Bonkers Travel Round Up - Unfeasibly Long Place Names, Curious Sanitary Ware And Other Oddities

So the summer is over, though with the current heatwave you wouldn't think it in Britain this week; the only mellow fruitfulness to speak of round here involved the spotty bananas I mashed up with Ideal milk the other day. Eight weeks on the road left me little time for blogging, unfortunately, though I did at least manage to report on the perfume highlights of the last few months.

However, it's been a while since my last "pure" travel post, so while my memories are fairly fresh, I will pick up where I left off at the end of July.

The second trip got off to an eerily smooth start - the surprise discovery of the Chanel Les Exclusifs range at Birmingham airort was just the start of it. On the plane there was no one else in my row, the flight arrived early, there were none of the usual queues at passport control in Stuttgart, and my bag was first off the plane. My hire car had air conditioning, and being diesel, was incredibly economical on fuel. Yes, it was a Skoda, but the build quality of Skodas has improved immeasurably since the mid-90s, when the company's mission statement used to be: "Step by step into the second century" (click on the fax below - lovingly preserved since my meeting at the Czech plant in 1996 - to enlarge the logo!).



What else? My first hotel allowed me to extend my check out till 1pm, provided two plump pillows!, a switch to activate the extractor fan - or not - in the bathroom!, and a choice of shady spots for my car - a life saver in the 35 C heat prevailing at the time. And the very first person I interviewed turned out to be a huge fan of our client, especially the lady in customer service, whom he described - most tantalisingly - as "so much more than a friend".



And then there was my "corridor vignette coup", whereby I managed to slip in and out of Switzerland for only two euros, instead of the usual 30 or so (40 CHF). I may have slightly fudged my itinerary to qualify, nipping out of the prescribed corridor between Germany and Switzerland into the adjacent reception rooms of Austria and Slovenia, but I figured I could play my "hapless tourist" card if I was rumbled. It worked for me a treat that time I rode a tram in Frankfurt without a ticket.

And the other triumph in Switzerland was to buy a wrap in McDonalds for under £10, which, despite the predictably high ratio of wrap, really did look as though it might have contained chicken somewhere deep within its floury folds. And whatever it was, you had to love the free Coca-Cola glass that came with it!



So there were a lot of things that went well. And to be honest, apart from failing to clock that Hungary had its own currency, my ineffectual mime of "smoked paprika" in a Hungarian branch of Tesco, and one or two hairy escapades involving Slovenian post offices and a communal laundry in Austria (which may warrant a separate post), most of the trips were free of incident. Of incident perhaps, but not oddities. So here is a round up of some of the things that particularly struck me on the last three trips.

Much of Austria is underground

Now Olfactoria may take issue with this statement, as she lives in the relatively above ground city of Vienna, and her summer house is not a cave dwelling either. However, if you drive from the Swiss border to Innsbruck, you are obliged to negotiate upwards of 30 tunnels, some mercifully short, many claustrophobically long, and all of them dark and dull. I couldn't help thinking that it would have been easier just to knock the mountains down rather than turn visitors to Austria into toll-paying troglodytes.



Curious sanitary ware and other toilet humour...

A rectangular toilet

"Rectangular" being the operative word... This was in my hotel in Udine, northern Italy, another unfortunate "near miss" kind of term. And "near miss" is arguably yet another one!



Papering over wise cracks

I consider myself a seasoned traveller, but this was my first brush with edifying toilet tissue: a homily in a roll, no less, with each sheet bearing a different nugget of wisdom. Here are some of my favourites, though they lose a bit of their snappiness - and all of their rhyme - in translation.

"Bad luck is a door which sticks as you are running to the toilet."

"Happy is he who forgets what cannot be changed."

"A financial genius is a man who can earn money faster than his family can spend it."



A seventies time warp en-suite

The bathroom of my Vienna hotel had floor-to-ceiling tiles in a pervasively beige colour scheme accented by brown and orange daisies - and an avocado suite! I was catapulted right back to my teens in the 70s. A bottle of Badedas bubble bath and a suggestive canister of Tickle deodorant would have made the scene complete!





Shit happens

On one of the rare non-subterranean stretches of Austrian motorway I spotted this lorry delivering a consignment of Portaloos:



Chupa Chups water towers (aka more strange things on poles)

Well, I assume that this silver ball on a pole is a water tower, having encountered broadly similar structures in the US, though some of those are admittedly more like leggy sputniks.





Window box frenzy

Window boxes on Tyrolean chalets are nothing out of the ordinary, but I nearly swerved into a ditch somewhere near the Austrian/Slovenian border on spying a chalet that was almost completely obliterated by window boxes in shades of purple and white. I wish now that I had photographed it, but it was a windy, mountainous road with nowhere where I could have safely parked. The photo below is a total lightweight in the window box density stakes, but if you multiple the number of boxes by a factor of three, and make the blooms extra voluminous while you are at it, you will be in the right ballpark.



Peremptory traffic signs

I came across this rather startling traffic sign several times in Austria. I am sure it is very effective in preventing the phenomenon of "Falschfahrer" (drivers mistakenly driving against the direction of traffic) which so bedevils the German motorway network. There are frequent radio announcements on German radio, warning other motorists to watch out for this "wrong driver" and on no account to overtake, in case he or she happens to be bombing along the other way at that precise moment.



Unidentified main courses

I was in some pretty remote spots over the summer, where sometimes it was a struggle to make myself understood in English or German, my "go-to" languages in Central Europe in which I can invariably conduct my interviews and get by generally. I was routinely baffled by menus in Slovenian, Hungarian and Czech - even in Serbian once - though I wasn't actually IN Serbia! (My Slovenian hotel was run by Serbians). Thus it was that some of my meals were the ultimate "pig" or "fish in a poke" - twice the unknown fish in question came complete with head, which is not something I would knowingly bring upon myself.

The board pictured below (from Slovenia), is a rare example of a menu with an English translation, for which I was understandably grateful.



Micro chapels

Everywhere I went in Central Europe, I spied tiny chapels: sometimes by the road, sometimes perched atop hills, while others had merely been plonked randomly in the middle of fields. They were so very, very tiny that I could have sworn some of them had been cut in half.



Every era of hotel room

The bathroom shot above nicely showcases the 70s throwback decor of my hotel in Vienna, but across my various trips I enjoyed the full spectrum of period decor, from bediggled baroque to loft dwelling minimalism. No prizes for guessing which I preferred!







Disappearing waste paper baskets

Now if anyone reading this works in the hotel trade, they may be able to explain whether I am imagining this trend, or whether there really has been a move of late to cull the population of waste paper baskets in hotel rooms. I remember that - regardless of the category of hotel it seemed (and here's where I may be mistaken) - there used to always be a bin in the bedroom and one of those annoying flip top or mini swing bins in the bathroom. Recently I have noticed an absence of bins in the bedroom, and have had to resort to drastically overfilling the little bathroom bins with all my empty mineral water bottles, fast food detritus, balled up tissues and discarded Google maps. Obviously I cannot feature a photo of the bins in the bedroom, as they have now vanished, so here is one of the uselessly diminutive style of bathroom ones instead.



And - rather symbolically, you may say - given its white colour, this bin appears to be disappearing too, like a polar bear on an ice floe...

Random museums

I didn't have time to visit it, but was intrigued to note that Vienna boasts a Museum of Contraception and Abortion (Museum fuer Verhuetung und Schwangerschaftsabbruch). That is right up there in my book with the wackiest museums I have ever come across - in Kansas City, if my memory serves me: an exhibition devoted exclusively to Caroline Kennedy's dolls, a museum of ghost trains, another one of barns, and my personal favourite, a museum featuring jewellery made entirely of human hair.



And finally, should any proof be needed that my business trips are just that little bit bonkers, here is a picture of some chickens in Srepenica, Slovenia, and one of a funny statue in Vienna. (If anyone is concerned, that flesh coloured excrescence is in fact the leg of a strategically placed passer by.)






Photo of chicken wrap from theimpulsivebuy.com, photo of tunnel from juniorannex.wordpress.com, photo of Tickle from flickr.com, photo of Chupa Chups from giftsguideuk.com, photo of chapel from redbubble.com, photo of swing bin from housekeepersheaven.co.uk, photo of cartoon from only-apartments.com, other photos my own.

A Midsummer Bonkers Road Trip: The Travel Bit - Part 2

Right, so here are some more things that struck me on this trip...

Germany is also a car park

In a recent post I had a real pop at the notorious traffic black spot / hole that is the Antwerp ring in Belgium. Two weeks of driving around southern Germany and Switzerland have unequivocably confirmed that in high summer at least, certain sections of Germany's motorway network are also a car park. I heard on the radio that Germany has 200,000 separate traffic jams a year, and I swear that most of these were on the A8, A5 and the northern extremities of the A81 at the same time as I was the other week. In particular, exits with Böblingen in the name should be studiously avoided. Indeed, if any reader is thinking of going on holiday to Germany at this time of year, I would urge them to give the whole of the Stuttgart area a very wide berth, or as they say over there: "wide roomily drive around" it.



A small hire car is a contradiction in terms

I have been renting cars for work on and off for some 20 years and (with the very occasional exception) have mostly resigned myself to the fact that regardless of how often I specify the smallest and most basic category of car - for which the illustration on the laminated car menu might be a Fiat Panda, say - I will invariably end up with a bulky wide-bodied jet of a people carrier or something not far off it, with a name I have never heard of. This time I was given a Kia Venga. Hello? Who came up with the idea of naming a Korean car after the present first and third person subjunctive of the verb "to come" in Spanish?



Call me conservative, but it wouldn't have been a top of the head choice for me. As it turned out, after I had grown accustomed to its cumbersome contours and noisy ignition, I came to appreciate the incredibly economic fuel consumption of the diesel engine. I would happily rent this car again on my return to Stuttgart in 10 days' time, not least on account of the Swiss vignette indelibly affixed to its windscreen; it cost me 40 SFRS for the rest of the year, even though I was only able to use it for all of two days. But peel it off at your peril, as we read in Wikipedia:

"They are usually constructed in such a way that detaching and reattaching them is impossible without destruction, ensuring that drivers can't use the same vignette on more than one vehicle."

That said, I found this photo on Ebay!



All caravans are Dutch

Now I may moan about the traffic congestion in Belgium and Holland, but at least the problems are not compounded by motor homes and caravans. No, this is because all the Dutch ones are on the move in Germany, obscuring my line of sight and occasionally swaying in an unpredictable and unnerving manner. They will always have at least three bicycles attached to the back, which helps to thin out the indigenous (over-)population of the blessed things that are set to try visitors to their own country.



"Wash & Go" gets a new spin

As some of my Facebook friends may recall, I had a bit of an incident with a nectarine on this trip - specifically, trying to eat it while driving. Well...inevitably, just a couple of bites in, bright scarlet juice spurted forth and landed on my white T-shirt and beige skirt. Knowing that speed was of the essence - in stain removal that is, not driving - I reached for my bottle of mineral water and upended it over the spreading red patches. I proceeded to rub each affected area as best I could, while keeping one eye on the road and the remaining hand on the wheel.

This derelict driving behaviour prompted a flurry of disapproving comments on my Facebook wall, including this from my best friend Clare:

"Do I take it that you have fitted hands-free laundry equipment in your vehicle, Ms Musson? Still, as long as you weren't using your mobile at the same time. That might have been dangerous."



A croissant, but not as we know it

I would like to counsel readers staying in German hotels not to be tempted by the croissants they may find nestling amongst the bread rolls at the breakfast buffet. For notwithstanding their convincing shape, these are not really croissants at all, in the sense of flaky, buttery, mouthwateringly lardy, light as a feather hollow-centred morning goods. Rather, they are dense and stodgy interlopers destined to disappoint and make you wish you had risked the boiled eggs even though they might well have been soft and cold by now. The exception to this rule is croissants served by my friend Claudia in her home (of which more anon). They were the real deal (possibly baked off from an authentic ready-made dough), and if I hadn't already stuffed myself with cupcakes I would have got stuck in without a moment's hesitation.



The credit card swipe of suspicion

It is commonplace nowadays for hotels to take an imprint of your credit card or note your passport number when you check in. This is in case you do a runner, presumably, or completely clean out the mini-bar without declaring so much as a finger-thin sachet of peanuts. What irked me on this trip was the fact that I seemed to be constantly asked to leave a deposit for this or that, which is clearly a further sign of distrust. It started at the airport when I was picking up my hire car: the rather aptly named "Thrifty" desk took a deposit of 1000 euros off me to cover possible damage to the vehicle, while the hotel in Stuttgart with the robdog Internet charges wanted a deposit of 20 euros just to unlock the phone in the room! Doubtless to cover at least part of my long calls to Nigeria. And hey, at the airport they even charge you a euro to use the trolley, which can only be recovered if you are prepared to walk your empty trolley the half mile back again to where you found it.



I should point out that wherever I went on this trip I finally got cafe staff trained in the art of tea making to my precise requirements. The key all along was simply to be very specific and consistent in one's order:

"A cup of black tea please, with a very small amount of cold milk on the side."



And finally, here are a few strange things I spotted on this trip:

A curious collage of culinary appliances



A fantastically funky phone box



Trees with bits taken out



Green potato crisps



A tower in a bath hat



The ultimate bad taste mannequins



Me and an oversized hula-hoop




So that's it for the travel bits! The perfume-related aspects of the trip will be reported shortly...



Photo of traffic jam from inmagine.com, photo of Kia Venga from de.wikipedia.org, photo of vignette from archive.friday-ad.co.uk, photo of Dutch car towing a caravan from caravantrekker.nl. photo of an arm from contrariwise.org, photo of croissants from sourdough.com, photo of a locked phone from awicons.com, other photos my own.

A Midsummer Bonkers Road Trip: The Travel Bit - Part 1

The latest road trip to Germany and Switzerland – well, fly drive trip to be precise – got off to an excellent start when, without a quibble, the MAC concession at Stansted airport exchanged the bottle of Studio Fix foundation I had bought back in April, the last time I was passing through. The item was out of its money back period, but they let me swap it for an eye pencil and a peachy crème lipstick called - rather inappropriately for a dissatisfied customer ready to do battle - “Shy girl”. As things turned out, I didn’t even have to play my “Just so you know, the sales assistant who colour matched me was orange” card, which I was keeping up my sleeve in case there was any argy bargy about the suitability of the shade her colleague had recommended.

So anyway, as ever I will split my trip posts into the travel-related and the (somewhat) perfume-related, adding further subdivisions as the mood takes me. Without further ado, here are some of the things that struck me this time round...

The demise of soap

Now you may say that this observation is old hat... Because of course for some time now hotels have quietly been replacing individual tablets of guest soap with wall-mounted dispensers: one over the sink and one over the bath, if they remember. There is clearly a massive cost saving to the hotelier by not having to replace used soap tablets on a daily basis - or in my case, used and unused stolen ones. However, on this trip I noticed a further worrying development, namely the substitution of loose shower wash bottles for cakes of soap or wall-mounted soap dispensers. By substitution I mean just one bottle plonked in the sink area somewhere. I find this move concerning, because the wall-mounted dispensers have been specially developed to be suitable for all body parts, including hair, while shower crème is just shower crème, and it feels decidedly odd to squeeze out a bit to wash your hands. The whole principle of shower crème is predicated on its usage being confined to the shower, otherwise it should be called...well..."wash basin creme". So that bothered me.



Over-zealous extractor fans

Okay, so I am not disputing the important role of ventilation in a windowless bathroom, but I was particularly struck on this trip by the relentless efficiency with which extractor fans kicked in in my hotel en suites, droning on for a good ten minutes after I had vacated the area. That is in itself annoying enough, but someone could really do with inventing an “intelligent” extractor fan - you know, like those windscreen wipers that sense when and how hard it is raining and switch themselves on automatically to the appropriate setting. By the same token, there is an urgent need for extractor fans that sense you weren’t prompted to use the bathroom by an urgent need of your own, but in fact only nipped in for five seconds to brush your hair or powder your nose. Quite literally. Currently, the extractor fan is – acoustically speaking – a decidedly blunt instrument.



Minibars as the new wardrobes

On my last trip I learnt the lesson that it is foolhardy to put things in the wardrobes of hotel rooms, for the chances are that at some point you will check out and leave key items of clothing behind. This time I was acutely wardrobe-aware, and took pains to hang all clothes outside on hooks and rails and sundry ledges in plain view. I was, however, staying on the whole in a slightly better class of hotel, and had a minibar in my room on several occasions. This offered an illicit temperature-controlled environment for my stash of emergency chocolate, miniature bottles of drugstore Sekt and the sandwiches I had smuggled away under cover of serviette from the breakfast buffet. I was of course quick to transfer my wardrobe learning to this new scenario, and left notes in prominent places to remind myself to remove my interloping food and drink items from the minibar before checking out.



Preternaturally early lunches

The corollary of this packed lunch-making habit is that having checked out I lost my refrigerated facility, and the sandwich had to take its chances in the ambient interior of my car – as in ambient to boiling hot, depending on the weather. I made a point of catching the weather forecasts on the morning news with their detailed four hourly temperature projections, and on the basis of this information would time my lunch break accordingly. This could be as early as 11am in the case of soft cheese, which I knew to be a hotbed of salmonella and other nasties ending in "-cocci" if allowed to reproduce unchecked. Given that I had not long eaten a copious breakfast, you may wonder at this determination to consume all the food to which my room rate entitled me, but in my line of work the camel principle is key.



Internet robdoggery

Most of the hotels on my last trip offered free Internet access, the only catch being that there was not always a signal in my hotel room, and sometimes I could only log on to the network in the dining room or the lower reaches of the hotel stairs. This time I had a mixture of free Internet in the room, free access somewhere else in the hotel, OR very expensive Internet access in the room, which is a racket of the first water. In Stuttgart, for example, the hotel wanted 8 euros for an hour’s surfing which is simply outrageous. By way of protest, I waltzed past the front desk and out into the street with my open netbook cradled ostentatiously in my arms, and proceded to try to log on to an unsecured network in any of the neighbouring properties. Nothing doing, sadly, but it was worth a throw.

Even 200 yards away I was still taunted by my robdog hotel’s network with its flagrant demand for 8 euros. So I took my netbook back to my room and set off in search of an Internet café. A customer in a nearby video shop directed me to a call shop about 15 minutes’ walk away, where they only charged 2 euros an hour. Yay! My determination not to pay the hotel’s rate was as much about the principle as the money alone, though it is fair to say that the six euros I saved would have bought me 18 bottles of water or one and a half bottles of Suddenly Madame Glamour in Lidl! And I got a bit of exercise along the way...



To be continued...


Photo of extractor fan from innovativeelectricalsupplies.co.uk, photo of roll from breakfastbonn.de, photo of call shop from nachbarschaft.immobilienscout24.de, other photos my own.

Another Bonkers Road Trip: Part 3 – Marriott, Schmarriot! Hotel upgrades, downgrades, and Gummi bears on pillows

Readers of my account of my Mid-West trip back in March may remember that I don’t care for fancy hotels. I don’t like the fact that the better the class of hotel, the more likely they are to charge for things I consider a basic human right, like Internet access in the room or a bottle of water for when you get a raging thirst on in the night, thanks to the hotel's deliberate ploy of cranking up the central heating too high or tempting you with (chargeable) peanuts in the minibar. Then there is the suffocating attention to detail, like the way they fold the toilet paper into a gratuitous point, or place a hygiene strip round the toilet seat.

So when I travel in Europe, I like to winkle out interesting mid-range places to stay, and regularly consult my assortment of accommodation guides of the “Hotels Of Charm And Character” or “The Most Attractive Guesthouses Just Off The Motorway” variety. And then sometimes I have to find somewhere on spec, usually after a long journey, when I start scouting for a place to stay as soon as I feel myself flagging at the wheel.

So here are a few “vignettes” of the unexpectedly luxurious – or just plain curious - places I stayed in on this trip…

The romantic tower room

If ever there was a place to let your hair down and indulge your inner Rapunzel, it was the romantic circular tower room of a medieval castle in Germany to which I was unexpectedly upgraded. I had booked a budget single in the annexe for half the price! In hindsight, they may have taken a snap decision to give me this room as one of the younger and more able-bodied guests staying at the time. As such, I must have looked well up to the task of negotiating the narrow stone spiral staircase that led to the room, and would be deemed unlikely to complain about the lack of a lift, or to sue them for a nasty bump on a low slung beam.



The vertiginous townhouse

Speaking of the lack of lifts in hotels, that is in fact one of the other things Holland is famous for, apart from being a car park. This means quite a schlepp with your luggage if your room happens to be in the eaves, as singles often are. And it is not just the number of steps, but their incredibly steep angle that puts Dutch accommodation right at the top of the league table of vertiginous accommodation. Apart from tree houses and bivouacs on Mount Everest, perhaps. My attic room in Nijmegen was so lofty in fact that Internet access (mercifully free of charge!) could only be found by perching precariously - and specifically - on the last three steps of the precipitous staircase.



The chipboard palace

For my overnight in Poland I deliberately picked the same hotel I stayed in on my last visit to the area in 2007. It had the advantage of being bang next door to the chipboard manufacturer I was visiting the next day, as well as showcasing its products in surprisingly comprehensive ways. I learnt on this visit that the hotel is also something of a local nightspot. My restaurant suddenly morphed into a disco, with 60 women of my own age bopping on the dance floor with remarkable abandon for 9pm on a Monday night, and all before I could finish my pork medaillons!



The solitary retreat suite

The other notable upgrade on this trip was in Schwerin, in a historic half-timbered coaching inn famous for its wine cellar. Once again I had paid for a basic single (somewhat more than in the castle, admittedly), and this time I was upgraded to an enormous suite that occupied the entire roofspace of one wing. It was 39 paces end to end, which is a lot, even if like me you take relatively mincing steps. As well as a bathroom and twin bedroom, I had a dressing area, a walk in closet and a living room furnished with a three piece suite, wing arm chair and foot stool, writing desk and office chair, and a dining table set for two. I spent a lot of time in this suite as you can imagine, returning to it at intervals through the weekend to take naps and generally luxuriate on every last item of upholstered furniture. The hotel was disappointed in me as a guest, however, for I failed to take the 12 euro breakfast on both mornings, never mind eat in their (doubtlessly pricey) restaurant.



The forbidden chippy

The accommodation that amuses me the most looking back is the room above a pub I stayed in in Bergen-op-Zoom. My landlady was a dead ringer for Pat Butcher out of EastEnders, and the bar was chaotically stuffed full of knickknacks and random bits of Victoriana, or whatever the Dutch equivalent might be - Wilhleminana?? My room overlooked the fire escape and was furnished with a squashy but ripped black leather armchair. There was a bit of a kitchenette, with a sink and fridge and microwave, above which was affixed a notice, prohibiting deep frying in four languages. How this might have been accomplished in a microwave with no utensils was unclear.



Oh yes, I haven’t mentioned the Gummi bears yet, a German confectionery line ritualistically laid on guests’ pillows in hotels of pretty much any calibre.

As Wikipedia explains: "A Gummi bear is a small, rubbery-textured confectionery, similar to a jelly baby in English-speaking countries. The candy is roughly 2 centimetres (0.79 in) long and shaped in the form of a bear."

I got through many of these small packets on my trips – wherever I had a twin room I would obviously eat both – but I didn’t realise they came in so many varieties:

"The success of gummi bears has spawned many gummi animals and objects: rings, worms, frogs, snakes, hamburgers, cherries, sharks, penguins, hippos, lobsters, octopuses, apples, peaches, oranges, and even Ampelmännchen (a style of pelican crossing men specific to Berlin), Smurfs and spiders."

Yes, never mind the rooms, next time I want a Gummi bear upgrade to a more exotic creature!





Photo of Gummi bears from erdbeerlounge.de, all other photos my own