When you go somewhere, you often notice lots of *little* things.
The post boxes are the same -- but blue. As are the phone boxes, except a few are yellow for reasons. There was a postcard of a set of four or five phone boxes in rainbow colours, I'm not sure if that was retouched or a photo of a physical art installation.
On Guernsey, they use numberplates in the most literal sense, of numbers from 1 to 99999 with no extra letters. At some point they allowed leading zeroes, and leading double zeroes, and I think even '0'. Low
or interesting numbers are auctioned off to pretentious pricks to raise money for the local government. There's a few other special cases like '1' being reserved.
The animal avatar of people from Guernsey is a donkey. Of Jersey is a toad.
Unsurprisingly, but a little sadly, for fairly small islands, they are suffering plenty of house price inflation and car congestion.
Guernsey and Jersey are both the principle islands of their corresponding Bailiwick, in this case a collection of islands, originally deriving from their control by a Bailiff. Guernsey's includes most of the other other islands you've heard of. Jersey is a bit more populous but iirc its corresponding balliwick includes few other islands.
On Guernsey the buses are quite good (although as always my impression is probably coloured by the fact that, where I LIVE I often want to travel into town in the evening and weekends, whereas on holiday I more usually travel during the working day). Partly because it's quite simple -- quite a lot of places are round the coast, so a lot of buses follow the coast, and then cut through one or two places on the way back.
On Jersey, they tried, but there's a lot more places you want to get to, so we ended up getting confused by buses that only ran once or twice a day, or were diverted in a bit of an ad hoc way for a big fete.
I was sad about my mobile phone. I completely hadn't realised that the islands are not actually in the EU (although they have to comply with a lot of regulation anyway for practical reasons), and that giffgaff don't provide free roaming there.
And, as always, I get confused, because you DO get a helpful text advertising the prices, but it's always aimed at someone who doesn't see much difference between the regular prices and 400x as much, it doesn't say WARNING INTERNET UNUSABLE DISABLE DATA ROAMING NOW. This is why I only leave a small amount of credit on my phone in addition to the goodybag, because when something goes wrong, it's inconvenient, as opposed to just devouring money infinitely. I wish there was a setting where I could enable FREE data roaming but completely disable paid data roaming, as there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between "free" and "usury", and save my credit for occasional texts and phone calls. At least, free wifi is becoming common enough it's not a big deal any more.
"Not being in the EU" is also ticklish in other ways. There's a fair finance industry, which is one of the biggest things keeping the island's economy buoyant. But I suspect is borne up by tax dodging enabled by being sort-of-not-really in the UK/EU. And when I'm listening to someone describing hundreds of years of eking out a living under constant risk of uk-continental wars and contradictory laws, it sounds like "fair enough, make your money where you can". But from other perspectives, it feels like global tax fiddles are one of the biggest blights on the world economy, and I don't blame local economies who become entrapped with them, but I'm not happy about it either.
We missed the hottest sun, but it was still really nice to see the countryside, and the sea, in a mix of sun and shower. Standing on the ferry's observation deck was really lovely.
We went on a walking tour of St Petersport in Guernsey, which is often a good way of getting to know what local people consider notable tourist places, which a lot of the information above came from.
And the Guernsey museum. They had a little history of the island. A folklore exhibition which was fascinating for what was in common and different with bits and pieces I've picked up from different places. And an exhibition of Victor Hugo's art. He lived in political exile on Guernsey for a while, and wrote a novel inspired by it (Travailleurs de Mer/Toilers of the Sea). His art, mostly brief but evocative sketches, looks -- well, exactly what you'd expect Victor Hugo to look like.
We also saw the Jersey museum. A mix of historical stuff, from ancient to recent. Random things stood out to me, like a history of bathing, with some early black-and-white film. It's amazing how slightly-different but really-similar people look. Some scary things from the WWII occupation.
And joined on to it, a reconstructed 19th century merchant's house. But what was fascinating was not so much the house, as I've seen similar things before, but the coincidence of my reading some books set around then just before, and imagining people living there. And the way they set it up -- recreating the moment when the house was first abandoned, by a fairly wealthy family then consumed by debt, auctioning the house and all the contents, everything in the house with an auction label on. But the auction stopped at the last moment by their creditors, who feared they would do a flit from their debt. And video screens of the family members, explaining their position in the crisis. Not just "debt", but the husband was hounded for his political views, and idealism in being a doctor providing cheap or free (but possibly questionable?) medical services.
The post boxes are the same -- but blue. As are the phone boxes, except a few are yellow for reasons. There was a postcard of a set of four or five phone boxes in rainbow colours, I'm not sure if that was retouched or a photo of a physical art installation.
On Guernsey, they use numberplates in the most literal sense, of numbers from 1 to 99999 with no extra letters. At some point they allowed leading zeroes, and leading double zeroes, and I think even '0'. Low
or interesting numbers are auctioned off to pretentious pricks to raise money for the local government. There's a few other special cases like '1' being reserved.
The animal avatar of people from Guernsey is a donkey. Of Jersey is a toad.
Unsurprisingly, but a little sadly, for fairly small islands, they are suffering plenty of house price inflation and car congestion.
Guernsey and Jersey are both the principle islands of their corresponding Bailiwick, in this case a collection of islands, originally deriving from their control by a Bailiff. Guernsey's includes most of the other other islands you've heard of. Jersey is a bit more populous but iirc its corresponding balliwick includes few other islands.
On Guernsey the buses are quite good (although as always my impression is probably coloured by the fact that, where I LIVE I often want to travel into town in the evening and weekends, whereas on holiday I more usually travel during the working day). Partly because it's quite simple -- quite a lot of places are round the coast, so a lot of buses follow the coast, and then cut through one or two places on the way back.
On Jersey, they tried, but there's a lot more places you want to get to, so we ended up getting confused by buses that only ran once or twice a day, or were diverted in a bit of an ad hoc way for a big fete.
I was sad about my mobile phone. I completely hadn't realised that the islands are not actually in the EU (although they have to comply with a lot of regulation anyway for practical reasons), and that giffgaff don't provide free roaming there.
And, as always, I get confused, because you DO get a helpful text advertising the prices, but it's always aimed at someone who doesn't see much difference between the regular prices and 400x as much, it doesn't say WARNING INTERNET UNUSABLE DISABLE DATA ROAMING NOW. This is why I only leave a small amount of credit on my phone in addition to the goodybag, because when something goes wrong, it's inconvenient, as opposed to just devouring money infinitely. I wish there was a setting where I could enable FREE data roaming but completely disable paid data roaming, as there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between "free" and "usury", and save my credit for occasional texts and phone calls. At least, free wifi is becoming common enough it's not a big deal any more.
"Not being in the EU" is also ticklish in other ways. There's a fair finance industry, which is one of the biggest things keeping the island's economy buoyant. But I suspect is borne up by tax dodging enabled by being sort-of-not-really in the UK/EU. And when I'm listening to someone describing hundreds of years of eking out a living under constant risk of uk-continental wars and contradictory laws, it sounds like "fair enough, make your money where you can". But from other perspectives, it feels like global tax fiddles are one of the biggest blights on the world economy, and I don't blame local economies who become entrapped with them, but I'm not happy about it either.
We missed the hottest sun, but it was still really nice to see the countryside, and the sea, in a mix of sun and shower. Standing on the ferry's observation deck was really lovely.
We went on a walking tour of St Petersport in Guernsey, which is often a good way of getting to know what local people consider notable tourist places, which a lot of the information above came from.
And the Guernsey museum. They had a little history of the island. A folklore exhibition which was fascinating for what was in common and different with bits and pieces I've picked up from different places. And an exhibition of Victor Hugo's art. He lived in political exile on Guernsey for a while, and wrote a novel inspired by it (Travailleurs de Mer/Toilers of the Sea). His art, mostly brief but evocative sketches, looks -- well, exactly what you'd expect Victor Hugo to look like.
We also saw the Jersey museum. A mix of historical stuff, from ancient to recent. Random things stood out to me, like a history of bathing, with some early black-and-white film. It's amazing how slightly-different but really-similar people look. Some scary things from the WWII occupation.
And joined on to it, a reconstructed 19th century merchant's house. But what was fascinating was not so much the house, as I've seen similar things before, but the coincidence of my reading some books set around then just before, and imagining people living there. And the way they set it up -- recreating the moment when the house was first abandoned, by a fairly wealthy family then consumed by debt, auctioning the house and all the contents, everything in the house with an auction label on. But the auction stopped at the last moment by their creditors, who feared they would do a flit from their debt. And video screens of the family members, explaining their position in the crisis. Not just "debt", but the husband was hounded for his political views, and idealism in being a doctor providing cheap or free (but possibly questionable?) medical services.