most definitely not a lie.

After dinner, I resumed staring out the window at all the passing landscape. There were parts of the journey that seemed like it was 97% trees and rusted out El Caminos. I’m only half-joking. I’ve never seen so many El Caminos in one day before, and ALL of them were abandoned in wooded areas.

Soon after we crossed into Georgia, we passed the distinct water tower of Folkston. I didn’t get a good shot of the tower, so I yoinked this one off the web to illustrate.

Pretty soon after that, it became too dark to really see much outside of the train, aside from the occasional gas station or Wal-Mart in the distance. The attendant asked me during boarding what time I wanted him to configure the bed. I had him come by at around ten. I played some zoom trivia for a bit, but my connection wasn’t very stable so it was not very successful. Amtrak technically has wi-fi but they don’t support video chats or streaming of any kind, so I was tethered to my phone and it was a little wonky.

The Auto Train makes only one stop in between endpoints, and it’s not for passengers. The train makes a brief halt in Florence, South Carolina to change engineers, refuel, and refill the water tanks. I was still awake when we made this stop, but I was exhausted. After a time, I climbed into the upper bunk and slept fitfully.

When I woke up, we were already in Virginia, cruising through Richmond. I was awake enough to see Squash-A-Penny Junction Antiques when we rolled past, and I rather wish I’d had the camera out. Set near the junction of two major rail lines, it was originally built in the 1860s as a general store. Now it’s an eclectic antique shop, and it just looks neat. I definitely want to double back to see it at some later point.

Right after we passed the Squash-A-Penny in Doswell, the attendant brought my “continental breakfast,” which was a banana, a crumb cake, some milk, a juice cup- not really a very heavy breakfast, but that’s ok because we were less than two hours from arrival.

Naturally, I started looking out the window again after breakfast, and just outside of Fredericksburg, we passed a big stone pyramid in an otherwise open grass field. I can’t pass up the opportunity to find out why a monument might be out in a field, so I looked it up later. Here’s what I learned:

This field is actually part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The pyramid, composed of granite stones and standing 23 feet tall, was erected in 1903 after a request during the late 1800s by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society. This American Civial War monument marks the point where General George G. Meade’s Union division penetrated a gap in ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s lines on December 13, 1862, during the Battle of Fredericksburg. Over the years it has become known as the Meade Pyramid. The more you know…

Toward the very end of the journey, the Auto Train spent a lot of time hugging the Virginia shore of the Potomac River, with Maryland across the way.

Finally, after a little more than sixteen hours on the rails, we made a slightly-early arrival at Lorton Station in Virginia. They uncoupled the autoracks first and started to offload the cars while the passengers deboarded. I have read that the entire Auto Train can offload all of the cars in a little more than an hour, but my car was pulled up almost as soon as I reached the front door of the station.

Ten minutes after I stepped down from the passenger compartment, I was back on the road, driving the last eighteen miles or so to my new apartment in Arlington.

Have you ever traveled by Auto Train?

21/52

Air Travel Lessons from the Pandemic

On June 4, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel, Travel Posts11 Comments

When it comes to my trips, I’m a planner. I’ve gone on at length in other posts about the way that I approach new cities and the way I plan out my trips. The experiences of the last three months have led me to rethink a few of my previously held stances about travel.

Never again will I book my flight more than 60 days before the trip: In the past, I have usually tried to get my flights about three months before I actually want to travel- having them booked relieves the mental stress of a hanging to-do list item, and getting them done early helps to get a good price on the ticket. Or at least that’s how it used to be.

The conventional wisdom used to be that the best prices on flights are usually found about 70 days before a flight and that the best booking window is 21 to 121 days before your flight date. If you wait until the last minute, flight prices are often hugely inflated, and if you get them too early, they can be just as bad.

When Covid-19 hit, my plans started to disappear and I was left with a need to cancel five separate trips out of state- that meant I had to cancel flights with JetBlue, American Airlines, Delta, Spirit Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and Frontier Airlines. I will never again buy my flight more than a month out- there’s just too much uncertainty, and having to cancel a flight is a giant pain in the ass. This leads me to the next lesson-

Never again will I use an all-in-one travel planning site: I have been an Expedia.com user since some time in 2001. I’ve used it for countless flights and hotels, using various airlines throughout the last eighteen years. I always felt like it was useful to have the web equivalent of a travel agent, and it worked well for me until it didn’t. The mass cancellation of all of those flights is where Expedia fell apart.

It was nearly impossible at first to reach an actual customer service representative, and when they finally started to get their response organized it was still clunky and hard to get a response.

JetBlue was the easiest to deal with- I was able to go directly to them and they canceled my flight and put a credit in their “Travel Bank.” Nice and easy. Several of the others wouldn’t talk to me directly though- if you book through an agent or a site like Expedia or Travelocity, a lot of the airlines will make you go back to that site to deal with any flight changes.

To my vast and unending surprise, the first airline to just do the right thing and give me back my money was Spirit Airlines. The cancellation with them was fully refunded, with a minimum of fuss. I was expecting more difficulty there, and their goodwill has guaranteed that I will use them again if the route I need is there.

Alaska Airlines also gave me a refund, once I called them and spoke to a customer service representative. They were very classy to me.

The other three allowed me to cancel flights, but only gave me credits. This is where the real lesson begins.

I have a long-standing relationship with Delta, and I’ve always enjoyed flying with them, but this experience has put me off of them a bit. For one thing, I haven’t been able to reach a person in weeks. For another, my Expedia flights resulted in airline credits, but those credits aren’t visible in my Delta account. If the credits from all those canceled flights lived in my Delta Skymiles account, I would be sanguine. They don’t, though. They live in Expedia. This is a problem.

The Expedia site is garbage. Up until a few days ago, there was absolutely no place on Expedia to even see a credit. Now you can see it on a per-trip basis, but there’s still no obvious list of them- if you don’t know you have a credit, you’ll never get a notification that you do. And you can’t use Expedia airline credits while booking on their site, you have to call their call center to use your credits. I’m not looking forward to that at all.

American Airlines is the same way- a credit, living somewhere in the Expedia system, that I will have to call in to use when booking a new flight with the same airline.

Frontier Airlines is the last of them, and Frontier gets all of my rage. All of it. The first time I called in, I only had to wait about forty minutes to reach a customer service representative. She initially said that I would have an airline credit, good until September of 2021, but that I would have to re-book within 90 days.

This is a problem because the event that I was attending via a Frontier flight is canceled, not rescheduled. None of my regular travel goes on Frontier routes, and I’m certainly not going to have more travel plans to coordinate with them in the next 90 days. I told the customer service rep this, and she said that she would get me a refund. She said she would route my information to another department to get the refund processed.

I now know that the Frontier Airlines customer service representative lied.

I know this because after a few weeks went by, I tried to call again. This time, it took me more than ninety minutes to get to a rep. He took my basic information, asked to place me on a “brief hold,” and that was the last I heard from him. I had roughly ten minutes of dead silence, and then the hold music came back and I was on for another twenty-five minutes, before I was suddenly disconnected from the call.

For my third attempt to reach someone helpful, I went the Twitter route, speaking to https://twitter.com/FrontierCare, who took more than two days for the first response. I explained my situation, and they said my reservation does not qualify for a refund. I repeated my explanation that the credit was useless to me, and a full two hours later repeated the “booked in 90 days, good until September 2021” bit.

So yeah, Frontier Airlines is going to keep my money, and will provide me no service for it. If they had said all along that they would not give me a refund, I would not have been angry, but the first customer service representative said I would have a refund. Either she lied through her teeth, or the next person I spoke to did. This is shitty customer service, and they’ve guaranteed that I will never fly with them or recommend them to anyone else I know. They can still save their relationship with me by doing the right thing, but they don’t seem willing to, and I’m not feeling up to spending another few hours of my life trying to get them to change their minds.

I have a long memory, Frontier, and I travel a lot. Just not with you.

I’m sure that I’ll still have new lessons from Covid-19 in the future. After all, most of my favorite things involve travel and the entertainment and travel industries are still changing and adapting to life with a pandemic. For now, I’ll leave you with this summary, the three main lessons I have learned from this experience:

Don’t book early. Just don’t. Wait until no less than thirty days from your travel date to get your airfare. You might have to pay a little more, but it’s less expensive than having an airline just keep your money without ever flying you anywhere.
Book directly with the airlines, not through a site like Expedia or Travelocity. If something goes wrong, it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with the airline directly than with a giant nebulous glob like Expedia. At this point in time, I’ve got a bunch of airline credits that I can ONLY use if I book through Expedia during a phone call. Once those credits are gone from Expedia, so am I.
Never fly Frontier Airlines. They suck. They have earned a spiteful place in my heart for taking my money without a usable service.

Have you learned any lessons from living through a global pandemic?

20/52

The London Film Museum

On May 26, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - The United Kingdom, Pop Culture2 Comments

My previous post about London led to a conversation with a friend about London, and I wanted to look at the pictures I posted in my blog post about the London Film Museum. When I went to look for the post, I discovered to my vast surprise that I never wrote a post about the London Film Museum, I only wrote a paragraph in one of my previous London posts. In August of 2012, I said the following in a longer post about London:

I quite enjoyed the London Film Museum, which had a lot of neat stuff, including Daleks, a TARDIS, the superman suit from Superman Returns, the Batman Begins batsuit, and a large variety of props from other movies. There was an entire room of Harry Potter stuff, and a large exhibit dedicated to Ray Harryhausen, including a full sized original Bubo. This was a highlight for me.

That’s it- just that one paragraph. All the pictures I took at the museum, which I thought I had posted years ago, were still unshared. I will now correct that oversight.

When I visited the London Film Museum, it was in a section of County Hall, right near Westminster Bridge, close to the London Eye along the Thames River. I have since learned that it moved to a location in Covent Garden in April of 2012- my visit was in July of 2012, so I suspect the museum was still moving, and I saw only a fraction of the entire exhibit. What I did see was pretty dang cool though.

Harry Potter props and costumes- A variety of items were present here, including some costumes, the Tri-Wizard cup, and Harry’s Nimbus 2000.

Star Wars stuff – London is the home of Pinewood Studios, which has been a production facility for most of the Star Wars films. There were a few Star Wars artifacts on hand during my visit. I saw much more at the Star Wars exhibit in Tokyo a few years later.

Jabba’s favorite decoration. He really brings the room together.

Alien – They had a sculpture of a Xenomorph and some facehuggers from the Alien franchise.

Doctor Who – A film museum in England would naturally have some Doctor Who items. Not as much as the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff, but still- a Tardis and a handful of Daleks were still neat to see.

Superman and Batman – Pinewood has a long history with DC Comics, and there weer a number of Superman and Batman artifacts on hand. First up, some costumes!

Next, we have part of the ship that brought Kal to earth in Superman (1978) and a newspaper from Superman II.

Braveheart, Hellraiser, and various animation – The Dangermouse cardboard stand was my favorite in this part.

The Ray Harryhausen Exhibit – This was my favorite part, to be honest- they had a special exhibit in plae called “Ray Harryhausen: Myths and Legends.” It contained various items from Harryhausen’s stop-motion work, but I was most interested in the Clash of the Titans items, particularly the full-sized Bubo the Owl!

Harryhausen himself, standing in front of Sinbad’s Minotaur

Have you ever been to a film museum? What’s your favorite prop that you’ve seen in person?

17/52

Ancient Ruminations on London

On April 20, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home, Travel Posts4 Comments

I have been slowly going through the old posts on my ancient LiveJournal, deleting most and saving some as pdf. There are a few, the rarest of posts, that are worth preserving, so I’ve been adapting or revising them to bring forward to this blog.

One such post was my answer to a question-meme, “If you won a trip to anywhere, where would you go, and why?” While I travel quite often now, that was not so when I wrote this on LiveJournal. This particular LJ post was written before I had ever been to Europe.

Anyone who’s known me for more than a week knows that I want to go to England more than any other destination; <lj user=’raptorgirl’> even gave me a London travel book a few years back as a birthday gift, The Irrevent Guide To London. I just need a travel buddy and a little lead time to put together the money and the vacation request.

It’s true, I used to go on and on about London. By the time I lived overseas, the money and vacation time was no longer a hindrance to going, and I realized pretty quickly that if I kept waiting for a travel buddy, I would never make it anywhere. So, I started traveling alone. And before long, I took that first trip to London- the first of many. By the time I finally made it to the UK, “The Irreverent Guide To London” was wildly out of date, but it was still a fun read. (And for those who aren’t hip to the LJ lingo, raptorgirl is the LiveJournal username of Vanessa, a dear friend here in Orlando. I met her originally when we were both students at the University of Central Florida, and it feels really weird that we’ve known each other now for more than two decades.)

I want to ride the London Eye. I want to see Stonehenge. I want to visit Stratford-on-Avon. I want to see that giant odd looking tower in Cardiff that figures so heavily in the early seasons of Torchwood. I want to see a show in Picadilly. I want to get drunk and lie in a field in Cambridge. I want to ride the Tube and mind the gap. I want to visit a very particular grave in Highgate Cemetary in London. Years of watching British television and reading British authors have given me a laundry list of things to do and see.

I’ve actually decided that I’m going to get there before I turn forty- that gives me just over a year and a half to get my shit together.

I’d like to see other parts of the world too, but that can all wait. London first.

All in all, I did pretty well on this list- In my first trip to London, I managed to ride the London Eye. (And again on a subsequent trip.). I took a day trip from Paddington Station to Salisbury to see Stonehenge. I went to Cardiff with one of my best friends on a subsequent trip to see Roald Dahl Plass, which was used for establishing shots as the Torchwood Hub. (Today is that friend’s birthday, actually- Happy birthday, Lorrie!) We went to the Doctor Who Experience on the same trip- alas, the. DWE has since closed. I’ve watched three different shows in Picadilly. I went to that grave in Highgate. I rode the Tube and minded the Gap. And I did so, so much more.

I didn’t get to go lie in a field in Cambridge, but maybe I’ll manage to do that after this pandemic wraps up. And while I still haven’t made it to Stratford-on-Avon, I did tour the Globe Theater in London, so maybe that’s close enough?

While I was wrong about the sequence – I was living in Germany before I ever made it to London- I did manage to see London before the deadline. Just barely. My first trip there was the summer before I turned forty. I’ve been back a couple of times since though, and there’s always more to see.

After seeing 28 different countries away from home, London is still my favorite place to visit in all the world. I miss it. I hope I can get back there sometime soon.

If you won a trip to anywhere, where would you go, and why?

16/52

Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV.

Category: Travel Posts