steve is gone! and i am all alone in rainy london. after this i will get my last vegie breakfast with my last suspicious vegie hotdogs, get my last pret-a-manger sandwich and my last banoffie pie, spend my last pounds and take a last look at hyde park. then i get on the pick-a-silly line to heathrow, terminal 1, board flight nz1 to auckland via LA and await the inevitable landing. home! its so so far away.
last night we saw a play of rainman, remember that movie with tom cruise and dustin hoffman? well. some deckhid, as the kiwis would say, thought it was necessary to make a theatre version of the film, and to make it exactly the same, except worse, and put josh hartnett in it. so we threw a malteser at him and got kicked out of the theatre. har har.
other than that its been all touristy, galleries and museums, 26metre dinosaurs, paintings of baby jesus and completely blank canvases. you know the london story from before. just add cider and lots more food, and i am now 10kg heavier than when i left. hopefully that doesnt count in my baggage weight.
guess i'd better run now. see you soon. thankyou for reading my blog, ladies and gentlemen.
Thursday 11 September 2008
Friday 5 September 2008
londontown
just a few quick things to say before i get kicked off the compy:
tallinn was amazing. amazing!! such a cool little town. we stayed in a hostel called euphoria which was so awesome, just like a little house with 20 beds, a lounge room with a shisha pipe and beautiful art all over the walls and musical instruments and a weird guy called bob...
a plate of dumplings, a can of cider and a coffee cost 55 krooni, 5 bucks. a big pancake full of feta the same. cider for 2 bucks! a pint of delicious cider!
want to write more but not much time. really miss it there. bike tour! steve popped a tyre. on our way to the airport yesterday i mimicked kicking steve in the balls and an eastern european woman screamed. it was funny.
but now we're back in london and our dorm at our hostel is full of australians so we're moving tomorrow. trying to see wicked tonight wooooo!!!!!!!
tallinn was amazing. amazing!! such a cool little town. we stayed in a hostel called euphoria which was so awesome, just like a little house with 20 beds, a lounge room with a shisha pipe and beautiful art all over the walls and musical instruments and a weird guy called bob...
a plate of dumplings, a can of cider and a coffee cost 55 krooni, 5 bucks. a big pancake full of feta the same. cider for 2 bucks! a pint of delicious cider!
want to write more but not much time. really miss it there. bike tour! steve popped a tyre. on our way to the airport yesterday i mimicked kicking steve in the balls and an eastern european woman screamed. it was funny.
but now we're back in london and our dorm at our hostel is full of australians so we're moving tomorrow. trying to see wicked tonight wooooo!!!!!!!
Friday 29 August 2008
finlandia!
hello ladies and gentlemen,
we're in helsinki today, and for two more nights, leaving for tallinn on sunday. before this, after the fez, we were in espoo, which was not really worth it. i wouldnt recommend it. we were lost for about an hour before we found the place, and when we found it it was rude and unclean. not worth it. though we did see some amazing red toadstools and a red squirrel.
things i forgot in previous blogs:
we saw the swedish prime minister! we were just wandering along in stockholm when two men with HUGE GUNS, real guns not anchorman guns, told us to step to the side because this huge procession of people was coming through with the lady prime minister in the middle. amazing!
espoo pet shop, looking at pets, cute kittens, puppies, fishies, tarantulas TARANTULAS!? and the worst part was, they had no kind of security!!! you could just slide the door open and let this beast the size of your had free into the room. all hairy and yella. not cool.
i got a piercing. dont worry mum, i can take it out without consequences. and its not damaging any part of my face. it's a bit hurty.
today we're going to explore helsinki, so far the weather has been bad and we havent seen much. hope you're all well. xox
we're in helsinki today, and for two more nights, leaving for tallinn on sunday. before this, after the fez, we were in espoo, which was not really worth it. i wouldnt recommend it. we were lost for about an hour before we found the place, and when we found it it was rude and unclean. not worth it. though we did see some amazing red toadstools and a red squirrel.
things i forgot in previous blogs:
we saw the swedish prime minister! we were just wandering along in stockholm when two men with HUGE GUNS, real guns not anchorman guns, told us to step to the side because this huge procession of people was coming through with the lady prime minister in the middle. amazing!
espoo pet shop, looking at pets, cute kittens, puppies, fishies, tarantulas TARANTULAS!? and the worst part was, they had no kind of security!!! you could just slide the door open and let this beast the size of your had free into the room. all hairy and yella. not cool.
i got a piercing. dont worry mum, i can take it out without consequences. and its not damaging any part of my face. it's a bit hurty.
today we're going to explore helsinki, so far the weather has been bad and we havent seen much. hope you're all well. xox
Tuesday 26 August 2008
goteborg, stockholm
today is tuesday august 26th. 16 days left. argh!
m 18 frog walk!!!!
t 19 train helsingborg-goteborg
w 20 goteborg, theme park, south park, punkd, cous cous with pesto and cheese mmmm,
th 21 train goteborg-stockholm, private room, raaaain, cafe
f 22 private room, shopping, boots, stealing stuff, x files movie
s 23 dorm, skansen, pet sounds, johannus and two canadians, maccas
s 24 dorm, everything closed, central station, tried laundry, rory and jeremy
m 25 dorm, laundry, shopping, buffet
t 26 ferry
so here we are, at the end of sweden. our bags are packed and scattered around us as we huddle at the free computer on the rygerfjord I. we've got 4 hours or so before our FERRY departs from the stockholm port, set for helsinki. we dock at around 9:30am tomorrow, so that makes it about a 15 hour trip, or perhaps 14 because i think there's a time difference. whatever the particulars, its sure to be a difficult and uncomfortable journey considering we couldnt reserve seats and have to rely on our speed and cunning..... uh oh.
sweden has been such a beautiful country. the people are very strange, lots of cool fashions and waif like model people but not so many of the typical 'scandinavian type' with the bright skin and white hair. the highlights of sweden:
walking through the woods...
on our last night in helsingingborg, in a covert attempt to avoid katerina we took to the woods behind our house, braving the rain and the bitterly cold winds. sweden has a law which dictates the 'right to nature', which means that you can walk, camp and pick berries from anywhere at all that you like. so we walked through the woods, around an old castle (we couldnt find anyone to tell us whose castle it was, but apparently its just offices now), met a border collie, SAW FROGS!!!, took photos, got lost, found black sheep, found horses, got found again. the swedish woods are so beautiful. looked for a bear, but luckily didnt find one.
goteborg...
a perfect hostel (with imperfect directions, took us 45 minutes and a bit of fare evasion to find it) with a kitchen to make delicious salty cous cous and watch punkd and south park and the olympics and sex and the city. we only had one day in this pretty little uni town, sweden's second biggest, so of course we went on more rollercoasters..... expensive but these were even faster than tivoli!!! sweden has a weird penchant for those scoopy lolly selections like what they used to have at kmart, they're absolutely everywhere, so on our goteborg day we caved and paid far too much to end up with a serious sugar shock headache and stomach cramps... not worth it.
we found a little cafe to soothe our pains, got the soup and a bagel deal with delicious broccoli soup and a cream cheese bagel for 55 kr.
skansen...
steve from behind me just said 'mm, skansen was awesome'. it's supposed to be a miniature sweden in the heart of stockholm. miniature amish sweden maybe, because it was missing the coops and overpriced restaurants that we've encountered. anyway, its this huge property with little amish houses and farms and mud structures and rose gardens and statues and..........NORDIC ANIMALS. so cool. reindeer are so little and helpless, i cant believe so many people eat them... they're only about hip height and they shed their antlers! so weird. meese are big and scary and their heads are enormous. the wolverine is a tiny animal who should not be an x-man because he is so unthreatening and hilarious. bear cubs! bear gonna eatcha! we got seriously close to some huge brown bears and watched the babies feeding, sooo awesome, photos to come one day. more horses, a huge owl, some tiny pig babies which made steve almost never want to eat ham again, BISON ARE BIG TOO, and a bit where you could pat goats which was supposed to be for children under 5 but there was nobody watching so i jumped in and found some baby goats and put them in my bag and they're here right now eating magnums. awesome.
RAAAIN.
the most serious downpour ever. we ran and ran for shelter but we got seriously owned, our clothes took 3 days to dry! drenched to the skin, its not normal for little aussies used to endless drought! we found a cafe deep under the ground and had toasted sandwiches and coffee and shivered in true wintry style, except it's summer here... how depressing.
SPIDERS.
everywhere. dont come to sweden for that reason. spider gonna eatcha.
X FILES
is the worst film ever. dont see it. dont even think about it. or maybe do see it. it's possible that it's actually not bad, it's just so brilliant that regular people can't understand it. and we paid 25 bucks a ticket. :(
PET SOUNDS BAR
and cocktails with a german called johannus and some canadian chumps. fun but too crowded and waaay too expensive, at 20 dollars a cocktail. maccas on the way home, an unsuccessful search for a 7/11 with some 3.5% beer (that's all they're allowed to sell outside the government shops, sweden has serious alcohol control) and home to bed.
RANDOMLY MEETING PEOPLE FROM THE JOURNEYS
rory and jeremy, the guy whose laptop i ruined in a drunken incident in copenhagen, were wandering down the canal in stockholm. i could hear this 'jes! jes!' and finally i realised! they went on a 20000 dollar cruise with their grandparents and ended up robbed in russia, drunk in the sea and plied with free food and alcohol by old people looking for toy boys. good adventures.
EVERYTHING IS CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
that's really annoying.
finland, ho!
m 18 frog walk!!!!
t 19 train helsingborg-goteborg
w 20 goteborg, theme park, south park, punkd, cous cous with pesto and cheese mmmm,
th 21 train goteborg-stockholm, private room, raaaain, cafe
f 22 private room, shopping, boots, stealing stuff, x files movie
s 23 dorm, skansen, pet sounds, johannus and two canadians, maccas
s 24 dorm, everything closed, central station, tried laundry, rory and jeremy
m 25 dorm, laundry, shopping, buffet
t 26 ferry
so here we are, at the end of sweden. our bags are packed and scattered around us as we huddle at the free computer on the rygerfjord I. we've got 4 hours or so before our FERRY departs from the stockholm port, set for helsinki. we dock at around 9:30am tomorrow, so that makes it about a 15 hour trip, or perhaps 14 because i think there's a time difference. whatever the particulars, its sure to be a difficult and uncomfortable journey considering we couldnt reserve seats and have to rely on our speed and cunning..... uh oh.
sweden has been such a beautiful country. the people are very strange, lots of cool fashions and waif like model people but not so many of the typical 'scandinavian type' with the bright skin and white hair. the highlights of sweden:
walking through the woods...
on our last night in helsingingborg, in a covert attempt to avoid katerina we took to the woods behind our house, braving the rain and the bitterly cold winds. sweden has a law which dictates the 'right to nature', which means that you can walk, camp and pick berries from anywhere at all that you like. so we walked through the woods, around an old castle (we couldnt find anyone to tell us whose castle it was, but apparently its just offices now), met a border collie, SAW FROGS!!!, took photos, got lost, found black sheep, found horses, got found again. the swedish woods are so beautiful. looked for a bear, but luckily didnt find one.
goteborg...
a perfect hostel (with imperfect directions, took us 45 minutes and a bit of fare evasion to find it) with a kitchen to make delicious salty cous cous and watch punkd and south park and the olympics and sex and the city. we only had one day in this pretty little uni town, sweden's second biggest, so of course we went on more rollercoasters..... expensive but these were even faster than tivoli!!! sweden has a weird penchant for those scoopy lolly selections like what they used to have at kmart, they're absolutely everywhere, so on our goteborg day we caved and paid far too much to end up with a serious sugar shock headache and stomach cramps... not worth it.
we found a little cafe to soothe our pains, got the soup and a bagel deal with delicious broccoli soup and a cream cheese bagel for 55 kr.
skansen...
steve from behind me just said 'mm, skansen was awesome'. it's supposed to be a miniature sweden in the heart of stockholm. miniature amish sweden maybe, because it was missing the coops and overpriced restaurants that we've encountered. anyway, its this huge property with little amish houses and farms and mud structures and rose gardens and statues and..........NORDIC ANIMALS. so cool. reindeer are so little and helpless, i cant believe so many people eat them... they're only about hip height and they shed their antlers! so weird. meese are big and scary and their heads are enormous. the wolverine is a tiny animal who should not be an x-man because he is so unthreatening and hilarious. bear cubs! bear gonna eatcha! we got seriously close to some huge brown bears and watched the babies feeding, sooo awesome, photos to come one day. more horses, a huge owl, some tiny pig babies which made steve almost never want to eat ham again, BISON ARE BIG TOO, and a bit where you could pat goats which was supposed to be for children under 5 but there was nobody watching so i jumped in and found some baby goats and put them in my bag and they're here right now eating magnums. awesome.
RAAAIN.
the most serious downpour ever. we ran and ran for shelter but we got seriously owned, our clothes took 3 days to dry! drenched to the skin, its not normal for little aussies used to endless drought! we found a cafe deep under the ground and had toasted sandwiches and coffee and shivered in true wintry style, except it's summer here... how depressing.
SPIDERS.
everywhere. dont come to sweden for that reason. spider gonna eatcha.
X FILES
is the worst film ever. dont see it. dont even think about it. or maybe do see it. it's possible that it's actually not bad, it's just so brilliant that regular people can't understand it. and we paid 25 bucks a ticket. :(
PET SOUNDS BAR
and cocktails with a german called johannus and some canadian chumps. fun but too crowded and waaay too expensive, at 20 dollars a cocktail. maccas on the way home, an unsuccessful search for a 7/11 with some 3.5% beer (that's all they're allowed to sell outside the government shops, sweden has serious alcohol control) and home to bed.
RANDOMLY MEETING PEOPLE FROM THE JOURNEYS
rory and jeremy, the guy whose laptop i ruined in a drunken incident in copenhagen, were wandering down the canal in stockholm. i could hear this 'jes! jes!' and finally i realised! they went on a 20000 dollar cruise with their grandparents and ended up robbed in russia, drunk in the sea and plied with free food and alcohol by old people looking for toy boys. good adventures.
EVERYTHING IS CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
that's really annoying.
finland, ho!
Monday 25 August 2008
le end of stockholm
i really want to blog but theres only one computer and a line.... awkward. theres not too much to write about but we're hopping on a ferry across the gulf thing tomorrow to helsinki, i might blog from the ferry if, like, technology works that way or whatever. hmm.
today we did laundry and went to h&m then went to topshop and ate buffet dinner. things are still cruising along pretty normal. miss you all heaps. miss gyp!!!!! keep seeing border collies who look like him.
17 days left..!
today we did laundry and went to h&m then went to topshop and ate buffet dinner. things are still cruising along pretty normal. miss you all heaps. miss gyp!!!!! keep seeing border collies who look like him.
17 days left..!
Monday 18 August 2008
copenhagen and helsingborg
hej from jes and steve in sweden. yeah, just got a ferry to sweden yesterday. as you do, when you're IN EUROPE.
so, boys and girls, it is august 18 and the end of the party is just around the corner, 24 days specifically. we're expecting to be in scandinavia for a bit longer, it's gotenborg tomorrow which is a supposedly very trendy town a couple of hours away, then stockholm for 5 nights, then hopefully a ferry to helsinki where we have no accommodation and might curl up with a bum in a trainstation. UN-PC!!!! its because of no uni. dont judge me.
now i will tell you a tale of a boy and a girl who have a romantic reunion at the arrivals terminal of copenhagen airport and all which happened around it.
from my point of view: i was worried that the months of wear and tear backpacking may have slightly diminished my aesthetic appeal/smell. so i went with a canadian girl called larissa to a bathhouse about 20 minutes walk from my hostel. steve wants me to mention at this time that i saw fake boobs in the changeroom, though i dont think its such a vital detail. hennyway. they were really delicious baths with two salt pools, massage chairs, a sauna and a steamroom which are a good challenge and some uv light chairs which were pointless and made me feel like a lizard at the dentist. so we swanned around feeling glamorous, and then got HAIRCUTS!! so i would be all prettied up for the reunion. unfortunately the hairdresser was an insane french lady who mostly made me bald and uncomfortable so it was a waste of about 320 thousand australian dollars.
steve's point of view: being the stupid backpacker i am, i checked out of the london hostel i was in on time... meaning i had about 9 hours to kill with a big big backpack. so, i put that pack down behind the counter at the hostel, read a bollocks novel i brought with me, ate some fantastic pickle and cheese sandwiches, looked in a museum (victoria and albert museum... lots of clothes from old old times), then got a train to Gatwick airport at 1 o'clock. I'd now successfully killed four and a half hours. On top of this the showers at the hostel had the worst water pressure i'd ever experienced, meaning my cleanliness was at best questionable when I plonked myself down on the floor of the crappest airport in London (I've never been to Luton or the one starting with S so don't quote me). I finished the bollocks novel. The plane that picked me up was relatively nice, but I couldn't understand the lady with the food so i didn't eat: really really cultured of me, i know. at about 11 pm, the doors of copenhagen airport arrivals thingamajig opened and...
SMEE 'GAIN: i caught the train to ze airport at about 9pm after drinking 6 orange fantas at an irish pub to keep me buzzing. oh, le waiting!!!! the peering and the waiting and the looking at the screens. v. painful. but at last!! le steve! le steve pushes his way past some old people and a disabled man and runs, runs! and attacks! argh! oh, it was amour fou or something. and i was very very happy.
le steve: THERE WAS THE JESSICA! All hair-cut and trim-looking from her months of travel. Grinning away (as usual) and looking all clean and smiley. It was all an act of course - she was only clean because I was there. Subsequently, she's taken about 3 showers in a week. If that.
yessica: 3 showers is enough for a smell of only one or half metre radius and if people get that close its their own fault.
enough of the silly narrative!!
in copenhagen:
tuesday:: wellz. it rained and rained. we went for a decent walk around the main square and streets, steve ate a danish hotdog with allll the toppings, including pickles and onions and mustard. for lunch we had pizza and matilde chocolate milk, because denmark is stupidly expensive. we ended up spending a lot of this day inside becuase of le rain. the hotel was OK, BUT A BIT WEIRD. because the lady from the desk was NOT normal. shouting at all her staff in front of customers etc, workplace awkwardness for all. cept our room had a fridge which was pretty cool because we needed somewhere to put the ben and jerryz.
the next day:: we visited christiania which is a free town in the middle of copenhagen. it used to be a military base, and then when they didnt use it anymore some hippies got in there and declared independence, maybe in the 70s? since then it's apparently deteriorated into an excuse for drug selling and emos congregating (its main st is called pusher st which is interesting) but we still found it reasonably charming. there's obviously a big push against the hard drug selling within the community as there are big signs with pictures of people punching needles that say 'say no to hard drugs' etc but i guess its still a problem. there's a lot of weed floating around though. we had some beers with a spanish guy and a newzealander who are living and working in norway, and then we wandered home. for lunch we had delicious sandwiches with avocado mousse!! AND ZEN WE SAW BATMAN!!!!!
i didnt really like it that much but i can understand its greatness. heath is really scary but personally i thought christian bale was lame. aaron eckhart did his classic starts good, turns evil, but still with good that he seems to do in every movie. it was a bit dumb, but pretty scary and sadistic.
thursday:: something which was so boring we cant remember it.
friday:: museum, tivoli. museum was boring. TIVOLI WAS GRATE. biiiiig rollercoaster zoom!!! upside down zoom!! aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! lots of money gone zoom!!!!! aaaaarrrrghhhhh!!!!!. donuts and bagels zoom.
saturday:: carlsberg factory = dumb but two free beers equalss ZOOOOOM.
sunday:: train from copenhagen to helsingor, the location of hamlet's castle on the sea border of denmark and a 20 minute ferry to helsingborg in sweden. hung around for about an hour on the trampoline in the back of our bed and breakfast until katerina the eccentric but lovely owner returned. she showed us EVERYTHING we could possibly have wondered about the building, including how to turn the keys and how to wipe our bottoms but then she went away and it was normal again. helsingborg is a really small town with a nice beach but grey weather, so we walked without swimming, bought brownie from the supermarket like true fatties, and ate soup for dinner.
monday:: I WENT horseriding, all day. katerina owns two palamino ponies! i was too fat for mine i suspect, and very bad at cantering, but it was still fun. steve couldnt come unfortunately, but i really want him to because its very exhilarating. for lunch we had thai food then watched the jumping horses in the olympics and katerina told us everything about it because she is retired and has time to know about these things.
steve's two bob worth: copenhagen, hey. twas verry nice. drank lots of juice, ate nice cheap beakfast every day and walked heaps. It's a funny joint - big old buildings with weirdly blatant advertising all over them. the canals are gorgeous, the people oddly attractive... really, all of them. Christiania was quite cool, particularly the sign at the 'exit' saying 'YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE EU'. What else? Ah, Tivoli. Why oh why doesn't John So, or whatsisname Brumby,put more money into Luna Park in Melbs? Tivoli, basically an amusement park, is the centre of all of Copenhagen's social scene - it has killer rides, lots of food and drink and amazing bands playing... the friday before i arrived the Flaming Lips played! Would have loved that. There are ponds and trees and bars and retaurants, it's like a little town with rollercoasters around it. amazing rollercoasters. this one, called the demon, had a big warning sign with arrows pointing to a little man and crosses all over his body. you weren't allowed on if you'd eaten more than 1 hotdog in the last three days. I'd eaten one, so i passed. i usually pass things. the demon went upside down and inside out and was the best thing ever. decided not to buy the photo taken of us on it because, well, we didn't have our photo-faces on and looked mighty odd. I've got some amazingly good memories of Copenhagen: hot dogs (the Danish national diet it seems, some of which are wrapped in bacon!), kebab shops on every corner (which i didn't touch... out of character perhaps), turkish buffet restaurant food that almost killed us, lovely buildings, a great section in the National Museum about toys (not boring, interesting and fun, if in an all-too-cutesy way), good beer and friendly people. And of course the beautiful Jessica. Missed her so much that any country would have been amazing I guess... Loved it. Helsingborg is small, but somewhat wealthy, like Porsea or something. A lot of BMWs, AUDIs, expensive-arse cars floating about. While Jes was riding the small horse, I looked at bigger ones and walked about thnking "so this is Sweden, hey?" No one answered, but when a lady said hi to me and muttered something in Swedish i finally felt like I knew where I was. Denmark was cool as hell, now it's all about the Swedish, the people that like to say they used to own everywhere else in Scandinavia. So nice. So so nice here. Goteborg tomorrow (the party town where all the sewdish musos are from, Jens Lekman etc), then Stockholm. Should be a cracker of a week.
hluv from jes and steve.
PS PLEASE HEMAIL JES
BECAUSE AT SE MOMENT I AM LESS POLPLAR THAN STEVE
so, boys and girls, it is august 18 and the end of the party is just around the corner, 24 days specifically. we're expecting to be in scandinavia for a bit longer, it's gotenborg tomorrow which is a supposedly very trendy town a couple of hours away, then stockholm for 5 nights, then hopefully a ferry to helsinki where we have no accommodation and might curl up with a bum in a trainstation. UN-PC!!!! its because of no uni. dont judge me.
now i will tell you a tale of a boy and a girl who have a romantic reunion at the arrivals terminal of copenhagen airport and all which happened around it.
from my point of view: i was worried that the months of wear and tear backpacking may have slightly diminished my aesthetic appeal/smell. so i went with a canadian girl called larissa to a bathhouse about 20 minutes walk from my hostel. steve wants me to mention at this time that i saw fake boobs in the changeroom, though i dont think its such a vital detail. hennyway. they were really delicious baths with two salt pools, massage chairs, a sauna and a steamroom which are a good challenge and some uv light chairs which were pointless and made me feel like a lizard at the dentist. so we swanned around feeling glamorous, and then got HAIRCUTS!! so i would be all prettied up for the reunion. unfortunately the hairdresser was an insane french lady who mostly made me bald and uncomfortable so it was a waste of about 320 thousand australian dollars.
steve's point of view: being the stupid backpacker i am, i checked out of the london hostel i was in on time... meaning i had about 9 hours to kill with a big big backpack. so, i put that pack down behind the counter at the hostel, read a bollocks novel i brought with me, ate some fantastic pickle and cheese sandwiches, looked in a museum (victoria and albert museum... lots of clothes from old old times), then got a train to Gatwick airport at 1 o'clock. I'd now successfully killed four and a half hours. On top of this the showers at the hostel had the worst water pressure i'd ever experienced, meaning my cleanliness was at best questionable when I plonked myself down on the floor of the crappest airport in London (I've never been to Luton or the one starting with S so don't quote me). I finished the bollocks novel. The plane that picked me up was relatively nice, but I couldn't understand the lady with the food so i didn't eat: really really cultured of me, i know. at about 11 pm, the doors of copenhagen airport arrivals thingamajig opened and...
SMEE 'GAIN: i caught the train to ze airport at about 9pm after drinking 6 orange fantas at an irish pub to keep me buzzing. oh, le waiting!!!! the peering and the waiting and the looking at the screens. v. painful. but at last!! le steve! le steve pushes his way past some old people and a disabled man and runs, runs! and attacks! argh! oh, it was amour fou or something. and i was very very happy.
le steve: THERE WAS THE JESSICA! All hair-cut and trim-looking from her months of travel. Grinning away (as usual) and looking all clean and smiley. It was all an act of course - she was only clean because I was there. Subsequently, she's taken about 3 showers in a week. If that.
yessica: 3 showers is enough for a smell of only one or half metre radius and if people get that close its their own fault.
enough of the silly narrative!!
in copenhagen:
tuesday:: wellz. it rained and rained. we went for a decent walk around the main square and streets, steve ate a danish hotdog with allll the toppings, including pickles and onions and mustard. for lunch we had pizza and matilde chocolate milk, because denmark is stupidly expensive. we ended up spending a lot of this day inside becuase of le rain. the hotel was OK, BUT A BIT WEIRD. because the lady from the desk was NOT normal. shouting at all her staff in front of customers etc, workplace awkwardness for all. cept our room had a fridge which was pretty cool because we needed somewhere to put the ben and jerryz.
the next day:: we visited christiania which is a free town in the middle of copenhagen. it used to be a military base, and then when they didnt use it anymore some hippies got in there and declared independence, maybe in the 70s? since then it's apparently deteriorated into an excuse for drug selling and emos congregating (its main st is called pusher st which is interesting) but we still found it reasonably charming. there's obviously a big push against the hard drug selling within the community as there are big signs with pictures of people punching needles that say 'say no to hard drugs' etc but i guess its still a problem. there's a lot of weed floating around though. we had some beers with a spanish guy and a newzealander who are living and working in norway, and then we wandered home. for lunch we had delicious sandwiches with avocado mousse!! AND ZEN WE SAW BATMAN!!!!!
i didnt really like it that much but i can understand its greatness. heath is really scary but personally i thought christian bale was lame. aaron eckhart did his classic starts good, turns evil, but still with good that he seems to do in every movie. it was a bit dumb, but pretty scary and sadistic.
thursday:: something which was so boring we cant remember it.
friday:: museum, tivoli. museum was boring. TIVOLI WAS GRATE. biiiiig rollercoaster zoom!!! upside down zoom!! aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! lots of money gone zoom!!!!! aaaaarrrrghhhhh!!!!!. donuts and bagels zoom.
saturday:: carlsberg factory = dumb but two free beers equalss ZOOOOOM.
sunday:: train from copenhagen to helsingor, the location of hamlet's castle on the sea border of denmark and a 20 minute ferry to helsingborg in sweden. hung around for about an hour on the trampoline in the back of our bed and breakfast until katerina the eccentric but lovely owner returned. she showed us EVERYTHING we could possibly have wondered about the building, including how to turn the keys and how to wipe our bottoms but then she went away and it was normal again. helsingborg is a really small town with a nice beach but grey weather, so we walked without swimming, bought brownie from the supermarket like true fatties, and ate soup for dinner.
monday:: I WENT horseriding, all day. katerina owns two palamino ponies! i was too fat for mine i suspect, and very bad at cantering, but it was still fun. steve couldnt come unfortunately, but i really want him to because its very exhilarating. for lunch we had thai food then watched the jumping horses in the olympics and katerina told us everything about it because she is retired and has time to know about these things.
steve's two bob worth: copenhagen, hey. twas verry nice. drank lots of juice, ate nice cheap beakfast every day and walked heaps. It's a funny joint - big old buildings with weirdly blatant advertising all over them. the canals are gorgeous, the people oddly attractive... really, all of them. Christiania was quite cool, particularly the sign at the 'exit' saying 'YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE EU'. What else? Ah, Tivoli. Why oh why doesn't John So, or whatsisname Brumby,put more money into Luna Park in Melbs? Tivoli, basically an amusement park, is the centre of all of Copenhagen's social scene - it has killer rides, lots of food and drink and amazing bands playing... the friday before i arrived the Flaming Lips played! Would have loved that. There are ponds and trees and bars and retaurants, it's like a little town with rollercoasters around it. amazing rollercoasters. this one, called the demon, had a big warning sign with arrows pointing to a little man and crosses all over his body. you weren't allowed on if you'd eaten more than 1 hotdog in the last three days. I'd eaten one, so i passed. i usually pass things. the demon went upside down and inside out and was the best thing ever. decided not to buy the photo taken of us on it because, well, we didn't have our photo-faces on and looked mighty odd. I've got some amazingly good memories of Copenhagen: hot dogs (the Danish national diet it seems, some of which are wrapped in bacon!), kebab shops on every corner (which i didn't touch... out of character perhaps), turkish buffet restaurant food that almost killed us, lovely buildings, a great section in the National Museum about toys (not boring, interesting and fun, if in an all-too-cutesy way), good beer and friendly people. And of course the beautiful Jessica. Missed her so much that any country would have been amazing I guess... Loved it. Helsingborg is small, but somewhat wealthy, like Porsea or something. A lot of BMWs, AUDIs, expensive-arse cars floating about. While Jes was riding the small horse, I looked at bigger ones and walked about thnking "so this is Sweden, hey?" No one answered, but when a lady said hi to me and muttered something in Swedish i finally felt like I knew where I was. Denmark was cool as hell, now it's all about the Swedish, the people that like to say they used to own everywhere else in Scandinavia. So nice. So so nice here. Goteborg tomorrow (the party town where all the sewdish musos are from, Jens Lekman etc), then Stockholm. Should be a cracker of a week.
hluv from jes and steve.
PS PLEASE HEMAIL JES
BECAUSE AT SE MOMENT I AM LESS POLPLAR THAN STEVE
Saturday 9 August 2008
pictures
budapest: the loft, harry potter and ron weasley aka the doctor aka mountain goat in shining armour, peter pettigrew aka simmo's brother, beautiful katie, popped collar guy and halena
vienna: smashed mark and my delicious cocktail, my french canadian friend, shameful midnight kebabs and americans
geneva: the UN, some rocks where i sat reading lady chatterly, the view from the train
munich: mas beers, andy, cocktails and georgia peaches
well, after i got sprung saying mean things about people i meet last time, this blog will be much more safe!! i feel so bad!!
its 3pm on saturday and steve must almost be touching down in london. does anyone know what time he gets in? im so excited... i just dont have the energy to do copenhagen by myself, its too big, too busy, too expensive...
alright, so from budapest to now:
i arrived in budapest on sunday afternoon and it was HOT. the hottest so far. maybe 35 degrees? i stumbled out of the train station and tried to make sense of some hungarian signs. i failed, and ended up on the wrong bus. so i tried to get off and got stuck in the bus door! and they drove on! and i was stuck!! very bad start to hungary. eventually, after being lost without a map for about an hour, i found what i hoped was my hostel: so far it was just a door with a 10cm x 10cm sign saying : loft hostel. hmm. i got in an elevator which had no lights and a manual door and i prayed for not death. not death!! eventually, 6 floors above comfort level, i stumbled into the loft, and met cliff and katie, the managers. it didnt seem like too many people were around, but it was pretty cool, just a house with normal house stuff and some nice beds and a tv. i sat down on the couch and was immediately accosted by an irish man telling me how dangerous budapest is and how he woke up in hospital that morning after being bashed and robbed. hmm.
i decided that budapest had gotten off to a bad start, so i rounded up two other people from the loft, joe and halena, and we went to the supermarket to buy food for a communal dinner. we bought dahl, onions, garlic etc and that night i made dinner for us, katie and cliff, and we had a nice bond over weird mushy lentils. i was too tired to go out so i put on the breakfast club, and it seemed that sunday was a good movie night because almost the entire hostel sat around and we danced to awesome 80s pop music.
monday i walked around the pest side of the river, which is the busy city side. it was pretty classic city and there wasnt heaps to get excited about, but i found a nice vegetarian samosa for lunch and a park to eat in. it was still SO hot, above 35 again, so i went home by about 4pm like a wimp and watched 40 year old virgin yeah.
tuesday was a lazy day, me, harry and ron and halena from the above pictures sat around drinking cappy (gross orange cordial drink) and playing kings cup. that night we went to an awesome rooftop open air concept bar called corvin tetu with most of the hostel. katie told us that it was a tradition for guests of the loft to steal corvin cups for their private collection. however, she underestimated the enthusiasm of the manchester 'lads on tour' boys we had in the group. 5 hours later, with the promise of a free dinner, they (peter pettigrew in particular) had perfected the art of cup pants: entire pantlegs full of cups. it was pretty funny at the time but cliff was pretty mad the next day when we had about 30 corvin cups to deal with....
wednesday i walked with halena and shannon (two american girls) over the bridge to buda, and we visited the palace. it was ok, again nothing to get excited about. i had to get a train the next morning at 5:30am so we went to the trainstation and waited for about 5 hours to get served so i could buy a ticket... massive bummer. we teased shannon a lot because she kissed the doctor the night before but admitted he was a selfish lover. awkward hostel times for them! vegementertainment, as katie named it.
wednesday night, as promised the night before, katie cooked for the whole hostel. but for reasons i will not elaborate upon for fear of getting sprung again, there was not enough pasta for everyone (pig pie), which resulted in a lot of whispered bitching on the balcony and mean nickname inventing. to stem our rage, katie, halena, shannon, kendra and i went to szimpla, another really awesome bar where i drank swimming pool cocktails and ate a cheese sandwich while halena made out with a REALLY gross drunk welsh man. you know a guy is not going to be cool when he stumbles over drunk, demanding to know who burned him (?!) and if we had any drugs. nevertheless, halena went home with him, then came back to our home because they couldnt find any condams. the gross guy continued to be gross, and harry and ron teased him mercilessly while halena slowly realised the grossness of her decision.
all of a sudden it was 4:45am and i hadnt had any sleep but i had to go get my train!! so i packed in the dark and sprinted out to the elevator. it was broken!! argh!! luckily, ron aka the doctor became the mountain goat in shining armour as he carried all my bags down 6 floors of stairs. hurrah! and that was the end of the loft. im so desperate to go back.
as i walked out onto budapest keleti station the sun was rising, and i felt so happy. i boarded the train, climbed into my sleeping bag and fell asleep for 7 hours.
prague was typically unhelpful as i made my way from the station to the airport, and as i have no czech koruny i ate stale nutella sandwiches from my backpack. ew!
so now im in a much more temperate copenhagen, most days are about 20 degrees and theres a fair bit of rain. its very busy and metropolitan and expensive, and im in a 66 bed dorm which is pretty crazy, but so far its been alright. i met some cool canadians who unfortunately have gone to stockholm now, but we'll hopefully cross paths again at some point.
3:30pm now. is steve in london town?? maybe he's flying overhead right now. who knows...
vienna: smashed mark and my delicious cocktail, my french canadian friend, shameful midnight kebabs and americans
geneva: the UN, some rocks where i sat reading lady chatterly, the view from the train
munich: mas beers, andy, cocktails and georgia peaches
well, after i got sprung saying mean things about people i meet last time, this blog will be much more safe!! i feel so bad!!
its 3pm on saturday and steve must almost be touching down in london. does anyone know what time he gets in? im so excited... i just dont have the energy to do copenhagen by myself, its too big, too busy, too expensive...
alright, so from budapest to now:
i arrived in budapest on sunday afternoon and it was HOT. the hottest so far. maybe 35 degrees? i stumbled out of the train station and tried to make sense of some hungarian signs. i failed, and ended up on the wrong bus. so i tried to get off and got stuck in the bus door! and they drove on! and i was stuck!! very bad start to hungary. eventually, after being lost without a map for about an hour, i found what i hoped was my hostel: so far it was just a door with a 10cm x 10cm sign saying : loft hostel. hmm. i got in an elevator which had no lights and a manual door and i prayed for not death. not death!! eventually, 6 floors above comfort level, i stumbled into the loft, and met cliff and katie, the managers. it didnt seem like too many people were around, but it was pretty cool, just a house with normal house stuff and some nice beds and a tv. i sat down on the couch and was immediately accosted by an irish man telling me how dangerous budapest is and how he woke up in hospital that morning after being bashed and robbed. hmm.
i decided that budapest had gotten off to a bad start, so i rounded up two other people from the loft, joe and halena, and we went to the supermarket to buy food for a communal dinner. we bought dahl, onions, garlic etc and that night i made dinner for us, katie and cliff, and we had a nice bond over weird mushy lentils. i was too tired to go out so i put on the breakfast club, and it seemed that sunday was a good movie night because almost the entire hostel sat around and we danced to awesome 80s pop music.
monday i walked around the pest side of the river, which is the busy city side. it was pretty classic city and there wasnt heaps to get excited about, but i found a nice vegetarian samosa for lunch and a park to eat in. it was still SO hot, above 35 again, so i went home by about 4pm like a wimp and watched 40 year old virgin yeah.
tuesday was a lazy day, me, harry and ron and halena from the above pictures sat around drinking cappy (gross orange cordial drink) and playing kings cup. that night we went to an awesome rooftop open air concept bar called corvin tetu with most of the hostel. katie told us that it was a tradition for guests of the loft to steal corvin cups for their private collection. however, she underestimated the enthusiasm of the manchester 'lads on tour' boys we had in the group. 5 hours later, with the promise of a free dinner, they (peter pettigrew in particular) had perfected the art of cup pants: entire pantlegs full of cups. it was pretty funny at the time but cliff was pretty mad the next day when we had about 30 corvin cups to deal with....
wednesday i walked with halena and shannon (two american girls) over the bridge to buda, and we visited the palace. it was ok, again nothing to get excited about. i had to get a train the next morning at 5:30am so we went to the trainstation and waited for about 5 hours to get served so i could buy a ticket... massive bummer. we teased shannon a lot because she kissed the doctor the night before but admitted he was a selfish lover. awkward hostel times for them! vegementertainment, as katie named it.
wednesday night, as promised the night before, katie cooked for the whole hostel. but for reasons i will not elaborate upon for fear of getting sprung again, there was not enough pasta for everyone (pig pie), which resulted in a lot of whispered bitching on the balcony and mean nickname inventing. to stem our rage, katie, halena, shannon, kendra and i went to szimpla, another really awesome bar where i drank swimming pool cocktails and ate a cheese sandwich while halena made out with a REALLY gross drunk welsh man. you know a guy is not going to be cool when he stumbles over drunk, demanding to know who burned him (?!) and if we had any drugs. nevertheless, halena went home with him, then came back to our home because they couldnt find any condams. the gross guy continued to be gross, and harry and ron teased him mercilessly while halena slowly realised the grossness of her decision.
all of a sudden it was 4:45am and i hadnt had any sleep but i had to go get my train!! so i packed in the dark and sprinted out to the elevator. it was broken!! argh!! luckily, ron aka the doctor became the mountain goat in shining armour as he carried all my bags down 6 floors of stairs. hurrah! and that was the end of the loft. im so desperate to go back.
as i walked out onto budapest keleti station the sun was rising, and i felt so happy. i boarded the train, climbed into my sleeping bag and fell asleep for 7 hours.
prague was typically unhelpful as i made my way from the station to the airport, and as i have no czech koruny i ate stale nutella sandwiches from my backpack. ew!
so now im in a much more temperate copenhagen, most days are about 20 degrees and theres a fair bit of rain. its very busy and metropolitan and expensive, and im in a 66 bed dorm which is pretty crazy, but so far its been alright. i met some cool canadians who unfortunately have gone to stockholm now, but we'll hopefully cross paths again at some point.
3:30pm now. is steve in london town?? maybe he's flying overhead right now. who knows...
Thursday 7 August 2008
københavn
anthony, poo is never a joke. poo is a mysterious and terrifying affliction which we suffer through in private and which destroys our faith in the beauty of humanity. poo is never funny.
i dont know how much i can be bothered writing about budapest right now as it is 10:10 at night on thursday, i've been travelling since 5am, and my hostel took me out last night so i havent actually slept since tuesday night. powering on pure adrenaline and appelsin juice (which is orange juice. these crazy danes!!)
budapest was amazing. i really really want to go back. all entirely due to the hostel. the city was ok, i was pretty lazy and it looked a lot like other cities, but my hostel was so good. its called the loft, and its about 5 terrifying floors above the ground (terror exacerbated by dodgy eastern european architecture....) and it was basically just 20 people living in a house together. and they had the 40 year old virgin on dvd, which was pretty sweet.
ill write more tomorrow, but im in københavn now and alive and my hostel is fine if a bit smelly. cant wait for steve!! love
i dont know how much i can be bothered writing about budapest right now as it is 10:10 at night on thursday, i've been travelling since 5am, and my hostel took me out last night so i havent actually slept since tuesday night. powering on pure adrenaline and appelsin juice (which is orange juice. these crazy danes!!)
budapest was amazing. i really really want to go back. all entirely due to the hostel. the city was ok, i was pretty lazy and it looked a lot like other cities, but my hostel was so good. its called the loft, and its about 5 terrifying floors above the ground (terror exacerbated by dodgy eastern european architecture....) and it was basically just 20 people living in a house together. and they had the 40 year old virgin on dvd, which was pretty sweet.
ill write more tomorrow, but im in københavn now and alive and my hostel is fine if a bit smelly. cant wait for steve!! love
Saturday 2 August 2008
geneva and vienna
its my last day in vienna, im off to budapest tomorrow. it is so hot here! so, a quick recount of the last couple of days.
oh radiohead just came on the radio. head. hahahahahahahahahaha.
so geneva was pretty boring. on the last night there, which i think was tuesday night, i met this crazy south african girl who had been partying non stop in interlaken for the last couple of weeks and was keen to do the same in geneva. so she bought my broke arse 3 pints of beer from the grocery store (very very cheap) and we drank beers and ate chips and she told me about how london is more dangerous than south africa. i crashed in my unfriendly dorm at about midnight, and slept for about 2 hours before i woke up and started absolutely freaking out about missing my train the next morning, i think because i was so desperate not to get stuck in geneva for any longer, so i went for a 3am walk around the hostel to kill some time, went on the internet and left at about 5.30 for the worlds longest train journey, from geneva, through zurich, through all of austria to vienna, which is right on the east side of austria.
i made the train journey sound pretty bad in the last post, but ill qualify and say that i also met some pretty cool people, including these two awesome german lesbians and their dog who looked and acted a lot like gyp and made me homesick. they got off and were replaced by two american men, a father and son, about 85 and 45 respectively, who ended up being super nice and let me use their blackberry (awesome!!) to go on the internet and gave me some food because i seemed so poor. then the creepy man got on but he was only a third of the journey so it was ok.
in vienna im staying in the wombats hostel, which is this really famous chain of hostels in europe based on some australian guy. its a nice hostel, really good facilities but its one of the busabout stops which means the percentage of australians is enormous. which is ok, a bit boring but not too bad i suppose. better than eastern europeans who are mean!!!!! or spaniards. fucking spaniards.
theyve got a cocktail happy hour here too, which is decent, and cheap double shots of spirits with juice, so that has been keeping me entertained most nights. last night me and another australian guy mark decided we were going to try to run our own pub crawl because the bar here is pretty corny and we had a spanish guy who said he knew some good places. we had a group of about 25 people following us in the end, seriously im thinking about starting a crawl back in melbourne, theyre just so easy! except we failed, because the spaniard (fucking spaniard) had bad bad taste in clubs and they were all corny as fuck, playing midnight oil and lots of 50 year olds dancing sweatily. so we ended up doing the 1.30 pike walk all the way home because the trains had stopped running. :( we had one kid on our crawl who is 18, australian, biggest baby face, who was very very drunk and silly who ended up getting face raped by this at least 35 year old australian woman who came out of nowhere. she was a real donatella versace plastic surgery job and he was probably so drunk that he fell for it. i felt bad but what can you do. he took her back to his dorm room at wombats. all class.
during the days ive been pretty lazy, walking everywhere still but cant be fucked with the touristy shit, so mostly just lying next to the river because its so so hot everyday, and getting horrendously sunburned. the river is good, its their way of compensating for lack of sea i suppose because everyone goes there for swimming. ive been trying to stay away from shops with varying levels of success, because the money is seriously depleted. and scandinavia is still to come! terrifying.
today i went to MOMUK, which is the museum of modern art in vienna. it was ok, i didnt like a lot of it, but they had one exhibition which was all about demons and demented beauty which was pretty cool. their feature exhibition was called bad painting, good art, which was all about moving away from and around within structures of 'good' painting. there was lots of traditional work, like mona and some portraits and mary and stuff, which were just smeared with paint and stickers saying i heart new york, etc. it was interesting. i dont think marion would be into it.
i dont know what to do with the rest of the day. i think we will go to a proper club tonight, called flex, so maybe ill have a little nap. OH. today i made food, for the first time since dan left. tortellini which was too oily but not too bad. fresh vegies are hard to come by, though, and im really missing them. spinach especially!!
and papa, yesterday i went for a meal but i didnt put it on your card because it was very cheap. it was like a big red curry soup with tofu and rice and zucchini and i felt much better for it.
oh and theres like some big buildings and stuff here. im not really into them but ill take some photos for you guys.
getting on a train tomorrow at about 11.30 and should arrive in budapest around 2.30pm.
plans have changed, also: am no longer meeting steve in london, instead going straight to copenhagen and meeting him there. dont ask, very confusing story in which a lot of money was wasted and a lot of annoyed was happening to me, but thats how it is, so im now flying to copenhagen on the 7th of august. staying in a 34 bed dorm in a TERRIBLE hostel. scary.
send me emails please, my inbox is bored and so am i!!
miss you all very much. xoxo
oh radiohead just came on the radio. head. hahahahahahahahahaha.
so geneva was pretty boring. on the last night there, which i think was tuesday night, i met this crazy south african girl who had been partying non stop in interlaken for the last couple of weeks and was keen to do the same in geneva. so she bought my broke arse 3 pints of beer from the grocery store (very very cheap) and we drank beers and ate chips and she told me about how london is more dangerous than south africa. i crashed in my unfriendly dorm at about midnight, and slept for about 2 hours before i woke up and started absolutely freaking out about missing my train the next morning, i think because i was so desperate not to get stuck in geneva for any longer, so i went for a 3am walk around the hostel to kill some time, went on the internet and left at about 5.30 for the worlds longest train journey, from geneva, through zurich, through all of austria to vienna, which is right on the east side of austria.
i made the train journey sound pretty bad in the last post, but ill qualify and say that i also met some pretty cool people, including these two awesome german lesbians and their dog who looked and acted a lot like gyp and made me homesick. they got off and were replaced by two american men, a father and son, about 85 and 45 respectively, who ended up being super nice and let me use their blackberry (awesome!!) to go on the internet and gave me some food because i seemed so poor. then the creepy man got on but he was only a third of the journey so it was ok.
in vienna im staying in the wombats hostel, which is this really famous chain of hostels in europe based on some australian guy. its a nice hostel, really good facilities but its one of the busabout stops which means the percentage of australians is enormous. which is ok, a bit boring but not too bad i suppose. better than eastern europeans who are mean!!!!! or spaniards. fucking spaniards.
theyve got a cocktail happy hour here too, which is decent, and cheap double shots of spirits with juice, so that has been keeping me entertained most nights. last night me and another australian guy mark decided we were going to try to run our own pub crawl because the bar here is pretty corny and we had a spanish guy who said he knew some good places. we had a group of about 25 people following us in the end, seriously im thinking about starting a crawl back in melbourne, theyre just so easy! except we failed, because the spaniard (fucking spaniard) had bad bad taste in clubs and they were all corny as fuck, playing midnight oil and lots of 50 year olds dancing sweatily. so we ended up doing the 1.30 pike walk all the way home because the trains had stopped running. :( we had one kid on our crawl who is 18, australian, biggest baby face, who was very very drunk and silly who ended up getting face raped by this at least 35 year old australian woman who came out of nowhere. she was a real donatella versace plastic surgery job and he was probably so drunk that he fell for it. i felt bad but what can you do. he took her back to his dorm room at wombats. all class.
during the days ive been pretty lazy, walking everywhere still but cant be fucked with the touristy shit, so mostly just lying next to the river because its so so hot everyday, and getting horrendously sunburned. the river is good, its their way of compensating for lack of sea i suppose because everyone goes there for swimming. ive been trying to stay away from shops with varying levels of success, because the money is seriously depleted. and scandinavia is still to come! terrifying.
today i went to MOMUK, which is the museum of modern art in vienna. it was ok, i didnt like a lot of it, but they had one exhibition which was all about demons and demented beauty which was pretty cool. their feature exhibition was called bad painting, good art, which was all about moving away from and around within structures of 'good' painting. there was lots of traditional work, like mona and some portraits and mary and stuff, which were just smeared with paint and stickers saying i heart new york, etc. it was interesting. i dont think marion would be into it.
i dont know what to do with the rest of the day. i think we will go to a proper club tonight, called flex, so maybe ill have a little nap. OH. today i made food, for the first time since dan left. tortellini which was too oily but not too bad. fresh vegies are hard to come by, though, and im really missing them. spinach especially!!
and papa, yesterday i went for a meal but i didnt put it on your card because it was very cheap. it was like a big red curry soup with tofu and rice and zucchini and i felt much better for it.
oh and theres like some big buildings and stuff here. im not really into them but ill take some photos for you guys.
getting on a train tomorrow at about 11.30 and should arrive in budapest around 2.30pm.
plans have changed, also: am no longer meeting steve in london, instead going straight to copenhagen and meeting him there. dont ask, very confusing story in which a lot of money was wasted and a lot of annoyed was happening to me, but thats how it is, so im now flying to copenhagen on the 7th of august. staying in a 34 bed dorm in a TERRIBLE hostel. scary.
send me emails please, my inbox is bored and so am i!!
miss you all very much. xoxo
Wednesday 30 July 2008
the hills are aliiiiiive with turkish food
germans love turkish food!!
had a 13 hour train trip today, not feeling well. at all. sat opposite another starer, (more like a gazer this time) who i didnt speak to the whole trip, but as i was leaving he said 'hey can we stay in touch? what´s your number?' which was not cool. hurry, man protector.
in austria, have phone number and onion breath. is too hot. phone number is 0681 8341 5484. dont know about area code. too tired to make friends. glad to be out of geneva. going to budapest next. proper blog tomorrow.
xoxoxo
had a 13 hour train trip today, not feeling well. at all. sat opposite another starer, (more like a gazer this time) who i didnt speak to the whole trip, but as i was leaving he said 'hey can we stay in touch? what´s your number?' which was not cool. hurry, man protector.
in austria, have phone number and onion breath. is too hot. phone number is 0681 8341 5484. dont know about area code. too tired to make friends. glad to be out of geneva. going to budapest next. proper blog tomorrow.
xoxoxo
Monday 28 July 2008
i'm sorry how much??
hello from the world capital of neutral politics.
so munich is over and i'm in geneva, but i'll start with the rest of munich.
the hostel i stayed at was called euroyouth hostel, and it was awesome. it was the perfect vibe, loads of cool tourists in the bar and still a small, quiet, clean dorm. after i wrote the last post, i went back to the bar and had two happy hour cocktails, because happy hour in germany lasts from 6-9 (awesome!!) and met up with the americans from the night before, max and a sober and very embarrassed drew who apparently didnt love me anymore, funny how that happens. they introduced me to their other friends from seattle and some boys from hawaii and we played beer pong in their dorm, which is an awesome drinking game which i will teach you when i get home because its amazing. you have to drink beer the american way, out of cups, but its totally worth it. the boys really wanted to go to a beer garden because it was someones birthday, but they were all wearing awful clothes and thongs and i said they probably wouldn't get in, which was when they christened me 'mom'. fair enough, there were about 8 boys and i was the only girl, so i went with it. i called them my little chickens.
we went to augustiner brewery which was about 10 minutes from our hostel and ordered steins, which are litre glasses of beer. a beer wench (the technical term, therefore not sexist) could carry all 9 steins at once! it was awesome. one of the hawaiian chickens who introduced himself as 'smooth' (vomit) found some german ladies and there was a quick conference between the boys as to which one was the sexiest and who would get to try with who. of course, the german girls were terrified of a large group of drunk american boys, and fled as soon as they could. the other hawaiian, named something i'll remember later, told me about how he'd done a tour of iraq, but i was drunk and i cant remember any details.
the next day i got up in time for the walking tour, so andy (of previous post laundry buddy fame) and i got to see the sights of munich. we did a free tour, which is a farce because they bully you into tipping, with a guy called keith, a scottish guy living in germany. he showed us a really lame cuckoo clock (europe is really keen on those!) and some of the places where hitler made speeches etc. at one point he was talking about how its now illegal to make the hitler salute, this exchange occurred:
dumb american girl in east coast drawl: so is that a federal law, or is it municipal?
keith: federal? i dont know what you mean?
dagiecd: fe-der-al. for the whole country, ya know, fe-duh-ruhhhl
k: ............... (stares)
diplomatic and helpful jes: well, germany isnt a federation, so they dont call it federal. maybe you mean, is it a national law.
dagiecd: .................. (long pause as stares at jes).............. FE-DUH-RUHL.
dahj: ...ok.
keith: its for all of germany.
dagiecd: .............(rolls eyes)
americans are funny.
after the tour i walked very slowly down the expensive strip of shops and wandered in and out of gucci, louis vuitton, dolce and gabbana. they were pretty un-keen on my dunlop volleys, but i persevered.
that night i went for drinks at the famous hofbrauhaus with some canadians i met, brittany and rachel, and their friends whose names i have also forgotten, one of whom was from montreal and sees win butler around the streets. we had more steins and ENORMOUS pretzls, bigger than your head, and stumbled home at a reasonably civilised hour.
saturday was my last day in munich, so i took my book (sex and the city) and i walked to the englischer gardens. they were very beautiful, theres a big river which runs through the middle, and it has all these little rapids and waterfalls and people somehow manage to surf which is pretty cool. i sat down by the river and ate my power sandwich, and read sex and the city for about half an hour.
THEN THERE WAS A DISASTER.
is anyone still reading? that was for your benefit. all of a sudden, in the middle of my peaceful picnic, disaster struck. suddenly my left thigh was burning like fire!! i looked all around for something that could have bitten me, like a spider or a lion or something, but nothing was there. i had three distinct bites. i was about to go into end of life panic attack spiral where i imagine all the things i havent achieved, when mum called. and she said nah she'll be right, so i had a beer and was fine. crisis averted!!!
i finished sex and the city and went back to my hostel where i met two american girls (from georgia! the south!) from my dorm, and andy the laundry friend, and we went back to the hofbrauhaus, this time for dinner. i had to hold the table while they all did stuff, and i got accosted by a very VERY drunk german man, of about 55 years old who kept trying to kiss me, much to his very VERY drunk wife's chagrin. i gave up the table and ran downstairs and found the others and we got a new table. SECOND CRISIS AVERTED.
i ate some kind of cheese pasta which was pretty lame but i got a stein which was awesome.
the georgia girls, whose names are gabi and ilena really wanted to find a club, so we spent about 1o hours and used all our german skills trying to find a club called two rooms, but in the end went back to our hostel for cocktails and karaoke. i did not get involved, but there was a very rousing rendition of 'i believe in a thing called love' from smooth, and a few nice boy band numbers. madonna was calling to me, but i resisted.
SO THAT WAS MUNICH.
NOW I'M IN GENEVA. KEEP READING BECAUSE IT'S FUN TO READ!!
sunday i got up SO HEARLY and caught the 7:12 train to zurich, and connected to geneva. geneva is not nearly as pretty as i imagined. its actually quite dirty and scungey. my hostel is fine, but after munich its hard because its just not social at all. theres no bar, there are lots of families despite being called 'geneva youth hostel' and its in a really boring area with no shops. there are some shops actually, but theyre mostly brothels. which is weird. i wandered along the river instead with a brazillian guy and a guy from zurich who i met in the hostel, and the brazillian guy jumped off a 5 metre platform which was pretty cool. i was too scared. and he was too sleazy so i wanted to leave.
its also really really really french, which i wasnt expecting. i was hoping there would be some german or italian, with which im much more comfortable, but its alllll french.
today, monday, i went to the UNITED NATIONS. it was ok. me and an american guy i met at breakfast, called brian, took a guided tour, but they really dont let you see much. its a real bus in bus out mentality. the general public are not allowed in the grounds, or to observe any conferences, but i got to see some cool rooms. i also bought a UN lanyard so that made the whole thing worth it.
the red cross museum is next to the UN, so i had a look around there, but its pretty lame. so i came back to the hostel and had a long long nap because i was bored and tired and lame. this afternoon i took a walk across the river to the old town, intending to get dinner, and this was the sight of DISASTER NUMBER TWO.
DISASTER NUMBER TWO:
so, i spend about a billion hours walking around and around and around and around stupid french geneva looking for somewhere i could eat for under 50 bucks. eventually i find a packed looking restaurant (good sign), and sit down. i look at the menu for a long time. i decide on tuna carpaccio with coconut cream and lime. the cleverer among you can see where this is going. I DONT KNOW WHY BUT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A FILLET. yeah, it wasnt. it arrived, in all its raw pink fishy glory. i looked out at the river. a single tear rolled down my cheek (not really. the medication wouldnt allow it!) and i asked for some bread. so basically i paid 30 dollars for 5 pieces of very stale bread, about 6 pieces of lettuce and a tablespoon of coconut cream. :( i thought about forcing it down, but i thought, why punish myself twice, i have to give away 30 dollars, why should i also eat raw fish?
i would like to assure you that the above disaster is entirely the fault of lame geneva, and i was merely the innocent victim.
following 'dinner' i craved the comfort of sleep but i wandered along the river a bit. there was some kind of lame carnival happening where a white man dressed as a ninja was cutting up fruit with a samurai sword using a live chinaman as a chopping board. i watched that for a bit. then i sat on the river with my new book (lady chatterly's lover) and read for about an hour as the sun went down.
its monday night now, and im in geneva until i catch a train to vienna at about 6 on wednesday morning. my phone has no credit so i cant receive calls, but im still receiving your msgs of love (though i guess some of them are getting lost!) so keep messaging and EMAILING PLS. it makes for the highlight of my day.
not sure where after vienna. suggestions?
miss, love.
xo
so munich is over and i'm in geneva, but i'll start with the rest of munich.
the hostel i stayed at was called euroyouth hostel, and it was awesome. it was the perfect vibe, loads of cool tourists in the bar and still a small, quiet, clean dorm. after i wrote the last post, i went back to the bar and had two happy hour cocktails, because happy hour in germany lasts from 6-9 (awesome!!) and met up with the americans from the night before, max and a sober and very embarrassed drew who apparently didnt love me anymore, funny how that happens. they introduced me to their other friends from seattle and some boys from hawaii and we played beer pong in their dorm, which is an awesome drinking game which i will teach you when i get home because its amazing. you have to drink beer the american way, out of cups, but its totally worth it. the boys really wanted to go to a beer garden because it was someones birthday, but they were all wearing awful clothes and thongs and i said they probably wouldn't get in, which was when they christened me 'mom'. fair enough, there were about 8 boys and i was the only girl, so i went with it. i called them my little chickens.
we went to augustiner brewery which was about 10 minutes from our hostel and ordered steins, which are litre glasses of beer. a beer wench (the technical term, therefore not sexist) could carry all 9 steins at once! it was awesome. one of the hawaiian chickens who introduced himself as 'smooth' (vomit) found some german ladies and there was a quick conference between the boys as to which one was the sexiest and who would get to try with who. of course, the german girls were terrified of a large group of drunk american boys, and fled as soon as they could. the other hawaiian, named something i'll remember later, told me about how he'd done a tour of iraq, but i was drunk and i cant remember any details.
the next day i got up in time for the walking tour, so andy (of previous post laundry buddy fame) and i got to see the sights of munich. we did a free tour, which is a farce because they bully you into tipping, with a guy called keith, a scottish guy living in germany. he showed us a really lame cuckoo clock (europe is really keen on those!) and some of the places where hitler made speeches etc. at one point he was talking about how its now illegal to make the hitler salute, this exchange occurred:
dumb american girl in east coast drawl: so is that a federal law, or is it municipal?
keith: federal? i dont know what you mean?
dagiecd: fe-der-al. for the whole country, ya know, fe-duh-ruhhhl
k: ............... (stares)
diplomatic and helpful jes: well, germany isnt a federation, so they dont call it federal. maybe you mean, is it a national law.
dagiecd: .................. (long pause as stares at jes).............. FE-DUH-RUHL.
dahj: ...ok.
keith: its for all of germany.
dagiecd: .............(rolls eyes)
americans are funny.
after the tour i walked very slowly down the expensive strip of shops and wandered in and out of gucci, louis vuitton, dolce and gabbana. they were pretty un-keen on my dunlop volleys, but i persevered.
that night i went for drinks at the famous hofbrauhaus with some canadians i met, brittany and rachel, and their friends whose names i have also forgotten, one of whom was from montreal and sees win butler around the streets. we had more steins and ENORMOUS pretzls, bigger than your head, and stumbled home at a reasonably civilised hour.
saturday was my last day in munich, so i took my book (sex and the city) and i walked to the englischer gardens. they were very beautiful, theres a big river which runs through the middle, and it has all these little rapids and waterfalls and people somehow manage to surf which is pretty cool. i sat down by the river and ate my power sandwich, and read sex and the city for about half an hour.
THEN THERE WAS A DISASTER.
is anyone still reading? that was for your benefit. all of a sudden, in the middle of my peaceful picnic, disaster struck. suddenly my left thigh was burning like fire!! i looked all around for something that could have bitten me, like a spider or a lion or something, but nothing was there. i had three distinct bites. i was about to go into end of life panic attack spiral where i imagine all the things i havent achieved, when mum called. and she said nah she'll be right, so i had a beer and was fine. crisis averted!!!
i finished sex and the city and went back to my hostel where i met two american girls (from georgia! the south!) from my dorm, and andy the laundry friend, and we went back to the hofbrauhaus, this time for dinner. i had to hold the table while they all did stuff, and i got accosted by a very VERY drunk german man, of about 55 years old who kept trying to kiss me, much to his very VERY drunk wife's chagrin. i gave up the table and ran downstairs and found the others and we got a new table. SECOND CRISIS AVERTED.
i ate some kind of cheese pasta which was pretty lame but i got a stein which was awesome.
the georgia girls, whose names are gabi and ilena really wanted to find a club, so we spent about 1o hours and used all our german skills trying to find a club called two rooms, but in the end went back to our hostel for cocktails and karaoke. i did not get involved, but there was a very rousing rendition of 'i believe in a thing called love' from smooth, and a few nice boy band numbers. madonna was calling to me, but i resisted.
SO THAT WAS MUNICH.
NOW I'M IN GENEVA. KEEP READING BECAUSE IT'S FUN TO READ!!
sunday i got up SO HEARLY and caught the 7:12 train to zurich, and connected to geneva. geneva is not nearly as pretty as i imagined. its actually quite dirty and scungey. my hostel is fine, but after munich its hard because its just not social at all. theres no bar, there are lots of families despite being called 'geneva youth hostel' and its in a really boring area with no shops. there are some shops actually, but theyre mostly brothels. which is weird. i wandered along the river instead with a brazillian guy and a guy from zurich who i met in the hostel, and the brazillian guy jumped off a 5 metre platform which was pretty cool. i was too scared. and he was too sleazy so i wanted to leave.
its also really really really french, which i wasnt expecting. i was hoping there would be some german or italian, with which im much more comfortable, but its alllll french.
today, monday, i went to the UNITED NATIONS. it was ok. me and an american guy i met at breakfast, called brian, took a guided tour, but they really dont let you see much. its a real bus in bus out mentality. the general public are not allowed in the grounds, or to observe any conferences, but i got to see some cool rooms. i also bought a UN lanyard so that made the whole thing worth it.
the red cross museum is next to the UN, so i had a look around there, but its pretty lame. so i came back to the hostel and had a long long nap because i was bored and tired and lame. this afternoon i took a walk across the river to the old town, intending to get dinner, and this was the sight of DISASTER NUMBER TWO.
DISASTER NUMBER TWO:
so, i spend about a billion hours walking around and around and around and around stupid french geneva looking for somewhere i could eat for under 50 bucks. eventually i find a packed looking restaurant (good sign), and sit down. i look at the menu for a long time. i decide on tuna carpaccio with coconut cream and lime. the cleverer among you can see where this is going. I DONT KNOW WHY BUT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A FILLET. yeah, it wasnt. it arrived, in all its raw pink fishy glory. i looked out at the river. a single tear rolled down my cheek (not really. the medication wouldnt allow it!) and i asked for some bread. so basically i paid 30 dollars for 5 pieces of very stale bread, about 6 pieces of lettuce and a tablespoon of coconut cream. :( i thought about forcing it down, but i thought, why punish myself twice, i have to give away 30 dollars, why should i also eat raw fish?
i would like to assure you that the above disaster is entirely the fault of lame geneva, and i was merely the innocent victim.
following 'dinner' i craved the comfort of sleep but i wandered along the river a bit. there was some kind of lame carnival happening where a white man dressed as a ninja was cutting up fruit with a samurai sword using a live chinaman as a chopping board. i watched that for a bit. then i sat on the river with my new book (lady chatterly's lover) and read for about an hour as the sun went down.
its monday night now, and im in geneva until i catch a train to vienna at about 6 on wednesday morning. my phone has no credit so i cant receive calls, but im still receiving your msgs of love (though i guess some of them are getting lost!) so keep messaging and EMAILING PLS. it makes for the highlight of my day.
not sure where after vienna. suggestions?
miss, love.
xo
Thursday 24 July 2008
just like john marsden pretending to be a teenage girl in jail, i have so much to tell you
hey melbuddies
how's it going? i haven't written since prague sucked, so i'll start there and move forward. prague began to not suck, happily. as dan/the story stealer has already told you, we had some awesome fun with svickova, free shots from crazy czech people, possible war zone experiences (i'm still pretty sure it was a bomb. you guys just don't get it on the news because of the iron curtain). but Usudu was awesome, the little bar recommended by sarah of ukranian-fearing pubcrawl fame. cocktails for 100 kroner, about 7aud, made specially by the bartender from secret ingredients that were probably a healthy mix of legal and illegal substances, but they were sweet and cheap so we rolled on happily. the czech republic is not a good place to be a vegetarian, but i did manage to find some jalapeno poppers (an american phenomenon, deep fried cheddar and bits of jalapeno) and bread dumplings which are so delicious and deadly.
on our last night we saw get smart, the fourth movie of the czech republic meaning that we had only spent two nights not at the cinema. it was average. anne hathaway's mouth is too big. the rock is hot but.
yesterday morning we had our teary farewell at the hostel. i didn't have too many tears on account of the mood stabilising drugs, but i think that somewhere deep inside me i may have some repressed sadness. hopefully it stays repressed. dan left at about 7am, making the record for the earliest morning of his entire trip, so i stayed around at ate breakfast and practised being courageous and strong. ha! i also tried to steal some bread rolls for lunch but got shouted at by the czech breakfast lady. but she didn't see the cheese triangles i'd already pocketed so she loses.
the train to munich was really nice, other than the loud scary argument between the train conductors and the czech police which went for about 45 minutes and we didn't move. this train was in little carriages, which was nice, and i didn't have to share with any creeps, which was even nicer. i think i might actually have been the carriage creep though, which is not so nice. i kept peering at people over my book and making comments in english, to which they nodded politely and looked away because they were all either czech or german. you know that person? i was that person. i was lonely shutup.
munich is really lovely, the weather has been beautiful and sunny, my hostel is great and i've talked to lots of people. last night i thought about going on the pub crawl but i don't like them at all so i just drank cocktails at the bar by myself while it was happy hour and talked to the bartenders. turns out they know the czech pub crawlers and know all about the mafia intimidation, so at least they've got some back up i guess? then i went to dinner with two jewish doctors who live off bambra rd, about 5 minutes from my house (depressing!) and an american male model who was about 8 feet tall and pretty into himself. the jewish doctors really freaked me out. they're real doctor people, they've been working for 2 years as junior doctors and they can already afford to take 9 months off work just to travel. and not cheaply either. and some awkward conversations happened about some moral issues and we disagreed and i made an excuse and walked home alone because they are weird. but they're nice i guess.
it took me about an hour to get home because i was listening to wicked and got lost in the back streets, and none of the atms would take my card, so by the time i got back to the hostel the bar was pretty packed. i thought, i can either go to bed and listen to wicked and everything will be joyous, or i can be brave. so i fought it and i was brave! i said to two boys, "hi i'm jes, i don't know anyone" and they said fair enough, and we played drinking games. one of them was wrecked and told me that he loved me so i went away from them for a while and played drinking games with some other people and eventually ended up quite drunk which was nice. an american called max kept mocking me for ordering half pints, the same as a melbourne pot, because apparently we're the only people in the world who drink beer like that. he kept asking me if i wanted a sippy cup, or if i needed a straw, or if i felt like a shot of beer next. what a tool. but you guys are getting teased when i come home because i'm so trans-national now!! har har
i slept through my alarm today and missed the walking tour so i went on my own walking tour, mostly touring the 5 different h&m stores they have in the central street but looking out the windows occasionally too. and i saw the residenz, which, i'm not sure because i don't have a guidebook but i think is the palace of a king or was or a duke or something. the specifics aren't important because the best thing ever was in the middle of the park, in a little rotunda. there was a man playing clarinet along with a jazz cd of swingy/dixie esque songs, busking, which is pretty common here, but there were about, oh at least 15 kids there, all from different familys, all under 5 years old, and they were dancing the shit out of that music. busting moves like you would not believe! swinging around, star jumps, the works. there was one little boy probably about 1 year old, whose only move was bending over and touching the ground and looking at the band through his legs, but he did it with such committment! for minutes on end! i wanted to take photos but you know how parents get about that kind of thing.
i also ate a bad sandwich and had a hot chocolate made of real chocolate (yum!!) and then i met another guy from my dorm and we did laundry. so it's been a pretty sweet first day alone. and i got a fanta which is great but the budget is blown.
anyway, that was a very boring and sequential post but i'm just letting you know i'm still alive if you're wondering, i know you are you crazy cats. you'll be getting the daniele back soon so make sure you make a fuss, he'll be in the euro-withdrawal for a few days at least.
miss u guyz, send me emails. xo
how's it going? i haven't written since prague sucked, so i'll start there and move forward. prague began to not suck, happily. as dan/the story stealer has already told you, we had some awesome fun with svickova, free shots from crazy czech people, possible war zone experiences (i'm still pretty sure it was a bomb. you guys just don't get it on the news because of the iron curtain). but Usudu was awesome, the little bar recommended by sarah of ukranian-fearing pubcrawl fame. cocktails for 100 kroner, about 7aud, made specially by the bartender from secret ingredients that were probably a healthy mix of legal and illegal substances, but they were sweet and cheap so we rolled on happily. the czech republic is not a good place to be a vegetarian, but i did manage to find some jalapeno poppers (an american phenomenon, deep fried cheddar and bits of jalapeno) and bread dumplings which are so delicious and deadly.
on our last night we saw get smart, the fourth movie of the czech republic meaning that we had only spent two nights not at the cinema. it was average. anne hathaway's mouth is too big. the rock is hot but.
yesterday morning we had our teary farewell at the hostel. i didn't have too many tears on account of the mood stabilising drugs, but i think that somewhere deep inside me i may have some repressed sadness. hopefully it stays repressed. dan left at about 7am, making the record for the earliest morning of his entire trip, so i stayed around at ate breakfast and practised being courageous and strong. ha! i also tried to steal some bread rolls for lunch but got shouted at by the czech breakfast lady. but she didn't see the cheese triangles i'd already pocketed so she loses.
the train to munich was really nice, other than the loud scary argument between the train conductors and the czech police which went for about 45 minutes and we didn't move. this train was in little carriages, which was nice, and i didn't have to share with any creeps, which was even nicer. i think i might actually have been the carriage creep though, which is not so nice. i kept peering at people over my book and making comments in english, to which they nodded politely and looked away because they were all either czech or german. you know that person? i was that person. i was lonely shutup.
munich is really lovely, the weather has been beautiful and sunny, my hostel is great and i've talked to lots of people. last night i thought about going on the pub crawl but i don't like them at all so i just drank cocktails at the bar by myself while it was happy hour and talked to the bartenders. turns out they know the czech pub crawlers and know all about the mafia intimidation, so at least they've got some back up i guess? then i went to dinner with two jewish doctors who live off bambra rd, about 5 minutes from my house (depressing!) and an american male model who was about 8 feet tall and pretty into himself. the jewish doctors really freaked me out. they're real doctor people, they've been working for 2 years as junior doctors and they can already afford to take 9 months off work just to travel. and not cheaply either. and some awkward conversations happened about some moral issues and we disagreed and i made an excuse and walked home alone because they are weird. but they're nice i guess.
it took me about an hour to get home because i was listening to wicked and got lost in the back streets, and none of the atms would take my card, so by the time i got back to the hostel the bar was pretty packed. i thought, i can either go to bed and listen to wicked and everything will be joyous, or i can be brave. so i fought it and i was brave! i said to two boys, "hi i'm jes, i don't know anyone" and they said fair enough, and we played drinking games. one of them was wrecked and told me that he loved me so i went away from them for a while and played drinking games with some other people and eventually ended up quite drunk which was nice. an american called max kept mocking me for ordering half pints, the same as a melbourne pot, because apparently we're the only people in the world who drink beer like that. he kept asking me if i wanted a sippy cup, or if i needed a straw, or if i felt like a shot of beer next. what a tool. but you guys are getting teased when i come home because i'm so trans-national now!! har har
i slept through my alarm today and missed the walking tour so i went on my own walking tour, mostly touring the 5 different h&m stores they have in the central street but looking out the windows occasionally too. and i saw the residenz, which, i'm not sure because i don't have a guidebook but i think is the palace of a king or was or a duke or something. the specifics aren't important because the best thing ever was in the middle of the park, in a little rotunda. there was a man playing clarinet along with a jazz cd of swingy/dixie esque songs, busking, which is pretty common here, but there were about, oh at least 15 kids there, all from different familys, all under 5 years old, and they were dancing the shit out of that music. busting moves like you would not believe! swinging around, star jumps, the works. there was one little boy probably about 1 year old, whose only move was bending over and touching the ground and looking at the band through his legs, but he did it with such committment! for minutes on end! i wanted to take photos but you know how parents get about that kind of thing.
i also ate a bad sandwich and had a hot chocolate made of real chocolate (yum!!) and then i met another guy from my dorm and we did laundry. so it's been a pretty sweet first day alone. and i got a fanta which is great but the budget is blown.
anyway, that was a very boring and sequential post but i'm just letting you know i'm still alive if you're wondering, i know you are you crazy cats. you'll be getting the daniele back soon so make sure you make a fuss, he'll be in the euro-withdrawal for a few days at least.
miss u guyz, send me emails. xo
Monday 21 July 2008
uh=ohhhh
cant type much as keyboard is all wrong and punctuation all missing.
guyz, prague is almost over and dan is almost gone, which means on wednesday i hit munich as a strong solo star woman. arrgh! im excited and scared. ive got 4 nights in munich followed by 3 nights in geneva at a boring looking hostel which is apparently very close to the UN (argh again, but in a different better way) and then two nights in vienna before hopefully a contiki which hasnt contacted me yet... not really sure whats going on with that. if anybody knows anything about contiki let me know. there might be a place i can book it in munich i guess.
dan is writing this same story but im sick of him stealing our good stories so IMA tell it too. hockay SO. ze other night we decided to make the same mistake twice, because its fun to break proverbs, and go on a pub crawl. excitingly named "the crawl" we were ready for some seriously gross fun. except it was more gross than fun, and the people were ugly men, so we ended up talking to the people who run the pub crawl. they were american and english mostly, and one of the american girls had just come to prague after spending a year in WA and NT which was pretty cool because she said "darwin" properly like an australian and kept accidentally saying mate. she was really cross-national and i dug it. but thats a side note.
more interestingly, the main guy who ran it was sitting outside looking massively bummed, his name was isaac, and he said to sara his sister, "the mafia is real, we have to get out" and sara said "oh no, what now" and we said "yes WHAT u talkin bout willis" and they told us that apparently here in relatively unstable eastern europe the ukranian mafia have a pretty tight hold on things. and because the three pub crawls in prague are now making so much money the mafia want in on it. so this guy isaac, who is like 25, his sister and his two friends who built this crawl from scratch and are the entire staff, have been receiving death threats from the ukranian mafia if they dont get out of the business. the mafia have started their own company called praha bike, and have hired some americans to start up a pub crawl, and these americans of course have no idea who they are dealing with, but theyre having trouble getting it off the ground so the bosses have decided to stamp out to competition. watch the news, kids, this shit is real down behind the iron curtain.
so that was weird. but the people were really cool and sara told us some places to go where we could get away from tourists so hopefully we will go to a bar tonight and a good czech restaurant tomorrow. yesterday we also ate a lot of thai food, which seems mentionable because it was really nice and made our tummies hurt a bit, and saw sex and the city which we talked about at length today. putting our university educations to use. mmhmm.
today we went to old prague castle which was pretty lame as there were about a billion tourists there who walk slowly and are lame. its all rebuilt for the tourists too, and has barely any historical significance. looked alright though. then we ate ryvitas with peanut butter and jam (the best idea to come out of america) under the eiffel tower. you heard right, folks, the eiffel tower is actually in prague, not france. the french did it wrong, according to some old czech architect, so he made it better and more structurally sound in the middle of prague. cool guy. then dan went to the toilet for a really long time and i got sunburnt waiting for him. and we thought about going in a mirror maze but didnt want to pay 50 koruny so we just peered in from the outside. best way to travel.
the coolest thing we saw today was the john lennon wall, which is this huge wall the velvet revolutionaries used to show their admiration for john lennons peace efforts in the 70s while they were oppressed by communism. now its this huge colourful wall of graffiti and its really beautiful, and everyone leaves their little comment. dan wrote "imagine" and i wrote "my boyfriend loves you guys!!" under a picture of the four of them. we are not very profound.
now we are going to make a dinner of porridge, sundried tomatoes and peanut butter and then hopefully get some cocktails later. more cocktail adventure photos to come.
i leave prague on wednesday at 9.20 and arrive in munich at about 3.30. i will go back to my german number so text or call that if you need me, or if you need the number leave a comment and i will text you.
hope you are all well, send me emails and write on my wall if you are lazy. buh bye xo
guyz, prague is almost over and dan is almost gone, which means on wednesday i hit munich as a strong solo star woman. arrgh! im excited and scared. ive got 4 nights in munich followed by 3 nights in geneva at a boring looking hostel which is apparently very close to the UN (argh again, but in a different better way) and then two nights in vienna before hopefully a contiki which hasnt contacted me yet... not really sure whats going on with that. if anybody knows anything about contiki let me know. there might be a place i can book it in munich i guess.
dan is writing this same story but im sick of him stealing our good stories so IMA tell it too. hockay SO. ze other night we decided to make the same mistake twice, because its fun to break proverbs, and go on a pub crawl. excitingly named "the crawl" we were ready for some seriously gross fun. except it was more gross than fun, and the people were ugly men, so we ended up talking to the people who run the pub crawl. they were american and english mostly, and one of the american girls had just come to prague after spending a year in WA and NT which was pretty cool because she said "darwin" properly like an australian and kept accidentally saying mate. she was really cross-national and i dug it. but thats a side note.
more interestingly, the main guy who ran it was sitting outside looking massively bummed, his name was isaac, and he said to sara his sister, "the mafia is real, we have to get out" and sara said "oh no, what now" and we said "yes WHAT u talkin bout willis" and they told us that apparently here in relatively unstable eastern europe the ukranian mafia have a pretty tight hold on things. and because the three pub crawls in prague are now making so much money the mafia want in on it. so this guy isaac, who is like 25, his sister and his two friends who built this crawl from scratch and are the entire staff, have been receiving death threats from the ukranian mafia if they dont get out of the business. the mafia have started their own company called praha bike, and have hired some americans to start up a pub crawl, and these americans of course have no idea who they are dealing with, but theyre having trouble getting it off the ground so the bosses have decided to stamp out to competition. watch the news, kids, this shit is real down behind the iron curtain.
so that was weird. but the people were really cool and sara told us some places to go where we could get away from tourists so hopefully we will go to a bar tonight and a good czech restaurant tomorrow. yesterday we also ate a lot of thai food, which seems mentionable because it was really nice and made our tummies hurt a bit, and saw sex and the city which we talked about at length today. putting our university educations to use. mmhmm.
today we went to old prague castle which was pretty lame as there were about a billion tourists there who walk slowly and are lame. its all rebuilt for the tourists too, and has barely any historical significance. looked alright though. then we ate ryvitas with peanut butter and jam (the best idea to come out of america) under the eiffel tower. you heard right, folks, the eiffel tower is actually in prague, not france. the french did it wrong, according to some old czech architect, so he made it better and more structurally sound in the middle of prague. cool guy. then dan went to the toilet for a really long time and i got sunburnt waiting for him. and we thought about going in a mirror maze but didnt want to pay 50 koruny so we just peered in from the outside. best way to travel.
the coolest thing we saw today was the john lennon wall, which is this huge wall the velvet revolutionaries used to show their admiration for john lennons peace efforts in the 70s while they were oppressed by communism. now its this huge colourful wall of graffiti and its really beautiful, and everyone leaves their little comment. dan wrote "imagine" and i wrote "my boyfriend loves you guys!!" under a picture of the four of them. we are not very profound.
now we are going to make a dinner of porridge, sundried tomatoes and peanut butter and then hopefully get some cocktails later. more cocktail adventure photos to come.
i leave prague on wednesday at 9.20 and arrive in munich at about 3.30. i will go back to my german number so text or call that if you need me, or if you need the number leave a comment and i will text you.
hope you are all well, send me emails and write on my wall if you are lazy. buh bye xo
Saturday 19 July 2008
i heard he killed 18 czechoslovakians!
hello friends and family.
it's saturday july 19 and i'm in prague, czech republic. it's pretty shit really. i want to send you pictures but this computer is 8 seconds away from having a heart attack and my hair has grown long and thin and i look like a mongoloid so i won't.
let me see, i haven't written since i was in germany, and dan's doing a pretty comprehensive blog over there because he loves writing, so i'll just do the main high and low points. first, we went to a concentration camp. it was pretty sparse and there's not much to see there because the russians hulk smashed it all in the cold war and then the germans rebuilt it so we would give them 10 euros. it's pretty grim. it was haunting because it's something you dedicate entire semesters to studying, but it's something i'm very willing not to do again. there was the typical bus in, walk around a bit, put a stone on a grave in honour of the deaths, watch a movie and get bussed out again before it all gets too real/far away from mcdonalds for the fat australian and british tourists. and they are fat, and obnoxious. americans are, on the other hand, cultured, slim and can speak other languages. we r lame.
then because we happily conform to our fat australian stereotype, we followed a series of misleading german signs that claimed to be taking us to mcdonalds. for about an hour. seriously. we couldn't find it!! it kept saying, oh just take this strasse, and now that strasse, and behind that big german flag and it's under that rock. but we couldn't find it so we went back to the stations looking like this ( ) in our bellies and like this :( on our faces. then of course it was in the station. we suck. so we ate mcKshickens which apparently suck in germany and fries with mayo and got attacked by automatic doors on the way out. i can't remember anything after that except i know i had half a beer then through up for about an hour, which was AMAZING. do you know how good it feels after you throw up??? i didn't. i'm definitely going to do that more often.
there were some drinking games with some cool canadians, steph, shannon and sam, it's a rule in canada yes, garth and andrew the americans (andrew was reading how to make friends and influence people the hostellers version, which is how he knew it is still cool to put gel in your hair and spike it up neatly every morning with a comb and get in peoples personal spaces. more freaks to come in this blog).
the next day i stayed in bed because i had a fever and felt sick so i read all of catcher in the rye, which i didn't love that much because i'm too much of an emotionally intelligent woman and have nothing of the emotionally demented teenage boy with which to connect. i just wanted to sit him down and have a serious talk about his issues and make him go for psychoanalysis. boys! really.
then the next day we stole our last breakfast and got frowned at by the heart of gold hostel staff for the last time, and took a train from berlin haptbahnhof in the direction of budapest to prague. it was ok, there was another staring man and a very hideous hulk-like man and an american man who gave me a book about ghosts for no reason which was ok i guess. and a kid with a mcKSHICken who despite our awful shicken experience still managed to make mayonnaise face look overly tempting and we thought about pulling him into pieces and eating him.
when we got to prague we had this disastrous experience of not being able to use our 1000 kroner notes (about 70AUD, and the only ones you could get from the atm) becuase nobody would change them, which you can read about on dan's blog, and the witch who kept doing a smile that was more like baring teeth at hansel and gretel as she fattens them in the cage. all detailed in dan's blog.
we're at a hostel called hostel advantage, which is ok, nice beds and nice big lockers but FULL OF FREAKS. we're sharing a dorm with 3 forty-five plus year old scottish men who all CAME SEPARATELY but SHARE A LOVE OF TALKING ON AND ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT SUPERMARKETS AND SOUP AND OTHER THINGS THAT START WITH SU AND SUCK AT 7AM AND SNORE ALL NIGHT AND GET TOO CLOSE. and there's a man who stays awake on his laptop all night and sometimes watches me while i sleep because i'm the only girl in the dorm. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH. czechoslovakian freaks. which made me have a panic attack and demand steve come here right now and be my man protector when dan leaves. but no! i will be strong and an ambassador for feminism.
we've been too digestively fucked and tired to do anything here so we've walked around shops, looked in h&ms, and seen movies. and paid $8 for hot chocolate. it's not cheap at all here. we saw hancock on our first night, which was not good, don't see it. then we saw the incredible hulk. which was incredible. HULK SMASH!!! ed norton is beautiful. i don't care what any reviewer says. it's awesome.
tonight we're going on a pub crawl we think, get some absinthe etc, but we could really just buy one and go see hulk smash again which i would like better actually, green liquid, green fairy, green monster you can just see how that would be a good night.
it's too touristy and boring to bother writing about prague. i wouldn't come here again. the architecture is cool but boy do they know it, it's basically 500 kroner everytime you look at a building. i'm not keen.
gotta run, this internet is more expensive than anywhere else in europe.
love you all homies, everyone comment!!!!!!!! tell me about your lives and what's happening and when my blog is boring. xoxoxoxo
it's saturday july 19 and i'm in prague, czech republic. it's pretty shit really. i want to send you pictures but this computer is 8 seconds away from having a heart attack and my hair has grown long and thin and i look like a mongoloid so i won't.
let me see, i haven't written since i was in germany, and dan's doing a pretty comprehensive blog over there because he loves writing, so i'll just do the main high and low points. first, we went to a concentration camp. it was pretty sparse and there's not much to see there because the russians hulk smashed it all in the cold war and then the germans rebuilt it so we would give them 10 euros. it's pretty grim. it was haunting because it's something you dedicate entire semesters to studying, but it's something i'm very willing not to do again. there was the typical bus in, walk around a bit, put a stone on a grave in honour of the deaths, watch a movie and get bussed out again before it all gets too real/far away from mcdonalds for the fat australian and british tourists. and they are fat, and obnoxious. americans are, on the other hand, cultured, slim and can speak other languages. we r lame.
then because we happily conform to our fat australian stereotype, we followed a series of misleading german signs that claimed to be taking us to mcdonalds. for about an hour. seriously. we couldn't find it!! it kept saying, oh just take this strasse, and now that strasse, and behind that big german flag and it's under that rock. but we couldn't find it so we went back to the stations looking like this ( ) in our bellies and like this :( on our faces. then of course it was in the station. we suck. so we ate mcKshickens which apparently suck in germany and fries with mayo and got attacked by automatic doors on the way out. i can't remember anything after that except i know i had half a beer then through up for about an hour, which was AMAZING. do you know how good it feels after you throw up??? i didn't. i'm definitely going to do that more often.
there were some drinking games with some cool canadians, steph, shannon and sam, it's a rule in canada yes, garth and andrew the americans (andrew was reading how to make friends and influence people the hostellers version, which is how he knew it is still cool to put gel in your hair and spike it up neatly every morning with a comb and get in peoples personal spaces. more freaks to come in this blog).
the next day i stayed in bed because i had a fever and felt sick so i read all of catcher in the rye, which i didn't love that much because i'm too much of an emotionally intelligent woman and have nothing of the emotionally demented teenage boy with which to connect. i just wanted to sit him down and have a serious talk about his issues and make him go for psychoanalysis. boys! really.
then the next day we stole our last breakfast and got frowned at by the heart of gold hostel staff for the last time, and took a train from berlin haptbahnhof in the direction of budapest to prague. it was ok, there was another staring man and a very hideous hulk-like man and an american man who gave me a book about ghosts for no reason which was ok i guess. and a kid with a mcKSHICken who despite our awful shicken experience still managed to make mayonnaise face look overly tempting and we thought about pulling him into pieces and eating him.
when we got to prague we had this disastrous experience of not being able to use our 1000 kroner notes (about 70AUD, and the only ones you could get from the atm) becuase nobody would change them, which you can read about on dan's blog, and the witch who kept doing a smile that was more like baring teeth at hansel and gretel as she fattens them in the cage. all detailed in dan's blog.
we're at a hostel called hostel advantage, which is ok, nice beds and nice big lockers but FULL OF FREAKS. we're sharing a dorm with 3 forty-five plus year old scottish men who all CAME SEPARATELY but SHARE A LOVE OF TALKING ON AND ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT SUPERMARKETS AND SOUP AND OTHER THINGS THAT START WITH SU AND SUCK AT 7AM AND SNORE ALL NIGHT AND GET TOO CLOSE. and there's a man who stays awake on his laptop all night and sometimes watches me while i sleep because i'm the only girl in the dorm. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH. czechoslovakian freaks. which made me have a panic attack and demand steve come here right now and be my man protector when dan leaves. but no! i will be strong and an ambassador for feminism.
we've been too digestively fucked and tired to do anything here so we've walked around shops, looked in h&ms, and seen movies. and paid $8 for hot chocolate. it's not cheap at all here. we saw hancock on our first night, which was not good, don't see it. then we saw the incredible hulk. which was incredible. HULK SMASH!!! ed norton is beautiful. i don't care what any reviewer says. it's awesome.
tonight we're going on a pub crawl we think, get some absinthe etc, but we could really just buy one and go see hulk smash again which i would like better actually, green liquid, green fairy, green monster you can just see how that would be a good night.
it's too touristy and boring to bother writing about prague. i wouldn't come here again. the architecture is cool but boy do they know it, it's basically 500 kroner everytime you look at a building. i'm not keen.
gotta run, this internet is more expensive than anywhere else in europe.
love you all homies, everyone comment!!!!!!!! tell me about your lives and what's happening and when my blog is boring. xoxoxoxo
Sunday 13 July 2008
ich bin ein berliner?
hello loyal readers; parents, steve, mietta, eliza, perhaps others? unlikely, but hopeful.
well, it's sunday afternoon in berlin and EVERYTHING IS CLOSED. seriously. it's one of the major-est european cities and it has the same attitude towards consumerism as the fricking tasmanians. so at 2:35pm, while you're all tucked up in your bedsies, or having a party for a boy who now lives under the stairs, i am listening to german punk rock (an inexplicable favourite of this hostel) and writing a blog.
dan has mostly caught you up with the end of the netherlands, i didn't do anything different other than fall asleep at the ICC (see below, turn head sideways for full effect) and get shouted at
by a guard and frowned at by a judge, which is pretty cool because hopefully that will happen a lot in my future when i become an ICC prosecutor who is still cool enough to turn up to work hungover and accidentally have a bit of a nap during some very boring evidence.
seriously though, it was really amazing to see it in real life. last year at uni in my first year international studies subject i wrote an oversimplified and vague essay on how the ICC could never be effective, and now i'm here seeing all these people and all this scholarship and the complexities of the statute and i'm so overwhelmed. the court only has jurisdiction (bad law language, don't get involved law graduate boyfriend) over three crimes so far, genocide, war crimes (mostly stuff that involves death and torture of civillians) and crimes against humanity, so they're really serious cases. we didn't see any of the accuseds, but it was still so sombre and scary. really is an awesome place to be.
we did a little bit of last minute shopping/throwing money at dutch people and receiving stuff we don't need because utrecht was a great place to be, and we watched our last episodes of ally mcbeal with ding ding, and on friday morning we did the WORST WALK EVER to the train station. don't mistake me, i know all walking is bad, but walking in an enormous downpour with all your worldly possessions dragging through puddles behind you just sucks. i would show you a photo but it's decided to stop working sorry bye.
the train to berlin was sweaty and smelly as usual, and we sat too close to some chronic stare-ers as usual, and some old people fought with some other old people about seats and wine gums as usual, but otherwise it was a smooth trip.
our hostel is amazing, "heart of gold" hostel which is themed like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is cool. we met some awesome kids in our room, kelsey from seattle is a sweet girl who helpfully speaks german and stopped the polizei at the train station from setting their muzzled alsations on us when we tried to use the elevator.
this is us trying to climb a bear, obviously i am not really trying because my arse is as big as the car tyre behind it but she did a pretty decent job. again for best results turn head to side.
she's gone now which sucks, but we've still got steph from canada who's working as an au pair in switzerland, who is leaving her job in september and asked me if i'd be interested (!!) har har never coming home. there's also the norwegian girls who we hated for the 4am light on penchant and nipple baring you've already heard about, but they joined us on the pub crawl last night and were vaguely tolerable. they pub crawl, on the other hand, was not tolerable, i didn't take my camera as i was ashamed and didn't need evidence of the disgustery, it was mostly GROSS australians kissing GROSS british people and doing shots straight out of the jagermeister bottle because after all, if you've got herpes, why keep it to yourself? share the blistering love.
so we bailed on that after too many free apple schnapps and went home, proud that we survived and ashamed that we parted with ten euro (almost 20 bucks!!) for the experience.
other than that interesting time, we haven't gone very crazy in berlin which is a pity because we won't get another weekend here. we went on a walking tour around the east and a screechy little lady called jessy told us about the history of berlin. it's amazing to think that less than 20 years ago the city was still divided into the rich western side and the poor, strong communist satellite city east berlin. the east seems to be much more interesting now, edgier and artier while the west is full of mean chanel ladies who frown at poor people who just want to try their glasses on for a second...
this is a building, possibly an old palace or something, i have forgotten because i am lame. it's a really nice example of the architecture though, and you can climb it apparently, which would be pretty cool. the gothic (?) style is really amazing and a lot of the city is really beautiful like that. there's also a lot of revisionism in the cityscape, for example, there used to be an imperial palace in the east from back in the days of the monarchy, and when communism came into fashion they pulled it down and made a "people's palace" where everyone could come and be buddies with the government. that palace got bombed by the allies, and years after the war towards the end of the cold war they started to rebuild it, but found out it was made of asbestos, so they sat around for a bit, then when the wall came down and communism went out of fashion they decided they'd rebuild the imperial palace. which they're still trying to do 20 years later. it feels a bit like they sort of switch on, switch off phases of their history.
we've done a bit of holocaust memorial stuff, there's this statue called "a mother holding a dying son", and beneath it is buried the remains of a german soldier and a murdered jew, so they can commemorate all the horrors of war, which is pretty cool. the roof is open, so when it rains she gets rained on, and when it snows the whole room powders over, which must be pretty moving.
there's also the modern jewish memorial which i don't have a great photo of, but it's basically these blocks, all of the same length and width but different heights, getting taller as you walk into it. its pretty big, maybe 200 square metres, and as you go you just get deeper and deeper into these blocks that are about the same size as graves. i really like the symbolism, because it's so stark and neat yet overpowering at th
e same time, it really communicates the fascist feeling, and how all consuming it must have been to be in germany at the time. and as you walk, the graves get taller, as though you can't understand how easily and rapidly the slaughtering occurred. very spooky and definitely haunted.
anyway, that's most of the interesting things about berlin, we're being lazy today because our bodies are sore from weird beds and pillows. we went to the markets this morning, i'm slowly knocking off souvenirs but really struggling, so if there's anything european you've always wanted that does not cost more than one euro feel free to make an application in writing to the heart of gold hostel berlin and you will receive a response within 4 to 6 weeks thanks bye.
hope you're all well, keep emailing as i check most days because i am a chump, i miss you but still don't miss melbourne so all of you just c'mere and we'll have a big partay. xxxxooooo
ps this is a bin. turn your head to the side. trust me it's pretty cool.
well, it's sunday afternoon in berlin and EVERYTHING IS CLOSED. seriously. it's one of the major-est european cities and it has the same attitude towards consumerism as the fricking tasmanians. so at 2:35pm, while you're all tucked up in your bedsies, or having a party for a boy who now lives under the stairs, i am listening to german punk rock (an inexplicable favourite of this hostel) and writing a blog.
dan has mostly caught you up with the end of the netherlands, i didn't do anything different other than fall asleep at the ICC (see below, turn head sideways for full effect) and get shouted at
by a guard and frowned at by a judge, which is pretty cool because hopefully that will happen a lot in my future when i become an ICC prosecutor who is still cool enough to turn up to work hungover and accidentally have a bit of a nap during some very boring evidence.seriously though, it was really amazing to see it in real life. last year at uni in my first year international studies subject i wrote an oversimplified and vague essay on how the ICC could never be effective, and now i'm here seeing all these people and all this scholarship and the complexities of the statute and i'm so overwhelmed. the court only has jurisdiction (bad law language, don't get involved law graduate boyfriend) over three crimes so far, genocide, war crimes (mostly stuff that involves death and torture of civillians) and crimes against humanity, so they're really serious cases. we didn't see any of the accuseds, but it was still so sombre and scary. really is an awesome place to be.
we did a little bit of last minute shopping/throwing money at dutch people and receiving stuff we don't need because utrecht was a great place to be, and we watched our last episodes of ally mcbeal with ding ding, and on friday morning we did the WORST WALK EVER to the train station. don't mistake me, i know all walking is bad, but walking in an enormous downpour with all your worldly possessions dragging through puddles behind you just sucks. i would show you a photo but it's decided to stop working sorry bye.
the train to berlin was sweaty and smelly as usual, and we sat too close to some chronic stare-ers as usual, and some old people fought with some other old people about seats and wine gums as usual, but otherwise it was a smooth trip.
our hostel is amazing, "heart of gold" hostel which is themed like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which is cool. we met some awesome kids in our room, kelsey from seattle is a sweet girl who helpfully speaks german and stopped the polizei at the train station from setting their muzzled alsations on us when we tried to use the elevator.
this is us trying to climb a bear, obviously i am not really trying because my arse is as big as the car tyre behind it but she did a pretty decent job. again for best results turn head to side.she's gone now which sucks, but we've still got steph from canada who's working as an au pair in switzerland, who is leaving her job in september and asked me if i'd be interested (!!) har har never coming home. there's also the norwegian girls who we hated for the 4am light on penchant and nipple baring you've already heard about, but they joined us on the pub crawl last night and were vaguely tolerable. they pub crawl, on the other hand, was not tolerable, i didn't take my camera as i was ashamed and didn't need evidence of the disgustery, it was mostly GROSS australians kissing GROSS british people and doing shots straight out of the jagermeister bottle because after all, if you've got herpes, why keep it to yourself? share the blistering love.
so we bailed on that after too many free apple schnapps and went home, proud that we survived and ashamed that we parted with ten euro (almost 20 bucks!!) for the experience.
other than that interesting time, we haven't gone very crazy in berlin which is a pity because we won't get another weekend here. we went on a walking tour around the east and a screechy little lady called jessy told us about the history of berlin. it's amazing to think that less than 20 years ago the city was still divided into the rich western side and the poor, strong communist satellite city east berlin. the east seems to be much more interesting now, edgier and artier while the west is full of mean chanel ladies who frown at poor people who just want to try their glasses on for a second...
this is a building, possibly an old palace or something, i have forgotten because i am lame. it's a really nice example of the architecture though, and you can climb it apparently, which would be pretty cool. the gothic (?) style is really amazing and a lot of the city is really beautiful like that. there's also a lot of revisionism in the cityscape, for example, there used to be an imperial palace in the east from back in the days of the monarchy, and when communism came into fashion they pulled it down and made a "people's palace" where everyone could come and be buddies with the government. that palace got bombed by the allies, and years after the war towards the end of the cold war they started to rebuild it, but found out it was made of asbestos, so they sat around for a bit, then when the wall came down and communism went out of fashion they decided they'd rebuild the imperial palace. which they're still trying to do 20 years later. it feels a bit like they sort of switch on, switch off phases of their history.we've done a bit of holocaust memorial stuff, there's this statue called "a mother holding a dying son", and beneath it is buried the remains of a german soldier and a murdered jew, so they can commemorate all the horrors of war, which is pretty cool. the roof is open, so when it rains she gets rained on, and when it snows the whole room powders over, which must be pretty moving.
there's also the modern jewish memorial which i don't have a great photo of, but it's basically these blocks, all of the same length and width but different heights, getting taller as you walk into it. its pretty big, maybe 200 square metres, and as you go you just get deeper and deeper into these blocks that are about the same size as graves. i really like the symbolism, because it's so stark and neat yet overpowering at th
e same time, it really communicates the fascist feeling, and how all consuming it must have been to be in germany at the time. and as you walk, the graves get taller, as though you can't understand how easily and rapidly the slaughtering occurred. very spooky and definitely haunted.anyway, that's most of the interesting things about berlin, we're being lazy today because our bodies are sore from weird beds and pillows. we went to the markets this morning, i'm slowly knocking off souvenirs but really struggling, so if there's anything european you've always wanted that does not cost more than one euro feel free to make an application in writing to the heart of gold hostel berlin and you will receive a response within 4 to 6 weeks thanks bye.
hope you're all well, keep emailing as i check most days because i am a chump, i miss you but still don't miss melbourne so all of you just c'mere and we'll have a big partay. xxxxooooo
ps this is a bin. turn your head to the side. trust me it's pretty cool.
Monday 7 July 2008
ik spreek geen nederlands, ik spreek geen nederlands
i love the netherlands!!
utrecht is, as we expected from the first hour, completely amazing. we love our house. excuse the bad bad bad photography, but this is a picture of the artyness of the house:
i have a quick question for all of you out there who are more arty than me, yes, all of you, why are all my pictures blurry? especially with the flash off? and please don't say "try to hold the camera still" because i have actually tried that.
a quick reflection on the week so far:
we arrived on wednesday from paris, it took about 4 hours on the train which was really good, trains rock because you can see all this countryside that you obviously miss from the air. except they're bad because freaky staring people sit opposite you and no matter how obvious the "stop looking at me!" return stare is, they just keep gazing. we saw belgium for about 48 seconds, it looked industrial and grey so we looked away again and just waited for amsterdam.
we caught a connecting train from amsterdam to utrecht, navigated our way out of the station, and sat on the footpath like hobos for about an hour while we waited for maud who we're staying with, this is her:
i don't know why i took such a wide picture either, see above re bad photography.
maud is so busy with interplay, the big european playwriting festival, that we've hardly seen her which sucks. last night she got in at about 4:30am and left again at 8ish this morning. and yet she's never grumpy. amazing.
so anyway, we met her and resumed our laziness at her house, eating wok2go and watching telly. boring boring.
thursday we met with anna barnes who is a playwrite from melbourne here for interplay, and florian who lives in delft (nl) who dan knew from interplay last year. we got sammiches and i discovered my love for kahlua and milk, which goes for about euro3.50 and is amazing. they have a h&m in utrecht too, which leads to equal portions of joy and despair as my suitcase fills and my bank account empties...
that night maud brought some friends around and dan and i cooked a very stingey meal of pasta and bread, which everyone hated but politely ate. erik, yorit, maud, anna and florian, dan and jes, and ding ding the adorable 13 year old cat sat around the table and shouted in english and dutch, here they are in their top-hatted glory:
after dinner maud went to get a meat-ball fryer. which is as much as we know about that. dan and i did the typical tourist coffee-shop expedition, no questions!! and maud met up with us to show us some dutch drinks, i had a red martini which was the most disgusting thing in all of the netherlands, and then we went home because there was a frasier marathon.
friday we finally hit up amsterdam and it was yuk. i'm so glad we're staying outside the city because it's so awful. tacky tourists buying huge dildoes and talking about "spliffs" makes you want to run for the utrecht hills. there were nice canals but they are nicer in in utrecht anyway. we hung out with florian, anna and her friend eliza and they talked about exploitation of women and how sweden is the best country in the world (free education!!). we wandered through the red light district and felt uncomfortable around the women undulating from the red curtained windows. i really thought a sex show would be funny, but it's just not. it's weird and you feel bad for the 15 year olds, the 55 year olds and the women with slight mental issues who end up in this work. not to mention the porn lined walls in the shops which include animal sex and the apparently very popular "terror of rape" series. eugh.
so that was a bit lame.
saturday we woke up and dan decided he would stay in his pyjamas eating chocolate mousse and watching ally mcbeal, which incidentally is the worst show ever made in its unique combination of low quality production, unoriginality, hideous calista flockhart and offensive morality. i caught a train to den haag because the water sign in me was desperately craving the beach. it was too cold to swim but i paddled, though heaps of crazy dutch people were swimming. i found some awesome statues of fairy tales and other stories, this one is pinocchio being held by gepetto, and on gepetto's hand if you look closely is little jiminy cricket. pretty cool.
i came home with wok2go to entice dan off the couch, and of course it worked, he ate all of his before peering into mine hopefully with his puppy dog eyes. stupid labrador owners have skills we'll never know. then we went out to the interplay festival bar where we consumed inappropriate amounts of fried cheese and chatted with the wanky play delegates for a few hours.
sunday florian took us to rotterdam music festival. rotterdam is about an hour out of utrecht, but the huge free festival was worth the trek. the only big name was devotchka, but we saw some other up&comings including emmy the great, blood red shoes and harry merry and the must. it was pretty nuts, there are loads of dutch punks and scenesters in rotterdam which reminded me a bit too much of melbourne, but it was still fun. devotchka were absolutely amazing. i wish i had a non-blurry picture but i can't find one, will post if i do.
anyway, so now it's monday, i apologise for this boring list/post but hopefully we'll become funny again soon. looking everyday for a cheap vespa and a free course to do in utrecht. might have found one in den haag. see you never har har har har har xoxoxoxo
Wednesday 2 July 2008
utrecht, me-trecht too
oh real internet with english keyboards for no monies. the little things!!
so we bailed on paris early. i know i know. who would have thought that the most romantic city in the world would charge you 300AUD for a croissant? while laughing at your french and spitting on the ground? the french, in their berets and stripy shirts with their baguettes and gerard depardieu. you've gotta love them.
there's so many bikes here, it's like an old world. i love it already. it's muggy though, and really really sweaty.
someone stole my thongs from the paris hostel!! very lame. other than that we've been very lucky, haven't lost much at all. we're eating an inappropriate amount of cheese, which seems to be all we can afford, and muller rice will never be allowed in our presence again.
what have i missed?
in the france hostel, 3ducks, we met some americans called mike and sara (just like zac and sara!!) who give america a good name. they were pretty introverted and intelligent but good value and had lots of interesting stuff to say about america at the moment. it sucked when they left because new roommates were lame and weird (spanish nicole richie!!)
we went to the louvre on monday, not that great. saw mona in all her a3 glory, and some other old pictures mostly of baby jesus or inexplicably naked women looking helpless. it was ok i guess. dan bailed to have a sleep in the sun and of course woke up with sunstroke, but we still went on a gravitron which was happily sitting next to the louvre! then he got sick. but it was worth it.
i think that's everything worth mentioning. i'm sorry my blog has no structure and not much interest value, but to repay your loyal reading family and steve i will try to include some pictures. waiiiit.....
that is mr eiffel on a rainy day, us drinking cocktails out of parisian desperation,
i look away for one second... why can't he get his own stuff...
marion kemp, the only other female kemp... and the gay pride parade she told us to go to
sacre coeur and the moulin rouge
the gates of buckingham palace and the arc du triomphe
the view from notre dame, and everything in its right place
hope you enjoyed. lots of love, jessenia xoxoxo
so we bailed on paris early. i know i know. who would have thought that the most romantic city in the world would charge you 300AUD for a croissant? while laughing at your french and spitting on the ground? the french, in their berets and stripy shirts with their baguettes and gerard depardieu. you've gotta love them.anyway, this morning we jumped a eurail for amsterdam. we stayed up til 2am packing, mostly to spite spanish nicole richie (read about her in dan's blog www.airplaneoverthesea.blogspot.com), and then woke at 4:15 to get the first train from felix faure to gare du nord. the train was great, apart from the 20 spanish students all sporting piercings, one mess of a dreadlock and stinky feet who had no concept of personal space. we sped through france, belgium and arrived in amsterdam at about 10:30 this morning. we're staying with dan's friend maud, though, and she lives outside of amsterdam in a town called utrecht, so we got another train there and waited in the rain on the footpath like homeless people until she could sneak out of work to bring us back. now we're hanging out in her office using her internet while she has a meeting with a terrifying man called hubert who leers through his curls and invites us to workshops (?!) and a
girl who is almost definitely stoned. amsterdam rocks!!
girl who is almost definitely stoned. amsterdam rocks!!there's so many bikes here, it's like an old world. i love it already. it's muggy though, and really really sweaty.
someone stole my thongs from the paris hostel!! very lame. other than that we've been very lucky, haven't lost much at all. we're eating an inappropriate amount of cheese, which seems to be all we can afford, and muller rice will never be allowed in our presence again.
what have i missed?
in the france hostel, 3ducks, we met some americans called mike and sara (just like zac and sara!!) who give america a good name. they were pretty introverted and intelligent but good value and had lots of interesting stuff to say about america at the moment. it sucked when they left because new roommates were lame and weird (spanish nicole richie!!)
we went to the louvre on monday, not that great. saw mona in all her a3 glory, and some other old pictures mostly of baby jesus or inexplicably naked women looking helpless. it was ok i guess. dan bailed to have a sleep in the sun and of course woke up with sunstroke, but we still went on a gravitron which was happily sitting next to the louvre! then he got sick. but it was worth it.
i think that's everything worth mentioning. i'm sorry my blog has no structure and not much interest value, but to repay your loyal reading family and steve i will try to include some pictures. waiiiit.....
that is mr eiffel on a rainy day, us drinking cocktails out of parisian desperation,
i look away for one second... why can't he get his own stuff...
marion kemp, the only other female kemp... and the gay pride parade she told us to go to
sacre coeur and the moulin rouge
the gates of buckingham palace and the arc du triomphe
the view from notre dame, and everything in its right place
hope you enjoyed. lots of love, jessenia xoxoxo
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