Oct
28
2008
The second day in Amsterdam was the day of Jonathan and Stan’s wedding reception. The heavy rain of Friday had given way to a beautiful cool but sunny Saturday, and the weather held for the whole day. The company was great, the beer, wine and food were excellent, and everyone had a great time. Traveling with a wheelchair, especially to a city like Amsterdam, takes planning and effort, and if I ever had any doubts whether it was worthwhile, days like this would dispell them. Being able to be there and be part of such an important event for two dear friends meant so much, and letting the wheelchair stand in the way of that would just be wrong. With effort and the help of the good people who were at the event, I made it to all the parts of the reception, and no barrier stood in the way of us having a first-class time.
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Oct
24
2008
When I was a kid, I loved anything to do with animals: the nature documentaries on the BBC; the Life on Earth book my brother got one Christmas; the rock pools on the shoreline in County Mayo; the zoo in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. I never lost that fascination, but I did go through a period where I wouldn’t go to the zoo anymore. I still wanted to watch the animals, but it wasn’t politically correct to like zoos, and I felt guilty about even wanting to go. Recently, I’ve come to appreciate zoos again, especially ones which are really making an effort to provide suitable enclosures for the animals that can’t be released into the wild. I can’t claim to have reclaimed the childhood sense of wonder visiting and animal watching, but I’ve enjoyed the visits. However, zoos present certain challenges to wheelchair users, and I strongly advise doing a little research about the zoo you plan to visit beforehand.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Gaia Park Kerkrade Zoo in the Netherlands. Getting there without a car would’ve been tricky, but fortunately my good friend Thomas (who took the photo for the new banner you can see) was keen to go and check it out, and he has a car with a big enough trunk for a wheelchair. We didn’t do any research beyond checking the weather (it was lovely) and the opening times, and there were a couple of surprises in store for us.
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Sep
10
2008
Things to do on a free afternoon in… Kraków, Poland.
Kraków [KRA-koof; Cracow] has such a beautiful city center with so much to explore that it is difficult to imagine having a free afternoon, but take my advice: no matter how short your trip, make sure you take one afternoon away from the castle, the restaurants, the old Jewish quarter and the churches to go out to the Wieliczka Salt Mine [vyeh-LEECH-ka]. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mine is so much more than you could imagine from the name ’salt mine’. There are whole rooms with intricate decoration carved into the salt of the mine, which was fully functional until 1996, and now stands open for tourists all year round. Like many such sites that were never designed for wheelchairs, it is not fully accessible, but they have done a good job of adapting it, creating a tour for wheelchair users that takes in much of the beauty of the mine.
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Sep
09
2008
Things to do on a free afternoon in… Cologne, Germany.
If you’re in north-western Germany, in the area called Nordrhein-Westfalen, and you have an afternoon to kill, consider taking a trip to the Cologne Chocolate Museum (Schokolandenmuseum Koeln), a celebration of 3000 years of chocolate. The 15-year old museum is quite accessible, rating a Good. Aiming to enlighten visitors on the history and the production of chocolate, it includes a hothouse with cocoa plants, artifacts from the ancient civilizations that created chocolate, an interactive display of modern and cult chocolate, and even a working production area. It’s not quite Willy Wonka’s Factory, but there’s a lot of fun to be had all the same. I was lucky enough to go with my friend James, a professional chef with friends working in the confectionary industry, which made the trip even more educational, as he had many stories to tell about what we were seeing.
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Aug
31
2008
This week’s city was San Francisco, but the main focus was getting around the city, not what there is to see and do. Today’s post is the first to focus on things to do and places to go in the city: as always for a Sunday post, it’s an ecclectic mix of facts, reviews and ideas, and by no means a definitive tourist guide. In later posts, I will revisit San Francisco to talk about specific neighborhoods and complete the picture of this great city. For now, here is my San Francisco Seven.
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Aug
26
2008
Picture the scene: it is after 11 pm in downtown San Francisco. My friend Geoff and I have just come out of the cinema, we both have to be up early the next day, and neither of us wants to face the stink of the Civic Center Muni Metro station elevators, so we decide to share a cab back to the Inner Sunset where we both live. We walk up to the nearby line of taxi cabs and head to the first in line, a station wagon whose driver is reading a newspaper.
“Evening,” I say, smiling. “We’d like to go to the Inner Sunset, 9th and Irving.”
He looks up, with the start of the smile on his face, but it quickly fades. He points at the wheelchair and scowls: “I can’t take that. You’ll have to call a cab from dispatch.” He then returns to his newspaper, discussion over.
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Aug
17
2008
This week’s focus has been on Amsterdam, and I would like to wrap things up today with seven other things that you might like to know if you’re planning to visit the Netherlands’ capital. This is an eclectic mix of ideas for things to see, mini-reviews and a couple of facts, just to cover some things there wasn’t time or space for in the week’s main posts.
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Aug
16
2008
Amsterdam is certainly a lively and exciting city, but it has far more to offer than the stores and coffee shops in the narrow, bustling streets flanking the Damrak, and the tourist attractions, beer gardens and restaurants ringing the Dam. If art and history are more your style, and you’d rather spend a quieter day, I recommend going to the wonderful Van Gogh Museum, which is out in the Museumplein (Museum Quarter) that also houses the National Gallery and Museum of Modern Art. While you won’t get away from the crowds, it’s a different pace, and I find it very restful.
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Jul
31
2008
My top pick for a place to eat in Barcelona is MamaCafé Restaurant, which rates an Excellent for great food, value for money and atmosphere, and a Very Good for wheelchair accessibility.
Finding a really good restaurant in a popular tourist destination can be a tricky task, especially if you don’t know anyone who lives there, so we must have had a lot of luck on our side when we stumbled upon the restaurant that I want to recommend to you today. MamaCafé Restaurant is not on a busy street or in the heart of a popular tourist area, but it is well worth going off the beaten track for. It lies in a neighborhood called Raval, to the right of La Rambla if you are heading away from Placa Catalunya. The web site includes an accurate map.
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