Category: travel

Why coffee in Portugal is so bad

The title of this blog post is the text I entered into my google search bar at Lisbon airport, on my way back to London last weekend. What Google showed me on top was a blog post titled “why coffee in Portugal is so good“. The contents of the post, though, had given me the answer.

In terms of coffee cultures, Spain and Portugal are rather similar. Coffee shops usually double up as bars, unlike in England for example. This means that the baristas aren’t particularly skilled, and so you don’t get fancy latte art. The coffees you get are thus espresso, espresso with some milk and espresso with lots of milk. The milk being foamed gives the coffee a good taste, in Spain that is.

The reason coffee in Portugal tastes bad is the same reason that coffee in France tastes bad – it is a result of colonialism.

During the years of the Salazar dictatorship, Portugal was economically isolated. This meant that it could only turn to its colonies for coffee. And the Portuguese colonies (not sure if Brazil is included in this since it became independent way back in the 1800s) exclusively produced Robusta coffee. And Robusta coffee, being inferior to Arabica, is roasted slowly, and produces a bitter brew. Which is what we uniformly got in our trip to Lisbon.

France had a similar story. Though there was no economic isolation, imports from its colonies were subsidised, and this was again largely Robusta coffee. And so, as the roads and kingdoms post linked above explains, coffee in France is bad.

I’m not sure if Spain got/gets most of its colonies from its erstwhile colonies. If it does, it goes a long way in explaining the quality of coffee in Spanish cafes, despite them doubling up as bars and not necessarily having skilled Baristas. For the likes of Colombia and Ecuador and Honduras produce absolutely brilliant Arabica coffee.

 

Liverpool

While I absolutely remain a fan of Liverpool Football Club, and had a fascinating tour of their facilities this morning, I’m not such a big fan of the city itself. Somehow overall the experience there (barring some taxi rides and the Anfield experience itself) was not particularly great.

For starters, it doesn’t help that the city has lousy weather. Being up north, in England and on the coast means there are strong winds, and it can be pretty bad when it rains. Then, when I got off the train station last night, the city seemed dead and the roads that I walked on until I found a taxi were deserted.

And this afternoon, after I had finished my stadium tour and went to the renowned Albert Docks, the experience there was similar as well. Rather dull and without too many people around. And once again the weather didn’t help matters.

And then there is the hotel I stayed in last night. The check in and check out were rather pleasant and I mostly got a good night’s sleep as well, but a former office building converted to a hotel can be a bit depressing. The room was rather small, with the bed stuck to two walls. And a part of it had been earmarked for the bathroom anyway. Even this morning when I got out of the hotel the area wasn’t really bustling (this was in central Liverpool).

And while I found the breakfast to be pretty good (I got a a “large English breakfast”), the service and decor of the restaurant wasn’t particularly appealing. And as I got out of the restaurant, I saw a “up for sale” board on the door!

Anyway, it’s just a few data points. However, in hindsight I feel less bad now about not booking my ticket to York yesterday itself, which would’ve cut my journey cost by 50%. Without a booked ticket, not finding the place particularly interesting meant I could quickly get to the station and take the next train onward.

So here I am, nearing York (I’m finishing this post now in a hurry since I should reach any time now, and I don’t want to scramble). The views on the journey have been rather stunning. The big breakfast meant that I didn’t need to have lunch today. And I had some beer and peanuts and cake on the train and am feeling happy about it now!

The only sore point is that soon after I had bought beer from the cart on the train, the conductor announced that the toilets on train aren’t working. In any case, York isn’t far away!

Cheers

This is Anfield

 

I had a massive fanboy time this morning, as I went on my long-awaited (nearly 14 years) pilgrimage to Anfield, home of the Liverpool Football Club. As I had mentioned in my post last night, this was the explicit purpose of my visit to Liverpool, and I had left home with only three bookings – train to Liverpool, hotel in Liverpool and the Anfield tour.

So after having polished off a “large Full English” (in hindsight, I’m thankful for that) at a local cafe close to my hotel, I took an Uber to Anfield. The driver was also a Liverpool fan and we spent time chatting about last afternoon’s game, when Liverpool played insipidly to draw across Stanley Park with Everton. I was in good time for the tour (that was to start at 11), and spent the time walking along the outside of the Main Stand.

There are benches dedicated to Liverpool’s greatest players of all time, and the floor is tiled with names of members (not all members I think – perhaps those that made contributions to rebuild the Main Stand 3 years ago). I paid my respects at the Hillsborough Memorial and walked back to the Kop end where the entrance to the Stadium Tour is situated.

The tour started on the sixth floor of the newly redeveloped Main Stand (if you’ve wondered why TV broadcasts of Liverpool games suddenly started showing a very high angle, this is the reason). Our guide Terry first took us to the hall where there were photos of “Liverpool’s six great managers”.

The choices were interesting – Shankly, Paisley, Fagan, Dalglish, Houllier and Benitez. As the Elo ratings show, these were all definitely managers who improved Liverpool, sometimes in a significant way (though the last two also let things slip considerably towards the end of their reigns.

I sensed some sort of discomfort in the group. Evidently, a majority were Liverpool fans, but talks about “the purpose of the club being to win trophies” and talking up of the number of trophies won so far brought up the painful reality that we’ve “AJMd” on a league, a europa league and a champions league in the last five years itself, and look on course to AJM the league once again. Nobody really wanted to point out that things aren’t going as well as we would like.

In any case, the tour moved on and our guide Terry was excellent, though sometimes he went back to familiar cliches. Describing the miracle of Istanbul, for example, he made the familiar joke of “Milan had Kaka, and we had Djimi Traore, and yet we managed to win”.

We moved on to a view of the pitch from the highest tier of the main stand, my first impression was that this is a rather “cosy” stadium. Now, the only other stadiums I’ve been to are the behemoths Camp Nou and Wembley, and in comparison to them, Anfield looked rather intimate. That also suggested why the crowd at Anfield is sometimes like “Liverpool’s 12th man”, as a poster outside the away dressing room claimed.

The small stadium means the crowd noise can reverberate easily around the stadium. The Anfield Road End is yet to be redeveloped, and once that happens the stadium will become “taller”, meaning the noise levels might get higher. Looking at the pitch from up the Main Stand gave me another regret – that I haven’t watched a game at Anfield (though I did watch Liverpool play at Wembley). Hopefully sometime in this lifetime I’ll fulfil that!

There were cutouts of various players placed near the dressing rooms. Salah’s was the most popular as everyone lined up to take a selfie with him. Rather than waiting there, I managed selfies with cutouts of all of Firmino, van Dijk and Alisson. The dressing rooms were impressive (especially the Home dressing room). I also found the differences between home and away dressing rooms interesting – the home room is soundproof while the away room isn’t. The home room has lighting control to adjust the lighting to the pitch. The away room has no such facilities. These are subtle differences we don’t appreciate as TV viewers, but can have a profound impact on the game.

And based on this, I don’t mind the draws at Manchester United and Everton that much!

 

You’ll Never Walk Alone

I first became a fan of Liverpool FC in April 2005, on the day of the first leg of their Champions League semifinal against Chelsea. While I was in London for a month and half after that, I never really executed on the pilgrimage to Anfield. Instead I went on trips around the country which my friends had planned.

For a long time, this was on my To-Do list. Yet, I continued to be lazy. I moved to England exactly two years ago, but had somehow kept putting off my trip to Liverpool. The initial plan had been to do it with family, carrying my daughter as she put her hands on the “this is anfield” signboard.

Finally, as it happens, I’ve made the trip just before we end our current stint in London and move back to India. And unlike that plan of that photo-op of my daughter with her hand on the “this is anfield” sign, I’ve come to Liverpool alone.

I don’t know the last time I had one an “unplanned trip”. This time I did some planning, though, but haven’t booked much. As things stand now, I’ve only booked my train to Liverpool (which I took this evening), my hotel for the night (where I’m writing this from) and the Anfield tour for tomorrow morning.

In my eagerness to get to the hotel after the train rolled in to Liverpool Lime Street at 10:20 PM tonight, I exited the station without bothering to see where the taxi rank was. And then google maps told me I could get a bus nearby, so I walked alone for a bit. There was a bunch of bus stops but it was unclear what bus I should take. So I walked on.

And presently an empty taxi came that way. And I hopped in. The taxi driver told me that my hotel is “one of the several old office complexes that have now become hotels” in Liverpool, “all thanks to the football”, he said. The room does look weird. It’s among the smallest hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, perhaps smaller than the one in Hong Kong.

I dont have the enthu to get up now, so here’s a photo of my room from my bed (that glass wall you see on the left is the bathroom). I trust what my taxi driver told me – I can fully imagine this little space having been a meeting room or office cabin once upon a time.

Anyways, off to bed now. Anfield beckons tomorrow morning! Never mind today’s derby result, and that we’re behind in the title race now.

Somerset wanderings

So we went for a road trip. To be precise, four adults and three children rented a car and drove down to a relative’s place in Cornwall, and all the way back. And on the way back, we saw Stonehenge. Rather, tried to see it, failed, and then stumbled upon it. For more details, read on.

The premise is that my wife’s cousin and her family are visiting us, and on Friday all of us set out to my wife’s uncle’s (same “side” as the visiting cousin) house in Cornwall. The idea of driving there was that on the way, or the way back, we could “cover” some tourist attractions that were hard to do by public transport, such as Stonehenge.

There are times when I pride myself on my planning. Such as this afternoon when we were driving from Cornwall towards Stonehenge, on our way back to London. On the way to Cornwall on Friday, I had noticed that the rest stops on the “M” motorways were much better equipped than those on the “A” highways (admittedly based on one fully sampled data point each, along with signboards). Our journey from Cornwall to Stonehenge had a short stretch on an M motorway sandwiched between two A highways. And I announced a slightly early lunch break so we could take advantage of the better facilities.

A post-prandial double espresso relieved me of the severe headache caused by caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and I presently took the wheel. Ten minutes later, I had taken a wrong turn at a roundabout which meant we were back on our motorway rather than motoring way towards Stonehenge. The wife, who was sitting next to me and navigating, proudly announced that the estimated time of arrival hadn’t changed due to my mistake.

I don’t know if the estimated time of arrival changed during the next hour and three-quarters, but most of that time was spent driving through the country roads of Somerset and some surrounding counties. There were hills and valleys and grasslands and sheep. We frequently passed through beautiful forests, which retained a tinge of green despite it being winter. The roads were mostly two-lane (one in each direction), and the sceneries kept changing.

Sometimes I like to describe my wife as being my “conscience keeper”, for she quickly pulls me back when I make the sort of mistakes I normally caution people against. For example, for the last six years I’ve been lecturing about cognitive biases, and I fell right into one of them when I said “I guess missing the exit wasn’t too bad after all, since we’ve been rewarded with such beautiful scenery”. “Well”, she replied, “you can’t say that because you don’t know what you really missed (in the road not taken)”. I quickly complimented her on how smart she is and drove on.

It was windy. Occasionally it was foggy. It even rained a fair bit. And the kids were screaming in the back of the car. But it was a most pleasurable journey. By the time we got close to Stonehenge, I thought to myself that it wouldn’t matter if we couldn’t see Stonehenge – the journey itself had been worth it (I’m not sure the adults in the back of the car shared this view).

And then it turned out that I had wished for too much. I have mentioned earlier about how I pride myself on my planning abilities, such as optimisation of lunch breaks. One thing I had failed to plan on, though, was Stonehenge’s opening hours. I had only seen that the place is open till 5, not that the last entry is at 3 pm. And when we happily drove past meadows of sheep and signs warning us that tanks might be crossing the road to finally reach Stonehenge, we were politely asked to turn back by security personnel.

Not having a place to park suitably as the wife tried to find directions home, I just drove round and round a roundabout. Directions found, the next order of business was to give some tired arses a rest, and to comfort the screaming kids strapped into their child seats. I quickly pulled into the first available hard shoulder on the A303, without waiting for a designated “service area” (with toilets and restaurants and fuel). By the time we had reoriented ourselves and pulled out of there, there was a traffic backlog ahead of us.

The road dipped and then rose again. Until the dip, there was bumper-to-bumper traffic. Beyond it, I saw cars go freely. It was similar in the other direction – there was bumper-to-bumper traffic leading up to the dip. After that, there was free movement of cars.

My first thought was that there was possibly an accident there. I soon dismissed that and thought there were sheep on the road (there were plenty in the meadows around). And then someone in the back figured out why the traffic had backed up from the dip from both directions – Stonehenge was clearly visible from there, and people had been slowing down to take pictures!

So here is one such picture taken from our car, along with a few others from our trip over the last few days.

Cousin-in-law-in-law drove the “home stretch”, which I didn’t mind at all since it was mostly along motorways which I find boring. I absolutely enjoyed driving around Cornwall yesterday (though we didn’t see that much of the famed Cornish coast), and the unexpected roads of rural Somerset today.

 

Vacation Shopping

This is yet another of those questions whose answer seems rather obvious to everyone, and to me in full hindsight, but which has taken me a long time to appreciate

For a long time I never understood why people shop during vacations, when both time and luggage space are precious commodities. With global trade, I reasoned that most clothes should be available at reasonably comparable prices worldwide, and barring some special needs (such as a certain kind of shoes, for example), there was no real need to shop on vacations.

The last day of our trip to Munich in June convinced me otherwise. That was the only day on the trip that the wife was free from work, and we could go out together before our afternoon flight. The only place we ended up going out to turned out to be a clothing store, where the wife freaked out shopping.

It didn’t make sense to me – she was shopping at a chain store which I was pretty certain that I had seen in London as well. So why did she shop while travelling? And she shopped far more than she does in a normal shopping trip in London.

In hindsight, the answer is rather simple – diversity. While the same stores might exist in various countries or cities, each is adapted to local tastes and prevailing fashions. And while everyone watches the same “runways” in Milan and Los Angeles, there is always a subtle difference in prevailing styles in different places. And clothes in the stores in the respective places are tailored (no pun intended) to these styles.

And it can happen that the local prevailing styles are not something that you particularly agree with. For example, for years together in Bangalore I struggled to find plain “non-faded” jeans – most people there seemed to demand faced or torn jeans, and stores responded to serve that demand (interestingly, jeans shopping in my last Bangalore trip was brilliantly simple, so I guess things have changed).

Similarly, the wife finds it hard to appreciate most dresses in the shops in London (and I appreciate why she doesn’t appreciate them – most of the dresses are a bit weird to put it mildly), and as a result hasn’t been able to shop as much in recent times. She had taken to claim that “they don’t seem to be making normal clothes any more”.

But the styles in London aren’t correlated with the styles in Munich (or elsewhere), with the result that in that one chain store in Munich, she found more nice dresses than she had in some 20 shopping trips over a year in London.

Fashion suffers from the “tyranny of the majority“. It makes eminent sense for retailers to only stock those styles and models that have a reasonably high demand (or be compensated for stocking low-demand items with a high enough margin – I have a chapter on this in my book). So if your styles don’t match with those of people around you, you are out of luck.  But when you travel, you have the chance to align yourself to another majority. And if that alignment happens, you’re in luck!

PS: On a separate note, I’m quite disappointed with the quality of clothes in London. Across brands, they seem to wear much faster than those bought in continental Europe or even in India.

Notes from Scandinavia

Two weeks back (1st to 4th August), we visited Scandinavia – primarily Copenhagen, but also a day trip to Malmö, to give ourselves the satisfaction of having visited Sweden. A few pertinent observations (check the wife’s pertinent observations from the trip here).

  • True to reputation, we concluded our visit to Sweden without having seen a single Swedish Krona. Admittedly, our only expenses there were in places that you would normally expect to take plastic money – a restaurant, a coffee shop and a memento shop at the railway station, but this fact deserves mention given Sweden’s reputation
  • The same cannot be said of Denmark, though. A friend who used to live there had told us that we don’t need cash there, but on the first afternoon itself we found out otherwise. We hadn’t bothered drawing cash on the way to our apartment, and when the wife started craving Thai food, I found two takeaways close to the apartment but neither accepted Mastercard – they only accepted “Dankort“. The widespread use of Dankort in Copenhagen means that there aren’t too many ATMs around either. And so that day the wife was forced to make do with Cup Noodles.
  • In that sense, payment in Denmark is like the proverbial washerman’s dog . Widespread use of Dankort means few ATMs. And foreigners’ cards don’t work in a lot of places. Oh – when we did find an ATM and withdraw money, the bank (Danske Bank) had the temerity to charge us an ATM withdrawal fee
  • Relative to London at least, Copenhagen is a dense city. Based on my limited data set (from a few random walks around our apartment in the Amager suburb), the dominant form of housing is the short (3-4 storeyed) apartment building. Some of them are pretty old – the one we stayed in was built in the 1930s, and there was no lift
  • The apartment buildings are also pretty close to each other, and given that this summer in Scandinavia has been especially hot, most people kept windows open, which meant that we could see into each other’s houses. People also didn’t seem to be that concerned about privacy – in the building opposite ours (which is a kind of college hostel, I think) we saw a naked couple making out. Also – I kinda don’t write this kind of stuff on my blog nowadays, but that also told us why people like to sunbathe topless. Contact me directly if you want to know more 😛
  • This liberal attitude doesn’t preclude creeps, though. On the other side of our apartment, we saw an old man sitting in the balcony (yes, a lot of houses in Copenhagen actually have balconies, unlike in London; also windows easily open out wide. Again unlike London) with a pair of binoculars, looking towards the hostel. Go figure!
  • Thanks to the heat, we didn’t walk that much. In a way, we did the trip “in reverse”, looking for comfort food on the day we landed and walking around the old town just before heading to the airport on the last day. All the while, we kept wondering how the city would be in winter
  • Berry absolutely hated the Copenhagen metro (she would start screaming as soon as we got into a train), and for good reason. Despite being built only in the last decade, the thing lacks air conditioning, and with  a part of the line overground, there is a massive greenhouse effect. And unlike the ancient London Metro, there are no windows on the trains either
  • The metro is strange otherwise as well. The structure of the stations means the lift takes far far lesser time than the escalators, which are rather complex. The size of the lifts, however, means that most people have to take the elevator. Also I never figured out where to tap in and out at the metro (didn’t affect us since we had taken a 72 hour tourist pass)
  • We went to the beach on the day we went there. And I did my usual “beach thing” – walked into the water until it was up to my knees. Surprisingly there was no one else doing that – they were all either sunbathing (the sun was pretty intense) or swimming. The city authorities had set up “ghats” on one section of the beach from where people could dive in and swim.

There were plenty more pertinent observations i made through the trip, but the delay in documentation means that I’ve forgotten the rest. Overall, it was an interesting place, though I think we would’ve enjoyed the trip better if not for the heat.

Beer Gardens

A lot of “local” pubs in London advertise that they have a “beer garden”, which is usually a grassy backyard that has a few outdoor tables. Having been to Munich, though, I would claim that these guys (in London) don’t know what they are doing, or at least that they can’t do it at scale.

On Friday evening we met a friend from IIT who has recently moved to Munich. Considering that there would be “a lot of kids” (three of his, along with Berry), he suggested that we meet at this particular “beer garden“, which was on the outskirts of town, a small distance away from the Isar river.

We got there following a ride in the metro followed by a tram ride and then a ten minute walk. And what a place it was. It was a massive ground in what appeared to be the middle of a forest, with one massive screen set up in one corner to show the Football World Cup. The entire ground was filled with long tables (eight of us (four adults and four kids) could easily fit in on one of the smaller tables), and on the edges there were play area for the kids.

The highlight of the place for us was that on a rare occasion of dining out, we didn’t need to worry that much about the kids. There were no high chairs for them to sit on, but we didn’t need to bother keeping them in one place, given the play areas and the gravel-lined ground that made it conducive for them to run around.

There was no table service for food and drink – there were a number of stalls at one end of the garden, where you could buy food and drink and get them to your table. After eating, it was your responsibility to clear your table and deposit used dishes at a central area (this was similar to other “self-service” restaurants in Munich). Food was mostly typical Bavarian fare, and it was pretty good. Once again, I overate.

In one sense, the upside of the lack of table service is that it eliminates the problem of how to split bills. Each person/ family can go get what they want, and eat and drink comfortably without the fear or under or over-ordering, and what others would think of them. And freed from both keeping kids in check and wondering about dynamics, and fueled by beer, you can focus on the conversation!

After dinner, we went down to the Isar river. It was already getting dark on our way down the wooded path to the river, but when we reached the river, it was suddenly bright again! Unfortunately it was getting dark, so we couldn’t spend too much time there, but it was a fantastic experience being there. It was already dark by the time we were walking back to the beer garden, and our path was lit up by fireflies!

We were wondering why this concept hasn’t travelled, not even till Britain. I mean, we have beer gardens here, but none at this scale. And most restaurants here rely on keeping kids tied in to their high chairs, colouring into the restaurant’s advertising material, rather than giving them a run about (which can potentially make them more hungry and make them eat more!).

One reason why beer gardens don’t travel is that they work well at scale, and that kind of real estate is hard to come by in most cities. Another is cultural – in India, for example, a lot of people don’t like drinking with their families, so places that combine drinking with kids’ play areas may be taboo. I can’t think of any more! Can you?

That said, when you visit Munich, don’t forget to go to one of the beer gardens (there are two massive ones in the middle of the city itself, in the middle of the English Gardens). It’s quite an experience!

Flaneuring once again

So I wrote my Day Two report too early. A few minutes after I filed it, the daughter woke up and refused to eat the lunch I had got packed earlier. The prospect of feeding her and keeping her entertained meant that we decided to go out again. And we decided to revisit the historic city of Munich (Marienplatz and surrounding areas once again).

And what a difference some sun makes! Streets that were largely empty yesterday morning were full of people (most likely tourists) today. Restaurants and cafes had set up lots of tables right in the middle of the road (a bit like Les Rambles or Rambla de Catalunya in Barcelona). The street musicians seemed better. And the whole place seemed more welcoming.

After some walking with Berry in her baby carrier, I decided to set her down and let her lead the way. The bigger squares in the area (Marienplatz and Odeonplatz) seemed to be gearing up for some festival that will happen this weekend. Stages and temporary stalls had come up for that purpose. We walked past them when Berry said something to the effect that she wanted to eat.

We walked into a bakery, and when I wasn’t sure of what to buy, we walked out. Soon, Berry said more vehemently that she wanted to eat. I found a nice looking restaurant, and we went in.

Now, the optimisation problem wasn’t so bad since I had already eaten and I only had to optimise for Berry. But this was a large place with lots of variety in food so I couldn’t decide. Thankfully Berry bailed  me out when she screamed “thothage! Thothage!!” (sausage). I duly ordered a Bratwurst with ketchup, which she then demolished. I felt truly happy that she had bailed me out of my decision fatigue.

Through this afternoon’s “beat”, I was thinking about how having a limited vocabulary and communication skills, Berry is not yet very demanding. The only things she’s demanded in the last two days were yesterday’s bike ride and today’s sausage. And when she demanded specific things I was able to fulfil what she asked for rather than having to second guess.

i realise that soon enough she’ll become more demanding, and while for a while it will be good in that I can simply focus on execution, it will also mean that she might take more control of my life then! I don’t know if the last two days’ training will help in that case.

Oh, and this wasn’t the last time we went out today. Later in the evening all three of us went to the outskirts of the city to meet a friend of mine from undergrad (and his family) who has recently moved to Munich. That experience deserves a blogpost on its own. Hopefully I’ll write!

A day at the museum

I still haven’t learnt on the food front – in my effort to optimise for both the daughter and myself this morning, I got her excellent breakfast and myself a terrible one. Actually I blame decision fatigue – there were so many stalls at the Munich Hauptbahnhof (central railway station, which is across the road from our hotel) selling what we wanted that I got confused on where to buy.

I wanted to buy croissant for her, and pretzel with Bavarian cheese for myself. After going round a zillion stalls, I bought them from the same stall I had bought croissant at last night (which the wife had for breakfast today and said was good). The croissant turned out to be excellent and was duly polished off by the daughter. I threw 3/4th of my pretzel in a dustbin on our way to the museum.

So our agenda for today was to visit the Deutsches Museum, reputed to be the largest science museums in the world. Now, science museums are the best museums in my opinion, since you generally have “something to do”.

The first museum I ever went to was the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum in Bangalore, where there are lots of fun activities, such as the chair on which you can rotate (and change speed by pulling in some discs). So the second museum I went to (the adjacent Government Museum in Bangalore) was a massive disappointment, as I tried pressing on the labels on the displays, imagining something might happen.

And despite not being the best maintained museum in Europe (it seemed rather “sarkari” to me), the Deutsches Museum didn’t disappoint. There were plenty of buttons to be pressed and pulleys to be pulled, especially in the physics section (I wished then that I had taken my daughter there when she was older, when I could have actually explained some of the science to her).

There were massive rooms full of boats and aeroplanes (the latter being Berry’s favourite room at the museum. She kept screaming “airplane” “airplane” there several times, and had great fun “navigating” a toy plane (see picture above). I tried hard to explain to her that some of the early aeroplanes (one of the Wright Brothers’s planes is on display at the museum, along with a few World War I planes) were actually aeroplanes. She recognised the Zeppelins as “airplane”, though!

We  saw stars and planets, and telescopes and yachts of different kinds. In the middle, we went to the museum cafe (which looked and felt like a sarkari canteen) and had excellent cheesecake. And I took her to the kinderreich (kids’ kingdom), a play area for kids.

As we were going through the last rooms of the museums, she started getting cranky. I took her once again to the aeroplane room, and she said goodbye to her airplanes. By the time we had walked to the metro station she had fallen asleep.

So there wasn’t so much of flaneuring on this second day, but I managed to see everything I wanted to see. For the most part, I had put her on her “leash” (to make sure she doesn’t run away too far), but then in the last part when she started tiring I put her in the baby carrier.

The first part of the “training” in travelling with me ends today. And I’m hopeful that I’ll have a proper flaneuring partner soon!