all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare... i think

so europe has unfortunately been left in haste, but i cannot complain especially considering that i've just landed in new york. it's easy to be sceptical about big cities, especially american ones that feature in bad movies (though ghostbusters was filmed here, and you can't forget cocktail so one really shouldn't generalise...). staying with john and kelly on the east side of manhattan, the central district - of empire state, central park and ex-two towers fame - will be explored today. seeing as i am rushing back to the airport tomorrow, and also taking into account that i don't have any luggage due to its inability to make it onto the connecting flight to new york from frankfurt, then i don't know how much of the city i will see on this trip. indeed johnny is a big lad and i doubt i'll be able to borrow much in the way of clothes from him so who knows what we can get upto tonight - bouncers may mistake me for a dirty bum but i'm used to it. will j...

as rightly noted by mr stephen hunyor - stella is so cheap in leuven that you could practically brush your teeth with it... brief cameo from mitch here in verbier (after a couple of potent gin and tonics): "i've had a few potent ones actually!" so it is obvious that i am not in leuven as i write this, so i do confess that this is a retrospective post but when you're on the run these things happen. unexpected and very sad circumstances back home have accelerated my departure date - a date that is flying toward me at breakneck speed and thus, in compensation, i have flown around the last few destinations at a similar pace. leuven was fantastic, a real pleasure to hang out with stephen most of all and the town itself is quite beautiful. some fantastic gothic architecture in a small student city who's shopfronts are 90% bars and 10% late night kebab shops. i train'd in on a cracker of a night last sunday just in time for the weekly free ja...

a little note in the last moments of my time in forback with my international travelling companions and local host who's mother insists on treating us like guests in a hotel. vien and i pulled some hospitality plate clearing out of the hat and she was a happy lady but still refused to relax! we took the car over the border (just a stones throw away) and went into the cute german town of saarbrucken where we attended yet another christmas fete and drank yet more mulled wine. the german variety was distinctly more alcoholic so we kept it to the one mug, which turned into a souvenier. have been spending money as if i owned a top hat and a large labour intensive factory in china at the moment - have purchased in luke cheng style 2 jackets some mittens a beanie and a woollen hoodie. you'd be proud luke, you'd be proud! ok we are off and i would prefer not to miss my plane...

at last i am able to break radio silence - a week of no reporting due primarily to alcohol induced inability to use a keyboard. currently writing on a 1998 french keyboard that requires one to press the shift button to use a fullstop (like a semicolon is more frequented?!), so this post won't be much more than a covert update currently under deep cover in a french household (that of joris the poitiers flatmate) in his home town of forbach: somewhere near metz and strasbourg. needless to say spent a week drinking with liam in poitiers; the cute town that i will most probably never see again but for some freak visit in the future. liam himself is only there for another 2 teary weeks and then will go home via the UK after a magnificent year (i am sure) perfecting his very fluent grasp on the language. not to mention claiming ownership of the "most drunk man in poitiers ever" title several times. one of which was on his birthday last saturday. aside to liam...

well sometimes london really does suck, especially when it takes 2.5 houirs to get to an airport - where 1 of those hours is spent getting accross london on a saturday morning when every other hung-over londoner is asleep and the streets are empty. in the end i really should have taken my own advice and taken a bus to liverpool st to pick up my train out to stansted airport. to fill those uninitiated in the cheap-airline deal, ryanair airports are usually in small random towns and, lucky for me, liam (and poitiers) happens to be one of those towns. it did all feel a litle too easy as i left claire and ben's house in fulham at 8am after succesfully waking up to my alarm and walked along the empty streets to the tube station. my flight didn't leave until 11am and on the way into london it only took me an hour and 45min from the airport: and that was peakhour. oh how wrong i was... the tube stopped and started and stuttered its way accross the underground and got me to liverp...

well one really can't complain about living "out of london" if it only takes 2-3 hours to get anywhere in the country (except for manchester, which takes 5). busses are the way to go, and quite frankly the tube is over-rated and over-priced when in london. all day bus passes are literal gold mines and i've seen the sights from the top of a red double-decker for £2.50... better deal than the official sightseeing bus by a long way so bournemouth is the temporary abode of another friend from what should now be known as 'the sarajevo bunch'. simeon is the last of those friends, aside from oli and hannah - who i couldn't get in touch with - that i managed to meet up with and did some very enjoyable last minute hanging out in his own town. technically bournemouth is not his home town , but for the duration of his degree (or indeed for however long he decides to continue his degree in fine-art/illustration) it is his home. and not a bad little home at that:...

well i have finally seen the head of our monarchy in all her pomp and glory as she was paraded back into buckingham palace in her horse-drawn elaborate buggy from her speech in parliament - the only one of the year and the only time she dresses in her virginal white royal garb. the hour long procession of marching royal guards to the tune of cavalry artillery being shot off in the park was to the delight of the throng of tourists who, like me, surely happened only to be there by chance (aside from the odd traditional londoner). and here i was going along to watch the humble changing of the guards! even though i really couldn't care less about/somewhat despise the monarchy, it was still quite a spectacle and if anything reinforced the ridiculousness of the arrangement. oh well i guess it gives a whole lot of army troops an excuse to dress up nice and to get the instruments out of the closet. nice horses too walked around nottinghill which is quite pretty so now i don...

www.youngineurope.com this link has nothing to do with my appearance on the front page/logo of the website and everything to do with the need for you to get involved and help produce a not for profit community travel recommendation website. launching soon but only if you write the editors a little blurb about your favourite hostel/cafe/bar/etc in europe. young people only - but you can always lie if you aren't. they'll never know! (sorry to undermine that little pre-req benj, but hey, what can you do) so go there: www.youngineurope.com cool i think that is my nights accomodation in manchester earnt...

well it was a quicky but it was worth it and how can you say "no" to benji and chris - mates from ol sarajevo and the all-night busride with the toilet stop from hell. not sure if i evermentioned it but it's worthy of a flashback: hard to forget a toilet with urinal water up to your ankles while you're wearing thongs. good on you chris you remember that one mate? so benji was kind enough to pick me up from the chorlton st bus station in manchester and then even kinder to take me back to his fine student abode - complete with toung-in-cheek "guevera" poster for the sake of the cliche: dedicated kids they are these ones! - and cook me a dinner over which we shared a tin or two of beer. benji's housemate, partner in crime and co-author of the wicked www.youngineurope.com (which i will plug properly later), dan, was even kinder in offering up his bed; but despite our shared love of all things electronic we decided it was best if he went upstairs and sle...

rob, my friend, this one goes out to you well the uk is full of suprises and as alluded (read: blatantly praised) to in the previous post a night on the town listening to the gorgeous lyrical musical poetry of joanna newsom was definitely a highlight. and in combination with a fine day couple of days with the dashing 'robere' the quick weekender up in nottingham was a memorable one. very much a student town, old nottingham - home to ye oldest inn in england - has some charm and a touch of character. nice beer in that pub infact and the ploughmans lunch went down well as we pottered through a game of chess or two as the wind and rain came in over sherwood forest. well kind of, the forest has actually been pretty much gutted and now there is a suburb named sherwood, but i do believe there are trees somewhere out there. a student party or two always livens up the weekend and we punished ourselves with 'cream&egg' flavoured vodka at a 80's themed p...

beautiful girl playing the harp and singing poetry (what else can i say?!)

oh yeah more photos up at http://photos.yahoo.com/jonodoeswhistler check again in a couple of days time because there will be updates to the "france & spain", the "portugal" and the "uk" folders. lovely

one could be deceived very easily as one walks through the s treets of quiet fulham - incredibly quiet considering the vicinity of fulham to central london... almost, too quiet - that one was in australia. aside from the unfamiliar store names, the dreaded £ symbol on menu's and that blasted imperial measurement system, the amount of australian accents floating through the chilly london air presents one with the impression that they are on some suburban street in australia. even more disconcerting was a night out in on the town where i could have sworn that i was in cargo bar sydney with the amount of banker dress-sense, drunk girls and aussie accents. quite disgusting really but my companions and i proceeded to consume vast amounts of the free alcohol that we were priviledge to and talk to people from britain (the few amongst the throng of would-be thong wearers). london itself is nothing short of cool; and i am sorry to mar the opening paragraph of my post with such an impres...

the first two of these items are scottish and united kindom institutions respectively. the former, quite rightly, holds a much higher standing in my mind simply due to the relative quality of the whiskey industry as a whole. hundreds of whiskeys, regionally denominated - and some better than the other of course - offer value that far outweighs any of the pre deep-fried items one can purchase in a fish & chips shop. unfortunately one cannot live off whiskey and must succumb to the only reasonably priced food availible in the U.K: sandwhiches from the supermarket, or a pizza. lucky for me i am only out of the "home" briefly as i write from edinburgh for i have the privelage of a kitchen and a keen cook in the form of scarlet back glasgow way. have unfortunately had to leave her warm abode for a night in incredibly windy but spectacular edinburgh. i don't like going in for the comparisons but it is worthwhile throwing in a few notes about the differences between the ...

an immense amount of stuff seems to happen in the smallest periods of time, especally in the company of one ms mcglynn who has played the host marvelously. i have seen much of local glasgow including the bottom of a fair few glasses of single malt. scarlets very homely (and tidy) apartment is quite conveniently situated near the best pub in glasgow. uisce beatha, which is gaelic, is a genuine irish pub in a scottish setting and offers a seletion of at least 200 whiskeys. not too shabby especially for the amateur drinker such as myself and i stuck to the extremely reasonably priced £1.60 glenfinnan which warms one quite substantially especialy when accompanied by a thick chicken soup. top place anyway but our nights were spent in various other glasgow hotspots; the student population creating a great atmosphere in the school bars and a fundraiser party on the second floor of an abandoned building was also cause for consecutive late returns home. glasgow itself is quite interesting...

after a relatively uneventuful (but memorable) day and a half in paris i sadly farewelled my seasoned travelling companion and beautiful girlfriend back to sydney. the walk from the metro station back to the hotel alone was quite strange and the two coffee's on an empty stomach earlier in the day didn't help the nerves. didn't quite break into tears but was looking forward to getting my arse out to beauvais airporty (a tidy 1.5 hours out of paris central on a bus). must note that the strangest thing about travelling alone is hearing music from my ipod in both ears; i had grown quite accustomed to blocking all sound out of the left and listening intently to lucy's selections through the right - it's a brave new world of stereo now and quite a nice sounding one at that... arrived late last night to the welcoming hug of scarlet mcglynn at the glasgow train station (from one half-hungarian to the next! wouldn't guess it with a surname like mcglynn though!). no d...

i am officially part of the coalition of the willing: if it wern't for those damned terrorists then i would still be in the possesion of my much loved and, now nostalgically thought of, pocket-knife. in truth it is my fault to forget to take it out of my carry-on backpack and check it in with the rest of my luggage (out of reach from my terrorist hands). but one forgets that one may be a terrorist threat, doesn't one? that incident along with a delay due to "funny smells in the cockpit" didn't make for a cheerful evening. although i am aware of the damage a barcelona kebab can cause, so i am glad they evacuated the plane on account of a pilots indescression. and i thought the no.1 rule in the pilots handbook was "no kebabs 12 hours before a flight"... lax i say! made it to paris and it's cold

it just so happens that upon returning from my rant that we were delivered from all evil and blessed with the meeting of 4 quite extraordinary kids from the south of melbourne. relaxed, fun, good taste in music and dare i say intelligent. it was unanimously decided as a miracle and we proceeded to get drunk and hit up the local rastafarian bar in the small alleyways of the old "bari gothic" segment of barcelona. we spent two great nights with jacob, georgie, jay and dan who (despite their youth) were high calibre companions and i am already looking forward to seeing them again sometime in the future. many a gourmet feast was cooked up in the most decked out pension kitchen we have ever come accross, and the cheery opera-singing host provided much lovable comic relief. and what a wonderful town barcelona is; sporting the best open air market ever (responsible for the previously mentioned feasts). it must be noted that we are qualified to rate barcelona's market because...

please lord deliver me from redneck aussies and drunk englishman: cursed cheap flights around europe! it aint all that bad but we have inadvertantly been deposited inidiot-central. the pension itself is marvelous with the most deckedout kitchen in spain run by two caricature old spanish men: one ofwhich has a deadly snore on him but our room is far enough away fromthe front desk that it is sufficiently muffled. and barcelona cityitself is outstanding - if only because of gaudi's sagrada famiglia(that enormous naturalist style cathedral which i will write abour inmore detail after my little rant). the coincidental meeting of severalsouth victorians in our hostel lead to some very unfortunate racist conversation, and this in combination with a couple of otheraustralians *cough cough, queenslander, cough cough* enjoying theirforced and consequently quite artificial "time of their lives" in granada has dampened my pride in being australian. not to bag the rambatam back ...

as david bowie once said: "i'm afraid of americans"

just the thing to sweeten up a holiday is ol' granada, which heralds the pommegranite as its local symbol (incidentally the fruit from which granadine, that red stuff they use in bars kind of like cotties cordial but with less artificial sugar). we arrived here after a hellish busride from seville; thankfully our last on this leg of the trip - there are no-doubt more rides to come when i get up north but at least then i'll be able to complain about stinking toilet smells infiltrating the airconditioning system in english. although i hear that scottish people sometimes have trouble understanding australians (?!). anyway i am sad to report that i detailed this experience with literary vigour upon my arrival in granada but the dodgy computer at the fantastic hostel 'rambatan' (another sweet, but considerably more hairy, fruit) ate my post and refused to regurgitate it. such frustration and 2 post lost in the space of 9 days almost did my head in. i am now in the safety...

god i love spain, it is the best - there is an amazing nocturnal culture here, and they pretty much do everything about 4 hours later than the rest of europe - which isn't exactly the best when you're arriving in seville at 6 in the morning after an allnighter on the bus and all you want is some breakfast... other than that the sleep-in, siesta and late/all night party organisation of their society is great for me. the famous 'lost post' of our night out in salamanca will be somewhat accounted for in this post because we had a similar night out here in seville (although there was no bar playing radiohead and it was a little more expensive so salamanca is still no.1 in my books). a long day of catching some winks in a starbucks in the early hours of the morning while waiting for our room to clear *they're good for something!* was followed by some hardcore sightseeing as we only have 2 full days. incidentally there is a fiesta on this weekend so we were lucky enoug...

dear madame/sir, i am writing to congratulate you on your fantastic "ask me lisboa" service and the well planned public transport system in lisbon. the centres are conveniently placed and are staffed by very knowledgable and helpful english speaking staff, and the public transport system is efficient and easy to use. despite my praise, i do have some recommendations in the interests of improving your service and consequently the general experience and well-being of other travellers to beautiful lisbon. firstly, and granted the information service is not a travel agency, but if one is to offer information about bus services then it would be best to provide accurate information. it is only by chance that i disregarded your agents advice and sought out a bus to seville myself otherwise i would have spent an unecessary night waiting for the supposed "one 9.30am bus to seville a day" special. i am not sure if it is a ploy to keep tourists for extra nights in the ...

only managed to have a short stay here, one night infact, but most definitely worth it. dramatic looking porto, as the travel guides exclaim, is extremely picturesque, and the best aspect is from the opposite bank of the douro river, gaia, where the port-wine factory's show off their wares and give guided tours of big barrells of port (fancy port from porto, who would have thought!). so we arrived last night late, as usual and will be the same for lisbon this evening. got to bed at a reasonable hour for the first time in what feels like forever but is pretty much only about a week or something. the night-dayer here was kicked off with a dinner amongst more students up near the local university. most normal people in portugal eat dinner before 11pm but the student population here is large enough to keep kitchens open to all hours. my 'hamburger on a plate' - ie hamburger with no bread and lots of fries - was chewed down to the sound of students shouting out their initiat...

i am positive that i wouldn't have had such a mad and fantastic time in coimbra if it wasn't for bernardo, who lives and has studied here in this lively and beautiful university town. before i go on i will warn you that this post may be a little bit disjointed as i am at the tail end of 3 allnighters here amongst the portuguese students; which was tagged onto a similarly lengthy night in salamanca which will not have the privilige of blog description unless i get seriously motivated to do some retrospective posting... so it is safe to say that we haven't really seen much of coimbra by day, the exceptions being an afternoon on our second day here walking through the streets of the magnificent old town and up the hill to the university; the clock tower of which presides over the town and dominates the night skyline - very indicative of the atmosphere of the town which is literally taken over by students after dark. the erasmus party here lasts a week and involves partying...

sadly, my first post has been lost and it is somewhere in the nether-regions of the internet, most probably recovering from a hangover somewhere after a big night out on the town. i have decided not to re-create what was my second post about salamanca: in the end it was nothing more than a description of our night out there - but there was blood sweat and tears involved in the creation of that account so i am a little beside myself and not quite up to writing anything about coimbra, where we are staying with a great mate of mine bernardo whom i met in sarajevo all those months back. it begins to feel that by the end of my travels i will have a life-time hospitality debt... if we get home before 6am tonight i may write something, otherwise coimbra will have to wait for it's blog debut until tomorrow. it is the university of coimbra erasmus party week so you are just god damn crazy if you're not sleeping in the day, and even crazier if you're not out drinking at night: do...

the city of bars and young good-looking students: many of which are on exchange. if you are reading this aj then start taking some spanish lessons and get over here. i'll say it only once: girls in g-strings dancing on podiums and we weren't in a strip club. we arrived last night at 1am from bilbao and, courtesy of a local american exchange student we walked through the hearrt of the town which was only just starting to get lively as the spanish tend to start eating dinner in the form of tapas at 10pm at the earliest. one thing that i will say is that the lonely planet maps are an absolute waste of time... kind of. the least they could do is put the hostels that they recommend on them, but the best our 2002 'western europe' could do was point us in the right direction. incidentally it was actually the right direction and we found the hostel but a good half an hour of walking with our packs searching out the hostel could have been avoided with some more accuracy on beha...

just quickly, the lack of posting in poitiers was because i didn't really feel up to writing about anything - was enough of an effort to keep up conversation with my mates because my health was quite average. still managed to make a birthday out of the 19th and we went out to a lovely poitiers speciality french cuisine restaurant called 'cafe d'absynthe' (i believe - my lack of memory has nothing to do with the shot absinthe we consumed in birthday celebrations... nor does it have anything to do with the disgusting mouthwash flavoured drink the bartender at the pilory pourted gratis for me....). i thouroughly enjoyed my meal despite having to leave the table to clear my head every 5 minutes and i think the snails, which were drenched in garlic and oil, went some way to putting my cold on the backfoot. nothing like a bit of herbal medicine and some garden animals. our nights in the pretty and very lively student town of poitiers were spent in fine style at the barry abod...

happy birthday to me *sniff sniff* (literally) oh well seeing as i can't taste any food i'll just have to drink more... parisian photos up at http://photos.yahoo.com/jonodoeswhistler

i can't say i'll be sad to say goodbye to the miraculously deflating blow-up mattress but i have grown quite attached to the urine smell of the metro... in truth i am quite sad to leave paris and two weeks have flown by rather speedily; most probably a due to my busy lifestyle here (one can't really kill too much time in a 25square-metre appartment - thats why the cafe culture is so big, along with the fact that during winter it would be too god-damn miserable to do anything else but sit indoors). the weather has been quite pleasant, if a little cold, but the odd spot of rain hasn't marred the experience at all spent a lovely day with charlotte, our old buddie from certlado and rome who now teaches english in dijon. she got a day-trip ticket up to paris and i got up at the ungodly hour of 7am (which incidentaly is a pre-daylight hour) to meet her at the train station. we indulged in a patisserie breakfast of croissant and coffee before setting out to the flea market...

went and saw a gig last night on a pirate-ship converted into a bar and permanently moored alongside the french national library on the sein. friends of the previously mentioned annabelle (jr, who i met the day i went out to annabelle's university, and his girlfriend marie) were nice enough to drag me along and practice their english on me. after wandering up and down the quay after hot-footing it from katie's boyfriends place i finally rendezvous'd (?) with my french connection and we searched out the mysterious location of the bar (which happened to be back where i was wandering earlier in the evening). the pirate ship wasn't a bad little venue for a gig and one doesn't have to spend too much on alcohol because the sway of the boat on the water is enough to make you feel drunk before you buy a drink. at once stage the rock and rolling of the venue seemed almost in-time with the band but i think that could have been my imagination. in terms of the music it was ...

yes this is a guilt blog and it won't be long because i have to run home i am using free - yes free and no blog - at the yann (french boyfriend/"lover" as they say) of katie goulds. the suburb is 'issy' and it's out of town 10min on the non-metro lines which, for hardcore central parisians like myself, is a bit of a mission. not really but it just feels like it because the trains are big and come less frequently... or something anyway due to these confounding factors and the deadline for my return home i don't have time to write a blog shock horror so i am reverting to list mode on the things that i have done over the last two days; i believe this is only the third so far so i'm not too worried. have been introduced to the french university system by the lovely annabelle ducros, daughter of birds friend here, who went to the effort of showing me around and sneaking me past the security guards (yep, big guys with uniforms) to allow me to see...

hit the pompidou centre today - it's actually quite good that lucy is working becasue this way i can see all those things that she's already "done" here. was lucky enough to catch the 'sons & luimieres' exhibition, which was a history of sound and light in 20th century art. some incredible shit in the early 20th really puts one's ideas of modernism into perspective (ie: that everything people do now was created around the turn of the century). it's quite difficult to imagine people like kandinsky and picasso sitting around painting all of this extreme abstract stuff while some more powerful idiots were starting a big disastrous and archaic war. i guess that shows you how much further ahead art is than mainstream politics and media. best part of the exhibition was an interview with john cage who was a pioneering american post-modern composer/artist. none of his stuff, which comes across as "old" to one familiar with the discord and an...