Paris: unexpected delays may occur in transit...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.