Salted codfish and cassoulet 2017

The sun was shining when we pulled back the curtains.   I had woken a little early but nicely refreshed.   We found a nice café in which to have breakfast and then took the train to Gloucester Road Station and walked to Kensington Gardens to begin a walk through Hyde Park. Kensington Palace As we entered Kensington Gardens Bev spied some bikes called “Santander” which are metro bikes for hire.   The idea is to pay a small fee which gives you an unlock code.   You ride your bike to your destination,   find another stand to leave your bike at and the bike locks back into it.   We discovered the cost was only £2 for the day and you can drop and pick-up a bike as many times as you like within a 2 hour period.   On the spot we decided to do it.   It was a great way to get around the gardens and the park and lots of fun, although compared to our bikes back home they were very simple and much heavier with only three gears.   ...

Trains never arrive when you think they should.   Thursday’s experience was that the trains were very frequent but for some reason the one we got from Lavender (our starting point) was delayed and we waited and waited for it.   Then when we got to the transfer point for going to Changi Airport there was a long wait for that train to arrive.   At Changi we found our terminal quickly and without much ado we were checked in. The only glitch was that for some reason they had decided to separate Bev and I.   That was quickly rectified.   We went through immigration very quickly and before long we were heading for the Gold Kris Lounge.   Compared to the Koru Lounge it is a much more crowded area but I did manage to score a “Le Figaro” (the national French newspaper) so I can practice reading in French.   There was no barista to make us a nice coffee either.   For a large plane the boarding was done very quickly.   About two ...

Emerging from the plane I was immediately hit with the humidity.   Fortunately I had removed my jersey prior to leaving but I began thinking perhaps the shorts that I had not packed might have been a good idea and I should have heeded Bev’s advice. We did not have any Singapore cash so while I got orientated at Changi Airport Bev found a cash machine and got some money which was, as it turned out,   a good start.   Hotel Yan next to the Tibetan Buddhist Temple We made our way to the train station. I had worked out that our hotel was about a ten minutes from the station but I had neglected to look up the name of station before we departed and having no internet was a problem.   I worked out the station name but had to do some more walking to buy tickets. Here, a very kind and helpful man changed our $50 note, gave us some coins for the ticket machine and showed us how to select the right tickets.   He remembered that our street was in Litt...

I discovered one of the advantages of having Elite Gold status with Air New Zealand is you can, if you book far enough ahead, use either airpoints or the gold reward to get a business class upgrade.   As the flight to Singapore was a night flight I asked for the guaranteed seats and we were lucky enough to get them.   Our plane was one of the new Boeing 787s which I have not flown in before.   We had nice lie flat seats which I like because I can get my feet elevated.   Bev and I had had little to eat during the day as we wanted to banquet on the plane. The nice thing about the business class seats is that they have a little seat at which another person can sit and you then eat together.   So that is what we did.   Remarkably the food was rather good, or perhaps it was the company.    After a champagne we had an entre, and mine was poached chicken with pomegranate that was delicious and was designed by Peter Gordon....

The title of the blog refers to the national dish of Portugal called bacalhau or salted codfish and the dish that is famous in the south-west of France called cassoulet which is a stew of duck, beans and sausages. The intention is that when we are there we try both dishes. We had decided that we would do another trip to Europe in 2017 when we saw some relatively cheap fares come up for travel to the UK.  I still had my Gold Elite membership of Air New Zealand which makes it easier to get upgrades and they can be bought for a reasonable price as well. We bought tickets to London via Singapore and back through Los Angeles.  The return leg was done before Donald Trump was elected and we may have made a different decision about the route if we had known the outcome of the election. In our initial planning we thought we would go to France and it was a toss up between Berlin and perhaps Portugual (Porto and Lisbon) with Portugal winning out as an...