Had lots of fun yesterday. It wasn’t the best of starts when my son bounded in at 6am and jumped onto the bed (grrrrr), but it did make us get on with the day. We packed the picnic, and then off to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The YSP was good. We choose a particularly bad day to go, because all the indoor exhibitions were closed for change-over, and outside it was blooming windy – although to be fair it’s a lot windier today, and snowing, so I mustn’t complain. It only took us 45 mins to get there, and we had a good old wander around looking at the various bits and pieces on display (and occasionally wondering if things were art or just something the wind had blown there). I’m not a particularly arty person, so I was never going to spend 30 minutes analysing a piece from all angles (espcially not with a three year old in tow). My appreciation of art is more along the lines of “nice cat”, “like those colours”, “that’s odd”, as I walk past – but one thing I really appreciated about YSP is the fact you’re encouraged to interact with the pieces.

I find it much more meaningful to actually touch things – run my hand over a surface, or poke my head through a hole. In some cases to actually walk through the piece. It’s a far more authentic experience for me then, say, visiting an art gallery where you’re kept 5m from the art by a rope cordon. Much more interesting for the boy too to be able to stroke the bronze cows, or walk between a statue’s legs.

My favourite part was what I think was the Access Sculpture Trail. Here you were semi-guided along a trail, where the pieces formed part of pathway – a bridge here, a pass there, a brick tunnel, that sort of thing. It formed a really nice whole, somehow, and really felt like a journey.

We came back via Henry Moore in the Country Park – although it was rather too near lunchtime to linger at this point, and I’d only show my ignorance by not knowing what any of his work is called. Quite impressive though.

It was clearly far too windy for a picnic outdoors, so I’d removed the back seats of the car before we left. We opened up the boot and spread the rug inside, and had a very pleasant time eating our sandwiches and being buffetted by the wind, looking out over the Country Park.

We had planned to go for a swim in the afternoon, but the boy was so tired after his exertions (and 6’o’clock start!) that he feel asleep in the car, and slept for about 3 hours, which didn’t leave enough time for swimming before bed.

Birthday cake and pressies next (hooray!), then boy to bed, and we settled down to watch a film and eat pizza. Pretty much my perfect evening. Inspired by our trip to the YSP, we plumped for Art School Confidential, a film neither of us knew anything about, but with a really good cast line up (Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Anjelica Huston, Steve Buscemi) and written by Daniel Clowes (who also wrote Ghost World, which I really enjoyed). It was ok, as films go. Quite amusing, and an acceptable plot, but not gold by any means. The more I see Sophia Myles in, the more I like her (and let’s face it, anyone who’s been a major character in Dr Who is off to a great start). I have half a suspicion she’s a one-trick pony, but let’s see.

So a really nice day. Was really fun to do something a bit different!

It’s my 33rd birthday tomorrow. Well, technically it’s the 33rd anniversary of my one and only birth day. I’ll just stop there. In my old workplace we would have called it james++.

I’m excited about my birthday this year, for the first time in several years. I’m not a great party animal, but the last couple have been “yeah, yeah, another birthday – so what”. I don’t really know why – but they haven’t seemed worth getting worked up about. This year I’m excited though, and have been for about 2 weeks. It might to do with the little ‘un, who now understands birthdays and gets really excited about them (even when they’re not his own). It might just be because it’s on a Saturday this year, which is always nicer than having to go to work. It might just be in comparison to last year, which was our annus horribilis (or whatever the phrase is).

Anyway, going to be a fairly low key day. Planning a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the morning. Been meaning to go forever, and birthday is as good an excuse as any other. Might take the boy swimming in the afternoon, then take-away pizza in the evening! Hoorah!

The boss informs me that a serious cold front is going to hit Yorkshire in the afternoon, and temperatures will plummet (quite possibly with rain). The BBC are forecasting snow for Tuesday. Snow!! It’s ages since we’ve had snow around Easter, although I’m sure it happened once or twice in my childhood.

Sunday is, of course, Mother’s day. Won’t say anymore on the off-chance someone who it might affect reads this between now and then. Course I only have one real Mother – but in keeping with a true 21st Century family, I also have a step-mother, a mother-in-law, and step-mother-in-law, and of course my lovely wife is the mother of our son. I’m already on far too thin ice here, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Or behind. Or something.

I’ll also take this opportunity to wish you a happy St Patrick’s Day. Top o’ the mornin’ to you all.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I hadn’t realised that Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who.

If we’re on the subject of embarrassing lack of knowledge, I also didn’t realise that 3G phones use GSM for voice – which destroys my main objection to getting one (i.e. that the coverage for normal phone use would be worse than my current 2.5G phone).

Ah well, live and learn.

On Wednesday, the snow arrived. About a foot came down overnight in Boston – other places got a lot more. This was enough to disrupt various airports, which meant the people who were supposed to arrive from Virginia that day couldn’t make it, so we all had the afternoon off.

Having been a day late on the way out, I’d missed my ‘mall’ time, so this was the day to make up for it. We plumped for the Cambridgeside Galleria, mainly because it was close-ish to Legal Seafood, and right next door to MIT. We put the shopping on hold because I wanted to at least visit the campuses of MIT and Harvard, hopefully have a bit of a look around.

Actually the first excitement was finding the mall. We got into Boston itself with no problem – the problem’s arose when it turned out the map I was using didn’t particularly reflect the road layout of Boston, particularly when it came to junctions, one-way streets, and whether turns were possible or not. In fact, we got to within about 300m of the car-park, and discovered it wasn’t possible to turn left, so instead had to go over the bridge and into some horrendously complex junction that ended up sending us in the opposite direction down the wrong side of the river. It must have taken us almost 20 mins of trying to negotiate the roads before we eventually gave up and followed the signs for the Interstate that lead out of Boston that we were fairly confident would enable us to get back in again in the right place to turn into the car-park! Of course, all this was going on with a foot of snow on the roads too – fun fun fun!

Anyway, romantic that I am, I thought it would be fun to walk to Harvard. It only looked like a mile or two on the map, and we had several hours to kill before dinner. I thought “let’s stroll to Harvard, and look around, then stroll back via MIT, and then do some shopping.” This would probably have been an excellent plan in the summer, but after a heavy snowfall?? Maybe not.

The thing is, America isn’t really geared up to walking. When it snows, the snowploughs come up in force and basically shovel all the snow to the side of the road, and great velocity. And what’s at the side of the road? The sidewalk!! So we ended up struggling through dirty snow/slush/ice water. On about 3 occasions I suddenly went up to my knees in ice slush, and the constant drizzly sleet/snow/rain didn’t really improve matters. After about 20 minutes trek, I got out the map and saw we’d managed about 1/4 of the journey. Really not good!!

We decided to get a taxi for the rest of the way – except there were none to be seen!! Not a taxi in sight. We carried and walking, and after a good hour (if not longer) we arrived at the Harvard campus absolutely soaked from above and below, and freezing cold. Once again hilarity saved the day, and we were in stitches for most of the ‘walk’ – the pair of us utterly inappropriately dressed, wading through icy water and sleet to a law school that neither of us knew anything about.

Anyway, we arrived at the campus, and saw the beautiful red-brick buildings, and lots of earnest looking law students striding around. I noticed one stream of students going into a particularly impressive looking building, and so we tagged along behind them, just to see where they were going.

Turned out we were in the Memorial Hall, and had accidentally joined a senior given a campus tour to prospective students. We found out all about Harvard, and the house system, and halls of residence, meals, and so on. Very interesting. We also dripped all over the floor, and found a heater to try and defrost against. The hall itself is most impressive – here’s what the Harvard website has to say about it:

Outside the Yard, the cathedral-like Memorial Hall (1878) commemorates Harvard men who died in the Civil War while fighting for the Union. The structure features 21 stained-glass windows from the Tiffany and La Farge studios. The building contains Sanders Theatre, a popular site for concerts, lectures, and performances. On the lower level, students gather for food, entertainment, and conversation in the spacious but cozy Loker Commons.

After about 10 minutes we’d had enough, so went back outside for a very short wander around, then off to a nearby cafe for hot drink + cake. The diligent students writing essays with a cold coffee nearby were duly noted! The cafe also happened to be next a taxi-rank, which sorted us out for the journey back to the mall. I’m afraid we decided to give MIT a miss – it had got dark by this time anyway, and, let’s face it, university campuses aren’t actually that interesting to walk around.

Shopping was fun – picked up some nice clothes. Came oh so close to getting a Wii. $250.00, and they had one in stock. That would have been 125 quid given the exchange rate I got. It would have been worth buying it just to sell it as soon as I got home. However I haven’t really genned up on if there are are region coding or importing issues, so decided it was a little bit too high risk. Oh so tempted!

One of my the people I was working alongside has all but emigrated to America, and now lives in California. He claims that there are basically two types of Restaurant in the US – really nice ones, with good service, decent food, edible portion sizes, but not necessarily too expensive… and complete dives that dump a mountain of deep fried crap onto your table with a glare for daring to even enter the place. The interesting thing is, he states, there is no sort of middle ground. No average restaurants.

Based on an experience of about 5 days and 4 different restaurants, I would agree – although obviously this is not a statistically significant sample.

Actually before I go any further, I should say that this is a very vegetarian unfriendly post, featuring explicit meat and fish scenes. 🙂

The first night we went to the Naked Fish (inspired by Jamie Oliver? Probably not), which was a really nice diner about a minute’s walk from our hotel. Despite the name, it actually did steak too, which I had on my first night – and it was nice. A nice size to eat, a yummy garlic butter, cooked nicely. Just fine. The others had nice fishy dishes that looked very tasty.

Evening two was a drive to downtown Waltham (the town on the outskirts of Boston where we were staying) to go a nice Italian restaurant. Again, a nice place. Good ambiance, tasty food (forget exactly what I had) – although my colleague’s steak didn’t look all that. But basically a nice restaurant.

So far so good, but day three was when it went downhill. We were late finishing at the client on day three, and couldn’t be bothered to drive anywhere, so decided to eat at the hotel’s bar/restaurant – the Picadilly or something. My colleague had vowed never to enter the place again, after having eaten there on his first night, but we persuaded him that it couldn’t be that bad.

First surprise was that popcorn arrived with our drinks. Yes, popcorn. Not bread. Not olives. Popcorn.

Second surprise was my starter – chilli nachos. Actually quite good nachos, but an absolutely enormous quantity. Easily enough for two to have as a main, probably three. It was so large a portion it was actually funny. I managed about 1/3 of it – the other two had about another 1/3 between them, and we left 1/3 on the plate. The other two had some bizarre coconut shrimps, which sounded quite nice, but were actually foul. Once they’d scraped off the coconut they weren’t so bad, apparently.

So I was totally stuffed, and then my main arrives. I’d decided a cheeseburger sounded nice – and they even asked me how I wanted it cooked. So this huge slab of meat arrives in a bap, with a limp lettuce leaf that appeared to have been staked to the plate with a little sign saying “medium” (I hadn’t dare ask for rare), and on top of the burger was some truly horrible radioactive cheese. Even after scraping it all off, the taste had permeated the entire burger. I didn’t speculate for too long on the actual burger itself – Aberdeen steak it most certainly was not.

After about two mouthfuls I really couldn’t manage anymore (although the chips were nice), and my friend opposite who’d ordered the same dish managed 3 mouthfuls before given up.

The really funny thing is, the three of us are in hysterics about just how awful the restaurant and the food is, when the waitress turns up and asks if everythings ok?

“Oh yes – everything’s fine. Lovely. Thank you very much”.

Very British.

After learning the lesson of day three, on day four we went to Legal Seafood in downtown Boston. There’s a whole other story about my afternoon in Boston – next time’s entry – but anyway we made it to the restaurant in the end. Nice place – quite a posh restaurant, and I decided to plump for the clam chowder followed by lobster served on a bed of clams and mussels. The soup was superb – and we even got little lobster croutons with it.

The next course was much closer to American-size portions. A whole lobster arrived on a bed of 30 or 40 clams (I think they were clams), with a little bowl that looked like it was filled with scummy water, and another smaller bowl with oil in. I actually took quite a long time trying to decide if it was a finger bowl full of soapy water before I dared to try some, but more on that in a min.

This was the first time I’ve eaten whole lobster, and it’s quite an experience. The first thing that happens is a little cardboard box (like a Chinese takeaway box) arrives with a plastic sheet (that turned out to be a bib!), a pair of nutcrackers, and a little bitty fork. Next a huge plate arrives covered with – I kid you not – a sheet of tin foil!

This is removed to show you Mr Lobster (or might be Mrs Lobster, I suppose) reclining on his/her bed of shells, with one claw casually dipped in the strange dirty water bowl. It was this that was my main argument against it being a finger bowl, although I suppose the claw might have flopped in my accident.

Anyway, the idea seems to be that you crack open the lobster shell with the nutcrackers, then dig out the flesh with the tiny fork, which ideally comes out in one piece. Although this is all very exotic, it wasn’t actually that nice, and there was far too much of it to eat. The only other occasions I’ve had lobster, it’s been lobster thermador, which is served in a delicious thousand-islandy type sauce and is just yum. Lobster without any dressing or sauce is a little bit plain, well this one was anyway. Likewise the shellfish were fine, but didn’t really taste of anything. I did taste a tiny bit of the dirty water bowl, and it actually turned out to be a sort of fishy stock. Our bet was that it was the water used to steam/boil the seafood, and dipping the lobster into it improved it a little, but it still wasn’t all that.

Day five we played it safe, and went back to Naked Fish. I did actually have fish this time, although I can’t remember what, and it was jolly nice.

Day six was a slice of pizza at JFK airport, so that probably doesn’t count… That said, it was a very pleasant meal, with a little bowl of salad, a spinach pizza, and a glass of wine, watching all the planes take off and land. The plastic knife and fork spoilt it a little, but I guess you can’t have everything!!

This is not to be ungrateful – all the food was on expenses, and a lot more exciting then my usual menu. And I know most of the people in the world would give almost anything to be too full to empty the plate. It’s just a very different experience eating out in America then it is in the UK…

American beckons!

Very smooth flight over. The films very Marie Antoinette (which wasn’t all that) and Man of the Year which was absolutely, and unexpectedly, awesome! Very very funny. I wasn’t going to bother watching it, until I heard everyone else on the plane laughing, so decided to plug in the headphones. Glad I did. I also had time to squeeze in some development on the plane for the demonstration the next day.

Arrived in Kennedy on time, did the whole passport, baggage reclaim (one of the first off, unusually!), and customs, then throw my bag into the transfer pile for the flight to Boston, through security again, grab a Starbucks and back online for some e-mail and other bits and pieces.

We board the shuttle to Boston in good time, get away from the gate cleanly – captain introduces himself and says

“It’s a rare day at Kennedy when there’s no traffic before us, we are number one for take-off.”

And indeed we are – straight onto the runway, all raring to go.

Except we don’t actually go. Can’t have been more than about 5 minutes, but it felt like ages, especially at an airport as busy as Kennedy. Finally the engines roar, and we start off, only to hang a right turn after about a hundred metres (I’m mildly surprised the plane could do a ninety degree turn at the speed we were going, but clearly it could). We footle around the apron for a bit, then the captain comes back on.

“Looks like I spoke too soon folks. The plane behind us saw a piece of plastic fall off – it’s nothing important, but we need to go back to the gate for maintenance as safety is our first priority.”

So back to the gate. Doors open again. Lots of coming and going – the captain’s on and off of the plane like a yo-yo. I can see enough out of the window to see them turn up with what appears to be a roll of gaffa tape, and then apply a strip of it to the leading edge of the winglet. It can’t have really been gaffa tape because it was transparent, but it really looked like it from where I was.

Captain comes back on.

“The item that came off the plane was the erosion tape on the wing – it has now been replaced, and we’ve just got to fill in the log-book, then we can go again.”

All of this has taken about 30 minutes, and I’m starting to get nervous for the people due to be meeting me in Boston. We leave the gate again, and this time:

“This is the captain – we’ve now hit the rush hour, and there are 8 planes ahead of us, so I estimate we’ll be about another half an hour on the ground.”

When we finally made it on the runway again, I looked behind, and there were 14 planes behind us!! Busy airport. Anyway, we made it up into the air, an hour behind schedule, and the captain made a mysterious comment about taking a a few “short-cuts” (how can you take a short-but between New York and Boston in a plane?!), and we magically only landed about 5 minutes behind schedule. Go figure. (Actually it was later explained to me that they schedule bag loads of extra time for planes going to/from JFK because there’s usually a long delay involved. In this particular instance they’d timetabled one and a half hours for a 35 minutes flight, but I guess it all worked out in the end.)

So safely in Boston, more or less on time. No problems collecting bags (although there was a mildly humourous moment when me and the person I was supposed to be meeting had to phone each other to make contact, because were we standing on opposite sides of the carousel. We then proceeded to both walk anti-clockwise around it, so were still on the opposite side to each other at the end of it. Several of my fellow passengers found this very amusing – actually to be fair we did too!)

All that remained of the day was to get to the hotel (very easy journey), grab a quick shower, then out for dinner. More about dinner on the next exciting installment!

I’ve now been told by two different people that I’ve got Amsterdam all wrong, and am basing my opinion the sleezy bit – which I guess is a fair enough comment. If I’d arrived in London for the first time on a wet February afternoon and spent an hour walking around either Kings Cross or Soho I wouldn’t have many positive comments to make.

Anyway, if I’d got around to implementing comments, the one below from handee2001 would have appeared (instead of which it arrived by e-mail):

Give it a second go it you can. The area directly around the station< is, granted, a bit grim. Of particular interest might be the church in a terraced house "Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder" ("Our lord in the attic"), and the Beguinhof, for a bit of religious history. The Amsterdam historical museum is areal treasure, and further out the canals get beautiful. And the art isn't bad, either. But yeah, the bit around Centraal station is grim. You've really got to move far enough away from that to get away from the day-tripping british stoner boys busy turning themselves green, and the american tourists

I got as far as designing the database schema for my comments system, and a skeleton AJAX implementation to do a funky show/hide comments what-not, but then lost enthusiasm because I thought the only people that would leave comments would be spammers!

I’m afraid I was very dull at Amsterdam, and checked in to the nearest hotel, in this case the Sheraton. I considered getting a train into town to find one there, but I didn’t know how the trains worked, and I had all my bags with me, so the Airport Sheraton it was. Very nice too – best of all it meant I could dump my bags in my room, and decide what to do unfettered. In any case, there is something very civilized about getting up, packing a few bits and pieces, and then strolling down the corridor to check-in for a flight. An 11am flight amounts to being a lie-in under these conditions – I think I got up at 8.30 or something!

Anyway, getting ahead of myself. I had to change some of my US money into Euro (I hadn’t planned a stop in Europe), then jumped on the train to Amsterdam central, stopping only to buy a little pocket-map.

I was very tempted to get the train to Rotterdam instead, but I didn’t have a clue how long the journey was or what the trains were like – and was nervous about getting stranded a long way from my flight again, so plumped for Amsterdam central. Only about 20 minutes on the train, so no worries.

I wasn’t actually very taken with Amsterdam. It was a miserable day, and I wasn’t there under the best of circumstances, but it was all really busy and really seedy. Perhaps just a reflection of where I was wandering – but it seemed to me the shops were all either sex shops – sorry ‘souvenir shops’ – or drug shops – sorry ‘cafe’s. In some cases both at the same time. To be fair I noticed only a couple of real sex shops, but the souvenir shops sell what I would classify as hard-core pornography alongside the clogs and fridge magnets. I suspect it’s a much nicer place to visit in the spring or summer, but in winter I couldn’t say it had much going for it…

I found a reasonable looking restaurant for lunch, but it was full of Americans. Nothing against our trans-Altantic cousins, just you can’t help but be aware of them if they’re nearby, especially in a food establishment. The waitress also got my order wrong (although what arrived was quite nice), so I pretty much gave up and went back to my room to watch a flick. (POTC: Dead Man’s Chest, in case you’re wondering), and get pizza on room service. Hey, I told you I was dull!

Actually I did a couple of hours work in the hotel room, and had a Skype home too, and a good soak in the tub. The life of an international jet setter, eh? 🙂

Nice slow start in the morning, 5 minutes stroll to check-in, then an hour or so to grab breakfast at the airport and do some e-mails and some gift shopping – then off to gate H2 (or whatever it was) for the long haul over to JFK international airport….

This entry was more wry the first time I wrote it, but it appears to have vanished without a trace so I’m not feeling wry anymore. Probably not a bad summary of the whole trip, actually!!

That said, the trip started off ok, really – in as much as “starting” means “getting to the airport in time to check-in”. I had a taxi booked for 04.30 in order to get to Leeds /Bradford for 5am, in order to get the 7am flight to Amsterdam. Taxi duly arrived, very easy journey to the airport. “Good,” thought I. “Plenty of time to check-in and grab breakfast.”

Actually there had been one complication by this point. The youth group had set the date for their 24 hour sponsored stay-awake to be that night/day. I seriously toyed with the idea of just staying up until 4.30, but then decided that even 6 hours sleep was worth it, so I went along to the start of the evening, and was tucked up in bed by 10. I suppose I should have been more worried about the 1cm of snow that fell on Friday night – but I managed to drive ok along an ungritted road, so I figured the planes would be ok. There was a worrying slew of cancellations shown on the airport website, but my flight was listed as fine and dandy, so I thought all was well.

There was a huge queue at the airport to check-in. Lots of people going off skiing. Anyway I got to the check-in desk, gave over my passport and tickets, and got my bags all tagged up. Nice lady gave me my boarding pass, and I was about to walk away when she hands me a letter.

“I’m afraid the aeroplane diverted to Robin Hood airport last night with the snow. Please take your bag and just wait at the front of the terminal building for the coach to take you there. It will be about an hour and a half late into Amsterdam.”

“But I’ve got a connecting flight….”

“Sorry Sir, but we are a budget airline. NEXT”.

Straight on the phone to Delta for the “Houston, we have a problem” phonecall:

“Sorry sir, you have a very restricted ticket. It can’t be changed, and it has no refund value less than 24 hours before travel.”

“What are my options?”

“… Well, we don’t have any availability for returning on Friday, so it will have to be

Saturday and Sunday .. Ah yes, and I can get you on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Boston this afternoon. That will be £4,000 please.”

I’m pondering whether or not to explain that I don’t think 4k is a realistic option for me, and indeed that coming back on Saturday/Sunday isn’t either (see Madeira), when the coach arrives to take me to Doncaster. Actually there was one minor flurry of excitement in the meantime, when I noticed a KLM flight going to Amsterdam a few minutes after my original flight was due to depart… but then it turned out that plane had diverted to Manchester, and everyone was getting on a coach there. Sigh.

Pleasant enough journey to Robin Hood airport (nowhere need Nottingham, incidentally), lots of hanging around there (although this did mean there was time to arrange a second mortgage in order to buy breakfast). I think by the time we took off it was about half an hour before the Delta flight was due to take off. Since it’s an hour’s flight to Amsterdam, this meant I could relax, really.

Sure enough, I get to Schipol – departure boards aren’t even listing my flight it’s that long gone. So I do the 10 minute hike to the baggage reclaim, wander out to my first ever time in Holland (been to the airport before, but only to transfer), and groove on up to the Delta desk.

Only everyone’s packed up and gone home from the Delta desk, so I’m left all alone in Schipol airport, with a ticket for a flight that’s halfway across the Atlantic, and a mobile phone that doesn’t work.

Did I mention my mobile didn’t have International roaming set up on it? (despite them telling me it was provisioned for roaming). It happened last time too – why don’t I learn? Still, 10 minutes on an airport payphone was enough to sort me out, and it’s back on the phone to good old Delta.

Actually in the meantime I’d set my boss on a mission to try and find an alternative flight from Amsterdam to Boston. There were one or two options (although one that was Amsterdam -> Dublin -> Paris -> Atlanta -> Boston or something, which I passed on)

“Ok – so I missed my connection because of the snow, but I have made it as far as Amsterdam. I know my outward ticket is worthless now, but if I make my own way to Boston can I still use the return leg on Friday?”

“You got held up getting to the airport in the UK by the snow?”

“No, when I got to the UK airport my plane had been diverted because of snow, so I had to get a coach to another airport, and by the time I arrived in Amsterdam I’d missed the flight”

“… You’re in Amsterdam at the moment?”

“Yes!”

“Oh. Please hold the line.”

“… It’s your lucky day sir! We’ll let you change your outward travel date to tomorrow morning instead for £100.00, if you’d like?”

Well – it wasn’t the question I’d asked, but I thought I was probably unlikely to get a flight to Boston for that day or the next day for less than £100 + the cost of a hotel room, so I went for it.

Next job – find a hotel room, then settle down to an unexpected day in Amsterdam. Well, half-day really.

One thing I forgot to mention was that we were there for the start of Lent, which of course meant Shrove Tuesday – Mardi Gras! To mark this event, there was a carnival in Funchal which we all went to.

It was actually quite fun – lots of people walked by, or came by on floats, and they were all dressed up in costumes. These seemed to split between general sex/horror (men in drag, Grim reaper), society references we didn’t understand (the tramps’ parade, and lots of scarecrows), and political messages, particularly a lot of stuff to do with health and money. We couldn’t understand the slogans, as there were in Portuguese, but could get enough of a grasp to get the basic message…

Had to swiftly distract my little boy a couple of times – first when a gallows came by that had someone being strung up ready to be hung (just pretend, but looked real), and second when a car came by with a sex orgy going on – again just pretend, but nevertheless with two men in drag standing on the roof gyrating and performing oral sex on a dildo. I looked a bit like there was a young lady in the back with her legs in the air, but – perhaps fortunately – the crowd got in the way.

To be fair, in the space of over an hour of people passing by, these were the only two I felt were inappropriate for a three year old – the rest was all either based on imagery that would pass him by, or good clean fun.

We also got a free DVD from the Ministry of Tourism (or something), that was a review of all the attractions on the island, including the 2006/7 New Year fireworks, which looked absolutely breath-taking. While I wasn’t there, it looked by far the most impressive and sustained display I’ve ever seen (this record was previously for me held by the Sydney 2000 fireworks, which again I didn’t see live, but looked pretty good on the telly).