Day 26: Stockholm, and the Invincibles rock the Rival

Mamma mia, here I go again; My my, how can I resist you? 
Mamma mia, does it show again?; My my, just how much I’ve missed you

WE COULD hardly put it any better than Benny Andersson, Abba superstar, Swedish captain of industry and our B&B host at the magical Rival Hotel – our Stockholm love affair is well and truly on.

It seems we are in the Soho of Sweden’s capital; a short walk from Gamla Stan – the Old Town – and in the centre of an enclave of art shops, designer boutiques, chi-chi bars and restaurants. The perfect place for three marauding children in other words.

 

Beautiful Stockholm at dusk…

And so, we took it on ourselves to well and truly kick the wheels of Benny’s place in terms of kid-friendliness.

I am not sure the super-cool staff-in-black will ever recover.

A Swedish version of the Groucho Club, the Rival is more funky ‘70s lighting, pop-art décor than croissant-squished-into-carpet. Or, should I say, it was until we swept through the restaurant.

All the staff have been impeccably mannered and unfailingly friendly, its just that they, well, couldn’t quite work us out. Given that prior to our invasion the youngest resident they had entertained was Justin Bieber (I guess) everyone seemed to be wondering what was the deal with these slightly incongruous, louche latecomers?

Who were these people who went to laundrettes while the rest of the guests went to the Royal Palace? What manner of people were these five who washed their pants and socks in the sink and bought new clothes to replace the ones they couldn’t clean? They say they have come on the train from Singapore – that can’t be right…!

This hotel is Kool and the Gang

Jasper skidded into the breakfast room to reload, against a backdrop of restrained chatter – Rival Hotel residents are way too cool to raise their voices, or get too excited about anything – and the five of us piled into a booth as far away from the other guests as possible.

An impossibly beautiful blonde waitress took our order: poached eggs, scrambled eggs, pancakes and French Toast (our order was so uncool it was über-cool…) and Jasper raced to the island to plunder the pastries and salmon.

As the breakfast room mumbled away in charcoal clothing, man-bags draped across shoulders, Lucky Strike cigarette packs sitting conspicuously next to Porsche key fobs, the Shines emanated a different vibe.

A way cooler one.

Jasper cut a dash in his “This is how I roll!” Fred Flintstone tee-shirt and skinny jeans, Ben exuded effortless elan with red combat shorts and fleecy dangling round his neck on a black ribbon – think a better looking, less try-hard Morten Harket – and Kitty had a rock chick thing going on with leggings under a dress and some serious attitude. Plus a hair-do like the guy from Slade. The one with the really bad hair-do.

This is how I roll…

I busted some moves with my ironically heterosexual look and aviator shades (at all times), while the impeccably turned out Mrs S looked as though she had been kidnapped by this Krazy Krew and was only along for the ride.

We ate croissants and black bread and white bread and brown bread and yoghurt and fruit and eggs and gravlax and rollmops and macaroons and pains au chocolate and pastries and meat. Then croissants again. With blueberries and blackberries and strawberries and raspberries and cranberries and lingonberries. It was “goooooooooooooood,” Kitty said. We all agreed.

And it was on such a feast, looking like ageing music producers and boyband members and emo singers and kidnapped aristocracy, that we took a vote on what we should do on Day 26 of the Long Trip Home.

Surprisingly the Royal Palace failed to get one vote – sorry Gustav – as Ben eschewed the crown jewels and Jasper turned his nose up at the changing of the guard to instead head to the outside Museum Svenska.

We waved goodbye to the clipped beards and charcoal-shirts on reception and headed down to the water.

The line-up…

Our magical blue plastic cards did indeed work on the ferries and so we boarded one in Gamla Stan, sitting outside to enjoy the cool breeze on a blisteringly hot day.

The museum was a fascinating journey into Sweden of the past. Not the Sweden of the 1970s, though, that was our hotel. This was the Sweden of the 18^th and 19^th century. We wandered around a village containing olde shoppes, a glass blowing workshop, furniture makers, a pottery, old farmhouse and an animal enclosure featuring reindeer, elk, wolves, lynx and other Scandinavian fauna.

It was a beautifully clear and warm day. Mrs S was delighted after the cold, grey and rainy Russia and a chilly Finland, and the children were absorbed in the innocent pastimes of hoop-and-stick, and stilt walking. I could have saved myself a fortune on Apple product had I only known the allure of a twig and length of aluminium.

Swedish fun

The Shinettes played and ran and fought and played and ran – it was a huge hit and, as Kitty flagged, we chose to stay put and have lunch in a shaded country courtyard where we bought some mouth-watering prawn sandwiches on black bread, and delicious rhubarb crumble.

“This is the best day ever,” beamed Mrs S as the sunshine twinkled on the water and the Shinettes played among the rose garden.

It was a tired and hot but happy gang who caught the ferry back to Gamla Stan and strolled up the hill to Mariatorget.

 
I do declare, this is the BEST DAY EVER

 Our Rival hosts were thrilled to see us again, especially when Ben did a triple fly-by in the revolving door (that’s how he rolls, baby) and we zipped upstairs for some showers, pikey clothes-washing and an impromptu Abba session (Benny has rather immodestly ensured that every room of the hotel has an Abba Gold album in the blue ray player).

Several platinum-selling tracks later we’d turned the army around and, after a quick polish of the aviators, headed back down to Gamla Stan for supper.  Kitty was fading fast, becoming increasingly heavy in my arms and by the time we sat down for supper she was sparko, snoozing on the bench-seat next to me.

The little rock-chick has been a superstar this trip, but she does suck up a lot of oxygen, and as she slept the four upright Shines chatted and reminisced and planned for the future.

Check out those revolving door, baby…

The more we are surrounded and absorbed by western culture, the more eager we are to get back to the UK and start our new lives ourselves after this cultural kaleidoscope of a journey.

The trip has been exciting but also at times exhausting, both physically and emotionally. It has served as a cathartic and very welcome escape from the sheer hard work and emotion of packing up our Singapore lives and planning for life in the UK. Now the reality of our new lives, work, school and home looms, and we are gripped by a combination of anticipation, excitement and dread. The boys are very excited, which is great, but that said, we are not finished with our holidays yet.

So, Jasper and Ben ordered Swedish meatballs for supper while I plumped for reindeer (medium rare, no red-nose please) and the boys illustrated, using the medium of mime, what I was eating. Yum.

Look what daddy’s eating

Kitty woke just in time to help Ben out with his meatballs and polish off some of my potato before we popped to an ice-cream parlour for enormous cones of Scandinavian goodness.

The night was such a success I softened on the tat-front and Jasper walked back to funkytown with a furry wolf (“I am calling him Fang”) while Kitty was clutching a reindeer in a Swedish hoodie (I am calling him supper). Ben, the only true businessman of this family, negotiated well as always, and instead carries an impressive credit to Copenhagen.

We strolled back at sunset, hot air balloons floating and drifting over this enchanting city and, not for the first time, I found myself wistfully considering a move to Scandinavia. We all loved Sweden and its friendly people, its relaxed lifestyle and its liveable, manageable capital.

It may be one for the Lottery win, but never say never. As Jasper says, after making a life for ourselves in Asia, the Invincibles can do anything…

Day 25: Stockholm… you beautiful, sunny su-pa-pa troop-pa-pa…

Money, money, money; Must be funny; In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money; Always sunny; In the rich man’s world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do; If I had a little money; It’s a rich man’s world…

IT CHOSE NOT to adopt the Euro, but Sweden very much remains a member state of the European Union. And do you know what? I think I have a sneaking suspicion I know where the EU’s butter mountain has gone. The wine lake and the milk lake too.

On Sweden’s hips, arse and stomach.

What happened to this nation of svelte Bjorn Borg-underpant wearing hipsters and Abba lip-syncing blondes I remember so fondly? I mean everybody looked so, well…. ENGLISH, frankly.

When our Helsinki to Stockholm ferry tipped us out at the Swedish capital this morning, I had to check that we hadn’t scooted back to Russia overnight. Or bypassed the western-European leg of our Long Trip Home and gone straight to Harwich.

Beautiful Sweden. But why don’t the people look Swedish?

Maybe it is having spent so long in Asia, and perhaps I haven’t noticed the warning signs in Europe beyond the scaremongering stat-based health stories in the Daily Mail, but Swedes seem to have ballooned since I last set foot here.

I can well understand why, mind. The food is snesational. In fact were we not having to ration ourselves to two meals shared between the five of us each mealtime due to the crippling cost of, well everything, we’d be piling on the pounds too.

The Swedes seem to be making good use of all this extra flesh, too – as a canvas for ink-work. They have become simply obsessed by tattoos. I could count on one hand today the number of people I saw with no visible sign of ink. There were Celtic arm-hoops, Asian symbols, Maori markings, Sanskrit script, olde-worlde anchors and botched DIY green ink affairs. Mums on the metro, dads in the park, teenagers with sleeves and young women with crosses on their ring fingers.

Ink-tastic…

“We’re just getting old,” Mrs S told me. It wasn’t an entirely comforting thought.

The discomfort was probably rooted in the realisation she has a point.

I felt old today. Weary. We have been on the road for 25 days with too little sleep and too little rest.

And although our travel is getting easier now, in some respects the journey is getting harder. As our surroundings get more familiar I notice we are becoming less inclined to pull together – there are fewer challenges or fears to unite us. I’ve certainly become more irascible and grumpy, and need a big last push to get over the line now. This team needs whipping back into shape – starting with yours truly.

Schisms appeared at breakfast on the ferry when the boys couldn’t agree what to have. I made the decision for them by marching them back to our room with nothing. It was only a temporary solution and soon they were bickering and fighting again – an exhausting pattern which lasted most of the day.

“Ridiculous boys, squabbling again… and that’s you too, daddy…”

 By the time they had become friends again in the evening, Mrs S and I were exhausted and disillusioned with the whole shooting party.

“This has been the worst day for me,” she said.

I sincerely hope tomorrow is a marked improvement because we are haemoraging cash on this brief leg of the trip – Sweden is without doubt the most expensive city I have been to in a long, long, long time.

We could have flown to Athens for the price of our cab-ride from the ferry to Mariatorget. I paid more for our laundry bill than I did for my first car (true story) and the price of our 24-hour metro passes would get you round London for a week.  

What a beautiful city, though, and I guess you get what you pay for. Although that may not have been the mantra in the minds of the other guests at the Rival Hotel (www.rival.se) when they ambled down to breakfast this morning to find the Shines had arrived.

Our rooms not yet ready, we had decamped in the foyer and were sifting through our nine pieces of luggage, removing dirty laundry and adding it to a large red-and-white plastic sack, the likes of which you see at Heathrow airport, generally belonging to people receiving a grilling from immigration.

 Suds up, dudes

 Put plainly, this is not why people pay good money to stay in this gorgeous boutique hotel owned by Abba legend Benny Andersson.

A very friendly but increasingly stressed bearded man (it wasn’t Benny. Or Bjorn) surveyed the scene with barely disguised horror, but we are beyond shame at this point, and really, really needed some clean clothes.

We managed to find respectable duds for everyone (even if it meant Jasper squeezing into a pair of Ben’s shorts, Freddie Mercury-style) and lugged the rest of it to the only city centre laundrette we could find some five or six Metro stops away.

In fact it was the perfect disguise and pickpocket deterrent. We looked like tourists, we were carrying a map and we clearly didn’t know where we were going, that much was true. But what kind of tourist carries an enormous bag of stinking clothes round Stockholm on a gloriously hot and sunny day, right?

You’re following this so far, yes? Infighting, crippling prices and back-breaking (and wallet-breaking) laundry loads, all in the first hour or so. I trust I am setting the tone. Added to all this is the fact that Mrs S is still aching and feeling ill, and somebody has obviously mistakenly advised Kitty that she is the boss of this family.

 
“Off to lunch, things always seem better after lunch…”

The intrepid Shines are not to be cowed, however, and we push on through, deciding to recalibrate the day at lunch.

We ask the achingly hip reception staff for a recommendation for lunch “somewhere cheap and good for kids” I think Mrs S might have said.

We are directed to somewhere called the Blå Dörren down by the waterfront, so I take another million pounds out of the ATM and we head off there.

Now, if I had been in any way unsure what sort of impression we had made on the hotel staff earlier in the day, when we arrived at our lunch venue I was in doubt no more.

They had steered us past literally dozens of bistros, cafés and neighbourhood restaurants all looking to be serving delicious Swedish fare.

The Blue Door, which coincided with the big blue cross on our tourist map, was basically a Harvester Inn.

There were some tables outside, and one of them was not yet occupied by heavily-tatooed, heavy-smoking, heavier-drinking denizens of downtown Stockholm, so we leapt in there.

The food was actually okay, but it wasn’t the rollmops and gravlax experience I had been anticipating for our introduction to Swedish cuisine.

A sea-faring nation…

 Suitably fortified by our salad-bar-and-pasta experience, we decided to jump on a ferry and visit the Vasa Museum.

We hadn’t realised we could use our 24-hour travel passes on the ferry, thus ensuring they retained their most-expensive-piece-of-plastic-we’ve-ever-had-in-our-pockets status 

The Vasa Museum offers “a unique insight into early 17^th–century Sweden” the blurb promises.

Cutting a long story short, the pride of Sweden’s military fleet, the beautifully ornate and heavily armed Vasa sunk on its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbour due to basic errors of design. It was salvaged in 1961 after 333 years under the sea. The brackish water had preserved almost everything and it now sits in the Vasa Museum, 98 percent original.

There are displays of its weaponry, re-enactments of its sinking and films depicting life aboard the great vessel. Goblets, barrels, cannoballs and nit-combs are displayed in all their glory.

Having absorbed one such display of all the ornate carving and decoration of the vessel’s stern, Ben hit the nail squarely on the head with the pithiest of comments.

“They should have paid more attention to making it float than making it look pretty,” he announced flatly.

Very pretty, but will it float?

I couldn’t have put it better myself, and wanted to carry him from the place on top of my shoulders. He had redeemed himself from the doghouse he was in for taekwondo kicking Jasper earlier, and we left the museum in finer fettle than we’d arrived.

Old hands at the Swedish transport system by now we jumped aboard a tram to admire some more tattoos and to head back to the old town, stopping off along the way to buy Jasper some new shorts and allow him to escape Ben’s pair.

He settled on some striking green ones and loved them so much he wanted to wear them out of the shop. This meant climbing up onto the counter in front of the till and writhing around while the sales assistant clipped the tag from his trousers.

As I say, it had been one of those days…

“Hold still, we’re almost there…”

Images of Day 25:

Day 23: Moscow to St Petersburg. Eventually.

YOU’D THINK that having ridden the world’s railways for around 10,000 kilometres over the last three-and-a-half weeks, and the fact that we were about to board our first European train, that the Shines would be fairly nonchalant when it comes to reaching stations in strange cities.

Well you would be wrong. But even so, both Mrs S and myself were surprised by the level of voice-warbling stress that crept into our planning and execution in catching the 158 from Moscow to St Petersburg. 

Having knocked off Red Square and the Moscow Metro the evening we arrived, we allowed ourselves a slower start to the day in the Mercure Arbat — braving the almost indescribably chaotic breakfast (no cutlery, no coffee, lots of staff but no clue) before getting our plans together.

 Trawling for tat on Arbat Street

We’ll plan well in advance and ask reception now to book us a taxi, after struggling with cabs the evening before, we thought, congratulating ourselves on our foresight.

Amina was standing behind the counter in her slick black uniform, a picture of professionalism.  

“Hi there, we need to check out at 12pm and will want a taxi to Moskva Oktiabrska station, please,” Mrs S told her, breezily. “How long will it take, do you think, because our train to St Petersburg leaves at 13:30pm.”

Amina raised her eyebrows. “Taxi will take five minutes,” she smiled.

“But that’s not possible. All trains for St Petersburg leave from Leningradsky not from Moskva Oktiabrska.”

Okaaaaaay.

“Well our ticket says Moskva Oktiabrska,” I pitched in, helpfully.

“Do you have ticket?” Amina asked.

So upstairs I troop again to the little hotel safe where I extricate the SNCF-issued ticket and, sure enough, it says Moskva Oktiabrska to Sankt Peterburg G.

“Never heard before,” Amina says, sticking to her guns.

“Well can you call the station and find out?” Mrs S asks, attempting to break the deadlock.

See Amina, it bloody well says OKTIABRSKA 

“Only have number for Metro. Do you have number on ticket? Is Russian ticket?”

No is French ticket but is Russian train and Russian station I thought, but instead continued surfing the Mercure’s wifi and soon found enough recent references to Train 158 leaving from Moskva Oktiabrska to feel comfortable that we are right and that Amina must have been off school that day.

“Ok, listen, we’ll take a taxi at 12 to Moskva Oktiabrska please. And check out at the same time. We’ll just go for a little walk now and be back to check out soon.”

Amina smiled but she didn’t look very happy.

We swung through Arbat and its souvenir shops, and our tat-ometer clicked away enthusiastically as we snapped up matryoskha doll Christmas decorations, fridge magnets and a pair of lurid fake fur Russian hats – orange for Ben and jade green for Jasper.

The heavens opened as we were at the farthest point from our hotel and we walked briskly back the hotel.

“I know problem with train,” Amina said triumphantly before I could even get in the door. “Your ticket say Moskva Oktiabrska, but train leave from Leningradsky. It same thing.”

I cannot tell a lie. This failed to clear anything up for me.

“They are the same place?”

“Yes, same.”

“So if we get a taxi to Moskva Oktiabrska we can get the 158 to St Petersburg?”

“Yes. It same place as Leningradsky.”

“Ok, we’ll still do that then, Amina. Many thanks for your help.”

We lucked out with the jolliest taxi driver in Moscow for our trip to the station and while he wouldn’t actually drop us at Moskva Oktiabrska/Leningradsky (well, why would he?) he did motion in the general direction of it as he turfed us out of his car on the side of the road opposite.

After tramping over rubble, through puddles, up and down broken concrete steps and into a dingy waiting room, we were finally there.

Boy am I glad to see you

We passed through a metal detector manned by an armed guard dressed in what looked like black riot gear. Our bags passed through after us and we moved up the platform towards where the front of our bullet train would be departing.

Some 40 minutes before we were due to leave, lights illuminated on the doors to indicate they had been switched on and were primed to be opened.

This prompted an American woman of a certain age to spring into action. She had adopted an imperious stance on the platform, flanked by her husband John and a youngster who looked like, and behaved in a sufficiently fawning manner to be, her grandson.

“Jaaaaaaaaahn, leave them there. Let the man do it,” she instructed her husband as he started to help the balding Russian porter struggling with her enormous cases.

It had been said in a tone which suggested it was not the first time today she knew what was good for John, and had told him.

 ‘Jaaaaaaaaahn’ looked pretty sheepish but did as he was told – he’d clearly been in this situation before, and it didn’t do to cross this matriarch.

‘The man’ huffed and puffed and sweated as he lugged case after unwieldy case onto the train.

I had sidled closer to the entrance with Mrs S and the three children. We had eight bags of our own between us and generally it takes a little time to settle the children in their seats – especially in this case as we were split between two carriages.

Taking his lead from the hen-pecked ‘Jaaaaaaaaahn’, ‘the man’ swiftly stepped to one side and blocked the children from getting on the train before his mistress, presumably in case a move of such audacity would displease the demanding matriarch.

The look of triumph on her face was something to behold as she stepped in front of the children onto No. 158 as though she were an empress boarding an imperial sea liner.

Her nose was firmly in the air as she took up position in seat 15. The dauphin was next to her in the aisle-seat 16, orange headphones clapped round his perky head, and ‘Jaaaaaaaaahn’ sat opposite, his nose in a guide book, but poised to leap to attention should the need arise.

I moved to the back of that carriage in a two-seat row, with Kitty choosing to sit with me.

The Peppa Pig theme tune started up as Kitty settled down and American-Psycho poked her nose above the headrests to survey the carriage, delighted at her place round a table while others squeezed into smaller spots.

I’ve never been especially convinced by the concept of karma, preferring to believe it is just a more exotic way of spelling coincidence, but what happened next had me revisiting this theme all the way to St Petersburg.

Just before the doors were due to close a large man loomed into sight by the entrance. Sweating profusely, he fumbled in his chest pocket for a slightly damp ticket and thrust it in the face of a female conductor.

She pointed in our direction and Igor-the-large began making his way down the alley.

 
Here comes the Big Man

The man was big, he was sweaty, he was squeezed into a Pringle tank-top which revealed large stained sweat patches on his shirt under his arms. His black denim trousers had a worn sheen about them that comes with too much wear and too little wash.

Certainly he was of striking appearance but that was not the most distinctive element of this character. The most noteworthy aspect of this man was the smell.     

It was strong a smell of unwashed bodies, seasoned with the fetid stench of unwashed clothes. It was sweet, worse than musty, and cloying. The sort of smell that you would want to be upwind of on any day, but certainly on a warm one.

When he paused and peered at seat 18 opposite orange-headphones boy and nose-in-the-air woman, I wanted to cheer.

He overshot his seat, hitched up his trousers, adjusted his tank-top and reversed into seat 18.

If American-Psycho’s nose had been pointed in the air before, it was now seeking the Mir Space Station. I walked Kitty up to Mrs S and the boys in Carriage One hoping to catch her eye, but she had twisted her body away from the man and was staring intently out the window.

‘Jaaaaaaaaahn’ seemed almost as amused as I was, relieved no doubt to be off duty for a spell while his wife was sulking and staring into the middle distance.

 
Good here, innit?

Twenty minutes into our journey I was still chuckling when Natasha sauntered down the aisle pushing a decommissioned airline trolley. This was a pleasant and unexpected surprise and made my plans to raid the buffet car redundant.

She doled out cheese, nuts, beef, chicken and mash and drinks which Ben and I shared, Kitty having pinched his place at the front of the train.

We rattled through countryside in comfort – at 250kmh – and I even managed a nap after lunch.

The story for Mrs S was a little different and she came heading down to the back of the train wild-eyed with about an hour to go. She was smelling slightly of wee thanks to a leaky Kitty nappy, and announced in no uncertain terms that she needed a break from her daughter and that I was to head up north and take over childcare duties with our youngest.

 
Love your work, Natasha

I manfully controlled the two-year-old for most of the remaining hour, only needed to walk her down to see her mummy a couple of times. No need for applause.

We pulled in to St Petersburg bang on time and our taxi driver met us on the platform. He spoke good English and, unlike his opposite number in Mesocw the day before, actually offered to help with a bag.

We then practically walked to the cabbie’s house to collect his car before splitting into two VW Jettas for a 5-minute drive.

He couldn’t really explain to me why we’d had to practically walk to the hotel only to get a taxi for the last hop, but his English was superb all the same and certainly good enough to exclaim: “You are very brave man, travelling with whole family.”

You don’t know the half of it, I thought…

In other news… Kitty resumed her fighting with Jasper after a brief period of distraction and I mediated, mostly by offerind electronic gadgest as a reward for calm behaviour. Meanwhile, in the other taxi Ben was pushing himself against the door away from his mother in a bid to avoid brushing against her and the wee smell…

After just a few minutes we pulled up to the Pushka Inn on the waterfront and checked in.

The Pushka palace… 

Galina, the duty manageress, spoke perfect English and made the process totally painless.

Handing us the keys to 306 and 308, she smiled: “Please enjoy your stay with us… and you will find in your rooms complimentary water because of course you should not drink the water in the taps.”

Raising my eyebrows, I nodded.

“Like Moscow.”

My eyebrows dropped, and I froze.

That cleared up one thing that had been bothering me, at least.

It turns out the St Petersburg water has Giardia lamblia a parasite which causes stomach cramps and diarrhoea…

The Pushka Inn was a delight – a tiny hotel carved out of an old waterfront family mansion, with a tiny two-man lift the alternative to stones steps leading to the upstairs rooms.

Going up? – room for small one…

There were more smiles in the first five minutes than in two days in Moscow,  and it was soon evident how more western this city is compared to the capital.

It was shortly before 7pm once we’d got changed, jumped on all the beds etc and we headed out to see some of the city before supper.

We had been recommended a boat tour of the city as an excellent way to see a lot of St Petersburg in a short period, but when we arrived at the waterfront we could not get on the English-language boat because it was already full. Of Italian tourists of all people. Which frankly seemed a bit rum as it wouldn’t matter what language it was in for them if not Italian.

Anyway, this meant we ended up the sole English speakers on a Russian boat. We were still able to appreciate the beauty of the city; and frankly there didn’t appear to be many laughs involved in any case so I don’t think we missed much .

It is all Greek to me

We were surprised what a nesh bunch the Russians were, though, all huddled under blankets as we sat up top in shirt sleeves.

Having yanked Jasper by the shoulder out of the road to save him from being run over (“I saw you step out and thought you were crossing, daddy”) we then slid into the adjoining Café Pushka for a bite to eat before bed.

A cacophonous family with eight children immediately cast the Shine children in a most positive light and we waited for our food playing a land-based variation of Battleships the restaurant provided on their paper placemats. Everyone, children and adults were playing and the dining room sounded like Bletchley Park with all the A3, F4, G6-ing going on.

Someone put these children to bed! 

When the food finally arrived Kitty swiped Ben’s Chicken Kiev off his plate by the bone Bam-Bam style before I could rescue it from her fist and avert a crisis. These children needed to be in bed. As if to underline the point, Ben, pulled the quote of the day out of nowhere as we waited for the bill.

“”Who knows where we are going tomorrow?” Mrs S asked.

Ben: “I do, I do, I do, I do. No I don’t…”

Well, the rest of us are braced for another international train – this time to Finland and Helsinki.

 

Day 22 – Moscow, and life on the outside…

WE’VE ALL READ that prisoners can find it very, very hard to adapt to life on the outside, right?.

They lose a sense of the wider world. Become institutionalised, increasingly inward looking. They rely on their captors for everything, and live a life where even taking a shower is a noteworthy occasion.

Well guess what, folks?

Baaaaaaaasiiiiiiil… as Sybil Fawlty would say… 

Today was the day we stepped off the mighty K3 after riding the iron workhorse all the way from Beijing to Moscow, and we were feeling shaky.

This chunk of green Chinese iron had been our transport, our accommodation, our restaurant and our restroom for six nights and five days.

Before we’d even reached Moscow Mrs S was already suffering a major case of Stockholm Syndrome. A bigger Sinophile you’ll never meet, and she has loved being in our little Chinese bubble since getting on board at Beijing Railway Station and retracing the route she first travelled in 1989.

The landscape has changed from Chinese to Mongolian to Russian, but the sounds and smells have remained constant and comforting.

The five of us enjoyed a final round of ham and eggs at old redcoat’s Soviet café dining carriage where we finally solved the sourdough vs stale bread mystery by discovering a furry patch of green penicillin on the loaf he dropped on our table.

Our straight-faced “frenemy” warms up… 

We said our goodbyes to the Chinese conductors who had become friends over the course of the week, and left the remainder of our Chinese money with them. From cursing us on day one when we owned up to not having a Mongolian visa (and an invalid Russian one), even the most straight-faced of the lot came to say goodbye to us, bringing the children trinkets his wife had made in Beijing for him to sell in Moscow as souvenirs.

Feeling good about life after witnessing this show of generosity I chided Ben for not waving back at a Russian child who had waved from a small suburban station platform we had rolled past.

“Ben, if someone waves at you, why not wave back?” I asked.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said, looking at me as though I had asked him to drop his pants and sing God Save the Queen in Red Square.

 “It’s not embarrassing, it is nice,” I insisted. “And the world would be a much nicer place if everybody waved at each other instead of feeling awkward or embarrassed or just ignoring each other.”

Of course Mrs S loved this line of chat, and for the next hour or so insisted on waving at me whenever possible, recruiting the children to join in too, until I was forced to admit that waving to people – whether you know them or not – is pretty lame.

Give a little wave… isn’t that niiiiiiiiiiice?

You really do have to be careful what you say in my family…

As we got nearer to Moscow, all waving had stopped and the beautiful countryside of the Ural foothills was replaced by urban sprawl and graffiti.

Our Chinese friends were busier than they’d been all trip. They were boxing up food and trinkets, wrapping boxes in tape, lugging sacks from one end of the train to the other and working in perfect harmony as a team – each carriage liaising with another.

We pulled into the platform bang on time and had no time to say another Zàijiàn to our Chinese chums before we were saying Zdravstvuj to Russia.

Our driver was waiting on the platform as the train came to a halt. Spade-faced and broad-shouldered, he greeted us with a half-hearted wave of a laminated Hotel Mercure sheet of paper before striding ahead of Mrs S who struggled along behind with three bags and Kitty in her arms. The boys staggered under the weight of their rucksacks and I brought up the rear, lurching along with four bags of my own.

Moscow mules

We walked past lots of heavy smokers in tracksuits as we tried to keep up with Robo-Kremlin’s steady pace, and eventually reached his black Mercedes in a pot-holed car-park where we loaded our bags into his car and set off through the wide open streets of the Arbat district.

Five hot showers removed almost all the grime of the six-day train trip and we were ready to hit the town. With little time in Moscow there was no time to spare and we bowled outside with a map in hand.

We couldn’t really figure out if we were in a good neighbourhood or not, although the prices indicate we are. We encountered  a lot of people who wouldn’t look out of place on a Far-Right rally, but perhaps that is just the fashion in this part of Europe now.

We found the Metro stop near our hotel – and an ATM inside. Things were looking up. I delegated Mrs S to be the speak-to-strangers-person (as she is so good at waving) and pushed her to the front of the queue to speak to the sturdy baboushka behind the ticket counter.

“WE. WANT. TO. GO. TO. RED. SQUARE,” Mrs S said…

“Now look here, we want some of your ticket things to travel to RED SQUARE, yes?” 

Against all odds, baboushka’s stern features disappear when confronted with Mrs S and Kitty, and she explains in her best English how many tickets we need, which line to catch and where to get off.

I am still staggered by this when, moments later between platforms, a tall chap with an equine nose wearing a white polo-neck jumper leans in to her and helps her select the right platform.

By the time we are on the train and a tourism student engages her and gives her tips for Red Square I am looking for hidden cameras. This isn’t the harsh, unfriendly city I had been warned about. We are having to plead with people not to get up and give us their seats on the underground, and fortunately we only need to travel two stops before we are there.

Mrs S has spotted a number of shady people “checking out tourists” and “casing out bags” so I am reluctantly persuaded to wear our rucksack dork-style, ie back to front. At this stage I easily look like the biggest prat in Red Square (and that includes a couple of guys wearing bright pink fur hats) but I am not going to let it ruin my afternoon and, when I set eyes on St Basil’s cathedral, I am genuinely awe-struck.

I looked way more embarrassing than this

Nothing can prepare you for seeing this wonderful building with your own eyes. A perfect form in perfect scale, I couldn’t take my eyes off this beautiful cathedral which dominates one end of Red Square and, frankly, makes every other building pale in comparison.

Lenin’s mausoleum was not open to the public so we could not visit, breaking our tradition of seeing “dead dudes” according to Ben, following our visit to see Ho Chi Minh’s body in Hanoi a week ago.

Everybody is tired and hungry and there is a fair bit of bickering going on between everyone, led in the main by Kitty, but I am running her very close for second place by this stage.

We’d planned to eat at Café Pushkin as a reward for enduring food rationing on the train (caused by me forking out the bulk of our food money on visas and bribes in Mongolia) and that meant another foray onto the Metro, this time in rush-hour.

I think we are all buying into Jasper’s notion of the “Invincible Shines” now after all we’ve been through so far, and we head fearlessly underground once more, unable to read the Cyrillic station signs but otherwise well-equiped with our line-drawn tourist map.

Pushkin our luck with this one?

Incredibly we (Mrs S) nail it first time and after a little wiggle on the walk we arrive at the café, which is actually as five-star restaurant, and our children are the only ones in the entire building.

We needed have worried, the boys behaved impeccably and Kitty transformed herself  from a cranky little witch into a sparkling Tsarina.

A friendly, elderly German couple in the window seat near our table were goggle-eyed at the Invincible Shines appetite for exotic food as Ben ate quails eggs and noodle soup, Jasper went for the Borscht – with roast goose – and Kitty slurped down salmon caviar with sour cream on blinis.

Jasper ranked Russian food right up there in his top three behind Thai food and Vietnamese food, while Ben also put it at number three behind sushi in top spot and Hana’s lemon-glazed shortbread. “That was sweet, baby” apparently.

Mrs S had a pork brisket dish and I plumped for stroganoff. Russia isn’t cheap these days and this was eye-wateringly expensive but offset against a week of boiled noodles on the train, it was well worth the cost.

As we left the restaurant we got a better idea of the status of the Pushkin Café by the number of chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside. We found a taxi to take us back the long way and, after a few trips down unnecessary streets, our moustachioed friend felt he had driven sufficient metres to warrant a blistering fare. With Kitty already asleep in the back, him driving like a maniac, no seatbelts fitted in his vehicle and everyone desperate for sleep, I paid up – it was his lucky day.

We all collapsed into our first real bed in six nights and already the trans-Siberian train seems a long time ago.

Mrs S and Freddie Mercury’s big brother

The Pushkin palace…

 
Quailsh eggsh Mr Bond?

Apple Pie smile

 

 

July 5 – Bangkok (or the day the Shines became hot favourites for the Parents of the Year award)

 Bangkok, Oriental setting, And the city don’t know what the city is getting…

SO goes the song. Well today Bangkok and its denizens got what can only be described as a masterclass in parenting as the adult Shines pulled out all the stops to win the Parents of the Year contest (perhaps fuelled by a lingering guilt at breaking the warbling-whistle yesterday in Penang)…

But regardless of motive, you can mark July 5 in your diary as the day when the worldwide standard of parenting shifted a little, likely never to be the same again.

It was a multi-pronged Shine tilt at the parenting title, one featuring ludicrous indulgence, some childish taunting and shameless truth-bending and manipulation.

The whole sorry saga began in, wait for it, the Apple store. We’d sought one out in Bangkok to solve what was becoming something of an increasingly pressing problem. 

I know, I know, I can hear the disapproving murmurs from all points of the globe. What kind of an idiot would buy an eight-year-old an iPad, right? Well don’t worry, you are way off.

We didn’t buy it for Jasper. Or even for Ben (WHO would buy an iPad for a seven-year-old, after all?) No, displaying the sort of behaviour usually the preserve of the uber-rich, the fairly-poor, or the extremely stupid, we purchased the 21st century’s must-have item for our TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER Kitty…

I’ll just pause to let you take that in.

Really? For me? What took you so long??

Even Jasper and Ben shook their heads sagely at the lunacy (that, though, was the extent of their mildly amused protests given that they had already received iPads pre-trip as a means to make tortuously long train journeys more palatable — they *have* got books on them as well as games, you know!!!). And that was the root of the problem in essence.

From day one when we clambered onto the first train at Woodlands, every time one or other of the boys has asked to use their iPad to watch some TV, read a book or play a game, Kitty has lunged maniacally at the headphones, demanded Peppa Pig at the top of her voice and generally instigated an all-in wrestling contest regardless of the time of day or night.

So I am afraid we’ll just take this one on the chin. Sixteen hours on a train with three under 9s is tricky enough — we can tell you that from experience now — but 6 days and nights without stopping from Beijing to Moscow will be our own Eastern Front, and if an iPad eases the pain, in any small way, we are all in…

The incident of the iPad was just the start, though…

While I can share the ignominy of the iPad purchase with Mrs S, the second parenting coup de grace was all my own work… 

Sitting with Jasper and Ben while Zoe was away with Kitty, I spotted an athletic looking resident of our hotel eating in the restaurant, his muscles bursting out of a T-Shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Stay Awesome“. It struck me, because that was just the phrase which appeared on Jasper’s leaving card from school.

“Why don’t you go up to that guy and say ‘STAY AWESOME DUDE,’ and high-five him, Jasper,” I mused. 

Ben joined in… “Yeah, go on Jasper… what will you give him if he does it? An X-Box…????”

It took me all of a nano-second to consider this transaction.

“Yep, you can have an X-Box, but you have to go up to him and say it in a really American accent… ‘STAY AWESOME DOOOOOOOD’ and go for a massive high-five,” says I.

Between us, Ben and I cranked up the tension, the taunting was elite-level, Jasper was gee-ing himself up (I could even lip read him practising the phrase — he was ACTUALLY VISUALISING DOING IT… and when he turned to sight his target, the guy was gone. 
Awesome Dude *had* been just over Kitty’s shoulder. Before he left.

When we saw Awesome Dude in the lift lobby shortly afterwards the spell had been broken, and I had retracted the X-Box offer in the light Mrs S’s disbelieving reproach.

We hadn’t even seen any of the sight of Bangkok yet, and already the day was going SO well… what could possibly go wrong?

We headed out onto the SkyTrain and leaped off at the Chao Phraya river to zip up to the Royal Grand Palace and Wat Arun. Against my better judgement we snubbed the public ferry to instead take a longtail boat at the kids’ request. This thing really was something else — a decrepit vessel powered by what looked like an enormous Rolls Royce jet engine.

Typhoid-spreading Death Vessel 

Now try as I might, I could not get the picture out of my head of a woman I’d seen on Locked Up Abroad or some similar piece of Discovery Channel scaremongery reliving her tale of getting a splash of Bangkok river water on her lips and ending up vomiting poo for a month before having her entire innards removed in a Thai hospital. So it was with no little trepidation that I boarded our ride which almost immediately began spraying river water all around my tightly pursed lips (and those of Jasper and Ben with whom I had helpfully shared that tale).

Still, we survived, and had an absolutely fantastic time touring the sights. Wat Arun was as imposing as it was striking, yet both Jasper and I managed to clamber up the thigh-judderingly steep steps of the central Khmer-style tower – he more gracefully than I.

.

The effort of the clamber up and down the tower left blood sugars dangerously low so we treated the children to the Coca-Cola Co’s finest (Coke, Fanta, you name it… — parenting win number 3) but it wasn’t until we got to the Grand Palace that the nadir of my fatherly skills was plumbed.

It’s the Real Thing

Running a little short of Baht, I asked the woman at the palace booth whether I had to pay full price for the children. “How old this one,” she said, pointing at Jasper.

“Eight,” I told her truthfully… but she eyed me suspiciously as she regarded my strapping eldest. 

“How tall he?”

“How tall are you, Jasp?” I asked… 

“Erm, I think one-forty.”

“One forty. He thinks,” I relayed.

“You may have to pay for him if he’s too tall,” she said, waving me off with just two adult tickets for the five of us.

Now, you’ll understand with Baht in short supply, no ATMs for miles and a tuk-tuk home  to pay for, this was not a risk I was prepared to take.

“Don’t walk so tall on the way in, Jasper,” I muttered as we approached the turnstile.

I can’t even begin to explain how confused he looked.

“Look, if they think you are too tall, or too old, then we’ll have to pay for an adult ticket and the booth is a long way back,” I told him, sparing the details of my temporary pecuniary disadvantage.

“Can’t you just walk a bit gimpy… stoop a bit?”

Finally, Mrs S piped up “And hold Ben’s hand or something…”

That was the kind of stroke of genius I have become accustomed to my wife throwing out there and saving the day. And true enough, Jasper stooped, held Ben’s hand and we were waved in… that nice Caucasian family with a sweaty father and slightly confused, gimpy stooped eldest son… I might just get him that X-Box after all…

The rest of the day sped by in a sensory whirl: the sounds of traffic, chatter and laughter, the smells of street food and of things you probably wouldn’t want anywhere near your mouth. Our brief whistlestop tour of Bangkok had been great fun. Exciting, memorable and a source of some wonderful memories and laughs. A vibrant, liveable city, and one which I am sorry we did not visit more during our time in Asia.

Mrs S had always been the driving force behind this madcap 13,000km trip home, and as I considered the day’s events, I found myself wholeheartedly reflecting what a fantastic trip of a lifetime this is, and what a truly life-changing/affirming step it could prove to be. What could possibly go wrong, as a wise man once said. Just then the Chang water I had put in the freezer exploded… 

Schoolboy error… nothing more to say

Two notes to self for Vietnam: keep enough local currency in my pocket at all times; and don’t put glass bottles in the freezer…

 

Wonderful memories of Bangkok:

Everyone wants a bit of mummy…

Simply stunning

 

 

Pleased we’re leaving?

 

 

 

steep steps to heaven…

Jasper heading the wrong way at Wat Arun…

July 3/4: Butterworth to Bangkok (or the day I discovered I no longer have any shame; and we swap palm plantations for paddy fields).

I CAN’T remember ever before feeling thankful for Thai insurgents… but then that came much later on Wednesday. First came the realisation that at the ripe old age of 44 I am finally free of any sense of shame or semblance of self-consciousness.

This can be the only possible reason I happily paid a man old enough to be my grandfather to pedal me around Penang’s Georgetown, straining ever sinew in his seventy-something-year-old 60kg body as I smiled beatifically from my trishaw’s throne at passers-by and tooting motorists.

I was only a fraction from proffering a Windsor wave – only the pith helmet was missing. Mrs S at least had the decency to look bashful while the three wee’uns and myself had the time of our lives weaving through the Pearl of the East’s colourful streets.
“Drive on my man, while my companion plays his warbling whistle…”

It was in Georgetown that Mrs S uttered the line of the day as we toured the Cornwallis Fort. “Darling, you know the difference between right and wrong and it is wrong to throw rocks at ancient buildings,” she calmly explained. Ben was the hapless recipient on this occasion. He soon cheered up after buying a warbling whistle form a local souvenir shop, and our tat-count rose by one.

Things took a turn for the worse for the B-man shortly after, though, as, on our ride back to the hotel, I flicked at his arm as he waved said warbling whistle in front of my nose and camera, sending the offending article flying into the road and under the wheels of a car behind. Indignant tears ensued, but at least there were no more toot-toots… and he soon saw the funny side of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeAlmGH6264

Once we had thanked our gasping and panting trishaw drivers, we rejected the E&O’s overtures to use the children’s pool to cool off, preferring instead the majestic sea-front swimming pool while the kitchen prepared packed lunches for our train to Bangkok. The E&O is a beautiful, palm-fringed vision of 19th century grandeur and a much-welcome stop over after our lengthy trundle up from Kuala Lumpur.Destroying the serenity of the E&O pool

 
Kitty getting ready for some swim action…

The schizophrenia of southeast Asian rail employees was on full display again at Butterworth station where an hour of “relax, relax, it’s okay, no problem, relax, come soon” was switched to “THE TRAIN IS LEAVING ON PLATFORM TWO IN TWO MINUTES” in what seemed like a nano-second. Fortunately we had our own warning mechanism — Kitty’s need to have her nappy changed just as a train is about to arrive. That knack has been running like clockwork so far.

The wait at Butterworth station was sufficient to make huge inroads into the E&O picnic (oh how travellers on their ‘Gap Yaaaaaar‘ would have sneered) and to replenish Mrs S’s bottomless snack bag.

The trusty Cold Storage tote has kept us happily in drink and victuals to date and, tardis like, seems to hold a staggering volume of goods. I found a container of cold chips in there tonight (true story).
The amazing bottomless Cold Storage bag 

And so to the insurgents. It seems that due to the unrest in southern Thailand, these days an armed guard patrols the sleeper trains travelling north from Malaysia. This knowledge instantly put me at ease and allowed me to stop worrying about the gangs of marauding bag-slashers and brigands I had imagined stealing our passports/money/kidneys. 

Poverty, though, was very near the surface as the palms gave way to paddies and most likely contributes to the unrest in the region. Our train rattled past ramshackle housing, broken down vehicles and scrubland.

Those trying to earn a crust are caught behind the eight ball on Train 36 as the women jumping on at one stop selling what smelled like delicious chicken had been pipped at the post by the better-organised contractors who had collected orders at the border to be delivered later on the route.
Tucking in – fine food on the Bangkok Ekspres

One thing which cannot be underestimated is the sheer volume of noise on these trains, however. Our fellow travellers could well have been attending a Brian Blessed symposium on voice projection. I know some pretty loud people — namecheck Schofes and JB — but these guys really were something else.

In the booth next door were 3 generations of Bogan royalty who did everything with the volume cranked to 11, from playing cards, to ordering food, to huffing and puffing backs onto shelves.

 Not to be outdone were the bizarre members of some sort of running club sporting Hawaiian shirts, though truth be told they looked as if they could run no farther than to the nearest roti prata shop. They bellowed the drinking songs and were soon joined by a large European man wearing a cub-scout neckerchief who had been fondling a Chinese woman’s feet (I had a strong feeling he didn’t really know her and was merely demonstrating some perceived skill picked up in “the East”). 

Strangest of all, though, was the academic-looking white-bearded German gentleman in the seats behind us who started the journey reading a dog-eared Penguin Classic. Two hours in and he had started drinking with a pair of mainland Chinese teenagers opposite. Three hours in and we ALL knew he had “had a driving accident in Shanghai” that his “favourite beer was a hoppy one from northern Germany” and that “I like chaos, yes, chaos is gooooood“.

I can’t be sure where euphemism started or ended, but by the time I managed to tune out, he was advising his new Chinese friends where they should visit in Bangkok. And I think you can guess the rest.

Juergen moves in for the kill…

To think I had been mildly concerned that Kitty and the rest of the Shine travelling circus would make a kerfuffle — it really was an aural assault from all corners of the carriage.

 “At least we’ll sleep well,” smiled Mrs S laconically as the drone rumbled on.

8 HOURS LATER:

 What can I say? When Mrs S is right, she’s right. We all slept the sleep of the good apart from a brief i-need-a-wee moment from B. The highlight of that 3am stumble down the corridor was the uniform groans from the running-team-revellers at the loud whoosh of the train doors letting us into the next carriage. 

 Our policeman/bed-maker was barely recognisable by the time our slumbering train rocked awake deep in the Thai countryside at around 7:30. Casually dressed in Malaysia, as he neared home HQ he had transformed himself into a character straight out of CHiPs… sporting the tightest of trousers, equally tight top, and a natty black jacket adorned with countless ribbons, badges and embellishments. Only his stern demeanour linked the two characters – so much for the Land of Smiles.
CHiPs. This is serious business, so no smiling…

Fields of lotus leaves flew past, along with level crossings abuzz with mopeds, brightly painted wooden houses and paddy field after paddy field. And still Carriage 10 and its motley characters rolled north. The beer started up again at 9am, the innuendo shortly afterwards. 

In our cabin, coffee and Milo was taken — the latter sipped from a spoon and predictably spilt on dad’s shorts — and Mrs S’s bottomless picnic bag plundered as we thought longingly of fresh Thai street food, and Jasper vowed to try deep-fried locust the first opportunity possible. He may live to regret that. And soon, as we plan a trip to the floating market in Bangkok…  

We pulled into Bangkok station and within half an hour were checked into the Anantara Sathorn, had rinsed the grime of the travel off, and turned our once-pristine suite into a hobo’s hovel. Eager to pack as much into the rest of the day we rode the SkyTrain to get some food, walked the SkyWalk to pick up some shopping and even squeezed in a trip to the gym before supper. The 5 of us hit the road in our glad rags at 8 to grab some food but in hindsight it was a bit ambitious and Ben fell asleep at the table… where five had walked to the restaurant, only three walked back, two with babes in arms.

Tomorrow’s another day…

The Shine wrecking ball rolls through the Anantara Hotel…

MORE MEMORABLE MOMENTS FROM DAYS 3/4:

We’re having a ball…

Nighty-night…

See you in the morning…

Hello Bangkok…

A fantastic, bustling city

Tuktuk time…

 

 

Day 2, July 2 – Kuala Lumpur to Butterworth (or the day Ben contradicts Wikipedia and Kitty learns Beijing Opera)

Hello KL, and goodbye. It was a thrill to be in Kuala Lumpur again, one of our favourite Asian cities which for years has provided a jolt of vibrant edge after the orderliness of Singapore.

Wonderful weather, no haze, and a day when, over breakfast, Ben Shine discovers a MAJOR FLAW in Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales’ ubiquitous organ of knowledge and information. When it comes to the Petronas Towers, Ben is pretty sure our wiki-friends have got it wrong. Because, rather than being a structure of “distinctive postmodern style to create a 21st-century icon for Kuala Lumpur” as Wikipedia claims, the Petronas Towers are, in fact, “MORE BORING THAN EVEN TEMPLES”. Fact.

 Who wants to see stupid towers?

Despite such a damning verdict from one so ordinarily measured in his analysis (I blame it on the Sunny-D breakfast drink), we headed to the most-boring-stupid-towers-ever-who-wants-to-go-there, only to discover Ben is in a minority of about one, and that all tickets to ascend the 452m structure had long sold out for the day.

The Petronas science discovery centre was truly something to behold, and we tucked in, between various school parties, spending a good 2 1/2 hours exploring the exhibitions, some of which put the Science Museum to shame. Such fun was had that we opted to cut it fine and stay a little longer at the Petronas, and rather than eat at the hotel we’d grab a quick bite at Kuala Lumpur Sentral before catching the bone-rattler to Butterworth.

When we finally rounded the corner to the exit, we found, between us and freedom, a solid slab of some 40 or 50 powder-blue clad schoolchildren, waiting politely if noisily in line to squeeze two and three at a time into the fairground-type pods-on-tracks that carried visitors through a final display in out into the lobby. Each pod took around 2-3 minutes to exit the display, so even somebody with my mathematical skills could quickly work out we had a 20-30 minute wait to even get out the door. Now that was just cutting it TOOOOO fine. Having scooted up the in-lane, we explained to a smiling volunteer that we just had to get out, didn’t he know, and that we were in a terrible hurry, and that it just wouldn’t do to have to wait half an hour and could we just bypass the display and exit through a fire exit and so on (you get the picture). All terribly polite. And all desperately ineffectual.

“Passive aggressive *asking* gets you nowhere,” Mrs S announces all of a sudden, as she opens the barrier and strides into the forbidden zone. “But when you start walking, things happen.” Of course we all followed, mostly head down apart from my apologetic smiles to startled security staff… And that’s the story of how we toured the inner bowels of one of KL’s most secure shopping malls, to be spat out into a shrine to Gucci, Prada and Armani and then a taxi to swing by the Eastin en route to KL Sentral.

The Shines boldly go where no man has been before. Well, apart from staff. And contract cleaners, obviously…

Our plan to eat at the station proved to be an inspired choice as we really sucked at the marrow of Asian cuisine at a Finger-fattening KFC:
We feel it is really important to embrace Asia. Its food, its culture… 

We did find a solution to the fleecy issue at the station, though. At the best of times Ben’s half-hourly cry of “where’s fleecy” can be a little wearing, as he absent-mindedly seeks his scrap of sheepskin which lives, from time to time, almost up his nose as he sucks his finger. But when laden with two rucksacks, a monster trolley and a wriggling two-year-old, the “where’s fleecy” call can, I am ashamed to confess, elicit a less than favourable response. Now fleecy lives round his neck in an Angry Birds lanyard (don’t ask). Better angry birds, than angry dad in any case. 
Where’s fleecy?

Despite Kitty’s best efforts to decide to “powder her two-year-old nose” mere minutes before the 2-Ekspres Rakyat pulled into KL and swiftly took off again for Butterworth, we managed to clamber aboard our Superior Class (ahem) coach in time. And what a treat lay in store. If you are partial to tinny Beijing Opera that is. Our seats – 4A, B, C and D – were nestled cosily in between a party of middle-aged Chinese women. After taking the opportunity of a brief stop to load up on aromatic noodles, and then discuss their merits at length, our kindly neighbour elected to share her fairly tuneless audio entertainment with her friends, with us, and with the rest of the carriage.

She produced a small aluminium cylinder of sound from beneath her leopard print shawl and it was a real coin toss to decide which was the more loud.
Our new friends
THAT SPEAKER

 Not to be outdone, speaker-woman’s pal (let’s call her staggeringly-rude-curtain woman) leaned back as far as she could, extended her arm past Mrs S’s ear and pulled KMT’s finest nylon curtain across OUR window. As Mrs S and I exchanged horrified/amazed glances (see below), staggeringly-rude-curtain-woman turned in her seat, poked her head through the seat back, and flashed the most triumphant of looks imaginable.
OMG. Did that really just happen???

Still, we settled down into a rhythm, feeding crisps, biscuits, nuts and generally every other foodstuff available at the Station “food” kiosks to the children while nourishing their growing brains with the best Disney has been able to squeeze onto an iPad. Oh, and a squeeze of apple juice. I feel a parenting award in the offing.

Our musical friends hopped off at Ipoh, and it was plain sailing, or training, for the next three hours into Butterworth and the E&O… although by the end of the trip we were pretty much the only ones left on the train…

Shout outs on Day 2:

• To Ginny for persuading us not to potty-train Kitty before the trip
• To Irene, whose family is from Penang (we are in Penang NOW)
• To Suze and Alex for the great idea of buying headphones for the boys – lifesavers!

Milestones and memories of Day 2:
Those boring towers
School trip day – not the blocking blues, but their yellow brethren…
Me and my girl
All the major food groups covered
Even mummies need an iPad at times like this
More superior class
The eagles have landed
Midnight bath at the E&O
Midnight view from our room…

 

July 1st 2013 – Day One reflections (just don’t expect this every day…)

So we survived day one, and it should all be downhill from here, right? The children were superstars despite being absolutely wired by the time we got into KL…

The JOY of arriving…

Truth be known, the only sense of humour failure was all mine — when it became evident Kuala Lumpur taxis are incapable of transporting anyone if they happen to be toting luggage any larger than an Hermes clutch bag. This, due to the fact their Proton boots/trunks are pretty much entirely taken up with LPG tanks. I know this now, but it took me a while to work out why cabbie after cabbie was turning his nose up at my bag-laden family and moving down the line. Still, look on the bright side, it was nothing ANOTHER lengthy wait in a shambolic queue at KL Sentral didn’t resolve.

Oh, NOTE TO SELF. Kitty really must alternate sitting on the left and right side of the aisles on the trains, at least until we get out of Malaysia. Today she was on the right side for the bulk of the journey – which meant for the best part of eight hours her left cheek and left cheek alone was pulled and pinched and pummelled by dozens of elderly headscarved “aunties”, cooing in Bahasa and tweaking the nonplussed Kitty’s face…

Coogee, coogee, coo… lemme grab that big juicy lambchop!

Ben puffed up with pride, showing his mum round our first hotel (a late addition to the schedule because he REALLY wanted to show Zoe where he stayed on his first big boys’ rugby tour). He was a little crestfallen to learn they did not have the “best burger I have ever eaten” on the menu for his supper, but he held it together waaaaaaay better than I did when I locked our passports and cash in the safe only to be unable to open it again. I know the bloody thing was broken but am equally convinced they think I am a total bonehead who cannot read simple instructions and work an IDIOT-PROOF room safe. Perhaps we’ll agree to split the difference. 

Mrs S and the Shinettes are all conked out now – even stay-up-all-night-if-I-can-Jasper – snoozing in cool, white linen as I type. These sorts of comforts will be a rarity on certain legs of this journey but not just yet.

There’s a morning at the Petronas Towers planned for tomorrow, followed by a spot of lunch and then we’re hitching up the wagons again for the push to Penang and a night in the glorious E&O – a beautifully elegant hotel and one of the real highlights for me. 

Before then, though, there is a good night’s sleep to be had (at long last)…

Some images from Day 1:

The sign our friend’s hand is resting on reads: “10,000 Ringgit fine for, errrrrrr, having the door open”. He can’t be blamed, though, he couldn’t read the sign what with it being obscured by him holding door open and all…

Women-only train coaches. A fantastic concept- I wonder, though, does he come here often…?

DAY 1 of 32 – the odyssey begins

…but you can’t go anywhere with an empty stomach… queueing at Woodlands Railway Station. Next stop Kuala Lumpur…