travel guides & dumb tourists
03 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in England, Food, General, Life, London, Music, people, tourists, Travel
Last week I was dressed in a long cotton dress and a silk red scarf from Nepal. I looked like I’d just come out of Tibet and dangered on resembling a female monk. However, I felt very gracious and the weather outside reminded me of monsoon season in Asia. It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed short bursts of hard rain with short bursts of glorious sunshine. It doesn’t bother me as I went out for a run in it. It was fun and funny peculiar to get wet and then to only dry off again when the sun came out during the run.
I had spent the day wandering around the Southbank, purely because it’s a beautiful part of London and there’s usually something going on. During the evenings, the wonderful sunsets along the Thames are amazing and a great way to finish a walk before heading home. The markets don’t change much here but the people do a little. I spent some time wandering around Foyles and playing croquet with some friendly Americans. Evidently they didn’t know how to play as they were holding the stick like a golf club and swinging it as we say, willy nilly! I sneered at them for a good ten minutes before they laughed at my incredibly out-of-range shots. It must have looked very odd when you had a monk-like oriental playing croquet with an american family wearing bright white trainers, badly fitted loose clothing, bum bags, utility waistcoats and silly hats on!
I leached off Foyles for all its information from their books about design, photography, travel and in particular, comparing different travel guides. I made a note as to which I’d buy off Book 24 (it’s the new Amazon!) for a fraction of the price. One thing that amuses me is the kind of people who I see at these bookshops. A very posh young couple had come up near me to look for a guide on the USA. They picked up the biggest book they saw by the household name Lonely Planet. They practically exclaimed how it was very text heavy and full of things they didn’t want to do. The lady complained how she’d never have time to read it all anyway, then made a sad face at her boyfriend. The boyfriend rolled his eyes and picked up a small pocket guide. Yet the lady complained how it didn’t contain enough information. After a few minutes of them bickering about not enough or too little information, they both came to conclusion that all guide books were useless. The boyfriend decided he was going to just print stuff off the internet when they got home. Before they left the aisle, the lady picked up the Lonely Planet book and said ‘Just in case darling. It will help give us a start don’t you think?’ and with that she gave him a kiss and indicated for him to go and pay for it.
Lonely planet guides are a bit like telephone directories. I actually detest them but they do the job. I probably only use about 10% of the book, the rest is useless information that I can find updated on the internet in about 1 millionth of the time. I don’t like big guide books, especially since I’d be travelling! You think I’d want to carry a telephone directory with me instead of phonebook on my mobile? Of course not. Travel guides should be interesting enough to read with photos to help locate these wonderful recommendations. I don’t really want details on hundreds of mysteriously deduced selection of hotels and shopping centres. The books weigh heavy from the 50 or so pages full of hotels that I’m never going to look at because I have no idea what they’re like. I have hostelworld and tripadvisor. This applies for the restaurants or shops which are only useful for the year the guide was published. It’s pretty much full of unnecessary information to warrant the £15 or so they charge you.
Has anyone actually listened to any of the authors of these guides on the podcasts? It might be just me and my dislike of rich bums but that’s what they sounded like. Imagine a dysfunctional rich family with a child who has no interest other than to do whatever he/she wants without working to earn a single penny because ma and pa pays for everything. Of course I’m jealous of these people, which may explain where the irrational dislike comes from. Could I recommend you a good travel guide? Nope. They all suck. The best travel guides are people who either live there or have travelled there recently. Travel guides should belong at home and stay there. I’d only use them for research to help find a top ten of a list of things to do. Even then, the internet serves that purpose pretty well and I can print it off if I want a paper copy. You perhaps beg to differ?
My belly started to rumble by the time I worked my way over to the world food section. There was an impressive, in both size and contents, a book on street Thai cooking. It was more a book to be admired at or someone who had giant hands with an equally giant kitchen. The book was almost A3 size and I thought to myself, how on earth do you prop this thing up when you’re shaking a wok with the other hand? I suddenly felt like I was 6 years old again, trying to prop up a massive Encarta Encyclopaedia on a page about planets because the pictures and facts were ever so fascinating. The photo’s were excellent and just made me excited about visiting Asia. Time for lunch! I had a delicious avocado and pine nut wrap with a whole cucumber for after’s. Yes, a whole one. Not half, not sliced but your regular vacuum packed WHOLE cucumber. I ate like an Englishman would in Paris; biting into a stick of French bread held in one hand and a block of cheese in the other. I like cucumbers. Do you? If not, why not you weirdo?!
I was eating my lunch inside Hays Galleria. It gave me some shelter from the crazy rain to avoid soggy sandwich syndrome. You know what it’s like when your mum makes them with slices of tomatoes so that by lunch time, they become all soggy and squashed (yuck!). It reminded me of something nauseating I learnt at school; Victorian mothers would chew bread and then spit onto a spoon to feed their babies. Like penguins do when they feed their young ones with regurgitated fish bits. Mmmmmmm….sounds delicious doesn’t it? Well, this is the feeling I get when I see a soggy bread sandwich #projectile vomiting.
OK, so enough graphic details about my lunch, let’s get to the point here. A couple of middle-aged women came up to me and presented me with a very bohemian Moroccan style shoulder bag.
“Excuse me madam, does this bag belong to you?”
“No, sorry”
With a slight twinkle in their eyes, they decided to look inside and discovered it contained about £3000, a brand new iPhone and a Louis Vutton wallet. Wow! What kind of STUPID woman forgets her WHOLE bag full stuff like that?! Surely it’s a trap? But no, some poor forgetful holiday maker has left her bag unknowingly right next to me. I told the ladies the last people I saw were an Indian couple. I could probably go and see if I could find them but they’d stopped listening to me as the other woman was bantering on how lovely the purse was. So I interrupted loudly and advised they should give the bag to the security staff in the area. Not that I trusted either one of them but I didn’t know what else to do. I was set up with my laptop, halfway writing this post and I didn’t feel like getting up from my comfortable spot. The security staff looked a bit shifty and I had observed earlier that day that they’d spent a good few hours joking and jabbing at each other when young attractive females would walk past. Hmmmmm. Anyway, the bag and their Christmas bonuses combined were in their hands now. I kinda felt bad for the STUPID woman for leaving her bag behind. A woman’s handbag becomes part of her when she travels around. It’s like wearing shoes or a bra. You’d notice if you don’t have it on your person. Literally it’s like walking around and feeling only a slight breeze on your chest before looking down and realising your breasts are bare because you forgot to put your top on when you strolled out of the house this morning
About an hour after writing this, an Argentinan band of 6 strong with primarily an accordion, tambourine, guitar and some banjo’s had planted themselves beside me and started playing a song. I am not sure what to do here other than just ignore them because I am sure they want my money. They’re playing the usual holiday classics, one of which I recognised as Dean martin’s Sway which made me smile. And with that, I went into Cafe Rouge and ordered dinner for one as I watched the band played all night before I headed home filled with music.
My writing has become rather uninspiring of late but that may have something to do with the fact that I have lots to organise. Quite distracted at the moment as I’m currently moving house and that itself, is a bitch!
