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Buenos Aires 2012 Hola Amigos, Buenos Aires beckoned once again, it was the allure of Argentinean food, the sound of Tango music, the warmth of its summer sun and the escape from the UK winter blues that prompted us to take the 14 hour overnight flight to South America. It was early morning when we arrived; a 'Welcome Romseys' sign led us to a waiting car which quickly whisked us off to our hotel in the shimmering heat of downtown Buenos Aires, some 40 kms away. Our travel arrangements had been booked through Dialaflight, a company we highly recommend. It felt good to be back in B.A. again, there was a familiarity about it; the magnificent grand mansions, the sophistication of old European values, the yellow and black taxis, locals parading in their finery with pet dog as status symbols, fine coffee houses and tea-rooms, doormen waiting outside every apartment block and of course the professional dog-walkers struggling along tree lined streets with six or more mutts on leashes. We moved the following day into a prearranged rental apartment; a comfortable, spacious modern abode with all mod cons and air conditioning situated in the the well heeled suburb of Recoleta, it was just around the corner that Eva Peron once lived and where she is also buried in a nearby cemetery. It has been five years since we were last here and some things have changed; prices have increased significantly, inflation is running at 25%. Yesterday, all subway fares went up 150%, so the subway staff have protested and are allowing the public to travel free of charge until further notice, at the same time they have put in a claim for a huge pay rise. We are still trying to figure out the logic of that! The country is currently run by Christine Kirchner who took over the presidency from her recently deceased husband, she has just had a cancer scare. This situation has a feel of déjà vue about it, will there be material here for a future musical? "I did it my way Argentina" In the four days we have been here we have done very little other than unwind, get used to the 35-40 degree heat and take short walks to explore the six blocks in all direction around us. Today's short walk led us to a very grand and ornate mansion, within which was hidden a very elegant restaurant with a pure red and black decor, including red linen napkins and black tablecloths. There was a delicious and unusually different four course menu, attentive staff and a decidedly select clientele - we genuinely felt we were not going to be allowed in. What a gem of a find! Its name? Sorry! Jean and I have sworn each other to secrecy. The price? a quarter of what one would expect to pay in London. We'll be treating ourselves there again, but meanwhile I guess we'll be back to enjoying Jean's cooking at home or to eating pizzas out in "La Cantina" for the rest of the week and to drinking the plonk of a rose Roy likes at the moment. For now the day is cooling off, the sky is clouding over, badly needed rain is predicted, What pleasant surprises will we encounter tomorrow? Hasta manana. Roy and Jean December 2011 2011 was a good year, we managed to meet up with many friends overseas and spent the 2010 Christmas month in California. Our thanks for the company of Lorna and family in Sacramento, Sunny, Minah and Jinwoo in Palo Alto, Nina and Monique, Elke and Andy’s family in Los Angeles, and of course, our fellow travellers Art and Janis who came down from Canada to join us. This year started off with two restful months in a house on the Belle Isle Plantation in South Carolina. It was whilst there, that our recovery from ‘three lost years’ really picked up, helped no doubt by the good neighbours, a plentiful supply of freshly caught fish and visits to our friends the Wings and Branfords in Florida. The month of June was spent pleasantly touring Europe by car in the company of school friends John and Pam Carroll from Australia. Jeans continues to enjoy her passion for art and has exhibited several times with her Art Club. Roy’s energy and stamina levels are at last returning, though not yet enough to cycle to Italy. Argentina is beckoning again; we shall not be horse trekking over the Andes this time around. Instead, we’ll be looking to spend January and February in an apartment in Buenos Aires, during which sister Jenny and neighbours Youzhi and Jerome will join us for a week to celebrate a significant birthday for Roy which coincides with the Chinese New Year. We hope that 2012 will be a good year and be everything you wish for. Roy and Jean Romsey in South Carolina 2011 March 2011
To the south of us is 60 miles of unseen coastline with little but swampland forest, an inordinate number of roadside churches and a fishing hamlet called McClellanville. We drove the 20 miles to McClellanville today and found a small community of 200 homes built around a shrimp-boat Landing along the Jeremy Creek between the Intercostals Waterway and interstate highway No 17.. The village caught the full ferocious brunt of Hurricane Hugo in 1989; a devastating event that has taken many years to recover from.
Apart from the dozen or so Shrimp-boats tied up to the wooden wharf, there were two shops, a restaurant, a post-office, a village hall and 8-10 churches. We lingered long enough to enjoy a huge plate of large grilled shrimps (prawns) with hush puppies and endless cups of coffee. We keep up with local events by reading the local Georgetown newspaper, last week's lead story was of a black grandmother and her grand-daughter who were car-jacked at gun-point outside of their church by a couple of black youths who then robbed her of $9-50cents and let her go, the lads then went off to another town and shot someone. I guess that is what happens in towns where there isn't an awful lot for kids to do! The nearest shops to our house in Belle Isle are 4 miles away in Georgetown, so you can imagine how quiet life is for us here; it is a real retreat; ideal for recuperating. The only people we see are an occasional elderly resident shuffling along under the giant live oaks; leading an over-fed dog on a leash in one hand and a long pooper-scooper in the other hand to steady themselves with. Some days the excitement is so much that I have to lie down! Speaking of lying down, I am told that South Carolina's most famous place is Fort Sumter where the first shots were fired in the American Civil War and that Georgetown’s most famous place was a 'house of ill repute' called 'Sunset Lodge'. It operated for forty years just along the road from Belle Isle; it closed in 1969 when Madam Weiss reckoned she was getting too old to run it. The building burned down in 1994, but the land is still called ‘Sunset Lodge’. Here in Georgetown is 'Black History Month'. so a Black American Parade was held along Front Street, complete with bands, high kicking marchers, local counselors and churches represented - being part of the Bible Belt , this small town has no less than 19 denominations with 98 churches. Last week we paid a visit to Charleston; a beautifully maintained historic Confederate city to the south of us, where most of its white, timber antebellum homes and churches are originals that were built in the early/mid 1700s; a time when fortunes were being made on the backs of African slave labour, from rice and cotton plantations. The homes looked all the better in bright warm sunshine against a background of fresh cherry blossoms and magnolia trees in bloom. We walked our socks off. Yesterday we took Flo, an elderly neighbour, out to lunch. Flo is an 86 year old ’Southern Belle' from the old school who speaks with a very slooooow and determined southern drawl. Nothing and nobody can hurry her. She later took us down to the shrimp wharf which was alive with large pelicans waddling around waiting for scraps, Flo’s uncle used to own a couple of shrimp boats so she introduced us to some of the fishermen who sold us a tub of fresh scallops; we’ll be eating those for dinner tonight. Well, that is about all the news for this time, except to say that the warm sunshine is bringing out the alligators and turtles to bask on the nearby banks and that we are just about at the tail end of our USA visit; time to think about packing. Lots of love to you all Roy and Jean January 2011 Hello folks, Our month long sojourn in California has been cold, wet and windy, not what we expected at all, but what the weather lacked we made up for in good company. We stayed a few days with our Los Angeles family; Andy and Elke; whose little children we baby-sat as toddlers and are now all grown up into nice teenagers at college and university. We had the use of one of the family's seven vehicles in which we drove slowly northward until we met up with our Canadian friends Art and Janis, they had driven four days southward from Victoria Canada to meet up with us and together we spent Christmas touring the Spanish/Mexican Missions of California. We ended up along the rugged Big Sur coastline where we came upon a huge colony of giant Elephant Seals that had come ashore to give birth to their young whilst the males fought battles of dominance. A truly awe inspiring sight. During our tour we called into Stamford university to say hello to our very good Korean friends Sunny, Minah and their son Jinwoo, they had become our close friends as neighbours in Southampton some years ago, we had the pleasure of seeing Jinwoo perform in a Christmas Play at their church. New Year was spent back in Los Angeles with Andy and all the family Our month-long sojourn in cold California had soon come to an end, it was time to escape to warmer climes; but enroute we were almost trapped in NY by snowstorms. However after much determination we managed to get a couple of flights south to the swamplands of South Carolina only to find that the snow and sleet had followed us. Brrr!
Happy New Year, we think of you always. Our Love Roy and Jean
Roy and Jean Romsey in China 2010 Hi folks,
We roaming Romseys, have just returned to the UK from our two months travels through China , it was an interesting and an eye-opening trip from many perspectives. China is a huge country and our journey involved travelling 9,000 kms by bus and train and a further 4,600km by internal plane flights, The journey, though long, did not seem so; We travelled over bumpy, dusty roads; along fast new expressways and on comfortable high-speed bullet trains. The scenery varied from endless dry deserts, majestic snow-capped mountains, smoke belching industrial plants and 100s of miles of green fields of vegetables, interspersed with cities sprouting forests of tall tower-cranes, busily building hundreds of modern high-rise apartment blocks to replace the dilapidated homes of yesteryear.
Today, however, China is a country on the move, and has been so since 1979, when it opened itself up to western thinking on economics. It has since become the manufacturing power-house to the world, and in doing so it has achieved the impossible; it has managed to retain its authoritarian central communist control whilst allowing a market economy to develop, mainly by state run enterprises. China does not, on the surface, appear very communist, its people seem happy, well fed, assertive, confident and enjoy freedoms that were once unheard of, the boundaries of which are constantly being expanded. They are benefiting from the millions of new homes being built and the massive infrastructure that goes with it; 1,000s of miles of new highways, rail tracks, power lines, power stations, reservoirs and piped water, sanitation and sewage treatment plants, new hospitals and schools. Their wages, though low by international standards, are within the local day to day value system of living, and it is this which allows it to remain competitive and be the manufacturing power house of the world. The country is controlled (just) by 60 million Communist Party Members, although they constitute less than 5% of the population, they are nevertheless are in positions of authority scattered throughout the 23 provinces and five autonomous regions, they follow a mammoth centrally controlled plan of development, which amazingly seems to be working, they achieve things in time spans that we in the west, because of our planning laws, can only dream of. – We may disagree with their methods but we have to admire their achievements. In the process of development, ‘Communist’ China has become a grossly unequal society, with billionaires and wealthy entrepreneurs at one end, the city population in the middle and the farming folk feeding the county at the other end. In the past 6 years the quality of life for city people (who are registered as citizens,) have risen by 71%, whereas for country people (who are registered as peasants) is only 3%. In order to help counterbalance this inequality, the government recently authorized a 40% discount on all electrical goods for peasants. Because of low wages, the country has yet to become a consumption society. That however, is planned to change within the next 5-10 years and in doing so will change the cost base and the whole dynamics of China’s export trade, just where that will leave the rest of the world is as yet a mystery, but many countries are looking to adopt this new ‘China Model’. Our reasons to travel to China were firstly to follow one of the old ‘ Silk Road ’ routes and later to visit two groups of friends. We spent the first 25 days with an organised Wendy Wu Tour in a group of 20 people; this was a strange departure from our normal independent travels. However, we quickly settled into the routine of being shepherded by our excellent guide from one interesting site to another, and to having our accommodation, food and transport all pre-organised. We undoubtedly covered more in those 25 days than we would have covered in 50 days of independent travel.
Our ‘ Silk Road ’ sojourn was in the convivial company of Australians and New Zealanders and involved four overnight train journeys on which we slept comfortably four to a cabin.
Whilst each city had its own unique qualities, they all seemed to be following a similar development plan; that of total demolition of yesterday’s homes followed by the building of wide streets, high-rise apartment blocks and fine public building in the form of stadiums, concert halls, museums, railway stations etc. whilst this is all very admirable, there is a westernised similarity to them all and if it were not for the Chinese food and Chinese people one could almost be anywhere in the world. Along the way we enjoyed visits to the amazing discovery of the Terracotta Warriors at Xian, The Great Wall of China - both in Beijing and again at the western end of the wall at Jiayuguan, - we visited various isolated Buddhist caves, temples, Grottoes and the Labrang Lamasery in Little Tibet where 3,000 monks lead austere lives, studying among other subjects, medicine and philosophy. We also visited a desert fortress, buried desert cities, mosques and many oases along the Silk Road . There still remains enough of ‘old China ’ in this part of the world to whet the appetite of intrepid travellers and satisfy our photographic eye.
We found the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang mind bogglingly huge, it is an area that shares its long 5,600 km borders with eight different countries, and is home to 13 distinct ethnic minorities, each with different cultures and languages, many of whom follow the Muslim culture of dress and religion and whose features belong more to the Central Asian countries rather than to that of the Han Chinese who came late to the region, but who now make up 40% of the population. We were in a politically sensitive area of China , where because of local unrest, the government had closed down the telephone and internet services last year and where in some cities we saw a strong military presence in the form of patrols of baton and gun welding squads on the streets. Each city had its large central ‘Peoples Square’ where community activities were held in the evenings, such as concerts, group exercising, line dancing, and where families promenaded with their child or grandchild. (Only city people are limited to one child, minorities and farmers are allowed two children. People have come to accept this as the norm and generally have no problem with this policy) Public transport and taxis are plentiful and cheap, while private car ownership is as yet limited to government officials, entrepreneurs and the few who can afford it; as a consequence, road traffic is not yet heavy. No one seems to follow any road discipline, therefore bad driving is the norm, vehicles park on the pavements as they are not allowed to park on roads, which in turn makes it difficult for pedestrians. a large numbers of silent, electrically driven cycles, scooters and trishaws also add to the problem. I read in the ‘China Daily’ newspaper that in one part of China they had just had a traffic jam, or rather a gridlock; an incident occurred that caused 7,000 trucks carrying coal to a power station to back-up and blocked roads for a week. We left our Wendy Wu Tour at Urumqi and travelled six hours south by train to the Gobi desert town of Hami; quoted by Marco Polo for its melons and hospitality. We were to spend two wonderful weeks catching our breath in the company of local girl Youzhi, and her French husband Jerome who are our delightful neighbours in England . Because of Youzhi and her parents we gained a great insight into Chinese day to day life and met people and went to places which we might not otherwise have done so. As foreigners we were an oddity and were frequently stopped by school children who wanted to try out their English skills on us, in return we learned that Hami’s population was 300,000 and that the local economy is based upon the production of melons, dates, raisons, coal and oil. Before leaving China we spent a further two weeks in the company of Mary and her artist husband, Professor Qing, they live in the very modern, coastal city of Qingdao where the recent Olympic Sailing events were held and which at the turn of the last century had been a German Colony. – When the Germans were ousted, they left behind some fine Gothic buildings and a brewery that is still in production today. (30 pence a bottle). Qingdao is a city of newly built skyscrapers, high-rise apartments, elevated expressways, beaches, parks and incredibly designed public buildings and universities. The city is both a naval port as well as a manufacturing hub for electronic and electrical goods. We were greatly impressed with the city, which is still being torn down and developed at an incredible rate. The layout and buildings at their newest university surpasses anything we had seen elsewhere; it has 25,000 students resident on campus. Despite their busy lives, Mary and Qing were great hosts, they found time to take us on walking and bus tours around the city, visiting markets, back lanes, academia, gallery art openings and exhibitions. Most evenings were spent sharing an evening meal, chatting and learning much about China . We left all too soon. A comfortable, ten hour, day-time express bullet train to Shanghai was our final leg through China . We arrived in pouring rain and were thankful that for once we had a pre-booked hotel waiting for us. Our plan was to visit the International World Expo for two days and shop for one, but because of the inclement weather and the horrendous queues, we managed just one day at Expo. Despite the exhibition covering several sq kms and being excellently organised, the various national pavilions had great difficulty coping with the over 400,000 visitors each day. We enjoyed looking at the brilliant and often quirky architecture of the pavilions, and found the few we managed to visit tremendously enlightening. It was time to go home; China had not only been interesting, but also an eye-opener. The silk route had lived up to our expectations, but we had not expected to find yesterday’s third world communist China in such an advanced, progressive and reasonably open state; they are on course to catch up and perhaps overtake the developed world in a very short time. It is debatable whether China will remain communist in name only or even be able to maintain its strict authoritarian rule, The future however seems bright, but has the potential for great turmoil.
Roy and Jean
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Hello
folks Here
we are,
another year
and as young
as ever (
we'll get)
Our month in
California
and our two
months
sojourn here
in the gated
community of
Belle Isle,
South
Carolina,
continues at
a pace
between stop
and slow.
The weather
is starting
to cheer up
with the
arrival of
some sun and
warm
southerly
breezes,
it's
predicted to
get even
better over
the rest of
the week.
Not too far
north of
here; just
over the
state-line
into North
Carolina, is
the broad
expanse of
Kitty Hawk
Beach from
where the
Wright
brothers;
(Wilbur and
Orville)
found time
to break
away from
their
cycle-repair
business, to
design and
build a
plane, in
which they
managed to
make the
first
controlled,
powered and
sustained
heavier-than-air
human
flight, on
December 17,
1903. What
an
achievement!
We
are now
ensconced in
a nice
timber
shingled
condominium
within the
gated
community of
Belle Isle,
it is an old
rice/indigo
plantation
just out of
Georgetown
between the
Pee Dee and
Sampit
rivers. As
we look
outside
through the
window we
can see a
bitterly
cold wind
blowing off
Winyah Bay,
causing long
scraggy
beards of
grey moss to
swing eerily
in the giant
Live Oaks
that dot the
almost
deserted
estate. Brrr!
Climate
Change! what
Climate
Change? We
seem to have
jumped out
of the
icebox into
the fridge.
Since being
here we have
spotted
plenty of
ibis, wild
grey deer
and a
possum, but
as yet no
sight of the
terrepins or
alligators
crawling up
out of the
surrounding
swamps, I
guess it is
still too
cold for
them to come
out and bask
on the
lawns. Most
of the
people on
the estate
are retirees
whose idea
of a walk is
to drive
their
golf-carts
from one
neighbour to
another. I
think our
being here
has lowered
the average
age by 15-20
years! From
time to time
we drive the
four miles
into
Georgetown
to buy
provisions
from the
huge
emporiums of
Piggly
Wiggly or
Walmart
supermarkets,
or if we
want a real
bargain then
we wander
into one of
the Doller
Stores.
Georgetown
is a
historical
township
with avenues
or Live Oaks
and a quaint
boardwalk
along the
riverfront,
its beauty
is somewhat
marred
however by
the presence
of two huge
factories -
A paper mill
producing
Kraft paper
and a Steel
Mill
producing
reinforce
wiring. Just
north of
here lies
the resort
of Myrtle
Beach which
has over a
hundred golf
courses and
many other
attractions,
so there are
never a lack
of places to
eat out at
or visit.
Well, that
is it for
this time,
we hope that
you are all
well a What
is the
weather like
where you
are? 
The
10 years of the Cultural Revolution from 1965-75
was a period of total madness that achieved
little if anything; it humiliated and destroyed
the spirit of those who possessed knowledge,
with so-called ‘re-education programs’, and it
destroyed everything that was old and precious.
Our
land route from Beijing went via Xian,
Lanzhou, Xiahe, Jiayuguan, Donhuang, Turpan,
Korla, Kuqa, Aksu and Kashgar and led us
eventually to the remote north west of China, to
the city of Urumqi, which is