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

2 nights of the university town, lecce, have flown by with little bad to report - a lovely little appartment that is well loved by jenny and her sweet italian flatmates, graziella and marianna (who are very generously cooking up a carbo feast at home as i type). a great whopping load of laundry, a large magnum of red wine and much sitting around playing the guitar has dominated the proceedings here - mixed up by a long walk through the town sampling gelato and local amaretto flavoured ice-coffee. all of this normality has been a nice wind-down in the south of the south after a whirlwind week and some crazy happenings in sicily... it was unfortunate that we had to rush through sicily so quickly, but thats what happens with unplanned side-trips and 2 nights was enough to give me a taste for more. the north side of sicily and some of the islands up there has joined several other destinations on the "to do" travel list for an unknown date in the future. but it would be a lie ...

see the life of my other, less hethen, personality at: http://www.millerfamily.biz/blog/2004/05/telling-it-like-it-is.html (and i choose revlon for those quick and easy 3-wash changes; perfect for those who lead double lives) doppelganger find courtesy of john "i'm meant to be doing my thesis" dance

literally in the "stiletto" of the big italian boot, girls don't get out of them down here but this post will be added to tomorrow with tales of our escapades at the foot of mt etna, tomorrow. for now my time on the free internet here is up and i have gelato to sample and food to cook for our wonderful host, good ol jenny langush ("cccccccccooooooooome on dooooooooooooooooown"). i welcome her to her cameo role in my blog look forward to... tales of bus drivers that refuse to tell you what stop you must get off at never-ending siesta's and hyper talkative locals in the town of linguaglossa public services that stop at 4pm last minute dashes to ferries all that and more, this time tomorrow!

still haven't quite mastered the ability to take an overnighter on the chin, but it doesn't help when half of the trip is 'delightfully' scored by a cacophony of returning italian servicemen. a herd of about 30 eighteen to nineteen year olds did their best to behave like children for a good 4 hours; the intensity of their banging and shouting and bad singing increasing with every chug along the trainline closer to napoli. this atmospheric soundtrack masterpiece was complimented harmoniously by a pensioner with two mobile phones that rang alternately and in to which he replayed the same conversation in semi-decipherable italian the nice busdriver took forgot to drop us off at our stop so we did a 5am tour of the airport which included a small visual of glowing red lava flowing down the side of mt etna, the volcano that sits over this town and that explodes once every couple of years. so far no action but our pack is on"quick escape" mode... the general hospi...

3 days of hardcore sightseeing and we are bloody knackered (strange how one begins to use iconic australian euphemisms when away). it would be a complete lie to say that we have seen everything here, infact there is enough to keep you busy in rome for a very long time and we have "strategically" left several key sites as preverbial carrots, to lure me back here sometime in the future. i think i will leave them for a fair while, however, because i am not so sure i can handle the streets, crazy drivers, and inhabitants of rome too soon. except for mauritzio, clara and massimo our family friends who have looked after us for two consecutive dinners and are very a-typical romans there is an observation that was confirmed by our massimo, that romans are particularly 'individualist'; but in a more overtly selfish way than one could imagine. it is quite a strange phenomenon because it is not so much in the way that they look or anything so tangible - indeed there is so mu...

it seems it is the little things that do it for me... like free internet and a colloseum dragged ourselves and our packs away from the communal dining room, which makes one feel like they are sharing a house rather than sharing a dorm, to the courtesy bus bound for certaldo trainstation this morning and took several deep breaths before purchasing a ticket to sienna. the plan was to spend a day in this apparently beautiful medieval town before pushing on to rome to check in to our pre-booked (yep we are matured travellers) accomodation at the yellow hostel. the second part of this plan went without hitch of any sort. the part where we leave our baggage in the storage at sienna station, however, was a disaster as they are "temporarily" (read: permanently) out of order. we had gone to the added precaution of getting one of our fellow bassetto guests who were off to sienna on a day trip yesterday to check it out for us, but it seems the sign of doom did not catch their attent...

it seems everyone stays on at the bassetto guesthouse, and it will be easy to understand why we are staying 4 rather than the planed 1 night when i manage to get some photos up... probably some time in october when i get back to the family in parma. for now you will just have to imagine an old monestary converted into a semi-self sufficient guesthouse overlooking hillside tuscan wineries (from which you can sample as you wish and buy direct from the office downstairs) with a big kitchen and a dorm full of relaxed travellers. it is also strangely comforting to hear an australian accent, and it is the first time that i have appreciated how useful cultural knowledge can be: body language, nuiances of expression and the accent combine to allow for extremely free and obvious communication. this environment has also highlighted how impenetrable cultural norms can be. some very well meaning, intelligent, genuine but slightly insular a girls from ottowa (which i think is a product of the...

so we have stumbled upon italy's best kept secret... certaldo. even though this place is in the italy lonely planet guide i'm not sure every reader comes through, and we picked up a flyer for the hostel from slovenia, of all places. so only about 45min or an hour away from the big commercial tourist-magnet that is florence is little certaldo and the hostel of everyone's dreams. we left early from the mosquito-ridden backpacker hell of st piu X and planned to do one last day of sightseeing, but david was cancelled due to the extraordinary line at the firenze centrale trains station baggage storage. grabbed the next train to certaldo, which has been up there with one of the best decisions we have ever made. lucy was excited at the size of the supermarket and when i ventured in there today it was no wonder: a suprise in an otherwise small tuscan countryside town. along side this marvel of the modern world, is one of the best hostels in the world. the bassetto guest house is...

so lucy and i are on a forced bed break because every hostel in florence insists on gender separating the sleeping quaters and, infruriatingly, the owners seem to notice no paradox in the fact that all the bathrooms are shared... this predicament is more of a problem for us than usual because, since leaving parma, we have stripped our luggage down to one-backpack mode until we get back there on the way to milan and our flight to paris. thankfully the quarrel over which room our only pack was to reside in was a short one because my bunk is upstairs (incidentally the greatest physically possible distance from lucy's in this hostel) which means the bag stays down with her. we would have stayed in a double at the hostel down the road except they only had vacancy for one night and we were planning to stay 2 or 3. considering that this place, though clean, isn't all that flash hot we are keeping it to two nights and 3 days of heavy sightseeing in florence and then skiddadling off to ...

the rain the rain the rain last night the children - all 7 of them - were going bannanas as we ate our dinner. anna maria applied some old italian mother logic and said (in italian of course) that it will thunder tomorrow. she hit the nail on its head and we are inside doing a whole lot of fuck all. it's great, and i'd be lying if i said i didn't enjoy wearing my trackies all day... i've manage to sort out some pics from the last couple of weeks and stock the ipod up with a fair bit of stefano's music collection, which gravitates around U2 and bruce springsteen. actually this a good addition because most of my U2 collection at home went missing in the "great cd wallet debacle" of 2002 in which i lost pretty much every cd that i owned. anyhow enough justifying my blatant breach of copyright. in another twist of fate, we have said goodbye to our plans to see the cinque terra and will spend a wet night in here in parma for one final evening (t...

so i think i can finally deem myself recovered from the train trip from hell we enduered from ljubljana - complete with a 3am departure, obnoxious drunken englishmen, delays, re-routes, extra stops, no sleep and stifling humidity the next day. i didn't really mind hell all that much though because i was well aware of that which awaited us at our destination... lucy, on the other hand, was not. parma is a beautiful little city in the "heart" of italy's north - yep, home of parmigiano-reggiano. the champagne of the cheese world. parma is, to our delight, pretty much the food capital of italy and we have been treated to the interminable hospitality of la famiglia - a combination that would strike fear into the heart of the dieter. i, however, am not on a diet so there is no problem with stacking the kilo's on.... i haven't yet managed to do so but if we weren't to leave tomorrow then i think that all this would change. i am struggling to string a sent...

ljubljana is a most interesting and unusual place - most especially for the tourist after spending the last two weeks in towns like vienna and prague that are 100% tourist friendly (and sometimes, it seems, orientated), our expectations of ljubljana were very different to the reality we experienced. upon arrival at the station one is impressed with every indication of tourism: english signs, english speakers etc. but if you walk through the town - aside from the castle and the odd "information centre" - the telltale features of the tourism industry barely show their nobly little heads. must note that learnt something new about myself in ljublijana: i had never thought i'd be unhappy that there wasn't a souvenier shop... my plan to collect a small flag-sticker from each destination has been totally thwarted - at first by my inability to remember to collect smal flags, and then by the inability for a local entrepreneur to sell terrible kitch items to tourists. forced...

its easy to talk lovingly about a place when you are writing on a stomach full of home-cooked italian food (and especially so when it is that of the bianchi's!). yes, i am in italy and i understand why most italian men have a 'paunch' - otherwise known as a pot belly i write now in the sweet lethargy that arises from the combination of past exhaustion and present relaxation. after 3 packed days of sight-seeing and wonderful hospitaltiy in vienna we took an overnight train to bled overloaded like south-american packhorses with snacks ranging from fruit salad to practical 3-course meal sandwiches courtesy of our australian/viennese livnig host donna. 9 hours and 2 changes (including an accidental busride) later we arrived to a lake bled sunrise and a full hostel. the biggest stroke of luck turned into a double-hit when the australian couple who's hostel beds we usurped mentioned that they were heading to zagreb. lucy's face shod its sleepless gloom and opportunist...

whoops guess i should have paid attention to my british mates who book in advance... no hostel in sight here. will have to try some more numbers but looks like we will be taking the 2am train to parma bled is fucking beautiful - more on that later. i'm in a little glass booth at the trainstation and i'm feeling somewhat like a goldfish

well my time here in the monds household is sadly coming to an end, but i'd be lying through my teeth if i said i wasn't excited about getting on a train to slovenia (which departs in about an hour and a half so i have to power through this post) we arrived to the smooth commercialism of the west in fine style on a luxury train from prague to vienna which cruised in in under 5 hours, which wasn't too bad considering we'd been accustomed to 8+ hour rides around the east on sticky pleather seats and open windows. the airconditioning all the way to vienna didn't really stop us having that sticky/stinky traveller feeling when we arrived; neither of which phased our host who is apparently well rehearsed in picking up student travellers from the trainstation. donna drove us home, took us into her house and then proceeded to wash (read: was on the verge of burning) our clothes for us before putting plates of steaming pumpkin soup infront of our faces. from this point ...

have put some from the last couple of destinations up at: http://photos.yahoo.com/jonodoeswhistler no smirks at the one of me in gyor...

the following is a mini guide based on my experience in prague do not, under any circumstance, not go to prague be wary of advice telling you to otherwise not go to prague due to "hyper tourism" . yes it is true that there are thousands of drunk poms on bachelor party excursions (what do you expect when you can get flights for less than 1euro out of london), but as long as you don't go to the main drag - which feels uncannily like bondi junction after 10pm - then you'll be sweet wear well worn in shoes, the less tread the better: makes it much easier to scrape off the dog-shit that was well avoided by lucy but not so daintily navigated by one who will not be named do not read excruciatingly poorly constructed novels about rome that flow like trash-bin hollywood screenplays while in the very same city that franz kafka wrote his penetrating social commentaries... most definitely go to the internet and shopping centre near the strawberry youth hostel before you get ri...

well krakow is definitely one not to miss, and the polish people (if you stumble apon the right ones of course) are extremely friendly; especially for lazy english-only speaking tourists like myself. i have become a master at international common sense sign-language so don't take me on in charades... last wrote after a lovely day and evening in krakow. visited wawel castel - pronouced with a "v" sound - with a suitably nerdy tourguide who proceeded to give us an overwhelmingly detailed description of almost every emplacement in the wawel cathedral and the sorrounding castle grounds. from this point my brain was liquified and could absorb no further information; hence the lack of post that evening. the laziness can also be attributed to the deliscious "typical jewish" (according to our waiter) dinner served in the old jewish part of town. this section of krakow is particularly vibrant and we returned the following day to visit the jewish museum which highligh...