Christiane Visits Number 10 Downing Street
Christiane Link describes her visit to Number 10 Downing Street in Durch die Teeküche zu Gordon Brown (Through the tea-kitchen to Gordon Brown).
(My translation)
In front of Number 10 the security people came out and laid two ramps at the entrance, and in a moment I was in the building - but not in the room, not yet.
…
We surrendered our cell phones, and then a worker accompanied me to an elevator. This ancient building actually had a rusty elevator. It was minute, but I just fit. On the first floor we found ourselves in a narrow hallway with thick carpets, valuable decorations and a thoroughly British design. And we stood in front of five steps. But there was a stairlift.
…
An employee apologized that I now would have to go through the kitchen. We weren’t going to go in at the front of the meeting-room, but from the back. In the tiny kitchen there were many helping hands cleaning up, after perhaps having just served tea.
…
I came into the room without even one step, and perhaps I’d seen more of Number 10 than most.
She adds, though, that there is a petition asking “the Prime Minister to remove the stepped approach to 10 Downing Street to create equal access for disabled people.”
Rabby Followup
Following up on Hauled off the Plane, LapLap, a regular FlyerTalk poster, has gotten a response from the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department concerning its regulations regarding blind passengers:
Here are the responses from www.cad.gov.hk
“Thank you for your email. The Civil Aviation Department has issued a Flight Operations Notice to all local operators in April 2008 reminding them to take necessary steps to facilitate persons with disabilities. Persons with disability should NOT be refused air transport on the grounds of their disability or lack of mobility, except ONLY for reasons which are justified on the grounds of safety.
Passengers with reduced mobility shall be seated where they will not obstruct emergency exits, impede the crew in their duties, obstruct access to emergency equipment or hinder aircraft evacuation. ”
When I made further enquiries about the aisle seat rule I got this response:
“We have not issued any other guidelines on the seating arrangement for the blind passengers. The guidelines given in the Flight Operations Notice (04/2008) do not prohibit blind passengers from taking up aisle seats.
Public Relations Officer
Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department”
Scott Rains has also posted a followup on Rolling Rains containing letters from Mr. Rabby:
Mr. President, within the past three months China has staged what are generally regarded as the most impressive Olympic and Paralympic games ever. While the whole world was watching you showed us the best China has to offer. However, the two experiences I have related to you lead me to wonder if China’s Olympic and Paralympic face was only its public face, and if there lurks, behind that public face, a hidden reality which, at least for the blind and disabled, tells a different story far less wholesome and far less welcoming.
Thank you, LapLap and Scott.
My Relapse: the Play by Play
Last week, I could stand briefly unassisted, walk with forearm crutches for short distances, dress myself, roll over in bed, and do 5K in under 35 minutes. This week, not so much.
Last weekend I went up to the YMCA of the Rockies with my choir. We do this every year - we goof around, go on hikes, eat and drink too much, sing way too much, then give a concert at the Stanley Hotel on Sunday afternoon. I, of course, planned to be a model of moderation, going to bed every night at 9:30 and hardly getting drunk at all.
Generally about half way through the day I need to lie down and stretch out my legs, so we always have a couch set up in the rehearsal area as well.
The first time I laid myself on the sofa during a rehearsal, I had to get someone to lift my legs off the sofa so I could transfer back to the chair.
The second time I laid myself on the sofa during rehearsal, I couldn’t physically sit myself back up again, and somebody had to both lift my legs off the sofa and pull my torso upright so that I could transfer back to the chair.
The third time I laid myself on the sofa (I know, at this point you’re saying, “No! Stay away from that sofa! It’s cursed!” but, like a clueless character in a horror film, I just kept going back) two guys had to pick my whole self up and put me in the chair.
Sunday morning I took a shower. Now, the bathroom had lights, a fan, and a heater, all of which were wired to the same switch. Unless I wanted to shower in the dark, the heater was going to be on (now you’re saying, “No! Heat bad!”). Luckily, the Y offered two water temperature choices, too hot and too cold, so I sensibly went with too cold. It was also some serious work to get into the tub, since the shower chair was about 4 inches higher than and 10 inches away from my chair, and there was only one grab bar, at the front end of the tub.
Shower done, I managed to straggle back out into the room, but decided I had exactly one transfer left in me. I decided to transfer to the bed rather than to the floor, to make it easier on whoever was going to have to retrieve my body. It was 9:00 am, and we had to be packed and out of the lodge by 10:00.
So I’m lying on the bed, wet hair, overheated and shivering at the same time, covered with only a towel, and Dear Reader, I was done. I got out my cell phone and called my friend P (who as far as I knew was just in the next room). She wasn’t - she was hiking up a mountain. Bless her heart, though, she decided that if I was calling for help, the least she could do was run back down the mountain and come help me. Ten or fifteen minutes later there were people in my room, dressing me and packing my stuff. They bundled me into someone’s car and we drove to the Stanley. From that point on, somebody was always with me, feeding me lunch, carrying my music, hauling me on and off sofas so that I could rest, and yes, helping me in the bathroom. After the concert someone else drove me home and poured me into bed, where I have remained (more or less) ever since.
Oh, except for Tuesday morning. Tuesday mornings I meet with my trainer at the gym. With some difficulty, I persuaded my husband that this was still an important thing to do - not to lift weights, per se, but to evaluate where I’m at and what I can do - that makes sense, right?.
So I got dressed (big accomplishment), got in the car (big accomplishment), my husband drove me to the gym, I told my trainer the short story of my last 4 days, and we went for any easy warm up around the track.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says. “Shouldn’t you rest? How long have you been resting?”
“Since Sunday!”
“Only since Sunday? I don’t think this is a good idea.”
So with both of them (husband and trainer) staring me down, I got back in the car and went home. Rats. Foiled again.
The moral of the story is, relapsing sucks. But it’s good to have friends.
Italy - Tours in Rome
We invested in two paid tours while in Rome, and I think it was money and time well spent. All my adult traveling life I have shied away from organized tours, but in the months leading up to this vacation my head was starting to explode from the effort of cramming adequate background information in, so I decided to let someone else do at least a little of the heavy lifting.
Context Rome’s Classical Rome
How do you find a walking tour of an busy ancient/modern city that is wheelchair-friendly? I gleaned the names of a number of tour companies from website reviews, guidebooks and my own googling. I was attracted to Context Travel initially for a number of reasons; the groups are small (6 people) and how can you not love a corporate description that includes the words “didactic” and “erudite”? Context was also the only company that actually had the word “wheelchair” appear anywhere on their website without the word “no” somewhere in its immediate vicinity.
A slight digression: use Google’s site search to find a particular word or phrase on a given website. This is great when the website’s own navigation isn’t going to cut it. Plug the phrase “wheelchair site:contexttravel.com” into Google, and you get Context’s Rome Frequently Asked Questions, which includes the faint suggestion that wheelchair touring of Rome is a possibility.
Anyway, we looked over Context’s list of Rome walks, and email to ask about the Classical Rome, Imperial Rome, Rome Antica and Arte Vaticana walks. A Context representative responded promptly:
Thank you for your inquiry with Context. In terms of the Vatican, we unfortunately cannot have wheelchair users on the small group walks because the Vatican requires people with wheelchairs to take a completely different route through the museums, which bypasses many of the galleries we cover on the small group walk. It is this difference in route that requires us to have wheelchair users book the walk privately, though we do provide a discount in these cases as there is no option of the private walk.
For the other walks, I would strongly warn against the Roma Antica. There is no paving on either the Palatine Hill or the Forum, which makes it nearly impossible to bring the wheelchair into these areas. We attempted this several years ago and unfortunately the site is made so unfriendly in terms of accessibility that it was near impossible. Therefore, I would recommend the Imperial Rome walk, which covers the Colosseum and the Trajan’s Markets. There is quite a bit of distance to wheel in between the sites, but I will leave that to your discretion as far as what you feel you will be able to handle. Both the Colosseum and the Trajan’s Markets are wheelchair accessible with ramps and elevators, so getting inside the sites should not be a problem. All told, the distance between the sites is about 1.2 miles. If you want to check out the route on a map, we begin at the entrance to the Palatine Hill (via di San Gregorio 30) and often end inside the Trajan’s Markets (though sometimes we just view it from the outside if time is short), which is on via IV Novembre.
In terms of the Classical Rome, the only restriction you might find would be that some of the docents visit the underground areas of San Nicola in Carcere, which are not accessible. However, not all of the docents do this and so I’m sure they would just modify the route. Otherwise the restrictions here might come from distance, which is about 1 mile (from Piazza Bocca della Verita to the Pantheon) over areas of the city that are often just cobblestones.
Based on this and on our belief that we could adequately tour the Colosseum by ourselves, we chose Classical Rome, and were very pleased. Our docent was Saskia Stevens, an Oxford PhD student in archeology. Her love for the subject matter was evident, and she placed what we were seeing in splendid historical context. Her description of what we were seeing in the Roman Fora was especially cogent and enlightening. The other two couples on our tour were fresh off the boat/airplane and were pretty jetlagged/exhausted - one couple dropped out about halfway through. Saskia also gave me one of the Italian phrases I used the most often in restaurants: servietta bagnata (ie, a wet napkin to clean off my grimy wheelchair pushing hands before eating). She also showed us the other wheelchair route up Monte Capitolino.
Laura Weinstein, Vatican Museums
I was bemoaning Context’s unwillingness to have me on the Vatican Museum tour to a friend, and he recommended Laura Weinstein (email: lauraweinstein@aol.com). Laura has been living in Rome for 4 years. In her previous life, she produced documentaries for the National Geographic, Discovery Channel, PBS and others, and is now working on a project about Caravaggio (sad to say, we only saw 2 Caravaggios the whole time we were in Italy!). She was game to try a wheelchair tour of the Vatican Museums, so off we went.
This was one of the few places where I paid full price admission as a wheelchair user. Mary Hanson, in her very useful series articles on accessible Rome, says that discounted admission is available. We asked about this, and were told that I needed an card from the commune (sounds like the German museums wanting my Behindertenausweiss [official disability identification]), so we didn’t try to argue.
We met in front of Saint Peter’s at about two in the afternoon (Laura told us the afternoon would be less crowded, and it was) and walked around the walls of Vatican City while Laura gave us some introductory information. Once inside and paid, we admired the reproduction of Laocoön in the entry as we were not going to be able to see the original (I’m still mourning the inaccessibility of the Pio-Clementine Museum, which includes the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere). Laura provided a very nice précis of the history of early Christianity and its relationship to Rome, after which we whipped through the Pinacoteca, followed by (not necessarily in this order, because I’ve forgotten) the Gallery of Tapestries, the Gallery of Maps, the Candelabra Gallery (which I studied in great detail while Laura and my husband were in the inaccessible Etruscan Museum), and the Raphael Rooms (ah! The School of Athens!).
Laura oriented us to the Sistine Chapel frescoes using the display boards provided in the Pinecone Courtyard. Access to the Sistine chapel was via platform lift (being repaired as we appeared, which was accomplished fairly quickly) and extremely steep Ramp of Death (do not try this on your own!). Then we dashed out of the museum complex in order to walk all the way around the walls of Vatican City again in order to get to St. Peter’s Basilica before it closed at 7:00 pm. (Note that there is a direct route between the Sistine Chapel and the Basilica, but it involves stairs, so as a “strict wheelchair user” [Laura's apt phrase], we went around.) We had about twenty minutes in St. Peter’s before we were shooed out.
The tour was an intense overview of an incredible amount of material, and it was great to have Laura’s guidance.
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