Another pun

This pun deserves its own post...

See two posts below for my story about boating in Oxfordshire. But on to the joke...

The Schwarzes are quite familiar with Steve Irwin, and Esther does quite a good impression. But they'd never heard of his cousin, so I was able to tell them.

You know Steve Irwin's cousin...

He's the guy who jumps onto the backs of crocs, then stands up and pushes them along with a pole...

He's...

THE CROCODILE PUNTER.

Bows...

Thank you, thank you... :D :D :D

My week in Chinnor

I had a nice relaxing week in Chinnor with the Schwarzes. I pulled the broken string off my guitar... and then pulled off all the others and replaced them with brand-new strings. Nice.

Last Thursday, I borrowed Tom's bicycle and rode in to Oxford along various roads through the countryside.

There are quite a few species of wildlife in Oxfordshire. On my ride, I saw...

1 muntjac deer
1 fox
1 squirrel
2 rabbits
1 mole (they are smaller than I thought)

Unfortunately they were all roadkill so not very exciting really. Hmm...

While in Oxford I only really had time for 2 places. One was The Eagle And Child, the preferred pub of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and Charles Williams. So I stopped there for a lunch of fish and chips, washed down with a cold pint of Guinness. :) After that, my second stop was just down the road - the Oxfam bookshop, where I picked up a copy of "Beowulf" translated into "modern" verse for 1.99, and a copy of CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity" for 99p.

Then I cycled back to Oxford, by a completely different route. Luckily Tom had scanned the relevant section of the AA road atlas and printed off a clear b&w map for me to follow... even when I took "wrong" turns, I still knew where I was and which way to go next. One place I passed was BMW's factory, where they make Minis. The only time I got lost was back in Chinnor... took a wrong turn two streets to early, and then eventually found the Schwarzes' house again.

On Friday evening we had a barbecue, and as the resident Aussie I was put in charge of the culinary duties. I cooked ribs, lamb chops, sausages, onion, sliced potato, cocoyam, plantain, and corn on the cob (smear with butter, wrap in foil, chuck on the grill - don't forget to keep turning it over every few minutes or one side will burn...). Delish.

Then Saturday morning the Schwarzes left for a week's holiday in Devon (it being a bank holiday weekend and the start of the mid-term school hols) and I caught a bus to London. More on my bank holiday weekend in the next post, folks!

Glennjamin

so, what've I been up to?

Well, having extended my hostel stay an extra night, I had a reasonably early night Saturday and woke up in time to hoist my bags onto my back and check out just before ten.

I then walked to nearby London Bridge tube station and rang the Schwarzes. They're a family we knew in Ghana when my parents were on the mission field. Tom and Elizabeth were youth leaders for us MKs in Tamale at one point. One thing I remember from back in those days was that it was Tom who introduced me to Red Dwarf, for which I am eternally grateful.

I found out which stations to go to, and how to get to their place out in Chinnor, a village near High Wycombe (which may or may not be in your atlases, out between Greater London and Oxford). I had to change trains at Waterloo (for some reason an ode to this Underground station won the 1974 Eurovision song contest...) and then change from the tube to the above-ground trains at Marylebone - I could be wrong, but this is one of the 4 on the Monopoly board. It's been funny seeing streets and station names on maps, that I know mainly from Monopoly. Walking down Fleet Street towards St Pauls the other day, I thought "Fleet Street? That's one of the red ones..." :)

Back to my story... I hopped on a train at Marylebone... or not exactly hopped, more like crawled under the weight of my bags. It was a nice reasonably fast train that hummed its way through the English countryside. Past little English towns with little English houses with their little English gardens. Very postcardy in a rushing-by-from-the-train kind of way. Much like my previous memories of England from a train. I arrived in High Wycombe station, rang the Schwarzes, and then just had to wait to be picked up by someone on their way home from church. Tom pulled up a little while later, and seeing me there, said "You must be Glenn." I had identified myself on the phone as "I'll be the guy with the suitcase and backpack and guitar"... so my self-description worked!

Dinner on Sunday night was rice, groundnut soup (my FAVOURITE Ghanaian food) and fried plantain - which I never liked much as a kid but was really good, and made from actual plantain. When I told the rest of the family in Australia about this, they were rather jealous. And their mouths were probably watering at the thought of real plantain. Oh well, they're warmer than I am.

Today I completely restrung my guitar, having broken a string while detuning for packing in Japan. It sounds so much better with new strings... surprise surprise.

Then in the afternoon we went for a wander through the village, and when the girls were back from school we headed off for Oxford to do a bit of punting on the river. Tom and I got there first, and it was sunny, then the wind picked up and the showers that had been hovering over the M40 decided to come over and see how we were faring, and drop some lovely cold rain down. Luckily it eased off not long after Elizabeth and the girls arrived, so we were able to go through with the plans of punting.

For those unsure of what punting is, I will explain. A quick Google search gave me the following definitions.

Punting means losing a fish under any circumstance. It's an especially bad "Punt" if you hook the fish, get a visual and see that it's a really big one, and then lose it.
from Gil Finn & Gearman Fly Fishing Slang Definitions

Noun
S: (n) punt, punting ((football) a kick in which the football is dropped from the hands and kicked before it touches the ground) "the punt traveled 50 yards"; "punting is an important part of the game"
from WordNet Search - 2.1 beta

and the final definition...

A punt is a flat-bottomed boat with a square-cut bow, typically used in small rivers and canals. The punter generally stands in the middle, or near the stern, and propels the punt by pushing off the river bed with a pole.
from Wikipedia

Yes, it was this last one we were doing. If you check out the Wikipedia page, there's a nice photo showing the kind of boat we were in. You stand at the back and push down with a large pole, being careful not to get it stuck in the mud at the bottom of the river. It's a very pleasant way to spend an hour, going up and down the calm river, seeing ducks and geese etc. I had a go at propelling the boat with the tall pole, and it's hard work at times... my feet were sore, probably from the force against the boat whenever I pushed off against the riverbed. And there was actual sunshine and blue sky overhead as we enjoyed our little river jaunt.

For those who fear my punning skills are falling by the wayside in my travels, FEAR NOT! I had a couple good ones.

As we were punting, we saw a moorhen by the side of the river. One of the girls pointed to it, and said something along the lines of "oh, look, a moorduck, or moorhen, whatever"... to which I said "It looks MORE HEN than duck..." :D

Later when moving back up the river, I said "stroke, stroke, stroke, heart attack!" That one's not so much a pun as a good joke. Trust me, English people appreciate a good sense of humour when they hear it... :D :D After all, they invented it. Just ask John Cleese. Look at how many puns were in Shakespeare. QED.

Oh well, that's OAR-l from me tonight... more later on down the ROW-d.

Sorry, those were rather bad, and not audience-tested.

Glennjamin

day 2 in London

Hi from drizzly London! There actually were a few minutes of sunshine this afternoon... I took a picture to commemorate the occasion.

Woke up this morning feeling a little under the weather, but moved my bags out of my room to storage (I had to check into a different room tonight). Then I headed out to the nearby tube station and bought myself a return ticket to Regents Park.

Regents Park is huge. It takes quite a while to walk from Regents Park underground station on the south side to the London Zoo on the northern side of the park. I had a voucher from the hostel giving me a discount on entry, which was nice.

I got to see quite a few rare and endangered animals, like Asian lions, an Amur leopard, and some newborn tortoises. There was also a 9-day-old African Crested Porcupine in a display with its parents.

Caught the tube back to London Bridge. Navigating tube stations is an adventure in itself. Waterloo Station has about four lines running through it, plus the aboveground railway station. There are tunnels and concourses and escalators and signs everywhere. But I made it back successfully!

Signing off...

Glennjamin

Day 1 in London

Enjoyed a free breakfast of toast and rice bubbles down the road at the other St Christophers... the hostel has two venues on the same street, about 2 minutes apart.

After that I posted my first post on this new blog... yay.

Walked across London Bridge and then after an initial wrong turn headed west towards Saint Paul's Cathedral. You know the one, big dome, in the background in every movie featuring London... just like the Eiffel Tower is in the background from every angle in Paris, or the Harbour Bridge in Water Rats...

Saint Paul's is big. So big that to get a shot of the facade and include the dome, you have to stand across the street and down the road. On my way back to the hostel in the afternoon, I got a great shot during a moment when the sun happened to be out.

A cold, drizzly day it was for the most part. I found a phone booth, and not having figured out my phonecard yet, I tried a collect call home. The operator said it wouldn't do it for that number, so I gave them my credit card number instead... it wouldn't go through. The operator repeated mum and dad's phone number back to me, but he got one number wrong. Maybe that's why the collect call didn't work... anyhoo, I gave him the right number and it worked - spoke with Mum for a few minutes and let her know I'd actually made it to London. She said if I was near St Pauls, I'd be near Australia House - but she didn't know the address.

After that I continued walking along the road, and stopped into a WHSmith and bought a pocket A-Z for £3.95. This was able to tell me I was on Fleet Street, and if I kept walking I would pass the Nigerian Embassy, and would also come across Australia House at a fork in the road. From there it was a short trip northward to the British Museum.

I picked up some leaflets at Australia House and made my way up Kingsway in the general direction of the Museum. I say general direction because it was at this point that my pocket A-Z decided to mysteriously vanish out of my coat pocket. I retraced my steps, going back to a couple shops I'd lingered in without actually purchasing (a sandwich shop - the smell was enough to cure my hunger; and a newsagent that didn't have a logic problems book)... but no luck. My £3.95 A-Z was missing. That's about 800 yen, or A$10.

The British Museum was AMAZING. The place was HUGE. I arrived just in time to join a 45-minute guided tour of the Renaissance Hall - a room restored to its 18th Century appearance, with books and Greek vases on all walls... display cabinets of African, American, Asian and European artifacts... sketches by Sir Joseph Banks... fossils... all kinds of objects from the Museum's collection, as well as a few items on loan from the Natural History Museum, Science Museum and the House Of Commons Library. Very fascinating look at the history of the museums, and of "collections" in general.

There was a very interesting piece in the African section of the museum, a giant thing called "Man's Cloth". Made by a Ghanaian artist, it was a kind of impressionistic kente-cloth. Made out of the plastic and alfoil bits at the top of wine or gin bottles. Fascinating. From further back it did look a bit like a piece of woven cloth.

Another amazing thing was the Ancient Near East section. Walking along, viewing wall carvings... the Assyrian siege of Lachish, with Jewish families walking off into exile... Asshurbanipal on a lion hunt. Wall friezes from the palaces of Nimrud and Nineveh (modern Mosul - on the news a lot lately). I wonder what Shalmaneser and his heirs would think if they could see their house walls on display in a foreign country today?

Well, that's all for today. My time is soon to be up on this computer.

Glennjamin In Europe

I'm in London!

I'M IN LONDON!!!

um... just thought you'd like to know.

I got here safely after a VERY LONG flight with bags that were TOO HEAVY... but I got here. That's the main thing.

Off I go to explore this cold rainy city! :)

Glennjamin