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

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...