Friday's toilet scenario

Friday, May 10^th 2013

It was a good job we gave our feet a rest last night as we spent most of our day in Cannes walking. I loved Cannes and I even got to wear my anorak. We had to take a tender from the ship to the port and I thought that it would be cold / windy. It was actually warm and draught free but I was still pleased to be able to wear my anorak.

In terms of High Things to Go Up, Cannes tempted us with the Super Cannes observatory. However, it was not obvious how far away this was, or how we would reach this and we weren’t really tempted by a possibly time consuming detour to the tourist information to find out; plus it was looking like a bit of a hazy so may not even have been worth the trek even if we had tried. We could see it up a hill; today’s touristical map did at least have a scale but no isobars. It looked like the walk might be about 5 km but there was no obvious pedestrian route marked and with no road names marked either it would be a bit risky.

Instead, we started the morning with a promenade around La Croisette – taking numerous detours to gawp at the super yachts. It really was something to see them in situ, rather than at a boat show. I don’t’ think that I believed that anyone actually bought them before. But here they were. And people were polishing them; they were polishing the insides of cupboards. When I say people I think it must have been “staff” – apparently it costs at least €1 million to run one of these things each year. We enjoyed posing with our favourite Bond Villain-esque vessels.

 

We also amused ourselves by looking in the yacht agents’ windows – a variation on the more common touristical activity of looking in estate agents’ windows (we did that too). We will not be buying a super yacht any time soon (nor a villa on the Côte d’Azur for that matter). Maybe we exuded an air of the luxury yacht type though as a man on the quayside seemed to think that we could do with some luxury transfers – private jet anyone?

Now Matt was getting rather keen to use the toilet. He followed the sign to the sanitaires in the marina, while I perched under a palm tree and wrote a postcard. Next thing I knew my phone was ringing – Matt sounded panicked: the sanitaires had been locked, he’d found another set of loos but these were shut for another half an hour and I was nowhere in sight. Things were clearly getting desperate. I was time I took charge of the situation. I found Matt and offered words of encouragement about the quality of his bladder while we took the scenic route through the rose garden to another WC that I had located on the touristical map.

Nature report 2

• Cannes is pleasingly free of seagulls. There are quite a few pigeons but they are fairly inoffensive pigeons – one was taking a bath.
• I spotted 2 lizards today. I always find this quite exciting, something I think that I have inherited from my dad.
• With less than a week to go until the Cannes Film Festival preparations were in full swing. Notably this involves bolstering the already plentiful palm trees, with the installation of many more on the beach. We saw a demonstration of how this involves cranes and badly driven diggers. I wonder what they do with all the extra palm trees when the festivities are over.
• There were lots of bottle brush plants. Apparently they’re poisonous (I seem to remember my mum warning me of this when I was little, even though I don’t think I had a propensity to eat random plants).
• Based on a highly unscientific study, the Yorkshire terrier appears to be the most popular breed of dog in Cannes

We found the WC to be a hi-tech toilet booth. There were four people in front of us in the queue: 2 friends (they looked local) and a couple (they looked Northern Europeans). It was a slow throughput at the hi-tech toilet booth as between each use it was disinfected, washed and dried. You did however get up to 20 minutes in the hi-tech toilet booth when it was your turn – which would potentially mean a very long wait for Matt.

The hi-tech toilet booth finished its cleansing cycle from the previous visitor and one of the friends went in. For some reason (optimism probably) I thought that the other friend didn’t need to visit the hi-tech toilet booth; but I was wrong. Friend 2 went in after another cleansing cycle. I spent a while pondering who of my friends I would be prepared to share a hi-tech toilet booth with. Quite a few probably – it was a spacious hi-tech toilet booth.

After another cleansing cycle the girl of the Northern European couple went in – we would be next. But no; the boy of the Northern European couple was also going to use the hi-tech toilet booth.

After witnessing a total of 5 cleansing cycles, it was finally our turn to use the hi-tech toilet booth. And a great 50 cents’ worth of hi-tech toilet booth it was too. I must say that there are worse places to queue for a toilet: there were shade and sun options and we saw at least 3 trains go over a bridge just over the road.

Thursday's unsatisfaction

Thursday, May 9^th 2013: continued

Barcelona is probably not a city that slow tourists such as Matt and myself should ever contemplate visiting in just one day. It is just too big with too much to see and do. I think that because of this we both felt somewhat dissatisfied after our day ashore. That said however it was an enjoyable day. (Thus enjoyable but unsatisfactory.) I had visited Barcelona about 10 years ago with my mum, so left it up to Matt to choose what he wanted to see.

We spent a significant number of our touristical Euros on the touristical bus. This seemed like a reasonable way of getting around the main sights. Lo and behold while we were on the bus it started to drizzle a little and I was exceedingly disappointed not to be able to deploy my anorak. The rain didn’t last long and we were able to enjoy the spectacle of retractable bus roof being applied. AS the day wore on we had hot sunshine so my packing failed on all accounts.

Here are some facts that I learnt about Barcelona from the touristical commentary:

• The statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona is the biggest of the 64 in the world – his index finger is 50cm long
• There are more mopeds per capita in Barcelona than in any other European city (but I think that they make less noise than those in Rome)
• There are over 100km of cycle lanes in Barcelona
• Barcelona has 8 universities
• The first stretch of railway in Spain was located in Barcelona (that is a fact especially for my dad)
• On wedding days it is traditional to take 12 eggs to a convent

It worries me that 50% of the facts that I can remember are transport based.

Unfortunately we spent quite a lot of our limited time in Barcelona in queues. We had hoped (one of Matt’s choices to visit the Sagrada Familia and had got off the bus a stop early so that we could wander a few streets to get there. It was a longer wander than we had expected – again the touristical map was scaleless (can it even therefore technically be called a map?) – but pleasant enough. The area around the cathedral-in-construction was packed. Matt went off to use one of those toilet booths (I am informed that he got his 50 cent’s worth) while I investigated the queues. The queue to visit the cathedral was reaching round the back of it, and moving very slowly.

The queue to hop back on the bus was slightly shorter and also slow moving. I chose to join the second of these and chatted to the people in front and behind me while Matt had an explore around the outside of the cathedral. Then we swapped over – he kept our place in the bus queue (I think he had the same conversations with our queue neighbours) while I mooched around.

Once back on, we stayed on the bus and completed the loop of the ruta azul. Time was not on our side and we were conscious of avoiding being the Felicity and Terence of Barcelona: the traffic had already seemed pretty awful and the situation wasn’t improved by a demonstration that was going on (about the economy I think).

Matt had to make a choice: transfer to the ruta roja and tour around the olympic stadium area or head back to the ship via the famous La Rambla. He went for the latter.

There are several High Things To Go Up in Barcelona – unfortunately most of them were outside of our temporal grasp. But Matt had done his High Things To Go Up research and had read that there was a cafeteria with a good view at the top of a department store in Placa de Catalunya. There was indeed a good view, with the added bonus of refuelling ourselves with some good value drinks and snacks. We also made use of the complimentary facilities and I helped an American by demonstrating how to use a push tap. As time wasn’t on our side I resisted spending any in the haberdashery on the way back out of the store.

 

Suitably refreshed, we started our traverse down La Rambla. It was busy. Really busy. I particularly enjoyed our trip into the colourful Bodega. A notable experience of our walk here is that we successfully avoided pick-pockets (or if we didn’t we haven’t found out about it yet). Based on a browse of the bars we also made a good call in getting our refreshments earlier as it looked like our touristical Euros wouldn’t even stretch to a glass of water here.