Goin' Dancin'

Another article I’ve published recently on the Net relates to my dancing experiences – when I say ‘my’ dancing experiences, I mean dancing with my wife. We went to a course in what we thought was ballroom dancing several years ago and discovered that they not only taught ballroom dancing but square dancing. And both forms of dancing were the ‘called’ type, where someone calls out the next move as you go. It’s very common in fact, but we’d never come across it before. We actually enjoyed it a lot, until it just became too time-consuming. It was great exercise, and both of us got quite fit doing it. We even travelled to a few other centres to join in square dancing conventions with other people.
However, those who were really into it would travel to Australia and the States and Canada and all sorts of places to join others who danced. And people would come to us too. That sort of thing was rather beyond our pocket and our amount of annual leave.
It’s time we got back into something along those lines again, as we’re both feeling distinctly unfit (in spite of all the work we’ve done on the house recently in terms of getting ready for carpet laying) and need something that gets us up and running.

Nope, that's not us in the photo: though we occasionally came close to such finesse. The photo's by catface3.

Various holidays

In NZ we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, not because we have nothing to be thankful about, but because it isn’t one of our history.

Quite apart from that the date is too close to Christmas, and because Christmas and the annual summer holidays all tend to run together in NZ, that time of year is already a big one in terms of ‘celebration.’

As it happens we don’t have any public holidays between Labour Day on the 22nd of October and Christmas. So by the time Christmas comes we’re really ready for days off.

I see that the US, however, has Veterans’ Day on the 12^th November, and then Thanksgiving only ten days later. A bit of a clutter in that month.

In Spain they have yet another holiday in that period: 1^st November is All Saints’ Day, 6^th December is Constitution Day and 8^th December is Immaculate Conception Day. Three holidays in December. That’s a bit over the top.

Of course in NZ we have Christmas Day and Boxing Day as statutory holidays, and then a week later New Year’s Day and the Day-After-New-Year’s Day, which apparently doesn’t have a name even though it’s a public holiday. These four make up for our lack of holidays in the previous couple of months, and also ensure that we get over the Christmas rush.

Sleeping around

Since we began our long holiday in the UK, we’ve slept in eleven different beds, by my last calculation. That’s including the week we spent with my daughter and her family because the tenants who’d taken over our house wanted it a week early. Those were single beds, but we’ve been fortunate to have been able to sleep in double beds ever since, with one exception. This was at the Youth Hostel in Gillingham, when we had bunk beds. I had to sleep on top, of course, and of course had to get up in the night to go to the loo. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to get down from an upper bunk bed in the middle of the night, in the dark, and doing it quietly so as not to wake the other person in the room, nor the people in the rooms next door, who, because the walls were so paper-thin, would have easily heard me.

It’s a bit like trying to play pianissimo when your instrument is a tuba, or a serpentine bassoon, or an aquaggaswack. The latter is listed on an odd site called OddMusic.com and is described as 29 hanging pot lids, a gong tree with a wide sonic palette. Don't ask me how to pronounce it.

B & B

No doubt most of you will pick this one up easily, but where do you find these oddly-named locations?
Adirondacks
Capital-Saratoga
Central-Leatherstocking
Chautauqua-Allegheny
Finger Lakes
Greater Niagara
Thousand Islands-Seaway
They’re all in the state of New York. None of them sound much like the city of New York, which is what most of us think about when we think about NY, but it just goes to show that NY state is much more varied than we usually consider it to be.
(Greater Niagara reminds me of a couple of villages near where we’ve been staying in Norfolk: Great Melton and Little Melton. Curiously, the latter is the bigger place!)
Anyway, in all these places you can find a New York Bed and Breakfast.
And these are just the general area names. Within each of these are twenty to thirty more options, with names from origins as widespread as American Indian, Dutch, English and French. Amongst them are a Rome, an Amsterdam, a Dundee, a Berlin, and a Naples. Then there are a range of English placenames: Essex, Southampton, Durham, Grenwich (not Greenwich) and Windham (rather than the ‘proper’ spelling of Wymondham). Corinth, Ithica, (and Ithaca) Utica, Hector, Troy and Syracuse add a Grecian touch.
None of them are quite as odd as some of the English place names that I’ve come across in Norfolk, but I’ll save that subject for another day.

Flying to Florida

Well, it looks as though the Brits are now buying up large less in the typical European holiday spots, and going further abroad; further, as in Florida. Yes, Florida in the States, that wonderful long peninsula that stretches down from the southern east coast like a fat finger.
I’d forgotten, until I was reading up a little on Florida, about the Florida Keys. Key West is one of them, and I thought it was also the name of a highly romantic, swash-buckling kind of movie that I saw as a child, and haven’t forgotten. But it isn’t. I thought it was a movie by Cecil B de Mille. But it wasn’t.
Anyway, all that aside, property in Florida is becoming the preferred option for lots of Brits, it seems. Brits with some cash to spare, that is, as these wonderful beach front properties aren’t quite going for a song. Still, unless you’re retiring there, you could always rent your condominium out to other fellow Brits who want a taste of the long stretches of beach, and the wonderful, warm weather. (Just don’t tell them that Florida also gets a lot more lightning than most places in the US. Still, lightning, as they say, never strikes twice, so they should safe enough!).
Condominium always strikes me (since we’re talking about strikes) as a most odd word – even odder that we should have it in the language when most people chop it down to condo. And now there’s another portmanteau word: dockominium, which is the water-based version of a condominium. However, rather than owning an apartment in a building, one owns a boat slip on the water.

A docko? Hmm, it doesn’t quite have the ring of a condo.
You’re going to ask me where the word, condominium, first came from, aren’t you? I’m going to tell you, anyway, since I was curious enough to look it up. According to the Online Entymology Dictionary, it dates from around 1714, and was apparently coined in Germany from com- "together" + dominum "right of ownership." It remained as a word in politics and international law until the sense of "privately owned apartment" arose in American English as a special use of the legal term, in 1962. The abbreviated form ‘condo’ was first recorded 1964.
There you go. All you wanted to know.
Disclosure statement

Buying up in Bulgaria

Rightly or wrongly, when I think of Bulgarians, I think of comic characters in operas, violent villains in movies, and other such negative pictures.
But Bulgaria, now that it’s been freed from Communism, is on the rise. You might even say it’s on the high rise, considering the number of apartment buildings that have been going up. And the image of the Bulgarians is altogether different to my stereotype.
Furthermore, a large number of Brits are buying up in Bulgaria, seeing it as the place to go for holidays. It’s still relatively cheap to live there, the air fares are good, and, most of all, the property values, though they’ve risen, are still economic by British standards. A few years ago you could buy a rural property for £5000. Though the price has tripled, by comparison with many other holiday spots, this is still a bargain.
There’s even a British real estate firm that specialises in Bulgaria Property. Someone got in on the act pretty smartly there!
And of course there are lovely coastlines and sunny beaches. Bit far for me to travel, but maybe one day….just like that maybe one day…Hawaii.

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