It's that time of the month again!
Considering that last month I was writing about making snowmen^H^H^H Daleks, it seems very odd that I've been out sunbathing in Russell Square Gardens most days this week. The Gulf Stream hasn't shut off yet, then.
NetherlandsAt the start of the month Emily and I went to Amsterdam, as it's somewhere we both wanted to visit in order to see our respective friends. On Friday evening after arriving, we met up with Emily's friend Stu, who took us out to an Ethiopian restaurant somewhere in Amsterdam - I forget where exactly because we were too busy running after trams whose stops aren't quite as close together as we'd hoped. Ethiopian food involves shared platters of curried portions spread across a base of floury pancakes. Finger food! It was rather tasty.
On Saturday I went to Leiden to meet up with fuzzie and Bertram while Emily spent the day with Stu. fuzzie, Bertram and I went to Noordwijk's sand dunes, which are just about the only hills I've ever seen in Holland. Emily joined up with us after we got back to Leiden station, and we went out for dinner at an American-style restaurant, where I had a very tasty and filling jambalaya and everyone else's food looked good too.
We had Sunday to ourselves and took the opportunity to explore Amsterdam, but first stopped off at the Sex Museum, which was ... interesting. And slightly scary. We ended up in Leidseplein around lunchtime, and had lunch in the excellent
Bagels and Beans before going to a flower market in the afternoon and crashing at our hotel -
the Westcord Art Hotel - for a little while before going out for dinner at
The Pancake Bakery, which I couldn't recommend enough. I had a savoury pancake for mains, a sweet pancake for dessert, and some poffertjes to finish it off, because poffertjes!
We flew back into London City Airport on Monday, which was slightly unnerving as the plane just flies along the Thames and gets closer and closer to the water until you think you're about to splash down, but the runway appears out of nowhere just before you do. I think I spotted the M25 over Essex before we got too low down, but I don't know Essex's geography well enough to say for sure.
So all in all we had a fantastic time, got to see our friends and do some touristy things, and ate incredibly well to top it off!
On the topic of good food, we cooked the ratatouille from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg Everyday cookbook after looking through it for ideas.
Really good! It's jumped immediately onto my list of favourite meals.
CanterburyLast Saturday I took Emily to Canterbury to show off the city and show her the place I'd gone to University in. After exploring the old town high street, we walked along the western part of my
old cycle route, over hand-operated level crossing and through a large orchard. We were going to turn around when we got to the footbridge over the Great Stour river on Tonford Lane, as I always used to do, but it turned out that Canterbury City Council had conveniently built us a footpath back to Canterbury along the Stour called
the Great Stour Way, which took us back to Westgate Gardens via the embankment of a closed (and removed) railway track.
After getting back to the City centre, we went into
Siesta (still awesome) and walked around and through the Cathedral as light faded, before having a curry at Kashmir Tandoori (not how I remembered it) and heading back to London/Dartford on the high speed rail (St Pancras to the Dartford bridge in 15 minutes, oh how I wish my commute was that fast, but I'd have to backtrack to Gravesend to make use of it).
It was all a wonderful day, and we'll definitely go back. Emily loved the sound of
camping in Blean Woods (I will update the link to the photos in that post soon, I hope)(Holy crap, I've barely changed) so there might be hammocking forthcoming in the summer.
And finally...
I had to perform surgery on femputer, my
plug computer which hosts my website, irssi and bitlbee sessions, and a few other things, after the PSU decided to go pffffut the week before last. My website was offline for a while but it doesn't seem to have affected my search engine rankings too much. I still get beaten by a dozen pages about the incidental
Scrubs character, bah.
( Third Doctor summary )
( Fourth Doctor nerdery )
I had to perform surgery on femputer, my plug computer which hosts my website, irssi and bitlbee sessions, and a few other things, after the PSU decided to go pffffut the week before last. My website was offline for a while but it doesn't seem to have affected my search engine rankings too much. I still get beaten by a dozen pages about the incidental Scrubs character, bah.
This weekend (yesterday, to be precise), we went to a tour of the closed Aldwych tube station. The 1907 station was closed in 1994 when its (pretty awesome) lifts broke down, and would've cost millions to repair or replace, more than the short fork of the Piccadilly line from Holborn could justify given its low traffic. Aldwych has been popular since then (along with Charing Cross' Jubilee Line platforms) as a set for films such as V for Vendetta and Die Another Day.
The station itself hadn't been redecorated before its closure, so still had a very old fashioned look to it. It was originally designed to be a major interchange station, and had three lift shafts, although only the rightmost shaft was ever used for the two now-defunct elevators. The information office was even placed at the top of the middle shaft. From there we headed down to platform level, using the 160-step spiral staircase.
The West platform contained an unpainted tube train, which could still run and was used for staff training and similar, although the electricity was switched off that day, I think to allow easy evacuation along the tunnel to Holborn should there be an emergency.
While the station was built with two lines and two platforms, the East platform only managed to last until 1914 when it was taken out of use. This was the more interesting platform of the two, as it had a much more derelict feeling, partly because half the platform area was never decorated because they ran short trains there, leaving old tiling only part way along.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
