It’s been a busy weekend and bank holiday. In fact, I’ve spent most of it working, except for a chilly afternoon in Helen’s back garden yesterday, the cinema last night, and lunch at mum’s today, followed by cake with Trevor and Jon, and then a long-overdue return to the gym.

The gym felt surprisingly good, actually. I thought it would have been nasty after *cough* weeks away on account of travelling and getting up early to work before work, but the treadmill felt comfortably familiar and I managed 50 minutes of running, jogging and eventually walking up a very steep hill, before coming home and emailing a French radio station.

Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. I emailed a Belgian radio station because it rather stupidly had the same name as the French one I’ve been listening to all weekend while I’ve been working. Ostensibly that’s because I’ve been convincing myself it’ll improve my French, but it’s back to back music, ‘sans’ presenters, so I’ve probably learnt about two words in the whole three days.

Anyhow,

Bonsoir, equipe de Zone 80

J’ecoute de votre service toujours avec iTunes et desire demander o? c’est possible acheter une copie de Jam par Eddy Wata.

S’il vous plait excuse mon comprehension de la langue Francais. J’essayer de l’improve mais c’est pas trop bon a ce moment.

Merci
Nik

Not so bad, I didn’t think, although it could have done with a few more accents to make it look truly authentic. Let’s see who replies first – the Frenchies I was hoping for, or the Belgiumians who will probably be insulted that I mixed up their station.

Actually, they might be flattered. Looking at their web site it looks like the Belgian station is broadcasting from a table in the corner of a kitchen somewhere in Liege.

The station I actually wanted was this one.

Oooo. What a cool follow-up to the Bourne Identity. Very worthy of being tagged on to the end of the original.

It starts a bit slow, so it’s best to watch the original first so you know what’s going on, but once it’s off, it doesn’t stop for the next two hours, and all of it seems very, very believable. There is only one predictable bit, which is so insignificant it makes no difference to what you think of the rest of the story, and it has some great shots of Berlin.

There’s a fantastic car chase through the streets of Moscow that is perhaps the best chase I’ve seen in any film. It looks dangerous – lethal, in fact. People look like they’re getting hurt, and the cars do really get smashed up, not like the sanitised chases you get in the Bond films where bullets and bumps seem to make no difference. I was on the edge of my seat for most of it – literally. It’s a good job there was nobody in the seat in front or I’d probably have had my teeth in their shoulder.

There are a couple of worthy jumpy bits, and more subtle things, too. Like the way the female CIA woman who’s after him turns up at every crime scene carrying her handbag like it was a sack of shopping, softening a character that other films would have made hard-nosed and one-dimensional.

It has an excellent web site, with a lot of explorable 3D Flash stuff here, and I’m very tempted to head out and buy the books.

Since getting back from my travels, and discovering that French isn’t actually all that hard, I’ve decided it’s time to improve my understanding of the language, so I’ve been reading Harry Potter a l’Ecole des Sorciers on the train (French dictionary close at hand).

I’m not doing too bad. I’ve read then first 19 pages without too much trouble, but at this rate it’s going to take a long time to get through the whole thing. Fortunately, I have to put the dictionary away when I’m reading on the tube and just trust myself to understand without any help, and it’s not all that bad.

No doubt that’s down to the fact that 60% of all English words are actually mispronounced French words, and that all words ending in -ant and -ent can be directly translated simply by pinching your nose and speaking with an air of superiority, so that’s 1600 words that anyone can understand already.

Any word I keep getting wrong, I’m writing on the top of every page so I know what to learn, and decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get hold of a GCSE wordlist so I can be a bit more proactive, which is why I ended up bumping into Kathryn and Ems by the escalators in Borders.

I didn’t recognise them because K had had her hair cut, and they didn’t recognise me because of the sun tan, but we ended up coffeeing together and I ended up coming out empty handed.

Looks like this book thing is going to be a long slog, then.

It’s not easy taking pictures through aircraft windows. The sun invariably mucks up the window and gets in the way, but when I finally got around to downloading the pictures from one of the two cameras I took off on my travels this month, I found the pictures of London I’d taken from the plane.

The one above, taken from just to the west of Heathrow, clearly shows the Thames running from the coast right through the centre of the capital.

The estuary, at Southend, is at the top of the picture, where it gets lost in the clouds on the horizon, before sweeping in towards the camera, dividing Essex, to the left of the picture, and Kent to the right. It then does a big loop to the right, to enclose London Docklands. At the narrowest point of that loop – where it almost closes up to the north (on the left of the swoop as you look at it here) is Canary Wharf, home to Europe’s tallest buildings. If they weren’t there you’d just be able to see the Dome on the opposite bank.

As the river continues towards the plane it narrows slightly but, more significantly, turns to the right (south) again to cut off Westminster (Parliament) from the West End, then level out before heading more severely than before south towards Battersea and the posher end of the commuter belt.

The genius behind BBC News?

(source: Arte Historia)

(source: Plain English Campaign)

Was work always that tiring, or is it just that today was my first day back?

Perhaps Tuesday wasn’t the best day to be starting back as it meant I’d been booked into a half-nine meeting, presumably on the assumption that I’d be in yesterday and so have notice. It’s as well I was early, mainly so I could travel on the train with the stinky cheese I’d bought the office before the crowds came out.

It’s ironic that after so much public transport these last two weeks it took until today for me to get my first delayed train. Due to a lineside fire or something.

And yet this morning there was a story in the paper about how well they (One) were doing, headed up ‘One is close to second to none’. It’s a stark contrast to the graffiti on Liverpool Street station: One Train, Usually No Toilet.

Well, first class on the TGV is no great shakes. Certainly not as good as third class on the Spanish trains, with their free headphones, films and constantly updated information on where you are and how hot it is outside the confines of the air-con.

You do get a wider seat, of course, but beyond that you little more than a slightly better class of screaming child in the seat beside you, and a more carefully groomed French dog under the seat in front of you. All the toilets but two were either blocked, or had broken locks on the doors, and the buffet car was smoky and unpleasant.

Still, Paris was fun, although I did make the mistake of buying some very stinky cheese in Galleries Lafayette. By the time I’d walked as far as the Champs Elysee in the noonday sun it reeked to high heaven, and as I took it back to Gare du Nord on the metro, a man sitting opposite actually pinched his nose to keep out the pong (albeit quite discretely).

The Eurostar was broken, too. Or at least carriages 15 and 17, so they piled us all in coach 18, where it quickly got very snug. Still, not quite as snug as those two broken carriages, which were devoid of air conditioning and quickly ramped up to Turkish Bath-like levels of heat.

I could happily have gone on travelling for another week or two – especially after two days of doing absolutely nothing under a pure blue, cloudless Provencal sky – but it is good to be home, and to have a washing machine, my own bathroom, my own kitchen, my own bed…

Now all I need is a week’s-worth of sleep and I’ll be ready to get on with life again.

I’ve worn myself out today seeing Barcelona from above. I did the Sagrada Familia last time I was here, so headed off to the Gaudi Park before all the other tourists were out of bed.

Even then it was very hot, and walking up the hill to get to it wasn’t pleasant, but it was worth it when I got there. Admittedly not as good as I was expecting (it is a Unesco World Heritage Site, after all) it was still pretty impressive stuff, and the views across the city were excellent.

One particular view caught my eye, though, and that was the church on the opposite hill. Looking it up in the guidebook, I saw that it was the highest point in the whole city, so made that my next mission, expecting it to be a simple wander down my hill and up the next one.

But it wasn’t.

First, it required a metro back into town (nearest metro stop just over a kilometre away) then a train out north, then a tram up a very steep hill, then a funicular railway to the top. And that was before the lift and then climb to the top of the tower, and the statue of Christ, arms outstretched as he is in Rio, on top of the top church (there are actually two churches on top of one another).

The only trouble was, I only had

So it’s Wednesday, which must mean this is Barcelona. Madrid was great. My first time there, so nice to see a new city, and particularly good to get out of the heat of Seville. In fact, the more time we spent in Madrid the less and less I liked Seville. It has so little to offer in comparison.

The Spanish trains have been fantastic. They have ceiling-slung monitors so you can watch films (Spy Kids today, unfortunately), complimentary headphones, those displays that show your progress across the country, the time and the weather, and so on.

Oh, and so much leg room you actually have to recline your seat to be able to get your feet on the footrest in front of you.

They are clean, efficient and filled with helpful staff. Shame the same can’t be said for the booking offices, but there you go.

It’s all a lot more like flying than taking the train, largely down to all the security. Since the Madrid bombs they are scanning every piece of baggage, and they check your tickets twice before you board any train, but it is so well done that it is not intrusive and it doesn’t hold you up at all. I doubt we could ever do it so efficiently at home, though.

It really helps to put Spain in context travelling across it by land, as before it was always a series of disconnected blobs – just the coastal bits I’ve visited in the past. Now, though, it is desert, arable land, dried rivers, hillside villages and big cities, and far more beautiful, in a stark and barren way, than I’d ever imagined.

I’ve just booked the last leg of my journey: Avignon to Paris to catch the Eurostar. Having left it a bit late, availability is limited, but on what’s left it’s only

It is unbelievably hot here. Certainly not the hottest place I’ve been, but at 39 degrees too much to stay out in the sun for long.

We had to come here by bus, unfortunately, as the Portuguese and Spanish governments haven’t yet got their acts in order as far as building a cross-border train line is concerned.

That would have been OK if the whole journey hadn’t consisted of a three hour lurching session as the body of the bus continually fought against the engine to go in the opposite direction. Oh, and the radio, which was on VERY LOUD. That wasn’t such a problem when we were still in Portugal and it was tuned to a station, but as we crossed the border it faded out of range to be replaced by what sounded like a very angry blender for the remainder of the journey.

I don’t think I’ll be sad to leave Seville when we take the train to Madrid tomorrow afternoon. We have done Alcazar (and I have that stupid Murder in the Discotheque song going around my head, and are currently sat outside the huge tobacco factory where the opera Carmen is set (and how nice it is to have a proper keyboard, rather than having to blog by PDA and stylus, as I did for the last entry).

That seems to be pretty much all the city has to offer, though, with the other main occupation being dodging the flies and the sun.

Everything was shut last night as we headed out to find dinner. Admittedly it was midnight, but this is Spain where they’re supposed to be open-minded enough to have sensible licensing hours, not Britain where a hangover from the Second World War means we’re still all supposed to be tucked up in bed by 11pm (the 11pm closing time was brought in to ensure that workers in the munitions factories weren’t hung over and half asleep when handling ball bearings and explosives the next day).

It’s been fun here, but I’m hoping Madrid will offer more.

I like the cool upside down punctuction on this keyboard