Author: Nick Fryer
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Osaka-jō and a Snorey Foot Massage
Day 5 – Tuesday, 2 April 2024 Barely any sleep on the overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Osaka. The train in from Kansai Osaka Airport to Osaka Namba at 6.40am slowly filled up with commuters looking even more zoned out than I was. Seb napped a bit as the carriage filled up – “filled”…
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A Religious Experience
Day 4 – Monday, 1 April 2024 After a breakfast of French toast (Anna) and stealing bits of French toast off Anna’s plate (the rest of us), we packed up, left our bags with our hotel (Aloft KL Sentral, a solid recommendation), and went where we could not, on our last swing past, the National…
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Ascension with Monkeys
Day 3 – Sunday, 31 March 2024 The only sensible thing to do, when the heat and humidity mean walking a hundred metres on flat ground leaves you panting and slimy, is instead to walk a hundred metres up a nearly vertical staircase to a large cave, then down some other steps, up some more,…
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Timing is Everything
Day 2 – Saturday, 30 March 2024 Google knows shit about walking around Kuala Lumpur. This is understandable, because it is precisely the sort of problem computers are shit at. There are no footpaths, barely any along the actual roads. People actually walk, when they walk, which is probably not often, down little gaps between…
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Being Boeing
Day 1 – Friday, 29 March 2024 Foreignness started quickly. In the queue ahead of us to get through international screening was a group – presumably a class – of Japanese high school kids, a couple of bunches of boys and perhaps twenty girls. All were in uniform, the rule presumably being enforced to ensure…
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Vestments
Tuesday, 20 December 2022 to Thursday, 22 December 2022 The Victoria and Albert Museum, to look at clothes behind glass, mostly, and then to King’s Road, to do the same. I’d never been to the V&A before, but knew its reputation and was unsurprised to be most interested in the textiles, if a little disappointed…
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Art, History and Illumination
Monday, 19 December 2022 Into London, my only full day so to do. Steven found enough time to join me for a few hours in a schedule filled with attempts to get professional commitments out of the way so that the family could enjoy the Christmas season without such distractions and, of course, dealing with…
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The Greatest Naptime Ever Played
Sunday, 18 December 2022 The main problem with the New York to London hop is that it’s too short. One is no sooner asleep than it’s breakfast time. Also, breakfast managed to be a disappointment in that it was entirely what I expected, the problem being that dinner had actually been good – rare steak,…
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Flight to the Old World
Saturday, 17 December 2022 Half a day left in New York, some more walking to accomplish, along the High Line, a former elevated rail line now turned into a linear park. Probably best seen in spring, at a guess, when it likely blooms with colour. In the depths of winter, the greenery is sparse, but…
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Enterprise
Friday, 16 December 2022 All professional duties discharged, I took my last full day in New York for myself. Walking aimlessly for a while, I found myself in the lower west side, somewhere down near the bottom of Eighth Avenue, or possibly Ninth. It was another drizzly day, the sky made of slate and the…