phase shifting into next week...

holding patterns...

2011-10-12T03:26:00.000+11:00

motivation is such a tenuous, yet powerful thing. of late i've had little of it, and none of it's come from me. i've got out of bed in the morning, gone to work. on the weekends i've managed to shake myself into motion because i know that beyond the veil of my bedroom door there is coffee. i get up for the coffee - a ritual habit that gives me some structure to the days that are actually my own. pull on some clothes, stagger into the kitchen, fill the kettle with 500ml of water and set it to boil while i add two dessert spoons of instant brown grit into one of my tall, elegant white mugs and add two tablets of artificial sweetener. the water's generally boiled by the time i've put the makings away. pour. add milk. take it out the front and look at it steam while i have a cigarette i don't really taste and read the morning's news on my phone. it's not much, but it makes me get up, move, survey the day before me, the world around me and their combined potential for myriad wonders.

it's easier during the week. from 8:30AM until 5:00PM my time is not my own and for the time being i'm happy enough for it to be that way. 5 days a week i don't have to think about what's to come next, and i'm usually so exhausted by the end of the day that it doesn't bother me that i don't really do much with myself in the evenings. talk to people online, read the news, watch whatever tv show i've been downloading of late, play a video game, read my book, sleep. wash, rinse, repeat. same shit, different day. it's easier than facing the grim reality of being completely and totally fucking clueless. tonight i spend half an hour playing with a toy aeroplane, transforming it into a robot and back again, just because it took my mind off how much precious time i've been wasting going nowhere.

for the last couple of years, now, i've been waiting for whatever's to happen next. 2 years ago yesterday i landed in Canberra with a couple of bags, a hard drive full of photos and a head full of memories with people to see and a life to rebuild, and proceeded to get on with the business of doing those things that people do - work the week, save a bit of cash each fortnight, go for drinks on Friday, then through random circumstance i met the Green Faerie and suddenly had something to Work Towards.
for three months i was in Canberra and she was in Perth, but that was ok because i knew exactly when and how i'd be fixing this problem. the rest was just patience and logistics, and these are things i've had a lot of practice at.

so the day came and so did i, across the continent to the Old Country and the reunion was sweetness and light but the warm, happy glow of Arriving faded over time, as it inevitably does, and once again i settled in to Wait. Wait for her to get things sorted so that she could move on with her life. Wait for me to get the finances together so that i could have the cash to help us start building a life. Waiting for this, Waiting for that. we'd agreed that plan towards buying a property each with the general view towards renting out one and living in the other, which meant that i needed to rebuild the slush fund i spent through in Europe and to achieve this i needed to earn it, save it, then earn some more. and Wait. so i put my other plans aside for the time being so that i could focus on this goal for the time being which wasn't a horrible thing - i had a girl to love and share my time with and beyond that i'd lost track of what other aspirations i might have had along the way. my 5 Year Plan finally came to fruition 6 months before the delivery date - i finally got the Team Leader job i'd been working towards for years, and after a brief celebration i looked forward looking for the next set of goalposts and saw... nothing, so i Waited, figuring that something would show up soon enough.

spin forwards a year and the Faerie and i went our separate ways amicably after agreeing that some differences of opinion are just too profound to ignore or gloss over, and i found myself still sitting in the wilderness with a blank horizon in front of me. having a high-pressure job meant that my career was happily looking after itself, and having the Faerie around meant that i could keep myself busy helping her to achieve her goals while i waited for the time to come to kick off the next stage of mine. now i didn't even have that to occupy myself with - just time on my hands and a lack of motivation. i'd started learning guitar before i left Canberra and continued when i got here, but it's sat in its case for over a year now untouched. i'd started learning German at about the same time, but apart from a few choice words i've not progressed at all. i've really done nothing that i'd consider of any value in all that time - flying around and around in circles looking for a place to land. i'd had a good enough time of it all - i went to the US for Shadow and The Boss's reWedding. i went to Cairns with Matthias (see Berlin: Don't Mention The War) and dived on the Great Barrier Reef. i flung my poi around at the Southbound Festival surrounded by half-naked women dressed as faeries... but i don't feel like i've progressed at all. all i really have to show for it is an amusing photo collection and a Big Fucking Stack of Cash.

a couple of amusing statistics, because numbers amuse me sometimes - if i were to convert it all into Australian Dollar coins and stack them all one atop the other the pile would be roughly as tall as the third highest skyscraper in Perth and weigh 5 and a half times more than me which, if dropped into a swimming pool, would displace 63 litres of water.

it's a fair whack of cash.

and as you'd expect, the having of it provides me with absolutely no joy whatsoever. the important thing is that it's a moderately large hammer with which i can make certain problems go away. if i want to take a week off work and head back to Cairns, for example, i can. my car needs new tyres? sorted. i want to take a friend out to dinner and they don't have any cash until payday? not even a concern.

so i have to ask - what the fuck is the point of having it if i have no fucking clue what the hell do do with it? the Responsible Adult i'm supposed to be by now says i should stick with the plan and Buy A House - that HAS been the goal all this time... but bearing in mind how trapped and tied down i've been feeling for so long now, do i really want to shackle myself to this place for another however many years? i've been feeling the wanderlust building for a while now there is a serious temptation to go and chase the Sunshine. of course, that raises yet more questions. it seems that for the last few years i've followed, rather than led. i followed the Faerie across the country, then followed Matthias to go diving after following Shadow to America, so i wonder whether i really want to hand the steering over to someone else again but... i also don't have a fucking clue what the hell i want to do with myself and i have to admit that this has led me to some extraordinarily interesting places over the last couple of years. if i'd not wound up in Australia's Sandpit pursuing a girl with big brown eyes i'd not have reconnected with Matti again, and i'd not have wound up in Cairns, let alone been invited back.

i wonder if i'm looking at this wrong - am i really relinquishing control, or am i diverting in order to fly alongside a while? and do i really give a fuck, as long as it keeps my life Interesting? because i have to admit that Give A Fuck is a resource that i have in incredibly short supply. for better or worse, i've still not done anything i couldn't walk away from and i can't contemplate doing any different now. i seem allergic to permanence, addicted to transience. i think i'm just about ready to accept that as being part of who i am, rather than something i need to fix. now i just need to find the motivation to actually do something rather than just Waiting for it to happen...

you have to look after you (because no one'll do it for you)...

2011-10-11T03:09:00.003+11:00

the rain's hitting my face through the open visor of my helmet as i ride off down Wanneroo Road, heading for home. i'm 20k over the limit. 30. the bike's barely awake under me, engine loping along as i cruise through suburbia. i've just done my Good Deed for the Day - gone to help someone who needed it. i don't owe him anything, but it was the Right Thing To Do. i should feel good right now... that self-satisfied feeling of knowing you did the Right Thing for the Right Reasons, but i don't. i'm not sure if i feel anything at all. i know, academically, that the air is fresh and clean, but it doesn't buoy my soul like i know it should. i know, logically, that i'm passing the cars around me, but i'm not noticing them. if i check my memory i know that i indicated, changed lanes and overtook, but it doesn't feel like me that did it all. there's music in my ears - i know this to be true. i can hear every word Scroobius Pip says, but i'm not comprehending. i'm insulated, floating in a silent ocean of mental fatigue over a featureless bottom of anger and i'm not sure if i can feel anything at all. just the pinpricks of the rain hitting my face, evaporating almost before they've landed.

i hit Ocean Reef Road and catch a lucky green on the Freeway onramp and hang off for a fast-left and fire through it and let the bike wake up a bit, hitting a dollar-fifty before i've even thought about it before dropping back to a gentle dollar-twenty cruise for the 30km run to the city. meanwhile, i'm sixteen days ago and 3472km away, standing on a beach near Cape Tribulation with a pretty girl under my arm. then i didn't have a care in the world. now i just don't care.

the job i took back in February, i still have. it's been touch and go a lot of the time but every time i've felt like i was ready to pull the pin, toss the grenade and walk away from the impending explosion i've held fire for one reason or another. i've been holding off, for the most part, because i want to have a job with some longevity on my CV. a career of short roles is starting to look bad, despite the solid and steady progression. it helps that my staff have been, for the most part, brilliant. a pleasure to work with. a reason to get up and go to work in the morning. unfortunately the joy ends there and i'm getting sick of being the umbrella that holds off the shitstorm of abuse from above. i can keep it up for a while yet, but how much longer remains to be seen.

i'm 2 weeks ago, enjoying One More Day in the warmth of the Sunshine before heading to Cairns Airport and saying goodbye.
i'm 4 weeks ago, spending my evenings talking online with someone i met only briefly, but who wants to know me better.
i'm 17 months ago, arriving in Perth after 3 days of driving with Shadow across the country to be greeted with tears and kisses.
i'm 2 years ago standing outside Canberra Airport, feeling like i'm Home for the first time in forever.

chasing a feeling, more than a place. a need to feel something beyond numb and angry, weary and betrayed. to feel like i'm in control again, however transitory and self-delusional it might be. soon i'll make my move - when the stars align and the way forward is clear. in the meantime i'll be making my plans and watching the signs, waiting until the time's right to set myself Free again...

16 jobs in 9 years...

2011-02-14T02:38:00.001+11:00

i'm what you might refer to as a "Career Contractor". i started my first one about an hour after completing my final tutorial for uni in October 2002 and I've been going on like that ever since. one month here, a fortnight there, 6 months somewhere else. the longest i've stayed in any one place, employment-wise, was just under 3 and a half years when i worked for a Large Federal Department. that was 4 separate contracts and three distinct job titles. the shortest was 6 days, working for Gatehouse Bank in London. i worked for Celine (part of the Louis Vuitton Fashion Group at the time) for just a touch longer. i've had a couple of Permanent jobs over the years, but they've never lasted and for one reason or another i've always wound up back in the contracting space.

for those who don't follow the varieties of employment arrangements, a "contract" differs from a "permanent" job more or less as follows:

- you're generally employed to provide a specific service, generally for a specific time frame. the idea is that you can bring someone in to fill a gap, say, cover for someone going on Long Service or Maternity Leave. they sit in the seat while they're needed then they're gone when they're not.
- you don't receive paid holidays, sick leave or anything else. if you're crook and can't come in, you don't get paid.
- you generally get paid more. a contractor needs to cover their own superannuation/pension out of the fee they receive, as well as cover themselves for any leave they want to take. the value of this comes to around 11% above the standard permanent salary, although individual contract rates can differ from this vastly. when pricing myself, i always bear that in mind and make sure that my requested rate takes this into account (i usually ask for 20% more than the perm expectation so that they can bargain me down a little without cutting into my income)
- at the end of your term there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll be extended in the role. your employer can opt to let the contract end, at which point you're back on the meat market.

so there's risk and reward. if you want to work extra hours, come in when you're sick and not take holidays you can earn a tidy packet as a contractor. if you're happy to bounce between jobs and be constantly updating your resume then life can be good and interesting, and if you like having a variety of work to do in different places then it can be really rewarding. i'm fairly good at saving some money for a rainy day, which means that i've been able to take holidays when i want. when i can manage it, i avoid taking sick days and if i can leave my holidays for the "between gigs" times then i'm able to put a fair amount of cash aside quite quickly when i've had to. you can cut and run pretty easily when a job turns out to be crap, and when things time out well sometimes you can find something to fill in a couple of months while you're waiting for something else - a better job that won't be starting for a while, or say, a move across the country. it also means that i've been able to keep my skills updated regularly and keep my resume full of buzzwords that keep new employers happy, so you could say that it's worked out quite nicely. it's a mercenary life - fighting with pimps to make sure you get the money you're worth and they don't screw you on their cut (pimps take a cut of your hourly rate, and if they can up their cut by dropping yours they will), making sure you've always got enough cash coming through in case you go through a dry spell between jobs, or so you can afford to take a holiday every once in a while so that you don't burn out. each contract that comes through has to offer just a little bit more than the last - you're often asked what you were paid in the last job when people judge your "worth". you could have all the skills on the chart, but if you were getting paid half the rate they expect in the last job then you'll be undervalued and there'll be a doubt that you're good enough for the better roles. you're CONSTANTLY chasing an extra couple of dollars at renewals. it may not be about the money, but if you have the same skills as someone who earned $60/hour in their last job and you were earning $40, they're far more likely to get through than you are.

that said, after eight and a half years of this, i'm getting pretty tired. i can write up selection criteria while configuring a new Windows server. my resume gets updated at least every six months, and that means i need to update Linkedin.com and iprofile.com.au every time as well. i keep a folder in my email full of email conversations with various recruitment agents in the towns i want to work (i still get emails from pimps in Melbourne after i briefly looked at working there, not to mention the ones in Canberra who haven't worked out that i live in Perth now. when i went to London i left my phone with my mother for her to look after and she'd get a couple of calls a month from people in various parts of Australia seeing if i was available). networking is a huge part of the game. the problem is that it's tiring. it's semi-constant effort. even when you're in a job you're still keeping in touch with your contacts, seeing what's out there, lining up the next gig. then, each time you leave a job, there are the goodbyes, farewell drinks, collecting email addresses from people who you'll probably never see again, a weekend or maybe a week's break before you're finding your way to a new office, trying to remember the names of your new colleagues and working out who to avoid, who's arse to kiss and who'll be signing your timesheet.

i just got job #16 after three, hour-and-a-half-plus interviews. i was on the market for just over 2 weeks and in that time i interviewed for three jobs, discussed half a dozen more and was offered two (i'd like to thank the Western Australian Skills Shortage). it's another perm. as i mentioned earlier, i've never had a lot of luck with perms. the first one i had was for a Large American-Based Multinational IT Integrator and the corporate culture was horrible. i nearly left on the first day and i only hung around for 5 months because it took 3 months to get the clearance required for my next job (the Large Federal Department). the next perm was almost as disastrous and i left after 9 months with my confidence shot to hell. i moved from there to another perm with a company which folded just in time for me to head off to London. now i'm leaving at the end of a 6 month contract with another Large American-Based Multinational IT Integrator that's left me demotivated and frustrated and walking into a small company that's only been around for 4 years. why these guys?

well, for a start it's because it's a Team Lead job. i've been chasing TL work for the last year or so now. not exclusively by any means - i'm certainly not desirable enough that i've been able to pick and choose to that extent, but nonetheless it's been on my radar. secondly, i'm getting sick of working for big, faceless IT departments. the jobs i've enjoyed the most have been for the small mobs - the ones where i can remember the names of everyone in the department at the very least. it means that i'm less likely to get pigeonholed in one particular aspect of the role, and i get more of a challenge. lastly, the guy who owns the company is the guy who spent the best part of 5 hours interviewing me and... i like the guy. i like his way of doing business, and i like the direction he intends for his baby. i'll be Employee #10, but this means i'm getting in early in the company's life so there's the potential for me to move smoothly up the hierarchy as the company grows if i can perform. it's SO much easier to gain seniority if you're managing all the new hires than starting at the bottom of a large company and working your way up. this isn't the 50's anymore. you don't start as a clerk in your 20's and work your way up to middle management in the same company before you retire at 65. it's a whole new corporate world these days. there's a joke that goes around IT departments:

How do you get a promotion in IT?
You quit and find another job.

It's sad, but true. with the Baby Boomers hogging all the management jobs and living an extra 20 years than their parents we Gen-X/Y's can't afford to sit around waiting. you look for a hole in another organisation and compete to fill it. OR, of course, you find a small company and try to get in early, and somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy. i like that idea and this has the potential to be a serious career move which is extraordinarily attractive at the moment.

oh, and it helps that he offered me enough cash that i won't be taking too much of a pay cut from what i've been on for the last six months because at the end of the day, career or no, i'm still a fucking mercenary.

by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 2)...

2010-04-26T15:12:00.002+10:00

i've had a couple more days to play with my new toy, and after several nights of disinterest and distraction-fuelled demotivation i'm left with little excuse not to sit down and talk about it, so here we go again...

the thing that sits in my hand...
hardware + software = product: of course they have to work together. look at Motorola in recent years - have you ever been walking down the street and seen a mind-blowingly beautiful girl walking arm in arm with a bloke who looks like a Neanderthal who was dropped on his head one time too many as a child and thought to yourself

"no, seriously, how the hell did that happen?"

that was the Motorola RAZR. brilliant piece of hardware. it was no thicker than my Nokia at the time, but was still a dual-screen clamshell. the keypad was responsive and elegant, the screen bright and easy to read. the software, on the other hand, felt like it had been thrown together as an afterthought. it was unintuitive, slow and bordering on sadistic. it was a Rocky & Bullwinkle phone - designed and built by separate teams who were patently unaware of each others existence and thereby never compared notes.

i'm pleased to announce that in the last week the hardware on the Desire has felt, in a word: solid. it has a heft to it that means it doesn't feel like it's going to fall to pieces in your hand, the rubberised back-plate has a soft, tactile texture that doesn't seem like it's going to squirm out of your hand like a wet fish, whereas the textured aluminium frame around the screen complements it nicely. the glass screen has, thus far, managed to resist scratches, although i need to wipe it down with a microfibre cloth every once in a while to remove the residue from my greasy fingers. this is to be expected - you're designed to touch the thing and you can't spell "wog" without "greasy" - it comes with my genetic heritage.

it's worth noting that the camera is fairly decent. i've seen the shots that the iPhone takes and it makes me wonder why people bother. the 5MP shooter on the back of the Desire is well and truly good enough for Government work. the tiny CCD's in these things will never be as good as their full-sized counterparts in DSLR's, but then that's not what you expected, is it? it's a happy-snap camera and should be treated as such, but having the facility to take a quick shot of someone to add to their entry in your phone book is cute...

i'm liking having the small row of actual buttons along the bottom of the face, if only because it gives me access to the functions they provide at any time without taking up valuable screen real-estate. the screen is Beautiful to look at - photos are clear and crisp, although you do get banding in graduated colours. oh well, i'll survive. the thing is that it's 3.7" diagonal leaves very little space, and fingers are only so small and real estate gets eaten up QUICKLY. i was perplexed for quite some time about the point of the little optical track-ball (of which i liked the addition. the less moving parts the better) until i needed to quickly go back in a text message i was writing. it gives you access to granular cursor movement which is near-on impossible with my finger. in general, it's a well put together little gadget, and the design decisions HTC have made have mostly been for the win.

there are a couple of niggling flaws that have irritated me and made me wonder why, when they've come THIS close to awesome, why HTC didn't put in just a little bit more effort. for starters, i now have Yet Another USB Cable to lug around. i'm not sure at this point in time whether this is another standard, of if HTC have just decided to fuck me for no good reason, but in a world where i have enough Mini-USB cables to just leave one everywhere i go on a regular basis why i now need one with a slightly different end. at least they provided it with a mains-to-USB converter, but still. then you plug it into the phone and notice that there's a 2mm gap between the moulding of the cable and the phone. it looks like it's not plugged in properly, but no - the light's on and a forceful push doesn't yield any further movement, so it MUST be right.

while we're talking about power, the battery life is also a bit of a bone of contention which no one's managed to come up with a decent answer to as yet. there isn't a smartphone on the market that i'm aware of that doesn't need to be charged more often than i need to eat. it DOES nicely get through the day tho - if i take it off the charge first thing Monday morning i reckon i could get to half-way through Wednesday before it ran out of juice, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things, but still. i do miss the days of my old Nokia 3210 which would last a week between charges with moderate use. perhaps i should invest in a small solar charger...

the back plate has received its fair share of scorn on the intertubes - i didn't mind overly much, but then i'm used to having to take the back of my phone to mess with batteries and the like. what bugs me is that if this same company built an almost-identical phone where you could change the Micro SD card on the fly, why the fuck do i have to take the battery out to do it on this one? i understand that i will Rarely If Ever change said card, but... my Blackberry could do it. the Nexus One can do it. how hard can it be, people?

apart from that, i'm pretty happy with it. i've been carrying it around in the pocket of my hoodie a lot of the time and it seems to have suffered not a jot from the occasional knock and bump against things. that said, i'm also yet to drop it so i'll just have to wait and see what the results of THAT little misadventure are when it happens.

ok, so it's pretty and all, but what's it like to USE?
well built hardware, intelligently thought out software, strong integration, these things are wonderful and all, but if it doesn't fit into daily life then all you've got is a very expensive toy which you pretend to use and inevitably sits on the shelf or in a drawer somewhere being of less use to you than tits on a bull.

for starters, it's quick and easy to check. i've spent a fair bit of time fiddling and customising and so on, but it's the work of something like 3 seconds to pull it out of my pocket, unlock the screen, glance across the icons to see if i've received any messages, flick over to my calendar, flick it back to the main screen, lock it and return it to my pocket. i consider this to be fairly reasonable, especially since in that time i've managed to visually confirm the following:

the time
missed calls
SMS/MMS messages
emails
my next calendar appointment/reminder
received Gtalk messages

that's a fair bit of information available at a glance.

when i walk in the house, or into the office, or arrive at various friends' places, the wifi automatically connects and synchronises to the various online resources i use. i have, at time of writing, not shelled out or a 3G data plan, and while i'm in no rush to do so i expect it's not far around the corner just for the sheer convenience (and because i can claim it off my tax - this is something of a motivator).

i've found that i pull it out in those brief tens of seconds where i'm waiting for something. i've installed a couple of newsfeeds (Slashdot and Engadget being primary) which update themselves and then sit quietly in the background, so instead of staring out into the distance when i'm waiting for the kettle to boil i can quickly flick through a couple or articles. i use a portal-app which connects to Skype, so i can now use my phone as a Skype Handset. if i want to have a video call i just chat while i power up my laptop, log into Skype-proper hang up and redial. it's just another way that i manage to make myself more connectible to people who it'd be FAR too expensive to call over the cellular network.

i have NOT, however, installed any games. there's one game that came pre-installed and which i can't seem to remove and about half of the people i've handed the phone to so they can have a look at the latest hotness (it'll be yesterday's news in another week or so - such is the nature of technology - but for the time being few people in Australia have had a real chance to play with Android so there's a lot of curiosity) will find it inside of a couple of minutes and have a play. frankly, if i wanted to play games on the go i'd give Nintendo money for a DS. i come under the category (more or less) of a "hardcore" gamer, rather than a "casual" gamer. i want immersion (and preferably explosions and gunfire or at least limbs flying off and blood splattering the landscape), so little games that fill in 5 minutes at a time are of little interest to me. there are things to read, information to assimilate, news to be updated on. i like to be connected and informed - this is what is important to me and so i have configured my phone to provide this in a dense, easily accessible format.

one other UI element that bears mentioning is the integration that Google have provided within Android. when i first started setting the phone up i imported my old contacts into the phone's database, connected the mail client to gmail and logged into Facebook through the provided application. Android is smart enough to realise that you may well have a lot of the same people across these various contact lists, and so it gives you the option to link them together into one meta-record. THIS, is too fucking cool for words, since now all i have to do is look someone up in the contacts list and get access to their phone number, any address they've emailed me from, ever (and that includes the online records in my gmail - i type in Julia and i get not just my friend here in Canberra, but a recruitment agent in London i've not had any contact with in over a year. this is seriously fucking awesome), as well as giving me their latest Facebook status, right there in their contact listing. if i want to know more i can click on that and it brings up Facebook so that i can comment on it, or see what else is going on. it's stuff like this that gives me a big, geeky hard-on, and it gets even better when i show that to iPhone users who proceed to lose their fucking minds with jealousy and say things like "Holy Shit... I can't do that!"

so has the Desire fit nicely into my life? yes, yes it has. for me it's an Enabler. for example, now when i make a batch of pikelets i can quickly and easily take a photo and share the moment with my girlfriend (who lives on the other side of the country) cheaply, and easily, without finding my camera, taking the shot, having to down-res it so that it won't take 5 minutes to send and receive... hey, look at me in a silly pose! i'll send her a copy! click, send. done. being 3700km away from each other for several months is painful, but now we send photos of ourselves back and forth on our smartphones and it doesn't seem so far.

so has the Desire made my life easier? yes, yes it has. has it done this any better than alternative products in the marketplace? possibly, possibly not - not having an arsenal of different phones that i've been able to test has made that particular question difficult to assess, but i'll say this much: i couldn't have done it as well or as easily, or wrapped it around my finger so nicely if i'd bought a fucking iPhone...

on why i hate Apple...
half my life ago when i was a young lad, my first ever job with at the Apple Centre in Perth, Western Australia. those were the days when every Apple product was a beige desktop with the rainbow Apple logo, laptops and portable devices were a matte black, Microsoft was The Enemy and Bill Gates was the Great Satan. it was one plucky little fruit company (another in a long line of technology startups that started in a couple of uni students' garages) against the Evil Empire. i was decidedly uncool amongst my friends because i Had A Mac, so while they were playing the Tie Fighter: Defender of the Empire and Mechwarrior i was playing Ambrosia shareware games and drooling over whatever Bungie were bringing out next. i loved my Mac - we'd never had an IBM-PC in the house and i had no idea what the fuck to do with DOS. working in the Apple Centre was a dream-come-true, and not just because they let me buy stuff at cost+5%. i'm sure i must have spent as much as i earned on kit and it's only because my folks subsidised my technology purchases (on the proviso that dad got all the good kit and i got the leftovers at least 50% of the time) that i had any cash left over at all.

the PowerMac 7500/100 i bought for $3000 had 16MB of RAM when i got it (i gradually upgraded it over the years with second-hand parts i traded customers for) and a 1GB Hard Drive. it lasted me for about 5 years of constant modding, upgrading and fiddling around before the motherboard finally gave up the ghost and it refused to boot and by this time i'd moved out of home and learned this little thing i call "fiscal reality" (which more or less comes down to the fact that you only earn so much and you can't keep begging your folks for cash so that you can have cool toys AND eat) so when i needed to replace it so that i'd have something to do my uni assignments on i bit the bullet and decided that it was time to learn how to do things in Windows so i got a friend to help me select parts and we built my first PC by hand. it was a learning experience, but a worthy one. there weren't a lot of Mac-specialist jobs going, i knew i'd be graduating in a year or two and i'd need to have some Windows skills or i'd have a hard time earning money. that, and i wanted to play games and up until that point games were something that happened to other people - people who had Windows PC's. Windows 2000 wasn't the prettiest User Experience on the planet, especially when Mac OS X first started showing off its glossy face to the world, but it certainly didn't lack options for fiddling and i learned fast

so the years passed and i became a Windows God while Gil Amelio got the boot as Apple CEO and Steve Jobs came back in from the cold (where he'd helped build a failed tech startup called NeXT and a wildly successful animation studio you may have heard of called Pixar) to be the "Interim" CEO and we started to see the various multi-coloured iMacs appearing in the world and i'd occasionally wander into an Apple Store somewhere and ponder whether i could afford to pick up one of these nifty lampshade iMacs or one of the new PowerBooks that were coming out in brushed aluminium (i couldn't).

then came the iPod, and it was awesome - all the portable MP3 players on the market had been gelded with minuscule amounts of storage, shite battery lives and zero audio quality. the only decent one i could find on the internet had small hard drive (a couple of gig from memory) and was made by a French company called Archos. i wanted one as desperately as a 13 year old boy who just hit puberty and has suddenly worked out the recreational use for breasts, but there were no Australian resellers and getting one in from the US was ridiculously expensive. then, suddenly, the iPod was EVERYWHERE. i was happy enough with my old Sony MP3 Discman so it was a while before i did some research and realised that the iPod was a fraud. sure, it was the greatest thing since the application of knives to bread except for one thing: it had one important flaw which was iTunes - the only way to get music on and off the thing, which meant that when i went over a friend's place i COULDN'T just give them a couple of songs by a new band to check out, and they couldn't return the favor. to make matters worse, when i installed iTunes to muck around with it i found to my digust that it had gone and rearranged and renamed all of my music and i couldn't find anything anymore. iTunes meant Control - and the entity in control was not me. this didn't seem to bother the average punter. they wanted their music on the go. they wanted it to be made easy for them, and Apple provided, not by making it easier for them to learn and become smarter, but by enabling them to be ignorant.

don't get me wrong - i'm an Egalitarian at heart. you shouldn't have to be a member of the technorati to be able to use a computer. it's just that i'm also a Darwinian with a firm belief that we should be striving to move forward as a species. giving the less educated/savvy/interested the tools to enable them to participate in the Great Technological Revolution of the Information Age is fantastic. REMOVING THE ABILITY OF TO STRIVE FOR MORE, on the other hand, is contrary to my guiding beliefs.

THEN, Apple released the iPhone, which took this philosophy of Control to all new heights. here was a device with so much potential, half of which Apple wouldn't let you access. take Bluetooth, for example. it's a short-range communication protocol allowing devices to connect wirelessly and (vaguely) securely. on my Desire i can use it to connect to my computer to transfer small files quickly and easily, or connect to my car's handsfree kit, or beam photos back and forth from my friend's phones. on the iPhone you can only collect to headsets. sometimes. when it feels like it. Apple say they're "ensuring a positive end-user experience". what they're doing is ensuring that you can only use the device the way THEY can you may. it's like you're renting the device from them, rather than buying it. imagine buying a car and being told you're only allowed to drive it between the hours of 1PM and 11PM, and do to otherwise would void your warranty? or if you pulled up to a petrol station and weren't allowed to put in petrol because you drive a Ford and the station will only sell fuel to BMW's? what the fuck?

then the iPad came out and any enthusiasm i may have had for those arseholes had finally evaporated into nothingness. it's a device that i've been waiting to be built for years - a small, light tablet that i can carry around and use as a portable life-extender. to be able to quickly whip it out at a cafe and read the news, or upload photos from my camera on the fly... but it doesn't even have a fucking card reader. what the fuck is the point? for the same price i can have a little ASUS EeePC that takes a minute or so to boot up, but on which i can do everything i need, AS WELL AS type at a rate of 1200 words and hour. it's a toy that the media can whip up a frenzy about, which could have been so useful, and has instead been limited to being a bright shiny toy that you don't even own properly because the only way to get your media onto it is over the internet or from fucking iTunes. it's the Christian-Communist mentality that says "do what we say the way we say it or we will cast you from the Garden". yes, i just called Apple Communists. get over it. prove i'm wrong. the point is that it COULD have been incredible. i look at it and can't help but wonder when the adult version is coming out. the version with all the features, the things they could have added at the cost of a couple of dollars extra, but they didn't include them. it's not because they had to cut costs, or because it was technically infeasible - they Specifically Decided Not To, because this they wanted to nerf their own product.

and the world praised them for it and flocked to hand over their money, because here's yet another unchallenging product from the company renouned for making shiny, pretty toys. they treat us like we're fucking children and in return we love them for it. gods-bless us.

at the end of the day what offends me most is that they are willfully limiting our ability to learn and grow. the whole "hacker" movement was driven by a curiosity to know what was going on behind the curtain, to reveal the Wizard and find out what the wheels and levers did, and then to recombine them to make them do something no one had ever thought to do before. it's Innovation, and Apple is intentionally stifling it, as if to say "how dare you look under the bonnet and see how we do what we do? how dare you have the conceit to second-guess us and think you might be able to do it better?" if Apple sold a car it would come with the bonnet sealed shut, and this offends me. it locks people into a single ecosystem that's even more closed than the Microsoft/Intel monopoly of the mid-90's and prevents people from having the opportunity to play and grow.

technology is and has always been a tool for us to improve our lives. we bend it to our will, not the other way around. it should be a framework that gives us options, rather than limiting is in how we are permitted to use it.

that's my underlying problem with the Fruit Company from Cupertino - they've gone from being the company that gave us a Second Way to manipulate information and become a Totalitarian state, determined to kill off outside innovation and keep the common people in a constant state of consumerism, baying for the next shiny bauble, rather than encouraging people to move forward and create. they are the embodiment of the divide between the creative and technical elite and the seething masses. it's a betrayal of the ideal that when the geek inenherited the earth we'd bring everyone with us rather than encouraging them to keep quiet... and i may be naive and i may be idealistic and i might be completely fucking wrong about the ability of my fellow man to cast off the shackles of ignorance and move forward into the light... but then if that's wrong i don't want to be right.

and that's why i hate Apple.

so where do we go from here?
so i have this phone and it's buzzed a few times while i lie in bed listening to Incubus, writing this and... you know what? it makes and receives phone calls. it allows me to write and read SMS messages. and emails. and receive Skype calls, and share photos and read the news, find True or Magnetic North and even tell me what street i'm standing on. once was the time it would take me at least 5 different devices to do all that and now it's all wrapped into a nice, neat little package. that's pretty fucking cool. has it become integral to my continued existence as a human being?

we're not talking about a cure for cancer here, or a viable solution for world hunger, or a system of living that overthrows the corporate-masculine-oligarchy. it's a fucking phone. a mini computer that condescends to make calls. that said, it's a bloody awesome tool which i'm finding extremely entertaining and unbelievably useful. there's more mucking around to be had before i'll feel like i'm done. for example, i want to find a way to set it so that when it connects to particular wireless networks certain applications stop or start, so that when i get home it automatically logs me onto Skype and makes me available to receive calls, but disconnects at all other times. that would be useful, and the voice recognition protocols are pretty haphazard for anyone who doesn't have an american accent.

still at the end of the day i bought a Desire because i wanted one, and it's about as good as these devices are going to get for the next month or two so i'm pretty happy with that. if i had to make the choice again i would, which is about as high-praise as you can give to a piece of consumer tech, isn't it?

by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 1)...

2010-04-21T01:09:00.002+10:00

i can haz a present!
i stumbled into work yesterday morning to find a Tyvek envelope with FedEx written all over it. 2-4 days: my arse - i ordered this thing 8 days ago and it was shipped 2 days later. LIES, i tells you. i should have been more excited and tried to tear into it with my teeth but an all-nighter in the office on Saturday night meant that i'd had to sleep through Sunday and i was still paying for it on Monday morning so my customary beer-mug full of coffee had to come first.

Tyvek is a bizarre substance you don't see often in this country. it's aquaphobic like plastic, tears like rip-stop nylon and cuts like paper and like most of the freakishly awesome materials in this world it's trademarked by Dupont. one of my more colourful friends used to make it into origami wallets.

inside was another, padded envelope (overpackaging, much?), protecting a smallish white box with the requisite warranties and whatnot, cables and, presented neatly on top just begging me to grab it and arc it up was my brand new HTC Desire, fresh off the production line from their factory in Taiwan. in one of their many disjointed attacks on the telecommunications world, Google contracted HTC to build them a phone of their own. their Android OS was taking on an appearance in the marketplace of a scitzophrenic monster with more faces than a thai demon with 3 or 4 different revisions floating around on a dozen or so devices from something like 5 different manufacturers and they wanted to put out a device that Did It Right, and so the Google Nexus One was born. it was, for all extents and purposes, pretty fucking awesome. a clear, bright touchscreen with a decently-high resolution, 1GHz (not that the Hertz-rating means anything in consumer electronics anymore, not since the IBM PowerPC 601 chip first came out, or the AMD x2 Dual Core processors later) processor called "Snapdragon", half a gig of RAM and the usual Alphabetti-Spaghetti-Soup of communication-related acronyms - WiFi, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, GPS, BT, etc etc etc. HTC are pretty used to this by now - it was only a couple of years ago they started making phones with their own name on them - before that they built shit for other people to slap a badge on and call theirs.

now, however, they're getting agressive in the marketplace and went "we've got the designs, we've got the kit, why the hell now make own OWN version? so they did and called it the Desire. there were a few changes - the N1 has dual-microphones, one to listen to you and the other to listen to, and thereby cancel out, the rest of the world, as well as a series of electrode connectors on the base so that you can just drop it into a cradle for charging instead of always having to plug it into a cable. the Desire, on the other hand, has a little extra memory and no Google branding on it. oh, and that cradle sells for ~AUD$80 and can, therefore, go and fuck itself. the N1 was also, at time of ordering, AUD$100 more expensive, so guess which way i went on THAT decision? i like Google and their (increasingly rickety) "Don't Be Evil" motto, but not $100-much.

with due consideration of the specs out of the way and my massive mug of coffee cooling quietly across my desk, i plugged in my new toy to get some charge into the branded Lithium-Ion battery while i backed up the contacts and so on from the beat-up old Blackberry Pearl 8120 i've been cruising around with for the last year or so, got my SIM into it quicksmart and turned it on, watching with glee as the splash screen came up accompanied by a bright, loud, happy chirp and the notably paradoxic message "quietly brilliant".

this is how it begins...
gone are the days when you turn on your new phone and the most you have to do before you can actually make a fucking call is set the time. now it's a full-on customisation. a few things struck me straight away: one of the first questions it asked me was whether or not i wanted to connect to mobile internet. no rude assumptions here - not everyone has a data plan, you know, and PAYG 3G Data is ridiculously expensive in some places so let's be polite and ask. i like this, as i have no Data Plan. do i want to connect to a WiFi network? yes, yes i would thanks, and would you believe it - it connects to the office's Server Engineer Only (No noobs!) 802.11g network and associated ADSL line quicker than i can write out the actions. NICE!

a couple of screen taps and i'm staring at the big, fuck-off clock and the shiny, gay-as-a-summers-day background you'll see in any of the advertising material. i didn't even have to set the time. the network is synched with time-servers around the work and will be FAR more accurate than me so it just uses that. i don't have to tell it where i am, either. it's worked it out so there's no need to bother me. would i care to take a tutorial on how to use the onscreen keyboard? i think i'll be fine. my new phone is on, juiced and begging to be touched and stroked. it's a touchscreen - that's what it's fucking for. it's like a little kitten sitting in the palm of my hand with its chin raised and an expression that screams

"i'm EVER so cute so PLEASE pet me!"

so i do. and i feel dirty, but if indecently assaulting electronics is wrong then i don't want to be right...

it's a phone... but is it?
i feel a bit off calling these things "phones". in as much as a phone is a device with which you "call" other phones, enabling communication across great distances and perhaps even send and receive text messages, the Desire is indeed a phone. but then, my laptop does the same thing. is it a phone? if it looks like a duck walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck, right? now my old Nokia 5500 Sport (which to this day refuses to die and lurks in my "Handy Odds & Sods" drawer (what Michael McIntyre would call a "Man Drawer")) is a phone. it makes and receives calls and text messages, can even take photos and be convinced, with some coaxing and cajoling, to send pictures over the cellular network. it has a calculator and a calendar and a couple of games, but at the end of the day its primary purpose in this world is to enable me to communicate with people. the Desire and its ilk - dating back to the old Compaq iPaq's (yes, before HP ate them alive), phone-enabled Palm Pilots, Windows Mobiles and, of course, the iPhone - are not, by this definition, phones. what i'd just started covering in my grubby fingerprints is, in fact, a small computer which also condescends to make phone calls. let's face it - Moore's Law has been rolling uninhibited for nearly 40 years now, and so what i carry around in my pocket has enough processing power to happily negotiate Apollo 11's landing on the fucking moon. i say this with no ego or immodesty - electrickery has just evolved so far that the device i use to call my mum has 1152 times the RAM of the first computer my dad bought when i was six, and 728 times the onboard storage of the old single-sided floppy disks we booted it from. oh, and it costs less than a third what that old Apple Macintosh 512k did (if you disregard 24 years of inflation). gods-bless progress.

but i digress. see, i'm old enough that i remember when phones were these things with big-arse bases, actual bells that rang when a call was coming in (hence the whole idea of a telephone "ringing" they had Fucking Bells Which Fucking Rang) and you weren't to touch because even looking at the damn thing cost money. but then, i also remember when the Internet was brand new and the only good sites on the thing were porn, porn, the Gillian Andreson Testosterone Brigade, porn and a couple of Star Trek vs Star Wars fansites., when spam was a disgusting ham-analogue and you got your knowledge of the world around you from these wads of dead-tree we called "books". yes, i am a fucking dinosaur. when i got my first mobile phone i thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and would keep pulling it out of my pocket and looking at it in case the magic smoke escaped and it'd disappear up its own existence. now i'm looking at a block of aluminium, plastic and glass that is better connected to the world than the Alienware behemoth of a laptop i'm typing on. it's not the future, because i have it right here and now. it is, however, a sign of things to come, and an idea about how we're all going to become a whole lot more interconnected. it's not a phone, it's a "smartphone", which basically means what i've already described: it's a mini-computer that also makes calls. let's just leave it at that and not go into the marketing-speak of "superphones" lest we reach the point where the "uberphone" marshalls its forces and marches on the Rhineland on its way to invading all of Europe and the destruction of all lesser-phones.

but wait, someone's already doing that - they're called Apple.

ok, enough of the phosophising and reminiscing about simpler times, tell us about the fucking phone!
so what's the first thing a geek does when he gets his hands on a new piece of equipment? they start rummaging around in its guts and see what it'll do of course, so i got stuck in wrist-deep looking for its cervix to see if i could make it sing. i have to admit that i was, and in fact had been, underwhelmed by the configurable options. i'd read many a review before i spent my own money on this thing and all the professional reviews (you know - the ones who never have to pay for their own fucking toys) had ejaculated paragraphs about how the HTC Sense interface was customisable and so on. after digging around for a while i came to realise that what they meant was "you can move icons around and stuff". sure, the are 7 screens you can fill with app-launchers and widgets-various, but really all that comes down to is that you're playing jenga with icons until you come up with a combination you can navigate easily. of course, we're talking about people who've been conditioned by Apple's "Thou Shalt Not Touch" iPhone Walled Garden (which i'll discuss more later) that actually having some control over their own goddamn phone must have come as such a shock that they needed to take a little while to lie down and change their underwear. that said, the HTC Sense overlay on Android is pretty damn sweet. i've played around with the basic Android Home Screen and it's alright, but Sense takes a lot of the pain out of the configuration, and adds some of its own magic to the experience. there's a widget for just about anything you want to access quickly - i now have the the big-arse clock displaying along with the current weather, various buttons to turn on/off my wireless functions that drain a LOT of the power, my Google Calendar (synched seamlessly to and from my online account), basic controls for the music player (which keeps playing when i do something else, but pauses when a call comes in. take THAT iPhone 2G/3G bitches!), a Speed Dial launcher with my most-commonly called peeps on it, an overview of my gmail inbox (again, mirrored from my online account) and a screen dedicated to my SMS inbox. it's a work in progress - things will come and go and get rearranged until it's all where i want it.

one of the little features of the HTC Sense widgets is that the weather view changes with the forecast - when it's cloudy outside you get clouds float across the screen when you unlock it. if it's rainy you get raindrops as if it were a windscreen, complete with windscreen wipers that push them away. it's cute, and if i thought it drained too much of the battery i'd kill them in an instant, but i've only had it for 2 days so far and while i know it's probably going to be like the little nasal giggle you thought was adorable when you first got together with your partner and gets old after a year or so, i'll leave it on there until it does... or something better comes along. that's what the Market is for.

the Market - wherein our intrepid adventurer braves Secksi-Time apps, "clever" sound effects and micropayments in search of useful doohickeys that enrich the Android-phone-owning experience...
you've got to have an App Store these days. Apple did it when they brought out the iPhone and it worked pretty fucking well for them, so now where Apple goes the rest of the market follows like a floppy-eared puppy-dog, snuffling around in Steve Jobs' leavings, looking for any money he couldn't be bothered bending over to pick up as it flows like autumn-leaves from his overflowing pockets. that said, it was a ridiculously smart move. until they came up with it, any time you wanted to add functionality to your portable device, be it a Portable Media Player, PDA or phone, you needed to plug it into a computer, juggle the various synchronisation tools and file formats, run the installer and Plug & Pray, and that's after digging through hundreds of virus-ridden websites looking for the app that MIGHT do what you want it to do and MIGHT work on the specific model device you'd dropped your hard-earned on... i did with my old Palm Vx (and Palm III before that) for years, and various Nokia phones after that and i'm here to tell you that it was a fucking Nightmare, so Apple said "Hell - let's do away with the PC altogether? It's internet-connected, why not have everything go straight to the phone? Do not pass the Start Button, do not collect 200 viruses?" and lo, the people were amazed because when they were using their phone and realised that what was missing from their lives was an App that made fart-noises or mimicked drinking a beer when you tilted the handheld, they could indeed have it, and have it in the time it took to type "flatulence" into their onscreen keyboard.

the Android Market works under the same principle, just with a few less body-odor-related Apps and a slightly-lower quality control. Google famously do not censor the Market, but i'm pleased to say that the quality doesn't seem to have suffered too much. there's a robust peer-review function where users can comment and rate the apps, and this pushes shittier apps lower and lower and better apps higher and higher. there are also filters you can use to show only Paid or Free Apps. i, i will take this opportunity to admit, am something of a Freetard. it's not that i WON'T pay for things, it's just... i have to really want it, and there are enough apps around that do what i want that have been written for fun, practice, uni assignments, publicity or just good old-fashioned benevolence that i've not been stuck looking at the One True App that Jesus de Christo from Barcelona wants 5 Euros for the priviledge of using (until your new OS is incompatible or your switch platforms, or the Market-Gods choose to take the App away from you because they favor it no longer). it's a fairly painless experience to use and download from, and being a Google product it has a fantastic search-function.

don't ask me what the Fart Apps are like - i have am yet to become so tired of life that i've been driven to downloading any. i emit enough noxous odors as it is without electonic assistance, thanks for asking.

that will have to do for this evening. in our next thilling adventure i will explore such delights as Call Quality, Typing On Keys That Don't Bounce (aka - what it would be like to live on the Enterprise-D in Star Trek), Generally Living With The Thing And How It's Changed My Day-To-Day Habits and the hate-filled tirade that is Why I Now Fucking Hate Apple...

Snippets #18: it's that time of year again...

2010-03-29T01:06:00.001+11:00

a little over a year ago i sat down to say thanks to number of people who had, in one way or another, influenced my life for the better... whether they'd intended to or not. it's been a long year since then and i've gone through some shit between then and now and while i'd like to stand tall and say i got myself through it... well, if i did i'd be lying. we move through each other's lives, steps in a dance that brings us together for seconds or decades, bouncing off each other, each of us a particle in life's Brownian Motion.

so here's to those i've met and remembered and those i've forgotten, to those you cursed me with their friendship and those who blessed me with hatred, to those who got me drunk and those who kept me alive... especially when they're the one and the same.

Pietre - for showing me just how easy it was to go out for the evening with someone i'd met 5 minutes beforehand.
Dad and my Sister - for showing me how high you can rise and how far you can fall.
Andrew - for getting drunk with me in 3 different countries.
Jacq and Nick - for helping me get back into circus tricks.
Speedfox, Daywalker, Cathy H and The Greyman - for being reliably up for a beer, sitting on the kerb outside the Red Lion and making my last few months in London awesome to the max.
Shadow - for always having something to teach and something to learn, for making my phone ring and always having a pot of tea on the go.
Sandra - for making it so easy to come back to Canberra.
Andrew Duggan - because firing me absolutely made my day, week, month and year.
Rachel - for making my last job interesting and being a particularly awesome reference.
Matt - for showing me it CAN be done, and putting up with my shit at his wedding.
Moonbug - for hanging out with me in yet another part of the world. where next?
Ondine - for being remarkably adaptable.
Shaalwyd - for always having an available ear and turning my life upside down in your driveway.
Matthias - fur Spasse auf Berlin.
Mal - for giving me absolutely no excuse for not being able to play Wish You Were Here.
MCG - for being part of some of my more entertaining stories and taking me to see the Little Mermaid.
The Boy - for never, ever changing.
Brit Pete - for giving my old leather jacket a good home.
Cesky Krumlov - for being such a lovely little town with such great, cheap beer.
Tiernan - for ensuring that there's someone out there who's even crazier and more inappropriate than i am.
Emma - for eliminating the "boring" from my life just when things were starting to get dull, and preventing me from giving up my gypsy lifestyle just yet...

you never can fit it all in, just say what you can. whenever you try to write the "definitive list" of anything you'll finish off, stop your laptop and be lying in bed trying to sleep when you realise you forgot something obvious. as per last year, anyone left off the list can whinge at me directly if so inclined, or alternatively are welcome to take the "go fuck yourself" option: the choice is yours...

the Peter Raven Self Improvement Project....

2010-03-22T15:48:00.000+11:00

it occurred to me about six months ago that apart from learning new skills for work and wandering around Europe i hadn't actually picked up any new skills since... um... shit, you know, i can't remember the last new skill i learned, you know? riding a motorcycle? what was fucking forever ago!

a while, anyway.

now, i work in the tumultuous world of Information Technology, where a new product is released onto the market on average once every five minutes globally, where Sun and Adobe insist on updating their Java and Flash platforms any time one of the developers farts (if the number of notifications i get to update is any indication), Apple release yet another piece of unreasonably popular bling every 12 months and Moore's Law has continued to hold true since 1965. it's a good world to live in - i get paid a frankly mind-boggling sum to play with gadgets and boss electrons around, but the amount of reading you need to do - reviews, manuals, whitepapers, etc - is pretty daunting. you're not going to keep up with it all unless you put the effort in. on top of that, there's the constant upgrade path - Windows 3.11 led to 95 led to 98 led to (the living abortion that was) Me led to 2000 to XP to (Me's spiritual successor) Vista and now on to 7. meanwhile, Windows in the server and corporate-space, NT grew up to 4.0 before converging with 2000, then on to 2003 and the stunningly originally-named 2008. on any given Tuesday i'm likely to need to know whether or not i can install Windows 2000 Server on this particular piece of kit, or whether i'll need to use Windows 2000 Advanced Server instead. can i install this app on the Windows 2003 Standard R2 x64 server, or will we want to deploy a VM running the x86 version instead? it's a lot to keep track of, memorise and use, and so by the time i head home i tend to want to do Something Completely Fucking Different like video games, drinking and having sex with women - you know, those good, wholesome pursuits of any lad in their mid-to-late 20's.

then i bogged off overseas and had several months of bumming around with less of the work and and a whole lot of fuck-all to do and i realised that playing video games got a bit old after a while, drinking was expensive and having sex with women... let's just not go there (because i hardly did). hell - apart from this little body of wordage i was a consumer - recipient of a torrent of input, and outputting little more than photos and the occasional whine of "woe is me, i can't get a job and beer is expensive".

getting back i had a number of grand designs, and one of these was that in 2010 i going to learn stuff again, namely another language and a musical instrument. i'd enjoyed French and German while i was travelling, and after digging through my fileserver again i realised i had a whole series of German lessons on it so that sorted that. Shadow's brother is a mad guitar fanatic and was overjoyed to take on the task of helping me learn, so that too was sorted. since then i've managed to get through the first 6 (of 30) German lessons (they're listen-and-repeat and go for half an hour. i do them when i have the opportunity) and i'm Making Progress with the acoustic Mal lent me to practice on.

it's been good fun - especially since i take almost any opportunity to use the German i've been learning on people, and the first time i cranked out a vaguely recognisable version of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd... damn it was a satisfying feeling. it's also reminded me of the joy of learning - for the last few years all the new stuff i was filling my head with was either a) work-related or b) history of the places i was visiting. half of my down-time over the years has been spent doing techie stuff anyway - it's not unusual for me to work 9 hours, then go home and spend another 3 stripping down laptops, refurbishing and rebuilding them. having something unrelated is helping to bend my brain in new directions. sure, sometimes i have to force myself to flick to the next lesson on my Personal Sanity Device when i'm on a decently-long drive (which now lives in my car rather than in my pocket, but that's how live works sometimes) or pulling up some Tab on my file server and actually pick up the damn guitar but... i'm having fun, and having fun being an active participant rather than a passive one like i would be if i were reading a book or watching a movie.

i'd like to think that i'll managed to have a decent grounding in German and be able to play a few tunes decently well by years'-end, but fuck it - i'll not be disappointed if i can't as long as i keep having fun in the meantime... and if this gets me back in the habit of learning new things... well, all the better, really!

mental block...

2010-03-22T10:43:00.011+11:00

i had something i wanted to talk about, i know i did, but after half an hour lying in bed trying to work out what it was i can't for the life of me remember what it was. i could ramble on about housework and video games and generic weekend amusements, but i won't bore you with the details so i guess this is all you're getting for now. i'm sure i'll remember what it was, or i'll thing of something else... such is the way of these things, really...

say something, anything...

2010-03-17T10:22:00.007+11:00

i'm suffering from the oddest variety of writer's block at the moment. i know exactly what i want to talk about during the day, but when i get to the part of the day where i have the time to actually apply brain to keyboard i think i'd rather say fuck it and sleep. this is getting a bit bothersome, so instead i'm just going to throw things down as dot points so that i can at least get SOMETHING written down:

my job is vaguely entertaining. it's also occasionally frustrating, but the joy of getting paid on a weekly basis is that before you know it you're receiving a hit cash injection, which makes is a lot easier to maintian your motivation.
Matt's & Julia's wedding went smashingly well (see earlier post). i woke up with a massive hangover the next day, although that had nothing to do with the wedding: afterwards Sandra and Alison invited Skye over and we sat up until disgustingly late getting through 6 bottle of champers. after which things got somewhat messy.
yesterday evening E and i celebrated our 400th email. i don't even want to know what the tally of SMS's and phone-call minutes would add up to. i'd question the figures, but Exchange logs don't lie...
speaking of which, i'm seriously looking forward to the Easter long-long-weekend which i happen to know is 16 days away, not that i'm counting. at all. in any way shape or form. i mean... 400 isn't THAT many, right? it's only 100/week...
after enjoying not having a backlog of broken tech to fix, i seem to have found myself with 2 laptops and a mobile phone to repair. i'm not sure how i accumulate these things, but what the hell? it'd be nice if i could earn money from this sort of thi... oh yeah, that's right: i do. a LOT. moo hoo ha ha!
i mean, we mostly email while at work, so that makes it 10 each way, each day. it's not THAT much. and Shadow: that's enough out of you, sunshine!
my poor Audi's had a hard time, having been mishandled by the fucktards at Goodyear in Phillip. seriously - how hard can it be to tighten the nuts on a fucking wheel when you put it back on? it can't be too much to expect, surely. their incompetence was a contributing factor in me running off the road in the wet the other weekend. i'm just lucky i didn't do any serious damage to mein Deutsch auto, although i did have the boys down Canberra VW Centre in Belconnen check it over. THEY at least do good work.
my guitar lessons are going vaguely well. i realised the other day that i can actually play most of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd - slowly, off-tune, but recognisably so. now if only i could engage my brain sufficiently to sit through Lesson 6 my German lessons...
i'm fucking tired and never getting enough sleep. i'm yet to find a good solution for this - even when i have a nice quiet night in at home there's always something to do, someone to call, something to read...

and on that note i'm going to try to do something about that last point.

Snippet #17: on outdoing yourself...

2010-03-08T10:28:00.000+11:00

i have a reputation when it comes to weddings, primarily that of being a shit-stirrer of the highest order. to date, i've been a Bride's Man once, Best Man twice and MC thrice. i've given speeches on four different occasions where i've generally insulted one or both of the members of the couple, questioned the bride's sanity, even expressed surprise that the bride was wearing white on the day. i've referred to the groom as being "a fat, useless layabout who'd never amount to anything". i've likened commitment to handcuffs and relationships to pits of despair that are doomed to failure... and somehow i've always got away with it. i've written the word "FUCK" in confetti. i've sold cigars to the groom's party. i've jokingly suggested that i'd show the bride's little sister a good time. and the groom's aunt. i've sung the first verse of "What about me" while using my kid brother as a prop. in short, i have a penchant for shennanigans, but somehow people keep inviting me to their weddings and giving me a microphone or a stage.

Matt & Julia got married yesterday in the nicest ceremony i've seen in a long time, and the first in may years that has had absolutely no religious over- or under-tone. it was solemn, and joyful, and completely perfect for who they are. of course, i was doing my best to keep the jokes flowing and Matt distracted. we just had to get him through to the kiss, and when he did it was like the clenched stillness lifted and a cool breeze blew through the clearing. from there on it was just a reception with too much beer and wine and all was joy.

we eat and people are having a great time, rolling into speeches which everyone kept short and sweet. i'd like to hope that it looked like i had more of a plan than i did - i more or less worked out the order of events as the evening went on. i got everyone's attention and cracked jokes between speakers. Julia's dad then Matt's mum, Elise as Julia's Matron of Honour then me as Best Man, after which i asked if anyone else wanted to say anything at which point Tiernan leapt to his feet and was informed that no, he was NOT permitted to speak. Julia un-ban-hammered him for a couple of minutes, until he started getting inappropriate and i ushered him back to his seat (we'd rehearsed it beforehand, when they told me i wasn't to let him speak. i couldn't help it - it was too good an opportunity to miss). Marcia took her cue and raised a toast before Matt & Jules made a show of cutting one of the 100 cupcakes Jules had made the day before, and with all the other formalities done i went to hit Go on the MP3 player Matt had given me for the Bridal Dance. i get it started and they start to dance awkwardly, so distracted by the fact that they're dancing in front of 87 of their friends and family that that it takes them a moment before they realise that what they're dancing to is not, in fact, Phoenix by The Butterfly Effect. i'm standing by the jukebox with a growing grin on my face as i watch them stop, ears pricked up, trying to work out what's wrong, the realisation dawning on them when the lyrics start

"Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down..."

that they have just fallen victim, at their own wedding, to a RickRolling.

i've told this to people over and people ask me how i'm still breathing. how the fuck did i survive? to be honest, they reacted exactly how i'd expected them to: i got a high-five and a hug, after which i legged it. see, when i'd seen Rick Astley on the list on Matt's Creative i couldn't help myself. i knew i just had to. the crowd seemed divided into the camp who had no idea what was going on, the group who thought that "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a lovely song and the rest of them who got the joke. by my reckoning it's the biggest, maddest thing i've ever managed to pull off at a wedding. the trick now is going to be finding some way of beating it.

the trick, you see, is to be audacious without being out-and-out insulting, make sure your gags are appropriate to the people you're playing them on and above all: make sure they're utterly harmless. i've gotta say tho, that i'm feeling pretty good about that one. there can't be too many peopel who can say that they RickRolled a wedding and by my reckoning this will keep my infamy-rating high for quite some time to come...

mi vida loca...

2010-02-25T05:21:00.001+11:00

ok, so things got crazy. er. crazier. i know my life is fairly well known for being more than moderately fucked up at the best of times, but this is getting ridiculous. 3 weeks ago i got on a plane for Perth - i spoke of this. i was unenthused. 2 weeks later i was back in Canberra wondering why i'd returned. the original plan was to hang around a week then fly out again, get back to the real world and bed in for the long haul. 4 days after landing i was quietly cruising the job ad's scoping out what Server Engineer jobs were available back out west. i'd been sitting around late on Saturday night having a conversation that went along the lines of:

"So... when do you leave?"
well, i WAS looking at getting out this thursday.
"Really? Well I've got Thursday through Monday off work..."
is that so? well i've not booked my flights yet...

so i hung around. sound familiar? all i can say is that it's nice having a flexible schedule. by the end of the following week i had 2 job interviews lined up in Canberra for the following Wednesday so i bit the bullet and booked flights for Tuesday. 8 hours of transit on Tuesday. 2 interviews Wednesday. 2 job offers Thursday. 1 contract signed on Friday and i started a 4 month contract on Monday at a frankly ridiculous pay rate. it ends on 30/June and has no possibility of extension, but that's ok since it's entirely likely that i'll be on the next flight out west.

yes. that crazy.

so what happened in Perth? i'd planned on having a quiet time, bum around, see people when i felt like it but otherwise take a chill pill and Wait Awhile. maybe get in a dive off Rottnest. it never works out that way though and i wound up being busy as busy as busy. seriously, next time i'll drop the pretense of relaxing and stock up on caffeine in advance... except that next time i'm likely to be be hanging around considerably longer than a week or two.

things seem to be dropping into place - as i've said far too many times over the last month or so: we have convergence. i was in Perth at just the right time to be in just the right place and meet just the right person. i came back to Canberra and walked into a job that fit in with my plans perfectly: enough time in Canberra to get everything done that needs to be done, that'll pay enough for me to put together another nest-egg and will finish early enough to have the time to score a short contract in Perth before i jet off for a while in September. it's like i've been saying for years now - when things are meant to happen they just work, and for the last few weeks it's all been effortless. i wasn't feeling settled in Canberra and suddenly that's a good thing. i was getting itchy feet and now i've got a reason to scratch them. the reasons i left Perth all those years ago have crumbled into dust and scattered in the wind (although they still don't have deregulated trading hours. fucking parochial bastards) and if it's too irritating there there's already a Get Out Of Jail Free card being waved in my face with the potential of leading me to Melbourne. or just back to Canberra. it's not like i'm short on options. i could see if i could wrangle another jaunt in London if it came down to it.

yes. that crazy.

it's funny... or at least, i've been laughing. i couldn't have planned anything this much fun and for once my gypsy lifestyle has worked in my favor. the sad thing is that no matter what i do i'll be breaking someone's heart. i stay in Canberra, people in Perth try to convince me to come back. i move to Perth and people in Canberra are going to make sad-faces at me. i figure that if i'm going to upset people no matter what i do i might at least make myself happy. it's either that or fuck everyone off and go somewhere completely different, make new friends in Vancouver or wherever and proceed to break THEIR hearts when i eventually get antsy and fuck off into the distance again.

i don't really want to do that. one day i'll settle down and stop wandering... but i get the feeling that it'll be something that just happens rather than something i plan. i'll turn around one day and realise that i've been in the same job for a couple of years, living in the same house in the same city and find that the biggest surprise will be that i'll have absolutely no desire to move on again. in the meantime i'll be taking the opportunities that present themselves - there's nothing to stop me paying the rent on my room in the sharehouse and bogging off until further notice...

if only because i have nothing better to do...

2010-02-04T08:16:00.003+11:00

every time i get on a plane, ever since i first traveled on my own and not under the watchful eye of the generic parental units, i walk down the gangway and as i step through the heavy door i extend the index- and middle-fingers of my right hand together, kiss them and press them against the fuselage as i pass through. every time i get off again i repeat the procedure with my left hand. the hand isn't important per se - it's just that this is the bit i can easily reach. the funny thing is that no flight attendant have ever commented to me about it, or even visibly noticed - not even on Virgin Blue flights where the hosties seem to get paid to have a little bit more personality.

beforehand i tend to wind up sitting in the departure lounge staring out the window, invariably eyeing off the plane that's about to take me wherever it is i'm going. once i get there i'm off without a backward glance, but before the flight? this is when i got time to kill. the problem is that i have a fairly good brain for mechanics, so i wind up appreciating the engineering that goes into these beasts of burden and invariably this means pondering what can go wrong. things like a hydraulic hose on the landing gear that was missed by maintenance which bursts when the gear retracts, preventing the gear from deploying for landing. or microfractures in the engine mounts that cause one of them to shear mid-flight "Donnie Darko"-style, causing the plane to spiral out of control. a calculation error in the GPS that makes the plane think it's higher than it should be and auto-correct into the wrong airspace. don't get me wrong - i've no fear of flying whatsoever, and the closest to fear i've ever come to when flying was the last time i flew into Melbourne: i was on the Red Eye Horror out of Perth and was so exhausted when i left that i passed out within a minute or two of the seatbelt light turning off, pillow between my skull and bulkhead, snoring away until i woke with a start to howling engines and a bump. i stared out the window in confusion thinking we were crashing and wondering why it was light outside, freaking out quietly until my brain engaged, i realised that i'd slept through the entire flight and we'd just fucking landed. we're not going to crash today either. i know this because of the pure and simple knowledge that this is not in fact a good day to die. that day will inevitably come, but my headbones tell me that it isn't today and i trust my headbones.

i remember when Going Somewhere was a major production - organise for this or that to be done, lock the bike up secure and out of sight, secure the car. organise with the housemates, emergency contact details, promises that i'll call mum (or the girlfriend when i have one - it's funny how often some of them wind up sounding like my mum...) AS SOON AS I LAND. have days planned out in advance, who i'll see, where i'll be, what i'm going to do. sometimes it's been a logistical nightmare, so complicated i've had to map it all out on a spreadsheet, printed calendars from Outlook complete with phone numbers in case i'm delayed and projected travel times so that i can be at each appointment on time and not miss anyone out.

i'm chockers for thursday, but i've got coffee at The Moon in Northbridge from 8:30 until 10:30 tonight with Potato Paul and if you can make it to that i'll have time for you... yeah... no, he's cool... no, i can't really push back any further, i'm meeting my brother for our annual drunken midnight stroll through Lathlain... wait... no, how about tomorrow night? we'll do a run to Alfred's Kitchen... i'll pick you up on the way through at 11, k? right. gotta go, i need to get to Spearwood now...

compared to usual, this trip to Perth has been almost lackadaisical in its planning... or lack thereof. i booked this flight yesterday at about midday. i still haven't got around to booking the flight home, in part by design but for the most part out of sheer laziness and apathy. i've got a few things on for the next couple of days i've not set too much in stone. i have my entire schedule in my head and it's not because i've got a better memory, it's just that i've kept it simple and open. my friends seem to be well trained - i advertised on my Facebook status

Peter Raven is preparing for another Tour of Duty in the battlefields of Perth...

and had a pile of people list out what times on what days they're free. it's no help for them to ask me when i want to do stuff - if they tell me when they're free i can make it all mesh... 90% of the time, anyway.

i'm not even sure why i'm going. the official reason is that i have a couple of weeks before i start work, so i might as well. Binky seems to think i'm coming over to be her savior or something. mum's convinced i'm coming to help keep her sane when my grandmother comes to visit. i'm not even really in the fucking mood. as Little Andrew was driving me to the airport (he picked me up from home and then ferried me to coffee so we could at least keep that appointment - part of the reason i booked QF719 (the 7:30PM direct flight over) was because i knew i'd be able to go to my weekly coffee at Essen beforehand) i could have sworn i told him screw it dude, i just ran out of "Give A Fuck". hang a right up Majura and make for Horse Park Drive, yeah? but either he missed it or i had a momentary disconnect between brain and mouth and it didn't make it out. i jumped out at the dropoff, thanked him and waited while he tore off in his beat up little Corolla and nothing more was said about the incident which obviously hadn't happened in the first place.

i DID need to get out of Canberra for a while - that much is for sure. i very nearly wound up hopping a flight on Delta to San Francisco, then continuing on around the bay to Santa Cruz so i could spend a week cluttering up MCG's couch (i may get around to talking about my second meeting with MCG (see Paris: unexpected delays may occur in transit...) in Copenhagen someday, but for the time being it will have to remain shrouded in mystery) but she wound up being ridiculously busy and not really in the position to entertain so the plan got the coathanger-treatment and i moved on to reconceive a better one. i pondered fucking off to Cairns or something and going diving, but being between jobs i'm watching the cash a fair bit and trying to reserve as much as possible so i can rejoin the 2 Wheel brigade as soon as humanly possible. my Old Man's bike's been sitting idle, on the other hand, and my old kit is sitting in my luggage down in the hold. parenthetically, i should probably add that my old helmet, jacket and gloves take up something in the order of 50% of the volume of the contents in that bag. if not for the fucking lid i'd be backpacking it. i pulled it out of the cupboard today, pulling on my old cordura jacket (the leather one being WAY too heavy for air travel), summer gloves and helmet and suited up for the first time in nearly a year and a half, re-adjusting everything to accommodate my considerably less rotund frame and caught myself looking at my gloved hands as i flexed my fingers and gripped the imaginary handlebars in front of me, revelling in the feeling of... rightness... or was it righteousness? i need to get another bike, and soon.

Perth's about the same cost to get to (or cheaper) as Cairns from Canberra, but it's a fuckload cheaper proposition when most of the fun i have there is social and most of my expenditure consists of beer and petrol. that, and i might be able to get a dive off Rottnest if i play my cards right.

either way, i've been somewhat unenthused... no, that's a lie. i've been struggling to give a fuck, which is strange because a week ago i was ready and rearing to go. then the afternoon rolled around on Monday and i lost the will to do much more than stare listlessly at the clouds on the horizon while i sat on the back slab drinking coffee, remembering when i was out amongst it... just... as much as i was missing being out in the world the actual impetus to get out of my chair and out of that fucking town had left me, every idea i had screamed "EFFORT!" and the needle on my "Give A Fuck-o-meter" started straining against the peg marked "Sie keine haben".

i struggled through last week, battling falling energy levels and high blood sugar. a week of fasting, careful eating, a trip to the quack and large quantities of prescription pharmaceuticals later and my sugars were dropping again, i was sleeping properly and i was moving around again, but somehow i lost the drive and i lost the care. still, i managed to pull my credit card and book the flight, i even managed to get on the fucking plane, so i can't be doing too poorly, right?

i don't know... i've been running on autopilot a lot lately. i have a sudden flurry of activity where i analyse every nuance of a conversation, then switch into Spinal mode where i do and say whatever first comes to mind and that seems to work just as well. i just roll with the punches and let my subconscious be my guide, living life like the drunk guy in a movie who's staggering down the street and seems to miraculously miss every banana peel, broken paver and pile of dog shit along the way, notices a dollar coin on the ground and when he bends to pick it up ducks his head just in time to miss being hit by an errant beer bottle. it seems like i've dodged a few bullets in the last little while, not because i have particularly good reactions, but because i just happened to get distracted by something shiny and not be standing where the bullet wanted to go. how does this relate to fucking off to Perth? fuck knows. being a Man Without A Plan isn't too bad a thing when you get in the groove and Mass Effect 2 on my Alienware laptop distracts me nicely from the the complete lack of and idea what the fuck i'm doing, as well as my inability to reliably line up a date for saturday night. i'm onto my 4th cup of the gritty brown whore's afterbirth-in-a cup that Qantas insists on calling coffee and i'll be landing in an hour or so now and i'll sort it out when i get there. might as well make the most of it. i'm either going to Perth because i have to be there or i have to be away from Canberra - which it is i'm far from caring about right now...

when life turns you around so quickly you suddenly realise you're staring at the back of your own head...

2010-01-28T00:04:00.007+11:00

have you ever stood on top of a mountain looking into the distance and wondered where it all went wrong? it's usually not too hard to trace back the steps, tally up all the times you zigged when you should have zagged, when you said just the wrong thing to the wrong person or went in half-cocked and find the total sum of your mistakes. this is where you look at the untidy calculus of your own failure and vow to do things right from now on and all that nonsense that keeps you moving forward in life and on to the next fucking debacle.

you know what's really fucked up? it's when you're sitting outside with a coffee after one of the most fantiastically awesome weeks you can remember while the cool change rolls in trying to work out where you went RIGHT. you look at the trigger points and think nah, couldn't be...

like how you started frequenting the same cafe every week on a Wednesday and through sheer happenstance met some interesting new people...
or you decided to be friendly to someone who looked a bit lonely and made a new friend...
or how you showed respect to someone who deserved it, and received it back tenfold...
or how you spoke your mind at work once too often, leading your bosses to give you the shaft...
and how getting the shaft was the best thing that had happened to you in ages...

see, a week ago i lost my job. it came time for my end-of-probation meeting, i was asked to meet my boss (who'd come down from Sydney for the occasion) offsite and was told politely-but-firmly that they considered me a poor fit for the team and so would be terminating my employment as at that moment. this was a bit of a surprise to me since they'd relied pretty heavily on me over the last 3 months, but fuck 'em. i was going to ask for a massive pay rise with the threat that overwise i'd walk, so the result was the same. an hour and a bit later i was sitting at coffee with 2 interviews lined up for the next 2 days, chatting with Lil' Andrew and Cathy (whom i barely knew, but seemed good value) and pondering my future. Andrew i've known for years - he's a nice kid and he's made a point of coming to meet me for coffee on my weekly Cafe Essen runs because craves same the regular social amusements i do and he seems to be using it as a catalyst because he's regularly inviting other people to come along which is how Cathy wound up being there. 2 hours later i had someone to go drinking with on Saturday night. by the time i got to Thursday morning's interview i had another one to go to later that afternoon, and i'd received a message from Wiza, the Intern back where i'd been working saying

"hey, where are you?"
i got fired yesterday, hasn't anyone told you?
"WHAT?"
meet me up tonight, i'll tell you all about it

by the time we met up that evening i already had a job offer.
by that time the next day i'd sat another 2 interviews and had another offer on the table.

2 days had passed since i walked off site and i already had job offers. it's like when you break up from the girlfriend who was pissing you off, but not so much that you were quite ready to dump yourself, step out in the blinking sunlight of singledom to find out that you've somehow started to exude sex-appeal and all the pretty girls want your phone number.

Sandra and Alison are in fine form when they get home and want to go out on the town and i tag along as designated-driver (we're going to go dance, can we leave you with our-) handbag minder until they decide they've had enough at 2AM and it's time for bed. i've not been out on the town for a few games of pool and a bit of a groove in so long it feels as if the last time i was in a night club i had to dodge Neanderthals on the way to the mens, so i was having a great time, even when the girls were happily dancing with each other and i was propping up a wall and sipping the Light Beers the girls were bribing me with.

Saturday arrives and i have a chilled out day with my traditional morning coffee and the last chapter of Bioshock (which i was replaying in preparation for the sequel to come out) that leads into a pleasant evening sitting by Lake Burley Griffin sipping Gin & Tonics with Cathy while the sun sets and Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog back at mine when the wind picks up too much to be comfortable and ends with me dropping her off in Civic after politely declining an offer to come out dancing. 2 nights in a row's a bit beyond me at the moment - i'm no longer quite in the form i was in back when i was in central Europe. catch you up next week? you betcha.

on Sunday i sleep and chill out and watch some TV that's piled up while i've run around like a crazy person. on Sunday i tentatively accept a job from a company i'll call Q who's 3 business lines are "IT Virtualisation" (translation: Computer Black Magic), "Commercialisation" and "Motorsport". yeah, they've got their own fucking Rally team. Rachel (who works for the client i was looking after and has more clue in her head than the entire company who just fired me combined) is good mates with Denis who runs Q and has been badgering me to take the job with the vague promise that they'll "make it worth my while". fuck it you know, why the hell not? i decide, and hit Send on the email.

Monday's spent hanging with AB, doing surgery on my old laptop and modding it to accept his graphics card. it's a free upgrade for him and a chance to offload a hand-me-down for me so we're all winners. i catch up with April which i've not made time for in ages and i grab kebabs with the boys. it's low-grade amusement, but it's relaxed and the tension of the last few months has been leaking out like the condensation from my Audi's air con. i'm in just the right frame of mind for Tuesday. it's Australia Day and Wiza from Indonesia is about to get a taste of a good ol' fashioned Australia Day Party. she'd dropped me a line early on Monday asking if i had plans for Tuesday, so i invited her along.

it's a slow start - i'm sleeping like crap and it's killing my mornings so i don't pick Wiza up until midday and we're not there until 1PM, by which time the party's in full swing and Matt & Jules' place is packed to the rafters. i can barely get in the fucking front door, my arms full of drinks and Wiza trailing in my wake wondering what the fuck she's got herself in for. i can't take a step without returning a greeting - hey, how you doing? fancy seeing you here and i'm not 2 steps into the living room before i'm screaming WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE!!?? because bold as brass in an armchair sits Jocelyn who lives in fucking Perth! through the living room minefield and into the dining area i'm not surpised to see Amanda. The Redhead. The Ex-Girlfriend Formerly Known As Kitten. i'm not surprised because Matt's a fucking champion and he messaged me when she arrived so i wouldn't get blindsided. i eject out the back door shortly thereafter, all the beers now in the fridge apart from the one in my hand. i've made my arrival and take shelter from the heat down the side of the house and enjoy the breeze while the party ebbs and flows around me. i could circulate, or i could sit right here and let people come to me so i sit and drink beers and talk to whoever shows up, dishing out and receiving insults from anyone who comes into range in equal measure.

after a while Amanda emerges and seeks me out. the last i'd heard of her she'd managed to get knocked up to some guy, married him and named the resulting spawn Samantha. i cop the sympathy plea pretty quickly - the guy's an arsehole, the marriage is in a shambles, she's moving back in with her sister (who's own marriage was on the rocks when last i saw her 2+ years ago), he's threatening to take the kid away, blah blah blah. i am unmoved. i cannot be swayed. i've heard this fucking story before and the last time resulted in us diving in the sack less than 2 hours later, thus commencing our infamous "second go of it" which eventually resulted in me buying a one-way ticket to London (fuck - i never quite got around to thanking her for that - i should do that next time i want to put the boot into her). i have no sympathy to give here, but somehow i manage not to be directly insulting.

that sounds horrible. give me a call sometime and we'll grab a coffee somewhere, i say to her.
"Yeah, that sounds great! Except I don't have a phone at the moment..."
really? well that sucks. i'm sure you'll sort something out...

yes, i'm being uncharacteristicly petty. you'll have to forgive me. or you can build a bridge and get the fuck over it. it's not that i hate her anymore. it's simmered down to a thick, creamy ambivalence with big chunks of disdain that emerge when she makes the mistake of assuming that i might still give a fuck about the hole she dug and buried herself in up to her teeth. i'm just happier than a necrophile with a key to the morgue that there is no possible way that her child was fathered by me, is all i'm saying.

ok, i'll admit it. i'm a little bitter, but with a crisp finish and the aftertaste of a cricket bat in the face...

meanwhile, i'm having a hell of a time. everyone's having fun and i'm in fine form. Matt, the Tinman and i are bouncing jokes off each other at an post-graduate level, and every once in a while Rick has us all rolling on the floor amongst the empty beer bottles and cigarette ends. even glancing across the group to see Wiza having an animated conversation with 3 of my ex-girlfriends doesn't put a crimp on my day, but eventually the sun starts to dip and i remember that i promised to take her off to find a good spot for sunset photos.

we hit the Cotter, but the light's wrong. she's loving the chance to see the bush and i'm having fun playing with her DSLR, but the clouds have rolled in and killed the light so we head for Mt Ainslie - it's a cliche, but a worthy one and the sunset we get is totally worth it. we find a nice spot on the rail and take it in turns to rattle off photos and talk composition and lighting until the fireworks kick off, marking the end of an awesome day. the rest is just dinner on the way to dropping her back at her place and a wind-up chat in the evening breeze while we re-hydrate and just past midnight i collapse into bed with a smile on my face and massively high blood sugar from drinking the wrong sort of beer steadily through the day.

next thing i know i'm waking up and it's today. i stagger out of my room in a haze that i'd love to blame on drinking too much, but which i know is because i've fucked my diet and let my sugar levels slip well and truly into the "forget pills, find some fucking insulin before your feet fall off" zone. while i come up with a game plan for how i'm going to get them back down again i check my email and drink the coffee that i crave more than life itself and find out that Denis has accepted my politely phrased demands and agreed to pay me the Golden Figure.

see, 4 and a bit years ago when i was working in my first real Government job at the tender age of 25, someone asked me "what are your career goals?" now, at the time i was pretty happy with the world. i had a hot little Redhead in my bed each night, a gorgeous, fast bike and a sharehouse that was like one rolling party. i was young, dumb and full of... potential, so i said the first thing that popped into my mind:

well, i don't know LONG term, but by the time i'm 30 i want to be a Senior Tech and/or a Team Leader and i want to be earning [insert a suitably large, round number here].

somehow, as time went by, this became more and more serious and it started driving me on. how was i going to get that sort of cash? for starters, i had to be better than good, so i went out to be The Best. i had to take on more responsibility, so it took on Everything. when it came time for contract re-negotiation i went in hard and when they argued the point i was out and in a higher-paying job before the door had a chance to swing closed, and so it went. my confidence was rarely more than half a step ahead of my arrogance, and together we fired up like a caffeine-guided missile right up until i turned around one day and said nah, fuck it. i'm off to London and the focus changed.

when i got back in the country i didn't think too much about my old 5-year plan. the months of begging for a job in London had left me in the mindset that a job was a job and if i managed to not take a back-step in pay then i was lucky. 3 months later and i'm back in form with enough cash that i'm not desperate for the next gig and the theory to test that if you don't ask you never get.

so i asked. and i got.

Senior Server Engineer. promise of Team Lead for projects. pay rate bang on the number i pulled so blithely out of my arse way back when i was just an arrogant little shit in a polo shirt.

in a week i've gone from Zero to to Hero with a pinch of Caligula rolled in. the Perfect Storm of having made the right moves at the right times and the right people deciding to lend a helping hand for no other reason than that they can and they seem to think i deserve it for some reason you don't completely understand.

a week ago at coffee Andrew and Cathy asked me what i was going to do and i couldn't tell them. go to Perth for a while, maybe? or i could apply for jobs in Melbourne or Wellington or something... take the chance to look outside Canberra for a bit. it took less than hours for all those thoughts to get knocked clear out contention, as if the Universe decided to interrupt and say "Bad Pete! Sit! Stay! You're going to hang around Canberra until further notice whether you like it or not!" for a moment there it looked like losing my job was going to give me a good excuse to look further afield. further reflection seems to indicate that i'm exactly where i'm supposed to be until further notice and really, who am i to argue with the Universe?

taking stock amidst the settling dust...

2010-01-13T23:30:00.006+11:00

some months ago i stared at the blank screen of my Eee and realised i couldn't fill it. my fingers jabbed at the keys for a while and a trickle of incomprehensible uselessness chased the cursor what i sat on the Ausabout bus until i gave up and stared out the window and watched the Austrian countryside slide by. over the next month i opened the text editor a few times and it returned my blank stare with an impassionate LED-backlit glare until i time and again admitted defeat and went off to do something else. the words didn't want to come so i left them where they were and moved on.

tonight i found myself staring up into the matt-grey sky and felt the falling droplets evaporate the moment they touched my skin while i wondered where it all went wrong. but they didn't go wrong. or right. they just went their own way and i let them carry me on while i waited for something to happen.

pulling back into Canberra was like waking up again after a longer-than-normal dream, Shadow standing at Canberra Airport looming like a brick-shithouse wrapped in teddy-bear fabric with a grin on his face wider than the sky over the desert, Sandra dashing up the stairs in front of the house and hurling herself at me for a tackle-hug. the old town hadn't changed and to be honest i'd expected nothing else. i couldn't remember the names of some of the streets, but i could remember the way without having to think about it. some people i caught up with couldn't believe i was standing in front of them again. some people had barely noticed i'd left. a week after landing i had a car and a job and a place to sleep and in the 3 months since i've been pretty much just rolling along in a semi-aimless fashion, waiting for something to happen.

nothing in particular, mind. anything.

i've had a couple of trips to Sydney - one at the behest of my new employers, one to meet up with the Grey Man who'd come back to Oz for the xmas break. i got through Perth and watched my kid brother get married. i passed through Melbourne and saw friends i'd not seen in 5 or 8 years. i'd gotten everything that would require me to be Not In Canberra done and out of the way so that i could focus on sitting around and doing fuck-all for a while, all planned out so that i could get my feet properly on the ground and put some roots down.

of course, it took not even 2 months for me to start going stir-crazy, pulling up lastminute.com.au every once in a while and having a speculative glance at how much flights would be to Wellington or Hiroshima or Cairns, pondering how the remnants of my Bike Fund would last if i put off getting back onto two wheels for another year and burned the cash going somewhere. fucking anywhere. see, while the old girl's exactly where i left it, the people in it are moving on faster than laksa through an octogenarian and i can't help but feeling that i'm just one more wedding away from being a dusty shadow fading in the rear-view mirror. my friends had been in the process of settling down, getting married and having kids (in no particular order, mind) for a while, but when it's happening in front of your eyes you tend not to notice so much. fuck off for a year and the progress becomes far more pronounced. when yet another friday rolled round where everyone was "having a quiet night in with the missus" or "looking after the kid" i gave up and buried myself in my room with a bag of salt & vinegar chips and the latest role playing game on my laptop, or sitting outside staring at the stars while the backlight from the screen flickered with Facebook updates and pictures of motorcycles i couldn't quite bring myself to take for test-rides.

i've found myself stuck in a limbo of my own construction - settling down and building a nest means i can't easily schedule trips to interesting parts of the world, fucking off to travel means i can't easily settle down and doing either would feel too much like admitting defeat so i've wound up in a holding pattern while i try to decide whether to land or to chase that bright spot on the horizon. it's all well and good being a confirmed bachelor when you've got plenty of other single friends to enjoy it with, but when it's down to you and the sad lonely sons of bitches who've been single about as long as you've known them... well, it's time to face the fact that you're hairy, ugly and generally undesirable and should probably just give in to the inevitable dingy bedsit filled with comics, computer parts and cats. there's only so far being the funny, well-travelled guy will take you and after that you're back to staring into another blank screen while the Lynx deodorant fades beneath your own personal eau de desperation.

the thing is that nothing went wrong - i got in and my life reconstructed itself around me... it's just that the old comfortable coat doesn't fit so well anymore. after months of grovelling and begging for work in London the job market couldn't employ me fast enough, but chasing the career just isn't exciting me like once it did. hanging with the old crew has been brilliant, but i just can't get enthused about buying a house when my head's still elsewhere.

there's one thing that constantly resolves out of the static, but it's like smoke, dissipating when i disturb the air by trying to get close, fairy-gold fading to dust in the morning light. there are no answers to be found there and it gets me no closer to understanding what i really want to do with myself long-term. 10 weeks through Europe, then a week in London, a couple of days in Hong Kong, a week in Perth and then another in Melbourne - not a day was wasted in over 3 months, so every day i spend going through the motions here feels like my life is slipping away from me, falling through my fingers... until i remember that this is what most of life is - those boring, unproductive days where you wake up, go to work, spend 8 hours doing something before going home, entertaining yourself before you fall asleep to do it all again tomorrow. i should probably get used to that if i'm to avoid going batshit-fucking-bananas.

so, of course, my survival instinct has given me plenty of buffer before i have to actually make a fucking decision. i'm off to the US in September this year for Shadow and The Boss's 20th wedding anniversary. i can sit tight with the excuse that i'm "saving for the trip" when really i'm really just avoiding laying down tap-roots until something gives me a nudge in the right direction, whatever that happens to be. either way, for the time being i'm trying not to think about it too much, in as much as that's possible for me. it really is a case of "look at the shiny-shiny!" - the more distracted i get, the happier i am. how long i can keep that up? well that remains to be seen...

Snippets #16: time and travel take their toll on your tools...

2009-08-11T00:14:00.001+10:00

the first thing to go was my laptop hard drive. the old Toshiba drive had taken some knocks and bumps in its life even before i stuck in my Eee last year and walking 100 metres back to the hostel after war-walking (looking for unsecured wifi connections) without shutting the machine down did it in (damn old-school, non shock-locking drives). i've patched it up and kept it limping along ever since, but not before it ate ~20 of my photos from the days previous so i know i can't trust it to store important data from now on. if i had access to my equipment i could set it aside and run a looped diagnostic over the course of a couple of days, but i need it too much and too often to have it out of action for that long.

i broke my specs in Paris - 5 years i've had those: so long that i can't even remember what i had before. they snapped on one side of the bridge. something most people don't realise is that titanium is work-hardened, which means that the more you bend and flex it the more brittle it becomes until when, one day, you're straightening them outside the Sacre Coeur it shears, leaving you with prescription sunglasses as your only way of seeing more than just a blur.

my camera's been getting progressively more and more beaten up, and there's now dust between the lenses which shows up as dark fleks in some of my photos. i'm still not sure how i'm going to clean that out, although i may spend some time exploring with my screwdrivers (i packed one small philips-head and small flat-head jeweller's screwdriver in my backpack in case i needed to mend something).

my cheap-arse shorts that i picked up in Primark for something like 6 quid have started tearing on the left-hand side between the pockets, and there's a rough patch on the left buttock from where my shoulder bag rubs against them. they've got a date with a skip when i get back to London... or better maybe: a ritual burning. i haven't had one of those in ages...

my PSD (Personal Sanity Device) died a death in Krakow - i'd forgotten that it was in the pocket of my shorts and it fell 2 metres onto the tiled floor of the shower and decided that it didn't want to boot anymore. i spent an hour that afternoon gently prising it open, reseating the memory module (the memory's not soldered onto the mainboard on this model and it had come loose) and reconstructing it to get it working again. it's scratched up more than it was before, but it's making noise again which is all i care about.

the Merrell shoes i bought on my first trip to Singapore for a bargain are starting to give - the stiching's finally going, the lining in the heel has worn through on the left one and the innersoles are so well conformed to my foot that i expect they'd cripple anyone else who tried to wear them. they've lasted me through something like 18 countries and a rough guestimation has them on my feet for over 1000km worth of walking. still, i have the feeling they're also going to want a burning before the year's out.

operating life is usually measured in time - a fridge will work for, say, 15 years before it needs servicing, or the compressor needs replacing. an engine is good for 10 years before it needs servicing. we think in how many years before something needs to be thrown out or repaired. in the aerospace industry things are measured in hours of operational use, which is really far more accurate. if i bought an mp3 player, used it once a week for an hour and packed away nicely in between it'd never get damaged or fall apart, and it'd finally die when the battery broke down, but that's not really the point, is it? what's the point of having something useful if you keep it wrapped in cotton wool and never use it? in real life i'm reasonably nice to my gear, and it lasts longer. while traveling i've been pretty hard on my kit, and in general it's stood up pretty well, especially bearing in mind the beating it's taken. i try to be as nice to it as i can be... it just seems that this life comes with a surprisingly increased level of entrophy. run around the place with a backpack and things are going to take a few knocks and bumps. i know i have.

last night i managed to fall backwards down a steep flight of steps, sliding on my back with my Eee clutched to my chest so that it wouldn't get smashed, keeping my head up so that i took the blows from the steps on my shoulders. today my back's a stiff, bruised mess, but nothing's broken and i'll heal - a smashed laptop screen's not the sort of thing i can easily replace on the run. i have a persistent cough that have been following me since Barcelona and a runny nose i've had since Interlaken. too many skipped meals and too much expedient, cheap food mean that i'm popping through the last of my multivitamins to try to keep myself in vaguely working order. i don't have the time or resources to look after myself properly if i want to cover the amount ground i've committed myself to, and i'm loathe to pay exhorbident prices for food in tourist locations which, to be honest, is where i wind up most of the time. something's going to give, but in the meantime i keep moving in the hope that i can keep ahead of the sickness-monster chasing me and i'll be able to steer clear until i'm done and have the time to spend a couple of days in bed.

living on the road has its toll. double my budget and i'd be able to run at a more comfortable pace. take more time and maybe cook for myself every once in a while, or eat better when i'm out. you know i wouldn't tho - double my budget and i'd double my distance and make even greater sacrifices so that i could get even further across the map. i just hope i manage to not break anything else i can't fix. or easily replace... which reminds me that i need to wander into town and see if i can find some two-part epoxy for my specs. it'd be nice to be able to see at night again...

Prague: hey gorgeous, where have you been all my life??? (50.1 North, 14.25 East, apparently)

2009-08-08T07:58:00.000+10:00

now what did i know about the Czech Republic 3 days ago? let's see... former Communist-Bloc country during which time it was half of Czechoslovakia. capital city: Prague. beer's cheaper than water. so not much, really. pardon my ignorance. i've picked up a bit since then...

remember how i said i loved Paris? and Berlin? when i sat around musing about places where i'd learn the language just so i could live there? welcome to Prague. been wondering where the most beautiful city in Europe was? welcome to Prague. where can you go into a supermarket and pick up three half-litre bottles of beer and still get change from a Euro? this is Prague, baby. it's the Happiest Place on Earth, City of 1000 Spires, possessed of more statues than anywhere else on the planet. ever watched the movie XXX with Vin Diesel, seen the big climax scene where they're trying to difuse the bio weapon before it destroys the city? that's the river in Prague. remember the story about the mad astronomer Tycho Brahe (who was actually Danish, but who's counting) who was supposed to have died of a burst bladder in the middle of a dinner party? Prague. read any Kafka? he was from Prague. it's got a Communism Museum and a Sex Machines Museum, plus the standard accumulation of churches, squares, and clutter you expect from an old, European city. it's just prettier than anywhere i've been. ever.

or at least: so far...

my first impression of the place was fairly average, but then i was heading from the main train station to my hostel somewhat outside the central area by foot at Stupidity in the morning and even then it was pleasant, walking past the statue commemorating the Soviet Liberation of Czechoslovakia (which looks suspiciously like two guys making out until you look more closely) on my way down to the river, through an industrial area and finding my hostel after an hour or so of walking after a sketchy night's sleep on the train. makes me glad i can carry my backpack a decent distance now. one way or another, i was HOURS too early to Czech in (ok, i SWEAR that's the last time i'll make that joke... it's just... you see so fucking many of those ridiculous "CZECH ME OUT!" tshirts at the touristy stores that eventually it works its way into your brain) so i Czeched (oops...) my email and joined in on the standard walking tour which, once again, happened to have a start point at this hostel. welcome to Plus Prague, a member of the "People Like US" chain of budget accomodation... and by budget i mean 6.60 Euro a night. it's a MegaHostel, but don't hold that against it. the busload after busload of Contiki and TopDeck fuckers just add to the colour... and give the Busabout folks someone to poke fun at. not that we feel superior or anything... today's NewEurope tour leader was a girl from Essex who went from "quite pleasant and sane" to "jumping around and yelling like there was something more than caffeine in her coffee" when she went into Performance Mode which is pretty much what i needed at the time, and she kept things nicely interesting the whole way through and by the time she'd finished i'd got chatting to a girl from Sydney who kept me company for the rest of the afternoon, cruising up to the castle, then down and around and in and out of the west-side of the river until got late and we both needed to get cleaned up for the pub crawl... but by that time we'd covered quite a lot of ground and walked some gorgeous streets.

fucking pub crawls. just about every hostel i've stayed in has advertised one, and Busabout is always pimping one or another. i've managed to avoid them all through this trip so far, but i figured that i might as well do ONE and see what all the fuss was about... and if i was going to do that i'd do it in the place with the cheapest beer. unfortunatly, the night turnout out to be crap. we met ran into Theo and Christian - the two lads i'd been out drinking with in Krakow - and hooked into their group for dinner which took so long to come that we were late for the meetup for the crawl. Chris and Theo distinguished themselves nicely by getting obnoxious with the wait-staff and then stiffing them on the bill. the crawl itself was crap - we found it at the first pub and joined in for Power Hour which is more or less: you have an hour to drink as many shots and pints of beer as you can before we move on to the next pub. it was an average pub, and i'm not a fan of rushing my drinking and the locations went steadily downhill from there. we got chatting with a couple of Canadian lads who were good value, but got stuck sitting next to a table of obnoxious Eurotrashy Germans who kept things loud and irritating. by the time we got to the next pub Sian (the skinny Aussie girl we'd met along with Chris and Theo) had drunk enough to be sick, so once she was done emptying her stomach on the pavement we poured her into a taxi with an honest driver (we found out later, seeing as she got to the hostel without being robbed or worse). come the fourth place Whatshername From Sydney was getting friendly with one of the Canadian lads and i was sick of it. we were out of pub territory now - into the underground club zone, and as fun as it was to get down and partying with the Eurotrash (what can i say? the German girls were pretty hot) my heart wasn't in it, so i bade my farewell and made a move.

i was pretty drunk, but no so far gone i couldn't find the tram stop... which is when i realised i didn't have a fucking ticket for the thing. they don't actually sell tickets ON the tram. you have to get one from a newsagent, or be lucky enough to be at a stop with a machine and this one didn't. nor did the next. or the next. next thing i know i'm walking back to the hostel at OMG at night, getting lost, finding myself, getting REALLY lost, giving in and hitting up a parked taxi only to find out that i was just 300m away by now and i might as well walk. i had a fun thing happen though - as i'm walking towards the river i see two people with backpacks being chased up the street by a cameraman and a sound guy who asked if i happened to know where the "Old New Synagogue" was. actually, i'd seen it before and gave them a hand on my map. next thing i know, a release form's been shoved under my nose and from the looks of things i may well just be featuring pissed as a newt on the next season of The Amazing Race. not bad for a night's work...

i woke up the yesterday with the innevitable hangover, but i had plans and i wasn't missing them. i heard about the Prague Sex Machines Museum years ago and i've always wanted to check it out, and the Museum of Communism almost as far back. with only 3 days in this place i wasn't going to miss out so i dragged myself together, cleaned myself up and got the tram back into town. the Museum of Communism is actually pretty amusing - it's located over Prague's biggest McDonalds and next to a Casino, which is fucking hillarious juxaposition if you ask me. it's not ALL communism, although it does discuss a bit of Stalin's rise in Russia. mostly it's about Communism in Czechoslovakia, in the days after WWII and before the Velvet Revolution when they cast off the old Marxist systems and the Velvet Divorce (because neither event was violent in any way - everything was completely peaceful) where the Czech Republic and Slovakia effectively said "Meh" and went their separate ways. the Museum is almost a photo essay with a couple of props, but worth seeing regardless, if only to check out some of the gear in the gift shop. there's not much, but the old-style propaganda posters with ammended captions are a laugh, like "You couldn't get laundry powder, but you sure could get your brainwashed..."

the funny thing is that the Czechs effectively liberated themselves, days before the Red Army showed up. in the final days of the war a Civilian Uprising kicked in, driving the Nazis out of Prague to be quietly mopped up by the Russians when they showed up later. the firefight between the remainders of the SS and the Czech guerillas was apparantly pretty epic, not to mention impressive considering they were untrained civilians for the most part. still, the Red Army rolled in the tanks so all the monuments point to them and since they were there they set up shop in the ashes, adding Czechoslovakia to the infamous Soviet-Bloc

me, i celebrated the capitalist society i've grown up in by cramming a massive amount of McDonalds down my throat before i went in. i hate having to resort to junk food like that, but i needed a sure-fire pickmeup and hangover cure and i knew it would deliver - especially once i'd acquired and demolished some variety of caffeine-drink. hangover fading, i wandered through the museum, then headed off and found the Sex Machines Museum which... well, it was better than the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, but i was still a little unimpressed. yeah, it had stuff... it's just not THAT well stocked with gear from history or kinky implements that actually shocked me. it's not that i'm so kinky that i'm unshockable or anything... it's just that nothing really surprised me, although some of the copies of patent applications on the walls made me burst into laughter.

museums out of the way, caffeine coursing through my veins, i was left in the middle of town with no specific plans and the rest of an afternoon to kill, which in my world means that it's time to abuse my footwear some more so i put my map away, picked a direction i'd not been in and walked. the rest of the afternoon was spent getting lost, then finding myself again, then getting lost some more. i stopped in a little arcade with an Alternative Music and Lifestyle store and Band venue, a tattoo artist and a funky little cafe where i read my book for a bit while satisfying my caffeine addiction, and i walked. i found the river and i walked. eventually i decided that i'd seen enough for one day and made my way back to the hostel to put on a load of washing and hit the pool and sauna.

yeah, Plus Prague has a sauna, and an underground swimming pool. how cool is that??? this meant that while every stick of clothing i own was spinning in the washing machine, i'd dived in the pool in my boardies, the cranked the heat, poured a bucket of water on and steamed the sauna way up while i sat there enjoying the sensation of my muscles relaxing while my body sweated out the toxins from my sinful life. i've done it every day i've been here - come back in the afternoon, dived in the pool, worked up a good sweat, then dived back in the pool. meanwhile, since the washing finished i've been able to enjoy the greatest luxury i've experienced in weeks:

All Of The Clothes i'm Wearing Right Now Were Clean When i Put Them On. this hasn't happened since... Valdelavilla. i think i finally sweated in my last clean tshirt when i was in Bruges or Amsterdam and since then i've just been living in my own filth. it was so happy to be have clean things to wear that afterwards i did a little dance and went for a celebratory beer at the pub down the road which is entirely decorated with car parts. i was supposed to be meeting with people in the lobby and we were all going to go together but they proved unreliable so i went solo and chilled out listened to the band while sitting in the beer garden with good Czech beer.

so why do i love this town so much? well, for starters: i'm rapidly coming to the opinion that there's no such thing as "bad Czech beer". it's not the same sort of artform the Belgians have made of it, but every beer i've drunk has been of good quality and GREAT value. a beer in the average pub? around a Euro, which will buy three cheapies in the corner store or two Budweiser Budvars (the original, not the American crap). the people are friendly, especially outside the city centre, and everywhere in the main part of town is just fucking gorgeous. it's the sort of looks that grab you reliably every time you look, and there's always something else to see. look across and you'll see art neuveau, art deco, gothic, baroque. look up and you'll realise that no matter how many statues there are at street level, there'll always be more on the rooftops. and over doors. and at the corners of buildings. the streets are that happy medium of "tidy" which means "not sterile and thereby boring" but also "not the squalid hellhole of Cairo" either. wander around in the afternoon sun, it's pretty. see it in the evening dusk and it's fucking gorgeous. look out over it all at night and you start wondering why you didn't bring your girlfriend... until you remember you don't have one because you're an hairy, unreliable pratt with a wanderlust. people say Paris is romantic, and i'll not disagree, but if you think that's "IT", you're fucking missing out when it comes to Prague.

it could be just me. i've spoken to people who haven't been impressed with the place, but i'm grooving this town. i could easily spend another couple of days running around this place, but i didn't have them to play with. i only had today and today was set aside to go to Kutna Hora - famous for one thing and one thing only: a small church decorated with human bones. you know me by now: macabre? gruesome? just TRY keeping me away, but i'll have to tell that story later, once i've had some sleep...

Krakow: now the hard bit's over...

2009-08-07T08:52:00.000+10:00

06/08/09 11:52PM

looking back over the last couple of days it seems like i got a lot packed into my first day in Krakow, while the rest was pretty cruisy. i guess this is partly true. sometimes that's just the way it works. it didn't seem like that the morning after Auschwicz when an impatient bus driver somehow mistook the words "Salt" and "Mine" for "Auschwicz" and nearly took me to the wrong bloody place, then seemed to blame me for the mistake when the ticket i'd handed him specifically said "Salt" fucking "Mine". still, i got the the right place in the end. i was vaguely curious about going to check it out after memories of The Grey Man mentioning it sometime back before time began, so when the folks i booked Auschwicz with had it as a package option with a small discount i thought why not? and paid the extra.

the Salt Mines near Krakow have the distinction of being the best preserved salt mines in the world, consisting of 240km worth of cut out of the rock over 700 years of active use, of which you get to explore 2.4km. it's pretty kooky in there - over time these people got a bit creative so in and amongst the examples of the old working conditions and tools there are Salt Sculptures - incredibly delicate sculptures that would dissolve if people touched them (i had to yell at a group of Americans who couldn't quite grasp the point of Don't Fucking Touch) carved whole from the rock. then things get REALLY odd. see, the Poles are about as Catholic as they come, so there's not just a chapel down there, but also a church at a depth of 100metres, entirely cut from the rock - the steps, the high roof, all carved out. there are frescos in the walls 12 inches deep with almost perfect prespective (the Last Supper is really impressive), a chandelier where every crystal is clear salt, and altar and a life-sized statue of Pope John Paul II (the Polish one). it's really, completely and totally unreal and OTT, but there you have it. alledgedly the world's deepest church. none of the mines are natural, either. it's all been cut by man, following the seam of salt that made the region rich, and that's what it's all about. Krakow had Salt, and when Salt was as valauble as Gold that meant a lot. the word "salary"? yeah, that comes from the word "salt". you've gotta love the kooky, interesting shit you... actually already knew when you got there in the first place.

it was an interesting morning. not the most exciting tourist attraction i've ever seen, but interesting and entertaining nonetheless and by 2PM i'd been dropped back at the hostel and was out on the street exploring again... in arelaxed sort of way. the nice thing about going somewhere for one specific thing is that anything else you see and/or do is a bonus, the result of which is that i basically spent the next day and a half cruising with no particular agenda - just pick a spot on the map, walk to it, see what's there, wash, rinse, repeat. i wandered into the New Jewish Cemetery (i couldn't find the gate to the old one which i've heard was entirely exhumed by the Nazis apart from one grave which they were told was haunted. cemetery? HAUNTED?!? where do i sign up?) - a quiet, shady, walled off city block just off the old Ghetto. even on a bright, sunny day it was dark and cool in there with graves packed in tighter London Unerground passengers at peak hour. it was kinda nice, but i didn't linger. i like cemeteries... i just don't stay too long.

speaking of cemeteries, do you have any idea how many fucking priests, monks and nuns there are in Krakow? or, for that matter, how many memorials and exhibitions there are dedicated to Pope John Paul II? i couldn't turn the corner without tripping over someone else in a habit of some description. the thing you don't realise unless you've a) researched these things or b) been there is that Krakow is where JP2 grew up, served as a priest, then a bishop and a cardinal. Krakow's his old stomping ground and they're seriously proud of it... although the cynic in me wonders how much of that's got to do with the number of Catholics who like to go on Pilgrimage to places like "Where the most beloved Pope in the last several hundred years grew up and got his Holy on". hell - people still love JP2. at least he wasn't a member of the Hitler Youth like Benedict the Whateverth.

meanwhile, i circumnavigated the castle one one day and actually went in on the next (don't bother - just head in, see the free stuff and get out), finding the Dragon Sculpture that flares up semi-regularly from a hidden gas burner. i walked up and down random streets, drinking coffee in random cafes and eating in random fast food joints. i basically got in as much as i could without stressing myself too much. i spent my second evening drinking with Lucas from Chicago, upsetting the old woman who lived next door to the hostel by getting loud outside late at night discussing modern post-religious morality and ethics (i went to see if he wanted to come for a wander the next day but he was dead to the world. i think i broke him). i took the opportunity to sleep in until 9AM (luxury!) and i absolutely, point-blankly refused to stress or hurry. it was around 4 that i got back to the Hostel and got settled in for the next few hours. i was on the night train again so i had hours to kill, but i'd checked out of the hostel and left my pack in the bag room for the day and being the nice folk they are they had no problem with me hanging around for the evening until it was time for me to skidaddle off for my train to Prague which meant that i got to cruise the net and eat popcorn while watching the evening's movie: Forest Gump.

i'm sorry i sound a little blah about Krakow... i really enjoyed it, but in a pleasant, relaxed sort of way. i'm finding that the more smaller, unassuming, quieter cities and towns are the more i like them, and the more i need to include them in between the big stops. sure, i was a little down in Bruges, but i needed it after Paris, and after flying around Berlin like a mad thing i needed Krakow. it's a really sweet little town with the added benefit that it's in the "cheap and cheerful" Polish way with just the right amount of charm that shows that they're not just putting it on.

of course, now i'm in Prague... and... well Prague's a whole other story entirely!
travel

Berlin: urban exploration with mixed success and a day of flying solo...

2009-08-03T06:58:00.000+10:00

02/08/09 09:58PM

a fellow traveler who'd passed through these parts before i did was asked what his favourite city in the world was. his response:

"East Berlin."

me, i've not been all over the world so i'll hold my tongue at this point. still, i found it to be an interesting assertion. certianly, lying in my bunk on the night train to Krakow, Poland, it occurs to me that i spent FAR more time in East Berlin than i did in West, but then i also have a certain fascination with Communism and its artifacts. by the time The Wall went up the population of East Berlin had dropped by a sixth from people getting the hell out of the Soviet-controlled area, which is why it was erected in the first place. on one night in the Red Army rolled barbed wire and soldiers out across , surrounding and encapsulating West Berlin, preventing anyone who was in the East from getting back. people visiting friends and family, or just out for a night on the town, were stuck and unable to return expect for in extreme circumstances. apartment buildings built in Soviet period tended to be the stereotypical concrete monstrosities you envision when you think "Communist architecture", so when The Wall fell the East was left somewhat underpopulated and seriously low-rent. now what sort of people congregate where the rent is cheap but comfortable? criminals! and artists (which some may consider to have a high instance of correlation, although i'm not one to judge). one way or another, East Berlin is Interesting without actually trying to be, and it's where you head to check out the Alternative vibe, or engage in adventurous passtimes like Urban Exploration.

UE is, basically, checking out old, disused parts of a city. in its purest form it's very much a "leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photos" sort of activity which is dangerous only in so much as that you want to make sure you avoid security guards and that your tetanus shots are up to date. Matti's plan for yesterday was to head out to an old abandoned amusement park in the East called Spreepark, then move on to the old abandoned military airfield. we picked up a couple of people at the Expats Drinks evening the night before, met at Alexanderplatz and rocked on. alas, Maia stopped every 5 seconds to take photos which kept us from moving too quickly and the Spreepark had far too many people in it to really get into and explore when we were there, and our lack of pace meant that by the time we'd walked around it, got in, evacuated at great speed and got back to the train station we were out of time to get to the airfield. it was an interesting expedition though - checking out what we could see through the fence, and exploring an old building nearby which seemed structually sound, but long-disused.

it's the sort of thing i'd like to try again in a smaller, better equipped group - specifically where everyone understands the idea of "time limit". hell - i reckon that with a bit of research i could spend a week just checking out old installations and facilities that have been abandoned and lie in wait of some developer with some spare credit to come through and transform them into something new. one way or another, out of time and getting hungry we made a beeline for the shop which allegedly introduced the Berlin-style kebab and stuffed outselves silly for all of 3.50 Euros. Matti went his way and i went mine to meet up with some of the Busabout folks and chill out for the evening. we'd done a lot in two days seeing the WWII artifacts and memorials, checking out the Charlottenberg (like a smaller Versailles) and meandering down the East Side Gallery - a 1.3km stretch of The Wall left intact, covered in a mixture of commissioned artwork and vintage graffiti where, if you know where you're looking you can find bars set up between the wall and the Spree river who truck in tons of white sand and create little beach-bars. we spent an hour or two in one of those drinking dark hefe wiezen and enjoying the sunshine before moving on to vegan food in Freidrichshain.

today i flew solo. most of the people i knew had left on the bus that morning, and with my train at 9:45PM i had the day to myself, so i plotted some points on the map and attacked them. i found the Stazi Museum (which was unfortunately closed), passed through the Trend Mafia Markets which were cool, if small, then screamed down to Potsdamerplatz where the Harley Days motorcycle meetup was parked up and down the road, then headed back to the Topography of Terror Holocaust Memorial to have a better look. it's an interesting memorial - 2711 concrete blocks of various heights built on an undulating piece of ground which you can walk through. it's laid out as a grid, so you go through in straight-lines, but as you go you see people passing through on different lines, only to disappear when they change course. in the middle of the city, it's quiet in there where the blocks rise a couple of feet over head-height, and eerie. i like it. the designer kept the meaning of the arrangement to himself, so it's up to the individual to interpret what it means to them. sounds pretty wanky, but it's also extremely effective at the same time, making you really think about it as you go. beneath is an exhibition which i found to be quite moving, outlining the timeline of Nazi persecution, then moving on to show transcripts of letter written by Jewish prisoners, German soldiers, Nazi officials, all laid out in lit patches of the floor in a darkened room. in fact, most of it's dark in there. there's the black, unlit room where the names of the dead are projected on the wall and voices in English and German are read out, along with a brief speil about who they were, what they did and how they died. i'm told that if you wanted to sit there waiting for it to repeat it'd take 10 years to go through.

now THAT is fucked up.

then there's the room where monoliths hang from the ceiling, looking like replicas of the ones above on the surface, explaining the fates of a number of families - where they came from, their occupations, where they were sent and who survived to war. it's solemn and heartrending and completely worth visiting.

i've heard people talk about reparation and retribution for the crimes committed by the Nazis, and how the German people should shoulder the burden of the events of 1937 to 1945... and i wonder how you ever could. how can a nation ever try to make up for genocide? how can you explain to a child that actions taken by ancestors they never knew would haunt them for the rest of their lives? i don't think it could ever be done, but i'm glad that such an effort's been made to mark those times and ensure that people never forget that it happened, that monsters really do exist and that they walk the streets with human faces rather than hide under the bed.

coming out of the exhibition i wandered over to where Hitler's Bunker sits mouldering in pieces under a carpark and stood for a while pondering, and while i looked around i noticed the Mythos Germania exhibit which explains the bunkers used by Nazi officials in the area, as well as how even the underground railway tunnels were separated during the Cold War, all the way through the reunification and the final removals of all traces of the old bunkers. all traces of the bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun spent their final days have been removed specifically to ensure that it can never become a shrine for Neo-Nazis, but you can still stand over where the remains sit buried. Mythos Germaina is diagonally across from the Topography of Terror. sitting between them on the east side of the road i noticed the Berlin Souveniers store selling tshirts and key rings next to the cafe where Matti and i had stopped for coffee 2 days previously and suddenly found myself feeling more than a little cheapened and disgusted by the juxtapositon.

there's no fucking helping some people, i swear.

so i moved on and headed back past the Brandenburg Gate, circled around and along the river a little ways, then went and sat on the grass in front of the Reichstag for a bit so that i'd get a chance to see it in the daytime, investigated the Tiergarten (avoiding the nudist area), then meandered gradually back to the hostel. an interesting aspect of West Berlin is the number of open gardens you can find. when The Wall went up it prevented any access in and out of West Berlin apart from train or plane, and with the cost of air travel in those days it wasn't the sort of thing a family could do just to get out of the city for a while. this meant that if people wanted to get out into nature they hit the park. the Tiergarten is just one of these, and it's the size of a small suburb, full of patches of forest surrounding avenues of grass with statues and water features. as i cruised through it i saw families having picnics, people lying around reading books and sunbathing, couples having quiet moments cuddled up together. it seemed a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and reminded me of London in no small way.

as i walked around aimlessly i came across a cluster of big rocks sitting in the grass with a plaque nearby which explained that a Berliner had sailed himself around the world picking up massive chunks of rock from the various continents and dragged them to this spot, leaving "sister" rocks in the original locations which he polished up on their Berlin-facing sides so that on one particular day the sun would hit them all simultaneously and bounce the light back to the ones in Berlin, linking Berlin with the rest of the world. i looked around the field and noticed a chunk of red stone with a couple of guys sitting on it so i wandered over and, recognising their accents asked

hey boys, d'ya reckon this is the Aussie stone then?
"What's that?"
so i explained what i'd seen on the sign and they looked at the rock speculatively
fuckin' crazy, isn't it?
"I reckon. Who'd've thought it? You come half-way around the world and wind up sitting on a rock from bloody home!"

i'd had about enough by the time i tramped back down Unter Den Linden to the hostel, so i killed the last couple of hours sitting around getting a few things organised on the net and making sure i got to the right train station good and early. some time soon i'll pass into Poland, and by the time i'm done there i reckon i'll have had about as much Holocaust history as i can stand. i've really enjoyed Berlin, although i can't help but feel that i'm nowhere near done with the place. when i first visited Amsterdam i had a long conversation with SpeedFox about whether or not we could live there. he'd just interviewed for a job there so it was a bit of a hot topic for him, and by the end of the day we'd pretty much agreed that neither of us would really enjoy it that much. Berlin, on the other hand, has probably knocked Paris out of my Top European City To Live In charts. i don't know if i'll get the chance, but i'll definately have to find some excuse to come back at some point in the future.

meanwhile it's time to see how well i sleep on a rocking, clicking train. at least neither of the guys i'm sharing the cabin with are snoring, so that's a bonus...

Krakow: today i went to Auschwicz...

2009-08-03T05:12:00.000+10:00

fuck.

i'm going for a beer now...

Berlin: Don't Mention The War...

2009-08-01T08:54:00.000+10:00

heading back from a pub out in the suburbs this evening in a city that was 20 years ago reunited with sledgehammers and constructive demolition, i was left to navigate the U-Bahn on my own for the first time since arriving. i don't often take public transport when i travel but in Berlin it's worth it, espcially when i'm being shown around some of the less-known sights and you want to save time, so as i walked down the steps my hands went into autopilot and fished my PSD and headphones out of my TARDIS bag and brought on some noise. i'm in Germany and i'm feeling that something in German would be appropriate but i realise quickly that i cleared Rammstein off some time ago in favour of... i'm not sure anymore. it might have been In Flames... or Incubus. i mentally scan my database, and on a sudden realisation i'm digging deep into the Guitar Hero soundtrack to find Heir Kompt Alex by Die Toten Hosen (Here Comes Alex by The Dead Pants) and everything's right with the world as the train runs along towards Alexanderplatz. shortly thereafter i remember that i included some Rammstein in some compilations i'd made up years ago and i'm pretty sure i had it loud enough that Keine Lust and Engel were audible to everyone else in the station. it didn't help that i was headbanging - that tends to draw attention.

i'm staying in a mega-hostel just off Unter Den Linden, roughly 20 minutes walk into East Berlin from the Brandenburg Gate. it's a good location, across the road from Alexanderplatz which is a) a large square with a water fountain and b) a main rail hub for the city. this made it easy this morning when Matthias came to meet me and show me around. it's nifty running into other travelers you've met before when you're out in the world. it's freaky-cool catching up with someone you've not seen in years, since way back in another life. i've not seen Matthias in something like 4 years, would realistically make it 2 lives ago, and the last time we spoke we were... i wouldn't go so far as to say less than friendly, but certainly not on xmas-card lists. still, when i walked out the front door to see him snapping a quick photo of the statue across the street i recognised him instantly, and we fell back into step just like it was old times when i used to come round to his place and drink beer until far too late in the evening.

i can't stress the value of having a local guide, even if they've only been in the town for 5 weeks. Matti'd been training to do the free walking tours i've been taking in almost every city, so we headed off so he could get some practice, meandering through the central area, then bouncing from location to location to check out some stuff that isn't on the regular tourist route, like having a laugh at the Australian-themed restaurant at Potsdamerplatz, and the artisty area in Freidrichshain. i'd already gone on a mission the previous evening after arriving with Dee, Stef and Val, taking in the Book Burning Memorial (a glassed-over hole in the ground in the stop where the biggest book-burning occurred, in which you can see bookshelves with enough room for one of each of the 22,000+ books on the Nazi list of prohibited titles) and the viewing terrace on top of the Reichstag (with is totally worth checking at night), where i experienced the strangest phenomenon.

i've never been to Berlin before, but i instantly knew this building, etched into my mind's eye. i'm standing 50 metres from the front steps with a pilfered MP44 Assault Rifle wearing a Red Army uniform fighting my way across the trenches and pillboxes surrounding the front of the building, taking cover behind burning tanks. sprinting up the steps, i leap over the barbed wire to clear the soldiers behind the sandbags, take out the heavy machinegun on the platform opposite then carefully pass between the pillars on the right-hand side so that i don't take a magazine-load of bullets in the back while i clear the fortified area in front of the heavy doors under the engraved roof. all this is happening in my head while i stand there looking at the facade, and i can't help but wonder at the accuracy of some of the computer games i've been playing in the last few years. i think i died a dozen times getting up those steps when i played Call of Duty 4, and the layout of the front of this building has been etched into my memory. it's pretty ridiculous getting flashbacks from a place you've never been, but there you go.

i'm glad i met this crew - Dee's older than she looks and is more mature than most of the kids on the bus, and Val and Stef? they're just... Nice. don't drink, don't smoke, they say things like "dang" and "shoot". i'm sure they have a wild side, but i'm yet to find it. next to these two i'm a total badass, which amuses me a little... but then next to these two my mum's a total badass. certainly, they've been a nice gang to hang with.

i'd been in town for an hour or two when i realised that of everywhere i've been since Paris... and possibly including... this is the most "home-like" city i've been in. this could have something to do with everything being so modern. Australian cities are, you have to admit, ridiculously young when compared to Europe. the country's only 221 years old for fuck's sake. i've drunk in pubs older than that in most of the countries i've been to, and some of these places have seen constant, civilised habitation for over 2000 years. most of Berlin, on the other hand, is less than 60 years old, and much of East Berlin is even more recent. in WWII most of the city was bombed down the shattered stone and burning timbers, and a lot of the rest was fought over tooth and nail by the remnants of the German Army and SS while the Red Army swarmed upon the last remaining Nazi strongholds in a wave of tanks, blodshed and brutal retribution for atrocities committed from Poland to St Petersburg. fighting went house-to-house back to the bunkers around the Reichstag until around the time Hitler embraced the warm friendship of a .32 Luger round in his bunker, the remains of which i stood over for a while, by which time there was barely a building left standing that wasn't gutted by fire and artillery and half the city had to be rebuilt. spin forward to 1989 and i remember watching news footage of the people taking to the Wall with pickaxes and hammers, tearing down the practical symbol of idealism and oppression that had divided friends and loved-ones for 30 years in one of the most spectacular aftershocks of the fall of the Soviet Union. much of the old Soviet-style buildings have been rebuilt or renovated, leaving much of (the former, but i'll continue to refer to as) East Berlin remarkably new - very much contemporary to much of the recent construction in Perth or Melbourne.

it helps that, unlike many of the places i've been where large swathes of the older parts of cities have been given over to tourists, Berlin feels like the sort of place where people actually live, as opposed to, say, Amsterdam where the locals generally wouldn't be seen dead in the RLD unless they were... you know... working. i'd been in town for less than 24 hours when i realised that i desperately wanted to learn German and apply for an EU working visa, although from what Matti said, if neu-Deutsch keeps getting popular everyone'll be English soon enough anyway which personally i think is something of a shame.

what a town! what a vibe! Berlin carries itself with the effortless grace of a city that works well as a unit. the public transport's excellent (when it's working - there was "emergency maintenance" on the S-Bahn while i was there. i'd love to see it when everything's humming along properly), there's someone selling bratwurst and/or kebabs on every second street corner, or so it seems. Berlin is home to the buggest Turkish population outside of Turkey and as usual they brought their food with them. nowhere seems too busy, or too boring, and a huge proportion of the population know exactly how good they've got it because they remember what it was like before when things were Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. pondering plans for the rest of my stay i can't shake the feeling that i'm really going to enjoy the next couple of days...

Snippets #15: on the right noise for he right time...

2009-07-31T08:46:00.000+10:00

when i was sitting on the train from Lisbon to Sintra, way back at the beginning of my trip, i pulled out my PSD, plugged my wraparound headphones in and hit the Play button on some Parkway Drive. i don't usually listen to music when i'm traveling - my ears are 1/6 of my sensory perception, and almost as important to my experience of a place as what it looks or smells or tastes like. if you've got headphones drowning out the sound of a place, how are you going to notice the hum of the Eurostar as it leaves the station at St Pancras, or the sweet whine of the violin the man's playing on the Paris Metro, the calls of the market vendors in Fyshwick, or the boys busking with cellos in the street in Bruges, the snatches of English overheard that tell you here's someone i might be able to talk to, or the horn of the bus that's about to hit you in Barcelona because you looked the wrong way before crossing the street? everywhere has its sound, each language its own tone - hot chili Portugese blur, hyperactive mania of excited Spanish, the musical sexiness of French or the manic staccato of Cantonese. it's part of each place's unique signature.

but somehow despite it being the 3rd day (if you count the last day running around London, followed by my night in Heathrow) of my trip, it felt like forever since i'd chilled out with some music, and some noise always helps to ease the long periods of time spent sitting, waiting, getting your corpus from one place to another. i didn't select Parkway Drive per se - i'd been listening to it so much in London that it was an automatic response, but somehow after Romance Is Dead had been playing for a minute or so and i realised that it was all wrong for the situation, and i pondered this while i sat and watched Lisbon roll past, become countryside and eventually evolve into mountains. Parkway Drive is a loud metal band from the east coast of Australia - loud and angry, fast-paced and screamy. it's music for angry young men who say "Fuck" a lot. music for when you're living in a city and have to deal with the amount of shit a metropolis like London throws at you, when you're surrounded by souless zombies living the same day over and over and over, dealing with the day-to-day drudgery of Real Life, struggling to maintain some semblance of spark in your soul. somehow it just didn't suit my new world of wandering Europe, in a new bed every couple of days with my home on my back, a shoulder bag full of city maps, unfamiliar streets and something new around every corner.

Andy Mckee plays me to sleep when i'm on trains and planes. Death Cab For Cutie sing to me while i blog more often than noot. Wish You Were Here by Incubus soothes my mind when i'm thinking of home and missing my people. Pink Floyd when i want some soul. Disturbed or Parkway Drive when i want to get charged up and energetic. The Cure when i'm feeling melancholy. right now Bloc Party are being English in my ears, wistful and mournful, but bouncy and exuberant all at the same time (i discovered Plans off the Silent Alarm album by accident yesterday and this evening it's hit the spot perfectly while i nagivated the Berlin U-bahn back to my hostel). Parkway Drive came back when i was in Bruges when i was feeling weary and fucked, walking the streets more because i felt like i should than because i really wanted to be anywhere but my bed with Carrion screaming on repeat, drilling into my skill and filling my tired bones with energy. i swear i grew 2 inches when i hit Play, my shoulders squared and my legs forgot they were exhausted. wandering the canals, my head wasn't in the game - i was still in Paris, sitting along the Seine at midnight, driving down the Cotter with the roof off my car and the William Shatner's cover of Common People cranked loud, walking into Dickson from O'Connor for dinner on a cool spring evening. i was tired and weary, quietly wishing i was home, ashamed of myself for not enjoying where i was or what i was doing more than i was, and adding some loud, angry noise to the mix kept me moving, exploring this faux-medieval town for a couple of hours until i felt like i'd done as much of it as i could possibly do.

i'd love to say that i've done all of this on my own - modern technology lets me brush fingertips with Home, too far out of reach to take hold of, but the most featherlight of touches that lets the feeling of warmth defeat the tyrany of distance, my 24 Hour Friends: people who are just as alone as you are and determined not to be, but sometimes it's enough to have a voice in your ears who reminds you why you're doing what you're doing, the value of it, the opportunity that's too good to be missed despite the cost to your health, your relationships, your savings account, lifting you up by your brain stem, dragging you forwards and making you hungry for more...

Amsterdam: is it just me, or did this place suddenly get a whole lot less cool?

2009-07-30T17:24:00.001+10:00

i hate to say it, but i'm fucking happy to be out of Amderdam. seriously, how much a place can change from winter to summer is amazing. it's not the town itself - it's still the happy little burg it was when i was here in February. the bucket's the same, it's all about the shit that's in it.

i'm being overly harsh i guess, but sitting on the bus on the long ride to Berlin i reckon i could have spent more time in Bercelona rather than stop here. i was only going to make it an overnighter, then get back on the bus in the morning and motor it onwards but i'd organised with the girls from Toowoomba whom i met in Bern to hang out while i was here so i took 3 nights rather than just the 1. it didn't help that they were a no-show for our evening out, leaving me fucked and abandoned, sitting on the side of the road in the RLD while i sat like a mug with my book on the kerb having stoned tourists trip over me while cigarette butts rained down out of upstairs windows. the only thing that saved the evening was when i went for a walk to look for food and ran into Mel from Busabout walking in the opposite direction and hooked in with her and her friends from there on in... although on reflection that may have wound up being the silver lining on the storm cloud that was starting to form over my head because if i'd not met up with Mel i'd not have met Dee, Stef or Val either.

i was already in a bit of a shitty mood when i took up my position on the kerb at 4PM. the previous night getting in was alright - i'd been in my dorm for all of 8 seconds when i got chatting to the Canadian who was lying on his bunk moaning and groaning about having been stoned and drunk every night the last week and spending too much money on prostitutes. didn't stop him coming down for a beer though, or paying for everything past the first round. we had a pretty good evening sitting around the Irish pub downstairs from the Witte Tulp (White Tulip) Hostel. even the rowdy Brit tourists who generally yelled over us and, while friendly enough, had a certain streak of "quick to anger soccer hooligan" about them, didn't really spoil the mood. they were just a taste of what i was going to see out on the streets later though.

the "English Stag Do" has a pretty bad reputation in most of Europe that i've seen. they get out in a pack, go somewhere cheap or fun and generally act like it's a fucking theme park. they seem to roll with the philosophy that they're only there for a couple of days so they can run amok and not have to worry about the mess they leave in their wake. it's all about getting pissed and shoving past you in the street while singing football anthems with these arseholes. it's not everyone, of course. not every young Aussie lad wears boardies, a blue wife-beater and a stubby-holder on his arm and makes a mess of Galipoli on ANZAC Day, but it happens enough (or used to - i avoided it when i had the chance this year based on the reputation, but people who went this year said they've cleaned up their act and this year was very respectful). Amsterdam attracts the sort of people who really want to get this sort of shit out of their system. want to go get stoned and not worry about getting arrested? want have a different girl every night and not go through the effort of chatting them up and buy them drinks? want to be able to piss in the street? actually, that's not really allowed. i nearly wound in lockup when i ducked down a quiet alley for some relief and was given a good shoving by an angry plain-clothes cop. the rest the Dutch will more than happily charge and tax you for. there are 3 Golden Rules i've been told have been the main tenents of Dutch law for hundreds of years: 1) You must be discrete. 2) You can't be harming anyone else. 3) It must be good for business. obey these three and it's all on for young and old. Catholicism survived through the Protestant age because of these three rules. Jews were accepted with to greater or lesser degrees even into WWII because of this.

it's just that it attracts seedy wankers who messy up the place and use it as an excuse for a big party, and summer is the time when everyone takes their break so plenty of them come to Amsterdam. i don't know how the locals stand it, but then the Dutch are famously liberal and open-minded. to this day i've not met a rude or nasty Dutch person - just look at Wiebe and Mieke who i hung out with in Sintra.

waking up the next morning without anywhere to be and a bit if a hangover i'd have loved a sleep-in... even just to 9:30 or 10AM. my grand plans of getting some fucking rest were defeated by the Old Church which my hostel happened to be in front of. it's not even a fucking church anymore, but that doesn't mean the bellringers have been laid off. starting at 8 and going on until about 10 at night the bells go off every fifteen fucking minutes. the bells... THE FUCKING BELLS!! WHY WON'T THEY FUCKING STOP? WE'RE IN THE ERA OF WRISTWATCHES FOR FUCK'S SAKE! i HAVE A CLOCK ON MY PHONE, MP3 PLAYER AND CAMERA! I DON'T NEED TO KNOW THE TIME FROM A FUCKING BELL! SWEET JEBUS i'LL RECANT MY ATHEISM, JUST MAKE THEM FUCKING STOP!!! every morning. every motherfucking, dog-raping, child-vivisectioning morning.

i can get by on 5-6 hours of sleep as long as it'd good and i don't have to do it for long, but a shitty pillow and sagging mattress put paid to that, so between a shitty night's sleep and the sandaled feet of a choir of angels pounding on my head i was not in a great mood. still, awake and with time to kill i headed off for a pile of Pommes Frittes et Mayonaise the NewEurope Free Tour for something to do, and because i knew in my gut that if i went i'd run into Mladin again, which i did. he was on the bus when i left Bruges and i knew he'd do the free tour on his first day to get an idea of the place before covering the rest on foot. he's a good bloke and i was missing the Triumvirate of Tourism from Paris and after walking around for 4 hours we stopped for a quiet coffee before i went off to my doomed appointment.

i spent the rest of the evening getting to know my new batch of 24 Hour Friends while Mel changed hostels and we went for a wander of the RLD since they'd not seen it at night yet. when i came in winter it was fairly quiet all told. this time round it was jam-packed with people and from the number of lads i saw going through the doors the sex-tourists were in full force. when you get up to with your money is up to you as long as it's not hurting anyone but i couldn't pay for it. it's not my style. still, the girls have to make a living so i'll not pass judgement. i heard a story in Paris that there was an interesting legal case in The Netherlands a few years ago where a woman applied for the dole and was asked if she'd tried prostitution and when she said "No" she was refused assistance because she'd "not tried all available options". the case went to court and (fortunately, as far as i'm concerned) the girl won. that must have been an interesting circus to be in the middle of...

the most surreal thing about it though was the tour groups of OAP's being led through, peering in the windows at the girls in their skimpies. that completely did my head in. imagine your grandmother wandering through Amsterdam's RLD surrounded by stoners and sex-tourists having a good old look-see. i can't do it. my head's ready to implode just thinking about it, and i think it'd be the end of either of mine, especailly my maternal. nonetheless, that's what i was seeing, not once but twice, on consecutive nights.

i tried for an early night and a better night's sleep and failed on both counts and in the end i think the only reason i dragged my aching corpus out of bed was to get away from those fucking bells, so i went to catch some of the stuff i'd not seen the first time i was in Amsterdam like the Sex Museum (which was interesting, but small and at the end of the day: meh), then tramed around until i got to the Waterlooplein Markets and found a phone booth so that i could call my kid brother for his birthday. when i got on Busabout they gave me a phone card that's supposed to be good for 5 minutes worth of calls to Australia, but not, it turns out, good enough to call a mobile phone which is the only number i have for The Boy since he stopped being a KIPPER (Kids In Parents Premises Eroding Retirement Savings) and moved out from the Parentals last December so i wound up saying fuck it (out loud, in the middle of the road just so you know) and eating into my drindling credit to call him on my mobile. the sound of shock was worth it. he's my kid brother - these things are worth it.

i ran into Mladin randomly at the monument in Dam Platz while i was waiting for Mel and the crew an hour or so later while i saw there with Inhale Exhale cranked on my PSD and my copy of Day Watch open on my lap and he kept me company while i killed time. Dee's an interesting Indian-Australian who's been good value and Val and Stef are fraternal-twins from canada who are straight as straight, but very Nice - good value one and all. we meandered around and checked out a few things they hadn't seen yet while we waited for our evening canal-cruise, then spent a bit over an hour being ferried along the canals. which was a pleasant way to kill the evening. pulling back into dock i spied Caitlin and her boyfriend sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe - two American kids i'd met in Interlaken and wound up bailing on the crew so i could go over and say hello, which is how i would up giving yet another tour of the RLD. i was going that way anyway - my hostel was in the middle of it all after all. it was an odd random encounter, but pleasant.

this morning i managed to beat the bells. i was out the door by 6:30AM so that i could get across town and to the pick-up point for the bus. the Val and Stef saved me a long walk - they were staying 100m down the road from me and had a spare tram ticket which they donated to me which meant that we were in position a good hour early. now it's all a couple of hours behind me and we're not far from the German border. we've been warned to get rid of any marjuana we may have saved for later before we hit there on threat of the arrest of not just them, but the bus driver as well and no one looks particularly worried. me, i've got better things to do than try to sneak a gram of fine Dutch weed across the border, so i know i'm clean. in the meantime, it's going to be a long run into Berlin and the motorway's pretty boring. if you want to see countryside take the train. if you want to get there cheap while surrounded by Australians take Busabout. i've got Dee sleeping next to me, but there's no way i'm sleeping on this thing so i guess i'll kill the hours watching Pushing Daisies and Flight of the Conchords. thank fuck for buses with power points...

Bruges: drinking chocolate and eating beer...

2009-07-26T00:49:00.001+10:00

"Don't go to Bruges," people would said when i told them where i was planning on getting to in Europe, "all there is to do is eat chocolate and drink beer."

wait... are you saying that's a BAD thing?

this is where i'm supposed to wax lyrical about Bruges. it's a small Belgian town you can walk across in half an hour... maybe more if you count the areas outside the moat. it's billed as a UNESCO-protected medieval town with charming streets and canals. what it is is a tourist village which is about as authentic as a Disney remake of a Hans Christian Andersson fairy tale. please note that i don't say this is specifically a bad thing. when you get past the instant reaction, Bruges is a lovely little place to kill a couple of days drinking some examples of the best-crafted beers on the planet. i've drunk a lot of beer in my time, across 5/7 of the inhabitable continents and i'm here to tell you that Belgian beer is the BEST... although i'm also prepared to recant this statement if necessary when i get to Germany.

oh, and the chocolate is fucking unreal, too.

and cheap. did i mention cheap?

you can cover off the main tourist attractions in half a day - it's what i did, with Danielle whom i met on the bus on the way in. go to the top of the bell tower in the Markt Square in the middle of town, then head off to see the Veneration of the Holy Blood (one of the churches claims to have a vial of Jesus' blood. it was a vial, it had dried-up brownish-red stuff in it... although i'd love to see a DNA comparison with the Shroud of Turin. you know... just for shits and giggles), bugger off to yet another church to see the Madonna and Child - the only Michaelangelo statue outside of Italy, walk past a canal or two and fetch up in the little pub with 200+ different beers behind the counter and see how many of them you can get through. there, see? throw in some Pommes Frittes et Mayonaisse and try out some of the chocolate (my recommendation: buy some of the broken-up blocks, take a massive bite and let it slowly melt in your mouth. it shut me up for a good 5 minutes... if you ignore the happy groaning) and you've done everything you need to do it Bruges. the rest of it is relaxation time.

seriously, i spent my second day going for a nice walk around the place taking photos and ignoring the tourist shops and spending almost no money - 5.50 Euros bought me over a kilo of spaghetti at a little cafe marked out on the tourist map (although the map failed to mention that this place had the Worst Service i'Ve Ever Seen, and i've been to Wong Kei's in London), and i worked through a 10 Euro Beer Card at the hostel. even my fucking hostel had incredible beer on hand. there doesn't seem to be any such thing as a bad Belgian beer. they must burn anyone who brews a poor batch at the stake or something.

my only little sin in Bruges was a visit to the local Heavy Metal Music shop, where i asked to hear any recommended Belgian or French metal, and would up walking away with a Belgian Punk album. the rest of it was just more rubber off the soles of my shoes and time spent sitting around the hostel's bar (the only place i could get a reliable net connection) chatting with Jess, the blonde Canadian who seemed to be hanging around a bit. she was pleasant enough company, and i wasn't looking for a new Best Friend or anything so she worked out well enough as someone to talk to.

i really needed the time to chill out though. it hit me hard on my second day there. i woke up feeling like crap, shifted my kit from one dorm to another and found myself sitting downstairs with breakfast trying to work up the motivation to do something other than lie around on my bunk all day. in the end i shamed myself into going exploring, but it was only 4 hours before i was back again, and i must have spent at least one of them reading my book while i waited for the rude waitress at he cafe to take my order (although once she did the food came quick), and another half standing in Metalzone listening to average-sounding music. i was, as they say, uninspired.

still, 2 days after arriving i'm back on the bus, this time to Amsterdam. my faithful travel-towel which has been with me since Egypt, on the other hand, didn't make it onto the bus. i left the bloody thing hanging up in Bruges after my shower this morning and didn't realise until i was climbing on the bus to go, so i guess i'm drying myself with a tshirt from now until i find a cheap replacement. oh well - these things happen on the road and if that's the worst thing i lose then i'll count myself lucky... wait... where's my external hard drive?

no, there it is. damn TARDIS shoulder-bag...

Paris: unexpected delays may occur in transit...

2009-07-23T09:51:00.001+10:00

i was supposed to be in Bruges by now - it's the date i've had booked since the day before i left London when i waved my finger at the calendar in the STA in Covent Garden and plucked a random date out of the air. as it happens, i'm not currently in Bruges: i'm still in Paris. it wasn't my idea, although it was a good one. one i liked more and more as the seconds passed after it was inserted into my head as gentle as a needle in your vein, as effective as a red-hot spike through your ear. wisdom comes at the strangest times, like when you're sitting on the bank of the Seine and someone says quietly:

"You know, you don't have to leave tomorrow..."

and so i didn't.

the free walking tour was a good idea too - there was a huge contingent from the St Christopher's and it was a good opportunity to meet a few people. i did another of the NewEurope tours in Dublin, and i strongly recommend them. it's a cheap 3-4 hours of entertaininemt, and you see a lot of a city quick. after we were done there were a few people who wanted to head off to the Eiffel Tower, so i went along and as we were all milling around afterwards in the shade of that monstrous feat of engineering i suggested that the Arc du Triomphe was only another 20 minutes walk onwards, so i led them there. suddenly i'm a fucking tour guide in a city i'd spent a total of 2 days in previously.

NewEurope run a number of paid-for tours, including one through the Montmartre area, famous for artists and sleaze, the Moulin Rouge and a particularly impressive church. we were all keen, so we caught the Metro out to Blanche Station from the Arc du Triomphe and met them up across the road from the Moulin Rouge (which is smaller than you'd expect, as well as being somewhat less impressive than the movie would lead you to believe). we're led along and shown the houses where Van Gogh lived and Picasso lived, as well as the cafe where Picasso painted pictures for food before he got famous, on to the statue dedicated to the martyr who allegedly picked up his own severed head, then hiked 6 miles up the hill to that very spot before dropping dead, preaching the gospel as he went, meandering our way up to the hill whereupon sits the church i'd seen in the distance from the Eiffel Tower ages previously. it's a gleaming white mixture of roman, byzantine and gothic styles. it's also where my spectacles broke in two, leaving me with my prescription sunglasses to see by.

well, fuck.

i wound up walking around through the twilight with a small crew of people who wanted to check out the markets we'd walked through previously on the tour and pick up some art. the area's jumping with starving artists making a living sketching portraits and caricatures, as well as some extraordinarily pleasant paintings of various landmarks, and i wound up dropping 20 Euros on a couple of nice pictures that'll go well with the pair i picked up in Barcelona. now there's a habit i should probably nip in the bud sooner rather than later...

meanwhile, after nearly 12 hours of wandering around with this group, i was starting to get to know them pretty well. there's Mladin - a Serbian from Melbourne taking his long-service leave, MCG - a Californian student with an eco-sustainability bent on exchange in Denmark and taking her time getting there, plus Stars and Moon - mum dragging her youngest around Europe for a while as part of her home-schooling. they've proven to be an entertaining crew for the last couple of days. we finally got back to the hostel just as the last of the light was fading, which was good since i was getting to the point where i had to choose between wearing my sunnies and being able to see the darkness clearly, or going without and seeing it light but blurry. next thing i knew, MCG and i were sitting on the little bridge across the Seine at 2 in the morning with me looking like some sort of vampire fetishist, wearing mirror-shades in the middle of the night, talking about sustainable technologies for a brighter future.

i finally got to sleep at somewhere around 3 or 4 when Snoring Guy rolled over, farted and shut the fuck up (i've come to the opinion that roughly one in 6 people snore, so if you're in a dorm room you're almost guaranteed to have SOMEONE sleeping in the same room who sounds like a cross between a clogged toilet and Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine), then was up again at 7:30AM to shift my bus bookings around.

today i played tour-guide again. our merry band caught the Metro to Notre Dame, then onwards to the Catacombs, where MCG bailed and headed for the hostel and 4 hours of sleep. i'm not sure how it happened, but people seem to think that i'm some sort of authority on this town. it helps that they wanted to see things i've already seen once and i have the sort of memory that holds onto otherwise-useless information which is none-the-less interesting. i'd planned on getting the crew to the Catacombs then chilling out in a cafe before meeting them afterwards but Stars wouldn't hear of it, and the next thing i knew my ticket was covered. we stopped for a bite to eat, and suddenly i have a burger in front of me. after guiding everyone around yesterday Mladin insisted on going a round at the hostel, and he's been talking about grabbing crepes somewhere too. this is the sort of generosity that does my head in - here i am wandering around with random 24 Hour Friends, having a good time and suddenly it's like a job people want to tip me for. i don't want it but i'll accept it, even if only not to be rude - i'm just happy to have entertaining people to hang with and i'm having a blast just walking the streets, soaking up the colour, practicing my French (mine is laughably bad, but better than most of the people i'm with so i've been doing a fair bit of the talking). what's really funny is that this isn't the first time someone's suggested that i drop out and become a tour-guide. maybe i should have a think about that...

meanwhile, Stars and Moon need to get to Charles de Gaulle for their flight to Luton and i'm going to make damn-sure they get on the right train, so Mladin and i help them navigate the maze of the nearby Metro/RER station, then accompany them as far as Gare du Nord on our way back to the hostel. i'm going to have to keep in touch with those two - Stars is a remarkably interesting woman in her early 50's with a lot of life-knowledge. she's a quick study as well. she had me pegged surprisingly quickly. Moon, on the other hand, has to be one of the clueiest 13 year olds i've ever met. life is long, though, and Stars has consigned her email address to the mercies of my Notebook de Dios so we'll just have to see what happens. i'm supposed to be passing through her part of the world in September next year anyway, so things could always get interesting.

i had a bit of a time out in my new dorm - booking an extra bed at the last second often means shifting rooms, and now i'm up on the 6th floor in a room with 6 beds, not bunks, and an ensuite bathroom. it hurt my wallet, but the convenience factor was entirely worth it. i was sitting in the bar a couple of hours later chatting with a couple of randoms - Rachel the Apprentice Chef from Sydney whom i'd met in my dorm earlier, and Emily from Melbourne who's touring for a couple of months while her boyfriend winds up his work before they meet back up in London - when MCG comes down and we head down the road for a cheap meal of couscous before whiling away the evening, picking up from where we'd left he night before while the rain comes down outside, making the streets glisten and lending the Parisien night a dream-like quality. tomorrow MCG, Mladin and i are headed for Versailles to check out the Chateau and the gardens that have seen the feet of the the likes of Louis XIV and XVI, Marie-Antionette and Napoleon Boneparte and i know that once again tonight i'll get nowhere near enough sleep, and tomorrow will be spent telling stories and entertaining the troops. we've got a good dynamic running now - 3 very different people with vastly different backgrounds who somehow get along famously. MCG's enjoying having interesting people to hang out with and Mladin's liking having the backup in his wanderings. he was really nervous about getting around a completely foreign city, but he's getting it together. by Friday he'll be running around alone without a care in the world. by Friday i'll be on the bus to Bruges, as tempting as it is to hang around untill Sunday when Mladin and MCG move on. i can't though - i just can't afford it, although that's probably for the best anyway. i could see myself getting too attached to this place and i don't have that luxury. places to do, things to meet, people to be... or is that supposed to be the other way around?

France - Back in Paris again (once wasn't enough)...

2009-07-21T07:39:00.000+10:00

FUCK!!! Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuckfuck!! damn my brain, damn my memory, damn my jet-powered rocket pants... which i don't have and are yet to be invented! it's Monday. i just hopped off the train at Gare du l'Est and started hiking off to go sight-seeing when i remembered that tomorrow i'd planned on going to the Louvre. but tomorrow's a Tuesday. the motherfucking Louvre's closed on a fucking Tuesday!

FUCK!

i stopped in the first cafe i saw and payed a ruinously high price for a coffee so i could use their wifi. the lack of free wifi in Interlaken meant that i hadn't actually worked out where my hostel was, so i needed to find it quick. half an hour later i'm there and wait for some stroppy French bitch to finish arguing with the staff so that i can get checked in, dump my bag and run. it's 4:30PM before i get there, having sprinted to the nearest Metro station and guessed right the direction to go. fortunately the Lourve is on the same line, and thank fuck for that.

come 6PM i'm much calmer. i've seen the Mona Lisa and the Venus di Milo, i've seen the Code of Hammurabi and more French paintings and sculture than i care to remember, including a room full of colossal Rubens works, and spent the rest of the time aimlessly wandering looking at whatever i can see, which is a lot. i could head back to the hostel again by Metro... but it's a pleasant evening and i've spent most of the day on the train from Interlaken to Basel, then on to Paris Est so i could use the exercise and i plod up to the Opera house, then meander my way back, stopping at a greasy kebab joint which happened to have an open wifi connection nearby to feed for the first time today, check my email and sort out my bus route and realise that i have 9 days unaccounted for at the end of the trip before i head off the the south of Italy. hmm... i'll have to find something interesting to fill those with.

did i mention that yesterday i went Canyoning? i don't think so. for a full description of what it involves, check the excellent Wikipedia page. for the lazy, you start at the top of a canyon and get to the bottom or end of it, jumping from rock to rock, wading through glacier-melt and jumping off or sliding down waterfalls. i was exhausted at the end of it, once i'd had a few of the provided beers and had a cheese-and-salami sandwich and the adrenaline had worn off. it's been safe-ified, and there are a pair of experienced guides who take you through, but from the 50 metre abseil at the top to the zip-line at the bottom it has to be one of the funnest things i've ever done - just imagine doing a flip off a 6 metre jump into freezing snow-melt next to a waterfall in the Swiss Alps. it's unbelieveable... now i just need to find 380 Franks so that ii can pay someone to let me jump out of a helicopter.

meanwhile, i'm back in Paris again and this is something which brings me no small joy - a pastry shop on every street corner, monuments you can navigate by and attractive women who say "oui" (or more usually in the case of one hairy Australian: "non"). the only sadness is that it means that i'm no longer in Interlaken. Jason and i parted company early this morning after having a lovely dinner out at the Thai place near the Funny Farm, but he's on facebook, so we can catch up whenever we want. we wound up sitting next to the guy who runs the Hang Gliding business in Interlaken, who asked how long we'd been travelling together.

mate! we only met a couple of days ago in the hostel!
"Really? You guys seem like best mates!"

i guess it was a bit like that. still, he's in London by now and i'm chilling out in the St Christophers alongside the north-east end of the Seine. i got the Louvre in today, so i have tomorrow to entertain myself. i'll probably do one of the free NewEurope tours - it leaves from the hostel and promises 3-4 hours of entertainment. it's lovely being back in Paris. i can walk around this city for hours on end and be happy, stopping occasionally for a coffee or a Tartelette Citron. it's going to be a great day tomorrow - i can feel it, then it's on the bus to Bruges for me and on to phase 2 of my trip. i'm still looking forward to heading home, but there's no urgency in it. i've hit my stride and got my second wind. i'm powering on in the best way and laughing all the way. part of the joy of being back in Paris is that i don't have that feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar place. i still have my map from the last time, but my feet seem to know more or less where to go and there's no concern about getting horrendously lost. it's a great feeling and i'm grooving it, a lot. i'd head back out into it tonight, but i'm opting for a quiet, and cheap one lying in my bunk with my Eee getting a few things sorted out online. tomorrow's another day however, and i'm sure there's plenty of adventures to be had then...

Interlaken: please let me get back here just once before my body breaks...

2009-07-19T03:23:00.001+10:00

it's one of those gorgeous rainy days where water's been falling steadily and gently from the sky since i woke up this morning and hasn't stopped in any real way since. it's the sort of cold wet day where if you were at home you'd look out the window in the morning and think fuck it, i'm not even changing out of my pyjamas, let alone leaving the fucking house, make yourself a steaming hot cup of tea, curl up on the couch with a bucket of popcorn big enough to feed Ethiopia and watch movies until you pass out under the blanket... but i'm not at home. i'm in Interlaken, Switzerland.

Interlaken is one of those places whispered about in hostels and cheap pubs - wherever low-fi travellers congregate. it's in the Lonely Planet and all, but unless you're in the Adventure Sports scene you've probably never heard of it. i hadn't either until i got chatting with two Canadian girls with more metal in their faces than the Statue of Liberty, waiting for the Airport Shuttle on my way out of Split. we did the standard backpacker's handshake of where are you going? where have you been? and they said

"We're going back to Interlaken."
back?
"Yeah, we had to totally rearrange our trip and add 2 weeks so we could go back. 3 weeks just wasn't enough."
wait... what the fuck's so special about Interlaken??!?

so when i got back to London i looked it up, promptly added it to my list of places to get to in Switzerland, filed under "i have too much shit to deal with right now to think about it too hard".

i pulled into Interlaken Ost Station at 3 in the afternoon a couple of days ago on a high. i'd spent the previous day wandering Bern with Chris from Colorado, hitting the Einstein Museum and generally enjoying the quiet little capital, then having some quiet drinks with him and the girls from Toowoomba. the girls were on an early train out, so Chris and i bummed around and took our time getting to the station. our departures were something like 2 minutes apart, and i spent the next 50 minutes ignoring my book. the view out the window was far too nice to miss - rolling hills and neat little villages giving way to a sky-blue lake in a valley of mountains which the train followed for about half the trip, stopping finally in the massively-touristy little town of Interlaken. picture a nexus of glacial valleys carved out between the mountains - a land-bridge between two lakes, one of which rates as the deepest in Europe at over 800 metres while overhead parachutes float down from helicopters, para- and hang-gliders soar and gondolas glide silently up to the top of mountains under a sky speckled with clouds. Interlaken is the Xtreme Sports capital of Europe, second in the world to New Zealand for people to run around like fucking maniacs and jump off or out of things in summer, or strap planks to their feet and slide down white mountains in winder. it's also possibly the most naturally-beautiful place i've ever been to, and after 16 countries it's getting towards the point where that's saying something.

i killed an hour or so checking out the town with my backpack strapped on under clear blue skies in 34 degree heat before i legged it out to Bonigen a couple of kilometres down the road and as separate from Interlaken as Queanbeyan is from Canberra. i'd been disorganised again and left booking a hostel too late, and without wifi at the YHA in Bern i decided to take the easy route and get them to book me a couple of nights in the one in Interlaken. this, it turned out, was something of a mistake. the Interlaken YHA's idyllicly located on the shore of the eastern lake with a nice little grassed area and decent facilities. it's also family-friendly, which came as a bit of a shock.

i'll admit that when i walked into the dorm in Bern to see a Spanish woman breast-feeding in a room that smelled strongly of "baby" i was a bit freaked out. rocking up in Interlaken to find out i was sharing the room with 2 families did not make me particularly happy. don't get me wrong - it's not that i don't like kids. i fucking hate kids. i didn't even like myself until i was in my 20's. they're loud, irritating, don't listen to anyone and you're not allowed to punch them or tell them to shut the fuck up. i'll admit that there are certain individual children i'm quite fond of, but on the whole i'd not be particularly upset if everyone under the age of 16 was sent to an internment camp until they became properly human and were allowed to join the rest of society. fortunately, my worst fears were never realised. there were plenty of kids around the hostel, almost all of whom were quite well behaved and apart from one little Indian girl who spoke only in short, sharp shrieks they managed to not actually force me to notice them.

i'd got myself settled in, read my book for a while and took the chance to enjoy some downtime for a couple of hours when a brain-wave hit me: town between two lakes, one east, one west. the sun sets in the west. there must be at least even odds of there being a great sunset! i had about an hour to get to the other side of town, so i powered off and caught the bus out to Interlaken West. when you check into your hostel in this part of the world you get a "Tourist Card" which entitles you to free use of the bus system, plus various discounts around the place, so i had no concerns about abusing it as much as possible. 4 hours later i staggered back into the hostel unfulfilled - i'd power-walked for nearly an hour trying to get to the western lake, only to realise that i'd massively underestimated the distance involved and had to walk back into town to get the bus back to Bonigen, then spent another hour walking down the street with my laptop out sniffing for open wifi connections. i eventually found one and sat down on a pile of bags of fertiliser, obviously looking dodgy as hell, but refusing to move until i'd caught up on my email.

sitting in the hostel going over the day's photos shortly thereafter and beginning to despair of meeting anyone interesting in this slice of family-friendly hell, i met Jason from Halifax, Nova Scotia and we've been hanging out ever since. with absolutely no effort we managed to hit it off in about 8 seconds, and 5 minutes later we'd agreed to meet at breakfast and go exploring the next day. Thursday was beautiful and warm with a sun which smiled down upon us like a golden god. when i dragged myself out of my bunk on Friday it wasn't just raining, it was pissing down. i'd known this was going to happen - in a town where the primary source of income relies on the weather, everyone knows what's coming tomorrow so i'd been warned about the incoming storms the day before, so Jason and i convened over low-GI cereal to discuss our game-plan, which turned out to be "get to town, hit the Tourist Information Centre".

Friday was one of those days on which, irrespective of the weather, the gods did smile upon me. between meeting at breakfast and heading out, the rain stopped. the bus arrived 2 minutes after we got to the stop so we didn't have to wait, and by the time we got into town there was some clear sky. there was no climbing mountains - the peaks were all obscured by clouds. they have CCTV up there on a public chanel so that anyone can check out the conditions, and that made planning the day much easier. in the end we wound up firing off to Lauterbrunnen by train to check out the Trummelbach falls which cut through the mountain past 11 viewing galleries and pump 20,000 litres of water a second down into the valley. the train's obviously been designed with tourists in mind: the windows all wind right down, and we spent the half-hour ride hanging out of them like a pair fools, taking photos and giggling like clowns with views sliding by that make you want to curl up in the corner and gibber quietly.

the weather was still holding out when we got back to Lauterbrunnen, so we headed off to Grindelwald if for no other reason than that it was there and accessible, and wound up not having to pay for the train because, out of sheer luck, the conductor just didn't get to us. Lauterbrunnen's famous for sitting in a valley with something like 72 waterfalls and was breathtaking. Grindelwald used to be a farming village before tourism reared its lucrative head and gives access to some of the region's peaks. we looked long and speculatively at one of the chair-lifts, but noted at the darkening sky and opted to skip it and head for the train. we were barely on it when the heavens opened, and our ride back to Interlaken was accompanied by a light-show to go with the pouring rain.

it was 3 hours later that we staggered into the hostel, soaked, but full of the cheapest pizza in Interlaken (still the equivalent of AUD$11.60), exhausted but jubilent and sat down to sink some cheap beer from the supermarket, high-fiving each other every couple of minuites. it was a fucking great day.

today's been a washout. Jason and i have shifted hostels to the Funny Farm which is far less of a mission to get in and out of town from. i'm booked in to go Canyoning tomorrow in Grimsel and we're heading out with a couple of Americans we met when we arrived to get pizza and watch the fireworks that are going off in the park. i'm loving this town, the quiet Swiss people wandering around and the backpackers and adventure-seekers who are all talking about what amazing activity they've just done, and what they have planned for tomomorrow. i was only supposed to be here for 2 nights and this is night 3 of what will turn out to be 4 and... well, i'm sure Lyon is lovely and all, but right now it could be turned into a smoking glass crater tomorrow and i'll not regret having missed seeing it because i still have one more day to enjoy being here.

yes, it IS worth coming back to... how shocked am i?

Barcelona -> Bern: soothing rain for the soul...

2009-07-15T09:48:00.000+10:00

it's raining in Bern and i'm feeling better than i have in days, sitting on the balcony outside my dorm room in the dark with the lightning flashing behind me while fat drops of water fall from the sky. by the time i flew out of Barcelona i was shattered - fucked up and bent out of shape. was it the heat? the crowds? i don't know. one way or another i was glad to finally get out of Spain.

i pulled into Barcelona on the night train out of Madrid on Sunday morning after spending the night in a cramped little cabin sitting up with an American girl, a lovely young Argentinian couple and a middle-aged Spanish couple who i spoke to mostly in sign-language and my broken Spanish. it was just like the scene out of Eurotrip when the kids are on the train with the amorous Italian guy, except less with the "scusi, scusi" and more of the waking up every hour or so feeling cramped and uncomfortable. night trains are an awesome idea for travelling - it cost me 41 Euros - 1/4 the cost of the high-speed AVE train, and saved me the cost of a hostel for the night while giving me an extra full day in Madrid. the light was blinding when i walked out of Barcelona Sants Estation with my backpack strapped on, and my world had the surreal slant that comes when you don't sleep well, wake up in a completely different place, and then suddenly as i'm walking along i realised i was standing in a grove of gum trees. i was convinced that this could NOT be right, but no - there was a little plaque on the ground saying that they were in fact Eucalyptus Globulus, and suddenly i desperately wished i was home again. a wise(ish) man once said to me "Holidays are easy, travel is hard," and in Barcelona i hit the wall.

it's around three and a half kilometres from the Sants to La Ramblas (The Rambles) in the heart of Barcelona. i could have taken the Metro, but why? i had time to kill and a city to see, and walking saved me 1.35 Euros. i took my time, grabbing a coffee at a little cafe on the side of Av. de Paral Lel to build up my strength. it was already hot when i stepped blinking out of the station at just past 8, and it just got hotter. i finally got to the Hostel at somewhere around 9:30AM to find that it was, in fact, a pokie lounge. WTF? the people running the place didn't speak english and pointed down the road when i asked about the Hostel at 49 Las Ramblas. no joy. i walked into a nearby hostel who refused to let me use their wifi, so i wound up walking up and down the street looking for an unsecured connection. i must have looked dodgy as fuck sitting on my backpack with my Eee on my lap, but i was beyond caring. finally connected outside the Tourism Information Centre, i checked the website to see that the address was, in fact, 49... except that the directions said 75. Double-WTF?

20 mintues later i'm sitting in the common-room of the dodgiest setup i've ever come across. no staff - i'd been let in by one of the Estonians who was staying there. the guy who manages the place comes and goes, it seems. after an hour of cruising their net connection i gave up, dumped my bag and bogged off to wander around the town. it's a pretty place, no mistake. broad streets tree-lined streets, pretty buildings, a Gothic Quarter which was all shady alleyways, the Picasso Museum with was well-worth the look (although not as good as the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) and a marina which has obviously been done up in the last few years with a statue of Columbus, Nelson-style, on a high plinth pointing west, and to glory.

after i'd had my fill of bizarre Gaudi architecture, forgetting which side of the road people drive on and nearly getting hit by buses and sweating in the sticky heat i got back to the hostel and finally got to check in. it turns out that they're actually operating illegally - they don't have a licence to operate, and they were massively overbooked (i was in a 6-bed dorm sleeping 8 people: one on a trundle bed, and 2 Scottish girls sleeping together)... but... you know? it was the friendliest place i've stayed in a long time, a nice lounge (with 2 people sleeping on the couch), their internet was free and fast and it was as comfortable as it had to be, in one of the best locations in town. the weirdness aside, i was actually kinda grooving it.

i've been talking to people about destinations for a while now - it's a standard Backpacker conversation: where have you been, where are you going, what was good, what sucked. i've heard the phrase "Oh, Barcelona shits all over Madrid," so many times that i had pretty high expectations. i find the best way to compare two cities is the sister-analogy, and Spain is no different. Barcelona's definately the prettier younger sister to Madrid, but in this case it's not completely a good thing. Madrid's the cultured, older girl with a deep-seated energy and doesn't give a fuck what you think. Madrid smells of hot concrete, salsa and tapas. Barcelona, on the other hand, is prettied up, but you realise quickly that she's done her makeup to cover up the bad skin and lack of personality. it's gorgeous, don't get me wrong... but i'm getting sick of younger girls with an inferiority complex. after Madrid, Barcelona smelled like last night's paella, urine and desperation and now i'm a little older and wiser i find i've far more time for the more worldly lass who doesn't feel like she has anything too prove. Madrid's beauty is effortless. Barca's is forced, and the vibe rubbed me completely the wrong way.

when i'd pulled in that morning i met a couple of English girls (ok, one was from Wales, but i'm not in the mood to split hairs, OK?) who i'd agreed to meet up with at 7PM to go for a drink and when they finally got their act together at a quarter to 8 we had a nice time wandering around, grabbing a gyros (think aussie-style kebab) at one place, then a jug of sangria at another and all would have been good if we hadn't been attached by a sweaty Spanish guy afterwards. it started with him yelling at us, then trying to grab me, then a shove, after which i decided that it was about time i distracted him while the girls legged it, so i threw him around for a bit then legged it myself.

i've not been in a fight in years, and the last time it ended in one blow. it turned out that i COULD in fact take a punch to the face and not fall over, so he backed off from there. i wasn't in the mood to take another shot in the jaw, so when he knocked my specs off i wound up having to knock him around for a bit while i desperately searched the ground for them, hitting him occasionally to keep him distracted. it was funny - holding my phone as a torch and scouring the pavement blindly while making sure that neither of us stepped on them. it was funnier when the guy who attacked me started calling for the police. i've got no fucking idea what was going on, but i spotted them, grabbed him by the throat and threw him into the street so that i could grab them, punched him again while i made sure they were intact and legged it back onto the croweded Rambla. i caught up with the girls again, but it was a while before the adrenaline wore off.

back in the hostel later i was starting to settle in for the night when the 3 Scottish girls checked in and we got chatting. when i mentioned that they should stay in the crowded areas on account of my adventures they joked about taking me out with them for security, and i said yeah, why not? which is why i would up hanging out with them until past 2. they were good company... not to mention hotter than Satan's Sauna.

the next morning i woke up in an almost empty room, covered in sweat, feeling like i'd been run over by a truck. most of the people in the hostel were heading off to a music festival nearby, which i'm guessing is why i had such a hard time finding accomodation for the 2 days i was planning in Barcelona. i hadn't been injured in the fight - he didn't manage to lay anything on me (it's nice to know for sure that the training i've had since the that last fight still works), and i hadn't drunk much, but i'd had it. i spend the rest of the morning lying around drinking water, trying to get up the energy to go back out and see more of the city, but i was fucked. i managed to drag my sorry arse out of bed, get some food into me and head off to walk around, but after about 3 hours in the heat i gave up and chilled out in the hostel, chatting with the 2 Swedish girls who'd spent the last week partying, the Malaysian/British student on walkabout and the 5 Aussies who'd just run with the bulls in Pamplona. i just wasn't in the mood - i tried to get up the motivation to blog but it just didn't happen. i tried to watch a movie but i couldn't concentrate. i was tired and feeling sick and really just not in a fit state for anything.

the next morning i pulled myself out of bed in pretty much the same state i'd entered it in, packed my shit and headed out to catch the Metro for the Airport (not as simple a proposition as it looked like it'd be on the map). i'd been so on the go for the last fortnight and the only thought in my head was about how shit i felt and how much i desperately just wanted to go the fuck home. check-in was quick and painless, the little Airbus A319 took off and i immediately passed out in my seat for most of the flight to Geneva.

you know how the Swiss are renouned for being well organised? well, everything you've heard is right. if they'd just accept the Euro and try not to be so fucking expensive this place'd be a paradise. the train station at the Airport connects straight to Geneva. i'd expected to have to find the station for my train to Bern, but it was a no-brainer so my lunch on the shores of Lake Geneva became too much of a mission for me to be bothered with. i had to change trains at Lausanne anyway, so i decided to go for a wander there instead and found myself rolling downhill through a lovely neat little town. i had enough time to get to Lake Geneva, then hike back up the hill, grab some fresh bread, ham and cheese from a supermarket and get back to the station in time for the next train out, and sat there watching the countryside roll by while i had a little picnic on the train, washing my sandwich down with juice and polishing it off with a couple of squares of dark Swiss chocolate.

sitting there, watching the Alps roll into the lake i couldn't help but laugh - on a train in Switzerland eating French bread wearing shoes from Singapore, shorts from London, a singlet from Australia and a hat from Thailand while i listen to people talking in German. sometimes i get so confused i have no idea where the fuck i am. somehow i managed not to fall asleep on the train to Bern. i don't know how. the countryside was lovely in the green-rolling-hills and mountains way that i loved about Ireland, but in a style that seems uniquely Swiss - everything neat and clean and nice. i kept looking for Julie Andrews to come dancing over the hill singing, but she never showed.

Bern and i got off to a bad start. part of what i hated about Barca was the crowds. Madrid was busy, but it flowed. Barca was full of gawping fucking tourists getting in my way and stopping in the middle of the footpath for no reason, bumping into me and risking a fist in the back of the head for their trouble. i stepped off the train and straight into rush-hour foot-traffic in the Swiss Capital and after the last few days i was on the verge of not being able to fucking take it. i was hot, sweaty, irritable and about ready to mow down anyone who got in my way. out of the station i sat down at a bus stop to take stock and check the map before footing it off towards the YHA. it wasn't a long walk, and almost entirely downhill (which is doing to suck huge piles of donkey-dick when i move on, but that'll be another day). check-in was quick and friendly, although they don't have any free fucking wifi (which should be a capital offence in this day and age). i got into my room to find out that i'd be sharing a dorm with a nursing mother, so the room smells strongly of baby, and sitting on the balcony sorting through photos from the last couple of weeks i was hearing a dearth of English being spoken in the courtyard until... wait... what was that? AUSTRALIAN ACCENTS! 3 OF THEM!

ten years ago i couldn't have done it. i was a much different lad back then and the idea of walking up to 3 girls and inviting myself into the conversation would have had me all tied up in knots. this, however, is a whole different country and i am a new and improved Raven since the old days so i threw my shoes on and went straight down there.

sorry, but i heard the accent from upstairs. mind if i join you guys?

which is how i wound up spending what was going to be a quiet evening lying on my bunk watching a movie sitting around drinking the bottle of port i'd picked up in Lisbon with Nat, Kyly and Lou from Brisvegas, along with Chris from Colorado. ordinarily i try to avoid other Australians on tour... or maybe avoid is too strong. i just don't seek them out. this time i needed it. i needed it like Goulburn needs a decent thunderstorm. i needed it like a smoker needs that one last fag. i needed to be amongst my own people, talking like i would back home, using phrases and sayings that have had people in the last several months looking at me like i'm strange, like when i was offered some snacks and said nah, but cheers. these little things. they're nice folks and we wound up being asked to quiet down a few times. we sat outside under the maple tree while it rained and the thunder rolled, until i got so heavy we were getting drenched and had to go inside. Kyly jumped on the piano, then grabbed her guitar and sung a song she wrote. 2 more bottles of wine were polished off and a good time was had by all, and after all that i'm feeling so much better it doesn't even fucking compare. a few hours with people who think that my hobby of having people film me doing poi in different places is cool, who are checking off places they've visited like a shopping list, who have stories of their misfortunes that they laugh about and tell like jokes... it's helped remind me why i AM a long way from home, why i'm running around like a fucking maniac doing as much as i can and seeing everything i can wrap my eyes around while i have the time. i'm actually looking forward to exploring Bern with Chris tomorrow, and that's more than i've been able to say for a couple of days now.

the world's looking up. it feels like i've hit the wall and managed to go through it, bricks an rubble scattered in all directions while i brush the mortar-dust off my shoulders and power on into the distance. i needed to feel the rain on my face after the last couple of weeks of blue skies and heat in Spain, and now my tired soul feels washed clean and renewed. of course, i've now gone and given myself 6 hours or less to sleep which is a bad habit, but fuck it. i had to sit down and bash it out, talk about it live, smell the moist air and listen to the dripping of water falling on this quiet little city. tomorrow's going to be a good day... i can feel it in my brain, but now i need to sleep so that i can be up and make the best of the breakfast provided in the morning. it's fucking expensive in Switzerland, so if there's free food i'm going to be all over it like a fat girl on a cupcake...

Madrid -> Valdelavilla -> Madrid: how my brain broke just by speaking my own language...

2009-07-12T08:31:00.000+10:00

i was in a rush when i flew into Madrid - so much of a rush that i actually spring for a taxi from the airport into town. i was really not in the mood for fucking around. i was supposed to be at an orientation lunch for my Pueblo Ingles programme at 2PM, and the flight didn't arrive until 40 minutes past that, so i sprinted into the city, dumped my backpack and powered across town. i missed the free lunch, of course, but i got a couple of coffees into me, listened to the live flamenco music and caught the briefing, which was the most important part - i kinda wanted to know what was expected of me over the coming week, and what i could expect in return.

Pueblo Ingles is a company operating primarily in Spain which teaches English. they do the standard courses, but they also have a programme where they take the students out to one of several little villages dotted around the place and immerse them in the language for a week. to keep the costs down, and to give them the most natural experience outside of spending time in an English-speaking country, they get in volunteers to spend the week with them and make us talk to them for hours and hours and hours on end. the biggest rule is that you never speak Spanish to them... although sometimes that gets bent if it means getting a better understanding. it's a lot of work for a volunteer - you have to get yourself to Madrid for the pickup, but they make it worth your while with free accomodation and 3 meals a day with just about as much wine as you'd want to drink. they say 3 meals a day. what they mean is a buffet breakfast, then 3-course banquets lunch and tea with morning tea and stacks of coffee thrown in, then they let you loose out into the town while you get paired up one-on-one with one of the Spaniards and suggested topics of conversation.

sounds like fun, yeah? well, it is. it's also surprisingly tiring. i like to think i can talk the ear off just about anyone, but at the end of the first day i was about ready to fall over from mental exhaustion and barely able to string a sentance together. it turns out i was the hardest person there to understand when i spoke naturally - i was actually told a couple of days in that the Spaniards were afraid to talk to me, i was so hard to follow, so i wound up doing my usual trick of adjusting my accent to make it easier to follow. this helped, i think.

it was an entertaining week, all told. we were in a little town village called Valdelavilla which literally translates as "Village In The Valley", with no mobile reception, a dodgy internet connection and no one else for miles around. the place was deserted back in the 20's when the government planted a pine forest which sucked up too much water for them to continue farming, then was redeveloped back in othe 80's/90's as a Rural Tourism resort. Pueblo Ingles has more or less permanent, exclusive access to the place for their programmes which run back to back, friday to friday, so the place is almost constantly in use so it works out well for everyone. what this all comes down to is that i got to see a part of Spain i'd never have seen if i'd done the tourist thing in a peaceful, quiet part of the middle of fucking nowhere in northern Spain. there were some surreal moments being out in the countryside, like when i took one of my victi... i mean charges for a walk, and on the way back was floored with the view of wind turbines up on the hill over the village, or when i woke up at 3 in the morning to a munching, crunching sound, looked out the window and saw 2 stags feeding on the green grass under my bedroom window.

the Spanish were hillarious fun, too. most of them had been sent by work to improve their English, but there were a few who'd paid out of their own pockets to be there, and at 1800 Euros each it's not a cheap proposition. i love the Spanish though - these are people who dance a the drop of a hat, and they all seem to learn at about the same time as they learn how to walk. seriously, these people can fucking MOVE, and they don't care who they dance with. the IT Manager in his 50's from Catalunya is dancing with the 19yo car salesman, then will pass him off for the pretty young OBGYN who was previously being spun around by the singer/dancer from Minnesota while the Russian/American dance-instructor tries to get the hairier of the two Australians to come salsa, gives up when he resists (by grabbing hold of the bar and refusing to let go) and instead grabs the photographer from Melbourne. ignore what you see on the streets of Madrid - the scam artists, the prostitutes, the thugs. don't let that be your impression of Spain. there were some beautiful, genuine people on the programme. take Olga and Clara, the OBGYN's. Clara had to be the sweetest lady i've ever met - always smiling and enthusiastic. she made me promise to let her know when i was in Rome so she could come and hang out with me, and how could i say no? take Jose Luis who was always stone-faced, then would come out with the driest humour i've heard in forever and having everyone on the floor laughing. then there was King Arthur (Arturo) and Pablo-the-Fifth (Pablo V) who were constantly dragging me aside to learn slang and swear words, and Marta who, at 17, became everyone's little sister. leaving was an emotional time - you spend a week of concentrated time with a bunch of people and when you suddenly have to go back to the real world you don't want to leave.

the Anglos were an interesting bunch, too - there were a couple of backpackers doing it for a bit of a change of pace (and a cheap week - my bar tab at the end came to 7.40 Euros), the regulars who've done programmes before, a number of Americans who'd flown in just to do the programme and were then heading straight home. a few of them had brought their teenage children with them who were involved in one of the teen-programmes.

that all said, i was pretty glad to get back to Madrid and not have to think so hard about what i was saying or how. making yourself easy to understand means speaking slowly and clearly, and keeping a conversation interesting without going into too many esoteric topics that they're not going to understand kept my brain working overtime. i was really looking forward to meeting up with the folks i'd met when i'd first pulled into Madrid, when i walked out of the orientation planning on heading off sight-seeing and was grabbed by Nic, the Mad Scotswoman, who dragged me out for a beer... or three. Nic's a veteran - she's done something like 6 different programmes over the years, so she's been in and out of Madrid enough that she knows her way around. i wound up hanging with her and Pete from Watford until past midnight on that first night and we'd exchanged numbers so we could find each other again afterwards, so at 9 i was waiting at the Bear statue just off Puerto Del Sol. it's a fairly famous little monument - only a metre or so high on a metre-high plinth, a bear reaching up to eat from a strawberry tree. i found out later that it symbolises the religious and secular sides of Madrid living in harmony from when the church held the land and mining rights and an agreement was made to not make life too hard on the town. the Bear statue is the standard meeting place for non-Spaniards in Madrid, so i had a fun time waving in the background of other people's photos while i waited for the rest of the crew to show up.

i liked Madrid a surprising amount. i was told not to expect much, but the dry heat agreed with me - it saps your strength far less than humidity, and there's a background buzz of energy that runs through the place. every city in Europe is built on a major waterway - an ocean, or a river - except for Madrid. it's fed water from an underground spring, but being inland keeps it dry and means you don't get the clinging heat you do elsewhere. you find yourself thinking at 2AM that it's really too early to head to bed because the party's only just beginning. Spain runs at a different pace and timing to anywhere else i've been in the world. forget about the siesta - business people don't have one, of course, you can also forget about finding an open shop between 2 and 4 in the afternoon because the shopkeepers DO. the good restaurants don't open until 9, where in most of Australia they're starting to shut down, and Spanish people think nothing of sitting out to dinner until 2AM, grabbing a couple of cervezas until 4, then meeting up at 9 or 10AM the next day. i have no idea how they do it, but i like it.

i met up with Pete the next morning at 9:30 back at the Bear to go sightseeing and spent half the day wandering around, grabbing coffee in Plaza Mayor and cruising through the Egyptian Temple. back in Egypt i was told that when UNESCO helped save Abu Simbel and the Temple of Isis a number of smaller temples were gifted to the countries involved, and the Temple of Dobod was one of them. it was kinda nice to have my memories of Egypt refreshed, if only for 5 minutes. shortly later we were back at the Bear to meet Nic and Sarah from California, as well as Fernando, one of the Spaniards from Nic's programme and Claire, a mad American who seems to have been everywhere and has more energy than i do at twice my age. by the time i climbed onto the night-train to Barcelona i'd been at the Bear 3 times as we met, split and met again. we'd done a brilliant tapas lunch and checked out some of the less-famous touristy sites, including the Don Quioxte statue i'd walked past earlier but in my rush to get where i was going hadn't noticed.

Madrid's a surprisingly addictive town. first glance says it's nothing much - just another European city, but when you're out on the town the resonance of a few million Spaniards pushes your energy levels right up, and sleep becomes this thing that happens to other people. now it's receeded into the distance and it's dark outside the carriage i'll be trying to sleep in tonight. tomorrow i wake up in Barcelona and i have high hopes for a good time there - it's been massively hyped and i'm hoping that the 2 full days i have scheduled will be enough. meanwhile it's time to curl up and see if Andy Mckee can play me to sleep so i have the energy to get through tomorrow...

Portugal: i went to Lisbon and somehow i managed to not find any roast chicken. i feel ripped off...

2009-07-02T08:53:00.000+10:00

1/7/09 11:53PM

in the last 2 days i've been offered pot and hashish on a total of 14 occasions. i've been offered cocaine on 4. most of the time it's regular looking guys, although twice it was middle-aged gents in a suit or a tweed jacket and cap. that was a little... odd. it's a little disconcerting when a guy walks up to you with a stick of what's unlikely to actually be hash or probably isn't marijuana in his hand. fortunately for everyone involved in the complete lack of a transaction they were happy to take a polite no thanks with a good grace and moved on. thanks, but i like to have my lungs and my nasal cavity on the inside, not the outside, and i have no interest in spending tonight in a Portugese jail... or worse: hospital.

Lisbon's pretty. actually, it reminded me a lot of parts of Croatia - old-school limestone buildings with terracotta roofs, smallish alleys emptying out onto wide streets. the majority of the Old Town is flanked by a pair of hills, forming a shallow valley leading down to the harbor on the Tagus River. on the eastern side, overlooking the city, is an old castle. on the west, a really very pleasant restaurant and night district. i'd heard that Lisbon wasn't really worth seeing, but now i really wish i had the chance to get down to Lagos which i've heard is nicer, but i have places to be and only so much time in any one country.

i rolled into town yesterday with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. i got an hour and a half at Heathrow, then about the same again on the plane. i rememeber it taking off, then someone giving me food, then coming in for the descent. one might consider crashing out at the airport to be a bit ill-considered, but it served its purpose and i knew for sure that i wasn't going to be late for my flight. i wish i'd had more time to prepare... but then, you always do. i'd printed out a map to my hostel, then promptly forgotten to pick it up off the fucking printer. it's typical - as my grandfather used to say: "Less rush, more hurry." either way, i managed to make do with that i found at the airport, although i'd i'd been paying better attention i could have gotten off the airport shuttle right outside my hostel, and not half an hour's hike uphill. by the time i finally got here i was dripping with sweat and must have smelled a treat... and i know it's only going to get worse as the weeks go by. the Hostel Without A Name was fine as far as things go, although its claim to be in Central Lisbon was a little creative. oh well. shit happens. i dumped my bag, changed my shirt for a singlet and headed off into the sunshine. 6 hours later i collapsed into my bunk having hit the castle, the foreshore, the Baixa (the dip in the valley) and a few of the rambling, medieval areas either side. my feet had barely left the ground when Pietre, my Italian dorm-mate asked me what i was up to, and whether i wanted to come out for a beer and while my brain was formulating the phrase i'm tired and i didn't get much sleep last night so i'm going to have a quiet one in my mouth jumped in with why the fuck not? and it was another 5 hours of wandering around the town before i was finally in bed again. damn beer-hungry mouth...

by the end of all that i more or less felt like i'd done Lisbon which is a little sad all told, so i checked out the Lonely Planet guide to Western Europe i'd borrowed from Moonbug and decided to hop the train and head for Sintra - around 40 minutes on the Lisbon commuter rail. Sintra was the holiday-home for the Portugese royalty, back in the day when they had any and is basically a pretty little forested area with a Moorish castle on at the top of the mountain which dates back to the 9th century. i got in with a basic plan revolving around "show up, see what there is to see", so i wandered into the town looking for lunch to find that everything was touristy and expensive so i kept heading up, up, up the mountain. another picturesque location, another fucking mountain. as i walked i realised i was surrounded by a band of OAP's cluttering up the footpath from somewhere in South America, probably Brazil from what little i know of Portugese. not a problem... except that they were slower than an inbred retard. fine - i can get past them... and then they decided that the best way to tackle a slow walk was to sing. i had enough of singing Latin American motherfuckers ruining my peace and quiet in Egypt, so i legged it faster to get away from them and found a nice little spot to have a light lunch... only to find that they'd followed me into the cafe and hadn't given up on the singing bullshit. no lunch for me then. thanks a fucking lot you noisy slow-walking throwing-off-my-chi sons of bitches.

so i decided that eating was just not going to happen and headed on up the mountain, to get away from the Brazilians if nothing else.

so it was that i got to the bottom of the castle section of the climb and was sitting down for a bit of a break that i met Mieke and Wiebe and somehow fell in with them for the rest of the day. Wiebe (think Wilbur) lives in Lisbon doing more or less the sort of work that i do and his mum Mieke (think Mika) had come to visit him for a bit. by the time we'd climbed to the top, tried sneaking into the castle without paying (and failed), taken a stack of photos and headed down again we were getting along roaringly. beers at the bottom, you say? how could i say no? we even wound up on the same train back to Lisbon together, and i couldn't have been happier with that arrangement. Wiebe and i seemed to share the same twisted sense of humour - there were a couple of times when he had me in stitches, rolling around my seat on the train. he's even started reading my blog, which has me worried. maybe i should say something nice about him?

it's these little things that really put a smile on your face when you're traveling - the 24 hour friends who add colour to the place. if i'd been only my own i think i'd have been pretty bored, but i was stoked beyond words to have interesting people to hang with, and to this day i'm glad to say i've never met a Dutch person who wasn't pleasant company.

tonight is quiet time. i'm checking out tomorrow and on a flight to Madrid to kick off what will hopefully be an entertaining interlude in Spain. flight? well, it was acutually cheaper to fly than to take a train, not to mention much, MUCH quicker. i really want to be avoiding air travel as much as possible. this is a train/bus trip for me, but when needs must to the airport i will go, and probably give EasyJet even more of my cash. otherwise, it's been a good start to the trip... 2 days down... and... what is it? 70 something more to go?

3, 2, 1... blast off (sleeping at Heathrow for fun & profit, but mostly desperation & convenience)...

2009-06-30T11:02:00.002+10:00

the last tube from Piccadilly to Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3&5 passes through Piccadilly Circus at 12:32AM. i know this because i have to know this - that was the latest possible time i could get there and still get out here tonight. i made sure i had plenty of leeway, and if i remember right i passed through there at around 11:47PM. TSO headed off on Sunday morning, leaving me to the last of my packing and running around. our last few days together were spent chilling out most of the time, with trips to the pub and a night out watching As You Like It performed at Shakespeare's Globe thrown in. all told, i think we had a really nice time - a lot crammed into a relatively short period of time, but none of it rushed. lots of walking, trips to Cambridge and Paris, nights at the pub and living the London life... it was a good way to finish off my time in this town.

i took a timeout and hung with the Grey Man in Hyde Park for the afternoon, which was probably a poorly considered move, but still something i wasn't going to miss - one last pleasant couple of hours sitting around on the grass sinking the last of the beers from the fridge. i hit the flat to throw the last of my shit into my bags and bolt off to Woolwich and a night crashing on SiJ's couch before the end. i was exhausted dragging all my crap through the bus and train, then up the hill to her place but relieved that at least it was all finally done and spent the rest of the evening sitting around with her and Lisa shooting the breeze until it was time to pass out.

my packing took days - frenzied periods of throwing things into one bag or another interspersed with time spent backing up data and preparing my Eee for 3 months on the road, my 500GB external hard drive full of movies and backups of crucial data (music, photos, that sort of thing) copied onto my 160GB backup drive which was then wrapped deep in clothes and soft things for preservation in case of the worst. i've done runs to the charity bins to throw out clothes that no longer fit and which i have no real need to drag back across the world (can somebody please think of the carbon?), and went into Bite with a bag load of stuff which i gave away in a joke auction... and somehow managed to score 10 quid for my troubles. i've packed and moved so many times in the last decade that you'd think that i'd be an expert at it by now, but i was still astonished by the number of bags of junk i had to run downstairs to the bins. old paperwork for a job i had for 3 days? bin it. this sock has a hole in it. in the bin with you (i stocked up on multiple pairs of identical socks before i left Aus specifically so that i wouldn't lose a pair if i went through the toes of one). small piles of detritus that you seem to hold on to until it comes time to move? gone. somehow, though, everything's got done and i've managed to not stress too much about it.

i got my bond back earlier today and promptly spent it on booking travel at STA - here one minute, gone the next, but i now know how i'm getting around 2/3 of my route with 3 days sunbathing on the southern Italian coast thrown in near the end, plus the best travel insurance i could afford in case something happens on the road. it's been a long day flying around the city, but productive. i was finishing off my last re-pack 5 minutes before walking out the door this evening and saying goodbye to Moonbug and Simono - a sure sign that i gave myself exactly the right amount of time to finish off the laundry-list of things i had to achieve before i came out to Heathrow tonight. in the end my farewell to SiJ came on the street - she was returning home just as i was leaving and i caught her for 5 minutes in the street as we crossed paths.

tonight i sleep at Heathrow Terminal 3. my flight leaves at 7:40AM and from Woolwich Arsenal i knew i'd never make it out there in the morning in time to catch it, so i decided to pull the classic backpacker's trick of trying to sleep at the airport. i'd probably be trying to pass out already if i hadn't met a guy from California called Gardener who was looking for the right terminal for his Singapore Air flight. we spent the last 2 or so hours chewing each other's ears off, comparing notes and generally keeping each other company. right now he's bedded down near a power-point across the hall from where i'm sitting, ear plugs in his ears to block out the beeping noise of the floor-polishing machine as it cruises around the Arrivals lounge (Departures doesn't have any seats). there are more than a couple of people here. the early-birds have scored the seats without arms and are laid out, happily snoring away. others are sitting awake. others still have laid out on the floor in sleeping bags. one thing's for sure - hardly anyone looks particularly comfortable and looking at what i've managed to scrounge i have the feeling i'll be lying here listening to Andy Mckee for quite some time to come before i get any sleep... if any at all.

in around 7 hours i'll walk off a BA flight and into Europe, leaving behind yet another phase of my life. i've packed it all in once more and between now and October 7th i officially have No Fixed Address and my home on my back with a wish-list of destinations that i know i have no possible way of fulfilling with the time and budget i have available. still, as far as ways to head home go, i'm reckoning that there are far worse than falling over at Canberra Airport off the back of 11 weeks in Europe, 2 days in Hong Kong, a wedding and far more reunions than i care to think about right now.

in the meantime, i'm going to pack my Eee back into my shoulder bag which i'll then throw under my head as a pillow and see whether sleep's going to be an option. if anything's certain about the next 3 months, grabbing sleep wherever i can find it is going to be absolutely cruicial...

France: one night in Paris...

2009-06-25T08:21:00.002+10:00

24/6/09 11:21PM

sometimes you can't help but make a bad joke, no matter how much you know you'll have to pay for it later. that said, a day and a half in Paris was nowhere near enough. i didn't stay in a Hilton, but it was cheap and pleasant and in a decent enough area to get around from. i've been seeing ads posted all over London talking about how cheap and easy it is to get to and from Paris by the Eurostar. hop a train, go through the Chunnel, pull up in Gare Du Nord 2 hours and 15 minutes later. it was something i thought might be fun to do while TSO was in town and since we agreed, we booked it back on her first night in town. we've been active, she and i. on Saturday we went to Cambridge for the day with the Grey Man while really quite hungover... well, he and i were, anyway. i knew we shouldn't have hit it so hard the night before at the Red Lion, but we had such a great night out these things happen. she bounced back like a trooper, the healthy wench. it was a really nice day regardless, wandering around the quaint little town, dodging students earning a bit of extra scratch peddling punting boats up and down the Cam. the night before we headed for Paris, however, i made sure i got a bit of an early one. i got at least 4 hours of sleep, i'll have you know. i still passed out somewhere in the Chunnel though. i'm getting really good at passing out for power naps on the train.

don't believe what people tell you - they're full of shit. i've been hearing for years the the French are rude, particularly Parisiens. this is crap. the rudest person i met in 2 days was the UK Border Guard at the train station on the way back to London. knowing English but refusing to speak it? bah. the number of times we'd go to order food with a bonjour and have them come straight back to us in English was phenomenal. it WAS a good chance to practice my meager French though - i've picked up a little bit here and there, and memorised a couple of new phrases before i left, but i still only stretch about as far as hello, i'd like a white coffee please. no, a big one. how much is that? thanks. goodbye which is... well, about as much as you need as long as you like coffee. still, we were both having a blast butchering the language and by the time we left i was able to conduct entire transactions in French, which made me feel pretty good about things.

we packed a lot into our day and a half, too - a hike across the south-end of Paris to the Eiffel Tower. the queue was there, but broken up into stages, but it wasn't a disgustingly long wait to get to the top where the view is incredible (and there's a Champaigne Bar, if you'd believe it), then across the Seine and through leafy bolevards to the Arc du Triomphe before we had to fly back to our hotel to meet up with a professional friend TSO had run into in Toronto for dinner. it's not often i've spent 47 Euros on a meal, but it was 3 courses, with wine and coffee, and it was incredible. a charcuterie platter to die for and a massive plate of bacon and sausage products on a pyramid of saurkraut, then a berry, custard and ice cream creation with crumbly bits and raspberry puree that was enough for a serious diabetic-nightmare. we ate really very well in Paris - crepes or baguettes for lunch, far too much Tartelette Citron and Flan, even some decent Turkish food at the end of the second day.

we filled in the second day with the Catacombs - over a kilometre of corridors lined with the bones of something like 6 million Parisiens, exhumed in the early 19th century and re-deposited in old limestone-mine shafts near Montparnasse. from there we hiked back to our hostel on Rue de Creperie (not its real name, but my name for it. there were something like 7 different crepe stores within sight of out hotel's front door. Paris seems to like having everything grouped together - on our walks we also came across Rue du Bookshop and Promenade a la Petstore...) via the Montparnasse Markets, then spent the rest of the hot, sunny day getting to Notre Dame via Jardin de Luxembourg with a little sit-down by the Seine on the way, then on to the Louvre to sit by the fountains before we took a meandering route back to Gare do Nord for the train out. we got there just in time - we'd not been on the train for more than 5 minutes when it left, so i'm counting it as well-timed.

i really liked Paris... and by extension the French. i threw some bad-French at them, they smiled, took pity on me and helped me out. it's a town with a busy, but chilled out vibe. everyone seemed really easy-going, in a "i don't give a fuck what you think" sort of way. where in London people dress like peacocks, everyone in Paris was... well, elegant. it occurred to me that this must be why people think the French are so arrogant. they literally don't give a fuck about what anyone thinks. if they're nice to you, it's because they want to be. if you piss them off they'll give you the evils. they don't feel the need to impress anyone, so they dress to feel nice, not to show off their plumage. i can't help but like these people more and more as time goes by. they have a rich and extensive culture and kinda appreciate it if you respect that in their country by learning to say Bonjour and not being an arsehole. that's too hard for some people, apparently. make an effort and as nice as anyone i've come across.

meanwhile, i'm going to have to head back to Paris at some stage soon to pick up on a few things i missed the first time round. i didn't get to go into the Louvre, for example. and i didn't get to try a Croque Madame - they looked cool... and i certainly wasn't responsible for the torture and murder of anywhere near enough geese. you know... maybe i just need to book a month or so and try to eat France, starting from Brittany and working my way east...

in the company of friends part 2: last chance to see...

2009-06-18T10:23:00.002+10:00

my aversion to early mornings is well publicised. i fucking hate them. i have a preferred sleep cycle of 2-3AM until 10-11AM. it's always worked nicely for me. fortunately i've managed to learn how to get up early when i have to for important occasions - those early flights, cross-timezone phone calls, or picking up a dear friend from Heathrow T5 when her flight arrives at 6:40AM on a Monday. why didn't i provide the same service for Ondine when she and the Marten arrived? well, being out of town at the time didn't help matters. sometimes things just don't mesh. The Short One, on the other hand, i could accomodate and so i did. sure, i had something like 4 hours of sleep the night beforehand, but these things happen. i'm rapidly getting to the point where i'm getting too fucking busy to sleep properly anyway. hitting the Big Red Button was one thing - now i'm going to be happily running around like a fucking maniac until the bombs hit, but that's another story.

TSO's spending a fortnight in London between a conference in Toronto, Canada and a Research Fellowship in Mannheim, Germany, and will be staying in the recently unoccupied bed in my room. you see, there are plans within plans in most of the things that i do and this is one of them. the main reason i haven't already fucked off into the distance is because i wanted to make sure i was in town when people who were coming to see me were there, so i've arranged my plans and timed the explosions to trigger less than 48 hours after she heads east. anything else would just be rude and while there are plenty of people in this world i'll happily be a fucking arsehole to with a smile on my face, TSO's not on the list. not even close. you don't get the title of one of my oldest and dearest friends for nothing, after all.

so far we've had a seriously fabulous time. my goal for the first few days was to walk the girl until her legs fell off. i've found it to be the best way to see this metropolis, and when the weather's been this stunning i've been taking every opportunity. it helps that it's also the best way i've found to break jetlag - get the fuck out in the sunlight and walk until you fall over, have a nice big meal in the evening and pass out early got a good 10 hours passed out, followed by a coffee served in a mug i can fit my head into... not that this size of coffee is unusual for me. my "regular" size of coffee is a Starbucks Venti mug.

what this all adds up to is that since she pulled into town i've made her walk from London Bridge to the London Eye, then across the Thames and up to Leicester Square via Cleopatra's Needle and Trafalgar Square (including a quick look into the National Gallery, naturally), down Whitehall to Westminster, then across the Thames again, down to Vauxhall Cross and then back to Oval on Day 1, then a day spent going from Victoria to Buckingham Palace, through Green Park to Leicester Square via Piccadilly Circus, up Regent St to Oxford, then New Bond and Bond Streets followed by a quick tube ride for an exploration of Harrods and Knightsbridge and finished off meandering up to Hyde Park Corner to chase squirrels around the grass. today was a tour of Camden Town which included an exceedingly long haircut for her and a short, stabbing pain for me then a quick trip down Tottenham Court Road before hightailing it down to Brixton. most of these haven't been solo missions - we had Jacq and Dan with us on Tuesday with Marta joining us for tea at the Eritrean place (yes, twice in 3 days. it's a great little place!) near to mine, then Jacq and Marta again on Wednesady, winding it all up with Caribbean food then cake at Jacq & Matt's place. i'm killing as many birds with as few stones as possible at the moment. if i ever get really good they'll fall from the just sky just by me wanting it. until then, however, i'm including as many people as i can in any activity i organise so that TSO gets the joy of exploring London, with the added benefit of meeting some of the many people who've helped to make my life interesting in the last 9 months. partly, they're going be hard to explain to people back home (even harder than trying to stuff them into my carry-on) and i know in the back of my head that a lot of them i'll never get to see again beyond Facebook and i want to make the last few weeks count.

it's been a grand few days. the majority of the walking's over for now, and i'm now looking at fitting as many other entertaining activities together like a jigsaw puzzle. there's a play to be seen at Shakespeare's Globe, a picnic at Spiral Hill near Woolwich and a couple of pub nights on the cards, two days in Paris booked for next week, and of course somewhere in the middle of all that i need to pack up my shit and find time to sleep. this is something of a "One Last Hurrah" for me - an opportunity to fly around London and take in all the touristy things i've enjoyed seeing one more time before i leave with no serious likelihood of return in the near-future. if i was bumming around on my own for this last fortnight i know i'd never bother, but having TSO around makes it seem far more worth-while. i won't do it for me, but i'll play tour-guide in a heartbeat and i'm loving it. for just a little while longer i can think of London as my city and remind myself of all the little stories and trivia i've picked up over the months by repeating them, things i notice triggering tales that string the town together like a spiderweb and draw it all together, making it come alive in a way that only standing on the precise spot and seeing it all in your mind's eye can do.

the insane thing is that it's all coming together. i'm done with failure and fighting a losing battle with employment. i hit the Big Red Button and set my world in motion again after months of stagnation, dumping me straight into my element. this is what i do best - we're in my world now, where my goals are reliant on no one but me; twist the throttle back until it stops, become a relativistic blur of motion and ride the phase shift into next week. everything's planned and fuck-all's organised, but the crucial pieces are coming together and i know i'll have all of the critical elements in place in time, even if i'm finishing my re-pack in the last 5 minutes before i have to walk out the door and get myself to Heathrow with a spring in my step and my responsibilities catapulted out the window and into oblivion.

but that's all little over 12 days away now and i have other things to worry about, like how to squeeze as much British comedy as possible into what little spare time we have scheduled and who to invite to the pub for drinks on Friday Night. it's a hard job, but some motherfucker's gotta be hated for doing it...

Croatia: the most awesome way is often not the most sensible...

2009-06-15T08:51:00.001+10:00

you get back from a week of sunbathing and swimming and drinking in the piazza of medieval towns and you kinda want to lie around your room and die quietly - check your email, watch a movie, eat something home-cooked and get your washing done. well... you maybe. my flight got in yesterday afternoon by 4PM i'd cleared Customs and Immigration and was on the platform for the Piccadilly Line into town. by 7:30PM i'd got back to basecamp, thrown a load of washing in the machine, dived through the shower, found some clean clothes and was sitting on the footpath outside the Red Lion in Soho with a beer in my hand. i'm loving this little pub - it has cheap-arse beer and a bohemian/proletariat atmosphere where everyone sits out in the street with plastic cups. somehow i managed to roll on until past twelve, whereupon i promptly turned into a pumpkin and headed for bed.

i'm really wishing i'd made the effort to get sociable with these folks sooner. i'm going to miss them when i go, and that day's getting closer and closer each time i pass out at night and drag my stiff and sore bones out of bed again each morning. i'm amazed i survived going out last night at all - Hvar turned out to be something of a debacle. it's a pleasant enough place with another fortress up on the hill which i wandered off to explore - my addiction to high places and all - before grabbing a a cheap burger at a greasy-spoon, then a couple of dishes at possibly the only sushi bar in Croatia. a little while later i met back up with the Kiwis and we hit the night club built in a converted convent and from there the night just got messy. i wound up having one or two cocktails to many and staggered my way back to the boat. one of the girls was mucking around and fell in the harbor, killing her phone in the process. Reagan almost went in - we were all acting like fools and laughing like drains, playing leapfrog with the mooring posts and he got stuck half-way over, rolling off and almost straight in the drink. i managed to stop him just in time, jumping for him and skidding on my butt across the limestone so i could grab his arm just in time. a couple of the girls got onboard just in time to not get left behind... and we all woke up with hangovers. it was a really very subdued day when we pulled into Split again and there certainly wasn't any partying that night. in the end i fetched up with a couple of the girls out grabbing a quiet bite and wound up getting talking to another Aussie tourist who'd been sitting alone at the next table. she seemed genuinely pleased to have some company.

i was pretty much over exploring by the time i had to get off the boat on saturday so i killed the morning cruising a free wifi connection i'd found the week before and getting myself to the airport where i had something of a disconcerting moment at check-in. it turns out that after a week of eating too much and lying around on deck doing fuck-all i'd managed to lose nearly a kilo and a half. hmm...

today was yet another peaceful afternoon in Green Park with the carnies, which turned into a mission out to my place for jugs of cocktails and Eritrean food. we walked the entire way for the fun of it, and since Jacq had her new stilts she did the entire trek with her knees at my eye-height.

tomorrow i need to be back out at Heathrow to pick up Marcia - she's spending 2 weeks in London between a conference in Toronto and a research posting in Mannheim, Germany. i'm really not looking forward to getting up at 5AM to be at the airport by 7AM, but these things you do. it'll be good to have her around for a fortnight - one last hurrah of playing tour-guide before i pack up my shit and fuck off into the distance, leaving behind this city i've fallen for but have to leave anyway.

damn... that sounds like a really bad habit i've gotten into, doesn't it?

Croatia: wow... i can't actually remember the last time i got sunburned...

2009-06-10T07:59:00.001+10:00

9/6/09 10:59PM

i have these vague memories of being a kid and getting sunburned. we'd head up the coast for a few days and go camping near the beach at some little hamlet between Perth and Lancelin and i'd forget to sunscreen some part of me (often stupid things like the tops of my feet or knees) or just neglect to put more on half-way through the day, then spend the next couple of days avoiding hot showers. i should have realised that i'd turned into a fucking pom after going through a year of winter. i've been spoiled by the English weather and piss-poor sunshine. i've spent hours in Green Park on sundays with my shirt off and barely gotten a tan. 3 hours on the top deck of a boat sailing the Adriatic and a moment of stupidity where i forgot to wash the salty water off myself and i've gone red as a fucking lobster. i'm amazed no one's tried to revoke my passport.

what a fabulous day that was tho - my first day actually sailing since this trip started turned out to be day 3 of the trip, clear, blue and sunny with crisp morning air which rapidly turned warm as the sun rose in the sky and the white top deck became rapidly populated by reading Aussies and Kiwis in their swimwear. i thought i'd turned both sides nicely. i thought i'd gone into the shade early enough. my biggest mistake was not rinsing off after we stopped for a swim. salt water residue continues to dehydrate the skin long after you've gone out of the sun, turning "a light burn" into "you are destined to peel". it was glorious though - peaceful, quiet, nothing but the flipping of pages, some chillout music over the boat's hifi, thrum of the diesel engines and wash of the sea off the bow.

i'm a little irritated though - we were due to set sail from Split on Saturday at around midday, but were held in port due to strong winds. as a result we got an extra day to wander around split and i'm missing out on the dive i was so looking forward to. i made the most of the day, wandering around with various people from different boats (there are a few different boats and tour companies doing more or less the same route as we are, so we've seen a lot of the same faces in port). on Sunday morning we were picked up by a bus and taken off on a day-trip to Mostar in Bosnia which is famous primarily for its bridge (dating back to sometime around when Jesus rode dinosaurs through Mordor), the Serbian army shelled the fuck out of it during the war back in the 90's. it was rebuilt out of the same materials, using the same methods, almost stone-for-stone and now you can't tell it's ever changed) and its impressive collection of bombed-out and bullet-scarred buildings. we go a good couple of hours wandering around and being shown some of the landmarks, including a "traditional Turkish house". Turkish house in Bosnia? WTF? well it turns out that the Ottoman Empire once stretched well into Eastern Europe, leaving a strong Turkish influence in Bosnia which would explain why so many of the cafes had food i remember my grandmother making in my childhood - halva, chevapi, turkish delight, baklava and that spiral ricotta and leek pie that i've come to love more and more as the years have gone by. we were given enough time to wander around the place before the bus took us back to Croatia, past a couple of old forts and villages, then north up the Dalmatian Riviera to meet back up with the boat at Makarska.

the last two days have been pretty much the same thing: drag myself out of my cabin (there's 14 of us on a boat that can carry 24 so i've managed a cabin to myself which is good since there's fuck-all room in it) and up the stairs into the Saloon where Mate (pronounced Mar-teh) has breakfast laid out. fresh bread, cheese, maybe ham, maybe boiled eggs, terrifyingly bad instant coffee that i've been sinking 2 cups of each morning, cereal go down my throat before i grab my book and head upstairs onto the top deck and into the cool breeze and bright sun which bakes more and more as the day goes by. most of the tourists can be found up there lying around in their swimwear (or less in the case of V, the Maltese Sydney-sider) at various stages of the day. sometime before lunch we'll drop anchor in a sheltered cove somewhere and it's time to go swimming in the cold, clear water, taking it in turns to dive off the top deck, or higher - off the captain's cabin: a 4-6 metre jump depending on your level of commitment, a fraction of a second of freefall before the splash. i've got some great photos - anyone who's not game for the jump's been willing to take rapid-fire photos. after a while the bell will ring for lunch and we'll be fed soup and mains - chicken, beef, fish, all sorts of odds and ends, all if it good (although some of the girls have complained about it being to salty. me: i like salt. i think it comes with the heritage. while we're eating the captain will weigh-anchor and we motor on into a different port.

after Makarska we pulled into Mjlet, a small town notable only for the national park it shares an island with on which there is a lake, in which there's another tiny island with an old monastery on it. we're offered a BBQ dinner that night on the boat - 30 Euros for more meat than we can handle followed by crepes, and all the beer and wine we can get down our throats in 3 hours. somehow i managed to not wake up with too much of a hangover the next morning, which is good since yesterday we pulled into Dubrovnik while we were polishing off our fish and rice.

Dubrovnik is one of those places i think everyone should see. it's an old, walled city of limestone and terracotta which has been beautifully maintained and, if necessary, rebuilt in the original style with the original materials (i think it's a hobby in this part of the world). broad, elegant streets intersect with tight, stepped alleyways. hanging with the Kiwis, it took us 2 hours to walk around the top of the walls - stops for photos, stops for ice cream, stops for drinks. you'd have to be really talented to take a bad photo in Dubrovnik: it's so achingly and effortlessly beautiful that you just want to fill your memory card. it gets even better when the walls run down the sea-ward side of the town where in 2 different places i saw hidden passages open out onto the rocks at the base of the walls and people have set up bars overlooking the ocean. go for a swim, get in a bit more sunbathing in the baking sun then hop back up the rocks for a beer? yes please! although, i had to forego the sunbathing bit, red as i was from the previous day.

i can't go on about Dubrovnik enough. all i can really say is that you Should Look At Some Of The Photos And See What i Mean. i can't get over how this place was brutalised during the war - i've seen some of the photos of streets i've walked down and buildings i've stood under, debris in the streets, roofs shattered and caved in, and now it's all been restored as if none of it ever happened, the fresh terracotta on you can see from the walls the only sign that anything ever happened.

today we pulled into Korcula (Kor-chu-lah) which is kinda like Dubrovnik's smaller, less developed sibling. what it lacks in scale, however, it makes up for in cocktail bars. i lucked into a quick dinghy-ride with the captain and spent an hour or so wandering around looking for the house where Marco Polo grew up, generally running into various people from the different boats and wandering around with one or another until i got bored of the idea, before joining a couple of the girls for complicated cocktails overlooking the marina. we wound up skipping the big drawcard in the end - a bar on the top of one of the old watchtowers which you can only get to up a ladder and where the drinks are raised up the outside of the wall in a little basket on the end of a rope. we've agreed that tonight's to be an early one in preparation for the Hvar, the second to last stop and a renouned party stop, so i'm taking the opportunity to chill out and enjoy the rocking of the boat.

Croatia: yes, there really is a place called Split...

2009-06-06T21:47:00.002+10:00

there's a pervasive stench of smoldering rubber as i walk through the entry of the terminal. the bearing on someone's roller luggage has gone and the friction of the wheel dragging has it hot enough to burn skin if i'm any judge. i should know - i've tasted this smell before. my fault for buying cheap-arse luggage in Singapore a long time ago and a suitcase i left far, far away. at least the trip out to Gatwick was painless - in fact it was so easy it barely even registered until i was already there. there's sod-all queue at the check-in counter for Croatian Airlines and i wind up getting chatty with the attendant who's keen to know the secret to my weight-loss (i take the opportunity while we're chatting to hop up on the luggage-scales, to find out that i currently weigh in at 84.5kg while fully clothed and with my pockets full of gadgets) and in the doing i manage to get an aisle seat in a row of 3 with an empty seat in the middle. score!

20 minutes and the standard security procedures later (you don't seem to need to emigrate from the UK - i've only been stamped out once and that was when i was leaving by ferry of all things) and i'm killing time with the zombie hordes in the dead-zone of the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport. an unadvertised upgrade made to the security scanners in the late-80's was a psychic hack which turns your brain to mush, making you pliable and obedient until you walk through the magnetic coil at the other end which reinstates your free-will. this is why they always ask you to remove your headgear when you go through security: it stops you from hiding a tinfoil hat under your fedora. unfortunately this security feature can be counteracted by being particularly stupid and possessing no discernable imagination, being nicely brainwashed in advance or by reciting particular passages of religious verse to yourself backwards in Sumerian. i swear this is why everyone i see waiting around an airport looks like they're moments away from going Resident Evil on my arse.

i count 3 different WS Smith bookshops, all with more or less the same collection of crap. there's a Buy-3-Get-4 deal going and i can't find more than 2 in any of the 3 stores that i'd want to read, much less spend money on... and they're all marked up by a 3rd anyway. i should be fairly well stocked for books on this trip - i'm packing a Charles Stross book that i know i can read twice if i have to, and a copy of Orcs that The Grey Man threw me the other day that looks big enough to use as a life-raft in case the boat sinks.

aeroplanes traditionally have the worst coffee on the planet and Croatian Airlines might actually be the worst i've ever had. that said, no matter how bad the coffee is on the flight i'm always compelled to have a second cup, or third if i'm on yet another of the Qantas post-Red-Eye-Horror connections i used to take far too often on my way from Perth to Canberra and back in years gone by. it's not a desire for the flavor... or even the caffeine, i think. it seems to satisfy some metaphysical need in my soul that craves recycled coffee grounds that've been cut with sump oil and mud harvested from the Glastonbury Festival, cursed in the name of an elder-god for good measure and had a thimble-full of plastic UHT milk stirred in, served in a plastic cup by an Air Hostie Barbie with a Slavic accent.

the plane was only an hour late in leaving and the food would be best-described as a crime against gastronomy, but i had more leg-room than i think i've ever had in economy short of being in an exit-aisle. the seats are of an older design and you can see the fabric starting to fray but i'd trade all the built-in cushions and plush faux-velour for having the ability to stretch out like this next time i'm flying long-haul. today i'm not - it's a little over 2 hours flight from London Gatwick to Split but for once i was comfortable in an A320-100 and that in itself was golden. the pretty-boy sitting in the window seat has tracks shaved in the the sides of his hair. he looks like a reject from this year's Eurovision, but he offered me a mint after massacring his meal so he's obviously friendly enough.

i'm through immigration and customs with a nice new stamp filling in some of the blank-space on page 4 of my passport (and completely throwing out the chronology - the next free page is 13, dammit) and throw 5 Euros at the bus driver to take me into town. it would have been nice to get here with a bit of daylight to spare because it's a lovely little place, even if it's a pigwhore to navigate. white limestone streets and buildings breaking into tight alleyways lead all through the centre of town. the main bus/ferry port is at one end of the Riva - a long, brightly lit promenade neatly laid out and built into buildings that look like they've stood since the Schizm, lined with palm trees and walked by well-dressed Beautiful People. i'll be here for an evening again in a week so i should get the chance to find somewhere to hang out where i don't stand out like a sore-scum.

i have some directions fossicked from the web last night at somewhere around 3AM, but without a printer i wasn't able to print out the Google Maps output so i'm reliant on finding people who a) speak english and b) know the streets. an english-speaking local with (amazingly) more technology hanging off him than me pulls out his GPS-phone and shows me the way, but it's still half an hour before i find the hostel i managed to book into last night. Meri, who owns and runs the little guest-house, lets me in and even takes me down to find somewhere to get a quiet bite at 10PM, which is how i've fetched up sitting in an open square outside a little cafe playing dance hits from the 80's. a quick glance at the menu gives me the feeling that i'm going to be OK here - coffee costs the equivalent of a pound, pints come in at around £2.50, which is what it cost me for a couple of massive slices of pizza down on the Riva.

at least my street-smarts haven't failed me. they've been developing nicely in the last few months, but i reckon i'm going to need all of them and more in the next little while as i venture out of the UK and out into Europe. that said, it feels really good to be a little off the beaten track, in a place i'd only ever heard of in "Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?" before a couple of months ago. i think i'm going to have to see if i can find someone who'll make me a coffee and sit around in this little square for a while, listening to the group of guys a couple of doors down who've just started singing in close harmony - a song i've never heard in a language i don't understand in a place i can barely point out on the map.

life is good. travel is better. Split, on the other hand, is fucking gorgeous.

in the company of friends...

2009-06-04T07:51:00.000+10:00

it can be kinda odd seeing people you know from home when you're distinctly Away From Home. i have friends i've met in Perth, Canberra, Melbourne and here in London... it's just a little offputting when they start to mix themselves up. it took a bit of getting used to when Moonbug moved to Canberra. now through amusing happenstance we're both on the other side of the planet, living an hour's bus ride from each other. when Julia moved to Perth from Canberra and came back telling stories of her adventures in some of my old haunts it was strange hearing her perspective. now i've just spent the last week hanging with Ondine and The Marten and somehow it wasn't weird at all. there wasn't even a period of "what have you been up to talk", but then with Ondine there never is. the conversation picks up again like it's only been a day and the rest fills itself in over time after we've finished our okonomiyaki and headed off down the road.

it's been a pleasant time playing tour guide, running them around Camden and Borough Markets, through the touristy areas around Trafalgar Square and generally breaking her by making her walk too damn far. it's been quite civilised as well with lunch at a Michelin Star Chinese restaurant just off Tottenham Court Road one day, and High Tea at the Dorchester Hotel on another followed by the feeding of squirels in Hyde Park. now, if only the Depeche Mode concert they'd come all this way to see hadn't been cancelled i think this would have been an altogether flawless trip for them.

meanwhile, i've been on the cusp of buying my homeward-bound tickets for the last few days. i'd have done it tonight if i'd not received a call about a promising-looking job completely out of the blue yesterday. i'm not excactly holding outv much hope for it. to be honest, i don't really want it. i've been spending my quiet hours with Google Maps open to a full view of Europe, my finger tracing lines on my screen of destinations and investigations of how i'm going to reach them. getting a job now would just get in the way of me wearing the soles of my shoes down to nothing on medieval cobbles and filling my hard drives with photos. that said, if they offer i'll take. i can always get back to Europe another time, whereas arriving back in Canberra penniless would be less than ideal. i'll know sometime next week, and when this job falls through like all the others i'll be able to wash my hands of the entire "working" idea and focus on blowing my slush fund hitting as many countries as i can before i run out of time then go watch my kid brother tie the knot.

Gloucestershire: two boys from Perth and a rented Kia vs. the West Midlands...

2009-05-27T07:49:00.003+10:00

what a weekend. no, seriously, what an epic fucking weekend. to think it nearly ended before it began, but i'll get to that. SpeedFox and i have had this planned for a while now - ever since we realised when it was going down. it started, as many of these ideas do, in a pub.

"Hey, have you heard of the Gloucester Cheese Rolling?"
hell yeah i have!
"You want to go?"
do i have a penchant for wearing too much black???

it's got to be one of the silliest things you've ever heard of. bloke throws a wheel of Double Gloucester down a hill with a 1:2 gradient and a mob of yahoos chase it. first one to the bottom gets the cheese. comparative silliness includes the Running of the Bulls and the Tomatina Festival, with similar injury ratios. colour me keen as mustard.

of course, there were a couple of setbacks. for starters, by the time we worked out when it was happening Fox was seconds away from hitting the "Confirm" button on a weekender in Belgium. louise was originally going to come along but managed to get herself uninvited, then with days remaining before we were set to head off the prices for hire-cars doubled overnight. we thought all was lost - our plans for the weekend really required having our own independent transport - until i came up with a bright idea which saved the day. see, it was only the hire prices in LONDON which had doubled...

our final plan was elegant in its simplicity: catch the first train out of Paddington to Bristol at 7AM on Saturday morning, pick up the car at 9 and head for Cardiff for breakfast. wander around Wales until we were sick of the idea and head for Coleford, a sleepy little farming village in the Forest of Dean (where SpeedFox was born and where we'd scored lodgings with his aunt and uncle). we get ourselves an early night and be up at 2:30AM to be in the car by 3 and on the road to Salisbury so that we can get to Stonehenge by 5:30. breakfast in Bath, then fire on to explore the Forest and the Wye Valley in the afternoon. have a well-deserved sleep-in on Sunday night, then off to Gloucester to attack a hill with a couple of other maniacs, thousands of spectators and global news coverage and generally try not to die before making a break for London and ditch the hire car at the Hertz down the road from my place in Kennington. what could possibly go wrong?

in the end: nothing. nothing whatsoever. well, almost.

getting up at 5AM sucks. when we met at Paddington we'd had about 7 hours sleep between us. itchy eyeballs aside, it was a pleasant train ride made easier by sugar-free energy drinks. we found the Hertz with the help of a map Fox had printed off the day before and were out of town quicker than you can say "which way to Cardiff?", which is a pleasant little town. we got in a little over an hour later, grabbed a bite to eat and spend the rest of our time there wandering around Cardiff Castle. amusingly, it was Fox who suggested that i make a scene and get my poi out in the courtyard of the old keep and of course i couldn't resist. it's well-worth a visit, even just for the quiet time of sitting around the grass being pleasantly surrounded by history (and tourists, let's not forget the tourists).

having had our fill of Wales we decided it was time to head for Coleford. Fox's aunt and uncle were sitting in the sun out the front when we got there so we joined them for a nice cup of tea and a chat before we went off to explore Simmonds Yat in the Valley. it took us a couple of wrong turns to find what we were looking for, but when we did the views were spectacular, and we eyed off a pub that we pledged to hit at the next opportunity. meanwhile, we were nearly late back at Coleford for tea kindly supplied by Fox's family, then we capped off the evening with a quiet pint at The Miner where he remembers his folk having a going-away party back when he was 6 and they were moving away to Oz.

getting up with less than 4 hours of sleep hurt. Fox lived his dream and took the wheel down to Salisbury so that i could play DJ and navigator (our little Kia had both USB and audio input so my PSD brought the noise). driving around england in the long pre-dawn was a great way to get around quickly, with sod-all anyone else on the roads. getting off the Motorway had us dodging deer and rabbits, and at one point the road was lined with bunnies all sitting and looking away from the road at regularly spaced intervals - our very own honor-guard, Watership Down style.

we finally hit Stonehenge at 5:15AM, just in time to see the sun crest the horizon. there were a pile of shivering people who'd come for their Stone Circle Access, and after a micro-briefing (don't damage the stones, no food, drink or smoking. now go have fun) we were let loose and spent an hour wandering around taking photos and with Fox as a willing cameraman i even managed to get a video of me flinging my poi around while he walked around me in a semicircle to get in as much of the scenery as he could.

you don't usually get to go INTO the circle at Stonehenge. if you rock up during the day you go through a tunnel under the road and are greeted with a discrete fence that prevents you from getting more within around 20 metres of the circle. book in advance, pay a little more and arrive before or after the regular session is closed and you get to go play. why the fuck else do you think we were there at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning?

when we got to Bath it was a ghost-town. the only people who seemed to be up and about were us and a few haunted-looking backpackers who were obviously on their way somewhere else. what was awesome was the chance to drive around the hilly streets exploring the place and getting to walk the streets without interferencne. we couldn't find a feed tho and by 9:30 we'd been there for nearly 2 hours and were getting hungry. we didn't find food until nearly 11, and had gone to Bristol via Avonmouth. we were originally heading for Weston-Super-Mare because it was a) on the coast, b) on the map and c) had a cool name, but every time we spied a sign for it we wound up lost and decided that the gods did not smile on WSM and we should try elsewhere. i finally got my Big Breakfast tho (which was... reasonably large), so at least i didn't go without.

by 1PM we were back in the Forest and buggered. we'd had a full day and covered 200 miles before breakfast on fuck-all sleep and we'd had it. alarms were set and we got 3 hours of sleep (each!) and were up in time to get back to Simonds Yat and hit The Royal for well-deserved beers in the sun.

i have a concept i've been working on for a while now: the Crystaline Perfect Moment: a quantum second in time that stretches out long enough for you to absorb everything about it and ingrain the entirety of the sensorium like a 3D photograph with the smell and taste and the warmth of the sun against your skin, the sound of the birds fucking around in the background and the view of whatever you're looking at. sitting at a park bench in front of The Royal with a view of the Wye Valley with a half-finished pint of cold Kronenboug, the tree-sperm floting in the air with a good friend sitting across the table... this was one of those moments. "how's the serenity?" SpeedFox quotes from The Castle. we must have say there for 2 hours, until the sun finally dropped behind the ridge across the river and we headed into town for some food and a few more beers to round off a fantastic day.

we hit Gloucester about an hour before the first race the next day. it's a tradition shrouded in history, but for once i'm not really interested too much in the background. take 100m of 1:2 gradient hill and throw yourself down it. thousands come to watch or participate, crowding the sides of the hill or the flatish plain below. we didn't manage to get in a race in the end, but once it was all over anyone who still wanted to go down hopped the fence, lined up and went down as a horde. i was a little worried about my knees, knowing that one foot wrong and i'd twist or jar something and it'd be all over red rover so i prioritised sliding on my arse to trying to stay upright. take three steps, slide, get some footing for another couple of steps, slide again and roll, slide, run, slide and roll until you hit the bare-10m of runoff before the bales of hay. the rugby team jumped out of my way - i was rolling sideways as i hit the bottom and somehow manged to get on my feet with enough time to hit the hay head-on, face to face with a woman who seemed part of the official team.

G'DAY!
"Are you alright?"
i'm AWESOME! that was FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!!!

she must get a lot of that.

we'd waited in line for hours, drinking a couple of tinnies of Dutch Courage and making friends with a couple of kids behind us in the queue. they'd come down from Canterbury and camped on the hill the night before. it'd taken them 3 hours to walk from the middle of Gloucester so we insisted on taking them into town. it wasn't far out of our way and there were 5 seats in the car so why not?

we fly down the road to Ross-on-Wye and pull into the car park of the restaurant right behind Fox's aunt and uncle. we were in a hurry, but it helped that the A road was windy and begged to be taken at speed. we were still muddy and filthy so he dived into the toilets to get changed and i headed down into the town to do the same, making use of the public convenience to clean off the caked-on mud and change into something clean then crossing over into the park on the River Wye to have a makeshift picnic and read my book on a park-bench.

come 11PM and i was dropping him off at his place in Hammersmith then heading for basecamp. i'd got a message from louise on Saturday night when i turned my phone back on saying that she'd found the perfect place to move into and was shifting on Sunday, so once i'd dumped the car back at Hertz i walked into a half-empty room and all the peace and quiet i could want. how's the serenity? today included the now-regular ritual of going over the photos and uploading them to the web and preparing for the hate-mail from people screaming "YOU BASTARD!"

but seriously, what a great fucking weekend.

time off to catch my breath...

2009-05-22T10:03:00.000+10:00

i've had a nice quiet week since getting back from Dublin - Eurovision on saturday night after wandering around Shoreditch looking at urban art, playing with carnies in the park on sunday and now a week of chilling around the flat, venturing out here and there for a bit of amusement whenever i can be bothered. Ireland left me nowhere near as exhausted or shattered as Egypt. the pace was better for a start, and i didn't feel like i had to be constantly on the go for fear of missing something important. this meant that the next day i was ready to hit the street which is particularly good since Ellen and i did plenty of walking.

i met Ellen through Moonbug back in December and while we've not been particularly close we've gotten along quiet nicely ever since and so when she picked up a guide-book outlining routes to take through various parts of London where you can see the works of the guerilla-artist Banksy i jumped at it. two people all dressed up for an evening out must have looked odd squeezing between fence-posts or climbing over walls, but these are the things you have to do if you want to see some of the secret scenery of Shoreditch. if you've not heard of Banksy you really should look him up. his work is anti-establishment without being rabidly anarchistic and interestingly executed.

i've hit a nice little groove for the time being. i'm still looking at jobs when i can be bothered, but i'm not really giving it much of my brainspace. in fact, i'm really just going with whatever seems to flow which is part of the reason i've not been blogging a whole lot. i don't really have anything much to say at the moment while i focus on cruising and enjoying the moment, even if that moment involves spending hours at a time cruising the net while i chat to people on IM, or talk to people across the world on Skype. life is going to heat up again soon enough and when it does i'll be screaming off in whatever direction i've found myself facing so i might as well be mentally prepared when it happens...

Ireland: Guinness is good for you!

2009-05-21T23:41:00.002+10:00

we're already in Dingle, but we're heading to Dingle. it's a little confusing, especially when you wind up on a boat leaving Dingle Harbor in Dingle to go chasing the Dingle Dolphins off the Dingle Penninsula. there was once a fisherman who lived in those parts known affectionately as Fungus due to his general lack of hygiene and microbiologically curious growths who had a dolphin as a companion. Fungus is gone, but Fungi the dolphin remains and is regularly pestered by tourists - myself included. after wandering around the charming little town of Dingle i couldn't resist the chance to hop on a boat and bother the wildlife, and had a lovely time watching them splash around while i got to know the Claires (Sydney and Perth in order of age). i'd have taken more photos, but my camera battery was dying a death and i had no idea when i'd next get a chance to charge it so i kept it in my pocket a lot of the time. i'm just glad that most of the ones i did take came out nicely.

we're doing a bog-lap of the Dingle Penninsula. the next one along is Kerry which is the popular one. the route around it is referred to as "The Ring of Kerry", which you may have heard of. Dingle is the same sort of area, but smaller, more densely packed and fits more easily into the tour which is why we get it instead. i've grabbed a seat next to Nathan which may have been a miscalculation since we're both largeish gentlemen and the seating's a little cramped. still, i grabbed as an opportunity to get to know him a little better and it works out well enough. i manage to get some charge on my camera in the cafe overlooking the Sleeping Giant (an island which, if you look at it right, strongly resembles a colossal man lying on his back in the ocean) which means that Ginelle and i get to play our now-standard "grab one of me, i'll get one of you" game before we hop back on the bus for a nap before we get to Killarney.

Galway's a university town. Killarney's a tourist town through and through. word is that the population triples in the summer when everyone comes down to enjoy the National Park - one of only four in Ireland. when i think National Parks, my cultural bias is for large swathes of bushland, untouched but for fire trails and walking paths. Killarney's a lovingly tended park - tended grass and patches of forest, rivers, streams and lakes (with castles in the middle of them). i'm an "optional extras" junkie, so i take the chance to sit on a horse-drawn carriage rather than walking and we spend an hour clip-clopping our way through the place before getting dropped at our hostel. my body's screaming out to lie down on my bunk and do nothing for a while, but i can't bring myself to so i ditch the tourists and head of for a walk around the town. Killarney's a small town though, so it's not long before i run into Vic (England) who tags a long until i randomly find Paul and the other sibs at a pub. Vic keeps going and i stop for a pint and we hang out until we have to go get cleaned up tea. i don't feel that i have to spell out where we wind up later that evening. to cover band was decent and for the fourth time that day i hear Kids by MGMT played. everyone else is well into it, but i'm feeling a bit ill for some reason. the drinks don't taste right and i only have a couple before i leave them to it and head for bed. it was a great "one last hurrah", but it's been a long week and i need sleep, and i wind up sitting around the common room for another hour reading my book while the night-attendant sleeps on the couch across from my comfy armchair.

a solid night of unconsciousness and i'm feeling fucking great, ready to hit the last day with gusto. Paul and Jodie don't look so great, but sweet jebus they're troopers. they've drunk me under the table every night and they're still moving. i'd try to blame it on my greatly-reduced mass, but that would be a cop-out. the glorious weather's taken a break and the clouds have moved in, promising rain Vic tells me. we've been hanging out a lot on the bus while i educate her in the joys of melodic death metal and oz-rock. it helps that she's small so we don't get much in each other's way. it starts drizzling when we get back on the bus after wandering Blarney Castle.

the story goes that there once was a prince who knew he could be king, should be king, but had a bit of an embarrassing speech-impediment. one day he was on one of his long walks around the forest when he came across a witch to whom he poured out his story. she told him to head back home, but look for a stone along the way (he'd know it when he saw it, she said), give it a kiss, keep it close and one day he would indeed be king. fast-forward past the obvious and he does indeed become king of the land and his reign is prosperous, owing in great part to him being able to talk himself out of wars and whatnot, and he built the stone into his castle to keep it safe. now it's a tourist-trap that's disinfected four times a day (more often at the moment, i'd hope, what with the Swine Flu paranoia going around) that you have to lie down and hang down a metre or so backwards to touch your lips to while a beefy Irishman holds you by your coat. it's a gorgeous castle with grounds i could have spent half a day walking around. Nathan and i walk and talk and take each other's photos before we load up and hit Tipperary for lunch (it wasn't really a long way) and then spin on back to Dublin.

i drank a lot of Guinness in Ireland, and it does taste better. because you're in Ireland. and Ireland's awesome. i tended to alternate between Guinness Extra Stout and Bulmers Apple Cider. of course, say Guinness in relation to Dublin and everyone goes on about the Guinness Storehouse at the site of the original brewery at St James Gate and i'm here to tell you that... well... it's not all that. after the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam the Guinness Storehouse was pretty crappy. it's in a fantastic building, with vaguely interesting exhibits, but what you want to do if you go is to go through the "this is how we make our beer" and "here's how we advertise our beer" and "here's the history of the Guinness Phenomenon" shit in the first 20 minutes then fuck off at speed up the elevator to the Gravity Bar at the top of the building. go to the bar and get your free (by which they mean included in the entry fee) pint and find a seat with a view. this shouldn't be too hard. it has windows around ~350 degrees (the elevators aren't transparent) of its circumference with a commanding view of Dublin. it's off in the west of town, so it's not like you're on top of Hilite 33 in Perth, but it's a great view nonetheless. it's a shame we were all a bit too wrecked to enjoy it properly. a week of constant "see things, go drinking, wash, rinse, repeat" has Paul, Jodie and me sitting there trying to enjoy ourselves while we wait to get the fuck out and go have a lie down.

oh, and the gift shop's not all that, either. sorry, i don't need the same tshirt as 300,000 other fuckheads and i've got enough bottle openers.

the Kiwis are out after tea - we hit a chinese buffet in central Dublin because it's a) good, b) plentiful and c) not fucking pub food. they're dead on their feet, which is a shame because i'm in the mood to go exploring. daylight savings means that it's light well past 9PM around this end of the world. luckily, Nathan comes to the rescue with an idea, which is why we find our way to the Brazen Head: the oldest pub in Ireland, established in 1198. it was only supposed to be for a pint, then we'd head back to the hostel but we weren't done so we headed into Temple Bar to have a pint at... Temple Bar. we're still not done, so we find a quiet little local pub near the hostel and have a pint there, walking around in the rain while we compare notes and talk about this, that and nothing.

the next night we're meeting up again. i've spent the day doing a 3-hour walking tour around Dublin (the sort run by students and paid in tips), then wearing myself out hiking around to places that look interesting on the map. Dublin's a fantastic place to wander around. it's small enough that it's pretty much all foot-accessible, big enough that there's plenty of stuff and dense enough that there's plenty to see between point A and point B. i get to pose next to Oscar Wilde again in Mirian Park, emulating a photo i was shown by my good friend Eduardo J. Bovine when i saw him last in Perth all that time ago, saw the sites of the old Viking settlement, the bullet holes in the GPO and the spot where the Rebellion surrendered in 1916 (marked by a red spot on the map, and nothing whatsoever at the site. there IS a great bookshop at the top of the T-intersection which i can strongly recommend. they had possibly the best second-hand section i've ever seen). 7:30PM and i'm at the Dublin Spire (erected for the Millennium, completed in 2002. nuff said, really) meeting up with Nathan, Sydney-Claire, Vic and her mum Julia and do you want to guess what we did? that's right - how better to cap off a week of drinking than by hitting a few pubs? spin forward to somewhere past midnight and Nathan and i are saying farewell with a bear-hug, a promise to find each other on Facebook and offers of lodgings should either of us be in the other's home-town (hmm... now i have a reason to go to Edmonton, Canada :).

i want to fill in what's left of my time in Dublin by seeing as much of it as possible, but after an hour of walking i'm spent. i can see me coming back one day if the stars align, but i think i've had enough for now. unlike the arrival, my departure's uneventful. bus to the ferryport, ferry to Holyhead, the train arrives early and i have no problems changing at Chester. i fall through the door into a dark room at basecamp - louise is out doing whatever she does when she's out - unpack and settle into bed to watch some of the TV i've missed in last week. she rolls in somewhere after midnight and we trade hello's as if i've been out the day not a week, and that's all good with me. i'm still high from the joy of travel and forming embryonic plans for the next trip. it really is a good time to be alive...

Ireland: Is it where you were or who you met while you were there that makes the cider taste so sweet?

2009-05-21T08:36:00.003+10:00

by the time i woke up in Dublin 6 days had passed, day after day driving through beautiful countryside, night after night in a different pub and hostel. our hostel in Derry was comfortable and well organised. the hostel in Belfast considerably less so. Galway was EXCELLENT, whereas the interior of the one in Annascaul i barely remember since i spent so little time in it, and almost none of it sober. Killarney was somewhere around average and Dublin did the job well enough, even with the radiators fused to "BLAST FURNACE" (nothing leaving the window ajar didn't fix). after a night out on the piss in Derry i woke up feeling amazingly good considering and stepped out into the dark, overcast morning with my coffee and realised that my mind was blank. nothing to worry about, nothing to plan or consider, just get on the bus and see what the day had in store for me: something i've been hanging out for since before i left Oz all those months ago.

over the rest of the week our merry bus meandered through most of the island of Ireland - the pins in the map on my Picasa album that misses a chunk of the south-east. we didn't really stop much in County Cork, i'm afraid. it's times like this that make me wish my camera auto-geotagged my shots, but micronised GPS is still a ways off, i guess. we managed to get to all the places i wanted to go to (Giant's Causeway, Blarney Castle), as well as places i never knew i wanted to see (The Burren, Cliffs of Moher).

i have a fascination for the Giant's Causeway - an area of volcanic rock which somehow cooled into an array of hexagonal columns marching out into the ocean. it's an almost unique rock formation where mathematical elegance meets the real world to the tune of the waves rolling in off the Irish Sea. it's the sort of place all the tourists want to see and while it's smaller than i'd expected it was still awesome to see and while every man and his dog's been there and wandered around, i kinda wonder how many people have stood in the freezing rain and flung poi around...

most of the tourists didn't hang around long - it was too cold and windy for most of them, but i got in as much as i could before heading back for the bus. next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which started life as an access route for fishermen to get nicely in the path of migratory salmon, now another tourist trap. don't be fooled; it's safe as safe, but the views are incredible and EVERYONE wants a photo of them walking back and forth. i'm just glad it was open - they close it off when the wind's too strong. as far as i was concerned, it was worth it just to be able to look back and look out on the coastline. standing on a plank of wood suspended over 26 metres of air by a few ropes was just a bonus.

before we know it we're in Belfast, sitting in a couple of Black Cabs being driven around some of the political landmarks of the city, and there are many. after the definite bias of the last day it was refreshing when our driver told us that they consider themselves to be neutral - "we hate everyone equally," he says, and we laugh. i'm still not sure whether he was kidding. where in Derry there are murals illustrating the Catholics struggle, in Belfast we found ourselves in a Protestant low-rent area where they all came from the other side. we hear stories about the perils of disloyalty, both real and perceived. we sign the Peace Wall built to separate the residential zones which to this day have gates which close at night in an attempt to kerb the violence (it's explained that soon after the gates were installed the IRA fired an RPG over the top of them to prove a point, demolishing a church in the process. point made, i guess). we go to see the Sinn Fein HQ, site of even more bloodshed, and a prison where ten men died in a hunger strike over their status as Political Prisoners. we're warned to leave the pub half an hour or so before closing time so that anyone watching is less likely to guess at our allegiances based on the direction we head off in. by the time we hit the pub everyone's a little... wary. we're not far from the Europa Hotel which is claimed to be the most bombed building in the world (at one point the IRA decided that the best way to get the attention of the journalists was to start blowing a few of them up. it worked, apparently), and somehow after that we never did feel particularly comfortable.

that night had to be the least fun we had on the entire trip. we fetched up in a pub which was fairly OK for a while, then went off to try another which, while pretty cool, was packed and had nowhere to sit. we moved on to another we'd been recommended to find out it was student disco night, too loud and full of fat girls wearing far too little. back to the original venue and it was louder, messier and irritating. i would up walking a couple of the girls back to the hostel and sitting up chatting with one of the americans while she finished her pizza.

i can't say i'd recommend Belfast as The Place To Visit in Ireland. Dublin is nicer by far IMHO, although your mileage may vary. i got talking to a Brit the other day who's opinion was entirely the opposite. still, i may mention this a few times later until i feel like the point's been driven home enough.

the hostel was crappy, but at least i wasn't in it long. next morning we're off towards Galway way out on the west coast. the weather's cleared up and it's warm, sunny, clouds decorating the sky because plain blue's just so BORING DAHLING! out on the road and the world is green and blue and white, magnificent, glorious, perfect. we've a lot of driving ahead of us, so Tom's grabbed a copy of "In The Name Of The Father" - a movie about a group of Irish folk from Belfast wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in the 70's in the English town of Guildford. more political propaganda, but it's illustrative of the sort of things that went on in the Troubles. i let it play in the background while i watch the scenery i wish would never end scrolls past, thinking of nothing much more than how to frame the next shot. we stop at the shady green cemetery which is the final resting place of W.B. Yeats (as in "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams") and rattle off photos before blasting down to a little seaside town called Strand Hill where i get to dip my toe into the North Atlantic and go nuts with my poi. as i'm packing up Ginelle (Canadian) comes running up to join in and we almost miss the bus, dancing around the beach and generally having a ball, then onto Galway.

i fucking loved Galway. i was about ready to piss into my water bottle by the time we got there (i piss-bolted (pardon the pun) down an alleyway when we pulled up i was so desperate. long drives + diabetes = bladder strain), but soon enough our kit's stowed the sibs and i went a-wandering, fetching up down the docks after a bit of tourist-tat shopping to find that the grass is covered in students sitting around having a beer. beer. on the grass. next to the water. we're down the bottlo faster than you can say 'scuse mate, which way to the offie? and 20 minutes later we're in the middle of it, lying around the grass, enjoying the sunshine and generally having a glorious time of it and while it's only a footnote here, it was one of the highlights of the trip. the pace of the tour was just about right - plenty of things to see, but also plenty of time to chill out and soak up the atmosphere.

another night, another pub and we're in The Quay where i've decided that tonight i'm on cider and we watch the cover band. we're having a blast and laughing like drains - Paul and i get rowdy when they play All Along The Watchtower while Jodie runs around with her plushie sheep. after too many drinks we find the rest of the group at Bar 903 up the road after posing for photos with the Oscar Wilde statue and i call it at somewhere around 1AM to sleep.

the Cliffs of Moher are out in Connaught, the area Oliver Cromwell pushed the Catholics into during the Plantation. after the plush, fertile lands in the east the west is next-to-barren, rocky and hard to cultivate. much of it is bare limestone with shallow soil in the low-areas, contrasting grey and green. during the 17th century the kings of England decided to confiscate catholic lands and hand them over to protestant nobles and army veterans. the Irish were forced to rent their lands back, and anyone surplus to requirements was pushed west "Death or Connaught" was the choice, and millions wound up trying to eke out a living in the Burren. during the Potato Famine nearly 2 million people died out there when their cash crops were barely enough to pay the rent and their food crop shrivelled black with Blight. now it's a tourist mecca and we're driving around looking at the rock walls build all over the place - Famine Walls. some were built to divvy up land for farming, some just to give people something to do. they had a lot of rocks to get out of the way so that they could till the soil they had to go somewhere, so they went into the walls. now the walls remain protected by the National Trust as a reminder and a county-wide monument.

meanwhile, limestone is a pretty soft, fragile sort of rock. unlike the volcanics like granite which are hard and wear slowly, limestone erodes like nobody's business. the waves of the North Atlantic have been battering at these shores for millenia, grinding away from the bottom and undermining the landscape which makes for some unbelieveable cliffs (think Great Ocean Road region in Victoria, Australia). we stop in an area that gives a great idea of what the Burren is all about on one side of the road, then drops off not far from the other. of course, i HAVE to go horsing around and my new friend Nathan (Canadian) helps out taking some insane photos.

from 30-40 metre drops to 250, our next stop is at the Cliffs of Moher which i'd not actually heard of prior to the tour. gentle green slopes drop off into the abyss and the water is so far down you can't even hear the waves. a section of it's been nannyfied and safetied with walls and pavement with a sign which reads "Please do not go past this point" blocking the way to the old goat-trail along the top of the cliffs to the south and is easily defeated. Ginelle's camera's just died - she tried to turn it on as we got off the bus and it's not playing anymore. she's shattered. i know the feeling - that's happened to me twice now in the last few years, so i tell her that's fucked up, but look: come along with me, use my camera for any shots you want to take and i'll copy them over to your card with my laptop later. over the next half-hour we take some mind-blowing photos, and even get videos of us flinging poi around on top of the cliff, two paces away from the dropoff. it's yet another insane part of the world and whenever i look at the photos i'm speechless.

it's also stuck me with a new hobby - getting photos and video of me playing with my fire-toys in amazing parts of the world. sure, Where The Hell Is Matt? got in first, but i'm not getting paid to do it motherfucker. meanwhile, all this adventuring is thirsty work, so it's onwards to the Dingle Penninsula and our introduction to the Irish Carbomb.

Paddywagon Tours decided at one point to set up shop in a little town called Annascaul. it's one of those quiet little villages with somewhere around 330 people living within a 6 mile radius. it's rural and pleasant and fairly conservative, which is of course why they took over a hostel, painted it bright green and named it the Randy Leprechaun. don't ask me, i'm just a fucking tourist, ok? it caused a... um... small amount of controversy, but they finally talked the townsfolk around and so there it sits. it's only open when the tour's there, and i have the feeling it owes its existence mostly to its convenient location for the next day's bog-lap around the Dingle Penninsula. still, it's neat, tidy and has its own bar, and in that they serve Irish Carbombs at 3 for a tenner. it's a bizarre, but entertaining concoction which i have the feeling you'd have to be mad to come up with, and Irish to name so ironically, but what the fuck? take a half-pint of Guinness in a glass. sit it next to a shot of 50/50 Baileys Irish Cream and whiskey. now pick them both up, depth-charge the shot and scull it. now to the other 2 in rapid succession. the men's record is 29 in a night. the lady's record is now 15 since Jodie went in with a bunch of Euros and something to prove. me? i only had 6, and a couple of pints. i was pacing myself... which somehow didn't stop me being talked into doing karaoke. call it peer-pressure. call it i'm surrounded by relative strangers so what the fuck? either way, i was in Ireland, so i sang U2, and i'm at that sort of stage of my life so i sang "i Still Haven't Found What i'm Looking For" and everyone must have been good and drunk by that point because they answered with roaring applause. don't ask me, i can't sing for shit, ok? they must have just been too polite to yell "Get off the stage!"

after that things got messy. Jodie spent some hours searching for her lost camera, only to find that it had fallen under Paul's jeans when she put him to bed. Pam was so sick that she spent most of the next morning clutching a double-plastic bag. faces on the bus were a mixture of "oh god i need more sleep" weariness and "please kill me" despair. no time. NO TIME! we're off to Dingle!

Ireland: leave your troubles on your doorstep with the junkmail and get on the Paddywagon...

2009-05-16T07:48:00.002+10:00

i stepped off the train at Euston Station and into a wall of noise that slammed in through my optic nerve, London's high-density stimulus bombarding me like i'd spent a week in sensory deprivation and opened the casket to find i'd been left on the median strip of a freeway at rush hour. standing outside for a moment before hopping on the tube, rain pattering on my coat, it took a minute to remember what the fuck i was doing, where i was going, who am i again? it's only 7:35PM, it's not too late. no, it's 9:35PM. that means i was on that last train for 4 hours. no, that's not right. yes it is. fuck i'm tired, i've been travelling since midday to get back here. i can't be tired, i haven't done anything. shut the fuck up and get on the fucking train - you're not allowed to be in culture-shock, it's only London for fuck's sake. you know London. you're home again. do NOT argue that point with me now, you're not in the mood.

sir, yes sir. this is no time to be arguing with myself. don't fight a battle you know you're going to lose. follow your feet - they know where i'm going.

i've just got back from 8 days in Ireland, out of the green and into the grey. the tension i'd dumped at Euston on Wednesday-last waited for me like a faithful puppy-dog and immediately got back to humping my leg and getting slobber everywhere. it's no wonder i prefer cats. 9 days ago i'd walked into Euston Station with a spring in my step and the smell of escape in the air. another trip booked at the last minute, bag packed the night before and hidden so that it wouldn't be obvious i was going away and snagged on the way out the door. i've got a few things to do today, i'd said on the way out the door. a few things to do involve a tube, 2 trains and a ferry to the Emerald Isle followed by the location of a pub or three in Dublin. Virgin Trains have to be the most comfortable i've ever been on - they even have power points in the cheap seats which allowed me to bash out a couple of thousand words on the way to Chester. 15 minutes after arriving i'm on Arriva Wales and firing on towards Holyhead, a drab and somewhat charmless little village notable only for its ferry port. i pulled up to the Irish Ferrys counter an hour before scheduled departure with everything lining up nicely to find out that the 17:15 service had been cancelled due to poor weather on the Irish Sea.

fuck!
um... i've gotta be in Dublin in the morning. so what do i do?
"You can still get on the 02:40 service if you like. that gets in at 6:00AM"
riiiight. ok. no worries. shit happens i guess. so where's the nearest pub?

next thing i know i'm sitting more or less alone in a pleasant little pub called bar2two cruising the free wifi and making my drinks last, engaged in the fine art of killing time with 10 hours to slaughter. i'd complain, but what the hell? i wound up chatting with the locals for most of it, meeting a nice guy called Trev who was keen to learn about this wonderful thing we call the "interweb". suddenly it's midnight, i haven't bought a beer in a long long time despite there being quite the collection of pint glasses in front of me and the pub's closing. "I've got beers in the fridge - come back to my place. It's only 10 minutes down the road and I'll get you to the ferryport by 2," he says. how could i say no? by the time i stagger through check-in i'm sloshed and i've made a good friend in Holyhead. i've rolled out my sleeping bag on a bench and passed out for 3 hours sleep before the ship even leaves port.

7AM sees me standing outside the central bus station in Dublin, immigrated, a pocketfull of Euros, vaguely awake, looking bleary-eyed at the streets. i'd been fortunate to spot the pickup point for my tour - a hostel called "Paddy's Palace" - on the bus out of the ferryport so at least i didn't have to wander around in circles trying to find the place. i'd booked to stay there the night before and because of the 24 hour notice policy my fee was gone which sucked a little, making for an extremely expensive rushed shower, coffee and bowl of cornflakes. when i emerge from the kitchen the foyer's full of tourists. there are 4 different tours starting from here today - i've booked in for the 6-day All Ireland tour through Paddywagon. i used to be dubious of guided tours, but after Egypt i'm warming to the idea. doing the maths, i'd easily have blown the cost of the tour if i'd hired a car and booked my own hostels, let alone the entry fees for the parks and sites i wanted to go to, and i'd likely have missed a lot of the interesting things i got to see, or taken far too long to get to them when i missed turns or got lost. our guide/driver was a tall Irish guy called Tom who was, to be honest, a bit of a dick. that said, he was entertaining and knew his stuff. one thing you miss when you do these things on your own is the stories and commentary and over the days he drove us around we heard the history of the Protestant/Catholic conflict, folklore, tales and songs, explanations of the significance of a lot of what we were driving past - the colour which is lost if you only have a Lonely Planet as a guide.

loaded up on the bus, we headed north towards Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your political bias) past a couple of sites of interest - the town of Drogheda to see the cathedral which is home to the mummified head of St. Oliver Plunket (where i managed to find some desperately-needed energy drinks), and a picturesque little cemetery wherein there is a Round Tower (where monks would hide in times of Viking raids) for us to wander around and take pictures of. we spent a lot of time on the bus - 6 days isn't really a very long time to see all of a place like Ireland, so a lot of our stops were "quick, jump out, take some photos and then we're off again" sort of affairs. the last thing i wanted to do was to sleep on the bus - not when the scenery was rolling by to show another beautiful view every 84 seconds. in Egypt i read or blogged while we cruised through the desert. once you've seen half an hour of desert you've pretty much seen the lot. in Ireland i wound up sitting around with my eyes glued to the window and my camera in my hand, trying to capture what i was seeing at 100kph and knowing that it just wouldn't be the same in 2D.

by the time we pulled into Derry and loaded into the hostel i'd made friends with Paul and Jodie - a pair of Kiwi siblings having their last hurrah before she went off to Cypress for a while and he went back to Edinburgh, and Jordan and Jamie - Canadian siblings doing something similar. we were all to be met by a local who took us for a wander through the walled city (the only one remaining in Europe, apparently), then down to the Bogside to see the political murals. Derry is in the far north of Northern Ireland. the change from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland is marked, even to this day. once upon a time there'd have been a checkpoint on the road manned by British Army soldiers carrying live ammunition. now it's just a sudden change of steet-signs and currency: RoA uses the Euro, NA still has the Pound. Derry is a charming little town which is fairly peaceful now, but still obviously divided. the hardline Loyalist areas wear the blue, red and white of the Union Jack on the kerbs and light poles. Republican areas wear green and RIRA graffiti. in the times of the Troubles Derry was the site of a number of the Civil Rights marches demanding the right to vote for Catholics (as well as the abolition of various other abuses of human rights), the most famous of which ended in the massacre called Bloody Sunday. Bogside is a low-rent area which became a Catholic ghetto so named because... well, it used to be a bog (i don't make this shit up, i just regurgitate. blame the Irish). when you walk out of the walled city and down the hillside you can see the neat rows of estate housing in a broad bowl, marked by a wall on which is painted "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" - a declaration and a challenge to the Powers That Be with the flag of Palestine flying overhead in a show of solidarity. all around on any wall big enough you'll see the murals painted over the years by the Bogside Artists - 2 storey high political artworks illustrating the oppression of the Catholics in the area. not far from the "FREE DERRY" sign is a small monument to Bloody Sunday inscribed with the names of the dead. there are still fresh flowers sitting around its base. the memories do not fade quickly in this place, part of why a conflict that started 400 years ago with Oliver Cromwell simmers on to this day.

it's still sinking in when we get our shit together a little while later to go find some food and head to the pub we've been recommended for the evening - the Peadar O'Donnell's which we're told is still IRA owned and run to this day, and where there'll be traditional Irish music. the political bias of the place is obvious when you walk in the door - it's a lovely little pub with the Irish, Palestinian and Basque flags pinned to the ceiling. there's a bastardised Australian flag too, with the Irish green, white and orange covering the Union Jack which makes me smile, so i snap a photo, trigger-happy as ever (there are over 1100 photos sitting on my Eee to sort through making for a snap-rate of around double my time in Egypt). by the time i walk out of there i'm feeling like i've just had the longest day in memory, but the night air is cool and clean, i've a skin-full of Guinness and as far as i'm concerned things are right with the world. the trip's only just begun, but i can smell the makings of a craic'in good time on the horizon and that night i sleep better than i have in months.

the zen art of looking for answers that you know don't exist...

2009-05-07T21:12:00.000+10:00

i haven't written anything more serious than an email in 3 weeks. i'm not even sure i can string a sentence together now, but i'm in a train with a power point and 2 hours to kill so i swear i'm going to try. when the emails started coming in asking if i had writers block i knew i had a problem. when my phone started to ring i knew it was serious. for the last 3 weeks i've been looking for answers, mind spiralling through the outer reaches of sanity while i desperately try to keep it together and keep putting one foot in front of another, utterly lacking in direction, going with the flow of the current, anything to avoid feeling like i'm standing still. i'm blind and mapless, internal compass in freespin like i'm standing at the magnetic pole and everywhere from here is south, blank and devoid of landmarks to give me a sign and when every direction looks equally unpalatable all i've been able to do is wander around in circles with a dumb look on my face while i wait for something to pop out of the snow and say "this way".

i got back from Egypt, glad to see London again and get some time to sort myself out. 3 days of work materialised out of nowhere which kept me commuting back and forth from Heathrow again for the remainder of the week. by the end of that week louise and i weren't talking again and we've spent the fortnight hence in stony silence and narky staccato conversation, quietly tearing chunks out of each other in a decaying orbit of mutually assured destruction. i wasn't in any state to sit there and deal with it so less than a week after getting back to London i was heading out of it again - a hire car booked on the spur of the moment, a route worked out on the way, a destination picked out because it was somewhere i'd be forced to turn around again and submit to the gravitiational pull of the capital.

over 2 days i drove 712 miles through the English countryside, hitting Land's End and coming back again. i kept the 5" tall map of the UK donated to the cause by Shadow's folks on the passenger seat, folded up so the last 6 inches of useful page were visible and more or less navigated by which town sounded nice, or which road looked most interesting. from London to Bournemouth to Dorcester to Exeter to Plymouth i explored the English countryside, driving past rolling hills and pretty villages, stopping every once in a while to take a photo. the countryside was lush and gentle, hedgerows stitching the pastures together and i remember standing there alongside some lonely road wishing i could spread myself thin over the countryside and be absorbed into the green. i found a cozy little B&B in Plymouth and spent the evening drinking with the locals measuring carefully from the £30 i had to my name and finding vast entertainment regardless. back on the road at 9 the next morning i headed down a tasty-looking A-road which led in the vague direction of Penzance and was a joy to drive, stopping when i saw a sign for the Eden Project which i'd heard about but hadn't expected to actually find. after walking the gardens and the biodomes i was back in the car to Lizard Point (the southern-most point of the mainland) to Penzance to Land's End where i saw a while and ate the pasty i'd picked up in the last town. this was part of the vague notion i'd had when i set out - get to Devon and have Devonshire Tea, get to Cornwall and have a Cornish Pasty. i had my cream tea sitting at the quayside in Exeter. i had my pasty on the rocks over the cliffs of Land's End (from a shop recommended by a hitchhiker i picked up a few miles out of Penzance). back in the car and it was back through Penzance to Newquay where i'd intended on staying the night, but by the time i found somewhere to park and i was wasn't feeling it so i moved on, picking Launceston more or less randomly because it was in the right direction, i'd never been and it has the same name as a place in Australia.

the first place i found to park was right next door to Launceston Castle which i decided to at least go and look at (it was 6PM by this point, still bright thanks to Daylight Savings) and wound up lying around on the soft grass overlooking the rolling green hills and village in the valley beyond for the best part of an hour while i tried to work out what the fuck i was going to do from here. eventually i realised that i'd seen enough of the english countryside and that from here on in what i really needed to do was drive. just drive and drive and drive, set the cruise to the speed limit and go until i ran out of road, fell asleep at the wheel or got back to London, which is why i wound up driving down some of the now-familiar streets of Mayfair and Westminster at midnight, through Knightsbridge past Harrods, all lit up like a Vegas casino, down Piccadilly and through Piccadilly Circus, around Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster where i did a U-turn and went back, cruising down The Strand and Fleet St, dropping right at Monument so that i could drive across London Bridge, through Elephant & Castle and off down Kennington Park Rd and back to basecamp.

2 days of driving, the best part of 18 hours behind the wheel with my PSD (Personal Sanity Device) strapped to my head, occasionally listening to BBC2, alone and with nothing to distract me from the chaos in my head, i had a lot of time to think and get my head straight. it didn't work... not entirely. by the end of it i still couldn't make a decision about what i was going to do with myself long-term and when i walked back into basecamp my calm evaporated like petrol, leaving an oily, explosive fume which has coiled in the air ever since.

i've been completely incapable of making any real decisions for a while now, so many of them i've offloaded onto other people who are more than happy to make them for me. the support i've had from around the globe has been unbelievable. i've got Shadow working to replace the rusted ruin that used to be a spine and replace it with a fresh rod of steel. Rapunzel makes the decisions i'm too indecisive for or simply don't want to make. i've got Sandra to keep me smiling and my eyes forward, SpeedFox and Daywalker who've fed me beers and listened to my ranting, always good for distraction. SiJ has filled in the cracks with movies and pleasant conversation and pushed me to cruise the meetup groups, which is why i've wound up meeting firedancers in Green Park for the last 2 weekends.

my poi hadn't had a whole lot of use until a couple of weeks ago. i've played around here and there, got a bit of my skillz back, then pulled them out when i could in my wanderings, usually so that i could say i'd spun them in interesting places (seriously, there has to be someone else who's spun poi on top of Mt Sinai at dawn, but i challenge you to find them). suddenly i'm in a park in the middle of town with a dozen other circus-types and i've been flinging staff or poi or juggling balls or devil sticks around for 4 and a half hours. the buzz from that day took half a week to fade, and by wednesday i was dying for sunday to come again, just for the like-minded company and the joy of spin. louise accused me of only doing it to show off, but for the first time in longer than i could remember i actually felt happy and energised. i hadn't realised how much i missed hanging with a bunch of people who all want to play and learn and have no agenda past meeting up every once in a while and doing something fun, where drinks in the pub are an afterthought not the main event, where you have a common interest past being bored.

the best thing is that while i've had a chance to just go off in the park, i've also met some hugely interesting people. 2 night ago i went to a play written by one of the guys from the park which was actually really good - you take a bit of a risk with these things when some guy you meet in the park begs you to come see the play he wrote. this once, i got lucky. afterwards he grabbed me and asked if i was coming to the pub and how could i say no? 2 hours later i'm heading off with a tentative invitation to head back to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the thought rattling around my head of wait... what exactly did he mean when he said "perform"???

it's the people who make life worth living. i've been remembering that more and more. every time i've started feeling fucked and abandoned i hop on Facebook and wind up having an hours-long conversation which leaves me smiling and helps get me through the day. one of them ended with the following, after which she promptly went offline so i couldn't reply:

"remember this , one of you most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"

the strangest thing is the patterns that are emerging. in the last fortnight i've had 5 different people use the phrase "Remember who you are," and 3 who've sagely whispered in my ear "I think the universe is trying to tell you something." two is a coincidence. 5??? 5 separate people in 3 cities. the problem is that they're right. life in London has ground me down. a couple of days before leaving for Egypt i was on the bus back to base from doing some shopping and i overheard a conversation between a middle-aged black guy and a Russian teenager on tour:

"Have you lived in London before?"
"No"
"Well you should! It'll make a hard man out of you. You learn to suffer in London..."

and i couldn't help but grin and think i'm blogging this...

it's true though. you know how you always hurt the ones you love? well it works both ways (thankyou Fight Club), and i have been loving London. the other problem is that i've been on the receiving end of an avalanche of derisive, demeaning bullshit and i've made the mistake of listening to it. somewhere along the way i've been blessed with a horde of irreplaceable friends but i've managed to lose sight of the knowledge that i'm well loved amongst them. it's a shame to see a friendship spanning years come to dust and blow away on the wind, but there comes a time when enough's enough. it's been a long, long time since i've had to write off a good friend, but i've finally run out of cope and the pen's in my hand. the only person who should be allowed to make me miserable is me godsdammit. i'm not entirely the victim here - human interraction is a 2-way street, but i'm sick of feeling like i'm standing in the middle of the road with my hand out-stretched.

i hate having to write off a friend but if the wisdom of crowds is anything to go by, too many people in two different countries seem to think i should have done it a long time ago and since i patently can't make a decision of my own at the moment, who am i to second-guess? if there are still people who look up to me, even in my reduced and demolished state, shouldn't i at least try to hold my head up high and make it worth their while? when the screaming majority keep saying you have worth, won't even the most self-deprecating eventually stop, listen and maybe even start to believe?

enough of this shit. life's too short and i have forward to worry about rather than back. it's taken me 3 weeks to sift through the entrails and work out in which direction they point. as the days go by the range of choices gets shorter and shorter, and what i want becomes gradually clearer. the lighter i get the easier movement becomes so we'll have to see how the world looks when i'm free of the last of the deadweight.

System Failure: Please Reboot...

2009-04-24T20:15:00.002+10:00

somewhere in the last week or two i completely lost the ability to write anything coherent or meaningful. i think they may have confiscated it at customs or something. i've applied to have it returned but this is British Bureaucracy we're talking about here so there may be a wait involved. otherwise, i might try wandering around the markets in camden to see if i can find a cheap chinese knockoff.

regular service will resume once i can find and install the missing components. thankyou for your patience.

Egypt Interlude: breaking the 4th wall for fun and profit...

2009-04-12T19:02:00.000+10:00

Deafening Silence by Machine Head's echoing in my ears when i pull my Eee out of my shoulder bag and try to work out what the fuck i'm going to say about Alexandria... and right now i've got nothing. i've been sitting in seat 24H of this 777 for nearly 2 hours reading a Bill Bryson book while i try to get the mojo up to say something interesting and i have the feeling it'll be later tonight or tomorrow that i go and sit in the kitchen of Louise and my flat in Kennington before i have the spare capacity available to process. looks like i'll have to do another retroactive. i hate having to do that - backdating something i meant to write so that i don't have weeks-long gaps in my content followed by hard busts of output. on this trip it's been unavoidable sometimes - i don't always get the chance to sit and write stuff as it happens and wind up bashing out 4 days' worth of entries on a long bus ride before my battery dies, checking it in my hotel room while the battery charges and my PSD and Louise's iPod hang off by their USB cables, then run downstairs to get them uploaded and set everything back on the charge before we run out for the evening.

before getting on the feluca i held court in the restaurant of the hotel we were in like that - rotating between 3 different power adapters, shuffling 3 camera chargers, 3 mp3 players, 2 phones and my Eee so that everything had enough juice to handle the next 2 nights away from power and flushing toilets. i just about got everything done, too - Mike's iPod didn't get a full charge and neither did my camera, but then neither ran out of charge before we could charge them again either so it all worked out.

it's all been a little insane on the blogging-front over the last 3 weeks. when Louise has been sleeping on the bus i've had my Eee out, bashing at the keys. any time that hasn't been spent sleeping, doing stuff, or on trips too short to make it worth booting up have been spent bashing keys or editing. here's a rough idea of what i do to get a post up online:

while i'm wandering around taking photos, seeing things or (if i'm not travelling) living the life, i'm drafting. witty or useful or insightful phrases or ideas that come to mind get filed away for later. sometimes i'll have entire paragraphs, or themes, or ways that i'm going to proceed with explaining something sitting in my head for weeks before i actually commit them to print. while on tour it's a lot easier - my framework is what i do with my day, and everything else flows or segues out from there. once the ideas are together i sit down to bash it out. almost every blog entry comes out fully-formed and ready to run with. no half-finished artifacts lying around on my Eee's hard drive, no fragments or drafts that need completing, no planning or writing-plans. i've always been like this. back in high school when they said you had to show yoour planning i'd fake it - write what i wanted in my essay and throw the "plan" together afterwards. that's just how i work: start with an idea and run with it until the spool runs out of string. the the only exception to this is when i'm writing something long and i get interrupted, which has happened a few times in the last couple of weeks, whereupon i have to pick up the flow again from where i left off which i always hate. each entry is the child of the mood i was in when i was writing, and that's going to be different 6 hours later. it's a pain in the fucking arse, which is why i wind up re-reading through what i've done already and often re-write the last paragraph so that the next flows the way i want it to. sometimes i go in with something resembling a plan or framework, sometimes i go open up my text editor with nothing more than a topic and my randon-simile-combinatron running in my headmeats.

music's important. i'm not sure if words can express just how important, but you could consider trying to drive a car without any bearings. i've tried, it doesn't work. crank the speakers, plug in earphones, doesn't matter, but give me noise. what it is doesn't seem to effect the flavour of the product, either. i've written angry while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, mellow and melancholy to In Flames and depressed to Blink-182. right now i've skipped through to Parkway Drive because after the last 3 weeks i desperately need metal. i've been listening to a LOT of Parkway Drive and Inhale Exhale of late, especially "Romance is Dead" and "I'll with no friends (and a grin on my face)".

when i'm sitting in the kitchen in Kennington with a reliable connection i'll usually write straight into the text entry field on the blogger site. out in the world i use a text editor and save it locally until i can get online. raw-text files from the last couple of months still litters the home folder on my Eee because i can't quite bring myself to delete them despite their having been uploaded weeks ago. once the file's saved it tends to sit for a while, hours or days, before i go through for an edit. read, correct, fix typos, add detail, rearrange sometimes. usually it's just a case of adding a few lines of information i missed out the first time around, embellishments or extra words to make the picture clear, sometimes a whole paragraph needs rewriting. these things you do for the sake of art...

whenever i have to work offline i'll note down the time and date i started so that i can fill in the timedate stamp when i finally get it up online. if i'm writing a retro i'll usually project the time i WOULD have been working if i hadn't been drunk, tired, distracted or generally not in the fucking mood to stare at a screen for hours on end. sometimes i try to string a sentence together and it just doesn't happen and if i try to force it all i get is drivel, a foul mood and a dead battery. i had that problem after getting back from Amsterdam - for a week and a half i couldn't write to save me and then spent the following 2 weeks catching up, retro's all the way.

once all that's done it's down to getting onto the net for 10 minutes, pasting all the appropriate words in the appropriate text fields, making sure it's tagged correctly (so you can click on the "UK" tag and only get my UK-related posts, for example) and hitting "Publish". sometimes i'll load up the page to see how it looks online, but since i don't use images or funky layout i don't usually bother. generally i'll spend an hour writing a thousand-word entry, do a quick read-through and post. i've improved my output in recent weeks and the other night in the hotel room in Cairo i was able to bash out 4700 words in around 3 hours, including a couple of breaks. i wound up adding a bit of content and splitting the entry into two for reasons of pace, so the editing-session took around 45 minutes. bearing in mind that i've posted near 24k words so far, you can guess how much time i've been spending in the cracks and quiet moments, on buses, trains, plains and boats. i'd have blogged in the fucking donkey if i'd had somewhere the rest the Eee - don't think i wasn't tempted, or that Louise didn't jokingly suggest it. 24k words and i'm nowhere near done.. i still have to worry about that fucking day in Alexandria, then try to capture the atmosphere of the last couple of days in Cairo... then somewhere in there i need to put together the exposition piece i've been planning since yesterday evening, but have no idea yet just how i'm going to make work.

sometimes when i sit here looking at my Eee i just can't bring myself even to start. sometimes i attack the keys with a focused fervour that would make an OCD-sufferer on cocaine blush. sometimes i sit down to say something i thought would be interesting, like... say... what i did in Alexandria, and wind up talking about something completely different. whatever it is i upload, i try to keep it fresh and interesting and people keep reading it so i guess i can't be doing too poorly. i often get perplexed when people i've only met recently tell me that they enjoy the blog, but i won't try to pretent it's not gratifying. meanwhile, i'm planning to continue with this until i get sick of the idea... or when people stop yelling when i don't post for a while. getting things out of my head and onto the screen tends to help reduce my desire to kill people, and the feeling of getting an entry that i've written, edited and feel good about posted is, while less than post-orgasmic, still a real buzz.

meanwhile, i need to eat more of the monster Toblerone i bought at Cairo International Airport (i was feeling shite and wanted chocolate. no preaching about my diabetes, i'm SO not in the fucking mood) and get Alexandria out of the way. i need something to get me in the mood... hmm... Slipknot brings a smile to my face. "Subliminal Verses" it is...

Egypt Day 17: the house that Alexander built...

2009-04-10T07:35:00.000+10:00

i've always had a quiet admiration for Alexander of Macedon... and not just because because his grandfather and my grandfather came from the same part of the world. where Louise will be coming back from Egypt with pile of Ramses II swag big enough you could bury her in it, Alex always gets a not of respect from me. he was followed by men twice his age, fought his away across the known world and won and died before he turned 30. he's history's embodiment of "life fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse".

somewhere earlyish in his career he wandered into Egypt and kicked the Persians out with (from what Soobie was saying) about as much effort as it takes to slap a mosquito that makes it into your 6th floor hotel room late at night and keeps you awake with its buzzing. i can imagine the conversation now... or at least how it would have played out if Egypt was Brunswick St in Fitzroy:

"So wheresa capitala dis place? LUXOR?? Wassamadda you? I'm not gunna rule from fucking Luxor! Youse all can get fuck mayte. All get fuck! I'm not gunna going up anna downa Nile all de time. Call my cousin Christos anna his mayte John an Stef. I wanna new capital closera to home. Youse can call it Alexandria... yeah, i lika that. Get going! I gotta polish ma Monaro mayte!"

or... well, proably nothing like that, really. still, you get the point. from the capital in Athens Luxor is a long, painful way away. shifting the capital to the coast of the Mediterranean made sense, even if just in travel time. Luxor was the capital of Upper and Lower Egypt, so its location vaguely central made a good compromise between Memphis in the north and Aswan in the south... kinda like Canberra in Australia. Everything in the Middle Kingdon of Egypt was about that balance between north and south. the crown of the kings was "the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt". the temples are covered in a synergy of papyrus and lotus - papyrus being the symbol of the north and lotus of the south. north and south, east and west, life and death, the ancient egyptians liked to play things in pairs.

meanwhile, Louise and i are running late for our meetup with Mohammed... or he's early. i'm not sure, but we get a call from the concierge while i'm throwing my showes on to tell us he's here already. when we get down we find a kindly man with a beard who looks like he may be in his early 40's... which around here means he's at least 50. he leads us out to his car - a late-model Hyunday Verna (Accent in Australia) and we're off up the Alex Desert Road. cars in Egypt are... intersting - Cairo especially. the standard taxi you see in Cairo is a 20+yo Fiat, Peugeot or Lada (the Egyptians did well out of their treaty with Russia... or maybe Russia did well outof Egypt. everywhere you go there are Ladas, the Air Force use MiGs and the police use AK's), painted black and white and looking like they've had every side patched and straightened at least once or twice. most of the cars i see don't have a straight panel on them and if it's clean it means it was washed this morning.

the Alex Desert Rd runs almost straight out of Giza north and west through the Nile Delta. it has 4 marked lanes, which makes it 5-6 lanes wide and surface i'd go so far as to say is "decent". you'll pass a mosque every couple of kilometres in case you're travelling at prayer-time... in fact, they seemed more frequent than service stations (got to love a country where religion's more important than petrol). over the course of 200km you gradually make your way from desert beige to farm green as you go deeper and deeper into the rich soil and and abundant farmlands in the north, then swamp and marsh-lands and then suddenly the blue-green of the Mediterranean. the city was originally built along a natural bay with a couple of small islands across it, which was altered over time to become a calm, enclosed harbor. the Lighthouse (one of the 7 Ancient Wonders) on Pharos Island is long gone and Pharos Island is now an indistinguishable part of the mainland, near enough to where the Citadel of is now.

we haven't spoken to Mohammed much. i'm in the front passenger seat with Louise sitting behind me in the back. it's a habit we got into on taxis if only because i can fend them off if things get nasty, and it means i'm a buffer against potential leering. it's important to note that this hasn't been an issue. at all. even in the slightest. Louise gets a lot of looks from both blokes and ladies. i get more than a few myself we're a novelty and there's no taboo in this culture about staring. regardless, sitting in the front it's mainnly my responsbility to keep the driver entertained, but when Mr Sayed mentioned that Mohammed's english wasn't the greatest he wasn't kidding. he gets by amazingly well though, it's just some of the concepts he doesn't follow our words for. this means that while Louise sits in the back sleeping with her headphones on, or playing with her DS i'm stuck up front not wanting to be rude by pulling my book out. Mohammed's our driver, but he's not a taxi. we're paying him, but he's not our servant. we need to be a little more respectful, so my book doesn't come out until WAY late on the way back to Cairo. it's not too bad though - he's having a fun time trying to explain things to me and teaching me new words in Arabic, little of which sticks. by the time we crest the last rise and are looking over the sea i'm getting well and truly ready to go for a walk around and not have to think too hard about how to say what i mean in simplified english.

one of the first things i notice about Alexandria is how much cleaner it is than Cairo. in fact, that statement is way too much of an understatement. it's Cairo's supermodel younger half-sister. same mother, different fathers, smaller and without the soft middle and saggy boobs, sporting a perfect smile and a better tan. in the 30's it was a slice of Europe-in-Africa - more French and Greek than Arabic. over the last 70-odd years the Arabs have reclaimed it, but kept most of the good habits. the streets are startlingly clear of litter, and because it's insulated by 100km of farmland and marsh it's nowhere near as dusty. i don't see a single tour bus in the entire time i'm there, so i'd guess that it's pretty far from the usual tourist routes. in the rest of Cairo when someone says "Welcome to Egypt," or "Can I take your photo?" i've learned to ignore them. i have to stop ignoring them here because Alexandria is the only place i've been in Egypt where no one. NO ONE has asked me for money or tried to sell me anything i didn't tell them i wanted to buy first.

Mohammed drops us off at the Citadel first up after skirting the bay. it looks like a fucking sand-castle - limestone walls which have been repaired and rebuilt recently from the looks of things, a squat boxy little fort with crenellations and arrow-slits, murder-holes and stout walls that i'd not want to lay siege to with weapons less recent than the last century or a ridiculous number of expendible mampower. we do our standard wander around, but here we're two of the few non-Egyptians in the place. it's full of school groups and Arabs on holiday. it's refreshing like a cool breeze, as subtly different from everywhere else we've been as a feather on the end of a sledgehammer.

exploring the passages and hideyholes in the Citadel i find out that in Alexandria i'm a superstar. i keep getting besieged with high school lads who want to take photos with me, they all want to be my friend, practice their english... i'm not sure if i look like someone famous or what the story is, and Louise is copping a bit of it too: catching shy glances and furtive smiles from the girls. i see one of them whip a phone up out of nowhere to get a photo of her before blushing and making a run for it. i'm a little wierded out by it all, but i'm learning to cope. it's kinda fun, especially when a group of lads blocks traffic on both sides so that i can get a nice photo of Louise while they wait for their own photo op. Louise isn't particularly impressed and doesn't think it's particularly appropriate - i shouldn't be encouraging them, she says. me, i'm just happy they're not trying to hit me up for cash or buy their shit and what the hell? if there's one thing in this world that puts a smile on my face it's making people happy without trying and the number of times i hear "Thankyou thankyou! You're a good man!" makes me think that if this is all they want of me then i'll give it twice.

we finish taking photos and looking around after an hour or so and eventually find Mohammed in the carpark so that we can get on to his next recommendation - the Library or Alexandria. there used to be a Great Library of Alexandria and at the time it was the greatest collection of written works the world had seen, but that mysteriously burned down somewhere back in Roman times. rumour has it that the most important, rare and interesting pieces were squirelled out in the hours preceeding, but i wasn't there so i couldn't tell you. it's only down the road, but it takes a while to get here because we have to wait for the diplomatic convoy to go past. "A Big Man is coming," Mohammed tells us as the armoured cars and trucks full of guns roll by. i spot the flag of Cyprus on the bonnet of a car, but that's all i know.

the Library is a massive, stadium-sloping building with rack after rack of books extending up 12 levels, each with a reading area. there are a couple of exhibitions on the middle floors, and a massive datacentre hosting the Internet Archives. it's a grand building, awe inspiring. its a temple dedication to the worship of accumulated knowledge and the written word. after looking around for a bit we head for the door, dodging the official party who've arrived at the Library since we're come in, so i walk up to part of the diplomatic entourage and ask who's come to visit. "Mr , El Presidente of the Republic of Cypress!" is the grinning response of a woman who's absolutely excited to be asked. sweet fuckery... we just walked within 10 metres of the guy.

Mohammed's looking for somewhere for lunch. he's got somewhere in mind but he can't remember where it is and it's obvious he's got his heart set on something specific because he's asking the same question over and over of every taxi driver we drive past. i don't understand the Arabic, but i CAN pattern match when i hear variants of the same phrase repeated. eventually we pull up in a vaguely-legal parking spot and sit down to some of the best, sweetest charcoal chicken i've ever had. it's been lightly marinaded, and roasted with a covering of onions and tomato. there's so much food that we can't get near to finishing it all and Mohammed gets some of the leftovers to go. it's a cool, dim little place we've fetched up that seems fairly clean, considering the woodchips strewn across the floor. there's even a basin with soap so we can wash out hands before and after tearing half a chicken to pieces and devouring it.

we stock up on water from a cheap-arse little supermarket. the other thing that Alexandria seems to lack is "tourist pricing". we've been here for something like 4 hours now and no one's tried to sell us anything, begged us for money or coax us onto a camel or horse. i'm loving the vibe more and more as time goes by and i'm starting to realise that if i had to live anywhere in Egypt it'd probably be here. back in the car and we find out that the greek ampitheatre is closed, which is a bit of a shame. we make up for it by getting Mohammed to park near the harbor and wandering along it for half an hour or so. i try to explain the concept of "beach" in a mixture of simple english and pantomime but it's not going anywhere so we call on Mr Sayed to help. at a little piece of beach at the eastern end of the main bay i get to dip my toe in the Mediterranean for the first time and celebrate by pulling out my poi and going off on the sand. when i stop 5 minutes later there's applause - everyone's come to watch the crazy white guy with his tennis-balls and streamers at the end of some string and for the first time in something like 6 years i get to bow to an audience of more than a couple of people and while we climb back up onto the footpath i'm grinning so hard i could break walnuts on my cheeks.

we're out of ideas and it's 3:30PM. with a 3-hour drive ahead of us we skip out on finding coffees and shisha and opt to head back to Cairo, getting back on the highway and into the insanity of Egyptian traffic. driving in this country is something of an experience. overwhere you go in the city there are cars squeezing through gaps i wouldn't have rated as such. the ends of wing-mirrors everywhere are scratched and cracked from where they brush regularly. even the open roads are ridiculous - on the coach on the way back from Abu Simbel our driver's going at least 30km/h over the limit, passing 2 or 3 of the other coaches at a time like they're standing still. our driver on the way to Dahab is regularly on the wrong side of the road playing chicken with trucks, and despite pulling over seconds before impact neither driver seems to blink. it's Situation fucking Normal. Mohammed's pretty relaxed. our taxi driver from Tuesday was one of the most skilled collision-avoidance drivers i've ever seen. i'm not sure i could have predicted traffic as well as he could, and i'm not shy about rating my own skills. Louise passes out in the back seat again and as we roll back from the delta to the desert i finally relent and pull my book out for a while.

i'm a little pissed off by this point - if i'd known how nice Alexandria would be i'd have tried to get a night there and see more of it. of everything on this trip it's been the biggest surprise. i love the genuinely friendly atmosphere of the place. i've been hearing "Where you from? Welcome to Egypt!" before a hundred times, but this is the first time i've felt like they're really pleased to see me as someone different rather than as a walking wallet that bleeds cash if they hit me with the right-sized stick.

nearly 12 hours after we left and we're back at the hotel finally, still stuffed from our excessive lunches. my appetite's slowly fading into a shadow of its normal self, so tea's skipped. Louise parks herself in bed and plays with her DS while i crank some tunes and i get to work blogging again - a little over 3 hours wearing the keys of my Eee smooth and i'm still nowhere near finished, so i keep going until my brain melts and i need to sleep. there's not long to go now before we head back to London... the days trickling away and i'm edging towards looking forward to it. there's only so much of this i can take, i think, before it starts to seriously do my head in but i'm in my stride and i think another 2 days are easily surviveable.

Egypt Day 16: it's not what you know that matters around here, it's how many men called Mohammed...

2009-04-09T08:12:00.002+10:00

sitting on the balcony again tonight it was so murky i couldn't even see the Pyramids. other nights i've been out here i've been able to see at least the outlines. tonight: not so much. air quality's not exactly what you'd call "good" here. a lack of regular rainfall means that stuff hangs in the air for quite a while before settling and between traffic (many to the taxis run on gas rather than petrol, which is good. most of the buses run on diesel or low-octane petrol and belch smoke which cancels out a lot of the benefits), cooking fires, burning rubbish which is heavily plastic and... did i mention dust? regardless of the reason, you can see a noticeable line in the sky from the pollution. looking down from the 6th floor it looks like the aerial scenes from Blade Runner (but without the rain) - the green lights in the nearby mosque's spire and the finished-before-they're-done buildings adding to the cyberpunk tinge.

Mr Sayed's in the hotel foyer this morning as promised, with Louise's chain fixed up as good as new. he's also brought along a pair of ear rings she'd asked to look at - little hollow cartouche's in silver, inscribed with the name Ramses II (Louise's hero). she loves them, and suddenly they're a gift. he REALLY didn't have to do that. just when he can't get any more awesome, he's also come through on another favour we asked on Monday morning: his friend Mohammed will, for LE400, will take us to Alexandria tomorrow and show us around for the day. 200+km and 3 hours drive each way, a 12 hour day. what a bloke. Mohammed's english isn't great, but Mr Sayed has a day off on Thursday so all we have to do is call him and he'll translate for us. i REALLY should have bought more stuff from him. he heads on his way, good deeds done well and truly up until next Ramadan, and we hit up the Taxi-Pimp for a ride into the Egyptian Museum. it was the first thing we were taken to on the official tour, but we really didn't get to do it in enough detail so we're heading back again with Mr Samir - a lovely bloke somewhere in his 40's with specs, a tweed jacket and a 2003 diary filled with notes written by grateful passengers.

we knock the museum over in DETAIL today - catching everything we missed the first time round, and a lot of the stuff we didn't. we spend the extra LE100 to see the mummies, including Ramses II and his father Seti I. Louise manages not to squee, but you can tell she's excited to finally meet her hero, even if he's been dead for 3000 years. we cruise the ancient jewellery, even the exhibit of mummified pets. some of it's world-class in its presentation. some of it's jam-packed in wherever there's space with even less rhyme or reason than the rest of Cairo. we saw the site for the new museum which is going up near the Pyramids and i'm really hoping they sort it out a bit better this time... or at least build it with some space to add anything the find later. there's just too much stuff with too little order to understand half of what you're seeing, but we're loving it anyway. Louise and i have been to so many museums together in the last 6 months that we've got each other's pace almost right so that neither of us is too fast or too slow and i'm more than happy to keep her company through the artifacts until my knee or back gives out, whereupon she's more than happy to sit and let me rest.

we kill the rest of our energy wandering around central-Cairo, meandering along the Nile until we find a street-bazaar and wander around with the locals. we're on their turf now - out of the tourist areas with their touts and walking amongst people who are just living their lives, where a couple of foreigners are an oddity to be stared at, not marks for a quick buck. finally getting sick of the idea we flag down a cab, agree on a price written in my notebook in Arabic (i know the symbols now, but not the words) and take the most convoluted route i've seen so far back to the hotel. this is the 4th time we've been brought this way and we've not used the same route twice.

Louise hits the room for a lie down and i hit the street for a reccie, looking around for potential places to eat tonight. i find a couple of convenience stores, some cafes i want to hit for shisha when i get the chance, and get a recommendation for a good restaurant which later proves to be too expensive. when we head out later we keep rolling past after seeing the prices (take THAT you "thinking i can't read any Arabic motherfuckers"! sometimes i can't be bothered to haggle over the price of my tea and just walk away...) so we roll down the street market a kilometre or so until we get sick of the idea. all the food-places are take-away and with the only english in sight being on the labels of our shoes we're not really sure what the hell we're ordering. it's interesting, and i'm enjoying the local colour, but we're also hungry so we wind up being boring and get room service.

i'm really digging all this at the moment. the abundant availability of sleep, cruising through the days at my own pace... there are worse places to be. i've just about got Cairo sussed. i wouldn't go so far as to say that i'd want live here, but i've accepted it and managed to get my finger more or less in the groove. it's almost a shame it'll all be over in another couple of days, but there are plenty more adventures to have in that time. i think we did well booking 3 weeks - it's been short enough to never feel bored, but long enough that i don't feel like i'm missing much or that i should be rushing. meanwhile, it's time for more sleep, glorious sleep. Mohammed will be here at 7AM so we need to be up at 6 and i've no interest in following the Way of Soobie and only allowing 4 hours to rest...

Egypt Days 13-15: i could have sworn i had more stamina than this. did i leave it all in Dahab?

2009-04-08T06:12:00.001+10:00

i'm sitting on the 6th-floor balcony of my (questionably) 4-Star hotel room sipping a beer while i gaze out on the Pyramids of Giza in the late-afternoon and i can hear the call to prayer echoing from the minaret a couple of hundred metres away. the dust and smog create a glow in the air which softens the sunset and gives the buildings a sepia tinge. the Hotel SIAG Pyramids advertises its rating behind the concierge desk, but i'm starting to realise that the stars in Egypt... they do not mean what i think they mean. much of the foyer is painted gold, with marble floors, a spiral staircase and red-upholstered chairs that look rather grand when you walk in the door, but you don't have to go far before the cracks appear in the facade. for starters, marble's cheap here. it's fucking everywhere, so i'm not impressed. the gold paint on the chairs started rubbing off years ago and it's well on its way now. the pool is an empty blue crater with brown sludge in the deep end (so much for our idea of sitting by the pool, chilling out). of the 3 lifts, i've only seen 2 work and even then they don't like coming up to the 6th floor (they're ok with the 5th though. maybe they got in a fight with the 6th and now they're not talking? who knows...) and the wireless internet in the foyer seems to actually be for the hotel across the road or something, so you need to sit just inside the doors to get a connection... and even then it drops out every few minutes which is hugely frustrating when you're trying to send a 3 meg attachment by email. it's not all bad here though. Louise and i have a queen-size bed each and true to the advertising the balcony does in fact have a great view of the Pyramids that we've spent a lot of time sitting and and looking at. the air con works which is good, not because it's particularly hot but because otherwise we'd have no fresh air. open the sliding door in the evening and you'd better have your mozzie repellant on otherwise prepare to be eaten. i've had my jabs, but typhoid is a nasty little disease which turns your blood to poison and is therefore not your friend.

a couple of days ago i was on the public coach from Dahab to Cairo. heading there we were crammed into a smaller tour bus which went direct. thanks to the extra night in Dahab, GoBus booked us onto the public coach which was surprisingly comfortable - better than the Mccaffrey's buses i used to take from Canberra to Sydney. it takes a more circuitous route, however, cutting across the Sinai peninsula to the west-coast and going through Sharm al Shiek and a couple of other places with immemorable names on its way to the capital. we had a 8:30AM start, but somehow were more shattered by the time we arrived at 5:15PM than we had been leaving at 7AM nearly a week previous. Louise slept most of the way, her head falling and snapping back every couple of minutes, while i drained most of my Eee's battery trying to make some amount of sense out of the days just passed.

Wally was at the bus stop to meet us and say goodbye - he was meeting his new group in a couple of hours, but still took the time out to see us off to our last tour-arranged hotel personally. i can't rate the service of the tour company highly enough - they've looked after us, kept everything tight, made sure we were always sorted and the moment we wanted to change the plan they accomodated us in a heartbeat. i was sad to see Wally go, just as i was sad to say goodbye to Soobie a week before. Soobie was our guide and our shepherd. Wally was our fixer and our friend. at the same time i was glad to be off the tour and off the map. now i do this thing My Way... Louise agreeing of course. i like to set my own pace and choose my own path. being on the tour grated a bit, but the reality of the situation is that i could never have completed as much as they did anywhere near as efficiently or cheaply, even given twice the time to do it, and even if i'd tried 80% of the detail would have been lost because they have the local-knowledge and know-how.

we get an early night in the Holiday Inn after finding the supermarket Soobie had shown us on the second day of the trip (conveniently, located just down the road from the hotel) and grabbing some fast food for tea, eating in our room and chilling out. we're met in the lobby by our jeweller Mr Sayed at around check-out time. he'd met us in our hotel in Luxor where he has a regular hookup through GoBus as their "trusted source" for jewellery which meant that when we ordered customised pieces he was guaranteed to deliver. we'd picked up our shipments on our second stint in Cairo, on our way to Dahab but my silver bling-bracelet had been too small and needed adjustment, and Louise'd necklace had broken in Dahab and needed repair. he came out to our hotel to pick her necklace up and promised to have it back to her at our next hotel in 2 days time. no mess, no fuss, no arguement, just an apology for the inconvenience. he didn't have to do that.

the business of the morning sorted we haggled with the concierge and arranged a taxi out to Giza and the hotel we'd booked ourselves for the last week in town. an hour later we were sitting on our balcony enjoying the view.

feeling appropriately chilled out, we hit the street in search of adventure, exploration and food. we've landed a bit of a ways off the beaten track here in Giza - the hotel is a kilometre or so off Pyramids Rd, opposite a new freeway overpass which is under construction. we've got no idea where the fuck anything is around here and no direction looks particularly obvious so we decide "fuck it" and head right, spending the next 2 hours doing a bog-lap around and through a mixture of suburbia and strip-malls, eyes of the locals tracking us (mostly Louise) as we pass through back-streets where english is something that generally happens to other people. it's hot and dusty but our limited Arabic successfully buys us cheap-but-delicious felafels and no one gives us any lip. i'm liking this - away from the tourist traps and the bazaars, seeing how these people live in the real world. a bit of a rest back at the hotel and we're out the door again. the hotel's Taxi-Pimp introduces us to Omar who will take us to the Pyramids Sound & Light Show, wait around for us then show us somewhere to get a bite to eat. the show's just as cheesy, lame and overly dramatic as advertised... but it's fun. i don't even mind when it loses the plot half-way through and goes off on a wierd tangent because at least it's interesting and tells stories i've not heard before. it IS actually worth going and paying to see, even if just to see the pyramids light up in pretty colours with lasers tracing out patterns on the flat wall of the Embalming Temple. true to his word, Omar takes us not only to an Egyptian fast-food place (FelFela - a greasy snack-joint selling felafel sandwiches and Shwerma Kebabs for LE1 and LE12 in that order. at that price i get Omar a felafel sandwich for being such a good sport. tipping is a big part of the culture here and i want to try something different) but a hole-in-the-wall grog shop where we stock up for the coming week.

Cairo's a dusty, dirty, smelly hellhole of a town. don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but don't take this as criticism either. areas like the one i'm at here in Giza are only a couple of kilometres from the Western Desert and therefore dustier than an octogenarian's lingere collection. rubbish arrangements are both serendipitous and democratic - anywhere that isn't currently being used has a pile blown in by the wind, then people just use that. they seem to get cleaned out every once in a while, but not until every man and his donkey has a pick through for anything of interest. the only clean cars you'll see were washed this morning, and spent most of their time since covered up. i've seen cars under bridges with a coating of dust so thick i couldn't tell what colour they started out, but now they're brown. the rubbish in this place makes me despair sometimes. i swear Bangkok was cleaner, although with the lack of humidity Cairo wins on smell. dry shit don't stink so much (although with the impressive donkey population even in the centre of Cairo there's plenty of donkey-shit around). seriously though? fuck it. that's just the way it is. YOU try keeping shit clean when the desert dust whips up and and a new load settles in the stillness of the night. it rains here so rarely it barely even counts and it'd take at least a week of downpour to give this place anywhere near the cleaning it needs.

this is what the PC-crowd like to call a "developing country". for every rich person is Cairo or Alexandria there are hundreds of peasants living a rural life up and down the Nile. the average Egyptian earns less than LE1000 a month. that's ~AUD$250, or ~GBP£100. and that's the average. i've been blowing something like that each week i've been here. for every dole-bludger sitting on their corpulent arse in Lakemba whining about how hard it is in the current economic climate, all i can say is come meet Mohammed. he works a field of garlic and carrots on the edge of the desert. he sleeps in a mud-brick hut with his wife and 3 kids. his 10 year old son just started working in a carpet factory and he's glad for it because the money Amir earns means he can take english-classes in a couple of years and maybe get a job in tourism as a tout selling dodgy-papyrus, driving a taxi or maybe even as a guide if he's lucky. the daily live of these people is dust, dirt, prayer and hard fucking work and if you still think your life is hard after seeing the gratitude in his eyes after you hand him the equivalent of a quid when you need to pull your head out of your fucking arse because it's completely full of shit.

there's not the money for garbage trucks in the burbs - they're focused on keeping the tourist sites clean (and they don't even manage that very well half the time) because that's what important here. Australia rode the sheep's back to prosperity before climbing on the Haulpak and hitching a ride with the resources boom. Egypt's riding the international tourist and the money we spend visiting the monuments and museums, shopping in the bazaars and the restaurants, taking tours and paying guides means freeways, water you can drink from the tap without catching dysentry, power with only the occasional brownout, hospitals and medicines, education and trades. i'd love it if they could keep the place tidier so that they didn't have to live in filth, but i understand why they can't. each day i come back to the hotel dusty and dirty and i don't want to know the colour the water'll turn when i wash my clothes back in London, but it comes with the territory. at least i know in a few days my clothes will be clean, and stay that way for a while.

Tuesday rolls in and we've both had something like 9 or 10 hours of sleep but we just manage to get down to the buffet in time to snaffle some chocolate-covered croissants and a sweet danish, along with a couple of mugs of the muddy water that passes for coffee in this town. it's either Turkish Coffee (WIN!) or Nescafe (FAIL!) around here, and the hotel doesn't do Turkish. shit together, we find the Taxi-Pimp and our new friend Mohammed agrees to take us around for the day. first stop is the Citadel of Salah Al-Din, perched over the city on a hilltop with a stunning view - a medieval fortress from back in the days before gunpowder when thick walls, a few thousand men and a decent stockpile of arrows could hold off an army. when the Turks and the Arabs finally took Egypt back from Napoleon and crowned Mohammed Ali (where do you think Cassius Clay got the name?) as the new king he had a grand mosque build at its peak: a majestic, but subdued place of worship. Ali and his dynasty ruled for the next 147 years, but the Mosque of Mohammed Ali remains.

i've been in churches galore - growing up with a quietly Roman Catholic mother and a father who dabbled in a few different christian sects before coming back to Orthodoxy with a religious fervour that would bring a tear to an Inquisitor's eye, i've seen the inside of more places of worship than i have Macdonalds restaurants. Catholic, Uniting, Baptist, Angligan, CoE, Orthodox (Greek or Russian), Buddhist (a couple of flavours), Hindu, Ancient Egyptian... throw in a Synagogue or two, Latter Day Saints and Scientology and i'll just about have the full set unless you want to get nutty and go Davidian (oh yeah - that burned down. shame). i've seen them big and small, grand like St Pauls in London, small and humble like St Margaret's (i need to check this) in Edinburgh Castle, sombre Orthodox churches full of gold-leaf ikons, colourful Hindus ringed with statues, halls with folding seats, converted warehouses and even an ancient brick temple overgrown by a Budda-Tree, tended by modest, peaceful buddhist monks. my first mosque was something new. light coloured stone walls a storey high giving way to dark coloured domes above, lights hung low on chains from a ceiling done in dark-olive green, deep brown and black, silver inscriptions and filigree and carpets on the floor for the believers to sit, pray and contemplate. a whispered story i overheard was that some local Jewish artisans were roped into the construction and decoration and when no one was looking they painted a Star of David at the top of the central dome around the mount for the main chandelier in gold, thumbing their noses at their Muslem task-masters. if you look up you can see it there to this day - apparently Ali could take a joke and let it stay.

it's peaceful and restful... none of the grotesquerie of the crucifiction, fire and brimstone, "do this or else", bleeding eyes or hearts. of course, i can't read Arabic so for all i know they inscriptions could be screaming "Death to the infidel" but somehow... i don't think so. we wind up sitting there for at least 10 minutes enjoying the serenity. even the american and Italian tourists near us take their shoes off and pay respect. back outside in the blinding sunlight we're back to our normal "get a photo of me in front of the " habits, but i'm starting to develop an inkling of why Islam spreads faster than an 18yo's legs at a toga party. later in the day we visit the Mosque of Sayyidna Al-Hussein near the Kahn Al-Kalili and i see people sitting, talking, praying, sleeping. fall asleep in a Catholic church and you'll be shoo'd out. sit on the floor and you'll be rudely prodded. here sitting on the floor is what you do. it's dark, cool, and thick stone walls provide a sanctuatry from the midday sun. seats? you sit on the carpet, fool! that's what it's for!

i'm not really sure what the Citadel's all about. we spent an hour or so wandering around it, following the circut of the somewhat-interesting (but poorly organised and a little pointless) Military Museum which had considerably more replicas and models than it had actual artifacts, skipping the Police Museum completely and generally enjoying the view of Cairo. like so much of Egypt, it's got a "thrown together" feel to it and i almost wish i'd had a guide to point at the interesting stuff i know i missed.

back on the street i give Mohammed a call to come grab us from the pickup point and we're off, but only after climbing into the wrong taxi and having to jump out 10 metres down the road. we're dropped off at Sayyidna Al-Hussein and after having a look around we cruise the markets for a while. Louise wants to look at jewellery. Louise wants to haggle for a shisha water-pipe. Mr Raven wants to gut-punch the next person who yells at him "Sir, Sir! How can I take your money?" walk softly, carry a big stick and pray i only break half your fingers. the first time i thought it was refreshingly honest, after which it got old really fast. Kahn Al-Kalili is Cairo's BIG tourist market. think of anything stereotypically Egyptian and/or Pharaonic, you name it: you'll find it here. two main streets linked by cross-roads and alleyways. keep your wits about you or you're getting lost. the unwary should carry a compass in their hand and their money in an internal body cavity... or maybe another set of trousers. which they left in another country. we don't get anywhere near into it on account of being tired, thirsty and in desperate need of a sit down. it's tourist-ville, so we even bargain down the price of our drinks and cocktail-shisha and enjoy a nice half-hour sipping sweet cold hibiscus while we watch the world go by, walking away with that contented feeling that too many things are right with the universe and anything that isn't is welcome to wait until i care again.

meanwhile we've lost Mohammed. i've burned through most of my remaining phone credit trying to work out where he is. he's in the carpark of the nearer mosque (there are 2 in close vicinity). no, he's on the street. wait, we'll meet him out the front of the farther mosque. we're going back to the car park? no, there you are! it's getting late and we've managed to hit rush hour on the freeway. oh. sweet. fuckery. somewhere in the middle of i-have-no-fucking-idea a 5-lane freeway hasn't just slowed to a crawl, it's stopped. people are getting out of their cars to see what's going on. after 5 minutes i'm sitting in the window of the taxi waving at the kids in the back of the truck ahead wishing i had my poi with me, otherwise i'd have given this Cairo Freeway an impromptu performance before running around the cars with my hat out asking for tips. turnabout is fair-play, after all. i'm SO pissed off - i'm never taking them out of my bag again. Louise is happy i left them in the hotel - she hates it when i make a spectacle. in the end we wait until the traffic mysteriously starts moving again and amuse ourselves by learning to read Arabic numbers (which came in useful today when we walked into a restaurant with an english menu but prices in Arabic. WIN!) by reading off licence-plates (they have both Arabic and Western on them, so they're like mini-Rosetta Stones). Mohammed gets in on the game and seems to be having a ball schooling the white kids. i get to the point where i can read all 10 numerals and say to him i can read numbers in Arabic! now i'm as good as an Egyptian 5-year old! and he loses it laughing. eventually we're dropped back outside the hotel. the bill? LE200 - the equivalent of AUD$50 for 6 hours and fuck-knows how many kilometres.

we celebrate in the restaurant next to the hotel which has an english/arabic menu and no other customers but us. the food's good, the staff hover around as if their heads are on the chopping block if we aren't completely satisfied and we while away our evening watching the Egyptian Top-40 and smoking apple-shisha while mosquitos mistake my legs for a free buffet.

Egypt Days 10-12: now i just need to learn to fly...

2009-04-05T08:32:00.001+10:00

walking down the market street in Dahab i can hear the call to prayer, and i'm now officially a PADI-Certified Open Water Diver. three days, 7 dives, 4 quizzes, 2 videos and an exam. with the shiny card that should come through the mailbox at basecamp in London in a month or so i can now hire kit, grab a buddy and plan my own dives down to a depth of 18 metres without requiring a Dive Master. i wasn't going to do the Open Water Course. i wasn't going to dive at all due to the expense, but on the first day in Dahab Wahil from Orca Dive Dahab came to talk to us and as he went on Louise and i met eyes across the table and nodded. after the first day in the water what started as a SCUBA course (2/3 of the full course load, max-depth 12 metres, Dive Master required) turned into the full Open Water Diver.

3 days spent, US$350 gone, it was worth every cent. the first time i got out there in full kit to swim around was just incredible - breathing easy, the mask correcting my vision nicely (i'm -1.25 in each eye and the perspex mask naturally corrects between -1 and -2 under the water so i'm sweet), fish having a contemplative look at my fingertips. rolling onto my back and looking up at the surface while a school of Scissortails passed overhead, flipping into a St Peter's Cross and watching the Clown Fish dart around Mohammed (our instructor, veteran of over 7000 dives), it's one of the few things i've found in the last couple of years that compares to motorcycling as a sport, although on reflection it's probably no less expensive when you get into it.

everything went smashingly through to the end of the first day. there's a required video to watch which we covered off the night before (after returning from Mt Sinai) and by the end of the day Louise and i had decided to extend an extra day in Dahab so that we could finish off in full. Mohammed grabbed me and Louise while everyone else was distracted washing their kit and told us that we were by far and away the best divers in the group. we headed off down the street grinning like hyenas, laughing like drains, loving life and having the time of ours. day two, for me did not go so well. i wasn't feeling particularly great to start with after waking every half-hour or so through the night when an exercise half-way through the second session left me gasping for breath under 3 metres of water, then after a bit of a fun-dive we had to practice taking our masks off underwater, then putting them back on again. welcome to a book i like to call "Things That Freak Mr Raven Out For Fun & Excitement". the list is short and simple, although i shan't be explaining it all to you today. 2 things that bear mentioning at this point are thus, however: i cannot fucking stand getting water in my eyes, including opening them underwater, and i have massive problems with getting water up my nose. you might think that this would get in the way of swimming and watersports, but i've developed techniques so that i can surf or swim or whatever, even in a big swell. for starters, i always look where i'm going and what's going on around me so that i don't accidentally catch a wave in the back of the head. i swim with my head up for the most part. it's not great, but it's adequate, and if i have to go under or through a wave i'll take a deep breath, scrunch my eyes up before diving under and exhale through my nose to keep it clear before rubbing the water out of my eyes on the surface. now you want me to fill my mask with water, open my eyes, try to keep breathing without water shooting up my nose then put my mask back on and clear it? you've got to be fucking joking.

i tried. i gave it my best shot. then i breathed water, choked and jumped straight to the surface (it's ok - we were in about a metre and a half of water) coughing, spluttering and gasping. that was the end of the dive and i staggered away gutted. i didn't feel better until much much later after Louise and i snapped at each other, rode camels off into the sunset and subsequently apologised. we'd had to rush from the dive centre back to the hotel because we were late for the evening's camel ride down the beach to see the sunset over the mountains. i'm loving camels; from their oft-joked-about toes to their teddybear-ears. i've seen enough people riding them in the last couple of weeks that i've picked up a few skills, one being that if you cross one leg over the front of the saddle then cradle you opposite knee with your ankle it's FAR more stable and comfortable. we didn't hang out particularly long - out on the beach the group sat taking photos and drinking bedouin-tea (a lovely, sweet herbal concoction brewed on an open fire) until the sun was nicely down then headed off again, loping off back to the hotel and i finally started to feel a bit relaxed.

another night of sleep and day 3 brings us from a group of 5 to a group of 3. Deano and Kim have finished at SCUBA and they're now out. it's down to Mike, Louise and me. the rest of the skills are demonstrated without issues, but i'm nervous as an arachnophobic with a Huntsman on his face when it's time to get my mask off again. the methodology preferred by PADI is to let enough water into your mask to cover your nose, then breathe a little, then repeat at just below the eyes and then with a mask full. i'm having none of this. the only way i'm passing this is if i can get a solid hold on my nose so it can't try to breathe through it and when it's time i take a deep breath, close my eyes tight like i'm about to die, rip my mask off my head in one quick motion and grab my nose tight. i'm kneeling on the ocean floor under 2 metres of water blind and desperately staving off gasping panic, my inhalations coming in ragged and fast while i struggle for calm. i get the pat on the head and i repeat the procedure in reverse, alternating between grabbing my nose tight and using it to exhale and clear the mask.

5 minutes later i have to do it again. half an hour later i have to do it again under 6 metres of water. i got through and i passed, somehow managing the highest score in the group for the exam. i copped flack from Mike for the rest of the day and i think Mohammed might have been going easy on me but i didn't care. the last of the practical skills over, a practice dive through the reef near the Lighthouse and the rest was a foregone conclusion. i ate my lunch while i flew through the exam and you couldn't have wiped the grin off my face with metho. walking out at the end of the day with out last practical dive done, kit washed and stowed, temporary certificates laminated and stowed in our wallets, we walked off down the market street with a massive feeling of achievement. it's such a simple thing that anyone can do it, but we weren't caring. we're both already thinking about where we can go diving now that we've unlocked access to most of the world's recreational dives. Greece or Spain in the summer is tempting, but in the back on my mind is the little island in Fiji i sat on for 3 days a year or so ago where the water was warm, the beers were cold and Rhianna sung "Umbrella" every hour on the hour. there was a little PADI dive shop i never got to try at the time and i feel like i missed out on something there. Louise keeps using the word "we" when discussing future dives. we made good buddies down under the water (PADI uses a buddy-system for safety. i'll watch your back and you keep the sharks off mine) and i'll happily partner up with her again... i'm just not assuming anything about the future at the moment.

still, it's something i'm remarkably glad i've done. after 3 days of suiting up and getting out there the movements and procedures have second-nature. a few more dives and i reckon i might start getting as comfortable as i am on a bike. now i just need to see if i can learn to fly a plane...