City Planning

Something about this place has bothered the hell out of me, even though it's mostly good, and that is that the people responsible for naming things around here don't understand that language is infinitely generative, i.e. you can keep making up combinations of sounds to form new words, combine words to make new phrases, etc. If you take a look at the part of Brighton where I'm about to move, you can see that the city planners had "Holling" on the brain when naming all the streets, which is just plain dumb.

The first time I went over to see the room I'm going to rent, I got a little lost, because I was supposed to turn onto Hollingbury Place, which you can see at the top, from Hollingbury Road. But those two roads don't actually intersect, and if you look at the zoomed-in map, you can see this whole naming situation gets even worse.

Since Hollingbury Crescent was where Hollingbury Place was supposed to be, I passed it, and consequently never found Hollingbury Place. I got wise soon after, though, and went back to Hollingbury Crescent and found my way from there, realizing that the Brighton city planners were even dumber (or meaner) than I thought.

This of course is not an isolated incident. Other overused names include North, Victoria, Montpelier, Preston, Lansdowne, and more, and that's just Brighton. I noticed this weekend when looking at a road atlas of The South that a lot of adjacent towns are all named the same thing, as well, though I can't remember any now. Later I may do a Funny Place Names entry based on that atlas. Every page was a treasure trove of hilarity.

I have noticed that they do something very clever with streets here, though, which is to name dead ends "Close" instead of calling them a street, road, etc. That eliminates the need for a dead end sign. You can see Adams Close on the maps above.

Devils Dyke

For a ridiculous fee of five pounds per round trip (and no student discount), you can take a bus, often an open-top bus, to one of the local giant patches of green, Devils Dyke.

Here's the establishing shot, with public house:

Hereafter all shots will be composed mostly of various shades of green. Devils Dyke is just a collection of hills and fields, essentially.

People go there to walk on little dirt trails, fly a kite, have a picnic, maybe look at some cows. We had a little walkie around, stopped by a tree stump to have a picnic, and then had some more walkie, after filling up on bread, cheese, hummus, olives, and fruit.

Here's a shot that's pretty much ALL green.

In the distance was a cute little house that's the kind of house I want, with a nice yard and a little pond with a swingy bench and lots of trees and shrubs and stuff.

Expensive, though.

Here's Ed, striking a Riker on a stile.

Don't forget the obligatory arm's-length two-shot.

This reminds me of that scene from Lady and the Tramp.

Here's a little fort, played upon by many a child. They RUINED it, har har.

I assume that strip of dark blue is the ocean. It's never far away.

British Summer

British summer is STUPID.

Lookit. The sky is all the same color, and that color is not blue.

Also, did you know they have a weather here called "white cloud"? That's when you look up and all you see is white cloud. This happens all the time. As if.

Kyrenia Castle

Kyrenia Harbor has an old fortressy castle right on top of it, which is the only other touristy thing we did besides beaches and a day tour. It was open quite late, maybe something like eight or ten at night, so we went in the evening, after we'd done our daily swimming and such. What the brochures and other publications about the castle failed to mention alongside the main opening hours was that even though the castle's admission is until late, anything inside it, like the gift shop, cafe, and most importantly, the Shipwreck Museum, all closed at five. That was very disappointing.

We didn't take this picture, but we didn't get a big establishing shot of this place, so I grabbed one from the intarvebs.



Anyway, we walked around the castle, and it was quite big, with a lot of rooms and ruined structures and such. Here's us inside a room with a nice ceiling, maybe a chapel:

I always like a good floor plan. You can see how close it is to the shore. It was for protection and stuff, for the various occupants over the last 1300ish years, from different empires and whatnot.

Here's another cool ceiling, possibly the same one from above, from the outside.

The crazy thing about this thing was the we got to the top of one of the towers, where there were these big crenellations (composed of crenels and merlons, heyyy), as you'd expect. But you could get up into the crenels and walk out to the edge of the tower, maybe fall off. There totally would be serious grates or rails blocking that stuff in the States or the UK, and plenty of other places. But I guess they leave the guests to figure it's a bad idea to wander too close to the edge. These next three pictures are taken from between the merlons. You can see how spacious it is, and often there would be rocks placed on the floor to help people climb up.

 They managed to put rails on the stairs and precipices on the inner parts of the fortress, though.

This is the place where they put convicted vampires to wait for the sun.

No castle complete without arches.

Here's the center courtyard. That giant wooden door opens up to the shipwreck museum, I think.

You can walk all the way around the circuit of the castle, but a lot of it has been allowed to be taken over by nature. Much of it has been destroyed, too.

This is a corner shot of the whole thing:

Again, you have to watch yourself in terms of fatal fall to rocky shore below.

This part is cool. Down at the harbor, this thing juts out into the water, and has a walkway so you can go down there and look at the water, and some people fish, blah blah.

But it looks just like my hand-arm! Scroll up and down again to see how well it matches.

Anyway, here's me in a dirty, lit-up cave.

This is the courtyard from within. There were a lot of little rock sculptures and weird things to look at down there, as I recall.

Also, there was a tiny anthropological museum that was still open, and we saw tons of tiny oil vessels from up to like a thousand years ago, along with this odd giant sculpture of one, and maybe there were some early tools, too.

Also dioramas of early man.

Then we found some secret passages that went underground and had a bunch of dark hollows and hallways. We speculated it was a wine cellar or some other type of storage facility. There was a window here and there that looked out onto the ground on one side of the castle, and we could see places we'd walked by and not paid much attention to the windows. We also saw other people walking by, but they couldn't see us, bwah ha ha.

 Ed took a little video down there, and it's pretty worthless for most of it, it being pitch dark down there, but at the end you see a glimpse of the tunnel that took us down there, and that's something.