Back!

Yes, I am back and in one piece and just about over the jetlag.

I am obviously not a real blogger as I failed to post anything at all while away. Partly my excuse is that many of the places that I stayed didn't have internet access and for the rest, well I had better things to do! Also, to anyone who didn't get a message or postcard I apologise. On day 1 I managed to lock my mobile phone and on day 2 lose my diary. This meant that I lost lots of addresses and phone numbers too.

I am still planning a proper write up of the holiday, but this will take a while. In the meantime, here are some highlights.

Travel
For long distance air travel, business class is simply in a different league altogether. Lie flat beds make it possible to get a decent night's sleep and access to facilities like lounges (with showers), dedicated checkin and even sometimes dedicated security screening makes even airports bearable.

Places
Berlin is a fascinating city and rather different from what I expected (not that I really know what that was). From a city/social planners point of view it was interesting to see how swift changes in power structures impact on the built environment. Both the east and west were becoming run down (in different ways) as a new city centre was coming into being in the centre. Perhaps the most emotional part for me was actually walking past the legendary "Checkpoint Charlie". Somehow even the hordes of tourist buses couldn't dampen the fact that this was a very historical site and was, until very recently, the end of the world as we knew it. On a more pleasant note, it was a nice surprise to find that my very rusty high school German was adequate for getting around, once I had picked up a few basic phrases (like 'take away' and 'eat in please').

Wales was a real eye-opener too. I got off on a wrong foot with Cardiff (getting lost) but with that out of the way I could feel a little of the 'buzz' that is apparently in this young city. The countryside was the best, though. From solid stone towns like Machynlleth, through delightful sea views around Aberdovey through to the stark post-mining landscapes around Blaenau Ffestiniog where I sat in the sun in the town square on a Sunday afternoon munching a sandwich and listening to the local teenagers natter in their local dialect.

San Francisco was perhaps the biggest let down. Again I started off on the wrong foot, staying in a hotel in a particularly down-market part of town where you had to make your way past the beggars and homeless people to reach the tram and where the ride into the city centre took you past boarded up warehouses, cheap liquor stores and sleazy adult cinemas. Still I got to ride on the cable cars, take a ferry across the bay to Sausalito and of course take endless photos of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Food
Number 1 rule for the hotel-based traveller is to stay in places with breakfast. More and more are offering what I call a 'German-style continental breakfast' with bread rolls, cheese, cold meat and hard boiled eggs. This is a good start to the day. If you are forced to go out and find breakfast at 9 in the morning you will find that (a) cities don't look half cruddy at that time of the morning and (b) it is hard to find anything beyond coffee and a muffin - not exactly nutritious and filling.

It would have been great to stay in places with kitchens too, particularly in Berlin where I was simply overwhelmed by the variety and quality and cheapness of fresh food. Raspberries at 1 euro a punnet! Peaches at 1.50 a kilo. Steak at 9 euros a kilo! I also ate the niced nectarines in Cardiff where I gave in and bought 8 for 1 pound, which I carried around for a couple of days eating half and getting the rest squashed.

In comparison, it was hard to find decent food in SF. Not only was everything expensive but if it was possible to have anything less digestible I don't know what it was. A basic sandwich would have white bread, cheese, cold meat, soggy lettuce and mayonnaise. I eventually started buying things from Safeway but even here there 'chef's salad' was lettuce, carrot, cheese, ham, turkey and a mayonnaise-style dressing. About the only cheap thing was coffee and on one day I actually managed to overdose!

So it's back to work now, and tomorrow I'll go back to the gym and find out exactly how much weight I have put back on!