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Published: February 13th 2011
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Lighthouse
Lighthouse in the Beagle Channel Off to Ushuaia, six days was enough in BA. The heat was getting to me, almost four years living in London with only patches of hot weather, when I was on holiday elsewhere, meant that my body was finding it difficult to acclimatise to sunny weather.
So once again Anna and I found ourselves on a plane. Luckily for us the flight is relatively short, three and a half hours, just enough time to catch up on my blog, which is where I’m writing this. Anyway, another grip from an old man. The plane is lade out in a 2 - 3 pattern. That is there are two seats and then the aisle and then another three seats. Anna and I are in the three seat row, I have the aisle seat and Anna the centre. Next to her, and in the window seat is another girl. Well as we’re taking off, after an hour seating in a baking hot airplane on the tarmac without air-conditioning, the girl next to the window takes out her mobile phone and starts taking photos out the window.
It is one of those things. I remember watching BBC breakfast and on one occasion they did a piece about what rules did people like to break. And viewers would send in their text message or e-mails with comments such as “eating in a library”, or “parking illegally while running into a shop to buy a loaf of bread” or “leaving my mobile phone on while flying”. I discussed this with my best friend and he said he did it himself, his justification was that if it could cause the plane to crash they wouldn’t allow you to take the phones on board. Well, I haven’t got a clue as to whether or not a plane would crash if everyone on the plane had all their electronic gadgets turned on. What I find frustrating about all of this, and this is where I start to sound “old” is that they’re all hypocrites. They all sit there feeling smug about themselves as they break the rules that they feel should be broken, at least by themselves. But should anyone break another rule, one that they feel should not be broken they’re generally the first to scorn.
The man who doesn’t offer the priority seat on the tube to the pregnant woman gets offended by the man who’s smoking on the platform. This man in turn is offended by the woman who pushed her way through the barriers without paying. She was offended by the woman who was speeding in her car and didn’t stop at the pedestrian crossing to let her pass. This speeding woman was shocked and offended when she saw a man speed past her sons school just moments after she had dropped him off. The speeding man was offended when he saw another driver take a drink from a bottle of beer. The man who was drinking the bottle of beer hated the fact that his wife slapped around their daughter. His wife was offended each time she saw the kids on the street smoking drugs. These kids got angry when they heard that a paedophile was going to be released onto ‘their’ block. And the paedophile was offended by the man who didn’t offer his seat to the pregnant woman.
I think you get my point, though I admit I kind of lost it at the end, and a lot of you will say that there are rules, and then there are laws, and breaking a rule is okay, but breaking a law isn’t. But then how many of you have sped, or broken some other law that you thought wasn’t that important.
And what is the point to all this? None really, we’re all hypocrites. So the next time when you see someone else breaking a rule or a law, don’t scowl, don’t get angry and don’t get offended, you’ve just done the same thing.
Yeah, yeah I know, there are some laws which should never be broken, such as murder, etc… whatever, don’t spoil my fun.
So after all of that, the girl sitting next to the window is now resting calmly listening to music playing through her mobile phone and the plane hasn’t crashed and life and the world still seem to be ticking along perfectly well with this broken rule.
Okay so Ushuaia is bloody cold, they say it has a temperate climate, but flying in from BA where it was 30 degrees to somewhere where it couldn’t have been above 10 degrees and then on top of that there is the cold artic wind blowing in that pierces every piece of clothing that we were wearing. Well needless to say we raced to our B&B and changed into our thermals.
Ushuaia is a very touristy town, which isn’t exactly surprising, it is at the arse end of the world and people always want to travel to somewhere out of the way so that they can say they’ve been there. Okay so maybe this is a bit cynical, but while the place is beautiful and there are penguins, unless you are travelling to Antarctica you could see everything elsewhere where it is warmer. So really there isn’t a need to go to Ushuaia except to say that you’ve travelled to the arse end of the world.
Having said all of that Ushuaia is a nice town, the houses are small and rugged. There are a large number of stray dogs which wander the streets. While none of them seemed dangerous we were told to avoid one particular area of town as the dogs posed a threat. We didn’t need to go to that area so we felt no compulsion to discover if she was exaggerating or not.
We spent that first day organising a trip to visit the penguins, which Anna was desperate to see.
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