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
Friday 29 August 2008
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
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