Hypermobility

 I never got round to mentioning the Gatwick Yotel, did I? In short, it not only lived up to, but exceeded my rather wild expectations. Accessible from the Gatwick concourse, it’s staffed by friendly (and yes, I admit it, attractive) Spanish men; it’s clean and quiet and amazingly convenient, and the rooms are amazing: very comfortable (single) beds (they’re lofted up, so may not be great for those scared of heights), a television with seemingly unlimited DVD options (I didn’t switch this on, as I was there to sleep, but it was good to know it was there), and a wee bathroom with a gigantic shower and specially formulated shower gel. I checked in around nine, slept from ten until half past four and was checked in for my 6.10am flight by around five; I arrived in Glasgow bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and was able to do a full day’s work. All that for £45! Highly, highly recommended, and I’m very excited to see that they’ll be opening in Heathrow and Schiphol soon (not that I ever fly through Schiphol, but again, it’s nice to know it’s there). I’m slightly afraid that once word gets out they’re going to be swamped and it’ll be impossible to get a booking, but that doesn’t stop me from promoting it like crazy, as it’s awesome.

Here’s me in my pod:

More Yotel photos on my flickr account, here.

***

In other news, I thought they were just putting up early xmas lights, but it seems that I have in fact just missed Glasgow’s Radiance festival of light. Oops. I’ve got to say, though, that Glasgow does xmas lights better than any other city I’ve known: this weekend just gone is the one year anniversary of my first ever visit to Glasgow, and I fell in love with it as soon as I walked past the Gallery of Modern Art, looked up, and saw this:

(From infovore.org.)

Before I went to Moscow everyone kept saying to me “oh, Moscow is nothing compared to St Petersburg!” and when I was in Moscow people kept saying “oh, wait till you get to St Petersburg!” and to hear them talk you would have expected Moscow to be some sort of horrendous concrete bunker (St Basil’s Cathedral in the centre as its one saving grace) in comparison to the glimmering mirage of perfection that is St Petersburg.

I loved Moscow. I admit that I am a total City Girl, so I suppose I am an easy sell, especially after three and a half days on a train in the taiga, but still, Moscow had the sort of energy that I really like in a city – and prize above elegance, these days, I think – and, as ever, my time there was too short; I will definitely be going back.

I stayed at the erroneously-named Central Tourist House, which is 9km out of the centre and not a house, by any stretch of the imagination. It was not ideal accommodation, mainly due to the location, but certainly wasn’t as hellish as the reviews at TripAdvisor or VisitMoscow.com would suggest (but then, I am always mistrustful of review sites like TripAdvisor, as people’s standards and opinions are so variable: basically, as long as there are no bloodstains on the walls and the food doesn’t poison me, my accommodation needs are very, very easily satisfied), and presumably convenient for anyone coming from Vnukovo Airport, as it’s apparently on the way into town from there. Anyhow, I had a private room, double bed, en suite bathroom, interesting views over high-rise Russian suburbs, and a generous (if peculiar) breakfast was included; I was admittedly awoken by noise in the corridor at 4am, but that was the fault of the billion English tourists there for the football, and frankly given the circumstances I was just glad not to be stabbed.

I only had one full day in Moscow, so what I was able to see was limited, especially as that day was a Thursday, which happens to be the day that the Kremlin is closed. However, this is what I did see:

- Red Square, which was much more impressive than I’d thought it would be: it’s an elegant space, and surrounded by enough interesting stuff (GUM, St Basil’s, Kazan Cathedral, the Kremlin, Lenin’s mausoleum) to keep anyone busy for a while;

- St Basil’s Cathedral, the outside of which is the sort of image that’s been seen so often that it’s lost a lot of its power, but the inside is absolutely and unexpectedly breathtaking;

- GUM, the sort of consumer paradise that doesn’t fit well with the traditionally austere image that Moscow has;

- The Tretyakov Gallery, which was possibly the most impressive art museum I have ever seen, especially the icon collection: I am a sucker for icons anyway, and there was a group of Orthodox nuns singing hymns there the day that I visited, which certainly added to the atmosphere; and

- The Moscow Metro (site in Russian), which is glamorous and amazingly efficient – the trains come every 30 seconds at times! It is wonderful! – and more than just a way of getting around, is actually a tourist attraction in its own right, as these photos would suggest.

My day in Moscow concluded with the Red Arrow sleeper train from Leningrad Station to St Petersburg. I admit that by this point I was somewhat over trains, but this service redeemed itself by being by far the swankiest train I’d been on, and I shared a compartment with a chap who’d been a rocket scientist during the Cold War, which enlivened the journey considerably.

So I am back from my most recent travels and it is long past time for an update, though I have been putting it off until all my photos were uploaded. However, uploading to flickr is taking an age (unexpectedly – I’ve never had problems with them before, and incidentally, you may not want to click on that link unless you’re prepared to wade through literally thousands of untitled and uncaptioned photos – it’s in progress, honest), and so I may as well get on with things.

I left Glasgow on September 22nd for the first, and least glamorous, destination on my journey: Knutsford, Cheshire, for the wedding of a friend. I’d never been to Cheshire before and to be honest was not enormously excited (though I was excited about the wedding), as the image in my head was of untrammelled suburbia, punctuated with footballers’ mansions and tedious commuter monstrosities. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Knutsford itself, which, in addition to being your typical slightly-posh Middle English small town, has a rather bizarre collection of Art Nouveau architecture, including the freakishly opulent Belle Epoque restaurant and hotel, where the wedding was – excellent food, and good just to look at. Too pricey for us in terms of accommodation, though, and we stayed at the Angel Inn down the road (scroll down), which was perfectly serviceable, despite giving Tom the Small Town Fear. Man Zen for decent Chinese food, too.

Perhaps most usefully, Knutsford is also only 20 minutes by car from Manchester Airport, from whence I was flying to Sydney the morning out of the wedding, and therefore made an infinitely preferable alternative to a grim airport hotel. Would visit again. Probably.

I think I am getting old. Back in the day, I used to be happy to save a bit of cash by sleeping in an airport rather than paying for a hotel or hostel, particularly if I had an early morning flight. This isn’t unusual – www.sleepinginairports.net is an entire site devoted to the practice. A night in Heathrow is best not repeated, but I’ve managed to get a comfortable couple of hours in Stansted (early morning flight to Berlin: pleasantly quiet, dimly lit, few middle-of-the-night flights mean it’s not busy and there are few loudspeaker announcements), Melbourne (several hours between arrival from the UK and departure for Auckland: fairly comfortable); a number of south-east Asian airports (Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Singapore, overly-long layovers between the UK and Australia), and even a fairly decent few hours’ kip in Pescara train station (late-night train from Bari after all-day ferry from Albania, and 9.30am flight: met an insomniac in the train station around 5am who gave me an early-morning tour of Pescara and then a lift to the airport, which was fairly miraculous). Back in 2002, I had an early morning flight to Nice, got a late-night train to Gatwick and remember having a very comfortable night there, in a warm, dimly lit, comfortably furnished upstairs area, and so it was with high hopes that, the weekend before last, after a Sunday wedding in Bournemouth, a lift back to London and the 2.22am train from East Croydon to Gatwick, I walked into the airport anticipating a couple of hours’ sleep before I had to check in for my 6.20am flight to Glasgow. Sadly, the comfortable, dimly-lit room of my memories was nowhere to be found, and instead I had to lie down on a marbe floor, under neon lights, with the constant interruption of one of those mechanised cleaning trolley things going past every fifteen minutes or so. Needless to say, I was not best set up for a full day’s work when I got back to Glasgow.

Anyhow. The 6.20am Easyjet flight from Gatwick to Glasgow International is a godsend, as it allows me to get to work on time on a Monday morning after a weekend of London-based revelry, and so it’s a flight I’m going to be using a lot in future; however, old as I now am, the idea of spending more nights on the floor in Gatwick fills me with horror. In just over a month I’ll be taking the AirBaltic flight from St Petersburg (via Riga) to Gatwick, arriving on Sunday evening, and then the Gatwick to Glasgow flight on the Monday morning, and so it’s with great excitement (along with a lingering feeling that I’ve sold out) that I’ve booked into the Yotel at Gatwick South for the night. Yotel! Little pods! With en suite, and comfy-looking beds! I am very much looking forward to seeing what this is like. You can book in four-hour blocks – my block of eight hours cost me £45, and will give me enough time for a disappointing airport dinner in Garfunkels or similar before checking in at 9.

I’m actually suprised that it’s taken them this long to start something like this. Years and years ago – in the late-’90s, I think – I was flying back to Sydney from London, and had a horrendous 15-hour layover in Bangkok, which was made infinitely better by the existence of a little hotel-like thing within the airport itself, so I didn’t even have to go through immigration. I think it was all of $50 US – or possibly $100 for eight hours – and I got to sleep in a pitch-dark, windowless room, have a shower, and watch a load of bilge on CNN, meaning that I was a hell of a lot less jetlagged and grumpy on arrival in Sydney than I would otherwise have been. I still think they’re missing a trick by not having more backpacker-style accommodation at airports – even back when I was happy to sleep in an airport, I would’ve been even happier to shell out £10 or £15 for a bunk in a dorm room – but the Yotel is a good start, and its Living In The Future aesthetic on the website is very exciting; I hope it lives up to it.

I’m obviously not that much of a sell-out, anyway, as I am also browsing www.couchsurfing.com. I’ve never actually used them before, and I’m sad to find that they don’t have anyone in Ulaanbataar, other than a couple of travellers passing through, but it might be useful for meeting people and possibly even cadging free accommodation in China. We’ll see.

In other news, is not Pestiside a fabulous name for a What’s On website about Budapest?