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

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

yes indeed the weather has turned all 'authentic october' on us and there is no escaping the cool wind that blusters down the parisian street; one must enforce high levels of discipline not to step into every cafe but now i remember why these businesses can be profitable even though there is literally one every 20m... it's actually not that miserable, and i am joyfully wearing those warm clothes i had been lugging begrudgingly around in 30degree heat only 2 months ago. i will admit that am already reminiscing over the warmth of those days but there is much to entertain and distract oneself from with in a town like paris. we are lucky enough to, not only be accomodated generously in birds appartment (the small space of which we are managing in quite deftly), but introduced to and entertained by several of her lovely family friends. we were treated to an expedition by car out to versailles - skipped the palace and went straight to the cute farm of marie antoinette, young

never been in an aussie embassy before - but one has to vote and it's kind of cool to flash a passport and be allowed entry into a big imposing building. go labor, and for those of you with no idea as to what i meant by "wicky wicky" (like my mother), then you obviously don't have enough contact with trashy american pop culture. wicky wicky? wild wild west? will smith? i'm in the west? and it's weird? i know, obscure... will write about versailles and funny australian ex-journalists living the bourgeois life in paris later

so district 11 aint so bad at all, nice little cafe was introduced to us thismorning by bird, opposite this internet cafe which charges a staggeringly reasonable 2euro an hour; and there are fruit markets every wed and sat out our window in the paved and tree-lined middle section of rue de charron - or "our street". makes lucy a happy camper and me a well-fed one. am indeed feeling a little like a camper because i have scored a blow-up mattress which fits nicely into the rectangular side knook of the appartment (also known as the walking wardrobe). general proceedure is to crawl into lucy's side of the fold-out bed in the morning and drink tea in '3-little-piggy' fashion. due to birds grown up person early morning (before 9) wakeup call we have been getting out of the house at the respectable hour of 10 and ambling around. lucy has seen most sites and big touristy things were accomplished by my determined father and i when i was here 10 years ago but we went t

welcome to the west it is relaxing, and also unusual, to be in a country where people follow the road rules. there may be rumours that parisians are crazy drivers, but i feel like i'm at a safe-driving school when i walk the streets here. infact, most unnerving of all is that people don't necessarily slow down when you step out onto the road (when the little man is red) becasue the drivers are so used to the pedestrians following the signals. all that non-chalant bravado of my italian pedestrianism has backfired. aside from being quite nice to return somewhere that exists only as a dreamy (but quite precise) memory, the people here are much more... how-you-say.. normal. at least in terms of fashion there is much less obsession here with the "latest and greatest" (regardless of how trashy and kitch) trend. this is not to say that i was waving my fashion police badge in italy, but the considerably lower percentage of fluro t-shirts and reflective/oversized glasses

i have said it before but i'll repeat myself for the sake of needlessly enforcing a truism: time fly's when one eats plate after plate of incredible home-made italian food, especially when one is in parma. this visit has been two short, and when we awake tomorrow from our second nights sleep under liliana and stefano's roof we will be whisking ourselves away to paris. in the end we were lucky to have 2 nights here because i only remembered * that our flight was on the 3rd, as opposed to the presummed 4th, during one of our morning internet sessions in lecce. had to hotfoot it that night and forego a third night drinking magnum's in lecce which was sad but i definitely don't regret ensuring the 2 nights here in parma. it is so comforting to be amongst the family after what feels, in retrospect, like an extremely whirlwind tour of italy. there is so much to see in this country and seventeen nights wasn't enough. i am glad we opted for more nights in the desti

yo y'all more images to accompany the words from the last 2 and a half weeks through italy: the firenze (florence) and rome folders are the newies http://photos.yahoo.com/jonodoeswhistler